Pride was not made for humankind

Text: Luke 14:1, 7-14

I’d like to talk today about quantum mechanics and Ramadan and how they help us think about discipline and humility. Which is what Jesus talks about in this parable today in Luke. These four things are both familiar and odd to us. And that’s how it is with parables, too. When Jesus tells a parable, he uses familiar situations to present what are, to his listeners at least, odd conclusions.

So, for example, the familiar notion of a meal shared with friends and neighbors. You invite the people you like. If it is a formal meal, you also invite the people who count. If it is a very formal meal, you make sure that the people who count sit in the right spots. In a wedding, who sits with the bride and groom. Who with the parents. Who has to sit with all the old folks. Being at the head table was then and is now an honor to be valued and coveted. No one wants to sit at the last table.

But Jesus makes this odd by telling folks not to rush for table number one. To hold back, to be humble, to ask for less, to expect little. Why does he say that?

What is odd is that we mostly don’t find this parable to be odd. It is the kind of thing Jesus says all the time. You know, the last shall be first kind of stuff. The one who loses his or her life will save it. We are so accustomed to hearing this kind of talk from Jesus that it is not shocking. But it should be. Jesus intended it to be.

Partly what has happened is that we are no longer disturbed by what Jesus says. There is a little rule in our heads: Jesus is good and kind. We follow Jesus. We therefore approve of what Jesus says. Sometimes without paying too close attention. Or feeling under any obligation to do what he says. It doesn’t shock us because, you know, it is our Jesus. Doing his Jesus thing.

And partly what is happening in this story is that we modern western people have ambivalent feelings about social and financial inequality and stratification. We admire the poor but don’t want to be poor. We approve of the people who sit at the lowest place but we ourselves neither want to nor expect to sit there. People who are wealthy have too much power, money, and arrogance. But we would love to have that much ourselves. We want to be ordinary but special.

The role model for many is the underprivileged and passed over person who gets lucky or who is discovered and becomes famous and wealthy. A kind of American Idol or Slumdog Millionaire or Sarah Palin variant. We like ordinary people who become celebrities. So when we hear this parable, we think: right. The ordinary person who is assigned the lowest table is discovered by the host and brought forward to sit at the head table in a place of honor. It is the American dream, and right there in scripture.

One problem with this is that we know it hardly ever really happens. In the world, most poor people stay really poor. The last stay last and the first stay first. Or more so. It is a joke when Garrison Keillor says “all are above average” because we know that that is as socially unlikely as it is mathematically impossible. There is only room for one number one.

So if we want to sit at the top table, we had better go for it. Waiting around for someone, for the host, to see us languishing and to come invite us forward—it’s just not going to happen. We believe in competition. We think it is natural. We think it is inevitable. And we think it is admirable. We might resent those who in the banquet rush to be seated in the best spots. But at least we understand them and give them credit. As for those who sit meekly, who stand about, who accept less—they are pitiful. This parable of Jesus—it’s not realistic. That’s not how things work around here.

But it is how God works.

When we say that all are saints and sinners, when we say that God forgives us our sins, when we say that Jesus loves you, when we say we are all God’s children, we are obliterating the distinctions that normally seem so active and obvious. One of us does not have to crowd out another. It is like quantum mechanics, an equally unintuitive and odd way of thinking about the world that allows, if I understand it right, for many things to occupy the same spot at the same time. The advances of some of us do not undo the position of others. Someone else’s gain does not have to be matched by your loss.

It is not easy to believe this in our hearts. It seems unnatural. It goes against our fears. To not push forward is therefore a discipline. That is, it is something that we have to practice. It is a spiritual practice. Spiritual practices are things that turn out to be good for you to do but that are often difficult to do.

As you know, we are in the middle of Ramadan, for Muslims a month-long time of fasting and alms-giving or acts of charity. It is a spiritual discipline similar to what Christians used to practice and sometimes still practice during Lent. No one thinks it is fun to skip food and drink all day and few people think it is fun to give away money and time to others.

Disciplines like those of Ramadan and Lent are exercises in humility. In being humble. In doing exactly what Jesus talks about in this parable. Of standing back, not pushing up to the front. Of being little, of not trying to be so grand.

Krista Tibbet is a radio interviewer who gets people to speak about matters of faith, and usually about their own faith. In a recent interview with newly-converted young American Muslims, she asked about their experiences with the discipline of fasting and charity. What was remarkable was that they rarely spoke about the difficulty of the discipline. What they spoke about was their joy. The joy of being humble. They used words like: mindfulness, peace, surrender, trust, contentment, holiness.

This is what we seek as Christians and as humans. To be present in our surroundings and to others. To be at peace. To give up our worries to God. To know contentment. To feel blessed.

The benefits claimed of a competitive life, a competitive culture, are wealth and security and power. Are these what we really most want? Is this what we were made for? Is what we hope from life? Don’t we long instead for the blessings that seem to come with humility? As often, Jesus is not commanding us. He is making us an offer.

At the end of this parable, Jesus gives us some advice. He speaks to us as hosts this time, not as guests. Our roles are reversed from before, and we are doing the inviting. But as before, the scene is familiar and the conclusion odd. Invite the most unlikely and perhaps unlikeable people to your house for dinner. People you don’t want to see. Who maybe make you nervous. Whom you don’t want to be seen with, either. You will be blessed, says Jesus. The message is similar to the parable: taking pride in yourself, in this case because of your nice friends, is not what Jesus is talking about.

One of the suggested alternative readings for today is from Sirach, a book from the apocrypha. (These are books in some Bibles that Martin Luther said were not “equal to the Holy Scriptures, but are useful and good to read.”) The reading speaks about pride as the beginning of sin. And at the end, it says “Pride was not created for human beings, or violent anger for those born of women.” [We should put those words on a plaque and hang it in our houses.]

There is a lot of pride, anger, and general self-aggrandizement going around in the world. I cannot see this stuff fitting into the teachings of Jesus, who walked, after all, humbly to the cross. We are not designed for it. It does not suit us. It is making us ill, and it is making us crazy.

Jesus is a healer. He says odd things—like the blessings of being humble in an arrogant and self-centered world—he says odd things that shock the world. By this, he offers the world another way to be and think and live. By this, he offers a healing way.

Good Matters

Text: Luke 12:13-21
Other texts: Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14, 2:18-23

On the one hand: what is this guy’s problem? He has so much stuff that his barn is bursting. His garage is full of junk, power tools, and yard furniture. His house is full of art, books, and electronic gear. His barn is full of food from years of fortunate harvests. Rather than sending some to Goodwill, or putting it out on the street like good Cambridge people would do, or selling it on Craigslist or posting it on Freecycle, or sending it to the Food Bank, he thinks he’ll tear down his barn and build a bigger one. That way he can keep all that is his, safe and ready.

On the other hand: what is the problem with this guy? It is prudent to save for the future. It is always good to have a nest egg, something to fall back on. In the Bible, Joseph saved the Egyptians from starvation by storing excess grain, just as the man is doing, for years. You can’t depend on Social Security. Save what you make and put it into a retirement account. Don’t be a burden to your children.

There is no question that there is a problem here. There is no question that the man is supposed to be an example of something bad and wrong-headed. Even to Lutherans, who value planning and prudence, who are save-for-a-rainy day kind of people, the man seems a glutton and cold-hearted. Jesus uses him as an example of greediness, not thriftiness. Is it just a question of balance? If he had been a little more generous, would it have been okay? If seemed less gleeful, more humble, more thankful, would it have been okay? Is there no room, as someone asked, in God’s economy for building bigger barns? Or are these even the right questions to ask of this passage?

The narrator in the first reading from Ecclesiastes and the man with barns have some things in common. For one thing, they spend a lot of time talking to themselves. And for another, as a consequence, they spend a lot of time thinking about themselves.

And what they are thinking about and talking about is this: how should a person live in the face of certain death? How should a person live knowing that we are mortal and that our years are numbered (we just do not know what the number is)?

For the Teacher (the narrator) in Ecclesiastes, the answer is: why bother? Nothing we do lives beyond us, so in the end our work is trivial and meaningless. “It is an unhappy business that God has given to human beings to be busy with,” he says. It is a lot of chasing the wind. And whatever you gather, it is not yours to keep; it goes to fools and villains to squander or ruin. Or even to wise persons, who might still do the same. Or to anyone, who will enjoy the fruits that you so labored for. For the Teacher, mortality invalidates the days of our lives.

For the rich man with barns, the answer is: why not? The hour of our death is in the unknown future. We will not live forever, but we might live a long time more. We must be cautious that we will have enough to last. Though mortal, what matters is the life we are now living and that we are able to live it well.

Eat, drink, and be merry, says the rich man with barns. Celebrate life while you have it. But the Teacher says: you quoted that verse from Isaiah wrongly. It goes: eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. All we do is in vain.

We do not live forever. In almost every scheme of things, by almost every measure, our time is short. In the two millennia between us and Jesus, there have been about 100 generations. In that time, cities and nations and peoples have risen and fallen. All of human history spans an amount of time equal to 100th of 1 percent of the age of the dinosaurs. The universe is vast and old. In its lifetime planets, suns, and galaxies have come and gone. We are not much more than nothing at all.

And yet our actions matter. We are not alone. We are entwined with others in a way that Luke could never have guessed possible. Not only do we share language, culture, dreams with other people; not only do we share creaturely behaviors and desires and stories with other people; we share parts.We are beginning to realize that we are made up just as much—if not more—of other organisms, bacteria and virus, as we are of human cells. Our DNA contains pieces of ancient viruses. Our lives are part of the lives of the history, present, and future of this world.

On the larger scale of spirit and thought, what we do makes a difference. When Jesus tells the story of the man with barns, his audience knows that the man’s riches come at the expense of others who are poorer than he is. Our modern notion that a rising sea raises all boats—that wealth is elastic and indefinitely expandable—would have been thought ludicrous in the time of Jesus. Wealth was fixed and limited. Among the followers of Jesus, being rich was a form—even if culturally okay—being rich was a form of stealing.

The man with barns and the Teacher and we all share a vain myth. The myth is that our good legacy lives on and benefits the world and that our bad legacy dies with us, without fault to the world. The Teacher whines that the good he does is enjoyed by others. But he does not mourn—or even acknowledge—the evil he might do and the effects it might have after him. And the man with barns has not a clue.

For whatever reason—the economic doldrums, environmental disasters, the creation of nuclear waste that lasts longer than history, rafts of trash in the oceans, the destruction of species—whatever, we have begun to wonder about what we are leaving to our children. Not the riches of the Teacher and the man with barns, but with the stuff we have denied. Is progress real? We are suddenly not so sure. And if it is, can we control and sustain it? For the first time in a long time in this country, people say their children will have a harder time of it than they have had.

There is a symbiosis in Christianity—some call it a tension—between the individual and the community. For some, the point of Christianity is personal piety. A relationship one on one with God. For others, the point is sanctification, living a holy life. And for still others, the point is to guide the community of the world into being more like the kingdom of God. Thus we have monasteries and missions and churches and soup kitchens. Thus: spirit, joy, reverence, and service—the motto of this congregation. Christians have always known that reverence leads to service. And the other way around, too. Individual lives of faith are nurtured in and nurture the community of humans.

Christians are not like the Teacher or the man with barns. We do not embrace any kind of notion that we are alone in the world. Or that we can act as if we were, leaving it to some other persons or some other force, some invisible hand, to correct imbalances or inequities. Or to some future technologies to make up for our dispassion.

We as Christians do not embrace any kind of notion that what we do does not matter. It is true that we are all saints and sinners both. And it is true that we depend on the grace of God to smooth the rough edges of our sins. But these two theological foundations of our faith do not let us off the hook. We cannot say that God will fix things all up, so why should we. Nor can we say that God knows all things, so what difference does it make.

We follow Jesus, who spent a lot of time telling people how to live. Telling us how to be good. It matters that we be good.