Jesus Christ, God Incarnate

Text: Hebrews 2:10-18

After the prayers of the people today in the middle of worship, we will say “Into your hands, God of grace, we commend all for whom we pray, trusting in your mercy, through Jesus Christ, God incarnate.” That last little bit is a somewhat unusual, non-standard. In the rule books, this prayer does not end with “God incarnate.” In the books, it ends with “Jesus Christ, our Lord.” Maybe all these Sundays you have been thinking, why does he say “God incarnate”? Why doesn’t he say it the right way?

When we pray the prayers of the people, we pray in the name of Jesus. That is what Jesus taught us to do. Ask for what you want in my name, he said. Praying in the name of Jesus is like invoking a friend’s name when you want the force of your friend to give weight and authority to your words. You might be looking for a job, and you get this lead from your friend Michelle. You call the lead: “Hi. Michelle suggested I call you.” He knows Michelle, so he pays attention to you. Or on the other hand, you might be acting as an agent: “Hi, I’m calling at the request of Mayor Menino of Boston. He’d like to meet with you.” It’s a kind of official name dropping.

When you pray in the name of Jesus, you are saying, “Hi, Jesus suggested I get in touch. Jesus said I should call you.” If we end the prayers with “Jesus Christ, our Lord,” we are doing more like the Mayor Menino thing. Our connection is sort of official. But when we end with “Jesus Christ, God incarnate,” we are invoking the name of Jesus more as our friend than as our boss.

What we are trusting here is that Jesus knows us. He knows what it is like to be a human being, with all the joys and sorrows of human existence. Our prayers during this time in worship are things we desire or celebrate as humans. Human wants and longings and gratitude. That someone get well, that someone be comforted, that someone be safe, that someone be happy at a birth, a birthday, a success after hard work, a break. Someone. Some one. Some human person.

In one sense, what’s the big deal that Jesus was a person? For many people in the world, that’s all that Jesus was. A good, wise, surprising, charismatic, radical, radically compassionate, healing person. For those people, the issue is Jesus’ divinity, not his humanity. That makes sense, I suppose. There are, after all, more examples of good humans in the world than there are of divine humans. But even if it makes sense, that has not been how Christians have thought for the past twenty centuries, or at least the past nineteen. Once things settled down after a few initial heresies, Christians have been historically more likely to deny the humanity of Jesus and to take his divinity as given. Certainly in the passage from the book of Hebrews, from which we just heard, that is the issue.

The book of Hebrews has what is called in church jargon “high Christology.” What that means is that in this book Jesus is portrayed as God, eternal and of all time, from the beginning of the world to the end. But Jesus became for a while a person. “For a little while,” it says, he was “made lower than the angels.” That means us, made like us. In Hebrews, Jesus’ godly nature goes without saying. But the book makes a special effort to convince us of his human nature.

He is like us in every respect, it says. He is a brother to us. We are his brothers and sisters. We share the same parent. We share in being creatures made of blood and flesh. For some people, this fleshiness of Jesus gives them the creeps. After all, we know well the things people do that are not so good. We get into some pretty bad stuff, some unpleasant situations, some grimy spots from time to time. How can we say that our God is like us in every way when there is a lot in ourselves that we do not respect at all. Some do not want a God who is human in every way.

Besides, Jesus is made to suffer. In Hebrews, this is the clincher. It was his suffering that proved him to be human. He did not hide behind his divinity and avoid the tough and painful things that people do. Like, for example, being executed. “Why don’t you save yourself,” the people asked Jesus on the cross. But if he had, he would not have been human. Humans don’t get those kind of options. When it says that Jesus is made perfect in sufferings, it does not mean that he is made morally pure through the suffering of himself or others. It does not mean that it is good to suffer. Or that Jesus liked to suffer. It means that Jesus suffered just like all people do. People suffer. Jesus could not be a complete person without suffering. Jesus did not seek suffering, but he was bound to suffer because he was completely a person. Like us in every respect.

By being just like us, there is a sense in which Jesus is more than God. I’m not sure quite how to talk about this. Jesus is God. That’s what the Trinity means. What Jesus does, God does. There is no way in our theology that Jesus can be more than God. What I really mean is more useful, more connected to us. That is still theologically a problem. But, as Hebrews argues—and as I think we often feel—because Jesus was a human, he is closer to us. He knows us better. “He had to become like his brothers and sisters,” says Hebrews, so that he could be more merciful and more effective “in the service of God,” as it says. When God became human in Jesus, God learned something that God did not already know. God learned in a way that before God had not: what it is like to be human. To love and to suffer as a person does.

God as Jesus knows us in a different way. Jesus weeps for his friend Lazarus, his heart aches when he sees people ill, he gets angry at scumbags and oppressors. Jesus is able to say about his executioners, as he is dying, “forgive them,” because he knows how easily people are caught in a mesh of fear and greed and ignorance.

Jesus is human-sized. He knows how big the ocean seems, he knows how powerless we feel and also sometimes how unreasonably powerful. He knows how long it takes to walk from Jerusalem to Nazareth.

And above all he knows death. He knows how it feels to face death. He knows how scary that is. He knows how much the fear of death ransacks our lives. How it tears through our fragile freedom and peace of mind and peace of the world. Makes us less compassionate, makes us fill barns with more goods so we’ll always have enough, makes us hold on to things and familiar systems, makes us fastidious and obsessed. The fear of death and its less-permanent cousins makes us afraid to live. So we are slaves to death, Hebrews says. In a way that Hebrews does not detail, Jesus destroys the power of death and frees those who are enslaved by fear.

To say, to feel, “Jesus is with me” is somehow different than to say “God is with me.” God is with us because it is God’s job, God’s nature. But Jesus is with us, so it can seem, because Jesus is family. Jesus is kin. Jesus is our brother. We can call on Jesus because we are related by the demands of kinship. Jesus speaks for us because he is us.

We pray prayers of concern and celebration. We pray in confidence because we know that Jesus speaks our language—the language of human life—without translation. Our longings are not trivial, our fears not phony, our celebrations not foolish. We know that God has more than an academic, a political, a cosmic understanding of us. Because God lives here. Jesus Christ, God incarnate.

Light Before Christmas

Text: Matthew 1:18-25
Other texts: Isaiah 7:10-16

As signs go, it was not much.

A child born of a young woman. As if that didn’t happen every day. A son, too. Odds of that happening were what: one out of two? Not exactly improbable. And his name was Immanuel.

Ahaz, king of Judah, was not looking for a sign. So he said. I’m not going to ask for any old sign, so said Ahaz. I would not ask for a sign from God, he says. Yet even so, he gets a sign. And he welcomes the sign. Ahaz is in a little trouble politically and militarily. He is concerned about an alliance from the north. And the sign of Immanuel points to good news in the end. The king has nothing to fear from his enemies. At least in the short term.

The birth of Jesus is as much a sign as an event. It is a sign of things to come, a sign of God’s eagerness to be part of the world, a sign of God’s hopes and plans.

When we recall the story of the birth of Jesus, we mostly remember the story from the Gospel of Luke (and we’ll hear that version tomorrow, Christmas Eve). But in this year and on this day, still in Advent, we hear the version from Matthew. (There is no birth story in Mark or John, which is interesting in itself.)

In Matthew, the birth of Jesus is a grammatical afterthought. If it portends great things, it is not very portentous. It is in a subordinate clause in a sentence that refers to what Joseph is doing, and in fact the whole passage is mostly about Joseph. Joseph is going to treat Mary honorably, Joseph has a dream, Joseph is comforted by the angel, Joseph is the son of the line of David, Joseph names his son Jesus. “Joseph had no martial relations with Mary until she had borne a son,” it says. That’s the birth story of Jesus in Matthew.

For Luke, the birth of Jesus is a performance. Very suitable to Christmas pageants. For Matthew, the birth is a sign. In Luke, Jesus is welcomed by shepherds and priests. But in Matthew, Jesus and his family have to flee in fear to Egypt to escape from evil King Herod. In Luke, Herod is not part of Jesus birth story at all. But in Matthew, Herod reads the signs. Herod knows that the birth of Jesus is a sign of a new world order, a sign that the days of Herod and his type and his cronies are numbered.

We, like those who lived in the time of Jesus, like people of every time and place, walk in worry and apprehension. Times are dark. We walk in darkness. We look for a sign that the future will not be the same as the past. We hardly know where we are, we cannot see where we are going, and do not know how get there. We look for a light to give us direction and also to illuminate the path ahead so that we do not stumble. We look for light at the end of the tunnel and also the light inside the tunnel, where we are walking.

At Christmas, we proclaim that Jesus is that light. I am the light, Jesus says. In Baptism, like the Baptism of Alec today, we pray that the light of Jesus shines in us so that other people might see it. May your light so shine, we said to Alec, that others may see.

Here in worship the light signs are everywhere. Santa Lucia is a celebration of light, Lucy walks with candles in her crown, we give a lighted candle to Alec (or to his responsible adults; he’s a little small yet), we light all four candles on the Advent wreath, we light all these [aisle] candles.

We are not quite at Christmas, in spite of the poinsettias and tree and this teaser Gospel story. We are still in Advent. And Advent is more than anything a time of looking. Looking hard, at ourselves and the world and God’s promises. At the beginning of Advent, looking back. And now, almost at the end, looking forward. We are tired of dark days and dark times. We look hard to find the light. Unlike Ahaz, we are looking for a sign, looking hard.

In both Luke and Matthew the birth of Jesus is a sign. In Luke it is a sign like a big billboard, something broadcast by Clear Channel Communications. In Matthew, the birth of Jesus is like a street sign in Boston, hardly visible.

But in both stories, the sign is there: Jesus is coming to change the world. Watch out, world. Watch out. The message of Advent is this: The days of the ways of darkness are numbered. There is a new way to be. Jesus shows us. The light shines. The light shines and the darkness will not overcome it.

Peace in the Kingdom

Text: Matthew 3:1-12
Other texts: Isaiah 11:1-8

There is a measuring device out on the street next to the church, down on Tremont Street. The device is called the Discontent-O-Meter. It measures anxiety. It measures how worried people are about the state of the world. It works through trash. If there are hardly any scratch tickets, empty pints, or styrofoam coffee cups in the gutter or on the sidewalk, then things are pretty good. People are feeling more or less OK. But if the street is littered from end to end, and little nips are stashed in the flower pots, then things are tough. I read the Discontent-O-Meter every day as I walk between my house and the church. Right now, things are tough. And have been for a while.

John the Baptizer preaches about repentance. Repent, he says, for the kingdom of God has come near. He takes people down to the river, where they confess their sins. It is hard to tell exactly what happens to those people next. The baptism of John resembled a rite of conversion. People were changed by it. Baptism both cleansed people of the old and initiated them into something new. What was new for them was not, it seems, a kind of restored soul. What was new was that they had become partners, or agents, or members, or citizens, of the kingdom of God. Which was near, though not entirely here.

The nature of the kingdom of God would have been clear to the crowds that gathered around John in the desert. It would have be a realm of this world. But in God’s kingdom, the poor are not abandoned, one nation does not occupy another as Rome had, the powerful leaders of the church and state do not strut around in fancy outfits while the people wear rags, the many do not starve while a few feast. Pretty much what you would expect. What we pray for every day here.

When the Pharisees and Sadducees come to John to be baptized, he calls them the brood of vipers. Children of snakes. Not because they are individually bad folks—maybe they are, but probably not, just regular folks in power—but because as a group they have not been welcoming of God’s kingdom. What have they as a group done to even things up between people on the outs and the people who are in? Will they repent? That is, will they turn to a new kind of life? Will they change their ways? It sounds like John does not think so. They come for show and perhaps for solace, but they probably do not come looking to be empowered to change the world. They are not discontent.

What we hope for in the kingdom of God is food, shelter, care, compassion, fellowship, fairness, and all the blessings of life. Those are the things that we can do something about, and the prophets have told us for millennia that God calls us to do something about them.

But what we long for most in the kingdom of God is peace. Peace is the sign, peace is the marker, peace is the reward of God’s kingdom.

People walk down Tremont Street with a lot on their minds. An appointment, a family problem, some issue at work, how to make ends meet, how to be safe, whether to buy something, how their clothes feel, where they’ll be next year, sorrow at some recent loss. These things occupy the front of their minds. Each day there is something new to ponder about. But I think that in the back of their minds, in the hidden and dark, deep anxious thoughts, in the constant background, is war. War today and the threat of war tomorrow and the sorrow of war in the past.

There are people today who remember World War II and the Korean War and the Vietnam War and the Gulf War and the war in Afghanistan and the War in Iraq. Plus the first Arab Israeli War and the Suez War and the Six Day war and the Yom Kippur War. Plus the Russian war in Afghanistan and the war in the Balkans and the war in Somalia and the war between Eritrea and Ethiopia and the war in Rwanda.

For over half of my life the U.S. has been actively at war. And in every year in the life of each of us here, somewhere in the world there has been active fighting, destruction, and death from war. There has not been a single year in any of our lives in which the world has been at peace. War is not new.

Maybe this is old hat. Everyone knows that wars go on always. But if it is old hat, it is a sad old hat, one that ought to be retired. Each day that war rages makes us more tired. Moves us high on the Discontent-O-Meter. It is a worldwide discouragement.

It is not meant to be. It is not what God has in mind. The design of the world is for peace. The story of creation in Genesis is a story of creaturely harmony and peace. The story of the fall is the story of the world broken. The prophecy that we just heard in Isaiah is the promise of a world restored. It is a radical promise. A time of unending peace is so strange that it will be as if natural enemies—leopard and lamb, lion and calf—will live together. As if predators never preyed on the young and weak. As if our fears for ourselves and those we love had no basis.

We might pray, as I think John the Baptizer must have and that people who came to him must have, that the oppressors become the oppressed. We might pray for victory of the righteous over the unrighteous. We might hope that the lion and the calf switch places, and pray that the lamb puts fear in the heart of the leopard. That would be a change. Sort of.

But I don’t think it would do much for reducing the reading on the Discontent-O-Meter. We think sometimes that what we want is victory, when what we really long for is the end to all battles.

If the kingdom of God is near, we are all in this together. Can just one of us be healed while all the rest are broken? Can just one of us be comforted while the rest suffer? The notion that John likes, that some are wheat while the rest are chaff, is not born out by the actions of Jesus nor by our own experience. We are each of us a little wheat and a little chaff. I speak, at least, for myself.

Even so, we could pretend that we know who is wheat and chaff. We could pretend that is is we who are authorized to separate the wheat from the chaff. We certainly have tried that tactic over and over again. People did that long before Jesus was born and sadly, have continued to do it long after he was crucified. But the results do not seem so great. It has not done much for the state of the world.

Things are not so good so far, as my son used to say. It is not good for the people who walk down Tremont Street, it is not good for you, to live in a world in unending battle. It drives us crazy and sad and moves each of us up on the Discontent-O-Meter. I bet it moves God up on that scale, too.

Advent is a time for reconsideration, which is another word for repentance. I’m not saying this is simple. But maybe it is time to consider. Jesus, the one we follow, did preach another way to live. He came to heal the world, he said, and in doing so to heal that part in our minds in which resides dark sorrow. And replace it with the light of God’s kingdom.

Separation. Reconciliation.

Text: Matthew 24:36-44 Other texts: Romans 13:11-14

Separation. Reconciliation.

Separation and reconciliation. They make the world go ‘round. Literally. Our planet longs to move on in a straight line, free from the sun. Without the sun, that’s just what it would do. But the sun pulls it back, every second the sun pulls the earth away from its headstrong straight-ahead path, and therefore the earth circles the sun. Even though its momentum seeks independence, it is grateful for its constant reconciliation with the sun. For without that, there is no life here. No us. No Advent.

In a similar way the electrons circle the core of the atom, allowing large things to form like people and churches. And inside those cores, quarks circle each other. This is not a permanent condition. Particles break loose from time to time. Good thing they do, or there would be no energy for life or electricity or much else. But in the short term, at least, things do not fall apart, the center does hold, we have a world that exists long enough for us to be grateful for it.

It is not just physics. Children orbit their parents, then run away to the playroom, the playground, the playing fields, in widening curves. And then return for comfort, hope, safety, peace. Lovers circle one another, binary stars. They drift away, run away, or are pulled away by other callings, to work or war or wondering about the green pastures on the other side of the fence, and then if lucky are drawn back to one another in a partial unity that is both fragile and rugged.

We are not permanent creatures. In the last few months at Faith we have had a bushel of births and deaths. We come and go. Together and not.

Separation is inevitable. So when Jesus speaks about two women, one taken and one left, that is not remarkable in any way. That’s life. Ordinary life. Matthew wants to show Jesus talking about a remarkable time, the end time. Matthew, like his contemporaries, was interested in the end of the world. Because, among other things, the world for them was not so great. Jesus lived on this earth in a time when the end of time seemed welcome, the separation of all of us, or some of us, from this worldly world. And a reconciliation, at the same time, of people with God, with God’s love, living in a unity with others and with God that would be more close than the closest lovers. A new place and time.

Two will be in the field, but one will be taken and one left. That is the way of things. We do not have to conjure up some sort of cosmic dislocation for that to happen. It happens all the time. In the simplest ways. Friends move away. Or we do. Spouses or partners part. Children grow up and move on. Interests change. People get sick and out of the loop. People leave us through death.

It is the way of things, but it is not what we want. We want to be close to one another. To not fight and quarrel and do battle. To not be estranged and awkward and at odds. To not be lonely. To not be hateful to others. To have no love unrequited. We want reconciliation.

We want this for ourselves, our individual selves, in our own lives with our own families and friends and colleagues, even, and neighbors.

We want this for our world, for the nations and peoples of the world.

We want this for us and God.

The story of God and humans is a story of separation and reconciliation. In the days of Noah, as Jesus says. God gives up on humans, washing them and creatures all away, then in the end saves them after all. Isaiah tells Israel that it and God are estranged, but in the end the two are back together again. We get angry at God and, it seems, God at us. But never for long, and never forever.

Imagine the disciples living at the time when Matthew’s Gospel was written, long after Jesus had died and been raised up. Imagine how frightened, sad, and hopeful they must have been. Imagine how desperately they must have wanted Jesus back, as desperately as we want an old friend back, as desperately as someone who has lost the one who gives one’s life meaning, as desperately as one who is left behind.

In Advent we long for the coming of Christ and the re-coming of Christ. It is an emotionally complicated time. We anticipate separation and reconciliation. The coming of Jesus at Christmas and the return of Jesus—who knows when. No one knows, Jesus says. The mystery of faith, we say in the prayer of thanksgiving: Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again.

Some find the end-of-the-world stuff creepy. Especially in these days when people write about it with such glee and triumphalism. But the separation we hear about in this story is not the point of the story. That is the context of it, the sorrow of it. No one hearing this story would have been pleased by hearing that in the field one will be taken and one left. That is not a good thing. That is just plain sad.

What is a good thing is that we continue to expect in some time to find hope, peace, joy, and love. That the son pulls us back around. That we expect in some time to be reconciled to one another, all of us, all people, all peoples, and that we expect to be reconciled with God.

Advent is a time for reflection on our life now and on what might come into our lives in the future. It not a time for us to be either gloomy or self-righteous. Put aside the works of darkness, the apostle Paul says, and put on the armor of light. In these weeks ahead, be with God. And be with one another.

Led into the Kingdom by a Shepherd

Text: Luke 23:33-43
Other texts: Jeremiah 23:1-6

How is it that in this world today slavery still flourishes, with around twenty million people, mostly women, held as slaves?

How is it that in this world wars still rage, people live in terror, ethnic populations eliminated, people tortured? How is it in this world that people still are left to starve, lack clean water, are infested with parasites? How is it in this world that so few still hoard so much, control so much, while so many have so little and are powerless? How is it in this world that nations still falter in fragility, refugees march, justice is systemically denied?

Where is God’s kingdom?

God knows, people long for a king. A king powerful enough to discipline the nations, compassionate enough to heal the wounds of poverty, wise enough to bring justice to all, clever enough to bring abundance, humorous enough to value joy and pleasure and beauty, humble enough to be in awe of all creation.

Where is God’s kingdom?

People long for a king. The story of such longing is not new. The list of human ills is largely unchanged. Only the names and places vary. People suffer war, injustice, scarcity, and nastiness. This is not new. People wonder when it will all be made better. That’s not new either.

Some expected Jesus to be the king. The King, in capital letters. For a population under foreign control and oppression—torture, injustice, ethnic disdain, poverty amidst luxury—the coming of Jesus seemed to some to promise the restoration of another, better time, though a time maybe in fantasy more than in history. They were disappointed then, to say the least, when Jesus was crucified. They called him Messiah, which is the word for Christ. Jesus Messiah. Messiah means the one who is anointed. Anointing is how kings were installed, or ordained, a sign of and a means of God’s blessing. What kind of Messiah are you, they wanted to know, who is executed as a criminal?

Where is God’s kingdom? they wanted to know.

The Bible seems to say that there is something a little perverted in our longing for a king. Or at least the kind of king we usually long for. Before the days of great King David, the Israelites had no king. But they badly wanted one.

“Give us a king to govern us” it says in book of the prophet Samuel. But God said to them: I’m not so sure you want a king. A king is a pain in the neck.

“These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. He will take ... the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work.

“But the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel; they said, ‘No! but we are determined to have a king over us, so that we also may be like other nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles’”

This model of king as commander in chief—what the Israelites hoped for and what people hoped to find in Jesus—is not the primary model in the Bible. The people who surrounded Jesus at the cross should not have been so surprised. The king’s job is to be a shepherd, not a ruler.

The king’s job is to watch over the sheep, not to boss them around. Not to be the king who takes your sons and daughters, but one who guides the flock. Not to use the people to fight his battles, but to give up his life for the people, his sheep. When God speaks through the prophet Jeremiah, God condemns the rulers as bad shepherds. You have scattered the sheep, God says, and have not attended to them. So God will anoint new shepherd kings to protect and gather the people.

Where is God’s kingdom?

Like the Israelites longing for a king to do battle, people make out God to be the same as their contemporary big, powerful leaders, but bigger and more powerful. And the kingdom of God becomes like a political state, only more imperial and victorious. We might make God out to be as a president, or a general, or a CEO. Just like a regular ruler, only more so.

But a shepherd is not a person of power. A shepherd was and is a low-paying low-prestige job, a humble job. A shepherd’s relationship with his or her flock is not one primarily of power. The sheep don’t appoint or validate the shepherd, they don’t elect their shepherd, they don’t hire and fire the shepherd, they don’t conduct yearly evaluations of the shepherd’s job.

An Episcopalian bishop recently resigned over a dispute with his congregation. His entitled attitude was revealing. He said, “I will neither compromise the faith once delivered to the saints, nor will I abandon the sheep who elected me to protect them.” But the sheep don’t elect the shepherd.

They don’t choose the shepherd. The sheep trust the shepherd. They follow the shepherd. They depend on the shepherd.

The kingdom of God is led by a shepherd.

We long for a king, mighty and victorious. What we get is a shepherd. What we think we need is a boss. What we need is a shepherd. We need someone, as Jesus spoke of, who will not be expedient or efficient, and will search for the one lost sheep in a hundred sheep bring that sheep back. [Like this Jesus in the mural here.] We need someone, as Jesus did, who will heal us, heal the world. We need someone who will feed us. We need someone who will teach us. We need someone who will keep us safe from our own clumsy wanderings and our good-natured ignorance. We are in deep mud right now. We need to be rescued.

We can call on God to lead us into battle, as Christians have for centuries. Onward Christian Soldiers. We can think of the kingdom of God as something wrested from the forces of evil. As in the video game where the evangelicals zap the sinners. We can ask God to be our king and we to be God’s army, carrying out holy destruction. But when we ask that of God, the answer we get is Jesus. We get Jesus as an answer. Jesus refuses to take on that job we put on him. At Golgotha Jesus does not bring fire down on his executioners. Forgive them, he says.

Christ is our shepherd. Our relationship with Christ begins with trust and hope. We are the sheep. We follow Jesus. We do not know the way. The shepherd offers us a way home.

Adiaphora

Text: Luke 20:27-38

On a scale from the most radical and strange to the most reactionary and predictable, worship at Faith is pretty much to the right, to the traditional. We follow a predetermined order from a Lutheran guide to worship, we pick songs from a Lutheran hymnal, we confess our sins in a Lutheran confession. If you were visiting here from most of the other Lutheran churches in the world, you’d feel pretty much at home.

A lot of the things that happen in worship have meaning. It is not just a bunch of arbitrary events strung together in a row. Someone, including theologians and liturgists, has thought the thing through. You might really like the way worship goes here; it might be one of the reasons you are here today. Or you might not like it so much; you might be here in spite of, not because of, the way this church worships. We do all these things in worship here, and each might add to your experience or it might not. We do all these things, but none of them is going to keep you out of heaven or get you into it. They are, I hope, great and helpful and comforting and thought-provoking and nourishing to your life and soul, but they are not the main thing. Not the main thing with God.

In the Gospel reading today Jesus gets into a discussion with some folks, some Sadducees. It seems like an argument. The Sadducees do not believe in the resurrection of the dead. Some other Jews that we read about in the Gospels, the Pharisees, for example, do. But the Sadducees do not. So they present an argument of the absurd. If the husband of a woman dies without her having had a child, the brother of the husband is to marry her. That was the rule. No doubt partly this is to foster growth of the community, but it also protects the woman who otherwise would be left out in the cold without family protection and care. So the Sadducees simply extend this rule. What if she has seven husbands in a row, and then she herself dies. If they all are resurrected, who will be her husband then? Instead of dismissing this as foolishness, instead of saying “OK, next question,” Jesus answers them.

It seems on the face of it that this passage is an argument about resurrection. But really, resurrection has nothing to do with it. That is, the point of the passage is not to tell us more about the resurrection than we already knew. None of the Sadducees would have been convinced by Jesus response, none of Jesus' supporters would have needed convincing, and modern readers bring two thousand years of previous thought to the passage.

The resurrection is the occasion of the discussion between the Sadducees and Jesus, but not the heart of the discussion. They could be talking about the Sabbath, or about how to pray, or about what to eat when. The things that Jesus argues about all the time, and that the Sadducees and the Pharisees and others get all incensed about.

Jesus is a man of his time. Partly. He is a Jew, knows about the law, and respects it, by and large. But he is a man out of his time, too. What he respects is the way the law draws people closer to God. What he does not respect is the way the observance of the law keeps people from God. The argument that Jesus and the Sadducees are having is deep and wide: they are arguing about what God is and what God wants.

Worship and observing the law are things people do to come closer to God. Martin Luther and the reformers talked a lot about the essence of worship. He said the essence of the church—what makes the church be the church—is that the sacraments be rightly administered and the Gospel be rightly preached. Everything else was extra. Not bad, not worthless, just not essential. He used the word “adiaphora” to describe these things. The word means “no difference,” or “it doesn’t matter.”

What Jesus says to the Sadducees is that what they are so worried about doesn’t matter. It is not the main point. Luther once said, when asked a theological question about the Eucharist, Leave that to the philosophers. Jesus is saying pretty much the same thing to the Sadducees.

God is the God of the living, Jesus says in his answer. He also says that people are God’s children. He also says that God is the same God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This is not the answer the Sadducees seek, yet it is the answer to their question. We worship one God, who embraces us as God’s children, and is on the side of life. The question you are asking is silly. Even if it had an answer, it would be adiaphora.

It is easy to confuse things that are good and helpful with things that are necessary. We think sometimes that praying in a certain way makes God like us better. We think sometimes that if we are more observant, or more ethical, or more something, that God will be more inclined to do what we want God to do. But this is a little arrogant and it makes for misery. We are neither so bad nor so powerful. God is already on our side. We are only children of God, not God’s adviser, attorney, or supervisor. Or employee. Nor is God our client, needing gentle care and from time to time a little persuasion.

In the same way, the future of the church does not depend on our ability to do everything right. What we do in worship and the many other things we do for the church are good and helpful, but it is not our job to save the church. It is God’s church.

We think sometimes that the faithful life is a life of jumping through hoops. Theological hoops (that is, about doctrine), liturgical hoops (that is, about worship) or devotional hoops (that is, about our own personal practices). But those chores are not ones that God assigns us.

It is impossible to say exactly what God wants of us. But I suspect it has little to do with marriage laws and how widows greet their long-dead husbands. Or with how we dress, or how we worship, or how exactly we pray. Or even whether we believe the right thing.

The essence of the church, said Luther, was simple: the sharing of the Lord’s supper and the sharing of God’s word. The essence of faith is even simpler: love God with all your heart and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. Simple and hard. God is both simpler and more demanding than we sometimes imagine God to be.

We are good at worrying. We worry about all sorts of things. Are we acting right, thinking right, worshipping right, talking right. I once made a sign for my office years ago when I was in business that said “Everything Counts.” But it is not true. Everything does not count. There is adiaphora in life, too.

As Jesus tells the Sadducees, don’t sweat the small stuff. Don’t let it consume you. God is the God of the living, says Jesus. It takes away life to attend so much to the inessentials, in what we do or what we think others do. Choose life over death, says Moses, the man of the burning bush. That is the main thing. As for the rest, it doesn’t matter.

Reformed What?

Text: Romans 3:19-28 Other texts: Jeremiah 31:31-24, John 8:31-36

This Wednesday is Reformation Day. It is the 490th anniversary of the day that a young Catholic priest named Martin Luther was said to have nailed a list of 95 arguments, his 95 Theses, or propositions, to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. The event has become the symbol of the start of the the Reformation, a major change in the way the church does business. Lutherans especially celebrate this day and event and movement. And so that’s what we are doing this Sunday.

Lutherans can be pretty pompous when it comes to the Reformation. After all, it’s “Luther-ans,” right? Luther, the father of the Reformation, “Here I stand,” and all that. We are fortunately made humble when we realize that for lots of people, the name Martin Luther brings to mind Martin Luther King, not Martin Luther, priest. Luther was a pretty amazing guy and there is much to admire in him, but he would have hated to have a whole denomination named after him.

On this day we read the scripture passages we just heard. They are kind of the model passages for the theology of the Reformation. If the church were a business, these passages would be attached to every press release. Especially Romans, and especially the last verse, verse 28, “justified by faith apart from works proscribed by the law.” Which is like the theological motto of Protestant churches.

It used to be that Reformation Day was a day to bash the Roman Catholic church. The first sermon I heard from one of my Lutheran minister colleagues about ten years ago was his lament that, since Vatican II opened up the Roman church (for a while anyway), he had nothing bad to say about them, and therefore on Reformation Day he had nothing to say at all.

What he mourned was the chance to celebrate the Reformation by belittling other faiths and other ways of faithful thinking. Valuing the Reformation by devaluing something else. He used the motto “justified by grace” as a weapon, or a badge. It let him claim that this verse was somehow exclusively Protestant and exclusively Christian. He would say that the Roman church embraced justification by good works. And he would say that Jews embraced justification by adherence to the law, that is, the Torah.

But to say either of these things is to create straw men, and it misrepresents other ways that people love and worship God. Rome officially agrees with the Protestants on the theology, having written: “good works ...follow justification and are its fruits.” And the Torah is as much a gift as any other sign of God’s grace. It is arrogance to say that the law became worthless through the action of Christ. Jesus said did not come to dissolve the law, or so he said.

The passage in Jeremiah that we heard is often interpreted to mean that instead of a written code of rules, God will make things nice in our hearts. That instead of being guided by the rules we’ll be guided by our pure hearts, which will draw us to goodness somehow. But that is not what God says here. What God says in the words of Jeremiah is that God puts the law within the people, that God will write the law on their hearts. The law does not go away, its place is changed. Or rather, its place is expanded. The law is not erased, it is additionally written in our hearts. The passage in Jeremiah does not diminish the law. It brings it closer to God’s people.

Likewise Paul’s arguments about grace do not substitute grace for the law. He does not say here in Romans: Ok, all you law-types, you can go home now. The game is over. Forget that old stuff; grace is the new way.

What he says is that now, through Jesus, the whole world may be held accountable to God. Not just Jews, but gentiles, too. Pagans and heathens and Greeks. They are in this, too. Because it is not just Jews who can sin, we are all sinners. And who isn’t? There is no distinction, he says. You gentiles, Paul tells them, are not off the hook, just because you aren’t Jews. The Jews had the law to show them about God, but it now God has been disclosed to you folks, too. You know about God, too.

The good news is that God, the God of the Jews and, it turns out, your god, too, is with you on this. That’s what “justified” means; that God is with you on this. You and God are right with each other, in synch, sort of. Not because of who you are or in what religion you were raised or how good you have been, but because God simply wishes to. It is a gift. That’s what grace means; a gift. God is with you because God likes to give you a gift. Justified—OK with God—through the action of God’s grace, a gift. It is God’s doing.

Both Jesus and Luther were reformers, not replacers. Luther was a Catholic priest who hoped that the church would change. Jesus was a Jew and spoke to Jews about their actions and faith. Neither (though I really can’t speak for Jesus; I’m guessing here)—neither had in mind to create either a new faith or a new church.

When we celebrate Reformation Day, we focus on the theology of the Reformation. The theology is important. It is good to know that God is cheering for you even if you are not doing so well at being good. That God’s love for you is unconditional.

But what Luther was most excited about (and Jesus was excited about it, too), was the freeing of faith from the oppressive and corrupt institutions of faith. Luther made the Bible available to the language of the people, he encouraged priests to marry, he denied their power to be heavenly judges, and he opened the liturgy and the celebration of the Eucharist to all, not just a few special people.

Both Jesus and Luther spoke not for the priests, people in power who in both cases had used the law and works to control and exploit the people. Luther and Jesus spoke for the rest of us, the ordinary people. What marked Jesus and Luther, among other important things, was that they were on the side of the ordinary. Or maybe better to say, they celebrated the extraordinary that was in the ordinary.

Those in power rule by fear. And the most vicious and fierce power they have is the power to make people afraid for their lives. Or the lives of those they love. The fear of sin is the fear of death, the fear that sin leads to death. The notion that if you mess up, you are gone. You are done for. Don’t step out of line, buddy, or else.

People in power were afraid of Jesus. Not because they thought he was God—they didn’t. Jesus frightened those in power because Jesus was not afraid of them, even though he knew the consequences, and that Jesus taught others—us—to not be afraid either.

In the Gospel of John Jesus tells the crowd that they do not have to be slaves to sin. He is telling them, among other things, that they can make mistakes, even according to the rules of God. And that no one, no human being, can tell them otherwise, no priest, no church, no doctrine.

Sin boldly! Luther said. Not because Luther wanted people to sin. It wouldn’t matter—people sin regardless. But because Luther wanted people to act boldly without fear, to be free as Christians can be. To act, we ordinary people, in trust. That is what faith means: to trust. Knowing that we are justified by faith through God’s grace. Trusting Jesus that God is with us, no matter what. And that we are free.

On Praying

Text: Luke 18:1-8

It is not always clear what Jesus means to say when he tells a parable. But it sure is clear in this one that we just heard. This parable is about prayer.

You might hear other things in the parable. It might be about justice, and it might be about persistence in general. But to Luke, who is telling a story about Jesus telling a story, it is about prayer. Jesus told them a parable, it says, about their need to pray always and not lose heart.

And it is a parable, not an allegory (as you’re probably tired of hearing me say). That is, we can’t make the judge to be God and the widow to be us. They are both well-drawn characters: the judge is a sleazy scum-bag and the widow is brave and aggravating. They don’t stand for anyone in particular (in fact, the story starts out: there was some kind of judge in some kind of city).

The story is an example of Bible-logic, reasoning that was common then. It reasons from small to large. From less to more. If the judge, who was a jerk, responded with justice to the entreaties of the woman, how much more will God respond to our pleas for justice? “Listen to what the unjust judge (the lesser) says, and will not God (the greater) grant justice?” So it is a parable about prayer that contains an argument.

It is about prayer, but a particular kind (probably the most common kind). It is about prayer that asks for things, which in church jargon is called petitionary prayer (because we are bringing petitions to God). There are other kinds of prayer. A friend says there are three kinds of prayer: wow, thanks, and help. Petitionary prayer is the “help” kind. There are other kinds, too, especially the kind where we don’t yap away at all but try to stay quiet, listening for God to speak. So this parable is about praying for something we want. Which today I’ll call just “prayer.”

Prayer is a kind of conversation. In the parable, the widow and the judge have a conversation. They have a relationship, they engage one another and what one does is influenced by the other. Not all conversations (or relationships for that matter) go very far. They need to be powered. Three things power the conversation between the judge and the widow, and the same things power our prayers. They are hunger, humility, and hope. And I want to talk about each of these today.

First, hunger. The woman is hungry for justice to be done. There is no prayer (we are talking about petitionary prayer, remember)—there is no prayer of this kind without hunger. We come to prayer needing something. Something big and meaningful like reconciliation of a broken marriage or healing from disease or something small like finding a parking space or getting a paper in on time. Something in us wants something. Even something that is not for us: the end to war and violence, the eradication of poverty, a joy-filled life for a new-born child. We pray to God with the same motivating ache and longing that makes us turn to the pantry when we are hungry. When we pray, we admit we are hungry. There is no point in praying if all of our life is satisfactory and satisfying. If all is totally complete. When we pray, we admit we have longings, desires, and needs. All of us, of course, have those needs. Praying, we acknowledge that to be so.

Second, humility. The woman comes to the judge for justice. She cannot make things right by herself. She is powerless in the face of her adversary’s privilege. Powerless by herself. When we pray, we acknowledge that we are powerless by ourselves to deliver whatever it is we hunger for. We cannot fix what is broken, or feed what is starving, or set right what is out of kilter, by ourselves. When we pray, we admit that we need something, which is tough enough to admit. And then we pray that we cannot meet that need without some assistance from God. Just as there is no reason to pray if we are completely satisfied, there is no reason to pray if we are on top of things. If everything is pretty much under control, if we think all it needs is a tweak here or there, or if we think all it needs is for us to be a little smarter, more energetic, more focussed, better. Why pray if we are going to take care of things by ourselves sooner or later. But experience, if nothing else, teaches us that there is not much, if anything, we can control. Praying, we humble ourselves to say so.

Third, hope. The widow comes to the judge assuming that he is able to hand her justice. She comes in need, she comes asking for help. And she comes with hope that her petition can be granted. Prayer is the concrete expression of our conviction that things do not need to be as they are. When we pray for peace, we are declaring that war is not everlasting. When we pray for health, we are declaring that illness is reversible. When we pray for rescue, we are declaring that we can be freed. We do not pray for the impossible. They is no point. We do not pray out of hopelessness, there is no inspiration. (When we are nearly consumed by hopelessness, we pray for hope, a self-fulfilling prayer.) Prayer is refusing to concede that tomorrow is just today over and over again, that the way things are has to be the way they always will be. In that sense prayer is powerful imagination coupled with trust that through God the future is still open.

Prayer therefore is not so much an action as a stance. It is not some exercise or chore or transaction or duty. It is the way. It is the way we approach God and life. Though we from time to time find ourselves to be self-satisfied, self-important, or hopeless, we know that in those times we are off-center. Our center is hunger, humility, and hope.

In the parable, Luke says that Jesus is teaching the disciples to pray always. And one of the mottos or slogans of the New England Synod is “pray without ceasing.” These might mean to mutter prayers under your breath in every waking moment (people have even tried that). But praying always is not some kind of super-piety. To pray always, without ceasing, is to remain mindful of our center. We pray with God who feeds our hunger, who holds our lives better than we can, who creates our new future.

All Were Healed

Text: Luke 17:11-19

Martin Luther was a young catholic priest. He worked hard at being good. But he was tormented by his conviction that he would never be worthy of God. He was, after all, only human, just a sinner, an imperfect being. Yet he felt that scripture was calling him to be better, better even than anyone could ever be. He felt that scripture was condemning him.

He wrote at the time: I hated that word, “justice of God,” which, I had been taught to understand [as] that justice by which God punishes sinners and the unjust.

“I couldn't be sure that God was appeased by my [efforts]. I hated the just God who punishes sinners. I said, “Isn't it enough that we miserable sinners, lost for all eternity because of original sin, are oppressed by every kind of calamity? Why does God heap sorrow upon sorrow and threaten us with his justice and his wrath?”

He felt that way especially about the writings of the apostle Paul. Paul was a thorn in the side of Luther, and Paul’s writings made Luther miserable.

Looking back at Luther from a platform 500 years later, you might find Luther’s agony a little excessive. You might think: He is a little too riled up about this. Or maybe you might not. Maybe you feel condemned by the Bible, too. Maybe when you hear in some Bible story about someone messing up, you think that passage is about you. Maybe you hear a lot of “shoulds’ in the Bible.

Maybe when you hear today’s Gospel story about the lepers being cured, you think: Those ungrateful lepers (the nine who just walked away without a word of thanks to Jesus). Maybe you think: This passage is telling us that we should be grateful for God’s gifts. It is telling us that we should realize who it is who provides our lives and health. Maybe is telling us that we should be more faithful. Maybe it is telling us that faith rewards us by making us well, or worse, that if we are not well it is because we lack sufficient faith.

If you thought that, you would not be alone. Many readers have seen in this passage praise for the one Samaritan (who even more amazingly was an enemy of the Jews, Jesus’ people)—the Samaritan who turns back to Jesus in thanksgiving and condemnation for those who leave without so much as a howdy-do.

Luther, after much violent thought (“I was raging with a wild and disturbed conscience,” he later wrote), came to see things differently. “I saw the whole of Scripture in a different light. The work of God, that is, what God works in us; the power of God, by which he makes us powerful; the wisdom of God, by which he makes us wise; the strength of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God.” So maybe you are like the second Luther, and see in the story of the lepers not what the lepers do and do not do, but what God is doing.

Ten people went to Jesus looking to be transformed. They had leprosy. They were considered unclean, disgusting. They were forced to live at the edge of the village, not in it. And by law they had to cry out to all who passed near: Unclean, unclean. They cry out to Jesus, “have mercy on us.” Help us. They cry out to be transformed. To have a new life.

Jesus tells them to go show themselves to the priest. To let the priest see them. It is not that the priest has any healing powers. But the priest is the judge of who is clean and unclean. It would be the job of the priest not to make them clean, but to announce that they were.

Somewhere on the way between Jesus and the priest they were healed, made clean the text says. It is not clear where exactly all this happened. It was not clear, it seems, how this happened.

There were ten people cured, but only one man who seemed to notice. The Samaritan. That man’s life was transformed. When the text says he was made clean, it uses a word that is like the modern word “cathartic.” Some major thing had happened, some definitive break with the sorry past. Some refreshing view of a hopeful future. Recognizing his new life, he praises God and runs back to Jesus to thank him.

What of the others? We don’t have to think them to be particularly dense. There are lots of reasons to deny what’s in front of your own eyes. There are lots of reasons to deny transformation. You might not think that you are worthy enough. You might not think you are ready enough. You might think it unlikely and you don’t want to get your hopes up (what if they had come to the priest and he said, “nope, not quite, not really, not enough”). You might not welcome it, for transformation can be disruptive. Even though they asked to be healed, perhaps they held a stake in the familiar.

But the man sees. And his sight leads him to gratitude. And his gratitude leads him to faith. He has been healed, made well, says Jesus. He has a new life.

God gives the man three gifts. The gift of sight, the gift of gratitude, and the gift of faith. Unearned and unearnable gifts. To see God’s hand in our life. To be thankful for what God has given us and showed us. To trust God.

This man is the more fortunate of the ten others on account of these gifts. But he is not the better of them. They all are healed, grateful at the time or not. They all receive something for nothing. They all are transformed, like it or not. Or maybe: like it and not.

We who like to see people get what they deserve, we who respond well to “should” (you should, they should, I should), we who know there are no gains without pains, we hear in the story that Jesus is a little put out. Like, I cured all ten of you. I mean, nice to see you here, Mr. Foreign Samaritan, but where’s the other nine? What’s up with that?

But this story is not about us so much as it is about God. Not so much about how we mess up but about how much God gives us even so. If we think of the ungrateful nine, we imagine all that they might have done better. If we think of the grateful one, we think he might be a model for us doing better. But if we think of the gracious one, the healer, Jesus, we think only of our generous God. I don’t think Jesus is annoyed at the nine who walk away. I think he is amused. I think he looks on them with affection and understanding.

Jesus does not heal these lepers because Jesus wants something back. The Samaritan is not the model; he’s the gravy (if I can mix metaphors here). It is great that he comes back to thank Jesus, and I’m sure Jesus appreciates it, but his gratitude is not the point. It is a little extra (it is an extra gift for the man). The point is that Jesus heals all the ten who cry out to him from the side of the road.

Many people live their lives seeking ways to be criticized. It is weird but true. We look for “shoulds” and we respond to them. But of course as Luther knew, we never can do all we “should” do, so we are always a bit—or a lot—behind in time and results. But there is no need to walk in shame. As Luther realized and then publicized, there is one who does not expect accomplishment and gratitude, but gives them to us as gifts. One who prefers healing to judgment. One who, as Luther saw, judges us with more generosity than we judge ourselves.

Come All You People

Text: 2 Timothy 1:1-14 Other texts: Luke 17:5

Note: This is a short homily introducing a special combined worship of three churches that make up the Faith community.

I am grateful, my brothers and sisters, when I think of you.

So writes the author of the 2nd Letter to Timothy. Grateful for all the new followers of Jesus, grateful for the churches in different parts of the land, grateful that God had gathered them together, people of all different sorts.

Don’t you feel the same way? Aren’t you grateful that God has gathered us all together today, and has gathered these three congregations, these three communities of faith, into this church home?

Who would have thought it? In a time when Christians are as known for their bickering as their solidarity, known for exaggerating differences, known for even praying that their Christian enemies might be cursed, who would have thought we would gather here in common worship and affection for God and for one another, brothers and sisters?

Each of us comes here for reasons of his or her own, but all the reasons seem to amount in the end to “God brought me here.” We are called, the letter to Timothy says, not by our own works—that is, our own schemes of one thing or another—but according to God’s own purpose and grace. God’s grace, which either means God’s charisma, or God’s gift. You can think of it either way (or both), whichever feels true to you.

We have come to be fed by the word of God, by the sacraments, by prayer and song and silence. We have come, in the words of this epistle, to rekindle the gift of God that is within us. To feed that fire, that metabolism that keeps us moving toward God and to care for each other. God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, it says, but a spirit of power and of love and of steady mind.

We come, some of us, because we were raised in a certain tradition. We are here because, as the letter says, we are reminded of the faith of our grandmothers and mothers, who invited us to come to church with them, or made us come. But others come because once a friend invited us to a church, or someone we were courting. Or we passed by in front of the church and saw the sign and felt that this was the right time to check things out. Or we were alone or frightened and the church seemed safe, or safe enough.

No matter though. We are bound together now. What binds us together is a search to know God, to be with God and God with us. There is no reason why you or anyone has to be here. No one is making you come. (Maybe the Holy Spirit is). We are bound together by the seriousness of a quest, and in that quest there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, woman or man; we are all one in Chris Jesus. So says Paul. We want to be able to say, as the writer of this letter to Timothy says, that we know the one in whom we put our trust.

The gospel reading for today (from Luke, chapter 17) says this:

The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” The Lord replied, “If you had the faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.

It doesn’t take too much to be started off on the quest. Just a tiny amount of trust (which is another way to translate the word “faith”) just enough to get us going. And then we are off.

This epistle to Timothy is one of the three letters in the Bible called the Pastoral Epistles. That’s because they were written concerning pastors. But except for these few introductory remarks and a few prayers, you won’t hear too much from the pastors here today. The church is the people who show up. That means you. Today persons from each congregation will speak to us about their own experience with God, perhaps about their own quest. And perhaps how it is that of all the places they might be today, they are here, now, gathered into one community of faith.

Dishonest Wealth and the Children of Light

Text: Luke 16:1-13

The scripture passages we hear in the readings each week are chosen by a committee. A big committee, with representatives from the many denominations that use what is called the Revised Common Lectionary. The lectionary is a list of selections from the Old and New Testaments—the Hebrew and Greek portions of the Bible—and the psalms. The lectionary lists readings for three years, called imaginatively years A, B, and C. We are now in year C. In this book are all the readings for year C, and we have similar books for years A and B.

You might ask whether the lectionary readings cover the whole Bible. That would make sense in a way. After all, for Lutherans the Bible is the final source of authority. But if we did read the whole Bible in three years, we would have to allocate five times the amount of space in worship than we do, because (by my informal reckonings) the lectionary readings cover a little less than a fifth of the Bible. And it actually is smaller than that, because some readings are repeated.

There are two main reasons for a lectionary or list of readings. First, the list is supposed to contain a lot of the important readings, as judged by the committee. So we won’t miss them. And second, the list disciplines the preacher, who cannot just get up and say “Hi, here’s some interesting things that I was thinking about this week, and I’ve picked a few Bible verses to beef up my argument.” That is, we are supposed to start with the Bible.

The problem with a lectionary is that, if you don’t read the Bible on your own, you’ll miss 80% of the Bible even if you attend worship every week.

Often the lectionary readings simply reinforce things we already know. They are familiar passages, or they state the scriptural basis for some theological position, or they tell the central stories of Christianity that all Christians need to hear to keep in touch with Jesus. But some days I think the readings are chosen just to keep us honest, you and me, to keep us on our toes. And to remind us that there is some pretty weird stuff in the Bible. And that we should not discount it. Some days, and today is such a day.

The reading from the Gospel of Luke today is a parable. Parables are never straightforward. They come to things sort of sideways. They are designed to surprise you, to shake you up and get you thinking. The story of the Good Samaritan, for example, is surprising because a man in troubled is rescued by an unlikely helper. Or the parable of the Mustard Seed is surprising because Jesus says that the Kingdom of God is like this tiny seed.

Parables are not allegories. That is, things and people in them do not stand for other things. The father in the story of the Prodigal Son does not stand for God, though the way he welcomes his lost son might make us think of the relationship between God and sinners. Us.

The parable for today in Luke is certainly surprising. It is supposed to make you think. But maybe all it makes you think is: “Huh? What’s with this? What is going on here?” There are a lot of strange parts to it, and it raises a lot of questions. As one scholar said, a many “interpreters have struggled to make sense of this parable.” Parables like this one make pastors want to suggest a hymn sing in place of the sermon.

The parable tells a story of a steward—like the site manager or operations officer—who is accused of cheating his boss, who is rich. The boss fires him. But first, the steward cheats the boss some more in a clever scheme in order to gain favor with the boss’s debtors. The steward is called both dishonest (he’s a bad guy) and shrewd (he’s a good guy). But there is so much here we don’t know.

Like, for example, who calls the manager shrewd? In our translation it says “And the master commended the dishonest manager.” But the word for master and the word for lord (as in Lord Jesus) is the same in Greek. Could it be Jesus who is commending this guy? And if so, why? And if the master is, why is he praising the man who cheated him? And is the master telling the steward to make friends by dishonest wealth, or is Jesus telling the disciples to (which is how most scholars read it)? And why would he say that? Is this good advice for Christians?

Who are the children of light? Why aren’t they so shrewd? Is that good or bad? What are eternal homes (a phrase which appears nowhere else in the Bible)? Why should your handling of wicked wealth (and why are you messing with wicked wealth in the first place)—why should that affect your handling of true riches? What does Jesus mean by true riches anyway?

Many interpreters of this text try to answer all these questions in a sensible way. They try to make what looks like a broken puzzle fit together to make a nice picture. But I’m not sure it can be done. They have to trim the pieces to make it work. They have to add a little notion here and ignore a little word or two there. There is a lot we do not know in this parable.

But there are some things we do know.

We know that this parable sits with a bunch of others in this part of Luke, and that most of them have to do with the way things will be, are, or ought to be in God’s kingdom. We know that some of them have to do with money. We know that Luke thinks that possessions are a problem for those who profess to follow Jesus.

We know that there are some things this parable of the steward have in common with some of the others near it in Luke. This parable, and the parable of the man who has to build extra barns to hold his extra stuff, and a parable that we’ll hear next week about a poor man named Lazarus, all start out “there was a rich man.” The parable of the man with the barns, the parable of the Prodigal Son, and this parable all have a main character in trouble or crisis of some kind. And when they are in trouble, they all mutter, trying to figure out what to do. And they all talk to themselves and make a decision. “I will do this: I will build larger barns,” says one. “I will get up and go to my father,” says another. “I have decided what to do,” says the third. I, I, I. None of them turns to God.

You cannot serve God and wealth, Jesus says. Why all this attention to money? Because wealth is incredibly attractive. It is also incredibly distracting. The complications of wealth make it hard to manage, but they also make it interesting to manage. The problems that wealth presents are just hard enough to be intriguing but just easy enough so that very clever people—shrewd people, you might say—can solve them. Rich people like to solve them, and like people who like to solve them, l suppose like the steward who is commended, in my reading, by the boss he cheated.

The Bible is the story of God’s relationship with us. It is often complicated because our relationship with God is often complicated. The Bible has weird parts because we have weird parts.

You cannot serve two masters, Jesus says. But we in our lives feel like we have many masters, not just two. And we make not just one permanent decision about whom to serve, but many daily ones.

God draws us near. We long to be drawn near. But God is not the only thing pulling us. There are lots of distracting attractions. When we are in crisis, when we are not sure where to go, how to deal, what to do, to whom do we turn?

Forgetful God

Text: Luke 15:1-10 Other texts: Exodus 32:7-14, Psalm 51

Humans are designed to forget. Unlike in some models of the mind, our brains are not mechanical or electronic machines. We notice some things but not others. We remember some things for years, others for just moments. Mostly, though, all our memories fade.

Until recently, that is. Now we have a huge repository of information, the global web, that remembers pretty much perfectly pretty much forever. If you did something not so pleasant a decade ago, the net will remember. You cannot outlive your mistakes, and their impact does not fade with time. This development worries people, because forgetting is important to us, individually and collectively. Forgetting makes forgiveness possible. It is not the same as forgiveness, and you can and usually do forgive someone without forgetting what that person did to you. But unless there is some trauma, you don’t remember everything exactly. And as we pull away from events over time, it makes room for reflection, reconciliation, and redemption. We are built to be forgetful.

In our relationship with God, it is easy to get confused about who does what. We get especially confused about repentance. In normal life, repentance is something we have to do to have someone say “It’s all right.” (I’m sorry, I won’t do it again, I messed up. Well, OK, it’s all right.) And if people don’t repent, that’s grounds for refusing to forgive them. Why should I forgive you, you’re not even sorry.

So when we hear Jesus talk about the joy in heaven over the one sinner who repents, it makes us wonder. Is repentance a requirement with God as it seems to be with us? Do I need to say I’m sorry before God says “It’s all right”? Will we lose our blessings unless we agree to change our ways for the better? Is it something we have to do to be favored by God, as it is to be favored by people?

The Israelites deserve God’s anger. God, through Moses, has just told them all the things they should do as God’s people, and in particular just told them that they are not to pay a lot of attention to other gods. So the very first thing they do is build this calf out of gold and start worshipping it as their lord. So God—our God and theirs—is ticked off. I have had it with these people, he says. And he threatens to zap them. But Moses intercedes. He argues with God. The Egyptians will laugh at you. Why did you lead all those people out of slavery, just to kill them in the desert. Change your mind, says Moses. It is hard to know whether God was nervous about being embarrassed. But whatever the reason, God does change God’s mind. That is, God repents. God turns back—which is what the word repent means—God turns back to the original plan: Israel onward to the promised land.

It is God who repents in this story, not the Israelites. There is no “I’m sorry, I won’t do it again” in this story. The repenting here is something God does, not something people do in order to have God do something in return. There is no “in return.”

The Israelites certainly deserve what God threatens to do. People like to see people get what they deserve. That’s one of the reasons some people don’t like the story of the Prodigal Son—in the next chapter in Luke—where neither son gets what he deserves. And why should the lost sheep of today’s passage get rescued, when by wandering away he puts the whole flock in jeopardy. But it seems like the words “God” and “what you deserve” don’t fit in the same sentence. God doesn’t seem to care much about who deserves what. The wandering sheep gets saved, the wandering brother gets a party, the adulterous woman gets freed, the workers who come late get paid the same as the ones who have worked all day, the beggar gets twice what he asks for, the Good Friday executioners get forgiven.

God gives too much away. In the parables that Jesus tells, no one asks for forgiveness. But they are forgiven anyway. No one repents. But they are welcomed by God anyway. The parables are not about how great the repent-ers are. They are about how great God is.

Sometimes I think the Gospels should be called “101 Jokes by Jesus.” He says these things with a straight face that you know are absurd. So today, he tells his listeners that the heavens welcome the one repentant sinner more than the 99 righteous people. But where are you going to find a crowd of 99 sinless people, one of whom repents? You’d be lucky to find one totally good person in a hundred, much less 99. We are all sinners, which we know by theology and by experience. If you’ve never done what you shouldn’t have or left undone something you should have, cool for you. The scribes and Pharisees grumble that Jesus eats with sinners. Good thing for us, I’d say. If Jesus only ate with the sinless, he’d eat at a table for one most of the time. If he wants to eat with me—and I want him to—I’m glad he eats with sinners.

We speak a lot about what God hopes we’ll do, what God says we should do, what we think God wants us to do. But our relationship with God is not so much about what God demands. It’s about what God gives. Even if we feel like we don’t deserve it, or don’t even feel bad about what we’ve done. Jesus eats with sinners not because they promise not to sin any more, but because Jesus wants to eat with them. This kind of hanging around with not-the-best sort of people is probably the most obvious part of Jesus’ ministry and for his contemporaries, and even for some folks nowadays, the most troubling. It is a scandal.

The psalm for today, a version of which we sang, is thought to have been a lament by King David after he slept with Bathsheba and then had her husband killed to cover it up. In the psalm, David says essentially: I would really appreciate it, God, if you’d just forget the whole thing.

I don’t know if God is more like the Internet or more like our brains—most likely not at all like either. We have a hard time forgiving, much less forgetting. But God evidently finds it easy. We worship a God who rejoices in the act of forgiving. Joy in heaven, the verses say, joy among the angels, when the ones who are lost are found.

Though made in the image of God, we forgive imperfectly, all messed up with thoughts of people getting what they deserve and accountability, or needing to receive an apology first, or just being unable to drop it. But we worship a God who forgives perfectly, and whether it is actually so or not, seems to perfectly forget. Which is good for wandering sheep and stiff-necked people. Good for us.

Choose Life

Text: Deuteronomy 30:15-20 Other texts: Luke 14:26

I set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you may live.

The Israelites sit on the border of the land of Canaan. They sit like kids on a seawall, contemplating the ocean, side by side, imagining their future. They have been traveling forty years to get to this place and this time to take the land they have been promised by God. They have been led here by Moses. They have been given the law to follow. They have made an agreement with God. God is their God. They are God’s people. The land of God is ready for the people of God.

Now Moses, near death, preaches to them for the last time.

I have set before you life and death, Moses tells them, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you may live.

These words can guide us. They can be, as they have from time to time been for me, a touchstone against which we prove decisions. Is what I’m about to do a blessing or a curse? Will it add life to this world or diminish it? Will it help others, or harm them? Will what I do cause pain or peace?

But these wonderful words, wise and powerful, can turn to mock us. They make it sound so easy. Just turn away from death. Just turn toward life. As if choosing were so simple. As if we didn’t already know that blessings are better than curses. As if we didn’t already know that life is better than death. Who among us would on purpose choose death? Who among us wouldn’t choose life if we could?

I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you may live.

It’s not easy.

It’s not easy because it is not always clear what’s a blessing and what’s a curse. Things that look good on paper turn out to be disastrous in fact. Things started for good reasons turn out to cause suffering. We start in love and end in sorrow. We start in hope and end in frustration.

The morning glories twist and grow and delight us with their blossoms, but they twist the necks of the marigolds and choke them to death. Life or death, blessing or curse?

How can we know all things? How can we control all the variables? How can we see all the ways our actions will affect all other people and this earth?

We cannot.

Issues that we deal with as a society are difficult because we can’t figure out, much less agree about, what’s going to happen. Does stem cell research fall on the life side or the death side? How about military intervention to stop a genocidal war? How about abortion? How about locking someone up in prison for life? It’s not that some folks are on the side of death and the others on the side of life (even though our politics sometimes makes us think so). It’s that both sides are trying to figure it out. What is the blessing here? What is the curse? Where is life? Where is death?

It’s not just large world-wide issues, but personal ones. We ask ourselves: should I, middle aged parent, move across country to care for my ailing and frail mother or stay where I am, where my popular daughter is in junior high school and my shy and difficult son is in fifth grade. Should we, a young couple in our late teens, raise our unexpected child ourselves or put it up for adoption? Should I, recent law-school graduate with lots of student loans, go for the big-bucks big-firm job for a while, maybe forever, or go back to my small hometown as I had planned? Should I, successful entrepreneur, whose son hates school—should I push him to work harder because I believe that success in school leads to success in life? Which is blessing? Which is curse?

I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you may live.

It’s not easy.

It’s not easy because the consequences are often hard to take. Jesus’ harsh words about hating one’s family are shocking. They make no sense coming from someone who advises us to love all, including our enemies. To love our neighbors as ourselves. To obey the commandments, including the one about honoring one’s father and mother.

They make no sense unless we imagine that Jesus is describing what is, not proscribing what ought to be. To disagree with those we love and who love us is not a recipe for discipleship. But it can be a result. People get angry and hurt and frightened. To follow Christ—to be my disciple, Jesus says—to follow Christ into life means putting Jesus ahead of all else, even family, even if it causes hurt. It is a horrible decision. How did Zebedee feel when new disciples, his sons James and John, abandoned their father and the family business and took off after Jesus?

I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you may live.

It’s not easy.

It’s not easy because it doesn’t end with one decision.

It might seem that Moses is asking the Israelites to make one final choice. But no such luck. The Israelites will have to make that choice over and over again.

The decisions we make, make our lives. Too often it is not a menu of choices that face us, but a choice between two alteratives. One or the other, no chance to back up. We have to do as Yogi Berra said, “when you come to the fork, take it.” And there is not just one fork in the road, but one after another. The forks we choose define our path.

Moses asks the Israelites to choose a life, a way of living, that aligned with God’s hopes. The book of Deuteronomy is about Israel’s covenant—their agreement—with God. When Moses asks them to choose life, he is asking them to put that agreement first in their minds and in their hearts. He is asking them to make God and God’s law the focus of their lives. He is asking them to be foremost, before all other things, people of God. He is asking them to think of themselves that way before all other ways.

And in the same way Jesus asks his disciples to choose. Jesus asks the crowd to hate mothers and fathers, wife and children, brothers and sisters, even life itself. The word “hate” here does not mean “have bad feelings toward.” The words are like legal terms. Love means “be loyal to” as one country might be loyal to a treaty with another country. When Jesus tells his listeners to hate life and family, he is telling them not to cling to these things above all. Like Moses, Jesus is asking the crowd to put God first before all things. Their first loyalty is to God, not to even important things like their families.

The book of Deuteronomy is formed as a book of laws, but in it’s 600+ laws, is a book of the heart. It is guide to responding to the experience of God’s love for a people. It is a guide to a way of living with God first in mind.

The Israelites stood on the border, just one step away from Canaan, the promised land. They stood on the border, just one step away from a prosperous future. They stood on the border, one step to complete their freedom from Egyptian slavery.

I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you may live. Living with God, Moses adds importantly. Loving God, obeying God, and holding fast to God.

Yet in this passage, unlike others in the Torah, the Israelites do not choose. The book of Deuteronomy ends with the people still on the border, still ready, waiting. The story doesn’t end. The offer remains for all people. And all people, including us, may accept it or not.

Will we? We often stand at some border, waiting, wondering what to do, nervous and confused. Wanting to choose blessing, afraid we will choose curse. At the fork, what path will we take?

To choose life and blessing is, as Moses says, to choose to walk in God’s path. God’s path is the path on which God walks. It is the path that God enjoys. It is the place where God is, where God is likely to be found. It is where God roams. God roams there waiting for us.

I will be your God, and you will be my people. That is God’s promise. God asks us to take one hesitant step onto God’s path. And when we do, God comes to greet us. God comes to take our hand. And as we walk step by step, day by day, God comes to walk with us.

Don't Forget, My Love

Text: Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16

Why be good?

Why be good? And why do good? Why let that guy nose into your lane from his driveway? Maybe he’ll let someone else do the same some day, but probably not. He’s clearly a jerk. Why pick up trash that someone else dropped? Why listen to your crabby friend complain once again? Why risk your job to defend a colleague? Why help those who are sick and poor? Why support infrastructure projects in Honduras, as some New England Lutherans are doing right now? Why fight for peace and justice? Why do anything good? Why should Christians, who are saved by grace apart from works, bother to do any good work?

The book of Hebrews is a strange book. Titled a letter in most Bibles, it is more like a long sermon. The language of Hebrews is very highfalutin, difficult in Greek and difficult even when translated into English. Hebrews is a book of high Christology, a theologians’ phrase for emphasizing the divinity of Christ at the expense of his humanity. Hebrews is big on the sacrifice of Christ and his priestly nature.

So it is odd to come across the final thirteenth chapter of Hebrews. Odd because all of a sudden the author begins to give down-to-earth advice about how to live as a Christian here in this world, in everyday life. It is so odd that some scholars think the last chapter was written by someone else, or tacked on later. But the final chapter tells us how to be good, and the book as a whole tells us why.

The advice is clear, specific, and short. There are four rules of conduct: Show hospitality to strangers. Be mindful of those in prison and who are being tortured. Be faithful in relationships. And stay free of the love of money. On the face of it, four seemingly unrelated exhortations. But they are sewn together by a common thread.

First: Show hospitality to strangers. The rule is first in the list. And it is the most emphatic: do not neglect to do this, it says. Strangers here means “people not like us.” The word means more literally “aliens.” Foreigners, people who look weird, talk weird, do weird things that we don’t do. And by weird, I mean different. People who admire things we don’t admire. People who believe things we don’t believe. People who don’t know the people we know.

The reason for this rule, Hebrews says, is that we might entertain angels without knowing it. Even those who seem strange to us might be angels. Not knowing them, we don’t know. Or they might just be good people just like us and our friends. People who have aspirations and fears just like ours. People whose reasons for doing things are just as complicated as ours.

The word for hospitality here means more than “tolerate” strangers. It means love the strangers. Love the strangers as you would your brother or sister. Go out of your way to give them the same break you’d give a friend. Forgive them a little. Help them before they ask for help. Be mindful of them. Do not keep them out. Invite them in.

Second: Remember those in prison. Remember those being tortured. We turn our backs on prisons and prison camps. Prisons are designed that way, to make it hard for people outside to imagine fully the people inside. As in our dealings with strangers, we imagine prisoners to be something other than us. We call them prisoners, but in Hebrews, in the Greek, it says “those who are in prison.” There are not humans outside and prisoners inside. There are people, some outside and some inside.

Think of those inside, Hebrews says, as if you were in prison with them. Bound up with them, it says. Imagine yourself in prison. Imagine yourself there for, say, five years. A short sentence by today’s standards. Imagine just a minimum security prison. Where you share a small cell with another person, where you hardly ever see your family or parents or children or partner. Where whatever you do is observed. Where your time is not your own at all. When you are subject to arbitrary rules and decisions. Where you have no liberty—which is the purpose of prisons. Imagine, say, starting next week and living like that for five years. Be mindful of those in prison, Hebrews says.

Imagine even more, if you can—which I’m not sure I can— being in a place where you are tortured. The word means “a place where you are held while evil things happen.” Imagine that, and be mindful of those who are being tortured.

Third: Be faithful in relationships. Honor marriage is what it really says, and don’t mess around with sex. In a time when the Roman oppressors mocked the Christians because they abstained from adultery, and where sex was an avenue to power and honor, the advice defended faithfulness against an unsympathetic culture. But the general is as true as the specific. Honor relationships. Don’t be tempted to betray your friends, or your partner, for other, sweeter rewards. Don’t use relationships as means to some other end.

And fourth: Keep your lives free from the love of money. Be content with what you have. Don’t put your trust in riches. Money is untrustworthy. It is great, but it can’t be counted on. It is addictive. It seems like a indicator of admiration and esteem when it is not. It is the love of money that is the issue in this passage. Money becomes an idol. We are tempted to turn to money for healing and peace when we could be turning to God.

Aliens, people in prison, marriage and sex, and the love of money. A motley crew. What makes these four rules a matched set is what Hebrews calls “mutual love.” We are exhorted to love others for what they are. Not what they represent—immigrants and criminals. And not with expectation of reward—affection and riches. Relationships with people are not based on transactions. People—other people—are not tokens, or counts, or aggregates, or means to an end. Not illegals, nor insurgents, nor gays, nor troops, nor reactionaries, nor liberals, nor “the homeless,” nor fat cat CEOs, nor anything that, though perhaps true but incomplete, lets us think of some people as something different in kind, character, and nature from you and me.

Mutual love in us is planted by our love for God and nourished by our imaginations. Imagining being the other person. Imagine you were the foreigner, imagine you were the prisoner, imagine you were the spouse, imagine you were the one who suffered because someone loved money more than you. Act as if you were.

When we are scared of people, we do crazy things. When we are tempted by idols, we do crazy things. We don’t do good. What makes the admonitions in Hebrews possible to follow is that first, God is with us. “I will never leave you or forsake you,” God says. And second, that God will help and protect us. “The Lord is my helper,” quotes Hebrews, “I will not be afraid. What can anyone do to me?”

The book of Hebrews is a love story. It is the story of God’s love for us and our love for God. It is the same story that is the story of the whole Bible. The mutual love is shaped and shown by Christ, both priest and sacrifice in the language of Hebrews. Christ who is and always was divine (“the same yesterday and today and forever,” it says) was able to be something else, was able to be us.

“Do not neglect to do good,” Hebrews says, “and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.”

We do good not because we have to, or because it earns us points, with God or anyone else. Not to get into heaven or to avoid God’s anger. We do good not because we get paid off in some way, emotional or actual, but because we are in mutual love with God and it pleases us, therefore, to do so, as it would please us to please someone we loved.

Sabbath Rest, Sabbath Power

Text: Luke 13:10–17 Other texts: Isaiah 58:9b–14

Last week, a man named Zhang Shuhong, a co-owner and manager of a small company in China killed himself on the third floor of his factory. He did so, people guess, because his was one of the companies that supplied toys to Mattel that were painted with paint that had lead in its pigment, which he had purchased from another company.

The man committed suicide. But he also was put to death. He was killed, yet no one was the killer. He was killed by circumstance, by the greed of the market to demand the lowest price, by the need of the toy maker to sell its wares cheaply, by our desire to be able to buy more of those toys. He was killed by fear, perhaps, that if he performed poorly he would lose his factory and the well-being of his family and his workers. In a worldwide competitive market, everything is on the margin. An infinitesimal incremental savings, or a tiny increase in costs, makes the difference between life and death. There is no slack. Slack is for losers. There is no rest. Those who rest fall behind or by the wayside.

The third or fourth commandment (Lutherans number them differently than most) is “Remember the Sabbath; keep it holy.” There are two versions of the Ten Commandments in the Bible, one in Deuteronomy and the other in Exodus. In both cases, the sabbath commandment is clear: The seventh day of the week is a sabbath. You shall not do any work. The commandment is the same in both cases, but the reasons given are different. In Exodus it says we must honor the seventh day because on the seventh day of creation, God rested. And so should we. And in Deuteronomy it says we must honor the seventh day because God freed the Israelite slaves and brought them out from the land of Egypt.

In one case, we take a sabbath day because we are creatures, not the creator. Creatures need rest. In the other case because we are free, not slaves. Free people are not bound by fear and greed. Creaturely rest and human freedom.

Like all the law, the commandments both protect and distinguish. That is, they both are good for us and for the world and they define us against the world. The Israelites, and the Christians who followed, are the people who observe a sabbath. The sabbath is both a means of grace and a mark that identifies us.

The sabbath is a gift of rest, modeled after God's rest. And as creatures, we need the rest. We cannot work nonstop. If we do, we go nuts. We get sick or worse, like the Chinese business owner. We harm others. We do stupid things and think weird thoughts. So we value the rest part of the sabbath.

But the sabbath is also a gift of power, modeled after God’s freeing power in Egypt. The sabbath is a shield against a kind of slavery. And we seem to have devalued the power part of the sabbath.

The sabbath is radical. It is radical because sabbath observance repudiates some the world’s most binding values.

The sabbath is a repudiation of constant work. Our faith says that no one can ask you to work all the time. No one owns all your days. One out of seven (that’s about fourteen percent) of the days is unavailable for sale or rent. The eighty-six percent left is plenty. The seventh day is God’s to give, and is given to you. No person has the authority to take it away. And even you don’t have the authority to give it away.

But the sabbath is more. It is a repudiation in some ways of the fruits of work. Not all fruits. God knows, Jesus says, that we need to eat, to have shelter and clothing, to be healed of our diseases. And Lutheran theology says that work is an expression of our love for God and for each other. But sometimes we work because we want a whole bunch more stuff. And sometimes we work because we are afraid that if we do not work hard we will be passed by and passed up. Or we will be defeated in life, commerce, or love by people who are willing to work harder and longer than we are. There are always such people. Sometimes we work because we are attacked by greed or by fear.

By observing a day, one whole day, of rest, we are denying the power of fear and greed. We refuse to succumb to those forces. We are saying that our longings and our worries are not going to jerk us around.

The sabbath is a repudiation of the notion that everything is up to us. We are creatures, and creatures made, it seems clear, to live with others. By observing a sabbath, we put part of our lives and welfare in the hands of others. And we put them in the hands of God. We acknowledge our vulnerability and dependence on beings other than ourselves.

We live in a time of commerce. Not just here in this country, but everywhere. We live in a time of competition. We live in cultures that demand hard work, excellence, and performance above all. Commerce is an idol, an evaluating judge. So Zhang was judged and found wanting, and he killed himself. This idol is not new. Isaiah speaks out against it.

The sabbath is a shield, our shield against the power of this idolatry. It is one of the few we have left. The sabbath gives us something beyond our own will and strength of character to resist. We observe a time of rest, a time without working, not because we are good or faithful or value “wellness,” but because we are told to.

I suspect we are letting the sabbath be taken from us. Or we are giving it up ourselves. I don't just mean Sunday, though that is our sabbath, but the whole idea of sabbath. Our culture seems to have concluded that sabbath is for wimps. But the preservation of the sabbath turns out to be hard work, and something worth working for.

We need some slack in our lives. Some room for downtime, and some room for error, for experiments that don't turn out, for things to be a little out of control. The sabbath is a place for all that.

Luther was said to have claimed to spit in the eye of the devil. The sabbath is a way of spitting in the face of greed and fear.

We should not put our shield down. We as Christians should not so easily give up the gift of the sabbath that God has provided and commanded. We are in danger of being overwhelmed by forces that are strong and tempting. We need to defend our lives and our freedom. We need the sabbath. Think of manager Zhang. It is a matter of life and death.

Dreaming

Text: Jeremiah 23:23-29 Other texts: Luke 12:49-56

Fantasy is great. In the Harry Potter books, people transport themselves instantaneously, which is a lot better than flying commercial airlines or driving from here to Chicago. Harry and his friends have a magical tent in which are bunk beds, a bathroom and kitchen, and a big soft armchair, which is a lot better than camping in the rain in the White Mountains. And the books also contain fantastic evil, personified and pure, without compassion or regret. But as Harry and Hermione and Ron get older, their lives become more complicated, just like real people. Not that they are beset by other-worldly troubles—which they are—but that they have begun to act like real people, complex creatures of friendship and jealously, courage and cowardice, love returned and love unrequited, hopes realized and hopes just as often frustrated. And the people they meet are both bad and good, strong and weak. In other words, just like in real life.

It is helpful sometimes to put ourselves in a fantastic world, different from our own. Fantasy is a kind of slack, a place known to be unreal, safe because the threats, no matter how dire, are phony. But it is not good for long-term solace. People know that, which is why eventually even in fantasy, reality intrudes as it does with Harry Potter. Even in the artificial computer world of Second Life, where people meet in the guise of avatars of their own making, as beautiful and powerful as they like, there is now advertising and commerce, winners and losers, the A-list and the rest of us.

“I have dreamed, I have dreamed,” said the false prophets mocked by God in Jeremiah. The dreams God speaks about are not visions of promise and hope, but fantasies. And the dreams that the people of Jeremiah’s time dream are the same ones that people have always dreamed. Dreams of power, dreams of wealth, dreams of security through strength, dreams of control, dreams of flawless love and beauty.

Sometimes these dreams are told by professional dreamers—people who have a stake in getting others to dream along with them, for commercial, political, or personal advantage and gain. But just as often we dream them ourselves, even against our own wisdom. I sometimes fantasize about owning a big house, forgetting the upkeep, taxes, maintenance, clutter; the moral shame of having more than I need; my own lack of interest and skills in carpentry and plumbing and furnaces. People dream of being their own bosses, or becoming a CEO, forgetting that they hate making decisions, or traveling all the time, or worrying about whether they can meet payroll. People dream of finding the perfect spouse or partner, forgetting that long-term relationships are built on promises and grow in the face of conflict and both unexpected joys and unwelcome struggles. Fantasy is great. You can go a long way on the force of your fantasies. But you cannot go all the way.

A prophet speaks about reality. Prophecy and dreaming—at least the kind we are talking about—are opposites. A prophet is a truth teller. A prophet is not sentimental. A prophet is anti-sentimental. It is tough job. Jeremiah did not want to be a prophet. No one would. In a land of dreamers, who would want to speak the truth? Prophets get into trouble. But getting into trouble is part of what it is all about. Being Christian, that is.

In the passage from Hebrews we just heard, the author lists what we might call Heroes of Faith. In the first half of the list are people who were strong, just, powerful, victorious. Gideon, Samuel, David. In the second half people—unnamed—who suffer, are persecuted, impoverished. There are not two lists here. All of these, it says, were commended for their faith. They all make up the “great cloud of witnesses.”

It is not an accident that the word for “witness” here is the same as the word for martyr. Clouds of martyrs living in faith. People who witness—that is, people who tell it like they see it—can get into trouble. It is important here to not confuse cause and effect. The scripture does not call us to suffer so that we might witness (that is, tell the truth about the world and God). It calls us to be truth-tellers, which in turn might cause us problems. Being a martyr—that is, getting in trouble on account of one’s faith—does not make one more Christian. It is not necessary or even desirable. And following Christ does not necessarily lead to conflict, but it probably will.

So when Jesus speaks about the division he brings, he is not promoting discord. This passage in Luke is descriptive, not proscriptive. If someone does what Jesus says to do—such as always placing people first before structure and power—then some folks are going to be bent out of shape. And fathers will be divided from sons, mothers against daughters, and all the other combinations—friend from friend, kin from kin. It is not inevitable, but it is likely. People will name those who follow Jesus as seditious, naïve, unrealistic, disloyal, geeky, arrogant, radical. Or they’ll do worse.

So Jesus speaks here to let people know what they are getting into—what we are getting into.

Christianity is not a faith of dreams, it is a faith of prophecy. We can take comfort in the presence of Christ in our lives, and in the intimacy of God in the affairs of humans, but ours is not a cushy faith. We are not called to take refuge in a religious fantasy. An opiate, as some have called it. Our God is not a God of fantasy but of reality. Of joys and difficulties. We are not avatars in an elaborate game of Second Life. We are real, complicated, people, and our God is a God of our lives as we actually live them.

In the psalm for today God speaks out for people who are weak, who are lonely, who are uncertain about what to do, who go hungry, who are at the mercy of others. In other words, just regular people like you and me who do regular things and have regular, complicated, sometimes great and sometimes difficult lives. A prophet reiterates God’s desire and guidance: that all care for the poor and troubled, and that all of us need care.

Our God may be an awesome God, but that does not mean we have to be awesome, too. God comes to us not in our dreams but in real life. Here. Now. In your life as it is. In this time. In this place.