Down in the Dust

Text: Luke 9:23-36 February 22, 2004

[Editor's note: Pastor Stein did not preach this week. This is a sermon on the same Gospel passage, preached in 2004.]

In the classic movie Buckaroo Bonzai, Peter Weller plays the title character. Buckaroo is a surgeon, a physicist, a comic book hero, and a rock star. Actor Lewis Smith plays his partner, lieutenant, and fellow musician. His name is Perfect Tommy. He is perfect. Able, cool under pressure, good looking, brave, decisive. There is something especially appealing about the notion of this man who is able to avoid the imperfections that otherwise put sand in the works of the lives of normal people like us. But of course it is fantasy; the man is made up. As in action-adventure movies of every era, he is the projection of our enthusiasm at the possible and our frustration with the actual.

Christians have a complicated relationship with perfection. The Kingdom of God is the promise of a perfect world on earth, a place in which all things go as God intends, without friction or misalignment. Heaven has been portrayed in our tradition as a place of perfection, and though images of it in the arts and in our imaginations vary, it is a place of perfect peace and contentment. Throughout Christian history people have vainly tried to make themselves perfect through prayer, self-inflicted suffering, and deprivation. As perfect as Jesus, they say they hope to be. Yet, especially as Lutherans, we know such effortful works cannot lead to perfection, since we are all sinners. That is, we are all imperfect.

These urges for the perfect self and world come as much from our hearts as from scripture. When we look at Adam and Eve and their fall in Eden, we grieve at not only what we have lost but what has yet to be restored.

On the mountain, Luke reports, there is a meeting between Jesus and his two greatest prophetic ancestors, Moses and Elijah. This is like a subcommittee of the Prophetic Mountain Club. They have three things in common. They all like mountains (Moses received the law on Mount Sinai, Elijah heard God’s still, small voice on Mount Horeb); they all come to listen for God’s guidance; and the third thing I’ll talk about in a moment. At this meeting Jesus becomes cloaked in dazzling white (as bright as a flash of lightning, another translation has it). The disciples see them in glory, a kind of technical term that means a shining divine presence. Not just glorious, their glory and Jesus’ are something that you could see.

For Peter, it is a perfect moment. That is, untouched by the hunger of the 5000, the feeding of whom Peter has just seen, and untouched by Jesus’ prediction of his impending execution, which Peter has just heard. It is a heavenly moment. In this moment, the usual messy platform of history is dust-free. This gathering of God’s special buddies takes place in a divine clean-room, unpolluted by real life.

Peter wants to keep it that way. Let’s build little huts, he says. In this way, perhaps, he can preserve that perfect moment forever. He can encapsulate, contain, and package it. He can keep this experience separate from the world of difficulties he inhabits.

We are subject to epiphanies, moments that reveal in an often dramatic surprise that God is here, that God is with us at this moment right now in this place. They happen to some of us in dreams. They happen to others in places where nature is thick. When sitting in a quiet grove, or a park at the end of the day, or on the rocks as the waves of the oceans shatter at our feet. They happen in moments of great happiness, at births and at the restoration of long-neglected friendships. They happen in times of sorrow, at bedside hospitals, in bottomless sadness.

They come in visions, in unexpected or impossible sightings, in voices we hear or seem to overhear. They come in moments of sudden clarity, where it seems to us that we somehow know the whole truth.

These epiphanies reveal something to us about God, and about God and us, and about God and the world. They are important experiences in our relationship with God. They give us important information. They deepen and enrich our understanding about God. It is dangerous and wasteful to dismiss them, as we modern people might tend to do. Unlike in other centuries, direct revelation of God has in our time been demoted as no longer authoritative or even useful. At worst, people consider it delusional. At best, wishful thinking. But to discount these experiences or to ignore them as random firing of synapses is denial. Like putting our hands over our ears and singing la la-la la-la. We should not drown them out.

They are not trivial. But neither are they the substance of our Christian life. They are enrichers, signifiers, pointers, but not the main thing. Had Peter succeeded in domesticating what happened on the mountain he would have confined and distorted both Christ’s character and his mission. Jesus cannot abide on this mountain for long.

As God did Moses and Elijah, God sends Jesus and his disciples back to the imperfect world. It is the third thing the three have in common. Sent back from the world of dazzling glory to the world of dust. Moses with his tablets and to more wandering and arguments with his people and with God. And Elijah—much to his dismay—to his prophecies. Jesus, to his teachings, his healings, his organizing of sometimes clueless followers, to his trial and death and then his resurrection and ascension. And Peter and John and James to a hard, and I’m sure, amazing, life of action in the world.

Listen to him! The voice of God directs the disciples. Listen to him. What does he say? If any want to become my followers, he says, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and continue to follow me. Continue to follow me. It is an ongoing and continuing day-to-day life of hard and nourishing and disappointing and fulfilling and aggravating and joyful work led by Christ.

The mountain of Moses and Elijah and Jesus is a meeting of heaven and earth. Perfection and dust. This story is in the middle of the Gospel of Luke. This is not the climax. This meeting is not the point of the story. The story continues. And continues not with us humans being hauled up onto the heavenly mountain. But with Jesus, chosen son, walking down to the dust, walking down to this imperfect world, walking down to be with us.

Jesus is not a sample of or a call to perfection. In our theology, we do not say: Jesus, perfect in every way. We say instead: Jesus, human in every way. We cannot make ourselves perfect. And we cannot make the world perfect. We are not called to. We are not called to be Perfect Tommys. We are followers of Jesus Christ. We are called to listen! Listen to him!

There Are Three Kinds of People in the World

Text: Luke 6:17-27
February 11, 2007

There are two kinds of people in the world.

There are those who are poor, and those who are rich. There are those who are hungry, and those who are full. There are those who weep, and those who laugh. Is that right? Is that what Jesus is saying here? Are there poor hungry weepers and rich stuffed laughers?

In the time when Jesus was healing and preaching, there were many, many people who were poor, hungry, and powerless. If you drew one of those demographic charts that look like pyramids, with big bases of poorer people at the bottom and gradually smaller layers of gradually richer people, with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet at the very top—if you drew one of those for Palestine 2000 years ago, it would look more like a thumbtack than a pyramid. With a wide horizontal base and a vertical spike. Almost everybody was poor. A very few were very rich. And a tiny bunch, way at the top, at the point, had almost all the power and most of the goods.

It is different today, but not a lot different. In the U.S. now, the richest person has about 350,000 times more stuff than the average person. (That means that for every dollar normal people have, the richest person has 350,000 dollars. For every cup of coffee you and I buy, the richest person can buy a pretty good house in Cambridge; for every latte, he can buy a house on Brattle Street.) In this country, the top 1% of the people own about a quarter of all the stuff that can be owned. In the world, the top 1% owns 40% of the stuff. The poorest 50% of the people, that’s three billion people, own only 1% of the stuff.

So it is not much of a shock to hear Jesus talk about poor people and rich people. What is—and was—a shock was to hear him say that the poor, hungry, and sorrowful people are blessed and that the rich, stuffed, and happy are to be pitied. How you define rich and poor depends on where you stand—and about where your friends and neighbors stand in relation to you. But I’m sure that you could classify people by their reaction to Jesus’ words. I suspect that the people in the first group that Jesus talks about, the poor hungry ones, thought, “hooray, finally!” And that the people in the second group, the rich full ones, thought things like, “the guy is delusional; let’s be realistic; what’s wrong with money?” They knew who they were.

Both those who celebrate and those who protest cannot claim that Jesus is speaking about some other world. In Luke’s gospel, when Jesus talks about wealth and power, he means wealth and power in a physical, earthly way.

The word “blessed” here pretty much means filled with abundance. It has to do not with things of the spirit. It has to do with power and riches and privilege.

By the same token, the word “poor” means destitute, without anything. It means not those who don’t have enough money, but those who have no money. If you know someone who has less than you have, then you are not poor according to the meaning of this word. There is a paradox in Jesus’ proclamation. Blessed are the poor is an oxymoron. Rich are you who are poor, Jesus seems to say.

And the word “woe” means “alas!” or “too bad.” It is not a word of condemnation. It is a word of grief. A word of sympathy. If anything, Jesus’ proclamation about the rich is one of pity and compassion. I’m sorry; too bad for you who are rich.

The same extremes are found in the other blessings and woes that Luke lists. To weep means to wail in intense sorrow. To laugh means to be full of joy. To hunger is to look on a table piled high with food and know that none is for you. To be filled is to be free to take your pick of that feast.

Jesus speaks to a crowd that knows that the Bible tells them—as it tells us—to care for the poor and hungry. The mandate of this care comes from our common humanity as identically children of God. The stories of the Bible emphasize that we are created beings, and also that we are freed beings. All the Israelites were freed from slavery in Egypt, not just the leaders and those with connections in high places.

But that common bond erodes pretty quickly. Jesus speaks to the crowd—who are mostly poor people. They hear him say what is way too obvious to them. The poor see the rich, because they had better see them: the rich have power over the lives of the poor. But the rich do not see the poor. The poor are by and large invisible, hidden by the wish of the rich not to see them. Which is what Jesus means when he says “they exclude you.”

If there are two kinds of people in the world, they are not granted equal weight in the world’s balance. When this happens, it is an injustice. That’s what the word “injustice” means in the Bible. A glitch in the plan, a distortion in God’s hopes and intent for the world, caused by the sin of people in their greed and fear. Injustice in the world is a sign that the idols are prevailing over God.

It certainly is true that there are rich and poor, hungry and well-fed. That may be the way it is. There may even be reasonable-sounding explanations for it. But both those who are poor and those who are rich know one thing: it is not just. It is not right. It is not just for some to sit by the side starving while other are more than satisfied. That may be the way it is, but Jesus reminds the crowd—and us—that it is not God’s way.

The prophets remind us that the community of God is a just community. Not a world in which the satisfied take a little better care of the hungry. Not a world in which the privileged give a little bit more to the needy. But a world that works in a different way, works in such a way that there is no poverty, no hunger, no oppression, no violence.

Jesus’ teaching here to the crowd is both a vision and an announcement that that’s how it is in God’s world. This is not a passage to elevate the ambitions of some and castigate others, though it does serve notice that in Jesus things will change. He is not saying there are two kinds of people in this world. This is not a call for the rich to be nicer and for the poor to hold on a little tighter to hope. It is a call for all people to welcome God’s kingdom. In the world of sin, only the rich and powerful get abundance. In the God’s kingdom, all do.

The beatitudes, as this list of blessings is called, comes in Luke right after a scene of healing. Jesus, it says, healed those who were troubled with unclean demons. We are all of us, poor and rich, hungry and full, sorrowful and jubilant, troubled by unclean spirits. The injustice of the world wears us away, makes us tired and crazy. We follow Jesus in the expectation that he will cure the world of the unclean demons of injustice.

The joke goes that there are three kinds of people. Those who are good at math and those who are not. I wonder about that virtual third person. A being who is like a spirit. This imaginary prophet who is unable to see the world divided into two halves. But who sees that in the eyes of God, in the just world, there is only one kind of people.

Lord of the Dance

Text: Luke 5:1-11 February 4, 2007

“They left everything.” That’s what Luke says. In the Gospel of Mark, from which Luke borrows freely, it says “immediately they left their nets and followed him.” It amounts to the same thing. Immediate and total change of life in a single instant. Simon (we know him better as Peter, after Jesus renames him)—Peter and James and John leave behind all that they had and all that they had thought they hoped for. In a single moment, and everything at once.

How are we to take this selection from Luke? Some see it as just an interesting story about how Jesus recruited his first disciples. Not everything in the Bible means something other than what it seems. We learn that they were common folk, not fancy or rich. We meet Peter, who is so impulsive throughout the Gospels. We learn that Jesus intended from the start to conduct his ministry in a team, rather than as a sole practitioner.

And some see it as an allegory, where one thing stands for something else. The disciples stand for us. Or the sea stands for the world and the fish stand for us. Or the fish stand for potential Christian converts. Or, as one scholar wrote, the net stands for us, though I’m not sure I understand that one.

But I see this passage more as a parable, a parable told in the actions of Jesus rather than in his words. As in a parable, unlikely things happen. Jesus, a carpenter, instructs Simon, a fisher, how to fish. They go out in the day, when the fish normally avoid the nets. The results are surprising and outlandish. And, like all parables, this one is less about us and more about the way God behaves.

In this story in Luke, it is as if Jesus and Simon Peter dance with each other. They are partners in one event, the calling of disciples for the ongoing ministry of Jesus. But Jesus is not the choreographer and Peter the dancer. Nor is Jesus the recruiter and Peter the job applicant. Nor is, yet, Jesus the leader and Peter the follower. That hasn’t happened yet, but it is happening right in front of our eyes.

If on the one hand we watch just Jesus dance, we see him make a suggestion about getting in the boat and trying to fish some more. We see him, somehow, provide an abundant catch of fish, too many for the nets to hold. Really, fish without end. And more than Peter by himself can handle. And we see Jesus forgive Peter, or at least we infer that he does so. And finally, we see Jesus tell Peter and his buddies: first, that they do not have to be afraid and second, that their lives have just been transformed.

If on the other hand we watch just Peter dance, we see him complain to Jesus about going out in the boat again. After all, it is daytime, and no one catches fish in the daytime. But in spite of that, we see Peter do what Jesus says. Some say this is a sign of Peter’s obedience, but that’s not quite the right word. Peter is enthusiastic. Peter is ready to try anything, no matter how crazy and weird it seems. He, the fisherman, is fishable. Then we see Peter catch a lot of fish, calling his partners for help. They do help, after which Peter falls to his knees, begs forgiveness, and tells Jesus to get out of town (the words mean “leave the neighborhood”). And finally, Peter leaves everything and follows Jesus.

To tell the story this way makes no sense. It is silly. It makes no sense because the point of the story is the give and take between Jesus and Peter. This give and take are not part of every Gospel story. The same story in Mark goes like this: Jesus said, “follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” And they did. That’s it. That’s the whole episode in Mark. But not in Luke.

In improvisational theater, I’m told, there is a paradigm called “offer and accept.” One of the actors creates an opening, an opportunity. “Wait, look out there. I think that’s my daughter in the car,” the actor might say. That’s the offer. One of the other actors then, if all goes right, steps into the opening and furthers the action. “Sure is, and it looks like she’s got an elephant in the back seat.” That’s an accept. If the second actor had just said “Yep, that’s your daughter,” that would not be an accept. That would stop the action, putting the responsibility back on the first actor.

It is like a dance, each person alternately offering and accepting, creating futures and walking into them. One dancer leads by creating a space into which the other moves.

The dance between Jesus and Peter in this story is a series of offers and accepts. Jesus proposes a boat ride, Peter accepts. Jesus suggests some more fishing. Peter complains at first, then agrees. Peter catches too many fish. Peter begs forgiveness. Jesus forgives him. Jesus tells Peter he has a new job. Peter leaves everything behind and follows Jesus. Ballroom dancing. Step step, side, together. It is the pattern of the life Jesus shares with Peter.

And more often than not, it is the pattern that Jesus shares with us.

It would be easier, for those of us who would like to know God and follow Jesus, if Jesus would just capture us—the word in the Gospel for catch people really means to snag—if Jesus would just snag us as he did Paul on the road to Damascus.

But not many of us feel called so strongly and so suddenly by Jesus that we leave all we have and follow him. Our lives do not usually conform to Mark’s story—Come follow me. Ok, will do, Jesus. Maybe that is the way it works for some. For most others, we meet Jesus in a kind of dance like the one performed by Peter and Jesus. Jesus suggests something. We try it, or we don’t. Something happens. Or doesn’t. We complain, and then like Peter we do what Jesus tells us anyway. We take a step. Jesus takes a step. We step back, Jesus steps forward. Jesus proposes something wild. Too fancy a step for us, we demure. For the time being, anyway.

And for some, we’re in the dance hall standing around watching the others dance, thinking maybe we’ll try it out sometime. But not now. It looks fun, but embarrassing.

Dance is a way of communication. And also an exercise in solidarity, patience, trust, and joy. And it is also a means of seduction. It seems that we are less often commanded to follow Jesus than we are seduced to follow him. Divine seduction is a kind of grace.

They left everything, says Luke. In a instant, says Mark. It appeals to us, this sudden break with the past. It is sentimental, in a James Dean sort of way. Rebellious and outrageous. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus shocks his listeners by asking them to put him, to put God, before other things they hold dear. If we are to follow Jesus, he says, there can be nothing that we are not willing to set aside.

Yet for most of us, we hesitate, thinking about the people were leaving behind—what about poor Zebedee, the father of James and John, who in Mark is left to run the fishing business by himself? Thinking about our families, our jobs, our aspirations and plans, our obligations to others. It is a constant awkward negotiation.

It would be wonderful to be swept off our feet by God. But more often we are gently guided, like a dance partner, learning to trust God and to feel trustworthy ourselves. In calling Peter and James and John, Jesus never says “follow me.” He just steps out onto the floor, puts out his arms. “Do not be afraid,” he says. Just dance.