That Kind of Love

'Jesus said to his disciples, “I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

“If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you. If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own. Because you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world-- therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you, ‘Servants are not greater than their master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you; if they kept my word, they will keep yours also. But they will do all these things to you on account of my name, because they do not know him who sent me. If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have sin; but now they have no excuse for their sin. Whoever hates me hates my Father also. If I had not done among them the works that no one else did, they would not have sin. But now they have seen and hated both me and my Father. It was to fulfill the word that is written in their law, ‘They hated me without a cause.’

“When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, she will testify on my behalf. You also are to testify because you have been with me from the beginning.”'

--John 15: 17-27

When my friend Marshall Jolly, the beloved new(ish) rector of St. Thaddeus Episcopal Church in Aiken, SC, a man with whom I share a long history and a deep appreciation and admiration, asked me to preach that church's patronal feast day, there was one important question to consider: floor or pulpit? Because the fact is that over the two years I was blessed to serve as the Director of Youth at St. Thad’s and gym teacher (yes, gym teacher!) at Mead Hall School, and over the several times I’ve been able to go back to that church, I never stood in the pulpit. I blame Jospeh Whitehurst, their longtime churate/associate rector, who had a greater impact on my early days in church work than he will ever know. Thus, I gave this message/homily/sermon from a very familiar spot: the floor of the nave of St. Thaddeus. 

St. Thaddeus Episcopal Church, Aiken, SC

I’ve carried St. Thaddeus Episcopal Church and Mead Hall School with me everywhere I have gone. Even what I wore while preaching. My cassock (the black robe) and surplice (the white…thing) were a gift from St. Thaddeus. And my red stole, even though it didn't match Marshall’s dress or the other hangings, was really special because it belonged to Mother Mellie Hickey, the first woman ordained a priest in the state of South Carolina, who, along with her husband, Fr. Howard Hickey, ministered in this place until she was over 100 years old. Your previous rector gave me this stole on the occasion of her death, and I’ve worn it at both my ordinations and only break it out on special occasions. I think this feast day qualified.

With apologies to Simon the Zealot, but as far as the folks in Aiken are concerned, this day is about his companion , Jude Thaddeus. The name is pretty redundant – and repetitive – given that Jude and Thaddeus are both variations on the name Judas. Considering that folks probably didn’t want him confused with…..the other guy, Judas – not Isacariot – is more often referred to as either Jude or Thaddeus. I suspect most of us are more familiar with Jude – what with St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital and all – but since about 2007 or so, he’s always been Thaddeus to me. But what’s in a name, right?

Church tradition says that Thaddeus was one of the original 12 apostles, along with Simon the Zealot. He was present at Pentecost and received the Holy Spirit that day, which is why he’s often showed with a flame above his head. And they say he traveled all over Mesopotamia in the days afterwards, mostly with Bartholomew; in fact, when the St. Thaddeus youth group joined with the one from St. Bartholemew’s in North Augusta for our first ski trip in 2008, their youth minister, the now Rev John Bethell, told the kids that our trip wasn’t the first time Bart and Thad had traveled together. Despite the two both being claimed by the Armenian Church as their founders, Thaddeus shares his feast day with Simon the Zealot, with whom he was martyred around the year 65 or 66 in Armenia; Thaddeus is often depicted holding an axe or a club to indicate how he died. You can use your imagination. 

St. Thaddeus and St. Simon, who share a feast day.

 Jesus told Thaddeus and Simon and the others: I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another. This was part of Jesus’ last great teaching to them before his arrest and crucifixion; we call it the Farewell Discourse. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another. What commands? A short while earlier Jesus had told them to not let their hearts be troubled, to believe in God and believe in him. They were going to face trials and hardships, Jesus didn’t have to be a psychic to understand that. Yes, Thaddeus, Simon, and the others would face those hardships, but consider that these words were written down almost a whole century after Jesus would’ve said them, to a community of folks who were scared, anxious, and altogether unsure of what the future held. For the folks who first heard this Gospel read in their midst, they had experienced the loss of their Temple and a resounding defeat in a war with the Romans. Questions abounded about what their faith could even look like in the aftermath of such trauma. It’s not hard to see how the words of Jesus would’ve hit them. Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God. Believe in me. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another. I can’t help but think that Thaddeus and Simon held on to those words, held on to each other, and held on to Jesus as they faced their deaths. I’d like to hope we could do the same. What wondrous love is this, O my soul?

But what’s love got to do with it…got to do with it? English is such a fickle language because we only have one word for love. I love my wife. I love the Cleveland Guardian. I love...lamp. There are eight Greek words used in the New Testament, which are translated into English as ‘love,’ but the word Jesus uses, agape is not used in any other contemporary Greek texts outside of the Bible. Think about that for a second. What kind of love must this be? There is no direct English equivalent, but the best we can come up with is Christian love. The love of God as expressed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Pierce Pettis, one of my favorite singer-songwriters has song called That Kind of Love, I played it one time at a youth group function where we shared songs that made us think about God. His is the best definition of agape I’ve found: “love triumphant, love on fire; love that humbles and inspires; love that does not hesitate, with no conditions, no restraints; that kind of love.” Former Presiding Bishop Michael Curry used to say that if it ain’t about love it ain’t about God. That kind of love. The kind of love that sets captives free, even as they are led to their deaths, as Simon and Thaddeus were. Love that comes in the hospital room at 4 am to clean you up when you’ve had a terrible accident, as an angel named Linda did for me after I received a liver transplant four years ago. Love that gives kids a chance when others might not, as Mead Hall teachers have done. Love that welcomes all, strangers and friends, as the clergy and people of St. Thaddeus have done for more than 180 years. I know this love is real, and I’ve staked my life on it. I know Jesus’ words were not just for Simon and Thaddeus, or the community of the Fourth Gospel that wrote them down, but they are for us. Now more than ever. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another. 

Pierce Pettis: That Kind of Love

There’s an old saying among our Orthodox siblings that Jesus welcomes everyone to follow him but doesn’t expect anyone to remain the same when they do so. If you are really about that kind of love, be warned, it will change you. It will take you down paths that you could never have imagined. It will make you see God in the ordinary stuff of life, as we meet Jesus in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, the water of baptism, and the oil of healing. It will tug at your heartstrings and make you root for the underdog. It will give you eyes to see that your life and the life of your neighbor – every single neighbor – is intricately linked, as Simon and Thaddeus’ lives were linked, even unto death. And it will call you away from the world’s temptations of power, prestige, and possessions – the same temptations Jesus himself faced in the wilderness with Satan - and it’ll lead you to kenosis, the emptying of oneself, that Paul uses to describe Jesus’ love on the cross, and to metanoia, the turning around of oneself that we also call repentance.  

It's not a pie-in-the sky, high hopes, Precious Moments, kind of love. It’s a love that gets down in the trenches with one another, and it’s a love I learned how to cultivate because I saw it at St. Thaddeus Church. You showed me that. Ella Breckenridge and Clarke Saunders of blessed memory showed me that. The patrons of the soup kitchen showed me that. Far too many people for me to name right now because I am sure to leave someone out, all showed me that. Now, as I told St. Thaddeus, go and show the world that kind of love! 

Wrestling With God

'The same night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had. Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, "Let me go, for the day is breaking." But Jacob said, "I will not let you go, unless you bless me." So he said to him, "What is your name?" And he said, "Jacob." Then the man said, "You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed." Then Jacob asked him, "Please tell me your name." But he said, "Why is it that you ask my name?" And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, "For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved." The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip.'

--Genesis 32: 22-31

'In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I solemnly urge you: proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching. For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths. As for you, always be sober, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully.'

--II Timothy 4: 1-5

'Jesus told his disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He said, "In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, `Grant me justice against my opponent.' For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, `Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.'" And the Lord said, "Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?"'

--Luke 18: 1-8

I have a confession to make.  I am closet fan of professional wrestling. I got hooked when I was in high school, thanks to Kenny Mullins, the senior in my 8th grade algebra class who said to me one week, “Just watch it!” I did and it’s been all downhill ever since.  I gave up religiously watching several years ago, but I’m still fascinated by it. It may be predetermined, but at its core it represents something fundamental about the human condition: the struggle between the babyface good guy and the heel bad guy, and in the end there is always a resolution.

Cody Rhodes (babyface) v. Roman Reigns (heel) at Wrestlemania.

However you may now think of me, pro wrestling is what I first thought about when I read our Scriptures for this past week. In Genesis we find Jacob running for his life, and to be honest, he’s kind of the heel in this story. He has cheated his brother Essau of his birthright, stolen a blessing from their father Isaac that was reserved for Essau, and altogether cheated and lied to get what he wants. Classic heel. Essau is out to get Jacob, who we find in today’s reading on a mountain where he wrestles all night with a stranger. It is widely accepted that this stranger is some kind of earthly form for God. All night long they struggle, grappling with one another. God knocks out Jacob’s hip, but Jacob is relentless and won’t quit until he receives a blessing. When morning comes the blessing is granted, God gives to Jacob a new name, Israel – literally, one who wrestles with God. Jacob even names that Peniel – the face of God. Wrestlemania’s got nothing on this bout. 

Jacob wrestles with God.

Our epistle from II Timothy paints the picture of an early Christian community that is struggling, wrestling both with their leadership, and probably with one another, as some are jumping ship. This letter, written to the community’s leader, is less of a chastisement of struggle and more of encouragement to persist and persevere through those kinds of struggles;  to wrestle with one another in ways that lead to healing and shared mission within the community.

That same persistence is what Jesus is articulating in the parable from the Gospel of Luke.  Let’s be honest, this isn’t the easiest parable in Jesus’ bag. If the judge in the story – often called the Unjust Judge – is a stand-in for God, he’s no babyface. He refuses to grant the widow’s request time and time again; she finally wears him out, wrestles with him, until he gives in to her demands, weary that she will exhaust him, or as the literal translation of the Greek reads: ‘Give him a black eye!’ I don’t believe, nor do any biblical scholars I could find believe, that we are meant to view the judge as a stand-in for God. Our relationship to God is not one where we have to pester God to the point that our request is granted – that is a pretty immature kind of faith; God isn’t some sort of cosmic vending machine that will eventually give us what we want. Yet sometimes, it can definitely feel like we are wrestling with, or even pestering God. The moral of the parable, then, is that our faith should be persistent and relentless, not so that we get what we want, but so that we always remember that God is not like the Unjust Judge, and does, in fact, hear us and bring about a resolution, even if it is not always the kind that we’re seeking. 

The Parable of the Unjust Judge by Nicola Saric

The story of Jacob, the commentary on the community of II Timothy, and the parable of the Persistent Widow speak to something to which we all can relate, and that is the struggle we sometimes feel with God, and maybe even with one another.  There isn’t a person out there who has not wrestled with God, sometimes all night like Jacob.  There isn’t a person out there who has not felt like they have pestered God again and again with their request. I’ve been there. We’ve all been there, maybe in the last year, certainly in the last five years, and even in the Before-Covid Times, we found ourselves in those knock-down, drag-out struggles. When change came suddenly and without warning. When we lost a job, or a loved one died. When everything we thought we knew to be true about ourselves was challenged. We’ve all been there, and some are there now.

I’ve had a lot of conversations with people over the years who have been really going through it and are scared because they had been taught that you don’t wrestle with God or question God. You just accept everything that comes your way, without complaint. Yet this is contrary to what the Bible actually shows us. It’s not just in these Scriptures for this week. Maybe the best example, of course, is Job. We don’t read nearly enough from Job, but that story is one that often gets misinterpreted. We celebrate his patience or the fact that Job coined the phrase, ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,’ but we sometimes forget that even Job eventually cursed God and cursed the day he was born.  Job is old, one of the oldest stories we have, whose roots can be traced back to an era long before Judaism existed, and its lesson is older than our Scriptures themselves, the lesson that part of what it means to be human is to wrestle with the Divine.

Eastern Orthodox icon of Job on the dung heap.

 

I actually believe that that is Good News. Here’s why. It’s the lesson of the cross, the lesson of struggle, the kind of realization that comes from wrestling with God in such a way that, like Jesus in that moment, we exclaim, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” To accept a message that says we should not wrestle with God, or that struggle with God and one another should never happen, minimizes our experiences of pain, and we no longer ground ourselves in reality, the reality that the writer of II Timothy knew, which is that living in community is hard, whether that community is a family, a church, or even just our one-on-one relationship with God. The wrestling matches we get into may not be easy or shot – they are seldom either- but in the end, out of those struggles, comes clarity and. an understanding of who we really are, like Jacob getting a new name, and a new path forward, like the empty tomb in place of the cross.

We may often come to the Scriptures looking for the message that makes us feel good, only to be hit with stories like these. They remind us that when we wrestle with God we are not doing anything wrong. We are, in fact, growing deeper in our knowledge and love of God, becoming more mature in our faith. It is similar to a marriage. I’ve probably learned the most about my wife, myself, and our relationship in the times we’ve wrestled with each other. They’ve actually made our relationship even stronger, more mature and meaningful. Cynthia Bourgeault, who is an Episcopal priest and contributor with Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation, says in her book The Meaning of Mary Magdalene, that the hallmark of a healthy relationship is not so much how well you get along but how well you fight, how you move through those wrestling matches, and come back to each other; the resilience that is at the heart of the relationship that tells you never to quit on each other. God doesn’t quit on us. Why should we quit on God or each other?

So if you find yourself today questioning God, wrestling with God, know that it’s ok. If you feel like you’re pestering God, that’s fine because God can take it. And in the end, you might come away changed, maybe with a limp or a new name, but one way or another, when the bell sounds, you’ll discover who you really are. 

Do Not Fret

1 Do not fret yourself because of evildoers; * do not be jealous of those who do wrong. 

2 For they shall soon wither like the grass, * and like the green grass fade away.

3 Put your trust in God and do good; * dwell in the land and feed on its riches.

4 Take delight in God, * who shall give you your heart’s desire.

5 Commit your way to God and put your trust in God, * who will bring it to pass.

6 God will make your righteousness as clear as the light * and your just dealing as the noonday.

7 Be still before God; * for God wait patiently.

8 Do not fret yourself over the one who prospers, * the one who succeeds in evil schemes.

9 Refrain from anger, leave rage alone; * do not fret yourself; it leads only to evil.

10 For evildoers shall be cut off, * but those who wait upon God shall possess the land.

--Psalm 37 (St. Helena Psalter Edition)

'The apostles said to the Lord, "Increase our faith!" The Lord replied, "If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, `Be uprooted and planted in the sea,' and it would obey you. "Who among you would say to your slave who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the field, `Come here at once and take your place at the table'? Would you not rather say to him, `Prepare supper for me, put on your apron and serve me while I eat and drink; later you may eat and drink'? Do you thank the slave for doing what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, `We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!'"

--Luke 17: 5-10

I love the Psalms! Whether we read them together, or antiphonally; whether it’s in our corporate worship on Sundays, or during the Divine Offices like Morning Prayer or Compline, the Psalms carry so much meaning; they are incredibly rich because they speak to the human condition. They’ve got it all.  From joy to anger, from sadness to confusion, the whole spectrum of emotion is covered in the Psalms. They are usually my go-to book of the Bible when I’m in need of some guidance or when folks ask me for some.

This is true for Psalm 37, which was the appointed Psalm for this past Sunday (if you were using Track 2, that is!).  It’s a Psalm that deals with emotions that I suspect many of us have wrestled with in these latter days; emotions like fear and worry.  Children starving in Gaza. American troops deployed to American cities in the name of, allegedly, keeping the peace. Every day feeling more and more like we are moving closer to some horrific combination of The Handmaid’s Tale and Terminator.  What can we do with such fear, worry, and fret about the present, yes, but especially the future? Blessedly, we have the Psalms, many of which are attributed to King David, himself someone who faced real existential fears, and more often than not, the poetry he and others composed speak a good word, even to where we are now.

David composing the Psalms from the Paris Psalter, an illustrated Byzantine manuscript.

It's right there in Psalm 37, in the first half of the first verse.  “Do not fret yourself because of evil doers.”  Do not fret yourself.  Did you notice that those words occur 3 times in the 10 verses that we read.  This is the prophetic voice of the Psalmist; we can imagine God speaking, both to the Psalmist and to us. Do not fret yourself.  It reminds me of the very first words said by the angels whenever they come to earth in the stories of Scripture.  Remember what those words are:  “Be not afraid.”  To know God is to know the peace that is beyond understanding, to know perfect love; which, of course, casts out fear.  Do not be afraid of the things that evil folks are doing.  When you look at the world and cannot understand why it is the way it is, take heart because God will, in God’s time and God’s way, bring all things to perfection, including the judgement of the wicked. Do not fret yourself.

That might be easier said than done. How can we possibly let go of our fretting in a time when it seems perfectly understandable?  The Psalmist says to “put your trust in God and do good.”  Take care of the things that we can take care of, focus on the good that we can do and trust God’s power to work in us and through us, even when we’re fretting. I come from a long line of worriers, so I get why this is tough.  And I’m sure that the Psalmist was going through some stuff when they wrote this. If it was, in fact, David, maybe he was running for his life when Saul wanted him killed, or maybe he was feeling the weight of his own sinfulness. Whatever the case, the Psalm’s instruction is to put one’s trust in God, focus on doing good, and God will deal with the rest. 

But how, then, do we really put our trust in God?  One way—and this is my favorite part of the Psalm —is “be still before God; for God wait patiently.”  To be still and wait patiently means just that, to remember that God’s timing is not our own, that we, blessedly, don’t have to have everything figured out, and that cultivating God’s brand of patience is, as someone once said, a virtue. To be still often means to stop for a minute and just breathe.  Breathe in God’s mercy, breathe out God’s love.  In my parish on Sunday we stopped in the middle of the sermon time and just breathed. Some closed their eyes, some had a soft, downward gaze. We were still. We noticed our breath, which made the very sound of God's own name: YA-WEH. We breathed in that stillness, releasing cares and concerns. We breathed out that patience, resleasing fear. Exercises like these can be a helpful and holy tool for centering ourselves and focusing on God's very presence within us, and it might be something you could try in in those moments of fretting. 

We begin to let go of the fretting, and we begin to put our trust in God when we stop, when we’re still, and when we realize that God, as the old song says, has got the whole world in God’s mighty hands, including us. I think of the image Julian of Norwich saw when she heard the voice of Jesus tell her that all manner of things would be well. She saw God holding something as tiny as a hazelnut, which God said was all that has ever been or ever will be, all of it made for love. Those breaths we take remind us of that love, that God is already in us – some folks call this the Cosmic Christ, the Jesus that is present within all living things. We begin to put our trust in God when we relinquish our trust in our egos, in our own wants and desires, understanding that when we come before God, are enough. That, too,  is something that can utterly cripple us when we consider the “evil schemes” of others, as the Psalm says. The thought that we aren’t enough, aren’t doing enough to overcome such evil, don’t have enough faith in God. 

Julian of Norwich and the hands of God

Jesus knew something about this. I imagine him taking a moment to pause, maybe even taking a breath himself, before he responded to the apostles asking him to increase their faith. I wonder if they were surprised when Jesus said that they didn’t need more faith, that even the tiniest seed is enough. What matters is to put whatever faith we have into practice when we can, to do what is ours to do and leave the rest to God. Think about the beginning and ending statements in our Gospel this week: “Increase our faith….We have done what we ought to have done.”

Much happens between all our beginnings and endings. Life builds us up and then wears us down. Love happens. Loss happens. Illusions of happily-ever-after move out and conflicted feelings move in. Hope for the journey gives way to despair, and we stumble and rise up and stumble again. Not unlike Jesus himself. And we pray once more for an increase of faith, to be freed of fretting.

Jesus reminds us that we are not the masters of God’s purposes in the world, merely the servants. We have enough faith to do what is ours to do, to serve what matters. We have, on our very breath, the name of God. We seek more faith, yes; but we also remember that even in the most troubling of times, we have not only Jesus’ example before us, but we have him within us. We have his very self on which we feast, bread and drink for our journey through the changes and chances of this life. And we have each other, companions on that journey. 

When the world feels crazier than it usually is, when you feel like you don’t have enough, that you aren’t enough, maybe you will pause, breathe in God’s mercy, breathe out God’s love. Know that you are enough. Know that you have enough. Be still, and do not fret. God’s got you. God’s got us. And all manner of things will be well. 

Later in our liturgy, we prayed one of my favorite prayers from our Book of Common Prayer, A Prayer for Quiet Confidence, and I close this blog entry with those same words, as a prayer for all of us during these troublesome times:

O God of peace, who has taught us that in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and confidence shall be our strength: By the might of your Spirit lift us, we pray you, to your presence, where we may be still and know that you are God; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Greed Is (Not) Good!

'Jesus said to the disciples, "There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. So he summoned him and said to him, `What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.' Then the manager said to himself, `What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.' So, summoning his master's debtors one by one, he asked the first, `How much do you owe my master?' He answered, `A hundred jugs of olive oil.' He said to him, `Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.' Then he asked another, `And how much do you owe?' He replied, `A hundred containers of wheat.' He said to him, `Take your bill and make it eighty.' And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.

"Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth."'

--Luke 16: 1-13

In 1987 Gordon Gekko quipped, “Greed is good,” a quote so iconic that some think Gordon Gekko is one of those people talking finances on a cable news network, not, in reality, Michael Douglas’ character in the film Wall Street. That line came to personify the Affluent Eighties, a decade marked by more, well, everything.  We’ve seen where such a focus on excess has gotten us—a greater disparity between rich and poor, haves and have nots, than any of us has ever seen.  

Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, on a fictitious cover of Fortune Magazine.

We might think that Gordon Gekko was just a product of his time and modern capitalism, but we hear again and again stories from the Bible in which the chief sin committed by the people, especially those in power, was the exploitation of the poor. The Torah outlawed interest on loans and other debts and required every person to leave their leftover goods and money for the poorest among them, yet again and again we hear the prophets, including Amos, my favorite prophet, call the people out for their behavior. By the time we get to Jesus, he’s leaning into his rabbinic heritage to use parables, metaphors, and rhetorical questions to subvert the systems of oppression in his own day. There’s something happening here in these parables....what it is ain’t exactly clear.

At first glance this Parable of the Dishonest Manager is really confusing. Is Jesus commending dishonesty, the kind of shrewd business acumen of a Gordon Gekko? The scholar William Barclay calls this "a story about as choice a set of rascals as one could meet anywhere." How are we to figure out which rascal in this story we are supposed to resonate with? Or which rascal who is a stand-in for God? What if the point of this parable is not to figure out which character represents us and God, but for Jesus to say something about the system of oppression in his own time, and in so doing, give us also a good word for living and moving and having our being in our time and place? Writer and preacher Brian McLaren says that understanding this parable is really easy, if we understand the economic ethics of 1st century Palestine! 

Rome occupied and exploited every facet of people’s lives, including their natural resources and their labor. They achieved their goals principally by way of collaboration between the religious elites and Roman officials. Those elites and other rich folks lived in Judea, while poor folks lived up north in Galilee. Rome needed produce from the poor Galilean farmers, namely wheat, wine, and olive oil, and so they taxed the beejesus out of them. The poor farmers couldn’t afford those taxes, so rich folks in Judea would come up to the north and say to the poor farmers, “We will pay those taxes of yours in exchange for the deed to your property; but don’t worry, you can still live and work as tenant farmers for the low cost of giving us a percentage of your wheat, wine, and oil.” The rich folks would then sell that tribute to the Romans, a textbook case of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. To top it all off, the rich folks very often wouldn’t go north themselves to obtain the tribute – after all, they were pretty hated – so they would send a manager, or steward, in their place. That’s the backdrop for this parable. Now you know who the rich person is, who the manager is, and who the debtors are.

The Parable of the Shrewd Manager by Marinus van Reymerswaele

So a rich land owner sees that his manager is not squeezing those poor farmers hard enough, he’s squandering the rich man’s property, which, remember, originally belonged to his debtors, those tenants. The manager is fixing to be fired, and he has to turn over the books to his boss. The manager isn’t a bad guy, he’s basically part of a middle class, stuck having to make a life for himself by doing the will of the rich guy by taking advantage of the poor. He says to himself, “I’ve worked for this guy all these years, now he’s ready to throw me out, and I’ve got no security.” When he realizes how expendable he is in this economic pyramid, he switches sides. He arranges things so that he cuts the debts of those tenant farmers – “How much do you owe? We’ll half it.” He gets some return for his rich boss, but he does it in a way that’s subversive, that gives a break to the poor, with whom he has now found solidarity. He recognizes the economic injustice being done and switches sides, using the very tactics of the oppressors to lift up the poor. For this he is actually commended as acting, in the words of our translation, “shrewdly,” but the original Greek word phronimos is better translated to “wisely.” Simply put, the dishonest manager is smart, and the rich boss sees and respects it. Game recognize game.

This parable immediately follows the three parables in chapter 15 about the lost sheep, coin, and child. It’s part of Jesus’ teaching against the religious elites, the very ones who have benefited from this collaboration system – in fact, Luke explicitly says in the very next verse that these folks are, in Greek, philargarus, which literally means “lovers of money.” You need to learn, Jesus is telling them, that it’s better to use your money in service of relationship than to use relationship in service of money. Or, as Jesus puts it in the final verse of this story, “You cannot serve God and wealth.”

That’s an interesting translation isn’t it? Some of you may know the original word here, which is mammon. It doesn’t have a direct English translation, which is why some Bibles, like the King James Version, don’t even bother translating it. Mammon is a Greek transliteration of a Semitic word that most closely means “that in which one trusts.’ Perhaps our Bible translators figured that “that in which one trusts” most often has meant money or wealth – Greed is good! Sure, we could preach this sermon outside the doors of congressional representatives who are so often bought by deep-pocketed lobbyists. Of course, we can point to this Gospel as we denounce modern day heretics like Joel Osteen and Creflo Dollar, who espouse the so-called Prosperity Gospel and have the audacity to think God actually needs them to have jumbo jets to spread the good news. We could do that, and we have. We can turn to this Gospel as we preach in both word and action, calling for a most just economic system, one in which the rich are in solidarity with the poor – as Torah intended – not continuing to rob them for pocket change. It’s pretty obvious who the folks are that need to hear that message. But there’s something about noticing the speck in our neighbor’s eye and ignoring the log in our own, right? So what is the message for us? 

False prophets.

This past Sunday was the 22nd anniversary of the first service conducted by my current congregation, the Church of the Advocate. This church was founded without land of its own and emphasized social justice and thoughtful liturgy that reflected the core pieces of their theology. The folks here have sought for the past 22 years to live into their missional values of compassion, justice, and transformation in many ways. One of those is the Advocate Tithe, an act of solidarity with poor and disenfranchised neighbors illustrated by the parish taking the very first 10% of their pledged contributions and designating them to help others. These folks know, perhaps better than most, that money is meant to be used in the service of relationship and not the other way around. But remember how mammon means much more than just money? It means that in which we put our trust. And boy, oh boy, I wonder what that could mean. What is it, brothers and sisters, in which you so strongly put your trust? What is your mammon?

If I’m examining my own life, I wonder how much trust I’m putting in things, as compared to my trust in God. How much trust am I putting in my toy collection, for example? Do I really need another one? How much trust am I putting in technology that is eroding away at my critical thinking skills, stealing the research and creativity of other people, and killing the planet, all the while telling me that it’s making my life easier? How much trust am I putting in efforts to save my own life, to preserve the safety and security of me and mine? What’s my mammon, the non-God-shaped matter that I, that we all, have relied upon? Writer and bootleg preacher Will Campbell, one of my theological heroes, once was asked to preach at Riverside Church in New York City, a very wealthy congregation. In his homily he asked, rhetorically, “What can I do to love Jesus and keep all my stuff?” He paused and said directly, “Nothing.” They didn’t ask him back.

The Rev. Will Campbell in the pulpit of Riverside Church in New York City.

Mammon might be the strongest weapon of temptation that the Enemy has. The lure of wealth, yes, but also the lure of comfort and security. Characters like the land owner and manager might seem strange and foreign to us, but this parable really does hit home in time and place of exploitation not that much different from Jesus when we really think about it. And it’s not great. But we can’t run away from it. We can’t all go and join monasteries – though, I’ve been tempted. We can’t be children of light, as Jesus says. What’s interesting here is the term “children of light”in this parable is actually a reference to the Essenes, to John the Baptist’s community and the folks who fled the cities and shunned the material world because of how evil they said it was. Jesus, by choosing to actually live in the world, rejects this principle. The children of this generation, he says to his crowd, are smarter than that, more shrewd than that. They have to live in such a world. We have to live in such a world. We cannot escape the reality in which we live. So what can we do?

The same adverb that Jesus uses to describe the actions of the dishonest manager – phronimos, or shrewdly – is used in Luke, chapter 10, verse 3, when Jesus tells his followers to be “wise as serpents, and innocent as doves.” Be wise, be shrewd, my brothers and sisters. We may have to live in a culture that is not that much different from the occupational state Jesus lived in, but we can find our way in it and through it. We do so by calling out the injustices of our own time – particularly economic exploitation, which is a tale as old as time – and by asking ourselves how we too have both benefited from and been enslaved to such a system. We do that inner work on ourselves so that we can do the outer work of using the resources we have in service of relationship, not the other way around, and rather than ignoring the growing issues of our time – a position only the privileged are able to do – we engage; we use the tools at our disposal to do what needs to be done, and we meet those challenges head-on, together. This, I believe, is the lesson of the Parable of the Dishonest Manager, and quite frankly, I think it’s a lesson at the heart of the foundation of the Church of the Advocate, making this a perfect Gospel reading for their 22nd anniversary. 

As one of the parish's old t-shirts put it: be the noun – advocate – and do the verb – advocate. If that is our mission, then surely the teaching of this parable is not far from us. Let us then use the circumstances given to us – like that manager – to create churches and communities that center Jesus above all and put mammon in its place, that we may be a people who are ever marching in the light of God. 

Being Lost

'All the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, "This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them."

So he told them this parable: "Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, `Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.' Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.

"Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, `Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.' Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents."'

--Luke 15: 1-10

I lose things.  A lot. I lost my high school ring, which was miraculously found in another state six months later. I lost my father’s college ring from the Citadel – if you know, you know – which was, sadly, never found. I lost a precious James Avery cross ring, which I wore on my right hand to match my wedding ring just before we moved back to North Carolina from Updstate New York. Honestly, I don’t know what it is with me and rings! While I was serving at a church in South Carolina I lost my sunglasses, and our wonderful parish administrator, who was a devout Roman Catholic taught me a short, simple prayer to St. Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of lost items: 

Dear St. Anthony, please look around. Something is lost and cannot be found.

I never found that particular pair of costly sunglasses, but if I had, she explained, I was supposed to show my gratitude by praying: 

Dear St. Anthony, thanks for coming around. What I had lost has now been found.

Any of y’all ever enlist St. Anthony’s help to find something you lost? Assuming you did find the thing you were looking for, do you remember how overjoyed you were to find it? 

St. Anthony of Padua

The entire 15th chapter of the Gospel of Luke is made up of three parables about lost things – lost sheep, lost coin, and a lost or prodigal child, which we don’t hear this week because we actually heard it way back on the Fourth Sunday in Lent. Each of these parables follows the same pattern: a sheep is lost from the fold, the shepherd goes to find it and rejoices when it is returned; a woman loses a coin that is worth 1/10th of her earnings, turns her house upside down searching for it, and when she finds it she throws a party to celebrate. Something is lost, someone searches for the something, and joy abounds when the something is found.

If parables are meant to teach us a thing or two about ourselves and God, the message of these parables seems pretty obvious. God is the shepherd searching for the sheep. God is the woman searching for the coin. The sheep and the coin are the folks who are lost, the folks God loves. They’re you. They’re me. They’re even the ones we wish would stay lost. To some of you biblical scholars out there, this assessment of the text might seem a bit like low-hanging fruit, but it's true, regardless of how simple it may sound, and it’s critically important for us to remember. So much gets in the way of us really believing this. Our shame whispers: “Maybe everyone else, but not you. Not after what you’ve done, what you’ve said, what you’ve secretly thought. A just God couldn’t possibly love you that much, to seek you out. Anybody but you.” Our pride whispers in the other ear: “Not him. Not her. After what they’ve done, what they’ve said, the seeds of contempt that they’ve sown. A just God would not possibly love them that much, to seek them out. Anybody but them.” Both voices are that of the Enemy.

The voice of Jesus is different. It says come unto me and rest. It says that one is loved to such an extent that he, this good shepherd, would leave everything to find such a one, would turn the whole house upside down looking for such a one; and what’s more, while speaking directly to the religious authorities who are chastising him for eating at the table of so-called sinners, Jesus does not return their outrage with his own. Moral outrage – whether self-inflicted or directed toward another – is not the way of Jesus. He remains engaged with the scribes and Pharisees. He is every bit in relationship with them as he is with the ones they call sinners. What a concept! Staying rooted in love so much so as to not leave the table! To borrow a line from Nichole Torbitzky: this is one of the beauties of the lure of God! 

The Parable of the Lost Sheep

The Wesley Study Bible summaries this chapter by saying that these parables are intended to move the scribes and Pharisees from grumbling to rejoicing. And yet, despite his efforts to reach across the table, despite his insistence that God does, really and truly, love every single person THAT much, these religious elites continue to grumble as if it’s some kind of national pastime! The more things change, the more they stay the same, am I right? Jesus pleads with them to understand that God is actively searching to reconcile, not seeking to punish. Why would they respond in such a way? Why would anyone, upon hearing such good news, respond with dismissiveness, blame? Why, even now, are there folks who cheer at the idea of a vengeful, angry God, but, once you start talking about a God who loves each person with the kind of fervor that the shepherd and woman possess in the parables, those same people rant and rave and utterly reject such a concept?

I wonder if it’s because such folks see themselves as part of the 99, the ones that the shepherd seems to abandon to go look for the one single lost sheep. Have they not also been loved? Why then would the shepherd – why would Jesus – leave them to go search for a “sinner,” for someone who doesn’t fit what they’ve been taught a person who is worthy of God’s love looks or acts like? Maybe blindness to their own belovedness has done this, the result of years of indoctrination, the twisting of empathy into something to be mocked and spat upon the way the passers by mocked and spat upon Jesus. Hurt people hurt people, so the saying goes. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. Perhaps we should all ask ourselves how we would feel if Jesus left us to go search for someone else. Would we, too, feel abandoned and angry? Could we possibly find the empathy for such a one?

These parables speak the truth that not only are we all loved, but we are all, to some extent, lost. When we silo ourselves for the sake of security, cutting ourselves off from the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of others, and are convinced of our own moral superiority, we are lost. When we strive so hard for success and capital that we reject the commandment to rest and cast our cares on God, believing everything really is up to us, we are lost. When we respond to the abominable plague of gun violence in our communities with scapegoating and what-about-isms, literally praying that such tragedies are not perpetrated by “one of us,” we are lost. To be lost is to rely solely on own egocentric worldviews, and to believe that the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the grace, mercy, and love of God that he both preached and embodied are not nearly enough. If this God of love is not enough, then neither are we. 

The God of love had a really bad week last week: the theatre of war expanding and escalating on the other side of the globe, public shootings here at home. Jesus don’t like killin’, no matter what the reason’s for. John Prine said that, and it bears repeating. The world and everything in it feels lost as of late. And while that might be true, here’s the thing: the shepherd and the woman in the parables were determined to find the pieces of the whole that were lost. They never stopped searching, never gave up. And the sheep and coin? They weren’t repentant. They were simply found. There is nothing that will stop Jesus from searching for any who are lost, and there’s nothing for any of us to do to earn such grace, such love, such mercy; it is a gift we need only accept, for ourselves and for those neighbors of ours of whom it would be easier to believe are not worthy of such a gift. Perhaps if we could do that for ourselves, we could do it for our neighbor; and if we could do it for our neighbor, little by little, person by person, then we would seek each other out, we would find each other, and there really would be celebrating in heaven. 

The God of love may have had a really bad week, but the God of love is still the God we know and meet in Jesus Christ, and this God never, ever gives up on any of us, even when we give up on ourselves, on each other, and on God. This Jesus of ours, is still seeking folks out, even through the tears that he has no doubt been shedding, while Rachel again wails over the sufferings of her children. Patty Griffin has a song When It Don’t Come Easy in which she sings, “If you break down, I’ll drive out and find you/If you forget my love, I’ll try to remind you/Stay by you, when it don’t come easy.” Kristen and I love this song, mostly because it sums up our relationship really well – I literally drove out and found her in the middle of the night early on in our courtship when we weren’t even sure if Team Kroe was really a thing. No matter if it’s you, me, or them, Jesus is searching, driving out there to find us, reminding us of his love, even when we forget; staying by us, when it don’t come easy. That’s grace, which makes all things possible, even for our own wailing to be turned into dancing. We may deserve blame, yet we’re forgiven. We may be filled with righteous anger, yet we can be joyful. We may wander away, yet we will always be found. 

Patty Griffin's song When It Don't Come Easy

Living In the Mirror

''The beginning of human pride is to forsake the Lord; the heart has withdrawn from its Maker. For the beginning of pride is sin, and the one who clings to it pours out abominations. Therefore the Lord brings upon them unheard-of calamities, and destroys them completely. The Lord overthrows the thrones of rulers, and enthrones the lowly in their place. The Lord plucks up the roots of the nations, and plants the humble in their place. The Lord lays waste the lands of the nations, and destroys them to the foundations of the earth. He removes some of them and destroys them, and erases the memory of them from the earth. Pride was not created for human beings, or violent anger for those born of women.'

--Sirach 10: 12-18

On one occasion when Jesus was going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees to eat a meal on the sabbath, they were watching him closely.

When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable. "When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host; and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, `Give this person your place,' and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, `Friend, move up higher'; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted."

He said also to the one who had invited him, "When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous."'

--Luke 14: 1, 7-14

I am a great lover of nerd culture, but one series that I have actually never really followed is Star Trek.  I know a few of you are Trekkies, so I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I never quite got into any of the series.  But there is one episode of the original Star Trek that I have always appreciated called “Mirror Mirror.”  Airing in 1967, “Mirror Mirror” introduced what the show called a Mirror Universe, where Captain James T. Kirk was evil and Mr. Spock had a goatee.  Other Trek shows through the years would return to the Mirror Universe, and icons of pop culture from Superman to Transformers have tinkered with the idea of another world that is the complete opposite of ours:  where up is down, left is right, and we say hello when we leave and goodbye when we arrive.  It is a universe turned upside-down.  

Kirk & Spock in the episode Mirror, Mirror

I often suspect that folks who heard the Good News preached by Jesus of Nazareth must have thought that he was talking about some kind of Mirror Universe; I suspect some still do.  Think about it.  He turns the usual ways of the world, the standards by which we have learned to order our lives, upside-down. We have been taught competition over cooperation, revenge over reconciliation, leading over following, enhancing our importance over humbly submitting to one another. When we attend a function like a dinner party, we’ve learned to scan the room to find those whom we like, with whom we want to be seen, and from whom, perhaps, we can gain some personal benefit, always keeping our eyes on the prize, on the next step up the ladder, higher and higher. Jesus’ not-so-subtle advice: reverse that strategy. 

There’s something about dinner parties, am I right? Clergy get invited to a lot of them, let me tell you, and there’s a rhythm and pattern to these kinds of functions. The host is trying to make it a good experience for everyone, but when the Big Deal folks walk in, there’s extra special attention that’s paid. Not that much has changed from Jesus’ time. There’s a kind of honor that comes from both hosting such a party and being invited to it, and especially in the ancient world these parties were opportunities to define one’s honor in relation to other people. Jesus often sat and ate with Pharisees and other religious leaders, bantering about Scripture and theology, the kind of activities that Pharisees lived for, their “play for mortal stakes” to borrow a line from Robert Frost. 

They thrived on these debates, especially with someone who held the level of respect and admiration as Jesus did. But as he scans the room and looks at the table, Jesus makes a suggestion that must’ve thrown folks for a loop: the next time you hold a dinner party, don’t invite your friends, your family, or the Big Deals; but rather invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, the outcast, and the socially and ritually unclean. The very folks you’d never consider, that you’d never want to sit at your table. True honor and blessing, Jesus is saying, does not come from seeking recognition and prominent stature, but by being among, living with, and ministering to these kinds of folks. This isn’t about good manners and party etiquette, this is the Kingdom of Heave;  this table that Jesus is calling the host of this party to create is what it looks like, and to hammer his point home he drops a truth bomb from Proverbs, chapter 25, verses 6 and 7, which they would’ve known very well: “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

Jesus at the Pharisee's dinner party.

It seems pretty clear that Jesus is giving us a lesson in pride and humility, something that is echoed in the words from the Apocyrphal book of Sirach: “The beginning of human pride is to forsake the Lord; the heart has withdrawn from its Maker.” Personal pride is what leads to not only an individual’s downfall but also the downfall of entire societies. The writer of Sirach closes out the reading today with the reminder that pride was not created for human beings, and yet, as someone in our Bible study said, we can’t seem to escape it. Why is that? 

Perhaps because pride very often masks itself as humility. Consider a certain political figure who, not that long ago, gave an interview in which he said, “I have far more humility than you might think.” The humble brag. Jesus’ words could then be heard as an instruction for how to manipulate others into getting what we want – be it power, prestige, or possessions. The moment that we have convinced ourselves of our own humility – our own righteousness, if you will – is the moment when pride takes hold. We can usually be sure that this is the case if we find ourselves getting defensive when someone calls us out on it. Jesus stands, now as then, offering something besides a divinely approved way for a person to be sure that they get what they want or that they are on the side of the righteous. Genuinely taking the lower seat is one thing, but doing so hoping to get noticed and moved up is another entirely. Scholar Fred Craddock compares this moment in Luke to a cartoon, a mad dash for the lowest place, with everyone’s ears cocked toward the party’s host, waiting for the call to ascend. 

Humility was a counter-cultural concept in Jesus’ day, something that, if actually lived out, could turn the world upside down. As far as Greco-Roman moral discourses were concerned, humility was rarely discussed. Today, however, it is talked about so often that it seems to have lost all meaning; and that humble brag is an everyday part of our lexicon. Real humility is hard to find, only the masquerading pride that is often a lip-service virtue. People talk about humility, but then place the very same labels of ostracization on folks that the ones around that Pharisees’ table placed on the poor and outcast. If we are to develop real humility in our lives, we must abandon any and all of our assumptions of position, our belief that we are morally right and others are wrong, that we are cool and others are mid, that we are humble and others need to be humbled. Those assumptions of position are what lie at the heart of patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormativ, and other modern, sinful instruments for maintaining socially, politically, racially, and religiously unjust systems. What then is the solution?

Martin Luther King called it the Beloved Community. Jesus called it the Kingdom of Heaven. It is a place where all belong, or none belong. A place where quid pro quos and transactional relationships are not needed. In this community, this kingdom, love is given without anything being asked for in return. Jesus tells the host of the party to invite the very folks who he not only wouldn’t consider sitting at his table, but folks who could never invite him to their own table, folks who couldn’t pay him back. Who is that for you? Who is the person you would never consider inviting to your table, who themselves could not or would not pay you back in kind? That’s who Jesus calls us to meet and invite to the tables in our homes, the tables at our church fellowships, and especially the Holy Table of the altar. Because that’s what Beloved Community, what the Kingdom of Heaven, looks like. It ain’t exactly a perfect reflection of how things actually are, but rather it’s God’s dream for how they should be. 

The clear sign of recognizing the inherent dignity in others, of cementing real Christian relationships with them, is breaking bread together. That’s the thing about a table: you can’t not be in relationship with a person when you’re sitting with them over a meal. We don’t need to build bigger walls, we need to build longer tables. Leave our positions of status, our fancy degrees, moral superiorities, and flag decals at the door because they ain’t getting us into the party. It’s only by grace, which has already invited everyone – you, me, them – and we’ve all got a seat, even the ones we might wish didn’t . Some could say it’s a Mirror Universe, an upside-down world that could never be; but don’t tell Jesus that! Because as far as he’s concerned, as far as we’re concerned, the world as it is now is what’s upside-down, it’s the mirror; the vision Jesus provides is what’s rightside-up, what’s really, really real. And that's no humble brag. 

A Real Shomer Shabbos

"Now Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, "Woman, you are set free from your ailment." When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, "There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day." But the Lord answered him and said, "You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?" When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing."

--Luke 13: 10-17

Bible pop quiz! How many commandments are there? If you said 10, you’re wrong; the grand total is 613. Let’s try another one: which is the fourth commandment? “Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.” This commandment is given in Exodus, chapter 20, verse 8 and again in Deuteronomy, chapter 5, verse 12. The Exodus version ties Sabbath back to the rest that God took after the six days of creation, hallowing the seventh day as a day on which no work should be done. In Deuteronomy, however, the commandment is tied to the Exodus event itself, whereby God reminds the people that under Pharaoh they worked as slaves, tirelessly, night and day, and that, unlike in Egypt, every person in their midst should observe Sabbath rest. It’s not a suggestion, it’s an expectation.

It is on a Sabbath’s day – Saturday – that Jesus is in a synagogue teaching, which, for what it’s worth, was not considered work because it wasn't transactional. While there he notices a woman who is suffering from an illness so debilitating that she’s permanently hunched over. She does not approach him, nor does she ask for anything, but seeing her in this condition, Jesus calls her over and pronounces that she is set free. Then he places his hands on her and she immediately stands upright. Even though it had been ok for him to teach, it was not, evidently, ok for him to do any healing. This did count as work, and as Walter from The Big Lebowski reminds us, the aim of any good Jew is to be shomer Shabbos, a keeper of the Sabbath. This interaction, which is witnessed by a crowd of people, is enough to send one of the synagogue leaders into a passive-aggressive frenzy. Rather than directly confronting Jesus, a fellow rabbi, he throws the woman under the proverbial bus: “Now’s not a good time, come back tomorrow!” His ire, though, is meant for Jesus, this delinquent who appears to not understand the commandment that there are six days for working; he seems to be anything but shomer Shabbos.

John Goodman as Walter in The Big Lebowski.

Or is he? Jesus performs an act of mercy on someone, something that should be perfectly fine on the Sabbath, given that it’s ok for someone to untie their mule and give it water; so if it’s alright to be merciful to an animal on this day, why not a person? This response, according to our text, shames the leaders and excites the folks who have witnessed this miracle. Is it any wonder that this is the last time we see Jesus in a synagogue in Luke’s Gospel? 

This confrontation speaks to the tension between the bountiful gift of salvation that God provides and the human desire to control it. I’d like to think that this particular leader of a religious community is not a malicious person, but someone trying so hard to figure out the correct thing to do that he misses what is the right thing to do. Again, like Walteri, he’s not wrong, he’s just a…..jerk. As the scholar William Barclay points our, “Jesus insisted that suffering must not be allowed to continue until tomorrow if it can be helped today.” This guy, with his rigid legalism, doesn’t get that.

Perhaps, though, it is less about rigidity to the commandment and more about a misunderstanding of it; after all, Jesus uses the commandment itself to argue against the leader and his response to the woman’s healing. Sabbath, is about much more than a 24 hour period of forced rest, it is a mindset and way of being. Sabbath is connected to creation and our finding contentment in God alone, just as we did in the beginning. It cannot be forced from the outside-in, but rather must come from the inside-out. Sabbath starts in our hearts and minds and spirits. We cannot rest on the outside from our labors if we are unable to rest internally from the myriad of trials and temptations that plague us. In a world that is constantly trying to control us from the outside-in through the pursuit of power, prestige, and possessions, developing Sabbath from the inside-out is an act of resistance.

Perhaps most importantly, Sabbath is intricately linked with the Jubilee, an expected celebration, according to Leviticus, chapter 25, during which time all debts are forgiven, all prisoners released, all lands returned to their original owners, and all people head back to the wilderness, which is where they met God in the first place. It’s a sort of hard reset button on society, one that keeps God at the center. The Jubilee occurs on the 50th year, following seven sets of Sabbatical years. (Every 7th year, in which all slaves were released from their bondage was a Sabbatical year.) In other words, Sabbath is deliverance.

The horn and broken chains representing the Jubilee (image courtesy of www.chabad.org).

This, I suspect, is what lies at the heart of Jesus healing the woman, rather than a statement condemning the legalistic view of the synagogue leader. The woman’s illness had resulted in the loss of social relationships and standing within the community. She’d been made unclean, forced to endure exclusion and loneliness. She is need of deliverance. Jesus’ words to her – “You are set free!” - not only bring physical healing but they also reinstate her to legitimate membership within her community. That sounds like behavior much more fitting of the Sabbath than simply watering one’s ox. 

This encounter between Jesus and the unnamed bent-over woman is all about deliverance and breaking the yoke. Her critics tell her it isn’t an illness from which she suffers, no, it’s possession by an evil spirit from Satan. This is the yoke placed on her by the community. Jesus removes this yoke, empowering her to stand and give glory to God. It is as if her eyes are finally open, like Dorothy seeing in technicolor for the first time in The Wizard of Oz, or Neo waking up in the real world in The Matrix. 

Dorothy goes from black and white to technicolor in The Wizard of Oz.

Think of the yokes that are habitually placed on us by a consumer-driven society designed to keep feeding us with bread and entertaining us with the circus, all the while our own freedoms are gradually pulled out from under us without ever knowing. Folks with eyes to see cry for freedom from such yokes, but the powers-that-be tell us now isn’t a good time, come back tomorrow. The lesson of this Gospel is not a condemnation of the commandment or “rule” to follow Sabbath, it is a condemnation of those who forget what it really means. Because if Sabbath, as a mindset and lifestyle, were actually incorporated into our lives, then every person would have their yokes thrown off and would know real freedom and delight in the Lord, to paraphrase Isaiah (chapter 58), who warned those returning from exile and captivity to not be as their oppressors had been, but to honor the true meaning of Sabbath and not to trample on it.

We dare not trample on such good news, though contemporary society has tried – just look at how they turned a Sabbatical from one year’s time to a matter of weeks! If sin is addiction, as one theologian put it, then ours is the addiction to a culture that tries to keep folks in line by distracting them with this or that product or gimmick, so that the real evil – the real Satan that binds us – can continue to thrive. But blessed assurance, Jesus is ours, and he will be there, if we hear him calling like the woman did, to set us free from that which binds us. In his book Sabbath as Resistance, the late, great Walter Brueggeman says “Sabbath is not simply a pause. It is an occasion for reimagining all social life away from coercion and competition to compassionate solidarity. Such solidarity is imaginable and capable of performance only when the drivenness of acquisition is broken. Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes. It is the pause that transforms. It is an invitation to receptivity, and acknowledgement that what is needed is given and need not be seized.”

This is grace, which, like Sabbath, is freely given by God. A gift that finds its truest meaning when we give it away to one who is suffering. It’s hard to say if the Jubilee, that year when debts were forgiven, land returned, and prisoners freed, ever actually happened in the context of history. But that was God’s dream. That’s shalom…salaam…peace. And whether it’s actually happened or not doesn’t really matter; we still strive to achieve that dream in both prayer and action. Isaiah calls us to be repairers of the breach – a slogan borrowed by the Poor People’s Campaign. Jesus calls us to proclaim by our words and actions that the Kingdom has come near, that Sabbath is not just a day to be observed, but a life to be lived. And if we could live that life, brothers and sisters, justice would roll down like waters, mercy would be freely given, and all would walk humbly with our God. It’s not a suggestion. It’s an expectation.

Faith, Faith, Faith

'The word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision, "Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great." But Abram said, "O Lord GOD, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?" And Abram said, "You have given me no offspring, and so a slave born in my house is to be my heir." But the word of the LORD came to him, "This man shall not be your heir; no one but your very own issue shall be your heir." He brought him outside and said, "Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them." Then he said to him, "So shall your descendants be." And he believed the LORD; and the LORD reckoned it to him as righteousness.'

--Genesis 15: 1-6

'Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.

'By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he stayed for a time in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land, living in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God. By faith he received power of procreation, even though he was too old-- and Sarah herself was barren-- because he considered him faithful who had promised. Therefore from one person, and this one as good as dead, descendants were born, "as many as the stars of heaven and as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore."'

--Hebrews 11: 1-3, 8-13

'Jesus said to his disciples, "Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

"Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks. Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them. If he comes during the middle of the night, or near dawn, and finds them so, blessed are those slaves.

"But know this: if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour."'

--Luke 12: 32-40

A great sage of 1990s once sang about the theme that runs through all of our Scriptures today:  “Before the river becomes an ocean, before you throw my heart back on the floor, oh oh baby I reconsider my foolish notion, well I need someone to hold me but I’ll wait for something more, cause I gotta have faith, oh I gotta have faith.”  God rest your soul, George Michael! 

Voice of an angel!

Ya gotta have faith.  We throw that sentiment around a lot, don’t we?  Ya gotta have faith that this will be the year our team finally wins—story of my life as a Cleveland sports fan.  In George Michael’s case, he’s gotta have faith that he’ll find that partner who won’t break his heart. It’s not just something that we preach on Sunday mornings.  Faith is an underlying theme of so many aspects of our day-to-day lives, and we are often told, in one way or another, that if the thing doesn’t work out, then we just didn’t have enough faith.  Is that, though, what biblical faith is?

Immediately our attention gets grabbed by the first sentence in the 11th chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews: “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”  That’s one of those sentences of Scripture that’s so popular that we see it on bracelets and bumper stickers; even Episcopalians can usually quote it.  But what’s really going on with this statement? The Greek word is pistis, which is used 4,102 times in the Bible . It means “a firm persuasion”, which is based not on sight or knowledge but on trust. And it goes both ways; it is inextricably tied to the notion of covenant, of relationship. God has pistis in Abram – the exalted ancestor – which is why God makes him Abraham – the ancestor of a multitude – showing that being “faithful” is about making and maintaining a commitment to an other, rather than being assured that God – or whoever we’ve made a covenant with – will give us something; after all, even though God’s promise to Abram is ultimately fulfilled, Abram himself doesn’t get to see it.

Mosaic of Abram (Abraham) gazing at the stars.

As for that definition of faith, our translation muddies the water a little. The word that gets translated as “assurance” –“faith is the assurance of things hoped for”--is hupostasis, which is better translated as “reality” because it doesn’t have anything to do with personal belief.  Also, the word translated as “conviction” –“the conviction of things not seen”—is elenchos, which again is not about personal conviction but is better translated as “proof.”  We could, then, read this definition as: "Faith is the reality of things hoped for, the proof of things not seen."  When we think of faith in this manner it becomes less about a personal assurance and conviction and more about the ever-truthful realization of the forward movement of God.  

Even that word, “faith”’ has been hijacked and used in nefarious ways. Consider this: what is the first thing that pops in your head when you hear the term “faith-based?” I suspect, based on some of your faces, that it isn’t the story of Abram from Genesis or the definition given by Hebrews 11. There are “faith-based” movie production companies – even a streaming service called Pureflix, I swear I did not make that up – and their products are quite bad. There is the Ark Encounter in Kentucky that says it offers a “faith-based” approach to science and thus shows dinosaurs and humans living together, and some parents and even public officials have pushed for actual school curricula that follows similar “faith-based” models that ignore real science. And, of course, during the COVID-19 pandemic, a great many folks proclaimed “faith over fear,” arguing that their decision to not be vaccinated was “faith-based.” How ironic, given that for many of us the decision to be vaccinated was, precisely, inspired by our faith, our commitment to and trust in our neighbors to care for one another. A great many of my friends and family ask if I have kept up with the HBO series The Righteous Gemstones, a kind of satire on the “faith-based” entertainment industry of megachurches and celebrity pastors, and while I love me some Danny McBride and John Goodman, I can’t watch it when our culture continues to portray “people of faith,” as little more than self-serving content creators and self-absorbed consumers. What has modernity done to faith? Where is the faith expressed by God to Abram, or written by the author of Hebrews? Where’s the faith of Jesus?

Promo image for season 2 of The Righteous Gemstones

I believe that the faith of Jesus is what stands between us and this neverending stream of false prophecies and heretical behavior that claims again and again to be “faith based.” Jesus makes clear in this teaching from Luke’s Gospel that faith in our God – the God of Abram whom Jesus called Abba – is not found by acquiring anything – be they power, prestige, or possessions - , but rather by surrendering everything. The entirety of God’s realm – a state of being that Jesus called the Kingdom of Heaven – is ours if we are willing to give away our stuff and everything else that we fear to lose. Fear attaches to whatever we cannot release, becoming a ruinous mold in the dark isolation of our grasping and clutching for control. The capitalist, consumer-driven culture of ours says that we can have control over our lives, that everyone can be a Caesar, if we accumulate riches or rely on this new device we’ve marketed as something that will do the hard work for us. Fear infiltrates our life, alters our breathing and shows up masked as various anxieties and the overwhelming need to fix things. By surrendering that need and the things that give us that false sense of control, we make room for Jesus to shine a healing light upon our minds and hearts to clear the mold of fear away; what’s he’s commending in our Gospel this morning is faith – even if pistis is not used -  the kind, that has its assurance in a future that is secured not by human wants and desires, but by the One who’s got the whole world in those mighty hands.

What can this kind of faith really do for us? It liberates us from our need for control, which itself is rooted in our fear of loss, the ultimate loss being death itself. But by living expectantly, unencumbered by the temptation for control, life becomes lighter, the burdens less self-inflicted. We find ourselves working with Jesus to create structures where all embrace his model of self-emptying love, even to those who trouble us; so much so that a thief coming in the middle of the night will not be able to alarm us. “Welcome!” we can say to the thief. “I’ve got plenty of stuff to offer you. I’m not afraid. Sit down at my table. Enjoy the feast!” Because, as one person in our bible study said this week, “God should be our only attachment!”

There is one great example of this kind of faith in fairly recent memory.  During the Apartheid days of South Africa, when the government tried shutting out any vocal opposition, Archbishop Desmond Tutu held a church service where armed police entered his cathedral in Cape Town in a move of intimidation while Tutu was preaching.  At one point he finally addressed the police directly and said:  “You are very powerful, but you are not gods. So, since you’ve already lost, I invite you to come and join us!”  With that, the congregation broke out into singing and dancing.  No one knew then that Apartheid would eventually be defeated, but Tutu’s faith was in something bigger, in the Kingdom of Heaven and the ultimate victory of God. When we place our faith in that Kingdom, in that victory, we will want for nothing, we will fear nothing, and we will do far greater things than we could ask or imagine.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu

This is what I believe it means to live lives of faith, lives that are oriented toward something so much bigger than ourselves; our desires, as well as our fears. From Abram the exalted ancestor and Jesus the Christ, to Desmond the bishop and you, may we be faithful, as God has been and continues to be faithful to us. And know that there’s an angel out there somewhere, singing for you and encouraging you along……

Ya gotta have it!