You Don't Miss the Water Until the Well Runs Dry

Text: Isaiah 64:1-9

Advent, as you’ve heard, is a time for reflection. It begins as we ponder where we are in our lives and in the scheme of things. It is in that way like Lent. It starts that way, in any case. But though the church knows that all of Advent is supposed to be time of preparation, it cannot resist getting excited toward the end, as we approach Christmas. It is not surprising. As we think about what was, we naturally wonder what will be and how it will be different. At the beginning is now. At the end is Christmas. Advent is a fast ride from sober reflection to the birth of Jesus, the incarnation of God, Emmanuel, meaning God is with us.

Emmanuel—God with us—is how it ends. Hooray for that. But that is not how things start. It is great to celebrate God’s presence. But sometimes God does not seem present at all. Sometimes God seems far away. Or vague. Or invisible. Or hard of hearing. Sometimes we feel alone. A friend of mine, who is going through a rough patch these days, says it feels like God is here, but a couple of states away. Like a friend who moved to the other coast. Or maybe it was you who moved.

The passage we heard from Isaiah this morning is called a lament. Laments are a proclamation about pain being suffered combined with a call for God’s intervention. Things are not good right now, God, and we’d wish you would do something about it. Laments are common in the psalms, which is one reason they are so appealing to people in daily life. A good chunk of many people’s lives is enduring pain (physical, emotional, or psychic) and a deep wish that God would come fix things soon.

It is this situation that prompts Mark to include this “end of the world” speech of Jesus. It speaks about suffering now (Israel was occupied by the Romans and the people oppressed) and suffering yet to come (about which Jesus has just told his disciples), but with the assurance that God will come soon (before this generation passes away).

Isaiah talks about the same thing, but usefully also talks about how hard it is to wait on God when you are in trouble, and the thoughts that you might have as you are cooling your heels hopefully.

This passage in Isaiah was written in a time that was supposed to be great, but wasn’t. All of Isaiah covers a period of about two hundred years, during which the Israelites are taken out of their land into exile. But by the end of the book, they are back home, hoping that all will be restored to the good old days when Israel was strong and righteous. But it seems it is not happening. Things are not working out. The prophet calls out to God. Complaining, explaining, and seeking God’s help. As with someone whose relationship is in trouble, his remarks reveal conflicting and powerful emotions. They go like this: you (God) were great. But now we are not so sure. You got angry. Ok, we messed up a little. But it is your fault; you made us do it, or at least let us.

The prophet starts by remembering how great God was. How powerful and good. How awesome. How God did surprising things. The presence of God is revealed to us, sometimes in astonishing and sudden ways, and sometimes we are overwhelmed. We turn our hearts and attention to God. No eye has seen any God besides you, Isaiah says.

Yet now, for some reason, we are estranged, Isaiah says. You are angry, God. You must be, since nothing is turning out right. Where are you? Where are the golden days, the sweet days? Where is the God in whom we put our hopes and trust?

Now it is true, admits Isaiah, that we maybe had something to do with this situation. We sinned. Against others and against you. We did stuff that we knew was not good and that would hurt you. We are a little ashamed, he says.

But really, God, he goes on to say, it is all your fault. Because you hid yourself, Isaiah says, we transgressed. We cannot be good without you. Our goodness comes from you. You left us in the lurch, in the muck by ourselves. We are lost without you, and you did not come to save us.

Yet Isaiah does not despair, does not give up on God, resigned to live alone, without God. Rather, he asks that the relationship between God and people be restored. Do not remember our sins, he pleads. Can we start again?

We are joined to God not by our goodness, and we are estranged from God not by our faults. We are joined to God not by what we do but by who we are. We are God’s creatures. God is the potter, Isaiah says, and we are the clay. We bear the mark of God’s hands, and our form is the result of the imagination of God. Our longing for God to be near, and the feeling at times that God is not, is a result of our connection to God, even when it feels like God lives in some other part of the country.

There is for sure a wish in these passage for God to come and fix things. My friend I mentioned earlier would of course like to have all the bad things in his life repaired. But he does not expect that to happen, really. That is not what bothers him. What worries and saddens him is that he feels alone, that God is not there with him, that God is far away. The fixing, though needed and welcome, is superficial. He wants God back.

There is a deeper longing to feel God near us. To be made whole by God’s presence. We are all God’s people, Isaiah says. God is our being. In Advent we, along with Isaiah, recall our past relationship with God, and wonder about the present, and look with hope to the future for Emmanuel, God with us.

In Our Time

Text: Matthew 25:31-46

There are four names for this Sunday. It perhaps is a sign of confusion in the church about the nature of Jesus. Or perhaps more true to say that it is a sign of the many natures of Jesus.

First, today is the last day of Pentecost, the last day of the church year, and the end of the days of ordinary time in the church calendar. It is the day we turn our churchly thoughts to special seasons of prayerful reflection, like Advent, and of celebration, like Christmas.

Today is also called Christ the King Sunday, always this last Pentecost Sunday. This man Jesus who has been living with us and teaching us in sermons and in parables all summer long, is revealed today to be one with the king of the universe.

Today is also called the Realm of Christ Sunday. Jesus brings a new world, a new way of being, to this ordinary world of joy and suffering.

And today is also called Judgment Sunday, reflecting the scene just painted for us by Matthew, in which distinctions are made and actions judged.

This story in Matthew is a parable. It, like the others that precede it in the Gospel, teaches us about what it means to follow Jesus. But it is no ordinary parable. It is the last parable in Matthew, and these words are the last public teachings of Jesus before he goes to his death. In that sense, they sum up or at least add an exclamation point to the stories in Matthew of Jesus’ ministry. It is as if Jesus were saying to his disciples—and as always therefore to us as well—as if Jesus were saying: if you remember none of what I’ve told you, at least remember this. Remember this story.

The different names of the days of this Sunday reflect different interpretations of the parable.

If it is the day of the king, then we have to ask: what kind of king is Jesus? If you are any other king or ruler, the answer is that Jesus is a scary kind of king. Jesus preached about sovereignty that overrode national and ethnic sovereignty. People’s loyalty to God overrode their loyalty to others, and their obedience was to God before others. To God, and not to other kings, or institutions, or even to family. There are many things that demand our loyalty and obedience, but if we honor Christ as king, then those other things are impostors. Charlatan leaders. On this day especially, we reject them. They are not the boss of you. Christ is.

If it is the day of the Realm of Christ, then we have to ask: what kind of world would it be if Jesus were the ruler of it? It would be the kind of world that Mary sings about when she hears that she will be the mother of Jesus. Who expects that her child would scatter the proud in their self-centeredness, remove the mighty from their seats of power, exalt the humble, fill the hungry with good things and send the rich empty away. Jesus preached about changing the relationship between the first and the last, making what was up and down to be side by side. This is the Jesus who was so joined to the hungry, the alien, the homeless, and the prisoner that what is done to them is done to him. And that to cause suffering in them is to cause God to suffer. In the realm of Christ, the injustices that we take for granted and as inevitable, are not. When Jesus teaches us to pray for the kingdom—the realm—of God to come, this is what he teaches.

And if this is Judgment Sunday, then we have to ask: how are we doing? Not how will we make out at the end of time or at the end of our own individual times, but how is the world doing right now? How are things going in regards to the bringing about the the realm of Christ? This passage—for all the inspiration it brings to our good hearts—this passage is a judgment. It is a critique. Here is the world as it might be, Jesus seems to be saying. And then asks, how is the world as it is now?

Imagine a world in which there was plenty of food, but some had none and others had much more than they could eat. Imagine a world in which there were medicines to heal people, but some people could not get them. Imagine a world in which people were put into prisons far away and then forgotten. Imagine a world in which aliens were despised. Imagine a world in which some people had too little clothing, in which some people had no shelter. It is, sadly, not hard to imagine. Just as you did not do it to these, you did not do it to me, taught Jesus. As you denied these, so you denied me, he taught.

Where in time is this story in Matthew? On the one hand, it is a story, a teaching, told by Jesus in his time. It is about some other time, in the future for the disciples, but no one knows how far. On the other hand, it is a story in the present of the disciples. It is about the time they are living right now. It tells them, through a story about the future, about how the world is judged now. And in that sense, it teaches them how the world should be in the present. Teaches us.

This is a parable, not a prophecy. It is designed to make us think about what is going on and our role in it. We are right to judge ourselves. Unlike the sheep and the goats in the story, who do not know what God expects of them, we do know. We have the benefit of hearing this story. We know better. As the sheep and goats were, we will not know who we are. But we will know what we do and do not do. When we judge ourselves, our world, we cannot claim to have been ignorant.

There are two sets of criteria given by the man who sits on the throne. In one, the righteous are commended for feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, visiting the prisoner. In the other, the cursed are condemned for doing nothing. It is hard, practically impossible, to always be good. It is harder, willfully impossible, to never be. We are commended for sometimes righting injustice. We are condemned for always refusing to.

This parable in Matthew is not about salvation. It is not, as some fear, about good works earning God’s respect. It is about sanctification—a churchy jargon word that means “being good, doing good.” Our faith, and the love of God unconditionally given, is supposed to guide us to living good lives. For followers of Jesus, his words and teachings and actions tell us how.

These words in Matthew chapter 25 are the last public teaching of Jesus. The first public teaching, starting in chapter 5, is the sermon on the mount. The sermon is as surprising as is the parable of Christ the King. Do not resist an evil-doer. Love your enemy. Give to everyone who begs from you.

The sermon on the mount and the parable of the king are like bookends, like the introduction and conclusion, of a treatise not only on the nature of Jesus. Not only on who Jesus is. But also instruction—surprising instruction—about who, as followers of Jesus, we are to be.

Re-forming the church

Text: Jeremiah 31:31-34, Romans 3:19-28
Reformation Sunday

It is fitting that we welcome new members to Faith on this day, Reformation Sunday. For Reformation Day—which is tomorrow, always on Halloween—is a celebration of a particular event of history, theology, and community. We who sit here today inherit the legacy of that event, when the church asked itself: What is the church, anyway, and what should it be?

This is not a new question. But the urgency of finding an answer to that question comes and goes. It has only been recently become urgent again. We are in a strange and changing time now in many ways, and certainly so in the ways of being church. It is an echo of the Reformation 500 years ago, when something was happening—no one quite knew what—with society, with politics, with transportation and commerce and communication, even with the weather (the world was emerging from a centuries long cold spell).

When anyone comes to a church, they come to at least three places at once. An historical place, a theological place, and a community.

First, we come to a long spiritual history.

This is Faith Lutheran Church in Cambridge. We share this church with others in this moment, and also with others of the past (and of the future). This church—as you have heard me say perhaps too often—is you. There is no church you come to that exists without you. And yet, Faith today is continuous with Faith of the recent and long past. Others have shared this space. We hear their voices and see the work of their hands. We sit in the pews that some carved, and we imagine their prayers rising up through the same dark peaked ceiling.

This is a Lutheran church in America, started as an immigrant church. The church in the U.S. is separate from yet part of the worldwide assembly of Lutherans.

And Lutherans everywhere are part of the Protestant tradition that includes many other denominations. Lutherans like to think of themselves as the founders of Protestantism, and that is partly so, but there were many voices of protest besides those of Luther and his buddies. And Luther himself stood on the shoulders of other brave protestors before him.

Protestants are Christians. There are other Christian churches and people who follow Jesus Christ. We think of the Roman church, but Catholics and Protestants are not the only brothers and sisters in the Christian family. And the Christian family is part of the extended family of the people of the book, which includes our cousins Jews and Muslims.

And we come to a history of ongoing reformation.

We celebrate the Reformation today. We call it The Reformation, as if there were only one. But the history of the relationship between people and God is marked by reforms. Jeremiah, the prophet who spoke to us in the first reading, lived in a time of turmoil and doubt. Defeated, occupied, and exiled, the Israelites wondered how they should consider the covenant with God: God is their God, they are God’s people. Was that still true? Had God abandoned them? Was the deal still on? And if so, how could they continue to know God?

Through the prophet Jeremiah, God promises a new covenant. But what is new is not the law but the way the law is carried. A new form of remembering and teaching it. I will put the law within them, said God. It was the same guidance made by the same God, but conveyed in a new way.

The line of our spiritual heritage twists and turns through reformers from long before Jeremiah to long after Luther. And including in our case Jesus, who like all reformers did not consider himself to be radical (I come not to abolish the law, he said). The reform of the church is always a call to repent, meaning to turn back to the basics of our relationship with God. A call to restore the trust and love and joy that comes from knowing God and knowing that we are known by God.

In doing so, reformers seem radical because the current state of affairs has become hateful and unbearable. They cannot help saying so, which makes them unpopular with some who like things the way they are. But the reformers do not intend to condemn the world as it is (I’ve come, said Jesus, not to condemn the world but to save it). Rather, they try to restate what we all knew about God all along, but had lost the words and the ways to remind us.

Second, we come to a theology of grace.

Central to the teachings of Luther, and of the Apostle Paul, and of Jesus as we understand him, and of Jeremiah and the prophets, grace is the essence of the God we worship. The notion of grace permeates the entire Bible. I forgive their iniquity, says God in Jeremiah, and remember their sin no more. God forgives us no matter what. There is nothing we can do that God will not forgive us for.

Lutherans are especially adamant about this, but it is a matter of degree, not principle. Neither Paul nor Luther invented this idea, though they did proclaim it. God is a God of constant and unremitting forgiveness. There is nothing we can do to lose God’s love. The flip side of this is there is nothing we need to do to gain it. No special action, thought, belief, or attitude. We already have it. It is God’s to give, not ours to earn. A corollary is that God’s grace applies to all people, not just us.

Which is a good thing, because Luther reminded us that we are both saints and sinners at the same time. We are generous and sour, kind and selfish, compassionate and mean. What is in us is in others; what is in others is in us. We are disallowed, as Paul writes, to boast.

And, finally, we come to a community of others.

Unlike in other times, no one is culturally required to come to church. We are here in this church because, as we pray, we hope to both be nourished here and to nourish this church. The word for church comes from a word that means called out to assemble. We are called to be here, and we are called to come out of our houses and our jobs and our own private places to assemble with other people also called. We are religious as well as spiritual. We worship together humbly, support each other with intentional respect, companions on the same quest, discovering in each other similar doubts and hopes. We share worries and joys together.

We celebrate the Reformation not because it was something new. It was not. Reformation is a habit of the church. And not because it was unexpected. The forces that led to it had been building for over a century. And not because it was radical. Luther was a Roman Catholic monk who repeatedly defended the church while attacking the way it acted.

We celebrate the Reformation because it reaffirmed that nature of the church as a work in progress. Not one church perfect for all in all times, but an adaptive and vital church that constantly listens to and returns to God.

We come here to this place that is tied to a history of other people seeking to know God; sharing a pretty well developed theology of creation, grace, and God’s presence among us; and formed into a familiar community. That tells us perhaps what the church is, but it tells us little about what it will be.

Our church partners (the Presbyterians, for example), speak of the church as reformed and always reforming. That is both a recognition that the church is always forming itself anew (not only in the official Reformation) and that the church must continue—and will continue to—change. It is easy for us to drift into patterns that seem so comfortable that we think they must be godly. We can forget that God continues to work in the life of the world. We then need prophetic voices then to help us rediscover God.

On this Reformation Sunday we can celebrate that ours is no doubt a time of reformation. We are in a time of disturbance and uncertainty. What will the church be like in our lifetimes? God only knows. It will not be the same as it was or is today. By those who are called to assemble, and with God’s help and guidance, the church will be reformed.

Thanks be to God.

Possible Kingdom

Text: Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18
Other texts: Matthew 22:32-46

If there were a mission statement of this church, which there is not, we could do worse than borrow the answer Jesus gives to the Pharisees when they ask about the law. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. And love your neighbor as yourself. After all, this is the trunk on which hang all the branches of the law and prophets. It is a summary description of the way to a holy and good life, a way to which Jesus subscribed. In this summary, Jesus combines two essential passages and ideas in the Bible from Deuteronomy and Leviticus (which we heard today).

On the pledge cards that are in your bulletin today are three pictures. (They are supposed to represent worship, fellowship, and service.) One of them shows this room, called formally the nave, informally the sanctuary. But it shows it backward, so to speak. It is the way I, standing up here, usually see this space. It is also shows the threshold to this room. There is a doorway. It is bidirectional. We come in to worship together and we go out to serve the world through our daily lives and actions. It marks the two parts of our lives with God. Sanctuary, a place set apart, a place of rest and worship, a sacred place. And mission, our lives in the world, a place of action, mercy, and kindness, another kind of sacred place. Both are a part of a holy life, both subjects of the law about which Jesus speaks.

It is common, and unfortunately especially so by Lutherans, to portray the law as legalistic and nit-picky. But it is a mistake to do so. The laws—the commands and guidance given by God via Moses to the Israelites—are a means of grace. They seek, in the large, to order the universe. To maintain harmony within creation and between people. They are a way—as there are in all faiths—a way of right action. And a way of reminding us that the world was both created by God and that God is here with us in it. They teach us to be holy because, as it says, God is holy. Be holy, says God, because I am.

The law has two approaches to doing this. One approach is interested in purity. Keeping things separate, the enforcement of boundaries, the prevention of pollution, all of which seek to keep the channel clear. To keep us on message. But the other approach—and the subject of today’s reading in Leviticus—is the opposite. It is interested in breaking through or ignoring the boundaries because of the need to do what someone called the “messy, disruptive ethical obligations … to set wrongs right.” What it takes to take care of our neighbor, even if our neighbor is not one of us, is outside of our walls. Even if a stranger, an alien, even if our enemy. To be just and kind and merciful to others.

To love God with all your heart, soul, and mind is first of all to love God with all yourself. Not just your prayerful self, or your generous self, or your good-natured self. Not just your intellectual, clear-thinking or believing self. But with your angry self, your selfish self, your mixed up self. Not just with your self that desires to be good but the self that would rather not. You cannot therefore love God by feeling good about God. It is not about your feelings, which you cannot control, but about your actions, which you can. This commandment does not ask us to like God—although we may—but to be loyal to God. To do what God says, to listen for God, and to put God ahead of all the other things that call us.

The command to love our neighbor works the same way. It calls on us to love other people with the same impartiality as we love God. We are not perfect, but since we know our own motives and inner good will, we give ourselves the benefit of the doubt. To love our imperfect neighbors is to extend the same benefit to all others. Loving your neighbor as yourself means to put your neighbor ahead of all the other things that you might otherwise like to do in regard to your neighbor. This is unlike enlightened self-interest. It does not say that loving ourselves leads in the end to good things for our neighbors. It is the needs of the neighbor that call us first; whether it benefits us is not the main point of this commandment. This command puts the burden of care and justice on us, not on some other force or system or people.

It also does not ask either us or our neighbor to be good, or likable, or admirable. Remember the parable of the Good Samaritan. We can like our neighbor, or be afraid of our neighbor, or be disgusted by our neighbor. It is all the same. Partly this is because we are all made in God’s image, even people we despise. Partly it is because we realize that we could be them and vice versa—love foreigners, the Bible says a few verses down in Leviticus, remembering that you yourselves were once foreigners in a strange land. But in the end it is because we belong to God. Love your neighbor, it says, I am the Lord. The two things are tied together.

Loving God and loving other people are not the same thing. The second command to love others, says Jesus, is like the first to love God, but not identical to it. Yet though one follows the other, they are not separate. The are alike and connected. You cannot love God without loving what God loves. Loving others reflects and is modeled on our love for God.

The reason why this all is part of the law, rather than just something nice to do, is that the purpose of the law—as lived and taught by Jesus—is to create the kingdom of God, the world as God intended it to be and we hope it to be. These commandments on which hang all the others seek to create a world in which all people might thrive. They are like the laws of physics—here is how things work. Or like a recipe—here is what to do to make things be the way you want.

We who gather here in worship, fellowship, and service in the name of Jesus—who come in to this sanctuary and go out from here in mission—we share the idea that such a world is possible, and that we have a hand in helping it come to be. Though we cannot follow these commandments always or easily, being not perfect, we acknowledge that they are the right ones to follow. That they lead to the world that we hope for.

So if we would like to have a mission statement, which we do not now have, we could make it this. So that the world may be as God’s kingdom and that all may thrive, to love God with all our hearts, souls, and minds; and to love others as ourselves.

Talking to Caeasar

Text: Matthew 22:15-22

One of Martin Luther’s contributions to the discussion of the church and its role in our lives was the insistence that our faith be grounded in the Bible. Sola scriptura, as he put it in Latin. Scripture alone. Meaning that other guides to our faith were secondary, even if useful. When in doubt, turn to the book. He came to this rule of thumb through his own experiences, trying to figure out what he and what the church should do in a time of crisis for both.

It’s a good start. But as you know from your own experience, what scripture says is in detail not always clear. There are lots of reasons for this, good and bad. One of the not so good reasons is that people like to do the job backwards. That is, they know what they want to think and they find passages in scripture that support their own view. These passages are called “proof texts”—verses that prove our own personal points. This is not what Luther meant. But even if we are careful and open to listening to the Bible, we are hearing with modern ears words that were spoken at least 2000 years ago. They speak to us, but they were not spoken to us in particular. Therefore, we might mistake (or ignore) the context in which they were said or written. We do not live in the time of Jesus, for example, and we cannot assume that people who heard him heard as we do. They probably did not. The words do have meaning for us—the Bible has been a bestseller for a long time. But we need to think hard about how to apply what Jesus said to other people, and apply it instead to us and our time. And as Luther would advise us, we need to do that—as he did—in study, prayer, and hearts open to guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Today’s passage from the Gospel of Matthew has long been used a proof text. It has been used to call for or justify the idea—which by now is a modern dogma—of the separation of church and state. But this is not true to its original time, and it is not helpful to us in our current time.

When the Pharisees and the Herodians approached Jesus, Palestine was occupied by Rome. Rome, a foreign empire, had possession of the land and governance of Israel. Though leaving the culture pretty much intact, Rome had installed a vassal king, Herod, and extracted wealth from the land in the form of taxes paid in Roman currency. On the coins it read, Tiberius, divine son of Augustus. The Herodians supported Herod, and argued that the people should pay the taxes. They were the collaborators. The Pharisees argued that to do so violated Jewish law and that people should not pay. They were the resisters.

They came, it says, to entrap Jesus. People interpret this to mean that Jesus was put between a rock and a hard place—forced to commit either sedition or blasphemy, and therefore getting into big trouble. But that is not quite what the passage says. He is not being asked to choose between religion and politics but between two different camps who have adopted two different tactics in the face of foreign occupation. Jesus will not do this. He will not support one or the other.

But he also does not say that some things belong to Caesar and some things belong to God. He does not say we must balance the demands of church and state. The issue is not church or state—in the time of Jesus and for about 1500 years after that, there was no distinction between church and state—the issue was how to respond to the demands of a conquering power. In that sense, this passage does not apply to us at all. Our circumstances are not similar.

It would be a short sermon if that was all there was to it. But there is something in this story in Matthew that catches our thoughts. Jesus’ response—in the traditional version “render onto Caesar those things which are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s”—has mystified and motivated people for a long time. We turn to this story for some guidance about how to behave as faithful people who live in a culture that does not share our faith or our understanding of God’s teachings. Whether that culture is the institution of the church—as it was for Luther—or the state or the secular society.

Until recently, modern Protestant mainline churches in the west—including Lutherans—have considered churches to be separate from but parallel to the secular world. Either withdrawn from or resigned to the goings on in the world. They argued among themselves about whether the church was within, against, or part of the culture. They made the church a place where people could take refuge from culture, think about things of the spirit, and hang around with other Christians. Though that is part of the story, it is not the whole story. (Lutherans sometimes turned to Luther’s notion of two kingdoms. But Luther never argued that the two worlds could be separated this way.)

In this view, when our faithful consciences disagree with the acts of the culture, we have to ponder which way we should turn. People have said about this passage that it is about maintaining dual allegiance to two realms, or that is is about living a balanced life in face of the demands of faith and the demands of the culture, or it is about the hardship in trying to do so.

But Jesus is not saying here that we have a difficult and annoying balancing act between two calls for our allegiance. We only have one allegiance: it is to God. Jesus is not saying “sometimes obey God but sometimes obey Caesar instead.”

Our hope is that someday the world will be the way God intended it to be. Your kingdom come, we pray, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. This is a prayer and a call for this world to be healed from sins and sorrows and to be saved from fear, violence, and greed. To be for all a good world in which to live.

Jesus teaches us in this passage that our job is to make the world of Caesar be the world of God. To live in the world according to our faith. I do not mean that Christians should convert everyone or to teach dogma in schools or to make Sunday the official sabbath. I mean that for those of us who profess to follow Christ, that his teachings be our guide in the whole of our lives. We who are Christians need to ask ourselves when we think about political action and policies not what would Jesus do, but ask instead: What did Jesus teach me to do.

The passage today in Matthew uses taxes as a way to focus on this question about what to do. So let us do the same. And let us start that by talking about food, which was, along with money, a favorite interest of Jesus.

On Friday, the Greater Boston Food Bank held a luncheon for its supporters and agencies—people like Faith Kitchen. Partly the event was to thank everyone for all they have done to feed people. And partly it was a way to remind everyone that there are a lot of hungry people in greater Boston.

In the past year, the Food Bank has fed over 400,000 hungry people. That represents about one out of every nine people in our neighborhoods. Most of those people go to bed at night not knowing where their next meal will come from. The Food Bank in the last year distributed 31 million pounds of food. Agencies like Faith Kitchen know that that is not enough; in the past few months the meals served here at Faith have been packed with people, many of them new to Faith Kitchen.

Even in our area, which has felt the effects of the financial downturn less than other parts of the country, one in nine people do not have enough to eat.

The Food Bank is truly great, but it does not live on donations alone. It relies heavily on a program called the Massachusetts Emergency Food Assistance Program. And money for that comes from the Commonwealth. That is, it comes from taxes. People who are hungry are fed through people’s taxes.

Unlike in the time of Jesus (and unlike in colonial times in this country), taxes are not a way of drawing wealth from one nation to another. Instead taxes are one of the many ways we act together for the common good. (Being law abiding, serving in programs like the military or Americorps, being civic boosters, are some other ways.) We all live together in one nation, and taxes are one of the things that help that work.

The people ask Jesus: Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar? Jesus might have quoted the summary of the law: love God with all your heart and soul and mind and love your neighbor as yourself. In our time, for many things, one way we enact our love for our neighbor is through paying taxes for the benefit of our neighbor. Contributing to the common good is a way we care for our neighbor.

How shall we as people of faith act also as people of a secular culture? Jesus tells us to render onto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s. Our call is not to flee from, or be resigned to, or give in to, Caesar. It is to call Caesar to account, to enlist the culture as a means to enact God’s will and hopes.

I’m not saying that you should love to pay taxes. Or hate them. But that you see them through the lens of your faith. I’m not telling you how to vote. Or what to think politically. What I am saying is this: for Christians, the decisions we make in the world must be considered in the light of our faith. That what we do in the world should reflect our faithful understanding. That when we think of the demands of Caesar, of the world, we think about them in terms of the commands of God.

Song for Living

Text: Psalm 23
Other texts: Isaiah 25:6-9

A man walks down the street. He is pushing a shopping cart. In the cart are bags and empty bottles. The wheels of the cart go clink-clinks when they cross the seams of the sidewalk. The man’s feet hurt. He rests on the steps in someone’s doorway. People look down when they pass, wishing not to see him. Sometimes he sleeps behind a church. In the winter, his hands get cold.

The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.

A child sits on the curb. He is humming a little tuneless song. The cars rush by in front of him. When the trucks go by with their rattles and groans, the boy’s hair gets blown. Otherwise it is as if he does not notice. In his hands is a disposable camera. He picks it up by the strap, then smashes it against the sidewalk. He smashes it again and again, until the camera opens and little plastic parts spill out. “It’s broken,” he tells his little sister, who is about four years old. Then he calls her a slut.

The Lord is my shepherd. He leads me beside still waters.

Inside, the man’s voice is gravelly with anger, the woman’s voice harsh with fear. They rise and fall like some modern harmony. There is a moment of quiet. There is a sound of doors slamming and silverware spilling. Something breaks. “We are not fighting,” he says, “this is a discussion.” She says, “get out, get out, get out.”

The Lord is my shepherd. He makes me lie down in green pastures.

A woman mourns her brother, and she wishes he were here with her now. She thinks: There was no reason for her brother to get so sick. Her brother was the healthy one. The smart one, too, and handsome. He would have been a rich man, everyone always said.

The Lord is my shepherd. He revives my soul.

The man sits by himself, watching. Time goes way too fast. Maybe it is a blessing. The life he thought was his to have never quite came. He wasn’t very lucky. And truth to tell, he did some stupid things. It’s hard. He’s not the person he thought he was. Not everything he has done has made him proud. People ask him how he’s doing. “No regrets,” he tells them.

The Lord is my shepherd. He leads me along right paths.

We are surrounded by enemies. But they are not the enemies we think. Not terrorists and robbers. Not people eager to harm us. Our lives are a mixture of good and bad, abundance and scarcity, joy and sadness. Things happen to us. We do things, We find that we are not the captains of our own ships.

The twenty-third psalm is about our deepest longing to be saved from sorrows. It is about our profound understanding that we are not made to live in sorrow. We know that we are creatures of sorrow, but we know that we are not made to be that way. There is dreariness and dread in our lives, but we know that God’s expectation for us is otherwise. We know that we walk down dark and scary valleys, but we know that we walk there neither alone nor desperate.

The twenty-third psalm makes us weep to hear it. It is not a sad song, but it reminds us of the sometimes sad songs of individual persons, men, women, and children. People we know and people we are. Songs we sing about us and about the people we love most dearly and the strangers—the mixed-up boy, the freezing man, the mourning sister—whom we see every day. It reminds us of the people we pray for, the things we ask of God. It’s not that we are creatures of sorrow. We are not. We are creatures of joy, beset by sorrows.

The psalm is not a sad song. We weep because it is a song that reminds us of what we wish to be, what might be, what we want most.

To be free from want. Not to have all we want, but to be free from the power of wanting.

To have enough to eat and drink, and which is pleasing and good, perfect as clear cold water.

To see beauty, and to live in, create, and preserve from harm places as beautiful as green pastures.

To have a light heart. To take pleasure in our existence and to make stupid jokes and dance and laugh out loud in inappropriate places. To forgive ourselves and others.

To have inner peace. To be free from apprehension, worry, and regret. To be revived when tired and restored when depleted. To live in trust. To be good.

And finally, to be guided by God’s hand. To be shown the way to these things. To be led along the right paths by God who both is way wiser that we and who forever loves us.

The psalm tells us that though surrounded by enemies, God prepares abundant life for us. Surrounded by enemies, we are served a feast that God lays out for us. The enemies—the things of sorrow—are still there. But we eat, and take pleasure, and laugh. God is with us. And for that, we weep in relief.

The prophet Isaiah speaks to the people of Israel in up until then their darkest hour. He reminds them of the promised life, the life created for them, a life that is possible, that is inevitable. God will wipe away the tears from all people, the prophet says. God will prepare for them a life of satisfying abundance.

A shroud—a veil, a blanket, a fog—a shroud covers them. The shroud is sorrow. They live in sorrow. But that is not their destiny, their nature as creatures of God. God will destroy, the prophet says, the shroud that is cast over all people. These verses move us. They are hard to believe, yet if they do move us, it is because we do believe them. We are drawn to them.

Christians are people of unsentimental hope. We know about the enemies, but we know about God, too. We have heard God’s promises, and in the valley God has walked with us the person of Jesus. God knows about sorrow. And God knows about abundant life. About vitality and beauty and renewal and refreshment and laughter. And God has made it clear which, between sorrow and life, God prefers for us.

In his baptism, Cormac today has been called by name into a community of people—all Christians all over the world, and the particular people here—who turn in hope and trust to the words in Swedish which ring this altar: the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”

Freedom of Little

Text: Philippians 3:4b–14

There is a view of the world that elevates the spirit and despises the body. In this view, the spirit or soul or psyche is perfect and pure. The body is imperfect and corrupted. The spirit is good in essence, and the body is bad in essence. There is nothing good about physical creation. In this view, salvation is a process of leaving the dirty body behind and letting the clean soul ascend. The world is rubbish and salvation is an escape from it.

This idea comes from gnosticism, a philosophy common at the time of Jesus. Though gnosticism was condemned by the early church as a heresy, the notion continued and continues to run strong in people’s view of the moral universe. This view is not, however, something that Jesus subscribed to or taught. Jesus was a healer of bodies, and a lover of good food and wine and interesting company. Jesus was a person who did people sorts of things and, it seems, liked the things that people ordinarily did.

And it was not the view of Martin Luther, who also liked to eat and schmooze. Luther was an earthy person, passionate and a little vulgar.

The world was created good, it says in Genesis. And God loved the world, it says in the Gospel of John. Our bodies are created by God. God feeds and clothes us and the rest of God’s creatures. God is generous to creation, and God promises an abundant life in this world. The world is full of good stuff.

You might think, on hearing today’s readings from Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi, that Paul would disagree. He talks about rubbish and leaving all this behind. And elsewhere he seems to condemn what he calls the “flesh.” Paul does have an issue in this passage, but it is certainly not about how the world is sour and the soul sweet.

We cannot deny that things of this world—stuff—can be a problem. And by stuff, I mean both material stuff and intangible stuff. Stuff that we carry around with us. Stuff we store away. Stuff we fret about. All the things to which we are so attached. Some of that stuff is material. Material goods. And some not. On Paul’s list are things of success and birth. Status, class, ethnic origin, positions of authority and responsibility, titles, reputation. It’s things and things associated with things.

Stuff can burden us. We spend thought and energy getting it, worrying about it, maintaining it, cultivating it, storing it, and eventually discarding it. It can define us. Paul is the Pharisee, the Benjaminite, the zealous persecutor. We are known by the things we have and the accomplishments we’ve achieved. And it can lie about us, making it appear that what we have—or equally what we do not—is who we are. We are not what we have or do not have or what we have succeeded or failed at. Things steal us, they steal who we are.

I don’t want to be crabby about this, because Paul is not crabby about it. He is not talking about virtue. He is talking about freedom. The problem is not stuff itself. Some of which, after all, is essential. And much of which is good, giving us pleasure and graceful appreciation. Paul’s complaint is not with stuff itself, not with the things of the flesh themselves, but with their hold on us. Which comes from our hold on them, and on our inability and unwillingness to let them go, unable and unwilling to consider them as peripheral, rather than foundational to our lives.

When Paul speaks about regarding all he had as rubbish, he says more literally that he reckons all those things as being dreck. He is talking about how he accounts for this stuff, as an accountant might record assets in a book. It goes in the “this is not critical to me” column. What he has lost, as he says, is how important these things were to him. They used to be in the “totally important to me” column. But though they still may be good and sweet and fine and beautiful, they no longer determine how he sees himself or his life or his work. The are accounted as having very little to do with him.

This passage in Philippians is a story. A story of about Paul himself. It is a salvation story. Paul comes from a culture—a Pharisee, tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew it says—that itself is defined by a salvation story. The story is the story of the Exodus, of a people freed from slavery. A people transformed from being slaves in Egypt to being partners with God and a light to the world. A people whose expectations were radically altered by God.

The story of Paul in this passage in Philippians, like the story of the Exodus, is the story of amazing grace. I once was lost but now I’m found. It is not that he repudiates the value—positive or negative—of what he had done before, or the pleasure he took in it, or even the sorrow he had over it. It is that he is now in a new story. Forgetting what lies behind, he says, and straining for what lies ahead. His motives are different, the way he sees the world is different, the climax of the story as he can imagine it is different.

The story is not over when Paul writes to the church at Philippi. He is in the middle of it, as he says. Transformations almost never come all at once. Even for Paul, who was struck blind on the road to Damascus and heard Christ’s voice—even that event was just the beginning of something new. He was changed by the help and guidance of others and by his own experiences after that sudden event. What is calling Paul forward now is different. No longer a closet full of tangible and intangible property, but the call of Jesus.

Paul does not demand the Philippians make the same change as he did. But he does invite them to. We don’t have to live our same old stories. They do not have to control us. It is possible to live in a new way, it is possible for the story to have a different ending than we thought.

Paul’s experience—the way he talks about it—is the experience of one who was held captive but now is released. By telling this story, he invites us to have the same experience. To change what we reckon is good, important, and compelling in our lives. To experience the freedom of a Christian. To be free.