Free to Play

This is the sermon delivered by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen to the congregation of Unfinished Community on Sunday, October 1, 2023, drawing from Matthew 21:23-32.

Today’s scripture is the sort of thing that requires a great deal of focus, careful exegesis, and detailed thought in order to really draw out the nuance of what God is speaking to us through the text today. So you might well imagine that I’ve spent a great deal of time this week surrounded by ancient and dusty tomes, digging into this passage in every possible way and exploring, with prayerful consideration and fierce academic integrity, precisely what the message is for us in this word, today.

You might expect that, but the truth is that this week has been, as you can probably tell, insane. Between dual outbreaks of adenovirus and influenza running through our kids schools like wildfire, graduate work, and a series of pastoral emergencies within our own communities, I have come to the end of pretty much every day less like a well-satisfied and accomplished adult, and more like a beleaguered soldier, stumbling back to the barracks after a week of trench warfare, burned and bleeding and about ready to pass out.

So it should come as no surprise really that, for the sake of my own sanity, I’ve spent no small amount of time this week playing video games. Truth be told, I’ve always found games to be a nice little respite from the stresses of life, and this week it’s been a very necessary one. In particular lately, I’ve been getting no small amount of enjoyment out of playing Star Trek Online - a fact which should surprise exactly no one - which is one of the many free-to-play online role playing games out there in the world.

Now I won’t bore you with all the details of the vast and complicated landscape of modern video games, but it is worth understanding that within the realm of online role playing games, there are really two very different types of game, and that difference is all, oddly enough, about how you pay for the games.

The first type of game are what we call subscription-based online games. These are usually the games that come to mind when you think of an online game, things like the original World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XI, and Final Fantasy XIV. In these games, you pay a monthly subscription, and the game developers use that money to continue developing the massive world of the game, adding more content, and shaping the world into something of a small masterpiece. Final Fantasy XIV, for example, is a vast, full, and beautiful world full of complexity, wonderful storytelling, and a surprisingly sharp sense of humor. And World of Warcraft, the OG of online roleplaying games, has been growing and adding new playable content on the regular for twenty years

Yeah, I feel old too!

But as great, vast, and wonderful as these subscription-based games can be, there’s another type that’s far more common, and those games are called “free to play” games. In these games, you usually don’t have to pay anything at all; you can download the game, and jump right in without ever spending a single penny, and the creators will still just keep adding more and more to the game over the years.

Now if you’ve ever studied economics for more than 5 minutes, you’ve immediately spotted something highly suspicious in this format, I assume. After all, if subscription games need you to pay money so they can keep making game, how is it possible for free-to-play games to do the same thing, but without charging anything?

Well Star Trek Online, the game I’ve been enjoying lately, is one of these types of games. And, just like any other game, you start by making your own, customized character, who then emerges into the world as a weak, squishy, level 1 character. In this game in particular, you begin as a little cadet who, for some reason, lucks into command of a small, nearly 200-year-old starship, which you then take out into the universe to do your best to make a difference. In playing the game, there are really three things you have to worry about; your character’s level (which grows with experience as you play), your equipment (that’s your weapons, shields, armor, and all that stuff), and your ship. As you play the game, your level begins to grow, and you get access to better and stronger equipment, better weapons and shields for your ship and stuff like that. Eventually, as you continue to grow and develop, you’ll get access to bigger and better ships too; ships that have room for bigger and better equipment, stronger engines, and the like.

After you’ve been playing for a while, you’ll have gone from a little cadet flying your tiny old ship out on small, unimportant missions, to a Fleet Admiral in command of a massive cruiser, fighting intergalactic wars, saving planets, and doing all that wonderful escapism you’d expect from a game like this. And once you get to the top, level-wise, the game does a fun little shift that most games of its type do, where you stop focusing on solo missions, and start spending your time working together with other players at top level to tackle missions so big, so difficult, that you need a whole team of players to take them on.

At this point, a not-insignificant portion of your playtime is spent coordinating with other players who, like you, have high-level characters, powerful equipment, and top-tier ships. You get groups together to tackle these great and difficult missions, and when you’ve gotten everyone together, ships in a formation that looks like it’s guaranteed to spell death for anything you might come across, ready and waiting to begin that calculated, skillful dance of gameplay that you’ve spent 65 levels learning how to do as perfectly as possible, that is when you finally realize how it’s possible for a game like this to be utterly and completely free.

You see, free-to-play games are also known as “pay-to-win” games because, unlike in subscription games, you also have the option to just whip out your credit card, and buy that high-level ship, or those planet-killing weapons. You can, as most people do, play the game as designed but, if you’ve got a lot of disposable income and a definitive lack of patience, you can just skip the grind and buy your way to the best stuff.

But, there’s a catch.

Oh, you can buy that massive, gorgeous starship, and fly around looking for all the world like someone who’s spent years playing the game, but all the game’s equipment is tied to your level. That means that no matter how much money you spend on that big, beautiful, powerful-looking starship, its just cosmetic. Until you go out and actually do the work of gaining experience, learning how to play the game, and leveling up your character, you can’t actually use any of those powerful weapons or equipment you’ve spent all that money on.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spent part of an evening coordinating a team effort in the game, finding myself placed in a group with other big, powerful ships just like mine, only for the mission to start and find that while I’m busy unloading several warcrime’s worth of weapons into the enemy, that ship who’s supposed to have my back is just…

…flying around, going pew pew with his little, level-1 phaser.

Of course, he gets blown up just about immediately, and since we’re partway into a 5-person fight and just now realizing that we only actually ever had 4 people in the first place, it turns out our group isn’t strong enough to do the mission on its own. So we fight bravely, fight heroically, and ultimately fight futilely, and after a time we’re all utterly and completely destroyed by a fight that we should have been able to handle easily, but for the ego of some rich kid with a bunch of disposable income who didn’t want to bother actually leveling up like the rest of us, and just wanted to skip right to the good part instead.

It’s frustrating, honestly, to be have to deal with someone who so blatantly doesn’t care about other people, someone so obsessed with having the appearance of strength and success that they’ll happily throw others under the bus just so they can look to all the world as if they’re strong and successful. People who’d much rather look like they’ve done the work, than actually do any real work.

This is the exact kind of person we’re presented with in the scripture today. The same frustrating, annoying, image-obsessed narcissist that lives in those free-to-play games have been around since before there was even electricity!

At first, reading this text though, it kinda looks like Jesus is the one being a bit of an arrogant ass here, right? I mean, imagine for a minute that you’re a pastor, or one of the elders, and you’re just sitting in church when some random dude just walks in and starts preaching. And not only that, but the congregation takes one listen to this guy and they start listening to him as if he was the pastor now! It doesn’t seem to matter that the elders haven’t given the ok for a guest preacher, or that the pastor is still sitting right there; this guy couldn’t seem to care less about the fact that he just walked into somebody’s church and started acting like he owned the place!

I mean, wouldn’t you be inclined to walk over, with a bit of a self-possessed attitude, and ask him just who, in God’s name, he thinks he is, anyways?

And I have to admit, the argumentative, iconoclastic side of me does really love how when the temple leadership come up to him in challenge, he turns it back around on them. Oh, it would make sense for Jesus to meet this challenge to his authority with a clear and definitive statement of the very real, very true authority that he’s got in that situation; you might imagine that this is the perfect time for Jesus to lead off with an “I am He,” with a capital “H” of course.

But no, rather than meeting force with force, Jesus kicks it back to them with a different question, a theological one about John the Baptist instead. Now, to be honest, we could talk a lot about who John the Baptist was, but the only really relevant fact to the story is, at this point, that he was extremely popular with the people. Like Jesus, John had a reputation for speaking in defense of the poor, and against the ruling, religious elites of the time.

So when Jesus asks the temple leadership just where John’s baptism comes from, they quite rightly realize that they’re in a bit of a bind. If they say that John’s baptism came from God, then Jesus has them dead to rights because, unlike the people in the surrounding crowd, they were all well-known opponents of John, just as they are of Jesus. However, if they say that John’s baptism didn’t come from God, then the crowd will be pissed. They might get angry, or worse, and if they did that it would break their image as the wise, sensible, and above all nice leaders of the temple.

And they know, these temple leaders, that their decision is rooted in a desire to appear as righteous as possible, to maintain their image as temple leaders, priests and elders alike. So, as image-obsessed leaders often do when trapped theologically, they decide to punt the question. “We don’t know,” they say. You just \ can hear the argument, can’t you? Rather than take ownership of their own fear and insecurity, rather than owning the superficiality of their faith, rather admit to fronting a religion that is only skin-deep, rather than taking the opportunity to be even just a little bit spiritually vulnerable and open to change, growth, and a bit of a level-up, instead these leaders try to make it God’s problem instead. “How could we possibly know that,” they start to rationalize to Jesus’ face, “that’d be between John and God. We can’t say anything about his personal faith journey, or the state of his heart!”

And just as they’re limbering up to tack a “butt” on the end of that, just as they’re getting ready to use “we don’t know” to deflect, to evade, to change the topic to anything but the no-win-scenario that Jesus has trapped them in, confident that they can spin the situation to regain their authority, Jesus shuts them down, hard. "Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things,” he says; “Same applies here. If you don’t know, if that’s an issue between John and God, then the same goes for my authority too.”

And he just…goes back to teaching and preaching. At this moment, he dismisses the pharisees, kicks them from the conversation entirely, and goes back to the crowd, to his people, to those who are dedicated to the work of learning, growing, and maturing in their faith by actively listening to the teachings of Christ Jesus.

You see, the church leaders walked into that situation with an assumption of authority, an assumption backed up by their shiny robes, and the weight of all that social currency - and actual currency - that they were carrying around with them. They knew all the right people, rubbed all the right elbows, and they looked for all the world exactly like you’d expect people of God to look. They did all the right prayers, full public with their piety, because the truth is that the crux of their authority was built on nothing more than the appearance of divine authority, rather than the genuine article.

And Jesus kicked them from the party without a second thought.

And from here, Jesus goes on into his parable, as he so often does, but what he’s explaining here is basically the same thing that any video gamer just feels, instinctively, in this situation.

There are two types of people in the world, two types of people you’ll encounter in a life spent in pursuit of God’s work of justice and mercy in the world. The first type of people are those who Jesus represents with the first son, the one who said that he wouldn’t go out into the vineyard, but changed his mind and went anyways. This son knew that, no matter the image he presented to his father, even if he was a bit disrespectful, if he truly wanted to get anywhere with his father, he needed to go out and actually do the hard work he had been asked to do. He had to put in the time and the effort, gain the experience, level himself up so that he could face bigger, and more important work, right by his father’s side.

The second son on the other hand, tried to skip the line. This guy told his father exactly what he thought the old man needed to hear, gave just the right image, said exactly what you’d expect him to say if he were the perfect son.

Only he didn’t actually do anything.

The second son didn’t want to actually play the game, so he just paid to win. Or so he thought. Because as Jesus turns back to the church leaders in this moment to ask the question, we the readers can start to see the real truth behind the parable:

The father knew which kid actually did the work, just as God knows the difference between those who try their best to look Christian, and those who try to do the much harder work of being a Christian.

You see, oftentimes in our faith, we can get obsessed with making sure that we look the part. We can lose ourselves in the appearance of faith, lose ourselves in the way that other people see us as Christian, that we become like these church leaders, more concerned with how the crowd might judge our answer than with taking the opportunity to learn, and to change, and to grow. This “image-driven” faith surrounds us and has, for many of us, become the yardstick by which we’ve been judged for our entire lives.

How many times have we been told that worship which doesn't elicit tears is insufficient, that a church service isn't complete without a public altar call, and that we should always be ready to stand, boldly and publicly, to constantly dedicate and re-dedicate our lives to Jesus Christ? How many times have we been told that if you're not raising your hands in the for-some-reason-now nearly-universal gesture of praising God, then you're not really worshipping? How often have we been told that a Christian must look a certain way, dress a certain way, act a certain way, or even be a specific kind of person in order to be deserving of the title Christian.

How many of us have been called a sinner because we didn’t sing loud enough, because we didn’t raise our hands high enough, or because we had the audacity to wear the wrong T-shirt, or a short skirt? How man of us have been condemned for failure to appease the crowd, even as we’re desperate to love and serve the Lord.

And it goes both ways too, to be honest. I have known several pastors - actual pastors, mind you, not evangelical cult leaders - who were so obsessed with the will of the crowd that everything decision they made as a leader was rooted in a single question; “what do people want?” Pastors like this are so terrified that someone might confront them, disagree with them, or find them unlikeable in any way, that they’ll just give anyone whatever they want, or tell people whatever they want to hear, even if it was contradictory, even if it was unhealthy, even if it was outright destructive for the person or the church…they'd just do or say whatever they though the other person wanted. And inevitably, churches led in this way fall apart; their worship becomes disorganized and inconsistent, because it’s constantly changing to accommodate the whims of whoever complained the loudest this week. Their leadership follows suit and becomes stuck, unable to actually accomplish anything because they’re so busy trying to make everyone happy that they’ve forgotten how to make sure everyone is fed.

They’re so busy trying to make themselves look like a good church, that they’ve forgotten how to be a church at all.

This is what Jesus is warning us about here, the hypocrisy that Jesus speaks against time and time again in the gospels. This is what he is speaking about in chapter 23, when he says “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.”

This is the authority from which Jesus preaches, both in today’s passage and overall. This is what gave him the right to stroll into the temple and start teaching, even while the leaders of the temple were standing there in shock at his audacity. The leaders of the temple couldn’t believe that this man could walk right in to their temple, and preach to their congregation without paying them any mind, but as they were standing there in their finery, wrapped in all that unearned social standing, flying around in their expensive starships that they bought rather than earned, they couldn’t see the truth staring them in the face:

It was never their temple in the first place.

God doesn’t go out of the way to invite only those people who look the part, who say the right things, wear the right clothes, or rub elbows with the right people. God doesn’t open the temple only to the “right kind” of worshipper, or save a seat at the front for those who please the most people.

God doesn’t care if you pay-to-win; God cares if you’ve actually played the game.

The kingdom of God is open to tax collectors, prostitutes, and everyone else that appearance-obsessed leaders have ever said isn’t welcome. There’s a seat saved right at the front for every single person who has ever been called unwelcome by a wannabe pastor who didn’t want the rich, old members to “get the wrong idea.” Scripture is meant to be read by stuttering voices struggling to get through the next word out of a love for God, songs are meant to be sung by off-key voices that just want to share their love and gratitude with the Creator. The pews are meant to be filled by the lonely, the dirty, the broken, the suffering, the uncertain, the poor, the homeless, the disabled, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and anyone else who’s cried out in their hearts to be embraced by the love of God, while being made to feel less than perfect by church leaders who paid their way to the appearance of righteousness.

For Christ came to us all in the way of righteousness, and the church leaders did not actually believe him, but the tax collectors, the prostitutes, and all those they had cast aside believed him.

And even after those leaders saw it, even after they saw God at work among them, they still did not change their minds and believe him, because he didn’t look like them.

So, I guess that’s my question for you all this week. Who do you believe? Do you believe the Christ who stands among those who go to work in the vineyards, who walk out into the world to do Christ’s work of compassion, care, mercy, and love? Or do you believe those with perfect clothes, and perfect teeth, who stand in front of thousand dollar cameras, with hundred-thousand dollar paychecks, getting millions of views for their ten-cent theology which says that what you do is irrelevant because God only wants you if you look just the right way?

Because I know what I believe. I believe in God, the Almighty Creator of heaven and earth in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord, who did not live for the wealthy and the powerful, but who suffered and died, hung on a cross between two thieves, so that all who are willing to go out into the world to do the difficult work of sharing God’s love might be find a home in God’s house.