Investing God's Presence

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Luke 19:11-27

“Put that money to work.”  How many times have you heard that?  I remember a long, long time ago in the ‘80’s my dad encouraging me to invest in mutual funds and that “let your money work for you” language was thick in the propaganda.  Mutual funds were ways, safe ways for everyday people to start investing in the stock market with their savings.  But…you needed $5,000 to open one.  I wished I had been able to do that back then.  Today that $5,000 would be worth enough to put both my kids through university.  I was in university myself at the time and didn’t have that kind of cash on hand.  To this day I have yet to have cobbled together enough to start an investment portfolio that would do me any good.  I chose the route of charitable giving as opposed to saving the excess wealth we had to play with.  I guess that makes me a fool in the eyes of many. 

But anyway, we all know the idea of putting money to work.  Investing in the stock market puts cash in the hands of businesses and entitles investors to a share in the profit that a company makes.  That’s buying a share.  The crazy side of it is that a share can be traded for more than its actual value.  If Company A has an annual profit of 5% and Company B shows 15%, people will want to buy shares in Company B and will be willing to pay more for them because they believe they will make more from them.  So, there’s what you make or lose from the actual dividend of the stock share and then there’s what you can make or lose from the perceived worth of the share itself.  

The long of the short is that you can put your money to work, if you got it.  It will make more for you.  And the more you have, the greater means you have to buy shares in companies that will provide even greater dividends.  Those who have more to invest almost always will make more than those who have less to invest.  Then there are those who are good at making a buck on the strategic buying and selling of stock shares.  They can start with a little and, keeping an eye on things, they buy low and sell high and make a lot off of the perceived worth of stocks regardless of the dividends.  So, put your money to work is the mantra these days.  Money will make you more money.  Outside of a catastrophe, it’s a given.  Don’t be afraid to invest.  Invested wealth grows.  That’s what they say.

Looking at our reading in Luke, this parable of investing seems to follow that line of thinking.  Ten servants were each given a mina to “put to work” for a rich dude who was going away to be made king.  We only hear how things went for three of them.  But, no matter.  The rich dude came back king and wants to know how his servants had done with the mina he had entrusted to them.  A mina would have been worth three months wages.  How well they did turned out to be the determinant of how much authority they would be given in the new king’s kingdom.  Prove yourself faithful with a little and you will receive a lot.

The first servant to give account was apparently good at investing.  His keen stewardship had caused that single mina to earn ten more.  So, the king granted him authority over ten cities as the reward for his trustworthiness.  The second was also good at investing but not as good as the first.  His one mina only earned five more.  So, the king granted him five cities to have authority over.  The principle was that the extent to which one was faithful with a little determined the amount of authority one would be granted in the kingdom.  

The third servant is a bit of a concern.  Because he was afraid of the rich dude, he buried the mina so that he wouldn’t risk losing it.  The rich dude now become king got very upset, called the servant wicked, and took his mina and gave it to the one who made the ten.  Some thought that was unfair but the king just wanted to invest in the people who were most able to provide him with a greater return on his wealth.  

The king finished the reckoning noting that to the one who has, more will be given.  In the case of this parable, the thing that one has isn’t simply the mina.  It is the faithfulness, the loyalty put into action, the desire to serve the king well.  The one who has that desire and acts on it will be rewarded accordingly.  The king then said, “the one who has nothing, even what he has will be taken away.”  The one who does not have the desire to faithfully serve the king will have everything taken from him.  This does not bode well for the next thing the king does is to have executed those who were against him being king. (Not a bright spot in this parable I know)  Faithfulness, loyalty to the king put into action, is what pays.  It’s what gives one the authority to reign in the kingdom.  

So, what of all this?  It’s a parable and so there’s some disguised meaning to things lurking about which we need to flesh out.  Jesus told this parable to his followers as he was nearing Jerusalem and he said it particularly to those who think he is going to bring in the Kingdom of God upon arrival there.  He’s was trying to tell them that was not going to happen and was planting the seeds that those who follow him will face a trial of faithfulness until he returns and then they will be rewarded.  The million-dollar question here is what the mina is.  What are his disciples going to be entrusted with until he returns.

What is the mina?  We only know two things about it: It’s valuable and everybody gets an equal share.  To spare us too much suspense, Jesus’ last words to his disciples in Luke’s Gospel were, “I am sending you what my Father promised.  As for you, stay in the city until you are empowered from on high.”  Jesus is referring to the Holy Spirit in a very Book of Acts kind of way (which Luke also wrote).  The Mina is the Holy Spirit which all disciples would receive and the Spirit will enable or empower all his disciples to serve faithfully until Jesus comes back to reign.  

So, let’s put two and two together.  We have all been given an equal share of the Holy Spirit to help us live the life of faith.  The Holy Spirit is the presence of God with and in us who gives us the desire to want to know God as God has revealed himself to us in, through, and as Jesus.  The Holy Spirit lets us know God is with us because he is God with us.  The Holy Spirits makes us to feel and understand that we are beloved children of God.  The Holy Spirit is who gives us the desire to want to know Jesus, to want to draw close to him, to want to lean on him in times of trial.  The Holy Spirit leads us to know that “the Lord is my Shepherd.” The Holy Spirit makes us want to love others as we have been loved – unconditionally, sacrificially, without reserve.  The Holy Spirit makes us able to forgive and to do the hard work of reconciliation.  The Holy Spirit prompts us to want to pray and to study the Scripture.  The Holy Spirit draws us to want to participate in Christian fellowship.  The Holy Spirit compels us to compassion for others.  Makes us hunger and thirst for a greater sense of the presence of God in our lives.  He makes us want God’s will to be done here on earth as it is in heaven.

We’ve all been given the mina of the Holy Spirit.  The challenge the parable presents us with is how do we invest the presence of God. How do we “do business” with the mina of the Holy Spirit and, if I might be so tacky, how do we put the Holy Spirit to work.  The Holy Spirit causes us to grow in love of God, self, and others.  Just as wealth, if invested, grows so also does the work of the Holy Spirit and our sense of God's Presence grow in us when we tend to it, causing us to bear the fruits of the Spirit – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  If we are afraid and bury the presence of God in our lives out of fear of doing something that might offend God or simply cause us to make some changes, we quench the Spirit and we will lose our spiritual passion and joy and sense of God with us.  But if we attend to the Holy Spirit, give time to sit with God, and follow the Spirit’s promptings we will develop a greater sense of God’s work and presence in our lives.

Investing the Presence of God begins with giving God some time, taking time for building the relationship with God.  This obviously involves taking time to sit in an awareness of God’s Presence.  Be still and know that God is God.  Put an empty chair in front of you.  That’s in essence what the lid of the Ark of the Covenant was in ancient Israel, a place for God to sit. I like three chairs one each for Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  While sitting there with your empty chairs, read some scripture, especially the Psalms, this gives God opportunity to speak to you.  Sing a hymn.  Give thanks.  If you’re bearing a load, share it with God.  If you’re mad at God, hurting, whatever, let God have it.  Cry your eyes out.  There’s nothing wrong with asking God to step up and hurry up and do what he does – heal, restore, resurrect.  God won’t get us for being petulant in the midst of difficulties, but he will teach us patient endurance.  A couple weeks ago I spoke of praying continually, specifically the Lord’s Prayer.  That’s the only prayer we need.  Give this prayer a lot of space in your thought world throughout the day and in your sleepless nights.  If you feel moved with compassion, go with it.  If you feel compelled to pray for or to call somebody, well, it just might be a God thing to follow up on.

Investing the Presence of God begins with giving space and time to be in relationship with our Living God.  Like wealth will grow if invested, so our sense of God’s presence grows when we open up to it.  God is present with us each.  God will speak with us each.  God will touch our hearts letting us know we are his beloved.  God will give us peace in the midst of turmoil.  Just give the Presence of God space and time and you will grow in Christ.  Amen.

 

Just Come

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Luke 18:9-14

I’m sure many of you have horror stories of when you were a child and had a chest cold and sore throat and it was likely your grandmother who whipped up a mess of boiled potatoes mushed up with mustard and onions and a few other stinky goodies; an old family recipe.  She then smeared it all over your chest and throat and it smelled so bad that you didn’t want to breathe, but it worked.  I was lucky.  My mom just rubbed Mentholatum all over me.  

Since the onset of pharmaceutical solutions to colds, aches, and infections we don’t see too many people going the route of treating such things with a stinky poultice. A poultice is a form of treatment where you apply a cooked up paste of stinky goodies to an infected area to absorb the infection into itself and relieve the inflammation in the area.  There are all kinds of recipes for poultices and as many of them work as don’t.  Regardless, the idea is that they will draw out the infection in the affected area and relieve the pain of inflammation. 

There is a theological term for this process of drawing out infection and relieving inflammation.  The term is expiation.  If you must know, it comes from the Latin word expiatio.  Piatio means devout, pious, or simply clean.  Ex means “Out of”.  The dirtiness or disease is taken “out of” thus leaving the person clean. Theologically speaking, expiation refers to removing the disease of sin and its ill-effects from a person leaving the person clean or devout or pious.  

In the Old Testament some of the sacrifices they had were for the purpose of expiation, for drawing out the feelings of shame and guilt that people felt when they realized they had sinned against God and against others and they realized the hurt they caused and needed the relationship with God and others restored.  These sacrifices were for unintentional transgressing.  God gave no means of expiation for intentional transgressing.  You had to find some way to live with the shame and guilt of intentionally wronging another and making reparations.  The expiating poultice for intentional hurting comes with Jesus and his death and the work of the Holy Spirit.  I also won’t mention that the penalty in most cases for an intentional sin was usually death.

Just a little bit about how this sacrifice stuff worked.  Humanity is sick with a disease of the mind in that we are self-willed rather than God-willed to the extent that we will intentionally and unintentionally hurt others and ourselves especially the people we love and vulnerable people.  It is so twisted that even when we think we are doing good it can be bad and bad can be good.  The only way out of sin is death.  When you discover you’ve hurt another unintentionally or intentionally depending on the severity of the hurt it does not feel good and you may wish you were dead.  

To be free of the shame and guilt incurred with hurting God, others, and self, one must die either literally or “to self” in humility and following God’s way to relationship reparation.  Life must pass through death to be cleansed and freed of this disease called sin and its harmful effects of shame and guilt and a whole myriad of others bad feelings.  With sacrifices of expiation, people offered them not to appease an angry God.  That’s propitiation.  But rather so that the life of an animal to whom they had transferred their sin could pass through death for them and reunite a person with God. 

How does life pass through death?  Leviticus 17:11 and 14 tell us that the life of the animal is in the blood.  When the priest sacrificed an animal and took its blood for ritual use, that was in essence life that had passed through death.  The priests then did interesting things with the blood of the sacrificed animal to expiate the guilt and shame that an Israelite incurred.

In ancient Israel they had three sacrifices or offerings for expiation.  The first two were simply the sin offering and guilt offering that they did when they knew they had sinned and wanted forgiveness.  They had also to make reparations with those they had sinned against.  The sacrifice was to heal things with God by getting the bad stuff out.  For the sin offering they would take an animal to a priest.  They would lay their hand on it.  The priest would then slaughter it and take some of the blood and sprinkle it on the ground before the curtain outside the room where the Ark of the Covenant was kept and where God was supposed to be.  What was happening with the laying on of the hand was that they were symbolically transferring their sinful self’s mired in shame and guilt to the animal, who then was put to death in their place in order to put all that bad stuff to death.  The priest then took the blood and symbolically presented that person’s life that had passed through death and was thus clean to God and God forgave and fellowship with God was restored.  They did the same thing for the guilt offering but with that one the priest would also put some blood on the person’s earlobe.  Applying this blood, this life that had passed through death, to the person’s earlobe was meant to heal the ear so that the person could hear the commandments of God better and keep it.

The third sacrifice and the most important happened on Yom Kippur or the Day of Atonement which was the national day of very solemn repentance.  On Yom Kippur the High Priest sacrificed three animals: a bull and two rams.  The High Priest slaughtered the bull as a sin offering on behalf of himself and the priests who represented the people to God and God to the people.  But in this case, he sprinkled the blood on the priests and then he actually took the blood further into the Holy of Holies and sprinkled it on the Ark itself.  They believed that the lid of the Ark was the throne of God here on earth and was called the mercy seat.  They also believed God was seated there unseen, shrouded in a cloud of smoke that was created by a big incense burn that represented the prayers of the people.  Thus, this sprinkling of blood from the same animal on both God and the priests actually united them in this life that had passed through death.  Then in representation of all the people, the High Priest took one of the rams, placed his hands on it and slaughtered it as a sin offering on behalf of the people.  He took this life that had passed through death and also sprinkled some of that blood on the Ark thus uniting the people with God in this life that had passed through death.  He then also sprinkled this blood all over the temple and its furniture to cleanse it of the stain of sin incurred by contact with humans.  All this sprinkling of blood symbolized the work of the Holy Spirit who unites us to God and cleanses us of guilt and shame and unions us to God and one another with life that has passed through death, the life of Jesus. 

The High Priest then took the second goat and whispered the sins of the people into its ear making the goat bear the sins of the people.  This goat, thus laden with the sins of the people, was then led out into the wilderness where it and the sins it bore would be destroyed by the beasties out in the wilderness.  This goat took away, bore away, carried away the sins of the people into death and there they perished forever along with the goat.  So also, Jesus, God the Son became human and in so doing took the Sin of humanity upon himself by becoming one of us and he removed Sin from us by his death on the cross.  When God raised him, he became the life of humanity that passed through death and who by the gift of the Holy Spirit to indwell us unites us to God himself.  Jesus is humanity’s expiation of sin, once and for all.  Jesus gives us this new humanity, this new human life by the gift of the Holy Spirit who lives in us each and bonds us together as a new humanity.  We need to come to him for the healing. 

I haven’t said anything about our passage yet so just allow me a couple of more minutes.  This Pharisee was a devout, Law-abiding man and indeed more than a bit pompous.  Because of his efforts to abide by the Law of Moses he feels he has the right to stand before God, toot his horn, and look down on “sinners”.  “Sinner” was a derogatory term, as offensive as some of the racial slurs that get thrown around today.  We find him looking with condemnation on this tax collector who is standing far off in the temple quite afflicted by the brutal fact that he had hurt a lot people in so many ways.  He is so full of shame and guilt that he wishes he was dead.  When somebody beats their own breast they are symbolically driving a knife into their heart.  

Tax collectors were Jews who collected taxes for the Romans and were considered to be traitors.  They always inflated the amount of tax owed so the could skim off the top to the detriment of many poor people.  They would also have poor Israelites beaten and imprisoned for not paying up.  They got very wealthy and were very hated.  They were indeed “sinners”.

The tax collector is standing far of, staring at the ground, beating his breast, and desperately praying, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”  He is so full of shame and guilt over what he has intentionally done to God’s people to get rich.  He is sick to death with himself and he has got no way to get the shame and guilt out of his system because the expiation sacrifices were only for unintentional sins.  I don’t know if you’ve ever been sick of yourself for the shit you’ve done (sorry to use that word but it’s fitting) and felt the helplessness of there being no way to make right for what you’ve done. I’ve been there.  All you can do is hope God can heal things.  This broken man certainly was there.

The tax collector’s prayer is interesting.  In our translation it seems he’s begging for mercy, or forgiveness from a judge.  But, the word in Greek isn’t the word they would have used for mercy.  It is the word they used for a sacrifice of expiation.  Literally, he is prayerfully begging, “God, be the sacrifice of expiation for me, a sinner.”  And…that is what God himself did in, through, and as Jesus by his death and resurrection and has applied it to us with the gift of his very self.

If you have ever been or are mired in the shame and guilt of the shit you have done intentionally or unintentionally, there is healing for that.  Come as you are into the midst of the people of God where dwells God in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit and start crying, start letting it out.  God will come to you and bear it away.  God will let you know you are His beloved child, beloved and forgiven.  And we the people of God won’t judge you.  We will hold you just as you are in the arms of the unconditional love of our Father in heaven to reinforce the love he has for you.  Just come.  Amen.  

 

Continual Prayer

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Luke 18:1-8

When I was a child I spent many weekends at my best friend Ronnie’s house.  As he lived across town, it was too far for a kid to walk on his own.  I needed a ride to get there.  As my parents worked on Saturday, I would often have to wait for Ronnie and someone from his house to come and get me.  Ronnie would arrange that on his end.  We’d be on the phone and her would say “Pops says he can come get you.  We’ll be there in a few.”  The assumption was a few minutes.  I would stand at the living room window watching and waiting.  An hour would pass, an hour and a half.  I’d call again wondering where they were.  “He says we’ll leave in ten minutes.”  Another hour or so would pass while I stood staring out the window, watching and waiting.  I’d call again.  “We’re on our way.”  Another hour or so goes by.  I’m not exaggerating.  I spent many Saturday morning and afternoon staring out that window waiting.  I’d call again.  “Are you coming.”  “Let me go check what’s up.”  I’d hear them bicker a bit in the background.  He’d come back to the phone. “Leaving now.”  A half hour later, he would show up with his brother and his brother’s girlfriend to get me.  Watching and waiting.  I wonder if I would have ever made it to his house if I had not kept calling.  I have no idea.  I don’t know what was going on Ronnie’s end of things.  Was his dad forgetful or had something more important going on. I don’t know.

Looking at our reading, this watching and waiting and persistent praying seems to be what faithfulness is and it almost seems like hope. Jesus asked his disciples that rhetorical question, “When the Son of Man comes will he find faithfulness on the earth?”  That question comes at the end of a parable in which he was teaching them about their need to pray persistantly so that they do not lose hope in God and fall away.  Jesus knew that being his faithful disciple in this world that crucifies its hope was going to get tough for them.  It was going to be quite difficult to live faithfully, according to hope by showing unconditional and forgiving love and steadfast commitment to Christian fellowship.  He likened this task to the hopeless impossibility of a falsely accused widow seeking vindication for her tarnished honour by going to a crooked judge who just likes to see people put to shame.  You ask and you wait.  You ask and you wait.  You ask and you wait.  You ask and you wait.  You keep at it until you’ve gotten on the judge’s (God’s) nerves enough that he grants your request.  That getting on God’s nerves part is probably Jesus showing a sense of humour, but we get the point.  We can relate to that widow.  So often when we pray, we do so wondering what it's going to take to get some action out of God, but then in time, God does act.

Praying continually, persistantly is necessary to having faith and being faithful.  Jesus says that if we don’t pray continually we are likely to fall into what we translate rather weakly here as discouragement or a loss of heart.  I’m going to get your Greek lesson out of the way early this morning.  The word Jesus uses there for loosing heart quite literally means “in evil doing.”  The word is enkakeo (Those who like playing with Spanish homonyms think en caca.) There are two senses in the way the word gets used.  It can be either “to treat badly or evilly” or “to wrongly cease doing something” meaning to quit on people or to leave fellowship.  So, without this habit of continual prayer Jesus’ disciples would be in danger of falling into the evil of a discouraged heart that leads them away from Christian fellowship or even to turn on that fellowship and treat it badly.  There is an integral link between prayer and staying in the body of Christ.  

There is a correlation between Jesus’ disciples learning to pray continuously and the continuance of Christian community on earth.  Without this discipline of prayer, the habit of continual prayer among the disciples of Jesus, the church, Christian fellowship, perishes.  It is in prayer that the personal faith, hope, and love that are the seeds of Christian community take root and sprout.  In prayer by the working of the Holy Spirit God changes us, transforms us to be in the nature of his children, like Jesus his Son.  As children trust their parents for everything, so prayer makes us look to our Father in heaven and trust him for everything. 

So, what is continual prayer?  Well, what goes on in our heads anyway? All of us worry.  Worry is a matter of instinct.  We just do it.  When we’re not worrying, we usually just let our minds go on in their own little worlds of imaginary conversations around emotions we can’t quite name.  Sometimes we get ideas.  A few of us can actually sit and think and sort things out.  Mostly, we just let our minds get preoccupied with whatever and we exhibit very little in the way of reigning in our thought world.

The discipline of continual prayer leads us to get control of our thought world with prayer rather than giving free rent to worry or mindless rambling.  It is unlike the Buddhist way which is to try to empty the mind of any thoughts at all.  It is also unlike the practise of mindfulness where we just be aware of our surroundings and take inventory of our inner worlds and try to self-sooth or positive self-talk the hurtful stuff away.  Prayer leads us to place our lives into the hands of the God who made us, who knows what’s best for us, and who will lead us to healing and restoration. Here’s some examples of continual prayer.  

First, there is finding a specific prayer to pray over and over in those times when we’re just letting our minds graze the green pastures of nattering thoughts.  I like the Lord’s Prayer for this.  “Our Father, who art in heaven hallowed be thy name.  Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven…” and so on.  I pray that prayer and think about what it means quite a lot especially “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.”  It reminds me to want what God wants for me, for the people I care about, and for the world.  If I wake up in the middle of the night, I wait and listen if anyone in particular comes to mind for whom I should pray.  Then after that, I just keep saying the Lord’s Prayer over and over in my head until I fall asleep.   When I’m out for a walk or cooking dinner or working in the yard, I try to pray the Lord’s Prayer continually.  In fact, if I were laid up in the hospital or lying on my deathbed, praying the Lord’s Prayer continually would likely be what you would find me and my mind up to.  

A more mission-oriented way of doing continual prayer would be to pray for everyone you see as you go about your day.  When we’re out and about, we can take notice of the people around us and pray inwardly, “Lord, bless them.”  If we see a young family walking a baby carriage up the street, if you’ve had kids, you know what they’re going through.  Pray for them.  There’s also actually talking to our neighbours and finding out what’s going on in their lives so that we can keep it in mind and pray about it.  If they are worried about something, bear that worry with them in prayer.  If they are okay with it, pray with them.  

 We can make our homes prayer centers.  Anybody that comes into our homes does not leave without us having first prayed for them.  This is especially so for our children and grandchildren.  If you start a ministry like that, be prepared for in time people will start coming to you. 

Prayer is our simplest form of participation in working along with God in making things here on earth as they are in heaven.  When people in churches take up this habit, this ministry of continual prayer, churches change because God begins to change the people in them to want what he wants, to see as he sees, to listen as he listens, to be as he is, and to do as he does.  

So, if Jesus were to return today and come to us would he find faith?  Would he find each of us praying?  God is not an unjust judge.  Our God deals in resurrection, in healing, in restoration and will act accordingly to answer our prayers.  Know this, if there is something in your life that is really hurting you, instead of worrying, pray it continually to God.  Eventually, you will get a sense that God is with you in the struggle and that he is working on it.  Watching and waiting and keeping on calling back through what seems God’s delaying is what faith, faithfulness is.  Continual praying, watching, and waiting.  Continual praying, watching, and waiting.  Continual praying, watching, and waiting.  That’s living faithfully.  There’s a peace there like no other.  Life doesn’t come free of suffering.  If you’re happy all the time you’re likely on something.  But, there’s this peace in Jesus that is found in prayer.  Amen. 

Turn around and Be Thankful

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Luke 17:11-19

I am perplexed.  Why does being thankful appear to be such a difficult thing? It cures a lot of things.  Maybe it’s just that being awful comes much easier.  Oddly, we have forgotten that the basic meaning of awful is “to be filled with awe”, with reverence, worshipful.  Instead, we have come to understand feeling awful is feeling absolutely terrible.  Feeling awful includes a lot of not good feelings – shame, guilt, dysphoria, anxiety, anger, bitterness, loathsome, lonesome, unlovable – I could go one.  We’ve all had our share of feeling awful.  

Interestingly, in the current world of mental health the cure for feeling awful is being mindful.  What they mean by that is sit still, breathe deep, and relax.  If you can’t relax then tense your muscles starting with your toes and do your whole body, muscle group by muscle group all the way up to your face and the top of your head.  This is good yoga stuff and if you’re having a panic attack, it will help.  As you relax, listen to the sounds around you, smell the smells, touch something to feel its texture, notice the details in something.  Then, take note of your feelings and name them.  Don’t ask why you feel them for that will spiral you out of mindfulness.  Just name them and take note of your body and how you feel those awful feelings in particular areas like is it hard to swallow, are your hands sweating, or do you feel nauseous.  Don’t judge yourself for having these unpleasant thoughts and feelings.  We’re humans in a messed-up world.  Everybody gets them.  Instead, pretend you are the best, most unconditionally loving friend you could possibly have and say to yourself what that friend would say.  That’s being mindful and learning how to be nice to yourself.  Even me just describing this should have made you feel relaxed.

Now, and it may be that I’m not as well read as I should be, but I don’t hear so much anymore about being thankful, particularly in the wake of Covid.  I think the reason for that may be that a lot of to most of people today in the wake of environmental disasters, wars, refugee crises, pandemics, economic ills, and etcetera are having a difficult time stomaching the thought that there even is a God especially one who is personally loving.  In order to be thankful one most have a power higher than oneself (to use the words of AA) who has a will and who cares to be thankful to.  Unfortunately, we live in a day when we need God to be God, but God just seems to be letting things run their courses so that a sense of hopelessness is the true pandemic.  We don’t see ourselves as being responsible for the ills in which we live.  So, we blame others.  We blame God.  After realizing blaming doesn’t cure despair, we turn inward to ourselves and to looking out for ourselves and how to make myself feel good in this hopeless world for despair sucks.  

This is a particularly hard time to live in if you are somebody who truly feels awful.  The world will tell you there is no God so cure your own awfulness by self-soothing and doing what’s best for you – self-minded.  I might be sounding negative and critical of what a lot of people are finding helpful, indeed life changing especially when you throw the daily practice of mindfulness into the pot with its resulting daily dose of feel-good brain chemicals, but...  I’ll just say that I am all for self-awareness and self-acceptance – knowing who I am and how I affect other people and changing those things about myself by which I hurt myself and others.  Those skills make one functional in relationship.  Self-mindedness breeds dysfunction and hurts others.

I might be old school but I think the cure for awful comes from outside oneself and is discovered in a relationship with God and with others.  It is knowing oneself to be a beloved child of the God who actually does care about everything and about us each and who actually can heal those overwhelming feelings of awfulness.  Turning to God and being worshipful (awestruck) and thankful is crucial to wholeness for us human beings whom God created to enjoy Him, and life, and each other, and ourselves.  Let me tell you about some lepers because I think these lepers in our reading today can help us see this.

Life as a leper in Bible times was horrible.  If you have ever had the pervasively wicked feeling of “there’s something wrong with me”, then welcome to the world of the leper.  Leprosy was a very misunderstood skin disease which in time made a person look like they are the walking dead.  Skin lesions, rotting extremities, pale flaky skin, facial features deforming – a person literally looked like they were rotting away in death.  Back then, they believed the disease was a curse on a person for secret sins.  Since they looked like death, they were not allowed to come to the Temple to be in the presence of the God who gives life.  They knew the disease was contagious and so lepers were made to live away from people and usually they formed colonies.  There was a religious term for the state of being cut-off from the presence of God and from other people – unclean.  Lepers were unclean.  There was something wrong with them and so they were shamed and felt ashamed.

Well, Jesus is and his disciples were out in the middle of nowhere, when a colony of ten lepers approached him wanting him to show them mercy, wanting him to do what only God could do, to do that one thing that would make life right, heal them.  Interestingly, Jesus didn’t do anything specific to heal them like touch them as he had done with other lepers.  He simply told them to go start living the way they would if they were healed and clean.  For a leper, the first thing you had to do if you were healed was to go see the priest who would pronounce you clean.  That pronouncement made it so you could return to life in community and come before God.  Jesus’ cure for just seems to be if you want to live, then quit acting like lepers and get on with living.  That’s helpful advice for many of life’s situations.  

So, as they took those first few steps of living life as if they were healed, they were made clean.  They had come to Jesus in hope that he would do for them what he had for others like them.  Then, in taking those first few steps of faithfulness to Jesus, to doing as he asked, they were healed.  There was no longer reason for them to feel shame or be cut off from the presence of God and from human community.

One of the lepers, upon realizing he was now healed, began to praise God loudly and he turned around to go back to Jesus.  He threw himself on the ground at Jesus’ feet and began to thank him.  In those first few steps of faithfulness to Jesus, of turning to God for healing, this leper found his awfulness transformed into worshipfulness and thankfulness.  So, he turned around to “God”, to Jesus, to be thankful.  In his encounter with Jesus he discovered that there is a God who does care about him and that there was nothing, not even death resembling disease of leprosy, that could separate him from God’s love and healing mercy that can be found in the Jesus way of life.  

When I hear what happens next, I am a bit shocked by Jesus’ response.  Since only one of them came back, Jesus wondered what happened to the other nine lepers whom he had made clean.  I wonder too.  Did they go on to live the healed life?  Did they not realize they were clean and continued to live as lepers?  Did they go to the priest?  Why were they not also moved to worship and to thankfulness?  

I think it was that they didn’t realize that Jesus was God with them?  They believed they were healed by a healer or a prophet or a great teacher.  They had been healed but God remained distant.  It’s like us not necessarily realizing the healing presence of God in medicine.  God is at work in the life of everybody for healing and yet we don’t take time to notice, to turn around and in worship give thanks.  And all the while, we continue on wondering why God has seemingly abdicated.  We don’t see God’s work because we are happier, safer to depersonalize God and keep God at a distance so that we can blame God for all that’s wrong while we ourselves don’t open ourselves to God's presence, don't pray, don’t crack a Bible expecting God to speak, and rather take the route of “self-mindedness.”

Jesus says to the man who came back in worship to thank him, “Get up and go on your way, your faithfulness has made you well.”  “Saved you” is what it says in the Greek.  There is a difference between simply being healed of awfulness and living the new life that God has created in, through, and as Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit  This man’s loyalty to Jesus expressed in his doing what Jesus said and returning in worship to thank him not only removed the “awfulness” of life that he experienced as a leper.  He found himself not just healed, but made alive “New Life” in relationship to God which overflowed with the joyful worshipfulness and thankfulness that comes upon you when you realize you are in the presence and the God who made you and loves you as no one else can.

I know I’m just a voice out in the wilderness.  But, I’m one of those people who has lived with that profound sense of “There’s something wrong with me” that makes me feel different and cut-off from others.  I knew the dark world of addiction and Jesus healed me of it.  Now, my days begin and end with turning to God worshipfully.  I do better when I add thankfulness to that mix.  I’ve tried being mindful, but I prefer being prayful even when praying is screaming at God in lament.  Even then, God makes his presence felt.  He lets us know he hears us and he communicates back, “You are my beloved child and your life is in my hands”.  

Knowing oneself to be a beloved child of God and that your life is in the hands of One who loves you enough to die for you goes a long way in this world of “Awfulness”.  I, like every one of you, would like to see God at this moment step up and be God and do what God does – heal, restore, resurrect – both for me personally and the whole world.  But now is not God’s time to do what he’s going to do.  But rather, now is our time to turn back and be thankful and be mindful not so much of ourselves but more so mindful, open to God’s presence with us.  It is our time to remember how he’s been faithful to us in the past.  It is time for us to give thanks especially for the people he’s put in our lives – spouses, children, family, friends.  It is time for us to turn around, come back to Jesus, and be thankful.  There is nothing that can separate you from the love of God present with you in Jesus.  Amen. 

  

Mustard Seed Faith

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Luke 17:1-10

I suspect that just about all of us have found ourselves staring at difficult days ahead and prayed something like “Lord, I believe.  Help my unbelief.”  We’ve needed to trust that things really are in the good and loving hands of a faithful God.  The diagnosis came.  There’s been an accident.  There’s been a death.  Times come when it becomes brutally clear that our lives are not our own, not in our control and as people of faith we need some assurance.

Well, that’s not quite what’s going on here with the disciples and their outright command to Jesus to increase their faith.  What’s happened is that Jesus had led them to the realization that being his disciples and leading his people was not going to be easy.  Faith and being faithful is a difficult matter.  In Luke’s Gospel in the few chapters prior to this moment, Jesus has been doing an innuendoed compare and contrast between the demands of true faithfulness in his Kingdom and the false faithfulness demanded by those Pharisees.  

To give you a brief recap, within the hearing of the most powerful vein of the religious authorities of the Jewish people, the Pharisees, Jesus has told his disciples that they cannot be slaves to both God and money.  The Pharisees were “money-lovers” and they ridiculed Jesus for saying this.  They were religious authorities who loved the wealth, power, and prestige that they had garnered over God’s people by being the brokers of the people’s relationship to God, the brokers of a “populist religion”.  Being populist meant that they had the power to define and enforce for the nation what good morals and good values were, what it was to be a good citizen.  They were the religious undergirding of the nation. 

Jesus himself was subversive.  He "called" disciples.  He invited people to be students of him and learn his way of life.   He roamed about proclaiming "The Kingdom of God is at hand.  Live accordingly and be faithful to this God-given Good News."  His message of the immediacy of the kingdom backed up by the works of power that he was doing was quite threatening to the powers that be.  The Pharisees, on the other hand, were quite aggressive about making converts to their way of being a faithful Jew.  They also proclaimed a powerful message, a gospel of fear that made converts.  It went: “The Messiah is coming to establish the Kingdom of God and if you want to be a part of his Kingdom and not have happen to you what he’s going to do to the Romans, the tax collectors, and the sinners, then you had better fall in with us.  Obey our interpretation of the Law of Moses to the jot and tittle like we do.  Give handsomely to us because we are the experts and without our judgements and expertise you are lost sheep doomed to damnation.” 

Ask any TV preacher or any big-church or mega-church preacher, there’s money in “populist religion”, which is religious beliefs that strike a chord with the cultural roots of a people and becomes popular.  It is quite lucrative to tell fearful, anxious people how to get and keep an almighty God on their good side.  It’s also easy to be seduced by the power and prestige that comes along with being a broker of “populist religion”.  The problem is that it causes leaders to mislead people into a religion based in magic and superstition rather than faithfulness. 

This is the topic around which we find Jesus in conversation with his disciples in todays’ reading.  Jesus tells his disciples that people will stumble, but woe to those who cause people to stumble as the Pharisees were doing.  The way in Jesus’ Kingdom would not be that of the strict Law observance the Pharisees were demanding.  But rather, in Jesus’ Kingdom it is holding one another accountable to God’s demands of justice, fairness, and above all, unconditional love.  Theirs would be the way of forgiving, which is bearing with and walking with one another in our sins, rather than judging and abandoning one another because of sins.  

In “populist religion” it is very easy to scapegoat and crucify those who challenge your power over people.  But in Jesus’ Kingdom, we have to accept people as persons, as “little ones”, as children of God and in humility serve them (not rule over them) by exercising accountability that leads to repentance and being forgiving, even to those who sin against us personally.  Dress codes and food rules are easy.  Judging and ostracising are easy.  But Jesus’ way is difficult and necessitates faith which is a relationship of profound loyalty to him.  

Jesus’ demands that like slaves we serve others and we do this by bearing with one another in mutual and unconditional love; that we keep one another accountable to a cross-formed way of life, to sacrificial generosity, and unbounded compassion.  We strive to be wealthy in the ways of the Kingdom of Heaven rather than wealthy with money.  The Lord of all creation demands we be forgiving…and need I say it again…forgiving.  These demands are difficult and it is in realization of the enormity of Jesus’ difficult demands of faithfulness rooted in his kind of love that the disciples’ outright order (they’re not asking, they’re ordering) Jesus, “Increase our faith.”

Jesus answered them with a very unusual answer: “If you had faith like a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, “Be uprooted and planted in the sea,” and it would obey you.”  Jesus is not telling them that if they could tap into some sort of power called faith, they could do miraculous things or pray it and really believe you already have what you asked for and God will do it for you. This is the sort of thing that you hear from the preachers and teachers of “populist religion”.  This passage says nothing like that.  It is a very cryptic allegory telling the disciples that they already have the faith that they need to avoid the traps of the “populist religion” of the Pharisees.   Let me run you through this.

First, here is this mornings’ Greek lesson.  This is a conditional sentence meaning should the conditions of the “if” be true, the “then” is true.  In Greek there are several different kinds of conditional sentences to clue us in on meanings that don’t easily come across in a simple literal translation.   The way Jesus words the “if” part here in the Greek language clues us in that the “if” part is indeed true which means that his disciples are indeed able to do what he says in the “then” part.   It should read: “if you had faith like a mustard seed (and it is true that you do), it is a fact that you are right now able to say to this mulberry tree ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea’ and it will indeed obey you.”  Translators leave ambiguity in the sentence for the obvious reasons that mulberry trees don’t do what we command them to because we have some magic power called faith.

Like I said, this statement is an allegory and this means that the mustard seed and the mulberry tree represent something and we need to know what that something is in order to understand what Jesus is saying.  A mustard seed is very small, about the size of a celery seed.  It grows into a very robust plant that can grow just about anywhere.  You can plant fields of it and grow it like a crop or you can let one plant grow and it will grow to the size of a large ornamental tree.  Either way, one tiny mustard seed in the end yields a bazillion more mustard seeds.  The mustard seed is representative of Jesus and the Kingdom of God.  Their faith, their loyalty to Jesus, is part of how that mustard seed grows and becomes the plant.

With respect to the mulberry tree, there is some debate as to whether it is a mulberry tree or a sycamore fig tree that has leaves that look like mulberry leaves.  If it is a true mulberry tree, it is a poor analogy.  If you’ve had a Mulberry tree you know they are messy.  They are quite prolific in the berry department and the berries are quite messy.  In Jesus day they made a black dye out of the juice because it stains so well.  Birds love the berries also and will flock to a mulberry and gorge themselves and poop black poo everywhere.  It’s just a messy tree.  

I think it is more likely to be the sycamore fig tree that Luke is referring to here.  Fig trees were very important in Jesus’ day as a food staple and were everywhere.  Jesus often used the fig tree as a metaphor for Israel as the fruitful people of God.  But the sycamore fig is a different kind of fig.  Its looks are impressive.  It is much larger than the ornamental size fig tree and has a stronger trunk and branches.  They actually grew this tree for its wood rather than its figs because the figs it produced were of less quality.  They referred to its fruit as moria from which we get our word moron which means foolish.  This tree represents the Pharisees and the foolish fruit of their “populist religion”.  It looks like a big sturdy tree but the fruit it produces is inferior.

The meaning of this little allegory that Jesus gives to his disciples is that they have mustard seed faith.  They have Jesus with them in the power of the Holy Spirit and so they are able to keep the demands of the faith.  Yet, they have to be careful and ever mindful of the temptation to the foolish fruit of the “populist religion” that the Pharisees had succumbed to.  If the disciples do as he commands, if they are faithful, if they love and serve as he has loved and served them, if they practise accountability and forgiveness, then the foolishly fruited tree of “populist religion” will indeed be uprooted from among them and planted in the sea.  The disciples do not need their faith increased.  They just need to live according to the faith they have already been given and the kingdom will grow.  Jesus, the mustard seed, in the power of the Holy Spirit will grow in them and through them albeit slowly and according to season.

So it is with us and our small congregations of disciples of Jesus out here in rural Ontario in these days of maybe post-pandemic.  We do not need a magical zap of faith from which some magical gimmick will bring forth miraculous church growth.  We just need to live according to the loyalty that Jesus has given us towards himself, the mustard seed of himself that Jesus has given us, and by the power of Holy Spirit a crop of people who live cross-formed, love of God filled lives that look like Jesus will arise that is distinctly different from that moronic fruit you find in “populist religion”.

And PS, back to the very beginning of the sermon, when those times come when it becomes brutally clear that our lives are not our own, not in our control, and as people of faith we need some assurance that God has not abdicated and that things are in God’s hands, have no doubt that Jesus, the Giver of the mustard seed, is with you.  Through the valley of the shadow of death he is with you and nothing can separate you from the love of God in him.  He loves you very much and will see you through and in those times, it is okay if you doubt or are angry with him and have all those other feelings like anxiety and fear.  He’s with you when the feathers hit the fan and he will let you know that.  Seek him and hold on.  Amen.