A Land of Two Stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jesus, the one, and the many

Text: Luke 15:1-10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Worth of It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pride was not made for humankind

Text: Luke 14:1, 7-14

I’d like to talk today about quantum mechanics and Ramadan and how they help us think about discipline and humility. Which is what Jesus talks about in this parable today in Luke. These four things are both familiar and odd to us. And that’s how it is with parables, too. When Jesus tells a parable, he uses familiar situations to present what are, to his listeners at least, odd conclusions.

So, for example, the familiar notion of a meal shared with friends and neighbors. You invite the people you like. If it is a formal meal, you also invite the people who count. If it is a very formal meal, you make sure that the people who count sit in the right spots. In a wedding, who sits with the bride and groom. Who with the parents. Who has to sit with all the old folks. Being at the head table was then and is now an honor to be valued and coveted. No one wants to sit at the last table.

But Jesus makes this odd by telling folks not to rush for table number one. To hold back, to be humble, to ask for less, to expect little. Why does he say that?

What is odd is that we mostly don’t find this parable to be odd. It is the kind of thing Jesus says all the time. You know, the last shall be first kind of stuff. The one who loses his or her life will save it. We are so accustomed to hearing this kind of talk from Jesus that it is not shocking. But it should be. Jesus intended it to be.

Partly what has happened is that we are no longer disturbed by what Jesus says. There is a little rule in our heads: Jesus is good and kind. We follow Jesus. We therefore approve of what Jesus says. Sometimes without paying too close attention. Or feeling under any obligation to do what he says. It doesn’t shock us because, you know, it is our Jesus. Doing his Jesus thing.

And partly what is happening in this story is that we modern western people have ambivalent feelings about social and financial inequality and stratification. We admire the poor but don’t want to be poor. We approve of the people who sit at the lowest place but we ourselves neither want to nor expect to sit there. People who are wealthy have too much power, money, and arrogance. But we would love to have that much ourselves. We want to be ordinary but special.

The role model for many is the underprivileged and passed over person who gets lucky or who is discovered and becomes famous and wealthy. A kind of American Idol or Slumdog Millionaire or Sarah Palin variant. We like ordinary people who become celebrities. So when we hear this parable, we think: right. The ordinary person who is assigned the lowest table is discovered by the host and brought forward to sit at the head table in a place of honor. It is the American dream, and right there in scripture.

One problem with this is that we know it hardly ever really happens. In the world, most poor people stay really poor. The last stay last and the first stay first. Or more so. It is a joke when Garrison Keillor says “all are above average” because we know that that is as socially unlikely as it is mathematically impossible. There is only room for one number one.

So if we want to sit at the top table, we had better go for it. Waiting around for someone, for the host, to see us languishing and to come invite us forward—it’s just not going to happen. We believe in competition. We think it is natural. We think it is inevitable. And we think it is admirable. We might resent those who in the banquet rush to be seated in the best spots. But at least we understand them and give them credit. As for those who sit meekly, who stand about, who accept less—they are pitiful. This parable of Jesus—it’s not realistic. That’s not how things work around here.

But it is how God works.

When we say that all are saints and sinners, when we say that God forgives us our sins, when we say that Jesus loves you, when we say we are all God’s children, we are obliterating the distinctions that normally seem so active and obvious. One of us does not have to crowd out another. It is like quantum mechanics, an equally unintuitive and odd way of thinking about the world that allows, if I understand it right, for many things to occupy the same spot at the same time. The advances of some of us do not undo the position of others. Someone else’s gain does not have to be matched by your loss.

It is not easy to believe this in our hearts. It seems unnatural. It goes against our fears. To not push forward is therefore a discipline. That is, it is something that we have to practice. It is a spiritual practice. Spiritual practices are things that turn out to be good for you to do but that are often difficult to do.

As you know, we are in the middle of Ramadan, for Muslims a month-long time of fasting and alms-giving or acts of charity. It is a spiritual discipline similar to what Christians used to practice and sometimes still practice during Lent. No one thinks it is fun to skip food and drink all day and few people think it is fun to give away money and time to others.

Disciplines like those of Ramadan and Lent are exercises in humility. In being humble. In doing exactly what Jesus talks about in this parable. Of standing back, not pushing up to the front. Of being little, of not trying to be so grand.

Krista Tibbet is a radio interviewer who gets people to speak about matters of faith, and usually about their own faith. In a recent interview with newly-converted young American Muslims, she asked about their experiences with the discipline of fasting and charity. What was remarkable was that they rarely spoke about the difficulty of the discipline. What they spoke about was their joy. The joy of being humble. They used words like: mindfulness, peace, surrender, trust, contentment, holiness.

This is what we seek as Christians and as humans. To be present in our surroundings and to others. To be at peace. To give up our worries to God. To know contentment. To feel blessed.

The benefits claimed of a competitive life, a competitive culture, are wealth and security and power. Are these what we really most want? Is this what we were made for? Is what we hope from life? Don’t we long instead for the blessings that seem to come with humility? As often, Jesus is not commanding us. He is making us an offer.

At the end of this parable, Jesus gives us some advice. He speaks to us as hosts this time, not as guests. Our roles are reversed from before, and we are doing the inviting. But as before, the scene is familiar and the conclusion odd. Invite the most unlikely and perhaps unlikeable people to your house for dinner. People you don’t want to see. Who maybe make you nervous. Whom you don’t want to be seen with, either. You will be blessed, says Jesus. The message is similar to the parable: taking pride in yourself, in this case because of your nice friends, is not what Jesus is talking about.

One of the suggested alternative readings for today is from Sirach, a book from the apocrypha. (These are books in some Bibles that Martin Luther said were not “equal to the Holy Scriptures, but are useful and good to read.”) The reading speaks about pride as the beginning of sin. And at the end, it says “Pride was not created for human beings, or violent anger for those born of women.” [We should put those words on a plaque and hang it in our houses.]

There is a lot of pride, anger, and general self-aggrandizement going around in the world. I cannot see this stuff fitting into the teachings of Jesus, who walked, after all, humbly to the cross. We are not designed for it. It does not suit us. It is making us ill, and it is making us crazy.

Jesus is a healer. He says odd things—like the blessings of being humble in an arrogant and self-centered world—he says odd things that shock the world. By this, he offers the world another way to be and think and live. By this, he offers a healing way.

Good Matters

Text: Luke 12:13-21
Other texts: Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14, 2:18-23

On the one hand: what is this guy’s problem? He has so much stuff that his barn is bursting. His garage is full of junk, power tools, and yard furniture. His house is full of art, books, and electronic gear. His barn is full of food from years of fortunate harvests. Rather than sending some to Goodwill, or putting it out on the street like good Cambridge people would do, or selling it on Craigslist or posting it on Freecycle, or sending it to the Food Bank, he thinks he’ll tear down his barn and build a bigger one. That way he can keep all that is his, safe and ready.

On the other hand: what is the problem with this guy? It is prudent to save for the future. It is always good to have a nest egg, something to fall back on. In the Bible, Joseph saved the Egyptians from starvation by storing excess grain, just as the man is doing, for years. You can’t depend on Social Security. Save what you make and put it into a retirement account. Don’t be a burden to your children.

There is no question that there is a problem here. There is no question that the man is supposed to be an example of something bad and wrong-headed. Even to Lutherans, who value planning and prudence, who are save-for-a-rainy day kind of people, the man seems a glutton and cold-hearted. Jesus uses him as an example of greediness, not thriftiness. Is it just a question of balance? If he had been a little more generous, would it have been okay? If seemed less gleeful, more humble, more thankful, would it have been okay? Is there no room, as someone asked, in God’s economy for building bigger barns? Or are these even the right questions to ask of this passage?

The narrator in the first reading from Ecclesiastes and the man with barns have some things in common. For one thing, they spend a lot of time talking to themselves. And for another, as a consequence, they spend a lot of time thinking about themselves.

And what they are thinking about and talking about is this: how should a person live in the face of certain death? How should a person live knowing that we are mortal and that our years are numbered (we just do not know what the number is)?

For the Teacher (the narrator) in Ecclesiastes, the answer is: why bother? Nothing we do lives beyond us, so in the end our work is trivial and meaningless. “It is an unhappy business that God has given to human beings to be busy with,” he says. It is a lot of chasing the wind. And whatever you gather, it is not yours to keep; it goes to fools and villains to squander or ruin. Or even to wise persons, who might still do the same. Or to anyone, who will enjoy the fruits that you so labored for. For the Teacher, mortality invalidates the days of our lives.

For the rich man with barns, the answer is: why not? The hour of our death is in the unknown future. We will not live forever, but we might live a long time more. We must be cautious that we will have enough to last. Though mortal, what matters is the life we are now living and that we are able to live it well.

Eat, drink, and be merry, says the rich man with barns. Celebrate life while you have it. But the Teacher says: you quoted that verse from Isaiah wrongly. It goes: eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. All we do is in vain.

We do not live forever. In almost every scheme of things, by almost every measure, our time is short. In the two millennia between us and Jesus, there have been about 100 generations. In that time, cities and nations and peoples have risen and fallen. All of human history spans an amount of time equal to 100th of 1 percent of the age of the dinosaurs. The universe is vast and old. In its lifetime planets, suns, and galaxies have come and gone. We are not much more than nothing at all.

And yet our actions matter. We are not alone. We are entwined with others in a way that Luke could never have guessed possible. Not only do we share language, culture, dreams with other people; not only do we share creaturely behaviors and desires and stories with other people; we share parts.We are beginning to realize that we are made up just as much—if not more—of other organisms, bacteria and virus, as we are of human cells. Our DNA contains pieces of ancient viruses. Our lives are part of the lives of the history, present, and future of this world.

On the larger scale of spirit and thought, what we do makes a difference. When Jesus tells the story of the man with barns, his audience knows that the man’s riches come at the expense of others who are poorer than he is. Our modern notion that a rising sea raises all boats—that wealth is elastic and indefinitely expandable—would have been thought ludicrous in the time of Jesus. Wealth was fixed and limited. Among the followers of Jesus, being rich was a form—even if culturally okay—being rich was a form of stealing.

The man with barns and the Teacher and we all share a vain myth. The myth is that our good legacy lives on and benefits the world and that our bad legacy dies with us, without fault to the world. The Teacher whines that the good he does is enjoyed by others. But he does not mourn—or even acknowledge—the evil he might do and the effects it might have after him. And the man with barns has not a clue.

For whatever reason—the economic doldrums, environmental disasters, the creation of nuclear waste that lasts longer than history, rafts of trash in the oceans, the destruction of species—whatever, we have begun to wonder about what we are leaving to our children. Not the riches of the Teacher and the man with barns, but with the stuff we have denied. Is progress real? We are suddenly not so sure. And if it is, can we control and sustain it? For the first time in a long time in this country, people say their children will have a harder time of it than they have had.

There is a symbiosis in Christianity—some call it a tension—between the individual and the community. For some, the point of Christianity is personal piety. A relationship one on one with God. For others, the point is sanctification, living a holy life. And for still others, the point is to guide the community of the world into being more like the kingdom of God. Thus we have monasteries and missions and churches and soup kitchens. Thus: spirit, joy, reverence, and service—the motto of this congregation. Christians have always known that reverence leads to service. And the other way around, too. Individual lives of faith are nurtured in and nurture the community of humans.

Christians are not like the Teacher or the man with barns. We do not embrace any kind of notion that we are alone in the world. Or that we can act as if we were, leaving it to some other persons or some other force, some invisible hand, to correct imbalances or inequities. Or to some future technologies to make up for our dispassion.

We as Christians do not embrace any kind of notion that what we do does not matter. It is true that we are all saints and sinners both. And it is true that we depend on the grace of God to smooth the rough edges of our sins. But these two theological foundations of our faith do not let us off the hook. We cannot say that God will fix things all up, so why should we. Nor can we say that God knows all things, so what difference does it make.

We follow Jesus, who spent a lot of time telling people how to live. Telling us how to be good. It matters that we be good.

Praying Shamelessly

Text: Luke 11:1-13

This is not a cat-and-mouse, hide-and-seek game we're in.* So says Jesus in Luke, as he helps his disciples understand the prayer he just taught them. This is not a little formal dance we go through with God. Prayer is not a contrivance, some convoluted religious contraption designed to deliver effective requests to heaven. There is not a special way to pray. Just as there is no special way to have a conversation. There are some models for prayer, just as there are some models for conversation. But the models for prayer, just as the models for conversation, are starter kits, ice breakers, and forms of art.

A friend tells me he sits and talks “to the man upstairs.” Maybe that is how you think of prayer, too. It is a nice way to describe a relationship we might have with God. Respectful, direct, and expecting something. There is not need in our prayer to beat around the bush, to begin with elaborate preambles, to apologize ahead of time for bothering God, as we sometimes do. “If you have a moment, God.” God always has a moment. When we pray to the one upstairs, we can expect that God is listening, paying attention to what we have to say in our words and in our hearts, taking an active role in the conversation.

Master, teach us to pray, the disciples ask. The disciples have seen Jesus pray. He prays a lot in Luke. In the desert, at night, before he feeds a crowd, near his death. In Luke (and in Acts, the other book that Luke wrote), prayer is the first Christian practice. The community of the followers of Jesus is a community of people who pray.

Maybe “ask” is too weak a word for what the disciples do. They seem to have an urgent need to pray. Their request is immediate and demanding. Teach us to pray. We need to pray. They are not really wondering how to pray, in what way, what stance or attitude to assume (and if so, Jesus does not really tell them). They need to pray. Jesus gives them a prayer.

They are direct. Jesus is direct. When you pray, say this. And what they are to say, talking to the one upstairs, is direct.

This foundation in Luke to the Lord’s Prayer is short and straightforward. So is the similar one in Matthew. You may find the words from our usual Bible more familiar than the ones we read this morning:

“Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. And do not bring us to the time of trial.”

The prayer starts with a short salutation, a sort of respectful: “hello, how are you?” It identifies the person to whom we are speaking. We call that person “father.” I’ll talk some more about that at the end. Partly, this salutation is just polite. When you speak to someone, you get their attention first. Partly it clears up in our minds that person to whom this prayer is addressed. Not some vague deity, but the particular creator of the universe. A personality, so to speak. God, even if not the gray-haired old man in a white robe, is an entity, a person with whom we can talk. Who has a name. The one upstairs. God, I’m talking to you. It reminds both of us.

But God is more than a person. God is special somehow. Holy, formally meaning set apart. But more to the point, uncorrupted by the ways and things of the world. God is not just like a human, only more so, only bigger, longer lived, and more powerful. But God is actively interested in humans, not just cosmic, essential, and life-giving. God up there, but not just up there.

After this introduction, the prayer goes immediately into four petitions, four things we need. These sentences are demanding, pushy even, abrupt. Four imperatives: lead us, feed us, forgive us, save us. There is no begging, no “please,” no argument. There is no qualification, no “if it be your will.” (That part goes without saying. It is not our job to give God permission. And besides, Jesus seems to be telling us that it will be God’s will anyway.)

God the creator wishes to provide for creation. We get confused: we ask God to lead us rightly. We get hungry, we are dependent: we ask God to feed us every day. We do bad and stupid things: we ask God to let us off the hook. We live in a scary and demanding world: we ask God to protect us from evil circumstances. We are human. We get physically, mentally, and emotionally troubled. Jesus says to pray: God, you are God. We could use some help down here.

There are other kinds of prayer. Thanksgiving, for example, or praise. But this one, the prayer Jesus teaches his disciples, is a prayer for help. We are taught by Jesus to pray for what we want. Not to pray for something we think God wants, not to pray for polite things only, but things we actually want. Things that matter to us in the moment. I’m starving, please feed me. I’m confused, please show me what to do next. I feel like an idiot, please forgive me. I’m scared, please keep me safe.

Later, Jesus tells a story about an inhospitable friend. This story is an elaboration of the prayer he just taught his disciples. It is kind of a case study. One of the points of the story is that we can be persistent in prayer. That we can bother God about what we want. That it is OK.

A better word, though, than persistent, is shameless. We can pray and pray and pray shamelessly. We can ask for whatever we want shamelessly. This is the kind of God we pray to. In the first reading, Abraham negotiates with God to save Sodom. Abraham presents his argument, God agrees. Abraham presses his point, God gives ground. Abraham pushes beyond all civility. God relents. Abraham is shameless. He is not ashamed to speak to God this way, he is not ashamed to pray for the city, he is not ashamed to ask for more. Abraham knows his God. God expects shameless prayer.

The disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray. What Jesus teaches them, though, is what God is like. What kind of God they pray to. God is like this: God encourages prayer. God enjoys a good argument. God listens to people. God is interested in the day to day. You don’t have to do anything special to pray to God. God is, we might say, interactive.

“Here’s what I’m saying,” the reading says. I’m saying that though there are fathers who might torment their children, that’s not like God. Though there are fathers whom you have to approach cautiously, that’s not like God. Though there are fathers from whom you can ask only certain things, that’s not like God. God is like a father whom you can approach without fear, with words uncensored and raw, from whom you can demand much, and from whom you can expect much.

Not everybody thinks that God is like that. But Christians are a group of people who do. It is significant that in this prayer the people all pray together. Give us, forgive us, deliver us.

When we say this prayer in worship here, we acknowledge that we do so confidently and that we do in solidarity with the whole family of the followers of Jesus in every time and place. This prayer does more than give us words to recite. It defines what God is for us and what God is like for us. And it defines us. We are the ones who pray this way. It is what Jesus taught us to do.

*Reading today from The Message version of the Bible.

Distracted from Justice

Text: Luke 10:38-42
Other texts: Amos 8:4-7

All of us get distracted from time to time. It is our human nature. People are designed to focus intently on one thing, but still let other things grab their attention. That mixture of single-mindedness and sensitivity to events is what makes us able to do complicated human things like drive a car or run a company or be a parent.

Martha is distracted. The narrator and Jesus both say it. She succumbs to distraction, a word that means to draw away from. It is as if she cannot help herself, as if there were two forces working on her: her love for Jesus and her desire to be with him; and her love for Jesus and her desire to feed and care for him, to offer him hospitality. Both Mary and Martha are distracted: pulled one way or the other, succumbing to one or the other love. Martha is distracted in a way that seems obvious, but Mary is distracted, too, called away from serving Jesus by her longing to be with him in this very moment.

The comment Jesus makes to Martha is often interpreted as judging her. Making a judgment about her choices (as, we sometimes, judge her character). But there is no judgment here. Jesus, is not telling Martha (or Mary, either) what to do. He is merely telling them what they are doing. Jesus’ comments, as they often are, are descriptive, not proscriptive.

This means that the purpose of this passage is not to place Mary and Martha in opposition to each other. The situation in the story is particular. Jesus was a friend of the household (at least we think so from John’s gospel, and it seems so here, too). In this story, it is Mary who has chosen the better part. But you can imagine that there were other times when the three friends met, and that in some of those times Martha chooses the better part, whatever that happens to be.

It also means that Jesus is not making a general comment about how one should live one’s life. This is not about how the contemplative life is better than a life of action, or a life of learning is better than a life of industry, or that a life of devotion is better than a life of service. Jesus is not saying that we should all be more mindful (though that might be a good idea). Jesus, at least here, is not saying we should be anything at all. There is no “should” in this passage.

What happens in the story is that Martha approaches Jesus and demands that he do something about her sister Mary. This is extremely odd. Martha and Mary are hosts. It was not good form then—and is not good form today—for the hosts to ask a guest to get involved with conflicts among them. It is a sort of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” moment. That Martha does pester Jesus is significant.

What does Martha want? Does she want Jesus to boss Mary around: tell Mary to get in there in the kitchen with her sister? Not likely. Does she want Mary to stand up and leave Jesus alone in the living room? Not likely that, either. If she were the king of the world, what would she have happen?

What Martha wants is justice. She sees injustice in the situation. She pesters Jesus because Jesus is a person of justice. Not that Jesus is just, though that may be so, but that justice flows from Jesus. The provider of justice, in the world of Mary and Martha, is God. Mary turns to Jesus not because he is her friend, and in spite of the fact that he is her guest at the moment, but because she recognizes and appeals to the divine in Jesus.

The prophet Amos, who provided us with today’s first reading, is known for his defense and definition of justice. It is in Amos that God calls on the world: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” And today, he gives examples of injustice. Cheating the poor (giving them smaller containers and charging them more); taking advantage of the fact that they need food so desperately that the merchants can sell them grain cut with the sweepings; making them slaves and servants and indentured employees because they have so little. You trample on the needy and bring ruin to the poor, the prophet says.

Justice is not making everything the same. It is not an even allocation of resources. And it is not giving everyone the same chance. Some people need more help than others. Some people can do more with what they are given. A just distribution of food is not one in which everyone gets the same bag of groceries. It is one in which no one goes hungry. Equality and fairness are not the same as justice. In a just system, even if all do not have the same, no one goes wanting. If some do, even if all have the same, the system is unjust.

And justice is not the same as revenge or redress. A just system is not one that counters one evil with another. Two wrongs don’t make a right, children rightly say. Justice is not served when one pain is inflicted to compensate another. The balance scales we use to symbolize justice are there to remind us that a thumb on the scale is injustice. They do not encourage us in retribution to harm others who harm us.

To whom do we turn to see justice done? If to ourselves, the goal is to balance sorrow against sorrow. Doing justice is to make sure that all suffer equally. Justice is done if you pay for your crime. Justice is done when your hurt matches mine.

But if we turn to God’s way of justice, the goal is to heal the hurt. To restore what is broken. The goal of justice is in the end to restore humanity to Eden. Justice is done when none suffer and all have plenty.

The deeds listed by Amos directly cause suffering and deprivation. The prophet is rightly angered by the merchants and wants them punished, but justice will be restored only when the people have food and strength and peace.

When we think about what we do, as individuals and in groups, and if we hear God’s call to be just, then we have to ask: does this hurt or heal? Does this heal or does this hurt? Does this bring us closer to Eden or extend our exile from it?

This is not easy. It seems complicated. And we are easily distracted by ourselves and our own hurts. Jesus, can’t you do something about Mary? Don’t you care about me? It is not fair. Like Mary and Martha, we are pulled away from God by our concerns.

It is not easy because doing justice is not a political activity. We do not do justice because it is better practically, though I’d say it is. We do justice because we belong to God. Doing justice is an expression of faith. It comes from our faith. Justice is not an act of expediency but an act of devotion. We try to act justly—that is, to heal people—because we love God. We work to act justly because God tells us to. And because we are God’s, we listen.