What's Your Creed?

Mark 12:28-34

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What’s your creed?  I’d like to talk about that today.  A creed is a central core of beliefs, religious or otherwise, that provide unity to a people and which, when listened to or taken to heart, can guide a person’s and a peoples way life.  In the Western Christianity we have two common creeds that most expressions of the church (denominations) will hold to but it doesn’t necessarily mean every individual who calls themselves a Christian would believe.  These are the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed.  Our traditional Creeds arose during difficult periods when there was conflict in the church and God called up leaders from among the people who were able through much persecution from within and from outside the church to say this is the Truth which we have discerned God to have revealed about who God is and what God is up to in the world.

The thing about Creeds is that they can be on the academic side and seemingly a matter of the mind rather than what we believe in our hearts.  The question I’m asking when I ask “What’s your Creed?” is what’s at the heart of what you believe about life, God, and people?  Another way of saying is what do you keep telling yourself is true about the way things are?  I can say that I believe The Apostles’ Creed – you know, I believe in God the Father (and the stuff that follows) and in Jesus Christ his only-begotten Son (and the stuff) and in the Holy Spirit (and the stuff).  I can know and understand the Apostles’ Creed in my head and confess it to be “the Truth”, but what I really believe about God, what I feel inside about God, may be something really quite different.  For some it may feel like abandonment, like God has hung me and the whole world out dry.  God created it all but God certainly seems to have forgotten us.  Or, something like God is almighty and on my side and is going to pour wrath upon “them” that ain’t whomever “them” may be because “them’s” just different than me and it threatens my way of life which God is Almighty God’s way. Or, it could simply that we believe this stuff but the topic of God rarely crosses our minds.

This divide between what I believe in my head and what I really believe in my heart may be simply the historical consequence that nowhere in our two most commonly confessed Christian Creeds does the word “Love” appear.  You know, if God is Almighty it is helpful to define Almighty in terms of love, particularly the vulnerable love demonstrated be Jesus dying for us.  For, Almighty typically gets defined in terms of power, often political power, and God is made a tool of Authoritarians.  It would be helpful to have mentioned in our Creeds that “in love” or “by love” God the Father Son and Holy Spirit created and sustains the world and is and will save and heal it, but the writers of the Creeds didn’t and so our two foundational Creeds seem to remain matters of the head that don’t affect change the heart.  Compare them to the fact that third step of Alcoholics Anonymous’s Twelve step program is more effective in affecting healing than either of Christianity’s two foundational creeds simply because of the word “care”.  “Made a decision to turn our wills and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.”

A good way to find out your creed is to determine what it is you are thinking and feeling about God and life when your feet hit the ground first thing in the morning.  What’s the narrative, the blah-blah-blah, that starts in once you start to wake up.  Some people get up immediately thinking about what they got to get done that day or the same worries they went to sleep with are still festering.  If you’re grieving, it’s likely you wake up in the morning and for a few moments everything’s OK but then that ton of bricks sets in.  Hang in there.  In time, the ton of bricks gets lighter and doesn’t hurt so much because you’ve gotten stronger.

 For me, my first few steps of the day on legs that ran a few too many marathons in my thirties on flat feet are a bit of adjustment.  To be honest, there are days when my first word consists of four letters…umph.  But, if pain were the dominant narrative of my inner voice, I would get right back into bed and never get up again unless of course it hurts more to be in bed than getting up and moving.  But anyway, I don’t listen to the pain.  I keep going because there is a deeper voice at work in me than what my body says first thing in the morning.  And, like they say “Motion is medication.”  Once, I’ve walked off the rigor mortis, it’s a new day.  It’s not pain-free, but I’m above ground and on it.  

Admittedly, I’m a morning person so I look forward to getting up around 5 AM.  So, a sense of hope is a part of the voice I hear.  I want to get up.  I want to go downstairs, grab a coffee and read and learn all that theological and biblical stuff that I read that’s going to give me insight on how to lead and what to feed you people.  I also take some time to pray for you folks and read the Bible.  But, then everybody else starts to rouse and it’s time to get on with the day.  

Yet, there’s still a deeper voice at play in me other than I look forward to getting up in the morning.  There’s a song that’s been going through my head lately in the mornings.  It goes something like this, “O Lord, thou art my God and King.  Thee will I magnify and praise.  I will thee bless and gladly sing unto thy holy name always.  Thee will I bless each day I rise, and praise thy name, time without end; much to be praised and great God is.  Whose greatness none can comprehend.”  

That song is reflective of something going on in me that I realize that my life is not my own.  I belong to Jesus Christ.  He is my Lord.  He is my King.  In all things even family decisions I have to do right by him.  I have to discern his voice before doing anything else (and quite honestly doing what’s best for the family can wind up being what it is.)  I do have to live my life with the fundamental narrative that daily I must turn my will and my life over to the care of God.  This doesn’t mean that life goes perfect and that I don’t get hurt and suffer.  God does not prevent every bad thing from happening, but I know he’s with me when they do and I’ve learned to wait things thing’s out listening for him.  Another way of saying this is that I’ve come to know myself, to experience myself, as a beloved child of God.  That changes everything.

There is, then, a “therefore” that arises from this fundamental belief I have that my life is not my own but belongs to God and is entrusted to God’s care.  As my life belongs to God, I have to conduct my life God’s way which means according to the same love God has shown me in Christ through the presence of the Holy Spirit.  Jesus said, “Love your neighbour as yourself.”  He meant that his people actually do that.

While I’m quoting Jesus, let’s look briefly at our reading today.  This scribe came to Jesus having seen that Jesus had answered well all the questions that the various power groups in Jerusalem had used to try and entrap him that they might have a legitimate reason to kill him.  Jesus brilliantly turned all the questions back on them.  So, this Scribe (Scribes were like lawyers with a lot of academic behind them) wants to know if Jesus is a true Jew at heart. A true Jew would have keeping the Commandments as their reason to live and so he asked Jesus what was the greatest of all the commandments.  Jesus answered quoting a Creed rather than naming one of the Commandments.  

This Creed was and is the basic Creed of the Jewish faith.  They call it The Schema, which is the Hebrew word for “listen”.  “Listen, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone.  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.”  The Israelites were to memorize this Creed and recite it at all times.  It would have been on their lips when their feet hit the floor in the morning.  In a day when people worshipped many gods, Israel had to remember who the only God is.  They had to love God with their whole being and Love is an active word.  As a people, as a nation they had to live according to the love of God and by the community that arises from this love the other nations would know who the true God is.  As a faithful Jewish man this was Jesus’s Creed.  

So, Jesus also added a second part “and to love your neighbour as you love yourself,” which comes from the Book of Leviticus at the end of a list of laws requiring Israel to practice justice and economic fairness and particularly show it to the poor.  This was something all those power groups in Jerusalem who were seeking to kill Jesus were not doing.  They were trying to save whatever hint of privilege and power they had by buttering up the Romans and collecting taxes that the poor could not pay.  They were obviously not listening to their Creed that God alone is God and loving God with their whole being was their purpose.  They were rather cowering before the supposed divine power of the Roman Emperor and abusing the poor while they themselves kept their privileges.  

         It is interesting to note that when Jesus was there in the midst of his most powerful enemies who were trying to entrap him in order to kill him, he stood on the foundational Creed that was in his heart.  And so, that brings me back to asking the question what is your Creed?  When you get up in the morning what are you saying to yourself…and is it healing and restorative?  Does it bring you to remember the “Truth” that you are a beloved child of God?  Does it inspire you to live for someone other than yourself?  What’s your Creed?  Amen. 

There's Hope and Joy on the Way

 Mark 10:46-52

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Bartimaeus is my favourite character in Mark’s Gospel.  Like the woman who snuck up behind Jesus in the midst of a pressing crowd to touch his cloak and be healed of a twelve-year-long menstrual bleed that made her an outcast (she’s my second favourite character), Bartimaeus only shows up once and he steals the show.  He is the epitome of what it is to follow Jesus and what it is to be healed and transformed by Jesus in what one could call the resurrection-formed lifestyle found along the cross-formed way, i.e., what the Apostle Paul calls new life in Christ.  With Bartimaeus we get a picture that there is something utterly, I mean utterly, life changing that arises from encountering Jesus who came to give his life to restore worth and dignity to a humanity who has forfeited the worth and dignity that God created us with as those who bear, who are, his image in the Temple of his creation.    

Last week, we dealt a bit with the meaning of Jesus’ death - why Jesus said he had to die.  He said, “the Son of Man has come not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.”  If you remember that word ransom does not mean he died to pay off a kidnapper.  Rather, we have no good word in English to translate it.  You just have to know that the word’s Old Testament use was what they called a “life price”, which was a small amount of money paid to the family of someone who had died accidentally by the person who caused the death.  This life price, this sum of money, had a dual purpose.  First, the gift symbolically said that the person whose life was now wasted to death had worth.  Thus, it restored worth to life that was wasted.  Secondly, paying this life price also redeemed or restored worth to the life of the one who caused the death for the penalty for wasting a life to death was to have one’ own life wasted to death.  To waste the life of another is to waste one’s own life.  Jesus’ death was the life price that restores human worth and dignity from how we have wasted our lives and the lives of others through the new life he gives us with the gift of the Holy Spirit who comes to dwell in and among us.

Coming back to Bartimaeus, he stands as the example of everybody who is honest with themselves before God and others.  Looking at his, it means son of Timaeus.  Timaeus is a Greek name that means “honoured one”, “valued one”, or “esteemed one”.  “Bar” means “son of” in Hebrew.  Metaphorically, Bartimaeus is “the son of one who has great worth”.  He stands metaphorically for all humanity. We humans are born with great worth in God’s eyes.  God created us in his image to live together in such a way that humanity looks like the loving communion of God the Father Son and Holy Spirit particularly at the level of family.  (We discussed that a few weeks ago.)  We are created as unique persons who are shaped within our relationships.  We only discover who we truly are when we give ourselves unselfishly and unconditionally to serve and build up others, i.e., give worth and dignity to others.  Imagine how beautiful God’s good Creation would be if we actually did that…but we don’t.  We’re too self-inclined.

 Back to Bartimaeus, Bartimaeus was apparently born sighted but somehow he became blind and this reduced him to being a beggar.  Back then, the general population viewed people with disabilities as being cursed by God or the gods for some hidden sin and were being punished for it in this life.  This stigma of being cursed resulted in becoming outcast.  People would have had very limited contact with you for fear your cursedness might rub off on to them like dirt.  Being outcast meant no job and thus led to begging.  

As a beggar, Bartimaeus would have lived outdoors under whatever shelter he could find and his hygiene would have been horrible.  His clothing would have consisted of a cloak and an undergarment.  To beg, he would have taken off his cloak and spread it on the ground in front of him for people to throw coins on so that they wouldn’t have to touch him.  Use your imagination, Blind Bartimaeus basically sat there alongside the road in his underwear with his only possession, his cloak, spread out before him, begging.  Humiliating, to say the least.  There sat Bartimaeus the son of the honoured one in his underwear blind and begging.  Sounds a lot like humanity if we’re honest…and that’s how he presented himself to Jesus.

Let me back up in Mark’s storyline for a moment.  Bartimaeus reminds me of someone we met a couple of Sundays ago.  Believe it or not, it’s that wealthy man who had everything except a sense of at life-giving relationship with God and so his life was empty.  Jesus and his disciples were setting out on the way when this wealthy man came, impeded him, and knelt before him in a sort of obsequious show of respect that wealthy people did to butter you up when they want something from you that only you could give.  

Everything the name “Timaeus” meant this wealthy man would have fit the bill.  Because of his wealth people would have considered him blessed for his faithfulness.  In the same Karma-like religious mechanism that people considered Bartimaeus cursed for some secret sin that caused his blindness, People would have considered this man blessed for keeping the Law of Moses which he told Jesus he had done since his youth.  He would have been a powerful, and respected, if not feared, man in the community. 

But there was a catch to this wealth.  The word for possessions, which he had lots of, that Mark uses indicates that he had a lot of land.  Having lots of land meant he had a lot of people indebted to him in a sharecropping relationship.  Sharecropping meant he let someone live on a plot of his land as long as they farmed it for his profit.  It amounted to little more than slavery, debt slavery like we get into with credit cards. One bad crop and the wealthy man owned you.  Consequently, he likely owned slaves as well.  Thus, sis wealth, which made him so esteemed would have made a lot of people feel worthless and become actually become economically and societally worthless.    

But, if you ask me, he was blind, spiritually blinded by his wealth and power and prestige and he knew it…and it was bothering him so he went to Jesus hoping Jesus could help him find the spiritual depth to life that he was missing; a living relationship with the living God.  But, he didn’t like the remedy Jesus gave him.  Sell your land and give to the poor.  In today’s terms that would would mean making his wealth accessible to somebody besides himself.  Maybe something like letting the dividends of his asset portfolio go to the people who worked the land for him, you know, the people who actually make the wealth for him.  Anyway, he went away sad and disturbed.  

His blindness came from his wealth and the power and prestige that he gained by it.  He’s blind because this is the way he believes it’s supposed to be.  It’s the way the world works and he’s at the top of it. He cannot imagine a world where abundance can be had by all if the spiritual discipline of sharing in generosity was practiced.  This wealthy, cosmopolitan, trying to be faithful, achieved it all man, upstanding, tip-of-the-top-cream-of-crop, overall good citizen of a man; the only person for whom Mark said Jesus looked at and felt “the Love of God” …he walked away from Jesus blind.  This wealthy man was spiritually “prior-sighted” in that he had a glimpse of who Jesus is otherwise he wouldn’t have wasted his valuable time to seek Jesus out on how to receive a God-filled life.  Things went dark for him when he realized he would need to relinquish his wealth-based status and share the abundance God had entrusted to him with those whom he had made worthless.

In comparing Bartimaeus and this wealthy man I cannot emphasize enough the hope and joy that is present in Bartimaeus’ encounter with Jesus on the way and how it was lacking from the wealthy man’s encounter.  Bartimaeus hears that Jesus is coming up the road.  There’s nothing wrong with his hearing.  He has heard and believed who Jesus is.  His hope to have a restored life is walking up the road right at him.  What does he do? He makes himself annoying by shouting out loudly and repeatedly something quite treasonous against the Roman Empire that could get a Roman garrison to come slaughter this crowd of people following Jesus who are already afraid of what’s going to happen to them in Jerusalem. “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.”  The people “politely” told him to “Shut the …… up!”  Yet, he continued to cry out all the more and louder. Jesus was his king and he wanted his king to show him favour and act on his behalf…to show him mercy.  The word for mercy in Greek is the word the Greeks used to translate the Hebrew word for loving kindness – Chesed – the loving kindness of God.  The same love with which Jesus looked at the wealthy man and felt.

Jesus summonsed Bartimaeus by means of those who shut him up (there’s a lesson there for the religiously “proper”).  They changed their message from rebuking him to one of encouragement – “Take heart.  Get up.  He’s calling you.”  That’s afar cry from shut up.  Bartimaeus, now remember he’s blind, throws aside his only possession and means to survival.  He sprang up and the word there is the same one used for raised up from the dead.  And, he groped his way to Jesus.  “What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus asked.  We just heard him ask James and John that question when they came seeking to sit on his right and on his left when he takes the world over, the places of most honour and power.  Bartimaeus doesn’t want glory.  He just wants to see again.  And suddenly…he began to see again.  His sight with respect to perceiving who Jesus is and his following through on it left him healed.  The sight he had in his spirit came through to his eyes. His worth and dignity were restored.  But he didn’t “Go!” like Jesus told him to.  He followed Jesus on the way.

The power, the hope, the joy of that moment.  As someone hearing this story millennia later it makes me want to leap with joy.  It is a “Yes” moment.  God broke in and made things to be the way they ought to be.  This is what it is to encounter Jesus, the One who came not to be served, but to serve and who gave his live as the life price to give worth and dignity to the many and yet he lives.  God raised him from the dead and by the power and presence of the Holy Spirit Jesus still encounters us like he did Bartimaeus.  It helps if we look for him in the areas where we feel disillusioned like the wealthy man and/or feel shame like Bartimaeus did.  

In closing, Bartimaeus was sitting alongside “the way” and he wound up following Jesus on “the way”.  Literally, “the way” was the road to Jerusalem.  Yet metaphorically, it was the road that led to Jesus’ giving his life as the life price to give humanity back its worth and dignity.  To us who follow Jesus, it is “the way” of being his disciples who serve rather demand to be served and who also do all we can to help one another discover our restored worth and dignity in Christ.  The wealthy man felt himself too worthy and would not divest himself of his wealth in order to help others have worth and dignity. Bartimaeus, on the other hand, was painfully aware of his state of being a blind beggar (which, metaphorically speaking, is what we all are) and he joyfully accepted the new life of following Jesus along “the way”.  If you are dissatisfied, disillusioned, wondering why it seems that “God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost took the last train for the coast”, feeling like the music has died, Jesus is here and is doing his thing.  To find him, we need to get back on “the way”, get less self-absorbed.  COVID has been good at leading us into the darkness of self-absorption.  Get back on the way of disciplining ourselves in the practice of helping everyone to discover their worth and dignity.  Instead of focusing on increasing our own worth and status in the world or, on the other hand, focusing on feeling like we are worthless and useless and all that; and, instead of hanging God out to dry because we feel God has hung us out to dry, which is what many to most people are doing today – how about we focus on serving and doing all we can to increase the worth and dignity of others.  That’s where we will find Jesus.  That’s the road Jesus is on and there’s hope and joy and healing on it.  Amen.  

The Price of Life

 Mark 10:32-45

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This is the only time in Mark’s Gospel that Jesus reflects upon the meaning of his death.  He says he had to give his life as a ransom for many.  Ransom does not mean what we today typically think of as a ransom: money paid to a kidnapper to set someone free.  In Old Testament Law one paid a ransom, or rather a life price, to redeem or restore worth and dignity, for a life that has been wasted to death by the criminal acts or neglect of another and it was paid to the family of the victim by the perpetrator; not the other way around.  

This idea of life price is not foreign to us.  You may or may not know that many governments have a policy of financially compensating the families of civilian casualties in war.  The US government during the Iraq war gave $2,000US per death or approximately 2,500,000 Iraqi dinars per death.  If you are wondering how much that really is, it’s about 282 of your favourite McDonald’s value meals.  In Afghanistan, NATO countries paid $50,000US per death per Afghani civilian death.  In the currency of Afghanistan, that is 2,500,000 Afghani per death.  That sounds like a lot, but if you lived in Kabul, how long could your family live on the 10,000 value meals that that money, that ransom or life price, could buy.  I must apologize for valuing human lives in accordance with McDonald's Value Meals, but I am just trying to point out the absurdity of war.

In Ontario, we have the Compensation for Victims of Crime Act which was enacted to help victims of violent crimes or their families pay for expenses that resulted from the violent crime.  Its preamble recognizes that a value cannot be placed on a human life, so it makes clear that victims are compensated only for expenses related to the crime.  The compensation can be in the form of a lump sum of $150,000 or by periodic payments that would in the end add up to $365,000.  If these dollar amounts were for a life, the family of a murder victim in Ontario would get a dump truck load of roughly 20,000 values meals, or periodic dumps of up to a total of 48,667 meals.  

For comparison’s sake, if a life’s worth came down to the price of McDonald’s Value Meals, then the life of your average Canadian victim of violent crime is worth between two and five times that of an Iraqi or an Afghani.  Should nationality or ethnicity make a difference?  Unfortunately, it seems it does   So, we’re working with a couple of questions here: what is the value of a person’s life and if it is wasted by crime or whatever is it redeemable?  Can its worth and dignity be restored?  

Well, this idea of compensating for life wasted by the criminal or negligent acts of another as means of restoring worth or dignity to a life that has been unfortunately wasted is actually a biblical idea.  A ransom or life price was a price paid that gave value to a life that was accidentally wasted and by paying it one could buy back or redeem one’s own life from being itself wasted if the consequence of death incurred from the accident - an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life.  For example, the Book of Leviticus chapter 21 states that if a man’s ox gored and killed somebody, a life price had to be paid by the owner of the ox and the ox stoned to death and not eaten and thus its life was also wasted.  If the ox had a history of goring, then both the ox and the owner were to be put to death.  But, a ransom or life price could be imposed for the owner to pay and in doing so he could redeem his own life from his required death. 

In other matters, a life price could also be paid to buy a slave from another owner such as ransoming a slave girl in order to marry her.  One could also pay a life price by means of a sacrifice to redeem one’s firstborn child from the LORD.  The LORD required this life price to make the Israelites remember that the lives of the firstborn of Egypt was the price of their own redemption from slavery in Egypt.  The LORD himself could also redeem a person or his people from calamity with the ransom of a mighty act of his hand.  Yet, when it came to intentional murder, there was no life price.  One could only flee to a city of refuge and live there until the current high priest died and then be free to return home.  

 Ransom and redeem are two words that are familiar to us as words that we Christians use to talk about salvation or rather more specifically to explain Jesus' death.  Unfortunately, their English meanings are no longer what the biblical words they translate meant.  We think of a ransom as being a sum of money paid to a kidnapper in exchange for the safe return of the victim.  When we think of redeeming it is in terms of redeeming a coupon.  If a coupon has a value of twenty cents towards the purchase of a particular product, we can redeem it and save ourselves twenty cents.  In the Bible, a ransom is an amount paid to a victim’s family to give worth and dignity back to a life that has been wasted to death.  To redeem was to rescue oneself or another from the waste of life that death is by paying a ransom, a life price.  We’ve heard of people being deemed worthy.  To redeem is to give worth back to a life that has been forfeited for whatever reason.  It is to make a person’s life not worthless even though it has been wasted.

So, what does this mean with respect to Jesus saying, "For the Son of Man came not to be served, but to be serve and to give his life as a ransom for many"?  As I said earlier, this is Jesus’ only attempt to interpret the meaning of his death to his disciples.  In light of what I have just explained, his life is the ransom, the life price that gives worth back to our lives for we have forfeited our worth, our value, our dignity due to sin and are thus lost to death.  He has given his life to us and for us to restore utterly restore, the worth and dignity of human life that we have wasted.  

Since we are talking about a ransom paid, it would be prudent to ask to whom or to what did Jesus pay his life as a ransom?  Well, according to the biblical definition, ransoms, or life prices, are paid to the victim’s family as a symbolic gesture of saying your loved one’s life had worth.  A life price was never aid to a perpetrator.  Here’s where things get confusing.  In this world of sin, we all are both perpetrators and victims.  We are perpetrators needing to pay a life price we can in no way ever pay because of our demeaning and wasting of life, our own lives and the lives of others.  When life is demeaned and wasted, death is the unfortunate consequence for the perpetrator.  We are also victims who have had our lives demeaned and wasted by our own actions and by the actions of others and death is the result.  For life to be really restored to its worth and dignity it must be brought back from death.

In one sense, Jesus gives his life, the life of God the Son incarnate, as the life price to bring us back from death and restore our worth and dignity.  He gives life to us as we are the victims of sin and death by the gift of the Holy Spirit to us each and to us as communities of those who follow him.  This infusion of divine life restores the worth and dignity of our lives which we as humans forfeit by trying to be our own gods and by our idolatry of “stuff” like money and power.  Not only does he give us back our worth and dignity, with the life price of his life he buys us back from our slavery to sin by making us to know ourselves as beloved children of God and enabling us to live accordingly.

To pay this life price, this ransom, he himself became the victim of our wasting ourselves.  He was a victim to us from the very beginning, the very beginning when he, God the Son, condescended to become as we are in our sinful humanity.  He demeaned his life to become one of us and we, in turn, wasted him to death, death by crucifixion.  Yet, the result of this is not utter, utter death, but new life, new Creation, resurrection.  Paul says, “He who knew no sin became sin that we might become the righteousness of God.”  This phrase, the righteousness of God, means that we are the proof that God is faithful.  God has not utterly abandoned those whom he loves to death but has moved his mighty hand to ransom us from death, by putting his own life into us by the gift of the Holy Spirit by whose power we will be raised from death on the day of resurrection.

Jesus has paid the life price and redeemed us from death.  His giving of his life, the incarnate life of God the Son, over to be wasted in death resulted in his passing through death to be raised to new life.  He gives this resurrected life to us in, with, and through the gift of the Holy Spirit.  He has given us his own value, his worth, his dignity.  We are beloved children of God and no longer utter waste cases.  Therefore, whatever we do, let us not waste this redeemed life we now have.   Rather, let us take up his life and serve in life giving ways in this sinful, evil world.  Let us take up our crosses and follow him for when we give our lives for the service of others in Jesus’s ministry of bringing in the Kingdom of God, his ransom is not in vain.  Amen.

Share Your Blessings

 Mark 10:13-31

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Well, it’s finally going to happen.  Capt. James Tiberius Kirk is actually going to make it into space.  I should clarify that it’s William Shatner, the actor who played Kirk in the original Star Trek series.  At the age of 90, the Shat is taking a free ride this month on a Blue Origin rocket to garner some publicity for private citizens going into space and apply a little leverage to the Discovery Channel to do a documentary on one of these soon to be more frequently occurring Blue Origin flights.  He will be up there for all of ten minutes.  Good on him…, I guess.

Well, there’s a tale to be told here.  If you didn’t know, Blue Origin is owned by the mega-billionaire Jeff Bezos who owns Amazon.  He and his chief competitor and also a mega-billionaire Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX fame are vying for NASA contracts to build the rockets NASA will use in the future as well as trying to make spaceflight accessible to private citizens.  The catch is that you got to be filthy rich to get a ride on one of these rockets.  Space is no longer the final frontier.  It’s now the playground for the wealthy.

Bezos’s and Musk’s efforts to capitalize on space travel do not come free of criticism.  Bill Gate’s, another one of those mega-billionaires and the creator of Microsoft also known for his philanthropy here on earth, has recently criticized them saying that there is too much that needs to be done here on earth for the world’s wealthiest to be playing rocket men especially during a pandemic.  He didn’t quite say it like that though.  Others have criticized Bezos as well.  Amazon made shopping easy during those COVID lockdowns but at great risk to Amazon employees.  Some say that if he’s got money to send The Shat into space, then he can afford to pay his Amazon employees a lot better.  After all, they are at considerable risk of catching COVID due to their job.

And here begins my rant on wealth inequality.  Did you know that during 2020 in the midst of all those lockdowns when so many down to earth working people were suddenly having trouble making ends meet the combined wealth of the world’s billionaires (according to Forbes, that’s 2,095 people), their wealth increased by 3.9 trillion US$?  That’s 1.86 billion a piece if things were equal among them.  The real estate moguls made a lot in 2020 resulting in making housing really unaffordable now for most people.  Did you also know that the combined income of wage earners in the same period went down 3.4 trillion US$?  I don’t know about you, but that makes me want to be sick.  I don’t want to sound judgemental, but how many billions of dollars has it cost Jeff Bezos to be able to call himself the one who put Capt. Kirk into space and all the while 3.1mil children per year die of malnutrition and that’s not saying how many simply suffer from it.

Let me fill you in on some more wealth trivia.  According to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report for 2019 (That’s pre-COVID.  It’s worse now.) 53.6% of the world’s working adults made less than $10,000 that year accounting for 1.4% of that pie we call global wealth.  34% of the worlds’ population makes between $10,000-100,000 and accounts for 14.7% of the pie. That’s people like us who pay the bulk of the taxes in most Western industrialized countries.  If you’ve been doing the math, that’s 87.6% of the worlds adults making 16.1% of the pie we call global wealth.  If you cut a pie into eight slices, that’s one slice.  Almost 88% of the world’s working adults are eating only one slice of the pie of global wealth.

Well, what about the other 12.4% of working adults who take in the rest of the pie?  That’s 83.9% of Global Wealth.  Well, 11.4% of the world’s working adults made between $100k-$1mil accounting for 40.5% of the pie.  The rest, 1% of the world’s working adults who make more than $1mil, they are eating the other 43.4% of the pie.  That’s 1% working adults eating almost half the pie while 54% of working adults are trying to share 1.4% of the pie.  That ultra-wealthy 1% are trying to go to space while the children of the 54% are dying of malnutrition.  Am I alone in thinking these extremes are not only unacceptable, but frankly immoral if not criminal?  

Unfortunately, we in the middle majoratively don’t see it that way and rather blame the 54% of working adults making less than $10k for not picking themselves up by the bootstraps and getting a job and pulling themselves out of poverty while the wealthy 12.4% are saying they make the jobs possible, so don’t tax them.  But maybe, if those ultra-wealthy paid taxes like the rest of us, we as a society might be able to do something about those children suffering and dying from malnutrition.  But wealth, the love of wealth, skews our perspective.

Well, I’m supposed to be preaching from the Bible I guess I should get on with it.  Looking at the Gospel of Mark, there’s this wealthy man here in our reading.  He seems to be the epitome of what Old Testament scholars call the Deuteronomic Principle.  The last few chapters of the Book of Deuteronomy are full of blessings and curses.  Blessed you will be if you keep the commandments and statutes and ordinances of the Law and cursed you will be if you don’t.  Many people, then and now, interpret them to be saying if you are faithful to God, he will bless you with wealth and health and other goodies.  The Book of Job is biting critique of that sort of thinking. 

This wealthy man comes to Jesus asking an odd question: What must I do to inherit eternal life?  It’s odd because an inheritance is typically not earned.  Granted you can get yourself written out of a will and lose your inheritance, but an inheritance typically isn’t earned. It is granted because you were born or adopted into a family.   

Moreover, the inheritance he is after is eternal life.  Eternal life was also a rather odd request for a Jew?  “Eternal life” is an idea is rooted in a very Greek philosophical and cosmopolitan way of thinking rather than your typical Jewish way of thinking.  Eternal life doesn’t refer to what happens after you die.  Rather, it describes a quality of life associated with God or the gods because only things divine are eternal.  So, this Jewish man is asking for a life that’s filled with God.  It could also mean the quality of life that people will have after the resurrection.  But again, that would be a God-filled life as Jesus promises in verse 30.

Jesus’s answer to this question inclines me to believe that it’s a quality of life that he’s after rather than a duration of life.  Jesus referred him back to what Jews rather than Greeks typically thought about: the commandments.  If he wants a life filled with God then he must keep the Commandments.  The man’s answer is eye-opening.  He had done that all his life, but something was still missing.  He’s like the song by the Irish rock band U2, “But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”  He seems quite frustrated and disillusioned.  He’s received the blessing of wealth et al that the Deuteronomic Principle promised, but there’s something missing…and fortunately for him he can’t build a rocket to try to find his answer in the heavens above the Earth.  

(Oddly, most people who have gone to space and looked back at the Earth have had what could be called a profoundly spiritual experience.  They’ve realized there’s more to life than “me, myself, and I” and have felt a sincere calling to come down to earth and make the world a better place.)

Well, Jesus looked intently at this faithful, yet disillusioned man who had it all but was missing the heart of the matter, Jesus looked intently at him and loved him.  Yes, Jesus felt love for the man.  This is the only person in Mark’s Gospel that Jesus is said to love.  The type of love mentioned is that agape love, the unconditional, selfless, even sacrificial love.  Jesus showed this love to that rich man by speaking the truth to him in love.  He didn’t say, “Count your blessings, Buddy.  You got it all.  You made the grade.  People are envious of what you have.  Don’t worry.  Be Happy.  Read some Deepak Chopra and learn how to meditate.   Take some anti-depressants and go on an adventure.  Build a rocket.  Buy a yacht.  Surround yourself with some young vixens like Solomon did.  You’ve got it all.  Just enjoy the blessing and be happy.  Eat, Drink and be merry.”  Jesus didn’t say that.  This wealthy man was a man of faith.  He knew something wasn’t right and sensed there was more to life than wealth.

The truth Jesus spoke to him in love was not good news that made the man feel good about his blessings.  He didn’t tell him to count his many blessings.  He told him to share them.  Jesus told him to divest himself of all that wealth; to sell all his possessions and give to the poor and build a treasure in heaven and follow Jesus.  The God-filled life, the life of the Kingdom of God is not found in the blessing of wealth.  It is found in sharing the abundance of what we have and being a student of the Jesus’ way of life which is living in accordance with being beloved children of God.  To this word of truth, the rich man responded with shock, some translations say great sadness, and it could also read that he responded with darkness.  

Beloved children…Jesus had just told his disciples “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the Kingdom of God as a little child, will never enter it.”  We often understand this in a way that idealizes the naïve trust that children have.  But there is another way to understand it.  Instead of saying “Welcome the Kingdom of God like a little child would welcome it” read it as meaning, “Welcome the Kingdom of God like you would welcome a little child into your life.”  Compare that to Jesus telling his disciples that it is darn nigh impossible for the wealthy to enter the Kingdom of God…but…with God all things are possible.  Wealth can’t buy the Kingdom of God.  The Kingdom needs only to be welcomed like we would receive a little child into our life; you know, love it and care for it.

The Kingdom of God is peace, righteousness, and joy.  It is community founded on justice, on economic fairness established through sharing, on equality among people, with safety and health for all.  The Kingdom of God is at had just as Jesus proclaimed and it is found among small gatherings of people who follow Jesus and live according to that one difficult and risky commandment that he gave to his disciples that we love one another as he has loved us…and that should affect how we handle our wealth.  Like little children are to us, the Kingdom of God, is a great joy and wonder to love and to watch grow.  Children are a miracle, but oh so fragile and easily hurt.  Who hasn’t prayed, “God don’t let me ruin my kids.”?  So also, the Kingdom of God.  It’s here, among us, and yet we can ruin it with neglect.  

Maybe the way we welcome and rear little children is the way we discover and welcome and steward the Kingdom of God.  We have fallen into the mistaken belief that the best way to provide for our children and for the future generation is to amass wealth that we may provide them with an inheritance that will ensure their security.  The truth of the matter with this way of doing things is those who have, who are relatively few in number, get absurdly more than the majority who do not have enough and whose children are dying of malnutrition and disease – things that come with poverty.  Moreover, the resulting disparity in wealth disillusions people and causes a great deal of resentment to grow which results in violence.  Our pursuit of wealth also comes at the expense of the environment.  

This might be a more appropriate Christmas sermon than a Thanksgiving one, but born in our midst, in our very midst, right here among us small little gatherings of Jesus followers is the Kingdom of God.  The Kingdom will grow and become the future of humanity.  It is at hand and indeed coming.  We will inherit it if we simply welcome it and love it as we would love and sacrifice for the well-being of children.  Maybe we will discover it in the way we rear the next generation of children.  

Maybe the Kingdom of God will become more visible if we by example teach the our children and grandchildren that we are entrusted to rear that instead of seeking a good paying job so you can have a comfortable and financially secure life and enjoy nice stuff, they should strive and see us strive to: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength…and love your neighbour as yourself.”  Instead of teaching them by example the lesson of pursuing and amassing wealth, we teach them by example to be stewards of wealth and to be satisfied with enough and make a spiritual discipline out of sharing our abundance with others who have less.  Maybe we also by example teach them to be stewards of this beautiful creation rather than being a virus and a parasite upon it.  Maybe we teach them by example to seek justice, love kindness, and to walk humbly with God by making the people we elect into government stop catering to the wealthy and start making the hard decisions to save the environment, improve global health care, improve global access to fair wages, and I could go on but I think I’ve depressed you enough for now.  Happy Thanksgiving.  Amen. 

God and Family

 Mark 10:1-16

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I was thinking about saving this passage for Thanksgiving Sunday because it has a lot in common with what goes on in the kitchen, around the table, and out on the porch when families get together for big holiday dinners.  There’s Jesus in conflict with the Pharisees and talk of divorce.  There’s a private discussion going on about adultery.  There are people trying to keep the children from bothering the adults, and adults who see the children and just want to love them.  I don’t know what you think, but this sounds to me like your typical Thanksgiving Day family get-together for many to most families.  

What a good many families call normal for Thanksgiving Day family dinners can be quite an explosive powder keg of a situation.  It is quite normal at big family dinners that the same argument that’s been going on for years erupts and someone goes storming off only to return next year to do it all over again.  Quite a few of the adults are either going through or have been through divorce leaving the rest of the family feeling like there is somebody missing.  There is hardly a family anywhere that has not in one way or another been affected by adultery.  And then there are the children.  They get together and play and yell and scream.  They are the grass that gets trampled when the pink elephants in the room fight.  

Thanksgiving Day family get-together’s, they are all about families getting together to be thankful, right?  Hopefully, but so often it is the case that holiday meals are the times when the pink elephants that nobody wants to acknowledge are most obviously standing there in the middle of the room or they are being dealt with in accordance with the pain they are causing.  Brokenness in families, in our families, is a universal norm.  It is the way we are.  

Brokenness is what Jesus was pointing at when he speaks of hardness of heart in this dispute about divorce.  In our reading the Pharisees come testing Jesus with regard to his regard for the Law and family values.  If he says “no, it is not lawful for a husband to divorce his wife”, then he is in disagreement with Moses.  If he says “Yes” then they will of course test him further on upon what grounds it is lawful for a husband to divorce his wife.  Can a man divorce his wife for burning his toast?  Please note that it was pretty near to impossible for a wife to divorce a husband in those days in Jewish communities.  Jesus’ answer in its entirety seems to say to the Pharisees albeit in an indirect way “how can you know what divorce is or adultery for that matter so as to make judgments about it when you do not understand what marriage is nor do you understand who your God is who has given us marriage?”  To them marriage was simply a matter of law, property, and family alliances and God was simply a law-giving judge who determines what is and is not permissible.  The Pharisees did not see marriage as the means God has given humanity for us to realize our created purpose as being created in the image of God, the God who is love.

Now, I would not be stepping out on a limb to say brokenness in families arises from our own hardness of heart in that we too have trouble understanding ourselves as being created in the image of God, the God who is loving.  God is the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Three persons giving themselves so completely to one another in love that they are one and the same.  God created humanity so that we would live in community that is in the image of this loving communion.  So, God created us male and female persons.  Men and women are pretty much the same stuff, but different.  Therefore, humanity has one nature consisting of two persons.  Marriage unites humanity into one person and if this union brings forth children by whatever means then there is a third person in this thing we call family and, voila, humanity reflects the triune image of God.  We become three persons in community; a family sharing a common bond of love and blood.  Thus, marriage is a particular relationship given to serve the purpose of bringing to fullness humanity’s created purpose of reflecting the loving communion of God the Trinity.  

Indeed, there is something special about marriage.  It is not simply a legal relationship, a contract.  Nor is marriage is the logical next step in a romantic fantasy.  It is more than two people cohabitating.  Marriage is a union of persons that is sacred because God has joined these two persons together into one to bring forth family, the basic unit of human community in the image of God.  Marriage and family work best when we love one another as God has loved us in, through, and as Jesus Christ – the selfless giving of ourselves in loving service of one another.  If we enter into marriage or bring forth children for any other reason than to help each other live more fully in the image of God then marriage and family will with much futility and sadness augment humanity’s brokenness.

So, what does all this mean for Thanksgiving Day get-togethers?  We as individual Christians, as Christian persons in the midst of families, we as Christians who form families, and we as Christians who welcome others into our lives as friends who are family, we have a calling to be a certain way in family and amongst our families.  We are those who must love and serve our families with the love of God in Christ.  Jesus shows us this with a simple hug and blessing given to children.  

I often comment on how God in incomprehensible love has adopted us as his beloved children and this should be our foundational and transforming attitude towards ourselves and everyone we meet.  We are all children from the dysfunctional family of humanity who need adoption into a healthy family that loves and serves one another, that communicates, and where each person sees themselves as being put here to help others become the image of Christ which God created them to be.  We are those who are to go to our family dinners to be there for others, to lift up the brokenhearted, to support the weak, and help the suffering, and laugh and celebrate with the joyous.  We are those who take our family members and friends into our arms in the embrace of Christ, the loving embrace of God the Father for his beloved children with whom he is well pleased and be a hopeful, healing blessing to them.  If we ourselves have brought family into this world then we carry the responsibility of making sure our spouses and children know this embrace and that as a family we become a welcoming family who embraces the world with the love of God and is a blessing to it.  Go to your families this Thanksgiving and extend to them the healing love, peace, and joy of Christ and be a blessing to them.  Amen.