16th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 21C

16th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 21C September 29, 2019 This past week, what had started out as a minor skirmish between the Lemburg family and our elderly next door neighbor developed into full-blown war. I had never actually met this woman, but she had not so nice words for Emerson when he was mowing our grass the first time, and I had noticed that she would openly glare at us when she was out walking her dog and we would drive by. Our neighbor spends a lot of time out working in her yard, and often when she is out in her back yard and our dogs are out, they like to go to the wooden privacy fence and act like they are going to eviscerate her. Usually, when I witness this, I call them back in and make them stay in the house. But this week, I wondered what would happen if I didn’t. So, I stood just inside the doorway on the screened porch, and I watched. I watched as my dogs went to the fence and began barking. I watched as the neighbor approached where the dogs were barking from her side of the fence and began fussing at my dogs. I watched as she disappeared again, and then I watched as she began shooting water at my dogs through the fence. I raised my voice: “Excuse me! Why are you trying to spray my dogs with water through the fence?” The neighbor, clearly unaware that I was outside watching, was caught off guard and said she was merely trying to water the plants on her side of the fence. I responded that I had been watching the whole time to which she countered that my dogs were disturbing her by being outside barking. Well, I will not bore you with the rest of the words that were shared except to say that while I never said anything untoward to our neighbor, I did have to apologize to our altar guild chair, Sandra Calver, who I was on the phone with during the whole encounter and to whom I vented some of my more colorful feelings about the nature of said neighbor. But even after the encounter was over, I still spent a fair amount of emotional energy imagining the revenge I could enact upon our nasty neighbor. Our gospel reading for today is yet another parable of Jesus. Just before the reading for today, Luke sets the stage by telling us that “the Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all this [Jesus’s parable of the unjust steward that we heard last week] and they ridiculed [Jesus].” So Jesus lets them have it, and then he tells the parable today—a story about a rich man who feasted sumptuously and the poor man named Lazarus (one of the only named characters in the parables) who lay at the rich man’s gate longing for the crumbs that fell off the rich man’s table and suffered his sores to be licked by dogs. Both men die, and the rich man goes to Hades, and Lazarus is taken by the angels to be with Abraham. When the rich man looks up and sees Lazarus with Abraham, he asks Abraham to send Lazarus to him to help ease his thirst. Abraham responds that he cannot do that saying “between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.” Then the rich man asks that Abraham send Lazarus to his brothers to warn them of what is to come if they don’t change their ways, and Abraham refuses this request also, saying “They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.' …‘If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.'" We talked last week about how some of the gospel writer of Luke’s agenda is revealed in how he talks about money, and this parable, along with its introduction, bears witness to that as well. Last week, I cited another commentator who said 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.”i And that is certainly true of this parable, too, but this parable, I think, goes beyond wealth to whether or not we truly see people and how our lack of seeing people is what fixes great chasms between us. Notice how even from Hades, the rich man is trying to get Abraham to send Lazarus here and there doing the rich man’s bidding. He didn’t actually see Lazarus as a human being, as a beloved child of God-hungry and suffering at his gates every day of his life, and he still does not see Lazarus beyond what use can be made of him. This great chasm that exists between the two in the parabolic afterlife began, actually, in life, and it was a result of the rich man’s disregarding of the teachings of the law and the prophets, who tell us how to care for the poor, how to treat our neighbor. And sometimes it is even the same for us, we who know the teachings of the law and the prophets and who have tasted the transformed life of people of the resurrection, followers of Jesus. So much of the hardships of this life are a result of the great chasms that become fixed between us when we do not take the time to really see each other—to see the other as a beloved child of God, to see what the other loves and values, to respect what the other needs. Once you start looking for these great chasms, paying attention to people’s suffering, you can see them everywhere you look. It’s certainly at the heart of the newly declared war between the Lemburgs and our elderly neighbor. Also this past week, maybe on the same day that I declared war on our neighbor, I read a Facebook post by Carrie Newcomer who is a Quaker singer, songwriter, and poet that I really like. She shared a story that she titled “A Goodness Down Deep That Keeps On Singing.” In it, she writes, “Last week my flight out of Sioux Falls was delayed several hours and so I missed my connection in Chicago, resulting in 4 hour layover in O’Hare Airport. I found a comfortable booth in a busy Starbucks and settled in with a book. There were three baristas working the busy counter. One was a young African American man with a wide smile. This wonderful man was singing mini arias in a beautiful operatic voice. He was obviously a trained vocalist, and a seriously fine baritone. He kept singing out the orders in soaring melodies as they came up, lattes and cappuccinos, the name of the patrons, and then always (with a final flourish) a thank you . I sat there for an hour, just listening to him, closing my eyes, enjoying the resonance of his voice, the flourishes, the final gratitudes. I noticed how some people stopped, clearly delighted by something so fine and rarefied. Others hurried by, so intent on getting where they were going, they arrived at their gate, but missed the miracle. There is a lot in this troubled world that feels like a gathering storm. But then something utterly unexpected and truly beautiful happens. There is a goodness down deep....that just keeps singing.” She continues, “Eventually I got up, ordered a latte - sang it to him ‘a small, with almond milk please...’ We got into a conversation (all sung) back and forth (his name was Owen, he had a show in town next Saturday, my name was Carrie, I just had a show in Sioux Falls). Finally, I sang an affirmation, “You have a truly beautiful voice. I have been so moved today by your generous and musical spirit." And then with a bow, I thanked him. He stopped. Leaned in and whispered, ‘I needed that today.’ Then he straightened up and sang with a flourish as elegant as a quill tipped pen, ‘Thank you.’ Yes, there is a goodness down deep...and it keeps singing....it just keeps on singing.”ii As people of the resurrection, we are called to be those who truly see others, to be those who try to bridge the chasm (those that we create and those that we don’t). May you look for ways to see people and to bridge the chasm this week. And lest you think I do not practice what I preach….after I wrote this sermon, I thought about what sort of peace offering I could make to my neighbor. I strode up to her front door with a pot of mums and some dog treats in my hand. I rang her doorbell, and when she opened it and glared at me, I said, “My name is Melanie. I’m your neighbor. I bought these for you. I don’t want to be your enemy.” For a moment she seemed almost overcome, and then she quickly invited me into her house where we talked, shared parts of our stories and exchanged phone numbers. The exchange ended with her and her little dog walking me back to my house as they took a walk around the block, and I felt that, at least for this moment, we had built a bridge over the chasm. i. David Lose from http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?m=4377&rp=blog53&post=2746 ii. Facebook post by Carrie Newcomer. September 24, 2019

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