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.

 

At the Heart of the Matter

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Luke 18:9-14

Recently, I saw a meme posted on Facebook which simply read, “Saying Jesus died for me is manipulative.”  The meme also included one of the comments in response to it which read, “To say he rose from the dead is gaslighting.”  That meme pushed a button with me but not because of the antichristian overtones.  Disagreement with or denial of the Christian doctrine of Penal Substitution (in a courtroom drama, Jesus, the innocent one, took humanity’s deserved penalty of death and damnation unto himself and died once and for all earning us an acquittal and enabling reconciliation with God) or, if you don’t like the courtroom imagery, just plain Substitutionary Atonement will do (Jesus’s death was in Humanity’s place for more reason than just moral infractions for which we deserve to be punished),…disagreement and denial of those biblical metaphors which attempt to explain Jesus’ death is nothing new nor is denying his resurrection.  That wasn’t what pushed the button.  I wear big boy pull-up pants these days and I can handle it when someone disagrees with my Jesus-centered understanding of reality.  

What pushed my button was just how loosely if not inappropriately terms which can be classified as “Therapy Speak” get thrown around these days.  Manipulation and gaslighting are terms that come to us from the world of psychotherapy and are particularly associated with the behaviours of narcissistic personality disorder.  We all know how roughly 10 years ago narcissistic personality disorder and the behaviours associated with it (so also the kindred diagnoses of sociopathy and psychopathy) hit the world stage with an unbelievably huge impact as people were trying to come to grips with the behaviour of a certain world leader.  Still today, we can rest assured that whenever certain political figures open their mouths we’re being manipulated and gaslighted.  Regardless, the aftermath of that sort of armchair psychologizing working its way through the news media and social media is that two people can’t have a disagreement anymore without somebody getting offended and somebody getting called a narcissist and somebody getting accused of manipulation and gaslighting just because their narratives differ around the same body of facts (whatever a fact is anymore).  When we accuse somebody of manipulation or gaslighting when that is not the case and we’re just having a disagreement, it only serves to shut down the conversation.  We need to leave the Therapy Speak to the therapists and hope to God they know what they’re doing with them.  Unfortunately, the world of therapy has its vogue pop-culture too.

In thinking about a possible response to the meme I could, in Pharisaical manner, very easily with a high degree of certainty at least as far as I am concerned look down my nose and accuse the meme and the sharers thereof of manipulating and gaslighting me for trying to convince me that my spiritual experience is a figment of my imagination that I use to get people to do what I want them to do.  I could say they have offended me and traumatized me because I have since been having ruminating thoughts because of the meme. After all, I’m writing a sermon about it.  No. I won’t play Pharisee and look down my nose and act all offended that somehow my rights have been violated by someone who sees things differently from me.  I also won’t mask  some sort of condescending, self-righteous rage at “people like them” behind a passive aggressive question in the comment section such as, “Doesn’t it bother you that you’re going to Hell?”  No, I won’t respond like that.  To me and many like me, Jesus’ resurrection and New Life in him by the gift of the Holy Spirit are as real and felt as are death and shame and guilt and suffering.  I can’t fault someone for not having the experiences that I have had in life.

Actually, I’m going to agree with the meme and the person who posted it as far as I can without denying the Truth of the substitutionary nature of Jesus’ death.  I know the person who posted it and I care greatly for that person.  I know where this person is coming from and it’s important to note that this posting came about in the wake of the murder of Charlie Kirk when American Christian Nationalists and people on the left were having a bit of a tit for tat to put it mildly.  I have some empathy for this person and this person’s views.  I will agree that a certain element of the Christian church truly has been manipulative with Jesus’ death, trying to coerce conversions out of people by guilting and shaming them with the big club of Jesus dying for them.  That big club becomes a battle axe when a person is further told that they aren’t a real believer in Jesus unless they are (and these days the list is) anti-immigrant, anti-Trans, anti-science, anti-climate change, anti-higher education, anti-abortion, anti-vax, pro-US, pro-Israel, and pro-Trump.  That arm of Christianity needs to see through its own delusion and realize they are causing “little ones” who belong to Christ to fall away.  As far as the meme goes, I will agree that Jesus’ death has been and continues to be used  by some to manipulate people, but I won’t throw the baby out with the bathwater and say that Jesus’ death was not in some wonderful way for me, for humanity…actually for the whole creation.

So, how would I respond to the meme if were to ever be able to get beyond the trauma of being called a manipulative gaslighter?  I would ask questions that sound a lot like those condescending “rhetorical questions” that people ask and then say you don’t have to answer.  I would start with “What if it’s true that Jesus died for us?”  What if it’s true that there is something so utterly wrong within the human condition that only God can heal it by becoming human, dying, and being raised from the dead?  

Seriously, what is wrong with humanity?  We suffer alienation from one another and from God.  We hide in shame.  We so often do violence to one another even if it is just a little lying to cover our asses.  We all have nasty little secrets we don’t want anybody to know (but isn’t great when we can trust another person enough to get that shit off our chests and then find ourselves still loved and accepted?). We’re all narcissistic to varying extents.  We’re all addicted to something.  We all do selfish stuff that hurts the weak and vulnerable and especially the people we love.  And, do I even need to mention the things we should have done but didn’t for lack of courage or fear of embarrassment.  This disease of the human mind is so profound and extensive that the whole creation suffers because of us.  As remarkable as we human beings are, we become a deadly virus everywhere we go.

What if the only way for a loving God to heal humanity of this disease is to become one of us as Jesus of Nazareth and thereby infuse God’s very life to humanity and not just humans but even literal physical matter not just the something nebulous called “spiritual” stuff.  And, not just infuse himself and his life into us, but he took human being, including this disease, into Godself, let it run its course in him, and then died with it, and that’s not the end.  Jesus rose from death, healed of the disease, with a new life to share and we discover it in following Jesus in his way of life marked by unconditional love, forgiveness, compassion, hospitality, generosity, and dying to self (which is antithetical to the pursuit of self-fulfillment, self-aggrandizement).  In following him that seed of new life, the Holy Spirit, begins to grow.  What if it is true?

I look at the world around me these days through the lens of this parable.  I see what appears to be just about everybody, myself included, self-righteously pointing the finger at everybody else while claiming to be right and thanking the god they’ve created in their own image that they ain’t like “those people”.  I really don’t see anybody hiding in the corner, sick to death of the way they are and the way they have hurt and taken advantage of others be they friend, family, or foe.  To be frank, we are all at heart tax collectors running around thinking everybody owes us something when in fact we each are the biggest debtors of all…broken, hurting, hiding.

This tax collector for some reason realizes that the cure for his diseased mind, soul, and body is that only God can do something about it.  It’s very interesting what he asks of God…and here comes a Greek lesson.  This tax collector’s prayer is mistranslated in every translation.  In the Greek text, he is not asking for mercy.  The word for mercy, eleos, is not there.  It would be fitting if it was.  That word is from the same word family as the words for olive and olive oil, which they used for a healing balm.  If that word was there, a beautiful translation of the prayer would be, “God, be a healing balm for me, a sinner.”  But that’s not what he is asking.

The word that is there is hilasterion, which means a sacrifice of expiation.  In the world of sacrifices, there were two kinds that the ancient world did to make things right with God, propitiation and expiation.  The driving thought pattern was: “I’m a sinner.  If I come into God’s holy presence, I will deservedly die.”  Propitiation, which the Israelites did not practice, was sacrificing an animal in your place to get God’s favour.  Expiation was a person transferring their sin to an animal usually by touching it.  The animal was then sacrificed, putting the sin to death.  This is similar to a poultice drawing infection from a wound.

This prayer is audacious.  It literally reads, “God, be yourself the sacrifice of expiation for me, a sinner.”  The tax collector realizes the extent of his sin is so great that a simple animal sacrifice of expiation won’t do it.  A human sacrifice would be evil and no cure at all.  He can’t fix it with his own death.  Everybody dies and we will all face God.  His sins, our sins, are so great his only hope for the healing of his diseased mind and being reconciled to God and to those whom he has hurt is for God himself to become the sacrifice of expiation for him.  

It may sound like ridiculous metaphysics, but that is why Jesus, God the Son, in love died on the cross for each of us.  There is healing for humanity in Jesus in the Holy Spirit-filled New Life he has to give.  It is time we check our self-righteous pride at the door and come to grips with how great a debtor we each are.  Jesus paid that debt.  Maybe we ought to give him a chance.  Amen. 

Cry Out...God Hears!

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Luke 18:1-8

Being a widow in Jesus’ day was no cake walk.  Because they were women, widows had no inheritance rights.  If they had sons, the husband’s estate was passed onto the sons.  This was the widow’s best bet for she would go along with the estate and live with the son.  If she had no son’s the husband’s estate including her would be passed onto the closest male kin.  Usually, the estate was taken but the wife rejected.  This left the widow suddenly without resource and often without recourse.  Moreover, there was a religious superstition shrouding widows.  Some believed that if a woman’s husband died before he was old, then he was being punished by God for some unknown sin and thus the punishment should be passed on to his widow as well.  This often led to the ill-treatment and exploitation of widows.  Begging was often the only recourse for a widow.

Regardless of what God’s people did to widows, God himself had great concern for their plight.  Isaiah quotes the Lord bluntly saying that he will bring vengeance on those who abuse the orphan and widowed, “See how the faithful city has become a harlot! She once was full of justice; righteousness used to dwell in her-- but now murderers!  Your silver has become dross; your choice wine is diluted with water.  Your rulers are rebels, companions of thieves; they all love bribes and chase after gifts. They do not defend the cause of the fatherless; the widow's case does not come before them.  Therefore, the Lord, the LORD Almighty, the Mighty One of Israel, declares: “Ah, I will get relief from my foes and avenge myself on my enemies.  I will turn my hand against you; I will thoroughly purge away your dross and remove all your impurities’” (1:21-25).  (This is a very relevant passage these days as certain governments have removed international aid to poor countries where widows and orphans make up the majority of the population.  Estimates of 300,000 or more deaths will likely result from this action.  Not to mention the removal of funding for affordable health care and other benefits such as school lunch programs and education assistance from the poor in their own country.  According to Isaiah, God will seek vengeance on these governments.)

Those prophetic words set the stage for Jesus' parable here in Luke's Gospel in which he uses a widow’s persistent pleading to a wicked judge to grant her justice against her enemy as an analogy for his disciples to pray continually and not to give up.  The parable immediately follows Jesus giving to his disciples a rather cryptic description of his death and then his second coming and he paints a picture of the time between the two being a difficult time which will certainly test their faith.  The parable seeks to say that the disciples’ prayers and their relationship to the Trinity may seem like this exploited widow who has to continually pester an unrighteous, uncaring judge as the only means for her to receive justice against her enemy.  But God the Father isn’t like that.  He does indeed care for his chosen ones and will speedily work justice for them against their enemies.   

God hears us when we cry out and does indeed work in our lives to put things to right for us, but it often takes time, quite a lot of time.  The image that the New Testament Greek implies is that God doesn’t just make a decree and wave his hand and it’s done.  There must be time for consequences to play out.  People must take responsibility for their actions.  Therefore, we are to pray continually while we wait and not give up on the God in whom we abide.

For further definition of what it is to pray I took a tour of the word “prayer” through Luke’s Gospel to see what sort of thing the people in Luke’s world prayed for and how they prayed.  Since Jesus tells us to pray continually, I think it would help to know what sorts of things we should occupy our prayers with and how and why.  Luke’s first mention of prayer is when Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, went into the Holy of Holies in the temple to do his priestly duties while people stood outside praying for him and the efficacy of his work.  While in there, an angel appeared and told him that his barren wife, Elizabeth, would bear a child (1:10).  This shows a correlation between the people of God praying before and during worship so that those who lead worship will hear a message about what God is really doing in the life of his people.  

Next, after Jesus was baptized by John, he stood there in the water praying and Luke says heaven was opened and we catch a glimpse of God, the Trinity – Jesus the Son in the water, the Spirit descending as a dove, and the Father saying this is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased (3:21-22).  Here we see a correlation between prayer and knowing that in Christ through the abiding of the Holy Spirit, the Father does indeed claim us as his own beloved children.  God the Father loves us as he loves his only begotten Son, Jesus, as we have a familial bond with him because the Holy Spirit has come to dwell in us.

Next, we discover that Jesus often slipped away to wilderness places (5:16) and up onto mountains to pray.  One night Jesus spent a whole night on a mountain praying and when he came down, he chose the twelve disciples (6:12).  Another time Jesus was praying alone with his disciples nearby and he asked them who the crowds said he was.  In the conversation Peter makes the confession of faith that Jesus was the Messiah from God (9:18).  Thus, we see here that there is a correlation between prayer and knowing one’s calling and who it is who calls us.  

Another mountaintop experience was when Jesus took Peter, James, and John up a mountain with him and while he was praying, they saw him transfigured in shining white standing with Moses and Elijah.  Immediately, we have another Trinitarian revelation.  A cloud (the Holy Spirit) enveloped them and God the Father spoke to them saying that Jesus was his Son whom he had chosen and they should listen to him (9:28).  Thus, there is a huge correlation between prayer and knowing who Jesus is and what he has come to do for all humanity and even you and me as individuals and once again we see that prayer is a Trinitarian experience with Christ in the Holy Spirit before the Father.

            What does Jesus say we should pray for?  In the first instance he says “Pray for your enemies” (6:28).  Once while Jesus was praying his disciples saw him and came and asked him to teach them how to pray and he taught them the Lord’s prayer.  “Father, in heaven hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come.  May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.  Give us each day our daily bread.  And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. And do not bring us to the time of trial, but deliver us from the evil one."  This is a good prayer to try to discipline yourself to pray continually.  Another thing to notice here is that when people see us praying it just might happen that they become inspired to pray and want to learn how to pray.  In our passage today Jesus tells us to pray always crying out for the Trinity to work justice for us against our enemies (18:10).  

Next Jesus talks of attitude in prayer.  In the passage immediately following this morning’s reading, Jesus condemns the prayer of the self-righteous where we thank the Trinity for how great we are and how good we have it and reminding him of all the good we do and so forth.  Have you ever prayed saying “God I’ve done this and that and this for you and I try to be the best that I can be.  Could you please do this for me?”  That’s praying on our merits of which we really have none.  Rather, Jesus tells us to pray the tax collector’s prayer of humble desperation, “God be merciful to me, a sinner.”  Actually, in the Greek it says, “God, be for me, a sinner, a sacrifice that removes my sin.”  If we get used to praying like that continually we find that the rest of our lives truly do begin to fall into place.  In the Eastern Orthodox traditions that have what they call the “Jesus Prayer” that they continually recite.  It goes, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.” 

Finally, when Jesus entered into the Garden of Gethsemane with Peter, James, and John, he instructed them to pray so that they would not fall into temptation and they joined with Jesus in his prayers.  To repeat, they joined with Jesus in his prayers.  They fell asleep albeit, but they joined with him in his prayers.  Did you know your prayers are never separate from the prayers of Jesus who stands continually before the Father praying for us?  His prayers become our prayers and our prayers become his.  

To wrap all this up, and emphasize a main point for you, Jesus tells us to pray continually and not give up because it is primarily in prayer that we meet Jesus in the Holy Spirit and in him we share his prayer life before God the Father.  People who pray a lot have a deeper sense of who God is as Trinity, who Jesus is and what he’s done for us.  It takes prayer to know God.  Without it we simply won’t come to know the living God whom we claim to serve.  So, pray continually and don’t give up.  Cry out for God the Father hears as he hears Jesus' own prayers.  Amen.

The Cure for Awful

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Luke 17:11-19

With it being Thanksgiving it’s a given that I’m supposed to talk about being thankful or gratitude as it’s called in theological circles.  Being thankful is good for us.  That attitude of gratitude can conquer a world of troubles.  I’m reasonably sure there would be no problems in this world such as war, poverty, abuse, crime, racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, etc., if we were predisposed to pondering on our blessings and feeling thankful most of the time.  Our mental and physical health would be so much better as well.  With gratitude being so good for us, why is it so hard to be grateful?  Why does being thankful have to be something we have to stop ourselves and take the time to count our blessings?  It doesn’t seem to come natural to us.  It takes effort.  

On the other hand, what does seem to come natural to us is feeling awful.  Oddly, we have forgotten that the basic meaning of the word awful is “to be filled with awe”, with reverence, worshipful.  We should be filled with awe.  But due to humanity’s sin-diseased nature, we twist the meaning of feeling awful to feeling absolutely terrible.  Feeling awful includes a lot of not good feelings – shame, guilt, dysphoria, anxiety, anger, bitterness, loathsome, lonesome, unlovable, covetous, greedy – I could go one.  We’ve all had our share of feeling awful. 

Let me tell you about someone who felt awful but found the cure - this here leper. Life as a leper in Bible times was horrible and it’s not so great now either.  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 and smell like the walking dead.  Skin lesions, rotting extremities, pale flaky skin, facial features deforming – a person literally looked like death.  And so, people back then believed the disease was a curse on a person for secret sins and so lepers were regarded as being bad people, cursed by God.  Since they looked and smelled like death, they were not allowed to come to the Temple to be in the presence of the God who gives life.  Since people believed the disease was contagious, they made lepers live away from people and usually in small colonies that smelt worse than a duffle bag full of hockey gear.  There was a religious term for the state of being cut-off from the presence of God and from other people – unclean – and being unclean meant they were untouchable because uncleanness could be passed on.  So, people shunned and shamed them and they felt ashamed - awful.

Well, Jesus 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, 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 them 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.  Get on with living.

So, as they took those first few steps of getting on with living 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, by doing as he asked, they were healed.  There was no longer any reason for them to feel shame or to 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 in worship and began to thank him.  In those first few steps of faithfulness to Jesus, this leper found his awfulness transformed into worshipfulness and thankfulness.  So, he turned around to “God”, to Jesus, to go back and give thanks.  In his encounter with Jesus, he discovered that there is a God who does care about him and that there was nothing, not even the death-resembling disease of leprosy, that could separate him from God’s love and healing mercy that can be found in Jesus and his way of life.  

Coming into the present, 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 you think will make you happy – be self-minded.  Being self-aware and self-accepting are good because those qualities help us with relationships, but being self-minded tends to backfire with leaving a lot of hurt people in your wake

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, everybody, and little ole me too.  God loves us each and actually can heal our overwhelming feelings of awfulness.  Turning to Jesus and being worshipful (awestruck) and thankful is crucial to wellness for us human beings whom God created to enjoy Him, and life, and each other, and even ourselves.  

When I hear what happens next in our reading, I am a bit shocked.  Only one of them came back, Jesus seemed shocked too.  What happened to the other nine lepers.  Did they go on to live that 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?  We’re left hanging.  For some reason, they weren’t moved to worshipfulness and thankfulness as this leper…but hey, such are we most times we’re healed of something.

Jesus says to the man who came back to worship and 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 by faithfulness in his beginning to do what Jesus said led to his being restored which led to his worshipfully returning to thank Jesus.  Jesus had not only removed the “awfulness” of life that the man experienced as a leper, he saved him, made him whole.  He wasn’t just healed, but more so made alive with the “New Life” we find in relationship to God which can’t help but overflow with the joyful worshipfulness and thankfulness that comes upon us when we realize we are in the presence of the God who made us, loves us as no one else can, and who saves us.

To close, AA has a catchphrase that you often hear people say when telling their story.  It goes “I got sick and tired of being sick and tired.”  Similarly, if you’re sick and tired of being awful, come to Jesus and he will lead you to feel worshipful and thankful; filled with awe at the awesomeness of God.  Amen. 

 

Just Believe?

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Luke 17:1-10

Back in 1985 when I came to faith…let me quantify that statement.  I had been raised in and around the church.  I believed in God.  I believed Jesus died for my sins.  I believed in forgiveness and Heaven and Hell.  I believed that you had to be a good, moral person and that good, moral people went to church.  I also believed that the US was specially blessed by God to bring peace and order to the world (I lost that one in university.).  I believed all that stuff you’re supposed to believe if you’re a Christian in the US.  I lived in the Bible Belt of the Southern US.  Those beliefs were so much a part of that culture that even if you didn’t believe them, you still knew you were supposed to.  If you just believed these things, you were on God’s good side.  

But there was something missing from that blessed magical formula. What I hadn’t come to believe, was that God was really with me, that Jesus was with me and that by the power and presence of the Holy Spirit I could hear and follow him.  In the wee hours of the morning on January 1, 1985 I gave my life to Jesus.  I entered into servitude to him.  I had to seek to know him and to listen for what he wanted me to do throughout this life he has given me and then do it.  That is a markedly different approach to life than just doing what I wanted to do hoping God would bless me for being good and believing the right stuff about him.

So anyway, back in 1985 when I came to faith, TV preaching was in its heyday.  The most prevalent message among the TV ministries seemed to be what was called the Health and Wealth Gospel, or the Name it and Claim It Gospel, or simply the Prosperity Gospel.  Its basic tenet was that Jesus didn’t want his disciples to be sick and poor.  You just have to believe that and claim it for yourself in Jesus’ name and you would have good health and become wealthy.  If you wanted that fry cook job at Burger King you had to say “Fry cook job at Burger King, I claim you as mine in Jesus Name”, then wait for the phone call.  If you were just scraping by, just give money to a TV ministry and what you gave would be returned to you 60, 80, or 100 times as much, so they promised. If you got sick and didn’t get better or didn’t get the job or your gift was returned multiplied, it’s because you didn’t have enough faith.  You wavered.  You doubted.  And so, you needed to ask the Lord to increase your faith.  To those TV folks, faith was a magic power that could be annulled by doubt.  The more you believed, the more you would receive.  Just believe!?

Well, the question for this morning is what did the disciples mean when they asked Jesus to increase their faith.  If we take the passage out of its context, it very nicely fits into the “faith as magic power” school of thought.  It sounds like if you remove all doubt from yourself, you could be like a Jedi warrior in the Star Wars movies and make a tree uproot and go jump in the ocean.  I will admit that in the Greek world and language the word we translate as faith sometimes did get used that way.  Regardless, if we put the disciples' request in the context of what has happened in the previous chapters in Luke’s Gospel, they are not asking for magical power.

They also are not asking for the ability to believe the right things about God and Jesus.  Just like I was raised to believe there is a God, and Jesus died for my sins, and all that, they aren’t asking for Jesus to help them believe all the more what Jews in their day were supposed to believe.  So, what were they asking for?

I hate to tell you this, but I am reasonably sure that we are reading our modern definitions of faith into this passage.  We hear it as if the disciples were asking Jesus to make it so they had less doubt and more trust in him.  Faith means more than just belief and trust as opposed to doubt.  Faith is loyalty, devotion expressed through the fulfilment of obligations.  The weight of its meaning falls more towards what we would call faithfulness not just faith.  Just as love is not love until we do love, so faith is not faith until we do faithfulness.

Moreover, I am inclined to say that “increase” is not the right word.  The Greek word simply means “add to”.  So, “Lord, add to our faithfulness.”  Were they asking for more faith to be added to what they already had or were they asking for something else?  I think they were asking for something else; for more obligation through which to show their loyalty.  Here we go; Randy’s complicated explanation.

In the chapters before this, Jesus has been using parables to prophetically proclaim that God had taken the responsibility of shepherding his people away from the Pharisees because they were abusing their role and authority.  Instead of doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with their God, they were power-greedy lovers of money who were using the Law of Moses to control and grow rich off of God’s people.  Their modus operandi was to give the people the false hope that the Messiah was coming and if they wanted a place in his kingdom, they were obligated to keep the Law jot and title… or they would be fined if they were caught breaking it.    

Jesus’ last words to his disciples (albeit within the hearing of the Pharisees) on the matter was simply that people are going to slip up and do something for which they feel guilty and ashamed of but WOE to anyone who causes another to feel guilty and ashamed of themselves.  Inflicting guilt and shame was the business the Pharisees were in.  The Pharisees were like a sycamore fig tree rather than mulberry which it resembles.  The mulberry tree isn’t well rooted and it looks like Cousin It from the Addams family, but its fruit is delicious.  It produces good fruit.  The sycamore fig is better rooted and has a strong trunk that they used for lumber, yet its fruit is inedible, bad fruit just like the Pharisees.  Jesus’ disciples were to instead practice the good fruits of accountability (to the Law of love) and forgiveness as opposed to the bad fruit of legalism.  I am persuaded to say that the disciples, in realization that the Pharisees were out as the shepherds of Israel, were asking Jesus to add obligation to their loyalty, something more to do to prove their loyalty than just following him around as his students.  They thought themselves ready to be the new shepherds of Israel.  

Jesus’ response to them on this matter goaded their apparent lack of humility.  Jesus asked them which of you would bring your servant in at the end of the day and sit them down at the table to eat (which they had been doing all along nearly daily every time they ate with him).  Would you thank your servant for their work?  Would you strip down to your loincloth and wash your servant’s dirty feet and then feed them (which Jesus would soon do for them).  No, you would tell your servant who just came in from a hard day’s work, to make dinner ready for you and then feed themselves when you were done.  You wouldn’t expect your servant to want to be thanked.  You would expect your servant to humbly do what he was obligated to do.

In order to shepherd the people of Israel Jesus’ disciples would have to know humility.  They would have to know how to humbly serve the people as opposed to ruling over them.  They already had loyalty and faithfulness (faith like a mustard seed), they just needed to learn humility.  Unfortunately, they won’t know humility until their teacher has washed their feet, until they’ve seen him die for the people, until they have felt his forgiveness for their betrayal, desertion, and denial of him.  Just believing isn’t faith.  Faith is faithfulness shown in humbly serving one another in love.  Amen.

 

What's in a Name: Lazarus

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Luke 16:19-31

Why did Jesus give that poor beggar the name Lazarus, inquiring minds want to know.  This is just a parable by which Jesus was addressing the Pharisees about how their love of money and consequent neglect of the poor was disqualifying them from being true descendants of Abraham and they needed to repent.  Jesus could have just stuck with saying there was a poor man who daily sat begging outside a rich man’s door, but instead Jesus named him Lazarus and on top of that he doesn’t name the rich man.  Why?  Obviously, there must be something about that name, Lazarus, that informs the parable?  Bear with me a minute and I’ll tell you what I think.

Right off the bat some would say it was the Lazarus that Jesus raised from the dead in John’s Gospel.  Afterall, Jesus mentions someone being raised from the dead there in the last verse.  I don’t think that’s it, because neither Luke, nor Matthew nor Mark seem to know of that event for some strange reason.  It is more likely Jesus was referring to his own resurrection which the Pharisees, who were responsible for his crucifixion, dismissed as a hoax.

The name Lazarus as it appears in our Bibles is a Latinized version of the Greek name Lazaros which is a Greekized version of the Hebrew name Eleazer which means “God has helped”.  In the Old Testament, the most famous Eleazer was the son of Moses’ brother Aaron who became High Priest after Aaron died.  Yes, a good many to most of the leaders of the Pharisees would have been from priestly families, albeit wealthy priestly families.  But I don’t think this Eleazar is the Eleazar Jesus was calling to mind.  There’s another more recent in memory to Jesus’ day that’s worth a long hard squint, but first there’s some armchair history you’ll need to know.

In Judea during the mid-100’s B.C., the Greeks had been ruling in Judea for about 150 years.  The leader of the Greeks at that time was Antiochus Epiphanes who was a twisted, sick individual.  He sacrificed a pig in the Temple as well as put a statue of Zeus on the altar.  He burned Torah scrolls and banned circumcision and all forms of observance of the Law of Moses.  His favourite pastime was publicly forcing Law-observant Jews to eat pork or be tortured to death. 

During his tenure, there arose a loosely configured resistance movement of faithful Jews known as the Hasideans.  It’s not really fair to say they were a resistance movement though.  Their devotion to keeping the Law of Moses was due to their unwavering faithfulness to God.  It was not simply a way of resisting Greek rule.  Antiochus, for some reason, hated their devotion to God.  

From among the Hasideans there arose the brothers Maccabeus who in 167 B.C. started a three-year-long revolt that drove the Greeks out of Judea resulting in a period of Jewish independence that lasted roughly forty years.  The festival of Hanukkah arose out of that revolt.  Oddly, the majority of Jews at the time opted to just keep their heads down and their faith private and took up the Hellenistic or Greek way of life.  Thus, the Hasideans were tortured for their faithfulness while the Hellenists lived comfortably.  Just so you know, a pretty convincing argument can be made that the Pharisees of Jesus’ day traced their origins back to the Hasideans.

The Hasideans had some key teachers, some very devoted men.  One of them was an elderly scribe named Eleazer.  He was probably in his 80’s at the time of the revolt.  There is a very well-known account of the day Eleazer and Antiochus Epiphanes met up (see 4 Maccabees 6).  Antiochus actually quite respected Eleazer for his intellect, his ability to speak eloquently, and his rationality.  He just didn’t understand why a rational person would keep such strict adherence to such a strict Law out of devotion to a god, especially a non-Greek god.  After a bit of debate, Antiochus decided to get on with testing the old man’s faith by threatening to have him tortured to death if he didn’t eat a piece of pork.  They debated some more and then with a bit of reluctance; Antiochus had the guards take him away to be flogged with a scourge.  That’s a whip made with many straps that is effective at ripping the flesh open.  They stripped him naked to humiliate him, tied his hands, and commenced scourging him.  He stood there bravely and took it for longer than expected.  Eventually he fell and then one of the guards started kicking him in the side trying to make him stand up but he couldn’t due to his age. 

The guards soon started to feel ashamed of what they were doing to this old man and pleaded with him to just eat a piece of meat and say it was pork so that they could stop the atrocity. Eleazer’s answer was basically, why should he let his long life of faithfulness end in such an act of cowardice.  What sort of an example would that set for the young.  It would be shameful to do such a thing just to gain a few more days which he would spend being mocked, particularly by the tyrant Antiochus.  He finished saying, “O children of Abraham, die nobly for your faith!  And you, guards of the tyrant, why do you delay?”, i.e., “Are you ashamed of what you are doing?” 

The guards then got on with it.  They took whatever metal things they could find and made them red hot and burned him to the bone with them all over.  Then they poured stinking liquids into his nostrils (sewage probably).  While they did this he looked towards heaven and said to God, “You know, O God, that though I might have saved myself, I am dying in burning torments for the sake of the Law.  Be merciful to your people, and let our punishment (there were seven brothers and their mother being martyred too), let our punishment suffice for them.  Make my blood their purification, and take my life in exchange for theirs.”  Then he died.  (Some serious theology there.)

If you remember, Eleazer means “God has helped”.  That may not seem to have been the case for Eleazer but not long after his death the brothers Maccabeus defeated the Greeks and drove them from the land.  For forty years the Jews enjoyed independence.  That was the last time until 1948 that they enjoyed that.

Eleazer (Lazarus) suffered for his faith in God and his faithfulness to the Law.  The Pharisees, his theological descendants, were on the other hand getting rich off of keeping the Law, one could even say they were being tyrants about it and that they were persecuting fellow Jews with it.  Actually, they were more like the Hellenist Jews in Eleazer’s day than the Hasideans from whom they originated.  I think Jesus used the name Lazarus (Eleazer) in this parable to truly convict the money-loving Pharisees of their hypocrisy.  Eleazer died for his faithfulness by being undeservedly tortured with flaming things. 

The rich man in the parable was also being tortured with flaming things, flames.  He was himself a Jew and should have gone to “Abraham’s bosom” where faithful Jew’s went to await resurrection.  But instead, he was in Hades, the afterlife that the Greeks believed in, where he was being tortured with flaming things because he deserved it.  He was a self-absorbed money-lover who neglected the poor right outside his door.  Even in death he thought that poor beggar Lazarus ought to be waiting on him.  So, it was with the Pharisees.  They missed what was at the true heart of the Law – the mercy that that rich man never showed to poor Lazarus and instead were using to Law really just to make people serve them and their hunger for power.

Let me try to lighten the mood. I knew an elderly man up until a couple of years ago when he died.  He had been a banker by career.  We all make assumptions that bankers are wealthy, but with this man you would never know if he was or wasn’t.  He and his wife kept things pretty simple.  He was a devoted Christian, husband, and family man.  Everywhere they lived they always found and attended a church.  When I first met him, he was treasurer of his church.  When I came on board, within just a couple of weeks he had me over to his house under the auspices of catching me up on the financial situation of the church.  The real reason was that he wanted to strike up a relationship, a friendship with me.  He thought a minister ought to know his people and their struggles and pray for them.  He wanted me to know that his wife had periods of not being well and he was afraid of losing her.  Whenever she got sick and went to the hospital, he would call me so that I could pray.  

He was a faithful man, but I do have to admit (as he would) that after having to live separated from his wife through Covid after a bazillion years of marriage, her death, his own health issues, and great untreatable pain there in his last two years, he was tempted to eat the pork so to speak.  He was also anxious that I was going to take a call somewhere else, so I had to routinely assure him that I would not take a call away from here before he died, that I would be here to bury him.  Number three on my list of reasons for not taking a call elsewhere is that there are so many of you just like him who have been faithful all your lives and deserve to be buried by someone who knows you.  He was a faithful, humble, generous man.

On a number of occasions his last couple of years, he had me over to talk about his funeral because he believed death was imminent or at least he hoped it was.  When it came to what if any particular Scripture he wanted read, he was adamant about one verse in particular, Micah 6:8: “He has told you, O Mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”  This man was Mac Elliot.  He passed away two years and nearly two months ago.  Whenever I come across the story of Eleazer (which is more often than you would think), he is one who comes to mind.  Mac knew what was at the heart of what God expects from humanity.  He was faithful all his life but had his faith tested there at the end, but still he endured…a just, kind, humble man before God.

Many small churches such as our four today are like Eleazer (Lazarus) keeping the faith and keeping the doors open and the lights on though it seems pointless.  On top of it all, the churches that are growing seem mired in the false beliefs Christian Nationalism, hating the immigrant, making the poor help themselves, (“The good Lord helps those who help themselves” is found nowhere in the Bible.) patriarchalism if not outright misogyny…and at the root of it really does seem to be the love of money.  But you folks, stay faithful, beloved of God.  Continue to listen to Jesus, the one who was raised from the dead.  The love, the friendship, you have here is an embodiment of him.  Keep the faith.  Amen.

 

Grifting

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Luke 16:1-16

If you’ve been a voyeur to American politics the past decade, you will have no doubt heard the accusation of grifting blaring out from both sides of the political spectrum towards each other.  Grifting is basically gaining people’s trust by dishonest means in order to get money or property from them.  There’s a bit of a diminutive insult in calling someone a grifter.  For example, Conrad Black was convicted of fraud for embezzling money from a company he was working for.  Though what he did would fit the definition of grifting, he should rather be called an “embezzler” than a grifter.  What he did was big-time and white collar.  Grifting, on the other hand, is something usually small change done by someone who’s sleazy.  It’s like rolling into town and pretending to be a world class pie chef and going to the PTA and after convincing them you will make world class pies for a fundraiser but you need cash up front for the ingredients and then absconding with that cash.  

Grifting is apparently commonplace among the rich and famous.  Celebrities do it quite often when they use their identity as a celebrity, their “brand”, to gain people’s trust to do things like run for public office when they know nothing about how the government works or even what it is to be a public servant.  They do it just to further their “brand”.  Or, like the actress G. P. back in the “90’s when she used her celebrity identity to assume the role of a health and wellness influencer while having no credentials in nutrition or mental health.  She started by selling juice blends for the use of cleansing the body not orally but from the bottom up.  She claimed particular blends could help particular health conditions and emotional states when administered that way.  She gives relationship advice too.  On the political stage, we’ve seen people go to a foreign country and use your identity as the son or sons of an American president to get business deals.  But here at home we should be really concerned when celebrities use their “pretend identity” as a celebrity to get elected to public office and then use that political and economic power to crash the stock market hoping that investors would instead buy their brand of Bitcoin.  Just saying.

Looking here Jesus’ Parable of the Shrewd Manager.  I would like to suggest that there is some grifting going on here but surprisingly, it’s not the shrewd manager who is doing it.  He’s an embezzler like Conrad Black and a skilled one; quite wily.  He’s a cut above a simple grifter.  I think the Grifters here aren’t even in the Parable but are rather the people the character of the shrewd manager represents.  It’s the Pharisees and Scribes from a chapter back who found it completely distasteful that Jesus kept company and even ate with tax collectors and “sinners”.  They were hypocrites like actors in the Greek theatre.  They were very good at putting on a mask and playing the role of devout religious authorities.  They knew the Scriptures, the law of Moses, the traditions, the traditional and authoritative teachings of the Rabbi’s going back to the 400’s BC.  There in the midst of Roman domination, they seemed to be keeping the faith by being as un-Roman as possible which they did by very publicly keeping the dress and dietary codes of the Law of Moses.  

These Pharisees (the Conservatives) along with two other groups, the Sadducees (the Liberals) and the Herodians (the royal Billionaires) were very politically savvy when it came to placating the Romans (a faux-democracy led by an Authoritarian).  If you were a devoted member of one of these Jewish sects (Parties), you would grow wealthy and powerful under Roman rule.  The Romans let you thrive as long as you kept rebellion against them at bay and gave them a cut on whatever grift it was you had going.  Rome by and large sent their most inept civil servants to govern in Judea and they were largely absent.  Rome held power over Judea primarily by military occupation and tax collectors who were Jews themselves but were seen as traitors.  The Roman military in turn kept order through bullying and extortion.  They weren’t known for mulching the public flowerbeds of Jerusalem or anywhere else.

Back to the Pharisees, their reason for being legalistic was that they were expecting God at any moment to send the Messiah to deliver them from Roman occupation and to establish the Kingdom of God once and for all forever and ever amen.  They believed that in the Kingdom of God the Law or Moses would be kept without exception.  If a Jew wants to be in God’s Kingdom when the Messiah comes, then they must live as faithful to the Law of Moses as possible in the present.  They also believed the Messiah’s coming could possibly be hastened if more and more Jews were keeping the Law so they were pretty good at making or rather coercing conversions.

The problem with the Pharisees was that they weren’t known for mercy.  They were actors, hypocrites (remember that sermon).  They were known for policing Law-observance and placing outrageous fines on those they caught violating them.  They didn’t really care about the real physical needs of widows and orphans, or refugees, or the poor in general.  They knew how to create loopholes in the Law where the Law required compassion and generosity from them.  They knew little about how to grant forgiveness to people who were weighed down in shame and guilt.  They weren’t very good at loving God with all their mind, soul, heart, and strength and their neighbour as themselves.  They were just good at keeping up appearances and penalizing those who didn’t.

In the Parable Jesus has the Landowner surprisingly commend the Manager for his shrewdness even though the manager had cheated him.  It was because when the Manager reduced the debts held by the tenants, even though it was for selfish motives, he was showing mercy, attending to the real needs of the tenants.  Like the Manager, the Pharisees were using their religious authority to grow wealthy by taxing the sins of others and in turn not using that wealth to help the poor among them.  They didn’t practice mercy.  Do you remember the story of the widow who came to the Temple and put her last two copper coins in the alms box?  That was all she had.  The Pharisees should have rather been looking out for her needs, but here she was not knowing where her next meal was coming from because she believed that you don’t come to Temple (church) empty-handed.  Like TV preachers, J.O. for one, they had no qualms with getting very wealthy by grifting on the spiritual needs of even the poorest among them.

It was apparent that the god the Pharisees really served was one called Mammon or what we would call Wealth.  Jesus warned his disciples that they cannot serve both God and wealth for they will inevitably love and be devoted to one over the other and their primary affection will likely be for mammon because that’s the way people are.  If we, Jesus’ disciples, choose to serve Wealth, we will likely get wealthy, but we’ll lose the Kingdom.  

Jesus will later tell his disciples in Chapter 22 after they have shared the Lord’s Supper and had a surprising argument about who is the greatest among.  Jesus said: “I confer upon you a Kingdom, just as my Father conferred one on me, so that you may eat and drink at my table and sit on thrones” (Lk 22:29).  His disciples will be tempted by Satan with political power and with wealth.  They must avoid those temptations and the King will be manifest in their midst.  

The Kingdom of God is about community, people bearing one another up in the love of Jesus Christ.   The end of chapter four of the Book of Acts gives a staggering image of what this community of the Kingdom of God looks like: “All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had.  With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and much grace was upon them all.  There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.”  

This passage from Acts describes beautifully what Jesus meant when he told his disciples to use their worldly wealth to make friends for themselves so that these friends may welcome them into the eternal dwellings.  Sharing what wealth we have with others according to need is Jesus’ rule for the handling of wealth in his kingdom.  This is what he was speaking of when he told his disciples “whoever is faithful with a little will be faithful with a lot”.  After all, the wealth that we have really is not our own.  

We, our very selves, belong to Jesus Christ.  He has bought us with his own blood.  We are his beloved slaves and everything we have is his own wealth which he has entrusted to us.  If we are not faithful in sharing the worldly wealth that is at our disposal, how can we expect God to entrust us with the true riches of his kingdom which are the peace of Christ and joy in his Spirit, knowing of God’s love, and genuine Christian community.  I may be stepping out on a limb and sawing behind me, but Jesus seems to indicate here that in the Kingdom of God there is a direct correlation between generously sharing wealth and truly receiving the riches and richness of the Kingdom of God in community.

To conclude, learning mercy by showing mercy is the first step into the kingdom.  Those who know this basic lesson pertaining to mercy and who strive to live accordingly will learn that the love of wealth threatens our God-given community.  If we are not faithful in our stewardship of the worldly wealth entrusted to us by sharing it according to need even to the point of exhausting it, (after all, Jesus gave his life) how can we expect the Triune God of grace to entrust us with the true wealth of the Kingdom of God, which is his very self embodied in Christian community?  Amen. 

 

Lost Yet Loved

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Luke 15:1-24

Years ago, when my son was about three and my daughter was still a babe in a stroller, the family went downtown Toronto to the Aquarium.  It was very crowded and a challenge to keep track of the kids in tow.  At the end of the visit, we went to the ultra-crowded gift store.  My son and I were wandering around looking at stuff.  I guess I must have let go of his hand to pick something up.  In just a matter of about three seconds, he was gone.  He had probably caught sight of his mother and off into a sea of people he went. Thankfully, the lost-ness lasted only about 15 seconds if that.  He didn’t know he was lost…but I certainly did.  It scared the socks off me.  

I remember once when I was maybe four being with my mother in Woolworth’s department store.  I don’t know what happened, but all of a sudden, I wasn’t with Mom anymore.  I was all alone and fear set in.  Little children don’t know how to process that.  I just froze and started to cry.  A salesclerk heard me and came and assured me we’d find my mother.  She took me to customer service and sat me on the counter then picked up a microphone and said, “Would the mother of a boy named Randy please come to Customer Service.”  Seconds later, Mom showed up crying and was very relieved.  

Those two stories shared; I can’t imagine how it would feel for your child to get so lost that they wished you were dead when all you’ve been is kind and gracious and provided for their every need.  Then after demanding their inheritance, they took off and squandered it.  Then, they show up a year or so later, maybe remorseful, but likely not.  That has to hurt…and the fear…and the grief.  You don’t stop being a parent.  When your children get lost you feel it.

In our reading today we have three parables involving something being lost.  They demonstrate three reasons for being lost; by accident, by neglect, and by willfulness.  We’ll spend a moment with each.

The first is the lost sheep.  When an animal wanders off, it’s not like they meant to.  It’s accidental.  It followed its nose or something.  We do that.  We’ve all been out driving or out for a walk, enjoying the day, not realizing we took a wrong turn or missed the turn and wound up somewhere else not knowing how to get back.  It’s accidental and yes, there’s a threat of danger. 

Getting lost in life happens as well.  We can get lost while following pursuits that take us away from the important things which are our relationships in life particularly with God.  We can just get too busy or overcommitted.  We can get caught up in doing and being what I want to do and be and suddenly we find ourselves alone and scared not knowing how to get back and mend the relationships we wandered away from.  We find ourselves being metaphorically just like the sheep in those paintings of the Parable of the Lost Sheep, alone and stuck in the bushes or on the side of a cliff where we can’t go forward and we’re unable to turn around. 

The thing to notice in this Parable is the shepherd’s concern for that one sheep who accidentally got lost.  The Shepherd leaves the other sheep, possibly to their detriment, and goes searching for that one that got lost.  When he finds it, over the shoulders it goes and he brings it back.  He doesn’t punish it, or lock it up by itself, or make it first on the slaughter list.  He celebrates.

Next, neglect can be the reason something gets lost.  That coin didn’t lose itself.  It’s a coin and it can’t wander off.  It was the woman who lost it probably in a moment of not paying attention.  Just like at the Aquarium, my son wandered off because I let go of his hand.  At Woolworth’s, I didn’t wander off from my mother.  She just assumed I was following her every twist and turn among the racks of the clothing section.  She took a turn without making sure I was with her.  Sometimes our getting lost is not our fault but of the one watching over us.

So also, it can happen in our relationship with God, sometimes our getting lost is God’s fault.  That’s a hard thing to grasp, but it’s true that sometimes God loses us.  Stuff happens and it seems God is not there.  Where are you God?  Why won’t you act?  These are two persistent questions.  Please notice in the parable that the time comes when the woman, when God realizes that he has lost his treasured coin.  You will be found and a lot of those “why God” questions will get answered.  Remember, when we feel cut off from God, alone amidst those faith shattering things that come out of left field, it is then that God is actually vehemently seeking for us and will find us.  Our task is to wait.

Lastly, there’s willful lostness when we abandon God and the good life he’s given simply looking for more.  It can and usually does happen when we are in a time when things seem to be going good. The marriage and the family are good.  The social life is good.  Church is good.  The prayer life is good.  Life is good.  But, then suddenly it isn’t.  Suddenly, what was once good is now not good enough.  We want more out of relationships or just plain want new relationships.  We’ve lost our connections to the old ones.  God, and we question if there is a God, seems to be a million miles away.  We’re trying to figure out who we are except in a context that doesn’t include the God who made us who we are.  The Church which we once experienced as quite supportive, we start to think is a fraud.  We no longer feel connected to our friends, especially our Christian ones.  In love they try to help, but we don’t accept their help and insist on finding it ourselves, whatever “it” is.  We just want to take what’s ours, or what we feel we’re entitled to, and leave.

Beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing.  They will show up and subtly convince the lost that they have or that they themselves are that more we’re looking for, that there are many ways to fill that hole in you that only God can feel.  They are caring and supportive and very encouraging of us as we inadvertently begin to hurt the people closest to us.  Time passes and we’re suddenly find ourselves believing that we are in life solely for ourself, fending for ourself, trying to make a name for ourself…and sadly we believe that that’s all there is.

Willful lostness will actually require us to betray ourselves, our core values.  To justify ourselves particularly our leaving people behind and hurting them, we find fault in them and blame them.  Our relationship to God, past friendships that were solid and good for us, well, we suddenly begin to see them as being bad for us, restrictive, preventative of our becoming who we truly are, who we truly want to be.  We will also rationalize what we’re doing by buying into the latest self-help videos on YouTube.

If you noticed in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the Father wisely and with great restraint doesn’t blow up at his son or seek after him.  Instead, he very bravely allows him to go and make his own mistakes.  Being in life solely for oneself will usually lead us to a rock bottom at which we hopefully will come to our senses and return to the good life we had and hopefully we will not have burned those bridges too badly.  At least with God, the door is always open and the light is always on should we want to come home, but with the people we’ve hurt, there’s trust to rebuild.

These three parables teach us a great lesson with respect to God’s love.  When we get lost in life, God does not cease to love us.  God will either seek us out or when it’s a case of willful lostness wait for us, wait for us to come to our senses.  We also should do the same for those in our lives we know to be lost.  Don’t be like the older brother and judge, continue to love and forgive.  Amen.

 

Fear: The Opposite of Faith

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Luke 12:1-12

A few months back I was mindlessly watching little short videos on Facebook which they call Reels and I came across one that made that royal waste of time and life suddenly have some worth.  It started with a young woman of university age speaking on the topic that Americans are suddenly waking up to the fact that Shakespeare is better performed with a Southern accent.  Then the video switched to a young Japanese-American named Reed Choi who began to recite Hamlet’s To Be or Not to Be soliloquy with a Southern accent. He even had a dip of snuff and a bottle to spit in for authenticity.  It went something like this:

“To be, or not to be – That is the question; Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing them; to die: to sleep”.  

The soliloquy is a very powerful bit of overthinking by Hamlet on the question of whether it’s better to live with shameful hardship brought on by the actions of one’s family or to take one’s own life.  The conclusion is that the fear of the unknown after death makes cowards out of us and so we resign to endure undeserved hardship.  That’s as best as I can figure what Hamlet was saying.  I don’t get Shakespeare half the time.

What struck me about this video wasn’t that Shakespeare actually sounded good with a Southern accent.  It actually did.  But it wasn’t that.  What got me was how good of an actor that young man was.  He drew you right into it.  He had a good sense of the cadence, when to pause, even when to spit.  That short moment was mesmerizing.  He was a really good actor.  He was good at stepping outside of himself to play a role.  That’s admirable.  He was a very good hypocrite.

Now, why would I call him a hypocrite?  Back in the Greek and Roman world, acting and the theatre were quite popular.  Actors would put on masks and go out on stage to play their role.  It was weird because you couldn’t see the emotions of the actor unless it was somehow portrayed in the mask.  Theatre was a Greek innovation.  Most cultures enjoyed just sitting around and listening to a good storyteller tell a story.  It is likely that the Gospels were meant to be portrayed in public that way.  They were memorized and performed by good storytellers.  But the Greeks, they were the ones who developed the art of telling a story by actors acting out the various roles.  This art of acting was called hypokrisis or hypocrisy as we know it and actors were hypocrites or hypocrites.  So, my young actor was thus a good hypocrite.

But the meaning of words changes over time.  By Jesus day, the theatre and hypocrisy had been in the land of Israel ever since the days of Alexander the Great, the 300’s BC, when the Greek Empire conquered the Land and Greek culture began to infect the cities.  Jews were not keen on hypocrisis and hypokrites –hypocrisy and hypocrites – and not simply because they were Greek activities.  Jews saw the profession as deceptive, as pretending to be something that you are not.  Putting on a mask and hiding your true identity to them was an affront to the God who created us as unique persons who should be the persons God created us to be.  

Looking at our text in Luke, this is why Jesus tells his disciples to beware of the yeast of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy.  When yeast gets into your dough or into your grape juice it works its way through the whole batch.  Particularly with wine, if a wild yeast makes it into the batch, it will ruin the taste.  So, keep the wild yeast out.  To Jesus, the Pharisees were good at putting on the mask of the externals of dress and dietary codes and following the jots and tittles of the Law of Moses and pretending to be righteous or rightly related to God.  But it was all a deception.  They lacked love.  They were judgmental.  And worse, they didn’t practice the way of justice and equality that were at the heart of the Law.  They simply used their religious pretense to gain power and grow wealthy.  They were hypocrites, actors, not faithful Israelites.  What they looked like on the outside was not reflective of who they were on the inside.

Now there’s a catch here to what Jesus was saying to his disciples.  The hypocrisy he was warning them against wasn’t the legalism of the Pharisees.  It was actually the opposite.  He was warning them against the hypocrisy of acting like they were not his followers when they were in public for fear of being persecuted.  It’s the hypocrisy of denial.  If they try to hide their faith, they will inevitably be found out for God’s powerfully working in them through the Holy Spirit cannot be hidden under a bushel basket.  That little light is going to shine like it or not.  The changes that were happening in them by the living power of the love of God in Christ simply cannot be hid or denied.  You can’t deny Jesus’ and his resurrection when you’ve been filled with his new life.  

Last week we talked about faith as being the hypostasis of the hoped-for things, the coming to light of unseen things.  Hypostasis meaning the settling out or the becoming visible of the unseen, behind the scenes things that God is doing to save and heal his very good creation and especially humanity.  Faith is our participation in what God is doing.  It’s not simply believing ideas and stuff about God as opposed to doubting.  Faith is found in the acts of faithfulness which are the coming to light, the becoming tangible of God’s doings.  

The opposite of faith isn’t doubt.  It is fear, the fear that we will be judged, rejected, shamed, or even physically harmed for our loyalty to Jesus.  A fear that causes us to hide behind a mask of looking and acting like we are not a part of what God is doing to save and heal everything through Jesus Christ.  Jesus addressed this fear with his disciples because persecution for association with him was a harsh reality they lived with.  If they denied him, they could spare themselves ostracism, job loss, prison, torture, even death.  One of the strongest arguments for Jesus’ resurrection was that none of the disciples who saw him raised from the dead denied it even while being tortured to death.  Nevertheless, like Hamlet, fear can make cowards of us.

I feel a bit apprehensive of talking about this kind of hypocrisy to you folks. In this day when people have walked away from the church and largely from following Jesus and to be quite frank, at the heart of why that has happened is Christian hypocrisy in one form or another.  But usually that form of hypocrisy was like that of the Pharisees, a hypocrisy that boiled down to those who called themselves Christians were very good at judging people for doing things the Bible says not to do while failing miserably at the things the Bible says to do such as: Love one another as Jesus has loved us.  Seek justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God, and forgive.  Be generous, welcome the stranger, i.e., the immigrant, feed them, clothe them, shelter them.  Turn the other cheek.  We’ve put keeping tradition before faithfulness.  We’ve mistaken the church building for the Body of Christ.  We’ve put nationalism before faithfulness to Jesus.  We’ve let bullies get their way. We’ve followed false teachers, false messiahs.  We’ve hurt children, women, and vulnerable people.  We’ve just simply and to our shame had some really nasty wild yeasts work their way through us.

Regardless, in this day and age when there appears to be next to nothing left of the North American church, you folks still come.  You keep the doors open and the lights on. You’ve raised your families in the church, lived the faith before them at home only to stand bewildered at their apathy, ambivalence with respect to Jesus.  The media has had nothing good to say about Christians since the movie Home Alone back in 1990 when a lonely young boy convinced a lonely, estranged old man to reconcile with his son while sitting in a pew anonymously watching his granddaughter rehearse being Mary in a Christmas Pageant.  He went home and made the call.  As a minister, in 27 years of ministry I’ve gone from being a valuable part of town life to being largely irrelevant if not suspect.  The question is always why do we continue on?

Please notice here that Jesus wasn’t accusing his disciples of the hypocrisy of denial.  He was just warning them, because they were going to face some pretty dreadful opposition and they would have reason to fear.  Fear is the opposite of assurance and cowardice is the opposite of faithfulness.  Cowering in fear to the point of denying Jesus is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, it is to waste one’s life to the point of deserving being thrown on the trash fire that was Gehenna.  Jesus was prodding his disciples to remain faithful for the God who loves each and every sparrow, loves us each even more.  In those fearful times when put on trial, the Spirit would be with them giving them what to say and do.

So, it is for us in these trying times.  Keep the doors open and the lights on.  As Peter wrote in the first of his two general letters to the churches, to Christians simply suffering because they were good, upright people, “Always be ready to give account for the hope that is in you.”  Your gracious behind the scenes well-doing, generosity, loyal friendships, love; these are embodiments of the hope this world so desperately needs, the hope that is in Christ Jesus who will yet again soon begin to call people to himself.  Endure.  Amen.