The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 20C] - September 22, 2013 (Luke 16:1-13)

 

There is always something peculiar—something a little “off”—about each one of the parables Jesus tells. The parables we heard in our lessons last week about the lost sheep and the lost coin are peculiar because of the way the seeker reacts when the object is found. What kind of shepherd that you know throws a party for lost sheep? And who invites neighbors over after finding a lost coin? We could go through each every parable that Jesus tells in the gospels and figure out what makes it odd, but this parable really takes the cake. Depending on which version of the Bible you’re reading, it may bear the title of the Parable of the Dishonest Manager, or the Parable of the Unjust Steward or the Parable of the Shrewd Manager. Regardless of which name you prefer for it, you have to admit it is one of the more complex and altogether strange stories that Jesus tells.

It’s hard to see at first why Jesus lifts up the actions of this rogue businessman as actions that are somehow worth imitating. First, he is accused of squandering someone else’s money, a charge we have to take seriously because he doesn’t defend himself. In other places—namely, the parable Jesus tells immediately before this one, the Parable of the Prodigal Son—people who squander property are not used as good examples. Secondly, when his job is put on the line, he does nothing to rectify the situation with his master. He doesn’t say, “Look. You’re correct. I repent. Let me work extra hard to make this right.” Lastly, he takes advantage of his master one final time by slashing the amounts people owe his master by significant margins! Caring nothing for the amount with which he was entrusted, he comes up with a plan that makes him sound selfish and self-centered. Carelessness, dishonesty, “me-first” thinking: it’s difficult to imagine how his actions could be seen as examples of living in God’s kingdom of righteousness. At yet, at the end, Jesus seems to use his behavior as a positive example for his disciples and other children of his light!

If you’re having a tough time understanding what is happening in this parable, you’re not alone. This parable has long stood as one of the most puzzling stories in the entire New Testament. Perhaps it might help if we were to re-tell the scenario of the Shrewd Manager with a contemporary feel:

The CEO of a national retail chain got wind that the franchise manager of one of his local stores had been grossly underperforming. The ledger sheets showed losses that might never be recouped made by consistently poor business judgment and lackluster marketing and advertising. The CEO calls the franchise manager on the phone and says that at year’s end he’s out of a job. He’ll be finding someone else to take over the store. The manager hangs up the phone and immediately starts to think about what he’s going to do to polish up his resume so that when the year is out and he is terminated he’ll be have something to show potential future employers. He remembers that people spend a lot more money at the holidays than at any other time of the year. So, even though it’s mid-September, he gets his store clerks to pull out all of the Christmas decorations and put them on the floor. Christmas trees, life-size snowmen, strings of twinkling lights…even though school has barely started, it may just work. People might grumble a bit (especially a few pastors who worry about the over-commercialization of Christmas) but deep inside they’ll be spurred to start their shopping.

And then the manager starts to think about the day after Thanksgiving: everyone’s sitting around, off-work, and with nothing to do. Why not open the stores even a little earlier this year and offer shoppers crazy discount offers? Sure, store security will be a mess. There’ll be people running all over each other for killer deals, but in the end it’ll win customers over.  And the fiscal year’s bottom line? In the black! The ledger books will look amazing, the brand’s name will be associated with clever marketing—it may even help him get back in his boss’s good graces. But if he has to apply for another job elsewhere, he’s now got a record that will more than get his foot in the door.

No matter where you stand on Christmas decorations in September or Black Friday extravaganzas, you have to admit they are clever methods to the real-world problem of being in the red. Those marketers and managers are brilliant. And no matter whether you find this manager’s business practices dishonest or unjust, you have to admit he is shrewd in dealing with his situation. That is, he senses the urgency of what he’s going through—that he is about to face a new reality of unemployment—and it causes his creativity to kick into gear. It causes him to begin thinking about creating a new future by putting himself in the debt of people who owe his master great amounts. By slashing their bills by up to a half, he creates a group of people who, in the way ancient middle eastern culture works, will now feel obliged to take care of him in some way.

Yes, an odd story, but Jesus tells it because he wants his disciples to understand that they are facing a new reality, too. That new reality is the life of discipleship in Jesus’ name. That new reality that God is turning the world upside down in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. That which was lost has now been found. The last will be first. The poor will be satisfied and the rich sent away empty.

Whatever you may think these things mean for Jesus’ disciples, at least one thing should rise to mind: this is not a reality to be squandered mindlessly nor it is a vision of the future into which we just mindlessly coast. Just as the manager senses a change coming and reacts to it in a way that helps further his cause, so should Jesus’ followers sense an urgency about the moment…so should Jesus’ followers feel OK about using some worldly wisdom and human cleverness about advancing the cause of the gospel. We can ask ourselves in each moment: what does it mean for me or for us right now that Christ, who was crucified, is now risen and Lord of all? What does it mean for me in this moment that I am dead in sin—no future of which to speak—but yet Christ has claimed me and made me alive?

Like the manager in the parable, we are so often good at responding to our own personal crises with creativity and cleverness. The store manager who pushes Christmas shopping season a little forward each year is using what resources he’s been given to respond to his own call as salesman. Why not apply these skills to the life of faith? Why not become shrewd and resourceful with all that God has entrusted to us as if our livelihood depended on it?

There is a Youtube video thatmakes the rounds every now and then called, “What if Starbucks marketed like the church?” It is a parable that pokes fun at the way congregations often end up turning off more newcomers than they attract without realizing it. Today’s parable might be re-written as “What if the Church marketed like a Starbucks?” Look at what they’d done with the Pumpkin Spice Latte. Very shrewd. It’s everywhere! What if the church had the whole world believing they couldn’t get through their day without Jesus? Are there any other successful practices followed by the world—business or otherwise— that could help Jesus’ followers in their mission?

Speaking of urgency, I get the sense that there is a real urgency among many of you about the call of a new senior pastor for this congregation. There is an energy, a pulse of mission and purpose within many of your conversations, along with an anxious desire that things move along faster or in a different way. We can assure you that people are working diligently and thoughtfully as they tend to that process. But the question from the odd-parable teller today reaches a little farther: how are you as a congregation and as individuals of faith sensing a similar urgency about your mission in general? Can you bottle that urgency about your staffing situation and administer it somehow to the overall work of sharing the love of God in your daily life? Are you shrewdly using the resources you’ve already been given to adapt to a kingdom that is graciously turning this world on its head?

Whoever is faithful in little is faithful in much, and much is precisely what you’ve received in Jesus Christ. Forgiveness of sins…unconditional love…compassion, wisdom, courage, and other gifts of the Spirit…the communion and fellowship of other believers…life eternal…these are just a few of the true riches with which we may say we’ve been entrusted. It is this Lord who senses the value in our lives and whose death upon the cross slashes all of our debts so that we may be made truly rich.

For, to our surprise, it is not only the parables that are a little odd, but it is those who listen to them and are transformed by them.  In the end, it is not just the characters and lessons that are a little peculiar (this shepherd, that manager) but those who are brought in line with the God who brings dead things to life, those who are claimed by a God who always seeks out the lost and is overjoyed when they are found. These folk seem a little out of place at times…for their witness and their faith in God’s new reality. They are like, dare I say, Christmas decorations in the middle of a September world—or they are like the clever manager who shrewdly puts them there—signs that there is not just one master in this universe, but rather only one master worth serving.

It is the only master who gives himself as ransom for us all.

 

 

Thanks be to God!

 

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 17C] - September 1, 2013 (Luke 14:1, 7-14)

 

At our staff meeting this past week, our visitation pastor, Tom Bosserman, kindly requested that we remind the congregation that there is still time to sign-up to participate in one of the Epiphany Supper Clubs. This ministry of fellowship, which has been going on for several years now, for whatever reason has been attracting fewer and fewer participants in the last several go-rounds. The way the supper clubs work is relatively simple: Pastor Bosserman groups three or four couples or singles together and they arrange among themselves, via email, the dates that each couple or single will take turns hosting a meal for the others in the group. When Melinda and I first arrived at Epiphany about 4 ½ years ago, we signed up to be assigned to a Supper Club group and found it a wonderful way to get to know people in the congregation. I can still remember our first supper club group: we were with the Wakes, the Bridges, and the Cards. At first I worried whether we would fit in. We were the only family whose name wasn’t a common noun. But, of course, it turned out to be excellent.

The act of sitting around a table in someone else’s home, eating food that they have prepared from their own recipe books provides the opportunity to connect with people on a much deeper level than Sunday morning conversation does. You learn all kinds of interesting things—meaningful and funny family stories, shared interests and experiences—when you break bread with one another. They become, quite literally, your companions; in fact, that’s where the word companion comes from. “Companion” means, “break bread with,” and for ages that has been marker of one’s status and identity. To our knowledge, in Jesus’ day there were not individual place settings. To eat, people literally passed bread around the table and broke off a portion for themselves.

Who would you call a companion? Who will you let into your house and eat around your table? Who will you make time for in your busy schedule to clean the house and put a special pot roast in the oven? Only blood relatives? Close friends and neighbors? Maybe you could expand that to people with whom you worship who sit a few pews back from you?

Table companionship has always been a big deal. We can see that in the gospel stories about Jesus, including this story today which features him yet again as a guest in a prominent Pharisee’s house. Jesus raises a lot of eyebrows for his choice of table companions. Usually we think of Jesus as eating with the tax collectors and other riff-raff that no one wanted to be associated with, but in reality Jesus shared bread with everyone, and that also included the well-to-do.

You see, eating together in people’s homes was part of what bound the culture together in Jesus’ day. If Pastor Bosserman had been floating his idea of a supper club to them, he wouldn’t have had to send out any reminders for people to sign up because they were constantly hosting parties or dinners and coming up with guest lists. But they, however, were not necessarily looking for friendly conversation. Hosts were trying to accomplish something for themselves. In short, people displayed their social rank and perceived influence by having people over to their table for fellowship with the expectation that they would be invited back or repaid in some way. It was how people worked their way up in society, how they established social networks and kept undesirables at the bottom of things. Honor and dignity were traded back and forth through this system of table companionship and woe to the person whose invitation to dinner was not eventually reciprocated in some way!

In characteristic fashion, Jesus turns all this on its head. He sees the guests at the Pharisee’s table fully participating in another supper club of the self-important. And notice what he does: he tells the people who actually have power to use it by sitting down at the bottom seat. It will dismantle the whole system. His instructions echo the song that his mother sang at his conception, Jesus reminds his Pharisee host that God “has scattered the proud…and lifted up the lowly” (Luke 1:51-52). God’s kingdom does not operate by these rules of who is in and who is out, who gets to sit in positions of honor and who is down there by the kids’ table. Some scholars believe that the root word for Pharisee is “to separate,” and that is precisely what Pharisees were known for: separating the clean from the defiled, the places of honor from the places of disrepute, the true table companion from the outcast…the water fountains for this race, perchance, from the water fountains for that race.

We know, at heart, we still like to separate things and people—we still are apt to assign seats in our lives to people who eventually can do something for us, who can reflect onto our character something we might not be capable of generating for ourselves. I think that’s why Dr. Martin Luther King’s words from a half a century ago this week still captivate so many of us. While his dream does, like those of so many prophets, call us to a better vision of God’s creation, they also remind us of our own tendency to “Pharisee;” that is, to position ourselves among God’s other children according to honor and shame and to let our opinions of ourselves define us a little too much. A little self-esteem is OK, I suppose, but we are prone to take it a little too far in many cases.

In God’s kingdom, which begins in earnest at the foot of the cross, we receive our true esteem and the only sense of honor that will ever really matter. As he hangs there, we see the full extent of our pride and sinfulness—that our grab for the seats of honor, the seats at the front of the bus, the seats near those who can repay us in some way, only end up tearing all of us apart. But at the cross we also see that he is willing to use his power and stoop to the lowest position possible in order to share God’s bread with us. He is willing to suffer in order that we may be a companion at his table in his kingdom forever along with everyone else that somehow gets “Phariseed” out in this world because they really have no way of repaying us.

During the servant trip to West Virginia last month, the youth group was given the task one evening to host a free meal for anyone in the city who wanted to come. They made the food—grilled hot dogs and hamburgers, chicken and rice casserole, barbecue and various salads and side dishes—and, because the weather was so nice, spread it all out nicely on large tables under the early evening sunshine. The place where we were staying was on the side of a steep hill, an abandoned old school building whose property literally perched over the downtown of Logan. From the main courtyard where during the week we had played countless games of foursquare with the neighborhood children, and where we had set up this banquet, we could look down and see right into the streets of the town that the declining coal industries had left desolate years before. A patch of grass sloped off rather steeply from this courtyard area and stopped at a sharp drop-off that was bordered by a chained-link fence that had stopped a loose foursquare ball from bouncing all the way down to Main Street many times before.

When the youth had finally assembled all the items for the buffet line, I heard Rachel Bracken, one of our own youth, tell Matthew von Schmidt-Pauli to go down to that chain-link fence and shout out into the city “Free dinner for anyone who wants to come!” Matthew looked at her like she was crazy. I think we all just expected that people had already received the invitation. “Just go do it,” she ordered. I’ve learned that people listen to Rachel. Matthew obeyed.

I watched as he leaned over the fence and shouted out over the rooftops of the city. And then we watched as people began to “come up higher,” climbing the hill to form a line for the supper. They were the homeless of Logan. They were the neighborhood children of the Kids Club we had hosted all week. Some had brought their parents, but most were still alone. Many of the adults seemed alone and shy around us. They were in need of showers and cleaning up, an opportunity that was often offered to them on Thursday evenings, but was unavailable that particular time. Eventually there was some mixing and mingling and some integrated action on the foursquare court.

We were just there for one night on one week during one summer, but there is a congregation there who does that every Thursday evening throughout the year. They host a meal for the people who can’t pay for what they’re going to eat and who can’t really repay in any worldly way. But although those guests won’t repay us for what did that Thursday evening, don’t think we weren’t blessed. Don’t think it for a minute. We were blessed with companions who were kind and grateful and full of interesting stories and conversation. We were blessed with not having to feel we owed them anything or we were owed anything back. We were blessed the vision of a meal that Jesus promises, the meal at the end of all these meals we host and share in this life…the meal for which this bread and wine is a foretaste. We were blessed with the breaking down of Pharisee boundaries that constrict us so. And we were blessed with the persistence of Rachel and Matthew, who wanted to make sure that invitation got out, that the city knew there was a feast to be had.

I don’t know, maybe Pastor Bosserman could get Rachel and Matthew to advertise this next round of supper Club! Come to think of it, maybe the church and the Lord’s Table could use more Rachels who understand the value of what God has laid before us and will announce to a separated world that there is a feast to be had. No need to repay. It’s all taken care of: “This is my body. Given for you.” Outcasts—if you feel that term applies to you—may stand first in line. You’re companions now. There is a feast to be had.

 

Thanks be to God!

 

 

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 15C] - August 18, 2013 (Luke 12:49-56 and Hebrews 11:29--12:2)

 

If you think about it, we talk a lot in the church about what a unifying figure Jesus is. We see him chiefly as someone whose love is a like wide circle, whose grace constantly extends to welcome more and more people. We admire how Jesus includes everyone, finding space in his community for the repulsive leper, the despised Samaritan, and even the uptight Pharisee—people we would probably exclude or despise, had we lived back then. Jesus even dies praying for forgiveness for the people who nail him to the cross. Jesus is all about unity, it seems, a unity grounded in the wonderful things Jesus brings to us—things like peace, and love, and joy.

In fact, during the Sundays of Advent many congregations often use an Advent wreath with four candles to symbolize some of the gifts that Jesus brings. As a child I learned that one candle, for example, was the “peace” candle, because the angels would sing at his birth of the wonderful peace on earth and goodwill toward humankind that would follow his reign on earth. The other candles were lit to represent joy, love, and hope, all fabulous and fantastic and friendly things we want from a unifying, all-embracing Jesus.

However, based on what Jesus himself says today in Luke’s gospel as he talks to his disciples about the expectations his kingdom has for the earth, we might need to re-think that Advent wreath this year. It sounds like we need to get rid of the peace candle and replace it with the division candle! “Do you think I have come to bring peace to the earth?” Jesus asks, clearly fired up at his disciples. “No, I tell you, but rather division!” We may need to rename not just a candle, but maybe re-think the whole idea of candles, themselves, with their soft, glowing nature. Jesus says he comes to bring fire to earth! With that in mind, maybe the whole Advent wreath should just be torched as kindling on the altar!

The bottom line is that if we take Jesus at his words this morning, he doesn’t sound very unifying at all, and the fire of which he speaks isn’t very warm and fuzzy. This is not the side of Jesus we’re accustomed to, the one that normally gets lifted up. No, this is a side Jesus that lays waste to the airbrushed Jesus we often project for ourselves, the soft-edged Jesus that never really challenges us or asks any demands of us. By contrast, here we see a Jesus that might actually cause some real pain and division in our lives, a Jesus that might indeed bring about some hardship and conflict when we follow him.

In an interview this pastweek at the Edinburgh International Book festival, the retired Archbishop of the Church of England, Rowan Williams, said that American and British Christians who talk of being persecuted should “grow up” and not exaggerate what amounts to being “mildly uncomfortable.” Those words may offend us, but I think the fired up Jesus we see in this morning’s gospel would wholeheartedly agree with Archbishop Williams. Many Christians in Egypt, by contrast, can claim to know about persecution. Or Christians in Syria can, too, as well as some Muslims in Myanmar and in other places throughout the world.

Coptic orthodox Christians in Egypt protesting discriminatory policies

What followers of Jesus in places like that can tell us is that Jesus’ love places us on the edge of a kingdom that rubs rough against a broken creation. Church is not just a well-meaning social service organization that brings together people to perform service projects in the community, however effective those service projects may be. Neither is church a place where individuals “tank up” on inspiration for the week. Rather, church is a community where our relationships with other individuals take center stage, as broken and damaged as they may be. Jesus’ fellowship is a new family that can, in fact, cause us to fall out of favor occasionally with the rest of the world, even other family members, for the decisions we make and the stances we take. By the power of the cross, Jesus forms among us a new kind of family that rearranges us according to God’s love and forgiveness, not according to what gender or race or social status the world gives us.

For hundreds of years, women who entered convents, for example, to follow monastic orders and live in a religious community based on the teachings of Jesus were shunned and abandoned by their families as a result of their decision. For such a woman, following Jesus in this way brought disgrace to her family because, by taking a vow of chastity and poverty, she eliminated her family’s ability to use her through arranged marriage and child-bearing as a means of solidifying relationships with more powerful families. At a time when women were valued as little more than property or a tool for concentrating family wealth or maintaining blood lines, Jesus offered a new, life-giving alternative. But, in doing so, he set mother against daughter, and daughter against mother.

But there is danger in separating the personalities and purposes of Jesus, as if he is nice Jesus and then mean Jesus, unifying Jesus and dividing Jesus, soft-glow Advent candle Jesus and fired-up, frustrated Jesus. For the fired-up Jesus this morning is, indeed, the one over whose birth in Bethlehem the angels sang, “Peace on earth, good will toward humankind.” The difference is that we must form our notion of peace around him and his message and not some misbegotten form of peace that remains in our own hearts and makes us self-absorbed. The particular kind of peace that Jesus brings does involve division. It divides us from things that go against this kingdom—things like our sin, our attachment to racism, economic oppression, and environmental abuse, to name a few. Jesus comes to divide us from all that, to remove them from human community as well as from our own lives.

Can we stand for Jesus’ kingdom and at the same time be complacent about changing this world to look more like him? Can we pray “thy kingdom come…on earth as it is in heaven” and at the same time stand in the way of justice in our own communities? Can we give thanks to God for the beauty and wonder of the gift of our lives, and not be concerned, in some way, about things like abortion, or the level of the prison population in our country? If this more complete picture of Jesus that we hear from in the gospel text causes us to take stock of our lives and scrutinize some of our choices, then it is doing what he’s supposed to. Jesus means to say he is not simply a dashboard decoration or a wall-hanging or pillow embroidery. The peculiar way Jesus unites people is divisive, in and of itself. But it is what saves us all.

To those who think Jesus comes simply to help us be spiritual and enlightened, Jesus says, “No!” To those who believe Jesus comes to help us achieve inner peace, Jesus says, “Nuh-uh!” To those of us who feel that Jesus’ message is simply about making life easier, making us feel happier, this Jesus says, “Nope! Think again!”

I recently returned from spending a week in Pittsburgh as a voting member of the Churchwide Assembly of our denomination the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Our denomination, like any church communion anywhere else, is very divided over many things. We heard heated debates this week on many of the topics with which we struggle—human sexuality, gun control, community violence…how properly to follow Roberts Rules of Order. We elected a woman bishop, a fact that many Christians around the world will have a hard time knowing what to do with. We passed a thorough social statement on criminal justice and what Christians can and should say about that issue in this country. And although there were decisions made that didn’t please everyone, although there are some who no doubt still feel the division there is some solace in the fact that we actually grappled prayerfully over these issues and others like them—that our faith is not just about lighting the subdued candle of an inner peace, but wondering how to burn towards the vision of a world where all relationships will be formed by the word of God and the love of Christ’s cross.

Because there will be a day, sisters and brothers, when we will realize that we have been fully cleansed in Jesus, when we realize we have been plunged into that grace, when we realize that we have, in fact, “laid aside every weight and sin that clings so closely,” and we will be fully united, totally one. There will be a place and time where nothing divisive—not even death—will lay claim to us.  He will have divided us from it and from within us forever.  We will stand and break bread with all those who have gone before us and who have felt the fire of his love,    the tax collectors and the Pharisees of every time and every age. We will receive what Jesus has given, in full.

And for that promise, for that glorious promise, my sisters and brothers, we may follow him now.

 

Thanks be to God!

 

 

 

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 13C] - August 4, 2013 (Luke 12:13-21)

 

I am not going to lie: it is awful challenging to come home from a week-long servant trip with thirteen youth and preach a sermon the next day. It is even more challenging to come home from a week-long servant trip with thirteen youth and preach a sermon on this passage from Luke about the parable of the rich fool.

It has nothing to do with the youth. Like usual, they were absolutely outstanding in terms of attitude and work ethic. And the challenge has little to do with the exhaustion I still bear in my body—we didn’t get much sleep at all, 60 some-odd people crammed like sardines into three large bunk rooms. The food was standard camp fare: somewhat filling but not terribly nutritious.


No, the reason why this sermon was even more challenging that it should have been is that after spending a week in Logan County, West Virginia, where more than a third of the population under 18 lives below the poverty line, I have started to feel like the rich fool with the bigger barns. After spending a week interacting on-site with at-risk youth whose only daily meal most likely came from the meager lunch in the program we were helping to run, I am starting to feel like someone who eats, drinks, and carries on pretty merrily on a regular basis. After all, I have a job…at the moment, at least. You contribute generously to my salary, health benefits, and a pension for retirement, and you added on a very lavish Christmas gift at the end of last year. I’m not necessarily affluent by most standards, but, then again, I am storing away something for my later years, a privilege that, I suspect, most people in this world don’t enjoy. And I don’t know the financial details of any of you—nor do I care to—but I imagine you’re in pretty much the same boat I am with regards to all this. We do store up all kinds of worldly treasures and can afford to eat and drink pretty much anything we want.

Furthermore, we care about equality in all things economic, and the initial question this person in the crowd asks Jesus about sharing the inheritance between sons seems absolutely legitimate to us. As a younger brother, the man simply thinks it’s fair that the family treasure should be divided among heirs equally instead of letting it all go to the first-born. After all, Jesus comes to re-distribute wealth, to liberate people from oppressive systems of commerce and economics, according to many believers and theologians. Doesn’t he at one point famously take a boy’s lunch of two fish and five loaves of bread and use it to feed five thousand hungry people (not counting women and children)? Why wouldn’t he care to dismantle an economic system that so obviously puts people at an unfair economic advantage just because they aren’t born first?

What was our youth group doing in West Virginia, after all, with all our school supply donations and trusty hammers and circular saws, if it wasn’t some sort of economic relief for the people we were supposedly serving? What were our Vacation Bible School children doing two weeks ago when they collected close to $1000 for people living in drought-stricken areas of Africa? Yes, this parable of the rich fool could make us a little uncomfortable this morning, I suspect, because despite all those wonderful examples of our generosity, they is still a small portion of what we have stored away.

However, Jesus tells the parable of the rich fool to make everyone a little uncomfortable—to make everyone pay a little closer attention—because the warning in this text is never against affluence. The lesson is never against having things, per se. It is, rather, against greed. It is a warning about where we place our security and where we look for salvation, and anyone—be they rich or be they destitute—can fall into the trap of thinking that we alone are responsible for our own success and that we can work hard enough or manipulate money well enough to be safe and secure.

That is not a danger only for the wealthy, although I do suppose we are more susceptible to it. We have the option of building bigger barns, after all, of using our wealth to get what we want from people or from the political systems that govern us. But, in reality, greed is a trap for all people. This parable is really a lesson not about how we are supposed to use our wealth, but about how our wealth can use us! The things we possess end up possessing us. We can start thinking that the ledger books we balance should end up making us feel balanced. However, let us not forget that there is only One whose love balances us, there is only One whose Spirit truly possesses us.

Scrooge McDuck

Our life is never in our own hands, which is what this rich fool believes, as he amusingly discusses only with his own soul what he should do with all his crops. Notice he’s never called the rich “evil guy.”  He’s called the fool, a term that implies no thinking, a lack of consideration. He is a fool because, in speaking only with himself, he doesn’t really think through his actions of accumulating. He just selfishly—but even more mindlessly—gathers more.

If he is a fool, then I know that this congregation is populated by many who are wise. I heard, for example, of one mother among you who held a leadership position last year at one of our local elementary schools which, we shall say, is located in a fairly affluent area of Richmond. This mother was put in charge of organizing the yearly Christmas party for the school. Rather than thoughtlessly planning yet another party for the kids where they would accumulate more candy they didn’t really need to eat and make more crafts they didn’t really need to take home to clutter up the kitchen, this mom decided the Christmas party would be replaced by a donation drive to collect basic items for people who are served by a local shelter downtown.

The project, as you can imagine, did not catch on with immediate popularity. Kids and parents included thought they were going to miss another chance to be merry. However, as the project gathered steam, as the children learned somewhat to their shock that many people are deprived of some basic hygiene items. Thanks to the faith of this parent, the children and parents alike at the school learned that merriment can be found in giving. Lots of it, in fact. Whether it was explicitly stated or not, they got a good glimpse of what it means to be rich toward God—to be involved in God’s restoration of creation through the outpouring of their blessings—and they didn’t even have to go all the way to West Virginia to do it. Yes, this congregation is filled with people who are rich toward God and wise with wealth. (And now I know someone in particular to tap for a youth service trip in the future).

In the long run, what those elementary school students learned is the lesson that the man in the crowd received who is worried about the fairness of the distribution of his family inheritance: namely, the kingdom of God is not supremely concerned with economic fairness or everyone getting and having the same amount of stuff. Rather, it is about realizing that the future lies in God, not in the insurance we think we have in money. It is about the awareness that his grace is ultimately to shape the world, not some amount of money or goods in certain peoples’ hands.

Wealth, possessions, food, shelter—the things Luther said we can call our “daily bread”—all these things are certainly given by God, but our vocation as people who have been baptized is not to count our richness in them. Our richness is in the God who gives them, because it is God who has given even his Son for us. Because of Jesus, we know we have value to God, that we are God’s prized possessions. As the psalmist says this morning, “There is no price one can give God for our life.” As his own life is poured out, the barn doors of God’s goodness are flung wide open and the sheaves of love and mercy come tumbling down upon us.

This is where our true wealth lies: in the knowledge that we are created and redeemed by a loving God who wants us to be a part of his restoration of creation. And when we are truly wealthy in this way, we are empowered to tear down some of our barns and look into the eyes of those folks we encountered in West Virginia…into the eyes of those receiving our bags of hygiene items here in Richmond…into the eyes of those we encounter anywhere…and see past their lack of worldly things, past their need of what we have in excess, and not look at them as purely an object of our charity but instead see another one of God’s prized possessions looking back at us.

 

 

Thanks be to God!

 

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 11C] - July 21, 2013 (Luke 10:38-42)

 

As a pastor, I occasionally find myself on the receiving end of anger about things that are written in the Bible. I’m sure I’m not alone here; I suppose everyone who identifies themselves as a Christian these days must periodically answer people’s questions about what’s in the Bible, especially the controversial parts. I am used to hearing people express frustration, for example, about some of the more violent scenes in the Old Testament books and what that supposedly says about God’s nature. Several women, understandably irritated by some of the passages in Paul’s epistles, have me asked me to explain why some parts of the Bible seem to value women less than men. Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son, Isaac, in Genesis causes problems for a lot of folks, for they wonder how a loving God could even ask a follower to do something so brutal. I admit: the Bible is chock-full of some pretty provocative stories and passages that I have come to expect will rankle just about any thinking person.

It may surprise you, however, to hear that one of the angriest reactions and most intense lines of questioning I’ve ever dealt with when it comes to Bible stories was over this story about Mary and Martha. It came from Doris, one of the members in the first parish I served in Pittsburgh. Doris was a lifelong churchgoer. She sang in the choir. She volunteered in the office whenever help was needed. Now approaching 80, she had served on church Council several times, and at every church function Doris could be found in the kitchen preparing the food and staying late to clean the dishes. Doris was a workhorse, just like any number of dedicated volunteers that you can find in every congregation across the earth. In small congregations, they are often the backbone of just about everything, jacks-of-all-trades that silently and somewhat happily get stuff done.

"Christ in the House of Mary and Martha," Jan Vermeer (1655)

In any case, Doris was not pleased with this story where Martha is the one doing all the work and Mary is being lazy listening to Jesus. If that’s not bad enough, when Martha gently brings this to Jesus’ attention, by golly, he chastises her for it! Nope, that didn’t sit well with Doris. In fact, she told me once when it came up in a Bible study that she didn’t understand why God would let those words come from the mouth of her Lord Jesus, as that far as she was concerned that story could be left out of the Bible and we’d all be better for it.

Safe to say, I think Doris identified with Martha. Doris knows what it’s like to be abandoned in the church kitchen while everyone else enjoys the church program in the fellowship hall. I wonder how many of us do, too, in our own way. There are so many tasks to be done, especially in and around the church, and, all too often, it seems to get done by many of the same corps of Dorises, over and over again. There they are, running the old dishwasher, or folding the newsletters, or mowing the church lawn, or crunching the budget numbers, but it’s carefree Mary, raising nary a finger to help, who gets the nod of Jesus’ approval.

What’s more, in Jesus’ day, Martha would have been seen as performing the necessary tasks of hospitality, the sign that you valued your guest’s time and well-being above your own. In ancient Middle Eastern culture, taking care of houseguests and meeting their needs was the foremost indication of godliness. We think of hosting and waiting on guests in our as a something novelty, an out-of-the-ordinary event that might involve a trek to Williams-Sonoma if we have the time. But in an environment that was ultimately inhospitable, like theirs—desert-like and often war-torn, the roads patrolled by bandits and criminals—peoples’ homes were typically the only oasis of rest and safety. Hospitality to the stranger was a way of life that weaved culture together. Martha was simply doing what was required of her, tending carefully to the needs of her guest, who, after all, was God.

One important key, of course, to understanding just why Jesus favors Mary’s choice of sitting at his feet is that Martha, we are told, is distracted by her duties. She’s not just performing them, she is preoccupied with them. I’m not sure Doris was ever preoccupied with her many tasks of keeping the church running, but I suppose it could happen to any of us. The tasks of faith can become overwhelming, and pretty soon they become like busy-work, or, what’s worse, they become our identity. We end up doing a whole lot of running around, distracted by the amount of good that needs to be done in the world and not enough sitting still and listening to the word of God.

That, after all, is what Mary is doing. She is on the floor, his dusty feet a few inches from her face, eagerly receiving everything her rabbi says. When Jesus compares the part of listening to the part of doing, he is not saying that the duties of hospitality and service are not important. Rather, Jesus is making the point that, in the life of faith. these things are somehow secondary to hearing and receiving the words of the Lord. As good as those tasks are, constant attention to them can unwittingly pull us away from the one thing that we truly need, for it is in the Lord’s words and in his words only where we learn who and whose we are. The most important thing we can do as followers of Christ is remember what we’re supposed to be. I think that’s what’s happening between Mary and her Lord.

Some of you here may remember the song that the youth praise band sang in worship during last year’s Youth Sunday. They chose the song, “Remind Me Who I Am,” by the contemporary songwriter Jason Gray. The song is actually a hymn, a song with prayer-like words that is clearly directed to God. The simple refrain of the song goes like this:

“Tell me, once again, who I am to you.
Tell me, lest I forget who I am to you, that I belong to you.”

When the youth group was practicing the song, some of the seniors had the idea to take the video for the song and adapt it for a worship setting. To do so, they had members of the youth group take large pieces of roughly-torn cardboard and write down a word on one side that describes how they often feel when they’re labeled by the world. Some of the words that were written down were “lonely,” “lost,” “inadequate,” “rejected,” “left out,” and so on. As the song was performed, members of the youth group walked out into the congregation carrying their cardboard labels. When they were summoned back by a Jesus figure, they slowly began turning those labels around to reveal their true identity: on the opposite side, in the same black marker, they had written the word “BELOVED.” This is an identity that each of us only learns when we spend time at the foot of Jesus: no matter what the world says about us or what name we give ourselves, we are beloved. In fact, Jesus dies in order to impart this identity to us.

This is the reason why Jesus says Mary has chosen the better part. We can work ourselves silly with the good works of faith, we can show the world all the good we do in service to the kingdom, we can impress others with our selfless ways of life, but we can and will be reminded of our identity only at the foot of the one who dies for us. We will only remember who and whose we really are when we spend time listening to his words, when we spend time letting his dusty feet get near our ears.

It’s still amazing to me that, despite all of this, the life of the church in this day and age can take on such a Martha feeling. In all the church’s fretting to be relevant, our running around trying to be cool, to be seen and heard as “applicable” and “important” in a post-modern world, we run the danger in the long run of just being pre-occupied. We find ourselves being pre-occupied with trendy social justice issues, pre-occupied with “making a difference” in our neighborhoods and communities.

I can’t tell you how many articles I’ve read by now that say the way to attract young adults to the church is through service projects and hands-on faith-in-action activities. But that’s what Martha was doing. She was faith-in-action, constantly moving about, wanting to be the hands of God’s work. But before we can be effective hands for God, we need to have an ear to God. Taking a cue from Mary, perhaps the best thing the church could do in the midst of the world’s busy-ness is to be seen sitting down at the feet of the Risen One who has come to visit us—to be seen listening to what he has to say about us. We can then let our service and our good works flow from there.

I remember one time in seminary when I was waiting tables as a side job I went out with a bunch of my co-workers after hours. Most of the group had gone up to the bar, I think, to order more drinks, busy, I suppose you could say, with the night’s activities. I was left at the table with this one young woman in her twenties who knew I was studying to become a pastor. I don’t know whether it was out of a sense of guilt or just the only way she knew to make small talk with me, but she shared that she had grown up going to a Lutheran church but hadn’t really returned much since she’d gotten confirmed. There’s so much to do on the weekends, she said, “help give me the motivation to go back to worship.”

Her question, there in the midst of the smoky barroom, caught me off-guard. I am positive that my response was mush-mouthed and no help at all. I was probably worried about sounding judgmental or too churchy in my response. I might have tried to convince her of all the cool service things the church does for the world, but that would have seemed to sell it short. Looking back, there is any number of things I could have said, I guess, that would have wooed or coerced her back to worship.

But now, I think of a better response: If I could have, in that moment I would have simply introduced her to Doris and said, “Because you might turn out like this woman. Selfless, compassionate, willing to work, but also willing to listen. Doris, even in the rush of her service, knew that being with the other disciples at his feet gave her the opportunity to listen, the opportunity to savor the better part…and there and only there will anyone ever be reminded who they really are: BELOVED.”

 

 

Thanks be to God!

 

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 10C] - July 14, 2013 (Luke 10:25-37)

 

Like almost any other child in any family, our younger daughter has earned several nicknames from her parents. One that she has had for a long time is “Little Counselor,” as in “Little Attorney,” or “Little Lawyer.” I’m not telling you this so that you can you can call her that—she probably wouldn’t appreciate that—but so that you know that one of the gifts she’s had ever since she learned to speak is the ability to make distinctions. Arguing with her has been and I imagine will continue to be a challenge for us because she can always find a way to be technically correct, or locate a loophole in our logic.

For example, a few years ago I had to attend an orientation conference for a youth mission trip down in South Carolina and since Melinda was off work I decided to take the whole family. We decided to take the church van, which the girls thought was a hoot. They’d never ridden in any other car before, much less a van. On the way back, the girls started arguing about something in the back seat and their voices started to get louder and louder until pretty soon they were yelling. Melinda turned around in her seat and told the girls to get quiet. “No yelling in the car, girls. Daddy’s trying to drive.”

Laura, without missing a beat, retorted, “It’s not a car. It’s a church van!”…as if that meant she didn’t really need to be quiet. She was two at the time. Nothing against any attorneys who are here…no, no, no, we are quite proud of her mind! And we know any good legal system depends on their careful attention to detail, their ability to draw distinctions and know definitions—but you can see the frustration Melinda and I are in for.

Trayvon Martin (Feb 5, 1995 - Feb 26, 2012)

It is only a fraction of the frustrations, I imagine, of those in the community of Sanford, Florida, today, at the news of an acquittal late last night in one of the most intensely-watched legal cases in the past decade. From its beginning, the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case had all the makings for a media spectacle and a chance for everyone to jump in with an “expert” opinion. All the favorite hot-button issues of race, class, age, gun rights, and drug use and law enforcement were involved. Like strands a sticky spiderweb that could entrap almost any reasonable man or woman, distinctions and definitions ran throughout the course of the whole ordeal.

We heard legal experts make distinctions, for example, about self-defense, distinctions about racial profiling…even attempts at distinctions about whose voice was heard on the 911 call. As a whole nation peered through their television screens to draw their own conclusions about whether justice was served or averted and what this means about our society today, it almost seems that the most basic injustice has been overlooked: that at the end of one foggy February night on the side of the road someone had been shot and left for dead, for reasons of self-defense or not. There’s no way to parse the tragedy out of that, no way to make any other distinction that will help us ignore or feel better about the terrible loss that has occurred or the violence which sadly occurs each day and night in many different neighborhoods in this country.

George Zimmerman

Jesus, as it turns out, tells a rather convoluted story about neighborhoods and violence and someone else being left for dead as a response to a lawyer’s attempt to make distinctions and test Jesus on a technicality. The first question the lawyer asks Jesus relates to eternal life and what someone must do to inherit it. Presumably the lawyer wants to hear Jesus’ knowledge of the Torah, the Jewish code of commandments. The Torah included a long list of laws, in fact, that could be interpreted and was interpreted many different ways. Jesus, like any good rabbi, turns the question back on the lawyer  by asking him what he finds written in the law and, more importantly, how he reads it.

The counselor responds with the two-fold statement on loving God and loving neighbor that we hear from Jesus himself at other times in the gospels: from the book of Deuteronomy, “Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your strength and with all your mind.” And from Leviticus: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Throughout Jesus’ life, those two commandments become linked together in  a way that lets us know love of God and love of neighbor are somehow vitally, inextricably linked, as if one cannot truly love God without also loving neighbor and vice versa. It makes me think of the truth that Catholic social worker Dorothy Day once imparted: “I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.”

He Qi "The Good Samaritan"

Jesus seems pleased with the lawyer’s understanding of the law, but as a lifelong Lutheran and theological descendant of the Protestant Reformation, I want Jesus to cut to the chase and tell the man that there’s nothing he can do to inherit eternal life. After all, that’s what has been hammered into my head since the beginning of my life. It’s what Paul says throughout his letters in the New Testament. It’s what we learn as Lutherans from our own pastors and professors and Sunday over and over again: there’s no amount of following any of God’s rules and laws that can help us inherit eternal life. Rather, we receive it through God’s grace. It is given, not earned…no matter how clever we are at reading and interpreting it.

Thankfully for our sake, the lawyer is also not quite satisfied with Jesus’ response, either, because there is one more big distinction to make: namely, if Jesus agrees that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves, then what exactly constitutes a neighbor? Is this a car or a church van we’re talking about? The law was actually a little vague on this point, and I guess the lawyer probably knows that. At several points in the Torah, “neighbor” is defined as anyone from the household of Israel, but in at least one other reference, “neighbor” is expanded to mean anyone who is found in your land, including foreigners and illegal aliens.

The road from Jerusalem to Jericho was steep and perilous.

Here is where the lie of questioning gets really tricky: which definition will Jesus choose? And if you’re thinking like the lawyer, then you know that the answer will help you figure out exactly who in this world you are expected to show compassion for, who you’re expected to serve and love. The answer to this question will help you pin down how to inherit eternal life.

As we all know by now, Jesus responds to the lawyer with the parable of the Good Samaritan, wherein a wounded and dying man is ignored by two of his own countrymen before receiving mercy from a complete stranger. Furthermore, the stranger happens to be a Samaritan, the group of people found most repulsive to the Jews. In modern usage, the term Good Samaritan has come to mean help from a by-stander, impromptu aid from someone not directly or intimately involved in the situation. However, that connotation blunts the original offensiveness of the parable Jesus tells. This story relates an interaction between two people who absolutely hate each other’s guts.

In Jesus’ time, it would have been hard to believe that a Samaritan would have ever stooped to help a Jew, and more importantly, no self-respecting Jew would have allowed a Samaritan to bind up his wounds, place him on a Samaritan’s donkey, and, on top of all that, pay for his recovery in an inn! No Jew would ever expect to receive mercy and salvation from that source. This Samaritan exhibits grace no one could fathom! A Jew would more achieve that kind of recovery on his own and from his own power—picking himself up off the road and somehow limping home—before he could expect to receive it from someone that unprecedented.

And as we hear the lawyer hear the story, we realize that maybe Jesus has answered the initial question directly after all, the question about how to receive eternal life: in the end, we aren’t able to achieve it ourselves, but we can receive it from a very unexpected, unprecedented source. In the end, the act of inheriting eternal life is not about distinctions we make or how critically we can think about theology or law or people on this earth. It is not about winning the argument or about thinking up new definitions that will get us off the hook. Rather, inheriting eternal life involves coming to the realization that we are really just a person stuck in a ditch, waiting for God’s mercy, dependent completely on someone’s compassion and love. And that rescue comes from the unlikely source of God himself, alien to this sinful earth, who stoops down in death on the cross to bind up our hearts and give us new life. God makes no distinctions about who we are and what we’re like. There is no loophole in his love, no effort to profile according to race or background or anything else. It’s just grace, and it saves us …Samaritan and Jew alike, Gentile, black, white, Hispanic, and any other distinction we like to think up.

Aime Morot "Le Bon Samaritain" (1881)

“Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” Jesus asks the lawyer, and the lawyer is still so repulsed by the answer that he can’t even mention the word “Samaritan.” He just responds, “the one who showed mercy.” Jesus: Go and do likewise. Maybe, then,  that’s the final lesson of the parable Jesus is trying to make: namely, that this is actually what eternal life looks like. It looks less like figuring out who your neighbor is and more like learning what it means to be a neighbor. The vision of eternal life, in fact, is not some cloud of happiness in the sky far away, but our imitation of the Great Samaritan Christ here and now, walking along our deserted, descending roads of this tired planet, and taking on the wounds of those we meet…and having them take on ours. Eternal life means following not the restrictions of laws and religion which often prevent us from being involved, but following the road of compassion and love in this world and the next for we really only love God as much as we love the person we love the least.

It is good to be a little counselor every now and then—car or church van, you hash it out—but, the truth be told, when we start making too many distinctions, especially when it comes to people, we begin to lose sight of God’s unexpected grace, a grace that never, ever loses sight of us.

 

 

Thanks be to God!

 

 

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.