Wandering and Enduring

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Luke 21:5-19

         I made a decision this week to avoid being so politically contemporary with this sermon so as to give us a break from the seemingly dystopian reality we live in and its accompanying dysphoria.  So, I’ll ask you to imagine that you live in the ancient Mediterranean world around the time of Jesus on a farm out in the country.  There’s olive trees and vineyards.  You’ve got nothing to do at night except to sit on the same hillside night after night in a toga, eating olives and sipping wine while studying the stars.  The stars in the night sky are just “Wow!” because there’s no light pollution.  Because stargazing is such an integral part of life, you are able to identify bunches of constellations, especially the twelve of the Zodiac.  The stars appear to follow a set course across the sky night after night.  Their positions change with the seasons but their path stays consistent year after year, as if changeless and predetermined.  

At any time of the year, you know what stars and which constellations are supposed to be where…excepting five of them.  Those five are the “Planetes” which means “Wanderers” because they seem to stray from their course through the sky.  They are in the night sky for several months at a time, sometimes at dawn, sometimes at dusk, and sometimes all night long.  Sometimes they disappear altogether for several months.  Sometimes they would even seem to go backwards.  In retrograde it’s called.  They wander.  They stray.  Like true Baptists, they even backslide from time to time. 

The scientists, astrologers to us today, say the Wanderers act like they have minds of their own, like gods, and may even be the embodiment of one of the gods so they named them Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.  When a particular Wanderer is in a particular constellation, it means something.  If a planet is in retrograde while in a particular constellation, that really means something.  Sometimes the Wanders cross in front of each other and sometimes they form a perfect arch across the sky.  They line up.  These are signs.  If you can interpret the signs, then you can know the course of your life, the future.  Thus, you spend night after night gazing at the stars watching for signs.

Being a stargazer, you are a part of a fellowship of scientists (astrologers, magi) with a repository of knowledge reaching back for as long as time itself.  Recently, like in the last 1000-2000 years, stargazers noticed a change in the way the stars were moving in what was believed to be a predetermined, changeless course.  Something happened with the Spring Equinox, the day on which the Northern Hemisphere begins to tilt towards the sun due to its orbit.  For as long as anyone has known, the Equinox progresses across the sky from year to year along a particular trajectory.  On the Equinox, the sun was supposed to rise within or near the constellation of Taurus.  Something has happened in recent memory of the stargazers, in the last 1000-2000 years, that has caused the equinox to change its trajectory and begin to move away from Taurus and towards and eventually into the Constellation of Aries.  What did that sign mean?  The changeless, seemingly predetermined course of the stars in the sky changed.  What did that sign mean?

Today we know that the earth wobbles on its axis so that the angle of the tilt of Earth’s axis changes a few degrees every 26,000 years which changes the way we see the stars in the sky.  That change the ancient stargazers noticed was the moment the earth’s wobble began to wobble back the other way.  As far as its meaning, the ancient stargazers explained it as the beginning of a new Cosmic Age, a shift of power among the relationships of the gods.  It was like the “60’s man and the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.  What’s your sign?”  Many people began to write a mythical story to explain it.  They said that Helios, the god of the Sun, had assassinated Zeus, who was sometimes represented as Taurus the Bull.  He was the most powerful of the gods.  Then Helios ceded power to Aries the Ram, god of the agrarian worker.  It was becoming the Age of the Farmer.  Did this sign mean it was the end of kings and empires and was now the time for the worker to rise to power something we would call a cosmic Marxist Revolution?

There was a cult, a Messianic cult, that rose up within the Roman world coincidental with the coming of Jesus, the Messiah, that attempted to explain this cosmic shift.  As best as can be determined it started in Rome where it was likely invented by a Roman of Persian (Iranian) descent.  It told the story that the god Mithras, a messiah-like soldier rooted in Persian religion, slew the mighty Bull Taurus setting in motion a new age of spirituality.  It was very popular among the Roman military who did their job but were tired of going to war and practising cruelty in the service of insane emperors in the hopes of being made a Roman citizen one day.  (Oops, I’m supposed to be giving the politics a break today.)  

Mithraism, as we call it, is categorized as a Mystery religion in that most of its rituals were secret and it leaned heavily on ecstatic experience.  When someone was initiated into the cult, they were led into a pit which was covered with a large grate.  A bull was then brought over top and sacrificed on the grate so that its blood poured down upon the initiates who then began to speak in tongues or manifest other ecstatic, trance-like behaviours.  Having participated in the slaughtering of Taurus they were now alive in the dawning of a New Age. 

Mithraism was likely Christianity’s most persistent rival until the late 400’s AD.   In its early years, Christianity and Mithraism had things in common.  Secrecy surrounding rituals and ecstatic experience top the list.  The general public believed that Christians by Baptism participated in the death and resurrection of Jesus and were washed in his blood and thereby had entered a new age in Christ by the gift of his Spirit.  People also believed that Christians were cannibals of a sort because they were purported to drink Jesus’ blood and eat his flesh at their “love feasts”.  In worship, particularly among non-Jewish Christian churches, there was a lot of tongue-speaking and prophesying.  These were sort of half-truths and misrepresentations of Christians among the general public because of the secrecy and it often led to persecution.  The followers of Mithras were on the other hand widely accepted.  Jesus was the Lord of a new spiritual Kingdom that was popular among the working class, slaves, and the poor and that was rivaling Caesar and the Imperial Cult.  Mithraism was popular among the soldiers and some political elites.  They both had in common that they were bringing in a new age.

So, looking at Luke for a moment, we pick up with Jesus having just been inside the temple watching hypocrites make elaborate donations.  Then came this widow who gave her last two coins.  No one seemed to care that she had nothing left to live on.  You would agree with me that there was something wrong with that?  They come outside and people start talking about how beautifully adorned the Temple was due to all those lavish donations.  It would have been a greater display of beauty if the people inside would have followed the requirements of the Law and looked after the needs of the widow.  Jesus remarks to them that the day is coming that this sham ends.  Those people in turn ask, “When will this be?  What will be the sign that this is about to take place?”  They believe the God of Israel is supreme among the gods.  For his temple to be destroyed, there’s going to have to be signs in the stars comparable to Taurus the Bull being supplanted by Aries the Ram at the Spring Equinox, a cosmic shift.

Jesus’ answer to them is remarkable, “Be careful that you are not made a wanderer.”  Many imposter messiahs will come claiming to be him, don’t go retrograde after them.  There will be wars and insurrections.  Nations and kingdoms going against each other.  Earthquakes, famines, plagues, terrorisms, even signs in the heavens.  These are all things that people at that time would believe to be indicative of a cosmic upheaval.   Now I’m going to paraphrase a little, he says, “But the end won’t come until you, my followers, have to give account for your loyalty to me.”  They will be persecuted, arrested, put on trial, put to death, betrayed, and hated.  But Jesus will give them what to say and not a hair on their heads will perish meaning they will not suffer an eternal death. 

Jesus’ last words on the matter: “By your endurance you will gain your lives.”  By your endurance you will attain what it is to truly live, the life that will persist into the age that is coming.  You might call it eternal life.  Endurance.  The Greek word there means to stand fast in acts of hope.  It is to live according to the hope of new life in Christ Jesus.  

These days there is a cosmic upheaval occurring so to speak. The Church these days, well, we’ve lost our most favoured status.  We’re being maligned not so much because of Jesus but because the general public assumes that all Christians are like those Wanderers who have allied themselves with corrupted political leaders whom they believe are God-sent and political parties who have co-opted Jesus’ name just so they can abuse power and gain wealth.  But that’s not us.  We will continue to be compassionate, to find ways to better help the poor, the immigrant, the refugee, the marginalized, the grieving, the broken-hearted, the broken of home.  We will continue to find ways to bring healing in our communities.  In the name of Jesus, we will speak the Truth and hold the Wanderers accountable.  We will be known for the way we love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, and with all our strength; and our neighbour as ourselves.  It has been said that at any given time in the history of Christianity, 2/3 of the Church is following heresy.  This is certainly true today.  But we are of the 1/3.  Friends, endure.  Stand strong as beacons of hope.  Amen.

 

Be a Neighbour

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Luke 10:25-37

We find Jesus here in a conversation with a lawyer who is testing him, testing whether Jesus is just some charlatan, wanna-be Messiah/prophet wandering through grifting the people with charismatic teaching and magic healings and stuff.  Jesus wasn’t from around there where that lawyer lived.  He was from away, from the hinterlands of Galilee.  On top of that, Jesus had sent 72 of his disciples out into the communities to prepare the way for him.  They had been proclaiming the arrival of the Kingdom of God just as Jesus had and were doing some of those magic healings themselves.  The countryside was erupting with curious excitement, if not real hope that Jesus truly was the Messiah bringing in the Kingdom of God.  

Yet, Jesus wasn’t from around there.  He was just a-wandering through.  I don’t blame the lawyer for playing protector.  He put Jesus to the test just as Satan did at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry.  “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”  He’s trying to trap Jesus with a loaded question.  But we need to be clear here about what he meant by eternal life.  Eternal life back then would not have meant going to Heaven when you die.  It would have meant life in the Kingdom of God, here on Earth when it comes.  Earthly life that was “filled with the knowing of the Lord as the waters cover the see” to quote Isaiah (Is. 11:9).  

It’s a complicated question he’s asking.  It hits at the heart of what it is to be a Jew living in that Land.  All Jews understood themselves as heirs to the promise God made to Abraham to make Abraham’s descendants into a great nation and to give them that parcel of land on which today the modern state of Israel shares with the Palestinians.  By simply living in the Land of Judea as a nation they were receiving their inheritance, the fulfillment of that promise.  

Yet, since the Babylonian exile in the 500’s BC there was a sense that they could lose their inheritance by not living up to the just, equitable, and peaceful way of life set out to them in the Law of Moses particularly the Ten Commandments.  If they turned from the Law, they would cease to be a blessing to each other and to the nations around them and God would kick them off the Land just as God had done by means of the Babylonians five centuries prior.

The presence of the Romans in the Land put that Promise under jeopardy.  At any moment they could lose their national identity and the Land due revolutionaries who sought to kick the Romans out of the land and secure God’s Promise to the Jewish people by means of violence.  It did not go well for them when twice that happened.  The Romans proved unbeatable in 70 AD during the Jewish-Roman War when due to Jewish revolt the Romans leveled Jerusalem and the Temple and then again in 135 AD, the Bar Kokhba Revolt, which resulted in a large dispersal of the Jewish people from the Land and the Romans changing the name of the Land from the Province of Judea to Syria Palestine.  (The current Israel/Palestine situation has roots going back that far and further.  It’s complicated and war is not the solution.  Loving the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and your neighbour as yourself likely is.)

This lawyer here is testing to see if Jesus is trying to lead a revolt and he’s asking Jesus in a tricky, somewhat coded way, “Are you leading a revolt that’s going to get rid of the Romans and establish the Kingdom”; i.e., return national sovereignty in the Land to the Jews.  If that’s what you’re doing Jesus, how do I get to be a part of that?”  Remember inheriting eternal life here does not mean going to heaven when we die.  It’s life in the Kingdom of God come here to earth, life here on earth filled with the peace of the presence of God.

Jesus gives an interesting answer.  He puts the question back on the lawyer.  He makes the Lawyer deal with the reason why centuries before God kicked the Jews off the Land and sent them to captivity in Babylon.  “What does the Law tell you to do?” Jesus pushes back.  The lawyer answers with what is basically the equivalent of the Apostle’s Creed for the Jewish faith at the time, the Schema.  Schema means “hear”.  It goes: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is your God, the Lord alone.  You shall love the Lord your God with all heart, and with all soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind.”  And, he also tags on to the Creed another commandment from Leviticus, “and your neighbour as yourself.”  “You’ve answered well.”  Jesus says.  “Do this and you will live.”

I guess something must have hit the lawyer when he heard himself say The Creed, the Schema, because for some reason he felt the need to justify himself.  I’m guessing he was having a bit of trouble with the requirement to love God, self, and neighbour and I’m guessing that the part he was having the most trouble with had to do with loving the neighbour.  He asks: “And who is my neighbour?”  

Well, I did a little research on who was considered to be a neighbour according to Israelite Law and I was surprised.  A neighbour is anyone, Jew or non-Jew, who lives in your community.  Strangers or aliens, people who moved to Judea and settled there were your neighbours too; even if they didn’t worship the God of Israel.  Under that definition, the Romans, particularly the soldiers, who were there occupying the land and bullying the Jews, they were neighbours too.  Therefore, the Law required the Jews to love them unconditionally (agape love) as they would another Jew.  Interestingly, the only category of person not considered a neighbour was the person who was just passing through, you know, kind of like what Jesus was doing.  You need to settle down in the Land if you’re going to be considered a neighbour.  

Jesus answers that question with the Parable of the Good Samaritan.  We’re all very familiar with that story.  The point of the parable isn’t to define who a neighbour is but rather to ask, "What kind of a neighbour are you?"  There’s loads of irony in the parable.  The Samaritan who was just passing through who did not fit the Law’s definition of a neighbour proved to be the better neighbour to the wounded Jew because he showed mercy.  He showed mercy to one who was his nemesis by blood and by history.  The priest and the Levite were legally neighbours to the wounded man but they were so concerned about keeping the Laws that pertained to being made ritually unclean by touching a corpse, that they didn’t even go see if the man was all dead, or just mostly dead.  That’s not neighbourly.  Our lawyer here would have been allied to them by professional association.  

Showing extravagant mercy even to your enemy defines what it is to be a neighbour whom you must agape love, unconditionally love, just as you would yourself, just as you would love God.  Showing mercy like that is a taste of Eternal life, life in the Kingdom when it finally comes to earth.  I suspect that our Lawyer by now recognizes that Jesus is not a charlatan revolutionary cult leader trying to start an armed uprising to bring in a violent false imitation of God’s Kingdom by attempting to overthrow the Romans.  The way this wandering Messiah prophet made this lawyer own his own baggage, well…there just might be life found in following this Jesus.

Well, here we are on Remembrance Sunday remembering those who made the ultimate sacrifice to free the world from autocrats who sought to be kings and we do so in a world that is still plagued with war and autocrats seeking to be king of the world.  This sermon may have brought your minds to the current conflict in Israel/Palestine.  There are two peoples there who have historic claim to the land.  By definition of the Law, they are neighbours.  They are neighbours!  Ghettoizing and attempting to exterminate your neighbour do not fit the biblical definition of being neighbourly nor does marauding and terrorizing your oppressor.  In fact, these horrific acts only demonstrate a lack of love for self and especially a lack of love for the Lord their God who is indeed God alone.  In fact, if we look at historical precedence, it is reason for God to cast them both off of his Land.  But there are a lot of innocent people there, families with children just trying to live, just like us, but whose lives are being destroyed by men who would be king.  

I was in Israel in May of 1995.  Yitzhak Rabin was the Israeli Prime minister and Yasser Arafat was leader of the Palestinian people.  It was peaceful then because those two men had begun to see each other as neighbours, indeed more than neighbours, family.  They ate in each other’s homes, played on the floor with each other’s grandchildren.  November 4, 1995 Rabin was assassinated by a Zionist settler who didn’t want peace, who just wanted the land, and then hawkish men, the current Prime Minister among them, took over and returned to oppressive ways.  The Palestinians lost hope and returned to terrorism.  There’s been a peace plan for decades but there will be no peace until they accept each other as neighbours and love one another.  Then they will live.  So also us.  Be a neighbour.   Amen.

 

 

What Is Enough?

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Luke 19:1-10

         These days it’s hard for me to read this story of Zacchaeus, that wee little man, and not think about…billionaires.  I have to admit I am very prejudiced against billionaires.  There may be some of them out there that are really nice people.  In the news, the governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker, weighing in at 3.9 billion, seems alright but that’s just on TV and by juxtaposition to a certain other billionaire.  That other?  According to Forbes, the current US president’s net worth has gone up 3 billion since being elected to his second term November 6, 2024.  There are laws down there that require elected federal officials, especially presidents, to take a hiatus from amassing private wealth during office to keep from appearing to be using the power of the office for personal gain.  I don’t care to know how much the net worth went up of the other top American billionaires who stood behind him at his inauguration.  Since that change in the American presidency, my grocery bill along with the cost of everything else except for gasoline here in Canada has gone up because of his economic policies.  It’s worse in the States.  

I’m sorry but I’m going to rant.  Considering that corruption is usually the result when wealth and political power intermingle…need I say more.  I will.  I guess the history of the Robber Barons from the late 1800’s and early 1900’s has been written out of the high school textbooks.  Have people forgotten what Carnegie, the Vanderbilt’s, the Rockefeller’s, the Huntington’s, the Dixon’s, etc. did to the average worker particularly in Appalachia.  They pillaged the region and that’s an understatement because I don’t want to use the “r” word.  Anyone who would vote for a billionaire for public office is not a good student of human nature nor of the historical relationship between wealth and political power.  It’s bad enough that billionaires buy off politicians for political and economic favours, but to put one in office.  Moreover, shouldn’t we be concerned about people who own or run multinational corporations holding positions of power in national governments.  I apologize for the rant and I hope I don’t lose any friends over this one, but seriously.

There are roughly 3,028 (according to Forbes) billionaires in the world today.  247 more than there were in 2024.  That’s 8% growth in one year.  8 of the top 10 billionaires are American.  There are 902 billionaires in the US.  89 more than last year; 10% growth since this president took office.  (Oh, that Big, Beautiful Bill.)  China has half as many coming in at 450, 44 more than last year; 10% again.  Russia with its war economy is ranked fifth in the world with 140, up twenty from last year; 14%.  Oligarchies are quite lucrative for the billionaires especially when there’s war involved. We have to wonder about Germany sitting at #4 with 171 of them, 20 more than last year, 12% more.  Canada has 76, nine more than last year, also 12% more.  The rich keep getting richer.

What about everybody else?  Globally, there are roughly 3.63 billion people earning an income among the 8.23 billion global population.  Only 3,028 of those workers are billionaires.  50% of those workers earn only 8% of global income averaging US$6.85/day(@$2,500/year) and own 0% of the world’s wealth.  The top 10% (@360M people) earn 52% of global income.  Realizing a difference between income and wealth, the wealthiest 1% inclusive of billionaires own 47.5% of the world’s wealth.  That’s from The World Inequality Report 2022.  I suspect it’s worse now.  Moreover, a year and a half of a global Pandemic made for a sharp little spike in billionaire assets; i.e., they took advantage of us when we were sick.  

Here in Canada by global standards we are doing pretty good; 24^th overall in average gross individual income.  The Canadian average gross individual income is around $54,000, but how many people do you know actually make that?  Take the rich people and an equal number of poor out of the equation and you get somewhere in the low $20k range for mean individual income. 

Realizing that I’m "numbering" you into dullness, here's a normal life picture. My income which is made public every year in our annual reports…it’s pretty good for someone working in the non-profit sector.  But, it is not enough in today’s world to support a family of four without taking on considerable and likely unpayable debt.  A second income in the household is necessary.  For this reason, finding ministers to serve in rural Canada is near to impossible.  It’s just enough for a single person with no dependents to be fed and housed and have a little extra once any education loans are paid…and the education is required for the job.  For the average Jill and Joe with a couple of kids, they now need a third income.  That third household income became necessary in the last 9 months in the midst of a shrinking jobs market…all the while them billionaires are giving each other jet planes.

I think I need to distract myself for a moment because my blood is beginning to boil, so let me talk about Zacchaeus for a minute.  Zacchaeus was a Jew who collected taxes for the Romans who were militarily occupying what they called the Province of Judaea.  The larger Jewish community would have viewed him as a traitor only partly because he was employed by and for the Roman occupiers.  The real hatred for tax collectors stemmed from the hard cold fact that nearly all of them used their post to extort money from Jewish the people.  They were notorious for corruption.  There was the Roman tax which was difficult for the average working Jill and Joe to pay and then there was what the tax collector padded on for himself.  If you were a Galilean fisherman living from catch to catch and had a bad catch or got skunked completely one day, to keep from falling behind on what you owe the taxman you had to go fishing on Friday night, the Sabbath, in the dark hoping not to get caught by the religious authorities who would fine you for working on the Sabbath.  If you’re a typical farmer and have a bad season... welcome to debt slavery.  The corruption of tax on top of tax had everybody hurting except for the tax collectors who were rolling in the dough.

But Zacchaeus, he was apparently different.  He claims to have not extorted wealth (maybe, it's kind of vague) and…he’s inexplicably drawn to Jesus.  A usual tax collector would have shamelessly extorted the people and wouldn’t have cared less about a wandering prophet who was a friend to the poor.  A usual tax collector would have been looking for a way to extort Jesus too.  But not Zacchaeus as far as we can tell.  He was just a Jewish employee of the Romans…and inexplicably drawn to Jesus.  

Well, Jesus came to town.  Zacchaeus, being a wee little man, humiliated himself by climbing a tree to see Jesus.  A usual tax collector would have had his thugs clear the crowd away.  Then, to everybody’s surprise, Jesus for some reason sought Zacchaeus out and informed him that he would be eating at Zacchaeus’ house that day. 

The crowds, sharing my sentiment for billionaires, were put out by this.  Zacchaeus was a “sinner”, a man steeped in the ways of the world as opposed to being true to his Jewish lineage, a betrayer.  The crowd let Jesus know it too.  Like good Israelites they grumbled.  Jesus belonged to them not to the likes of that tax collector, that “Sinner”.  When you’ve got a crowd of “sinners” calling you a “sinner”, well that kind of makes you a “sinner’s sinner”, the walking damned.  2,000 years later we’re fairly accustomed to Jesus being a friend to tax collectors and sinners but rather hard on judgemental, hypocritical religious types.  But, how surprised would we be if Jesus got himself invited to a feast at the White House ballroom? 

Well, I wish Jesus would and I wish the billionaires would respond like Zacchaeus did in response to Jesus' befriending him.  Zacchaeus came on down from the tree and was joyed to welcome Jesus.  Joy!  But then, Zacchaeus, that wee little man, hears the grumbling of the crowds at what he had become being a tax collector.  The Truth at what he had been doing with the life God had given him.  He didn’t do what billionaires do when people try to hold them accountable.  He didn’t belittle them, call them stupid with low IQs, or seek retribution by suing them for defamation.  No.  He immediately gave a third of his personal wealth to the poor and promised to repay fourfold anyone he may have extorted.  He made restitution rather than sought retribution.  We have to wonder what it would be like if billionaires instead of hoarding wealth in extravagance, shared it with the rest of the world who don’t have a livable income and no means of generating wealth.  Reality is that it takes millions of very poor people to make one very rich person.  Whether we mean for that to happen or not, it does; but… it’s reversible, you know.  

Notice what Jesus calls salvation here.  It’s not that Zacchaeus made the right decision about Jesus and now he’s going to Heaven when he dies.  That’s not mentioned anywhere here.  Salvation is that Zacchaeus, the betrayer of God’s people, is restored to being a child of Abraham by climbing down out of that figurative tree of ultra-wealth and restoring to his people, God’s people, what he had taken.  In Jesus’ Kingdom, salvation looks like wealth shared rather than this game of accruing more and more and more of it.  There needs to be a point where enough is enough.  There’s nothing wrong with having some wealth as long as everybody has the opportunity to acquire wealth.  One person having more than enough wealth robs a multitude of others from it.  

If there was a role for the church could play in this, it would be to be more specific on wealth.  It is not enough to simply talk about greed and stewardship.  The Christian Church should be saying things like it is immoral to have an annual individual income of more than $115,000 and unethical not to give the excess to create means to wealth for those who do not have it.  That means doing things drastically different than how Capitalism does it.  At the very least, we in the church need to be thinking about and addressing in practical ways what is enough and what we should do when we have more than enough.  Just saying.  Amen.