Sermon for 9.26.10

Scriptures for this day are here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearC_RCL/Pentecost/CProp21_RCL.html

Jesus is breaking rules again. We have a rule in American society – we don’t talk about money. We will tell the most intimate details of our sex lives – but we won't talk about money. Jesus breaks that rule, and comes right out and talks about the most taboo subject – and all three lessons today are about money, so I couldn’t avoid talking about it if I tried.

So I decided to research what it means to be “rich.” You can go on a website called GlobalRichList.com – you can enter your income and see where you stand in relation to the rest of the world. The median household income in US for 2007 was $50,233 – so think of Mr. or Ms. Average American, someone who worries about the price of gas and whether he can send the kids to college, and what happens if the car’s transmission finally goes out. He makes $50,233 a year. So if you enter this as your income, you get the following information: “You are the 58,938,818^th richest person in the world.” You don’t think that’s so hot, no one goes around shouting, “We’re number 58,938,818!” But the kicker comes if you look at the next line down, where it tells you what percentage that puts you in. If you make $50,233 a year, Mr. or Ms. Average American, that puts you in the top .98% - you are in the top 1% of the world’s income. And if being in the top 1% doesn’t qualify someone as rich, I don’t know what does.

In fact, even some poor people in the US are rich. The poverty line for a family of five in the US is $25,790, and if you make the US poverty line amount – you are still in the top 10% of people in the world – an incredible fact to me. Because there are plenty of people who struggle to make ends meet here – yet it’s all relative. A man in Haiti was quoted as saying, if you eat three meals a day – you are rich. Well, that’s a simple enough definition for us to go on.

So let’s take this information that the average US person is unimaginably rich to the average person in the world – half of world’s population lives on less than $2 per day (less than we would spend at Starbucks) – and ask what the scriptures have to say about it. And when you ask this question, you begin to think that maybe Halloween came a little bit early this year. Not that I’ve seen streets filled with miniature-sized Darth Vaders, fairy princesses, and teenage monsters lugging pillowcases full of Snickers. This early Halloween is way scarier than that. Because if you can read today’s scriptures from the standpoint of someone who is probably in the top 10% at least of the world’s income, and not be scared, you’re a lot braver than I am, and you can escort me into any dark alleys I need to go into. Someone once said, "It's not what I don't understand about the Bible that bothers me. It's what I do understand!" Yep, that’s the problem, all right.

I tried to talk myself out of being frightened by today’s scriptures. From the prophet Amos: Alas for those who lie on beds of ivory – hey, no problem – I don’t have any ivory in my house. Alas for those who eat lambs from the flock and calves from the stall – not to worry, I get my lamb and beef from the grocery store. Alas for those who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp – naah – I listen to them on my iPod (in my air-conditioned car, on my way to eat in restaurants and watch movies). Alas for those who drink wine from bowls and anoint themselves with the finest oils – well, you get the picture. The technology has changed, but we have access to all these things – leisure time, plenty to eat and drink, entertainment to enjoy. And Amos says: if you have all these things, and are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph – alas to you.

If we can enjoy the good things of life, and not be grieved for those who can’t, we will be the first to go into exile, says Amos. A kind of exile that is brought to graphic life in our parable from Luke today, with its vivid description of the flames of Hades, which are the fate of a rich man who looks up from his torment to see the poor wretch he stepped over every day as he went into and out of his house, up in Heaven, and begs for mercy – but it’s too late for mercy.

Now Jesus isn’t telling us this story as description of what heaven and hell will be like – his point is about this life (God has heaven under control). What Jesus wants us to focus on is how we live right here, and how our use of possessions helps us or hinders us from loving God and loving our neighbors. Jesus spends a lot of time talking about this. Last week we heard him say “you can’t serve God and wealth” – we can’t serve two masters, it’s one or the other, and we’re kidding ourselves if we think we can compartmentalize our life into spheres – this hour on Sunday for God, the rest of our lives for everything else.

No, says Jesus, it all belongs to God already – we are just stewards, caretakers of the many blessings God has given us. Everything we do reflects how we feel about God – every interaction with another human, every hour we pass on this earth, every dollar we spend. I serve on the board of TENS, The Episcopal Network for Stewardship, and we have a very simple definition of stewardship: stewardship is everything I do after I say I believe.

We can wish that Jesus would concentrate on more “spiritual” matters like prayer and healing, miracles and heaven. But the fact is, Jesus talked more about our use of money than any other subject except the kingdom of God – in fact, today’s scriptures show that our use of money is intimately related to our place in the kingdom of God.

Now I want to be clear: this is not a stewardship sermon, not if you think stewardship is a euphemism for the church asking for money. Churches do need money do accomplish God’s mission, and that’s part of what God asks us to use his gifts for, but that’s not what I’m doing here. This is about something absolutely vital to our spiritual well-being, and I would be irresponsible as your pastor if I didn’t talk about this. Stewardship is not about what we do for the church, or about what we do for others – stewardship is about what we do for ourselves.

Our lesson from 1 Timothy makes it clear – having money or wanting money can put us into grave spiritual danger: “Those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith & pierced themselves with many pains.”

It’s not the mere possession of money that is the problem, and you don’t have to be rich to have the problem of loving and wanting money too much – it’s what the love of money and the desire for money does to us spiritually. And we don’t even know it’s happening – we are unaware of what it’s doing to us. Clement of Alexandria, a 2^nd century theologian, compared wealth to the danger of handling a poisonous snake, "which will twist round the hand and bite, unless one knows how to lay hold of it without danger by the point of the tail. And riches, wriggling either in an experienced or inexperienced grasp, are dexterous at adhering and biting; unless one, despising them, use them skillfully, so as to crush the creature, and escape unscathed."

I think it would not be an exaggeration to say that for many 21^st century Americans, our use of money and possessions is the single most significant spiritual issue we will face in our lives. Not prayer, not church attendance, not for God’s sake, sexuality, but the practical, everyday, mundane, extremely personal question of how we use money.

So what is it that brought the rich man to this dreadful state? Look at parable: Lazarus lies at his gate; the rich man doesn’t give him even scraps from his table. Every single day this rich man goes out through his gate to visit his friends and transact his business in the town, steps over Lazarus on his way out and his way in, notes the crowd of friendly dogs trying to help Lazarus feel better, and does nothing.

It’s not the simple fact of being rich that condemns the rich man, it’s the fact that he does nothing to help this bleeding, starving man at his gate. He sees Lazarus every day, yet he doesn’t see him at all – not as a person for whom God gave him responsibility – Stewardship responsibility. The chasm between the rich man and Lazarus was fixed long before they died. That chasm was put there by the rich man, whose years of habit failed to let him see Lazarus as a human being, a brother, someone deserving of mercy and grace. And once they both died, that chasm remained right where the rich man had put it.

Once we are in habit of creating chasms between ourselves & our brothers and sisters by ignoring their claims on us, those chasms become hardened by years and years of practice, worn down to the bedrock of our souls, permanently fixed in our spirits. So that when we stand before God, we cannot remove them even if we try. For the rich man, his habits of mind have prevailed, the chasm cannot be crossed. His story is over.

The good news is, for you and I, story is not over. There is still time to cross that chasm. Because we are not the rich man in this parable, and we are not Lazarus. We are the five brothers, the ones still here on earth, the ones who can listen to what God has to say. We have Moses and the prophets to listen to, we have the words and witness of the church, we even have someone who has risen from the dead to tell us. All we have to do is listen.

There are two suffering people in this story. The suffering of Lazarus is easier to fix: for the hungry man, you bring him food. For the woman with no clean water, you bring her drink. For the children with no prospects in life, you give them education. For family with no livelihood, you give them work and a home.

But the rich man is suffering too. And so for the one who is suffering from the love of money, you set him free. The one who is clinging to wealth as his savior, you give him opportunities to share that wealth and turn his salvation over to God who has the power to give it.

Our story is not over, and the story of God is not over. For us, it’s not too late. God can open our eyes to see the needs of this world around us, so that we can begin living in the kingdom of God right now.

Sermon for 9.12.10

Scriptures for this day are here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearC_RCL/Pentecost/CProp19_RCL.html

“I once was lost but now am found; was blind, but now I see.” These are words that any of us can sing by heart. Words that powerful could only have come from a person with a profound sense of lostness, an overwhelming awareness of God’s grace and forgiveness. And it’s true – because the author of those famous words of Amazing Grace was an 18^th century clergyman named John Newton with a very dark past. He had been captain of a slave ship. Yet one night, in the midst of a terrible storm at sea, in fear for his life, he cried out the most basic prayer of all: “Lord, have mercy.” He became aware of the amazing grace of God, who found him when he was lost, renounced the slave trade, became an abolitionist and an Anglican priest and one of the most popular preachers in England – and wrote a number of hymns, including Amazing Grace, the hymn that brings tears to our eyes, because it speaks to us of a love that will find us no matter how lost we are.

Lostness is an experience we have all had to one degree or another. Some of us have experienced only the smallest moment of looking around and not seeing our mother as a toddler, some have “hit bottom”, knowing they’ve gone as low as they can go. Some have experienced desolation of lost love relationship or grief of a loved one’s death; some have experienced emptiness of realizing that all the time and effort we have poured into a lifetime of work doesn’t fill an empty heart.

It’s a sense of isolation that I think is one of the core experiences of human life, and it’s to this basic experience of lostness that Jesus speaks in our gospel today. Confronted with a group of upstanding church people who believe that anyone who they consider “lost” doesn’t have any right to be found, instead of arguing with them, Jesus tells them a story.

Now remember, when Jesus tells us a parable, he intends for us to be surprised, and we can uncover several surprises in this gospel. First: here is Jesus, speaking to a group of well-behaved, sincerely religious people and saying to them that they’re welcome, but they’re not the guests of honor at his party. The guests of honor, the ones he’s throwing the party for, are those sinners and tax collectors they’d rather not have around. He’s saying, the church is not a museum for saints, but a hospital for sinners.

I have heard people say, I don’t think I can come to church, because all those people have it all together and I don’t. And Jesus says, that’s why the church is here. If you think you have it all together, if you think you know what God is up to, if you think you are doing just fine, Jesus says, think a little bit harder. Because the closer you come to what God is up to, the further out of your comfort zones you will find yourself going. You might even find yourself out there with God, searching and sweeping to find others who are lost, and throwing parties when they are found – so watch out.

The second surprise is this: the God of the universe, the being of unlimited power and unsearchable might, is not a God who chooses to exercise power at all. God cares about people’s behavior, but when they are sinners, instead of zapping them with lightning bolts or calling down the wrath of heaven, God goes out searching, with lamps and brooms, calling out their name, and trying to win them with love, not force.

This comes as a huge shock to people in the ancient world, who believe that a God who is worth anything is a God who can force people to do his will. And maybe it comes as a shock to us as well, because no matter how often we’re told that God is a God of love, not of overwhelming force – it’s hard for us to believe. But this gospel says clearly that this is a God who yearns for us, and who will keep on calling and keep on searching – a God who will not violate our free will to behave as badly as we want, but who will also never stop loving us.

Here’s the third surprise: "Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?” Let’s ask ourselves – which one of us WOULD do that? How does this make any sense? To leave 99 sheep to wander off and get lost or eaten by wolves, just to save one? Only a crazy person who hasn’t thought it through would leave 99 to save one. The second parable seems to make more sense – if you have only 10 coins and you lose one somewhere in the house, of course you would light a lamp and get out a broom and sweep till you found it. But then what would you do? Would you throw a party for all the neighbors? Spend more than the coin you found to buy food and drink for all to celebrate? Once again, Jesus isn’t making any sense.

The only way any of this makes any sense is if these are not stories about sheep and coins at all. It only makes sense if we are not numbers to God, something to be counted, but rather beloved children. So think of it like this: Which of you, losing track of a beloved child, would not sweep and search without ever tiring, for the rest of your life if necessary, until that child is found? And then it makes sense. it doesn’t make sense to risk 99 sheep to save one, and it doesn’t make sense to spend two coins to celebrate finding one. But if you have a child, and you love that child more than your own life, you are not going to stop searching till you find him. That’s the only way these stories make sense – they make sense if God is crazy in love with us, if God refuses to stop searching till every one of us is home safe, and when we’re home, safe and sound, God throws a party to celebrate. ‘Tis grace has brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.

No matter how far we are separated from God, God keeps on searching. Maybe it’s just me – but it seems that this year the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks 9 years ago yesterday has been particularly contentious and difficult. It doesn’t help that a fringe pastor of a tiny church in Florida threatened to mark the anniversary by burning copies of the Koran, an act which is not just disrespectful, but truly contrary to common sense, putting countless American and other lives at risk. And it brings up a question for me: what illuminates the Bible for us? What helps us shed light on God’s word and God’s truth spoken to Christians? Burning Korans doesn’t illuminate the Bible, what illuminates the Bible for me is the way it is lived out in real life. And as I think back to that day of desolation, I remember a couple of iconic photos from that day. One you may remember seeing – a photo of a quiet church graveyard, white with ash and blowing paper – the graveyard of St. Paul’s Chapel, Episcopal chapel of Trinity Wall Street. In the months after the attacks, that little chapel became the headquarters of a troop of 60 chaplains of all faiths – Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus – who ministered to the recovery workers at Ground Zero – provided them food, kept the chapel open 24 hours a day – there are photos of firefighters in full gear taking a break to sleep in St. Paul’s Chapel. About 60 % of those chaplains were Episcopalians, since it was St. Paul’s. Those who participated in that ministry, who provided comfort, nourishment and simple presence and care to exhausted workers, speak of it as a life-transforming experience – God’s presence in the midst of lostness, God’s care in the midst of devastation. God comes to us in the most extreme places of our lives, and brings comfort.

One more iconic photo I remember – a blurry photo in a stairwell – office workers running down, firefighters running up – some of the true heroes of that day. I won’t speak any more about that photo, because we will all be in tears if I do, but it helps illuminate God’s word for me. Running into a burning building – was that not exactly what Jesus Christ did when he came to earth to find us when we were lost? Putting himself in harm’s way for the sake of the people he loved enough to die for?

When God looked at humankind, lost in emptiness, loneliness, war and destruction; when God looked at all the inventive ways human beings had devised to hurt and kill each other; when God saw that we were lost so far that we would never find our way back to him on our own – God’s son came into this hurting world to find us.

Our God is the one who runs into a burning building instead of running out. Our God is the one who loves us so much he would never stop searching. Our God is the one who would give everything, up to and including his own life, to make sure that no one is ever lost again.

Our God is the true author of Amazing Grace – the one who comes to us and finds us when we are lost. And our God is the one who sends us out to search in turn – for the lost, the lonely, those in despair, those separated from God’s love because they have never heard of it. Our God is the one who searches for each beloved child until he finds us, brings us home and tells us to invite all our friends, because God is planning to rejoice and throw a party – 99 sheep all celebrating the return of one more – which is what we come together to do here every week.

Rejoice, for God has brought us home to his banquet. I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see.

Sermon for 9.5.10

Scriptures for this week are here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearC_RCL/Pentecost/CProp18_RCL.html

I went to high school in Austin, Texas, one of the country music capitals of the world. Nowadays it’s edgy and indie-rock oriented, but back in the late 70’s, Austin was full of hard-core country music. I went to high school with boys who dressed in hand-tooled leather belts with big turquoise buckles and their names on the back, so if you happened to forget who you were talking to, you could just walk around back and take a look to remind yourself. While you were back there, you might (or might not) take note of the fact that he had a round, worn circular spot on his right back pocket where his chewing tobacco always rested when not in use. (If you happened to walk into class behind one of those boys with a worn circle on his back pocket, and he was carrying a paper cup, you knew to stay away from that thing.)

We went to high school dances and danced to the same stuff everyone else was dancing to in the late 70’s – Saturday Night Fever and the soundtrack from Grease and “Crocodile Rock” and “Stairway to Heaven,” (what’s a bustle in your hedgerow, anyway?) – but we had other stuff too. If you went to high school in Austin in the late 70’s, you had to know how to two-step, and polka, and waltz, to hard-core classic country and western songs. And the dance floor would really fill up when they put on the Cotton-Eyed Joe, with everybody linking arms and doing the original line dance, and periodically shouting out a certain word that I can’t repeat in church, but if you’re from Texas, you know what I’m talking about.

Well, so if you spent any time listening to 70’s country music, you know a few of the classics. “Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain,” and “Luckenbach, Texas” and “London Homesick Blues” (“I want to go home with the armadillo” – a song that people from Texas sing with tears in their eyes). And then there were the ones that were written with maybe a little less reverence: “Oh Lord, it’s hard to be humble, when you’re perfect in every way.” Someday I’ll preach a whole sermon on that song.

But of all the classic 70’s country and western songs, one has to stand head and shoulders above the rest. It’s the song that Wikipedia claims is the world’s only Christian football waltz, and I mean to tell you, if there’s any kind of song more perfect for Texas than a Christian football waltz, I can’t think what it is. My only question is why it only ever occurred to one person to write a Christian football waltz. I’m talking, of course, about Bobby Bare’s immortal “Drop kick me Jesus, through the goal post of life,” featuring such cherished lines as “I’ve got the will, Lord, if you’ve got the toe,” and, “All the dear departed loved ones of mine, Stick ‘em up front in the offensive line.” Yes, “Drop kick me, Jesus, through the goal post of life” is an all-time classic.

Well, if ever there were a set of scriptures to drop kick us somewhere, these scriptures today are the ones! You might say that in these scriptures, Jesus gives us a good swift kick in the pants. They make us stand back, ask what we’re doing and what we intend to do, and they ask us to count the cost.

Paul’s letter to Philemon: you read this and you don’t necessarily think it’s earth-shattering. But what Paul is doing is no less than upsetting the foundation of all human relationships. Paul is saying Jesus is here -- and everything has to change. The apostle Paul is sending a runaway slave, Onesimus, back to his master, Philemon, with a plea for mercy. Paul knows he hasn’t a legal leg to stand on in asking for Onesimus’ freedom, and yet Paul knows also that in Jesus, all relationships have changed.

Paul wrote in Galatians: “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Here he puts those words into action. He presents Onesimus no longer as a slave, but as a brother with whom Philemon shares the bond of baptism – and that means everything has to change. He begs Philemon to look at Onesimus as if he were looking at Paul himself.

In fact, in Jesus, it’s the same thing - all of us are one. In Jesus, all the social structures that have held the world together have fallen apart – and the only bond that matters is the bond of love that holds together the beloved people of God. We are all one in Christ Jesus.

And if this causes us to think twice about all the social positions that people hold in our world, if this causes us to squirm in discomfort at the inequalities we see and know about, things that keep people apart like education, wealth, citizenship, race, sexual orientation, political outlook, instead of helping them remember that in Christ they are brothers and sisters, if this makes us uncomfortable with the way the world we live in works, it should. Because following Jesus has never been sweet and easy. Following Jesus means everything has to change.

Following Jesus is costly and difficult, and it means everything about us has to change – our relationships, our commitments, and our use of possessions. That’s what our gospel says today. Barbara Brown Taylor says about this passage: after meditating on this passage, she has to say that Jesus would not have been a good parish priest. Because here in church, we make lots of efforts to invite people in and make them feel beloved, safe, welcome, and assure them of benefits of membership. But here’s Jesus – followed by crowds of people who can’t wait to see and hear what he does next – and what he does is he turns around, looks at them and warns them that if they think they want to follow him, if they want to be members of his movement, if they want to become his disciples – they might not have thought the whole thing through. They might just want to turn around and go back home.

Because if they follow him, if they truly and honestly put their hearts into becoming his disciples – then everything will have to change. He’s just going to give them a good swift kick into a whole new life. He tells us that the whole structure of our relationships is going to have to change – and it’s not that the Lord of love is truly telling us to go around hating other people. It’s not that we are supposed to give up on loving our families, it’s that Jesus is giving us a whole new family – our brothers and sisters in Christ –and we are supposed to love him, and them, just as much as we love our families.

Now remember, for the Jews, love was not something you felt, it was something you did. To love someone means to take action to care for them. That means that we are supposed to care as much about the education of a child in Veracruz as we do about our own children. As Paul says to Philemon, treat Onesimus as you would treat me. So we are to treat every person as if they were Paul, or even Jesus himself, because we are all one in Christ Jesus.

And if we didn’t think that was impossible enough, then Jesus says we are to take up our cross and follow him. This is not something annoying (like we go around saying, my mother-in-law calls me on the phone and wants to talk for an hour every day; I guess she’s my cross to bear), this is something terrifying – Jesus is saying we need to be willing to die like a condemned criminal for the sake of the gospel. And maybe we’re OK with that, because in our world, it’ll never come to pass We Christians don’t get executed for our beliefs in 21^st-century America.

But if the idea of bearing a cross doesn’t trouble us, maybe the last sentence should: you can’t become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions. It kind of drops with an empty thud, doesn’t it? It leaves us gasping, because I don’t think there’s one of us present who’s ready to do it. And if we think about that, we might not be so ready to get out on the dance floor and waltz to “Drop kick me Jesus, through the goal post of life.”

Because if we let Jesus into our lives, if we really decide to follow him, Jesus is going to ask us to change in every part of our lives. Jesus is going to ask us to start living as though we have been launched right into a whole new world, a world in which every thing we do, every relationship we have, every possession we own, every vote, every purchase, every interaction with anyone, anywhere, is holy and consecrated to him.

That doesn’t mean we spend all our time in church, and it doesn’t mean we give every thing we have to the church – in fact, what it means is that the holy part of our lives extends way past the boundaries of any church and way past the one hour a week we spend worshiping. It means that our world is our church, and everything we do in any part of our lives is a holy act of worship, consecrated to God. And if that’s not a thought that makes us stop in our tracks and wonder whether we want to stay on the Jesus team, it should be. Because Jesus wants every single thing we do to be in his name.

Back in Texas when I was growing up, people used to say things like “it’s cheap, but it ain’t free.” Well, that’s almost true about the grace of God – almost, but not quite.

The grace of God is free, but it ain’t cheap. Christ comes to us free, he lifts us out of death and into life, he surrounds us with the love of God and the knowledge that to God, we are infinitely precious and infinitely loved, and he lets us know that the Lord of the universe would do anything, anything, to save us from ourselves. But as we become aware of that grace and love of God, he asks something of us. He asks us not to hoard it for ourselves; he asks us to give it away to world around us – a world that is starving for it. He asks us to give ourselves away. Because the love of God is not ours to enjoy, it is the world’s to share. And that’s good news for the world.

So count the cost: is Jesus worth following? I think he is. I think the fact that Jesus came to live and die among us, just because God loved us, is life-transforming good news, and I think that good news is worth sharing. It’s news that’s worth giving ourselves, and taking up our cross, and starting a whole new life for.