Posts
How much of my life has been bound up with money! All my life, I have had to work to earn it. I had to work to earn it at one job or task or another because I found out early on that my widowed mother was right: it does not grow on trees. And if it did, such a tree certainly did not grow in our yard.
I.
Money is a problem to all people, and it always has been. Why else would roughly 2,350 verses in the Bible speak to money and possessions? Why else would so many of all the sayings and parables of Jesus that are recorded in the gospels have to do with money and material possessions and our relationship to them? That amounts to one of every seven verses in the synoptic gospels and 16 of the 38 parables Jesus told.
Why is this so? It is so because Jesus recognized that whether you are rich or poor the truth in our text applies to all of us: “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.”
A fragment of that verse, incidentally, is one of the most often misquoted texts in the Bible. You have probably heard it rendered as “money is the root of all evil.“ But it is not money that is the problem; it is the love of money. And the “the root of all evil” is a King James Version mistranslation. Clearly, there are many sins and crimes that have nothing to do with money. The writer was merely being emphatic when he said that money is a root of all kinds of evil. As one commentator said, “When one is dealing with a degrading vice, the interests of virtue are not served by qualified assertions.” Does that remind you of some recent political advertising?
Truly, however, there is no kind of evil that cannot grow out of the love of money--when the desire for more money becomes merely unfettered greed and people become unrestrained in their drive for more money.
The desire for money, when it takes hold, can become like a thirst that is insatiable. The Romans said that wealth is like sea water. The more of both you taste, the thirstier for them you become.
The desire for wealth is founded on illusions. It is founded first on the desire for security from the world’s hard knocks. But it cannot buy security from what life deals to us. It cannot deliver us from sickness, sorrow, or tragedy or death. It cannot buy health.
It is further founded on the desire for comfort and luxury. But it cannot protect us from broken hearts and grief, nor from the loneliness we experience inside ourselves. It cannot buy love. Even the Beatles, wealthy beyond our imagining, knew that. They sang, “I'll give you all I got to give if you say you love me too. I may not have a lot to give, but what I got I'll give to you. I don't care too much for money, money can't buy me love. Can't buy me love, everybody tells me so. Can't buy me love, no, no, no, no.”
The desire for money can make us into selfish people. It creates a competitive spirit within us. It means nothing to the money-motivated person that someone else must have less in order that he may have more…or that someone else must lose in order for him to win.
The desire for wealth can so fix our thoughts upon ourselves and our own affairs that other people become merely the means to enriching ourselves…or mere obstacles in the path to riches.
One of the strangest things about the desire for wealth is that it is founded on the desire for security--but it results in worry and anxiety, the fear of losing what one has. The more a man has to keep, the more he has to lose.
By far the greatest danger of the love of money is that it may lead us into wrong ways of getting it. Some people will swindle and cheat to get money. We read about them every day.
Most people will not go that far, but all of us may be tempted to bend the rules a little…cut the corners, just a bit…neglect to mention a fact or two…just slightly mislead others…or silently allow them to mislead themselves…deliver just a little less value than we could have.
And some may not do any of these things, but so drive themselves down the road to financial success that they use up their bodies…and their minds. They never stop to smell the roses…and if they have heard it, they do not reflect on the proverb that says, “There are no pockets in a shroud.”
II.
We have not been talking about money, but about the love of money and what it can do to people. Clearly, money is an important concern to us and to all people. Our task as Christians is to keep money in its proper place in our lives. There are still a few stories in the news to gladden our hearts, and one of those in the past week was about the elderly couple in Canada who just gave away to charity 98% of the $11 million they had won in the lottery. They said they are just plain country folks who didn’t need more than what they already had, and so they prudently put 2% in savings and gave away the rest.
A realistic and proper concern for money is a realistic and proper concern of Christians. We ought to examine on a regular basis the way we think and feel about money.
Money is the way the world works. There is no escaping it. To seek to be independent, to pay one’s bills, to provide a home and opportunity for one’s family, to provide for one’s own old age--all this is a Christian duty. Paul tells us in I Timothy 5:8 that anyone who does not provide for his own has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
Christianity does not argue for poverty. Jesus Christ does not urge us to be poor. Rather he is presented to us as one who chose to be the friend of the poor. But there is no special virtue in being poor, and there is no happiness to be found in struggling to make ends meet. Rather, the Christian church--including this tiny island of Presbyterianism that we call Faith Church--has been told by its Lord to seek by any and all means within both our individual and our corporate powers to work to improve the economic lot of the world’s poor people.
Money, Christians, is neither good nor bad. It is simply dangerous. With money, we can do great good. In the pursuit of money, we can do great evil.
Money is a responsibility. It brings with it power into our pockets and pocketbooks--the power to do evil or to do good.
The habit of liberal giving to people and causes that need our money is the greatest antidote to any selfishness or sinfulness concerning our money. Stewardship is a wise and deliberate dedication to God of a portion of that which we have been given by God. The money in your pocket or pocketbook has inscribed on it “In God We Trust.” Our use of our money will testify silently as to whether we trust in God--or in money itself.
III.
Paul wrote that he had learned to be content in whatever circumstances he found himself. Most of us have not, most of the time. But can we learn that contentment, that state of mind that trusts in God rather than in treasure? Yes, if we work at it.
Peace of mind will never be found in more money. It can be created only in us. The contentment that Christ can bring is more profound than anything that money can bring us. It is a state of mind that is independent of money. It is the state of self-sufficiency.
Sir Henry Wotton wrote, a long time ago, of the character of a happy life and said that the person was blessed, “Who God doth late and early pray more of his grace than goods to send, and is Lord of himself, though not of lands, and having nothing, yet hath all.”
Socrates marveled, “How many things there are which I can do without.”
Epicurus said, “To whom little is not enough, nothing is enough.” And he went on to say that to make a man happy, “Add not to a man’s possessions, but take away his desires.
And the rabbis of old taught their congregations: “Who is rich? He that is content with his lot.”
Our western developed society, unlike other societies in undeveloped parts of the world, has seen each succeeding generation, by and large, enjoy more material prosperity than the preceding generation. The middle-class income of a family headed by a college graduate in the United States makes us richer than 95% of the people on this planet--and richer than 99.9% of all the people who ever lived.
My parents would have counted themselves wealthy to have enjoyed what I take for granted. The economic and material world of my children is vastly different from the one my wife and I entered into when we first began our married life. And my children’s children think that world as I describe it to them is simply quaint. They cannot imagine a world of just 60 or so years ago in which television was only just being born. And in a store that sells memorabilia, when I pointed out to one of my camera-in-his cell-phone grandsons a black, rotary-dial telephone, he asked, “What is it?”
I am content, when I look at the reality of my life, when I look at that which is real in my life. The peace of contentment grows out of a concentration on the things that are permanent…the things we can take with us.
There are just two things we can take with us: our selves--whatever they have been--and the trusting conviction that we go to the one who is our friend and the lover of our souls.
Before we go, we will find happiness and contentment on this planet when we escape the slavery of money and possessions, when we find a different kind of wealth in the love and fellowship of family and friends and fellow Christians, and when we realize that our most precious possession is our relationship to God, made possible through Jesus Christ. Amen.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Remembering to Say "Thank You" (Luke 17:11-19)
I was taught to say “thank you” to anyone who gave me anything or did anything for me. I say “thank you” to the wait persons who refill my water glass in a restaurant. I say thank you to the mail person and the Fed Ex person and the man who picks up our trash. I taught my children to say “thank you,” and they have taught their children to say it.
Saying “thank you” is one of the conventions of politeness. But there is a “thank you” that goes far beyond conventions. It is the “thank you” that comes from the heart, when your heart has been touched by someone else’s love or kindness. It is the spontaneous “thank you” of being touched by the unexpected goodness of another person. It is the emotion that wells up in us when we realize that someone is doing something for us out of love or friendship--and for no other reason.
It is the “thank you” that is accompanied by a lift and a lilt in your heart. It is the “thank you” that sometimes causes me to say, with a little smile, “Thank you, God; thank you, Jesus,” when I realize that something good is flowing into my life…when I remember for a moment that the good in my life far outweighs the bad…when an unexpected gift comes my way.
One of my favorite grandchildren stories--and if you have heard it before, just enjoy it again--is about our grandson Stefan and an Easter egg. When he was just a little guy, he offered to peel an Easter egg for me, and when I said that would be nice, he did so--right down to the yolk. And as he handed me that little yellow ball of cholesterol, he said, “Because you are the best man in the world.” My thank-you to Stefan including hugging him to me, both in love and so he wouldn’t see the tears in my eyes. I was also saying in my heart, “Thank you, Lord, for the love of my children and grandchildren.”
I.
Today’s gospel lesson is about 10 people who were helped in their misery by Jesus, but only one of them returned to thank him. How could the other nine fail to give thanks? Perhaps they were too eager, after their long isolation, to rejoin their families and to resume normal life. Under the same circumstances, would we stop to give thanks? How often do we stop to give thanks for our blessings? How often do we forget to thank God? How often do we fail to thank our spouses for loving us, for putting up with us? Our parents for what they have done for us? How often do we forget to thank our friends for being our friends? Our neighbors for being pleasant? Is thankfulness our habit?
This story is one of those told about Jesus, not by Jesus. It was told by Luke the Gentile, who never knew Jesus in person, as far as we know. This story is an allegory, and it is easy to tell who the players are. Of the ten lepers, nine are the Jews who considered themselves the upright, God-fearing, all right, okay children of Israel. Such were the Scribes and Pharisees who could not, would not, listen to and accept the teachings of Jesus, and with whom Jesus had to contend so often. Their leprosy, allegorically speaking, was their pride in their leadership role among the people and their inability to see themselves as sinners in need of the forgiveness of God.
Leprosy, today called Hansen’s Disease, was greatly feared in the ancient world. Today it is treatable and curable with antibiotics, but in Jesus’ time it was a chronic, wasting disease that killed people slowly. And with leprosy, unlike many other diseases, you never got better--only worse.
The book of Leviticus, the third book in the Bible, devotes two whole chapters, the 13th and 14th, to leprosy. Dermatologists have identified at least seven separate medical problems described in those two chapters that were called leprosy. Many of those skin diseases often went away after a while, and so there are explicit instructions in Leviticus as to how the priests should determine that a person was clean again, as opposed to “unclean.”
Such diseases were believed to be punishment for sin, all the more reason why the diseased persons were condemned to live outside human contact and be shunned, unable to participate with their people in the worship of God.
Leviticus declares, “The leper who has the disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head hang loose, and he shall cover his (mouth) and cry ‘Unclean, unclean.’ He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease; he is unclean. He shall dwell alone in a habitation outside the camp.”
In that time, you had better hope you never had an outbreak of psoriasis or a persistent skin rash, because it meant you were unclean and exiled from your community until the disease went away and you showed your once-again-clean body to the priest.
II.
In Luke’s story, ten lepers were healed and declared clean again by the priests--but only one returned to thank Jesus. And the one who returned was, among the Jews, a double outcast. The first reason for his exclusion was simply that he was a leper.
The second reason was that he was a Samaritan. Samaritans were scorned and hated by the good church folks of Jesus’ day. They held Samaritans in such low regard, so despised them, that they would walk miles out of their way to keep from setting foot on the lands of this inferior class of sub-humans. Are there any parallels in our modern-day social and religious prejudices?
This passage of scripture is another of gospel-writer Luke’s picture post cards showing how Jesus’ own people rejected him, but outsiders and outcasts did hear and accept him. Luke was himself an outsider, a Gentile. He delights in telling stories of outsiders whom God has blessed, and he even makes Samaritans the heroes of some of his stories.
The nine, Luke is saying, might have been healed physically, but not spiritually. The outsider, the despised Samaritan, received a spiritual blessing that Jesus’ own people denied themselves. And the underlying, undergirding message in the story is that God is no respecter of persons--not of Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Asians, Africans or Caucasians. All humans are God’s children and God loves them all.
Let the simple little hymn of our childhood continue to ring in our ears: “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight.” It is a children’s song, but God would have us know a supremely important aspect of our own childhood, and that is that we never outgrow being the children of God our Father. God longs to take us--all of us--into his lap.
III.
Another major lesson in this story is that having faith means getting up and doing something. It is as the Letter of James reminds us, that faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. The people in this story were told by Jesus to get up and go and do something: show themselves to the priests, submit to a physical examination. Verse 14 of our text says that “as they went, they were made clean.” The lepers were not healed immediately, but instead were healed as the obeyed Jesus’ command to go and do something. If they had not taken action, they would have continued to languish in their isolation and rejection.
Faith is not a feeling; it is a venture. In what ways is God calling you and me and this church to move, to step out in faith? It seems that we ask God for things and God’s reply is, “Go and do something.” Our faithfulness in the going and doing is the proof of our faith. Faithfulness in the going and doing is also the bringer and strengthener of faith.
God desires that we see our lives as a journey. The best kind of journey has lots of interesting side roads and rest stops, but it is a journey. A journey means progress toward a destination--or perhaps a number of destinations, one after the other. Faith is not a state of mind; it is a lifestyle.
God’s blessing on us is in the going and the doing. It is on the journey, in the going, that we experience the beauty of the world. It is on the journey, in the going, that we experience the helping hands of family and friends and fellow church members. It is on the journey, in the going--and not immobilized in our spiritual easy chairs--that we experience the presence and the power of the spirit of God, the companionship of Jesus, in our lives.
And when we experience that power and presence, it should be as natural as breathing to pause now and then, and smile in our minds--smile in our minds--and say, “Thank you, Jesus.”
Meister Eckhart, a mystic, writer and theologian said, about 700 years ago, “If the only prayer you ever said in your whole life was ‘thank you,’ that would be enough.”
Saying “thank you” is one of the conventions of politeness. But there is a “thank you” that goes far beyond conventions. It is the “thank you” that comes from the heart, when your heart has been touched by someone else’s love or kindness. It is the spontaneous “thank you” of being touched by the unexpected goodness of another person. It is the emotion that wells up in us when we realize that someone is doing something for us out of love or friendship--and for no other reason.
It is the “thank you” that is accompanied by a lift and a lilt in your heart. It is the “thank you” that sometimes causes me to say, with a little smile, “Thank you, God; thank you, Jesus,” when I realize that something good is flowing into my life…when I remember for a moment that the good in my life far outweighs the bad…when an unexpected gift comes my way.
One of my favorite grandchildren stories--and if you have heard it before, just enjoy it again--is about our grandson Stefan and an Easter egg. When he was just a little guy, he offered to peel an Easter egg for me, and when I said that would be nice, he did so--right down to the yolk. And as he handed me that little yellow ball of cholesterol, he said, “Because you are the best man in the world.” My thank-you to Stefan including hugging him to me, both in love and so he wouldn’t see the tears in my eyes. I was also saying in my heart, “Thank you, Lord, for the love of my children and grandchildren.”
I.
Today’s gospel lesson is about 10 people who were helped in their misery by Jesus, but only one of them returned to thank him. How could the other nine fail to give thanks? Perhaps they were too eager, after their long isolation, to rejoin their families and to resume normal life. Under the same circumstances, would we stop to give thanks? How often do we stop to give thanks for our blessings? How often do we forget to thank God? How often do we fail to thank our spouses for loving us, for putting up with us? Our parents for what they have done for us? How often do we forget to thank our friends for being our friends? Our neighbors for being pleasant? Is thankfulness our habit?
This story is one of those told about Jesus, not by Jesus. It was told by Luke the Gentile, who never knew Jesus in person, as far as we know. This story is an allegory, and it is easy to tell who the players are. Of the ten lepers, nine are the Jews who considered themselves the upright, God-fearing, all right, okay children of Israel. Such were the Scribes and Pharisees who could not, would not, listen to and accept the teachings of Jesus, and with whom Jesus had to contend so often. Their leprosy, allegorically speaking, was their pride in their leadership role among the people and their inability to see themselves as sinners in need of the forgiveness of God.
Leprosy, today called Hansen’s Disease, was greatly feared in the ancient world. Today it is treatable and curable with antibiotics, but in Jesus’ time it was a chronic, wasting disease that killed people slowly. And with leprosy, unlike many other diseases, you never got better--only worse.
The book of Leviticus, the third book in the Bible, devotes two whole chapters, the 13th and 14th, to leprosy. Dermatologists have identified at least seven separate medical problems described in those two chapters that were called leprosy. Many of those skin diseases often went away after a while, and so there are explicit instructions in Leviticus as to how the priests should determine that a person was clean again, as opposed to “unclean.”
Such diseases were believed to be punishment for sin, all the more reason why the diseased persons were condemned to live outside human contact and be shunned, unable to participate with their people in the worship of God.
Leviticus declares, “The leper who has the disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head hang loose, and he shall cover his (mouth) and cry ‘Unclean, unclean.’ He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease; he is unclean. He shall dwell alone in a habitation outside the camp.”
In that time, you had better hope you never had an outbreak of psoriasis or a persistent skin rash, because it meant you were unclean and exiled from your community until the disease went away and you showed your once-again-clean body to the priest.
II.
In Luke’s story, ten lepers were healed and declared clean again by the priests--but only one returned to thank Jesus. And the one who returned was, among the Jews, a double outcast. The first reason for his exclusion was simply that he was a leper.
The second reason was that he was a Samaritan. Samaritans were scorned and hated by the good church folks of Jesus’ day. They held Samaritans in such low regard, so despised them, that they would walk miles out of their way to keep from setting foot on the lands of this inferior class of sub-humans. Are there any parallels in our modern-day social and religious prejudices?
This passage of scripture is another of gospel-writer Luke’s picture post cards showing how Jesus’ own people rejected him, but outsiders and outcasts did hear and accept him. Luke was himself an outsider, a Gentile. He delights in telling stories of outsiders whom God has blessed, and he even makes Samaritans the heroes of some of his stories.
The nine, Luke is saying, might have been healed physically, but not spiritually. The outsider, the despised Samaritan, received a spiritual blessing that Jesus’ own people denied themselves. And the underlying, undergirding message in the story is that God is no respecter of persons--not of Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Asians, Africans or Caucasians. All humans are God’s children and God loves them all.
Let the simple little hymn of our childhood continue to ring in our ears: “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight.” It is a children’s song, but God would have us know a supremely important aspect of our own childhood, and that is that we never outgrow being the children of God our Father. God longs to take us--all of us--into his lap.
III.
Another major lesson in this story is that having faith means getting up and doing something. It is as the Letter of James reminds us, that faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. The people in this story were told by Jesus to get up and go and do something: show themselves to the priests, submit to a physical examination. Verse 14 of our text says that “as they went, they were made clean.” The lepers were not healed immediately, but instead were healed as the obeyed Jesus’ command to go and do something. If they had not taken action, they would have continued to languish in their isolation and rejection.
Faith is not a feeling; it is a venture. In what ways is God calling you and me and this church to move, to step out in faith? It seems that we ask God for things and God’s reply is, “Go and do something.” Our faithfulness in the going and doing is the proof of our faith. Faithfulness in the going and doing is also the bringer and strengthener of faith.
God desires that we see our lives as a journey. The best kind of journey has lots of interesting side roads and rest stops, but it is a journey. A journey means progress toward a destination--or perhaps a number of destinations, one after the other. Faith is not a state of mind; it is a lifestyle.
God’s blessing on us is in the going and the doing. It is on the journey, in the going, that we experience the beauty of the world. It is on the journey, in the going, that we experience the helping hands of family and friends and fellow church members. It is on the journey, in the going--and not immobilized in our spiritual easy chairs--that we experience the presence and the power of the spirit of God, the companionship of Jesus, in our lives.
And when we experience that power and presence, it should be as natural as breathing to pause now and then, and smile in our minds--smile in our minds--and say, “Thank you, Jesus.”
Meister Eckhart, a mystic, writer and theologian said, about 700 years ago, “If the only prayer you ever said in your whole life was ‘thank you,’ that would be enough.”
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Heaven and Hell: Who, Where and Why? (Luke 16:19-31)
Our gospel lesson today is another of those lectionary passages I would just as soon have skipped over. First of all, I realized that if I were going to preach on it, I was first going to have explain what it is not about. It is not about heaven and hell, at least insofar as they are popularly understood or misunderstood.
In the first place, there are no coherent doctrines of either heaven or hell in the Bible. I will repeat that: there are no coherent doctrines of either heaven or hell in the Bible. Show me a “proof text” about either, and in five minutes or less I will produce two or three more that say something else. One verse, or even some verses here and there, do not make a clear-cut case, Christians--about anything, I might add.
In the second place, most popular understandings of heaven and hell are drawn not so much from the Bible, as from mythology, hymnology (particularly spirituals), John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante Aligheri’s Inferno. Much of what those who dwell on the matter of Hell believe is drawn from isolated symbolic references that do not by any means constitute a coherent doctrine, and the rest of what they believe is drawn from mythology and literature that was developed long after the writing of the Scriptures.
And in the third place, Jesus did not mention either heaven or hell in this story. He spoke of the poor man being taken into the bosom of Abraham, which is to say, united with his spiritual ancestors. These Jews, you see, thought of themselves as the children of Abraham.
In what he said about the fate of the rich man, he did not use the word “hell,” although the translators of the King James Version of the Bible rendered it that way, and a lot of readers today want to interpret it that way. In its original Greek, Luke’s Gospel uses the word “Hades,” the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew “Sheol,” which was simply the abode of the dead--all the dead. In all its uses in the Bible except this one, Hades has little if any relation to afterlife rewards or punishments. Biblically speaking, Hades is simply the Greek successor word to Sheol and means simply the grave. In fact, in the KJV version of I Corinthians 15: 55, which states, “O death, where is thy sting” O grave, where is thy victory?” the Greek word translated “grave” is “Hades.” I could go on, but that would be pointless.
The real point is that those who were listening to Jesus on the spot understood these references to the bosom of Abraham and Hades in ways that we cannot.
I.
Do I, your old preacher, believe in a heaven? I want to believe--and I do--in a state in which my identity is preserved, where God calls me by my name, and I can be in that complete and full communion with God that eludes me in this life and I can enumerate to Paul the points at which I think he got it wrong. How and where I do I think this will be, and what will the circumstances be like? I have no idea. I can’t even find a point at which to begin speculating.
I even consulted Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary. Oddly, he did not offer a definition of hell, but he defined heaven this way: “A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of their personal affairs, and the good listen with attention while you expound your own.”
I love astronomy and the exploration of God’s starry universe just enough to want it to have something to do with my future state, and I would like to think of myself as somehow flitting about among the stars in an afterlife. In fact, I would like for my grandchildren to think that granddad has gone to be among the stars. And I hope that God will not be offended if, as I slip away from this world, he hears me sing to him my wish contained in that popular song, “Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars. Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars.”
Do I believe in a hell? I do not--most emphatically do not--believe in a hell of fire and everlasting pain, because I do not believe in a God who would do that, even to those who hate him. And yet, because God gave me free will, I must believe that I have the option of choosing eternal separation from God rather than eternal unity with God.
And still yet, I believe in a God whose mercy and capacity for forgiveness extends right up to that moment of final choice. And I must say, with Roman Catholic theologians, that we do not know that there is a single soul in hell--to which I must add, “whatever that condition may be.”
But whatever may be the case about an afterlife, I do insist that pondering the pavements of heaven or the temperature of hell is simply to waste time and mental energy speculating about the unknowable.
II.
In the day in which Jesus told this parable, there was no unanimous opinion about an afterlife--and Jesus knew that. But both men in his story died. That happens, doesn’t it? Sooner or later, rich or poor, man or woman--we all die. A rich person may get a fancier casket and a larger tombstone, but that’s about it. At the moment of death, we all fall into God’s hands to receive whatever God has waiting for us.
The Pharisees believed in an afterlife. And so they sought to earn the blessings of God and the reward of a heavenly afterlife. They thought to do it through their scrupulous adherence to the Law. By being holy, by being good--according to their own estimation of what constituted holiness and goodness--they would build up religious brownie points and be rewarded by being comfortably nestled in the bosom of Abraham. Conversely, this performance would save them from the punishment that awaited those who did not conform to their standards.
The Sadducees, the other powerful religious group, did not believe in an afterlife. They maintained that we live out our personal heavens and hells in this life, on this earth. Through the way we live our lives, we earn God’s favor, or disfavor, not by and by, but now. Thus, what comes our way in this life is what we deserve, here and now, and God leaves our day-to-day operations up to us. Unfortunately, living for today resulted in some of them living it up today.
In the story he told to his disciples, and to the Pharisees and Sadducees who were listening in, Jesus was recalling an Egyptian myth of a rich man who was punished in his afterlife for his selfishness and a poor man who found comfort in his afterlife. The Pharisees and Sadducees would have been familiar with this story, because it was discussed in several rabbinic writings they surely had studied.
Generally, to those who believed in an afterlife, Sheol was regarded in Jewish theology as simply a shadowy sort of underworld that was nothing more than a warehouse for departed souls. In later Jewish thought, Sheol was divided into two parts--one for the reward of the righteous and the other for the punishment of the unrighteous. It is within this later thought that Jesus framed his parable.
The Greek writers of the Apostles’ Creed, in the fourth century, used the word “Hades” that has been translated--mistranslated, in terms of modern English--as the “hell” into which Jesus descended. Jesus did not go to any kind of hell! He died and his body was buried in a tomb. That is the Hades, not the hell, from which Jesus arose. I prefer to say only that he descended into death; that he was dead but he lives.
III.
This one is the only parable in which any of the characters is given a name. Lazarus, the name of the poor man, is a derivative of Eleazar, which means “God is my help.” The name Dives is not a name given by Jesus; it is simply a Latin word meaning “rich man,” a word lifted from the Latin Vulgate bible and used by the later translators of this gospel story. But it is in these two characters in the story, one rich, one poor, that we can find the point that Jesus was trying to make.
Jesus was attacking the lifestyles of the Sadducees, who dressed in fine clothing and ate gourmet foods, but who neglected the poor. They didn’t even see the poor, so preoccupied were they with living well and acting correctly.
They could do this because they were part of the temple hierarchy and came from wealthy families. They also had access to temple funds to provide themselves with a few niceties befitting their station. Their modern counterparts are the religious figures who head up mega churches, preach to cult followings, and wear Brioni suits and Rolex watches.
Jesus was also attacking the Pharisees, who Luke describes in verse 14 as lovers of money, who ridiculed Jesus’ teaching about money. Their theology drawn from the book of Deuteronomy persuaded them that wealth is a sign of God’s blessings and poverty is a sign of God’s displeasure. They would consider that a person like Lazarus deserved his suffering
It is a terribly, terribly unfortunate aspect of our own society that wealth is often seen as a reward and poverty is too often seen as a punishment. But it is simply not true that all people get what they deserve--either good or bad--in our society. Many people get misfortune that they do not deserve. Witness the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own, who cannot find new jobs because there are none, and the many people who are now facing foreclosure on their homes through no fault of their own.
While this parable might seem to be about money or the lack of it, it is really about values. Its question is not whether we have money, but whether we love money--whether we share God’s concern for the poor and vulnerable--whether we are too preoccupied with personal concerns to notice the Lazaruses in our midst. In a country where the common people were fortunate if they ate a small piece of meat or fish once a week, Dives is a figure of indolent self-indulgence. Today, we don’t need to be wealthy to engage in this kind of self-indulgence, for by world standards, we Americans feast sumptuously every day and all-you-can-eat buffets and super-sized portions have most of us either gaining weight or struggling--like me--to take it off.
Our danger is that we will fail to understand that by world standards, we are rich. I live in a comfortable house with running water, electric lights, flush toilets, a big refrigerator, washing and drying machines, and central heating and air conditioning. I have a closet full of clothes, some of them very nice but hardly ever worn. We have two good cars, a few years old but still very serviceable. I also have some moderately expensive toys to play with. By the standards of most--that is, most--of the world’s people, I am fabulously wealthy. And so are you.
Money is not dangerous or an evil in and of itself--but its uses can be both. The danger is in what people do with money, and in what money can do to us. One commentator observed that it gave Dives “I” trouble. He could not see beyond his “Is”: I want…I need…I desire…I deserve…I like. His sin was not that he was rich, for that is not a sin. His sin was in what he allowed money to do to him. He allowed his self-concern to blind him to the needs of others who were
less fortunate than he.
Dives represents all people who spend their money on themselves, with never a concern for the fact that money--even a little money--imposes duty on us.
It is our duty to consider carefully how we use our money--not only what we have, but what we shall have. Our planning must go beyond planning for the possessions we want to acquire next. God must be our partner in our financial planning.
We have a duty to the Lazaruses in our community and in other lands on the other side of the world. We have a duty to the people, both near to us and far away from us, who live with little comfort or hope and who could use our help. Some of those people might possibly be as near to you as the next pew: people who could use a friend, people who are sick or lonely or depressed, people who could use a helping hand.
St. Teresa of Avila said it: “Though we do not have our Lord with us in bodily presence, we have our neighbor, who, for the ends of love and loving service, is as good as our Lord himself.”
Jesus intended that the hearers of his parable--and today, we the readers of it--should ask ourselves some questions.
Where do find our identities in this parable? The rich man in the story was identified only by his wealth, and that proved to be empty.
In what ways, and to what extent, do we pursue things that ultimately fail to satisfy?
Does our struggle for income and accumulation blind us to the needs of others?
How can we use our financial resources faithfully and justly?
Jesus calls us to examine our lives. Jesus would have concurred with Socrates, the Greek philosopher, who said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
There is nothing wrong with working hard and making some money and saving some of it. There is nothing wrong with using some money to buy some comfort and some enjoyment. There is something wrong with never being able to help someone else because we haven’t enough for ourselves.
It is the generosity and unconditional love and grace of God that gives life and identity--not our bank balances, houses, cars or clothes. And it is only the generosity and unconditional love and grace of God that will ultimately satisfy us--not things.
It is as Blaise Pascal said, there is a God-shaped blank space in our hearts. We feel its emptiness and we try to fill it with many pleasures and possessions--but only God will fit in that blank, and only God can fill it.
Sermon preached by Chuck Swann, Faith Presbyterian Church, September 26, 2010
In the first place, there are no coherent doctrines of either heaven or hell in the Bible. I will repeat that: there are no coherent doctrines of either heaven or hell in the Bible. Show me a “proof text” about either, and in five minutes or less I will produce two or three more that say something else. One verse, or even some verses here and there, do not make a clear-cut case, Christians--about anything, I might add.
In the second place, most popular understandings of heaven and hell are drawn not so much from the Bible, as from mythology, hymnology (particularly spirituals), John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante Aligheri’s Inferno. Much of what those who dwell on the matter of Hell believe is drawn from isolated symbolic references that do not by any means constitute a coherent doctrine, and the rest of what they believe is drawn from mythology and literature that was developed long after the writing of the Scriptures.
And in the third place, Jesus did not mention either heaven or hell in this story. He spoke of the poor man being taken into the bosom of Abraham, which is to say, united with his spiritual ancestors. These Jews, you see, thought of themselves as the children of Abraham.
In what he said about the fate of the rich man, he did not use the word “hell,” although the translators of the King James Version of the Bible rendered it that way, and a lot of readers today want to interpret it that way. In its original Greek, Luke’s Gospel uses the word “Hades,” the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew “Sheol,” which was simply the abode of the dead--all the dead. In all its uses in the Bible except this one, Hades has little if any relation to afterlife rewards or punishments. Biblically speaking, Hades is simply the Greek successor word to Sheol and means simply the grave. In fact, in the KJV version of I Corinthians 15: 55, which states, “O death, where is thy sting” O grave, where is thy victory?” the Greek word translated “grave” is “Hades.” I could go on, but that would be pointless.
The real point is that those who were listening to Jesus on the spot understood these references to the bosom of Abraham and Hades in ways that we cannot.
I.
Do I, your old preacher, believe in a heaven? I want to believe--and I do--in a state in which my identity is preserved, where God calls me by my name, and I can be in that complete and full communion with God that eludes me in this life and I can enumerate to Paul the points at which I think he got it wrong. How and where I do I think this will be, and what will the circumstances be like? I have no idea. I can’t even find a point at which to begin speculating.
I even consulted Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary. Oddly, he did not offer a definition of hell, but he defined heaven this way: “A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of their personal affairs, and the good listen with attention while you expound your own.”
I love astronomy and the exploration of God’s starry universe just enough to want it to have something to do with my future state, and I would like to think of myself as somehow flitting about among the stars in an afterlife. In fact, I would like for my grandchildren to think that granddad has gone to be among the stars. And I hope that God will not be offended if, as I slip away from this world, he hears me sing to him my wish contained in that popular song, “Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars. Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars.”
Do I believe in a hell? I do not--most emphatically do not--believe in a hell of fire and everlasting pain, because I do not believe in a God who would do that, even to those who hate him. And yet, because God gave me free will, I must believe that I have the option of choosing eternal separation from God rather than eternal unity with God.
And still yet, I believe in a God whose mercy and capacity for forgiveness extends right up to that moment of final choice. And I must say, with Roman Catholic theologians, that we do not know that there is a single soul in hell--to which I must add, “whatever that condition may be.”
But whatever may be the case about an afterlife, I do insist that pondering the pavements of heaven or the temperature of hell is simply to waste time and mental energy speculating about the unknowable.
II.
In the day in which Jesus told this parable, there was no unanimous opinion about an afterlife--and Jesus knew that. But both men in his story died. That happens, doesn’t it? Sooner or later, rich or poor, man or woman--we all die. A rich person may get a fancier casket and a larger tombstone, but that’s about it. At the moment of death, we all fall into God’s hands to receive whatever God has waiting for us.
The Pharisees believed in an afterlife. And so they sought to earn the blessings of God and the reward of a heavenly afterlife. They thought to do it through their scrupulous adherence to the Law. By being holy, by being good--according to their own estimation of what constituted holiness and goodness--they would build up religious brownie points and be rewarded by being comfortably nestled in the bosom of Abraham. Conversely, this performance would save them from the punishment that awaited those who did not conform to their standards.
The Sadducees, the other powerful religious group, did not believe in an afterlife. They maintained that we live out our personal heavens and hells in this life, on this earth. Through the way we live our lives, we earn God’s favor, or disfavor, not by and by, but now. Thus, what comes our way in this life is what we deserve, here and now, and God leaves our day-to-day operations up to us. Unfortunately, living for today resulted in some of them living it up today.
In the story he told to his disciples, and to the Pharisees and Sadducees who were listening in, Jesus was recalling an Egyptian myth of a rich man who was punished in his afterlife for his selfishness and a poor man who found comfort in his afterlife. The Pharisees and Sadducees would have been familiar with this story, because it was discussed in several rabbinic writings they surely had studied.
Generally, to those who believed in an afterlife, Sheol was regarded in Jewish theology as simply a shadowy sort of underworld that was nothing more than a warehouse for departed souls. In later Jewish thought, Sheol was divided into two parts--one for the reward of the righteous and the other for the punishment of the unrighteous. It is within this later thought that Jesus framed his parable.
The Greek writers of the Apostles’ Creed, in the fourth century, used the word “Hades” that has been translated--mistranslated, in terms of modern English--as the “hell” into which Jesus descended. Jesus did not go to any kind of hell! He died and his body was buried in a tomb. That is the Hades, not the hell, from which Jesus arose. I prefer to say only that he descended into death; that he was dead but he lives.
III.
This one is the only parable in which any of the characters is given a name. Lazarus, the name of the poor man, is a derivative of Eleazar, which means “God is my help.” The name Dives is not a name given by Jesus; it is simply a Latin word meaning “rich man,” a word lifted from the Latin Vulgate bible and used by the later translators of this gospel story. But it is in these two characters in the story, one rich, one poor, that we can find the point that Jesus was trying to make.
Jesus was attacking the lifestyles of the Sadducees, who dressed in fine clothing and ate gourmet foods, but who neglected the poor. They didn’t even see the poor, so preoccupied were they with living well and acting correctly.
They could do this because they were part of the temple hierarchy and came from wealthy families. They also had access to temple funds to provide themselves with a few niceties befitting their station. Their modern counterparts are the religious figures who head up mega churches, preach to cult followings, and wear Brioni suits and Rolex watches.
Jesus was also attacking the Pharisees, who Luke describes in verse 14 as lovers of money, who ridiculed Jesus’ teaching about money. Their theology drawn from the book of Deuteronomy persuaded them that wealth is a sign of God’s blessings and poverty is a sign of God’s displeasure. They would consider that a person like Lazarus deserved his suffering
It is a terribly, terribly unfortunate aspect of our own society that wealth is often seen as a reward and poverty is too often seen as a punishment. But it is simply not true that all people get what they deserve--either good or bad--in our society. Many people get misfortune that they do not deserve. Witness the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own, who cannot find new jobs because there are none, and the many people who are now facing foreclosure on their homes through no fault of their own.
While this parable might seem to be about money or the lack of it, it is really about values. Its question is not whether we have money, but whether we love money--whether we share God’s concern for the poor and vulnerable--whether we are too preoccupied with personal concerns to notice the Lazaruses in our midst. In a country where the common people were fortunate if they ate a small piece of meat or fish once a week, Dives is a figure of indolent self-indulgence. Today, we don’t need to be wealthy to engage in this kind of self-indulgence, for by world standards, we Americans feast sumptuously every day and all-you-can-eat buffets and super-sized portions have most of us either gaining weight or struggling--like me--to take it off.
Our danger is that we will fail to understand that by world standards, we are rich. I live in a comfortable house with running water, electric lights, flush toilets, a big refrigerator, washing and drying machines, and central heating and air conditioning. I have a closet full of clothes, some of them very nice but hardly ever worn. We have two good cars, a few years old but still very serviceable. I also have some moderately expensive toys to play with. By the standards of most--that is, most--of the world’s people, I am fabulously wealthy. And so are you.
Money is not dangerous or an evil in and of itself--but its uses can be both. The danger is in what people do with money, and in what money can do to us. One commentator observed that it gave Dives “I” trouble. He could not see beyond his “Is”: I want…I need…I desire…I deserve…I like. His sin was not that he was rich, for that is not a sin. His sin was in what he allowed money to do to him. He allowed his self-concern to blind him to the needs of others who were
less fortunate than he.
Dives represents all people who spend their money on themselves, with never a concern for the fact that money--even a little money--imposes duty on us.
It is our duty to consider carefully how we use our money--not only what we have, but what we shall have. Our planning must go beyond planning for the possessions we want to acquire next. God must be our partner in our financial planning.
We have a duty to the Lazaruses in our community and in other lands on the other side of the world. We have a duty to the people, both near to us and far away from us, who live with little comfort or hope and who could use our help. Some of those people might possibly be as near to you as the next pew: people who could use a friend, people who are sick or lonely or depressed, people who could use a helping hand.
St. Teresa of Avila said it: “Though we do not have our Lord with us in bodily presence, we have our neighbor, who, for the ends of love and loving service, is as good as our Lord himself.”
Jesus intended that the hearers of his parable--and today, we the readers of it--should ask ourselves some questions.
Where do find our identities in this parable? The rich man in the story was identified only by his wealth, and that proved to be empty.
In what ways, and to what extent, do we pursue things that ultimately fail to satisfy?
Does our struggle for income and accumulation blind us to the needs of others?
How can we use our financial resources faithfully and justly?
Jesus calls us to examine our lives. Jesus would have concurred with Socrates, the Greek philosopher, who said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
There is nothing wrong with working hard and making some money and saving some of it. There is nothing wrong with using some money to buy some comfort and some enjoyment. There is something wrong with never being able to help someone else because we haven’t enough for ourselves.
It is the generosity and unconditional love and grace of God that gives life and identity--not our bank balances, houses, cars or clothes. And it is only the generosity and unconditional love and grace of God that will ultimately satisfy us--not things.
It is as Blaise Pascal said, there is a God-shaped blank space in our hearts. We feel its emptiness and we try to fill it with many pleasures and possessions--but only God will fit in that blank, and only God can fill it.
Sermon preached by Chuck Swann, Faith Presbyterian Church, September 26, 2010
Friday, September 3, 2010
A Golden Parachute (Luke 16:1-13)
You have heard me speak, from time to time, of preaching from the lectionary. Well, what is that? It is a three-year cycle of scripture readings that offers, for each Sunday in the year, lessons from the Old Testament, the Psalms, the gospels and the epistles. I am a New Testament preacher and I choose to preach from the gospel texts, most of the time, though not always. Why abide by the lectionary? For the reason that it is designed to expose us, over a period of three years, to the “whole counsel of God.” I take that seriously, rather than just skipping around in the Bible and choosing texts that strike my fancy or support my prejudices.
But one of the problems lectionary preachers encounter is that sooner or later, the lectionary is going to present us with some texts that are difficult to understand and even harder to explain. Today’s gospel lesson is one of those. On the face of it, Jesus appears to be citing the actions of a dishonest man as an example for believers.
We read this passage and we want to say, “Hey, wait a minute, Jesus! This guy is a crook. How can this be?”
I.
On the face of it, Jesus appears to be citing the actions of a dishonest man as an example for believers. But if we dig beneath the surface, we can see that Jesus may have been describing the action of a dishonest man who chose to become honest in order to save himself.
There are two possible interpretations of the man’s conduct--with lessons to be drawn from both.
First, if we say that the transactions described in the parable were dishonest, as they seem on their face to be, we can hardly believed they were praised by the man’s boss, who was the victim of a fraud. If we say that these actions were dishonest, we can say no more than that the master commended the steward, not for dishonesty, but for realism, determination and resourcefulness in dealing with a personal and business emergency.
In that case, the parable must have been one of Jesus’ warnings about coming crises, a warning from Jesus to his followers, the children of light, that they would have to be as wise as the children of this world, to take immediate and resolute action in the face of impending disaster. And Jesus did warn of hard times ahead for them. And so, under the interpretation of the steward’s actions as being simply dishonest, we can hear in the story a warning from Jesus to his followers that they could not sit on their hands when the times called for resourcefulness and action.
But in a second interpretation of the parable, we can also make a case that the steward was not committing a wrong by his actions, but righting a wrong. These people were Jews, remember; and the law of Moses forbade the taking of interest from fellow Jews on any kind of loan or credit.
(Closer to our own religious history, Martin Luther agreed with the Old Testament prohibition against charging interest for any reason. But John Calvin recognized the difference between personal and production credit. It was not okay with Father John to borrow money to buy a bigger TV set; it was okay to borrow money to buy stuff to make soap that you would sell to your neighbors. This put our Calvinist forebears a step ahead of the Lutherans on making money.)
We simply don’t know how to interpret the dishonest manager’s actions. It may be that Jesus was offering another subtle criticism of the ethics of the Pharisees. In their time the Pharisees had found ways of getting around the law. They argued that the purpose of the law was to protect the poor and destitute from exploitation--not to prevent the lending of money or the extension of credit for the mutual profit of lender and borrower. They argued that there were some situations in which a loan could be considered a kind of business partnership and interest on the loan was just a fair sharing of profits. And if a man already possessed any measure at all of the commodity he wished to borrow--wheat, oil, etc.--he was not destitute and it was okay to charge him interest.
Thus interpreted, this parable is an attack on the niggling, insincere methods of scriptural interpretation by which the Pharisees managed to keep their religious principles from interfering with their business dealings.
They could have rationalized the actions of the steward in the parable. What he did was to return their promissory notes to the debtors and write new ones--without interest. And so, for the first time in his career, perhaps, he had done what the law of Moses required. It is called doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.
He was obligating the debtors to him. He was also building up his master’s reputation as a just man. He was ready to make spiritual capital by a munificent gesture--when there was no other course open to him.
The steward was too weak to dig ditches and too proud to beg, so he set up for himself a “golden parachute,” as it is called in the business world these days. He would save these creditors a lot of money, and they would be obliged to help him out when he lot his job.
It is common in the upper echelons of corporate management these days, for officers and directors to be protected from loss if a company is acquired by another in a merger or takeover, or if for any reason they lose their jobs. Their employment contracts protect them from loss and guarantee them handsome stipends if they are fired. In recent memory, Ross Perot caused so much trouble when he became a director of General Motors that the board paid him millions of dollars to leave. And in even more recent memory, many of the officers and directors of some of the nation’s largest bank left their positions with multimillion dollar payments in hand as their companies melted down behind them. Golden parachutes, indeed.
II.
This parable, according to verse one, was told to the disciples, not to the crowd, but in verse 14 we learn that the Pharisees, “who were lovers of money” were listening too. That being the case, perhaps it was Jesus’ principle point in telling the story that if worldly men like the landowner and his steward can recognize that their best interests will be served by keeping the good opinion of their neighbors, religious people ought to be equally astute in keeping the good opinion of both neighbors and God.
On our recent western trip, our bus passed through some country said to have been the territory of the famous Butch Cassidy and his Hole-in-the-Wall gang. And since this was a morning for a long bus ride, to help pass the time, our tour guide showed us the movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” on the bus’ video system. Butch Cassidy and his sidekick were out-and-out criminals. They robbed banks and trains. And we are not supposed to root for such bandits. But we did. Everyone who saw that movie mentally and emotionally supported Butch and the Kid because they were, at least in the movie, such appealing characters--just a couple of happy-go-lucky guys who stole money…at gunpoint. And when we analyze our support for them, we realize that we were manipulated by the movie makers into liking these characters.
We cannot--and should not--give the same emotional support to the crook in this parable. But we must admit that as quick-witted and ingenious as he was in acting for his own self-interest, so we as followers of Christ ought to be enthusiastic and energetic in our lives as children of God.
It is always typical of a group following a strong leader that the group members abdicate their own power of decision making and turn it over to the leader. This is why cults invariably have one person at the top of the heap whose rule is unquestioned. Jesus did not want his followers to be like this. He saw an unfortunate tendency toward passivity in his followers. He saw in them an unfortunate interpretation of his description of God as a loving father. Some of his people were descending into an attitude of “big daddy will take care of us.” He saw them fastening on those aspects of the religion he taught as a relief from the religion of fear that was taught by the religious leaders of the day.
That same tendency toward passivity infects some Christians today, and Jesus doesn’t like it today, either. Some Christians today think of weekly worship as the full discharge of their duty, and Jesus doesn’t like that, either. Some Christians today would seem to be singing to themselves unendingly, “Be not dismayed, whate’er betide; God will take care of you.” Jesus doesn’t like that, either.
III.
Jesus calls on his followers to be active in the faith; not passive. We are to be busy serving; not sitting. The Christian life does not consist of soaking up salvation like spiritual sponges. Jesus calls us, as he called his disciples so long ago, to be busy…dreaming…scheming…deciding…doing.
Two men who have been particularly adept at dreaming and scheming in the business world are Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, both of whom are among the richest men in the world. Gates became a multibillionaire through his genius and some sharp business practices in the world of computers. Buffet became a multibillionaire through his genius in the business world and his mastery of buying and selling stocks. It must be seen--and it has been seen by both men-- that the acquisition of wealth often comes at the expense of someone else. I do not know what they think and how they feel about how they acquired their wealth; but I do know that both men have pledged to give at least half their billions to charity. They also have challenged another 80 of the world’s billionaires to do the same, and 40 of them have already agreed to do so.
Andrew Carnegie, a Scottish immigrant who became one of this country’s wealthiest men, used his money to build more than 2,500 public libraries. He had this to say about it: “This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of wealth: To set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance, to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent on him; and after doing so to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds…to administer in the manner…best calculated to produce the most beneficial results to the community.”
One more modern man observed cynically that money is how you keep score. Money can’t buy happiness, jokes one of my friends; a man with five billion dollars is just as happy as a man with 10 billion. But there is happiness to be found in giving it away to someone who needs it--and in the case of many of the world’s people, who need it desperately. Jesus calls us to a life of self-giving. And money is either a tool or a trap. We cannot serve two masters. We must decide for one or the other.
The Episcopal Book of Common Prayer contains these memorable words, “In all time of tribulation; in all time of prosperity…good Lord deliver us.”
Paul said to Timothy (I Timothy 6: 10), the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. That’s the love of money; not money itself. Money is not bad in itself; money is good when it does not rule us, but serves us and others who need our help.
In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus has a great deal to say about the dangers associated with money, for money competes with God for our attention and affection. Wrong attitudes about money can bring about spiritual ruin. But it is entirely possible to use money in Christ-like ways. God give us resources that not only provide for our needs, but also allow us to demonstrate our faithfulness. God will know whether we used our resources to help others.
The real moral of this story is one that finds great emphasis in Luke’s gospel: forgive. Forgive it all. Forgive it now. Forgive it for any reason or for no reason. Forgive because the Lord’s Prayer asks God to “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And the real major character in this story is the master who forgave the steward for mismanaging his funds in the first place. That master, of course, represents the God who forgives us for our misbehavior. The currency, the money, of God’s kingdom is forgiveness.
CONC.
Whatever our circumstances, we can help people who have less than we have. Even poor people can help others. I remember the comment of a missionary to Brazil who responded to those Americans who said they could not afford to tithe their incomes. He said, “I know people who live in houses with dirt floors who do.”
Our calling is to see our personal resources, whatever they may be, as having eternal consequences. Do we see the connection of our money and possessions to the causes of Christ? Jesus does! He calls us to be clever and energetic with our resources, for his sake.
Obedience, heeding the calls of Christ, is our “Golden Parachute.” When the time comes for each of us to bail out, we may know that we shall land gently and safely. Amen.
But one of the problems lectionary preachers encounter is that sooner or later, the lectionary is going to present us with some texts that are difficult to understand and even harder to explain. Today’s gospel lesson is one of those. On the face of it, Jesus appears to be citing the actions of a dishonest man as an example for believers.
We read this passage and we want to say, “Hey, wait a minute, Jesus! This guy is a crook. How can this be?”
I.
On the face of it, Jesus appears to be citing the actions of a dishonest man as an example for believers. But if we dig beneath the surface, we can see that Jesus may have been describing the action of a dishonest man who chose to become honest in order to save himself.
There are two possible interpretations of the man’s conduct--with lessons to be drawn from both.
First, if we say that the transactions described in the parable were dishonest, as they seem on their face to be, we can hardly believed they were praised by the man’s boss, who was the victim of a fraud. If we say that these actions were dishonest, we can say no more than that the master commended the steward, not for dishonesty, but for realism, determination and resourcefulness in dealing with a personal and business emergency.
In that case, the parable must have been one of Jesus’ warnings about coming crises, a warning from Jesus to his followers, the children of light, that they would have to be as wise as the children of this world, to take immediate and resolute action in the face of impending disaster. And Jesus did warn of hard times ahead for them. And so, under the interpretation of the steward’s actions as being simply dishonest, we can hear in the story a warning from Jesus to his followers that they could not sit on their hands when the times called for resourcefulness and action.
But in a second interpretation of the parable, we can also make a case that the steward was not committing a wrong by his actions, but righting a wrong. These people were Jews, remember; and the law of Moses forbade the taking of interest from fellow Jews on any kind of loan or credit.
(Closer to our own religious history, Martin Luther agreed with the Old Testament prohibition against charging interest for any reason. But John Calvin recognized the difference between personal and production credit. It was not okay with Father John to borrow money to buy a bigger TV set; it was okay to borrow money to buy stuff to make soap that you would sell to your neighbors. This put our Calvinist forebears a step ahead of the Lutherans on making money.)
We simply don’t know how to interpret the dishonest manager’s actions. It may be that Jesus was offering another subtle criticism of the ethics of the Pharisees. In their time the Pharisees had found ways of getting around the law. They argued that the purpose of the law was to protect the poor and destitute from exploitation--not to prevent the lending of money or the extension of credit for the mutual profit of lender and borrower. They argued that there were some situations in which a loan could be considered a kind of business partnership and interest on the loan was just a fair sharing of profits. And if a man already possessed any measure at all of the commodity he wished to borrow--wheat, oil, etc.--he was not destitute and it was okay to charge him interest.
Thus interpreted, this parable is an attack on the niggling, insincere methods of scriptural interpretation by which the Pharisees managed to keep their religious principles from interfering with their business dealings.
They could have rationalized the actions of the steward in the parable. What he did was to return their promissory notes to the debtors and write new ones--without interest. And so, for the first time in his career, perhaps, he had done what the law of Moses required. It is called doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.
He was obligating the debtors to him. He was also building up his master’s reputation as a just man. He was ready to make spiritual capital by a munificent gesture--when there was no other course open to him.
The steward was too weak to dig ditches and too proud to beg, so he set up for himself a “golden parachute,” as it is called in the business world these days. He would save these creditors a lot of money, and they would be obliged to help him out when he lot his job.
It is common in the upper echelons of corporate management these days, for officers and directors to be protected from loss if a company is acquired by another in a merger or takeover, or if for any reason they lose their jobs. Their employment contracts protect them from loss and guarantee them handsome stipends if they are fired. In recent memory, Ross Perot caused so much trouble when he became a director of General Motors that the board paid him millions of dollars to leave. And in even more recent memory, many of the officers and directors of some of the nation’s largest bank left their positions with multimillion dollar payments in hand as their companies melted down behind them. Golden parachutes, indeed.
II.
This parable, according to verse one, was told to the disciples, not to the crowd, but in verse 14 we learn that the Pharisees, “who were lovers of money” were listening too. That being the case, perhaps it was Jesus’ principle point in telling the story that if worldly men like the landowner and his steward can recognize that their best interests will be served by keeping the good opinion of their neighbors, religious people ought to be equally astute in keeping the good opinion of both neighbors and God.
On our recent western trip, our bus passed through some country said to have been the territory of the famous Butch Cassidy and his Hole-in-the-Wall gang. And since this was a morning for a long bus ride, to help pass the time, our tour guide showed us the movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” on the bus’ video system. Butch Cassidy and his sidekick were out-and-out criminals. They robbed banks and trains. And we are not supposed to root for such bandits. But we did. Everyone who saw that movie mentally and emotionally supported Butch and the Kid because they were, at least in the movie, such appealing characters--just a couple of happy-go-lucky guys who stole money…at gunpoint. And when we analyze our support for them, we realize that we were manipulated by the movie makers into liking these characters.
We cannot--and should not--give the same emotional support to the crook in this parable. But we must admit that as quick-witted and ingenious as he was in acting for his own self-interest, so we as followers of Christ ought to be enthusiastic and energetic in our lives as children of God.
It is always typical of a group following a strong leader that the group members abdicate their own power of decision making and turn it over to the leader. This is why cults invariably have one person at the top of the heap whose rule is unquestioned. Jesus did not want his followers to be like this. He saw an unfortunate tendency toward passivity in his followers. He saw in them an unfortunate interpretation of his description of God as a loving father. Some of his people were descending into an attitude of “big daddy will take care of us.” He saw them fastening on those aspects of the religion he taught as a relief from the religion of fear that was taught by the religious leaders of the day.
That same tendency toward passivity infects some Christians today, and Jesus doesn’t like it today, either. Some Christians today think of weekly worship as the full discharge of their duty, and Jesus doesn’t like that, either. Some Christians today would seem to be singing to themselves unendingly, “Be not dismayed, whate’er betide; God will take care of you.” Jesus doesn’t like that, either.
III.
Jesus calls on his followers to be active in the faith; not passive. We are to be busy serving; not sitting. The Christian life does not consist of soaking up salvation like spiritual sponges. Jesus calls us, as he called his disciples so long ago, to be busy…dreaming…scheming…deciding…doing.
Two men who have been particularly adept at dreaming and scheming in the business world are Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, both of whom are among the richest men in the world. Gates became a multibillionaire through his genius and some sharp business practices in the world of computers. Buffet became a multibillionaire through his genius in the business world and his mastery of buying and selling stocks. It must be seen--and it has been seen by both men-- that the acquisition of wealth often comes at the expense of someone else. I do not know what they think and how they feel about how they acquired their wealth; but I do know that both men have pledged to give at least half their billions to charity. They also have challenged another 80 of the world’s billionaires to do the same, and 40 of them have already agreed to do so.
Andrew Carnegie, a Scottish immigrant who became one of this country’s wealthiest men, used his money to build more than 2,500 public libraries. He had this to say about it: “This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of wealth: To set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance, to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent on him; and after doing so to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds…to administer in the manner…best calculated to produce the most beneficial results to the community.”
One more modern man observed cynically that money is how you keep score. Money can’t buy happiness, jokes one of my friends; a man with five billion dollars is just as happy as a man with 10 billion. But there is happiness to be found in giving it away to someone who needs it--and in the case of many of the world’s people, who need it desperately. Jesus calls us to a life of self-giving. And money is either a tool or a trap. We cannot serve two masters. We must decide for one or the other.
The Episcopal Book of Common Prayer contains these memorable words, “In all time of tribulation; in all time of prosperity…good Lord deliver us.”
Paul said to Timothy (I Timothy 6: 10), the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. That’s the love of money; not money itself. Money is not bad in itself; money is good when it does not rule us, but serves us and others who need our help.
In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus has a great deal to say about the dangers associated with money, for money competes with God for our attention and affection. Wrong attitudes about money can bring about spiritual ruin. But it is entirely possible to use money in Christ-like ways. God give us resources that not only provide for our needs, but also allow us to demonstrate our faithfulness. God will know whether we used our resources to help others.
The real moral of this story is one that finds great emphasis in Luke’s gospel: forgive. Forgive it all. Forgive it now. Forgive it for any reason or for no reason. Forgive because the Lord’s Prayer asks God to “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And the real major character in this story is the master who forgave the steward for mismanaging his funds in the first place. That master, of course, represents the God who forgives us for our misbehavior. The currency, the money, of God’s kingdom is forgiveness.
CONC.
Whatever our circumstances, we can help people who have less than we have. Even poor people can help others. I remember the comment of a missionary to Brazil who responded to those Americans who said they could not afford to tithe their incomes. He said, “I know people who live in houses with dirt floors who do.”
Our calling is to see our personal resources, whatever they may be, as having eternal consequences. Do we see the connection of our money and possessions to the causes of Christ? Jesus does! He calls us to be clever and energetic with our resources, for his sake.
Obedience, heeding the calls of Christ, is our “Golden Parachute.” When the time comes for each of us to bail out, we may know that we shall land gently and safely. Amen.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
God's Lament (Jeremiah 8:18-9:3)
The miners from Chile have been much in the news and much on our minds.
The whole world has been in their corner.
And many of us have given a thought or two or more to what it must have been like to have been 2000 feet down in a dark, dirty, hole without much food or water.
How would I have handled that?
How would you have handled that?
Would I have felt God-forsaken?
Would I have shouted out my anger at God and man?
Have you ever felt like life was teetering
On the edge of chaos—held together by a thin thread
Tears, anxiety
Hovering just below the surface
Fear, grief, trepidation
Heart sick
Joy Gone
Utter dismay
Isolated, alone,
Angry, crushed
Have you ever breathed Lament from every pore of your being
GOD HAS
Hear now the powerful lament of God from the prophet Jeremiah 8:18 -9:3
This is the word of God for all people—Thanks be to God
From the mouth of Jeremiah we hear the words of our suffering God.
We hear the disappointment, the agony, the weeping for God’s children who have turned away.
In our hearing, we yearn for a verse of Hope
And in our yearning
We are given permission to express the Gut Wrenching parts of our life.
In God’s Lament, we humans,
We who are indeed created in the Image of God
Are Freed to express all that is within us
Freed to have no barriers, no secrets
Freed to have all things spoken and exposed to God
Mary can say, “Lord, if you have been here, my brother would not have died”
And others could say, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying”
They could bring God in Christ to tears, but they were free to express all that was within their hearts.
God can hear our every thought. Our prayers can open all of our life to God.
We don’t have to act nicely in God’s presence.
We don’t have to appear better off than we are,
to put on joyfulness when our hearts are broken,
When we feel alone and forsaken God will hear us.
If God’s speech is Raw—Ours can be too
Our lament, our doubt, our questions—
Even our Anger bring no danger to our relationship with God
They are ingredients that enhance our relationship with God
Because these are real.
These ingredients bring full-flavor to who we are
As we live in the potter’s hand,
As we live in the hands of the one
Who will make us whole.
The beauty of Lament is that it is real
Reflecting the true realities of life
The freedom of lament
Is that in giving voice to our anguish
We realize that we are not alone in our pain
When we hear the pain of God
We can perhaps find something that reflects life as we know it
Life as we are experiencing it
In our songs of Lament
Those around us enter with us
God enters with us
And through our cries
The possibility of hope is Reborn
When our cries are heard—When someone listens
The journey toward healing begins.
The prophets and the psalmist assure
That the depth and raw-ness of our pain
Can be given directly to God
We have the promise that God is never absent.
God enters our pain-no matter what we may be suffering
And the God who enters our pain
Is the same God
Who saw his only son tortured.
Who watched his only son die.
Who cries for a people who turn from him.
The God who enters our pain –with us
Is the God who knows suffering.
The tears of God that we read about today
Are tears for a wayward people.
And they are tears for us
God sees our suffering—coming just down the road
Our suffering because of our choices
Because we turn away.
God sees where we are headed
And a fountain of tears is not enough to express his sorrow
It must feel a bit like watching children and grandchildren struggle into adulthood
We are vulnerable in our watching.
What happens to them hurts us.
Sometime what happens to them hurts us more
Than anything we could bring on ourselves
When life’s pain stems from terrible decision, we feel helpless.
What happens to another hurts us and we lament.
God watches us struggle—struggle to grow
God sees where we are headed
And a fountain of tears is not enough to express God’s sorrow.
God hurts because God’s children hurt.
God hurts because we hurt.
We hurt ourselves and we hurt each other.
And in Jeremiah’s time God’s hurt is increased
Because not only did the people of God—the children of God
Make terrible decisions
But they are also indifferent about it.
They just do not seem to care
Have you ever wanted to shake someone till their teeth rattle?
As you watch them arrogantly
Choose a path toward destruction?
But we can not make others strong with our strength.
We can not make others wise with our wisdom.
Strength and wisdom have to be discovered and developed, and have to be learned—not given.
Each person having to discover in his own way.
Each having to give birth to his own strength.
Each having to give birth to his own wisdom.
And to endure the labor of that process
Labor that often, -maybe always, involves pain
God is watching the people of Israel
As the people of God teeter on the brink of Chaos
And God cries.
God cries for a community headed toward Death
A nation where communal integrity is Destroyed
God’s people have forgotten
That they are accountable for each other
And responsible to each other
I’m afraid this is true, not just for the people of Israel, but also for us.
We are indeed keepers of our Brothers and Sisters
All our brothers and sisters around the globe
The poor, the homeless, the hungry
The jobless, the unwanted and the unloveable
The forgotten, the lonely, the hurting
The hated and the enemy
God’s people have forgotten that
We are inter-dependent and inter related
What happens to one—happens to us all
There are no independent, isolated actions
Our attempts to get ahead—may push someone else behind.
Our moves toward arrogantly imagined selfish goals may
Put a stone of stumbling in the path of the Kingdom of God.
Not only in Jeremiah’s world, but here and now as we read the news of business and politics, and society,
We can see that God’s people have forgotten that God alone is Lord
Of our lives and of all things.
As a result of all this forgetting
We see ourselves attempting to shape the world
According to our vision—not God’s.
Have the people of God forgotten true life
And in the process chosen death?
We choose death
When we try to organize life into neat packages
That we can control.
We choose death
When we reject our basic inter dependent, inter-related nature.
We choose death
When we fail to fully listen to the faithful voices around us
When we fail to be accountable and responsible to the will of God.
We choose death
In our idolatry as we seek control
As we take truth and bend and shape it to our own purposes.
What do our business dealings say about our faith?
What do our purchases say?
What does our use of our most valuable resource(time) say?
“They have grown strong in the land for falsehood
And not for truth and they do not know me.. says the Lord”
Hear Jeremiah speak to us, to you and to me.
God’s own people have forgotten to know God
And in their forgetting have chosen death.
And God Laments
As we twist and shape the world for our own glory.
God Laments
Maybe we too need to lament.
Maybe we need to lament the loss of communal integrity.
Maybe we need to lament
The despair that we cover with self-sufficient autonomy
Maybe we need to lament
Hopelessness that we cover with stoic independence.
Or maybe we simply need to bring our basic, human need for God
To a conscious and named level.
Maybe we just need to cry out—revealing
Our exhausted spirits
Our broken relationships,
Our damaged families, and communities
Our viewed, witnessed and experienced violence
Maybe we just need to cry.
Dare we name our brokenness.
Dare we refuse to white-wash truth and reality.
Dare we fully embrace life as Christ intends us to live.
Our God cries for us
The beauty of crying out—the beauty of lament
Is that it is real and reflects the true realities of life
The freedom of crying out—the freedom of lament
Is that in giving voice to our anguish
We realize that we are not alone in our pain.
God cries
And in the pain of God
We can find reflections of ourselves.
Thru all cries—thru all lament
The possibility of hope is reborn.
When cries are heard
When someone listens
The journey toward healing begins.
Scripture assures us—our experience assures us
The experiences of the faithful around us assure us
That the depth and raw-ness of our pain
Can be given directly to God.
We don’t have to make it pretty, or nice, or politically correct for God.
We have the promise that God enters our pain—no matter what.
Through-out history the faithful have marched to the throne of God and cried out their pain.
Our only hope is to march ourselves to the throne of God and in loud lament cry out the pain that lives in our souls.
God, in accepting our lament, brings us to be strong, strong in faith,
strong in utterance,
strong in insistence,
strong in risk-taking
Our prayers of lament teach spiritual survival
Here is what to do in the pit of hopelessness:
Cling to God, even when God has seemed to slip away from you.
Yell at the top of your collective lungs.
Hold tightly, mercilessly, and with every ounce of strength to hope in Christ.
Shout and scream at our Lord and Savior..
That’s it
Don’t hold back.
Complain, protest, resist.
Reach into yourself to claim your experience and your capacity to see and name reality.
Jeremiah serves as a model survivor.
Stick to God with absolute loyalty.
Put doubts and rage and betrayal before God’s face.
Lay it out so you can see it yourselves and can see the deep, unending wound and isolation.
It is exactly laments’ bitter complaints and assaults on divine justice that, paradoxically, make them a perfect vehicle of fidelity.
Fasten on to God with all your strength in the midst of catastrophe.
Keep the relationship alive.
Keep communication open.
Think of the miner, months down in the depths, knowing how unfair this was.
Did you hear one of them say, “I held God’s hand”
We must hold on to God no matter what
And God will hold on to us—no matter what
Halleluah, Amen
The whole world has been in their corner.
And many of us have given a thought or two or more to what it must have been like to have been 2000 feet down in a dark, dirty, hole without much food or water.
How would I have handled that?
How would you have handled that?
Would I have felt God-forsaken?
Would I have shouted out my anger at God and man?
Have you ever felt like life was teetering
On the edge of chaos—held together by a thin thread
Tears, anxiety
Hovering just below the surface
Fear, grief, trepidation
Heart sick
Joy Gone
Utter dismay
Isolated, alone,
Angry, crushed
Have you ever breathed Lament from every pore of your being
GOD HAS
Hear now the powerful lament of God from the prophet Jeremiah 8:18 -9:3
This is the word of God for all people—Thanks be to God
From the mouth of Jeremiah we hear the words of our suffering God.
We hear the disappointment, the agony, the weeping for God’s children who have turned away.
In our hearing, we yearn for a verse of Hope
And in our yearning
We are given permission to express the Gut Wrenching parts of our life.
In God’s Lament, we humans,
We who are indeed created in the Image of God
Are Freed to express all that is within us
Freed to have no barriers, no secrets
Freed to have all things spoken and exposed to God
Mary can say, “Lord, if you have been here, my brother would not have died”
And others could say, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying”
They could bring God in Christ to tears, but they were free to express all that was within their hearts.
God can hear our every thought. Our prayers can open all of our life to God.
We don’t have to act nicely in God’s presence.
We don’t have to appear better off than we are,
to put on joyfulness when our hearts are broken,
When we feel alone and forsaken God will hear us.
If God’s speech is Raw—Ours can be too
Our lament, our doubt, our questions—
Even our Anger bring no danger to our relationship with God
They are ingredients that enhance our relationship with God
Because these are real.
These ingredients bring full-flavor to who we are
As we live in the potter’s hand,
As we live in the hands of the one
Who will make us whole.
The beauty of Lament is that it is real
Reflecting the true realities of life
The freedom of lament
Is that in giving voice to our anguish
We realize that we are not alone in our pain
When we hear the pain of God
We can perhaps find something that reflects life as we know it
Life as we are experiencing it
In our songs of Lament
Those around us enter with us
God enters with us
And through our cries
The possibility of hope is Reborn
When our cries are heard—When someone listens
The journey toward healing begins.
The prophets and the psalmist assure
That the depth and raw-ness of our pain
Can be given directly to God
We have the promise that God is never absent.
God enters our pain-no matter what we may be suffering
And the God who enters our pain
Is the same God
Who saw his only son tortured.
Who watched his only son die.
Who cries for a people who turn from him.
The God who enters our pain –with us
Is the God who knows suffering.
The tears of God that we read about today
Are tears for a wayward people.
And they are tears for us
God sees our suffering—coming just down the road
Our suffering because of our choices
Because we turn away.
God sees where we are headed
And a fountain of tears is not enough to express his sorrow
It must feel a bit like watching children and grandchildren struggle into adulthood
We are vulnerable in our watching.
What happens to them hurts us.
Sometime what happens to them hurts us more
Than anything we could bring on ourselves
When life’s pain stems from terrible decision, we feel helpless.
What happens to another hurts us and we lament.
God watches us struggle—struggle to grow
God sees where we are headed
And a fountain of tears is not enough to express God’s sorrow.
God hurts because God’s children hurt.
God hurts because we hurt.
We hurt ourselves and we hurt each other.
And in Jeremiah’s time God’s hurt is increased
Because not only did the people of God—the children of God
Make terrible decisions
But they are also indifferent about it.
They just do not seem to care
Have you ever wanted to shake someone till their teeth rattle?
As you watch them arrogantly
Choose a path toward destruction?
But we can not make others strong with our strength.
We can not make others wise with our wisdom.
Strength and wisdom have to be discovered and developed, and have to be learned—not given.
Each person having to discover in his own way.
Each having to give birth to his own strength.
Each having to give birth to his own wisdom.
And to endure the labor of that process
Labor that often, -maybe always, involves pain
God is watching the people of Israel
As the people of God teeter on the brink of Chaos
And God cries.
God cries for a community headed toward Death
A nation where communal integrity is Destroyed
God’s people have forgotten
That they are accountable for each other
And responsible to each other
I’m afraid this is true, not just for the people of Israel, but also for us.
We are indeed keepers of our Brothers and Sisters
All our brothers and sisters around the globe
The poor, the homeless, the hungry
The jobless, the unwanted and the unloveable
The forgotten, the lonely, the hurting
The hated and the enemy
God’s people have forgotten that
We are inter-dependent and inter related
What happens to one—happens to us all
There are no independent, isolated actions
Our attempts to get ahead—may push someone else behind.
Our moves toward arrogantly imagined selfish goals may
Put a stone of stumbling in the path of the Kingdom of God.
Not only in Jeremiah’s world, but here and now as we read the news of business and politics, and society,
We can see that God’s people have forgotten that God alone is Lord
Of our lives and of all things.
As a result of all this forgetting
We see ourselves attempting to shape the world
According to our vision—not God’s.
Have the people of God forgotten true life
And in the process chosen death?
We choose death
When we try to organize life into neat packages
That we can control.
We choose death
When we reject our basic inter dependent, inter-related nature.
We choose death
When we fail to fully listen to the faithful voices around us
When we fail to be accountable and responsible to the will of God.
We choose death
In our idolatry as we seek control
As we take truth and bend and shape it to our own purposes.
What do our business dealings say about our faith?
What do our purchases say?
What does our use of our most valuable resource(time) say?
“They have grown strong in the land for falsehood
And not for truth and they do not know me.. says the Lord”
Hear Jeremiah speak to us, to you and to me.
God’s own people have forgotten to know God
And in their forgetting have chosen death.
And God Laments
As we twist and shape the world for our own glory.
God Laments
Maybe we too need to lament.
Maybe we need to lament the loss of communal integrity.
Maybe we need to lament
The despair that we cover with self-sufficient autonomy
Maybe we need to lament
Hopelessness that we cover with stoic independence.
Or maybe we simply need to bring our basic, human need for God
To a conscious and named level.
Maybe we just need to cry out—revealing
Our exhausted spirits
Our broken relationships,
Our damaged families, and communities
Our viewed, witnessed and experienced violence
Maybe we just need to cry.
Dare we name our brokenness.
Dare we refuse to white-wash truth and reality.
Dare we fully embrace life as Christ intends us to live.
Our God cries for us
The beauty of crying out—the beauty of lament
Is that it is real and reflects the true realities of life
The freedom of crying out—the freedom of lament
Is that in giving voice to our anguish
We realize that we are not alone in our pain.
God cries
And in the pain of God
We can find reflections of ourselves.
Thru all cries—thru all lament
The possibility of hope is reborn.
When cries are heard
When someone listens
The journey toward healing begins.
Scripture assures us—our experience assures us
The experiences of the faithful around us assure us
That the depth and raw-ness of our pain
Can be given directly to God.
We don’t have to make it pretty, or nice, or politically correct for God.
We have the promise that God enters our pain—no matter what.
Through-out history the faithful have marched to the throne of God and cried out their pain.
Our only hope is to march ourselves to the throne of God and in loud lament cry out the pain that lives in our souls.
God, in accepting our lament, brings us to be strong, strong in faith,
strong in utterance,
strong in insistence,
strong in risk-taking
Our prayers of lament teach spiritual survival
Here is what to do in the pit of hopelessness:
Cling to God, even when God has seemed to slip away from you.
Yell at the top of your collective lungs.
Hold tightly, mercilessly, and with every ounce of strength to hope in Christ.
Shout and scream at our Lord and Savior..
That’s it
Don’t hold back.
Complain, protest, resist.
Reach into yourself to claim your experience and your capacity to see and name reality.
Jeremiah serves as a model survivor.
Stick to God with absolute loyalty.
Put doubts and rage and betrayal before God’s face.
Lay it out so you can see it yourselves and can see the deep, unending wound and isolation.
It is exactly laments’ bitter complaints and assaults on divine justice that, paradoxically, make them a perfect vehicle of fidelity.
Fasten on to God with all your strength in the midst of catastrophe.
Keep the relationship alive.
Keep communication open.
Think of the miner, months down in the depths, knowing how unfair this was.
Did you hear one of them say, “I held God’s hand”
We must hold on to God no matter what
And God will hold on to us—no matter what
Halleluah, Amen
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
The Cost of Discipleship (Luke 14:25-33)
In 1937, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor, published a book entitled The Cost of Discipleship. It became a Christian classic and it was required reading when I was a seminarian. In his book, he attacked the modern Christian tendency toward what he called “cheap grace.” He was not the first to use the term, but he used it more effectively than anyone before him.
What is “cheap grace?” In Bonhoeffer’s words, “Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession. It is grace without discipleship, without the cross, without Jesus Christ. Or to put it more clearly, it is to hear the gospel preached as follows: ‘Of course you have sinned, but everything is forgiven, so you can stay as you are.’”
Bonhoeffer openly and powerfully condemned the acculturated Christianity of Hitler’s Germany, which was busy compromising with and conforming to Naziism. And what happened to him as a result of his preaching and his undercover participation in plotting against Hitler was his own cost of discipleship.
In 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Nazi Gestapo. He spent the next two years in prison with the Gestapo trying to break him and induce him to become a more conciliatory voice. He refuse to recant. Instead, he defied them and openly admitted that he was an implacable enemy of Hitler and of Naziism and he would never change his mind about either. And so, in April 1945, with American forces closing in on the concentration camp where he was being held, the Nazis hanged Dietrich Bonhoeffer. One report said he was hanged with a thin wire in a manner that would cause him to strangle. Another said he was hanged from a tree in the camp. The cost of his discipleship was ignominious death at the hands of evil men.
If you will look on page 78 in your pew Bibles, you will see that the passage I have read to you is set off as a separate paragraph (pericope) with the title The Cost of Discipleship. I could think of no better title for this sermon.
I.
What does it mean to speak of the “cost of discipleship?” There are two words here: cost and discipleship. Jesus is saying, “You can not be my disciple free; it is going to cost you something.” And he proceeds to shock the crowd by telling them how much it is going to cost them.
As Luke the gospel writer tells the story, Jesus was being followed by a large crowd of people on this, his final, fateful journey to Jerusalem…Jerusalem, where he would pay his own cost of discipleship.
There were two types of people in the crowd. On the one hand, there were those in the multitude, wanting to be on hand for the grand opening of the kingdom Jesus had been preaching about. They were thinking of it, unfortunately, as a renewal of the earthly kingdom of David. They probably thought it was going to be a day of glory, rewards and rejoicing for all. There would probably be dancing in the streets, singing, feasting--a great, grand national party.
In the second group were the disciples and a few others who perceived, however dimly, that Jesus was about more serious business--a lot more serious-- than dancing in the streets. But even some of them, too, thought that perhaps this was going to be the long-awaited day when God, through Jesus, was to unveil finally the promised kingdom that would result in the great religious revival of the Jewish people.
Jesus had tried before to bring both groups down to earth. And here, in today’s reading, we find him stopping to speak one more time, to make one more effort to get the people who were following him to understand that stark realities awaited everyone who would follow him in the dark days that he knew lay ahead.
And so Jesus asked them, “Have you counted the cost of discipleship? Are you willing to pay it?” It is a question we, too, must answer.
What is the cost for us? Is it to make ourselves get up every Sunday morning and get dressed for church when we would rather stay home in our pajamas and read the Sunday paper? Is it to be nice to some of our fellow church members and act as if we are a lot more interested in them than we really are? Is it to put a little something in the collection plate on a regular basis, even if it sometimes makes us quietly say “ouch?”
Jesus said that the cost of discipleship is a lot stiffer than any of that. His words to the crowd were shocking. “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.”
“Hate” is a shocking word, and as it is used here simply does not mean what we usually mean by it. In fact, our understanding of the word applied to its use in this passage does not make sense. The Greek word as used here is a term of comparison. It is a way of expressing willingness to be detached from or to turn away from something or someone, even from family members, who may want us to go in a different direction.
Will Willimon, who was chaplain at Duke University for years, once told a group of pastors that he had never had a call from parents saying, “Help us, please. Our son is misbehaving.” But hardly a year went by, he said, when he did not get a call from parents saying something like, “Chaplain, can you help us? Our son (or daughter) has gone overboard with some religious group and wants to go off to Haiti and work in some literacy training program after graduation. And we want him (or her) to go to law school.”
Is such a student, in effect, “hating father and mother” in order to heed the call of Christian discipleship? Yes--in the sense that the student is willing to face the terrible tension between discipleship and the ambitions his or her parents have for their child. It is not a negative matter of not liking or loving one’s parents; rather it is a matter of choosing a higher loyalty.
Jesus is a kind man, and he said to the people, “I know you mean well.” “But,” he continued, “you must understand that if you really mean to be one of my disciples, you are going to have to pay some rent on the job.” The currency in which that rent must be paid will be work and sacrifice. The rewards from doing that job will be in hearing your Savior say, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
II.
Jesus said to the people then and says to us now, a discipleship that costs you nothing is not really a discipleship; it is only a pretense. Good intentions are not enough; they must be proven with good deeds. Right beliefs must always be borne out by right conduct.
What does it mean to us, then, to be disciples? And how much will it cost us?
The true disciples of Jesus are those who live out the great commandment of Jesus, which is to love God and to love people--utterly. This means right decisions that result in right actions, commitment that is proven in service and consecration that is observable in one‘s life--or it means nothing at all.
By decision, I mean to really mean what we are saying when we sing “Here I am, Lord. I have heard you calling in the night. I will go, Lord, if you lead me. I will hold your people in my heart.”
Commitment is to truly mean what we are saying when we sing, “I love thy kingdom, Lord.”
Consecration means that we mean what we are saying when we sing, “Take my life and let be consecrated, Lord, to thee.”
Jesus taught us that to love God is know God as our Creator, and to love God as our heavenly Father. And to understand God as Creator and Father is to be sensitive to God’s active presence in the world.
It is to be driven to our knees, as I am, when we consider the heavens, the work of God’s hands. When I seek and find through my telescope some tiny smudge of light that I know to be another galaxy with a hundred billion suns in it, I am in awe of God’s handiwork. But I am no less awed when I lift my eye from the eye piece to throw back my head and behold the canopy of the starlit sky God has spread above us. It is then that I ask in wonder, “Who are we, that you are mindful of us?” The answer that comes to me is, “You are my children and I love you.”
To love God our Father in return means to find the strength and purpose in our lives to worship him intently, to pray to him believingly, and to follow where the Holy Spirit leads us through the words of scripture and the promptings of our brothers and sisters in the church.
To love people means to acknowledge them as our fellow children of God, made in God’s image just as we are. It is to look at other people with trust and understanding--and if they fail and fall, with compassion and forgiveness.
To love people as Jesus loves them is not to engage in some kind of syrupy sentimentality. It is to refuse to be walled off from any of God’s children by hatred, prejudice, fear or class distinction, and to try by every means at our disposal to build creative relationships with them. It is to enter into the arena of public action and commitment on behalf of causes we believe in, and on behalf of persons who need help. It is to take on other people’s problems as our problems, to share as much as we are able in finding solutions to those problems.
I have told this story before, but I am going to tell it again. It is the story of a lady who served as a Vista Volunteer, in the Domestic Peace Corps, and worked at helping poor, elderly and mostly uneducated people in a large and populous county navigate through the bureaucratic mazes that sometimes separated the people from the help they needed. County officials announced one day changes in procedures that this lady felt would work to the detriment of her poor and elderly clients. And so she went from office to office in the county office building to protest the proposed changes. The changes were canceled, and one county official gave as the reason, “Because Mrs. Swann raised so much hell.”
Well, let me not close on that note. She’ll be angry enough as it is, on the way home. Let me close instead with a note about David Livingstone, one of the most famous Christian missionaries and able Christian leaders of all time. He said that his motto had been “Fear God and work hard.” And he said of his career, “That is all I have ever done.” Let us all fear God and work hard--and we will find that the cost of discipleship is well within our ability to pay it. Amen.
What is “cheap grace?” In Bonhoeffer’s words, “Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession. It is grace without discipleship, without the cross, without Jesus Christ. Or to put it more clearly, it is to hear the gospel preached as follows: ‘Of course you have sinned, but everything is forgiven, so you can stay as you are.’”
Bonhoeffer openly and powerfully condemned the acculturated Christianity of Hitler’s Germany, which was busy compromising with and conforming to Naziism. And what happened to him as a result of his preaching and his undercover participation in plotting against Hitler was his own cost of discipleship.
In 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Nazi Gestapo. He spent the next two years in prison with the Gestapo trying to break him and induce him to become a more conciliatory voice. He refuse to recant. Instead, he defied them and openly admitted that he was an implacable enemy of Hitler and of Naziism and he would never change his mind about either. And so, in April 1945, with American forces closing in on the concentration camp where he was being held, the Nazis hanged Dietrich Bonhoeffer. One report said he was hanged with a thin wire in a manner that would cause him to strangle. Another said he was hanged from a tree in the camp. The cost of his discipleship was ignominious death at the hands of evil men.
If you will look on page 78 in your pew Bibles, you will see that the passage I have read to you is set off as a separate paragraph (pericope) with the title The Cost of Discipleship. I could think of no better title for this sermon.
I.
What does it mean to speak of the “cost of discipleship?” There are two words here: cost and discipleship. Jesus is saying, “You can not be my disciple free; it is going to cost you something.” And he proceeds to shock the crowd by telling them how much it is going to cost them.
As Luke the gospel writer tells the story, Jesus was being followed by a large crowd of people on this, his final, fateful journey to Jerusalem…Jerusalem, where he would pay his own cost of discipleship.
There were two types of people in the crowd. On the one hand, there were those in the multitude, wanting to be on hand for the grand opening of the kingdom Jesus had been preaching about. They were thinking of it, unfortunately, as a renewal of the earthly kingdom of David. They probably thought it was going to be a day of glory, rewards and rejoicing for all. There would probably be dancing in the streets, singing, feasting--a great, grand national party.
In the second group were the disciples and a few others who perceived, however dimly, that Jesus was about more serious business--a lot more serious-- than dancing in the streets. But even some of them, too, thought that perhaps this was going to be the long-awaited day when God, through Jesus, was to unveil finally the promised kingdom that would result in the great religious revival of the Jewish people.
Jesus had tried before to bring both groups down to earth. And here, in today’s reading, we find him stopping to speak one more time, to make one more effort to get the people who were following him to understand that stark realities awaited everyone who would follow him in the dark days that he knew lay ahead.
And so Jesus asked them, “Have you counted the cost of discipleship? Are you willing to pay it?” It is a question we, too, must answer.
What is the cost for us? Is it to make ourselves get up every Sunday morning and get dressed for church when we would rather stay home in our pajamas and read the Sunday paper? Is it to be nice to some of our fellow church members and act as if we are a lot more interested in them than we really are? Is it to put a little something in the collection plate on a regular basis, even if it sometimes makes us quietly say “ouch?”
Jesus said that the cost of discipleship is a lot stiffer than any of that. His words to the crowd were shocking. “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.”
“Hate” is a shocking word, and as it is used here simply does not mean what we usually mean by it. In fact, our understanding of the word applied to its use in this passage does not make sense. The Greek word as used here is a term of comparison. It is a way of expressing willingness to be detached from or to turn away from something or someone, even from family members, who may want us to go in a different direction.
Will Willimon, who was chaplain at Duke University for years, once told a group of pastors that he had never had a call from parents saying, “Help us, please. Our son is misbehaving.” But hardly a year went by, he said, when he did not get a call from parents saying something like, “Chaplain, can you help us? Our son (or daughter) has gone overboard with some religious group and wants to go off to Haiti and work in some literacy training program after graduation. And we want him (or her) to go to law school.”
Is such a student, in effect, “hating father and mother” in order to heed the call of Christian discipleship? Yes--in the sense that the student is willing to face the terrible tension between discipleship and the ambitions his or her parents have for their child. It is not a negative matter of not liking or loving one’s parents; rather it is a matter of choosing a higher loyalty.
Jesus is a kind man, and he said to the people, “I know you mean well.” “But,” he continued, “you must understand that if you really mean to be one of my disciples, you are going to have to pay some rent on the job.” The currency in which that rent must be paid will be work and sacrifice. The rewards from doing that job will be in hearing your Savior say, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
II.
Jesus said to the people then and says to us now, a discipleship that costs you nothing is not really a discipleship; it is only a pretense. Good intentions are not enough; they must be proven with good deeds. Right beliefs must always be borne out by right conduct.
What does it mean to us, then, to be disciples? And how much will it cost us?
The true disciples of Jesus are those who live out the great commandment of Jesus, which is to love God and to love people--utterly. This means right decisions that result in right actions, commitment that is proven in service and consecration that is observable in one‘s life--or it means nothing at all.
By decision, I mean to really mean what we are saying when we sing “Here I am, Lord. I have heard you calling in the night. I will go, Lord, if you lead me. I will hold your people in my heart.”
Commitment is to truly mean what we are saying when we sing, “I love thy kingdom, Lord.”
Consecration means that we mean what we are saying when we sing, “Take my life and let be consecrated, Lord, to thee.”
Jesus taught us that to love God is know God as our Creator, and to love God as our heavenly Father. And to understand God as Creator and Father is to be sensitive to God’s active presence in the world.
It is to be driven to our knees, as I am, when we consider the heavens, the work of God’s hands. When I seek and find through my telescope some tiny smudge of light that I know to be another galaxy with a hundred billion suns in it, I am in awe of God’s handiwork. But I am no less awed when I lift my eye from the eye piece to throw back my head and behold the canopy of the starlit sky God has spread above us. It is then that I ask in wonder, “Who are we, that you are mindful of us?” The answer that comes to me is, “You are my children and I love you.”
To love God our Father in return means to find the strength and purpose in our lives to worship him intently, to pray to him believingly, and to follow where the Holy Spirit leads us through the words of scripture and the promptings of our brothers and sisters in the church.
To love people means to acknowledge them as our fellow children of God, made in God’s image just as we are. It is to look at other people with trust and understanding--and if they fail and fall, with compassion and forgiveness.
To love people as Jesus loves them is not to engage in some kind of syrupy sentimentality. It is to refuse to be walled off from any of God’s children by hatred, prejudice, fear or class distinction, and to try by every means at our disposal to build creative relationships with them. It is to enter into the arena of public action and commitment on behalf of causes we believe in, and on behalf of persons who need help. It is to take on other people’s problems as our problems, to share as much as we are able in finding solutions to those problems.
I have told this story before, but I am going to tell it again. It is the story of a lady who served as a Vista Volunteer, in the Domestic Peace Corps, and worked at helping poor, elderly and mostly uneducated people in a large and populous county navigate through the bureaucratic mazes that sometimes separated the people from the help they needed. County officials announced one day changes in procedures that this lady felt would work to the detriment of her poor and elderly clients. And so she went from office to office in the county office building to protest the proposed changes. The changes were canceled, and one county official gave as the reason, “Because Mrs. Swann raised so much hell.”
Well, let me not close on that note. She’ll be angry enough as it is, on the way home. Let me close instead with a note about David Livingstone, one of the most famous Christian missionaries and able Christian leaders of all time. He said that his motto had been “Fear God and work hard.” And he said of his career, “That is all I have ever done.” Let us all fear God and work hard--and we will find that the cost of discipleship is well within our ability to pay it. Amen.
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