15th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 20C

15th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 20C September 22, 2019 I’ll never forget the time, years ago, when a member of my church showed up in my office and actually volunteered to be the stewardship chair for that year. (I can count on one finger the number of times I have seen that happen!) When I asked him why he wanted to volunteer to be the stewardship chair that year, he told me a story. He said that one Sunday, during the annual giving campaign the year before, I gave a sermon that was talking about the scripture passage from Luke 12:34: when Jesus says “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” In this sermon, I had invited the congregation to go home that week and to look at their checkbooks or online checking accounts. I invited them to investigate what their use of money had to say about where their hearts were. Well, he did that, he said; and he discovered something that really disturbed him. He said to me, “I realized I was paying more to my two golf club memberships that I don’t even really use than I was giving to the church in any given month. That upset me. So I have cancelled one of the golf club memberships and have increased my pledge to the church. He finished by saying, “I have been transformed in how I look at money and how I see what it says about my relationship with God and other people. And I want to help other people be transformed in this way.” Our reading for today from Luke’s gospel is one of the most difficult parables; it is known as “the parable of the unjust manager.” And one helpful thing that I have learned from our study of Amy-Jill Levine’s book Short Stories by Jesus and the study we are doing the corresponds with it, is that it is important, when looking at parables, to look at the actual parable itself and then to look at what Jesus or the writer of Luke has to say about the parable. Interpreters over the years have lumped these two together, and in order to see these old parables with new eyes, we need to separate the story from the interpretation. So, first, the story. Jesus tells his disciples that a rich man has a manager and charges are brought to the rich man that the manager is squandering his property. (We don’t know if this is true or not or what evidence is offered. We assume the charges are true and that informs how we read the parable, but what if they aren’t? Does that change how we read the parable?) The rich man calls the manager before him, ask for an accounting and says he can no longer be his manager. So the manager goes out (to get the accounting) and realizes that if he is about to be out of a job, then he needs to do something to preserve his future because he is cut out for neither manual labor or begging. So he looks to the relationships with his master’s debtors, and he reduces the master’s debt with each of them, so that they would think more kindly on him in the future and welcome him in their homes. When all is said and done, the rich man commends the “dishonest manager” (and can we assume, does not fire him?) “because he acted shrewdly…” Then the passage picks up with Jesus’s commentary on the parable, which shows us some of Luke’s agenda and also adds to the difficulty and complication of this parable. Another commentator points out that Jesus’s commentary via Luke offers at least 4 different interpretations to the parable: 1. The children of the light need to act more shrewdly. 2. Christians should make friends by “dishonest wealth.” 3. If you’re not faithful with dishonest wealth, who will trust you with the true riches? 4. You cannot serve two masters.i In the midst of those confusing interpretations, the commentator writes, it is important for us to remember “that one of the prominent themes in Luke is the proper use of wealth. Except it’s not just the use of wealth; it’s more like Luke is concerned with our relationship to wealth and how that affects our relationships with others.”ii So, what is our relationship to wealth and how does that affect our relationship with others? The only way I know to invite you to examine this question this week is to invite you to dive into how you spend your money. Look at your checking account statements-whether it is online or in your checkbook register; look at your credit card statement. Make a list of what relationships or priorities are most represented in those numbers and then sit with those before God and ask if how you spend money reflects what you would hope about your relationships. If not, why not, and how might you change that to be more reflective of who you want to be and who God is calling you to be? i. David Lose from http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?m=4377&rp=blog53&post=2746 ii. Ibid.

14th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 19C

14th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 19C September 5, 2019 This past week, my book club met to discuss the book we had chosen to read this month: Congratulations, Who Are You Again? by Harrison Scott Key. It’s a memoir by a local author who is from a small town in rural Mississippi and who now lives here in Savannah and works at SCAD, and this memoir that we discussed is actually his second book that is all about the process of having a dream of writing his first book, which was also a memoir. Did I mention that I usually hate memoirs? So reading a memoir about a person’s writing of their first memoir was not something I was particularly excited about. In an effort to help me, one of our members sent me the link to Key’s TED talk which he gave here at Savannah TEDx. In his TED talk, which is titled The American Dream Value Menu, Key debunks some of the common statements that motivational speakers say to young people about following their dreams such as “you can do anything you put your mind to;” “you can have it all;” and finally, “do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.”i In response to these lies, Key has created what he calls “The Great American Dream Value Menu” which consists of the following 6 areas: 1. Family 2. Friends (which includes church) 3. Fun (which is what we do for our hobbies) 4. Fitness 5. Financing (your day job) and 6. The Dream. And Key says of these, “According to my experience, at any one time in your life, you get to pick 3. That’s it.” What Key is talking about is that in life, we may have many things that we value. All 6 of these areas are important and very valuable to us as human beings. But Key says that we are only able to focus on three at a time, and when we put too much focus on one over others, then we begin to lose the others. This is primarily what he writes about—his struggle to find harmony among his competing values. Because when we put too much time and attention into one thing we value, our attention becomes spread too thin, and it is easy to lose other things that we value in the process. Our gospel reading for today gives us two out of three parables in Luke chapter 15. Luke writes that Jesus tells these parables in response to the Pharisees and Scribes who are grumbling because the tax collectors and sinners are coming near to hear Jesus’s teachings. And it’s easy for us to look down on the Pharisees and Scribes because of how the story of Jesus has been told throughout the years, but y’all, they are us. They are the faithful religious people who care about the community and who try to do what is right-trying to be in relationship with God as scripture teaches. The tax collectors are people who have sold out their own people to make money off of them in conjunction with Rome, the foreign power who has come in and taken over their land; and the sinners would be our equivalent of arms dealers, drug dealers, mercenary people who do not give one whit about the community around them and are ruthless in looking after their own interests even to the detriment of the community .ii So Jesus tells this series of three parables, and they are all about people losing things and then seeking after them until they find them. And Jesus begins by asking the Scribes and the Pharisees, “Which one of you wouldn’t do these things…” First, we have the parable of the lost sheep, where a man realizes he has lost one sheep out of 100, and he leaves the other 99 sheep to go off frantically searching for the one lost sheep. When he finds it, he brings it home and throws a party for his neighbors to celebrate its return. Then we have the parable of the lost coin, where a woman realizes that she has lost one coin out of 10, so she frantically cleans her house until she finds the missing coin. Then she throws a party and invites all her friends to celebrate her recovery of the missing coin. The third parable, which we didn’t get to hear today (we actually heard it back in Lent), is what is known as the parable of the prodigal son. There is a man who has two sons. The younger son asks for his share of the inheritance and then goes off and squanders it in dissolute living. When he comes to himself, he realizes he should go home and apologize to his father and beg him to take him back. So he does this, and the father runs out to meet him, decks him out in splendor, orders that a huge party be thrown and begins to celebrate the return of this son who he thought he had lost. Meanwhile, the older son is left out working in the fields. The party is going on, and the father doesn’t even think to send someone to tell him the good news and invite him to join the party. When the older son finds out what is going on, he refuses to come in, so the father finally goes out to him, reassures him of his love and his place of belonging and encourages him to come to the party. And that’s where the parable ends. We don’t know if the older son ever comes in to the party or not. We don’t know if he is ever reconciled with his father after he has become lost in his father’s attention and in his joy in the return of the younger son. The third parable shows us the stark reality of what is only hinted at in the first two parables. What on earth actually happens to the 99 idiot sheep who are left completely alone, left to their own devices when the man leaves all of them behind to go seek out the one lost sheep? And how much money of her 10 coins does the woman spend in throwing a party for the recovery of the 1? When we place a higher value and attention on one thing of value, other things of value get lost. So what is the invitation of the good news in these parables to us, the earnestly -trying-to-be-faithful-people-of-God this week? I think, first, it is the call to pay attention to what we value, to pay attention to where our focus is, and to help us to remember the valuable things that are lost when our attention wavers from them or when we place too much attention on one area of value over the others. Second, it is to remember that nothing and no one is ever lost from the heart of God. Even when God is maddest and most disappointed (like in our Jeremiah reading for today), God does not forsake anyone. All are present in the heart of God, even when we don’t know it ourselves. This means that as the people of God, it is our call to look for ways we can seek out, come alongside those who have been lost from us, members of our family who may be estranged or maybe who we haven’t talked to as much as we should; (are there people from our church we have lost? Then this applies to them, too). And it is also our call to be aware of how certain people have been lost from the priorities of society—the poor, the lonely, even those who put their own self-interested above and beyond the good of those around them (maybe especially them). What would it look like if people of faith encouraged people in power to consider ways to try lessen the damage that our existing societal structures do to the already lost—immigrants, people who are in prison, people who are homeless, people who are on welfare…?. When we place too much attention on one value to the exclusion of others, the other values get lost. When we place too much attention on certain people, to the exclusion of others, people get lost. May God help us be brave enough to be like the father who had two sons, who realizes when he has forgotten one son, and who goes after him and tries to make things right. i. http://www.tedxsavannah.com/talks/the-american-dream-value-menu/ ii. I got this interpretation from Amy—Jill Levine in her book Short Stories by Jesus.

13th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 18C

13th Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 18C September 8, 2019 Sacrifice—it almost has become a dirty word in our culture. Even the definition from Miriam-Webster is kind of scary: “an act or offering to a deity of something precious; especially the killing of a victim on an altar.” Yikes! Our lectionary crafters and the gospel writer of Luke seem to be unrelenting in confronting us with a Jesus whose words are extreme, uncomfortable—words about hating those whom we hold dearest, words about counting the cost, taking up crosses, and yes, that unpopular notion of sacrifice. Even in the church, where we talk about Jesus’s sacrifice every single week, sacrifice has become almost taboo. Feminist and liberation theologians remind us that for a long time the concept of sacrifice was used to subjugate people—especially women and poor people and people of color, and the people who weren’t in power. We were told that it was our Christian duty to sacrifice, and for many, many years the church wielded that notion over people. Now, the church is afraid to talk about sacrifice because 1. It’s not popular, and 2. People have so much competing for their time and attention and resources, and we fear that such an unpopular notion will drive them away, back out into a world that eagerly touts the joys of easy convenience and instant gratification. But you know what? I’m not afraid of talking about sacrifice with you or with others because I see you, and you are already sacrificing. I see you parents who give up almost every weekend you have in order for your children to enjoy the benefits of competitive sports. I see you who work grueling hours at jobs that do not feed your soul so that you may have the money and the resources to do what you need to do. I see you older folks who live on fixed incomes and sometimes have to choose between food and medicines at the end of some months, or those of you who must choose what you are able to do and accomplish within the growing limits of your physical capabilities. I see you who wake up at ungodly early hours of the day to exercise; I see you who are attentive to what you put into your bodies in an effort to lose weight or to be healthy. And of course, being a part of a community such as the church often means choosing between our own ideologies and the needs of others. Yes, you all know much of sacrifice already. And why is it that you are making these difficult choices? It is because certain things, people, relationships are important to you. We sacrifice for what is most important or most valuable to us. Over and over again in the gospels, Jesus tells us that the Kingdom of God is here now, that eternal life begins now. This means that being a Christian—a follower or disciple of Jesus on the way isn’t about what we think or “believe.” It is about how we live and love and order our priorities, and it is about what we allow to possess us. “You sacrifice according to your priorities. And in today’s [gospel] passage Jesus is saying the Kingdom of God he proclaims and the kingdom life he exemplifies should be a priority, actually be the priority. So maybe we should contemporize Jesus’s parable and ask, ‘What parent wouldn’t count the cost before signing up for the traveling soccer team, and what new employee wouldn’t consider whether she is willing to work every weekend her first year?’ You are already making sacrifices in your lives, and Jesus tells us that Christian discipleship or the Christian life calls for the same.”i Years ago, I heard Bishop Greg Rickel from the Diocese of Olympia speak about stewardship, and I was completely confronted when he talked about the incredible importance of telling the truth in our churches. He said to us, “How often do we say, “We didn’t have enough money, time, resources, energy to do_________(whatever, you fill in the blank). But the truth is really that we didn’t choose to spend our money, time, resources, energy to do that.” And I was caught short, confronted by this important difference because I know this is so very true for my own life. How many times do I say in one week, “I didn’t have enough time to do that.” When really the truth is that I didn’t choose to spend my time that way. So the question that Jesus is inviting all of us to examine this week, with his challenging demanding words is “How do I choose to spend my life?” And the reality of God is that God takes whatever small portion of our lives that we offer to God, and God multiplies it one thousand-fold. God accepts our scarcity and transforms it into abundance because joyful abundance is God’s nature. But deep down we still know that we have chosen to offer God only this tiny bit, when we have so much more that we are choosing to spend elsewhere. And we are ashamed, and that becomes even more of an impediment that we put between us and God. Jesus calls us beyond that. He calls us to examine our lives, the use of our time, the way we spend our money, those priorities and people we hold most dear. He invites us to say honestly—not I didn’t have enough…but rather this is what I chose. But he also invites us to sacrifice more for our relationship with God—because no matter how important these other people and priorities might seem to us now, when all pieces of this life are stripped away, it is only this—your uniquely created self and God. That is the most important thing there is. That is the essence of eternal life. So this day and this week, may we all be unafraid to speak the truth about our lives. To count the cost. To look at our lives, our calendars, our commitments, our titles, our relationships, our material goods, our bank accounts and to really and truly examine how we are spending our lives. And then let us prayerfully consider what God is inviting us to sacrifice in order to grow more deeply and more fully in the knowledge and love of God and in living a life of following Jesus. i.David Lose from his blog http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=2726

12th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 17C

12th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 17C September 1, 2019 This past week was the anniversary of the death of Emmett Till. Till was a 14 year old African-American boy who was visiting the Mississippi Delta from his home in Chicago when he allegedly whistled at a white woman and was then murdered for it. Historians believe that Till’s lynching and his mother’s insistence upon a public funeral and an open casket sparked the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement and the beginning of the way that America wrestles with racism and the horror our society has inflicted upon people of African descent since the days of slavery. This past week, an article on NPR talked about how Mississippi continues to wrestle with how to tell the Emmet Till story. The headline of the news story was “'Why Don't Y'all Let That Die?' Telling The Emmett Till Story In Mississippi,” and the article talks about how the historical marker that has been placed near where Till’s body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River has been removed from the spot after repeated vandalisms—the most recent being captured in a photo of the sign riddled with bullet holes and three fraternity brothers from Ole Miss posing beside it smiling and holding guns. I was especially struck by commentary from two different men in the article. The first one said, “‘The question of who gets to tell the Emmett Till story is a charged question’ says Dave Tell, a professor at the University of Kansas and author of Remembering Emmett Till. ‘There is way more at stake than simply a history lesson on what happened in 1955," Tell says. "Because it matters morally who gets to tell it, and it matters financially who gets to tell it." Reilly Morse, president of the Mississippi Center for Justice, which is supporting the efforts by others to have “Bryant’s Grocery and other sites associated with Till's lynching protected as part of the National Park Service, says that for decades, there has been a reluctance to draw attention to the building.” " ‘It's just a symptom of America's struggle to come to grips with its history of racial brutality,’ Morse says. ‘And for folks that live here, there's been, over generations I think, a tendency to sweep it all under the rug to the extent possible. And there's shame attached to it.’"i In our Old Testament reading for this week, we see the importance of remembering and telling stories, the power of who gets to tell the story, which shapes how it is told, and the effects of shame on the story. Our reading from Jeremiah continues as a covenant court case that has been brought by Yahweh against Israel, saying that Israel has forsaken the covenant they had with Yahweh and Yahweh is blameless in all that is unfolding. In our reading for today, the prophet speaks on behalf of Yahweh saying, “What wrong did your ancestors find in me/ that they went far from me,/ and went after worthless things, and became worthless themselves?/ They did not say, "Where is the Lord/ who brought us up from the land of Egypt,/ who led us in the wilderness,/ in a land of deserts and pits,/ in a land of drought and deep darkness,/ in a land that no one passes through,/ where no one lives?"/ I brought you into a plentiful land/ to eat its fruits and its good things./ But when you entered you defiled my land,/ and made my heritage an abomination./ The priests did not say, "Where is the Lord?"/ Those who handle the law did not know me;/ the rulers transgressed against me;/ the prophets prophesied by Baal,/ and went after things that do not profit./ Therefore once more I accuse you, says the Lord,/ and I accuse your children's children./ Yahweh is the one who is telling the story here, and Yahweh is complaining that the all the people of Israel, including the most faithful, have forgotten the story of their salvation and their deliverance by Yahweh’s hand. How we tell stories matters; there’s power in that, and when our stories are colored by shame, then we tend to want to forget them, sweep them under the rug, pretend like they didn’t happen. That is a normal human emotion going all the way back to at least the 600’s BC when this portion of Jeremiah was written. Sociologist Brene Brown has conducted thousands of hours of research on shame, and she writes about it extensively. She writes about how the antidote to shame is actually vulnerability (which is counter-intuitive). And she helps people cultivate shame-resilience through four elements: 1. Recognizing when we feel shame and learning our triggers. 2. Practicing critical awareness. 3. Reaching out and telling our story. 4. Speaking about shame, which shines the light on it and helps it lose its power over us. All of these elements come together to help us become more of our authentic selves and to develop more meaningful relationships with others.ii This is all actually what Jesus is referring to in his party advice in parable form from today’s gospel: don’t think too much of yourself and really, don’t think too little of yourself either. Show up in authenticity, self-awareness, and some humility, and relationships will be strengthened. How we tell our stories matters. There is great power in that, and it informs how we show up—either in shame or in authenticity. Did you know that there are many times that I’ve heard people in this church tell our story with shame? It hurts me to see it because I love this church and I love y’all, and it is not an authentic telling of our story, when we let it be colored by shame. It usually starts with “well, we are just a small church, we couldn’t possibly do….” Or it manifests itself in a longing for more—usually more of who we think we used to be—more people, more young families, more children.” Our true story that is not colored by shame is that God has already given us everything that we need; God has sustained us and will continue to sustain us because God is faithful. Jesus Christ has promised to be present with us whenever we gather, and one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit that is manifest in this place (actually, mentioned in the Hebrews reading for today) is the gift of divine hospitality—where people are welcomed and made to feel at home. This week, this church will kick-off CAST-Co-Op at St. Thomas. It is a boldly courageous and bodacious experiment to create a place of hospitality and authenticity for the community outside our church’s doors. Many people have given many hours of their lives to helping bring this about, and of course, we all want it to succeed. But that’s not the point. The point is that this offering can help us change how we tell our story, to move away from saying “oh, we’re just a small church” to saying “God is with us, and God is faithful, and God has already given and will continue to give us all that we need”. That gives us courage to try new things and to offer the gift of hospitality which has been given us by the Holy Spirit to a world that is in need of just that.” Your invitation this week is to think about how you tell your story. What parts of it do you try to hide because they are colored by shame? How might letting the light of God’s love shine on those be a healing balm to move you toward courage, connection, and greater vulnerability? i.https://www.npr.org/2019/08/28/755024458/why-don-t-y-all-let-that-die-telling-the-emmett-till-story-in-mississippi?utm_term=nprnews&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=npr&utm_medium=social&fbclid=IwAR14IEeVXXAXcJFzjiTXbDhrBg6JCgy6Llq9PK_lrfJF7GcJiaYjvRvAIMA ii.Synopsis of Brene Brown’s work is paraphrased from https://www.habitsforwellbeing.com/shame-resilience-theory/

11th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 16C

11th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 16C August 25, 2019 I read an obituary this week that was unlike any obituary I’ve ever read. Here’s how it begins. “Gary Bean. Knoxville - To the owner of the big skinny dog that disappeared from your North Knoxville front yard where you had chained her to a picnic table: Gary Bean stole her. He was working in your neighborhood and would slow down and look every time he'd drive past your house. He considered talking to you about it, but you were never around, and it didn't take him long to decide that anybody mean enough to treat a dog like that wasn't worth talking to anyway, so he applied bolt cutter to chain, loaded her into his truck and went on the lam. She had a home and a new name by the weekend. Her new people called her Maggie and loved her for the rest of her life, which was doubtless way longer than it would have been if she'd stayed chained to your picnic table. That was many years ago, and the dog stealing statute has long since run, so there's nothing you can do about it now, if you're still around. And even if you are, Gary's out of your reach. He died last Thursday without ever once regretting setting Maggie free. Truth to tell, you probably weren't his only victim. Gary never met a critter he didn't love and wasn't about to let technicalities stop him from acting on his convictions.”i The obituary then goes on in the usual manner. Part of me really admires Gary Bean and his dog-stealing obituary confession and all its bravado. We Americans all have at least a little amount of rebellion in our DNA, so we can appreciate someone who “was not about to let technicalities stop him from acting on his convictions.” But then there’s the other part; the oldest child part of me. There was an image going around a while ago that talks about birth order in families and the ways that siblings deal with or adhere to “the rules.” The image has a picture of three siblings with a caption by each that reads: “I’m the oldest-I make the rules.” “I’m the middle –I’m the reason we had rules.” And “I’m the youngest-the rules don’t apply to me.” The part of me that is still the oldest child reads Gary Beans obituary and is slightly horrified because not only did he break the law and steal someone’s dog, he defiantly confessed it in his obituary! (An oldest child would never, ever brag about breaking the rules in such a public fashion!) So there’s a good part of me that really sympathizes with the leader of the synagogue in today’s gospel reading. (He was most likely an oldest child like me. You can tell this by his emphasis on the rules.) Because, y’all, there is a reason that we have rules or laws. In fact, this particular law that the leader of the synagogue is so upset about—the law about not doing work on the Sabbath—was given to the Israelites after God has freed them from slavery in Egypt. Think about it. Slaves don’t get a day off. God is telling them, “You are no longer slaves, and as a part of that, I am giving you a day of rest so that you may remember the goodness of your creation and that I am God and you are not.” The Sabbath is a gift from God- a day of rest and renewal, and the laws were created to make sure that every person had equal access to the Sabbath and the rest and renewal that is offered through it. God gave the people the law about the Sabbath to give people freedom and to encourage wellness. And while it’s easy for us to judge Jews for the ways they keep Sabbath which may seem overly extravagant to us, we only have to look at the shift in Sabbath keeping culture among Christians over the last generation, to see that we, too, need laws and practices to protect us from ourselves! This is what we oldest children have been saying all along: once you start bending the rules for one person, then it just becomes a willy-nilly free-for-all and society breaks down into a kind of lawlessness where people steal other peoples’ dogs and brag about it in their obituaries. If we are really honest, each of us has a little bit of the oldest sibling, the synagogue leader in us. Each of us has laws that we think are sacrosanct, that can never and should never be broken. And we are prepared to rain down fire on those who would break those laws. But then, in comes Jesus, who doesn’t necessarily break the law but revisions it. He offers grace and mercy to this woman whom he refers to as a daughter of Abraham, and he asks why should she live even one more day bent over and unable to stand up straight after having lived this way for 18 long years. Another preacher has said of this passage: “The law matters because it helps us order our lives and keep the peace. The law matters because it sets needed boundaries that create room in which we can flourish. The law matters because it encourages us -- sometimes even goads us -- to look beyond ourselves so that we might love and care for our neighbor. But as important as law is -- and notice that Jesus doesn’t set aside the law but rather offers a different interpretation of it -- it must always bow to mercy, to life, to freedom. Law helps us live our lives better, but grace creates life itself. Law helps order our world, but grace is what holds the world together. Law pushes us to care for each other, but grace restores us to each other when we’ve failed in the law.” He concludes, “Jesus came preaching the kingdom of God, and while the law helps us make sense of and get more out of life in the kingdom of the world, it must always bend to the grace that constitutes the abundant life Jesus proclaims. For above and beyond all the laws ever received or conceived, the absolute law is love: love God and love your neighbor. Or, perhaps, love God by loving your neighbor.”ii Your invitation this week is to think about laws that you hold to be most sacred. Or think about laws that have been much in our common discourse lately. And then in and through prayer, be in God’s presence with that law and invite God to help you see the grace beyond the law, the ways that law invites or even goads you beyond yourself and your own justification to see how God is calling you to better love and care for your neighbor. i. https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/knoxnews/obituary.aspx?n=gary-bean&pid=193629892& ii. David Lose. “The Law of Love.” Sunday, August 18, 2013. http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=2699

10th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 15C

10th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 15C August 18, 2019 Last week, I spent a week in training in conflict mediation at the Mediation Skills Training Institute at the Lombard Mennonite Peace Center. The diocese encouraged me to go get this training, so I could offer my skills in different ways to the greater diocese, but I also learned a number of things that could be useful tools in parish ministry (although, I’m hoping not to need any of these in the near or distant future!) One of the goals of conflict mediation is for the mediator to help two people, different groups, or even whole systems (like a church) communicate with one another and problem solve together to address the issues and interests involved. The whole point is to try to help people to move beyond a win-lose mentality and help them explore win-win possibilities. Our facilitator told numerous stories and emphasized how God can and does work through this process to bring about healing and reconciliation for those involved. All that is to say that it seems that our readings for this Sunday just might lend themselves toward conflict mediation. First you have God who is bringing a court case against Israel for breach of covenant in the book of Isaiah. God is telling Israel that God does not desire their hollow worship and reminds them of what they are supposed to be doing as a part of being God’s people: that is to “cease to do evil,/ learn to do good;/ seek justice,/ rescue the oppressed,/ defend the orphan,/ plead for the widow.” (This is from last week’s portion of Isaiah chapter 1 verses 10-20.) Then in today’s reading, the narrator says he is going to sing a love song, but this love song consists of the frustrated expectations of God for God’s people presented in a parable about a vineyard owner and an unproductive, uncooperative vineyard. The parable concludes with the utter destruction of the vineyard due to the owner’s frustration, and just in case we missed the comparison, with the words: “For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts/ is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah/ are his pleasant planting;/ he expected justice, but saw bloodshed;/ righteousness, but heard a cry!” Then you have Jesus who has set his face toward Jerusalem and is on his way to die saying, “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three.” (I’m not really sure how to mediate a win-win solution from that scenario!) Here is what strikes me from these two readings. First, God’s love is abundant and freely available to all, but God’s love does not come without expectations of how God’s beloved are supposed to act. Isaiah and Jesus to a somewhat lesser extent are both prophetic voices who are reminding the people that being the chosen people of God is about so much more than how they worship. They are reminding people that God’s love has expectations for them and those expectations are not being met. They are expected to do justice and to love mercy. They are expected to protect the most vulnerable among them—the widow and the orphan. They are supposed to show hospitality to the strangers among them, both those who are not Jewish and those who are from other lands. They are failing in all of this, and God has grown frustrated and disappointed with them. Second, we need to remember the context of Jesus’s words for his 1st century audience. The family unit which he references is the building block of that society. By saying that he is bringing division to that foundational unit, he is saying that his mission is to completely overthrow the status quo. His early followers understood that to follow him meant to question the status quo as it related to absolutely everything: politically, religiously, sociologically, economically, socially… One commentator writes, “…Following Jesus meant not merely adopting new beliefs, but a new way of living. To be a follower of the one who accepted and even honored the disreputable meant that you needed to do the same, rejecting the easy temptation of judging others and instead inviting them into our lives. To be a follower of the one who preached love and forgiveness was to practice the same, particularly when it comes to those who differ from you even, and maybe especially, in terms of what they believe.” It’s getting where I don’t even want to look at the news any more. It is becoming increasingly difficult for me to witness the deep divisions at work in our country over what would seem to be the most basic and fundamental issues. I begin to despair and just want to shut it all out and live my peaceful life. And it all just seems too big for me to figure out, and I know that there is no single political party who has it all figured out. “All of us have fallen short of the glory of God.” Today’s readings are a sharp and painful reminder to me that being God’s beloved comes with expectations and that being a follower of Jesus means questioning all aspects of the status quo. We cannot remain faithful to those callings and bury our heads in the sand and do nothing, hoping that it will all just work itself out. But what on earth are we to do? How are we to even begin to seek a win-win solution in a political system that has become so entrenched in win-lose? This morning, as I was wrestling with all this, I took a break and read the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr’s daily email. In this email, he writes about creating peaceful change; he writes about how any kind of transformation of society begins with people being rooted and grounded in their own identities as beloved of God that is found in prayer and contemplation. He writes about finding communion in our prayer, communion with God and even communion with our enemies. Rohr writes, “When we begin by connecting with our inner experience of communion, our actions can be pure, clear, and firm. This kind of action, rooted in one’s True Self, comes from a deeper knowing of what is real, good, true, and beautiful—beyond labels and dualistic judgments of right or wrong. From this place, our energy is positive and has the most potential to create change for the good. This stance is precisely what we mean by “being in prayer” and why we must pray always to maintain this state of constant prayer.” He continues, “I’m not telling you not to act. The Gospel offers a way to make our action sustainable and lasting over the long haul. People on the Right tend to be perpetually angry, fearful, and overly defensive, and people on the Left tend to be perpetually cynical, morally righteous, and outraged. The Gospel calls forth a refined instrument beyond these two falsehoods that can really make a difference because it is a new level of consciousness altogether. Such activists are themselves “a new creation” (Galatians 6:15) and the lightning rods of God’s transformative energy into the world.”ii A little over two years ago, in my very first sermon here, I talked about 5 practices of discipleship. (Do you remember them? 1. Pray daily. 2. Worship weekly. 3. Learn constantly. 4. Give generously. 5. Serve joyfully.) I have lost the pattern of praying daily, of contemplation, and I feel its absence keenly. So your invitation this week is to join me in trying to establish, reestablish, or strengthen that practice of daily prayer in your own spiritual life. Like Jesus’s original hearers, many of us have lost the ability to interpret the present time; but when we open ourselves to being in the presence of God daily, that alone can and will transform us, and it will help us transform the world. i. http://www.davidlose.net/2016/08/pentecost-13-c-pursuing-a-faith-that-matters/ ii. From Richard Rohr’s daily meditation from the Center for Action and Contemplation. August 18, 2019; https://cac.org/creating-peaceful-change-2019-08-18/

8th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 13C

8th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 13C August 4, 2019 In all three readings for this Sunday, I see a ribbon that weaves through all of them—that is the challenges of idolatry to our relationship with God. Our reading from Colossians is the only reading of the 3 that actually mentions the word “idolatry.” It is found in a laundry list of characteristics of worldly behaviors that followers of Jesus are called to avoid or turn away from in a portion of the letter that is a reminder and a teaching about baptism. In Hosea, we see God, a tender and nurturing parent, mourning Israel’s turning away from God both politically and religiously—seeking aid from other nations and worshipping other gods in idolatry. In the gospel reading for today, Jesus is called upon to settle a family dispute over inheritance. Jesus tells a challenging parable with a stern rebuke as its conclusion: “But God said to him, `You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God." At its heart, the dispute and the parable are about idolatry—how we give our attention to gaining or making money and acquiring possessions above giving our attention to being open to a deeper relationship with God and people around us. For me, each of these cases of idolatry hits a little closer to home. In the Colossians reading, there’s a list of characteristics that we are called to “put to death:” “fornication, passion, evil desire, greed (which is idolatry). I mean, I don’t know about y’all, but I think I do ok on most of those most of the time, so I’m not too worried about that list. The challenge of Hosea of turning away from God to worship other gods and to seek political alliances with other nations also isn’t something that I, as an individual, feel convicted over. We may all have different opinions on how our nation shakes out on this one, but that’s not really something any of us can control, right? The gospel reading hits a little closer to home for me, not because I’m squabbling with my brothers over any sort of inheritance issues; but if you’ve driven past my new house recently, you can’t help but notice a giant, metal Pod in the driveway that is filled to the brim with our stuff. I can’t really think of a finer illustration of our modern equivalent to the image in Jesus’s parable of building bigger barns to store our stuff in. (So I’m definitely convicted on that one.) But here’s where I’ve really struggled and been convicted with this notion of idolatry this week. I’m reading a book that a friend and colleague recommended; it’s required reading for her son who heads of to college this fall. It is titled Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy by James Williams. Williams left a career at Google to get an advanced degree in philosophy at Oxford University. The premise of his book is that “something deep and potentially irreversible seems to be happening to human attention in the age of information. Responding to it well may be the biggest moral and political challenge of our time.”i Williams argues that much of technology today is designed to realign our goals in ways that we don’t even notice. He likens it to if we had a GPS device that we followed that, instead of taking us where we wanted to go, took us hours out of the way. He writes, “No one would put up with that sort of distraction from a technology that directs us through physical space. Yet we do precisely this, on a daily basis, when it comes to technologies that direct us through informational space.” As I write this sermon, I have not finished the whole book, but I’ve read enough to be convicted and to recognize that idolatry, at its heart, is about who and what we give our attention to and how we give it. Understood in this light, I am sad to say that I am woefully idolatrous, and it is so much more insidious than eschewing characteristics in a list from Colossians or even a giant Pod in my driveway. It is staggering for me to think about the millions of ways in a given day that I give my attention to what Colossians would term “worldly things”—things that are not of God or in keeping with the love of God as revealed in the person of Jesus Christ. And for us modern followers of Jesus Christ, that is a much greater temptation and tendency than worshiping a golden calf in the wilderness (which may still be some of our definition of idolatry). But what are we to do? What can we possibly do? When I was at Honey Creek a couple of weeks ago serving as a spiritual director for the final summer camp session, I got to baptize one of the counselors there-one who had never been baptized or active in a church community and who found a way of life and love in working at Honey Creek this summer. The counselor whose name was Jude wanted to be baptized by immersion, so we arranged for a horse trough to be brought outside the chapel and filled with water. I baptized Jude at the closing Eucharist on the next to last day of camp with all the campers and counselors, volunteers and staff of Honey Creek gathered around. The next day, at the closing service of camp, we showed a slide show of pictures for the week, and when the picture came up of me baptizing Jude, with my hands upon Jude as she was fully immersed under water, several of the campers gasped and one exclaimed, “It looks like she’s drowning her!” And it did! And it was supposed to look that way, because that is what we really think we are doing in our baptism; we are dying to our old life and being born again in the new life of Jesus Christ. And while we don’t get baptized more than once, we do renew our baptismal vows over and over throughout our lives as a reminder that parts of us need to die so that others can be reborn in the new life of Jesus Christ. Your invitation this week is to pay attention. Pay attention to how you give or spend your attention What parts of how you spend your attention are, in fact, idolatry—impediments to your relationship with God and to your living in the fullness of God’s light and love? For those things that you can change/adjust yourself, begin making plans to change them. And for those things under which you are powerless, invite the Holy Spirit to put those parts of you to death so that you may be reborn and restored to the God who has always loved you. i. Williams, James. Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy. P 3.