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Sermons by Pastor Sue Ostrom unless
otherwise indicated
February 5, 2012
Exodus 16:2-4, 13-21
John 6: 1-14, 35
Bread
of Heaven
Today we come to our Food of the Week
with a prayer on our lips as we sing the old hymn: “bread of heaven, bread of heaven, feed me til I want no more.”
Bread is the most common food
mentioned in the Bible. The word itself
is used 361 times, not counting references to flour or grain. From the bread Sarah made for the strangers
who were angels in disguise to the road to Emmaus where the risen Jesus was
revealed in the breaking of the bread, it is a food rich in meaning. It is supper, sign, and sacrament.
Bread of heaven, feed me til I want no more.
After Moses led the Hebrew people out
of slavery in Egypt, they complained of hunger and longed for the foods they
had known in bondage: “we ate our fill
of bread,” they moaned, missing supper.
God promised, “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you and each day
the people shall go out and gather enough for that day.” Sure enough, each morning when the dew dried
they found a fine, flaky substance on the ground. They called it manna.
Some people explain manna as the
excretions left by insects that feed on the tamarisk tree. It is an interesting theory, though it misses
the divine touch that with manna those who gathered little and those who gathered
much had neither extra nor lack. All
were fed until they wanted no more. This
was daily bread, not a larder stocked full in preparation for a blizzard. It could not be stored up but vanished with
the light of the sun or became foul with worms: except on the day prior to the
Sabbath. On the Sabbath they were to do
no work, so the day before they could gather twice as much. On the Sabbath no manna fell.
Manna fed the Hebrews for the forty
years they spent in the wilderness between Egypt and the Promised Land. Day by day they gathered what they needed,
and no more.
Bread of heaven, feed me til I want no more.
Centuries later there was another
group in a wilderness, and they too were hungry. They had come out to listen to Jesus. “Where are we to buy food for these people to
eat?” Jesus asked his disciples. Philip
pointed out, “Six months wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to
get a little.” Then Andrew came along
with a young boy ready to share his lunch of five barley loaves and two fish.
We must not mistake his loaves for
hearty loaves of bread like those you see on this table. His loaves were more likely what I would call
rolls or biscuits. The fish were not whole
salmon but sardines. Barley was grain
for the poor: it cost half as much as wheat.
It made a coarse, dense bread because it has less gluten than
wheat. Maybe that’s why we don’t hear
about gluten intolerance in those days:
wheat bread was for the wealthy and there weren’t many of those.
Jesus took the boy’s simple little
offering, blessed it, and distributed it to those gathered. Thousands of people ate from one boy’s lunch
and wanted no more. There were even
twelve baskets of leftovers.
Some say the real miracle here was
that when people saw the boy’s generosity, they were moved to take out the
lunches they had stashed in their pockets and share with each other so that
nobody wanted for more. And who is to say
which is the greater miracle: bread
mysteriously multiplied or sharing multiplied?
Who is to say which is the real bread of heaven: manna in the wilderness
or a little boy’s lunch?
Bread of heaven, feed me til I want no more.
In addition to supper (or lunch), in
the Bible bread is also sign. The manna
which fed the Hebrews for four decades was a sign of their dependence on
God. They had to gather it each day, not
stockpile it in giant grain elevators.
Those years in the wilderness taught them, not to pull themselves up by
their own bootstraps, but to look to God for their strength. Moses told them to keep one jar of it for
posterity, “in order that they may see the food with which I fed you in the
wilderness.” Manna was a sign of God’s
providence.
The bread of heaven which was manna
was preceded by unleavened bread. After
many delays, the Pharaoh finally agreed to let the Hebrew slaves leave. Like a woman fleeing an abusive partner who
has no time to pack but goes with the clothes she is wearing, these slaves
baked their bread before it had time to rise.
Passover, the festival which commemorated their flight, became known as
the Feast of the Unleavened Bread. The
bread baked in haste was a sign of God’s deliverance.
The Gospel of John notes that it was
close to Passover when Jesus multiplied the loaves and the fishes, or expanded
their hearts. However you choose to see
that miracle, it is important to note that it, like all miracles in the Bible,
was not an end in and of itself. It was
a sign pointing to something else. As
the American flag symbolizes a nation of liberty and justice for all, so the
boy’s lunch turned into food for thousands who wanted no more pointed the way
to something more. The loaves were a
sign of God’s grace.
“I am the bread of life,” Jesus said. Note that he did not say, “I am the
cheesecake of life,” or “I am the fatted calf of life.” He said, “I am the bread of life.” It is true that faith in Jesus calls us to
celebration. It is also true that at the
deepest level, our faith helps us to look to Jesus for the basic stuff of
life. People in Bible times ate far more
bread than they did meat or fruits and vegetables. Bread sustained them for daily living.
Bread was women’s most important and
time consuming chore. It started with
grinding barley or wheat into flour, a task that could take as much as three
hours for a family of five or six. They
did it every day except the Sabbath.
As the bread of life Jesus is our
daily sustenance. You can’t stock up on
grace once a year, trusting in that Christmas Eve service or prayer retreat to
feed your soul for the other 364 days.
We need Jesus every day, every hour, every minute. Jesus is there to sustain us during that
contentious staff meeting at work, when the kids are squabbling and the washing
machine just broke, when there is more month left than money. Jesus not only sustains us, he energizes us
to share our lunches with the multitude, to go forth in faith before we’ve had
time to pack, to love even the unlovable.
Bread of heaven, feed me til I want no more.
“This is my body, given for you,”
Jesus said at the last supper after he took the bread, blessed it, and broke
it. The blessing was the prayer we used
at the start of the service today, and which Jewish households pray to this day
whenever bread is broken and shared around the table: “Blessed are you, O Lord our God, King of the
Universe, who brings forth bread from the earth.”
At that supper, bread became more than
a sign, it was a sacrament, a visible sign of an inward and spiritual
grace. So it is that we know the real
presence of Jesus when we break bread together in Holy Communion. So it is that as we break bread we know the
broken body of Jesus. When we do this in
remembrance of him we too are re-membered or made
whole again because Jesus shows us just how much God loves us. As we come to the table, today laden with
baskets spilling over with bread, we offer to Jesus our daily lives knowing
that in him they are blessed. As we come
to the sacrament with the aroma of baking bread filling this room, we trust
Jesus to make of our lives a fragrant offering to God.
Bread of heaven, feed me til I want no more.
The bread you brought today is both
sacrament and coffee hour.
Traditionally, the bread blessed for communion had to be consumed in its
entirety for it is the body of Jesus.
This bread has been blessed and what we don’t use for communion needs to
go down to Epworth Hall for coffee hour.
The youth will take the baskets down for us. We also need volunteers to
help cut or break it. Our sacrament will
extend into fellowship, and our fellowship into the rest of the week so that
Jesus, the bread of life, will sustain us at work and school, at home and play. Anything left this morning will go to the
Campus Christian Center, so that our sacrament will extend into the community.
Bread of heaven, feed me til I want no more.
January 29, 2012
Luke 15:11-32
Husks,
A Fatted Calf, and a Young Goat
Last week we took a break from our
sermon series on Foods From the Bible to celebrate Africa Sunday. Today we pick up the food theme again with
Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son. Food plays an important role in this
story. There are three different foods
mentioned and they mark the turning points in the story: the husks fed to the pigs with which the lost
son longed to fill his belly, the fatted calf killed to celebrate his return
home, and the young goat which the elder son complained he never got for a
party with his friends. Let’s take a
look at each of them and the insights they give us into this story and our life
with God.
The story begins as a younger son
shames and insults his father by asking for his share of the inheritance early,
saying, in effect, “Dad, drop dead.”
Surprisingly the father gives it to him and the son quickly blows it on
riotous living. Soon he is destitute and
has to resort to a minimum wage job slopping hogs. For a good Jewish boy this was about as low
as he could go, for hogs were ritually unclean and Jews had nothing to do with
them. It’s tough to make ends meet on
minimum wage, however, and the son was hungry.
He was also anything but good.
The husks he hungered over were
probably pods from the carob tree. They
were nutritious and easily stored. They
were not high class. Commonly used as
livestock food, they were also food for the poorest of the poor.
The carob tree is related to our
locust tree. In fact, it may be that
when John the Baptist ate locusts and wild honey, the locusts were not the
relatives of the grasshopper, as I’ve always thought, but pods from the carob
tree. They have also been called St.
John’s bread.
The son’s desire to eat these husks,
or pods, tells us of his deprivation and need.
A modern day equivalent might be people who resort to eating dog food,
or the people in North Korea who gather grasses and weeds because they have
nothing else to eat. The son who
humiliated his father was now himself humiliated.
Typically in Bible times a father so
shamed by his son’s disgraceful behavior would disown such a child. If the boy returned home, at best he would
offer him bread and water, and force him to work off his debt. That is what the son expects.
Often that is what Christians expect
as we come before God. For years the
church has confronted us with the shame of our sinful behavior. “All have sinned and fallen short of the
glory of God,” the apostle Paul wrote to the Romans. Even those of us who are responsible, law
abiding citizens look with regret on our selfish thoughts and actions. We are embarrassed by our own bodies, ashamed
of our freewheeling imaginations, and appalled at our wasteful ways. “Blessed God, I have sinned before heaven and
before you,” we confess. “I am no longer
worthy to be called your child.” We come
to God expecting bread and water, for surely that is all we deserve.
I think a shame based faith fails to
understand the nature of sin and does not truly grasp who God is. I can’t count the number of people I’ve known
who lived in fear, sure that God was marking against them every single misdeed,
large or small.
Mary was terrified to receive communion. She had been taught it was a sin to take it
in an unworthy manner, and since she believed she was inherently unworthy she
could never take it. Della constantly
apologized for herself, whether it was for the cookies she baked or because,
due to dry skin, she bathed every other day not every day. She never seemed dirty to me, but she
regarded herself as unclean, inside and out.
Neither of them lived what I would call riotous lives. I’m sure, like the rest of us, they were not
perfect. Neither were they bad people as
they seemed to believe.
The Greek word for sin means to miss
the mark. Yes, we fail to love God with
our whole hearts and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Sadly people like Mary and Della didn’t love
even themselves. I suppose you could
call that a sin. I think of it, instead,
as a tragedy.
We
often forget that sin is communal as well as individual. Racism, sexism, and
environmental degradation are every bit as sinful as murder, adultery, and
theft, though you probably won’t go to prison for them.
Expecting his crust of bread, the
prodigal son hadn’t even gotten all the way home when the old man came running
down the road, his robe flapping in the breeze.
He shed behind him the dignity expected of a man of his stature. Before the boy could mumble his apology, his
father had called the servants to begin preparations for a feast, starting with
the fatted calf.
In Bible times, few people ate meat
except at festivals. The prosperous
might eat it on the Sabbath. Even for
the prosperous the animals slaughtered tended to be older, tougher ones who
were past breeding age. Chicken, mutton,
or goats were the most common meat. Veal
was the most expensive cut of meat because of the animal’s future value in
breeding or pulling a plow. Thus, the
father’s order to kill the fatted calf is an astonishing extravagance, like
cashing in an IRA to pay for a birthday party.
For him to throw a party for the child who had publicly humiliated him
with his premature demand for his inheritance and his spendthrift ways was out
of character.
There is a third food in this
story. The resentful elder son refuses
to join in the festivities. In another
breach of etiquette, the father leaves his guests to go and plead with his
oldest child to come inside. Instead,
this son points to his righteous life and complains, “I have never disobeyed
your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might
celebrate with my friends.” A young goat
would have been enough for a real party, especially when meat was not eaten
regularly. It would also have made for a
smaller and less extravagant party than the fatted calf. It was more like a Sunday dinner than a
wedding celebration.
The young goat tells us of the older
son’s jealousy and resentment over his younger brother’s apparent favored
treatment. He had been the good child,
responsible and hard working and obedient.
And unappreciated. He hadn’t even
gotten a back yard barbeque, and yet the bad child got prime rib. No fair, no fair, no fair.
I’m not the first person to point out
that there are two lost sons in this story: the younger one who broke all the
rules, shamed his father, and left home; and the older one who did all the
right things and was so filled with resentment that he could not rejoice at his
brother’s surprise return. Most of us, I
suspect, are more like the older son:
we’re the good kids who work hard, contribute to our community, and come
to church. We don’t break very many
rules. All the while, we wait for others
to notice how good we are, and we resent those who seem to get away with their
bad behavior. It is hard for us to
forgive them.
Sometimes we find ourselves hungry and
destitute, ready to settle for even the lowliest of God’s gifts. Sometimes we find ourselves on the outside of
the party looking in, shaking our fingers at their bad choices, and wishing for
a young goat so that we might celebrate with OUR friends.
The good news is that whether we are
the naughty ones who have to resort to slopping hogs or the resentful, good
kids who are unable to forgive, God comes to us to invite us to the heavenly
banquet. God is always looking for us,
whether we have been separated from God by our reprehensible behavior, or, like
the older son, by our righteous lives and unforgiving attitudes. God runs down the road to greet us, welcoming
us before we can mumble a confession.
God leaves the other guests in order to hunt us out as we sulk in the
corner. “Come on in!” God coaxes. “The table is set, the feast is prepared, and
the party is incomplete without you.” We
may only deserve bread and water, but God serves prime rib.
January 15, 2012
Genesis 25:27-34
Esau, Jacob, and the Lentil Stew
This is the second week in our Foods
of the Bible series. Last week we
examined wine and its general meaning in the Bible. Our Scripture was the story of Jesus changing
water into wine at a wedding in Cana of Galilee. The Palouse is not known for growing wine
grapes. We specialize instead on the
other half of the Eucharistic meal, though even there our wheat is used not so
much for bread as for noodles.
Today’s food of the week is a Palouse
specialty: Lentils. According to the US Dry Pea and Lentil
Association’s web site, the states of Idaho and Washington produce 26% of the
total amount of lentils grown in the United States. The Lentil Festival web site rounds that
figure up, claiming the Palouse produces a third of the lentils grown. We know about lentils.
Lentils were perhaps even better known
in the Bible lands and in Bible times.
As we know, lentils are good for you: they have lots of protein and
fiber. In Biblical times, they may have
been the most important component of diets after grains. The Mishnah, a
commentary on the Old Testament dating from about 100 AD, required a man to
supply his estranged wife with two pounds of lentils a week. Lentils were apparently an early form of
alimony.
Red lentils were especially common in
Syria and Egypt. As we know they are
also grown in the Palouse. The Hebrew
word for lentil is adash. It is related to the word for red, admoniy, from which comes adam,
the first human. The soils and rocks of
Edom, the area south of the Dead Sea, tend to be rusty colored. In the end it all goes back to the humble
little lentil.
Lentils were also known as the
“Mourner’s dish.” The rabbi’s said, “as
the lentil rolls, so do death, sorrow, and mourning constantly roll about among
men.”
Just prior to our reading today from
Genesis, the old patriarch Abraham had died.
Our story picks up with Abraham’s twin grandsons, Esau (also called
Edom) and Jacob. Esau was a hunter and
Jacob more of a farmer and shepherd.
Jacob was cooking lentil stew and Esau had gone hunting. The text does not explicitly say this, but it
is possible they were preparing the funeral dinner in memory of Grandpa
Abraham. As the hunters among us know,
sometimes the hunt is successful and sometimes not. In this case, Esau came home empty handed and
hungry from his efforts.
Jacob, on the other hand, didn’t have
to risk much to cook up a pot of lentil stew.
Assuming the harvest had been good, lentils were a pretty safe bet. So he had a savory dish bubbling away when
his brother came in, weak with hunger.
Neither of them come off well in this tale.
Esau demanded, “Give me some of that
red stuff, for I am famished.” Now it is
possible that he really was close to starvation. Few people in that day had the sorts of
bodily reserves many of us have. A day
spent tramping around the hills would have taken a lot of energy. On the other hand, this could have been an
over exaggeration, like the person who comes in from work or school stating,
“I’m starving to death,” meaning, “I’m really hungry.”
Jacob, knowing he had the upper hand,
bargained. “First sell me your
birthright.” The birthright was the
rights of the oldest son. That included
twice the land the other sons got combined, as well as leadership of the
family. Even though Esau was only older
by minutes, that gave him considerable status, wealth, and privilege. In his hunger, Esau conceded, and Jacob got
his way. He had been a trickster since
before birth. Now he used the lowly
lentil to gain superiority over his brother.
Esau gave up his rights for a bowl of food. Years later Jacob would continue the pattern
when he tricked their father into giving him the deathbed blessing intended for
Esau.
Esau, Jacob, and the story of the
lentil stew are a story of food used to manipulate and coerce. It is a common theme in life. Many of us first experienced it on the
playground when a wily play mate traded a chocolate chip cookie for a turn on
the swings or a cut in line for lunch.
The recent death of North Korean
leader Kim Jong Il has reminded the world of the
famines which plagued that nation in the ‘90’s and threaten them again. In part they have been due to poor harvests
and flooding. They were also due to poor
economic management of a centrally planned system, and to Kim Jong Il’s focus on building up nuclear weapons even as he
refused to buy food for the millions of people starving in his own
country. He sold his birthright. Estimates are that over a million people died
during the 1990’s. Millions more are at
risk again. He traded their lives for
military might and a failed economic system.
In 2008 the United States suspended
food aid to North Korea because so much of it was sold on the black market
instead of giving it to the people who needed it most. It is a dilemma. In an article from The Telegraph I read on
the internet, dating back to last July, a North Korean woman who managed to
flee to China, said of food aid, “The people will get very little – but it will
be enough to help people survive.” Do we
resume food aid hoping that enough of it will reach those who need it to save a
few lives and knowing much of it will not?
Or do we withhold it because of the extortion and to make clear our
stance against a corrupt and evil system?
The intricacies of foreign policy are
beyond my ability to fully understand.
They are also outside the abilities of ordinary people like us to
impact. They rest in the hands of power
brokers in that other Washington, thousands of miles away. And yet they are closer than it seems. The US Dry Pea and Lentil Association has six
international representatives. It sells
to countries all over the world, Asia included.
Trade missions, including the sale of agricultural products, can be a
means of goodwill and peace, be that to North Korea or to Mexico. So can international study programs like the
ones I know several of you have participated in. And international trade, or lack thereof, can
be a way to manipulate other nations, of selling our birthright. There’s a bit of Esau and of Jacob in most of
us. There are no easy answers.
The birthright Esau sold for “some of
that red stuff” included the family land and his role as head of the
family. Whether you are a farmer tending
hundreds of acres of land or a homeowner with just a small lot, most of us have
access to some land. As Christians we
are members of the Body of Christ. Jesus
is the head of that family. The last and
the least, from North Korea to the rattiest trailer court in Moscow, are
members of that body. Our birthright is
the love and compassion of Jesus.
Sending lentils or wheat to North
Korea is outside our abilities. We can
do our part to ensure that the hungry in our own community have enough to
eat. The food stuffs gathered in the
Thanksgiving and Christmas food drives are pretty well gone from the shelves
now. Pick up a bag of pasta or a can of
soup, or some lentils, every time you go to the grocery store. Bring it to church and leave it in the blue
tub in the entry way. Or add a few
dollars to your pledge and designate it for the food bank.
The fresh produce collected last
summer by Backyard Harvest and distributed to food banks is also surely
gone. Our gardens are bare and our fruit
trees dormant. Some of us, however, are
dreaming over seed catalogues and planning next summer’s gardens. As you do so, include an extra row of beans
or potatoes for Backyard Harvest. It is
a marvelous way of sharing our birthright with our neighbors in need. It provides them with fresh produce instead
of the salty preserved foods we usually donate.
Jacob used his lentil stew to gain
superiority over his brother. Let us
instead use food to build community and connections among us. Join me downstairs in Epworth Hall, not for
coffee hour but for Lentil Hour. I’m not
sure what all is there. I know I brought
Lentil Soup. Others may have brought
other lentil dishes. Here in the heart
of lentil country they are free: no birthrights required today, just an empty
stomach and a full heart.
January 8, 2012
John 2:1-11
Cheers!
It has been two weeks since Christmas
Day and one week since New Year’s Day.
Most of the extra cookies and candy made for holiday festivities are
gone from our cupboards, though not from our waistlines. Losing weight is surely one of the most
commonly made New Year’s Resolutions, and one of the hardest to kept.
In a way it seems like bad timing then
to start a new sermon series today on food.
Who wants to think about food now, when we’re still bloated and overfed
from a month and a half of parties. I
originally planned this series for last fall.
I switched to coordinate last fall’s preaching with our church wide
study of the Sermon on the Mount. In
God’s ironic way, this may actually be better timing.
Most people in the Bible lived on the
edge of survival. They were far from
overfed. Certainly food was a part of
festivals for them, just like the Thanksgiving turkey and the Easter ham are
for us. We will look at some celebratory
foods: wine at a wedding, and the fatted
calf to celebrate the return home of a lost son. Most of our focus, however, will be on
simple, basic foods: lentil stew, fish, bread.
In two cases we will extend our worship focus into coffee hour. Check the sign up
sheet at the back of the sanctuary if you can bring a crock pot of lentil soup
or stew for next Sunday. On the first
Sunday in February I’ll ask for people to bring a loaf of their favorite
homemade bread.
The food of the week today is
wine. No, we are not having a wine
tasting party during coffee hour. A long
held Methodist value, affirmed in our Book of Resolutions, opposes the
consumption of alcoholic beverages in United Methodist facilities. Certainly many people can safely and
appropriately enjoy an occasional glass of wine, but not all. So we don’t serve it here. My husband claims the Methodist miracle is to
turn wine into grape juice, which isn’t far from the truth. Mr. Welch, who first learned how to preserve
the juice of the grape without fermentation, was a Methodist. He made his juice to use at communion.
The Bible itself recognizes the
problems alcohol can present. Proverbs
warns, “Do not look at wine when it is red . . . . at the last it can bite like
the serpent.” Better to be cautious
about its use than to fall prey to addiction.
That said, wine shows up often in the
Bible. In a time and place where water
was often contaminated, wine was a safer beverage for even ordinary use because
the alcohol killed the bacteria. It
wasn’t New Year’s Eve champagne, but the beverage which helped to wash down
dinner.
Perhaps because wine was so common in
Bible times, it is an image rich with symbolism. It ranges from Revelation’s stern warnings
about the wine of the wrath of God to Jesus’ metaphor of new wine as a sign of
the Holy Spirit bubbling in our lives.
Wine is a positive way of telling about God’s grace and joy. As the Bible looks ahead to the end of time
as we know it, it uses wine to tell us of the joyous arrival of God’s new age.
And, of course, wine symbolizes Jesus’ blood and his sacrifice on the cross.
This morning we’re going to look at
one of the more famous stories in the New Testament about wine: Jesus’ first
miracle in Cana of Galilee. Jesus and
the disciples were guests at the wedding when Jesus’ mother reported to him the
crisis: the wine had run out. His
response sounds rude to us: “Woman, what
concern is that to you and to me? My
hour has not yet come.” In his day those
words were not as abrupt as they sound to us.
“Woman” was a term of respect.
Jesus was simply telling her that this was not his problem. But Mary told the servants, “Do what he
says.” Jesus told the servants to fill
stone jars with water. They did as he
asked, and the water turned to wine: fine wine and vast quantities to
boot. It was a sign of God’s extravagant
abundance: 120-180 gallons of high
quality wine. Jesus didn’t make the
cheap stuff you buy in cardboard boxes at the grocery store. He made the prize winning wines from the best
years.
God’s love for us is not measured out
in ounces, like the tastes carefully allotted at wine tastings. It is cheerfully splashed into our lives with
no thought about the price or the amount.
“Cheers!” God says to us as the sun shines on us, when the leaves change
colors and the hills are painted in brilliant hues on an autumn afternoon. “Proast!” God will
say to us when the flowers bloom in a gaudy confusion of colors this
spring. I feel God’s extravagance in the
hugs of children freely offered to me on Sunday mornings. I hear it in their shouts during recess at
McDonald School below my home.
As Christians we know the extravagance
of God’s love most clearly in the gift of Jesus. We’ve just celebrated the wonder of the
incarnation in which The Word became flesh. God was born among us as a human
baby, lived among us as an ordinary village carpenter, and died on the cross to
demonstrate to us the depth of God’s love.
Jesus did not calculate just how much pain he was willing to endure, nor
count the cost of loving us. He simply
came to share life with us, and when that life led him to the cross, he took
it. He didn’t come to be somber and
gloomy, though sadly some churches present him that way. He came among us in joy and life, like 180
gallons of the finest wine.
Like tepid water turned to a deep red
wine, Jesus brings new life and abundance to our tepid ways. The history of religion is one of
revitalization and renewal after stagnation.
Jesus breathed new life into the Judaism of his day. There are various opinions on whether he
intended to create an entirely new religion out of Judaism. What we know is that it happened. Fifty days after Jesus rose from the dead,
the Holy Spirit came upon his tentative followers gathered in an upper room and
so filled them with joy that they were accused of having drunk too much new
wine. From that point on, the number of
believers expanded rapidly. Individual
lives were transformed and they in turn changed the world.
1500 years later a monk named Martin
Luther took the tepid ways of the church of his day and brought it new
vitality. He insisted that salvation
came through faith alone and not through money given to build a grand
cathedral. He translated the Bible into
the language of the people so they could read it for themselves. He taught the priesthood of all believers, so
that everyone had authority and responsibility to live out faith. The Protestant Reformation fermented in many
ways around the world.
200 years after Luther, John Wesley
took a look at the Anglican Church of his day and saw a tepid religion. Worship was a matter of rote response and had
little to do with the everyday lives of everyday people. Wesley took the radical step of preaching
outside: in fields, at the mines, on the city streets, anywhere he could get
people to listen to him. And listen they
did. He must have been a powerful
preacher. I’ve read Wesley’s sermons and
on paper, 300 years later, they aren’t that exciting, yet thousands gathered to
hear him.
Wesley insisted the people continue to
worship in the Anglican churches and go there for the sacraments. He also gathered them into small groups – he
called them classes. There they studied
the Bible, prayed for each other, and held each other accountable to live out
their faith. Stagnant religion bubbled
into new wine alive with joy. Great
Britain was transformed.
I see new wine bubbling here at First
United Methodist Church. We have learned
how to laugh in church so that worship is fun.
Lives are being transformed. Some
of you have come to this church brand new to Christianity. A new adult membership class began this
morning for people eager to learn what faith in Christ is all about. Others of you have come here from other
churches, happy to join with other families and eager for our various
children’s activities. We are extending
our faith into the community. The bell
choirs play at events around town. Many
people are involved in Habitat for Humanity, serve on community boards, work in
the food banks, and volunteer with University groups. Lives are touched. Quietly and sometimes loudly you share God’s
extravagant abundance. The wine of God’s
goodness is flowing free. Cheers!
January 1, 2012
Matthew 2:1-12
Paying Homage
“We have come to pay him homage,” the
wise men, the magi, said to King Herod when they knocked on the palace doors to
ask about a new King of the Jews. When
Herod heard their news, he consulted with his advisors, then sent the magi to
Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have
found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.” When the Magi found Jesus in Bethlehem,
Matthew tells us, “on entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his
mother, and they knelt down and paid him homage.”
Three times in twelve verses the word
homage is used in reference to the Child Jesus.
We know that Herod had no intention of actually paying homage to anyone
other than himself, and I think it is significant that he echoed the magi’s
word, however false his pretenses.
Homage is the primary focus of this
story. It was the magi’s goal: to pay
homage to Jesus. They did not travel the
long, risky road from Persia (or wherever it was they began) in order to ooh
and aah over a cute baby or even to play peek-a-boo
with a toddler. They came all that way
to pay him homage.
They did not seek out this new king as
a formal State occasion, in which they established their status by presenting
expensive gifts. They came to pay him
homage.
They did not come to conduct a formal
study on Jewish child rearing practices or the effects of a kosher diet on the
growth rates of Hebrew children. They
came to pay homage.
They did not even come to offer their
treasures, however much we make that a focus of their role in our Christmas pageants. First and foremost, the magi came to pay
homage.
Homage is not a word we use much these
days. I’d be surprised if, over
breakfast, anybody here said, “Let’s go and pay homage at the Methodist Church
this morning.” Often we are not even sure
how to pronounce it. Is the H hard or
silent? Chances are many people can’t
even define it. So let’s explore this
word.
The Greek word Matthew uses in our
reading today which is translated as homage is proskyneo. It means, “to kiss the hand toward, to fall
to one’s knees, or to touch the ground with the head as an expression of
reverence.” Another word, also not
commonly used, is to prostrate oneself, not to be confused with the cancer
common among older men. Not only are
these words unfamiliar to us, the actions implied in them are also unfamiliar
to us, at least to United Methodists.
Devout Muslims prostrate themselves in their worship. When I’ve taken confirmation classes to the
Pullman Islamic Center, we’ve watched as rows of men have knelt on the floor
and then leaned forward to place their heads on the ground. Muslims are to pray five times a day. They can do so in a Mosque, in their offices
at work, or out on the street. If at all
possible they prostrate themselves. They
do so in part to ground themselves, to place themselves in contact with the
earth (or at least the floor.) It is a
posture of extreme reverence and humility.
Christmas pageants miss the mark when
we tell children in bathrobes clutching perfume bottles to kneel before the
manger. It would be more accurate,
though less dignified at least to our Western eyes, if they bowed all the way
and pressed their foreheads to the ground.
When the magi entered the house and saw the Child Jesus, they expressed
their relationship to him by placing themselves as low to the ground as they
could get. They prostrated themselves.
Our brothers and sisters in the Roman
Catholic and Episcopal Churches kneel frequently in their worship. They may not go as far as bending to place
their heads on the ground, but they do incorporate posture and the use of their
bodies in their worship. That’s not part
of our tradition. I am not suggesting
that we add kneelers to our sanctuary or that we spread out into the aisles and
maybe downstairs to prostrate. I am
conscious that we give up something when we fail to incorporate the use of our
bodies in our worship.
Sometimes United Methodists kneel for
communion. In this church those who wish
to do so are welcome to kneel at the rails after they take the bread and
juice. Today in particular you may wish
to pay homage in that way.
Let us pay homage as we meditate in
silence on the wonder of God’s love for us.
It is a love so profound that God came among us as one of us in a child
vulnerable to the cruelties of a jealous tyrant.
Let us pay homage to the Christ Child
as we reflect on God’s Holy Invasion into our world threatening worldly
powers. In the last two months, two of
my colleagues have paid homage to Christ through their witness in the Occupy
Movement. I suspect there are differing
opinions about that movement in this room today. I’m a bit conflicted myself. My colleagues went, not so much to protest,
as to be present as pastors and peacemakers to the young people making their
stand. They went dressed in their
clerical vestments, not so very differently from how I am dressed this
morning.
On November 15, Rich Lang, pastor at
University Temple in Seattle, tried to walk between protestors and police,
hoping to keep peace. Instead he was drenched
with pepper spray, first on his back and then full in the face. A month later, John Helmiere,
pastor at a new church start in Seattle, went to the Seattle Port protest. Again he wore a clerical collar. He wanted to be a voice of peace between protestors
and police. He called, “Keep the peace,
keep it non violent.” He was pulled to
the ground by police, punched on his face, and incarcerated for twelve hours.
Whatever you think about these
protests, I invite you to consider the homage paid through my colleagues’
bravery and witness. They literally
prostrated themselves as Rich fell, blinded by the pepper spray, and John was
pulled to the ground by the police. They
testified to their faith with their bodies in the midst of violence even as
they called for peace.
I am too much of a coward to follow
their example. We each have our own
paths to walk. Protest is not mine. I am moved to tears by their witness.
Let us pay homage to the Christ Child
on this first day of a new year. Let us
pray for peace in a world filled with violence, for hope in a world of despair,
and for love in a world filled with hate.
Worship begins with reverence and
humility as we place ourselves before God.
It is not something we do for just an hour on Sunday mornings. We pay homage to Christ every moment of every
day. A few are called to dramatic,
public actions that make the headlines.
All of us pay homage as we go about our daily lives.
Pay homage as you sit on the bleachers
at a basketball or volleyball game. Cheer
for your team and greet with respect fans for the opposing team. Pay homage by helping a lost child find her
parents, or by sharing your popcorn with a neighbor.
Pay homage to Christ at work. Your posture there may be seated, maybe in
front of a computer screen, with your mind focused on the task before you. Unlike your Muslim colleague you may not take
out a prayer mat in the middle of the day to pay homage on the floor. You can pay homage by lifting up your crabby
office mate in prayer or listening to a troubled student.
Pay homage to Christ as you glide down
the ski slope. Give thanks for the
beauty of a snow covered tree and a body healthy enough to ski.
Pay homage to Christ as you clean up
the remnants of last night’s party and remember the person who had a bit too
much to drink and so had to get a ride home.
Pay homage as you celebrate the good things that happened in 2011 and
grieve over the bad ones. Pay homage as
you offer to God 2012, that your entire life will be your gift. Pay homage that you may be the star which
guides others to God.
December 25, 2011
Isaiah 11:1-9
Luke 2:1-8, 52
Christ
is Born Today
Today is not the first time there have
been toys present in a worship service at First United Methodist Church. Those of you who have been around for a few
years, may recall the year when the Sunday School’s March Mission focus was to
bring teddy bears or other stuffed toys to be given to the law enforcement
agencies or the hospital to give to children traumatized by some emergency. We hoped they would provide comfort to those
children. That Lent, during an otherwise
somber season, teddy bears and rabbits and frogs showed up in church. We placed them on pews throughout the
sanctuary and invited people to prelove them, so the children
who got them would get some of that love.
I’m not sure how much attention even the adults paid to the sermons
those weeks, but I do know there was a lot of love and joy in this place, which
really is the best worship.
I also remember two little girls in my
first church. Emily and Megan were about
3 or 4 at the time. For several years
they brought their dolls with them to church and sat them next to them on the
pews. I was always tempted to add 2 to
the attendance records.
It’s always an ironic surprise for
Methodists when Christmas Day falls on a Sunday. After all, many of us have been to church
just hours before. Heaven forbid we
would go to church too much! For many
families, Christmas morning is reserved for opening stockings and unwrapping
packages. Up long before dawn, parents
long for another cup of coffee and some time to relax before setting the table
for Christmas Dinner or packing everybody up to head off to Grandma’s house. Coming to church is not in the plans.
Some faithful souls come out,
however. This year I invited children of
all ages to bring a toy to be blessed. I
had no idea what to expect.
We are more accustomed to celebrating
the spiritual part of Christmas on Christmas Eve. It’s then that we read about Jesus being born
in Bethlehem and sing Silent Night.
Christmas morning is usually the revelry of wrapping paper and empty
boxes.
The wonder of Jesus’ birth is as true
on Christmas morning as it is on Christmas Eve.
There is nothing in the Bible that says what time of day Jesus was
born. Sure we read that the shepherds
kept watch over their flocks by night, but that does not mean that was when
Jesus was born. Babies can show up at
any time of the day or night. Jesus was
no different.
That’s the whole point of Christmas,
be it Christmas Eve or Christmas Day.
God came among us as one of us.
Jesus was born like every one of the billions and billions of people born
before or since. He probably came out of
his mother red and wrinkled and squalling.
Mary was probably sweaty and exhausted after hours of labor. Like many babies, Jesus likely had his days
and nights mixed up, so that he was more awake at 2 AM than at 2 PM. Contrary to the words of the carol, he did
plenty of crying. He was not always
sweet smelling.
Jesus did not stay a cuddly little
baby any more than our children remain infants.
The last line in Chapter 2 of Luke is as much about the incarnation, or enfleshment of Jesus, as is the line that says, “she laid
him in a manger.” It says, “And Jesus
increased in wisdom and in stature and in divine and human favor.” Jesus grew up. Maybe there was a door frame in the
carpenter’s shop where Joseph and Mary scratched lines to indicate how much
Jesus had grown. Clearly, someone taught
him how to read. There may have been a
time when he struggled to learn his aleph’s and beth’s,
the A’s and B’s of Hebrew.
As a part of his growing, Jesus
undoubtedly played. We don’t know what
sorts of toys he had, but I can make some guesses. Joseph was a carpenter, so surely Jesus had
scraps of wood to use as blocks. Maybe
Joseph even made him a small hammer so he could practice pounding things together. Perhaps Mary stitched him a cloth or leather
donkey out of scraps from her sewing.
Recently I saw a link on FaceBook that listed the 5 best toys: Stick, String,
Cardboard Box, Cardboard Tube, and Dirt.
I added a 6th:
Water. We know Jesus did not have
cardboard, but surely he played with all the rest, just like children do today.
Play is children’s work. It is how they learn. It starts with developing the motor skills to
hold a rattle or build a tower of blocks.
As children experiment with textures from water to dirt they explore
their worlds. They try on adult
roles: Mommy or Carpenter. They negotiate relationships and boundaries:
who is It in the game of Tag? What does
it feel like to be left out or to leave another out of a game? Jesus surely experienced all of those things
as he grew in wisdom and years, as he increased in human and divine favor.
In the same way, children learn to be
Christians through play. As an adult,
Jesus once compared people to children playing wedding or funeral. Parents are sometimes shocked when they
discover their child burying the doll.
It is the way that child learns to make sense of the funeral for Grandma
she attended last week.
So children play church. They baptize the dog, preach to the teddy
bear, and take goldfish crackers to the needy in the doll house. I heard a story recently about a 2 ½ year old
whose father observed her carefully peeling round stickers out of her sticker
book and placing them on a post as she said something. Her Daddy listened more carefully. She was saying, “The body of Christ given for
you.” She was playing communion.
We don’t know for sure what sorts of
games Jesus played any more than we know what toys he had. I am convinced Jesus played. And so I think it is entirely fitting on this
Christmas morning for us to hold a service for the Blessing of the Toys. It is a way of sanctifying children’s work,
of blessing their daily lives. Just as
adults are Christians while they change the oil or grade papers, so children
are Christians whether they are playing house, tag, or church.
May they grow in wisdom and years,
just as Jesus did. May they increase in
divine and human favor like Jesus did.
For Christ is born today. We know
God is among us.
December 18, 2011
I Samuel 2:1-10
Luke 1:46-56
A Topsy Turvy Christmas
It was a topsy
turvy Christmas.
Instead of cutting a beautiful Douglas Fir or buying a Scotch Pine for
her Christmas tree, Jo collected a tumbleweed and decorated it. I can only imagine what a delicate and sometimes
painful task it was to string lights and place ornaments on the fragile
branches of the tumbleweed.
It was a topsy
turvy Christmas.
To keep the new kitten out of the Christmas tree, the family hung it
upside down, with the star at the bottom and the garlands around the top which
was actually the bottom.
It’s a topsy
turvy Christmas when instead of hanging stockings by
the chimney with care, you drape mittens around the pellet stove, hoping for
treats in them, maybe 5 candy canes. Who
knows, maybe on a topsy turvy
Christmas a woman might find tangerines in her panty hose left to dry in the
shower, and a man might discover boxes of raisins in his coffee mug.
On a topsy turvy Christmas Santa’s reindeer fly backwards through time
to deliver presents to the little boys
and girls who got nothing last year.
Rudolph’s bright nose needs to be replaced with a florescent tail
light.
This church has already been a part of
making such a topsy turvy
Christmas happen. We sponsored two
families for Christmas for Kids. One
family has four children. The father
reported that last year the children received only hats and gloves and a few
toys from the Dollar Store. This year
they are getting doll houses and forensic kits, blocks, and bug kits, in
addition to new coats and other clothes.
Santa’s reindeer flew backwards through your generosity.
On a topsy turvy Christmas, in place of a roast beef dinner served to
the family on the beautiful Christmas dishes, they’ll pass out mugs of cocoa
and ham sandwiches to people at Sojourner’s Alliance. Rather than gaily wrapped packages piled high
under the tree, there will be money sent to Light Up the World through the
World Service fund of the United Methodist Church. Instead of buying lovely gifts for each
other, friends and family will focus on those in the world who have the least.
Our Scripture readings today take a topsy turvy Christmas from upside
down trees and tangerines in panty hose to our pocketbooks, our living rooms,
and even to City Hall. The reading from
Luke is traditionally called The Magnificat. It is the song Mary sang after the Angel
Gabriel told her she had found favor with God and was to give birth to the
Messiah. Mary’s song stops the action of
the Gospel. No more angels, no
shepherds, no wise men, not even a simple donkey.
Mary celebrates the greatness of
God. She places a magnifying glass on
the fine print of the covenant God had formed with God’s people, the sort of
stuff most people don’t bother to read.
She transposed it from 6 point type to 72 point type in bold letters, so
that everyone had to sit up and take notice of what God was doing: “he has scattered the proud in the thoughts
of their hearts. He has brought down the
powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry
with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”
When you listen to the melodies of
this song at a Bach Concert, it is easy to settle into your seat and sigh in
admiration at the clear tones of the soprano who can actually hit those high
notes and make it through the 16th note runs. It is easy to miss the words. Oh, it is very well to smile that the hungry
are fed and the lowly lifted up. Hear
the other parts: the proud scattered,
the powerful brought down from their thrones, the rich sent away empty. She is singing about the educated people who
have health benefits and pension plans, who sleep in safety and comfort each
night. She isn’t just singing about
Warren Buffett and Butch Otter, or about Nancy Pelosi and Bill Gates. She is talking about middle class people like
us. The Magnificat
lampoons and subverts the social hierarchies not just of Mary’s day but of ours
too.
She sings this song because as her
belly swells she has caught a glimpse of God’s topsy turvy future made real in her life. God’s absurd choice of this teenage girl to
birth a miracle, to bear the Messiah, brings the future right into the present
day.
Mary’s song echoes the song of Hannah,
the mother of Samuel. Hannah, like Sarah
before her, had waited for a child with empty arms. In desperation she had gone to the temple to
pray. The priest then accused her of
being drunk. Then the miracle happened
and she gave birth to Samuel, whom she dedicated to God. She sang of God’s mighty works: “The bows of the mighty are broken, but the
feeble gird on strength. Those who were
full have hired themselves out for bread, but those who were hungry are fat
with spoil. The barren has borne seven,
but she who has many children is forlorn.”
Hannah sings of God’s topsy turvy world which subverts our typical understanding of who
is blessed and who is cursed. Centuries
later, with her own unexpected pregnancy, Mary echoed her foremother in the
faith.
Two thousand years later it is
tempting to relegate the songs of these women to history, or to turn them into
sentimental lullabies which warm our hearts and leave our lives
unchallenged. My friends, God refuses to
be simply an interesting story from the past or a Hallmark Moment. God insists on charging into our lives to
turn our worlds upside down.
This afternoon, some of us will
celebrate a topsy turvy
Christmas as we gather in Uniontown to dedicate the newest Habitat for Humanity
house. It’s a double
accomplishment. For the first time, the
Palouse Habitat affiliate has built two houses in one year.
Christmas elves have been working six days a
week to finish this house so Sarah Keller and her children can be home for the
holidays. Usually these volunteers work
at most two days a week. I am proud that
many of them come from this church. They
have installed plumbing, laid linoleum, and painted walls, among other
tasks. And that’s just this week. If you see some men walking a little more
gingerly than usual, it may be because they are tired and sore.
This has been a topsy
turvy project for our church. I’ve hoped to get us involved with hands on
mission projects. We tried to send a
team to White Swan, WA to help build a house after the fire storm destroyed
many houses there, and yet we could not pull that off. Last spring we did send a work crew out to
the Habitat site. Those were things I
tried to organize. One worked and the
other didn’t. Without any input from me,
volunteers have joined the Codger Crew with Habitat. Other people serve as officers on the Habitat
board. Ken Hall is the site supervisor
and Jennifer Wallace the executive director.
They are not official representatives of our church and they extend our
ministry into the community without needing any formal connections.
Habitat is a topsy
turvy deal.
The house is no give away: Sarah
will pay a mortgage on the materials, but not on the labor or any
interest. She has also put in plenty of
her own sweat equity to build the house.
You may have heard or seen stories in
the news this week about another topsy turvy Christmas.
People standing in line to pay on their lay away items at K Mart’s
around the county have been told their bills were paid in full. One donor apparently did so to honor her
recently deceased husband. Blessed are
those who mourn for they shall be comforted.
On a topsy turvy Christmas we join our voices with Mary to sing of
God’s greatness for God looks with favor on the lowliness of his servants. Blessed are those who kneel for hours to lay
linoleum for they shall be exalted.
Blessed are those who anonymously give to complete strangers for they
shall rejoice.
God has lifted up the lowly. God is welcoming a family in substandard
housing to their own home. God has filled the hungry with good things and sent
the rich away with emptier wallets and fuller hearts.
Come to think of it, since Christmas
is not my birthday or your birthday, maybe a topsy turvy Christmas just puts everything right side up after
all.
December 11, 2011
Luke 1: 26-38
Genesis 18:1-15
Birthing
A Miracle
I had never thought about her name
until a woman I know who is active in our Annual Conference mentioned the
challenges she faces in ordering things over the phone. “Last name?” the clerk will ask her. “Virgin,” she replies. “First name?” “Mary,” she answers. At which point most clerks tell her they are
not amused and ask for her real name.
She tells them that is her real name: Mary Virgin.
The BVM, or the Blessed Virgin Mary,
is the best known woman in the New Testament.
Tradition pictures her as THE sainted one, the epitome of faithfulness
and obedience, the model Christian. In
the Eastern Orthodox Church she is known as the Mother of God, the birther of miracles, unlike any other person.
Christians of all stripes tend to be
torn between thinking of Mary as that exceptional person whom no one else could
hope to emulate and as an ordinary girl not so very different from any other
teenage girl. She was most likely gawky
and awkward, embarrassed by the pimples on her face and self conscious of her
changing body.
In our reading today from the Gospel
of Luke Mary learns of the role she will play in the miracles of God. The angel Gabriel announces to her that she
is to give birth to a child who will be called, “The Son of the Most
High.” It is a birth announcement with
many parallels in the Bible: Sarai’s conception of Isaac; Hagar’s of Ishmael; Hannah’s
of Samuel, and Elizabeth’s of John. Each
case follows a pattern. It begins with
an unexpected appearance of a divine figure and the woman’s fear or confusion
in response. Then comes the announcement
that she will bear a child despite some barrier to her ability to do so,
followed by the woman’s objection, to which the divine figure offers a promise. Both Sarai and
Elizabeth were old. “The way of women
had ceased to be with them,” the King James Version of the Bible discreetly
puts it. In contrast, Hagar and Mary
were young. Hagar was just a slave girl. Mary had not known a man.
Her story follows the pattern. Gabriel appears, she is perplexed, Gabriel tells
her, “you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him
Jesus.” Mary points out the obvious: she
is a virgin. Gabriel explains, “The Holy
Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you;
therefore the child to be born will be holy.”
In her ultimate response, Mary says,
“Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your
word.”
We do ourselves and Mary a disservice
when we separate Mary’s ordinariness from her servanthood. They do not exclude each other. In fact, they enhance each other. In embracing her identity as God’s servant,
Mary offers her very ordinariness to God.
It is that ordinariness which allows the miracle to happen, for that is
what makes it clear that the miracle Mary is to birth comes from God with whom
nothing is impossible.
We come here today as ordinary
people. We gather as students sneaking
in worship in the midst of studying for finals.
We come as faculty who must go home to write those finals. We come as small business owners trying to
make a go of it in a tough economy and office workers doing double duty because
other positions have been cut. We come
as retired people cutting corners to make the Social Security check stretch,
and harried parents trying to keep the kids under control so they don’t
distract other worshipers.
I am among you as an ordinary
person. I have never once raised a
person from the dead, though I may have eased passage into death for a
few. I can’t tell you how it works, but often
a person in the last stages of life dies about an hour and a half after I pray
with them. Be careful when you ask me to
pray!
I have never walked on water, unless
you count snowshoes. I often long for a
magic wand to banish cancer, fix a troubled marriage, or feed the hungry. I’ve never yet found one.
I am no miracle worker. I am not a prophet. I don’t hear the voice of God speaking
directly to me. I’m just like the rest
of you. And like Mary it is precisely because
we are ordinary that we are God’s servants.
We are not the masters of the house nor the rulers of an empire. We are just ordinary people doing the best we
can to live out God’s love in the world.
And when we embrace our identities as God’s servants, we open ourselves
to allow God to birth miracles through us.
We don’t have to be superstars of the faith, just ordinary workers.
As a church our primary identity is as
servants of God, not as pillars of the community, good people, or that
beautiful building on 3rd Street.
Those are all fine things to be and servants of God tops them all. Mission is not just a nice thing to do. It is not simply one program of the church
along with worship and Christian education.
Mission IS who we are for it is our service to God.
This Advent we’ve been talking about
birthing a miracle by paying 100% of our World Service and Conference
Benevolence Apportionment. That fund is
the basic missional fund of our denomination. It is the epitome of who we are as United Methodist’s
because it provides the structure which allows flashier ministries to
happen. By working together with other
United Methodists, by fulfilling our connection, we are able to do amazing
things.
Paying this fund in full would be a
true miracle. It has not happened since
1981. At best we have paid about half,
and that has often been a struggle. It
is not news to anyone that a lot of people in our country and in our community
are having a hard time paying their bills.
So is our church. Reversing a
thirty year trend, in a bad economy, seems unlikely.
“For nothing will be impossible with
God,” Gabriel told Mary when she pointed out that she could not give birth to
Jesus because she was a virgin. I
believe Gabriel is also saying to us, “nothing is impossible with God.” In fact, miracles are happening in this
church. We have baptized 18 people this
year – more than in any one year in 2 decades.
Average worship attendance is up 15 % this fall over the comparable
Sundays a year ago. I keep holding my
breath, waiting for the numbers to drop.
I am nervous about even saying these things out loud for fear it will
jinx things. “How can this be?” I often
ask God, “For I am just an ordinary person and this congregation is filled with
ordinary people. We’re just regular
folks not superstars of the faith.”
When Mary objected, Gabriel told her,
“the power of the Most High will overshadow you.” The impossible happened because the Holy
Spirit worked in Mary’s life in ways no double blind, scientifically sound
study can document. The Holy Spirit
stepped into her life and she birthed a miracle.
I believe the Holy Spirit is at work
in this church. Sure we don’t always
agree on everything. Paying the bills is
tough. Sometimes the pastor picks hymns
everyone hates. And the Holy Spirit is
here. We too can birth a miracle. Let us embrace our identity as God’s servants
and see what God can do.
December 4, 2011
Judges 11:30-40
Mark 6:17-29
Birthday Party # 2
Today’s birthday party has no festive
little party hats, no gaily wrapped packages, no burning candles. It has no squeals of glee, no voices raised
in song, no happy ending. In fact, this
gruesome tale tells us of a party gone horribly awry, like the one several
weeks ago that ended up with two students dead in a car accident. It is not the kind of story most of us care
to listen to at the start of December.
Last week we heard about a birthday
party for the Pharaoh of Egypt at which the chief cupbearer was released from
prison and restored to his position, the baker was hanged, and Joseph was
forgotten and languished in prison. I
noted than that birthday parties are the invention of the elite. Ordinary people didn’t get a cake, much less
a party. In fact, only two birthday
parties are even mentioned in the Bible.
Our story today is the second birthday
party mentioned. In this one the guest
of honor is Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great. Earlier Mark called him a king, which was a
bit of a stretch. Technically he was the
tetrarch of Galilee, which meant that he ruled an area one fourth the size over
which his father had reigned. He had
asked Emperor Caesar if he could be called a king. Caesar had said no. The Kingdoms of the Herod’s were fading. His reign was marked by pride, jealousy,
cruelty, and death, all of which showed up at his birthday party.
Herod Antipas’ tale is a sordid story
from start to finish. He married his
sister-in-law, which offended the sensibilities of the Jews, including John the
Baptist, who did not hesitate to say so.
It was a politically unwise move.
Herod put John in prison, though he liked to pull him out occasionally
for the entertainment value. At the same
time he feared and respected John.
At this birthday party, Herod was
entertained by his step-daughter’s dancing.
Tradition has it the dance was sensuous and that is what pleased
Herod. Could be, though the Bible is not
explicit here. What we do know is that
Herod was so pleased that he promised the girl anything she wished, up to half
his kingdom. It was a rash vow made in
public. The girl asked her mother’s
advice, and harboring her grudge against John she advised her daughter to ask
for John’s head. Out of pride, Herod was
forced to keep his word and fulfill the promise. The girl got her bloody reward. Not my idea of a party favor.
Herod is not the only person in the
Bible to make a rash vow he would soon regret.
Jephthah had been estranged from his half
brothers, but when they found themselves at war they called on him to lead the
battle. Reluctantly he agreed and then
struck a deal with God. If God would
grant him victory, Jephthah promised to sacrifice
whoever greeted him on his return home.
He probably expected it would be an animal – maybe a goat or a
chicken. Sure enough, Jephthah’s forces were victorious. To his horror, the first thing he saw as he
neared his home was his only child, a much loved daughter, who came to greet
him, dancing. Sort of like Salome,
Herod’s step-daughter. Today we are
aghast that Jephthah kept his promise and that his
daughter complied.
Both of these stories remind us that
in moments of revelry we sometimes say things we later regret; in the
enthusiasm of the moment foolish words slip out of our mouths; in an instant
that comment on Face Book is posted or the email is sent and we’re left to live
with the consequences. Sometimes alcohol
lowers our inhibitions and other times we say stupid things all on our
own. Few of us have gone to the extreme
of murder. Many of us have thought
better a couple of hours later when it was too late to unsay the words. Been there, done that, cursed my own
foolishness.
Both of today’s stories end in
violence: Jephthah’s daughter mourns her virginity
and then returns home to be sacrificed, John the Baptist loses his head. They are decidedly unchristmassy
stories. You may be asking yourself why
I would inflict them on you at any time, but especially why now? Where are the shepherds? Where is the baby? Where are the beautiful words of Isaiah and
the strains of The Messiah? We began
this service by singing of joy. Why all
this gore? More commonly on the second
Sunday of Advent we read about John the Baptist as the voice in the wilderness
preparing a way for the Lord. Or maybe
we would hear of his surprise birth to elderly parents who had long since given
up hope of a child.
John’s unusual conception and birth
parallel the even more unusual conception and birth of Jesus. In the same way, John’s violent death
foreshadows Jesus’ violent death on the cross.
Neither John nor Jesus lived among the elite. Chances are that neither of them ever had a
birthday party, be it the revelry of Herod or the more restrained celebrations
some of us enjoy.
When Herod heard about Jesus, haunted
perhaps by a guilty conscience, he wondered if he was John raised from the
dead. Jesus’ name had become known
because he had healed some people and even raised a young girl from death. Jesus’ true significance, however, lay not in
his power to work miracles. It lay in
the cross. It was easy for someone like
Herod to be impressed with Jesus’ special powers. He failed to comprehend who Jesus really was
because he failed to recognize him as One who suffered on behalf of others. John’s death is the opening melody that sets
the stage for the full story of the true understanding of Jesus.
In our attempt to get at the true
meaning of Christmas, this Advent I am saying, “Christmas is not your
birthday.” Neither is it Herod or
Pharaoh’s birthday. Thank goodness. There is never an appropriate time to
celebrate violence. This is the season
to celebrate Jesus, who did love a good party.
He was criticized for feasting with sinners and tax collectors. He was even accused of being a glutton and a
drunkard. John by contrast, fasted.
As we remind ourselves that Christmas
is not our birthday, I do want to say that it is ok to party. Be careful what you promise. It is possible to have a good time without
overindulging in alcohol. The benefit is
that the next morning you can remember what you said. Enjoy yourselves. This is a season of joy.
Christmas is not your birthday. It is Jesus’ birth we celebrate, not our
own. I’m not asking anyone to
suffer. No one should be the victim of
anyone else’s violence, alcohol induced or otherwise. In honor of Jesus, I am asking us all to
sacrifice just a little bit. Cut back
the level of your gift giving so that you have something left to honor
Jesus. The Mission Committee’s suggestion
is a gift to the World Service Fund. It
is not a very exciting fund. As I said
in the newsletter, this is the socks and underwear mission fund of the church
which makes possible the more exciting things like Nothing But Nets to reduce
malaria or sponsoring a child in Africa.
It has been thirty years since our church paid our full share of this
fund. In the last few years we have
gotten ourselves up to almost 50%. Three
decades since we’ve done our part. That
means for all these years the church has been going around without the proper
foundation garments. Really, it is
shocking.
To pay our full share we need to raise
just over another $7000. Sounds like a
lot of money. I think we can do it. So maybe instead of getting your daughter the
$35 Holiday Barbie she gets a $15 Barbie and bike set, and your son gets the $8
Mastermind Board game instead of the $90 Mindflex
Duel Game. And so on for the rest of
your list.
$7000 is a lot of money. We’ve been averaging about 180 people in
worship since the week after Labor Day.
If each person spent or received just $40 less on Christmas we could
make a miracle happen. We could reverse
a thirty year trend and put this church’s mission giving back in the proper
foundation garments. Rather than those
funky little paper hats, wouldn’t it be great to be properly dressed for Jesus
birthday?
November 27, 2011
Genesis 40:20-23
Matthew 1:18-25
Birthday
Party # 1
My family is dominated by mid-winter
birthdays: my step-son, brother, niece, brother-in-law, and mother in December,
and my father, me, and another brother-in-law in January. All of them are within a month, either side,
of Christmas. I have always associated
Christmas with birthdays. My Christmas
shopping list has two columns: Christmas and birthdays. We’ve often celebrated the December birthdays
with one combined bash. Still, there are
a lot of reasons for family gatherings in these two months.
People whose birthdays fall in late
December often find that their birthdays get lost in the hubbub of
Christmas. I contacted folks in our
church with December birthdays and asked them how they’ve been impacted. Their answers have been combined in our
Advent Candle ceremonies. Some noted
that an advantage is that combined gifts allow for larger presents which would
not be an option for just one. The
disadvantage is that it can make the birthday less of a special day.
This year, I’ve asked people with late
November and December birthdays to light our Advent Candles, both to recognize
their birthdays and to highlight our theme:
Christmas is not your birthday.
It comes from a book by Mike Slaughter, pastor at Ginghamsburg
Church near Dayton, Ohio. One adult
Sunday School class has been studying that book.
Rev. Slaughter points out that
Christmas has become more of a consumer orgy than a festival of the
incarnation. The pressure mounts each
year to buy more and more elaborate gifts.
Families go into debt. We measure
the holiday by the number of gifts under the tree. We forget about Jesus. So, Rev. Slaughter challenged his
congregation to reduce the amount of money they spent on gifts and then to help
birth a miracle by matching what they spent with a gift to the Ginghamsburg Sudan Project.
It is a big church. The first
year they raised $317,000. In the six
years since then the project has grown, both within that congregation and
without. $4.4 million has been given to
Darfur. Farmers have been given tools
and seeds, wells have been dug, and schools have been built.
The more I thought about Rev.
Slaughter’s ideas, the more I was moved.
Christmas is not my birthday. I
don’t need another pretty sweater, a new dish for the kitchen, or a fancy
electronic gadget. Why should I get
presents to celebrate Jesus’ birth?
In truth, December 25 is not really
Jesus’ birthday either. No one knows for
sure when he was born. The best guess is
that it was in the spring, the time of year when shepherds were more likely to
be tending sheep around Bethlehem.
Christmas is more properly the festival of the incarnation. It celebrates when God became human, or as
the Gospel of John puts it, the Word became flesh. That is the theological concept behind
Christmas. It is important for us to
understand that. And the point remains:
Christmas is not my birthday, or yours, even if you were born on December 25!
This theme led me to think about other
birthdays in the Bible. There aren’t
very many. Oh sure, lots of people are
born in the Bible, but most people didn’t get a party. Chances are most ordinary people didn’t even
know the exact date. In the days before
calendars your family might recall, “You were born the winter we had that big
snow.” The Gospel of Luke associates
Jesus’ birth with the registration taken by Emperor Augustus. Furthermore, birthday parties with cake and
candles and presents are the invention of modern day affluence. Families who live on the edge of survival
don’t have the money for such things.
Birthday parties were reserved for royalty.
And sure enough, the first birthday
party to be mentioned in the bible is for the Pharaoh of Egypt. It is a side light in the longer story of
Joseph, whose life is a cycle of ups and downs.
He was a favored son sold into slavery by his jealous older
brothers. In slavery he gained his
master’s favor, who put the household under Joseph’s care. Then he was imprisoned on false charges of
rape when he spurned the advances of the master’s wife. In prison, he gained the jailer’s favor, who
gave him new responsibilities. He made
friends with the other prisoners, including the Pharaoh’s chief cup bearer and
baker, who had somehow angered Pharaoh.
Joseph interpreted their dreams and asked them to remember him. When his interpretations turned out to be
correct and the cupbearer was restored to his job and the baker hanged, the
cupbearer forgot all about Joseph.
The restoration of the cupbearer and
the hanging of the baker are part of Pharaoh’s birthday party. Joseph is a minor figure easily forgotten,
yet in the end he turns out to be God’s instrument of salvation both for the
land of Egypt and for his brothers back home who had sold him into slavery in
the first place.
There is another Joseph in the Bible
who is also easily forgotten. We read
his story from the Gospel of Matthew.
When we talk about Jesus’ birth we usually focus on Mary, and often the
shepherds and wise men. But Joseph? Not so much.
And like the Joseph of Genesis, dreams are an important part of his
story. An angel of God speaks to him in
a dream to assure him it is ok to take Mary as his wife after she is found to
be with child by the Holy Spirit. After
that we hear nothing of Joseph. Oh, a
couple of times Jesus is referred to as the son of Joseph, but other than that
he disappears from the scene. And he
played his part in making the miracle of Jesus happen. He too is an instrument of God’s salvation.
During festivities it is easy to
overlook the background figures. How
often on Communion Sundays do we forget about the Cupbearers and Bakers, the
ones who grow the grapes and the grain behind the juice and bread we use? Do you ever think about the people who
prepare the sacrament and clean it up?
Mary plays a leading role in most Christmas pageants. Joseph is just along for the ride. As Pharaoh celebrated his birthday and the
cupbearer rejoiced in being released from prison, it was all too easy to let
poor old Joseph languish in prison, forgotten again.
Christmas gets so hectic as we rush
from one party to the next, check names off our shopping lists, and decorate
the house, that we forget about Jesus.
We confuse God with Santa Claus and reduce our prayer lives to wish
lists.
This year, the Mission Committee and I
are asking you to remember that Christmas is not your birthday. Slow down, simplify your celebration, and
reduce your consumption. First United
Methodist Church has many giving opportunities in December. Choose which of them to support.
This year I have asked the Mission
Committee to combine their Alternative Giving project with the Christmas
Offering mentioned in the letter I’ll send out in a few weeks. The Christmas Offering is split between the
Building Maintenance Fund and our World Service and Conference Benevolence
Apportionment. The alternative giving
will go to World Service. The World Service part pays global expenses for our
denomination, like the Boards of Global Ministries and Discipleship. The Conference Benevolence Fund supports
things like campus ministries and New Congregation Development.
Friends, our church has not paid 100%
of this asking for thirty years. Quite
honestly we receive back more than we send in because of the money that comes
to support campus ministry at the UI.
This year we are on target to pay about half. I am asking you to help make a miracle happen
so that we can pay 100%. What a miracle
that would be! We would need another
$7000. Given our budgetary woes, that
seems nearly impossible.
Stop for a moment and think about what
you spent on Christmas last year. Then
consider if your kids could survive with fewer toys, your sister would be just
as happy with a smaller gift, and you could ask for less. Imagine a miracle. Doug and I have committed to cutting our
giving in half this year and then matching it with charitable gifts. In some cases those will be to causes more
fitting to the person than our church is.
In most cases it will be this one.
I’m also making each person a bookmark in cross stitch so there will be
a homemade gift.
Imagine a miracle. If 100 families cut back their Christmas
giving even by 25% and gave the difference to this fund we could easily raise
$7000. We too could birth a
miracle.
Christmas
is not your birthday. It isn’t
mine. It is Jesus birthday. Let us not forget him so that Christmas
becomes Birthday Party #1.
November 20, 2011
Luke 19:1-10
Investing
in Faith
The dangers of wealth
make the headlines: Bernie Madoff is convicted of running a pyramid scheme and making
off with people’s retirement funds; a politician hides $90,000 in cash in his
freezer which he had been going to use as a bribe; the treasurer for the
Renaissance Fair here in Moscow embezzles thousands of dollars to support her
drug habit.
It is easy to
relegate the dangers of wealth to others: shady politicians, corporations;
tycoons; drug addicts; all people with whom we have little in common.
Most of us are more
likely to think about the dangers we face from the lack of wealth:
unemployment, student loans mounting up, the price of gas, the high cost of
medical care.
The Bible, however,
confronts ordinary people like us with the dangers of wealth. Three weeks ago the Parable of the Rich Fool
made us think about our own greed. Jesus
had been asked to intervene in a family dispute about an inheritance. Instead he told a story about someone who
built big barns to store his riches but died before he could enjoy it. I told you about being confronted with my own
greed.
The next week, Jesus’
most difficult parable, The Prodigal Manager, led us to consider both
dishonesty and waste. We also talked
about mobilizing our money in accordance with the journey of faith.
Last week the story
of the rich man and Lazarus showed us how wealth can blind us to the suffering
that is right here in our own community.
The dangers of wealth
haunt the church itself. The youth who
are being confirmed today briefly studied Martin Luther, who challenged the
practice of indulgences. People were
told that they could speed up their entrance into heaven by donating money to
the church. The fires of hell licked at
their heels so that they gave generously.
Indulgences were a
great fund raising tool for the church in Luther’s day. St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome was paid for
with indulgences. Maybe if this church
sold indulgences we could finish remodeling the education wing and rebuild the
organ!
Martin Luther
recognized how manipulative and abusive indulgences were. When he was unable to reform the church from
the inside, he went outside and a new church was born. There was more to the Reformation than
indulgences but it was one significant part.
The dangers of wealth had infected the church as it yielded to its own
greed. These days we are appalled at the
suggestion that anyone could buy their way into heaven. We will not solve our financial woes by
selling indulgences. You probably would
not fall for it anyway. Salvation is not
for sale at any price.
And yet over the last
few weeks I have heard myself talking to you about building treasure in heaven
through prayer, fasting, and yes, charitable giving. Truly I do not think salvation, or even the
church, can be bought, but I wonder if hidden underneath my complete rejection
of the idea does not lie a hidden indulgence.
When I encourage you to start giving a percentage of your income to the
church as a way to build treasure in heaven, am I not cloaking indulgences in
another language?
Zacchaeus raises the question for us. I’ve always liked Zacchaeus
because he was short. The people of his
day felt otherwise. Zacchaeus
may have been short in stature but he was not short on funds. As a tax collector he had contracted the
right to collect revenue for the Roman Government. He owed Rome a certain sum and beyond that he
could collect as much money from people as he could squeeze out of them. Zacchaeus was the
chief tax collector. He not only worked
for the hated Romans, he cheated, extorted, and manipulated money from folks
who lived on the very edge of survival.
When Jesus came to
town, he saw Zacchaeus up in a tree, and told him, “Zacchaeus, hurry up and come down; for I must stay at your
house today.” Zacchaeus
made an instant conversion, both of his soul and of his bank account. “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will
give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back
four times as much.”
Zacchaeus’ story is full of surprises. To begin with, he climbs a tree to be able to
see Jesus. What an undignified act for a
grown man, and an important one at that.
We short people have to work at maintaining our dignity. We get mistaken for children often enough as
it is. Acting like a boy would not help.
Jesus’ behavior is
another surprise. By inviting himself to
stay at Zacchaeus’ house, Jesus broke the code of
etiquette. Proper behavior meant waiting
to be invited. Even today only family and close friends invite themselves
over. Jesus presumed an intimacy that
was not present.
Perhaps the biggest
surprise of all is Zacchaeus’ pledge to give half his
wealth to the poor and to make fourfold restitution to anyone he had
defrauded. Clearly he would soon no
longer be wealthy. His largess
challenged people’s assumptions about him.
He was no longer the fat cat living in luxury at other’s expense, but
someone who cared about everyday people.
Zacchaeus’ vow is a sign of distributive
justice, in which the playing field was leveled and everyone started with the
same amount. The Hebrew Bible held such
distributive justice as the goal. In the
year of Jubilee, every 49 years, or a Sabbath of Sabbaths, all debts were
canceled, and all lands went back to the original owners. It was a radical idea. It’s unclear if it was ever practiced. If it were there would be no protests about
1% of the population controlling the majority of the wealth in our
country. Your student loans would be
forgiven. You would also give up ownership
of your house.
Jesus says to Zacchaeus, “Today, salvation has come to this house,
because he too is a son of Abraham. For
the Son of Man has come to seek out and to save the lost.” Salvation is the biggest surprise of all. It even includes Zacchaeus,
the selfish old traitor.
Today we celebrate
the surprise gift of salvation as we welcome six youth who are being confirmed
and two adults who are transferring their membership. Let me be clear: church membership and salvation are not
identical. I believe God’s salvation is
much bigger than the membership of this or any church. That said, today these people are accepting
the salvation acknowledged in their baptism.
Three of the youth will be baptized.
Three will reaffirm the commitments their parents made for them when
they were baptized as smaller children.
Some of these young people have been a part of this or other churches
since birth or even before. They can’t
remember not coming to church. Others of
them are new to church. In every case I
have emphasized to them that today is their commitment.
I was one of those
people who came into the church as a youth.
I knew nothing about the Bible, no idea how to pray, or what salvation
meant. Boy was I in for a surprise! Six years after I was baptized I headed to
seminary to prepare for ordained ministry.
My last Sunday at church I knelt in the front of the sanctuary as the
officers of the church laid their hands on me and prayed for me. Afterwards, Jack said to me, “Now you know
how to answer people who ask, ‘Have you been saved?’ You can tell them, ‘No, I’ve been invested.’”
Zacchaeus gave of his wealth not to buy salvation but because,
having been saved, he invested himself in God’s work of salvation. Today eight people put themselves at God’s
disposal. They open themselves to be
invested, not to earn salvation, but because they have been given salvation.
November 13, 2011
Luke 16: 19-31
A Lot
Like Me
I do not think of myself as a wealthy
person. I drive a 1994 Honda Civic with
205,000 miles on it. The upholstery has
a few rips and stains. There are dents and
paint chips on the hood. Most of the
furniture in my house is at least 25 years old.
Doug and I don’t take exotic vacations.
We’re more likely to eat potatoes from the family garden than steak and
lobster. As the Occupy Wall Street
Movement says, we are the 99%.
And we have food and shelter. When we are sick we have access to good
medical care. Most of the time we don’t
need it, because we enjoy the riches of good health. I received a fine education. I do not fear for my safety.
Those are all things that most of the
time I take for granted. Then I realize
that health, safety, food, and shelter are things much of the world does not
take for granted at all. There’s been a
picture going around Face Book of two tiny children, their ribs sticking out
and eyes bulging as they reach for a plate of gruel. “To us you are the 1%,” it
says. And it is true: too much of the
rest of the world, I am the 1%. I am
wealthy indeed.
Our reading today from the Gospel of
Luke tells us about a rich man, “who was dressed in purple and fine linen and
feasted sumptuously every day.” Most
likely he came from a royal tradition.
The dye used to make purple came from tiny sea creatures. It was hard to get and so it was expensive
and generally reserved for royalty. This
rich man lived in a gated community. We
are not told his name or much else about him.
He isn’t depicted as an evil person.
There’s no mention that he lied or cheated, that he stole or murdered
anyone. Except for the royalty part, he
was probably a lot like me.
A lot like me, the rich man did not
really see the poor beggar, named Lazarus, who lay each day at his gates. Jesus’ parable does not say whether Lazarus
called out to the rich man as his carriage drove past. It doesn’t say whether Lazarus ever sent an
appeal for leftovers up to the house.
What does seem clear is that the rich man did not take much notice of
Lazarus until after they both died. The
rich man, respected citizen that he had been, still ended up in torment. It was then that he realized Lazarus was far
off, at Abraham’s side, enjoying the comforts of heaven.
The rich man was a lot like me because
I too am blinded by my comfortable life to the suffering of the poor right here
in my own community. It is easy for me
to think that poverty is not a pressing issue in Moscow. We don’t see people living under bridges or
stationed at Third and Main with cardboard signs saying, “will work for food.”
It turns out the poor are right under
our noses. We may not have people living
on the streets but homelessness is an issue.
People sleep on their friends’ couches, or in their cars, maybe even
Honda Civics. They live in substandard
housing: run down trailer parks and old houses with leaky roofs and frayed
wiring. According to Sojourner’s
Alliance, 21.5% of people in Latah County live under the poverty line. Sojourner’s regularly turns away 10-12 new
families every week, because they are full and have no room. The food bank
serves between 200-300 people a week, up 40-50 people. People like me are oblivious to the extent of
the problem.
Just after the parable in today’s
reading, Jesus says, “Occasions for stumbling are bound to come, but woe to
anyone by whom they come.” Just like I
stumble over raised spots in the sidewalk because I haven’t paid attention to
where I am going, I can stumble over the poverty that is among us because I
have closed my eyes to it. Earlier in
his Gospel, Luke paired, “Blessed are the poor for theirs is the kingdom of God,”
with “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.” Woe to us indeed.
Sometimes the problem is not so much
blindness to suffering but overexposure.
Suffering shows up on our TV screens every day. Night after night you see heart wrenching
pictures of starving children in the Horn of Africa, victims of the latest
natural disaster, or an elderly couple in Spokane who can’t pay for their
medications. After a while we begin to
suffer from compassion fatigue. Another
earthquake? More tornadoes? Give me a break! With so much suffering in the world, it is
easy to get overwhelmed by my own powerlessness to really change anything. I know that sending a check to the United
Methodist Committee on Relief to help
with the latest disaster is a band aid.
I don’t know how to solve the underlying issues and so I eventually
close my eyes.
We can also become voyeurs looking in
at other people’s lives as objects of pity and not real people. Photographer Paul Jeffreys,
who works for the United Methodist Committee on Relief, wrote on his blog: “in
any place where God’s children gather, there is incredible capacity for joy and
love. Much of the media coverage . . .
has focused on the pain. You’ve seen the
images of malnourished children, for example.
I’ve taken some myself. They are
an important part of visually describing the landscape. But if that’s all we see, it becomes a kind
of disaster porn that reduces people to mere two-dimensional victims waiting to
be rescued by us do-good outsiders.” His
words accompany a picture of a young boy joyfully splashing in the overflow of
a water tank at a refugee camp in Kenya.
He looks a lot like any child playing in the sprinklers.
Jesus’ parable challenges us to move
beyond what Jeffreys calls disaster porn. It dares us to open our eyes to see real
people, living real lives full of both joy and pain. Lazarus is the only figure in any of Jesus’
parables who is named. Except for him,
they are known by their descriptions:
the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, the woman who lost a coin, the
Good Shepherd. Lazarus, however, is
named as an individual.
One of the best things about Habitat
for Humanity is that the people who receive the houses are named individuals
who partner with others to build the house.
Those of you who volunteer with Habitat know Sarah Keller as a real
person. You have sweated with her, joked
with her, and talked with her. Maybe you
have even cussed with her when something has not gone right. Together with her you have crossed the chasm
not only between the have’s and the
have not’s, but you have torn down the barrier between nameless people in
substandard housing and those of us wealthy enough to go home each night to
warm, safe houses.
The City of Moscow and our mission
committee, are currently exploring another opportunity. Family Promises is a
network of churches who take turns hosting homeless families in their church
building. Volunteers serve and eat a
meal and then spend the night at the church with homeless families. They get to know each other as real people
with real stories. The families assisted are not nameless statistics or two
dimensional objects of pity but folks who wash the dishes with you. It will take time to decide if we can pull
off this program in Moscow and to determine if our church wants to be
involved. I am excited about the
possibility. Already my eyes have been
opened to the reality of poverty in Moscow.
It is a little scary to imagine taking the next step to name those
impacted.
Over the last two weeks, I’ve been
talking with you about the impact of money on our spiritual health. Let us take the moral and spiritual challenge
of seeing the invisible poor among us as real people, who are a lot like us.
November 6, 2011
Luke 16:1-13
The
Prodigal Manager
As I shared with you last week, I
recently received a sizable inheritance from my parents. My goal has been to set aside most of that
money towards retirement housing. After
consulting with a couple of financial planners, I put the bulk of the money in
bonds. While they probably won’t earn as
much as stocks would, they are a more stable investment that also is less
likely to drop in value. I hope it will
at least keep pace with inflation so that when I retire in another 13-15 years,
it will be enough to buy some kind of home.
In the last several years, the church
has received two generous bequests from saints who remembered us in their
wills. The Prater’s left us over
$300,000 and Melva Hoffman $20,000. That money has gone into the church’s
endowment fund. Our policy is not to
touch the principal. It means that
Louie, Mildred, and Melva will continue to support
the church they loved for decades after their deaths. The interest from the endowment has allowed
us to do a variety of things, from remodeling the Tween’s
Room to hiring a peer minister to work with college students. What it does not do is pay the utilities, buy
toilet paper, or pay the rest of our staff.
Our Church Council intentionally chose not to depend on endowment money
for general fund expenses, believing that the living saints, those of us who
are active in the church right now, are the ones who must support its
ministries. Churches which live off
endowments get lazy in their stewardship.
It is nice to have a stable source of income to start new programs and
do special things. It is also important
for us all to be part of the everyday ministry of the church.
In today’s difficult parable, we hear
a story about someone who looked for stable resources to live on. It is one of Jesus’ most challenging parables. He seems to praise ethically questionable
practices. To begin with, a manager has
squandered his employer’s property. To
make matters worse, he then calls in his employer’s debtors and reduces their
debts. Sounds like a shady fellow all
the way around.
There are numerous possible
explanations for his behavior which might put him in a better light. Some scholars suggest he was cutting out his
commission so that he was not cheating the boss but reducing his own pay. Others point to the Hebrew Bible’s
prohibition on charging interest. They
wonder if the manager was taking off people’s debts the interest which should
not have been charged anyway.
With either of these explanations, the
man becomes righteous as well as shrewd.
They make this story a little easier to swallow and that’s why I am not
sure about them. Jesus rarely goes with
the easy solution.
So let’s dig a little deeper. This parable comes on the heels of the
Parable of the Prodigal Son. There too,
a subordinate figure, in that case a younger son, squanders his
inheritance. It’s what the word prodigal
means: to waste. The Prodigal Son blew
his money on wine, women, and song – riotous living, the Bible actually
says. We don’t know how the Prodigal
Manager squandered his boss’s property.
What we do know is that the same Greek word is used in both stories for
what is translated as waste in English.
And in both stories, the prodigal, the wastrel, the shady character, is
received back and celebrated at the end of the story. The celebration is not of their reprehensible
behavior but of the relationship they have.
In the son’s case it is with his father.
In the manager’s case it is with his friends.
The manager reduced people’s debts so
that they would welcome him into their homes when his lost his job for
squandering the boss’s property. At the
end of the parable Jesus advised, “Make friends for yourselves by means of
dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal
homes.” In English we miss the
distinction between the homes. The
first word for home – the kind the manager hoped to find with his new friends –
means house, like the sort of permanent housing I hope to be able to eventually
buy with the inheritance from my parents.
When Jesus refers to eternal homes, however, the word is actually tents,
not permanent housing at all.
Tents have a long history in the
Bible. Long before King Solomon built
the temple made of cedar, the Hebrew people worshiped in the tabernacle, also known
as the tent of meeting. God traveled
with them as they wandered in the wilderness.
God resisted the very idea of a temple, of a permanent house, suspecting
(correctly) that a permanent dwelling would make faith too sedate, too secure,
too stiff. When they worshiped God in
the tabernacle they better understood God as a living and moving God. After the temple was built they got caught up
in political problems and forgot about God.
The
Gospel of John says of Jesus, “The Word became flesh and lived among us.” The word used for lived means “to fix one’s
tabernacle” to set up the tent. Jesus
camped among us.
The
Parable of the Prodigal Manager challenges us to a pilgrim faith. Just as it is unhealthy for a church to
depend on endowment income to pay general fund expenses, so we cannot depend on
the permanent assets of our wealth to live as Christians in the world
today. Jesus began life as a
refugee. His parents had to flee with
him to Egypt to escape King Herod’s genocidal rage. As an adult, he traveled from place to place,
noting that he “had no place to lay his head.”
Those of us who would follow him can have no permanent residence. We are nomads and our faith must be mobile.
Most of
us, of course, do have permanent houses to live in, or at least dorm rooms or
apartments, where we leave our stuff and go at night to sleep. I’m not suggesting that you sell your house
and live on the streets. Fiscal prudence
and prodigal faith do recognize that money is not a permanent possession, but a
resource to be mobilized. As individuals
there is a delicate balance between setting aside resources for the future and
unforeseen emergencies and letting go of money so that we are not possessed by
it. We live always in the tension between taking responsibility for ourselves
and extravagant generosity. John Wesley,
our Methodist forbear, noted that our wallets are often the last part of us to
be converted. Setting aside the
inheritance money toward retirement housing has taken a lot of intentional
thought on my part. I started to get
sucked into my own greed as I hoped for just a little bit more. It took a spiritual kick in the pants for me
to realize that I could invest wisely for the future AND give away a
significant amount of money.
Fiscal
management is but one part of our faith journey. It is also a part easy to put off, saying
“It’s nobody else’s business” and, “I’ll get to that when I have more
money.” While it is hard to tally up
just how God has touched my life, money is pretty easy to measure.
We are
travelers on a journey of faith and not conquerors of a new land. That is as true for the relationships we
build with other people, the hobbies and careers we follow, and the way we
spend our days as it is for the use of our money. When I learn to let go of my money I also
become faithful with the living of my days.
Instead of being ruled by my bank account, I am ruled by God, who in the
end is the source of all that I have.
And God is the One who welcomes me home.