What Angels Say

Text: Daniel 10:10-14, 12:1-3
Michael and All Angels

Today, in a moment, we will welcome Christina, Jeff, and Nicole to membership in this church. One of the many good things about the ceremony, which is called the Affirmation of Baptism, is that we begin the confession of faith (the creed) with a promise to “renounce … the forces of evil, the devil, and all his empty promises.” This certainly reflects the view of Martin Luther, for whom evil was personified in the devil, or satan, and was a force active against God and good. Luther was said to have recommended that we spit in the devil’s face, and in the Lutheran theme song, A Mighty Fortress, “the old satanic foe” is thwarted in his quest to “work us woe.”

For Luther, the conflict was both cosmic and personal. Whether or not you believe evil to be encapsulated in a person, the renunciation that we promise affirms that evil exists, and that it is a force that diminishes us and is to be reckoned with. And on the flip side, that evil can be resisted and that we live in the hope that it will someday be derailed.

Sometimes that hope is tried by circumstance. When the portion of the book of Daniel, from which we heard the first reading, was thought to have been written, Israel was occupied, and the religious practices—like observing the Sabbath—were outlawed. The structure of a faithful life had been dismantled. God, it seemed, had abandoned God’s people. Where was God’s presence? Evil prevailed. How were the Israelites to live without God, without God’s guidance? How would they know how to live a faithful life against the forces that oppressed and censored them, made them forgetful and desperate? Were they on their own? Was God uncaring, or impotent, or angry, or no longer mindful of them?

Into this despair a mysterious and grand creature in human form comes to Daniel. He brings good news. “Do not fear, Daniel, …your words have been heard.” He reveals to Daniel a vision of things to come. But it is his presence and his announcement that God evidently has been hearing about the plight of God’s people, and does care, and has plans to do something about it—that is the good news.

This is the job of angels. To bring news, specific news from God in particular times. An angel is not a characteristic or type of some heavenly creature, but a job description. More an adjective or verb than a noun. Someone who participates, as someone said, in angelic events. The word “angel” means news, or message. An angel is a messenger. It is not a coincidence of spelling that the word “angel” resides in the middle of the word “evangelism”—ev-angel-ism—meaning good news, news—angel—that is good.

In the Bible, angels bring, almost always, momentous news. Timely news. They announce God’s interest—as they do in Daniel—and remind people of God’s involvement in the affairs of the world. Usually when the people are despairing and wondering where God is in their lives. They are sent by God, and they come to particular people—delivered by hand, so to speak, not published or broadcast—carrying a particular message. They do God’s bidding and obey, as the psalm says, because they know God’s bidding. And angels, being a sign of God’s attention, know those whom they visit.

When it seems, as it often does in hard times, that God is lost, then we are lost. We are God’s creatures, and we have neither the skills nor the foresight nor the courage to find our good way by ourselves. The devil feels free to roam uninhibited, and we are more likely, being anxious in our loneliness, to be enticed by his promises, which begin to seem full of possibility, not empty at all.

When God seems lost, stories like Daniel and Revelation appear. They are apocalyptic, which does not mean “end of the world” but rather means they reveal. They are visions. Though they portray destruction and chaos, they are really books of hope. They are not stories of the end of all time and space, but stories of hope for a new world, a new beginning, a new way of being, and world that fits better what God had planned for us. They are not written to frighten us into goodness, but to comfort us. God comes in these books not to ruin things, but to save them. Angels are agents of this conviction.

We have a sense that the world and we are made for better things. That the good that God declares the creation to be in Genesis is our birth and our destiny. Angels seem to fit into that, somehow; in popular tradition they embody the deepest contentment that we long for and believe will be ours. They are imbued, saturated, with heaven, where God works and lives. And the angels, too.

The idea of heaven is appealing, but not so much as a place of harps and clouds. But rather as the embodiment of a heavenly life that is the life we most feel designed for and need. A life free of the evils of the world—wars, poverty, slavery, privilege—and the sorrows of humans—hungry, disappointed, abused. Where the world is true, in the sense that it is one pure thing all the way through, not bruised like a fruit by expediency and fear and equivocation and violence. Heaven is a place, or a condition, or a time, in which the pattern of goodness is clear and achieved.

People tell stories about angels all the time. They do not do that because angels are cool, though they undoubtedly are, at least as described in the Bible. But because the people have been convinced that they have had a glimpse of heaven in an angelic event. They have been brought a message, a revelation, that in the midst of the forces of evil, the devil, and all his promises, there God is present, and is watching over them.

Passionate God is Heartbroken

Text: Luke 15:1-10
Other texts: Exodus 32

It is possible, I suppose, to have a god who might do anything. Or at least to have a theology that claims it so. But could you praise and worship a god who is capricious, who may not keep promises, who cannot be taken at one’s word?

The relationship between us and the God we worship is based on a covenant, a promise, a contract between us and God. We worship a God who instructs us in how to be righteous—that is, in how to be right with God. We trust that instruction to be true and effective.

It may be that our God can theoretically do anything—it doesn’t say—but theory does not matter here. The God we know has willingly constrained God’s self. I am your God and you are my people, God has told us. We have a relationship in which God has promised to be involved. “You have sworn to [your people] by your own self,” Moses reminds God in our first reading. On God’s own name and by God’s own being has God promised to behave in certain ways toward humans (and toward all creation). And God has enlisted human partners—like Abraham and Sarah and Moses—who rely on and trust in God’s faithfulness to God’s promises.

Today’s first reading comes as Moses has been up on Mount Sinai getting God’s law, retrieving the two tablets on which God had written them. He had been there for forty days, and the people down below had become impatient. They had prevailed on Aaron to make an image of God as a golden calf, immediately violating the first commandments of God about making (and worshipping) idols.

God is not pleased. At first, God blames Moses. “Your people,”—now they are Moses’s people—“are acting perversely.” Then God threatens to wipe out everybody, just as God did before Noah and the flood. Then God tries to bribe Moses, telling him that he, Moses, will be the father of a great nation, a promise God already made long ago to Abraham. Finally, God asks Moses to step back so that God can act without impediment. “Leave me alone,” says God.

But Moses will not step back. Moses argues with God. Moses threatens to embarrass God. Moses reminds God of the covenant that God had made with the people. And in the end, and amazingly, God changes God’s mind.

The God we worship is not a statue made of gold or anything else. Our God is, according this story, moved by argument, persuaded by the threat of embarrassment. God cares what people think of God. This God is not perfect, unemotional, unchangeable, unmoved. Our God has a stake in the fate of the world, admires creation, has desires, weeps when seeing the suffering of humanity and gets annoyed at its stupidity. This is a God who prefers good to right, mercy to judgment. This is not an impassable God, meaning one who cannot, does not, or chooses not to feel. Our God is a God of passion.

In the Gospel reading today, we heard Jesus tell two parables (they are a companion to a third, the story of the Prodigal Son). In each of these parables, something is lost, someone longs to find what is lost, and what is lost is found. In each story, there is a big feast and celebration.

But these are not so much stories about what is lost as they are about finding, about searching for and finding, and rejoicing at finding. What is lost does not ask to be found (they are sheep and coins, after all). Though repentance is mentioned, no one in the parables repents; no one asks for forgiveness. But they are searched for and welcomed home anyway.

The parables are more about the persistence of the seeker than they are about the character of what is sought. They are not about how great the repenters are; they are about how great God is.

It is no fun being lost. Being lost in the woods, lost in the dark city, lost as a child in the mall—it is terrifying. It is a good metaphor for the despair and hopelessness we can feel. Being lost in our lives, feeling as if we had no different future or no future at all, fearful that we might not survive—it is mind-numbing. Feeling as if there is no one in the whole world who might look for us, might try to find us, might bring us home. Feeling that we are wicked, out of control, occupied by demons, sinners unforgiven and unforgivable. Estranged from God, people, and all creation.

And to lose someone—or to see someone we love who is lost or in danger of becoming lost—is heart-breaking.

The Pharisees and scribes see Jesus being somehow corrupted by his fraternization with sinners. His contact with sinners makes him like a sinner, they think. No doubt the sinners see it differently. They are those who, as in the parable, know they are lost. (Unlike the Pharisees, who think they are not.) They eat with Jesus, it seems, because Jesus knows what it is to be lost.

The woman ransacks her house to find the lost coin. The shepherd goes out into the wilderness to find the lost sheep. They are driven to find what is lost. Jesus eats with the sinners—and then tells these stories to explain it—because he is likewise driven. Those who are lost break God’s heart, God’s passionate heart.

We who are lost lose conviction that anyone would come to find us, that we can be found or rescued. But we are not just lost things, one lost thing among many things not lost, a fraction not worth bothering about. We are lost to someone. The shepherd is compelled to search for the lost sheep because the sheep is lost to the shepherd, belongs to the shepherd, is the shepherd’s own. The shepherd cannot be a shepherd without longing to find the lost sheep, any more than God can be God and not search for us lost sinners.

What the shepherd does seems crazy. Which of you, Jesus asks, would not leave the 99 in the wilderness to search for one. The answer of the prudent sheep owner is: none. No one would do that, no one would value the time so cheaply, no one would risk the 99 for the sake of the one. But God does.

Our God—they are your people, Moses eventually reminds God—our God is extravagant and exuberant. Our God is crazy in love with people. With us.

When God declares to the Israelites—and to us—I am your God, you are my people, then God becomes vulnerable to losing us. God’s heart is changed. All heaven rejoices.

Seeker, Not Sought

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

Happy are those who have not walked in the counsel of the wicked, sings the psalm for today. Psalm 1, the one that introduces the 149 others. Happy are those who have not lingered in the way of sinners. Happy are those who do not sit with the scornful. They meditate on God’s teaching day and night. And everything they do prospers.

It is a small crowd, those happy people. So small that perhaps there is no one in it. Who are these people who have never sinned nor listened to sinners, who think only of God’s teachings? Whose every endeavor prospers. Are there any such people in the real world?

Moses has presented his people with a choice. He has done God’s work, leading the Israelites out of slavery and conveyed to them God’s law and commandments. Now, on the verge of finally entering the land promised to them, Moses preaches one last sermon, exhorting them to walk in the way of a God who has freed them, fed them, guided them, and now brings them home.

I have set before you today life and death, Moses tells them, prosperity and adversity. Choose to follow your God, not other gods. Choose to observe God’s decrees. If you do so choose, you will prosper. If you do not, you will perish. Blessings or curses, he offers. Life or death. Choose life.

The choice is clear. Choose life. Obviously. Who, given this choice, would willingly choose death?

Yet, we are easily led astray, as Moses warns the people. The Bible is a story of a people who, though they love God, are nonetheless unable to keep God’s commands, who are unable to keep away from the counsel of the wicked, who are unable to do what they want and refrain from doing what they do not want. In other words, it is the story of all people.

It is not easy to choose life. It is not always clear what is a blessing and what is a curse. Can a war be just? Can ending a life be compassionate? Can greedy accumulation enable mercy? We are more confused than villainous.

We are prone to distraction. It makes sense. We are aware creatures with lots of interests and a brain that likes to know everything that is going on. It helps us survive. Things compete for our attention. Some are the commandments and ordinances, as Moses says, of God, and the teachings of Jesus, whom we follow. But even when we turn to God, that attention is short-lived. So there is never only one choosing of life and that’s that. We have to choose life over death again and again, endlessly.

Our distractions are rarely evil. Jesus tells his disciples that those who do not hate their families cannot be his disciples. This is a hard saying. Partly that’s because we in our time honor families and find them to be—usually—a source of physical and spiritual comfort and energy. And partly because honoring parents is one of the commandments that we are supposed to obey. And partly because it is hard to make yourself feel some way, much less hate what you now love. Including life itself.

But Jesus is not talking about feelings, here. The words love and hate in Jesus’ time were more about obligations and behavior than about emotions. They had their source in contract law. So the admonition of Jesus here is not so much about degrees of affection. It is rather about loyalties and where they lie.

This is not the first or last time that Jesus compares his disciples’ allegiance with other calls on them. Elsewhere in the Gospels they leave their homes, their work, their nets and fields, their parents. They leave the dead to bury the dead. They are advised—as they are here—to give up all they own. They are instructed to carry no baggage. These things are all distracting voices—serving other gods, in the words of Moses. They add to the cacophony that makes it harder for one to decide how to choose life.

These statements by Jesus are not a call to asceticism. They are not a call at all. They are not a list of requirements. They are not a gateway to discipleship. They instead are an observation, a description, a statement of fact. Physics.

Being a disciple of Jesus is likely to get you in trouble with your family. Jesus is going to ask you to make moral, practical, and political choices that may estrange you from others, including your family and in spite of your bonds to them.

When Jesus talks to his disciples in this passage, he is giving them a heads up. When you become a disciple of mine, here is what might happen. This is a warning of sorts. A disclaimer.

The cross is not a prerequisite of following Jesus, but it may be a consequence. Disagreeing with ones we love is not a recipe for discipleship, but it may be the result. Those who hold their families most dear—and their possessions—are likely to run into problems. They will likely have to make decisions in which it is hard for them—maybe impossible—to choose life over death.

A disciple is a student. That is what the word means. The hope of discipleship is transformation, not just accumulation of knowledge or a notebook full of aphorisms. Those who follow Jesus hope for transformation in themselves and, as a result, in the world. Being Christian changes things. We obey God—we follow Christ our teacher—because we love God and also because we find that God’s promise of a new life is trustworthy.

This does not mean we have to get it exactly right. We will not get all A’s. We will choose our families and possession—other gods—over Christ. Our hearts will turn away, as Moses warns. Yet that is not a reason to abandon the whole enterprise.

The commands and grace of God are good news about the heart of God, who longs to bring us life. Moses’ talk about loving God, obeying God, and holding fast to God is not so much a statement about law as it is about heart—God’s heart. God makes a promise of life. It turns out not to be as contingent as it seems, for as the story unfolds, God delivers on God’s promise anyway, even when the Israelites—and we—continually choose death over life. Even when we walk in the counsel of the wicked.

A lectionary alternative for today is psalm 139. It is a fitting partner to the one we sang today, almost as near the end of the book as Psalm 1 is to the beginning. The psalm gives thanks that God is with us, even when we stray. As we are bound to. You search me, it says to God, you know me, you follow my journeys, you surround me.

Even when we walk among the wicked, the scornful, the sinners. No matter how little we meditate on God’s teaching. God seeks us out and walks with us.

Living It Up

Text: Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16
Other texts: Luke 14:1, 7-14

We seek the good life.

What kind of life is that? We know the answer in the core of our being. We know, as it says in Hebrews, that it has little to do with the love of money. It is not nourished by accumulation. Instead, it has something to do with contentment, peace, humor, generosity, companionship.

The book of Proverbs is an example of wisdom literature. Wisdom literature teaches us what the wise person would do. The wise person is the one who seeks the good life. Wisdom literature guides us to the good life. In the first short reading today, it teaches us about the wisdom of humility. Jesus adapts this teaching to his own.

The book of Hebrews—being a theological treatise disguised as a letter—is not primarily about how to live the good life. But the last chapter, from which we heard today, is. It tells us what the good life means for Christians. If Jesus by his existence and death replaced altar sacrifice for his followers, then how, Hebrews asks, can they now worship? How can they now show their love of God? Rather then leaving them to figure this all out, the author of Hebrews reserves the last chapter to guide them.

At the top of this guide are two commands. The first one is: continue to love one another. The word is phila-delphía, translated often as brotherly love (thus the motto of the city). Love other followers of Christ. And the second one is: show hospitality to strangers. The word for hospitality is philo-xenía, love of strangers. Strangers here does not just mean someone with whom you are not familiar. It means strange. Weird. Do not forget to love people who are weird. People maybe not like you very much.

So, to live the good Christian life: love the ones you’re with, and love the others, too. That sounds like something Jesus might say. Be hospitable to all. And especially, he says in the Gospel reading for today, especially the ones who seem strange to you.

To be a good host—to be a good practitioner of hospitality—is to think of others first. To think of them more than you think of yourself. A good host is aware of the needs of his or her guests. More, a good host goes out of the way to make sure those needs are met. A good host puts money and time and thought into nourishing guests in body and spirit. The host is driven by love of his or her friends, and, for Christians, equally of strangers. It is a model for Christian love.

Hospitality is a form of humility. Humility is social glue. It embodies interdependence, patience, and awareness of others. It is essential for good community. Humility requires a tolerance for self-doubt and uncertainty. A willingness to wait and see. A humble host is not independent, self-reliant, or self-righteous. A person certain that her or she is right is not a humble one.

But mostly, humility requires imagination. What would other people like? What would they dislike? This is more than asking: what would I like if I were in the shoes of that other person. It is more than the golden rule. It is imagining what it would be like to be that other person, with his or her background, abilities, history, not with yours. As if, as it says in Hebrews, as if you were in their body. Imagining what it would be like—not for you to be in jail, with all your education and strength and confidence—but imagining what it would be like to be that person in jail. What would it be like to be that person who is being tortured? And then, imagining that strange person so well that you love strange them, and act accordingly.

This hospitable imagination is not rare, exotic, or saintly. It serves nurses and counselors well. But also other people with empathetic imaginations who are not in care-giving occupations. Salespeople (the best of whom are servants to their customers), and good product designers. Steve Jobs of Apple, but maybe not Tim Cook, who replaced him. Empowering leaders, but maybe not charismatic ones. Effective teachers. Best friends.

Jesus advises us in his parable to be humble. To sit in the lowest place. The humble, he says, shall be exalted. But this is not easy advice to hear. None of us wants to be at the bottom. It makes us feel little and helpless. We fear that our survival and happiness—and our chance at the good life—depends on the power we ourselves have over our time and money and well-being.

But it is possible to be humble without being terrified if we put our trust in a higher power, in God, to care for us. It would be imprudent to do otherwise. So when Hebrews tells us to be content with what we have—do not push to the head table—it adds: “for [God] has said ‘I will never leave you or forsake you.’ So we can say with confidence, ‘The Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid, what can anyone do to me?’”

It takes practice to remind ourselves of this. It is a spiritual discipline. We get better at it over time. Just as we do imagining ourselves being another.

The Gospel of Luke has a preference for a change in the the way the word is ordered. In Luke, Mary predicts that the powerful shall be brought down from their thrones and the lowly lifted up. In Luke, Jesus calls the poor blessed, but woe to the rich. But this readjustment of powerful and powerless, rich and impoverished, is not regime change. Not the same old structures but with new bosses. It is a change in the working of the world.

For Luke, the good life is a sign of and at the same time a cause of God’s new world. Which world comes out of our own humble actions and at the same time makes our actions possible. But it is not going to happen if we all continue to make a beeline for the best seats. The evidence of this is that so far it has not—either for each of us individually or for the world. The good life continues to elude us.

When reading the teachings and parables of Jesus, it helps to ask whether it is a commandment—your should do this—or an observation—you are doing this. But perhaps in this case, it is an invitation. If we practice being good hosts, if we approach others with humility, if we imagine ourselves to be as others are, then we trust the good life will be ours. And the world’s.