Money-Love - A Living Hades

Luke 16:19-31

There are so many things to say about this Parable before we get to what the Parable says.  So beware.  At the top of the list is that this parable is not about Heaven and Hell and one’s eternal security.  It has nothing more to do with that than the jokes we tell today about St. Peter at the pearly gates.  It is a parable about how we live life in the present in Jesus’ Kingdom.  Specifically, do we put people first in our relationships or are our relationships based more on how we can use people for our own purposes and justify ourselves.

Jesus here contrasts two ways of life.  The first is the Israelite way, the Kingdom of God way, which Jesus symbolized by Lazarus being at Abraham’s side.  Older translations call this “Abraham’s Bosom”.  “Abraham’s Bosom” is God’s people expressing Abraham-like faithfulness through keeping the Law of Moses and the demands of justice that God commanded through the Prophets.  The second way of life is the Greco-Roman way, the way of the world, the way of Money-Love and Power-Love.  Jesus symbolized this way of life using the Greek word for the Greek concept of the after-life, Hades (not Hell), to describe the tormented existence of Money-Love that Luke said tarnished the Pharisee’s lifestyle.  They were very outwardly faithful according to the letter of the Law, but in their hearts they hadn’t quite accepted the spirit of the Law and the Prophets.  Instead of being truly generous people concerned with justice, they loved the power and image that having money provided them.

Another thing we need to say about this parable is that it resides in a section of Luke’s Gospel where Jesus is teaching his disciples about how the pursuit of wealth can complicate being faithful.  At 16:13 Jesus tells his disciples that they cannot be slaves to two masters, to both God and Mammon; Mammon means wealth.  Immediately after Jesus says this, next in verse 14, Luke says that the Pharisees, who were “lovers of money” – money lovers and that’s a derogatory term - they heard Jesus and ridiculed him.  So Jesus shoots this Parable of a rich man tormented in a Greek “Hell” in an effort to shame them.  He is accusing them of acting shamefully like Greek’s rather than like true Israelites.

The Pharisees were Israel’s most devout people, experts in the Law of Moses and the writings of the Prophets.  They were expecting the Messiah to come at any moment and establish the Kingdom of God.  They ardently, passionately, zealously strove to be ready for this day by strictly observing the Law of Moses.  The Pharisees of all people should have been living lives exemplary of Abraham’s Bosom, of true Israelite faithfulness but they weren’t. 

A third thing to say about this parable is that there is more going on here than just some rich guy ignoring a poor guy who daily lay outside his door.  All we’ve got to do is walk a few blocks in downtown anywhere and we all become guilty of that.  The problem was that one child of Abraham ignoring the real needs of another child of Abraham completely tars the revelation of himself that God wanted to give the world by calling the Old Testament nation of Israel into existence beginning with Abraham and giving them the Law and the Prophets to live by.  Let me say a lot more about this because this is the heart of the parable.  Our acting in faithful compassion towards others is part of how God reveals himself in this world.

The way of faithfulness that God started with Abraham would be God’s way of saving humanity from its Fall into trying to be God.  God called Abraham and told him to go to a land that God would show him because God was giving him that land and would make his descendants to be a great nation through which all nations would be blessed.  Abraham went and his children became a great tribe in the land of Palestine.  In time the “children” of Abraham found themselves enslaved in Egypt and God delivered them with a mighty hand.  At Mt. Sinai, they agreed to let God be their God and they promised to live the way he wanted them to live.  Thus, God gave them the Ten Commandments.  Being faithful to God by following these commandments was to be the core of their community life.  By living this way God’s promise to Abraham would be fulfilled.  They would be a great nation.  They would be blessed and they would be a blessing to all nations.

Yet, it goes deeper than that.  Through this faithful people God would demonstrate to the world that He is the only true God and that he is steadfastly loving and faithful and an abundant provider.  The nation that worshipped this God, the Lord God of Israel, would be abundantly provided for, always protected, and their community life would be just and beautifully rich in neighbourliness. 

And it goes even deeper than that.  Israel in its communal life of faithfulness lived according to the Law and the Prophets would bear God’s image, reflect God’s image into the world.  Humanity was created in the image of the Trinity, the loving communion of Father Son and Holy Spirit.  The nature of our relationships is to reflect the image of the Trinity’s loving communion into his creation.  But, due to Sin our attempts to be God mar our reflection of God’s image.  Communal life of faithfulness, compassionate and just faithfulness, lived according to the Law wouldn’t cure the problem of Sin.  The incarnation of God the Son and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is God’s remedy for that.  But, faithfulness, Abraham’s Bosom is the way for now.

This rich man and Lazarus in this parable are both children of Abraham.  The rich man’s ignoring Lazarus and letting Lazarus persist in such a wretched existence was an utter denial by the rich man of his own claim to be a child of Abraham and thus of being one of the people of God.  This is why there was an unbridgeable chasm between Hades and being in Abraham’s Bosom.  The rich man in his Money-Love cut himself off from being one of the children of Abraham.  As Jesus said one cannot serve both God and Wealth.  As Paul writes, “Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.  For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.  Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs” (1 Tim. 6:9,10).

While on vacation this summer I read a short little book called Leadership and Self Deception: Getting Out of the Box by the Arbinger Institute.  It describes the torment we go through when like this rich man we betray who we know ourselves to be by not doing what we know and feel we ought to do.  We have a predictable pattern of thought and behavioural self-deception that we go through when we don’t do what we know and feel we should do.  It goes like this.

I a follower of Jesus, a child of Abraham, see someone in Lazarus’ condition.  Though knowing I should do something to help this person that goes beyond throwing money at them, something that would require me to change my lifestyle by making some sacrifices, something that would require me to regard this person as a real person and a child of God like me, I do nothing.  This doing nothing is an act of self-betrayal.  I am betraying who I am as a child of God who through my acts of faithful compassion God reveals himself to the world. 

In the wake of this decision to do nothing, of this self-betrayal, I begin to see the world in a way that justifies my self-betrayal.  I inflate that person’s faults convincing myself they are worse than they are; a lazy, bad person.  Their faults become my justification for me not doing what I know I should.  I also begin to look past my own faults and inflate my own virtues to justify my self-betrayal – I am a good, hardworking person getting what I work for.  I also begin to inflate the value of things that justify my self-betrayal meaning I find practical reasons for not doing what I know I should.  I’m too busy.  I have to get to work or I’ll be fired.  Finally, I will find a way to blame the person for my not doing what I know I should.  It is her fault that she is the way she is. 

When I see the world in self-justifying ways, my view of reality is distorted.  Like the rich man in Hades I cease to regard others as persons and focus only on my own needs.  I find my self closed up, isolated in a box of prejudices, of twisted perspectives of others, of self-justifying opinions.  I begin to treat others in ways to which they will respond that will reinforce my self-justifying but will also cause them to become self-justifying and to enter their own box.  The rich hate the poor.  The poor hate the rich.  Americans think themselves better than Canadians and Canadians think themselves better than Americans.  Whites hate Indians and Indians hate whites.  This is called collusion.  We collude in giving each other reason to not regard each other as beloved children of God and to continue on in our boxed up and hateful little worlds of self-betrayal where we don’t do what Jesus commands us to do and what the Holy Spirit prompts and enables us to do – Love as Jesus has loved us, giving himself up for us.

Money-Love, the pursuit of wealth, makes it very easy for us to shut ourselves up in this living Hades of self-betrayal, self-justification, and collusion.  The way out is to see every person as a real person, a beloved child of God and act compassionately as the Holy Spirit who dwells in us each prompts us to do.  Even if it means we must give up a few things or quite a bit, we must do the compassion we know we should otherwise we make God look really ugly.  Amen.

Lost in Unfaithful Faithfulness

Luke 15:1-10; 1 Timothy 1:12-17

These two parables from Luke are two in a series of three about the lost being found through very extravagant and wasteful means and then once found a very extravagant and wasteful celebration happens.  The third is the parable we like to call the Parable of the Prodigal Son although the younger brother’s return from his prodigal-ness, which we like to stress, should take a back seat to the Father’s extravagant love and then particularly the older brother’s jealousy. 

Jesus aimed these three parables at the religious authorities, the Pharisees and Scribes, who couldn’t accept him as the Messiah because he hung with the wrong crowd, the tax collectors and sinners.  These very devout people of Israel then also would not celebrate with Jesus that he was bringing back into the fold those in Israel who had lost their way.  The point of these parables isn’t so much that wayward sinners lost in moral decadence are repenting and getting saved, but rather that the Scribes and the Pharisees cannot see that they themselves are painfully and ironically lost in the unfaithfulness of their own faithfulness. 

The tax collectors and sinners were discovering in Jesus a very real hope.  They could see and understand that God, their God, the LORD God of Israel, the God of their fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was present and acting with salvation in their very midst.  With, in, and by the hand of Jesus the Kingdom of God had come near and these lost, morally decadent “sinners” and tax collectors were coming by the droves to be a part of it.  The religious authorities ostracized people like this and snubbed and shunned them from coming to the Temple where Israelites believed the presence of God to be.  But, these lost sheep of Israel were finding the God of Israel in fellowship around the table when they shared meals with Jesus who was really quite compassionate towards them.

The Scribes and the Pharisees on the other hand, they couldn’t get in on the celebration of the Kingdom of God being at hand.  They of all people should have been able to recognize who Jesus was and what God was doing in, through, and as Jesus.  They knew their Scriptures.  They followed the Law.   They believed God was faithful and that the Messiah was soon to come.  Times were bad in Israel under Roman oppression and only God could make things right.  Whereas the tax collectors and “sinners” had lost hope and bought into the Roman way of life, the scribes and Pharisees believed that they needed to be ready when the Messiah came which meant total Law observance.  They needed to be living as if the Messiah had come and was reigning already.  If a person wanted to be saved and enter the Kingdom when the Messiah came, he had to become like them.

In their minds anyone, Jews in particular, who did not observe the Law was unfaithful and would be rejected when the Messiah came…yet, here was Jesus sharing meals with tax collectors and “sinners”.  Their idea of what “faithfulness” meant unfortunately kept them from seeing who Jesus is and celebrating what was happening.  They were lost in unfaithful faithfulness.

These three parables follow a progression.  In the first, a shepherd leaves behind 99 sheep to go find the one that has gone missing.  In the second, a woman wastes a lot of time to find one coin lost out of ten.  In the third it is one son out of two.  The way Jesus sets us up with this progression we cannot help but ask who are really the lost ones in need of repentance – the “faithful” who can’t recognize Jesus and celebrate the arrival of the Kingdom or the “sinners” who can.

Well looking at 1 Timothy, I think Paul would certainly say that in these parables Jesus was certainly pointing at him.  He was one of those Pharisees, an up and coming leader.  Educated by the great teacher Gamaliel in Jerusalem.

In verse thirteen Paul describes himself as formerly being a blasphemer.  This is someone who offends the power and majesty of God by speaking against what God is doing or acting like God himself.  The religious authorities back then accused Jesus of being a blasphemer because he spoke against them and did things that only God could do.

Paul also calls himself a persecutor.  Believing himself to be faithful he persecuted the church.  The Book of Acts tells us that he was there when the temple authorities stoned to death Stephen, the first Christian martyr.  He stood by watching, holding the cloaks.  He used to arrest Christians to take them before the Temple authorities to be tried for blasphemy for which the penalty was death.  On such a trip to Damascus, Syria Jesus, resurrected and ascended, personally confronted him.

Paul also calls himself what the NRSV translates as a “man of violence”, a hybristes.  This is a loaded term.  We get our term hubris from it.  It means a powerful person who arrogantly treats others shamefully.  Jews in Jesus’ time and just before used it to describe Greek and Roman leaders who persecuted faithful Jews with great contempt.  The Books of the Maccabees describe the 200 or so years before Jesus when the Greeks occupied Isreal and oppressed the Jews.  They tell of “men of violence”, leaders of the Greeks who did things like make the Jews eat pork or be tortured to death and who put up idols and sacrificed pigs in the Temple.  Paul compares himself to one of these.

Paul says his life as a faithful, dedicated, and zealous Pharisee was a life of “unbelief”, “unfaithfulness”.  In those days even though he believed himself to be working for God and protecting God’s honour and being the most faithful person he knew how to be, he was unfaithful.  God was not working in and through him.  Paul was actually acting against God in hubris.

But Jesus showed him mercy.  On the Road to Damascus in a bright light Jesus called Paul to his service.  It is entirely inaccurate to say that Paul had a conversion experience and suddenly went from being a law abiding Jew to being a grace believing Christian.  It is also inaccurate to say that Paul realized he was a sinner and like the Prodigal Son he came to his senses and repented and became a believer in Jesus and got himself saved.  Paul is not the poster child for the Revivalist preachers of the last three centuries who liked to tell people they were going to Hell if they didn’t get themselves right with Jesus.  Paul did not close his eyes, bow his head, and raise his hand to accept Jesus as his personal Lord and Saviour as if he were at an Evangelical Crusade.

It is more like this.  Jesus personally called the most unlikely person in all Israel to come and be one of his Apostles and it turned Paul’s world completely on its head.  On the Damascus Road a bright light surrounds him and a voice asks him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”  Standing in the presence of the risen and ascended Jesus Paul calls this presence “Lord”.  Jews only call God “Lord”.  Paul asks, “Who are you, Lord?”  The presence answered, “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. Get up and go into Damascus and you will be told what you are to do.”  In that moment it became obvious to Paul that the followers of Jesus were not making this stuff up.  The prophecies concerning the Messiah, Israelite hopes for the end times Kingdom of God, the resurrection of the dead – the core tenets of the Pharisees, Jesus who was somehow “Immanuel”, God-with-Us, had inaugurated them all.  Paul’s image of God being a vengeful God who punishes the wicked outright had to change.

Paul was a lost sheep.  In the midst of his trying to be the most faithful Israelite he believed he could be, he was a lost sheep.  He was lost in unfaithful faithfulness.  Blind to his own need for repentance and indeed unable to come to his senses because he was so sure of his Pharisaic interpretations of what the Bible said.  He was blinded by his own beliefs.  The word “radicalized” is popular these days.  He was radicalized.

These parables about the lost and found and the example of Paul come as a powerful challenge for us North American Evangelical types to examine ourselves as to whether we might be lost in unfaithful faithfulness.  We look around at our culture and rather arrogantly judge moral decadence.  We rant on about things like the detrimental effect of the removal of prayer and religious education from the public schools.  We lament and rant on about how unchristian our society has become, but rarely do we call into question how un-Christ-like we are.  With great hubris we arrogantly judge those who hang out on Main Street once the sun goes down.  We regard as untouchable poor people who won’t pick themselves up by their bootstraps.  We’ll have nothing to do with such as these for they are the domain of social services. – and let’s not even get into human sexuality.  How lost are we in unfaithful faithfulness?  Lord Jesus, open our eyes.  Amen.

Faithfulness and Fellowship

Philemon 1-25

It is often the case that people of faith are called irrational and weak, and told that their Christian faith is just a psychological crutch.  It grows even worse if a person of Christian faith claims to have had a “spiritual” experience.   Then we are called crazy.  500 years ago such thinking would have been rare.  But today, such thoughts are regular occurrence for us living in the wake of two key philosophers, Renee Descartes who lived in the 1500’s concurrent with the Reformation and Immanuel Kant who lived in the 1700’s.  Forgive me the lesson in philosophy to which I will subject you.

Descartes was a mathematician who became preoccupied with the question “How do I know I exist”.  His answer came to him one afternoon while he was awakening from a nap.  “I think, therefore I am.”  I exist because I can have inner thoughts, reason, and know things. This idea of his pushed the Western world into an over fascination with subjectivity and individualism.  Subjectivity, the inner world of “me”, began to take our world be storm.

Moving on, if you ever wondered how Mainline Christianity found it’s demise in congregations becoming social clubs concerned with moral good due to religious beliefs, then Immanuel Kant is your man.  He was fascinated with how we know what we know.  He concluded that there is no such thing as objective knowledge.  We cannot know a thing in itself.  All we can know is our experience of a thing and what sort of sense we can make of it in our own heads. 

Kant’s effect on the world of religion was to say that God is ultimately unknowable and all we can know of God (if there is one) is a matter of our own personal beliefs.  The great physicist, Sir Isaac Newton, taught that God gave order to the universe.  Kant turned that into being us who order the universe with our innate ability to reason.  In Kant’s world, the human mind becomes Newton’s God.  Kant further went on to hold that the only good that belief in God and participation in church can serve is the undergirding of moral order in society. 

Due to Descartes and Kant for us Westerners faith has become a matter of intellectual assent to ideas about God in whom we struggle with placing personal trust.  Faith is purely a subjective matter.  When this is all faith is, atheism soon abounds.

This bias towards subjectivity shows up in how we translate into English Paul’s great definition of faith that we find in Hebrew’s 11:1.  We read: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (NRSV).  Words like “assurance” and “conviction” turn faith into something totally subjective like “I believe, therefore God is.”  That is not what Biblical faith is.

A study of the Bible shows that God is real on God’s own terms.  God makes himself known.  God communicates to us.  God has revealed himself to us in, through, and as Jesus Christ.  God is at work in his world in, through, and as the Holy Spirit and has included us as his people, the church, in his saving, restoring, renewing, and recreating work.  This is a given.  It doesn’t matter if we “believe” it or not.  It’s what God is doing and God will bring this promised hoped for saving of his creation to its completion.  What matters is faithfulness.

A more literal translation of Hebrews 11:1 is “Now faith is the ‘hypostasis” of the hoped for things, the coming to light of unseen things.”  What Paul is saying there is far from a subjective matter of personal belief.  The word “hypostasis” is a word that belongs in the world of objectivity.  To the ancient Greek philosopher it meant the actuality or actualizing of a hidden reality.  To the ancient Greek scientist “hypostasis” was the result of the sedimentary process.  Fill a bucket with pond water.  It appears clear or mostly clear but come back later and sediment will have formed in the bottom of the bucket.  This is the coming to actuality of things hidden.  To the ancient Greek doctor “hypostasis” was urine and feces – the actualizing or end result of hidden processes.   

For Paul “hypostasis” is God’s plan for creation coming into our sphere of reality – on earth as it is in heaven.  Faith is the coming into our sphere of reality of the hoped for things, the coming to light of hidden things.  God’s faithfulness in love brings it about.  The part we play is not a matter of subjective beliefs and trust, but more so to respond in kind to God’s steadfast love and faithfulness.  In fact, it would be closer to Paul’s intent to say that faithfulness rather than faith is the hypostasis of the hoped for things, the coming to light of things hidden.

Looking at Philemon, what we have in this letter is a good example of what this “hypostasis” looks like.  It is the forming of Christian fellowship by faithfulness and love.  Paul commended Philemon for his faithfulness and love for the Lord Jesus and all the saints that has given rise to fellowship in Philemon’s household church.  Paul had a word for this fellowship, “koinonia”.  Koinonia was “in Christ” fellowship – gatherings of people in which Jesus was embodied through the work of the Holy Spirit amidst the faithfulness and love of God’s people. 

Koinonia is egalitarian in nature.  All people are equal.  Churches in Paul’s day were household churches in which slaves and their wealthy patrons and matrons, Jews and non-Jews, men and women all shared the same status of child of God.  They gathered together for worship in which everyone could contribute and then they shared a meal that included a celebration of Holy Communion.  They sat at table together.

This type of fellowship was unheard of in Paul’s world.  Master and slave did not sit at the same table for a meal regarding each other as equals.  But this fellowship, this “koinonia” on earth is the hypostasis of as it is in heaven.  Faithfulness in Jesus name is displayed by regarding no one as better or less than yourself and by erasing the dividing lines of wealth, status, gender, race, nationality, and especially hostility.  Christian fellowship is faithfulness exhibited in mutual, sacrificial, unconditional love.  It is fellowship that actualizes the hoped for new humanity – the family of God in Christ who bear his image.

Koinonia, “in Christ” fellowship, is a faithfulness that embodies reconciliation.  When relationships in the church are broken, we in and according to the love of Christ strive to heal them.  This is the hypostasis of Jesus having reconciled humanity to God through his death on the cross that destroyed anything and everything that separates us from God and from one another. 

Paul’s letter to Philemon is a case study in all this.  Paul wants Philemon to accept Onesimus into his fellowship in a way different than before when Onesimus was an unbelieving slave.  Philemon was a wealthy patron of the Colossian church.  Onesimus was his slave.  Somehow Onesimus and Paul met up due to Paul’s imprisonment.  Historically, scholars have said that Onesimus was a runaway slave, but it is more likely that Philemon sent him there to assist Paul in prison.  

While there with Paul, Onesimus became a follower of Jesus.  Paul says he gave new birth to him in the Lord and calls him his own child and so also he reminds Philemon that he owes Paul his life as well in the same way.  Paul goes on to make a strong yet innuendo-ed case that Onesimus and Philemon are now brothers in the Lord due to Paul.

Philemon, fathered by Paul in the Lord, should have come to prison and cared for Paul himself but he didn’t and sent Onesimus in his stead.  Paul is now sending Onesimus back to Philemon because Paul has discovered something.  Onesimus, the slave, is also Philemon’s brother.  It would have been totally acceptable in Paul’s day for male heads of household to have children by their female slaves.  Onesimus was likely a half-brother to Philemon.  In verse 16 Paul makes it clear that he wants Philemon to accept Onesimus back into his household with a new status - “no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, a beloved brother especially to me but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord.” 

Paul makes it clear that Philemon and Onesimus are not only brothers in the Lord.  They are also brothers in the flesh and he wants Philemon to do right by his half-brother and not regard him anymore as a slave but more so as an equal in his household which he inherited from their father.  In “koinonia” the fact that Onesimus is the son of a slave woman has no bearing. 

The implications of this are huge.  This is reconciliation that lifts up the lowly and raises them in status.  It is a skeleton in the family closet being brought out into public view and made right.  “Thy kingdom come.  Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.”  

Paul in all his wiliness is making sure that Philemon will follow through.  He addresses this letter to the whole household and therefore, the whole household will hear it read to them in public and Philemon will have to follow through on order to save face.  Paul also says to prepare a room for him because he will soon come and see that Philemon has followed through.  Paul also assumes any debt Onesimus might have so that Philemon has nothing to lose but everything to gain through his faithfulness in the Lord. 

Philemon is a little letter, 300 words, about the faithful handling of a family matter that would have absolutely overturned the social norms of power and status in Paul’s world.  Philemon, known for his faithfulness and his love towards Jesus and the saints, must deal faithfully with this “family matter” created by his father’s adulterous affair with a slave.  But according to “koinonia” it is not right for Philemon to own his half-brother as a slave so he must resolve this blemish in a way that it becomes an hypostasis of the King Jesus’ kingdom on earth. 

The family can be a place of painful secrets which faithfulness and love in Christ can heal.  The hypostasis of heaven on earth is a family matter.  May it come to light in our own.  Amen.