Wednesday, November 24, 2010
November 21, 2010 - Christ the King Sunday
So let's talk stewardship. Today is what we call “Commitment Sunday” after all. It's the day when we as a church ask our members to make a financial commitment, to write down and turn in a pledge card of what you'll give over the course of the coming year. It's something I hope you've thought about, talked to your significant others about, prayed with God about. It's an important decision – I often say that looking at what we do with “our” money is like taking our spiritual pulse. It's not the only vital sign, but it can often shed some light on where we are in our relationship with God. So we ask you to do this every year, not just for the money or so we'll have an idea how to budget, but as an opportunity to check in with God about where we are. Are we growing in trust? Are we holding something back? We should give our pledge for the year some serious thought, because it's more than just a number of a piece of paper.
Of course, stewardship isn't only about money. We'll talk about that some in this sermon, but money not the only thing God entrusts to our care. We see that in the second lesson we heard this morning. Paul's letter to the Colossian Christians contains this beautiful prayer and a poetic description of who Jesus Christ is: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for in him, all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers – all things have been created through him and for him.” Everything in all of creation is Christ's – created in him and through him and for him. Which means that it all belongs to him. Now at an abstract level, that idea doesn't bother us too much. In fact, it sounds pretty good – but it seems pretty far removed from us, to say that everything belongs to Jesus, that nothing we have belongs ultimately to us, that God has just given it to us to manage, to take care of – that's great as a general concept, but it's easy to act like it doesn't have much to do with our lives here and now. It's easy to pretend that it doesn't have anything to do with the particulars of our lives. But then we hear what Paul says a few verses later – that Christ is the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything.
First place in everything. That phrase really got me this week. It kept coming back to me. Christ is supposed to have first place in everything. And I wondered, what would that look like? What would it mean for Christ to have first place in everything? What would it mean for Christ to have first place in my life?
That question, for me, is at the heart of the whole idea of stewardship. It starts with recognizing that everything we have belongs to God, that nothing we have is really ours, but just entrusted to us by God. And being good stewards of all of God's gifts means using those things the way that God wants us to. And that means putting Jesus first. It means having Jesus at the center of our lives instead of hanging around the edges. It means making him our first priority. And honestly, if we did that, if Christ really did have first place in our lives, a lot of things would have to change.
Putting Christ first would show in our calendars – in the way that we spend our time. It might mean spending less time watching TV or messing around on Facebook and more time caring for and serving others. It could mean shifting our activities and events – skipping Sunday morning soccer practice or trips to the beach and coming to worship instead. Maybe it would mean rearranging our schedules so that we actually take the time to read the Bible and pray.
Putting Christ first would show in our relationships too. We would be slower to anger, quicker to listen, quicker to forgive. We'd carry around fewer grudges, less bitterness, less regret. We'd treat each other as the beloved children of God that we each are, extending kindness and compassion and mercy, mixing it with honesty and accountability, learning to speak the truth in love.
If Christ were first in our lives, it would show in our wallets and our bank statements. If Christ is first in our lives, it will change the way we spend our money. And I'm not just talking about how much you give away to the church or to other charities. The biblical model for financial stewardship is a tithe – giving 10% of your income to God's work in the world – and I hope that you'll grow toward that – it can open up new ways of trusting God to provide. Giving an offering can be an easy first step – giving an offering to the church is a fairly straightforward transaction; we can measure it. But God still cares what we do with that other 90%, so being good stewards of our finances means thinking about where we spend that money and what we spend it on. We could give 10 or 15 or 20 percent of our income to the church, but if we're spending the rest in ways that harm people or the planet, if we're engaged in mindless consumerism we're not being faithful stewards. Black Friday's this week, the Christmas spending spree is upon us. Do the things we buy and where we buy them and how they're made and by whom help or hurt those involved in their production? Are we willing to sacrifice the well-being of our global neighbors in order to save a buck on our end? Or are we willing to make some sacrifices of our own – to live more simply so that others may simply live, as the bumper sticker puts it?
This whole “Jesus having first place in everything” gets to be pretty complicated when you start thinking about what that really means, how far-reaching “everything” is, how completely it will change us – if we'll let it. And let's face it, in most aspects of our lives, Jesus isn't even a distant second. He's blocked by our selfishness, our laziness, our inattention to his call.
But thanks be to God that Jesus doesn't wait for us to get our act together. Part of following Jesus means taking that leap of faith & making a commitment – not just with our finances, but with our whole lives, our whole heart & soul – to put Christ first in everything we say and think and do, even though we'll never be able to do it completely. But we try anyway, because the One who asks us for everything gives us everything in return, not just ourselves, our time, and our possessions – Jesus gives us himself, crucified on the cross and raised from the grave. Through him, God “has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son...” This King we serve redeems us, forgives us, reconciles us. He is worthy of the commitment he asks, today and everyday. May we make that commitment without reserve and give thanks joyfully – and may our lives that reflect that thanksgiving as we learn to put him first in everything.
Amen.
November 14, 2010 - Pentecost + 25
I'm going to play Captain Obvious this morning and say buildings are important to us. There's a practical reason for that of course – they protect us from the extremes of the weather, they give us a place to keep our stuff. But it's more than that, right? One building is not the same as the next. We get emotionally attached to certain buildings – to our homes or the homes of our families and friends, to our churches, sometimes even to where we work or where we go to school. Because buildings are so much more than just bricks or wood or stone. Important stuff happens in them. They hold our memories, and they are filled with our hopes for the future. They represent safety, security, stability.
The people with Jesus in the gospel today had a similar relationship with the temple. They point out its beauty and majesty as they walk through the temple with Jesus. And no wonder – it was built to impress, built to last. It was huge, built out of enormous stones cut precisely to fit perfectly on top of each other. The temple was massive, built on a deep foundation, and reaching up to the sky. It was solid. It felt permanent. But people weren't emotionally attached to the temple just because of its physical structure – it was because of all it represented. The memories and hopes and dreams of the people of Israel were housed there, yes, but even more than that, the temple was the place where God was. In all its glory, the temple was a symbol of God's protection, a sign of God's presence among them, a place that would always stand, because God was there.
So imagine how shocking it was to hear Jesus say that this same temple wouldn't last, that not one stone would be left upon another. If something as solid as the temple couldn't stand the test of time, what could? And Jesus goes on to list all of these other scary predictions: wars, natural disasters, deadly diseases; arrests and persecution and betrayal at the hands of your closest family and friends.
Bad enough to hear Jesus say that this is what was coming, but Luke's first readers, the people this gospel was originally written down for, they were living it out. Read Acts (which is like Luke, part 2, written by the same author), and you see all of these things coming to pass; and even the temple, that most permanent looking of buildings, it was destroyed by the Romans. Gone. And they were left with questions, filled with uncertainty. What do we do now, when all the things we thought would last, that we thought were secure, have crumbled around our feet?
We know that feeling. We have, all of us, put our trust in things that seemed solid, things that offer the promise of a bright, stable future. We build our lives around these things – marriages, friendships, careers, homes, retirement accounts, all the things that make for a good life. And when everything falls into place, when everything is going well, we see them as Jesus' listeners saw the temple: signs of God's blessings and love.
But what do we do when things start to fall apart, when the things we have placed our trust in are destroyed and crumbling around us and we stand in the wreckage? When a young wife and mother loses her husband unexpectedly to a heart attack? When a tragic, senseless accident changes everything in an instant? When the unemployment runs out or the stock market drops and takes your financial security with it? What do we do with the suffering caused by earthquakes or floods or deadly diseases? What do we do when our trust is shaken, when it seems like the world is about to come to an end?
Jesus says that these things will give us an opportunity to testify. And that doesn't seem so great; I think we'd rather skip those opportunities and have everything go along the way it was before. But it's not as though God causes hard times to come just to push us into giving a witness to our faith. And what Jesus is talking about isn't making up some silver lining, or making believe that everything is okay when it's not. Jesus never asks us to pretend things are okay when they're not. There is real pain in each of our lives. We face genuine disappointments and challenges and tragedies. And following Jesus doesn't mean that that's all gonna go away. It doesn't mean that we are going to be protected from difficulty. But when Jesus says that our hard times will give us a chance to testify, it's because there's something deeper going on, something stronger than our struggles.
It's what the disciples did testify to every chance they got – that despite our troubles, Jesus never leaves us. Jesus is always with us. It's a promise that's kind of hidden, kind of subtle in this reading – when Jesus says that he will give his people words & wisdom to speak – but if he's there to guide our words, it means he's there. He's present with us, in and through all of the hardships we face, no matter what they may be. He never leaves us to face our burdens alone.
That is what we are called to testify to – that even in our darkest times, Jesus is there. That was the steadfast witness the disciples gave: that Christ was always with them, that the love of God knows no end. In everything they did, they always pointed back to the God who was at work in the world, especially in those places where the need is the greatest, bringing healing where there is hurt, hope where there is despair, light where there is darkness.
It's not always easy to do. It can be a challenge to look at our situations and to see and feel God at work. But if we look, if we dare to seek Jesus, we are sure to find him, to feel him - through the support of our friends and family, through the strength that comes when we need it most, through the peace that passes understanding. It is a call to trust God's never-ending love for us, to believe that no matter what we are facing, we don't face it alone. And that is the only thing that enables us to endure. We can't do it on our own strength, but only when we lean on the one who holds us fast. When the whole world seems like it's crumbling look for Jesus, because he's there. All other things will fade away, but Jesus' love endures. That is the good news, so don't be shy. Talk about it. Testify! Someone else needs to hear it too.
Amen.
Maternity Leave
From September 26 - November 7, I was out on maternity leave - hence, no sermons here from that time.
September 19, 2010 - Pentecost + 17
“Once upon a time,” Jesus says, “there was a rich man. And it comes to his attention that his senior manager has not been doing such a good job – that he's been squandering the rich man's property. Well, understandably, this doesn't make the rich man happy, so he calls the manager into his office, and says, 'that's enough! You can't work for me anymore – go get the books together so I'm up to speed – and then it's out the door with you.”
Well, of course, the manager isn't quite prepared for that. In this economy, & what with being fired and all, he knows he's not likely to find another upper-level management job. He knows he's not cut out for a manual labor/blue-collar kind of job – and he is too proud to beg... In no time, he's gonna be out on the street with no way to make a decent living. So he comes up with a plan – he calls together the people who owe the CEO money – and he takes their debts and he cuts them down in size, hoping that when word gets out about what happened, they'll think kindly of him, that they'll remember that he did them a favor financially, and welcome him into their homes, give him a meal, maybe let him sleep on the couch for a little while til he can get back on his feet again...
And while his motives aren't pure, we can understand. We're with Jesus as he tells this story this far. So were his listeners, probably – the disciples who Luke tells us up front were there, but also the Pharisees, who he tells us a few verses after the reading ends were listening too.
But then Jesus goes on – and nothing happens like what we would expect... we, like the listeners of Jesus' day, expect that something dramatic will happen, that the rich man will blow his top, that he'll bring the law down on the manager for squandering even more of his $, for cooking the books. We expect the dishonest man to get called on the carpet & condemned for his dishonesty. But instead, the rich man commends the manager for his shrewdness; and Jesus seems to hold him up as an example to follow - “make friends for yourself by means of dishonest wealth, so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.”
And we all just kind of do a double-take at Jesus. Wha??? Did he just say what I thought he said? No, can't be... It goes against our sense of right and wrong, of fair & unfair, of what is ethical, of what doing the right thing is. We get offended by this story of someone getting ahead or at least protecting himself by less than above-board means. This parable doesn't make much sense to us, based on our understanding of who Jesus is and what he expects from us – and unfortunately, there's not a follow-up where Jesus pulls the disciples aside and tells them what it means, like there are with some parables. So we're left to wrestle and struggle with what's going on here, thoughts going in circles about how we might understand what Jesus was trying to say to us and his 1st century audience. And I have to tell you, none of the things I've come up with or read about seem to quite do it. There's no easy answer to what this gospel lesson means; it's not a black & white morality play.
But I was thinking that how we understand this story and what we think about the manager have a lot to do with perspective, a lot to do with who we identify with in what Jesus is telling us. Do we put ourselves in the place of the rich man who seemingly just got ripped off? Are we the dishonest manager? Or are we in the place of the debtors who just caught a big break? Is the rich man completely innocent himself? We'll think differently about the manager's actions depending on what we think about the rich man and his debtors.
I was thinking about how we could possibly ever root for the manager and what he does, and the story of Robin Hood came to mind. Whether you envision him as Kevin Costner in the movie from the 1990s or as a cartoon fox in the Disney version or have some other mental picture all together, clearly Robin Hood was someone who made friends by means of dishonest wealth. He took money that didn't belong to him and gave it away. That's not right or fair; it's not ethical from a pure perspective of right & wrong. But we cheer for him anyway – because Robin Hood steals from the rich to give to the poor. He undercuts an unfair, unjust oppressive system, and helps people who are really in need. And the common folk love him for it. Robin Hood isn't the bad guy, the rich guy is. Robin Hood's the hero! Unless you happen to be the rich person he's stealing from. That changes everything, doesn't it?
And that's where I come back into the gospel. Because how we understand this story depends on who we think we are in it, and who we think Jesus is too. We might want to think that Jesus is the rich man, commending us as managers to do some underhanded stuff, which leaves us where we started. But I think there's another way to look at it. Maybe in this story, Jesus is the manager. And that leaves us as either the rich man or the debtors... When we identify with the rich man, there's a piece of us that gets all up in arms that what the manager does isn't right or fair. It's not fair to take these debts and forgive huge portions of them. We want people to pay what they owe, and who is this manager to say they don't have to? But imagine yourself for a minute in the place of the debtors, who in that ancient world economy were probably more like the oppressed, disadvantaged poor of the Robin Hood story than we might realize, caught in a system that would never let them rise above where they were now, that would always hold them down, hold them captive to what they owed. And imagine your joy and relief, imagine the burden that would be lifted if you suddenly found that your debts were forgiven. Set free! Released, even though you didn't do anything to deserve it!
That's where I find myself in the story today. I know it doesn't fit exactly with the story Jesus told. The manager forgives their debts only in part, and then mainly for his own selfish needs and motivation. But he does it whether they deserve it or not.
And that's what Jesus does. Knowing how much we owe, how deep the debt of our sin is, Jesus calls us to him, and says, “You, what do you owe? Well, take your bill, sit down, and make it zero.” In one fell swoop, not out of selfishness, or corruption, or his own need, but out of pure love, Jesus zeroes our debt. He cancels our sin. It doesn't quite make sense, but that's what Jesus does. It's unexpected, it's undeserved, and it's a gift that's open to all! Thanks be to God!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)