I spent all of Friday this week in a training learning about what it means to be a Coach in the ELCA. Now, it’s different than what we think of for sports coaching, but it is still meant to help people be the most whole selves that they can be. So people come to coaches with a specific and timely issue and together we figure out the next steps forward; this is especially important at times when people are feeling stuck within a situation. Yet, a coach isn’t like a mentor or a consultant where we tell you what to do. We won’t tell you how we handled a similar situation or give you an action plan to follow without you doing the work to create it yourself. In fact, most of our work is done through asking questions and getting people to realize what they may in fact already know somewhere inside of them. Jesus seems to be doing a similar thing in today’s Gospel!
Part of what is so interesting to me about today’s Gospel reading is that Jesus doesn’t just answer the question asked by the chief priests and elders. He doesn’t just tell them that he is here by God’s authority because that doesn’t help them believe it to be true, in fact they would probably be outraged. Instead, he asks a question of his own: “What was the origin of John’s right to baptize? Was it divine or was it human?” (Matthew 21: 25). Jesus asks this question knowing that they are going to be stumped by it because there is no “right” way to answer in the minds of the chief priests and elders; either way, they have been caught in Jesus’ logical trap.
And, I think Jesus’ question has less to do about actual authority and it more so comes down to the question of faith. Who do we believe and how do we come to believe it? And, does our faith change over the years? Because part of the challenge with Jesus’ followers and the religious leaders of the day was that the disciples way of living out faith looked vastly different from the way it had always been done before. How was that possible? To make all of those changes and yet still be faithful?
Now this is starting to sound like church debates that have happened for the past 2,000 years, whether it’s the early councils like at Nicea and Constantinople who determined the Creeds and what was acceptable to believe as a part of faith and what was heresy. Or even Luther’s own debates with the Roman Catholic church at the time of the Reformation because he didn’t feel like the Church was living fully into the Gospel. But, it isn’t only a thing of centuries ago! The pandemic especially brought to the forefront for churches these questions of faith and what was deemed “acceptable and right” in these unprecedented times. Questions like how to do communion or baptisms.
Before the pandemic even began, we were having discussions at Seminary about whether or not we could do communion over Livestream since only about a quarter of our students were on campus for chapel while the rest had to Zoom in if they wanted to join. Some people felt that this was not at all how the Eucharist should be conducted while others said who are we to limit God’s work. Their argument was that if we can believe God works in all these other ways in the world, how can we say that we don’t believe God can work through a computer screen? It came down to discussions of Tradition and authority; and about change, whether we were ready for it or not.
While this is obviously different than the Gospel reading today, since that was about baptism and not communion through a computer screen, I think it highlights our desire to show that we know the most about God and how God wants us to operate in the world. Yet, I think our Gospel reading and even our other readings today are coming back to trust. God doesn’t need us to know everything about God (in fact, that is quite impossible), but instead we are called back to trust in God’s grace and mercy. To hear that God doesn’t need us to live out our faith just in the prescribed way of history, but instead it all comes back to the core of trust in God and what does that mean for our lives. If we were still in Luther’s day, you all would be standing for the whole service!
I always wonder what the religious leaders think because here again Jesus says that “The truth is, tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kindom of God before you” (Matthew 21: 31). Was that a wake-up call for them about what the kindom of God was really about? Yet, while I ask these questions, I also don’t want to shame them for the way they lived out their faith because otherwise I’m no different from them. They had this way of practicing faith that had been passed down for centuries and they had been faithful to it; any sort of change was difficult for them to accept. Yet, if the current structure of church is teaching us anything, it’s that while the core can remain the same, our faith and the way that is lived out in the world does in fact change over the centuries. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be here this morning.
And, you have probably heard me say before that scholars have predicted that we are around another Reformation point in the church, as historically there is usually some big shift every 500 years or so. This can feel scary, especially when we have only read about the Reformation and all of the challenges that brought, but it also feels so exciting to think about what our faith can look like moving forward; a faith still centered in Christ and our trust in God’s grace. A reformation in which we trust that the Holy Spirit is still leading us. And, as we see in today’s Gospel, it isn’t just about having the right answer. It is about opening ourselves up to what God is doing in the world and trusting in that, even when it feels scary because we don’t know the next right step.
I want to connect this back to coaching for a second because we learned that it is really important to not ask directive questions because we don’t know what is best for our clients. We might know how we would respond to a similar situation, but we are not the person who is living in the midst of it. And, what I think is beautiful about this idea of asking questions that are open-ended and that help shift perspective is that it reminds us that the things we thought were most important might not actually be when we dig a little deeper. I see Jesus’ questioning doing something similar here today because it shifts the perspective a bit about what Jesus’ ministry actually is in the world and how people are affected. It isn’t just about by whose authority Jesus is able to teach, it is also them wanting to know how Jesus can be doing these things because it is a threat to their own authority and their own sense of worth. It is about what impact his teaching is having on the world around him. But, Jesus helps them to see that for themselves instead of just simply answering that he is here on God’s authority. After all, Jesus isn’t here to cast out the religious leaders, but to invite them into a new way of living too. And if those before us could trust John and Jesus, maybe we trust in God to guide us through all the changes ahead of us too.