We (Must) Take Scripture Seriously

 

November 13, 2022 – The 23rd Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 28C

Malachi 4:1-2a; 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13; Luke 21:5-19

© 2022 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video of the entire service can be seen here with the sermon beginning around 22:20.

One year when I was in middle school, our youth group went to Panama City Beach for Spring Break. That might sound like fun, but we didn’t actually go to the beach for more than a few minutes. Instead, we spent the whole time at a renewal conference with other youth groups, listening to overly enthusiastic preachers, amazingly confident small group leaders, and a really loud Christian rock band that none of us liked. Although I don’t remember a lot about that conference, two things stick with me all these years later: I remember feeling pressured to give my life to Jesus publicly because I was made to believe that my private devotions weren’t sufficient, and I remember being asked to use the Bible to solve the “welfare crisis” in this country.

The youth in our small group were split up into pairs, and each team was handed a Bible and a societal problem that they were supposed to solve using biblical values. I don’t remember any of the other topics, but I recall flipping through the pages of scripture, desperately looking for anything that had to do with welfare. We were stumped. When it was our turn to share, we acknowledged that we hadn’t found anything but offered our firm conviction that “God helps those who help themselves.” “That’s not in the Bible,” the small group leader snapped back at us disappointedly, mistakenly attributing our words to Shakespeare. “Second Thessalonians 3:10,” was all she said by way of correction, waiting for us to find and read the verse aloud: “For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: anyone unwilling to work should not eat.”

I didn’t pay a lot of attention to politics back then, but looking back and realizing that a certain former Arkansas Governor was in the White House and that the “Welfare to Work” bill was being debated in Congress, I’m not surprised that we were asked to use the Bible to find a simple answer to that complex problem. I’m not sure what the leaders would have done if we had cited Matthew 25:5—“For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat”—or Proverbs 25:21—“If your enemies are hungry, give them bread to eat”—or Isaiah 58:6-7—“Is this not the fast that I choose:…to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house?”

But what are we supposed to do with today’s reading from 2 Thessalonians? Here, the apostle Paul seems to say unequivocally that those who are unwilling to work shall not eat. Does he mean that? He even gives it as a command, flexing all his apostolic muscle to get his point across. But the Bible rarely offers simple, unequivocal answers to difficult issues, and it might not surprise you to learn that Paul probably wasn’t attempting to winnow down the welfare rolls in Thessalonica. 

It turns out that laziness or, as our translation puts it, “idleness,” wasn’t really the issue. The phrase (ἀτάκτως περιπατοῦντος) translated at the beginning of this passage as “living in idleness” more precisely means “walking in a disordered way,” as in a soldier who is “marching out of ranks.” Translators have a hard time knowing what Paul meant when he used that phrase because this is the only time it is found in the Bible. For a long time, English translations of the Bible kept the original idiom without attempting to explain it. For example, the 14th-century Wycliff Bible used “wandereth out of order,” and the 17th-century King James Version chose “walketh disorderly.” 

By the middle of the twentieth century, however, things had begun to shift. Translators wanted to provide more context, perhaps to be sure that overly literal interpreters didn’t think the problem in Thessalonica was Christians who couldn’t walk in a straight line. For example, when the American Standard Version, originally published in 1901, was updated in 1971, the phrase went from “walketh disorderly” to “leads a disorderly life.” But other translations wanted to go even further in the name of contextualization, borrowing (perhaps unfairly) from the surrounding text, changing “disorderly walking” to “living in idleness,” and Christians have been confusing what Paul had in mind ever since. 

It could be that the disorder or misconduct that Paul had in mind was sheer laziness, but reading the rest of the passage or, even better, the rest of First and Second Thessalonians is an important step to figuring it out. Whatever Paul wanted to convey, we see that he based his argument on the time he spent in that community: “For you yourselves know how you ought to imitate us; we were not [disorderly] when we were with you, and we did not eat anyone's bread without paying for it; but with toil and labor we worked night and day, so that we might not burden any of you.” 

You’d be hard-pressed to call Paul lazy or idle, but you could say that he was too busy doing important things like preaching and teaching to earn a living. You could say that an apostle like Paul shouldn’t have to pay for his own meals but should be entitled to live off the generosity of others. But Paul didn’t want to set that sort of disorderly example. He didn’t want other would-be apostles to take advantage of their authority, so he always paid his own way. 

If you took time to read the rest of First and Second Thessalonians, you’d discover that the overarching problem Paul was addressing in that community wasn’t lazy Christians, who expected others to feed them, but pretend-apostles, who expected the Christian community to treat them like royalty, hanging on their every word and providing for their every need. But you’d never know that if the only verse you ever read was 2 Thessalonians 3:10. Thankfully, we belong to a Christian tradition that takes the Bible more seriously than that.

“Blessed Lord, who has caused all holy scriptures to be written for our learning…” We prayed those words in the collect for today, acknowledging the God-given gift of not only the scriptures we like to hear but of all the scriptures. When Thomas Cranmer, the author of the first Book of Common Prayer, wrote those words, he was implicitly criticizing the dominant religious institution of the day not only for insisting that worship be offered in a language that the people could not understand but also for breaking up the reading of scripture with so many feast days that most of the Bible went unread during worship. Today, the dominant Christian culture does much of the same, prioritizing translations that reinforce their opinions and proof-texting select verses to fit their arguments. But the Word of God will not be weaponized like that.

If you want to know what the Episcopal Church believes about something, the right place to look is in our prayers, and today’s collect tells us what we believe about the Bible. We believe that God caused all holy scriptures to be written, not as a literal, factual record of history but as a divinely inspired gift that was written for a particular purpose—for our learning. We believe that God helps us do more than memorize the words on the page. We believe that God enables us to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them until they become a part of who we are. We believe, as the Rite I version of the collect puts it, that it takes patience—time and repeated encounters with God’s Word—to receive the full benefit of the comfort that God’s Word provides. And we believe that immersing ourselves in the richness of that Word will help us embrace and hold onto the ultimate hope that God has given us, which is everlasting life. In short, we believe that the whole Bible is God’s gift to us and that, when we study it deeply, it helps us maintain our hope in what God has promised us.

But Cranmer’s vision of a rich, scripture-fueled hope wasn’t to be accomplished by coming to church once a week and paying attention when the lessons were read. He imagined a church in which all people—clergy and laity—were committed to reading the Bible every day. In the preface to the first Book of Common Prayer, Cranmer wrote that, by coming to church and hearing the scriptures read every day, “the people…should continually profit more and more in the knowledge of God, and be the more inflamed with the love of [God’s] true religion.” Though it may sound like something you’d find in another denomination, there is nothing more Anglican or Episcopal than reading your Bible seven days a week. That’s why we offer Morning and Evening Prayer most days and encourage you to read the Daily Office on your own.

Throughout Christian history, isolated verses of scripture have been used to do terrible things—like defend slavery, perpetuate misogyny, dehumanize the poor, demonize individuals because of their sexuality, excuse abusive behavior, and justify genocide. But the whole canon of scripture tells a very different story—one of God’s persistent love for the world, preference for the poor, vindication of the oppressed, and redemption of the lost. We are a part of that story, and, if we want to tell that story that is good news for the world, we must take the Bible seriously—seriously enough to read the whole thing and to read it every day until it takes hold of our hearts and minds and shapes our lives into lives filled with hope. 

Enough Room, Even For Us

 

October 30, 2022 – The 21st Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 26C

Isaiah 1:10-18; 2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12; Luke 19:1-10

© 2022 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video of the service can be seen here with the sermon beginning around 18:00.

Zacchaeus might have been short, but I think it was his shortcomings that sent him climbing up that sycamore tree. Luke tells us that “he was trying to see who Jesus was, but, on account of the crowd, he could not, because he was short in stature.” It was the crowd that stood between him and Jesus. If he had been taller, he could have seen over them, but no one was willing to let him stand up front. Think about the last time you were at a parade. Doesn’t the crowd usually make space up front for children or other people who either need to sit down just can’t see from the back? Don’t we know intuitively how to line up with the taller people in back and the shorter people up front so that everyone can get a peek?

No one was willing to make room for Zacchaeus, and he knew better than to ask. Zacchaeus was a chief tax collector—a title Luke may have made up to convey either that he was some sort of district leader among revenue officers or simply that he was exceptional at his job—particularly skilled at squeezing money out of his fellow Jews in order to fill the coffers of the Roman Empire. Regardless, Zacchaeus’s job had made him filthy rich, and that was a problem—a problem for Zacchaeus but also an interpretive problem for us as well. 

Think about it. What sort of people did Jesus like to spend time with? And who were the ones Jesus was always after to change their ways in order to find their place in the kingdom of God? We know that Jesus loved surrounding himself with tax collectors and other notorious sinners—those people whom polite society refused to welcome—but he didn’t seem to care for rich people whose wealth created a chasm between themselves and the poor. So what was Zacchaeus supposed to do? He was a complicated example of someone whom society had rejected but whose wealth had made him powerful. Would he be welcomed by Jesus or brushed aside? 

Zacchaeus had heard about Jesus, and he wanted to see who he was, but he couldn’t get too close, or else he might be further humiliated. He had heard that this rabbi believed that even tax collectors could be accepted at God’s table, but he was no ordinary tax collector, and he wasn’t sure whether that radical welcome would include the likes of him. So he climbed up into the boughs of a sycamore tree and hid among the leaves, hoping to see Jesus but also hoping to escape notice.

But Jesus noticed him. “Zacchaeus,” Jesus said to the little man hiding up in the tree. Does it surprise us that Jesus knew the man’s name? How shocking that must have been to everyone who heard it! “Hurry and come down,” Jesus continued, “for I must stay at your house today.” Notice the imperative behind Jesus’ words. “I must stay at your house today.” I must. Something compels me to be your guest today. The presence of God’s kingdom and the perfection of God’s promises require that Jesus come and lodge with Zacchaeus, the chief tax collector. His riches and way of life should have represented an obstacle to God’s reign becoming manifest in his life, yet this was the man whom Jesus sought out.

No sooner had Zacchaeus scrambled out of the tree to take Jesus into his home than the entire crowd began to grumble that Jesus had gone to be the guest of a sinner like that. Usually, when Jesus dined with tax collectors and sinners, it was the religious authorities who grumbled—the goodie-goodies who didn’t understand why a religious leader like Jesus would spend time with the riff-raff of their day. But this time, Luke tells us that “all who saw it”—all who beheld this radical gesture of reverse hospitality—began to complain about what it represented. None of them was comfortable with the thought of a faithful rabbi—even one known for keeping company with societal outcasts—entering the home of a traitor as notorious as this chief tax collector. This was a step too far, even for Jesus. Even the reign of God, which Jesus had come to make manifest among the lost sheep of Israel, had its limits.

But then something remarkable took place. We don’t know whether Zacchaeus heard the grumbling, though surely he knew what the crowd thought. Standing there, he said to Jesus, “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.” That represented a remarkable transformation—that the man whose work and whose wealth had cut him off from God’s people was now offering to give back so much of what he had—but the text leaves some important ambiguity about whose transformation we’re witnessing in this instant. 

Although many English translations, like the one we use in church, render Zacchaeus’ words in the future tense—“I will give” and “I will pay back”—the biblical text actually uses verbs in the present tense—“Half of my possessions, Lord, I give to the poor; and, if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I pay back four times as much.” It could be that Zacchaeus was using the present tense to convey a future resolve, which would imply that this encounter with Jesus had changed his life so radically that from now on he would give all that money away. But it could just as easily be that Zacchaeus was describing the way he already lived, revealing a quiet generosity that no one in the crowd had ever known. That ambiguity has fueled debates among scholars and preachers for generations, but I don’t think it really matters because I don’t think Zacchaeus is the one whose conversion is the focus of this story.

“Today, salvation has come to this house,” Jesus declared, “because he, too, is a child of Abraham.” Could it be that those words become true not because Zacchaeus has undergone a moment of transformation but because all of us who look on now see this child of God in the light of God’s grace? Can it be that Jesus’ insistence that he dine in the home of the chief tax collector changes our understanding of who belongs in God’s reign? Maybe we are the ones whose conversion this story is about. Maybe we’re the ones who are supposed to be changed by this encounter.

We believe in a God whose love for the world is bigger than anything we can imagine. We believe that God’s grace is big enough for tax collectors and sinners. We believe that God’s welcome includes the poor, the widow, and the orphan. But do we believe that God’s love is big enough for us as well? Very few of us fit neatly into one of the biblical categories of people to whom God reaches out in love. Is there room for complicated sinners like us in the kingdom of God? Can we believe that God’s love is meant for us as well? Or are we so worried that we won’t be accepted that we scamper up into the branches of a sycamore tree in the hopes that we might get a look at Jesus from a safe-enough distance that he won’t bother to tell us what we are afraid he might otherwise say—that we don’t belong?

Zacchaeus went looking for Jesus, but Jesus went looking for Zacchaeus as well. “I must stay at your house today,” Jesus said, showing us that God’s kingdom cannot be complete until even the least likely among us finds their place at God’s table. None of us belongs at that table because we are good enough, holy enough, or generous enough. We belong because God’s goodness towards us is always enough. There can be no limit to God’s welcome because there can be no limit to God’s love. May we hear in Jesus’ words to Zacchaeus the same words that God speaks to each one of us—I must stay at your house today. May we see that God’s reign cannot be complete until all of us are there.

Faith Is Persistence of the Powerless

 

October 16, 2022 – The 19th Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 24C

Genesis 32:22-31; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5; Luke 18:1-8

© 2022 Evan D. Garner

Just outside of the metropolis of Lineville, Alabama, halfway between Ashland and Wedowee and just north of Ofelia, is an institute for reverse missionary work known as SIFAT—Servants in Faith and Technology. Instead of sending people overseas to help those in need, SIFAT hosts community leaders from around the world—leaders who bring their particular problems all the way to Lineville, where, with the help of scientists, engineers, teachers, and agronomists, they explore what it will take to improve the lives of their own people back home.

Because SIFAT hosts so many people from around the world, they also serve as a place where independent missionaries and mission teams from nearby churches and organizations can come and experience a little taste of what life might be like in another culture. And I can tell you firsthand how jarring and bitter that taste can be.

A few years after I was ordained, I helped chaperone a group of youth at SIFAT for a spring break retreat. We weren’t going on a mission trip, but we wanted to broaden our understanding of what missionary work could be. One afternoon we were led to the Global Village—a tiny, makeshift hamlet in the middle of the woods, complete with a dirt road, tin-roofed lean-tos, a tiny market, several villagers, and a rather cantankerous policeman. We were split up into teams and told that our dinner that night would consist only of whatever our team could acquire from the actors in the village.

At first, this seemed like a fun game—a test that would challenge our ingenuity, pride, and persistence. Quickly, though, things became far more difficult than I anticipated. At one point, while our team was offering to do some manual labor in exchange for a few tortillas, some of the staff, who were posing as residents, stole our sleeping bags, leaving us without protection through the March night. When I complained to the policeman, he locked me up in jail for questioning his authority. 

When he wasn’t looking, I snuck out of jail, but I was dismayed to find that our youth, who hadn’t been given the tortillas they were promised, were now pretending to sell drugs to scrounge together enough food for the night. Then, one of them stole the backpack of a staff member, who thought she had tucked it away in a safe place, but, when the youth tried to trade the bag for food, we were told that the staff bags were off limits. I complained that our sleeping bags should have been off limits, too, but I must have raised my voice in an inappropriately confrontational way because I was then rearrested and given a stern warning by the policeman, who I honestly couldn’t tell whether he was speaking to me as a character from the village or a staff member at SIFAT who was worried I might take matters into my own hands.

The whole episode was designed to teach the youth that, in other parts of the world, people don’t get justice the way we do—that sometimes good, hard-working, honest people don’t get what they deserve—but the rage I felt meant that I was the person who needed to learn that lesson most. I understood how the game was supposed to work, but, when it was the youth on my team, whose welfare I was responsible for, who weren’t going to get anything to eat or any sleeping bag to sleep in that night, I lost it. There was nothing I could do to get what was right for my team—to get what should have belonged to us—and I snapped. It was truly a first-world, privileged response, and all it got me was thrown in jail.  

You don’t have to go overseas or even to Lineville, Alabama, to find people whose cries for justice fall upon deaf ears. They are all around us. They are our neighbors. They work hard and follow the rules and do their best, and, still, they don’t get what they deserve. They’ve asked for help. They’ve filed complaints. They’ve done everything they’ve been asked to do. And nothing. They have no earthly reason to believe that anything will ever change, but they keep trying. And their experience and identity help us understand this parable of Jesus.

Despite Luke’s editorial introduction, the story of the widow and the unjust judge has less to do with always praying and more to do with not losing heart. To Jesus’ hearers, this parable would have been laughably cartoonish. “In a certain city, there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people.” You couldn’t make it any more ridiculous than that—to describe a judge, the arbiter of justice, as one who had no concern for human laws or divine statutes. 

And in his court is a widow who just doesn’t know how to quit. She’s a widow, which means that she is completely powerless—totally dependent upon others for her survival. Her late husband’s property would not have passed to her but, if she were lucky enough to have a son, she might be cared for in that son’s household. And, if she didn’t have a generous and compassionate son, she might return to her father’s family but only if her late husband’s relatives were willing to return her dowry to provide for her care. Otherwise, she would subsist only on the charity of those who might throw the beggar-woman a coin or two out of pity. And the fact that the widow was standing before the unjust judge lets us know that she has no other options.

“Grant me justice against my opponent!” the widow said to the unjust judge over and over and over again. He was her only hope, and yet hope was something he would not give. There was no one to plead her case—no one to stand up for her. Only a faithful judge—one who cared about what God would want or what the community would recognize as just—would have granted her request, but Jesus’ exaggerated representation of callousness had no intention of giving into the widow’s demands.

As the story stands, there is no reason to expect anything to change. The widow has no power, and the judge has no pity. There is nothing anyone can do to make a difference. But then Jesus surprises his listeners with an even more absurd twist. Just when the audience knows that the story cannot have a happy ending, Jesus gives the helpless woman the strange power of annoyance. And the judge, using a word that literally means “strike me under the eye,” says something like, “I will give her justice or else she might annoy me to death.” And, in that powerless widow, we suddenly discover a new sort of subversive power that depends not on her physical strength or influence but on her refusal to give up.

“Hear what the unjust judge says,” Jesus tells us. Even when no one could see it coming—even when everyone was sure that the judge would never give into the widow’s request—her persistence—her refusal to give up—worked. How much more, therefore, should we expect our gracious God, who is just and who does hear the cries of God’s people who lift their voices to God day and night, to save those in distress? Our God is nothing like the unjust judge, yet how quickly do we lose hope when the justice we seek is delayed?

Jesus asks us to remember what those around us cannot afford to forget. Even when it feels like nothing will ever change, we have a reason to hope because we belong to God. The persistence of the powerless shows us what it means to have faith—not in the institutions of this world but in the God whose justice and righteousness will triumph over those institutions. Their unbroken and unbreakable witness teaches us not to lose heart.

Do we believe in the one who brought God’s people out of slavery in Egypt? Do we believe in the one who raised Jesus Christ from the dead? If that is our God, we cannot lose hope. If that is our God, we know what the future will hold. And, if that is our God, we must press on for the sake of those who are denied justice in this world—not because we have the power to pull down the mighty from their thrones all on our own but because we belong to the one who does. 

What Sort Of Faith?

 

October 2, 2022 – The 17th Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 22C

Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4; 2 Timothy 1:1-14; Luke 17:5-10

© 2022 Evan D. Garner

Video of this service can be seen here with the sermon beginning around 23:30. 

Lord, increase our faith! We could all use a little bit more. Just a tiny bit more faith and then we wouldn’t worry so much. If we had more faith, we wouldn’t worry about the economy and the stock market and whether we will have enough in retirement. We wouldn’t worry about politics or elections or Supreme Court rulings. We wouldn’t worry about our spouse or our children or our neighbors or our pets. 

If Jesus gave us more faith, we wouldn’t have such a hard time making our lives look the way God wants them to look. With more faith, we wouldn’t struggle to find the time and energy and money we wish we had to give freely to God’s work in the world. We wouldn’t find ourselves wanting the world to be a better place but not quite caring enough to do something about it. We wouldn’t feel pulled so sharply between the demands of this world and the demands of God’s vision for it. 

Lord, increase our faith! With a little bit more faith, temptation wouldn’t be so hard. Sin wouldn’t be so stubbornly difficult. And, when we fell, we wouldn’t fall so far, and we’d always have the confidence to get up and repent and return to the Lord. If only we had a little bit more faith. If only Jesus would give it to us.

For several weeks now, Jesus has been on a tear about what it means to belong to God and God’s reign. He’s told us that, if we want to follow him, we will have to hate our families and carry our cross. He’s made it clear that we will have to give up our claim on earthly wealth in order to partake in heavenly treasure. He’s reminded religious folks like us that our traditions and status don’t count for much and that it’s those who suffer the most who understand what it means to belong to God. No wonder the disciples are asking for more faith! If our entrance into the kingdom of God is as narrow and difficult as Jesus has made it out to be, we had better find some more faith, or else this isn’t going to go well for any of us.

But, as Jesus says, if we had faith the size of a mustard seed, we could say to one of those giant sycamores outside the church, “Be uprooted and planted in Lake Fayetteville,” and it would obey us. We don’t need more faith, Jesus tells us; we need true faith, deep faith, real faith. If we had even the tiniest speck of that sort of faith, it would be enough for God to work through us in mighty ways. Like a pinhole opening or the smallest crack under a door, faith like that—no matter how small it is—gives God an opening through which God can show up in powerful ways. If we want to belong to God and God’s reign—if we want our lives to be an image of what God is doing in the world—we should stop wishing for more faith and start looking for the kind of faith that transforms us.

And the best way to find that faith is to take a good, hard look at our spiritual posture. How are we approaching God? Are we looking for ways to make God’s kingdom come, or are we looking for ways to belong to the kingdom that God has already brought to the world in Jesus Christ? Do we seek a life that manifests our faith in God, or do we dream of inheriting whatever life God is calling us to? On the surface, the differences between those two kinds of faithful lives aren’t that significant. They sound a little like distinctions in faithfulness by degree. But, if we are to have the sort of faith that Jesus envisions for his followers—the kind of faith that moves mountains—we need to find that narrowest of sweet spots of believing in God in a way that lets God take over our lives and use us in ways more powerful that we could imagine all on our own.

I think that’s why Jesus responded to the disciples’ request for more faith with the provocative and problematic image of a slave coming in from the field. We can’t encounter this analogy without remembering the horrors of human bondage and acknowledging its legacies, which are still a reality today. We cannot hear Jesus hold up the identity of a slave as one we are supposed to pursue without also admitting that there is nothing good or right or holy about one human being owning another as property. 

Many English translations choose the word “servant” instead of “slave,” perhaps rightly implying that that role in ancient Palestine was more like that of an indentured servant than the chattel slave more familiar in the American context, but the human being in Jesus’ analogy clearly didn’t have the freedom to decide how to spend his evening, nor was he likely to receive any gratitude for the work he did. Part of me wishes that we could translate Jesus’ mini-parable into our contemporary context by making it a story about parent and a child or an officer and a soldier, but I don’t think that would convey the real point Jesus is making.

The issue isn’t being treated poorly or doing thankless work. That isn’t what it means to have the right kind of faith. In order to get across what it means to believe in God wholeheartedly and belong to God’s reign fully, Jesus must push the boundaries of what it means to belong to God’s kingdom out beyond where we are comfortable because there is nothing comfortable about belonging to God. No matter how hard we try, no matter how lofty our ambitions, we cannot belong to God on our own terms. We must give ourselves completely and unreservedly over to the vision God has for lives. And thanks be to God that, when we stop trying to fit God’s kingdom into our own understandings and allow God’s reign to remake our expectations completely, real faith takes control of our lives, and good things start to happen. That’s the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

This whole, long series of challenging teachings about what it means to be a disciple and what it looks like to belong to God’s reign has been Jesus’ attempt to get us to forget our place in this world in order to find our place in God. When Jesus tells us that we must forsake our families and that we cannot serve God and wealth, he is not saying that only orphans and poor people get into heaven. He’s showing us that our attachments to this world must dissolve completely if we are to develop a new way of being united with God. 

To answer that call, we don’t need more faith; we need the right kind of faith. And even the tiniest amount is enough. We need to find ways to believe that God’s will for our lives and for the world is the only thing that matters, and that’s not easy. No one said it would be easy, least of all Jesus. But, once even the tiniest seed of that faith begins to sprout in our lives and we catch a glimpse of the power of God manifest through us, that crack begins to widen, and that pinhole starts to open up. Pretty soon, God is using us to move mountains, and the things that once felt like they were standing in the way of God’s vision for our lives crumble away. That’s what happens when faith takes over. That’s what it means to belong to God.

Faith like that takes over when we let go. That sort of faith moves in when we get out of the way. When we stop telling God what we think God is supposed to be doing in the world, God will start showing us how God’s transformation is already taking hold. When we stop looking for the kind of faith that enables us to do what we think is best and start asking God to give us the sort of faith that trusts in God with our whole being, we will see just how powerfully God is at work in our lives and all around us. We don’t need any more faith than we already have. In Jesus Christ, God has already given us more than enough. We just need God to help us see it.

How To Make Friends In Heaven

September 18, 2022 – The 15th Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 20C

Amos 8:4-7; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13

© 2022 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video of the entire service can be seen here with the sermon beginning around 22:25.

Are you a Christian or an Arkansan? An Episcopalian or an American? Do you pledge allegiance to the flag or to God? I hope the answer can be both. Usually, we are able to hold onto both parts of our identity as citizens of this country and children of God’s kingdom without experiencing much conflict between them. One aspect informs the other. We can be both. Just as I am a priest and a husband, a father and a son, an uncle and a sibling, we all experience dual identities that we hold together without even thinking about it—until we have to. Do I cheer for Arkansas or Alabama? Usually, it’s both, but, once a year, I have to choose. Once a year, I must decide where my true allegiance lies.

Today’s gospel lesson is hard to hear in any age, but I think that understanding and applying the parable of the dishonest manager to life in the twenty-first century is even harder than it was back when Jesus first said these words. “There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property.” In the strange story that follows, Jesus describes a manager who cuts backroom deals with his master’s debtors in order to curry favor with them so that they will take care of him after he is fired. In the end, the owner actually praises the dishonest employee for his shrewdness, and then Jesus offers an even more astounding summary by encouraging his followers to “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that, when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.” What does any of that mean?

Before I try to pull apart the parable and make sense of it, let me remind you that this passage comes right on the heels of three other parables—those of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the two lost sons, also known as the parable of the prodigal son. If you can’t remember the details of those parables, don’t worry. Suffice it to say that Jesus wanted his audience of religious leaders to understand why he always ate with tax collectors and sinners, so he told them three parables of lostness. God is the one who seeks after and finds those who have gone astray. God is the one who always welcomes the lost back into the fold. But, at the beginning of this parable, the audience changes. Instead of speaking to the scribes and the Pharisees, who didn’t like the fact that Jesus’ ministry was a model of this seeking out the lost, Jesus tells this story to his disciples—his followers—as if to remind us what it means to belong to the one who has come and found us.

So what is life as one of Jesus’ disciples supposed to look like—like a dishonest manager, quickly and quietly telling his master’s debtors to cancel large portions of what they owe in order to benefit from that malfeasance down the road? Well, sort of. This isn’t a parable that is supposed to teach us how to run a business or how to cheat and get ahead. But it is supposed to teach us that we should approach our place in God’s kingdom with the same focus, intensity, and urgency that someone who belongs fully to the ways of the world would approach the news that they were about to lose their job. But making sense of this parable requires us to separate the dishonest wealth, which is the currency of this world, from the shrewdness of the manager, which has a place both in this world and in the kingdom to which we belong.

Let’s look more closely at the story Jesus tells. The owner of a large agricultural business has heard that his chief manager is squandering his property. As soon as the manager learns that he must turn in his books and that he will lose his job, he hatches a plan. He tells one of his master’s debtors to change his bill from 100 baths of oil to 50 and another to change what he owes from 100 kors of wheat and make it 80. Those weren’t small amounts but hundreds of gallons and hundreds of bushels, worth tens of thousands of dollars in today’s money. And, because he was his master’s legal agent, those decisions were final. The manager’s dishonesty would surely be discovered, but there was no way for the owner to get his money back.

Part of what makes this parable so hard to understand is how Jesus seems to celebrate that deception. Plenty of scholars have tried to relieve that awkwardness by suggesting that the manager was simply foregoing his commission or eliminating the interest and, thus, making his master look better, but the debts that were cancelled were too large to be an interest charge or a commission. But, if we look carefully at the text, we see that Jesus isn’t actually praising the man’s dishonesty. The owner in the parable commends his manager’s shrewdness, and Jesus likewise encourages his followers to be shrewd as they deal with the dishonest wealth of this world, but the deception isn’t what’s celebrated here. The thing that is being held up for us to emulate is shrewdness—the ability to use the resources at hand to accomplish our goals. The question for us is whose goals are we trying to accomplish with the resources we have been given.

The children of this age, Jesus explains, know exactly how to get what they want with what they have. They know how to use money to manipulate a situation. They know how to make sure that, when the bill comes due, they aren’t standing there emptyhanded. And the tax collectors and sinners who were Jesus’ disciples would have been very familiar with that way of life. They all knew what it meant to belong to this world and to be good at it. It came naturally.

But the children of light—the ones who belong not to this age but to the kingdom of God—aren’t very good at using what resources they have to attain what God envisions for the world. And we aren’t good at it because using the currency of dishonest wealth to achieve godly results doesn’t come naturally at all. Shrewdness and sainthood don’t usually go together, but Jesus wants us to realize that, in fact, they do. For those of us who belong to God and God’s reign, we must—like the manager—use anything and everything at our disposal to accomplish our true purpose, and, because our true home is not in this world but in the world to come, our true purpose can only be to serve God.

We cannot serve God and wealth. We have to choose. Will we try to make enough room for God amidst our financial priorities, or will we trust that there is enough room for us and our flourishing in the kingdom of God to which we must devote all our wealth? If we belong to God—to the one who seeks us out and finds us—all our riches, our relationships, our positions, our power—everything we have in this life must be devoted to God as clearly and cleverly as the manager, who used his position to secure a comfortable place for himself when he was dismissed from his management. 

Because we belong to God, we are not waiting for someone to welcome us into an earthly home. We wait for God to welcome us into the eternal habitations. In this life, our wealth—the inherently dishonest currency of this world—is an opportunity to make friends for ourselves among those whom we know to be seated at God’s table—the poor, the outcast, and the disenfranchised. They are the ones who can welcome us into the eternal homes. So, when you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends, your relatives, or your rich neighbors in case they may invite you in return, and then you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid [when they welcome you] at the resurrection of the righteous.

The Strange Love of the Cross

 

September 14, 2022 - Holy Cross Day
Isaiah 45:21-25; Galatians 6:14-18; John 12:31-36a

You know those moments from your past that fill you with embarrassment and shame? Things you said or did that you now look back on and wish you could go back and undo them? I don't dwell on any of them very often, but, every once in a while, when I'm in a particular setting or my mind wanders back through the past until it lands in an uncomfortable spot, I am overwhelmed by that sense of regret. Where do those memories live when they aren't at the front of our mind? What sort of baggage are we carrying around? Why do we keep reburying those things when they pop back up? In the end, when this life is over and we set our burdens down, what do we think happens to them?

Today we celebrate the feast of the Holy Cross. One legend has it that the original cross, the True Cross, on which Jesus was crucified, was discovered by Helena, the mother of Constantine during a missionary journey to found churches and relief agencies in fourth-century Palestine. When taken to the spot on which Jesus was said to have suffered, died, and been buried, Helena saw that a pagan temple stood in on the site. She ordered it to be destroyed and the earth under it to be dug out and carted away. As they dug away the dirt, they discovered three buried crosses, one of which must have belonged to Jesus and the other two to the thieves who hung on either side of him. To determine which once was the True Cross, they brought out a noble woman of the city who had suffered from an illness for many years and caused her to touch each cross. Finally, when she touched the True Cross, her illness was miraculously healed. Helena and her associates established that cross as an object of devotion in what would be come the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, but she took with her the Holy Nails and a few fragments of wood back to Constantinople, where this devoted mother ordered that some of nails be melted down and incorporated into the emperor's helmet and the bridle of his horse for added protection.

I'm not sure that I believe any of that legend, but I am sure that the legend points us to a remarkable and, perhaps, even more important discovery--the transformation of the cross from something we would bury in the ground as a reminder of a shameful death into to something we would venerate as a symbol of our new and everlasting life. We may take it for granted, but that discovery took a little time.

In the first century, the Apostle Paul wrote boldly of the cross of Christ as something in which he boasted--the source of his own transformation--but that wasn't something his readers would have taken for granted. First-century Christians largely did not know what to do with the cross. The earliest iconography and symbology that Christians used omitted the reminder of Jesus' execution. Paul instinctively used the shame of the cross to highlight the glory of God, but a fuller appreciation for how the instrument of shame and death could become a sign of life and hope took a hundred years or so to develop. By the end of the second century, mosaics begin to depict the cross as a reality to celebrate, but the first disciples of Jesus and the generation or two that followed them were so traumatized by the execution of Jesus that they preferred to bury that memory and all signs of it literally in the ground.

To me, that sounds familiar. My instinct is to hide away the reminders of my shame because, on the surface, they represent for me my greatest failures. Those are moments from my past that I would just assume leave behind. And yet a part of me knows that they have to come out--out of the dark, out of the ground, of out me--in order that I might be healed. And the cross of Christ is how they come out without the sting of shame and death.

"When I am lifted up from the earth," Jesus proclaimed, "I will draw all people to myself." This, John tells us, was to indicate the kind of death that we was to die. The confusing, strange, beautiful, counter-intuitive truth of the cross is that, by dying for us, Jesus lifts from us the shame of our own little, painful deaths. If the cross of Christ is the consequence of humanity's brokenness, then the empty tomb shows us that the death of Jesus is also the death of our own death--our own brokenness, our sin. We find salvation, therefore, not in running away from the cross or our own shame that belongs there but by turning toward it, uncovering it, looking at it, and giving it over to the saving power of God.

Because of Jesus, we believe that even our very worst has no power to defeat God and God's forgiving love. Because of Jesus, we believe that the things we most want to hide have already been confronted and defeated by God. We celebrate the cross not because it is an instrument of shame and death but because, though such an instrument, God has redeemed us and healed us and made us whole. Jesus Christ stretched out his arms upon the hard wood of the cross so that all people might come within his saving embrace. 

Which One Of You?

 

September 11, 2022 – The 14th Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 19C

Exodus 32:7-14; 1 Timothy 1:12-17; Luke 15:1-10

© 2022 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video of the entire service can be seen here with the sermon beginning around 22:00.

Jesus sure did spend a lot of time with sinners. Of all the details in the gospel accounts, Jesus’ preference for spending time with social outcasts and notorious ne’er-do-wells is among the most well-known and reliable. Jesus loved hanging out with troublemakers, and all four gospel writers make a big deal about it. I wonder why Jesus liked spending time with sinners so much. Maybe it’s because they were more fun to be with than the religious leaders of his day. (I can believe that.) Or maybe it’s because Jesus knew that they were the ones who needed saving the most. (I don’t believe that.) Or maybe it’s because Jesus wanted to teach religious folks like you and me something about who God is and how God saves us.

If you think about it, Jesus’s decision to spend all that time with tax collectors and sinners doesn’t make a lot of sense. God is holy. God is faithful. God is righteous. The people at Jesus’ table were the exact opposite of that. Why would the Son of God, the Incarnate Word, the Holy One choose to hang out with people whose lives made it harder for God’s people to recognize God in their midst? God is always for God’s people, but these tax collectors worked for the enemy of God, the Roman Empire. By collecting taxes on behalf of the empire, they helped keep God’s people in its imperial shackles. We tend to dismiss the Pharisees and scribes because we know that members of their religious group were opposed Jesus, but it’s hard to fault them for grumbling about the company Jesus kept. 

If you were trying to build a following of people whom God could use to manifest God’s triumphant power in the world, why would you surround yourself with imperial sympathizers and faithless degenerates? Why? Because those notorious sinners are exactly the ones through whom God’s reign becomes manifest on the earth. Jesus wasn’t eating night after night with people whom polite society had rejected simply because he had sympathy on them. He surrounded himself with outcasts because God’s power comes into this world when those who are lost are found and recovered. And Jesus told some parables about that to make his point. 

“Which one of you,” Jesus began, “having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?” There is some debate over whether Jesus’ depiction of the shepherd’s willingness to leave behind the ninety-nine is realistic. We even discussed it in staff meeting this week. Would Jesus’ audience have been surprised to hear that a shepherd would risk losing some or all of the ninety-nine just to search for the one that was lost? By presenting an unrealistic shepherd, is Jesus trying to tell us something shocking about the radical compassion of God? Surely he is, but I’m not convinced that’s the way he wanted to make his point. 

Historians have found secondary sources that describe under what conditions a shepherd would be justified—and thus be held blameless—for leaving an entire flock behind to search for a single lost sheep. As long as the temporary caretaker wasn’t blind or drunk or foolish, the action Jesus describes was considered reasonable and justified. Luke, however, doesn’t elaborate on the circumstances surrounding the shepherd’s decision to leave them behind except to say that he left them in the wilderness. That’s a less-than-comforting description, which may indicate a truly reckless act, but the fact that there were established rules for leaving the sheep behind makes me think that the point of this parable is more nuanced than that and that Luke decided to skip over those details because they weren’t as important.

I am more interested in the way that Jesus presents his parable—with a question that pulls his audience into the heart of his illustration. “Which one of you,” he asked, “having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?” Which one of you? Even though the way that Jesus posed his question assumes that anyone who heard it would answer in the affirmative, in this case, the short answer was none of them…because none of the religious leaders he was addressing would have ever imagined themselves as a shepherd.

Shepherds weren’t good people. They were smelly, shady, and poorly behaved. There’s a reason they worked out in the fields, away from everyone else. An ancient proverb says that all shepherds are thieves because they always let their sheep graze on grass that didn’t belong to them. We know that David, before he became Israel’s king, was a shepherd, and we know that the psalmist and some of the prophets dared to liken our God to a keeper of sheep, but those were exceptions that proved the rule. No Pharisee or scribe would have ever deigned to think of himself as a lowly shepherd, and for Jesus to suggest it was the shocking part. That’s the part of the story that no one saw coming—that these good, faithful, religious types would be forced to imagine themselves crawling up and down a hillside, calling out in a most undignified manner for a single lost sheep.

I dare say the same is true for us. I only know one or two parishioners who have any sheep to lose, but, in our case, I don’t think this parable is about sheep. How many of us, having a hundred children in the Head Start program and having one fall behind, would not leave the ninety-nine to learn by themselves in order to get the one that was lost back on track? How many of us, supervising a hundred people on probation and losing one of them, would not stop calling to check on the ninety-nine and go after the one that was lost until we found them? How many of us, having a hundred children in foster care and losing contact with one of them, would not ignore the ninety-nine until we found the one that was lost? 

We belong to a God who searches diligently for each one of us and who rejoices when we have been found, but, even more amazing than that, we belong to a God whose salvation is manifest in this world only when the entire hundred are back together again. This parable isn’t about God seeking out and welcoming a stranger who didn’t belong among the other ninety-nine in the first place. This is about God showing the ninety-nine that they cannot be complete until the one who is missing—the one who has belonged in their midst the entire time but who has been lost to them—has been brought back into the fold. 

How often do we regularly and routinely identify our place in society as one that is linked inextricably to the welfare, inclusion, and prosperity of everyone else around us, especially those who live on the margins of life? How often do we think of God’s saving work not as something that elevates the individual out of whatever spiritual, economic, or physical crisis they endure but as something that brings the one who has been estranged by hardship back into a community that cares for them? If this sounds like a different way of imagining what Jesus’ death and resurrection accomplished, it is.

Jesus came among us and lived and died and was raised from the dead to set us free from the power of sin and death. The work of evil in this world is something that would try to convince us that the community of God’s children can be complete even while some of us are still missing. The isolating power of sin would hide from us the fact that all our lives are fully linked with one another and with God. But thanks be to God that Jesus has defeated those powers that would seek to pull us apart.

If you are here in this church or watching online but feel that you don’t really belong in this place among God’s people—if you feel like a lost sheep hiding in plain sight—then know that Jesus has come to seek you out and find you and bring you back home. And know that we cannot experience God’s saving love without you. And, if you’re here and already know that you belong in this place, then don’t forget that your place among God’s people cannot be complete until everyone is here beside us. Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until you find it? “Which one of you?” Jesus asks.