Led into the Kingdom by a Shepherd

Text: Luke 23:33-43
Other texts: Jeremiah 23:1-6

How is it that in this world today slavery still flourishes, with around twenty million people, mostly women, held as slaves?

How is it that in this world wars still rage, people live in terror, ethnic populations eliminated, people tortured? How is it in this world that people still are left to starve, lack clean water, are infested with parasites? How is it in this world that so few still hoard so much, control so much, while so many have so little and are powerless? How is it in this world that nations still falter in fragility, refugees march, justice is systemically denied?

Where is God’s kingdom?

God knows, people long for a king. A king powerful enough to discipline the nations, compassionate enough to heal the wounds of poverty, wise enough to bring justice to all, clever enough to bring abundance, humorous enough to value joy and pleasure and beauty, humble enough to be in awe of all creation.

Where is God’s kingdom?

People long for a king. The story of such longing is not new. The list of human ills is largely unchanged. Only the names and places vary. People suffer war, injustice, scarcity, and nastiness. This is not new. People wonder when it will all be made better. That’s not new either.

Some expected Jesus to be the king. The King, in capital letters. For a population under foreign control and oppression—torture, injustice, ethnic disdain, poverty amidst luxury—the coming of Jesus seemed to some to promise the restoration of another, better time, though a time maybe in fantasy more than in history. They were disappointed then, to say the least, when Jesus was crucified. They called him Messiah, which is the word for Christ. Jesus Messiah. Messiah means the one who is anointed. Anointing is how kings were installed, or ordained, a sign of and a means of God’s blessing. What kind of Messiah are you, they wanted to know, who is executed as a criminal?

Where is God’s kingdom? they wanted to know.

The Bible seems to say that there is something a little perverted in our longing for a king. Or at least the kind of king we usually long for. Before the days of great King David, the Israelites had no king. But they badly wanted one.

“Give us a king to govern us” it says in book of the prophet Samuel. But God said to them: I’m not so sure you want a king. A king is a pain in the neck.

“These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. He will take ... the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work.

“But the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel; they said, ‘No! but we are determined to have a king over us, so that we also may be like other nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles’”

This model of king as commander in chief—what the Israelites hoped for and what people hoped to find in Jesus—is not the primary model in the Bible. The people who surrounded Jesus at the cross should not have been so surprised. The king’s job is to be a shepherd, not a ruler.

The king’s job is to watch over the sheep, not to boss them around. Not to be the king who takes your sons and daughters, but one who guides the flock. Not to use the people to fight his battles, but to give up his life for the people, his sheep. When God speaks through the prophet Jeremiah, God condemns the rulers as bad shepherds. You have scattered the sheep, God says, and have not attended to them. So God will anoint new shepherd kings to protect and gather the people.

Where is God’s kingdom?

Like the Israelites longing for a king to do battle, people make out God to be the same as their contemporary big, powerful leaders, but bigger and more powerful. And the kingdom of God becomes like a political state, only more imperial and victorious. We might make God out to be as a president, or a general, or a CEO. Just like a regular ruler, only more so.

But a shepherd is not a person of power. A shepherd was and is a low-paying low-prestige job, a humble job. A shepherd’s relationship with his or her flock is not one primarily of power. The sheep don’t appoint or validate the shepherd, they don’t elect their shepherd, they don’t hire and fire the shepherd, they don’t conduct yearly evaluations of the shepherd’s job.

An Episcopalian bishop recently resigned over a dispute with his congregation. His entitled attitude was revealing. He said, “I will neither compromise the faith once delivered to the saints, nor will I abandon the sheep who elected me to protect them.” But the sheep don’t elect the shepherd.

They don’t choose the shepherd. The sheep trust the shepherd. They follow the shepherd. They depend on the shepherd.

The kingdom of God is led by a shepherd.

We long for a king, mighty and victorious. What we get is a shepherd. What we think we need is a boss. What we need is a shepherd. We need someone, as Jesus spoke of, who will not be expedient or efficient, and will search for the one lost sheep in a hundred sheep bring that sheep back. [Like this Jesus in the mural here.] We need someone, as Jesus did, who will heal us, heal the world. We need someone who will feed us. We need someone who will teach us. We need someone who will keep us safe from our own clumsy wanderings and our good-natured ignorance. We are in deep mud right now. We need to be rescued.

We can call on God to lead us into battle, as Christians have for centuries. Onward Christian Soldiers. We can think of the kingdom of God as something wrested from the forces of evil. As in the video game where the evangelicals zap the sinners. We can ask God to be our king and we to be God’s army, carrying out holy destruction. But when we ask that of God, the answer we get is Jesus. We get Jesus as an answer. Jesus refuses to take on that job we put on him. At Golgotha Jesus does not bring fire down on his executioners. Forgive them, he says.

Christ is our shepherd. Our relationship with Christ begins with trust and hope. We are the sheep. We follow Jesus. We do not know the way. The shepherd offers us a way home.

Adiaphora

Text: Luke 20:27-38

On a scale from the most radical and strange to the most reactionary and predictable, worship at Faith is pretty much to the right, to the traditional. We follow a predetermined order from a Lutheran guide to worship, we pick songs from a Lutheran hymnal, we confess our sins in a Lutheran confession. If you were visiting here from most of the other Lutheran churches in the world, you’d feel pretty much at home.

A lot of the things that happen in worship have meaning. It is not just a bunch of arbitrary events strung together in a row. Someone, including theologians and liturgists, has thought the thing through. You might really like the way worship goes here; it might be one of the reasons you are here today. Or you might not like it so much; you might be here in spite of, not because of, the way this church worships. We do all these things in worship here, and each might add to your experience or it might not. We do all these things, but none of them is going to keep you out of heaven or get you into it. They are, I hope, great and helpful and comforting and thought-provoking and nourishing to your life and soul, but they are not the main thing. Not the main thing with God.

In the Gospel reading today Jesus gets into a discussion with some folks, some Sadducees. It seems like an argument. The Sadducees do not believe in the resurrection of the dead. Some other Jews that we read about in the Gospels, the Pharisees, for example, do. But the Sadducees do not. So they present an argument of the absurd. If the husband of a woman dies without her having had a child, the brother of the husband is to marry her. That was the rule. No doubt partly this is to foster growth of the community, but it also protects the woman who otherwise would be left out in the cold without family protection and care. So the Sadducees simply extend this rule. What if she has seven husbands in a row, and then she herself dies. If they all are resurrected, who will be her husband then? Instead of dismissing this as foolishness, instead of saying “OK, next question,” Jesus answers them.

It seems on the face of it that this passage is an argument about resurrection. But really, resurrection has nothing to do with it. That is, the point of the passage is not to tell us more about the resurrection than we already knew. None of the Sadducees would have been convinced by Jesus response, none of Jesus' supporters would have needed convincing, and modern readers bring two thousand years of previous thought to the passage.

The resurrection is the occasion of the discussion between the Sadducees and Jesus, but not the heart of the discussion. They could be talking about the Sabbath, or about how to pray, or about what to eat when. The things that Jesus argues about all the time, and that the Sadducees and the Pharisees and others get all incensed about.

Jesus is a man of his time. Partly. He is a Jew, knows about the law, and respects it, by and large. But he is a man out of his time, too. What he respects is the way the law draws people closer to God. What he does not respect is the way the observance of the law keeps people from God. The argument that Jesus and the Sadducees are having is deep and wide: they are arguing about what God is and what God wants.

Worship and observing the law are things people do to come closer to God. Martin Luther and the reformers talked a lot about the essence of worship. He said the essence of the church—what makes the church be the church—is that the sacraments be rightly administered and the Gospel be rightly preached. Everything else was extra. Not bad, not worthless, just not essential. He used the word “adiaphora” to describe these things. The word means “no difference,” or “it doesn’t matter.”

What Jesus says to the Sadducees is that what they are so worried about doesn’t matter. It is not the main point. Luther once said, when asked a theological question about the Eucharist, Leave that to the philosophers. Jesus is saying pretty much the same thing to the Sadducees.

God is the God of the living, Jesus says in his answer. He also says that people are God’s children. He also says that God is the same God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This is not the answer the Sadducees seek, yet it is the answer to their question. We worship one God, who embraces us as God’s children, and is on the side of life. The question you are asking is silly. Even if it had an answer, it would be adiaphora.

It is easy to confuse things that are good and helpful with things that are necessary. We think sometimes that praying in a certain way makes God like us better. We think sometimes that if we are more observant, or more ethical, or more something, that God will be more inclined to do what we want God to do. But this is a little arrogant and it makes for misery. We are neither so bad nor so powerful. God is already on our side. We are only children of God, not God’s adviser, attorney, or supervisor. Or employee. Nor is God our client, needing gentle care and from time to time a little persuasion.

In the same way, the future of the church does not depend on our ability to do everything right. What we do in worship and the many other things we do for the church are good and helpful, but it is not our job to save the church. It is God’s church.

We think sometimes that the faithful life is a life of jumping through hoops. Theological hoops (that is, about doctrine), liturgical hoops (that is, about worship) or devotional hoops (that is, about our own personal practices). But those chores are not ones that God assigns us.

It is impossible to say exactly what God wants of us. But I suspect it has little to do with marriage laws and how widows greet their long-dead husbands. Or with how we dress, or how we worship, or how exactly we pray. Or even whether we believe the right thing.

The essence of the church, said Luther, was simple: the sharing of the Lord’s supper and the sharing of God’s word. The essence of faith is even simpler: love God with all your heart and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. Simple and hard. God is both simpler and more demanding than we sometimes imagine God to be.

We are good at worrying. We worry about all sorts of things. Are we acting right, thinking right, worshipping right, talking right. I once made a sign for my office years ago when I was in business that said “Everything Counts.” But it is not true. Everything does not count. There is adiaphora in life, too.

As Jesus tells the Sadducees, don’t sweat the small stuff. Don’t let it consume you. God is the God of the living, says Jesus. It takes away life to attend so much to the inessentials, in what we do or what we think others do. Choose life over death, says Moses, the man of the burning bush. That is the main thing. As for the rest, it doesn’t matter.

Reformed What?

Text: Romans 3:19-28 Other texts: Jeremiah 31:31-24, John 8:31-36

This Wednesday is Reformation Day. It is the 490th anniversary of the day that a young Catholic priest named Martin Luther was said to have nailed a list of 95 arguments, his 95 Theses, or propositions, to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. The event has become the symbol of the start of the the Reformation, a major change in the way the church does business. Lutherans especially celebrate this day and event and movement. And so that’s what we are doing this Sunday.

Lutherans can be pretty pompous when it comes to the Reformation. After all, it’s “Luther-ans,” right? Luther, the father of the Reformation, “Here I stand,” and all that. We are fortunately made humble when we realize that for lots of people, the name Martin Luther brings to mind Martin Luther King, not Martin Luther, priest. Luther was a pretty amazing guy and there is much to admire in him, but he would have hated to have a whole denomination named after him.

On this day we read the scripture passages we just heard. They are kind of the model passages for the theology of the Reformation. If the church were a business, these passages would be attached to every press release. Especially Romans, and especially the last verse, verse 28, “justified by faith apart from works proscribed by the law.” Which is like the theological motto of Protestant churches.

It used to be that Reformation Day was a day to bash the Roman Catholic church. The first sermon I heard from one of my Lutheran minister colleagues about ten years ago was his lament that, since Vatican II opened up the Roman church (for a while anyway), he had nothing bad to say about them, and therefore on Reformation Day he had nothing to say at all.

What he mourned was the chance to celebrate the Reformation by belittling other faiths and other ways of faithful thinking. Valuing the Reformation by devaluing something else. He used the motto “justified by grace” as a weapon, or a badge. It let him claim that this verse was somehow exclusively Protestant and exclusively Christian. He would say that the Roman church embraced justification by good works. And he would say that Jews embraced justification by adherence to the law, that is, the Torah.

But to say either of these things is to create straw men, and it misrepresents other ways that people love and worship God. Rome officially agrees with the Protestants on the theology, having written: “good works ...follow justification and are its fruits.” And the Torah is as much a gift as any other sign of God’s grace. It is arrogance to say that the law became worthless through the action of Christ. Jesus said did not come to dissolve the law, or so he said.

The passage in Jeremiah that we heard is often interpreted to mean that instead of a written code of rules, God will make things nice in our hearts. That instead of being guided by the rules we’ll be guided by our pure hearts, which will draw us to goodness somehow. But that is not what God says here. What God says in the words of Jeremiah is that God puts the law within the people, that God will write the law on their hearts. The law does not go away, its place is changed. Or rather, its place is expanded. The law is not erased, it is additionally written in our hearts. The passage in Jeremiah does not diminish the law. It brings it closer to God’s people.

Likewise Paul’s arguments about grace do not substitute grace for the law. He does not say here in Romans: Ok, all you law-types, you can go home now. The game is over. Forget that old stuff; grace is the new way.

What he says is that now, through Jesus, the whole world may be held accountable to God. Not just Jews, but gentiles, too. Pagans and heathens and Greeks. They are in this, too. Because it is not just Jews who can sin, we are all sinners. And who isn’t? There is no distinction, he says. You gentiles, Paul tells them, are not off the hook, just because you aren’t Jews. The Jews had the law to show them about God, but it now God has been disclosed to you folks, too. You know about God, too.

The good news is that God, the God of the Jews and, it turns out, your god, too, is with you on this. That’s what “justified” means; that God is with you on this. You and God are right with each other, in synch, sort of. Not because of who you are or in what religion you were raised or how good you have been, but because God simply wishes to. It is a gift. That’s what grace means; a gift. God is with you because God likes to give you a gift. Justified—OK with God—through the action of God’s grace, a gift. It is God’s doing.

Both Jesus and Luther were reformers, not replacers. Luther was a Catholic priest who hoped that the church would change. Jesus was a Jew and spoke to Jews about their actions and faith. Neither (though I really can’t speak for Jesus; I’m guessing here)—neither had in mind to create either a new faith or a new church.

When we celebrate Reformation Day, we focus on the theology of the Reformation. The theology is important. It is good to know that God is cheering for you even if you are not doing so well at being good. That God’s love for you is unconditional.

But what Luther was most excited about (and Jesus was excited about it, too), was the freeing of faith from the oppressive and corrupt institutions of faith. Luther made the Bible available to the language of the people, he encouraged priests to marry, he denied their power to be heavenly judges, and he opened the liturgy and the celebration of the Eucharist to all, not just a few special people.

Both Jesus and Luther spoke not for the priests, people in power who in both cases had used the law and works to control and exploit the people. Luther and Jesus spoke for the rest of us, the ordinary people. What marked Jesus and Luther, among other important things, was that they were on the side of the ordinary. Or maybe better to say, they celebrated the extraordinary that was in the ordinary.

Those in power rule by fear. And the most vicious and fierce power they have is the power to make people afraid for their lives. Or the lives of those they love. The fear of sin is the fear of death, the fear that sin leads to death. The notion that if you mess up, you are gone. You are done for. Don’t step out of line, buddy, or else.

People in power were afraid of Jesus. Not because they thought he was God—they didn’t. Jesus frightened those in power because Jesus was not afraid of them, even though he knew the consequences, and that Jesus taught others—us—to not be afraid either.

In the Gospel of John Jesus tells the crowd that they do not have to be slaves to sin. He is telling them, among other things, that they can make mistakes, even according to the rules of God. And that no one, no human being, can tell them otherwise, no priest, no church, no doctrine.

Sin boldly! Luther said. Not because Luther wanted people to sin. It wouldn’t matter—people sin regardless. But because Luther wanted people to act boldly without fear, to be free as Christians can be. To act, we ordinary people, in trust. That is what faith means: to trust. Knowing that we are justified by faith through God’s grace. Trusting Jesus that God is with us, no matter what. And that we are free.

On Praying

Text: Luke 18:1-8

It is not always clear what Jesus means to say when he tells a parable. But it sure is clear in this one that we just heard. This parable is about prayer.

You might hear other things in the parable. It might be about justice, and it might be about persistence in general. But to Luke, who is telling a story about Jesus telling a story, it is about prayer. Jesus told them a parable, it says, about their need to pray always and not lose heart.

And it is a parable, not an allegory (as you’re probably tired of hearing me say). That is, we can’t make the judge to be God and the widow to be us. They are both well-drawn characters: the judge is a sleazy scum-bag and the widow is brave and aggravating. They don’t stand for anyone in particular (in fact, the story starts out: there was some kind of judge in some kind of city).

The story is an example of Bible-logic, reasoning that was common then. It reasons from small to large. From less to more. If the judge, who was a jerk, responded with justice to the entreaties of the woman, how much more will God respond to our pleas for justice? “Listen to what the unjust judge (the lesser) says, and will not God (the greater) grant justice?” So it is a parable about prayer that contains an argument.

It is about prayer, but a particular kind (probably the most common kind). It is about prayer that asks for things, which in church jargon is called petitionary prayer (because we are bringing petitions to God). There are other kinds of prayer. A friend says there are three kinds of prayer: wow, thanks, and help. Petitionary prayer is the “help” kind. There are other kinds, too, especially the kind where we don’t yap away at all but try to stay quiet, listening for God to speak. So this parable is about praying for something we want. Which today I’ll call just “prayer.”

Prayer is a kind of conversation. In the parable, the widow and the judge have a conversation. They have a relationship, they engage one another and what one does is influenced by the other. Not all conversations (or relationships for that matter) go very far. They need to be powered. Three things power the conversation between the judge and the widow, and the same things power our prayers. They are hunger, humility, and hope. And I want to talk about each of these today.

First, hunger. The woman is hungry for justice to be done. There is no prayer (we are talking about petitionary prayer, remember)—there is no prayer of this kind without hunger. We come to prayer needing something. Something big and meaningful like reconciliation of a broken marriage or healing from disease or something small like finding a parking space or getting a paper in on time. Something in us wants something. Even something that is not for us: the end to war and violence, the eradication of poverty, a joy-filled life for a new-born child. We pray to God with the same motivating ache and longing that makes us turn to the pantry when we are hungry. When we pray, we admit we are hungry. There is no point in praying if all of our life is satisfactory and satisfying. If all is totally complete. When we pray, we admit we have longings, desires, and needs. All of us, of course, have those needs. Praying, we acknowledge that to be so.

Second, humility. The woman comes to the judge for justice. She cannot make things right by herself. She is powerless in the face of her adversary’s privilege. Powerless by herself. When we pray, we acknowledge that we are powerless by ourselves to deliver whatever it is we hunger for. We cannot fix what is broken, or feed what is starving, or set right what is out of kilter, by ourselves. When we pray, we admit that we need something, which is tough enough to admit. And then we pray that we cannot meet that need without some assistance from God. Just as there is no reason to pray if we are completely satisfied, there is no reason to pray if we are on top of things. If everything is pretty much under control, if we think all it needs is a tweak here or there, or if we think all it needs is for us to be a little smarter, more energetic, more focussed, better. Why pray if we are going to take care of things by ourselves sooner or later. But experience, if nothing else, teaches us that there is not much, if anything, we can control. Praying, we humble ourselves to say so.

Third, hope. The widow comes to the judge assuming that he is able to hand her justice. She comes in need, she comes asking for help. And she comes with hope that her petition can be granted. Prayer is the concrete expression of our conviction that things do not need to be as they are. When we pray for peace, we are declaring that war is not everlasting. When we pray for health, we are declaring that illness is reversible. When we pray for rescue, we are declaring that we can be freed. We do not pray for the impossible. They is no point. We do not pray out of hopelessness, there is no inspiration. (When we are nearly consumed by hopelessness, we pray for hope, a self-fulfilling prayer.) Prayer is refusing to concede that tomorrow is just today over and over again, that the way things are has to be the way they always will be. In that sense prayer is powerful imagination coupled with trust that through God the future is still open.

Prayer therefore is not so much an action as a stance. It is not some exercise or chore or transaction or duty. It is the way. It is the way we approach God and life. Though we from time to time find ourselves to be self-satisfied, self-important, or hopeless, we know that in those times we are off-center. Our center is hunger, humility, and hope.

In the parable, Luke says that Jesus is teaching the disciples to pray always. And one of the mottos or slogans of the New England Synod is “pray without ceasing.” These might mean to mutter prayers under your breath in every waking moment (people have even tried that). But praying always is not some kind of super-piety. To pray always, without ceasing, is to remain mindful of our center. We pray with God who feeds our hunger, who holds our lives better than we can, who creates our new future.

All Were Healed

Text: Luke 17:11-19

Martin Luther was a young catholic priest. He worked hard at being good. But he was tormented by his conviction that he would never be worthy of God. He was, after all, only human, just a sinner, an imperfect being. Yet he felt that scripture was calling him to be better, better even than anyone could ever be. He felt that scripture was condemning him.

He wrote at the time: I hated that word, “justice of God,” which, I had been taught to understand [as] that justice by which God punishes sinners and the unjust.

“I couldn't be sure that God was appeased by my [efforts]. I hated the just God who punishes sinners. I said, “Isn't it enough that we miserable sinners, lost for all eternity because of original sin, are oppressed by every kind of calamity? Why does God heap sorrow upon sorrow and threaten us with his justice and his wrath?”

He felt that way especially about the writings of the apostle Paul. Paul was a thorn in the side of Luther, and Paul’s writings made Luther miserable.

Looking back at Luther from a platform 500 years later, you might find Luther’s agony a little excessive. You might think: He is a little too riled up about this. Or maybe you might not. Maybe you feel condemned by the Bible, too. Maybe when you hear in some Bible story about someone messing up, you think that passage is about you. Maybe you hear a lot of “shoulds’ in the Bible.

Maybe when you hear today’s Gospel story about the lepers being cured, you think: Those ungrateful lepers (the nine who just walked away without a word of thanks to Jesus). Maybe you think: This passage is telling us that we should be grateful for God’s gifts. It is telling us that we should realize who it is who provides our lives and health. Maybe is telling us that we should be more faithful. Maybe it is telling us that faith rewards us by making us well, or worse, that if we are not well it is because we lack sufficient faith.

If you thought that, you would not be alone. Many readers have seen in this passage praise for the one Samaritan (who even more amazingly was an enemy of the Jews, Jesus’ people)—the Samaritan who turns back to Jesus in thanksgiving and condemnation for those who leave without so much as a howdy-do.

Luther, after much violent thought (“I was raging with a wild and disturbed conscience,” he later wrote), came to see things differently. “I saw the whole of Scripture in a different light. The work of God, that is, what God works in us; the power of God, by which he makes us powerful; the wisdom of God, by which he makes us wise; the strength of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God.” So maybe you are like the second Luther, and see in the story of the lepers not what the lepers do and do not do, but what God is doing.

Ten people went to Jesus looking to be transformed. They had leprosy. They were considered unclean, disgusting. They were forced to live at the edge of the village, not in it. And by law they had to cry out to all who passed near: Unclean, unclean. They cry out to Jesus, “have mercy on us.” Help us. They cry out to be transformed. To have a new life.

Jesus tells them to go show themselves to the priest. To let the priest see them. It is not that the priest has any healing powers. But the priest is the judge of who is clean and unclean. It would be the job of the priest not to make them clean, but to announce that they were.

Somewhere on the way between Jesus and the priest they were healed, made clean the text says. It is not clear where exactly all this happened. It was not clear, it seems, how this happened.

There were ten people cured, but only one man who seemed to notice. The Samaritan. That man’s life was transformed. When the text says he was made clean, it uses a word that is like the modern word “cathartic.” Some major thing had happened, some definitive break with the sorry past. Some refreshing view of a hopeful future. Recognizing his new life, he praises God and runs back to Jesus to thank him.

What of the others? We don’t have to think them to be particularly dense. There are lots of reasons to deny what’s in front of your own eyes. There are lots of reasons to deny transformation. You might not think that you are worthy enough. You might not think you are ready enough. You might think it unlikely and you don’t want to get your hopes up (what if they had come to the priest and he said, “nope, not quite, not really, not enough”). You might not welcome it, for transformation can be disruptive. Even though they asked to be healed, perhaps they held a stake in the familiar.

But the man sees. And his sight leads him to gratitude. And his gratitude leads him to faith. He has been healed, made well, says Jesus. He has a new life.

God gives the man three gifts. The gift of sight, the gift of gratitude, and the gift of faith. Unearned and unearnable gifts. To see God’s hand in our life. To be thankful for what God has given us and showed us. To trust God.

This man is the more fortunate of the ten others on account of these gifts. But he is not the better of them. They all are healed, grateful at the time or not. They all receive something for nothing. They all are transformed, like it or not. Or maybe: like it and not.

We who like to see people get what they deserve, we who respond well to “should” (you should, they should, I should), we who know there are no gains without pains, we hear in the story that Jesus is a little put out. Like, I cured all ten of you. I mean, nice to see you here, Mr. Foreign Samaritan, but where’s the other nine? What’s up with that?

But this story is not about us so much as it is about God. Not so much about how we mess up but about how much God gives us even so. If we think of the ungrateful nine, we imagine all that they might have done better. If we think of the grateful one, we think he might be a model for us doing better. But if we think of the gracious one, the healer, Jesus, we think only of our generous God. I don’t think Jesus is annoyed at the nine who walk away. I think he is amused. I think he looks on them with affection and understanding.

Jesus does not heal these lepers because Jesus wants something back. The Samaritan is not the model; he’s the gravy (if I can mix metaphors here). It is great that he comes back to thank Jesus, and I’m sure Jesus appreciates it, but his gratitude is not the point. It is a little extra (it is an extra gift for the man). The point is that Jesus heals all the ten who cry out to him from the side of the road.

Many people live their lives seeking ways to be criticized. It is weird but true. We look for “shoulds” and we respond to them. But of course as Luther knew, we never can do all we “should” do, so we are always a bit—or a lot—behind in time and results. But there is no need to walk in shame. As Luther realized and then publicized, there is one who does not expect accomplishment and gratitude, but gives them to us as gifts. One who prefers healing to judgment. One who, as Luther saw, judges us with more generosity than we judge ourselves.

Come All You People

Text: 2 Timothy 1:1-14 Other texts: Luke 17:5

Note: This is a short homily introducing a special combined worship of three churches that make up the Faith community.

I am grateful, my brothers and sisters, when I think of you.

So writes the author of the 2nd Letter to Timothy. Grateful for all the new followers of Jesus, grateful for the churches in different parts of the land, grateful that God had gathered them together, people of all different sorts.

Don’t you feel the same way? Aren’t you grateful that God has gathered us all together today, and has gathered these three congregations, these three communities of faith, into this church home?

Who would have thought it? In a time when Christians are as known for their bickering as their solidarity, known for exaggerating differences, known for even praying that their Christian enemies might be cursed, who would have thought we would gather here in common worship and affection for God and for one another, brothers and sisters?

Each of us comes here for reasons of his or her own, but all the reasons seem to amount in the end to “God brought me here.” We are called, the letter to Timothy says, not by our own works—that is, our own schemes of one thing or another—but according to God’s own purpose and grace. God’s grace, which either means God’s charisma, or God’s gift. You can think of it either way (or both), whichever feels true to you.

We have come to be fed by the word of God, by the sacraments, by prayer and song and silence. We have come, in the words of this epistle, to rekindle the gift of God that is within us. To feed that fire, that metabolism that keeps us moving toward God and to care for each other. God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, it says, but a spirit of power and of love and of steady mind.

We come, some of us, because we were raised in a certain tradition. We are here because, as the letter says, we are reminded of the faith of our grandmothers and mothers, who invited us to come to church with them, or made us come. But others come because once a friend invited us to a church, or someone we were courting. Or we passed by in front of the church and saw the sign and felt that this was the right time to check things out. Or we were alone or frightened and the church seemed safe, or safe enough.

No matter though. We are bound together now. What binds us together is a search to know God, to be with God and God with us. There is no reason why you or anyone has to be here. No one is making you come. (Maybe the Holy Spirit is). We are bound together by the seriousness of a quest, and in that quest there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, woman or man; we are all one in Chris Jesus. So says Paul. We want to be able to say, as the writer of this letter to Timothy says, that we know the one in whom we put our trust.

The gospel reading for today (from Luke, chapter 17) says this:

The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” The Lord replied, “If you had the faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.

It doesn’t take too much to be started off on the quest. Just a tiny amount of trust (which is another way to translate the word “faith”) just enough to get us going. And then we are off.

This epistle to Timothy is one of the three letters in the Bible called the Pastoral Epistles. That’s because they were written concerning pastors. But except for these few introductory remarks and a few prayers, you won’t hear too much from the pastors here today. The church is the people who show up. That means you. Today persons from each congregation will speak to us about their own experience with God, perhaps about their own quest. And perhaps how it is that of all the places they might be today, they are here, now, gathered into one community of faith.

Dishonest Wealth and the Children of Light

Text: Luke 16:1-13

The scripture passages we hear in the readings each week are chosen by a committee. A big committee, with representatives from the many denominations that use what is called the Revised Common Lectionary. The lectionary is a list of selections from the Old and New Testaments—the Hebrew and Greek portions of the Bible—and the psalms. The lectionary lists readings for three years, called imaginatively years A, B, and C. We are now in year C. In this book are all the readings for year C, and we have similar books for years A and B.

You might ask whether the lectionary readings cover the whole Bible. That would make sense in a way. After all, for Lutherans the Bible is the final source of authority. But if we did read the whole Bible in three years, we would have to allocate five times the amount of space in worship than we do, because (by my informal reckonings) the lectionary readings cover a little less than a fifth of the Bible. And it actually is smaller than that, because some readings are repeated.

There are two main reasons for a lectionary or list of readings. First, the list is supposed to contain a lot of the important readings, as judged by the committee. So we won’t miss them. And second, the list disciplines the preacher, who cannot just get up and say “Hi, here’s some interesting things that I was thinking about this week, and I’ve picked a few Bible verses to beef up my argument.” That is, we are supposed to start with the Bible.

The problem with a lectionary is that, if you don’t read the Bible on your own, you’ll miss 80% of the Bible even if you attend worship every week.

Often the lectionary readings simply reinforce things we already know. They are familiar passages, or they state the scriptural basis for some theological position, or they tell the central stories of Christianity that all Christians need to hear to keep in touch with Jesus. But some days I think the readings are chosen just to keep us honest, you and me, to keep us on our toes. And to remind us that there is some pretty weird stuff in the Bible. And that we should not discount it. Some days, and today is such a day.

The reading from the Gospel of Luke today is a parable. Parables are never straightforward. They come to things sort of sideways. They are designed to surprise you, to shake you up and get you thinking. The story of the Good Samaritan, for example, is surprising because a man in troubled is rescued by an unlikely helper. Or the parable of the Mustard Seed is surprising because Jesus says that the Kingdom of God is like this tiny seed.

Parables are not allegories. That is, things and people in them do not stand for other things. The father in the story of the Prodigal Son does not stand for God, though the way he welcomes his lost son might make us think of the relationship between God and sinners. Us.

The parable for today in Luke is certainly surprising. It is supposed to make you think. But maybe all it makes you think is: “Huh? What’s with this? What is going on here?” There are a lot of strange parts to it, and it raises a lot of questions. As one scholar said, a many “interpreters have struggled to make sense of this parable.” Parables like this one make pastors want to suggest a hymn sing in place of the sermon.

The parable tells a story of a steward—like the site manager or operations officer—who is accused of cheating his boss, who is rich. The boss fires him. But first, the steward cheats the boss some more in a clever scheme in order to gain favor with the boss’s debtors. The steward is called both dishonest (he’s a bad guy) and shrewd (he’s a good guy). But there is so much here we don’t know.

Like, for example, who calls the manager shrewd? In our translation it says “And the master commended the dishonest manager.” But the word for master and the word for lord (as in Lord Jesus) is the same in Greek. Could it be Jesus who is commending this guy? And if so, why? And if the master is, why is he praising the man who cheated him? And is the master telling the steward to make friends by dishonest wealth, or is Jesus telling the disciples to (which is how most scholars read it)? And why would he say that? Is this good advice for Christians?

Who are the children of light? Why aren’t they so shrewd? Is that good or bad? What are eternal homes (a phrase which appears nowhere else in the Bible)? Why should your handling of wicked wealth (and why are you messing with wicked wealth in the first place)—why should that affect your handling of true riches? What does Jesus mean by true riches anyway?

Many interpreters of this text try to answer all these questions in a sensible way. They try to make what looks like a broken puzzle fit together to make a nice picture. But I’m not sure it can be done. They have to trim the pieces to make it work. They have to add a little notion here and ignore a little word or two there. There is a lot we do not know in this parable.

But there are some things we do know.

We know that this parable sits with a bunch of others in this part of Luke, and that most of them have to do with the way things will be, are, or ought to be in God’s kingdom. We know that some of them have to do with money. We know that Luke thinks that possessions are a problem for those who profess to follow Jesus.

We know that there are some things this parable of the steward have in common with some of the others near it in Luke. This parable, and the parable of the man who has to build extra barns to hold his extra stuff, and a parable that we’ll hear next week about a poor man named Lazarus, all start out “there was a rich man.” The parable of the man with the barns, the parable of the Prodigal Son, and this parable all have a main character in trouble or crisis of some kind. And when they are in trouble, they all mutter, trying to figure out what to do. And they all talk to themselves and make a decision. “I will do this: I will build larger barns,” says one. “I will get up and go to my father,” says another. “I have decided what to do,” says the third. I, I, I. None of them turns to God.

You cannot serve God and wealth, Jesus says. Why all this attention to money? Because wealth is incredibly attractive. It is also incredibly distracting. The complications of wealth make it hard to manage, but they also make it interesting to manage. The problems that wealth presents are just hard enough to be intriguing but just easy enough so that very clever people—shrewd people, you might say—can solve them. Rich people like to solve them, and like people who like to solve them, l suppose like the steward who is commended, in my reading, by the boss he cheated.

The Bible is the story of God’s relationship with us. It is often complicated because our relationship with God is often complicated. The Bible has weird parts because we have weird parts.

You cannot serve two masters, Jesus says. But we in our lives feel like we have many masters, not just two. And we make not just one permanent decision about whom to serve, but many daily ones.

God draws us near. We long to be drawn near. But God is not the only thing pulling us. There are lots of distracting attractions. When we are in crisis, when we are not sure where to go, how to deal, what to do, to whom do we turn?