Down in the Dust

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There Are Three Kinds of People in the World

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

There are two kinds of people in the world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lord of the Dance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Use Your Words

Text: Jeremiah 1:1-10 January 28, 2006

Words matter. They are not just ways to label the world. They influence how we see the world. What categories we have for things. How we perceive things, how we perceive time. People—like advertisers or politicians—try to put words in our brains so that we will see the world and our place in it in a particular way. When we see things, we attach them to categories we already have words for. New ideas take a while to take hold because they either demand new words or new ways of using old words.

The words for things we think a lot about seem to take up a lot of space in our heads, and things that are not so important take up less space. There is less chatter there. But the reverse is true, too. If we spend a lot of time with the words of an idea, we begin to think a lot about it. Partly, that’s what education is. Partly that’s why TV is so powerful. And books. It makes a difference in your head depending on whether you read a lot of murder mysteries or The New York Times or Consumer Reports or the Bible.

It turns out the on the piano, in the key of C major all the notes are played on the white keys. C D E F G A B C. In the key of A minor, also, all the notes are played on the white keys. A B C D E F G A. Same notes. This is pretty “duh” if you know music, so please bear with me a moment. But if you know nothing about music, as I know nothing, you might find this pretty mysterious, as I did until last week, when I read a book explaining it (the book is called This Is Your Brain on Music). How do we know, if the scales are exactly the same, in which key a song is written? The answer is that in a song in C major the note C is played a lot, and played strongly, and played longer, and that the song returns to it. And a song in A minor, it is the A that is played lots, and loud, and so forth. The note that gets the most attention is a good clue to our brains about the key. It is the same with ideas. The words that get the most attention in our brains tell us what ideas are important to us.

Last week I went to a conference at the new convention center in Boston. The half-day program was sponsored by Microsoft in order to tell everybody about the new version of Microsoft Office that they are releasing. I’m a little embarrassed to admit to you that I went to this conference, and I can’t quite say why I did. It was my history as a techy, maybe, that drew me there. You know I like to think about technology, but this was kind of an overdose of it. The people there were professional technology managers, designers, and engineers.

What was amazing to me was not the software, which it turned out I didn’t really care much about. What was amazing was that it seemed to me that in many ways people had come to the convention center to worship. Not that Microsoft was like a god—far from that. But that the attitude of many of the guests was worshipful. They were there because they had a deep-seated need to know important things that affected their lives in significant ways. They came for guidance. They came for truth. They came for a way to behave, a way to live, that would give them a kind of peace in their work. They came to be nourished and energized. As someone might come to church.

I imagined what was going on in the minds of the guests. They had come to sit for at least three hours, six for some who stayed all day. What I saw—and I admit I’m just making this up—I saw a bunch of emotions. I saw boredom and anxiety. I also saw desire, a kind of lust for this technology. And coupled with that a disgust at themselves for these desires. I also saw ideas, revelations, understanding; I could see people imagining solutions, possibilities. Some had come for salvation: help me!, I’m in a pickle, show me the way out. And in some I saw a sense of dislocation. What am I doing here? What does this have to do with my life, my family, my children, my worries about the war, the kind of world I want?

Microsoft’s purpose in this conference was evangelical. That is, they had hoped to spread the word, the good news about Microsoft Office. (It is not an accident that technology companies have people called “Evangelists.”) They hoped to fill the heads of the people there with Microsoft kind of words. To think in the key of Microsoft, so to speak. Microsoft wanted people to look at the world of their own work and the problems they face with Microsoft eyes. So that when they saw something, they would think about it in terms of Microsoft products.

Except for the details, my fellow conference goers were like the people that the prophet Jeremiah was sent to talk to. Jeremiah’s audience probably wasn’t worried about Solutions Management or Continuous Content Replication, but I’m sure they had other things on their minds that were more appropriate to the age. Crops and rituals and family feuds—or whatever. Things in their world that were important, scary, and confusing. In other words, they were just ordinary people. Seeking guidance for daily tasks and decisions, a way of life, and salvation from fear and pain.

The prophets that God calls in the Bible are by and large ordinary people. Moses was embarrassed about the way he talked, David was a young shepherd, Isaiah a man of unclean lips. Jeremiah was a twelve-year-old boy. “I’m only a boy,” he said when God calls him. They were nothing special. Just ordinary people like you and me.

We are like these prophets. Hesitant to speak about things that are important to us. We are, after all, Lutherans. And some of us Yankees, to boot. We are hesitant, perhaps, to talk about our faith and our relationship with God. We are like Jeremiah, who says, “I don’t know what to say.”

It is usually not the knowing but the saying that is working against us here. We know what to say about all sorts of complicated things in our lives, things about how things work, how they ought to work, why they work the way they do. We are good at knowing and for many things in our lives, good at saying. But not so good, we think, at saying about faith.

But we don’t have to think we are good at saying, any more than Jeremiah did. Partly, because God can do the saying. “I have put words into your mouth,” God tells Jeremiah. And partly, because God tells us to. “You shall speak whatever I command you,” God tells Jeremiah. But mostly because people need to hear us.

It makes a difference—to me and to the world—which words are in my head. I can be thinking about Windows Vista, or OS X Leopard, or Ubuntu—all computer operating systems. When I think of operating systems, those words look to me like answers. Or I can be thinking about what God has done, or what God is showing me and what God wishes I would do. Or what God is showing Faith and what God wishes Faith would do. When I think about God, the words look to me mostly like questions.

We all are called to speak because it is good for people to have lots of God-words in their heads. To think in the key of God more than the key of operating systems. And we are the ones—not the only ones, but some of the ones at least, to help put God-words there.

What if we read Jeremiah replacing the Jeremiah with Faith Lutheran Church? It would go like this:

Before I formed Faith Lutheran Church, … I knew it, and before it was built, I consecrated it; I appointed it a prophet to the nations. Then Faith said, “Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a small church.” But the Lord said to Faith, “Do not say, ‘I am only a small church; for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you. Do not be afraid …

How would that be?

Or better, what if you put your own name where Jeremiah’s is. Think along with me: “Before I formed <your name here>, I knew <your name here>. I appointed <your name here> to be a prophet. Then <your name here> said, “I do not know how to speak. I am only an ordinary person. ” But the Lord said, Do not be afraid. I am with you.

Everybody is like the people at the computer conference. Everybody has a deep-seated need to know important things that affect their lives in significant ways. Everybody longs for guidance, for truth. Everybody wants to know how to behave, wants a way to live, that will give them peace.

You don’t know all the answers, but you’ve thought hard about the questions. And you have words in your head that maybe they have not heard yet, but long to hear in their own heads. You and I, we are ordinary people. We are the prophets.

Speak up! Do not be afraid. God is with you.

Good News How

Text: Luke 4:14-21 January 21, 2006

Jesus came bringing good news. But not everyone agreed the news was good.

This speech of Jesus we just heard are the first words of his ministry, following immediately after his baptism and his temptation in the desert. As a reader in the synagogue, he is given or chooses a passage from the prophet Isaiah. It is a song of hope and trust and change for the better for a beleaguered people. After hard times, good times are ahead. An anointed one—which is what the word messiah means—has come, called to proclaim good news. A time of restoration (Isaiah adds that “they will raise up the former devastations, they will repair the ruined cities.”)

This anointed one brings good news to the poor, frees the captives, restores sight to the blind, and liberates the oppressed.

This is a reading of promise, but to those who heard Jesus on that day, the passage is old hat. They’ve heard it countless times, so many times that perhaps it has lost its impact. To those oppressed people to whom Jesus speaks, those under Roman occupation, it sounds perhaps like wishful thinking, or whistling in the dark.

So it is a shock when Jesus puts away the scroll, and sits down, and tells them “today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

At first they are pleased and proud. This is his home-town, he’s come back as a grown-up. Joseph and Mary’s boy. But they are little nonplussed, too. What does he mean? And by the time Jesus compares himself to the great prophet Elijah, they are furious, and they take him to the edge of the cliff and try to throw him off. But he escapes.

But his home town buddies were not the only people to be bewildered and upset by Jesus’ words or his claim to fulfill them. In his life and since that time, the poor have been worried that what he said would happen had not. And the rich have been worried that it might.

Of all the four Gospels, Luke is the most interested in the plight of the poor (and by poor, he means everyone who is disenfranchised and dispossessed). In Luke, Mary sings of the poor raised up and the mighty cast down. In Luke, the poor, the hungry, those who weep are blessed. In Luke, Jesus comes proclaiming good news to the poor. In Luke, Jesus comes to the poor.

Today’s reading has historically been a problem especially for those who not poor. Those who have things and who by and large don’t go to bed hungry. For the privileged. There is a bit of cognitive dissonance as those who are mighty try to reconcile their status with their commitment to this Son of God they follow. There have been lots of strategies to make things fit, of which the top five are these.

Strategy one. Sentimentalizing. The poor have a special life, according to this strategy, a kind of blessed life not available to the rich, a simple life. Their relationships are fundamental and their living is homey. They are good, simple folk favored by God.

Strategy two. Spiritualizing. Jesus doesn’t really mean poor when he quotes Isaiah. He means poor in spirit. Matthew does this in his version of the beatitudes. Blessed are the poor in spirit. We are all poor in some ways, even those who are materially rich. Releasing the captives doesn’t mean letting people out of prison, according to this strategy, it means releasing our inner demons.

Strategy three. Metaphorizing (that’s not a real word). The poor and blind are not real people, but symbols for something else. The exiled nation of Israel. The infidels and atheists. Evolution. Sin. This earthly life from which we will one day escape.

Strategy four. Displacing. Jesus said it, but it doesn’t mean what it sounds like. This is not about the poor, but about Jesus. The focus is not on the poor, but on the savior, who is using the poor, and this prophecy, as just one example. This passage is about Jesus’ character, not about those he happens to mention.

And strategy five. Denying. According to this strategy, this passage has nothing to do with us, Gospel readers of the past 2000 years. It is pretty, but pretty irrelevant to the faith I claim. I don’t even see why you’re talking about it. Get to the point!

The point is that no matter how hard we might try to avoid these verses or excuse them, they nag at us. In a good way. That is, they seem right. Not irrelevant or immaterial, but appealing. Jesus is not trying to fool us or frighten us. This is good news; we can feel it.

It feels good, I think, because the verbs are good. Release, restore, recover, go free. Though we may think it expedient to put people in prison, no one thinks it is good. Though people are blinded by all sorts of natural causes, no one thinks it is good. Though we might understand how one group oppresses another, no one thinks it is good.

These verbs work no matter what the context. When we hear “release to the captives,” it makes sense whether we are in prison and long to escape or in bondage to some kind of obsession and long to escape or stuck in a cycle of revenge and long to escape.

When we hear “recovery of sight to the blind” it makes sense whether we have cataracts and long to see or in ignorance and long to see or lost in mental confusion and long to see.

When Jesus refers to the year of the Lord’s favor, most scholars think this is code language in Luke for the Kingdom of God, a favorite phrase of Luke, and as much a place of the physical present as of the spiritual future. When we hear of the prisoners being set free, and the blind healed, and poverty eliminated, and oppression ended—when we hear of these things we think that’s how it will be in the Kingdom of God. When the inhumane things we do and the sorrows we suffer will no longer happen. Sickness, and sadness, and craziness, and brutality are not the way things ought to be, and in the Kingdom of God they have no place.

What draws us to this passage, what makes us embrace it instead of deny it through all those different strategies, is that we want this kingdom now, here, in our time, for humanity and all creation. Jesus says that these words of Isaiah will be fulfilled. Are fulfilled.

As Christians, we are officially naïve. Intentionally so. We believe Jesus when he says things like this. We live expecting the Kingdom of God, and we trust that the Spirit will strengthen and guide us to help make that so. There will be an end to captivity, poverty, blindness, and oppression. Jesus proclaimed this good news. And we agree it is good.

Praising Mediocrity

Text: 1 Corinthians 12:1-11 January 14, 2007

Let's hear it for mediocrity.

Let us celebrate just getting by. Let us commend doing less than your best. Let us extol what in the college I went to they called “gentleman's Cs.” Let us praise doing okay, satisfactory, good enough.

If this makes you squeamish, you are in the right culture and the right time. “Be all you can be” is not just an advertising slogan, it is the motto for our times. Kindly mentors tell their charges, “I don’t care how well you do, just as long as you do your best.” That is, the results don’t have to be perfect, but the effort better be.

To live in the expectation of giving 100% all the time is to live constantly on the edge of judgment. And if effort, and not result, is the criterion, then there is never a time for rest, for a little slack, for down time. And we’ll always fall short, for the job is never done, because the job is not accomplishing something but working hard. Which has no end. Live hard, play hard, is hard. Where is the Sabbath in that?

It is a kind of idolatry. Anything that commands us—orders us around—and commands our attention—that we pay attention to in a constant awareness—that thing, that force is an idol for us. Doing the best you can is a close cousin to striving for perfection. And they are both good friends of optimization: striving to make things the best possible, rather than simply satisfactory. [A friend] says I’m an optimizer when parking my car in our neighborhood. I want to be right in front of our house, so I look for the rarely-found elusive perfect spot, while passing by good spaces a half-block away that she would have taken. And perfection and optimization are both buddies with performance. Performance is doing something for the presentation of it and usually also to impress. A good performance is perfect (though no real performance ever quite is, just as no real endeavor ever quite is, either).

There are times when performance matters. When someone’s life depends on what you do, for example. But even less dramatically, in competitive situations, doing the best, optimizing, and such can make a difference. This week Steve Jobs, the head of Apple, introduced a new iPod/cell phone combo device at the MacWorld Conference in San Francisco. It was an amazing performance. The New York times said: “has there even been anybody in the history of marketing to introduce products with the sheer dazzling showmanship of the legendary Apple chief executive?” The day after the performance, Apple’s stock rose 10%.

But we, even Steve Jobs, rarely are called to situations so critical as to demand perfection and ultimate effort. That doesn’t mean that people won’t make those demands, people like bosses, families, spouses. We ourselves are sometimes the most strident demand-ers. But just because you can do something well doesn’t mean you have to. As someone said [Chesterton], if something is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. Sometimes a C- is plenty enough.

There needs to be a place in our lives where you don’t have to be all you can be. Where you can do less than best, and where perfection is neither expected nor desired. If we are lucky, home is such a place. As Robert Frost’s character says, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Regardless of your performance. Though for some, homes are not that.

But the church is. Or should be. We worship a God of grace, as Pastor Seitz reminded us last week. God loves you no matter what. We have to say this over and over because it is hard to believe. Too good to be true. Very good. You have no obligation to God to live up to your potential. If “living up to your potential” is something you have to do, then it is a “work” in the classic Lutheran meaning. That is, something you do to earn God’s forgiveness, favor, and blessing. And we are taught that there is no such requirement. In Christ’s church, it is okay regardless. You don’t have to get it right.

When Paul writes this letter we heard to the church at Corinth, he writes to a group of people who are strutting around saying what good performers they all are. They all think they are Steve Jobs. That is, they think they are great, and each one thinks that he or she is doing the most important job. Paul wants to cool this competitive and ferocious ardor a bit. So he tells them three things,

First, everything you do in the church, he tells them, is for the good of the church. The “common good,” it says in the reading. The word means “to carry with others,” to share the work like a bunch of people trying to lift a heavy box. None of you is the CEO.

Second, none of the things you do is more important than the things other people do. All are necessary, he says later on in the letter, for the functioning of the body of Christ, the church. And you are not so smart that you can say one thing is more important than another, because it is not. To make himself clear, Paul says neither (A) gifts (like prophecy or praying or evangelism), nor (B) service (like helping others and visiting them or comforting them), nor just work (like anything not covered by A and B). The Greek words, FYI, are the base of the English words charisma, deacon, and energy. They are all part of the church. Gifts, service, and work.

And third, and most important, Paul tells them that it is not they but the Spirit who is responsible for the gifts, service, and work that they bring.

Unlike a manager in a corporation, God does not try to recruit the best people available for the job. God does not ask for resumes for the folk God invites to the church. It is not because God sees all people as valuable, though that is no doubt true. But it is because that is not how it works. God does not assemble the church out of available parts. God does not put together a team.

The church is the people who gather there. The Spirit takes those people and allots the gifts, services, and work according to the way the Spirit chooses. It is not so much that there are a diversity of skills brought to the church to be assigned. But that there are a diversity of gifts, service, and work that the Spirit dispenses among the people who have actually gathered. When people come to church they are transformed by the Spirit (“activated,” it says in our reading; but “energized” would be better). So it is sufficient; the church lacks nothing.

That is why no one in Corinth can be too proud, because it is the Spirit’s allotment that they have. And it also why being the best you can be is totally foreign to this passage, because you may not have been chosen for what you do best, but for something, maybe, that you don’t even do very well. But that you have been energized to do nonetheless. Nothing that happens here depends on your being skillful, even though everything that happens here is a result of your skills.

There is something wonderful and rich about this. Long ago, when I was first starting to come back to worshiping in a church after a twenty-year break, I went to a minister friend to ask what I could do to serve, to help other people besides myself and family. She quoted me a passage a little further on in Corinthians, saying to me “people have lots of gifts. Perhaps you are serving by doing what you are doing best already.” It was not what I wanted to hear. I wanted to do something that someone needed. I did not want to be valued for what I already could do. I wanted to be seized by God and led to a place that needed someone, anyone, even me. And so at my friend’s suggestion I started volunteering in a prison, where I was energized by the Spirit, though I would not have put it that way then, and transformed to do my barely satisfactory work there. Which was good enough. And for me, freeing and revealing and life-changing.

The pews of the church are made for those who choose to sit in them. The church provides a sanctuary—a safe place, a holy place, meaning a place set apart. The are enough forces in the world, in our lives, that drive us to perfect, optimum, arduous, performance and 100% effort. But the church, a sanctuary set apart, need not be one of them. It is a place to put all that aside for a bit. It is okay. This is your home. A place to bask in the grace-filled approval of God, and to be energized by the Spirit.

Tactics

Text: Colossians 3:12-27 December 31, 2006

Welcome, children of God, holy and beloved.

Modern Protestant Christianity is a long on strategy and short on tactics. Or to be more churchy: long on theology and short on practices. Or what Christianity calls disciplines: things we can do to live the kind of faithful life we would like to live. It is great to know that we are justified by God's grace, but now what? What do we do day to day, hour to hour, knowing we have been freed from the power of death?

For Protestants, disciplines have usually been put at the back of the drawer, along with the unpaired socks and the squashed penny souvenir from the Space Needle. Something not very useful but not yet ready for the trash. Luther and especially his fellow reformers felt that Christians had been captive to the rules and regulations of the Roman church, and so de-emphasized many powerful but traditional disciplines that they thought enslaved people to the church hierarchy. And in our time, people have been confused about how and how much their faith can and should be expressed in public, as opposed to personal or private, lives. There is a school of thought that imagines faith to be something emotional—a feeling, sort of—or belief, but not something real; as real, say, as paying the rent or dealing with your boss or your significant other. Practical things.

But the need for guidance—we have been saved by Christ; now what do we do today, or this minute?—is a question even the earliest Christian communities struggled with. The passage in the letter to the Colossians we just heard from tries to help its readers with an answer.

It is likely that this epistle was written by someone other than Paul, some time after his death, but to a group of followers of Jesus who are trying to conform their lives to Jesus. How should they do that? The letter presents a kind of argument, or a kind of program, for behavior. In summary, the argument says that we can act in a certain way out of power that comes from Christ. In detail, the argument has four parts.

First, it starts by making clear that the things that usually guide people’s actions: power, position, safety, revenge, things like that, are not helpful to Christians. Instead, the people are urged to be compassionate, kind, humble, gentle, and patient. What these five things have in common is a tendency to put others before ourselves. To consider others to be equal to or better than we are. Counter-cultural, for sure. [As one scholar explains:] To waive one’s rights rather than be concerned for personal gain. To not become frustrated and enraged but to make allowances for other people’s exasperating behavior. To acknowledge as if we were feeling it ourselves the pain that others feel. All these things are essential, Colossians argues, for the sake of the community. And the community in the end is the whole world.

But this is a list of goals, not tactics. Easy to note, hard to do. So the second part of the argument backs up a step. Everybody wants to be compassionate. No one wants to hurt others. But how can we do that? We start with what we know. And what we know is the word of Christ. Which in our case means the words of Jesus (his teachings, prayers, and parables) and the words about Jesus (the Gospels, and also the words that others tell us about their own experiences of Christ) and about the words in our own heads and hearts about Jesus (our own experiences of Jesus in life, in prayer, and in worship and song).

“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly,” the people are told. The word is like food. Rich food. Good food. Delicious and nutritious. As rich as Christmas chocolate and good wine and as nutritious as tofu and green beans. Like food, the word of Christ gives us energy, power, and substance. It is necessary for life and action. Let the food-like word of Christ be in you, says Colossians. That means: don’t fill up on other things; don’t spoil your appetite. And it means: seek the word; spend time in the pantry and looking into the refrigerator. Snacks would be good, too.

The third part of the argument is that the word of Christ leads to peace. The peace is a result of confidence that in Christ, death has no power to rule us. What we learn from the word of Christ is that we can live without fear. Or maybe more practically, that when we have fears—which we are bound to have—that we can turn to the word of Christ to remind us that the fears are—at their core—groundless.

“Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts,” the people are told. There are lots of other things that might rule in our hearts. What are the things that pull us, move us, and rule us? Wanting to be admired, to be safe and secure, to be loved, to not be lonely, laughed at, ignored. To get good grades. To get back at someone, to be left alone, to not be bothered. But of all those things, says Colossians, the peace that Christ brings is the ruler of them all. They are the subjects. You tell them to hush, to quiet down a bit, to chill. Let peace have its sway, says Colossians. Let peace be the boss.

The goal drives us. The word powers us. The peace frees us. But it is Jesus who shows us what to do. The fourth part of the argument is that empowered by the word and freed from the power of fear and death, we live our daily lives through the guidance of Jesus. “Do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus,” says Colossians.

As we do anything, keep Jesus is mind. Think to yourself: I do this in the name of Jesus. I come across a beggar on the street. Could you say: “I give this dollar in the name of Jesus.” How about: “I pass on by in the name of Jesus.”

Could you say: I admire the sky in the name of Jesus. I eat this Special K cereal in the name of Jesus. I vote for this person in the name of Jesus. How about: I complain about my boss in the name of Jesus. I throw this trash on the street in the name of Jesus. I smoke this cigar in the name of Jesus. How about that?

I paint this picture. I visit my aunt. I take the dog for a walk. I give some money to Oxfam. I buy an iPod. I fix my car. I write this nasty letter or this complimentary one.

Do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus. In some things we do it is easy to add “in the name of Jesus.” “I donate to Lutheran World Relief.” “I say hello to the ticket taker.” In others, it makes us uncomfortable. Rightly so. “I cheat on my taxes.” Or makes us embarrassed or sad. “I steal from my business colleague.” “I refuse to call my father.” Or so bad and secret that it makes us go “la la-la la-la. I don’t want to hear you.” The rule of thumb for Colossians is this: judge what you do, or intend to do, by considering whether you would be comfortable doing it “in the name of Jesus.” If you would, then do it. If you wouldn’t, then don’t.

Thinking about Jesus in all we do helps us pay attention to life and our lives. It is a kind of mindfulness. It is a discipline, a habit of being that helps us live more intentionally (that is, not by accident or distractedly or carelessly). It helps us to notice the world more (makes that Special K taste better and the clouds more beautiful and the iPod more amazing), it helps us do with less (because we take time and enjoy the pleasures of appreciation), and it helps us be virtuous as defined in Colossians (because we notice that others are much like ourselves).

It sounds from all this that faith proceeds practice. But it is usually the opposite. If we wait until we feel spiritually ready, we’ll never start. It is like trying to write the perfect love letter, which being never perfect never gets sent, and the lovers never meet. Spiritual practice is not like a final exam, best taken after much preparation. It is more like trying to fix a faucet. You just start, and if you find that you have to rush to the hardware store to find the right bolt, then back a while later to get that special tool—well, that’s how such things go. And that’s how most of us learn about plumbing.

Faith is like that. You start out doing things in the name of Jesus. And in your heart, the peace of Christ begins to rule, and in you, the word of Christ begins to make itself at home. And pretty soon, you find yourself acting with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. And you begin to see, as Colossians says at the very first, that you are chosen by God, holy, and beloved.