Preached August 29, 2010
Luke 14:1,7-14
What position of importance do you think you deserve? At home? At work? With your friends and family? At church? Jesus has much to teach us in this week's gospel lesson from Luke about what it means to honor others and be honored by them. Jesus was a people watcher. We have talked several times recently about how Jesus has an uncanny ability to see people that others are overlooking, and to see people as they really are. . .warts and all.
Remember that Jesus and the disciples are on their way to Jerusalem. This summer and into the fall we will be following Jesus on this journey as he teaches his disciples what it means to be a follower of Christ. He has been telling them what the New Community of God will be like when it comes into existence and this passage is also about that New Community. He has just finished a discourse on the Banquet that God will give when the New Community comes into existence. People from all parts of the world will stream into the banquet, even those that the Jewish nation at that time felt were beyond God’s love and acceptance. I’ve asked this question before: Who is it that you don’t expect to see, or don’t want to see seated at the same table in God’s New Community for that Great Banquet? I believe you will be surprised by who God seats next to you!
One of the things that Luke does in his creative writing of the life of Christ is to repeat events, just so that the reader will not miss the warning or truth Luke is trying to express through the words and actions of Jesus. We don’t get to read all of the passages between one week and another, or even all of the verses of a passage on any particular week, so we often miss these repeated stories as they are left out of the weekly lectionary choices.
Between verses one and seven in today’s lectionary, verses we didn’t read, Jesus is at a banquet on the Sabbath at a Pharisee’s home. Luke wants us to know that this isn’t an ordinary banquet, because today, on the menu is a theological discussion about God’s presence in our lives and what that means in the way we respond to the needs of others. Luke tells us that everyone is watching Jesus, but the English doesn’t get at the Greek undertones which actually say that they were watching him ominously, expecting him to do something that was against their rules and regulations. This is probably the real reason behind his being invited to the banquet. And Jesus doesn’t disappoint them.
On this particular day there is a man with dropsy in need of healing and Jesus not being one to wait when he sees someone in great need, and repeating the lesson we had from last week when he healed a woman on the Sabbath in the Synagogue, Jesus asks his host and those gathered if it is allowed to heal on the Sabbath. No one answers him. Remember what happened last week when the Synagogue leader objected to Jesus healing on the Sabbath. They are probably thinking they don’t want to be the object of Jesus’ verbal response.
Now you need to know that dropsy is a disease where your arms and legs swell grossly. It was a disease associated by rabbinical thought with immorality and un-cleanliness. Don’t miss the important fact here that when Jesus heals someone he is also pronouncing forgiveness upon them. The rabbi’s thought that no healing could come to anyone unless God forgave that person of the sin they believed caused the illness. This is one of the things they have against Jesus, he is pronouncing people healed, and something which they believe only God can do. But the evidence of God’s forgiveness is seen in the healing of the persons Jesus touches. So knowing what they are thinking, Jesus heals the man.
Though they say nothing Jesus more or less knows exactly what they are thinking, how can he heal, that is do work on the Sabbath? They were probably upset because healing implied that the man was pronounced forgiven for any sins he had, which they believed were the cause of his affliction in the first place. But that's for another discussion.
Please understand that the Pharisees aren’t the bad guys. They are faithful believers in God and they are trying to apply the wisdom of the scriptures to their lives. Yes, they have created 614 rules they have to keep in order to be faithful and they get all caught up in whether a person is or isn’t keeping all 614 rules…because if you don’t then they believe you aren’t faithful. They have become so trapped in their thinking that they have forgotten all about God’s compassion and love, forgiveness and acceptance, and they fail to apply those overriding principles to their own treatment of others.
Jesus argues with their unasked questions, again, as was typical of rabbis, from a lesser situation to the greater situation. He reminds them that if their ox or a child falls into a ditch or a well on the Sabbath that they will quickly work to get the ox or the child out of the ditch without compromising the Sabbath Laws. How much more important is a person in great need of healing than an ox in the ditch?
I rather think that Jesus knows that his followers and the Pharisees at this banquet are missing the real lessons he is trying to teach them about what it means to be a disciple. False pride and social status have nothing to do with being a true disciple of Christ.
Jesus was a people watcher. Do you like to go the mall and sit on a bench and just watch people as they go by? Lots of interesting things happen. You can learn a lot about someone just by watching how they talk and act in public. Jesus, as we know, from other passages was a great lover of people watching. This day he observes how those in attendance try to take the most important positions of honor at the table as they arrive. The seating was on couches arranged in a U with two to four persons reclining on each couch, and with the host seated at the base of the U and honored guests seated immediately to his left and right with the most honored position being the seat immediately to his right. Simply put, the closer you were seated to the host, the higher up in the pecking order you were. Some, who take seats beyond their social position, may have to be told by their host that they have to give up their seat so that a more important person can have it. The Greek here implies a long slow agonizing walk to the couch at the end of the table, knowing all the way that everyone is watching as you are put in your place in the lowest seat in the social pecking order. How embarrassing as you are hurt more with every step you take. Jesus tells them that it would be better to take seats of lesser importance and then have the host escort them to more important seats of honor.
Jesus’ point is that honor is not something we grab with gusto for ourselves, but something that is bestowed upon us as an honor. How much different for the guest to take the last seat at the beginning of the banquet, and then have the host tell this humble quest that he or she will be ushered to a greater seat of honor. In fact Jesus uses the term “glory” to characterize the honor that results. “For everyone who exalts (our glories) himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted (gloried).” It is a theme about the New Community of God that Jesus repeats often in Luke’s gospel often and it is a reversal of the usual thinking of his contemporaries.
Jesus is not against giving honor to those who deserve honor, he is, however, against the use of power and prestige to puff yourself up. God honors the humble person and the door to the New Community of God is through humility. We are truly humble when we recognize our great need for God in our lives, and not any so-called rights to God’s blessings.
Jesus expands on this thought by observing who has been invited to this banquet and sees that they apparently all have the ability to return the favor and in fact according to custom and society are expected to return the invitation by inviting the host to their home for dinner. This kind of payback hospitality is not what should exist in the New Community of God.
How much better, Jesus tells them, would it be if they invited those to dinner those who had no ability to repay them and from whom they never expected to get an invitation to dinner in return: the poor, the powerless, the sick and invalid, the homeless and, shall I say it, even unlawful immigrants. He tells them to invite the outcasts of society, those people that would normally not be welcomed into their homes. Such a dinner would be a true reflection of the Banquet of the New Community of God that Jesus says will take place when God's ways are truly able to be put into practice on a daily basis in our lives. We will do for others without expecting to get something back from them. We will care for others in a loving manner that doesn’t reflect our hopes for a return favor someday…not even an expression of appreciation. How often have you said something like, “They didn’t even thank me for my kindness?” I think Jesus would ask us, “Did you do it because you expected them to thank you? Did you do it because you wanted to be appreciated and lifted up into a more honorable position in society or in relationship to this person? Or did you care for them because you really wanted to help them? If the latter, then you don’t need to expect a thank you, just appreciate your own good behavior and the fact that you have helped someone in need.”
The story continues with Jesus telling another parable about a man who invites high society guests to his banquet but everyone turns him down so he sends his servants out to bring in all those who would never get an invitation to such a banquet: the poor, the lame, the blind and the maimed. But there is still room even after they come so the host sends his servants out to bring in total strangers and even foreigners by bringing back all those on the highways and the hedges, an illusion to the Gentiles, those that most rabbis thought were far beyond God’s love and acceptance.
There is a warning here, that those who feel they deserve the blessings of God may not experience those blessings if they turn away from God and away from God’s New Community because they do not want to associate with those very same persons that God loves and accepts, forgives and includes, even when those persons are not normally accepted into human society for one reason or another.
Let’s get to the crux of the matter: Do you expect to get something back from others when you do something nice for them? Or do you simply do the nice thing for others because that is what God expects from us all of the time: truly caring for the needs of others in compassionate and loving ways?
There are no exceptions to being compassionate and loving in the Bible and if you do think you have discovered a passage that gives you the right to exclude and ignore any other person then perhaps you haven't studied the Bible enough and need to go back to really reading the Bible in its entirety and stop just picking out favorite verses and ignoring the rest of what it has to say.
So will you join in the banquet in the new community of God today, or will you refuse God’s invitation to join God and all of those that God includes in God’s New Community? It’s up to you, stay on the outside, or come inside to experience God’s love and hope and peace.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Set Free to Be…, Luke 13:10-17, 38th Anniversary ECMCCS
Preached August 22, 2010
Luke 13:10-17:
When I was young I believed that being a good Christian, a follower of Christ, was all about following the rules: They taught me that if I wanted to go to heaven I had to keep all of the rules. They would tell us that once you became a Christian you could never lose your salvation. But they also taught me that if you were breaking the rules, then you probably never had really become a Christian anyway and you were going to hell unless you decided to ask God to forgive you, pledge your life to God and start keeping all the rules.
Here is a short list of some of the rules I grew up with:
Read one chapter of the Bible every day. Memorize a verse of the Bible every week. Attend Sunday school and worship every Sunday morning. Attend evening Sunday School and worship every Sunday. Go to church for mission study and worship and prayer meeting every Wednesday. Attend youth group devotions every Friday night. Add to that the following: You can’t smoke if you are a Christian. You can’t drink alcoholic beverages if you are a Christian. You can’t dance or go to a school dance if you are a Christian. You can’t go to movies if you are a Christian. You have to be in church every time there is a worship service, bible study, or other event, even if it happens at the same time as a school or community event. You have to show you are loyal to God by not letting anything else interfere with your going to church! Church was more important than school homework. If I had a research paper due in school but there was a full evening of events at church, then I was not allowed to do the research paper since it would take me away from church if I went to the library. No arguments. I used to ask my parents to let me stay home one Sunday evening a year to see the Wizard of Oz movie on TV. It only came on once a year, always on a Sunday night. But my parents always said, “No. Missing church is a sin. You will go to church.”
I’ve come to understand that for many so-called Christians it is following the rules that make them believe they are leading a successful Christian life, the life that God wants them to live.
But I know, regardless of what anyone says, that there is absolutely no way that anyone of us can keep all of the rules that the Bible states one should follow. How many of you eat shrimp? Sorry, that’s an abomination. You are going to hell. How many of you right now have an article of clothing or shoes on that was made out of more than one kind of fabric? Why that would be everyone of us since all of us are wearing shoes and all shoes are made out of more than one kind of fabric or material. Sorry. Abomination. You broke the rules, you are going to hell.
Living by the rules is a horrible way to live! Because sometime, somewhere you will fail to follow one of the rules. It’s human nature. At the time of Jesus’ ministry they had codified over 600 rules that one had to follow if one wanted to say you were a good Jew serving God. One of those rules was that you had to keep the Sabbath holy by not doing any kind of work on the Sabbath.
Living by the rules means that I am mostly concerned with myself and keeping myself under control all of the time. Living by the rules means I have little time to be concerned about other people and their problems or situation. Living by the rules means that I spend all of my time looking at me and have no time left to look at other people, to really see them and to realize that I am part of a greater community.
One of the things I’ve taken to heart over the years are the words of Henri Nouwen, "love Jesus and love (others) the way Jesus loved." Today’s scripture lesson is an example of how Jesus loved.
On this particular Sabbath Jesus is teaching in the Synagogue. Suddenly he stops his teaching. He has seen a woman bent over suffering from what many believe to be scoliosis a developmental deformation of the spine. She has had this affliction for eighteen years. By now she is crippled, probably can’t stand up straight, probably has a twisted and hunched appearance, may not be able to look up any longer, only down at the ground. But like a faithful woman of her time she is at church with her family and friends. Maybe she has heard about this rabbi, maybe this is the first time she has met him. But no one is clamoring for her healing because she has always been this way and her family and friends have stopped noticing her horrible situation. But Jesus sees her, really sees her and Jesus calls her to come to him. Jesus sees her as a captive to her disease and Jesus is going to set her free to be all that God wants her to become.
He places his hands upon her in the sign of a blessing and he pronounces her healed, set free from her ailment. Jesus recognizes within her something holy and divine and with his touch he pronounces her to be a beloved child of God. The scripture says that she stood up straight and began praising God. Can you imagine her joy at being set free?
But there were the rule followers there that day and they weren’t happy with the situation. Healing someone on the Sabbath was considered to be work. You could take care of a sick person on the Sabbath, but they couldn’t get better or you would be accused of working if you helped them. I remember staying home from school as a child, faking my illness, and then being so upset when later in the day I wanted to play but my parents kept telling me that I was sick and had to stay in bed.
So the leader of the synagogue lets everyone know that this isn’t following the rules. “Come back on Monday, after the Sabbath, that’s the time for healing. You should not expect healing on the Sabbath, because the Sabbath is a holy day set aside for worshipping God.” His message was clear: Jesus has broken the rules. Jesus has put the welfare of a crippled woman over the religious obligation to following the rules. Now isn’t the time for healing. Wait! Come back another day!
Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem. He is teaching his disciples what it means to be a follower of Christ and what it means to be a citizen of the New Community of God. Jesus isn’t going to let anything, even religious rules, keep anyone out of God’s New Community, nor allow anyone to be abused or rejected or ignored in this New Community.
Jesus spends a lot of time in conflict with the religious leaders of his day about what the Sabbath was supposed to be. Remember that in last week’s scripture lesson from Luke Jesus said following him would result in division among people as people realized that doing things God’s way meant doing things differently than they have ever done them before. Following Jesus means changing and no one likes to change. I believe that Jesus was attempting to teach people that he believed that the Sabbath should be an example of what the New Community of God was to be like, a little-bit-of-heaven on earth. And Jesus wasn’t going to wait until a more favorable day if there was a need today. Jesus by his act of healing on the Sabbath demonstrated to the people exactly what the New Community of God was like, and then he went on to talk about it, too, in the following verses. These weren’t just empty words. Jesus knew that actions were the concrete demonstration of your words and your beliefs. Put your words into action! It’s easy to say a word of blessing to another person, it isn’t always so easy to put those words into action, to take your hands and make something happen that will really bless another person’s life.
I’m sure that the Synagogue leader, probably a Pharisee, didn’t really have a problem with Jesus healing this woman, it was a matter of timing. It was a problem of when it happened, not to whom or by whom it happened or how it was accomplished. Just go away today and come back tomorrow. Tomorrow is the day when healing can happen. Tomorrow you won’t be breaking the rules. Just wait a little longer. We in the Queer Community are used to hearing these kinds of words. Just wait a little longer until everyone can agree that marriage equality is the right thing to do, then you can get married. Just wait a little longer until everyone in congress and the Senate can agree and then we’ll put an end to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Wait until we can get everyone on board and then we’ll pass laws that say that gay and lesbian and transgender persons can’t be harassed and fired from their jobs.
There is a tension in the story between Jesus and the leader of the Synagogue. You can feel it as you read the story. Here are two faithful Jewish men who are both struggling with what it means to be faithful to God. I don’t think the Synagogue leader is a bad man; he’s pressing the case for obedient faithfulness to God. But so is Jesus! They both want to keep the Sabbath holy, they just disagree about how to do that. Jesus says the time for salvation, for healing, for being set free isn’t tomorrow, it’s right now, today, no matter what day it is. In fact, Jesus is saying, that the Sabbath is the perfect day for healing, the perfect day to be set free from whatever binds and cripples you in your life.
If we are called to love Jesus and love others the way Jesus loved, then its very clear to me that this story gives to us a model of what it means to be the church—to be the body of Christ—not just on Sunday, but every day of the week. Jesus is the model for us…for all of us…in our daily lives…in our homes…at our places of work…out in the community that surrounds us.
Look around you at the people in this place today. Who is the bent over woman you have stopped seeing? Do you really see these people? Do you know the troubles and tear-jerking problems that many of them are facing? Have you taken the time to get to know them, really know them? Or do you just see them as they appear to you in church on Sunday and think that is all there is to them? Who in this room have you blessed with your presence in their lives? Who has felt your hand of blessing and healing upon them? Will you love each other like Jesus loves you?
As you walk through this city this week who is the bent over woman and will you open your eyes and see, really see the people around you? Can you love them like Jesus loves them?
The bent over woman we have stopped seeing could be our neighbors of color. We can be proud of the progress we have made in our society. But there is still much progress to yet be made. Take for instance the plight of the African American whose house is up for sale and who asks their real estate agent if they should remove their family pictures from the walls of the house so no prospective buyer will know they are black? Is their question unreasonable?
The bent over woman we have stopped seeing could be the homeless on the streets we walk by without feeling compassion for and from whom we avert our eyes and avoid speaking to lest they ask us for help. Why don’t we decide to do something for the folks living in the Nicklesville tent city one block up the street? If nothing else we could take sandwiches and nourishing drinks to them once a week.
The bent over woman we have stopped seeing could be the Queer teenager that has been kicked out of his or her home by their so-called tough loving parents to fend for themselves on the streets and face exploitation and harm as well as disease and discomfort. It is estimated that 40-60% of youth on the streets are LGBT. Many of them have attempted to take their own lives, many have succeeded just because they are gay. We could volunteer to help those teens right here every single night of the week in the ROOTS program housed in this very building.
The bent over woman could be one of our own who has trouble understanding his or her own sexuality or gender identity and has not yet come to understand that he or she is a beautiful and beloved child of God who doesn’t have to do anything or change anything to receive God’s acceptance or ours. We have a mission as a church to speak to the needs of those in the Queer community in clear, strong voices that counter the message of hate and revulsion that is broadcast so loudly by the fundamentalist Christian right. It is our heritage as the oldest LGBT congregation in the Pacific Northwest and it is a heritage that we must live up to and live into.
When we stop seeing the bent over women and men of our day, when we stop believing that it is part of our responsibility to touch them, to bless them, to set them free then we have stopped being the church that God called us into being 38 years ago. When we stop seeing and stop loving and stop caring and going and doing for others, then we stop being the New Community of God.
We have a lot to be thankful for this year. We have a new place of worship. We have new friends in the University District Ecumenical Parish and Campus projects. We have a new opportunity to become a growing, caring, loving church. Nothing stands in our way of achieving the vision that God has implanted in us except we ourselves. Let us renew our commitment to seeing and doing, to loving and touching, to blessing and freeing others to be all that God wants them to be.
Luke 13:10-17:
When I was young I believed that being a good Christian, a follower of Christ, was all about following the rules: They taught me that if I wanted to go to heaven I had to keep all of the rules. They would tell us that once you became a Christian you could never lose your salvation. But they also taught me that if you were breaking the rules, then you probably never had really become a Christian anyway and you were going to hell unless you decided to ask God to forgive you, pledge your life to God and start keeping all the rules.
Here is a short list of some of the rules I grew up with:
Read one chapter of the Bible every day. Memorize a verse of the Bible every week. Attend Sunday school and worship every Sunday morning. Attend evening Sunday School and worship every Sunday. Go to church for mission study and worship and prayer meeting every Wednesday. Attend youth group devotions every Friday night. Add to that the following: You can’t smoke if you are a Christian. You can’t drink alcoholic beverages if you are a Christian. You can’t dance or go to a school dance if you are a Christian. You can’t go to movies if you are a Christian. You have to be in church every time there is a worship service, bible study, or other event, even if it happens at the same time as a school or community event. You have to show you are loyal to God by not letting anything else interfere with your going to church! Church was more important than school homework. If I had a research paper due in school but there was a full evening of events at church, then I was not allowed to do the research paper since it would take me away from church if I went to the library. No arguments. I used to ask my parents to let me stay home one Sunday evening a year to see the Wizard of Oz movie on TV. It only came on once a year, always on a Sunday night. But my parents always said, “No. Missing church is a sin. You will go to church.”
I’ve come to understand that for many so-called Christians it is following the rules that make them believe they are leading a successful Christian life, the life that God wants them to live.
But I know, regardless of what anyone says, that there is absolutely no way that anyone of us can keep all of the rules that the Bible states one should follow. How many of you eat shrimp? Sorry, that’s an abomination. You are going to hell. How many of you right now have an article of clothing or shoes on that was made out of more than one kind of fabric? Why that would be everyone of us since all of us are wearing shoes and all shoes are made out of more than one kind of fabric or material. Sorry. Abomination. You broke the rules, you are going to hell.
Living by the rules is a horrible way to live! Because sometime, somewhere you will fail to follow one of the rules. It’s human nature. At the time of Jesus’ ministry they had codified over 600 rules that one had to follow if one wanted to say you were a good Jew serving God. One of those rules was that you had to keep the Sabbath holy by not doing any kind of work on the Sabbath.
Living by the rules means that I am mostly concerned with myself and keeping myself under control all of the time. Living by the rules means I have little time to be concerned about other people and their problems or situation. Living by the rules means that I spend all of my time looking at me and have no time left to look at other people, to really see them and to realize that I am part of a greater community.
One of the things I’ve taken to heart over the years are the words of Henri Nouwen, "love Jesus and love (others) the way Jesus loved." Today’s scripture lesson is an example of how Jesus loved.
On this particular Sabbath Jesus is teaching in the Synagogue. Suddenly he stops his teaching. He has seen a woman bent over suffering from what many believe to be scoliosis a developmental deformation of the spine. She has had this affliction for eighteen years. By now she is crippled, probably can’t stand up straight, probably has a twisted and hunched appearance, may not be able to look up any longer, only down at the ground. But like a faithful woman of her time she is at church with her family and friends. Maybe she has heard about this rabbi, maybe this is the first time she has met him. But no one is clamoring for her healing because she has always been this way and her family and friends have stopped noticing her horrible situation. But Jesus sees her, really sees her and Jesus calls her to come to him. Jesus sees her as a captive to her disease and Jesus is going to set her free to be all that God wants her to become.
He places his hands upon her in the sign of a blessing and he pronounces her healed, set free from her ailment. Jesus recognizes within her something holy and divine and with his touch he pronounces her to be a beloved child of God. The scripture says that she stood up straight and began praising God. Can you imagine her joy at being set free?
But there were the rule followers there that day and they weren’t happy with the situation. Healing someone on the Sabbath was considered to be work. You could take care of a sick person on the Sabbath, but they couldn’t get better or you would be accused of working if you helped them. I remember staying home from school as a child, faking my illness, and then being so upset when later in the day I wanted to play but my parents kept telling me that I was sick and had to stay in bed.
So the leader of the synagogue lets everyone know that this isn’t following the rules. “Come back on Monday, after the Sabbath, that’s the time for healing. You should not expect healing on the Sabbath, because the Sabbath is a holy day set aside for worshipping God.” His message was clear: Jesus has broken the rules. Jesus has put the welfare of a crippled woman over the religious obligation to following the rules. Now isn’t the time for healing. Wait! Come back another day!
Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem. He is teaching his disciples what it means to be a follower of Christ and what it means to be a citizen of the New Community of God. Jesus isn’t going to let anything, even religious rules, keep anyone out of God’s New Community, nor allow anyone to be abused or rejected or ignored in this New Community.
Jesus spends a lot of time in conflict with the religious leaders of his day about what the Sabbath was supposed to be. Remember that in last week’s scripture lesson from Luke Jesus said following him would result in division among people as people realized that doing things God’s way meant doing things differently than they have ever done them before. Following Jesus means changing and no one likes to change. I believe that Jesus was attempting to teach people that he believed that the Sabbath should be an example of what the New Community of God was to be like, a little-bit-of-heaven on earth. And Jesus wasn’t going to wait until a more favorable day if there was a need today. Jesus by his act of healing on the Sabbath demonstrated to the people exactly what the New Community of God was like, and then he went on to talk about it, too, in the following verses. These weren’t just empty words. Jesus knew that actions were the concrete demonstration of your words and your beliefs. Put your words into action! It’s easy to say a word of blessing to another person, it isn’t always so easy to put those words into action, to take your hands and make something happen that will really bless another person’s life.
I’m sure that the Synagogue leader, probably a Pharisee, didn’t really have a problem with Jesus healing this woman, it was a matter of timing. It was a problem of when it happened, not to whom or by whom it happened or how it was accomplished. Just go away today and come back tomorrow. Tomorrow is the day when healing can happen. Tomorrow you won’t be breaking the rules. Just wait a little longer. We in the Queer Community are used to hearing these kinds of words. Just wait a little longer until everyone can agree that marriage equality is the right thing to do, then you can get married. Just wait a little longer until everyone in congress and the Senate can agree and then we’ll put an end to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Wait until we can get everyone on board and then we’ll pass laws that say that gay and lesbian and transgender persons can’t be harassed and fired from their jobs.
There is a tension in the story between Jesus and the leader of the Synagogue. You can feel it as you read the story. Here are two faithful Jewish men who are both struggling with what it means to be faithful to God. I don’t think the Synagogue leader is a bad man; he’s pressing the case for obedient faithfulness to God. But so is Jesus! They both want to keep the Sabbath holy, they just disagree about how to do that. Jesus says the time for salvation, for healing, for being set free isn’t tomorrow, it’s right now, today, no matter what day it is. In fact, Jesus is saying, that the Sabbath is the perfect day for healing, the perfect day to be set free from whatever binds and cripples you in your life.
If we are called to love Jesus and love others the way Jesus loved, then its very clear to me that this story gives to us a model of what it means to be the church—to be the body of Christ—not just on Sunday, but every day of the week. Jesus is the model for us…for all of us…in our daily lives…in our homes…at our places of work…out in the community that surrounds us.
Look around you at the people in this place today. Who is the bent over woman you have stopped seeing? Do you really see these people? Do you know the troubles and tear-jerking problems that many of them are facing? Have you taken the time to get to know them, really know them? Or do you just see them as they appear to you in church on Sunday and think that is all there is to them? Who in this room have you blessed with your presence in their lives? Who has felt your hand of blessing and healing upon them? Will you love each other like Jesus loves you?
As you walk through this city this week who is the bent over woman and will you open your eyes and see, really see the people around you? Can you love them like Jesus loves them?
The bent over woman we have stopped seeing could be our neighbors of color. We can be proud of the progress we have made in our society. But there is still much progress to yet be made. Take for instance the plight of the African American whose house is up for sale and who asks their real estate agent if they should remove their family pictures from the walls of the house so no prospective buyer will know they are black? Is their question unreasonable?
The bent over woman we have stopped seeing could be the homeless on the streets we walk by without feeling compassion for and from whom we avert our eyes and avoid speaking to lest they ask us for help. Why don’t we decide to do something for the folks living in the Nicklesville tent city one block up the street? If nothing else we could take sandwiches and nourishing drinks to them once a week.
The bent over woman we have stopped seeing could be the Queer teenager that has been kicked out of his or her home by their so-called tough loving parents to fend for themselves on the streets and face exploitation and harm as well as disease and discomfort. It is estimated that 40-60% of youth on the streets are LGBT. Many of them have attempted to take their own lives, many have succeeded just because they are gay. We could volunteer to help those teens right here every single night of the week in the ROOTS program housed in this very building.
The bent over woman could be one of our own who has trouble understanding his or her own sexuality or gender identity and has not yet come to understand that he or she is a beautiful and beloved child of God who doesn’t have to do anything or change anything to receive God’s acceptance or ours. We have a mission as a church to speak to the needs of those in the Queer community in clear, strong voices that counter the message of hate and revulsion that is broadcast so loudly by the fundamentalist Christian right. It is our heritage as the oldest LGBT congregation in the Pacific Northwest and it is a heritage that we must live up to and live into.
When we stop seeing the bent over women and men of our day, when we stop believing that it is part of our responsibility to touch them, to bless them, to set them free then we have stopped being the church that God called us into being 38 years ago. When we stop seeing and stop loving and stop caring and going and doing for others, then we stop being the New Community of God.
We have a lot to be thankful for this year. We have a new place of worship. We have new friends in the University District Ecumenical Parish and Campus projects. We have a new opportunity to become a growing, caring, loving church. Nothing stands in our way of achieving the vision that God has implanted in us except we ourselves. Let us renew our commitment to seeing and doing, to loving and touching, to blessing and freeing others to be all that God wants them to be.
United & Divided or Jesus & Family Values, Luke 12:46-59
Preached Sunday, August 15, 2010
Luke 12:46-59
This isn’t an easy text to preach on, or even to understand. We just don’t like for Jesus to say things like we read in this passage. This isn’t the Jesus we usually think we know. This is a very different Jesus. Jesus uses the idea of fire as a symbol of judgment. But it is important to remember that though Jesus uses the language of judgment and social violence, that he never resorted to any violent actions, and never was suggesting that violence should become a part of our lives in disagreements with others.
We want a Jesus that talks about harmony and peace, not one that talks about conflicts between people. And then he goes even further and says that he will be the cause of such conflicts. In short Jesus is saying, “Follow me and you can expect there will be trouble and misunderstandings. It’s a given fact. Don’t think life will be comfortable and easy if you follow me.”
(From Out in Scripture) “But this passage begs the question of why Jesus would want to use such violent imagery when he was peaceable. One reason is to remind us that a life as a follower of Christ will inevitably lead to conflict. Jesus is certainly the "Prince of Peace," but that is far different from peace at any cost. The peace that Jesus sought to bring is first and foremost a peace with God. Such a peace will lead to peace among humanity, but we must remember the direction in which godly peace flows. It flows first from a life lived in communion and obedience to God and then outward to the world around us. What Jesus is reminding us is that such a peace is not always welcome and is often met with violent resistance. Jesus' words are cautionary for those who take a life of discipleship too lightly”
Jesus’ disciples have continually misunderstood what he has been telling them about the New Community of God he will usher into existence. They think it will be an earthly kingdom and them will be the officials in charge of everything, enjoying the honor and prestige of their new positions next to him, their new King. But Jesus keeps telling them that’s not the kind of community he will create. He is facing a time of turmoil that will ultimately lead to his death. He is not so much being a prophet of his own future as he is being a good interpreter of the signs all around him. He knows he is on a collision course with the powers and authorities of his day and that they will use all the necessary violence and perversion of the law they can muster to get rid of him because to allow his teachings to take hold on their society would mean that they would be out of power. That’s something that they won’t let happen.
Jesus isn’t satisfied with the status quo. Greek stoicism taught that there was a certain order to everything, even human society and that everyone had a place and should stay in their place. Change was not something you desired for your society because that would mean adjustments and adjustments often mean somebody loses and someone else wins, somebody suffers and some one else reaps a reward. But Jesus isn’t buying into that kind of thinking, because Jesus knows that change must happen in a society if the poor and the outcast, the widow and the orphan, the lame and sick, the eunuch and leper are to be included in the community, too. And Jesus will not tolerate a future where anyone is rejected or cast out of God’s new community.
Many fundamentalist Christian leaders talk abundantly about how Jesus supports their interpretation of Family Values. But that isn’t what we read in the gospels about what Jesus is actually saying. Respect your parents? When Mary comes to Jesus with his brothers to take him home because they think he’s gone off his rocker, he refuses to speak to them and tells his disciples that his mother and brothers, his family, are those who obey his teachings. Pretty harsh stuff from a guy who is held up as the icon of Christian Family Values.
Think about it for a minute. Jesus never did what was expected of a male in his society. He did not have what we would call a home, though many do think he probably had a house in Capernaum. He did not have a regular trade to make a living at, instead he roamed the country as an itinerant preacher, hardly a wealth producing occupation. He did not have a wife or children, something someone of his age would have been expected to do. And he apparently encouraged a whole lot of men to leave behind those same expectations of their society and follow along after him from place to place, living off of the wealth of the women who supported Jesus’ ministry with their money. That’s what the scriptures tell us. I’m not making any of this up. He was not a stand up macho man living up to society’s expectation of who and what a man should be. He was in fact a very Queer person and he called his followers to become Queer persons too, people who were outside of the expected norm of that society. That’s what Queer really means.
The patriarchal society of the time, that means that the father was the primary person in the family structure, was modeled after the Roman Empire with the most powerful father of them all being the Roman Emperor. Christian fundamentalists will still tell you that they believe the best family structure is that of the superior father with an inferior mother and their children living a life together with the father having the last word on everything and everyone else obeying him peacefully without disagreement or turmoil. Sounds like a great way of living if you are the father of the family. But what if you aren’t the father. What rights do you have? None, if Dad chooses not to give them to you.
Jesus said that his real family was those who followed after him, those who took his teaching seriously and applied it to their lives and to their relationships with others. He modeled for them what that meant by how he cared for other people. I’ve pointed it out before Jesus had great eyesight. He saw the person in trouble before anyone else could see them. Jesus saw people just as they were, not as they wanted to be seen by society. He looked at them and he really saw them, and then he spoke to them and cared for them in ways that demonstrated to them that he was seeing them and he was caring for them. The blind man who was rejected from his Synagogue because Jesus had healed him: Jesus heard about what had happened to him and went to find him and care for him. The woman on the street who had been bleeding for years and touched the hem of his robe believing that if she did so she would be healed. And when she did, and was healed, Jesus stopped the crowd and found her and cared for her. He restored her to society, a society that had rejected her because she had something different about her that she couldn’t change and so society rejected her and cast her out and refused to associate with her, calling her unclean and unfit for human society. But Jesus brought her into the New Community of God he was creating.
In the Queer community we talk about our chosen family, those who we have built a family relationship with because often we have been rejected by our own families of birth because of who we love or because of our gender identity. You are my chosen family. In many ways you are more important to me than any natural family member I have, except perhaps my children and grandchildren. But then, you are my family who I am in contact with every single day of my life, unlike my children who live on the other side of the continent.
Plus, some of my natural family members don’t want to associate with me. They think I’m sinful and unclean because of who I love.
I’ve been pissed off all week about the kinds of rejection and isolation that members of our church family have gotten from their own natural family members. I have been told about parents that reject their own children because they are gay or trans or lesbian. Parents who tell their children that he or she must change and be just like everyone else if they are to receive the love of their parents. Sometimes it is subtle, and sometimes it isn’t. One parent told her child this past week that the blessings he was enjoying in his life which he attributed to God, were not from God because God wouldn’t and couldn’t bless anyone who lived the kind of lifestyle that he did. That’s blatantly telling her own child that he is going to hell because he is gay, something he can’t change about himself because that is who God created him to be and how God created him to live his life, in love with another person of the same sex. That’s pretty damn cruel for any parent to say to his or her child.
I wasn’t going to preach this way today. I was going to preach differently, but the stories you told me in person and over the phone kept adding up and it made me mad. Then on Thursday I got up and turned my computer on, giving up the idea that I would preach a sermon this way, and there on my facebook page was a question from a complete stranger, a young lady in her twenties who is a friend of someone who came to our church. Her question: do you promote homosexuality?
I sent her a message asking: Who are you and why would you ask me this question?
She replied: Just wondering because the Bible says it is wrong.
Thus began a conversation. One which I almost didn’t have with her because I wasn’t really in the right mindset. But I prayed and asked God to help me help her see how wrong she was and hopefully open up her heart and her mind to begin to see things differently than she had been taught by others. Listen friends, whoever you are, when you feel that the Bible gives you the right to reject another person or cut them out of your life or out of the New Community of God, then you aren’t reading the same Bible that I am reading and you aren’t acting like a follower of Jesus.
Here is the usual thinking of our fundamentalist friends: If you are homosexual then you are a sinner in need of forgiveness for your abominable sinfulness. They equate homosexuality as a more horrible crime in their thinking than even murder. You don’t think I’m right? I’ve been in churches where members were excommunicated because they were gay though they weren’t in a sexual relationship with anyone else, just gay. And that same church welcomed into its membership and eventually ordained and called to their staff a person who had committed murder during a robbery. Another church kicked a young man off its drama team because he appeared to be gay by how he spoke and used his hands when speaking, while allowing a young straight man to return to singing in their choir after he had an affair with a married women in the church and agreed to attended two counseling sessions with the pastor as penance. Penance if you are straight. No penance if you are gay. And you think I’m exaggerating. Wish that were true, but it’s not.
Jesus is saying that “Peace at all costs” has no place in the New Community of God. We must stand up for ourselves and for anyone else who is rejected from human society because they are simply different. I use the term Queer to refer to anyone who is different, not just sexually or gender wise.
This conflict will take its most horrible toll within our own families. Jesus knew that the family was where most of the turmoil would occur as individuals accepted and followed his teachings. Jesus was dethroning the family from its absolute claim over its members and freeing them to become what God created them to be and do what God was calling them to do. Jesus’ warning is not an invitation to the kind of religious fanaticism we often witness in ultra conservative or fringe groups like the Phelps family or Focus on the Family. Instead it is a passion that springs from the heart of our human condition. It is a passion for love, for change for the better, for justice for all, for a renewal of society so that no one is rejected and all are included. These are not the fanatical tenets of a cult leader, but they are the foundations of hope for the world.
The young lady who contacted me was named Michelle. We talked throughout the day on Thursday exchanging emails. I refused to discuss her questions about the Bible because she had already made up her mind about scripture. I did tell her that there were many passages in Leviticus that she obviously didn’t obey when she quoted me the Leviticus passage that says two men who have sex should be stoned to death. She responded by telling me that Jesus had freed her from the law and she wasn’t under any obligation to adhere or follow the Levite rules any longer, but she still persisted in using those same passages to tell me that I was under the law because I was a homosexual person.
The usual thinking goes this way: You are gay and you are a sinner in need of salvation. If you think you are a Christian then you need to think again, because you can’t be a Christian and gay at the same time. Therefore you must not be a Christian, so you are going to hell. When I persist that I am a Christian in these conversations I am told that I am a false teacher and as such I will enjoy an even more horrible experience in hell than I would have if I had simply been gay.
Sometimes they will allow that I can be gay and Christian and am therefore only in need of healing for my sickness. When I insist that I’m not sick and don’t need healing, then I am told I am possessed by an evil spirit and need to have it exorcised because it is keeping me seeing the truth. When I say that I am not possessed and that I am thinking very clearly then I am told that I am so far out of God’s will that God is going to give up on me and I can never receive forgiveness in this lifetime or the next.
When I point out to them that they are judging me, they tell me that they are only repeating to me what the scripture says and that they are responsible for saving me from a life in hell, even though they know nothing about me except that I am the pastor of this Queer congregation. It’s a circular argument, with many points in contradiction of other points, but it seems to be logical to them, even if it isn’t logical to me.
When I ask them why they would want to pick me out from the facebook pages or the phone book and contact me to tell me I am an abomination they usually tell me that it is because they love me but hate my sin. You’ve heard it as ‘hate the sin but love the sinner.” When I tell them I’m not sinning, in fact, I am living with my beloved partner in a committed relationship not unlike the one they enjoy with their own partner in life, they go back to telling me that I’m lost and headed for hell. I can’t seem to win this argument.
Now remember they say they love me and hate my sin. So I want to know what it is about me that they love, because love usually comes out of a relationship lived with another person. And as far as I know I didn’t ever have a relationship with these persons before they contacted me to condemn me. So I took a different approach with Michelle and began to tell her about my life, about my children, about my grandchildren, about my daughter that died five years ago, about my youngest daughter that was in a car accident this summer, about Mark and our life together, about this church and how we are growing and caring for people that other churches have rejected. I wanted Michelle to get to know me as more than just a gay pastor she read about on the internet. I am happy to tell you that her last two posts to me demonstrate that she made a change in her perception of me and began to see me as a real person. Her last post was an apology and a statement that she was sorry to hear about my daughters.
It may not happen for you. You may not get that person who has decided to confront you about your sexuality or gender and condemn you to ever see you as a real person, to begin to have a real relationship with you based on love and respect. But don’t stop advocating for yourself. Don’t stop trying to get them to see you as a beloved child of God created in the image of God and a beautiful follower of Jesus Christ. Sexuality and gender have nothing to do with following Jesus, no more so than the color of your skin, or the origin of your ancestors. It may take the rest of the world a long time to accept those facts, but those facts are true and you need to accept them for yourself.
(From Out in Scripture) “Even we in the LGBT community have remarkable freedom to worship as we see fit despite being cut off from larger faith communities. It is important for us to recognize that despite our difficulties, we have the ability to live our lives with a level of openness and security that many LGBT people in other parts of the world can't even imagine. Even when denied many of the same rights our fellow citizens enjoy, there are LGBT people around the world who would accept the level of freedom we have without complaint.
“The point is not to accept what we have, but to recognize that as we advocate for our equality we should not be surprised when we meet resistance. (Jesus met great resistance, even violence for his beliefs. As followers of Jesus should we expect anything less than the same thing?) Our encounter with God affirms our full humanity and it is from that place that we must speak out. As we speak from this place, we will meet resistance from those unwilling to hear God's voice as it relates to us. We also must not be so concerned with our own rights that we neglect to advocate for others around the world who live in fear and oppression.
Let me leave you with these words from another of today’s scripture passages: (Psalm 82:3-4)."Give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked"
Luke 12:46-59
This isn’t an easy text to preach on, or even to understand. We just don’t like for Jesus to say things like we read in this passage. This isn’t the Jesus we usually think we know. This is a very different Jesus. Jesus uses the idea of fire as a symbol of judgment. But it is important to remember that though Jesus uses the language of judgment and social violence, that he never resorted to any violent actions, and never was suggesting that violence should become a part of our lives in disagreements with others.
We want a Jesus that talks about harmony and peace, not one that talks about conflicts between people. And then he goes even further and says that he will be the cause of such conflicts. In short Jesus is saying, “Follow me and you can expect there will be trouble and misunderstandings. It’s a given fact. Don’t think life will be comfortable and easy if you follow me.”
(From Out in Scripture) “But this passage begs the question of why Jesus would want to use such violent imagery when he was peaceable. One reason is to remind us that a life as a follower of Christ will inevitably lead to conflict. Jesus is certainly the "Prince of Peace," but that is far different from peace at any cost. The peace that Jesus sought to bring is first and foremost a peace with God. Such a peace will lead to peace among humanity, but we must remember the direction in which godly peace flows. It flows first from a life lived in communion and obedience to God and then outward to the world around us. What Jesus is reminding us is that such a peace is not always welcome and is often met with violent resistance. Jesus' words are cautionary for those who take a life of discipleship too lightly”
Jesus’ disciples have continually misunderstood what he has been telling them about the New Community of God he will usher into existence. They think it will be an earthly kingdom and them will be the officials in charge of everything, enjoying the honor and prestige of their new positions next to him, their new King. But Jesus keeps telling them that’s not the kind of community he will create. He is facing a time of turmoil that will ultimately lead to his death. He is not so much being a prophet of his own future as he is being a good interpreter of the signs all around him. He knows he is on a collision course with the powers and authorities of his day and that they will use all the necessary violence and perversion of the law they can muster to get rid of him because to allow his teachings to take hold on their society would mean that they would be out of power. That’s something that they won’t let happen.
Jesus isn’t satisfied with the status quo. Greek stoicism taught that there was a certain order to everything, even human society and that everyone had a place and should stay in their place. Change was not something you desired for your society because that would mean adjustments and adjustments often mean somebody loses and someone else wins, somebody suffers and some one else reaps a reward. But Jesus isn’t buying into that kind of thinking, because Jesus knows that change must happen in a society if the poor and the outcast, the widow and the orphan, the lame and sick, the eunuch and leper are to be included in the community, too. And Jesus will not tolerate a future where anyone is rejected or cast out of God’s new community.
Many fundamentalist Christian leaders talk abundantly about how Jesus supports their interpretation of Family Values. But that isn’t what we read in the gospels about what Jesus is actually saying. Respect your parents? When Mary comes to Jesus with his brothers to take him home because they think he’s gone off his rocker, he refuses to speak to them and tells his disciples that his mother and brothers, his family, are those who obey his teachings. Pretty harsh stuff from a guy who is held up as the icon of Christian Family Values.
Think about it for a minute. Jesus never did what was expected of a male in his society. He did not have what we would call a home, though many do think he probably had a house in Capernaum. He did not have a regular trade to make a living at, instead he roamed the country as an itinerant preacher, hardly a wealth producing occupation. He did not have a wife or children, something someone of his age would have been expected to do. And he apparently encouraged a whole lot of men to leave behind those same expectations of their society and follow along after him from place to place, living off of the wealth of the women who supported Jesus’ ministry with their money. That’s what the scriptures tell us. I’m not making any of this up. He was not a stand up macho man living up to society’s expectation of who and what a man should be. He was in fact a very Queer person and he called his followers to become Queer persons too, people who were outside of the expected norm of that society. That’s what Queer really means.
The patriarchal society of the time, that means that the father was the primary person in the family structure, was modeled after the Roman Empire with the most powerful father of them all being the Roman Emperor. Christian fundamentalists will still tell you that they believe the best family structure is that of the superior father with an inferior mother and their children living a life together with the father having the last word on everything and everyone else obeying him peacefully without disagreement or turmoil. Sounds like a great way of living if you are the father of the family. But what if you aren’t the father. What rights do you have? None, if Dad chooses not to give them to you.
Jesus said that his real family was those who followed after him, those who took his teaching seriously and applied it to their lives and to their relationships with others. He modeled for them what that meant by how he cared for other people. I’ve pointed it out before Jesus had great eyesight. He saw the person in trouble before anyone else could see them. Jesus saw people just as they were, not as they wanted to be seen by society. He looked at them and he really saw them, and then he spoke to them and cared for them in ways that demonstrated to them that he was seeing them and he was caring for them. The blind man who was rejected from his Synagogue because Jesus had healed him: Jesus heard about what had happened to him and went to find him and care for him. The woman on the street who had been bleeding for years and touched the hem of his robe believing that if she did so she would be healed. And when she did, and was healed, Jesus stopped the crowd and found her and cared for her. He restored her to society, a society that had rejected her because she had something different about her that she couldn’t change and so society rejected her and cast her out and refused to associate with her, calling her unclean and unfit for human society. But Jesus brought her into the New Community of God he was creating.
In the Queer community we talk about our chosen family, those who we have built a family relationship with because often we have been rejected by our own families of birth because of who we love or because of our gender identity. You are my chosen family. In many ways you are more important to me than any natural family member I have, except perhaps my children and grandchildren. But then, you are my family who I am in contact with every single day of my life, unlike my children who live on the other side of the continent.
Plus, some of my natural family members don’t want to associate with me. They think I’m sinful and unclean because of who I love.
I’ve been pissed off all week about the kinds of rejection and isolation that members of our church family have gotten from their own natural family members. I have been told about parents that reject their own children because they are gay or trans or lesbian. Parents who tell their children that he or she must change and be just like everyone else if they are to receive the love of their parents. Sometimes it is subtle, and sometimes it isn’t. One parent told her child this past week that the blessings he was enjoying in his life which he attributed to God, were not from God because God wouldn’t and couldn’t bless anyone who lived the kind of lifestyle that he did. That’s blatantly telling her own child that he is going to hell because he is gay, something he can’t change about himself because that is who God created him to be and how God created him to live his life, in love with another person of the same sex. That’s pretty damn cruel for any parent to say to his or her child.
I wasn’t going to preach this way today. I was going to preach differently, but the stories you told me in person and over the phone kept adding up and it made me mad. Then on Thursday I got up and turned my computer on, giving up the idea that I would preach a sermon this way, and there on my facebook page was a question from a complete stranger, a young lady in her twenties who is a friend of someone who came to our church. Her question: do you promote homosexuality?
I sent her a message asking: Who are you and why would you ask me this question?
She replied: Just wondering because the Bible says it is wrong.
Thus began a conversation. One which I almost didn’t have with her because I wasn’t really in the right mindset. But I prayed and asked God to help me help her see how wrong she was and hopefully open up her heart and her mind to begin to see things differently than she had been taught by others. Listen friends, whoever you are, when you feel that the Bible gives you the right to reject another person or cut them out of your life or out of the New Community of God, then you aren’t reading the same Bible that I am reading and you aren’t acting like a follower of Jesus.
Here is the usual thinking of our fundamentalist friends: If you are homosexual then you are a sinner in need of forgiveness for your abominable sinfulness. They equate homosexuality as a more horrible crime in their thinking than even murder. You don’t think I’m right? I’ve been in churches where members were excommunicated because they were gay though they weren’t in a sexual relationship with anyone else, just gay. And that same church welcomed into its membership and eventually ordained and called to their staff a person who had committed murder during a robbery. Another church kicked a young man off its drama team because he appeared to be gay by how he spoke and used his hands when speaking, while allowing a young straight man to return to singing in their choir after he had an affair with a married women in the church and agreed to attended two counseling sessions with the pastor as penance. Penance if you are straight. No penance if you are gay. And you think I’m exaggerating. Wish that were true, but it’s not.
Jesus is saying that “Peace at all costs” has no place in the New Community of God. We must stand up for ourselves and for anyone else who is rejected from human society because they are simply different. I use the term Queer to refer to anyone who is different, not just sexually or gender wise.
This conflict will take its most horrible toll within our own families. Jesus knew that the family was where most of the turmoil would occur as individuals accepted and followed his teachings. Jesus was dethroning the family from its absolute claim over its members and freeing them to become what God created them to be and do what God was calling them to do. Jesus’ warning is not an invitation to the kind of religious fanaticism we often witness in ultra conservative or fringe groups like the Phelps family or Focus on the Family. Instead it is a passion that springs from the heart of our human condition. It is a passion for love, for change for the better, for justice for all, for a renewal of society so that no one is rejected and all are included. These are not the fanatical tenets of a cult leader, but they are the foundations of hope for the world.
The young lady who contacted me was named Michelle. We talked throughout the day on Thursday exchanging emails. I refused to discuss her questions about the Bible because she had already made up her mind about scripture. I did tell her that there were many passages in Leviticus that she obviously didn’t obey when she quoted me the Leviticus passage that says two men who have sex should be stoned to death. She responded by telling me that Jesus had freed her from the law and she wasn’t under any obligation to adhere or follow the Levite rules any longer, but she still persisted in using those same passages to tell me that I was under the law because I was a homosexual person.
The usual thinking goes this way: You are gay and you are a sinner in need of salvation. If you think you are a Christian then you need to think again, because you can’t be a Christian and gay at the same time. Therefore you must not be a Christian, so you are going to hell. When I persist that I am a Christian in these conversations I am told that I am a false teacher and as such I will enjoy an even more horrible experience in hell than I would have if I had simply been gay.
Sometimes they will allow that I can be gay and Christian and am therefore only in need of healing for my sickness. When I insist that I’m not sick and don’t need healing, then I am told I am possessed by an evil spirit and need to have it exorcised because it is keeping me seeing the truth. When I say that I am not possessed and that I am thinking very clearly then I am told that I am so far out of God’s will that God is going to give up on me and I can never receive forgiveness in this lifetime or the next.
When I point out to them that they are judging me, they tell me that they are only repeating to me what the scripture says and that they are responsible for saving me from a life in hell, even though they know nothing about me except that I am the pastor of this Queer congregation. It’s a circular argument, with many points in contradiction of other points, but it seems to be logical to them, even if it isn’t logical to me.
When I ask them why they would want to pick me out from the facebook pages or the phone book and contact me to tell me I am an abomination they usually tell me that it is because they love me but hate my sin. You’ve heard it as ‘hate the sin but love the sinner.” When I tell them I’m not sinning, in fact, I am living with my beloved partner in a committed relationship not unlike the one they enjoy with their own partner in life, they go back to telling me that I’m lost and headed for hell. I can’t seem to win this argument.
Now remember they say they love me and hate my sin. So I want to know what it is about me that they love, because love usually comes out of a relationship lived with another person. And as far as I know I didn’t ever have a relationship with these persons before they contacted me to condemn me. So I took a different approach with Michelle and began to tell her about my life, about my children, about my grandchildren, about my daughter that died five years ago, about my youngest daughter that was in a car accident this summer, about Mark and our life together, about this church and how we are growing and caring for people that other churches have rejected. I wanted Michelle to get to know me as more than just a gay pastor she read about on the internet. I am happy to tell you that her last two posts to me demonstrate that she made a change in her perception of me and began to see me as a real person. Her last post was an apology and a statement that she was sorry to hear about my daughters.
It may not happen for you. You may not get that person who has decided to confront you about your sexuality or gender and condemn you to ever see you as a real person, to begin to have a real relationship with you based on love and respect. But don’t stop advocating for yourself. Don’t stop trying to get them to see you as a beloved child of God created in the image of God and a beautiful follower of Jesus Christ. Sexuality and gender have nothing to do with following Jesus, no more so than the color of your skin, or the origin of your ancestors. It may take the rest of the world a long time to accept those facts, but those facts are true and you need to accept them for yourself.
(From Out in Scripture) “Even we in the LGBT community have remarkable freedom to worship as we see fit despite being cut off from larger faith communities. It is important for us to recognize that despite our difficulties, we have the ability to live our lives with a level of openness and security that many LGBT people in other parts of the world can't even imagine. Even when denied many of the same rights our fellow citizens enjoy, there are LGBT people around the world who would accept the level of freedom we have without complaint.
“The point is not to accept what we have, but to recognize that as we advocate for our equality we should not be surprised when we meet resistance. (Jesus met great resistance, even violence for his beliefs. As followers of Jesus should we expect anything less than the same thing?) Our encounter with God affirms our full humanity and it is from that place that we must speak out. As we speak from this place, we will meet resistance from those unwilling to hear God's voice as it relates to us. We also must not be so concerned with our own rights that we neglect to advocate for others around the world who live in fear and oppression.
Let me leave you with these words from another of today’s scripture passages: (Psalm 82:3-4)."Give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked"
Installing a New Operating System, Luke 12:32-40, Proper 14C
Preached Sunday August 8, 2010
Luke 12:32-40
Have you ever been in a situation where two people seem to be talking to each other, but neither side is really listening to the other? Such is the situation that Isaiah describes to us today. God has told the people of Israel what God wants from them, but they haven’t heard and obeyed, therefore God says to them that God will no longer hear or respond to their prayers until such time as they do listen. Nothing is as frustrating as trying to talk to someone and not having that person understand you, or respond in such a way that clearly shows they have totally misunderstood you.
The people of Israel have settled into their worship routines in the Temple to such an extent that they have forgotten why they are doing what they are doing. They are suppose to be worshipping God, but they have become so focused on the pattern of worship, on the specific steps and formulas they were suppose to follow that they have completely failed to honor God with a deep awe and respect, to live lives free from evil actions, and to take care of the vulnerable in society, that is what worship is truly suppose to be. You cannot love God and hate your neighbor, or even ignore your neighbor.
I’ve been in churches where people have fought with each other over what kinds of songs and hymns will be sung. One side wanted worship and praise music because that is what they liked best. The other side wanted hymns and songs from their own worship traditions because that is what they liked best. Neither side would acknowledge the other side’s needs as being legitimate, and therefore neither side in those churches got to experience real worship because every worship service turned into a war. They forgot to worship God and instead focused on what they thought was the right style of music needed for a proper worship service. I’m afraid that like the people of Israel in Isaiah’s time that God gave up listening to the prayers of either side in those worship wars.
It is interesting to note that Isaiah has God referring to the people as worse than the people of Sodom and Gomorrah whose cities were destroyed because of their great sinfulness. You have heard a lot of preachers talk about the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah and usually with much vengeance against our Queer Community as they misinterpret and downright lie about why the ancient writers of Genesis tells us those cities were destroyed. It wasn’t because of their sexual orientation or even because of their sexual behaviors, it was because they failed to recognize God as God and failed to recognize and treat their fellow human beings as worthy of respect, love, and care. Those are the evils recorded in numerous places in the Bible, including by Jesus himself. And that’s exactly what Isaiah tells the people of Israel that they have also failed at doing.
We have celebrated this week the Federal Judge’s ruling that California Proposition 8 was unconstitutional and that Queer Persons have the right to marry just like heterosexual persons. To deny us the that right is to put us into a different and lesser class than everyone else. Our fundamentalist Christian friends may cry foul and try to get a higher court to throw out this ruling on the basis of their own morality and so-called Biblical beliefs, but the judge clearly said that their moral beliefs alone could not be the deciding issue.
Furthermore, their characterization of our sexuality as somehow being sinful and against God and humanity is twisted and though they believe their view is supported by so-called historical interpretations of the scriptures, it is abundantly clear to me and others that those interpretations are based on hate, and on a failure to apply the basic principles of love and acceptance of others valued by God throughout the entire Bible and taught to us by Jesus. When we have to put down another person in order to claim our rights over their rights I do not think that God celebrates that kind of behavior or thinking. It is only when we hold up our love for God and our love for each other as well as God’s love for all of the varieties of humanity that we can truly say that we are living in the New Community of God that Jesus ushered in with his own life and example.
Jesus comes compassionately to teach his disciples and others exactly what it means to follow him, to become new citizens in God’s New Community. We are on a journey with Jesus and his followers as he leads the way to Jerusalem through our scripture readings from the book of Luke. This journey will take us through October. Exactly what does it mean to be a follower of Jesus. Today we learn that it means that we must take care to keep our hearts focused on God and God’s way instead of upon the things the world tells us is important.
Jesus opens this week’s lesson by saying tenderly: “Do not be afraid, little flock,” and then goes straight into the words that strike more fear into Christians than anything else Jesus ever said, “Sell your possessions, and give away your money to the poor.”
Terrifying words. Horrible words to hear. I’m afraid of it because I’m scared that maybe we are supposed to take it literally, that maybe we are supposed to give away all that we own. All of it. Afraid that maybe everything I buy, every meal I eat in a restaurant, every little luxury I purchase for myself, is a sign of my lack of faith in God, of my unwillingness to give it all away and trust God to supply what I need for life.
I can wriggle out of my discomfort to some extent. Clearly it says it is God’s good pleasure to give us the kingdom, therefore we should sell and give. It doesn’t say sell and give in order that you might receive the kingdom. And while that’s literally true that doesn’t entirely make me feel any better.
I’ll have a big problem trying to explain myself out of obeying these verses, because one sixth of all the things the Bible records Jesus as having said are about our relationship to money and material possessions. He speaks more about this than he does about love, about prayer or about forgiveness. Especially in the Gospel of Luke.
Why does Jesus speak so much about money and material possessions? He gives the answer right here, because where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. And perhaps there is nothing else that can lead us away from the things that really matter faster than money, and certainly if we added sex and power we’d probably just have all the reasons we stray away from God’s will and purpose in our lives. Mark Twain : Some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God, and over these ideals they dispute, but they all worship money.
Now we could wrestle here with how we might go about being more faithful with our money, or how to learn to live more simply and give more generously, and that would be a perfectly appropriate thing to do with this passage, but I think there is another question that underlies our fear of Jesus talking about money, and if we don’t address that question, we’ll probably be wasting our time pooling our thoughts on the money question.
You see I believe that underneath this is a question about the place that Christian faith occupies in our lives. In fact the very wording I just used is probably symptomatic of the issue. Does Christianity just occupy a portion of our lives, just a small defined place in our lives, perhaps only a couple of hours on Sunday mornings, and if so what is it doing making claims on other areas of our lives? Like our money for example. Or do we ourselves occupy a place in the New Community of God which should and will affect everything we believe, think, say and do?
You will often encounter people visiting a church like ours, or any other church for that matter, as part of their search for the right church for them. Now I have no objection to this - I think it is important to find a church that is right for you - but I think all too often we actually have a similar approach to Christian faith as a whole. We look around for a version of church that sits comfortably with us. We don’t hand ourselves over to Jesus and say, “Whatever, wherever, whenever.” We want meaning, we want purpose, we want spiritual growth, we want fullness of life, but we want it to fit in comfortably with our chosen careers and lifestyles and interests, and most importantly within our preferred time schedule. We want a Christianity that will be the icing on the cake, not something that will trash the cake and force us to rebake the cake from scratch. Or for those of you who now speak computer language, we want a Christianity that is a user-friendly, platform compatible add-on, not a Christianity that overrides our current life-operating system and installs a radically different version.
This of course is no surprise. We live in a culture that trains us early to approach everything that way. “What does this have to offer me and from which I could benefit? What is available here that would make a welcome addition to my life?” For every possible desire there is a vendor offering it to those who seek it. Do I need a break, some time out? There’s the travel agent with a rock bottom price for a week on the Islands. Do I need to unravel my complicated feelings about my relationship with my mother? There’s a psychologist offering an appointment on Tuesday. Do I need to get lost in a good story? There’s the cinema offering the latest movie at 7 pm. Do I need to appease my hunger or spirit or strengthen my sense of connection with the mysteries of life? There’s a church where I can pick up this week’s worship and sermon session at 11:00 AM.
The church becomes just one more vendor supplying another product in response to consumer demand. Our Christian faith and spirituality becomes just one more product in the market place. Pick some up whenever you feel the need. Evangelism of course becomes the advertising and marketing strategy for the product or the particular supplier, encouraging people to pick some up a bit more often.
And why should it be any different we might ask. Why should the church and Christian faith be exempted from competing in the market place like everything else? I’m actually not suggesting that it should be exempted from competing like everything else, but that we should wake up and realize what it is competing for. To revert to computer language for a moment it is not competing against the other aps and add-on modules, it is competing against the resident operating platforms. If you are buying a home computer you first have to choose whether to have a Windows platform or a Macintosh platform. Whichever way you choose, that basic decision will then limit what programs you can run with it. You can’t run Word for Windows on a Mac.
If you want to install Christianity 1.0 on the hard disk of your life, you will have to uninstall the previous operating system. You can’t run it on top of Consumer 98 or Money Sex & Power 7. Contrary to Focus on the Family you can’t even run it on top of Traditional Family Values 55. Christianity is not an add-on nor is it even a general application. It is an integrated operating system, incompatible with all other operating systems, and it dictates what else can be run with it.
Those of you who use computers a lot already know that sometimes an incompatibility doesn’t show up straight away. Sometimes it just starts corrupting things and causing seemingly random malfunctions until eventually the whole system crashes. So it is with attempting to retain incompatible applications with your new Christianity 1.0 operating system.
Career Path 2.0 might have been running smoothly with your old operating system, and at first it may seem to have no problems with Christianity 1.0. Your Growing Share Stock Portfolio Add-on and your favorite pastime Casino 1.2 might initially seem to be OK too. But after a while if you’re noticing things starting to react strangely and malfunction so that you may have to do a careful search, a prayerful search in fact, for the incompatibility problem. If nothing in your life has ever caused a significant compatibility problem with your Christianity, then can I suggest in all seriousness that you haven’t installed Christianity 1.0 at all, you’ve just got the icon sitting benignly on your desktop while you continue to run your old system.
Let me illustrate again completely differently for those of you who aren’t into computers. When I first became a Dad, my oldest daughter just turned 36 this week, I went through a lot of anxiety firstly about whether I wanted to be a dad, and then once that decision became irrelevant, about whether I could cope with being a dad. And one of the main reasons for that anxiety was that I knew that I couldn’t just treat my child as a one more addition to my life. In becoming a dad I knew that I had to be willing to reassess the appropriateness of everything else in my life, I had to let go of my life as I knew it and wait to see what things were compatible with my new life as a dad. Now there is no doubt that there are plenty of parents who treat their children as simply add-ons or aps to their lives and change little else. You’ve probably met plenty of them and heard things like, “We’ve got the house, our careers are established and progressing well, it’s time to have children.” The children are just expected to fit in around their parents’ lifestyle choices. They are just treated as items to be ticked off on a list of goals. “By the time I’m forty I want a townhouse, a beach house at Rye, a partnership in the firm, a blue chip share portfolio, a classy spouse, two children, and a BMW sports convertible.” And they set about ticking off the goals and collecting the trophies.
And I don’t know about you, but my observation is that the people who’ve managed to accumulate all those trophies don’t seem to me to be any less anxious or any more at peace in their hearts than the people who are having to decide what to go without this week - toilet paper or milk. They’re anxious about different things most of the time, but just as anxious. And every now and then something pulls the rug out and calls them to put things back in perspective. I read an interview with Ringo Starr, the drummer from the Beatles. He spoke about how when his daughter was diagnosed as having a brain tumor he suddenly realized that in the face of some things all the fame and fortune is not worth a thing.
“Do not be afraid, little flock, it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom.” The good news is that new life in Jesus Christ is still a free gift. Meaning, purpose, hope, peace, fullness of life - all are a free gift from the God who loves you and longs to bless you more richly than you could ever imagine. It is a free gift to everyone who will accept it. I could hand out free copies of the newest Windows operating system but unless you installed it properly on your computer it’s a pretty useless gift. I suppose you could use the disks as beer coasters or something. I could hand out free Bibles but only those who read them and thoughtfully apply the lessons will benefit.
When we come to this table in a moment you will be offered a free gift - a piece of broken bread. Not something that is of much value outside of this worship space. But if you will allow yourself to hear the words “Take, eat, this is my body,” and recognize the presence of Jesus Christ you will be at a moment of decision. You can take and eat, accept the broken Christ who gives himself to you and say, “I am no longer my own, but yours, Christ. Help me to become what you will, rank me with whom you will; Put me to doing, put me to suffering; let me be employed for you or laid aside for you; exalted for you or brought low for you; let me be full for you or emptied out; let me have all things, let me have nothing; I freely and wholeheartedly yield all things to your holy pleasure and divine will.”
Or you can just eat the bread and walk away, perhaps enjoy the ritual we repeat each week, the sense of mystery, the links with an ancient tradition. Perhaps you will even be stirred by the prayers and the song and sense of sharing a special moment with others. Perhaps even value your friendships with those you come to the table with and appreciate the sense of belonging and community. Or you can just walk away, close the spiritual compartment of your life for another week and go on living your life unaffected by it all with the different part of your life continuing to spin in all directions perhaps even tearing you apart.
You can file a few Christian values and experiences in a little spiritual compartment of your life, or you can open up everything and receive the free gift of the New Community of God. “Do not be afraid, little flock; it is your Parent’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom.”
Sure living that way can be scarier, but if your life is invested in the one who breathes life into the universe, it will also be far richer, deeper, and more integrated. Wading in the shallows is not really swimming. If you can still touch the bottom safely, you’re not really living. It’s time to jump into the deep water of faith. The choice is yours. “Take, eat, this is my body.”
Luke 12:32-40
Have you ever been in a situation where two people seem to be talking to each other, but neither side is really listening to the other? Such is the situation that Isaiah describes to us today. God has told the people of Israel what God wants from them, but they haven’t heard and obeyed, therefore God says to them that God will no longer hear or respond to their prayers until such time as they do listen. Nothing is as frustrating as trying to talk to someone and not having that person understand you, or respond in such a way that clearly shows they have totally misunderstood you.
The people of Israel have settled into their worship routines in the Temple to such an extent that they have forgotten why they are doing what they are doing. They are suppose to be worshipping God, but they have become so focused on the pattern of worship, on the specific steps and formulas they were suppose to follow that they have completely failed to honor God with a deep awe and respect, to live lives free from evil actions, and to take care of the vulnerable in society, that is what worship is truly suppose to be. You cannot love God and hate your neighbor, or even ignore your neighbor.
I’ve been in churches where people have fought with each other over what kinds of songs and hymns will be sung. One side wanted worship and praise music because that is what they liked best. The other side wanted hymns and songs from their own worship traditions because that is what they liked best. Neither side would acknowledge the other side’s needs as being legitimate, and therefore neither side in those churches got to experience real worship because every worship service turned into a war. They forgot to worship God and instead focused on what they thought was the right style of music needed for a proper worship service. I’m afraid that like the people of Israel in Isaiah’s time that God gave up listening to the prayers of either side in those worship wars.
It is interesting to note that Isaiah has God referring to the people as worse than the people of Sodom and Gomorrah whose cities were destroyed because of their great sinfulness. You have heard a lot of preachers talk about the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah and usually with much vengeance against our Queer Community as they misinterpret and downright lie about why the ancient writers of Genesis tells us those cities were destroyed. It wasn’t because of their sexual orientation or even because of their sexual behaviors, it was because they failed to recognize God as God and failed to recognize and treat their fellow human beings as worthy of respect, love, and care. Those are the evils recorded in numerous places in the Bible, including by Jesus himself. And that’s exactly what Isaiah tells the people of Israel that they have also failed at doing.
We have celebrated this week the Federal Judge’s ruling that California Proposition 8 was unconstitutional and that Queer Persons have the right to marry just like heterosexual persons. To deny us the that right is to put us into a different and lesser class than everyone else. Our fundamentalist Christian friends may cry foul and try to get a higher court to throw out this ruling on the basis of their own morality and so-called Biblical beliefs, but the judge clearly said that their moral beliefs alone could not be the deciding issue.
Furthermore, their characterization of our sexuality as somehow being sinful and against God and humanity is twisted and though they believe their view is supported by so-called historical interpretations of the scriptures, it is abundantly clear to me and others that those interpretations are based on hate, and on a failure to apply the basic principles of love and acceptance of others valued by God throughout the entire Bible and taught to us by Jesus. When we have to put down another person in order to claim our rights over their rights I do not think that God celebrates that kind of behavior or thinking. It is only when we hold up our love for God and our love for each other as well as God’s love for all of the varieties of humanity that we can truly say that we are living in the New Community of God that Jesus ushered in with his own life and example.
Jesus comes compassionately to teach his disciples and others exactly what it means to follow him, to become new citizens in God’s New Community. We are on a journey with Jesus and his followers as he leads the way to Jerusalem through our scripture readings from the book of Luke. This journey will take us through October. Exactly what does it mean to be a follower of Jesus. Today we learn that it means that we must take care to keep our hearts focused on God and God’s way instead of upon the things the world tells us is important.
Jesus opens this week’s lesson by saying tenderly: “Do not be afraid, little flock,” and then goes straight into the words that strike more fear into Christians than anything else Jesus ever said, “Sell your possessions, and give away your money to the poor.”
Terrifying words. Horrible words to hear. I’m afraid of it because I’m scared that maybe we are supposed to take it literally, that maybe we are supposed to give away all that we own. All of it. Afraid that maybe everything I buy, every meal I eat in a restaurant, every little luxury I purchase for myself, is a sign of my lack of faith in God, of my unwillingness to give it all away and trust God to supply what I need for life.
I can wriggle out of my discomfort to some extent. Clearly it says it is God’s good pleasure to give us the kingdom, therefore we should sell and give. It doesn’t say sell and give in order that you might receive the kingdom. And while that’s literally true that doesn’t entirely make me feel any better.
I’ll have a big problem trying to explain myself out of obeying these verses, because one sixth of all the things the Bible records Jesus as having said are about our relationship to money and material possessions. He speaks more about this than he does about love, about prayer or about forgiveness. Especially in the Gospel of Luke.
Why does Jesus speak so much about money and material possessions? He gives the answer right here, because where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. And perhaps there is nothing else that can lead us away from the things that really matter faster than money, and certainly if we added sex and power we’d probably just have all the reasons we stray away from God’s will and purpose in our lives. Mark Twain : Some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God, and over these ideals they dispute, but they all worship money.
Now we could wrestle here with how we might go about being more faithful with our money, or how to learn to live more simply and give more generously, and that would be a perfectly appropriate thing to do with this passage, but I think there is another question that underlies our fear of Jesus talking about money, and if we don’t address that question, we’ll probably be wasting our time pooling our thoughts on the money question.
You see I believe that underneath this is a question about the place that Christian faith occupies in our lives. In fact the very wording I just used is probably symptomatic of the issue. Does Christianity just occupy a portion of our lives, just a small defined place in our lives, perhaps only a couple of hours on Sunday mornings, and if so what is it doing making claims on other areas of our lives? Like our money for example. Or do we ourselves occupy a place in the New Community of God which should and will affect everything we believe, think, say and do?
You will often encounter people visiting a church like ours, or any other church for that matter, as part of their search for the right church for them. Now I have no objection to this - I think it is important to find a church that is right for you - but I think all too often we actually have a similar approach to Christian faith as a whole. We look around for a version of church that sits comfortably with us. We don’t hand ourselves over to Jesus and say, “Whatever, wherever, whenever.” We want meaning, we want purpose, we want spiritual growth, we want fullness of life, but we want it to fit in comfortably with our chosen careers and lifestyles and interests, and most importantly within our preferred time schedule. We want a Christianity that will be the icing on the cake, not something that will trash the cake and force us to rebake the cake from scratch. Or for those of you who now speak computer language, we want a Christianity that is a user-friendly, platform compatible add-on, not a Christianity that overrides our current life-operating system and installs a radically different version.
This of course is no surprise. We live in a culture that trains us early to approach everything that way. “What does this have to offer me and from which I could benefit? What is available here that would make a welcome addition to my life?” For every possible desire there is a vendor offering it to those who seek it. Do I need a break, some time out? There’s the travel agent with a rock bottom price for a week on the Islands. Do I need to unravel my complicated feelings about my relationship with my mother? There’s a psychologist offering an appointment on Tuesday. Do I need to get lost in a good story? There’s the cinema offering the latest movie at 7 pm. Do I need to appease my hunger or spirit or strengthen my sense of connection with the mysteries of life? There’s a church where I can pick up this week’s worship and sermon session at 11:00 AM.
The church becomes just one more vendor supplying another product in response to consumer demand. Our Christian faith and spirituality becomes just one more product in the market place. Pick some up whenever you feel the need. Evangelism of course becomes the advertising and marketing strategy for the product or the particular supplier, encouraging people to pick some up a bit more often.
And why should it be any different we might ask. Why should the church and Christian faith be exempted from competing in the market place like everything else? I’m actually not suggesting that it should be exempted from competing like everything else, but that we should wake up and realize what it is competing for. To revert to computer language for a moment it is not competing against the other aps and add-on modules, it is competing against the resident operating platforms. If you are buying a home computer you first have to choose whether to have a Windows platform or a Macintosh platform. Whichever way you choose, that basic decision will then limit what programs you can run with it. You can’t run Word for Windows on a Mac.
If you want to install Christianity 1.0 on the hard disk of your life, you will have to uninstall the previous operating system. You can’t run it on top of Consumer 98 or Money Sex & Power 7. Contrary to Focus on the Family you can’t even run it on top of Traditional Family Values 55. Christianity is not an add-on nor is it even a general application. It is an integrated operating system, incompatible with all other operating systems, and it dictates what else can be run with it.
Those of you who use computers a lot already know that sometimes an incompatibility doesn’t show up straight away. Sometimes it just starts corrupting things and causing seemingly random malfunctions until eventually the whole system crashes. So it is with attempting to retain incompatible applications with your new Christianity 1.0 operating system.
Career Path 2.0 might have been running smoothly with your old operating system, and at first it may seem to have no problems with Christianity 1.0. Your Growing Share Stock Portfolio Add-on and your favorite pastime Casino 1.2 might initially seem to be OK too. But after a while if you’re noticing things starting to react strangely and malfunction so that you may have to do a careful search, a prayerful search in fact, for the incompatibility problem. If nothing in your life has ever caused a significant compatibility problem with your Christianity, then can I suggest in all seriousness that you haven’t installed Christianity 1.0 at all, you’ve just got the icon sitting benignly on your desktop while you continue to run your old system.
Let me illustrate again completely differently for those of you who aren’t into computers. When I first became a Dad, my oldest daughter just turned 36 this week, I went through a lot of anxiety firstly about whether I wanted to be a dad, and then once that decision became irrelevant, about whether I could cope with being a dad. And one of the main reasons for that anxiety was that I knew that I couldn’t just treat my child as a one more addition to my life. In becoming a dad I knew that I had to be willing to reassess the appropriateness of everything else in my life, I had to let go of my life as I knew it and wait to see what things were compatible with my new life as a dad. Now there is no doubt that there are plenty of parents who treat their children as simply add-ons or aps to their lives and change little else. You’ve probably met plenty of them and heard things like, “We’ve got the house, our careers are established and progressing well, it’s time to have children.” The children are just expected to fit in around their parents’ lifestyle choices. They are just treated as items to be ticked off on a list of goals. “By the time I’m forty I want a townhouse, a beach house at Rye, a partnership in the firm, a blue chip share portfolio, a classy spouse, two children, and a BMW sports convertible.” And they set about ticking off the goals and collecting the trophies.
And I don’t know about you, but my observation is that the people who’ve managed to accumulate all those trophies don’t seem to me to be any less anxious or any more at peace in their hearts than the people who are having to decide what to go without this week - toilet paper or milk. They’re anxious about different things most of the time, but just as anxious. And every now and then something pulls the rug out and calls them to put things back in perspective. I read an interview with Ringo Starr, the drummer from the Beatles. He spoke about how when his daughter was diagnosed as having a brain tumor he suddenly realized that in the face of some things all the fame and fortune is not worth a thing.
“Do not be afraid, little flock, it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom.” The good news is that new life in Jesus Christ is still a free gift. Meaning, purpose, hope, peace, fullness of life - all are a free gift from the God who loves you and longs to bless you more richly than you could ever imagine. It is a free gift to everyone who will accept it. I could hand out free copies of the newest Windows operating system but unless you installed it properly on your computer it’s a pretty useless gift. I suppose you could use the disks as beer coasters or something. I could hand out free Bibles but only those who read them and thoughtfully apply the lessons will benefit.
When we come to this table in a moment you will be offered a free gift - a piece of broken bread. Not something that is of much value outside of this worship space. But if you will allow yourself to hear the words “Take, eat, this is my body,” and recognize the presence of Jesus Christ you will be at a moment of decision. You can take and eat, accept the broken Christ who gives himself to you and say, “I am no longer my own, but yours, Christ. Help me to become what you will, rank me with whom you will; Put me to doing, put me to suffering; let me be employed for you or laid aside for you; exalted for you or brought low for you; let me be full for you or emptied out; let me have all things, let me have nothing; I freely and wholeheartedly yield all things to your holy pleasure and divine will.”
Or you can just eat the bread and walk away, perhaps enjoy the ritual we repeat each week, the sense of mystery, the links with an ancient tradition. Perhaps you will even be stirred by the prayers and the song and sense of sharing a special moment with others. Perhaps even value your friendships with those you come to the table with and appreciate the sense of belonging and community. Or you can just walk away, close the spiritual compartment of your life for another week and go on living your life unaffected by it all with the different part of your life continuing to spin in all directions perhaps even tearing you apart.
You can file a few Christian values and experiences in a little spiritual compartment of your life, or you can open up everything and receive the free gift of the New Community of God. “Do not be afraid, little flock; it is your Parent’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom.”
Sure living that way can be scarier, but if your life is invested in the one who breathes life into the universe, it will also be far richer, deeper, and more integrated. Wading in the shallows is not really swimming. If you can still touch the bottom safely, you’re not really living. It’s time to jump into the deep water of faith. The choice is yours. “Take, eat, this is my body.”
Take it Off. Take it All Off. Luke 12:13-21, Colossians 3:1-11
Preached Sunday August 1, 2010
Luke 12:13-21
John Selby Spong writes in his monograph, This Rabbi Lord, “The key…I believe is our ability to distinguish between Jesus and the Christ. They are not the same. Jesus was a person; Christ is a title, a theological principle. Jesus was of history. Christ is beyond history. Jesus was human, finite, limited; Christ is power that is divine, infinite, unlimited. Jesus had a mother and a father, an ancestry, a human heritage. He was born. He died. Christ is a principle beyond the capacity of the mind to embrace or human origins to explain. The name of our Lord was not Jesus Christ, as so many of us suppose. He was Jesus of Nazareth about whom people made the startling and revolutionary claim: “You are the Christ!”
Spong goes one: “In Jesus of Nazareth, men and women saw the fullness of life being lived, the depth of love being shared, the courage to be being revealed. To them Jesus made known the full meaning of life, and love and being. He revealed God, and whenever God was seen in human life, that power is called Christ. “Your are the Christ, Jesus!” That was the claim. “You are the Christ, for in your life, we have seen the meaning of all life. In your love we have seen the source of all love. In your being we have seen the ground of all being.”
In a lighter vein, Rev. Bill Wall, from the United Church of Canada said in April: “What makes Christian’s distinct? One word: Jesus....But that answer is just the start of the debate. A friend told me recently, “My Jesus and my sister’s Jesus aren’t even distant cousins.”
We know that the Jesus we talk about in our church is very different from the Jesus that James Dobson and Focus on the Family talk about. Their Jesus doesn’t like you and me. I do hope that our Jesus likes them, though. I’d like to think that the Jesus you and I are in relationship with would want to be in relationship with them also.
People often come to Jesus thinking that they already know him and that they can therefore expect from Jesus just what they want out of him. It was no different in Biblical times. So today’s passage from Luke begins with a man coming to Jesus to settle a family feud. In that time it wasn’t uncommon for those in the midst of a feud to turn to a respected rabbi who would listen to both parties involved in the disagreement and then render a wise decision on how to handle the problem. Perhaps it would have been wiser of this man to have selected a different rabbi.
Jesus appeared ready to turn ordinary situations into teaching moments. He took the stuff that life is made of, human interactions, human relationships, and turned those events into lessons of great importance.
I have a feeling that the crowds gathered around Jesus would have been very earthy, very human crowds, with lots of teasing and joking going on, not at all like a worship service. Being earthy isn’t sinful. Lots of earthly things are needed and important. Jesus was a very earthy kind of man and his stories reflect his earthiness and his humanness.
Inheritance usually involved the handing down of real estate to one child in the family, usually the eldest son, so that the entire family farm would stay in the family and not be divided up into smaller lots. I heard in the news two weeks ago about tribes of people in Asia where several brothers marry one woman in order to keep the family farm intact and in the family. In Jesus’ day one might pay off your siblings financially to buy out any interest they might have in the property. But you never sold the family farm. Instead of answering the man, Jesus tells a story that goes to the real heart of the matter: greed.
He tells the story of the Rich Fool as the Parable has come to be known. At first glance the man doesn’t seem to be much of a fool. He is running a successful farming business and has ample barns to store up his produce to sell off during the year to bring in a constant stream of money. He’s not a bad guy. In fact, he has done such a good job of managing his business that with the blessing of good weather and abundant rain at just the right time he has reaped a bumper crop this year. With far too much product on hand he decides to tear down his barns which aren’t big enough to hold the harvest and build bigger, newer barns in which to store his grain.
This decision on his part would have brought to mind in Jesus’ hearer’s the story of Joseph from the Old Testament who interpreted the Pharaoh’s dream about 7 years of abundance followed by 7 years of famine. The Pharaoh ordered storage facilities to be built and the grain to be stored during the 7 years of abundance so it would be available in the 7 years of famine to feed the people. Joseph was appointed the overseer of this project and was able to save his own family from the famine. So this seems to be a wise and prudent decision on the part of the farmer.
But did you notice that in this man’s discussion with himself he never refers to anyone else, not even to God. Jesus’ audience that day would have noticed this, and they would have noticed some things that Jesus’ story doesn’t mention, but which were part of the social and religious customs of the day.
First of all, implied within Jesus’ story is the concept that this man should have first thanked God for the blessings that have been bestowed upon him and taken an offering of the first fruits of his labor to the Temple and given it to God. But that’s not what he did.
Secondly, as we see in so many of the parables of Jesus the expected action when sudden abundance comes upon you is to gather your family and friends and hold a celebration feast so that together they could all give thanks to God for God’s blessings and share in your joy. But that’s not what he did.
Thirdly, out of his abundance he should have set aside some of it to give to the poor, the needy, the widows and the orphans as the religious law required. But that’s not what he did.
He only thinks about himself. Nowhere do we read of any actions or statements about his relationships with God and others. Instead he decides that he will eat and drink and be merry for his own good fortune. But as Jesus puts it, he doesn’t get a chance to enjoy his lonely celebration because his number comes up and his life is over. What about his great fortune now? If he had no family, as this story implies, it now belongs to the tax collectors.
In contrast to this we have the story about a revolutionary war hero General Lafayette who after the war in America went back to his home in France where he had a large estate. One year his estate has a bumper crop of grain while the country as a whole has a crop failure. His advisors tell him that because of the scarcity of grain he should raise his prices and reap a financial reward. Lafayette instead told his advisors it wasn’t the time to sell, but time to give away his bounty to others in need.
Jesus is trying to tell us that being greedy, trying to get things for ourselves and only for ourselves, is not the way that we should think and act as citizens of the New Community of God. Instead we should be building up treasures for ourselves in heaven. What does that mean?
Building up treasurers for yourselves in heaven doesn’t mean that some day when you do get to heaven there’s going to be a big house full of lots of goodies waiting for you, all of the things that you didn’t get in this life. As the old spiritual song says when you get to heaven you won’t get beautiful clothing to wear, wings on your back, shoes on your feet, rings on your finger, nor will you get a crown encrusted with jewels to put on your head. My relatives used to say when they did an especially nice thing for someone else, “I guess I just got a diamond in my crown.” That’s pretty simplistic, child-like, literal thinking. It’s time we grew up and really paid attention to what Jesus is trying to teach us.
Jesus is telling us in so many different ways and demonstrating by his actions what he means: caring for the weak, the poor, the ill, the widows, the orphans, the rejected and ejected, the down and out, and even for the up and out like the farmer in the story. We need to pay attention to the relationships we have with other persons and make sure that we are honoring those relationships in healthy, life-giving ways. That’s what the apostle Paul is talking about in the Colossians passage this morning.
Max Lucado tells the story of Bob, who was born into the land of coats! His mother loved the color blue and made Bob's first cost a lovely shade of blue. Every time she noticed her son in his lovely blue coat, she cheered, "Yes, Bob!" He felt good in his blue coat, but Bob had to grow up and go to work. So he put on his best blue coat and slipped out of the house, going to his new job.
The people on the street saw him and began to yell, "Yuk, Yuk!" Their coats were yellow and they hated blue. Into a store ducked Bob and bought a yellow coat, put it over his blue coat and continued on his way to work. The people cheered, "Yea! Bob!" Bob felt good in his yellow coat over his blue coat.
He stepped into his boss’ office to get his assignment for that first day, who came in, looked at him and yelled, "Yuk!" So Bob jumped up, took off the yellow coat and stood waiting for approval in his blue coat. The boss yelled, "Double Yuk! Bob. Here at work we wear green coats!" With that, Bob slipped back on the yellow coat, over the blue coat and put the green coat on top. "Yea! Bob!" said the boss. As he left for work, Bob felt good.
After work, Bob slipped off the green coat, put it under the yellow coat and walked proudly home. He opened the door, went inside, as his mother looked at him with a "Yuk" on her lips. Bob quickly changed coats, putting the lovely blue one on top. Mom whispered, "Yea! Bob!"
Bob got so good at changing coats until he became a popular man around town. He changed coats so swiftly until he had folks fooled into believing that whatever coat they had on, he had it on too. Bob loved hearing the crowd say, "Yea! Bob!" He couldn't stand hearing "Yuk" Bob was elected mayor of the Town of Coats and had a faithful constituency.
One day he heard a noise outside of his window and then heard a pounding on his door. The Yellow Coats brought in a man wearing no coat. "Kill him!" they cried, "he doesn't fit in!" In his yellow coat, Bob said, "Leave him to me."
"Man, where is your coat?" he asked. The man said, "I wear no coat." Bob replied, "everybody wears a coat. What color do you choose?" The man responded the second time, "I wear no coat."
By then the Green Coats had gathered under Bob's window. Running to the window, his green coat on top, Bob yelled down to them, "I have it under control." The Green Coats shouted, "Kill him!"
At this time his mother entered into the room, and Bob slipped his blue coat on top. "Bob, where is his blue coat?" Mother asked, The Man replied, "I don't wear a coat." "Kill him," said Mother as she left Bob and the man alone.
"Man”, said Bob, “you have to wear a coat or they are going to kill you." "Bob," said the man, "you need to decide to stop wearing your different coats. Take them off, take them all off and let the world see who you truly are." "Take them off? Take them all off?" asked an incredulous Bob. The man said again, "Bob, you have to make a choice."
As the crowd kept crying, "Kill him!" Bob washed his hands, opened the door and marched the man toward sure death. The man looked at Bob, with one final word, "Choose." Bob was left alone with his three coats and the questions ringing in his mind, "Take them off? Take them all off?"
We’ve got to stop worrying about what coat we should put on and instead worry about what kind of relationships we are building with God and with others in our lives.
Paul writes to the people of Colossia from the letter to the Colossians. Apparently, they are wrestling with theological questions and philosophical debates around the centrality of Jesus. Was this Jesus just a wonderful human teacher, or was he truly the Divine Son of God or some combination of the two? That is still a question we ask ourselves today. False teachings, trying to combine human intellect, Greek wisdom, and strains of Judaism with Christian truth, have all embroiled the Christian Church in arguments over this issue for two thousand years.
So, Paul writes to deal with the divinity, death and resurrection of Jesus, and explains how the world's teachings are empty when compared with God's plan for us in Jesus Christ. Then, he moves into describing how Christians ought to think and behave because of our relationship with God.
Let me reread a portion of the scripture from Collosians to you from Petersons translation The Message:
You are done with that old life. It's like a filthy set of ill-fitting clothes you've stripped off and put in the fire. Now you're dressed in a new wardrobe. Every item of your new way of life is custom made by the Creator. It has the ultimate Designer label on it. All the old fashions are now obsolete. Words like Jewish and non-Jewish, religious and irreligious, inside and outsider, civilized and uncouth, slave and free mean nothing. From now on everyone is defined by Christ. Everyone is included in Christ. So, dressed by God for this new life of love, put on the wardrobe God picked out for you."
Paul is telling us to "Take off all the old and put on the new." It's about taking off the politically correct, the socially right, and morally expedient coats we have been wearing and standing naked before Christ in order to be fitted with the appropriate Christian garb. It's time to stand up for Jesus Christ.
This passage says that deceiving ourselves and trying to fool others is not sufficient for life in the New Community of God. This passage comes and declares that there are some things we can no longer do and call ourselves Christ-like. We have to take off that quick anger and that filthy temper. We have to take off that meanness which allows us to do three snaps when someone insults us, or a flip of the third finger, when someone cuts us off on the highway. We have to take off that dirty language that just slips out. We have to take off telling those nasty jokes which make fun of God's people who don't look or act like us. We have to take off lying, which we claim like children caught with their hands in the cookie jar, "everybody does it." All of those things belong to the outdated, outmoded wardrobe of our lives Before Christ!
When Christ comes into our lives there is a difference. When Christ comes into our lives there is a newness. When Christ comes into our lives we will change. We can stand naked before the One who knows us intimately and who loves us just the same.
Tell me, what color coat are you wearing right now? Most of us, like Bob, keep changing coats, which are dependent upon where we happen to be and who we happen to be with because we can't stand to hear other people say, "Yuk!"
Jesus speaks one word for all of us today--choose! Choose by making the decision for Christ today. No more coat changing for me. I choose to stand naked before Christ and to allow him to dress me with his own Ultimate Designer Label clothing. All that I have comes from God. God loves me just as I am! God sent Jesus into my life so that I might rise up above all the turmoil and strife and live the resurrected life in Christ. I don’t have to wait until some day in the distant future to enjoy heaven, for the real heaven, the New Community of God exists already in the here and now. You and I are living in that New Community right now.
The call is clear. No more blue politically correct coats. "Yuk!" No more yellow socially acceptable coats. "Yuk!" No more green morally expedient coats. "Double yuk!"
When we give our lives to Jesus, we can stand naked and ready to be used by God, knowing that we are loved and accepted exactly as we are. We recognize that Jesus, our Savior, came and stood naked before all the world. He lived a transparent life and allowed the disciples to see him at his best and even at his worst. He was completely human. He allowed himself to be vulnerable and let the world watch him die a victim's death.
But God said, that’s not the end of this story and clothed in majesty and victory, Christ rose with a new wardrobe in his hands for you and me. He rose to dress us with right living, with compassion for others, and with the power to live in victory over anything that keeps us away from God.
I have decided to let Jesus come into my life and redesign it for me. I'm taking it off. I'm taking it all off. I want to be dressed by the One who is the Ultimate Designer for me. Today, dear friends, I also invite you to choose Jesus as your own Ultimate Designer!
Luke 12:13-21
John Selby Spong writes in his monograph, This Rabbi Lord, “The key…I believe is our ability to distinguish between Jesus and the Christ. They are not the same. Jesus was a person; Christ is a title, a theological principle. Jesus was of history. Christ is beyond history. Jesus was human, finite, limited; Christ is power that is divine, infinite, unlimited. Jesus had a mother and a father, an ancestry, a human heritage. He was born. He died. Christ is a principle beyond the capacity of the mind to embrace or human origins to explain. The name of our Lord was not Jesus Christ, as so many of us suppose. He was Jesus of Nazareth about whom people made the startling and revolutionary claim: “You are the Christ!”
Spong goes one: “In Jesus of Nazareth, men and women saw the fullness of life being lived, the depth of love being shared, the courage to be being revealed. To them Jesus made known the full meaning of life, and love and being. He revealed God, and whenever God was seen in human life, that power is called Christ. “Your are the Christ, Jesus!” That was the claim. “You are the Christ, for in your life, we have seen the meaning of all life. In your love we have seen the source of all love. In your being we have seen the ground of all being.”
In a lighter vein, Rev. Bill Wall, from the United Church of Canada said in April: “What makes Christian’s distinct? One word: Jesus....But that answer is just the start of the debate. A friend told me recently, “My Jesus and my sister’s Jesus aren’t even distant cousins.”
We know that the Jesus we talk about in our church is very different from the Jesus that James Dobson and Focus on the Family talk about. Their Jesus doesn’t like you and me. I do hope that our Jesus likes them, though. I’d like to think that the Jesus you and I are in relationship with would want to be in relationship with them also.
People often come to Jesus thinking that they already know him and that they can therefore expect from Jesus just what they want out of him. It was no different in Biblical times. So today’s passage from Luke begins with a man coming to Jesus to settle a family feud. In that time it wasn’t uncommon for those in the midst of a feud to turn to a respected rabbi who would listen to both parties involved in the disagreement and then render a wise decision on how to handle the problem. Perhaps it would have been wiser of this man to have selected a different rabbi.
Jesus appeared ready to turn ordinary situations into teaching moments. He took the stuff that life is made of, human interactions, human relationships, and turned those events into lessons of great importance.
I have a feeling that the crowds gathered around Jesus would have been very earthy, very human crowds, with lots of teasing and joking going on, not at all like a worship service. Being earthy isn’t sinful. Lots of earthly things are needed and important. Jesus was a very earthy kind of man and his stories reflect his earthiness and his humanness.
Inheritance usually involved the handing down of real estate to one child in the family, usually the eldest son, so that the entire family farm would stay in the family and not be divided up into smaller lots. I heard in the news two weeks ago about tribes of people in Asia where several brothers marry one woman in order to keep the family farm intact and in the family. In Jesus’ day one might pay off your siblings financially to buy out any interest they might have in the property. But you never sold the family farm. Instead of answering the man, Jesus tells a story that goes to the real heart of the matter: greed.
He tells the story of the Rich Fool as the Parable has come to be known. At first glance the man doesn’t seem to be much of a fool. He is running a successful farming business and has ample barns to store up his produce to sell off during the year to bring in a constant stream of money. He’s not a bad guy. In fact, he has done such a good job of managing his business that with the blessing of good weather and abundant rain at just the right time he has reaped a bumper crop this year. With far too much product on hand he decides to tear down his barns which aren’t big enough to hold the harvest and build bigger, newer barns in which to store his grain.
This decision on his part would have brought to mind in Jesus’ hearer’s the story of Joseph from the Old Testament who interpreted the Pharaoh’s dream about 7 years of abundance followed by 7 years of famine. The Pharaoh ordered storage facilities to be built and the grain to be stored during the 7 years of abundance so it would be available in the 7 years of famine to feed the people. Joseph was appointed the overseer of this project and was able to save his own family from the famine. So this seems to be a wise and prudent decision on the part of the farmer.
But did you notice that in this man’s discussion with himself he never refers to anyone else, not even to God. Jesus’ audience that day would have noticed this, and they would have noticed some things that Jesus’ story doesn’t mention, but which were part of the social and religious customs of the day.
First of all, implied within Jesus’ story is the concept that this man should have first thanked God for the blessings that have been bestowed upon him and taken an offering of the first fruits of his labor to the Temple and given it to God. But that’s not what he did.
Secondly, as we see in so many of the parables of Jesus the expected action when sudden abundance comes upon you is to gather your family and friends and hold a celebration feast so that together they could all give thanks to God for God’s blessings and share in your joy. But that’s not what he did.
Thirdly, out of his abundance he should have set aside some of it to give to the poor, the needy, the widows and the orphans as the religious law required. But that’s not what he did.
He only thinks about himself. Nowhere do we read of any actions or statements about his relationships with God and others. Instead he decides that he will eat and drink and be merry for his own good fortune. But as Jesus puts it, he doesn’t get a chance to enjoy his lonely celebration because his number comes up and his life is over. What about his great fortune now? If he had no family, as this story implies, it now belongs to the tax collectors.
In contrast to this we have the story about a revolutionary war hero General Lafayette who after the war in America went back to his home in France where he had a large estate. One year his estate has a bumper crop of grain while the country as a whole has a crop failure. His advisors tell him that because of the scarcity of grain he should raise his prices and reap a financial reward. Lafayette instead told his advisors it wasn’t the time to sell, but time to give away his bounty to others in need.
Jesus is trying to tell us that being greedy, trying to get things for ourselves and only for ourselves, is not the way that we should think and act as citizens of the New Community of God. Instead we should be building up treasures for ourselves in heaven. What does that mean?
Building up treasurers for yourselves in heaven doesn’t mean that some day when you do get to heaven there’s going to be a big house full of lots of goodies waiting for you, all of the things that you didn’t get in this life. As the old spiritual song says when you get to heaven you won’t get beautiful clothing to wear, wings on your back, shoes on your feet, rings on your finger, nor will you get a crown encrusted with jewels to put on your head. My relatives used to say when they did an especially nice thing for someone else, “I guess I just got a diamond in my crown.” That’s pretty simplistic, child-like, literal thinking. It’s time we grew up and really paid attention to what Jesus is trying to teach us.
Jesus is telling us in so many different ways and demonstrating by his actions what he means: caring for the weak, the poor, the ill, the widows, the orphans, the rejected and ejected, the down and out, and even for the up and out like the farmer in the story. We need to pay attention to the relationships we have with other persons and make sure that we are honoring those relationships in healthy, life-giving ways. That’s what the apostle Paul is talking about in the Colossians passage this morning.
Max Lucado tells the story of Bob, who was born into the land of coats! His mother loved the color blue and made Bob's first cost a lovely shade of blue. Every time she noticed her son in his lovely blue coat, she cheered, "Yes, Bob!" He felt good in his blue coat, but Bob had to grow up and go to work. So he put on his best blue coat and slipped out of the house, going to his new job.
The people on the street saw him and began to yell, "Yuk, Yuk!" Their coats were yellow and they hated blue. Into a store ducked Bob and bought a yellow coat, put it over his blue coat and continued on his way to work. The people cheered, "Yea! Bob!" Bob felt good in his yellow coat over his blue coat.
He stepped into his boss’ office to get his assignment for that first day, who came in, looked at him and yelled, "Yuk!" So Bob jumped up, took off the yellow coat and stood waiting for approval in his blue coat. The boss yelled, "Double Yuk! Bob. Here at work we wear green coats!" With that, Bob slipped back on the yellow coat, over the blue coat and put the green coat on top. "Yea! Bob!" said the boss. As he left for work, Bob felt good.
After work, Bob slipped off the green coat, put it under the yellow coat and walked proudly home. He opened the door, went inside, as his mother looked at him with a "Yuk" on her lips. Bob quickly changed coats, putting the lovely blue one on top. Mom whispered, "Yea! Bob!"
Bob got so good at changing coats until he became a popular man around town. He changed coats so swiftly until he had folks fooled into believing that whatever coat they had on, he had it on too. Bob loved hearing the crowd say, "Yea! Bob!" He couldn't stand hearing "Yuk" Bob was elected mayor of the Town of Coats and had a faithful constituency.
One day he heard a noise outside of his window and then heard a pounding on his door. The Yellow Coats brought in a man wearing no coat. "Kill him!" they cried, "he doesn't fit in!" In his yellow coat, Bob said, "Leave him to me."
"Man, where is your coat?" he asked. The man said, "I wear no coat." Bob replied, "everybody wears a coat. What color do you choose?" The man responded the second time, "I wear no coat."
By then the Green Coats had gathered under Bob's window. Running to the window, his green coat on top, Bob yelled down to them, "I have it under control." The Green Coats shouted, "Kill him!"
At this time his mother entered into the room, and Bob slipped his blue coat on top. "Bob, where is his blue coat?" Mother asked, The Man replied, "I don't wear a coat." "Kill him," said Mother as she left Bob and the man alone.
"Man”, said Bob, “you have to wear a coat or they are going to kill you." "Bob," said the man, "you need to decide to stop wearing your different coats. Take them off, take them all off and let the world see who you truly are." "Take them off? Take them all off?" asked an incredulous Bob. The man said again, "Bob, you have to make a choice."
As the crowd kept crying, "Kill him!" Bob washed his hands, opened the door and marched the man toward sure death. The man looked at Bob, with one final word, "Choose." Bob was left alone with his three coats and the questions ringing in his mind, "Take them off? Take them all off?"
We’ve got to stop worrying about what coat we should put on and instead worry about what kind of relationships we are building with God and with others in our lives.
Paul writes to the people of Colossia from the letter to the Colossians. Apparently, they are wrestling with theological questions and philosophical debates around the centrality of Jesus. Was this Jesus just a wonderful human teacher, or was he truly the Divine Son of God or some combination of the two? That is still a question we ask ourselves today. False teachings, trying to combine human intellect, Greek wisdom, and strains of Judaism with Christian truth, have all embroiled the Christian Church in arguments over this issue for two thousand years.
So, Paul writes to deal with the divinity, death and resurrection of Jesus, and explains how the world's teachings are empty when compared with God's plan for us in Jesus Christ. Then, he moves into describing how Christians ought to think and behave because of our relationship with God.
Let me reread a portion of the scripture from Collosians to you from Petersons translation The Message:
You are done with that old life. It's like a filthy set of ill-fitting clothes you've stripped off and put in the fire. Now you're dressed in a new wardrobe. Every item of your new way of life is custom made by the Creator. It has the ultimate Designer label on it. All the old fashions are now obsolete. Words like Jewish and non-Jewish, religious and irreligious, inside and outsider, civilized and uncouth, slave and free mean nothing. From now on everyone is defined by Christ. Everyone is included in Christ. So, dressed by God for this new life of love, put on the wardrobe God picked out for you."
Paul is telling us to "Take off all the old and put on the new." It's about taking off the politically correct, the socially right, and morally expedient coats we have been wearing and standing naked before Christ in order to be fitted with the appropriate Christian garb. It's time to stand up for Jesus Christ.
This passage says that deceiving ourselves and trying to fool others is not sufficient for life in the New Community of God. This passage comes and declares that there are some things we can no longer do and call ourselves Christ-like. We have to take off that quick anger and that filthy temper. We have to take off that meanness which allows us to do three snaps when someone insults us, or a flip of the third finger, when someone cuts us off on the highway. We have to take off that dirty language that just slips out. We have to take off telling those nasty jokes which make fun of God's people who don't look or act like us. We have to take off lying, which we claim like children caught with their hands in the cookie jar, "everybody does it." All of those things belong to the outdated, outmoded wardrobe of our lives Before Christ!
When Christ comes into our lives there is a difference. When Christ comes into our lives there is a newness. When Christ comes into our lives we will change. We can stand naked before the One who knows us intimately and who loves us just the same.
Tell me, what color coat are you wearing right now? Most of us, like Bob, keep changing coats, which are dependent upon where we happen to be and who we happen to be with because we can't stand to hear other people say, "Yuk!"
Jesus speaks one word for all of us today--choose! Choose by making the decision for Christ today. No more coat changing for me. I choose to stand naked before Christ and to allow him to dress me with his own Ultimate Designer Label clothing. All that I have comes from God. God loves me just as I am! God sent Jesus into my life so that I might rise up above all the turmoil and strife and live the resurrected life in Christ. I don’t have to wait until some day in the distant future to enjoy heaven, for the real heaven, the New Community of God exists already in the here and now. You and I are living in that New Community right now.
The call is clear. No more blue politically correct coats. "Yuk!" No more yellow socially acceptable coats. "Yuk!" No more green morally expedient coats. "Double yuk!"
When we give our lives to Jesus, we can stand naked and ready to be used by God, knowing that we are loved and accepted exactly as we are. We recognize that Jesus, our Savior, came and stood naked before all the world. He lived a transparent life and allowed the disciples to see him at his best and even at his worst. He was completely human. He allowed himself to be vulnerable and let the world watch him die a victim's death.
But God said, that’s not the end of this story and clothed in majesty and victory, Christ rose with a new wardrobe in his hands for you and me. He rose to dress us with right living, with compassion for others, and with the power to live in victory over anything that keeps us away from God.
I have decided to let Jesus come into my life and redesign it for me. I'm taking it off. I'm taking it all off. I want to be dressed by the One who is the Ultimate Designer for me. Today, dear friends, I also invite you to choose Jesus as your own Ultimate Designer!
Choosing the Best Dish, Luke 10:38-42, Proper 11C
Preached Sunday, July 18, 2010
Luke 10: 38-42
........On their way to Jerusalem, Jesus and his followers passed through a certain village and accepted the invitation of a woman named Martha to share a meal in her home. Martha had a sister named Mary, who sat on the floor the moment Jesus arrived and hung on every word he said. Martha, on the other hand, was trying to prepare an elaborate meal for her guests and was getting more and more disturbed about it. She came in and said to Jesus, “Lord, doesn’t it bother you that my sister has left all the work to me? Tell her to get up off her butt and give me a hand.”
........But Jesus answered, “Martha, my dear Martha, you are preparing so many elaborate dishes when only one dish of food is really needed for our nourishment. Mary has chosen the right ‘dish’ and it is not going to be taken away from her.”
When I was growing up I often spent summer vacations on my grandparents’ farm in western Tennessee. It was a fabulous change of pace for me from life in metropolitan Chicago. It was sort of like leaving civilization and returning to the days of the pioneers because my grandparents still did much of the work of the farm the same way it had been done for hundreds of years before the advent of mechanical farming. That also meant that there were many social expectations that were 'taught' to me. One of those was: The men always eat first.
When it was time to eat the men would rush in from the fields where they had been working and crowd around the table while the women, even those who had worked in the same fields as the men, would serve them, get their drinks and deserts, and clean up after them. Even the little boys got to eat before the little girls. It was only when the men had finished eating the women sit down to eat themselves, sometimes not even getting the same food if the men had consumed all of what had been prepared. It was just the way things were done and for many years nobody seemed to question why there might be any reason to change it.
On quiet evenings when few others were around I did question my grandmother as to why she would still let the men eat first and the women second. I could understand the big middle of the day meals when lots of people were working together to plant or harvest the fields, but not the evenings at home with just family. She said that was the way it had always been done.
Now, you need to know that I was just as bossy as a child as I am as an adult. So I started telling my grandmother to sit down and eat while I waited on her. Not too long after that other family members began giving her the same honor...even at the mid-day meals on work days. She had earned a place of honor at the table with the men. I’m glad to report to you that after not too many years a new tradition was established in my family. Those who were the oldest men and women in the family were honored by being fed first at family gatherings, even on work days.
One of the problems we have in interpreting and understanding gospel stories like the one today is that we tend to read them alone, ripped away from their context, from the surrounding stories the author of the gospel has deliberately placed together for a purpose. This story is one of several where Jesus teaches his disciples about hospitality, about welcoming others into the New Community of God. Today’s gospel story speaks about the kinds of social expectations that Jesus’ own society had about men and women, about hospitality, and about eating together and enjoying each other’s company, especially enjoying time with a friend named Jesus.
We know from other gospel stories that Mary and Martha are sisters who live with their brother Lazarus in Bethany, just outside of the city walls of Jerusalem in the town of Bethany. Luke gives us none of those details in this story. Seemingly this story is way out of place geographically as Jesus and the disciples have just left Samaria and are not yet close to Jerusalem. Do remember, however, that the gospel writers weren’t necessarily reporting to us a day by day description of Jesus’ movements, nor where they especially knowledgeable or accurate about the geography of the Holy Land in their story telling. They were collecting stories about Jesus’ ministry and teaching and then putting those stories together based on themes within their gospels for particular purposes related to why they wrote the gospels and for the specific communities they were writing for, communities who also had special needs the authors wanted to address. So, it really doesn’t matter that we know that Jesus couldn’t be anywhere near Bethany since this is the beginning of his journey toward Jerusalem. What is important is the purpose that Luke has in telling us this story at this particular point in his gospel.
Mary and Martha and their brother Lazarus are a Queer family indeed. An unmarried man, or at least his wife is never referred to, and his two unwed sisters who certainly appear to be of marriageable ages present us with a very unconventional family for this time. Some have identified Lazarus as the Beloved Disciple that the author of the gospel of John refers to several times. Given the fact that Jesus apparently likes to hang out with these three siblings whenever he’s in the vicinity of Jerusalem, makes them look even queerer.
Some have gone so far as to suggest that Mary or her sister Martha might have been married to Jesus and this would account for his frequent visits to their home. Such thoughts bother some people, but not me. The thought that Jesus was a complete human being with love interests and perhaps a wife or a lover just doesn’t faze me like it might have many years ago when I was a young teenager still stuck in a fundamentalist religious community.
Jesus was well known as a man who enjoyed good food and good drink and the company of those that the social elite of his day would have been horrified to welcome into their homes. Jesus apparently knew how to have a good time or at least that’s what his adversaries kept accusing him of doing. Perhaps they were jealous of his popularity and had to come up with some reason why they shouldn’t be a part of the celebrations Jesus seemed to usher into existence just by his presence.
Normally in the gospels we would be told that Jesus had come into the home of a leading male citizen of the community for a dinner. However, on this day, Luke tells us that Jesus has come to the home of Martha. Identifying Martha as the main host for this occasion is very queer indeed and we probably need to ask ourselves why Luke does this.
Some of our sister theologians believe that this story is preserved by Luke, for it isn’t told by any of the other gospel writers, because it is a story that women who were followers of Jesus handed down to each other. Why might that be so?
This week the Catholic Church announced revisions in its laws pertaining to sexual abuse of minors by priests listing it as a moral crime and at the same time listed the ordination of women of women as one of the most serious crimes of sacrament against Church law. That they would list both in the same document, almost equating them as equally bad, has caused quite a stir among Catholics and others worldwide for it seemed to put the two crimes on equal footing. The Catholic Church has been quick to say that isn’t what it meant, but that the ordination of women is still a crime because Jesus didn’t have any female disciples. While it is true that we don’t have any women listed in any of the gospels or the book of Acts as being ‘official’ disciples of Jesus, we do know that Jesus was accompanied by a rather large group of women when he was traveling with his male disciples, and when the men are mentioned it is not unusual for the gospel writer to also list women who were present. From recent scriptures we have focused on we know that these women gave financial support to Jesus’ ministry out of their own wealth.
Given the social expectations of that historical time, it shouldn’t be surprising that even if there had been any official lady disciples that their names aren’t recorded in those listings, especially given the fact that all of the gospel writers we know about were apparently male. But, isn’t it interesting that we have this particular story about Mary and Martha as well as several other stories about women in the life of Jesus? Remember that all of the gospel stories were passed down from one generation to the next, from person to person, until they were finally written down as collections of the teachings of Jesus in what we now call the four gospels. Perhaps this is a story about two of the female disciples of Jesus.
We read that Jesus sent the 12 disciples ahead of him to make preparations for his journey through Samaria, a region known for its hate of Jews, and for being hated in return by Jews. Then we learned that Jesus sent out 70 of his followers with instructions to take a blessing of peace to Samaria and accept the peaceful hospitality of the Samaritans when it is given back to them. If that wasn’t lesson enough for everyone about the kind of hospitality that Jesus wanted his disciples to practice, Luke then has Jesus tell a story about a hated Samaritan who acts more like a neighbor to a man who has been beaten and robbed than a priest or a Levite, two of the most righteous men in all of the country.
This week's gospel story has Jesus and his followers descending upon the home of Mary and Martha who welcome him and the men with great hospitality. One commentary I read took the numbers of followers literally and said that Martha has opened her home up to over 83 men and the women traveling with them. If you showed up at my house with more than 80 of your friends and expected Mark and I to feed you and put you up for the night, I think I might freak out too. The probability is that Jesus a few friends came by that day, far less than 80.
Martha does the socially expected thing of a woman in her society as the oldest woman of the household and arranges a meal for Jesus and his followers, however many there might have been with him. Apparently Martha is an ancient version of Martha Steward and soon is organizing a meal, and the household to take care of her guests. She just forgets one thing, to be present with her guests, to enjoy their company, especially that of Jesus.
She is apparently a very competent woman and greatly respected for her abilities in giving hospitality as it would have been expected of her under the circumstances. However while she is dashing around the house, Martha apparently notices that something isn’t quite right with the situation because her younger sister, Mary, isn’t helping her. Instead Mary is sitting at the feet of Jesus with the men listening to him teach. That was not an action women normally took in that society. Women were not taught to read, write, nor invited to take part in scholarly discussions, at least not in public where they would be seen.
I for one think that this is one of the reasons this story probably proved so durable and was most likely told by women to women to support their being seen as full and complete disciples of Jesus, equal to any man. If Jesus had a reason to reject women from being a disciple or taking part in his teaching, he could have done it right at this point and believe me, if he had, the men who preserved these stories for us to read would have reported it just that way. But Jesus didn’t reject Mary or Martha. In fact, Jesus apparently was delighted that Mary was learning at his feet just like one of the men and he wasn’t going to take that away from her.
Now before we go further into the story about Mary and Martha, let me take just a moment and tell you about Claude…not his real name, but this is about a real person. Claude came into my church as a man of many talents. He was a very creative person who could organize large dinner parties for the church for special occasions complete with elaborate color coordination of flowers, table arrangements, table cloths, wall decorations, and even lighting.
To attend a feast that had been planned and executed by Claude was to partake of a fabulous celebration of color and sights and taste. He did such a great job that we asked him to be the church host and coordinate all the dinners and special events for the church.
Now when Claude was just volunteering his time and talents he was content and happy and everyone appreciated his work and applauded him and patted him on the back and told him how wonderful he was and Claude loved it. But when Claude took on the responsibility of coordinating the monthly potlucks and other events involving food Claude became a very different person. Claude began complaining that no one helped him, or at least not enough people helped him and those that did help didn’t help in the right way. Claude would overspend his budget and then complain when the church couldn’t reimburse him for expenses he hadn’t asked for approval before he bought his supplies.
One day when he had worked very hard, ignoring the help that others offered him because they just didn’t do things the right way, or at least not the way Claude would have done it, he overheard someone say that the mashed potatoes weren’t warm enough and he burst into angry tears and abruptly left the church without even saying goodbye. The rest of us had been having a great time enjoying the food and the fellowship and it took several hours to piece together the reason for Claude’s sudden disappearance.
Instead of enjoying the fellowship and the food that had been brought in by everyone, Claude had focused instead on some of the minor issues of the day, like how hot the potatoes were after they’d been sitting on the table for several minutes, not something that was that important, in fact, the person who complained took his plate and put in the microwave until his potatoes were warm enough for him to eat them. Claude would have probably been offended at that if he’d stayed around long enough to be offended by it.
After one more such event at a later potluck dinner, we decided that coordinating the dinners for the church wasn’t something that Claude could do with any reasonable pleasure and joy because his attitude was all wrong. So we went for months with no one in the position and guess what? I hate to say it, but even without the marvelous decorations and flower arrangements, we all enjoyed the dinners a whole lot more than we had when Claude took over and demonstrated his displeasure with all of the rest of us.
I suspect that Martha was a lot like Claude. Martha becomes perplexed that she has to direct all of the work herself...a considerable amount given the number of men who were possibly present and who were probably not helping with the meal. The Greek language used indicates that she is preparing a very elaborate meal probably consisting of many dishes, the ancient equivalent of a six or seven course dinner. Ostensibly she is doing this to honor Jesus as a guest in her home.
Before the dinner is served, however, Mary goes to Jesus to complain that Mary isn't helping her do the work. This in itself is not a hospitable thing for Martha to do; it is a huge break in etiquette. One does not burden one’s honored guest with family disputes, nor does one usurp the authority of the guest to get your own way. Martha apparently thinks that she knows Jesus well enough that she can expect him to agree with her complaint and that Jesus will therefore order Mary to get up and go and help Martha finish the meal preparations. There is so much wrong with what Martha does. But Martha is in for a surprise.
Let me pause for a moment and explain that many have misused this scripture to say that Jesus prefers those who lead contemplative lives of quiet reflection and study over those who lead lives of active service to others in the name of Jesus. People have created hierarchies in which Mary is the one to be honored for her devotion to Jesus and Martha is to be put down for her service oriented ways. But that isn’t what this story is about and never was. The church needs both those who are contemplative and those who give themselves in Christian service to others. Try to do church without either one and you don’t have much of a church. As I’ve said many times before to you, the problem is with Martha’s attitude, not with what she is doing. Attitude is everything!
Jesus answers: "Martha, my dear, Martha. You are worried about preparing an elaborate meal for me, when only one dish of food is necessary to satisfy our hunger. Mary has chosen the better 'dish' and I will not take it away from her." Jesus was not scolding Martha. He was using extreme terms of endearment in talking to her. I imagine him addressing her like I do one of my beloved grandchildren, with tenderness and total acceptance and absolute love. I believe Jesus was inviting Martha to sit down and enjoy some time with him, too, by listening to him and talking with him.
Given her bad attitude she apparently needed a big lesson on loving others with the right attitude. Spending time with Jesus was more important than fulfilling anyone’s social expectations of what a woman should do or even what a host should do. The most important guest in all of history was present in her home and she needed to stop and smell the flowers instead of worrying about which flowers to put in which vases to convey the best message of hospitality. In worrying about hospitality, Martha forgot to give hospitality to everyone, including to her sister Mary, or even to Jesus.
Being present with Jesus was the most important 'dish' of choice on the menu for the evening. Jesus doesn't restrict anyone from following him. God welcomes both women and men fully into a mutually meaningful relationship. Normal social expectations about gender roles are blown wide open in the New Community of God. Women can sit at the feet of Jesus and learn to be his followers, the same as men. Women can be pastors and priests and music directors and theologians and seminary professors, as well as deacons or lay leaders in the church. For that matter, men can be great cooks and hosts, or teach children, too, and do so in response to Jesus' call to his follower. When society tells us we have to live up to its social expectations about our gender, remember, those things aren't important neither to Jesus nor in God's New Community. Are you being too busy to spend time with Jesus this week?
When you can’t practice Christian hospitality, or when you don’t feel like giving Christian hospitality to another person, then you need to remove yourself from the situation and let someone else help that person. You may even need to call upon others to do for that person what you cannot do for him or her yourself. When your attitude about serving Christ and serving others in Christ’s name is not what it should be, then you need to stop and get your attitude readjusted. Doing the right thing may not be the right thing to do if your attitude is all wrong.
We treat life and others the wrong way. We usually want to know what we are going to get out of anything we might attend or anyone we might be with. Perhaps we need to start by asking ourselves what is it that we can give to others, what is it that others need from us? When we begin with the focus on ourselves, we fail to see the other people that God wants us to see, really see, and really care about.
As churches grow the members usually become more and more concerned about what the church is going to do for them, how is the church going to help them in life instead of how is the church going to care for its surrounding community and reach out to those who do not know what it might mean for them to be a part of the New Community of God. When we take our eyes and our hearts focus off of the surrounding community and we begin to focus only on our own needs and wants we might as well put up a sign at the door that says: No one else needed. No one else wanted. We’re too busy taking care of ourselves.
Martha was so busy taking care of those things that Martha thought was important that Martha forgot about being a friend to Jesus, about being a caring sister to Mary, and even about proper decorum be trying to involve Jesus in a family dispute to get her own way. As we continue to grow as a church there will be many choices before us, a whole smorgasbord of options, but it is my fervent hope that you and I will choose the best dish, that we will keep our eyes and our hearts focused on the best dish: being friends of Jesus, friends to each other, and friends to the world around us. Yes, we might need to take care of ourselves at times, but in taking care of ourselves, let us not lose our focus on the people around us, for that is who God sees and that is who God wants us to see. When Jesus saw someone in need, Jesus stopped what he was doing and cared for them. Jesus became their friend. He did that for Martha. It’s that simple: See a need and help. Be a friend to everyone…but with the right attitude.
Luke 10: 38-42
........On their way to Jerusalem, Jesus and his followers passed through a certain village and accepted the invitation of a woman named Martha to share a meal in her home. Martha had a sister named Mary, who sat on the floor the moment Jesus arrived and hung on every word he said. Martha, on the other hand, was trying to prepare an elaborate meal for her guests and was getting more and more disturbed about it. She came in and said to Jesus, “Lord, doesn’t it bother you that my sister has left all the work to me? Tell her to get up off her butt and give me a hand.”
........But Jesus answered, “Martha, my dear Martha, you are preparing so many elaborate dishes when only one dish of food is really needed for our nourishment. Mary has chosen the right ‘dish’ and it is not going to be taken away from her.”
When I was growing up I often spent summer vacations on my grandparents’ farm in western Tennessee. It was a fabulous change of pace for me from life in metropolitan Chicago. It was sort of like leaving civilization and returning to the days of the pioneers because my grandparents still did much of the work of the farm the same way it had been done for hundreds of years before the advent of mechanical farming. That also meant that there were many social expectations that were 'taught' to me. One of those was: The men always eat first.
When it was time to eat the men would rush in from the fields where they had been working and crowd around the table while the women, even those who had worked in the same fields as the men, would serve them, get their drinks and deserts, and clean up after them. Even the little boys got to eat before the little girls. It was only when the men had finished eating the women sit down to eat themselves, sometimes not even getting the same food if the men had consumed all of what had been prepared. It was just the way things were done and for many years nobody seemed to question why there might be any reason to change it.
On quiet evenings when few others were around I did question my grandmother as to why she would still let the men eat first and the women second. I could understand the big middle of the day meals when lots of people were working together to plant or harvest the fields, but not the evenings at home with just family. She said that was the way it had always been done.
Now, you need to know that I was just as bossy as a child as I am as an adult. So I started telling my grandmother to sit down and eat while I waited on her. Not too long after that other family members began giving her the same honor...even at the mid-day meals on work days. She had earned a place of honor at the table with the men. I’m glad to report to you that after not too many years a new tradition was established in my family. Those who were the oldest men and women in the family were honored by being fed first at family gatherings, even on work days.
One of the problems we have in interpreting and understanding gospel stories like the one today is that we tend to read them alone, ripped away from their context, from the surrounding stories the author of the gospel has deliberately placed together for a purpose. This story is one of several where Jesus teaches his disciples about hospitality, about welcoming others into the New Community of God. Today’s gospel story speaks about the kinds of social expectations that Jesus’ own society had about men and women, about hospitality, and about eating together and enjoying each other’s company, especially enjoying time with a friend named Jesus.
We know from other gospel stories that Mary and Martha are sisters who live with their brother Lazarus in Bethany, just outside of the city walls of Jerusalem in the town of Bethany. Luke gives us none of those details in this story. Seemingly this story is way out of place geographically as Jesus and the disciples have just left Samaria and are not yet close to Jerusalem. Do remember, however, that the gospel writers weren’t necessarily reporting to us a day by day description of Jesus’ movements, nor where they especially knowledgeable or accurate about the geography of the Holy Land in their story telling. They were collecting stories about Jesus’ ministry and teaching and then putting those stories together based on themes within their gospels for particular purposes related to why they wrote the gospels and for the specific communities they were writing for, communities who also had special needs the authors wanted to address. So, it really doesn’t matter that we know that Jesus couldn’t be anywhere near Bethany since this is the beginning of his journey toward Jerusalem. What is important is the purpose that Luke has in telling us this story at this particular point in his gospel.
Mary and Martha and their brother Lazarus are a Queer family indeed. An unmarried man, or at least his wife is never referred to, and his two unwed sisters who certainly appear to be of marriageable ages present us with a very unconventional family for this time. Some have identified Lazarus as the Beloved Disciple that the author of the gospel of John refers to several times. Given the fact that Jesus apparently likes to hang out with these three siblings whenever he’s in the vicinity of Jerusalem, makes them look even queerer.
Some have gone so far as to suggest that Mary or her sister Martha might have been married to Jesus and this would account for his frequent visits to their home. Such thoughts bother some people, but not me. The thought that Jesus was a complete human being with love interests and perhaps a wife or a lover just doesn’t faze me like it might have many years ago when I was a young teenager still stuck in a fundamentalist religious community.
Jesus was well known as a man who enjoyed good food and good drink and the company of those that the social elite of his day would have been horrified to welcome into their homes. Jesus apparently knew how to have a good time or at least that’s what his adversaries kept accusing him of doing. Perhaps they were jealous of his popularity and had to come up with some reason why they shouldn’t be a part of the celebrations Jesus seemed to usher into existence just by his presence.
Normally in the gospels we would be told that Jesus had come into the home of a leading male citizen of the community for a dinner. However, on this day, Luke tells us that Jesus has come to the home of Martha. Identifying Martha as the main host for this occasion is very queer indeed and we probably need to ask ourselves why Luke does this.
Some of our sister theologians believe that this story is preserved by Luke, for it isn’t told by any of the other gospel writers, because it is a story that women who were followers of Jesus handed down to each other. Why might that be so?
This week the Catholic Church announced revisions in its laws pertaining to sexual abuse of minors by priests listing it as a moral crime and at the same time listed the ordination of women of women as one of the most serious crimes of sacrament against Church law. That they would list both in the same document, almost equating them as equally bad, has caused quite a stir among Catholics and others worldwide for it seemed to put the two crimes on equal footing. The Catholic Church has been quick to say that isn’t what it meant, but that the ordination of women is still a crime because Jesus didn’t have any female disciples. While it is true that we don’t have any women listed in any of the gospels or the book of Acts as being ‘official’ disciples of Jesus, we do know that Jesus was accompanied by a rather large group of women when he was traveling with his male disciples, and when the men are mentioned it is not unusual for the gospel writer to also list women who were present. From recent scriptures we have focused on we know that these women gave financial support to Jesus’ ministry out of their own wealth.
Given the social expectations of that historical time, it shouldn’t be surprising that even if there had been any official lady disciples that their names aren’t recorded in those listings, especially given the fact that all of the gospel writers we know about were apparently male. But, isn’t it interesting that we have this particular story about Mary and Martha as well as several other stories about women in the life of Jesus? Remember that all of the gospel stories were passed down from one generation to the next, from person to person, until they were finally written down as collections of the teachings of Jesus in what we now call the four gospels. Perhaps this is a story about two of the female disciples of Jesus.
We read that Jesus sent the 12 disciples ahead of him to make preparations for his journey through Samaria, a region known for its hate of Jews, and for being hated in return by Jews. Then we learned that Jesus sent out 70 of his followers with instructions to take a blessing of peace to Samaria and accept the peaceful hospitality of the Samaritans when it is given back to them. If that wasn’t lesson enough for everyone about the kind of hospitality that Jesus wanted his disciples to practice, Luke then has Jesus tell a story about a hated Samaritan who acts more like a neighbor to a man who has been beaten and robbed than a priest or a Levite, two of the most righteous men in all of the country.
This week's gospel story has Jesus and his followers descending upon the home of Mary and Martha who welcome him and the men with great hospitality. One commentary I read took the numbers of followers literally and said that Martha has opened her home up to over 83 men and the women traveling with them. If you showed up at my house with more than 80 of your friends and expected Mark and I to feed you and put you up for the night, I think I might freak out too. The probability is that Jesus a few friends came by that day, far less than 80.
Martha does the socially expected thing of a woman in her society as the oldest woman of the household and arranges a meal for Jesus and his followers, however many there might have been with him. Apparently Martha is an ancient version of Martha Steward and soon is organizing a meal, and the household to take care of her guests. She just forgets one thing, to be present with her guests, to enjoy their company, especially that of Jesus.
She is apparently a very competent woman and greatly respected for her abilities in giving hospitality as it would have been expected of her under the circumstances. However while she is dashing around the house, Martha apparently notices that something isn’t quite right with the situation because her younger sister, Mary, isn’t helping her. Instead Mary is sitting at the feet of Jesus with the men listening to him teach. That was not an action women normally took in that society. Women were not taught to read, write, nor invited to take part in scholarly discussions, at least not in public where they would be seen.
I for one think that this is one of the reasons this story probably proved so durable and was most likely told by women to women to support their being seen as full and complete disciples of Jesus, equal to any man. If Jesus had a reason to reject women from being a disciple or taking part in his teaching, he could have done it right at this point and believe me, if he had, the men who preserved these stories for us to read would have reported it just that way. But Jesus didn’t reject Mary or Martha. In fact, Jesus apparently was delighted that Mary was learning at his feet just like one of the men and he wasn’t going to take that away from her.
Now before we go further into the story about Mary and Martha, let me take just a moment and tell you about Claude…not his real name, but this is about a real person. Claude came into my church as a man of many talents. He was a very creative person who could organize large dinner parties for the church for special occasions complete with elaborate color coordination of flowers, table arrangements, table cloths, wall decorations, and even lighting.
To attend a feast that had been planned and executed by Claude was to partake of a fabulous celebration of color and sights and taste. He did such a great job that we asked him to be the church host and coordinate all the dinners and special events for the church.
Now when Claude was just volunteering his time and talents he was content and happy and everyone appreciated his work and applauded him and patted him on the back and told him how wonderful he was and Claude loved it. But when Claude took on the responsibility of coordinating the monthly potlucks and other events involving food Claude became a very different person. Claude began complaining that no one helped him, or at least not enough people helped him and those that did help didn’t help in the right way. Claude would overspend his budget and then complain when the church couldn’t reimburse him for expenses he hadn’t asked for approval before he bought his supplies.
One day when he had worked very hard, ignoring the help that others offered him because they just didn’t do things the right way, or at least not the way Claude would have done it, he overheard someone say that the mashed potatoes weren’t warm enough and he burst into angry tears and abruptly left the church without even saying goodbye. The rest of us had been having a great time enjoying the food and the fellowship and it took several hours to piece together the reason for Claude’s sudden disappearance.
Instead of enjoying the fellowship and the food that had been brought in by everyone, Claude had focused instead on some of the minor issues of the day, like how hot the potatoes were after they’d been sitting on the table for several minutes, not something that was that important, in fact, the person who complained took his plate and put in the microwave until his potatoes were warm enough for him to eat them. Claude would have probably been offended at that if he’d stayed around long enough to be offended by it.
After one more such event at a later potluck dinner, we decided that coordinating the dinners for the church wasn’t something that Claude could do with any reasonable pleasure and joy because his attitude was all wrong. So we went for months with no one in the position and guess what? I hate to say it, but even without the marvelous decorations and flower arrangements, we all enjoyed the dinners a whole lot more than we had when Claude took over and demonstrated his displeasure with all of the rest of us.
I suspect that Martha was a lot like Claude. Martha becomes perplexed that she has to direct all of the work herself...a considerable amount given the number of men who were possibly present and who were probably not helping with the meal. The Greek language used indicates that she is preparing a very elaborate meal probably consisting of many dishes, the ancient equivalent of a six or seven course dinner. Ostensibly she is doing this to honor Jesus as a guest in her home.
Before the dinner is served, however, Mary goes to Jesus to complain that Mary isn't helping her do the work. This in itself is not a hospitable thing for Martha to do; it is a huge break in etiquette. One does not burden one’s honored guest with family disputes, nor does one usurp the authority of the guest to get your own way. Martha apparently thinks that she knows Jesus well enough that she can expect him to agree with her complaint and that Jesus will therefore order Mary to get up and go and help Martha finish the meal preparations. There is so much wrong with what Martha does. But Martha is in for a surprise.
Let me pause for a moment and explain that many have misused this scripture to say that Jesus prefers those who lead contemplative lives of quiet reflection and study over those who lead lives of active service to others in the name of Jesus. People have created hierarchies in which Mary is the one to be honored for her devotion to Jesus and Martha is to be put down for her service oriented ways. But that isn’t what this story is about and never was. The church needs both those who are contemplative and those who give themselves in Christian service to others. Try to do church without either one and you don’t have much of a church. As I’ve said many times before to you, the problem is with Martha’s attitude, not with what she is doing. Attitude is everything!
Jesus answers: "Martha, my dear, Martha. You are worried about preparing an elaborate meal for me, when only one dish of food is necessary to satisfy our hunger. Mary has chosen the better 'dish' and I will not take it away from her." Jesus was not scolding Martha. He was using extreme terms of endearment in talking to her. I imagine him addressing her like I do one of my beloved grandchildren, with tenderness and total acceptance and absolute love. I believe Jesus was inviting Martha to sit down and enjoy some time with him, too, by listening to him and talking with him.
Given her bad attitude she apparently needed a big lesson on loving others with the right attitude. Spending time with Jesus was more important than fulfilling anyone’s social expectations of what a woman should do or even what a host should do. The most important guest in all of history was present in her home and she needed to stop and smell the flowers instead of worrying about which flowers to put in which vases to convey the best message of hospitality. In worrying about hospitality, Martha forgot to give hospitality to everyone, including to her sister Mary, or even to Jesus.
Being present with Jesus was the most important 'dish' of choice on the menu for the evening. Jesus doesn't restrict anyone from following him. God welcomes both women and men fully into a mutually meaningful relationship. Normal social expectations about gender roles are blown wide open in the New Community of God. Women can sit at the feet of Jesus and learn to be his followers, the same as men. Women can be pastors and priests and music directors and theologians and seminary professors, as well as deacons or lay leaders in the church. For that matter, men can be great cooks and hosts, or teach children, too, and do so in response to Jesus' call to his follower. When society tells us we have to live up to its social expectations about our gender, remember, those things aren't important neither to Jesus nor in God's New Community. Are you being too busy to spend time with Jesus this week?
When you can’t practice Christian hospitality, or when you don’t feel like giving Christian hospitality to another person, then you need to remove yourself from the situation and let someone else help that person. You may even need to call upon others to do for that person what you cannot do for him or her yourself. When your attitude about serving Christ and serving others in Christ’s name is not what it should be, then you need to stop and get your attitude readjusted. Doing the right thing may not be the right thing to do if your attitude is all wrong.
We treat life and others the wrong way. We usually want to know what we are going to get out of anything we might attend or anyone we might be with. Perhaps we need to start by asking ourselves what is it that we can give to others, what is it that others need from us? When we begin with the focus on ourselves, we fail to see the other people that God wants us to see, really see, and really care about.
As churches grow the members usually become more and more concerned about what the church is going to do for them, how is the church going to help them in life instead of how is the church going to care for its surrounding community and reach out to those who do not know what it might mean for them to be a part of the New Community of God. When we take our eyes and our hearts focus off of the surrounding community and we begin to focus only on our own needs and wants we might as well put up a sign at the door that says: No one else needed. No one else wanted. We’re too busy taking care of ourselves.
Martha was so busy taking care of those things that Martha thought was important that Martha forgot about being a friend to Jesus, about being a caring sister to Mary, and even about proper decorum be trying to involve Jesus in a family dispute to get her own way. As we continue to grow as a church there will be many choices before us, a whole smorgasbord of options, but it is my fervent hope that you and I will choose the best dish, that we will keep our eyes and our hearts focused on the best dish: being friends of Jesus, friends to each other, and friends to the world around us. Yes, we might need to take care of ourselves at times, but in taking care of ourselves, let us not lose our focus on the people around us, for that is who God sees and that is who God wants us to see. When Jesus saw someone in need, Jesus stopped what he was doing and cared for them. Jesus became their friend. He did that for Martha. It’s that simple: See a need and help. Be a friend to everyone…but with the right attitude.
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