A Land of Two Stories

Text: 1 Timothy 6:6-19
Other texts: Luke 16:19-31

There is a struggle going on in our hearts. It is a struggle of beliefs, of convictions, of trust, of the source of our hope. It is a struggle of two stories fighting for our souls.

On one side is the story of abundance. This is the story of the first chapter of Genesis, in which God gave us the world and all things in it. It is good, it is good, it is good, God says in Genesis. It is the story of God’s care for us revealed in creation and in beauty and in the pleasure we take in things. It is a story of God’s compassion for us and God’s provision for God’s creatures. It is the story of Psalm 104: God opens God’s hand and the world is full of good things. And it is the story of the psalm for today: God who brings freedom, and food, sustenance. It is the story that Jesus is—generously coming here—and the story that Jesus tells. Do not worry, you can trust God, he says. It is good.

But on the other side is the story of scarcity. This story is in Genesis, also. It is the story of famine in Egypt, of being prudent, cautious, and storing things up for the future. It is the story of being hungry in the desert, when the Israelites longed for the cook pots filled with food they no longer had. It is the other story in Pslam 104: God hides God’s face and creation withers and dies. And in today’s psalm: in the end we perish, and our thoughts go with us.

These stories are in us, competing to guide us and to be the story that we use to make sense of the world. Oddly, both stories describe the world. But they are not equal. The story of abundance is the foundation of generosity and satisfaction and hope. The story of scarcity is the foundation of fear and worry and isolation. The question is: are we blessed or are we deprived? Thankful or wretched?Which story do we believe most?

All of us know which is better. It is better to feel satisfied by abundance than to feel harassed by scarcity. But I look at myself and I look at people I know, and I know that we feel harassed at least as often as we feel satisfied. I do not like it.

Luke, the writer of today’s Gospel reading and also of the book of Acts, spends a lot of time talking about money. How we think about money has exactly to do with which story we most believe. That is one reason why we talk about it so much. That is the reason Jesus talks about it so much, too. More so that any other single topic. That’s because it reveals to us how we feel about God and about our relationship with God and mostly about whether we trust God or not.

The early Christian church—just like the modern church—worried a lot about money, too. The first letter to Timothy, today’s second reading, is a guide to Christian behavior. And in today’s passage, which concludes this letter, we learn about how to behave with money. Or at least get a critique about it.

The writer of this letter warns against people who love money. Lovers of money, Luke calls them in the Gospel reading. This word (it is just one word in Greek)—this word, lovers of money, appears only in this passage in Luke and in the letter to Timothy. It could mean just people who love money—like it a lot. But it would be more useful and more accurate to think of it as people who are having a love affair with money. They are money’s lovers. Because it is being money’s lovers that gets us all in trouble, in both Luke and in Timothy. Having an affair with money.

Our relationship with money can be exciting, energizing, transforming. But like an affair, loving money is a betrayal of our love for another—God in this case, and other human beings—and a promise that we formally made, not coincidently, in baptism. And it plunges, as it says in Timothy, it plunges people into ruin and destruction. “People” meaning not only the lover, but the many who are harmed by the action of the lover. As Lazarus, for example, was, by the rich man’s inattention. And as many in the world today likewise are.

Money is like any addiction. One person described the process of addiction as: First, fun; then, fun plus problems; and finally, just problems. The love of money is like that. What we hope from money is what we hope from love. Strength for life, wholehearted trust, and partnership. What we get as money’s lover, however, is the opposite. Futility, betrayal, and a cruel master. Money is not effective or reliable, and it demands more from us than it gives.

What we seem to want from life, it says in Timothy, is godliness and contentment. Contentment and abundance are cousins of each other. The word contentment here means satisfaction. Having a sufficient amount. It means having enough. Not a skimpy amount, but sufficient to be strong enough to prosper as creatures. If we have food and shelter, it says, then that will be sufficient. This letter is not a call to poverty. It is an encouragement to find what is enough. And enough, in this meaning, is not just enough for each of us. It includes enough for helping others, too. Enough to protect us against the elements and to help others. And also from Genesis: enough for sabbath, enough for rest.

Nonetheless, we fall into temptation, it says in Timothy (and as we know it to be true). It is easy to get trapped, it says, by many senseless and harmful desires. Having more than enough. We can call this greed, but it comes from fear. It comes from listening too much to that story of scarcity. From thinking that we must rely on ourselves to get enough. From having to control all the world, as the rich man tries to do, even in death.

We in this country and everywhere are telling the story of scarcity more and more. That scares me.

There is not much room for God in our lives in that story of scarcity. If there is nothing given—if we are not the recipients of graceful abundance—then perhaps there is no giver. Or maybe it is the other way around. If we are not sure there is a giver, then we cannot trust that we will be given what we need. If we cannot rely on God, then we are right to turn to money, to ourselves. But the end of that way is sadness. For experience teaches us that neither money nor our own efforts are reliable. Nor do they work. And if we cannot trust money and we cannot trust ourselves and we cannot trust God, then we are in the soup.

How can we be sure that God will provide for us? For one thing, we have scripture—Moses and the prophets, it says in Luke. And the teachings of Jesus, who tells us over and over not to be afraid and not to worry. But that was not enough for the rich man. He wanted a more certain sign. Something 100% believable. He thinks a visit from dead Lazarus would do it for his brothers. But of course, they’d just say it was not really Lazarus, or that he hadn’t really died, or that it wasn’t really a message from their brother, or that it was, but who cares? There is no certain sign.

We trust God because we when we do—amazingly, when we are very generous and forgiving and easy-going—good things happen to us and our friends and our world. Strange, but true. And even stranger, the reverse is also true: when we act as if we trust God—acting as if we were generous and forgiving—then we find we trust God. Trusting God is a consequence more than a cause of how we live our lives. Trust, like love, takes practice.

This story in Luke and this exhortation in Timothy are not moralizing tales. That is, they are not telling us that we had better shape up because God wants us to. When the rich man is being tormented in Hades, Abraham takes no pleasure in his fate. Even in this “I told you so” story, Abraham seems sad and moved with compassion.

Being in love with money is a trap, it says in Timothy. In the trap is a life of many piercing pains. The words of the Gospels and the teachings of Jesus help us escape the trap. Be generous, be forgiving, be ready to share, love people more than you love money.

When we are baptized, two things happen. First, we resolve—or someone does on our behalf, as they did today for [child baptized today]—we resolve to take a side in the struggle of our hearts. To listen hard for the story of abundance (and to retell it) and as much as we are able, to cover our ears and shut out the story of scarcity. And second, we are given some necessary help, in the form of the Holy Spirit and in the support of the community of Christians. And when people affirm their baptism, as folks did today, both they and the community renew that resolve and reliance.

Quiet the story of scarcity that brings you fear. Repeat to yourselves every day the story of abundance that brings you contentment. Baptism is the symbol of a new life. Take hold, as it says in Timothy, of the life that really is life.

Jesus, the one, and the many

Text: Luke 15:1-10

As he often does in the Gospels, Jesus makes a little joke.

The Pharisees are unhappy with Jesus because he eats with the riffraff. He also eats with the Pharisees, but we don’t hear from the people who don’t think Jesus should do that. I’m sure there were some. “How come you, Jesus, a man of the people, consort with those fancy snobs?” But the voices of the tax collectors and sinners are rarely heard, in the Gospels as in real life.

I sometimes have a feeling that the Pharisees amuse Jesus. He is always getting their goat. And when they make stupid pronouncements, he embarrasses them. When they try to catch him making a mistake, they find that it was they who erred. You would think that after a while, they’d give up.

The Pharisees really don’t like it that Jesus stretches the bounds of what is permissible. There is a way you are supposed to act, and many times Jesus does not act that way. Some of their objections are social and some legal. Tax collectors were scum, working for the man, meaning Rome. Sinners were law-violators. They did what God said not to, or did not do what God said to. Neither were, in the Pharisees’ eyes, fit company for a rabbi, a teacher, like Jesus. Jesus did the wrong thing, set a bad example, and was rousing the rabble by his teachings.

To answer their complaint, Jesus, as he often does, tells a parable. A parable is a wicked little story that makes you think. He tells two. The first one is about some sheep. “Which of you,” he asks them, “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?”

Would you leave ninety-nine sheep in the wilderness? All you who would leave those ninety-nine sheep to fend for themselves, those good and faithful and wise sheep who did not wander off recklessly, to search for that idiot sheep who seems clueless and endangers all the rest, all you who would do that, raise your hands.

The answer to Jesus’ question is: no one. It makes no sense. That’s the joke. No one would. To risk the many for the sake of one. It goes against the theory of the greater good. Which says that better for one to suffer so that the many might not. It it the reason behind much of the way societies work, from things as diverse as torture and triage and scapegoating.

It is the way we work, but it is not the way Jesus works. Jesus seems much more concerned—and it gets him into trouble all the time—more concerned about the particular than the general. The theory of the greater good compares the actual, present, and particular suffering with a hypothetical, future, and general good. An individual suffers now for some predicted suffering of many. Jesus seems to care more for the person who is really suffering now than he cares for the potential or even likely future.

The Pharisees are rightly worried about the rule of law and the stability of culture. So when Jesus does what he does—heals on the Sabbath in the face of a law against it, or lets his disciples glean food then, or touches and cures the hemorrhaging woman, or hangs around with the illegals—he acts in favor of persons over principles. And also, he seems to see the particular person and his or her particular situation instead of what that person represents. Some real person that you can sit down and share a meal with, not a drunk or an illegal or an alien or a tax collector or a sinner. So in the parable, the shepherd seeks to find the one sheep that at the moment is actually lost at the risk of a possible, but not actual, danger to the many others.

What makes things lost is that someone misses them. People can feel lost emotionally, of course, but what makes the lost sheep and, in the second parable, the lost coin be lost is that someone wants to find them. Even when people say that they feel lost, they mean that they are searching for some other version of themselves that they once knew or hope to know. The shepherd wants to know: where is my sheep? The woman wants to know: where is my coin? What makes the single coin and the single sheep special is that they are desired, wanted, sought out.

The Pharisees grumble that Jesus welcomes the sinners, the reading says. But the word the Pharisees use really means to seek out. To go looking for. The action is on the part of Jesus, not the sinners. The action in the parables is on the part of the seeker, not the sheep or coin that is sought. God looks for each of us. We are looked for by God. God comes and gets us.

Sometimes we say we lose our faith. When people say that, they mean that they have lost the conviction that they have been found. That is, that they are like the sheep and the coin, apart from God and apart from any center in which their souls may take rest. But worse, it also means that they have lost the conviction that anyone is even searching for them. They feel not only separated but abandoned, which is a whole other thing. They feel like people who have suddenly fallen out of love, or children who are estranged from their parents or someone who has lost another to death. Not even missing, because they feel that no one even seeks them.

The Pharisees complain that Jesus eats with sinners. These people are not lost to the Pharisees, who are not seeking them but rather wish they were gone. How much better, they think, if the people who annoy or threaten us were just to disappear. But the sinners no doubt see things very differently. Jesus makes them appear. He seeks them out, making them not invisible but missing. That is, they are longed for.

Jesus writes that there is more joy when a sinner repents than when ninety-nine righteous persons do. But this is the second joke Jesus tells in this passage. For it would be hard to find even one sinless person much less ninety-nine in a crowd of one hundred. As Lutherans are taught, we are all saints and sinners. We are all in this sense separate from the source of our being and life. We are all missing; God is seeking out each one of us. We are not the ninety-nine virtuous souls who never wander. It is good for us that God is unreasonably looking for us.

When the Pharisees are unable or refuse or are too timid to see the sufferings of flesh-and-blood individual people, when they are willing to sacrifice them for the vague and the general, when they wish to wish them away—when the Pharisees do that, they turn their backs on the pleasure of a divine grace. They deny themselves the joy that concludes both these parables of Jesus. For these parables are less about repentance and more about joy. That is the direction in which their plots move. The high point of these stories is the joy of the finder. A joy even angels in heaven share, says Jesus. These stories do not call us sinners to repent. They invite those of us who think we are righteous to join the sinners, who are also us.

The Pharisees evidently think that they are favorites of God and that the sinners are not. And the sinners—well, we don’t know what they think. Some probably agree with the Pharisees and others think the opposite.

All have hopes and fears. Jesus says that ninety-nine were left. We like to imagine—it suits us to imagine—that they are a bunch of well-organized, well-balanced, good sheep. But Jesus does not say that.

It is more likely that all one hundred sheep are wandering around. It is a big mess. No one knows what’s going on. Some feel secure and some feel condemned. But each one is lost. The most arrogant Pharisee and the most humble sinner are all lost. Each one is frightened and clueless. And walking in our wilderness, there is Jesus, the shepherd. Missing every one of us, wanting each one of us, seeking us out.

The Worth of It

Text: Luke 14:25-33
Other texts: Deuteronomy 30:15-20

Here is our story up to now. This is what Jesus has done so far in this one chapter—chapter 14—in Luke.

First he tells some fancy dinner guests that the last will be first and the first—meaning them—will be last. Then he tells them that instead of inviting their family and friends to dinner, they should have invited poor and sick people. Then he tells a parable of another feast in which the original guests offer lame excuses and so the are replaced by street people. Then, today, he tells us who can and cannot be his disciples, and it seems a little rough. His followers might have wondered what they were getting into.

You might find Jesus to be a little cranky in these stories. Or at least forceful. But I hear in the voice of Jesus and in the stories he tells in this section of Luke a deep sadness. The things that go with being a disciple of Jesus are hard and upsetting sometimes. And he knows, I’m sure, that most people will find them so.

You cannot be my disciple, he says three times. These verses are littered with negatives. There are thirteen occurrences in the Greek of the word “no” in these eight verses. These are not happy sayings, and they are not encouraging ones. Jesus knows that being a disciple, a follower, is hard. He is not commanding us here, or threatening us, or laying down admission requirements. He is telling us how it is, how it will be.

In today’s reading Jesus presents three choices. Or better to say, Jesus makes three offers. He presents to us three attributes of the life of a follower of Jesus. They are allegiance, risk, and poverty. It is as if—as he teaches us in the two parables—the one about the tower and the one about the king—as if he wants us to know what’s up before we sign up.

First, allegiance. To whom do we turn for blessings? To whom do we turn for safety? And who calls us to responsibility? In other words, what is the source of a life that is prosperous, secure, and good? Those things to which, or to whom, we turn are the things that command our allegiance. The list is long for most of us, and includes things like our own skills, our close friends, our loving families, our possessions, the rules of our culture. When we say that we must attend to these things, then they have our allegiance. Sometimes these things deserve it, and other times not. But no matter what, Jesus says, they are secondary to what God calls us to be and do.

If you do not hate your parents, your spouse, your family, Jesus says, you cannot become his disciple. And not only that, but if you do not hate life itself, you cannot become his disciple. Jesus is not talking about degrees of love here. He is not mostly talking about emotion. The word “hate” is the opposite of the kind of love that we have for our neighbors and our enemies. We don’t have to like our enemies and we don’t have to dislike our family and friends and life.

But we should not soften what he says too much. He is saying that his followers disavow the things that—in the time of Jesus and in our time—command their allegiance. He is saying that his followers put all those other people on notice. If there is a choice between God and them, the choice goes to God. Not to their families, not even to the preservation of their own lives.

Jesus is describing a way of life. That’s what makes this so shocking, so hard, and so potentially rewarding. He is not describing a way to slightly adjust things. He is saying that to be his disciple one must live with God always in mind. We must ask when taking some action: does this action I’m taking align me with God or not? When making some decision: in this decision that I am making, am I thinking about God or not? And, practically, if not then is there some other way I can act or other decision I can make?

Second, risk. Jesus was tried and executed for his teachings and his actions. All this about making the first people be the last, about disavowing your family, about not honoring the sabbath, about loving your enemies, about turning the other cheek—that made people angry. And if the followers of Jesus do what he did and do what he said to do, people will be angry at them, too. And disown them, and imprison or exile them, and maybe harm them.

Jesus proposes a new way of living, but to proclaim that and then to actually do it is a risky endeavor. The cross is not a pleasant symbol. Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus in spite of the cross, not because of it. The cross was a means of violent and hateful death. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple, Jesus tells the crowd. It is a risk-filled path. Jesus warns his followers.

And third, poverty. In our culture, we are at least as distracted by possessions as we are by relations. To acquire and protect our possessions, to house and maintain them, distracts us from God’s call to us to love God and to love our neighbor. We are tempted to love God and neighbor less than we love our stuff. We are willing to harm our neighbor and ignore God’s commands for the sake of our stuff.

This is not news. In the parable of the feast in Luke, the invited guests fail to show up because they have been diverted by what they own or wish to own. I’m sorry, one says, I just bought a new house (he really says land, but it’s the same thing) and have to go look at it. I’m sorry, the other says, I just bought a new car (he really says oxen), and I want to try it out. People like stuff and are unwilling to let it go. It was just reported that the wealthiest top 1% of people in this country receive 23% of the all the income. They are holding on to that money. Thirty years ago it was 9%.

Jesus says that none can become his disciples unless they say farewell to all their possessions. Not give up, as the words in our Bible have it. But: say farewell to. Not a loss, but a separation from possessions. A dis-attachment.

The things that Jesus places in opposition to being a disciple of his are all entanglements. They are things that we get stuck to. Family. Safety. Possessions. They take effort and energy away from God. That is, we are unable to respond to God’s calls—calls to care for all others, to refrain from violence, to give freely, and to be grateful.

There are always multiple calls on our time and work. We are always managing our attention and care. A parent caring for a difficult child might shortchange his other children. A person caring for a sick parent might shortchange the rest of her family. A doctor spending hours caring for his patients might shortchange his spouse. It is harder to turn our backs on our responsibilities than it is on our possessions. But if something has to be shortchanged, Jesus says, it is our entanglements, not God.

When Jesus says that people cannot be his disciples, he is not judging them. He is not condemning them for their ineptitude or their inabilities. He is talking physics here, not morality. To lose weight, eat less or exercise more. To move an object at rest, apply a force in the direction you hope for. There is no should here. It is the way things are.

Now, this all seems pretty grim. The things Jesus wants us to let go, to say farewell to, are things we like. Things that sustain us, even, like our network of family and friends. If that’s what disciples of Jesus do, is it worth it?

It is a hard question to answer. If it were easy, we wouldn’t be hearing about it in Luke’s Gospel. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be upsetting to contemplate. A rule of thumb in reading scripture says that if someone in the Bible talks about how people should do something, it means that they were not doing it. Moses tells the people of Israel to obey the law of God, to choose life over death, because they have not been and probably don’t want to. If it were easy to choose life over death, Moses wouldn’t be talking so much about it. When Paul tells the people of Corinth not to be so snooty about sharing the Lord’s Supper, it is because they have been. When Jesus tells the crowd that they must carry their cross, it is because they are reluctant to. For many in that crowd the consequences of discipleship are just not worth it.

But for others … What the crowd—a large crowd, Luke says—what the crowd sought from Jesus was a new life. For one reason or another—it doesn’t say—they were lost or tired or confused or unable to cope or unsatisfied. They listened to Jesus—people listen to Jesus now—because they—because we—hope to hear about a new way to live. They need to get out of themselves and the patterns of their lives. Patterns that are tiring, boring, dangerous. They need to be freed from what John Calvin called “the deadly pestilence of love of strife and love of self.” It goes beyond being a good and responsible person—they want to be a new person. That’s what Jesus is talking about. That’s is why people are willing to consider what he has to say, as hard as it is to hear. That is why they are willing to follow Jesus.

This transformation of our being is, for most of us (but not all of us), a long process. It happens in a lifetime rather than in a moment. And, for most of us, it requires the support of a community of other people looking for something similar. Moses was speaking to all of the Israelites, but what happened did happen because of what each person did. Discipleship is a communal activity that is implemented in the decisions that each one of us makes over time.

I have set before you life and death, Moses says. He is asking them to love God with all their hearts and souls and minds and to love their neighbors as themselves. This is not about emotions and feelings, even though emotions and feelings come from it. To follow God, to follow Jesus, is a rational and decisive act. Or better: many rational and decisive acts, one after the other, in different circumstances and over time. In those places and times, as much as you are able, choose life.

I set before you life and death, says Jesus. Choose life that you may live.