The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 21C] - September 26, 2010 (Luke 16:19-31)

Mark Zuckerberg has been in the news quite a bit this week. For those who might not recognize that name right off the bat, Mark Zuckerberg is the founder and CEO of Facebook, the online social networking site that now boasts 500 million users worldwide. Thanks to the overwhelming popularity of his internet creation, which allows people to share all kinds of personal information like photos and favorite news stories and imaginary farm equipment with the click of a computer key, Zuckerberg became the world’s youngest billionaire ever when he was only 23 years old. Computer genius, he is only 26 years old now and his net worth is $6.9 billion.

Zuckerberg made the headlines once this week because a quasi-biographical film of Zuckerberg and the genesis of Facebook, called, The Social Network, will hit the theatres nationwide on Friday. I’ve not seen the film, but it chronicles his rise to internet icon status as an undergraduate at Harvard. The subtitle for The Social Network is “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.” It is a play on words that, unfortunately, only the Facebook in-crowd will fully appreciate, but the essential meaning is still there for everyone: those who are ambitious in obtaining status and wealth must often trample human relationships in the process. The film apparently does not portray Zuckerberg in a flattering light.

Be that as it may, Zuckerberg also made headlines this week as he announced a grant of $100 million to the impoverished school system of Newark, New Jersey. Citing his desire to see that all children get afforded the same type of education to which he had access as a child, Zuckerberg chose to shower his generosity on the Lazarus of today’s educational system: Newark’s schools have a 50% graduation rate and were declared a “failure” by the state government in 1995. That the same country could produce both a person like Zuckerberg and a school system like Newark’s is a reminder of the disparity of wealth and opportunity that beset all human communities.

No, we do not need Jesus’ lessons to remind us of the world’s haves and have-nots, but we get them anyway, especially in Luke’s gospel. Hardly a chapter goes by where Jesus doesn’t highlight the needs of the poor and oppressed and also draw attention to the excesses of the rich. The song that Mary sings in Luke’s first chapter should tip us off to this theme of poor versus rich. Reflecting on God’s incredible decision to use a young, unmarried virgin as the way for Jesus to come into the world, Mary rejoices, “God has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.” But of all the talk about the fate of the rich and the poor and where they fit into God’s kingdom, this parable of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke’s 16th chapter makes the point most vividly.

The Pharisees, who are the target audience for this parable, have endured Jesus’ teachings about money for awhile. Described by Luke as people who loved money, the Pharisees begin to mock and ridicule Jesus because he claims that one cannot serve God and wealth. Finally, Jesus resorts to telling a story. Where lessons and rhetoric often fail, simple stories with imaginative characters and dramatic plots often succeed.

The Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus
workshop of Domenico Fetti (1618/28)

This rich man was filthy rich. He is often named “Dives” (DYE-veeze) because dives is the Latin word for rich, and therefore the word used in the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible for centuries. Dives dressed, for example, only in the best. “Purple and fine linen,” we are told, but we know the names—Oscar de Laurenta, Armani, Hollister. He ate everyday like it was Christmas or Thanksgiving. With the best cooks in the land at his service, no doubt, he never ate leftovers, even though he had them. Some might say that Dives “had it all,” but that would be wrong. That, in fact, was his problem: he felt he didn’t have it all. Once he had some, he realized there was always more, and so his life was built on this vicious circle of acquiring and acquiring…there was, in his view, always more to be had. Clothes, food, influence, Facebook friends…Dives could always use more.

Meanwhile, right out at the entrance to his neighborhood, where he’d practically have to trip over him each day, lay a beggar named Lazarus. If Dives was filthy rich, Lazarus was filthy poor…and I mean filthy. Not only did he have no food or money, but he was stricken with some awful skin disease and had no access to adequate health care, unless you count the dogs who would come and lick his open sores. He would have loved to eat those leftovers from Dives’ five refrigerators, but—alas!—Lazarus was invisible. No one really paid him attention as he sat there in utter anguish. Two people, living together in the same world—sharing the same property, even—but having completely different experiences with life. One is successful, living the high life, and the other is a low-life. Then they both die.

As Jesus tells the story, Lazarus doesn’t even get the luxury of a burial. Nevertheless, angels swoop down to carry him away and lay him comfortably in the bosom of Abraham, where most people would hope to spend eternity in that day and age. Dives gets a burial, but then finds himself in Hades where he gets tormented forever. Ever the opportunist, Dives looks up and says to Abraham (even in death choosing not to address the poor man directly), “Hey, Abe, this place stinks. Why don’t you send ole Lazzy-boy to get me something to drink?” Abraham informs him of the rules: there is a huge, unbridgeable gap between where Lazarus is and where Dives is in Hades and that’s that. No crossing. For any reason. Kind of like the short distance between the mansion and the gate which Dives chose never to cross in his life on earth, right? Abraham goes on to inform him of the reversal of fortune that Jesus has been mentioning throughout his ministry: the hungry are filled with good things and the rich are sent away empty.

But that doesn’t stop Dives. He continues to bargain with Abraham, maybe for the first time thinking of someone other than himself. His brothers! Maybe if Lazarus were to go to them from the dead—again, he refuses to dignify Lazarus with a direct request—then his brothers would be warned against the perils of self-indulgence. And that’s where Abraham reminds Dives of what Jesus has been saying the whole time: this business of taking care of the poor and sharing wealthy with others is not a new concept. It has been a central message of God’s word through the prophets since the beginning of Israel’s history. Abraham’s final message to the rich man: even if someone were to rise from the dead, people will still be drawn to money and wealth and power more than they will be drawn to God’s Word. Even if someone were to rise from the dead, people will still be tempted to avert their eyes and their generosity from the Lazaruses who lie in their path.

Earlier this week I was driving out of a Wal-Mart parking lot and got stopped at a red light. There, beside me, on the median, sat what looked to be a homeless man holding up a sign asking for help. He looked dirty and unshaven, some words on his sign were misspelled, and he seemed to be nodding off to sleep, even though it was about lunchtime. I thought to myself, I could give him something now, but all I have is a little cash and he might not use it wisely.

As I pondered what his life might be and its juxtaposition to so many shoppers leaving a mall, I wondered at my own awkwardness at being so close to him. Why my mistrust? Why my shame? Why my judgment? I’m sure it had something to do with sin, but before I could rationalize anything, a car turning into the parking lot just on the other side of him stopped, bringing all traffic behind it to a halt. Down rolled a window and out popped the hand of a driver bearing a fast food bag. He called the homeless man over and handed him what I supposed was a hot meal. At that point the light turned green and I had to drive on, but not before I thanked the driver of the car (in my head, of course) for reminding me, yet again, that someone has risen from the dead.

It’s very easy, even in this country, to think that if someone is poor it somehow their own fault and the resources are there for them to remove themselves from their condition. It’s the stereotypical and unhelpful thought pattern that “God helps those who help themselves.” And this attitude exists not only in our time. Just as disparities of wealth have always existed, so have possible theories for those disparities, no matter how incorrect they may be. In Jesus’ day it was very common to think that if you were poor it was because God had punished you somehow, and that if you were rich, it was because you had done right and God had blessed you.

Yet before we turn these parables of Lazarus and Dives strictly into a lesson on social justice, a lesson on the economics of God’s kingdom, we must remember that Jesus tells this parable primarily to the Pharisees, who are lovers of money. It is Jesus’ sternest warning against the dangers of trying to serve two masters. The desire to have more and more quarantine us from the ability to help others and bring them joy in this life. We do not open our hearts and our gates and our car windows because we earn points with God that way, or because we want the comfort of Abraham’s bosom. We open our hearts and our gates and our car windows and give of our wealth—whatever that may be—because that’s how the world looks now that Jesus is risen Lord.

Maybe the world has always been a tale of the imbalance between the Zuckerbergs and the Newarks, but it mustn’t always be that way now that someone has risen from the dead. People of faith don’t have to fall into the trap of thinking that “this is just the way the world works out,” because we know it isn’t true. It never was, which is what Moses and the prophets were trying to make clear. But it’s especially not true anymore. Jesus has triumphed over all the powers of greed and selfishness, showing us that opening our lives to the Spirit of God makes us truly richer than any amount of money. The story of Lazarus and the rich man isn’t about the ultimate fate of the poor or the rich. If we get stuck on that aspect of the parable we are liable to miss the point. The point has more to do with the world that Jesus’ ministry has come to create, a world where the rich and poor alike are transformed by the gospel and, by the bye, realize their interconnectedness and rejoice in their responsibilities to each other.

This, then, is why Mary calls it good news that the rich and the satisfied, in God’s kingdom, will be sent away empty. This is why the gospel is good for both poor as well as the rich…because under Jesus’ reign even the money-lovers will learn what Lazarus and the rest of the poor already know: that God is our only help. In the end it will not be money, or fame, or a good education, or the right upbringing, or computer ingenuity that gives us the life that really is life. God alone is where we’ll find our hope, and for his vision of a world restored in Jesus we work and pray.

And that, as it turns out, happens to be the meaning of Lazarus’ name. The name Dives might mean “rich man,” but Lazarus, in fact, means, “God is my help” in the language of Jesus’ time. It is an ironic play on words that would not have been lost on the Pharisee audience. Isn’t that a clever piece to the story? The poor man’s name actually means “God helps me.”

As we look out in despair and confusion at the disparities in our world, and as we ponder our own place in it, may we not simply see Lazarus, but perhaps be him, too. In the wondrous light of the resurrection, may the risen Lord Jesus name us “Lazarus”: God is our help.

Thanks be to God!



The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 18C] - September 5, 2010 (Deuteronomy 30:15-20 and Luke 14:25-33)

Eeeerrrk!

That’s the sound I believe you would hear if you were to hold this portion of Luke’s gospel up to your ear. It’s the sound of screeching tires from brakes being applied rather suddenly and forcefully, as when the road you are travelling takes a turn off to the side in another direction without warning.

Eeerrrrk!

It’s the sound of hundreds, perhaps thousands—no, make that millions of would-be disciples—stopping in their tracks to get their bearings and possibly re-calculate their route in Jesus’ footsteps. Like listening for the sound of the ocean inside a conch shell, if you hold this particular page of the New Testament—this specific admonition from Jesus--up to your ear, that’s the sound you can make out.

At least, I know I can hear myself hitting the brakes pretty hard when I hear these words about true discipleship. I don’t know about you, but I find myself almost instinctively backpedalling, my hand groping for some spiritual GPS device with which I could investigate possibilities for circumnavigating these unhappy obstacles.

It’s been a wild and interesting ride thus far. The demands of discipleship haven’t been too taxing, yet the rewards have been fairly attractive: the promise of a kingdom fulfilled, good news for the poor, the vision of a world released from captivity to sin! Discipleship has, for the most part, seemed relatively doable. That is, until now…until this point when our leader wheels around mid-step and seemingly lays it all on the line: following will mean, in fact, loving him above all else, carrying a cross, and—gasp!—giving up our possessions. Now it appears more might be asked of us than we originally thought, and if we are to re-prioritize and re-calibrate, it would be best to apply the brakes and think this through.

On the whole, we can’t blame Jesus’ for not letting his followers know what their in for. We can’t claim that this is a bait-and-switch approach to discipleship, and it’s good that honesty is the policy here. Yet, at the same time, doesn’t Jesus know that you attract more flies with honey than you do with vinegar? I mean, what kind of church growth campaign would this be, anyway? We hear stories about the decline of so many mainline churches in America, the dwindling membership numbers of our own denomination, and the rising statistics of those who say they’re unchurched. Wouldn’t it be better to highlight the fun aspects of following the Lord, if Jesus were to wheel around and remind us of the upcoming potluck dinners and the youth group Synod events? Does he really think being so blunt about the costs will make people sign up and follow?

Could you imagine, for instance, if this is how we introduced Henry Waller this morning to the waters of baptism? “Hal and Ally, do you realize what you’re getting Henry into? Do you know you’re signing him up for a good bit of suffering, introducing him to a way of thinking and living that will often have him at odds with the world? Are you prepared for him to learn to love Jesus even more than he will come to love you?? Happy baptism, everybody!”

Yes, perhaps better to downplay these aspects, Jesus, for fear we’ll all apply the brakes, and then never rev the engine up again! Like the Israelites in this morning’s passage from Deuteronomy who stand at the threshold of the Promised Land, looking over the Jordan, hopeful and yet chastened after forty years of wandering, the followers of Jesus face something like a decision at this point: Eeeerrrk! Life…or death. Prosperity…or adversity. Continue to Jerusalem with Jesus…or go back to whatever we were doing before.

Lutherans have long had something of an allergic reaction to anything that smacks of “decision theology”; that is, any understanding of Christian faith which suggests, in any way, that our salvation is dependent on our decision for God. Lutherans have typically chosen to proclaim all this the other way around: that salvation is ultimately based on God’s decision for us, that God never gives up on us, and his love is a free gift offered in the life and death of Jesus Christ who came to suffer and die so that sinners could be reconciled to God. In baptism, we have these promises, never to be revoked, and Christian life is about fashioning an authentic response to those promises. Yes, if there is a decision involved in securing our redemption, we would always choose to stress God’s decision for us so that the message of grace is loud and clear.

And yet, there is a sense in which some type of decision is expected from us at not one but at perhaps several points along the way. There is some need for an acknowledgement on our part, by the power of the Holy Spirit, that we will join our meager forces with this kingdom coming. We will, in fact, commence to building that tower that Jesus mentions in his mini-parable. We will commit our armies to the battle. We will submit, that is, to the suffering that comes when standing up for justice and peace, and we’ll strive to view the world and our relationships with Christ at the center.

That’s what Jesus is driving at in his short but direct speech here on the road to Jerusalem. Without mincing his words, Jesus urges anyone who has an interest in being a disciple to weigh first what that means. This discipleship endeavor is not, as it sometimes appears, just another social service organization that goes about doing good here and there. This movement is not, as it often comes across, a club for fellowship and networking, or a historical society that propagates a certain heritage. The community of Jesus’ followers isn’t even about a certain kind of worship, a gathering of people who like to do little religious things together. Rather, Jesus calls real people to a real journey that has real demands.

Incidentally, a book on this particular subject has recently been published which is causing quite a stir in certain Christian circles. A review of it was even run on CNN this week. Entitled Almost Christian, the book is researched and written by Princeton Theological Seminary professor Kenda Creasy Dean. In it she posits, rather controversially, that many of the youth in Christian churches these days are not really Christian, having instead developed a “watered-down faith that portrays God as a ‘divine therapist’ whose chief goal is to boost people’s self-esteem.” Furthermore, Dean argues that many “parents and pastors are unwittingly passing on this self-serving strain of Christianity.”

To draw her conclusions, Professor Dean undertook hundreds of interviews of active church youth across the country and asked them about their faith, their lives, and what was important to them. She discovered that while they could talk with considerable nuance about subjects like money, sex, and their family relationships, they were surprisingly incoherent when asked to talk about their beliefs. Interestingly, Dean hypothesizes that this watered-down version of Christian faith that youth are receiving and hearing from pastors and parents is largely why youth are drifting away from the mainline churches. They recognize, on some level, that no demand is really made on them, that no challenge is really offered from this type of distant god, just as such a god steers clear of teenagers’ tough questions about life.

I can’t say that I have experienced her findings to be true about the youth I’ve worked with at Epiphany. After all, one of our youth members freely donated the cash gifts she received from her sixteenth birthday party to fund part of the youth group’s servant trip to South Carolina last month. Another one spent the last week of her summer running a day camp for inner city children in her own backyard, without compensation. What I found most interesting about Dean’s conclusions is her answer for teaching about the God we encounter in the gospel today, the God who sends his Son to suffer for our sake. She says that parents “who perform one act of radical faith in front of their children convey more than a multitude of sermons and mission trips.” Such an act might include, for example, turning down a more lucrative job offer to stay at a struggling church or spending a summer abroad working on an agricultural renewal project and then verbally connecting that type of radical decision to the life of faith. ("Author: More teens becoming ‘fake’ Christians.” John Blake on CNN.) In other words, it involves taking to heart the words about the rigors of discipleship, and deciding to head forward, deciding to embark, time and again, on that path of grace that God lays out before us in Jesus.

And somewhere along the line, I would say, we learn that it is actually quite worthwhile to follow…that even after we’ve hit the brakes over and over again, we discover that the fun we might be looking for really is found in sharing all that we have with others, in dedicating all our worldly possessions—indeed, our very lives—to the cause of something far greater that our pastime or our own personal glory. Somewhere along the way—and as a Lutheran I would say at innumerable points along the way—we do decide that crossing over Jordan, for all its scariness and all its sacrifices, is still the only path worth taking, the only land worth occupying, for through it we truly enjoy the life God desires for us, a kingdom that is eternal.

And also along the way we discover, to our shock, that it isn’t vinegar Jesus has used to invite us into the life of discipleship. No, my friends, it isn’t vinegar at all, but its far sweeter cousin, wine. With bread and wine, placed out upon a table surrounded by the very fellows who slammed on the brakes in betrayal and denial, Jesus offers his own self and God’s own forgiveness as his eternal pledge of help and salvation. And this gift has been given, it turns out, as a part of a growth campaign: your growth…your growth into a life that is prosperity, a life of radical growth around every bend in the road. It has been given for you, Henry…and for all of us.

One question for us to ponder, as we sit there with our foot on the brake pedal: will we take it?

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 16C] - August 22, 2010 (Luke 13:10-17)

Chalk lines: this hidden but essential element of roofing became the new arch-nemesis of your hard-working youth group in their task to put a new roof on Mrs. Fife’s home during their servant trip to South Carolina earlier this month. Chalk lines: if they are not observed and obeyed as shingles are nailed down, as we learned in the 90-degree sun, a roof will not look good and will likely not keep out the elements. No matter how many roofs I’ve gazed upon admiringly or lived under throughout my life, I’ve never appreciated just how precise the art of laying down shingles really is until the youth group had to do it. Heeding those pesky chalklines—along with paying attention to those little grooved tabs on the shingles—are the key to getting the job done right.

However, it is very much easier said than done, and we found that our fascination with the neat little contraption that could thwap down the orange lines of chalk with the flick of a wrist was equaled by our frustration at trying to obey them. On more than one occasion, youth group members were ordered to rip up freshly-nailed shingles and put down new ones in their place because they discovered they had drifted ever so slightly from the guiding chalklines that ran the length of the roof. A deviation that seemed very insignificant as we started a line could produce a huge discrepancy if carried out over the course of the whole roof. I must say the youth took it quite well when they had to discard, for example, a whole hour’s worth of work and begin again. I can’t say I would have been quite so patient a student learning the rules of roofing, especially when they seemed so easy to break.

Rules, guidelines, protocols, Vision and Expectations…call them what you will, but everything in life seems to have them. Even religion, for example. Religious devotion, while life-giving, seems to be riddled with all kinds of rules and guidelines, often administrated by a clergy that is rigid and unbending, like a roofing foreman. It turns out that even something relatively straightforward like God’s day of rest comes with a complete set of chalklines to help observe it.

The Sabbath, which is Hebrew for “seven”—since God rested on the seventh day of creation—could be one of the trickiest commandments to observe. There’s no way at this point that I could sketch all of the guidelines and rules for keeping the Third Commandment that existed in Jewish culture, especially by Jesus’ day. In the first five books of the Old Testament alone there are numerous laws about Sabbath-keeping. No fires, for example, were allowed to be kindled in the home on the Sabbath, for building a fire constituted “working.” Oxen and other livestock were also included in the prohibitions from work.

By the time Jesus was preaching in synagogues, many hundred years later, Jewish scribes and religious leaders had defined Sabbath-keeping in such a way that it limited the number of physical steps that could be taken on the Sabbath day. If you or your cow walked over the limit, it could suggest your rest wasn’t ample, and that was forbidden. All in all, restrictions regarding any of God’s Commandments could get very complicated, and as we see from the story in the gospel, it was often much easier to thwap those religious chalklines down than it was to figure out how to follow them.

When Jesus takes the time to heal this bent-over woman on the Sabbath—and in the synagogue, no less—it appears as though Jesus has bent one of the rules. Healing, you see, constitutes work, since clearly a priest or Levite would have to perform the ritual prayers and accompanying sacrifices. Don’t they deserve a day off, too, so as not to break the rules? Fresh off a vacation, myself, I have to be honest and say I can completely understand the Pharisees’ reaction. All they’re trying to do is follow the rules, to obey that chalkline as best they can. After all, it’s not like they’re rejecting the woman outright. In her defense, she doesn’t even ask for healing; she just shows up. Perhaps she knows if healing is what she needs, she can come back tomorrow and receive proper attention then. What’s another day to eighteen years? And rules are rules, aren’t they? Yet Jesus’ seizes the opportunity to heal her. She is let loose from her bondage and lifted up—spiritually and physically—to praise her Creator.

A common misunderstanding of this story is that Jesus flouts the rules in order to show mercy to the woman. He is seen as a hero of some sort, as he “sticks it” not only to the Pharisees but to God’s law in general. Like the Jetblue flight attendant the other week who, having reached his limit with rude passengers and rules for courteous conduct, left his job in dramatic fashion by sliding down the emergency escape chute on the tarmac, Jesus appears here in the synagogue to be a flippant rule-breaker, jettisoning the entire system of religion and what it stands for. Such an understanding of this episode no doubt pleases those who support a view of Christian faith free from any formal structure. Jesus, they claim, doesn’t like rules. He says they just get in the way. So, such people say, better opt for a form of faith or spirituality that doesn’t get encumbered with such things.

Yet it’s important to note that’s not really what’s happening here. Jesus is not, in fact, thumbing his nose to God’s rules, or even putting a new spin on them. It is true he may be breaking the Pharisees’ rules about the Sabbath, but those are just that: the Pharisees’ rules. Jesus is not throwing out the baby of life-giving faith with the bathwater of misused religious structure. What Jesus does do in the synagogue is refocus everyone’s attention on the original intent and purpose of God’s law, particularly the one about the Sabbath. God is about fostering and providing for his people a life free from the power of sin and death. The God of Israel—indeed, the God of the Pharisees—is about lifting up those who are bowed down. The God whom Jesus calls “Father” is abounding in steadfast love, who desires, at his core, to “renew our youth like an eagle’s and provide vindication for all who are oppressed” (Psalm 103). God, in fact, has always been about those things most emphatically, and God’s commandments and ordinances have never been given to oppress anyone’s growth or prolong anyone’s undeserved suffering. Rather, they have been given to free God’s people for an abundant life where we enjoy the benefits of God’s creation to their fullest and where we find joy in true communion with our fellow brothers and sisters.

This is what Jesus is illustrating when he lays hands on the woman and raises her up. In doing so, he is not only exposing the hypocrisy of the Pharisees—who, he notes, would have done less for a beast of burden—but he is showing us all what honoring the Sabbath was always meant to do. It’s not necessarily about following rules merely to prevent us from working (although rules can often be helpful) but it is about fully enjoying life as one of God’s creatures.

True observance of the Sabbath—intentionally taking time for rest and not doing work—reminds us that we cannot save ourselves, that our industriousness, for all its glory, can never give us everything we need. Our hands, our American hands—even collectively employed—are not the source of all that is good and helpful for living. Like the woman in the synagogue, we cannot straighten ourselves out on our own. We must rely on God to provide that power for us, just as we truly rely on God for everything. Sometimes, observing the chalklines helps us remember that. But mainly we receive that when we look to Jesus for mercy and comfort. When we come to him for healing and find him on the cross, arms outstretched in love. There we begin to see how Jesus becomes our real Sabbath—that place so freely given, that person so graciously offered for our benefit. On the cross, he becomes the one who lifts us up and points our lives and our voices in praise to the God of love.

We returned last night from a week of vacation with two other couples with very young children, one of whom was only four months old. All twelve of us were in one house together. We all managed to make it out alive, and we had a great time, but it was intense week of midnight feedings and early risings. Speaking of rest and relaxation, I don’t think any adults got much. Our daughters, ages two and three, who had to share a bed for the first time, were also exhausted from lack of sleep and too much play. As I went to bed last night, I found Clare, our three-year-old, asleep in the hall upstairs.  Apparently she had ventured out at some point to read books by the night light—against our bedtime chalk lines, I might add—and fell asleep there.  Maybe in her head she was still at the beach.

A heartless rules enforcement might have required me to wake her up, get her to put her books away, and march that little lady back to bed. But, instead, I decided just to reach down and pick her up in my arms and carry her back to bed, where she belonged. She was tired, bent over.  She needed to learn a lesson, but maybe, in this instance, grace could teach it better than law.  She never even woke up.  It reminded me of the times in my own childhood when my father would lift me up in his arms in times of my own exhaustion, or out of a screaming fit, and remove me to somewhere safer, somewhere more restful.

That, in fact, is the God we meet in the Sabbath. That is God we meet in Jesus. Say what you will about the usefulness of rules and structures, the heart of Christian faith is always about relationship. It is about the abounding love of a God who bends low to scoop us up in his arms when we are at our weakest, at our most broken—and, yes, at our most defiant. He lifts us up so that we, his beloved daughters and sons, may stand up straight again, sing our praises for all the wonderful things he is doing and, as younger generations have taught me to say, raise the roof!

Thanks be to God!



The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

St. James the Elder, Apostle - July 25, 2010 (Mark 10:35-45)

By all accounts, James, the apostle, was a go-getter. To be honest, we know blessed little about most of the apostles’ personalities and motivations. The gospels were not written to tell their audiences the details of anyone other than Jesus—and, more specifically, the details of a certain sliver of Jesus’ life. Most of the people other than Jesus, play relatively minor roles in the story before fading into obscurity, and it is important that we do not attribute too many characteristics to them that just aren’t there. Yet, in spite of this fact, we are told enough about James and his brother, John, that he manages to come across throughout the New Testament as something of a zealot, an eager beaver.


He is one of the first disciples to respond to the call to follow Jesus. He is fishing in the boat with John and his dad, Zebedee, when along comes an itinerant rabbi from Nazareth seeking new disciples. No matter that an occupation of fishing was steady work—and apparently a family profession for the Zebedees—immediately, the gospel-writer Mark tells us, they leap from the security of the nets to follow this Jesus. James, along with his brother and Peter, are the only disciples to trek to the top of the mount of Transfiguration, where Jesus is revealed as God’s own Son. There is one point in Luke’s gospel, when the disciples and Jesus are making their way to Jerusalem, when the eager James suggests that Jesus command fire to come down and consume the Samaritan villages en route who have refused to accept Jesus. And no one else in the Bible, to my knowledge, is given a nickname by Jesus. Events like that one in Samaria and the one in this morning’s gospel text likely lead Jesus to dub James and John “Boanerges,” which is Aramaic for the “Sons of Thunder”.

The lesson from Acts illustrates that, even after Jesus’ resurrection, James’ instinct for zeal, his thundering passion for following Jesus, has not abated. In fact, in what seems like a fulfillment of Jesus’ prediction in the gospel lesson after James declares that he will, by golly, be able to drink the cup that Jesus’ drinks, James’ zeal leads to his death. At one point during the Acts of the Apostles, when the church was just getting going, members of the church hear that a great famine is expected throughout the earth. Rather than, perhaps, going into hiding and hoarding what they have to escape this potential tragedy, rather than circling the wagons, they organize a relief mission—an outreach pantry, if you will—to fellow believers in another region. In this case, a mission-driven church sticks its neck out, and Herod Agrippa’s sword comes slashing down, right on the head of James the elder. According the Bible, that makes James the first disciple to die for the sake of the gospel. According to legend, the executioner who was appointed to put James to death was so moved by James’ testimony that he converted to Christianity at the last minute and was beheaded simultaneously with James. Even if it is only legend, it certainly fits James’ “go-getter” persona that comes through in the gospels.

It is the episode from Mark’s gospel this morning which illustrates for James, however, that Jesus’ kingdom involves a certain kind of go-getting. James and his brother are so keen on following Jesus and so excited about the coming reign of God that they want Jesus to rank them as number one and number two. I’m sure they feel they’ve deserved it. After all, they’ve followed and listened like any good disciple should—and once they get to Jerusalem, it will soon be time to start handing out judgments and decrees. “We are able,” they confidently respond when Jesus asks them if they can drink from the same cup that he will. It is clear that they are eager to assume the roles of glory and honor. What is not clear is whether James and John and the other disciples understand the type of glory and honor Jesus will embody.

In order to explain it, Jesus compares the honor and glory that Jesus’ disciples are to seek to two professions—serving tables and being a slave—that not only required a lot of work, but were also traditionally looked down upon. In Jesus’ day and age, fewer kinds of work were seen as more demeaning than bringing people things while they ate and serving as a house slave. In a society where everyone was trying to accumulate honor for themselves by getting other people to do as many tasks for them as possible, willingly making the choice to be focused on others’ needs seemed backwards, counterintuitive. But that, as it turns out, is the way God’s kingdom works. In the world’s eyes, it is backwards, counterintuitive, upside down. The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve. This is what happens when your leader goes to Jerusalem not to rule with power and might, but to overthrow the powers that be by suffering, being mocked, and eventually dying. This is what a kingdom looks like whose own leader comes in humility to put himself in a position to serve even the least among us, whose own leader is such a go-getter that he goes to the cross to get us saved.

The witness of the apostle James reminds us of our call to be a “go-getter” church—but not with a zeal that seeks worldly glory, or with a thoughtless passion that runs roughshod over everyone else. We are called to be a “go-getter” church in the manner that Jesus shows to James: where greatness is measured not by how strong or powerful we are, but by how we use our strength and power to serve others. We strive to be “go-getters” for God’s kingdom, where true honor is determined not by how many people listen to us, but by how attentively we listen to the needs of others. The witness of James the elder, apostle, reminds us that a church is not great which seeks to establish its authority through force or cunning or wealth. The church is great which embodies Christ’s authority through service, kindness and generosity. And a disciple is not one who seeks praise, or accolade, or status, but one who seeks to serve, often tirelessly, and often without recognition.

Vacation Bible School is happening this week, as evidenced by the African motif running throughout the church building. It will be a Baobab Blast!  One-hundred twenty four children will make their way through our doors each day this week, most of those not members of our congregation. I have always thought that Vacation Bible School volunteers are some of the best foot-soldiers that the gospel has, and we’ll have fifty of them this week. They will lead songs, teach crafts, make snacks. They will console homesick kids, resolve minor disputes, and apply band-aids. They will collect donations from little hands that will go to purchase mosquito nets to save the lives of children half a world away. They will get silly tunes stuck in their heads for about two weeks they will create and then tear down construction paper and hand-painted set designs within five days, and by Friday they will wonder how all of this made them so tired. All because they are a part of a “go-getter” church.

I remember distinctly the night in my former congregation when my first week of leading Vacation Bible School came to a close. We had held our VBS for two-and-a-half hours in the evening. As my volunteers and I reckoned it, each hour of VBS took an average of four hours in planning and preparation. I didn’t know about them, but I was exhausted, mentally and physically. That night I called my folks to let them know how it went. In all honesty, I called to let them know how ridiculously hard I had worked and how as a child I never realized Vacation Bible School was that draining and, to be totally honest, I expected my parents to praise me up one side and down the other. I was sure they’d think no one had ever worked as hard as I did in that Vacation Bible School.

But when I got done with all my complaints and embellishments about how grueling it was, how I clearly deserved better, my mom’s response was, “So? Well, yeah. Sounds like every Vacation Bible School I’ve ever done. It was exhausting in the eighties when you were a child. It’s tiring for the adults, but the kids love it. What did you expect, Phillip?”

What did I expect? Perhaps, deep down, I was expecting some other sense of glory other than the one that comes when serving Jesus. Deep down, I suppose I was expecting the church’s mission to happen without any real hard work and humility from me. What my mother’s response taught me was not too far off the lesson learned by James: that zeal properly placed and channeled for the kingdom of God leads to acts of service and tending to the needs of others. And it can seem slave-like at times. What I had expected was a place at the right hand of VBS-volunteerdom. What I got was a little death. A little death to myself. A death, but a life-giving one.

Those who are baptized with Jesus’ baptism all eventually learn the same thing: the path of glory and honor in the kingdom of God never leads to a retreat from the world. In fact, it makes us daughters and sons that thunder straight into it. The call to be a disciple is an invitation to share the message that has so wholly claimed us: into Judea where a devastating famine is about to hit…into the mud-huts of malaria-ridden African villages…into the needs of the nearby low-income neighborhood, into the hospital room whose air is heavy with mourning…into the friendship with the non-believer.

Yes, this can be tiring cup to drink, but it is a cup that never runs dry. Filled to the brim with Jesus’ own love and sacrifice, it always flows with the promise eternal life. Filled with the drink of gracious forgiveness, it refuels us to be a church that, by all accounts, is a go-getter.

Thanks be to God!



The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 11C] - July 18, 2010 (Luke 10:38-42)

Any parent or grandparent or babysitter who has been faced with the task of equally dividing a remaining cookie, or piece of cake, a set of chores, between two (or more) siblings knows first-hand what a challenge it can be. I remember that my sister and I, as youngsters, could argue over any discrepancy in fairness that we perceived, however trivial. And, oh, how we would protest if my sister, for example, thought that I had received a larger portion of the last slice, or if I thought the piece she got contained more chocolate chips than mine did, or if we thought the list of chores was unevenly distributed. And to this day, I’m fairly certain my English-major sister, who always had the upper hand in argumentation skills would claim I got the better portion in most situations. As wise as King Solomon, and no doubt weary of our bellyaching (as she called it), my mother pretty quickly developed an ingenious method for splitting tasks or pizza, come what may. In her plan, one of us would be entrusted with dividing whatever portion or object we were fighting over, and the other one would get to choose. This tricky little system put the onus on the person entrusted with dividing the portions to make them as equal as possible so that the chooser had no one to blame but themselves for the portion they ended up with.


My point is we don’t know if Mary and Martha, the famous sister act of the New Testament, had a similar ingenious system for dividing their tasks and chores, but we catch a glimpse of a little tension in the lesson today. When Jesus comes to visit, Martha does all the work. Mary, on the other hand, sits around. Martha ostensibly makes him feel “at home,” busying herself with the domestic tasks of providing a fresh basin of water for washing, as well as food and drink. Mary pays no heed to what he might need. Martha chooses to tend to the many duties of good hospitality, working in the kitchen and the hearth, engaged with the expectations of decorum and service and protocol. Mary, meanwhile, chooses simply to listen to whatever their guest says, engaged in little more than conversation. And, after all this, after all Martha’s huffing and puffing, after all her hard work and dedication—after all her bellyaching—Jesus explains that Mary has chosen the better part.

I don’t know about you, but when Jesus utters something like a value judgment, my ears perk up a little bit, my back straightens a little more against the pew. I don’t know why that is. I suppose I expect Jesus to be supremely fair, bipartisan and impartial. I half expect him, the Prince of Peace, to stay out of such matters as choosing sides, and, if he must, I usually expect him to spin out a parable that completely disorients my take on the situation. But here, in this case, Jesus clearly sides with Mary. No matter how Martha looks at it, Jesus has stated that Mary’s choice of sitting and listening—and therefore all but ignoring the typical obligations of hospitality—is the slice of the pie that really is better. Not only that, but Mary’s choice of task reflects an attention to a necessary thing, a devotion to one particular thing that matters above anything that Martha is doing.

In the ancient Middle East, hospitality might have been considered the highest virtue. Its importance was tied partially to the unforgiving nature of the desert environment and the need—which everyone collectively comprehended—to tend to the fragility of human life. Hospitality was tied to honor, as well as the understanding that God and God’s messengers often masquerade as strangers in need of shelter and food.

In this case, Martha is simply enacting exactly what the best mores of her culture—indeed, her religious faith—would dictate. She is serving as hostess with the mostess, taking the proper steps to make sure that their guest is comfortable And it has nothing at all to do with gender roles. Notice that in the Old Testament lesson from Genesis that Abraham and Sarah both undertake the obligations of welcoming strangers into their camp. The event of someone entering your home was a chance to make that guest feel safe, well-fed, and honored. So what is so wrong with this part Martha has chosen? After all, doesn’t even Jesus himself says at one point, “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve”?

Although Mary does seem to shirk her responsibility of showing good hospitality, she does display the attitude of a faithful disciple, one who listens attentively to the words of Jesus. Mary, in choosing to hear what her distinguished guest has to say, in letting the dishes and pans wait until later, exhibits undivided devotion to the kingdom of God. It’s not that Jesus slams housework, per se, or taking care of others’ needs, but when Martha emphasizes service and caretaking to the point that it becomes hers and everyone else’s priority—notice how she demands that Jesus get after Mary—Jesus must gently remind her that discipleship is not all about doing. In fact, the better part of discipleship, the one thing that is truly necessary, does not really involve doing anything at all, but, rather, being near enough to Jesus’ word that it can be heard. Martha’s error is not that she tends to these tasks of service, but that she has let them distract her from that one thing Mary chooses.

It is a dilemma that all people of faith struggle with, this pastor especially. Our culture has become far too preoccupied with being preoccupied. The demands on our schedules these days are intense. And when we’re not rushing off to one event, or preparing ourselves for the next show or practice, we are plugged into a cellphone or an iPod or an email, as noble as some of those causes may be. I wonder how much of this attitude has even infected our Sunday worship of God, where we think things must get done in a prescribed amount of time so that we can get on with the next item on our agendas. We run the risk of expecting to be preoccupied during worship, distracted into thinking that worship is somehow supposed to move us, that it should always be entertaining or uplifting or mentally provoking.

However, truth be told, we come to this gathering with a different motivation than to be preoccupied or distracted. Christians come to worship because we discover that God is in our midst, and therefore deserves undivided attention and praise. The focus, as Mary illutrates, is not on us or our tasks, but on Jesus.

Mark Allan Powell, a professor at one of our ELCA seminaries, tells the story in one of his books about once meeting a young man he describes as a Christian rock fan. Powell explains how he envied this young man, for his faith seemed to be so centered on the joy of living in Jesus. When Powell asks the young man where he goes to church, he almost brushes him off, explaining that he couldn’t find a church where he fit in. The young man then complains that the church where he’s a member is “like something out of an old black-and-white T.V. show.” The young man goes on to explain that everyone gets dressed up fancy, and that the music doesn’t sound like anything on the radio and the preacher never preaches anything exciting. “I don’t know,” he says, “it’s just…boring.”

Powell then goes on to ask the young man, “do you love Jesus?”

“Yes, I do,” responds the young man. “I love him with all my heart.”

“Would you die for him?” Powell inquires.

“Yes, I would,” replied the young man, after some reflection.

“You would die for him, but you won’t be bored for him?” countered Powell. Powell goes on to say that “we can waste our time in worship, and know that it was time well-spent.” Why? Because we have spent time like Mary, giving our unreserved attention to the things of God. Powell ends up encouraging the young man to go to church the next Sunday and be bored and see what happens (Loving Jesus. Mark Allan Powell, Augsburg Fortress, chapter 14).

I’m sure that, to a certain degree, Mary does sits at Jesus’ feet in order to receive wisdom, to be fed by what he says, but I reckon she largely pays close attention to him simply because he is there. Jesus has come into her midst, into her home, and that is reason enough to drop the distracting tasks and pay him attention, to focus on his words. In a day and age when we feel the weight of so many distractions, when we can easily come to equate faithfulness and devotion to how busy and preoccupied we are, the challenge for the disciple is always to remember that our faith and our truest life is grounded in what we hear about God and about ourselves. And that, my friends, starts with listening, first and foremost, to what Jesus says to us. Jesus’ interaction with Mary and Martha is not a moralism about slowing things down. Yet, as it turns out, there are some basic things we can learn only by listening to God.

I have a cousin who has spent the last four months of her life, more or less, waiting at the side of a hospital bed as her close friend fights for his life against a debilitating disease. He is in intensive care, unable to move because of all the machines and tubes that are hooked up to him. For the majority of these last few months, he has been under the clouding influence of heavy sedation and coma-inducing drugs so that his body can heal enough to start taking the medicine. My cousin, meanwhile, sits patiently at his side, with little responsibility other than to be there if he wakes up and remind him of where he is and what is happening and, foremost, that his loved ones are near. He wakes in such fits, fighting at the IV line and yanking at the ventilator tubes, and my cousin and this young man’s other relatives jump into action and say, “John, you’re in the hospital.” “John, you’re OK.” “John, settle down.”

It occurs to me that, in this hospital vigil scene, John is a lot like Mary, sitting at the feet of Jesus, my cousin, Amanda. You see, it is only when we’re in the presence of our Lord, that we can properly hear who we are, that we’re fine, that we’re loved. Because, let’s be honest, we’re all fighting for our lives, and we can all get distracted by so many things—the IV lines and ventilator tubes of our careers, our passions, the clouding effect of our diversions, our duties, our relationships with others. When we sit at the foot of Jesus and come-to…when we hear his word…when we take the bread and pass the cup…we are reminded who and, more importantly, whose we are. We come to know our Lord, once again, and our identity as his child forever is brought into focus again.

In the end, this is the one thing we really need.

In the end, this is God’s intensive care, and we are provided with grace to steady us for the tasks ahead. And yes, at the foot of Jesus is where we are prepared for service.

May we all, at long last, quit our bellyaching and come to see that this is the better part and that, no matter what, it will never be taken from us.



Thanks be to God!



The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

painting: "Christ in the House of Mary and Martha" Jan Vermeer, 1654-55
photograph of church by Meredith Sizemore Photography: www.wix.com/MSizemore/Meredith-Sizemore-Photography/

The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 10C] - July 11, 2010 (Luke 10:25-37)

You can practically hear the pencils being sharpened in the crowd at the beginning of today’s gospel lesson. A lawyer has just stood up in the midst of the crowd to test Jesus, and his aim is to snare this bright young rabbi from Nazareth with a sticky question about Jewish law and, with hope, humiliate him in front of everyone. This lawyer is good. He is a product of the recent rabbinical education reform, “No Pharisee Left Behind.” He learns for the test, can memorize anything set in front of him, and can quote it back to you. If he has a weakness, it is his inability to think creatively, but he hopes that won’t come into play because he wants to catch Jesus on a technicality: who is the neighbor?


The issue at hand is that Jewish Law, the Torah, is actually inconclusive on this question. At one point, “neighbor” is defined as other sons and daughters of your own people; that is, neighbors are other fellow Israelite countrymen and –women. However, at another point in the law, the term “neighbor” is expanded to mean anyone who is found in your land, foreigners and illegal aliens, included, even ones who come seeking economic opportunity. By pinning Jesus down with the question, “Who is my neighbor?” the lawyer is asking Jesus to clarify this distinction. If actions toward my neighbor are what will help me to live in God’s kingdom, then it will be helpful to know exactly how Jesus will interpret this. Pencils are sharpened, and the whole crowd is ready to take notes. You can’t fault them for thinking critically. Perhaps they are even thinking carefully. But I can’t help but believe they might be thinking a little cowardly, too.

And, like a clever Supreme Court nominee before her panel of politicos, Jesus slices and dices the question in a way they can’t initially make heads or tails of. He tells a story. It was actually very common for rabbis to tell stories to respond in debates, but Jesus’ story has a few twists and turns in it. When a fellow Israelite countryman gets beaten by bandits and is left by the side of the road for dead, both a priest and a Levite walk by on the other side, refusing to help him. Perhaps the priest and the Levite do recognize the poor, injured guy as a neighbor, but they are too bound by other restrictions and regulations—“don’t touch blood, don’t be late for obligations”—to help the man. Perhaps these professionally religious types recognize him as neighbor but their response to him is all in their head, as if their faith has made them too heavenly-minded to do any earthly good.

That’s the first twist—the non-response of the two figures representing the best of Israel’s holiness. Then comes the next twist in the plot: the person who actually does stop and take care of the wounded man, going the extra mile to make sure he gets healed, is a person whom no one would ever expect to go out of their way for an Israelite.

Samaritans were despised by the Israelites. They were considered half-breeds, imposters, dirty and mean. You could expect no good to come from Samaritans. In fact, in the previous chapter of Luke, Jesus himself gets rejected by a Samaritan town. But in this parable, which is told maybe even in the same day as that rejection, it is the Samaritan who saves the day. The key phrase in the story is that Jesus says the Samaritan looks on the man and is “moved with pity.” The Samaritan has compassion. He wants to suffer along with this wounded man with the chance he might restore him to health. In doing so, Jesus imbues his filthy main character with the quality that Israel’s own prophets had associated with God’s own heart. A Samaritan’s display of compassion for and Israelite = one enormous plot twist.

The lawyer in the crowd has most likely stopped taking notes at this point. He is either drawn into the unlikely drama of this fictitious story, or it is likely he is repulsed altogether. When Jesus looks at him and says, “Which of these three turned out to be a neighbor to the one who fell into the hands of robbers?” the lawyer is not even able to mention the word “Samaritan” on his lips. He simply replies, “the one who showed mercy.”

And right there is the final twist to the story, and the most remarkable one. The hinge of the parable swings not on discovering who our neighbor is so that we may respond appropriately, but actually being a neighbor to anyone in need. The point of the parable is not that the Samaritan correctly recognizes the wounded man as his neighbor. The point is that the Samaritan lets himself be ruled by compassion and, in doing so, becomes a neighbor to the other. In his reply to the lawyer’s question, Jesus doesn’t simply tweak the definition of who counts as a neighbor, but he gives greater clarity to what it actually means to be a neighbor. The lawyer’s task has been to think critically about these issues, to reason and to act carefully. But in God’s kingdom, the chief task is to think and act compassionately.

Furthermore, we must remember that this parable is set within the context of a question about eternal life. Jesus’ story is told in order to clarify exactly what “loving the neighbor” entails. So, in addition to receiving a lesson about the Law’s expectations, we also hear a story about God’s grace. Maybe, in fact, this is what eternal life looks like. It looks like no one caring anymore about these boundaries of race or class or national identity or ethnic identity, distinctions for which we are far too quick to take up arms to defend. Instead, eternal life is best envisioned as surprising, death-defying occasions of self-sacrifice and compassion, times where we take the side of someone who is hurting enough to take on some of the hurt ourselves. The fullness of God’s kingdom will be borne by compassion that wipes the tear from every eye, compassion that drives us the extra mile and makes short order of the artificial restraints we place around it now—restraints imposed by our own schedules and budgets, our own prejudices, our own agendas. Eternal life resembles this kind of suffering alongside our other brothers and sisters more completely, unafraid of how it will make us look, or whether it will wear out the back of our own animal and deplete our resources. Eternal life, therefore, will look more like the great teacher himself, Jesus, self-sacrifice extraordinaire, who himself stops on his own journey of glory to go to the cross, and in the process, picks us all up from the side of the road and heals us.

Mariam was a teacher on staff with me at the school for refugee children at my internship congregation in Cairo, Egypt. A refugee herself from the war-torn country of Eritrea, Miriam had been eking out a living in Cairo for her family for a few years before I got there. I assume she is still there, either unable to seek refuge in another country, or perhaps she feels that teaching young refugee children is her place. When I was there, Mariam taught the upper-level classes of English and science. She was a trained teacher, qualified to do much more than our little school, with its limited resources, could allow. Nevertheless, she taught with unparalleled love and enthusiasm and integrity. The children absolutely loved her and thrived in her classes, even though they were action-packed with energy and themselves dealing with the effects of many internal wounds.

As is common in refugee work, about every few weeks or so another child would get word that his or her family had been accepted for resettlement in the States or Australia or Canada, the very places Mariam herself might have dreamed that she would take her family someday. Once she brought us both to tears as she explained that three of her former students saved up their allowance so they could call her long distance from Calgary, Alberta, every night for a week in order to tell her they missed her and loved her. Mariam put herself in a position of pain and vulnerability in order to teach those students and make them better people. In fact, I could say that everyone who passes through St. Andrews Church in Cairo, whether a student or teacher (or feckless Lutheran intern) is touched by her mercy and compassion.

And Mariam is Muslim. She is a veil-wearing, peaceful, take-her-Islam-seriously type of Muslim. And, what’s more, almost all of her students and co-workers are Christian. She loves them without question—offers her life to them, you could say. I know that we often see on the TV pictures of turbaned so-called Muslims ramming planes into skyscrapers and inciting suicide violence against Westerners and Israelis, but I can’t get Mariam the Muslima out of my head as the example of the Good Samaritan. In the crazy way God often chooses to get his point across, I learned from Mariam a little more about how his kingdom functions, how we are to stop worrying about what the law requires and figuring out who exactly is our neighbor and instead just be a neighbor, be ruled by compassion, and show mercy. And every tear will be wiped from every eye. This is the stuff of eternal life.

So, at the end of his twisty-turny parable, Jesus simply tells the lawyer “Go and do likewise.” Go and do likewise. Suffering pays no heed to any boundaries. Neither then should compassion. Break your pencils, O Pharisee. This is no test. Christ has claimed everyone for mercy. The same goes for you—you who have been picked up from the side of life’s road and washed clean with this water, whose wounds have felt the salve of this body and blood: you, too, can let loose with his compassion. “It is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. This word is near you…in your mouth and in your heart.” You, too, can stop the studying. Go. Be a neighbor.


Thanks be to God!

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 7C] - June 20, 2010 (Galatians 3:23-29)

Only very rarely does my wife like to dress our two young daughters in matching outfits when they go out in public. Because they are separated in age by only eighteen months—and because they both have the same hair and eye color—they are often mistaken as twins. I suppose she thinks that they already have so many things in common that at least what they're wearing might help with differentiating the two, or might develop their sense of individuality. I know, however, that there will likely be a time in their life where they won’t be caught dead wearing the same clothes together. In their youth it might be cute and adorable, but when it comes time to choose that first ball gown or prom dress, I can imagine considerable effort will be made to put on something very different from each other. One must only glance out at our own congregation this morning to learn that, if given our preferences, we will always choose to wear something different from everyone else. Even the stereotypical Fathers Day necktie gift is selected with an eye to make dad stand out in some way.

But what if everyone were to wear the same thing? What if we did pull ourselves out of bed each Sunday morning, stuff down a bite of breakfast, and arrive for worship to find that someone had put us all in matching outfits? Well, as it turns out, the apostle Paul said that’s precisely what has happened. “As many of you as were baptized into Christ,” he says in his letter to the Galatians, “have clothed yourselves with Christ.” As it turns out, our baptisms have clad us each in an identical garment, a pure, resplendent one that sets us apart not from each other, but from the world.

At one part in his letter to the church in Galatia, when he is trying to explain how they are to regard each other, Paul reaches for this metaphor of clothing. The point is that Christ’s death and resurrection has formed a new creation in which many former distinctions are no longer ultimately valid, where people view each other simply as another sinner for whom Christ died and rose again. “There is no longer Jew nor Greek, no longer slave nor free, no longer male and female,” Paul continues, elaborating his point. These individual ethnic, social or gender distinctions that would normally be divisive no longer set the believers apart because Christ has united them in his death. When we pass the waters of Christ’s death and resurrection, we essentially receive a uniform, of sorts, matching outfits which enable us to cover over any distinction the world may place on us and instead take on his characteristics of faithfulness and love. That’s what we wear. It’s the inspiration for the utterly un-fashionable robes that we worship leaders wear. It’s also speaks to the white robes that all people traditionally wore right after their baptism, like the one that two confirmands helped Greg Parker step into a few weeks ago immediately following his baptism.

This point Paul is making is radical. He lived in a world that was no less prone than ours to find stability in labeling people and sticking them into different boxes. To proclaim that Christ had effectively done away with those distinctions and put everyone on the same level with everyone else not just in God’s eyes but in each other’s eyes, as well, was earth-shattering. It was life-giving, of course, but also earth-shattering. In fact, the church in Galatia had found it a little too earth-shattering, and they had begun to retain some of those earlier distinctions within their membership.

Apparently what happened is that after Paul had brought them the gospel and helped to set up their congregations, some other missionaries came after him who convinced the Galatians that in order to be a real follower of Christ, all men needed to submit to a certain Jewish practice, the one where they receive a certain little snip. It was a sign of God’s covenant with Abraham, obedience to the law.

When Paul gets word that the Galatians were doing this, it sends him into orbit.  He is furious. Nothing, he reiterates, can add or detract from the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. No law, no practice, no custom, was useful in establishing their relationship with God. Christ alone had accomplished that for them. Jesus had brought about this new creation of righteousness based on faith, and the church is charged with living out that new reality, much like a group of people who have all received the same new clothes to wear. Making people submit to any aspect of the law and its requirements only served to break apart that community by setting up distinctions. “All of you are one in Christ Jesus,” Paul says at the homiletical climax of his letter to the Galatians. “And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.” Done deal.

Written two-thousand years ago to a group of smallish congregations in Asia Minor that may not even exist anymore, Paul’s words about the gospel are no less radical and no less hard to live today. That is because the new community that the gospel creates is no less radical today. The gospel does not seek to create a homogeneous community, where everyone is a mindless clone of everyone else, but it does create a community where Christ’s faithfulness alone binds us together. It strives to be a place where no one labels another or creates the atmosphere where one group seems more “saved” than another. Any distinction that we bear due to ethnic group or language group or nationality or socio-economic class or even gender does not ultimately matter in our faith. The church now may not be guilty of the particular problem that the Galatian congregation had—and we can thank heaven for that!—but we still fall short of the vision that Paul puts forth.

The congregation I served on my internship was partly made up of two ethnic Sudanese refugee congregations who had been bitter rivals in their former southern Sudanese homeland. Even though they were both Christian tribes, they remained mutually suspicious and distrustful of each other in Cairo. We found they had brought their old divisions with them into our congregation. They regarded each other as different tribes. Eventually my supervisor had caught on to their conflict, especially when it came time for them to divide the offerings and Christian aid packages among the members of their respective congregations. They were unable to do it without accusing the other congregation of malpractice. So, my supervisor withheld their authority to divide the offerings themselves until they each agreed to worship together once a month with Holy Communion. Within only a couple of months, something amazing happened. They began to regard each other as fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, recognizing each other not mainly as Dinka or Nuer, but as a community which had received the extraordinary gift of faith. Pretty soon, they not only took on the authority of dividing the offerings, but even started planning other events together.

That is perhaps too easy example to get our heads around—pointing out the mistakes of others—but what about the different tribal and affiliations that affect us here in the United States, or even within our denomination? There are many ways in which we still have a hard time realizing we all wear Christ. I think that keeping this in mind is highly important, for example, in the current debate our denomination is having about issues of human sexuality and the definition of marriage. Without realizing it, we can use terms and language that immediately set up unhelpful distinctions within the body. When one group, for example, repeatedly describes themselves as “progressive” or “reconciling” Christians on this issue, they immediately set up a pejorative distinction, leaving others who don’t agree with them feeling as though they are backward or reactionary. As my colleague Pastor Price has noted, when still others set themselves forth as “orthodox” Lutherans, they imply that others who don’t agree with them are heterodox; that is, outside the Christian family. The disagreements that congregations and denominations are having are indeed important, and thoughtful dialogue is vital, but a community of the new creation in Christ should not, as Paul notes, use language and create distinctions that denigrate or belittle a brother or sister who has put on the same baptismal outfit as everyone else.

On the other hand, another pitfall the church must avoid, is in thinking that the church should merely look and feel like an episode of Glee, the new hit series on Fox which follows the triumphs and tragedies of a hapless show choir in a high school in Ohio. For those who haven’t seen an episode yet, the show choir in Glee contains a member of just about every racial, social, and gender group or clique that you can think of in the American high school. There are cheerleaders, jocks, nerds, a guy in a wheelchair, a couple of Asians, an African-American, a homosexual, a townie, and a prep. Part of the reason why I think the show is such a phenomenon is because it does embody and project onto the small screen all the images of a new community based on a Hollywood’s idea of diversity, a world where social and racial and gender distinction don’t seem to matter. As the show choir rallies around the common goal to perform musical pieces with creative gusto, they learn to appreciate one another’s differences.

The community created by the show choir’s director is an inspiring one. They are a new group that somehow manages to eke out a name for themselves by being an intentional hodge-podge of outcasts and misfits, and they genuinely learn to “get along.” But where the community in Glee falls short of the new creation in Christ, by contrast, is that it is still a community based on each member’s trumpeting what they perceive as their own individual identity—and the rest of the members just have to make space for it. In short, they haven’t “put on” any meaningful unifying characteristic. For all the choir director’s efforts, no one has made the choir members truly one: they are members simply because they want to be, and their individual distinctions still seem to matter.

That, in short, is where all human community devoid of Christ falls short, and a church that continues to seeks to lift up such differences as hallmarks of diversity is still missing the point. We can not truly be made one by any other person than Jesus Christ, and the only new creation worth living is the one where we learn to regard each other not as loveable or worthwhile in our own right, but loveable and worthwhile purely because Jesus Christ has died for us. We are loveable and worthwhile, and we learn to live together, because Christ is our ultimate common ground. And our unity is based not in our ability to overcome our obstacles, but in Christ’s victory over even the greatest obstacle. Said another way, if we preach the gospel of Christ, all diversity will take care of itself.

As many of us who have been baptized into Christ, have clothed ourselves in that awesome reality. I don’t know if you’re as happy with this new garment as I am. To be honest, it doesn’t always fit like I know it should, but wearing it with you here on a regular basis is helping to take it in where it’s loose and let it out where it’s a little tight. I can’t help but notice the first thing Luke says about the man from Gerasene who is miraculously cured of his demons: he is found “sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed, and in his right mind.” That’s us, clothed and in our right mind—when we’re sitting at the foot of the one who has made us one. I’m quite glad we’ve got these new clothes, because in a world that is increasingly fragmented and apt to live by labels, to break us apart into little isolating islands of personal preference, I’m pretty confident that Jesus Christ and his wonderful garment of unity is the only thing out there that can pull us together.

Thanks be to God!

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.