It Is Not What You Know

Text: Romans 13:8-14
Other texts: Matthew 24:36-44

Paul writes that we know what time it is. Matthew writes that we will never know when the time will come.

Paul writes that we know it is the end of the long dark night and the glimpse of a new day. The time is now to gather up the lose ends, to make amends to those we have harmed—willfully or not. That in light of the coming light, it is time to attend to the commandments God has given us: love one another, do no harm to others. The time is now.

Matthew writes that we—in good company with the angels and the Son of God—we cannot know when the new day will dawn. As with those caught in the waves of the flood that Noah escaped, our world might be changed in an instant. The message is the same as Paul’s: love one another, do no harm to others. The time might be now.

Paul and Matthew speak with the same urgency. Whether we know nothing of the time or know exactly what time it is. And if that is so, does what we know make a difference? What does it matter what we know? Does it matter at all?

The first reading today is from Paul’s letter to Romans. We are reading this book in Bible study after coffee hour, but we are not up to chapter 13 yet. The passage we heard is from verses 11 to 14. But these verses are a little out of context. They are the tail end of an argument that Paul makes about how to live a Christian life. The argument starts at verse 8. Here’s how it goes:

Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”

Then it goes on with the verses we heard: Besides this, you know what time it is, and so forth.

What Paul is saying is that the breaking dawn of a new age forcefully reminds us of the importance of the commandments—in the law and reinforced by Jesus—to love one another as oneself. And what that entails is to do no wrong to others. We are not doing what God said to do. We harm other people all the time, intentionally or more often otherwise, mindlessly. We should not. That’s what God said. Remember that that’s what God said. The urgency that Paul feels is not about what is going to happen next. The urgency is about what we should be doing right now. The end of the darkness means that there is not much time, in Paul’s thinking. But whether there is little time or a lot of time, our job is the same. Love our neighbors. Do no harm.

We don’t know, in spite of Paul’s energetic arguments, about the future. Being faithful Christians does not instantly make everything precisely clear. But what we do know about is now. We know how we are behaving right now. And we know how we should be behaving. Nothing is changed about that. That is not new. It is old. We do know what is right. That is something we are very good at. Not that we listen to what we know all the time. We are also good at denying things and excusing things. But that does not mean we don’t know better.

There are voices that advise us to do what is legal, or expedient, or prudent, even. Good for ourselves, our families, our companies. As if that were enough. Yet we know what is right. We are advised not to pay attention to what we know. We are told that as long as it is official and well-considered and does not hurt anyone directly, that it does not matter.

But it does. We are advised to lie to ourselves. It makes us sick. Lying to yourself about whether you are doing what is right makes you sick. Sick at heart. It is a corruption, a wound of sorts. Something ill and malfunctioning. Our bodies and our souls know this. It is another thing we know.

The word salvation means to heal. One purpose of the law—the commandments that Paul quotes from—one purpose of the law is to heal that sickness of heart. It is like a medicine, or an antidote. Loving one another, doing no harm to others, is a way to keep us from getting sick. And to make us better when we are sick. In the metaphoric darkness that Paul likes to write about, we are sick. He reminds us that we know what is right. It is written down in this book, the Bible, and, as Jeremiah later said, in our hearts.

Paul then summarizes the commandments the same way Jesus did: love one another. Love does no wrong to a neighbor, Paul writes, therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law. It fulfills the law because it is identical to the law. That is, people who follow the law and people who love one another do the same thing. Exactly the same thing. There is no detectable difference.

What we do matters. When we do what is right—defined as we are talking about as loving one another and therefore doing no harm—it matters. It matters to the world. It matters to us. I’m not making this up. It is what Jesus taught. When you say to yourself, it doesn’t matter what I do, you are lying to yourself. When others tell you that it doesn’t matter, they are mistaken.

That what we do matters is a gift; it is not a burden. What could be worse than living a life in which what you did, did not matter. What kind of life would that be? Not a good one, I think.

Paul and Matthew talk about a new dawn, a new day, a new age. It sounds so sudden, but it is not. The day dawns slowly. Until that moment, we are in the dark. Until that moment, our faith gives us a way to measure a good life. Do we love one another? Do we do no harm?

Matthew is right. About that day, when all is resolved, about that hour, no one knows. And Paul is right too. We know what time it is now. And though we are in the night, let us lay aside the things of darkness. Let us put on the ways of the light. Let us live as if it were the day.

We Want a King

Text: Jeremiah 23:1-6, Psalm 46

The people wanted a king.

Some time after the Israelites had settled into the promised land, they began to long for a king. You can read about this in the first book of Samuel. God sees this as an issue, and God says to the prophet Samuel, “they have rejected me [God], from being king over them.” Samuel speaks the word of God to the people and tells them all the bad things that kings do. Raise taxes from you, send your children off to war, abuse their power, favor their cronies. The usual list. But the people want a king. “We are determined to have a king over us so that we might be like other nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles.” And so in the end they get what they want, and Saul, the first king of Israel, is crowned.

In time Saul gives way to David, Israel’s greatest king, loved and feared. Solomon follows David. And shortly thereafter Israel splits into two nations, and a series of kings rule them, each king worse than the last. The final king is Zedekiah—ending a long line of poor and ineffective leaders—who the Bible says “did what was evil in the sight of the Lord,” as his predecessors before him did. It was just as Samuel had told them it would be. But the lesson the Israelites learned from this was not, as you might think, to get rid of kings and rulers. Instead, they longed not for no king, but for a better king. They longed for a king, in particular, who was like David. Wise and powerful.

Today is the feast of Christ the King. Recently some have started to call it the Realm of Christ Sunday. I’m sympathetic with that. Kings are a little monarchical, anti-democratic, paternalistic, and old fashioned. Plus sometimes abusive, corrupt, and war-loving. That’s not how we want to see Jesus. Maybe “realm” is better. We would like Jesus to be more modern. “The reign of Christ is a reign of peace,” as one commentator wrote. Jesus, this guy goes on, “is a model of radical inclusivity. Someone who sees the value God has bestowed on every human being.” Now you know I think all that is mostly true. But that it is not the whole story. And it is not what the people of the Gospels thought when they thought of Jesus as a king. And it is not what many Christians in history have thought. What they wanted from Jesus is what the Israelites wanted. A powerful king like David, strong, good, and mighty. Christ the King.

People want a leader. That’s because our world seems always to be unraveling. Things fall apart. Martin Luther took today’s psalm, Psalm 46, as his inspiration for the fight song of the Reformation, A Mighty Fortress. In the translation we sing, it says that the forces of the world threaten to devour us. Another version, which seems to me to be more like it feels, says that those forces threaten to undo us. It is the struggle of life over death, meaning over chaos, growth over decay. Information over entropy, if you like.

John Calvin, a reformer like Luther, but a lot more gloomy, thought that in his time the cosmos was disintegrating. It does feel like that sometimes. It is the unfortunate way of things. The psalm compares the wobbliness of nations and kingdoms to the upheaval of earthquakes and hurricanes. The verbs it uses are the same for both. In times like his, in times like ours: What can we count on? To whom do we turn?

People want peace and prosperity. And justice. We hope for those things from our leaders, and when we go without those things it is the leaders that we blame. A leader is supposed to be like a shepherd to us. In the time of prophets like Jeremiah, that is what being a king meant. A shepherd guardian.

Leaders—any leader, in the church, commerce, politics, the academy—leaders are not supposed to be in it for themselves. They are not supposed to line their own pockets. They are not supposed to own everything. They are not supposed to disdain the sheep. They are not supposed to favor their buddies. They are not supposed to risk the lives of the sheep recklessly.

Yet that is what they too often do. Jeremiah’s rant in today’s reading is about bad shepherds, bad leaders. Jeremiah condemns Zedekiah and his predecessors. Under their so-called leadership, the nation falters and the people are aimless. You have not attended to my sheep, God says in the reading. I’ll do it myself, God says.

God in Jeremiah promises a king like David, from David’s line, wise and just.Those who heard Jeremiah prophesy imagined a forceful, fine-looking, valiant king as they imagined David to be. A king of all Israel who would restore it and its people.

And a few centuries later there were those who hoped Jesus might be that king. But it did not turn out the way they hoped. They were disappointed.

When Christians speak of Christ the King, they see in Jesus a hint of Jeremiah’s promise. But our hope is no longer for a new and redeeming king of Israel but of a king for the world.

We expect that kings of our nations will be good (not corrupt, cowardly, and so forth). But we do not want our own kings to be nice. Or rather, we want them to be nice to us sheep, but not nice to the wolves. We are not all one flock, we are scattered into nations, and we see other nations as wolves in disguise. As they no doubt see us. So it will not be by our own devices that the realm of Christ will happen. Not by kings of nations.

Nations make much ado, it says in the psalm. God seems uninterested in all that. God in the psalm brings desolations on the earth—[that’s how the pew Bibles put it]—but what gets dissolved are things long overdue for it. Arrows and spears and shields. War. And weapons. All gone.

Luther, writing A Mighty Fortress, saw a battle, a struggle between forces. But for Luther, the enemy was not us, other sheep. For Luther, the enemy was Satan, or evil, or “this world’s tyrant.” The devil and all his empty promises. Luther, who always spoke in earthy terms, was said to wish to spit in the Devil’s eye, and said that the Lord’s Supper gave us sustenance to fight the Devil. He gave evil personality. That feeling we have that the world is coming unravelled, Luther described as the result of a divine agent.

The people want a king. But not for the same reasons that the Israelites badgered Samuel. We want a king to heal the world, to knit up the unravelling. To fight the evil one. To redo what chaos undoes. To lead us. To teach us and to guide us and to make us courageous. To be a model for us. We want peace and prosperity and justice for all of us. We want protection against the corrosion that fear creates. We cannot do this ourselves. We turn to Christ to be our king.

By honoring Christ as King this day, we remind, comfort, and encourage ourselves that the future of the world is not finally in our hands. That God continues to be intimately concerned with the world and us. We are not alone. God is in the midst of us. The lord of hosts is with us.

Working and Eating

Text: 2 Thessalonians 3:6–13

This sermon preached by Katie Wilson, vicar this year at Faith

I would like to begin by thanking Pastor Stein and the community of Faith for the opportunity to stand before you all and share with you from my heart. The honor and the privilege of standing here, today, is an honor and privilege that I never expected to have; I am deeply grateful.

Today I would like to speak about food, and community, and what it means to work and to eat.

I am a new face here at Faith Lutheran, and I have come to stand here in church because of the work I do with Faith Kitchen. Twice a month, beneath the very floor beams on which your feet currently rest, the basement of this building is transformed into a hub of energy and exchange. Food that would have been thrown away has been reclaimed, processed, and redistributed by a fantastic entity that deserves our great respect: the Greater Boston Food Bank. Hundreds of pounds of food come to us: frozen fish, canned fruits, dry goods, meat, pasta, ice cream. This food is overflow or overstock from the FDA, from the co-op, from grocery stores. It was unneeded or unwanted in the eyes of its previous owners and thus was designated as a donation.

Our work in Faith Kitchen begins with this food: we defrost fillets of fish and slice pungent onions, we boil rice and simmer soup, sometimes we peel and chop individual potatoes like precious jewels before they are boiled and drained and mashed by hand—sometimes we open a cardboard box and mix flakes of dehydrated potato product with enough hot water to reconstitute it, to make it food. Sometimes the minestrone is made from scratch with garden grown greens floating in a savory broth coaxed from onions, garlic, tomatoes, oil, and time spent simmering slowly on the stove—sometimes my job is to open one prepackaged box after another and pour the standardized contents into a pot to heat. In either case, whether we are cooking from scratch or embracing convenient shortcuts, cooking is an alchemical process. When we are in the kitchen our business is the transformation of raw material into caloric value that not only satiates hunger and fulfills nutritional needs, but also satisfies the human need for love, attention, care and a place within community.

So now we are getting into the real business of Faith Kitchen. While food is the bedrock of this program it is the people participating that make it what it is. I am not speaking only of those who come week after week to volunteer their time and energy cooking and cleaning and serving, though they of course are essential. At every meal the doors of Faith Kitchen are metaphorically thrown wide open and all are welcome to join us and eat. All are invited to the table. It is reasonable to assume that our demographics reflect a portion of the local homeless population, the disadvantaged and the underserved. Many guests do have homes and jobs, however, and yet are living on a budget that is getting tighter and tighter—so tight they cannot afford the nutrition they and their families need, despite their work and effort. Ever increasing numbers of people who never expected to find themselves hungry may find themselves short this month, and might find respite in a free hot meal. But there is no doorman at the entryway to Faith Kitchen checking off a list of qualifications. There is no judgment, no requirement to be there. All are welcome. All are welcome.

What then do we do with a passage such as the one we read today in Thessalonians, a passage that states “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat”? Reading this passage literally we hear a voice of unequivocal judgment: those living in idleness, those busybodies, and those unwilling to work should not eat. Reflecting on this passage, however, I am called to ask of myself, and of us: What does it mean to work? And what does it mean to eat?

I can say that my work at Faith Kitchen is to cook and to clean, to order food, plan menus, set up tables, even lead the community in prayer. In the other aspects of my life my work is to read, to attend lectures, to write intelligent papers that may or may not have any relevance to my daily life. Perhaps you are a teacher, an accountant, a waste disposal expert. Perhaps you are a musician, a mother or father, the director of an organization, a gardener, or a sales clerk. What I would like to suggest is that however you earn your living, whatever work you do, there is another strain of work that we are constantly presented with. Each and every one of us is presented with the opportunity to do this work every day of our lives. No matter how much or how little money we make, no matter how prestigious or not our title or description or lack thereof may be, I suggest that each day we are faced with the work of bringing attention, and integrity, into every one of our mundane and individual interactions.

What does it mean to work? The work that I am speaking of is paying attention to the attention that we are giving to the task at hand, to the person in front of us, to the prayer being spoken in our hearts. Paying attention to how we pay attention helps us uncover the motives underneath the actions that we take—we may find, for example, that we are peeling potatoes with resentment for being stuck with the dinner shift or with envy for the person making chocolate cake and licking batter off the spoon. Pay attention to how you listen in your next conversation with a family member, close friend, or co-worker: to what extent are you able to purely listen? What does it mean to listen without injecting your own judgment even silently, to listen without interruption, without planning the next thing that you want to say, without waiting until it is your own turn to talk? Pay attention to this.

It is not attention alone that is the work, however. I am often extremely aware that I am making a fool of myself or acting with my own self-interest at heart. Cultivating awareness of intentions and actions is a crucial practice but it is an empty practice if we are not also cultivating integrity and compassion to match this attentive awareness.

What I am most interested in is the way that every minute interaction, every mundane chore and event and relationship, every choice made and word spoken is what constantly creates the world and the community that we inhabit. The means that we employ to bring about our ends are, in fact, constantly creating further means and ends. We are constantly engendering the world around us, and that creation is enacted for better or worse based on each interaction we have. Our work is to make the world around us a better and more beautiful place, and I believe that we do so every time we bring our full attention and full integrity into a relationship, an interaction, a project, a meal, or even a brief and fleeting moment of prayer. This is what it means to work.

But what does it mean to eat? When we eat we are feeding our body fuel, we are giving it the calories it needs to physiologically propel ourselves through the world. But eating is also nourishment, and nourishment happens on many levels. Our hearts and souls and minds must be at rest to enjoy a good meal. The company will hopefully be good or the silence pure and sweet. Pausing for a moment of prayer before beginning helps us to appreciate the food, to take it in more mindfully and gratefully. Pausing for prayer in this way is a means of bringing intention, and attention, to the act of eating, and is a way to acknowledge that the act of consuming food is far more significant than simply loading up on calories as a means to an end. In a communal space, such as the bustling and boisterous basement of Faith Lutheran on meal nights, this act of communal prayer acts as much to unite the community as it does to quiet and center the individual mind. When we pray together, even in silence, and then eat together, we are sending the message to ourselves and to each other: we are in this together. We are not alone. Knowing this is nourishment. Sharing this is nourishment.

When we eat we are nourished by the gifts the earth has heaped upon us. Our attention to the food and our intentions to nourish the community indeed do transform donations that were once considered waste into vital nourishment for many people. But more importantly, it is the intention and integrity of the individuals at Faith Kitchen—volunteers and guests alike—that transform the space from a basement into a community. This community is what enables us to eat, to truly eat, to be truly nourished.

When Thessalonians states that “those who do not work should not eat,” I do not believe this is a condemnation of those guests that we so happily open our doors to each month, and invite in for a free meal. Rather, I would ask if it is possible to be nourished without doing the work of showing up in presence and attention. If one is not able to work—to be present and compassionate with others, to bring attention and integrity to their most mundane actions—is it even possible to be nourished by mundane meals or by the community that surrounds us?

The passage we read from Thessalonians closes with the words: “now such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living. Brothers and sisters, do not be weary in doing what is right.” Likewise I would like to exhort all of us to do this work, quietly and constantly, in each relationship and friendship and task at hand. Lest I sound too much like a “preacher in a pulpit” I would also like to say that these are goals that I aspire towards and to which I constantly fail. Our work is not to be perfect, but to remember the kind of person we would like to be, the kind of world we would like to live in, and to help create it. Each interaction, each meal, each moment, presents us with the opportunity to do this work, and thus to eat, and to be nourished. May we all work. May we all eat. And may we “not be weary in doing what is right,” little by little, step by step, word by word, and meal by meal.

How Will I Look in Heaven

Text: Luke 20:27-38

At the center of Christianity is renewal. Jesus brings renewal to the world and to each of us. Things that are bad will become good. What is broken will be fixed. Jesus teaches about living a good life, about being a good person. But those teachings guide us to change ourselves and thus the world for the better. Through Jesus, things will be different. That difference is a cause of and also a result of our trust in God and in Jesus. Jesus saves the world and saves us by changing us.

When people talk about the effect of being Christian, their sentences are full of words that mean renewal: return, reborn, refresh, repair, restore. And resurrection. These words are so full of life and joy and hope that they seem about to pop. All those “re-“ words inspire us for two reasons.

First, they make us realize that we are made for better things. We are not created broken and needing to be whipped into goodness (as if that were possible). We were created good and became broken. Inside the potential of the world and inside the potential of our souls is God’s goodness. But it has somehow been corrupted, become cloudy, distorted. So the evil in the world is a mistake, not fundamental. Or if you were to speak like Martin Luther, done to us by Satan, the Evil One, the Lord of Darkness. Or like the apostle Paul—who taught much to Luther—by the power of Sin. Paul and Luther are trying to describe the same thing: innate goodness perverted. We are not designed to suffer, but to live contentedly and joyfully. That is what God intended and does intend.

And second, these words give us hope that what we were designed to be can in fact someday be. We can be renewed—made as intended again. We can be restored—made whole again. We can be refreshed—made vital again. We can reborn—start again.

Things sometimes do not go so well for us. Circumstances, chemistry, poor choices, natural events, forces in and out of our control—for whatever reason, our lives are sometimes not so great. Something happens that shouldn’t; something does not happen that should. We feel beaten down for a moment, or for much longer, and cannot escape. Sometimes things look bleak. In these moments, it is easy to think that the way we are now will be the way we are going to be forever. That the future will be today all over again. In those times, renewal seems to be a bad joke. Rebirth, longed for, seems unattainable. No joy. We imagine God to be powerless to restore us, or maybe just uninterested.

In today’s Gospel story, the Sadducees try to make a fool of Jesus. They do not believe in the resurrection of the dead (unlike the Pharisees, as I said earlier, who do). They want to trip Jesus up, so they invent this far-fetched story of a woman marrying seven brothers in a row. If they are all resurrected when they die, then to whom will she be married, they ask Jesus. This is a joke. You can imagine them congratulating themselves on their sneaky, clever example. High fives all around. That’s a good one, they all say. They are laughing at Jesus.

But Jesus takes them seriously. Their question is a variant on a more modern version: What will I look like in heaven? Heaven being, in this view (as in the Sadducees’), like earth only better. Which of the many ways I’ve been and seen in my life will I be in heaven? Will I be old and creaky? Young and foolish? Will the extravagant part of me, that I like, be diminished? Will my rough edges, only some of which I don’t like, be ground away? What clothes will I wear, if any?

What Jesus says to the Sadducees—and what we hear for ourselves in this story—is that they are thinking that resurrection is just like here and now, only longer. That the eternal future is just like today—more or less—over and over again. But Jesus says it is not. It is different. The Sadducees think of God in a tiny, constricted sort of way. They see God’s options as limited. They lack imagination.

The strange thinking of the Sadducees is not that different from ours when we feel stuck in the present, when we are out of hope, and see the future as an extension of the present. It represents a kind of cosmic discouragement. The Sadducees’ absurd story of the brothers and the widow is designed to shut out the future. They are doing what we do when we tell ourselves that forces in the world or in ourselves make a different future unlikely, impossible.

Jesus teachings, and especially in the Gospel of Luke, counter that discouragement. Jesus teaches that the last shall be first, that the lowly shall stand, that the hungry will be filled, that the poor will be satisfied. These are stories of new futures. Captivity will be freedom, enemies will be as family, greed will be generosity. Sadness will be happiness.

Jesus encourages us—as he did the Sadducees—to expect more, to expect much, from God. Christianity teaches hope for a transformed world. A world not in which the poor get riches, but one in which there are no poor and rich. Not one in which the wounds of war are healed, but one in which there is no war. Not one in which the hungry are given food, but in which no one goes hungry. The goal of the ministry of Jesus is to transform the world. The effect of the ministry of Jesus is to transform each of us, and thereby transform the world.

It does not require magical thinking to trust we can be renewed, restored, refreshed, reborn. Resurrected. On the contrary, to think that anything is static goes against our knowledge of the way things work in the universe and of our own experience. A member of Faith once said that you never know what this church will be like six months from now. The spirit moves this place. And moves in our lives. Even death does not change that. The world is dynamic. We know that the stars in the heaven are not fixed, that all things are in motion, that movement in time is the rule of creation. And we know that is true in our lives.

We do not need to be like the Sadducees. We do not need to let our inability to see how the future will unfold hem in our hopes for new life.