Orthodox Churches Didn't Need a Reformation

November 25, 2026, First Lutheran Church, Throggs Neck, Bronx, N.Y.,

When Reformation Sunday comes around every year, I think of an old friend I knew through the National and World Councils of Churches. 

I met Father Leonid Kishkovsky in the 1970s when we were both young ecumenists representing our churches on these councils. 

Back then, Leonid, a Russian-born priest in the Orthodox Church in America, wore a black cassock and parted his long hair in the middle. His beard and dour expression made me think of Rasputin. 

Leonid was a quintessential Orthodox priest. I told him that when I was a young Air Force chaplain’s assistant in October 1967 I visited Rome. 

“That was the time Patriarch Athenagoras I was there to confer with Pope Paul,” I said. 

Leonid raised his eyebrows. 

“The Pope and the Patriarch concelebrated a mass at the high altar,” I added. 

Leonid shook his head. 

“No they didn’t,” he said. 

“Yes,” I persisted. “That’s what the church media called it.” 

“Impossible,” Leonid said. “They may have stood together at the altar but it could not have been concelebrated.” 

I replied that as a Baptist layman I could not have made the word up but he was unmoved. 

Later, during one of the National Council of Churches’ worship celebrations of Reformation, I sat next to Leonid. He leaned over and whispered, “We don’t observe Reformation Sunday,” he said, referring to Orthodox churches. “We did not have a reformation. Didn’t need one.” 

Whether they need reforming or not, in most Orthodox churches, the liturgy, ministry, and requirements for ordination have not changed in twelve hundred years. 

Leonid became an archpriest in the Orthodox Church in America and retired to serve as pastor of a church on Long Island. He became ill and, toward the end, preached in a wheel chair. He died in August 2021, may his memory be eternal! 

For Christians who are not Orthodox, Reformation Sunday, if not a high holy day, is a time to reflect on how the church has evolved over the centuries. 

When the reformers risked their lives to translate scripture into the vernacular, it was a revelation. Nowhere in the bible were references to popes, bishops, priestly celibacy, or Purgatory. Soon, thanks to the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, these truths were spread far and wide. The established church was threatened and the Reformation was on. 

Imagine the amazement of people who were told that good works was the only way to get into heaven when they read this passage in their own language: 

“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus, for good works…” (Ephesians 2:8-9) 

We have so much to thank these early reformers for, particularly the realization that we are saved by faith, and that no one – no pope, no bishop, no priest – stands between the individual sinner and God. 

Thus Reformation Sunday is a day for rejoicing and gratitude for those who came before us, including Martin Luther, who never intended to found a church named for him. As Luther famously said, “While I was drinking beer, God reformed the church.” 

But we would be doing these early reformers a disservice if our rejoicing did not include a sobering awareness of what they faced. The penalty for reform was invariably torture and fiery death at the stake. 

It’s difficult for us to fully appreciate what they went through. 

The late British writer C.J. Sansom wrote seven novels that paint a vivid and horrifying picture of the state of the church under the erratic and unpredictable reforms of Henry VIII. The novels offer detailed descriptions of life in medieval England, the smells, the sewage troughs in the middle streets, the multi-tiered caste system from King to peasant. The novels are written in the voice of Matthew Shardlake, a hunchback lawyer who struggles against his disability to solve crimes and brush against such personages as Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Cranmer, Queen Catherine Howard, and Henry VIII himself. 

In his book Lamentation, Sansom draws us into the dark side of the Reformation when King Henry vacillates on what his people should believe, what they should read, and how they must worship. People who guessed wrong what the King wants them to do at any given time face painful deaths. 

One of the most disturbing scenes in the book involves Anne Askew, a 25-year-old anabaptist reformer who claimed the authority of the Holy Spirit over the king. She was arrested by devious officials who plotted to depose Henry’s sixth and final wife, Queen Catherine, because they suspected she was a closet reformer. They tortured Anne Askew on the rack to force her to reveal that Catherine was one of her supporters. 

But Anne never talked. 

Sansom’s description of the rack is not for the squeamish. We hear the groaning of the ropes and the cracking of Anne’s joints and her screams, we struggle to breathe in the hot humidity of the torture room, we smell the foul sweat of the men pulling at the rack. 

Anne Askew was the only woman to be tortured on the rack prior to being burned at the stake because King Henry, in his tender wisdom, forbad women to suffer this fate. For that reason, the torturers were careful to hide their identities. 

Anne’s body was so broken by the rack that she could not stand. She was tied to a chair and taken to the place of execution where she was chained to the stake in an upright position. 

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to smell the acrid smoke and feel the flames as they climbed her body. According to some reports – accepted by Sansom in his fictional account – Anne’s suffering did not last long. In a spirit of Christian compassion her executioners tied a bag of gun powder around her neck. It exploded almost immediately, ending her agony and blowing her head off. 

It all began five hundred and seven years ago this Halloween when Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg. We celebrate this relatively benign but courageous fact today. 

But it’s not as simple as that. The truth is, if he had his way, Luther would have nailed a few Anabaptists to the door, too. And Jews. And the Pope. The defacing of the Wittenberg door was the ominous prelude to decades of burnings, beheadings, torture, and other primitive forms of hermeneutical discussion. 

Luther, who spent much of his life hiding from Catholic assassins, would have readily immolated the odd Mennonite or Jew whose theology he found abhorrent. 

Luther was complicated. Among other things, he was a bona fide prophet. God spoke through him with blinding clarity. 

But Luther also spoke for himself, and on those occasions he was often wrong. He was a typical sixteenth century European Christian who bristled with anti-Semitism and xenophobia and he bristled brisker than most. Had his glowering imperfections been less obvious, his followers might have elevated him to the demigod status of Joseph Smith or Mary Baker Eddy. 

Whether Luther actually defaced the Wittenberg door with nails is a matter of dispute, but historians are clear that he sent the theses to his bishop, Albert of Mainz, on October 31, 1517. They were not a demand for comprehensive church reform but a complaint about the sale of indulgences, a papal racket for selling tickets to heaven. 

The Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences was the opening salvo of the Protestant Reformation. Pope Leo X, who depended on indulgences to continue living in the manner to which he was accustomed, was alarmed by Luther’s disputation and eventually excommunicated him. His Holiness also dispatched goon squads in search of Luther’s hoary head. 

Ironically, the sale of indulgences has never gone away completely. There are still church fundraisers that suggest a donation of $5 will assure the attentiveness of the Blessed Mother to prayers. And scores of television evangelists, most of whom scorn both Lutherans and Catholics, raise millions by promising that contributions to their ministries will bring “special blessings” that undoubtedly include heaven. 

Luther’s point was that with God’s grace, salvation is achieved by faith alone. That was a revolutionary revelation that relieved a heavy burden from sinners who saw themselves struggling futilely to please a vengeful God. We Lutherans are beneficiaries of Martin Luther’s teaching that only the Holy Spirit can give us faith and we cannot do it ourselves. We are not among those who go around asking each other, “Have you found Jesus?” Through grace Jesus has found us. 

Salvation by faith remains a wonderful idea, and it’s too bad Pope Leo X couldn’t see it. It’s also too bad that the reformers themselves sometimes lost sight of it. 

But times change and we Christians are no longer immolating each other. Today Pope Leo XIV warmly embraces Lutherans and Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York (who knew he was a Luther scholar?) acknowledges “the church needed reforming” in 1517. One can even see the day in the not-too-distant future when Lutherans and Catholics will share the same communion elements of bread and wine at a common table. 

The ideal result of the Reformation will be when Lutherans and Catholics share a common priesthood, but that day seems far off. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America ordains women as pastors - ministers of Word and Sacrament - and consecrates women as bishops. But the otherwise open-minded Pope is not likely to go there. So for those who believe it is essential for the church to embrace the gifts of all who are called to ministry, regardless of gender, there is still reforming to be done. 

As we look forward to the perfect unity of a reformed church, it may be good to keep in mind that Reformation has always been imperfect, often brutal, and slow to embrace the insight that Luther saw in his more gracious moments: that persons are redeemed by faith, not dogma, and by God’s grace, not priestly intercession. 

True reformation may be a long ways off, but by God’s grace it will come. 

Like the long, slow moral arc of the universe, the arc of reformation bends inexorably toward unity. 

I'll Meet Your Caesar and Raise you a Jesus

 
October 18, 2026, First Lutheran Church of Throggs Neck, Bronx, N.Y.

The first time  I remember hearing about Jesus using a Roman coin to make a point about “rendering unto Caesar” (Matthew 22) was in 1956. Our pretty young Sunday school teacher read it to our Sunday school class in the United Church of Morrisville, N.Y. Daisy Jo was nubile and cute and triggered pre-pubescent stirrings in us 10 year old boys. Mostly I remember the way her lips formed the words, “I Would Be True,” which was hymn 180 in our little red hymnals. She’d lead the singing nearly every Sunday and we responded with wistful lisps, as if it were a futile lovers’ pact.

But I digress. The biblical reference to a coin attracted my attention because I knew the value of money. A dime could be exchanged for a thick Superman comic book at Dougherty’s Drug Store, and when I wasn’t absorbed with Daisy Jo’s evangelical wiles I was trying to imagine what a biblical coin looked like. The Indian head nickels in the collection plate were possible clues, but I suspected they looked little like the ancient oinage carried by Pharisees. So I wondered.

Naturally, there was no way to Google the Caesarian coin; Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin weren’t even born in 1956.

But now we live in an age of instant gratification where a few well-chosen keystrokes will fill the computer screen with instructive links. Hundreds of photos of 2,000 year-old Roman coins now appear to satisfy any numismatist’s curiosity, and so do links to thousands of articles about the Caesar who reigned in Jesus’ time: Tiberius Julius Caesar Augustus.

Historians refer to him more simply as Tiberius, to distinguish him from his predecessor emperors whose names he acquired to show his superior pedigree.

Daisy Jo never went into this kind of detail and perhaps it was just as well. I don’t know how the other kids imagined Caesar, but my image was of President Eisenhower in a toga: ancient, smiling, bald, and good. When Jesus told the Pharisees to “render unto Caesar,” I didn’t consider that to be a bad thing. My parents rendered their offering unto the collection plate every Sunday and unto Ike every April 15. It sounded like a reasonable plan to me.

But – and it’s a big but – Tiberius may have been a soldier-statesman, but he was no benign Ike. Those of us of a certain age learned all that in 1978, when I, Claudius – a BBC television adaptation of Robert Grave’s two novels on the first Roman emperors – appeared on PBS. Tiberius was convincingly portrayed as a paranoid, dyspeptic, sadistic and homicidal wacko by George Baker, MBE, a British actor and writer who, in real life, was very nice. 

Historians generally agree that Tiberius was not nice, although it’s hard to be sure because accounts of the emperors were written by either their friends or their enemies, both of whom were known to distort their anecdotes for devious ends.

When Jesus was shown a coin with Tiberius’ likeness, he was looking at one of history’s most evil villains. In that context, an invocation to “render unto Caesar” sounds like an encouragement to aid and abet.

The question is whether Jesus’ is saying citizens have equal obligations to the church and their government. The problem is, both institutions are equally imperfect.

Once during the Vietnam War I helped prepare a young man to present a biblical case to his draft board to obtain conscientious objector status. “I told (the board) that Jesus said to turn the other cheek and love your enemy,” the young man reported later. “They said, ‘Jesus also said to render unto Caesar, and military service is how you’ll do that.’”

Throughout history there have been good Caesars and bad Caesars, and it seems unlikely Jesus intends us to render unto all of them.

I was born 16 months after Adolf Hitler died, but he was one bad Caesar whose evil impact endured long after he was gone. To my knowledge, no circulating German coins ever bore his likeness, but he did appear on Reich postage stamps. In fact, so many Hitler stamps were printed that they exist as worthless curiosities. It’s gratifying to note that a stamp commemorating a German pastor who opposed him has greater value.

Pastor Martin Niemöller is well known for this Nazi era statement:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out -
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out 
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out -
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak for me.

The Nazis came for Niemöller in 1937 after he became the leader of a group of German clergy opposed to Hitler. He was sent to the Sachsenhausen and later to the Dachau concentration camps until he was released by the Allies in 1945. He was charged with “not being enthusiastic” in his support for the Nazi regime. The crime was actually a capital offense. His most famous colleague, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was hanged at the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp. But Niemöller never wavered, and he remained under the constant threat of death at Dachau until he was liberated by the Allies in 1945. He became a president of the World Council of Churches when the ecumenical body was formed in 1948.

One of the most powerful tributes to Niemöller is a play written by Gordon C. Bennett, retired professor of language arts at then Eastern Baptist College: God is My Fuehrer, a dramatic interpretation of the life of Martin Niemöller. Written in the midst of the Vietnam era, the play is Bennett’s testimony that a Christian’s highest authority is God in Christ, not governments and certainly not draft boards.

The play is out of print, but its impact on my life has been long-lasting. I took several courses from Gordon between 1968 and 1970, and I recall his research involved a trip to Germany where he met with Niemöller. Gordon has spent his entire life as a witness for peace, rendering unto God the things that are God’s.

I never met Martin Niemöller, but I had colleagues at the World Council of Churches who knew him well. I think what makes him such an impressive figure is his ordinariness: soft spoken, small in stature, with unexceptional aims. He admitted that he supported Hitler when he first came to power, “mostly because I yearned for a return of the Kaiser.” But once it became clear that Hitler sought to take God’s place at the center of national life, Niemöller turned away from Caesar and never looked back.

“Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

Jesus’ statement reverberates throughout history, not only as an ingenious rhetorical device to avoid a lawyerly trap but as a clear affirmation of what most churches have historically maintained: the state and church must be kept separate.

That way, when the state begins to stray from the commands of God, it is easier to remember that Caesar’s authority is not equal to God’s: not in A.D. 30. Not in 1940.  Not now.

“For it is, and must remain the case,” Martin Niemöller said, “that we must obey God rather than human beings.”

Forget Truth Social. Rejoice.

 October 11, 2026, First Lutheran Church, Throggs Neck, Bronx, N.Y.

“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.” – Philippians 4:5

“Jesus laughed.”

You won’t find that verse in the Gospels. It should be as prominent as “Jesus wept,” but it’s not there.

I think that must be an oversight on the part of the Gospel writers because, surely, Jesus’ contemporaries who saw him eat, drink, sleep, and weep, also saw him laugh.

Maybe the Gospel writers didn’t mention it because they thought it not Christlike to chortle. Or perhaps they never mentioned it because Jesus’ laughter was so familiar they saw no reason to remark on it.

The problem for us is that the lack of an explicit Gospel reference to Jesus’ fun side makes it difficult for us to imagine a joyful savior. “Did Jesus ever laugh?” a woman once asked in a Bible study class I attended. “You never see any pictures of Jesus laughing.”

That’s true. And part of the problem may be that we have been trained to see religion as humorless.

When I was in college, a popular cereal manufacturer made a feeble attempt at humor by printing funny sayings on its box.

The one-liners began with the words, “Confucius Say.”

“Confucius Say, ‘Best way to save face is keep lower part shut.’”

“Confucius Say, ‘’To make long story short, don’t tell it.’”

“Confucius Say, ‘Last will and testament is dead give away.’”

None of these lines are particularly funny. Perhaps the “Confucius Say” was added so you wouldn’t notice.

I can’t remember the name of the company that used Confucius to shill its products in the sixties, but I remember one revealing reaction to the campaign. I was sitting sleepily in a history class on ancient China when the professor interjected, “What’s so funny about ‘Confucius Say’? Would we find it funny if an ad campaign used the phrase, ‘Jesus Say’?”

Well, back in 1968, probably not. Confucius, who lived 500 years before Jesus, was a respected Chinese teacher, writer, and politician. Like Jesus, Confucius advocated personal and public morality and justice. His teachings were enormously influential in China and throughout Asia. He wasn’t a stand-up comedian and he didn’t make jokes, any more than Jesus made jokes in the Sermon on the Mount.

Unless, of course, Jesus did make jokes in the Sermon on the Mount. Some contemporary scholars claim we miss Jesus’ humor because we don’t understand his times or his audience.

A foolish man built his house on sand? (Matthew 7:26). Jesus’ practical audience would have burst out laughing – just as soon as they caught their breaths following his hilarious lines about giving your kid a stone to eat (Matthew 7:9) or walking around with a log in your eye (Matthew 7:4).

Come to think of it, maybe the shtick has possibilities. “Jesus say: man who eat too much toast get stuck in jam at narrow gate.”

Back in 1968, when Confucius was quoted on cereal boxes, religion was not a rich source of humor. Today, Confucius thrives on the Internet in memes so vulgar they can’t be repeated in mixed company. And Jesus is no longer untouchable when it comes to humor, even in toy stores. Action Jesus rolls up his sleeves next to plastic effigies of GI Joe and The Rock, while bobble headed Jesus competes in stores with bobble headed Barack.

The question is, how much humor are you able to take with your religion?

One Sunday evening years ago I drove into the parking lot of White Plains First Baptist Church. As soon as they recognized my car, two women – mature mentors of teenagers – ran up to me in obvious distress. I asked them what was up.

“Are you familiar with Life of Brian?” they asked simultaneously.

Of course I was familiar with Monty Python’s irreverent movie about Brian, one of many two-bit evangelists who gathered small followings in Palestine at the time of Jesus.

The film pokes fun at the soldiers, Pharisees, and peasants who interacted with false prophets, although Brian’s story is obviously close to Jesus’. Even the Magi briefly attend Brian’s birth until they realize they have mistaken the hovel of the Virgin Mandy for the crèche of Mary. When they realize their error they rudely grab their gifts out of the young mother’s hands and beat a pious path to the manger.

Life of Brian, like all of Python’s offerings, is not for everyone, but the two women were shocked by what they had just shown to the adolescents. Literally wringing their hands, they asked, “Do you think we’re in trouble?”

Life of Brian is only offensive to people who mistake it for a spoof on the messiah, which it is not. In my own view, I think it’s safer to show the film to teenagers than to encourage them to Google the tasteless and generally lascivious offerings of Confucius Say.

Religion and Christianity are no longer hands-off topics when it comes to humor. A popular meme on the Internet shows Jesus annoying a bartender. “Just water please. But put it in a carafe.”

These witticisms show a steady trend toward the demystification of religion and, perhaps, the final secularization of society.

But it is becoming increasingly obvious that the biggest joke of all has been hanging over our heads for two-thousand years.

The punch line is the Messiah himself. The joke is in the vast difference between the Messiah we were expecting, and the Messiah we got.

Rabbis tell us the Jewish concept of Messiah has remained unchanged for 4,000 years: a human warrior descended from David who would rebuild the temple, and enable the world’s Jews to return to Jerusalem and live forever in peace.

The Messiah would emphatically not be the Son of God, because the very idea would be anathema.

The Messiah the people of First Century Palestine were awaiting was a Judah Maccabee on Steroids, a bigger-than-life, pumped-up superhero with a cape and an M embroidered on his chest.

But what did they get?

Ha. They got a vulnerable baby too frail to lift his head.

They got a weakling who would grow to manhood indifferent to the political milieu in which he lived.

They got a gentle philosopher who talked incessantly about the reign of God.

They got a pacifist who called upon enemies to set aside their enmities and love one another.

They got a drifter who lived among the poor, engaged lowly women as equals, healed the sick, and expressed God’s compassion for all people.

They got a wise-cracking jokester who had no choice but to live out the irony he was: a vulnerable, puny, delicate human who personified the Almighty God, very man of very man and very God of very God.

And they got a Messiah who asserted his power in powerlessness, and who declared that God always honored the weakest and the last above the strongest and the first.

If the essence of humor is surprise, the utterly unexpected result of our assumptions and desires, then the coming of the Messiah is the funniest event in history.

For those who were praying for Messiahman the Mighty, the coming of the babe of Bethlehem was a warning to be careful what you pray for.

The coming of the Messiah is so different from all our expectations that all we can do is shake our heads in astonishment and delight.

And what else can we do when we hear the angels singing on high, when we finally get the great joke God is playing on us?

It’s funny. Rejoice. Again, I will say, Rejoice.

And laugh.

God Says Nope. Ten Times.

October 4, 2026, Saint Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, Queens, N.Y.

The parable of the wicked tenants continues the story we have been reading for the past several weeks. Again, Jesus responds to the chief priests and elders questioning his temple protest (Matthew 21:12–17).

Who is Jesus in this latest parable? He is the Son who comes to reclaim his Father’s property, is violently rejected by the Father’s tenants, and is vindicated by the Father, prompting judgment on the unfaithful tenants.

By reclaiming his Father’s property, the Son restores creation’s divine order. Jesus’ ministry shows this: the sick are healed, sinners restored, and God praised (Matthew 9:8). He brings wholeness to a broken world, offering glimpses of the “kingdom of heaven”—creation as God intended.

The long process of bringing wholeness to broken world has been the theme of Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament for thousands of years. The Revised Common Lectionary directs us to an unexpected commentary on Matthew 21: the 20th chapter of Exodus and the birth of the Ten Commandments.

Apart from finding the Ten Commandments preserved on brass plates in courthouses, government buildings, and other public places, how have you encountered these sacred rules for life?

On hot summer evenings at Lackland Air Force Base, when we basic trainees were granted a rare night off, we’d adjourn to a small patio that had vending machines and bitch about how tough it was.

It wasn’t really all that tough because the Air Force was reluctant to send out-of-shape young adults to march in the 100 degree Texas heat (we heard there had been fatalities), so we spent many days in air conditioned classrooms memorizing Air Force esoterica. But we thought we were working our asses off, at least compared to the leisurely days of our bygone civilian lives, and we loved the patio breaks. We could sit on hard benches, smoke Luckies, and suck back Dr. Peppers while keeping a wary eye out for psychotic sergeants.

This was in 1964. The Bay of Tonkin incident had happened weeks earlier and, although none of us knew this would trigger a massive U.S. troop surge in Vietnam, we were all wary about the future. We’d smoke as many cigarettes as we could in the time allotted and talk about stuff we thought was important: whether we’d get a pass into San Antonio, whether Sergeant Ellefson was certifiably nuts, whether our girlfriends were thinking about us, whether we’d survive the dreaded basic training obstacle course, or whether we’d be posted to Southern California or to some deadly rice paddy a million miles from home.

We even talked theology. One night I sat smoking with a basic trainee from El Paso while he patiently explained why Catholicism was superior to my religion. My dog tags said I was United Church of Christ, based on a guess I made to my recruiter because my home church was the United Church of Morrisville, N.Y., but I had little idea what the UCC was.

The intense young Texan on the patio assured me his church was the true church because it generated real miracles, including the appearance of the Virgin at Fatima and the inexplicable bloody tears that trickle down the alabaster cheeks of certain saints.

“These things give me such an oomph in my faith,” he said, and all I could do is nod vacuously because my church was not big on visitations or dubious phenomena. The young man (whose name I never knew) did express regret that his church wanted him to remain a virgin until he married and he wasn’t allowed to masturbate. “But wet dreams are not a sin because they are involuntary and I do look forward to those wet dreams,” he said. I nodded realizing we had some common ground and watched as he took a deep drag on his cigarette. He smiled but, unexpectedly, his face darkened.

“The ten commandments,” he whispered. “I’ve broken eight of then.”

I watched him mutely as a sadness crept across his face. I was 18, so it never occurred to me to doubt that a boy so young could be such an accomplished sinner.

“Which ones?” I asked.

He shrugged and looked away.

“Did you kill someone?”

He shook his head adamantly. I tried to remember the other nine commandments. Swearing, lying, having sex, stealing. What else? Not going to church? Worshipping Zeus? Wasn’t there something about coveting your neighbor’s ass, which we used to snicker about in Sunday school? But what was coveting?

We sat in silence. Soon the break would be over and we’d have to retreat to our sweltering barracks for another sleepless night.

I cleared my throat. “What ones didn’t you break, then?”

He shook his head as if he didn’t understand the question, but his mood brightened abruptly again. “Hey,” he said, smiling. “Time’s up.” A sergeant, who had the power of life or KP on us, strutted onto the patio pointing to his watch. Still smiling, the young man winked at me and waved. “God bless you,” he said cheerfully. He was assigned to another barracks and I don’t recall ever seeing him again. I wish I had gotten his name so I could Google him to see if he ever became governor of Texas or a shopping mall sniper or, perhaps, a monsignor or bishop. But he disappeared into the night, and now I wonder if he’d ever found the time to break the other two commandments, whichever they were.

These ancient memories come to mind because I’ve been reading Martin Luther’s Small Catechism, published in 1529 for the training of children. Luther summarized all essential theology into the Ten Commandments, the Apostles Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Sacrament of Holy Baptism, the Office of the Keys and Confession and the Sacrament of the Eucharist. The Small Catechism leaves out a whole lot of bible, and the radical reductionism makes me think of a cartoon showing two monks laboring at their calligraphy over two ornately designed bible broadsheets. One monk turns to the other and says with a smirk, “Someone is going to get a break. I’ve left out a couple of commandments.”

As succinct as it is, the Small Catechism is still a lot to chew on, beginning with the ten commandments themselves. When you get to my age, you can’t read the commandments without reflecting on the ones you’ve broken, and how often. Have I worshipped idols? Possibly. Have I disrespected God’s name? Have I misused the Sabbath? Have I stolen? Have I disrespected my parents? Have I lusted – well, let’s stop there.

Sometimes it does seem the law and the commandments are too darn much. This notion was dramatized by the rabbinic sage Mel Brooks, who in his History of the World Part I included a scene of Moses struggling to carry three stone tablets down the mountain. As Moses approaches the crowd, he intones, “The Lord God has given unto me these fifteen …” But one of the heavy tablets slips out of his grasp and falls to the ground in a hundred pieces. Moses thinks quickly: “…these TEN commandments.”

It’s entertaining to speculate what those additional five commandments may have been, but it’s not really necessary. Once the basic ten became a part of Jewish law, they began to multiply like sea monkeys in water. Leaf through your bibles, through Leviticus, through Deuteronomy, through Numbers and beyond, to see what happened. The original ten commandments were annotated, expanded and commented on sixty-fold. Oy vey. I’m wondering how morose my friend at the Texas patio would have been had he been moved to confess, “I’ve violated 585 of the 610 laws in the Pentateuch.”

And well he could have done so. Who can possibly remember all the laws of the bible?

Consider just a handful, arbitrarily chosen from Deuteronomy 22:

You shall not watch your neighbor’s ox or sheep straying away and ignore them; you shall take them back to their owner. If the owner does not reside near you or you do not know who the owner is, you shall bring it to your own house, and it shall remain with you until the owner claims it; then you shall return it. You shall do the same with a neighbor’s donkey; you shall do the same with a neighbor’s garment; and you shall do the same with anything else that your neighbor loses and you find. You may not withhold your help. You shall not see your neighbor’s donkey or ox fallen on the road and ignore it; you shall help to lift it up. If you come on a bird’s nest, in any tree or on the ground, with fledglings or eggs, with the mother sitting on the fledglings or on the eggs, you shall not take the mother with the young. Let the mother go, taking only the young for yourself, in order that it may go well with you and you may live long.

And so forth.

The original ten commandments are difficult enough to interpret. The weight of 610 biblical laws is so burdensome most people think they have only one choice: to be crushed beneath them, or stop reading them.

As I was reading though the Pentateuch this week, I remembered something I had read in my youth, an article in Mad magazine. Mad, also a product of rabbinic insight and dead-on humor, noted that President Eisenhower had a tendency to ramble, obfuscate and puzzle the public with musings and non sequiturs. The President probably did this deliberately, as his press secretary, James Haggerty, suspected. Prior to a press conference, Haggerty warned the President that a number of issues were sensitive and he could not afford to make a gaffe. “Don’t worry, Jim,” Eisenhower said. “I’ll just confuse them.” And on many occasions, he did just that.

Mad magazine’s solution was simple: Hire the most laconic and taciturn man in America to serve as an interpreter for the most circumlocuitous president. Their candidate: Gary Cooper. During each press conference, the magazine suggested, after Eisenhower finished speaking, Coop would go to the mike and say, “Ike says, ‘Yup.’” And if the rambling utterance appeared to head in a different direction, Coop would distill it again: “Ike says, ‘Nope.’”

How nice it would be, we say to ourselves, if we had a similar device to help us interpret all the laws and the prophets going back five millennia.

Thankfully, the device is already in our possession – in the words of Jesus.

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ He said to him, ‘ “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’ (Matthew 22:34-40)

You don’t have to be an ecclesiastical lawyer to realize how complicated biblical law can be. The very complexity of the law has led to wide misunderstandings and dangerous misinterpretations. Over the centuries, good Christians have used the law to start wars, burn each other at stakes, trade in slaves, commit genocide on cultures that were considered inferior, relegate women and girls to the status of property, and despise others whose languages, complexions, religions, or sexual orientations are different from ours. All in the name of God’s law.

But lest we be confused, Jesus offers a clarifying note: “God says, ‘Nope.’”

All the law and the prophets can be distilled into two simple sentences, Jesus declares:

Love God.

Love your neighbor.

In the final analysis, it may well be that each of us has broken one or four of the ten commandments. And it goes without saying that the Decalogue is one of the most important documents to emerge from human history, because these commandments constitute the first time basic rules of conduct and morality were written down.

But it would be a shame to follow our ancestors into the maze of confusion that the law became.

Love God. Love your neighbor.

Jesus has shown us the way through the maze, in five unforgettable words.

God grant that we discover the secret of living them. Despite its daunting profundity, the secret can be stated even more simply than in Luther’s Small Catechism.

When God says love everyone, don’t try to figure it out.

Just say “yup.”

By What Authority?

 

September 27, 2026, Saint Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, Queens, N.Y.

Church cancelled; Nor'easter

It’s a week before Passover and Jesus is in the Temple.

Not just in the Temple. He’s holding the Temple captive to his righteous presence. He entered Jerusalem in a grand procession celebrated with flowers and palms and went directly to the Temple with a lash to toss animal cages and money boxes into the air.

Now he stands his ground in what one commentator calls a one-man occupation of the Temple. He’s attracting too many people who believe in his powers of healing and comfort and the Chief priests and scribes are eager to move him out. They mount a series of offensives to undermine Jesus’ authority or paint him as a  posturing fraud.

First the Temple leaders concoct a “gotcha” question to trap Jesus into saying things that would be regarded as blasphemous or, even worse, force him to be conspicuously silent.

Aware that much of Jesus’ popularity is based on the astonishing miracles he performs, they ask two questions. “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you that authority?”

The disciples near Jesus must have cringed when they heard this. Jesus is in danger! After three years of itinerate ministry, the disciples had no doubt Jesus was God’s son, the Messiah, the Christ. But if the chief priests could force him to say that aloud in public, they would have all the evidence they needed to arrest him. That kind of blasphemy carried a death sentence with it.

But Jesus, who had spent three years sparring with the Pharisees, was not about to get entangled in an ill-conceived verbal snare. 

“I will also ask you one question; if you tell me the answer, then I will also tell you by what authority I do these things. Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?” 

The chief priests glanced at each other and turned aside. John the Baptizer was an off-limits topic because the people had loved him and regarded John as God’s  prophet. The Temple leaders did not have the political clout to declare John’s baptism had no divine origin. The crowd would turn against them.

Abashed, the turned back to Jesus and murmured, “We don’t know.” 

“Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things,” Jesus said. And I like to think he said this with a slight smile on his face.

Jesus is, after all, still occupying the Temple where he can’t be touched and he plans to be there for a while. In fact he won’t leave until the first verses of Matthew’s chapter 24.

But Jesus is not through with the chief priests and elders yet. Before they can wander away, he calls to them.

“What do you think?”

Perhaps Jesus is soliciting their opinion on what he is about to say, or perhaps he is inviting them to reason together with him. The question certainly has the effect of compelling the senior leaders to listen.

Jesus tells the story of a man who had two sons who he wanted to work in his vineyard for a day. He asked one son who told him no but later changed his mind and went to the Vineyard. He asked the other son who told him yes, but went away and forgot about it.

Professor Stanley Saunders, a retired seminary professor, sets this parable in the “two sons” motif of biblical story telling.

He writes: “The two sons tradition itself begins with Cain and Abel and Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, Aaron and Moses, and David and his brothers, the prodigal and his older brother —a tradition laden with motifs of envy and betrayal, struggles for power, and sometimes reconciliation.”

And perhaps the two sons in Matthew’s parable strike a common chord. As I was reading the story it occurred to me: I am these guys.

I hate to think how many times in my adolescent rebellion I adamantly refused my father’s request to do a job but, feeling guilty moments later, did it anyway. And how many times I said, “Sure, Dad,” but went to my room to type and draw cartoons and forgot all about it. There are times when I accepted my father’s authority, albeit reluctantly, and times when I paid lip service to my father’s authority but rejected it.

The leaders of the Temple agree with Jesus that it was the first son, the one who said no but went to the vineyard anyway.

“Actions speak louder than words,” Professor Saunders notes.. “Jesus uses this exchange to expose what the leaders really thought about John. The chief priests’ and elders’ failure to believe and respond to John reveals the truth about where they stood, and thus which brother they actually represent. 

“Jesus’ authority, in contrast, is affirmed by the integrity of his words and actions, as well as by its outcomes: gathering and restoration, healing and cleansing, release from demonic powers, restored sight, table fellowship with sinners, and preservation of the least ones—all examples of the “fruit” of repentance.”

Early Christian leaders came to Matthew’s gospel years after 70 C.E. when the Romans destroyed the temple and abolished the priesthood. But the parable of the two sons reminded people of how much more the priests could have done in their day.

“Although the chief priests were appointed by God and the elders were elected by God’s people, they professed allegiance to God in empty words alone while failing to fulfill their divine calling to serve others (20:25–27),” writes Professor Eunyung Lim of Middlebury College in Connecticut. “Like the second son—whose reply, ‘Yes, Master’, sounds emphatically obedient—their words never translated into action.

One of Matthew’s goals throughout his Gospel is to affirm the authority and power of Jesus.

But “Matthew is not content,” writers Professor Saunders, “with the simple claim that Jesus possesses divine power, nor even that his power surpasses that of worldly leaders. Matthew focuses instead on the nature, source, and consequences of Jesus’ power. He aims to demonstrate not only that Jesus is more powerful than the world’s powers, but that his power is of a different kind, a power that produces healing and reconciliation rather than alienation and violence.”

Our human spirit is not equipped to fully understand the enormity of Jesus power. John’s Gospel is only a poetic approximation of that power and its source.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life,  and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.”

We will never fully comprehend the astounding power of creation that is gracefully and unpretentiously expressed in the words, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth …” (Genesis 1:1).

What was it like? A blinding Big Bang as God flung matter into the void, resulting in billions of spheres of hot plasma made of hydrogen and helium that became stars and sons, and the manifestation of orbs of iron and gas and water that hardened into planets. Over billions of years the earth cooled, land masses split apart, drifted into continents, rock was ground into soil, soil mixed with water and created the intangible conditions that gave forth to single celled life. Cells joined together, Life clung tenaciously to the earth and over long eons became birds, reptiles, mammals, primates, and, finally, humankind.

We will never comprehend it. But in faith we trust it all happened by God’s plan and by God’s hands.

And an integral part of it at the very beginning was the Word, the Son who in the fullness of time became flesh and walked the earth as a human being.

Therein lies the authority of Jesus. That authority is from God, and that authority manifests God’s love for creation. And not withstanding breathtaking and creative power that authority is, we know it in the form of Jesus who brings us eternal life, unconditional love, healing, comfort, and holy instructions to love one another and manifest justice for all.

UNFAIR!

September 20, 2026, First Lutheran Church, Throggs Neck, Bronx, N.Y.

I was born in the Catskills and grew up in Central New York farm country. My father was a poorly paid school teacher with five kids and he spent his summers working on road crews to make ends meet. When my siblings and I approached him for money we did not have high expectations.

As a result we looked for sources of income elsewhere. We painted, we weeded neighbor’s gardens, we became orderlies in the local nursing home, we trimmed the grass around gravestones at the cemetery.

I was the oldest so the better opportunities came my way. One of our neighbors was Dick Bury, a dairy and hay farmer, who was dependent on hired hands to get the chores done.

I had some wonderful, challenging, back-breaking experiences working for Dick. In the spring I helped pull overflowing sap buckets off the maple trees and pour the sap into large vats where it would be boiled and boiled until it became maple syrup. I was surprised that the sap from the tree was tasteless and definitely not sweet but it was a useful lesson about being patient until the golden syrup was ready for your waffles.

In the summer Dick would mow his hay and mold it into tightly packed 85-pound rectangles that plopped out of the baler every few feet. Several of my friends and I would be hired to lift and toss the bales onto a flat-bed truck driven by Dick.

It was hard work but Dick was generous with breaks and always had a vat of sweet ice tea ready to soothe our throats. My friends and I began work at sunrise and worked through suppertime. When the day was over he paid us for the hours we worked in cash.

Not all of us were able to begin the day at sunrise. Sometimes we had family obligations or other duties and we would join the hay bale crew at noon. We knew we’d take a pay cut for fewer hours of work. But of course that was only fair. Dick Bury was a good and fair man.

In fact, I would go so far as to say Dick would have been constitutionally incapable of paying the same wage to workers who had worked half as many hours as the others. His conscience would not allow it. It would be unfair.

Fairness is one of the fundamental credos of human conduct. Even young children know when they are not being treated equitably. I sometimes think the accusation of “UNFAIR” is among the first words used by kids who think a brother or sister is getting more than she deserves.

We measure our integrity and goodness by whether we are being fair or being treated fairly. We have the Fairness Doctrine. Fair Wage. Fair Play. Fair chance. Fair opportunity.

So how do we understand Jesus’ declaration, in Matthew 20, that all these exemplars of fairness may hold little weight in the Kingdom of God?

Professor Nicholas J. Schaser, of Macalister College, to whom I have turned many times for instruction, helps us parse the Parable of the Vineyard Laborers.

In Jesus’s parable, a landowner hires laborers to work in his vineyard throughout the day (Matthew 20:1–7). He agrees to pay the first group a denarius for the day, then hires additional workers at the third, sixth, ninth, and eleventh hours—about 9:00 a.m., noon, 3:00 p.m., and 5:00 p.m. At day’s end, he pays the latecomers the same denarius promised to the first workers (20:9–10).

Seeing that the later workers receive the same pay, the first group complains: “These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat” (20:12). The landowner replies, “‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you” (20:13–14).

Professor Schaser introduces us to different ways this parable has been interpreted.

“Unfortunately,” he writes, “much traditional interpretation identifies the grumbling group as works-focused Jews or Pharisees, and the subsequent workers as gentiles or Christians.”

That makes little sense, he says. There are no Pharisees in the audience so Jesus has no reason to chastise them for grumbling against the landowner. Jesus is addressing his disciples, so it makes sense that the first laborers represent the first disciples Jesus called to follow him and the latecomers are the followers who came after them.

Rather than centering the laborers, Professor Schaser invites us to consider the householder. Jesus’s parable portrays God’s love and grace toward those who follow him. Before any work begins, the householder enters a binding agreement with the first laborers and promises their pay. This reflects God’s covenantal faithfulness: human effort does not earn the reward but flows from the grace of a covenant already established.

The householder also continues seeking workers throughout the day. “About five o’clock he went out and found others standing around, and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here idle all day?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard.’

Although the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition’s wording—“standing around” and “standing here idle”—may suggest indifference or laziness, the Greek simply describes them as “without work” (argōs).

In the parable of the vineyard, Professor Schaser notes, we are reminded of the command God gave Israel through Moses: “Give liberally and be ungrudging when you do so, for on this account the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in all that you undertake. Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land’” (Deuteronomy 15:10–11).

The generous householder—God—offers work and purpose to everyone he encounters.

What could be fairer than that? This is good news for each of us. God doesn’t care if we are cradle Lutherans or lapsed Lutherans, whether we are unchurched, whether we are good or bad, whether we are just or unjust, whether we are worthy or unworthy, or whether we are late to faith.

No matter who we are, whenever we come to the vineyard of faith, God is not measuring your worth by when you clocked in. When God says, “You also go into the vineyard,” the full rewards of the Kingdom are yours by grace.

Like the “generous” householder (Matthew 20:15), God seeks those who need meaningful work and extends to all the grace of a living wage in the Lord’s vineyard.

And that is no reason to grumble.

Forgive or Fuggetaboudit

 

September 6, 2026, Saint Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, Queens, N.Y.

“If your brother or sister sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If you are listened to, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If that person refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church, and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a gentile and a tax collector.  Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.  Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven.  For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” - Matthew 18:15-20

I am fortunate enough to come from a family that often brings bible stories to life like medieval morality plays.

My grandfather and his brother, my Uncle Fred, lived in two stately farm houses separated by a narrow ribbon of grass. They hated each other and regarded the other’s property to be an evil pit that should never be traversed. As a boy I visited Uncle Fred at his barn every time we were in town, partly because he and Aunt Mae always welcomed me warmly, sometimes with cookies, and partly because I loved their old mangy German Shepherd, Shep. I presume members of my family never told Grandpa about my incursions into enemy territory and I was barely aware that my visits might have angered him.

I have no reason to believe Grandpa and Uncle Fred ever visited each other alone to point out the other’s grievous fault. And my family’s way of becoming witnesses to their brotherly spats was to form whispering conclaves to complain behind their backs.

“You know, Uncle Fred and Grandpa used to live in each other’s houses and one day they decided to trade,” I heard my father whisper to my mother. “No one knows why.”

“You know, Uncle Fred borrowed money from Grandpa to open a restaurant in Erie, Pennsylvania,” I heard Uncle Bob whisper to Cousin George. “The restaurant failed and Uncle Fred returned home without the money.”

“You know, Grandpa was the oldest of four siblings and some people think Grandpa did better than the others when their father’s will was probate,” Aunt Betty whispered in Uncle Bud’s ear.

None of these unfounded rumors sounded severe enough to generate lifelong enmity between the two old men, but I was a kid and there was s0 much about life I hadn’t figured out.

By the time I was a teenager the lingering competition between Grandpa and Uncle was their race to eternity.

Grandpa won the race and was laid out in a suit he never wore in a casket he would have thought too expensive. My teenage cousin Barbie and I were focused on a fly that alit on Grandpa’s nose and we didn’t hear the whispers that were swirling around us: 

“Where’s Fred?” “Is Fred here?” “Did Fred say he was coming?”

Barbie and I noticed that the fly had taken up permanent residence on Grandpa’s nose. “Remember how he’d whisk flies off his nose without waking up?” We both envisioned Grandpa reaching out of the casket to shoo the fly and we started laughing. We tried to hide it by lowering our heads but Aunt Lena noticed our shoulders shaking and thought we were crying. She came over and put her arms around us, which made it even harder t0 suppress our laughter and real tears dripped down our cheeks.

Then Uncle Fred walked in. 

All eyes turned to him and then, because my family believes it is impolite to stare, all eyes turned away. Uncle Fred nodded at a few people and walked over to the coffin.

He studied Grandpa’s remains for a few moments. (The fly was gone.) He turned away briefly to see if he was being noticed and turned again to Grandpa. He nodded. He harumphed. He turned sharply and walked out the door.

The whispers resumed immediately.

“Was that Fred?” “Was he crying?” “He wasn’t smiling was he?” Where did he go?”

Thus Grandpa and Uncle Fred brought life to this Gospel passage: “and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a gentile and a tax collector.” Of course, neither of them would have entered a church, and I suspect both of them wouldn’t mind being thought of as a gentile or tax collector. 

After mentioning tax collectors and gentiles, Jesus adds, “whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven” (18:18). This statement can be understood in several ways, three of which are especially compelling.

Professor Nicholas J. Shaser of Macalaster College in Saint Paul, Minn., offers some suggestions as to what Jesus mean when he says we will bind and loose on earth and in heaven.

First, because the language of binding and loosing appears in a discussion of sin and possible forgiveness (18:5), Matthew 18:18 may refer to sins being forgiven or retained. John’s Gospel offers a similar saying: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained” (John 20:23). This suggests that the fourth evangelist understood Matthew’s “binding” and “loosing” in terms of forgiving and retaining sins.

Second, Matthew’s saying may refer to the disciples’ authority to exclude and restore members of the church, a reading that fits the surrounding discussion in Matthew 18:15–20. Josephus, the first-century CE Jewish historian, describes the Pharisees of the first century BCE as “becoming administrators of everything—to banish and recall whom they want, to loose and bind” (Jewish War 1.111).3

Third, binding and loosing may refer to exorcism and authority over demons. Several Second Temple texts use the terms this way, including the account in which Raphael “bound” the demon Asmodeus and freed Sarah from demonic affliction (Tobit 8:3). The New Testament reflects similar usage when Satan is “bound” and “loosed” in Revelation 20:2–3, and when Luke describes a woman whom “Satan had bound” for 18 years before Jesus “loosed” her on the Sabbath (Luke 13:16).4 

Still, because Matthew 18:15–20 does not mention the devil or demons, the first two interpretations may be stronger.

The passage concludes by affirming God’s authority over church proceedings and Christ’s continuing presence with the gathered community. Jesus declares, “If two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (Matthew 18:19–20). 

Finally, we are reminded that although internal conflict is unavoidable, unity and fellowship and communication help sustain divine guidance and promote a forgiving spirit among believers.

And I must offer a shout-out to Grandpa and Uncle Fred by vividly showing us precisely how not to do it.