Jesus has been teaching through parables in the Gospel of Matthew for weeks now. As we hear today’s Gospel reading, we should remember that from now on Jesus will move toward his Passion with his friends and disciples close and the crowds at a distance. He has been teaching about the Kingdom: the Kingdom of Heaven is like….As we continue to listen we will notice the coming chapters are preparing the disciples for their work after Jesus’ death. Parables, as one commentary suggests, teach us about justice and grace. Some are stories of direct cause and effect like the parable of the ten maidens and today’s story of the talents; others are stories of grace like the tax collector who is justified, the prodigal who receives a welcome home party or the laborers who receive a full day’s pay for an hour’s work.

I’ve been desperately trying to figure out who’s responsible for 2020 being the year that it has been. What evil force is behind all this? At the beginning, I thought it was marketing for Charmin, or maybe Purell. Then I thought it was definitely Zoom.

Today, All Saints Sunday, marks for us the end of our Liturgical Year. Next week, we will celebrate the First Sunday of Advent, and begin a new year together. Last year, every Sunday in Advent we sang the Canticle of the Turning. This song is based on the Magnificat, or the Song of Mary, in which she proclaims that God has flipped the world upside down by choosing her to bear the Son of God.

We sang, with great delight, “My heart shall sing of the day you bring. Let the fires of your justice burn. Wipe away all tears, for the dawn draws near, and the world is about to turn!”

Buckle up, my friends, because today I want to preach with you all about holiness. As usual, I want to start with a story from my childhood church. The Pentecostal denomination of my youth placed a high premium on what we called personal holiness. How much someone adhered to a strict code of individual behavior was both a way to deepen one’s relationship with God and an outward representation of that relationship, a living proof-text of one’s righteousness. But often to me, this definition of “holiness” was simply a burden.

The scenario from our gospel this morning feels very contemporary, in which a group of people sets out to entrap someone whose religious and political allegiances are seen as threatening. Instead of doors opened to receive fresh air and understanding, questions become spears designed to wound and demonstrate the opponent’s weakness. “Tell us what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?”

This question is beyond loaded. The emperor is a symbol not merely of government, but of oppression and idolatry. The tax was a way not only of counting heads in Judea and Galilee but of financing their own oppression. To support it was akin to asking for a knee to be pressed against their necks. But to challenge it was to mark oneself as a potential revolutionary. Either way, you couldn’t win.

We are given two very different images of the Kingdom of God in this morning’s scriptures; one from Paul in his letter to the church in Philippi, and one from Matthew’s Gospel.

Matthew gives a stark version of a parable of Jesus that plays up the division and condemnation between the community to which he is writing and their Jewish siblings across the street.

Matthew’s community is having an identity crisis, and so he offers them this image of the kingdom of God that can be compared to a wedding banquet where invited guests don’t show up and are killed for their refusal while their town burns around them. And one who does come is expelled for not wearing the right outfit.

I’ve preached on this passage before, and with enough unpacking, there is good news to be heard in this parable.

Could you hear the longing in St. Paul’s letter to the church in Phillipi? Could you hear Paul’s desire that the current circumstances of his life might break open and reveal something more of the new life promised to him by Jesus?

Paul writes, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection”

He moves forward, despite his current challenges, “straining forward to what lies ahead.”

Why? “To press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.”

What a letter for our time. What important words for us to hear as we live out our days hoping for something new, something more, working to let God break into the world, straining forward, pressing on.