That We Might Have Hope

“Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given 0us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.”

Do you recognize this collect? If we had been following the collects in the Book of Common Prayer, we would have heard it on the next to last Sunday of the Church year. Because we are experimenting with an extended Advent season, we heard a new collect written for the second Sunday of extended Advent. However, in the former Book of Common Prayer, the 1928 Prayer Book, this prayer was heard today, i.e., what would have been the second Sunday of Advent. As a prayer, it actually dates back to 1549 and our very first Book of Common Prayer. It reminds us that study of Scripture must be an integral and ongoing part of our lives, so that we may truly understand what God has done and continues to do for us.

It’s not surprising that the church heard this collect on the second Sunday of Advent. As a prayer, it reflects the first words of the portion of Paul’s letter to the Roman Christians that we just heard: “Whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.” The “scriptures,” that Paul mentions were the Hebrew Scriptures, since Paul’s letters antedate all the Gospels, and since the writings that we now call the New Testament were declared canonical, i.e., appropriate for followers of Jesus to hear and study, only in the fourth century. Here Paul is at the end of his letter. In his final exhortation to the Christians in Rome, Paul reminds them that, through Christ, the gentiles are now included in the covenants and promises that God made to Israel. More important, he tells them that diligent study of Scripture will enable them to maintain their hope of Christ’s coming, as they work out their differences and learn how to live in harmony with one another.

Paul challenges the Roman Christians to remember their scriptures by embedding references to those very scriptures in his exhortation. The “steadfastness” which he commends to them alludes to the endurance of Christ, especially his endurance of insults, shame, and death. In alluding to Christ’s endurance, Paul echoes Ps. 69:9, a verse that for Christians describes Jesus’ travail: “It is zeal for your house that has consumed me; the insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.” To emphasize God’s inclusion of the gentiles in God’s promises, Paul alludes to Psalm 18:50: “For this I will extol you, O Lord, among the nations, and sing praises to your name.” He also quotes Psalm 117:1 “Praise the Lord, all you nations! Extol him, all you peoples!” Finally, Paul quotes the end of the passage from Isaiah which we just heard: “On that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall inquire of him, and his dwelling shall be glorious.”

Paul’s insistence on the importance of the Hebrew Scriptures is echoed in the Gospel of Matthew. This Gospel was written after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD and was most likely composed for a community of Jewish Christians. So it highlights the Jewish origin and identity of Jesus and his earliest followers. For Matthew, Jesus is God’s anointed. He is a teacher as exalted and as authoritative as Moses, who was considered to be the author of the Hebrew Law.

What is more important, Matthew takes great pains to show that Jesus is the fulfillment of both the law and the prophets, and that in him all of God’s promises are fulfilled. To drive home his point, Matthew opens his account of Jesus’ life with a genealogy that firmly establishes Jesus as one of David’s descendants, i.e., from the “stump of Jesse,” i.e., David’s father. Thereafter, he either directly quotes from the Hebrew Scriptures or alludes to passages from Scripture. In the twelve verses we just heard, Matthew has embedded references to Abraham, and to the prophets Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Zechariah. Here are a few examples. He alludes to the prophet Isaiah to characterize John the Baptizer: “A voice cries out: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.’” With John’s ascetic lifestyle, wearing camel’s hair and eating honey, the evangelist alludes to Elijah’s way of life. His calling the Pharisees and Sadducees a “brood of vipers” is an indirect allusion to the passage from Isaiah we heard today, in which the asp and the adder were seen as former enemies of human beings. At the end of the passage, the “chaff,” an image for the destruction of the wicked in fire, is a recurring image in the Hebrew Scriptures.

Paul of Tarsus knew the Scriptures. The writer of the Gospel according to Matthew knew the Scriptures intimately. Do we? Do we have any sense of the historical contexts of our various books of Scripture? Have we encountered Jesus’ own understanding of his mission, as the Gospels characterize it? Do we know why the four Gospels are different? Do we know what the content of our hope as Christians really is? This Advent our Scripture readings have been suggesting what the reign of God might be like. Do we have any clearer picture of the “reign of God” or the “Kingdom of Heaven,” that has now come near us? Do we know what Scripture has to tell us about living together in harmony? Do we have any clues about the contents of the Scriptures of other faith communities besides our own?

Scott Gunn, the editor of Forward Day by Day, tells us that a “recent study revealed that Episcopalians are about the most spiritually content people around.” For Gunn, this is not good news. People who are spiritually healthy, he suggests, are not content with what they learned of God in confirmation class, especially when that event was decades ago. Rather, he tells us, “People who are spiritually healthy want to grow and learn, to always look for the next step in their journey.” That includes us. You say you’ve already read the Bible from cover to cover? You say you’ve been going to church as long as you can remember, and you’ve heard these passages from Scripture hundreds of times? Scott Gunn reminds us – and I would strongly second his observation – that “every time I study any passage in the scriptures, even one I’ve read dozens of times, I grow and learn.”

Advent – especially this extended Advent season -- is a time a think about the promises and prophecies that God has made to us and to all people, prophecies we hear first in the Hebrew Scriptures, prophecies that are restated in the Christian Scriptures, and prophecies that have parallels in the Scriptures of almost every other major faith tradition. Advent is a time to wonder whether and when the peaceable kingdom Isaiah describes will come to pass. Advent is a time to ask what the one more powerful than John the Baptizer will be like. Advent is a time to wonder how the Scriptures of other faith communities describe God’s promises about the future of history. Our understandings of Jesus, God, and the future of humanity should change and evolve as a result of our life experiences. Ideally, Advent is a time to take stock, and to see whether we are growing in an appreciation of God’s love and mercy, towards ourselves and towards all people. Advent is a time to make a fresh start and a new commitment, a commitment to renewing our cooperation with God and to hearing again what God is telling us through sacred texts.

So here’s my invitation to you: find a time and a way to grow in your understanding of Scripture. Can you find a regular time to read reflectively some part of the Bible – even a few verses at a time? Forward Day by Day is a good place to start – and it’s even available on line if you don’t take one of the paper copies we order for the parish. Or try reading a few verses contemplatively, then journaling about what they mean for your life. How about reviving the Wednesday evening Bible study that Deacon Carolyn was leading? If you would like a good commentary on the Bible, A.J. or I would be happy to suggest one. Are you interested in learning more about the parallels and differences between our faith and those of other faith communities? There are tons of good books on those subjects, as well as many different web sites.

Of course, studying Scripture is not an end in itself. We don’t get special treatment or brownie points from God because we can quote Scripture. The Sadducees could quote the Torah, and the Pharisees knew both the Torah and other writings. Even the devil could quote Scripture!

So here’s the good news. Our Scriptures are a gift from God! They were written, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, to reinforce our trust in God. They equip us to live holy lives and to share the good news with others. Most important, they enable us to give voice to the hopes we have for God’s future. May God enable us to “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” our scriptures, and may the Word that we hear become flesh in us.

Swords into Ploughshares

In the north garden of the United Nations building in New York City stands a huge bronze sculpture. The sculpture depicts a man with a hammer in one hand and a sword in the other. The man is beating on the sword, in order to convert the sword into the cutting edge of a plow. This arresting sculpture was created by the Ukrainian artist Evgeniy Victorovich Vuchetich. It was given to the UN by the then Soviet Union in December, 1959. Although at that time the United States and the Soviet Union were “enemies,” the statue is a powerful visual reminder of our human desire to end wars and to convert instruments of death into tools that bring forth life.

Vuchetich’s statue alludes to one of the most famous passages of Scripture, which we just heard: “… they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks….” This image comes from the beginning of the book of the prophet Isaiah. Really three books bound together, the first forty chapters of Isaiah were written in the 8th century BC, during a period of great political turmoil in Israel. The passage that we just heard presents a series of wonderful images that point us to God’s promises and God’s future, to what lies beyond our immediate earthly events.

Speaking through Isaiah, what does God promise us? We hear first of all that devotion to God will be what brings all people together. We hear that humanity – all humanity – will be happy to receive God’s direction and instruction. We hear that people will no longer be motivated by envy, greed, resentment, retribution, and fear. We hear that people will renounce war, and that they will turn their instruments of war into implements that enable them to nourish each other. And, lest we get too dreamy about all these promises, we hear a challenge from God: “O house of Jacob. Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!” Through Isaiah’s words, God invites us – not commands us, invites us – to share God’s vision and to orient ourselves towards God’s promises, just as we follow a beam of light.

What a vision! While much of the church has just begun Advent, we are in the fourth week of our extended Advent. During this season we are invited to continue sharing God’s vision of what will be. As Jesus’ followers we are confident that God’s reign has already begun. After all, Jesus began his ministry by calling out, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near.” As we wait in this mid-time for God’s reign to be fully realized, in this Advent season we continue to divine its shape. Two weeks ago, we heard that there are no scapegoats in God’s realm, no one who is “other.” In God’s realm all are included, a promise echoed in Isaiah’s prophecy in “all the nations” and “many peoples.” Last week we heard that, as people already living in God’s realm, we owe our highest allegiance not to any earthly authorities but to Christ himself. Today we are reminded that in God’s realm, there will be both diversity and unity: all the many nations and peoples of the earth will come together under God, and will live with each other in peace. As followers of Jesus, is God’s promise of peace so surprising? Didn’t Luke’s gospel depict angels announcing Jesus’ birth with the promise of “Peace to all men and women on earth who please him?” Didn’t Jesus himself promise, in the gospel of John, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you?”

So do we see any of Isaiah’s vision of peace and unity realized in our own world? I was born in 1943. I was too young to experience World War II. But I do remember the cold war and the threat of nuclear disaster: “duck and cover” under my school desk, bomb shelters, and Nevil Shute’s On the Beach. I remember Korea, Viet Nam, India and Pakistan, Bosnia, and Iraq. Now Syria is in ruins. Forty years after the 1967 war, Israelis and Palestinians are still not at peace.

And in our country? We have just come through a divisive election, in which both sides vilified each other. We heard that some groups among us are dangerous and unwanted. Even local elections proved divisive, causing conflict in families, among friends, even in parishes. Many people fear for the future of our nation, state, and community. Will we ever get closer to Isaiah’s vision of unity and peace?

What about in our own lives? Are we at peace within our families, with our friends, within this parish? Or are we estranged from someone? Is there someone with whom we need to reconcile? Are we are peace within our own hearts? Or are we fearful, worried, angry, feeling unloved, or even unworthy of love?

If we want to catch glimpses of the reality of God’s promises, perhaps we need to begin with ourselves. Perhaps we need to make peace within ourselves. Perhaps we are called to accept God’s invitation to walk in God’s way on a personal level. As your pastor, I invite you to take time, even during this busy “holiday” season, to sit in silence and encounter the true source of all that we long for, the true source of shalom, peace. Find that deeper relationship with God. Franciscan Richard Rohr reminds us that, “This might well be the essence of the spiritual journey for all of us – to accept that we’re accepted [by God] and to go and live likewise.”1 Can you know the truth of that acceptance by God in your own heart and share it generously with others? Perhaps this is the time to engage in self-examination, to look hard at our relationships with family members, friends, members of this parish, and members of other faith communities and organizations. Perhaps this is the time to pursue reconciliation wherever it is needed.

Perhaps “now in the time of this mortal life,” we might consider accepting God’s invitation to partner with God in making real God’s promises of unity and peace. Can we truly accept that there are no “others” in God’s realm? I want to share with you a poem that so perfectly expresses that acceptance. It is called “Shalom: Magnetic heart.” The poem begins with the lines,
You and I are “other” to each other,
foreign creatures,
locked in our independent skin.


You and I, we’re unnerved
when we’re together,
we’re fractured, disconnected,
thin as moth-wing.

And yet, the same stuff
that tears us from each other
gravitates us to each other,
and all along,
the earth keeps spinning
to help us shake the
regret-dust from
our shoulders.

The poem ends with these lovely images of unity within God’s Shalom:

Shalom– She knows us better.

Shalom– She binds together the
blistered souls,

and we quiet ourselves,

eyes locked,

all “otherness” dissipated
in a stream of
perfect light.2 https://kaitlincurtice.com/

Can we accept that we live in a diverse nation that embraces people of all ethnicities, national origin, faith community, and gender? Can you find that part of God’s realm that you are uniquely called by God to contribute to? Can you make common cause with others across ethnic and religious lines? Perhaps you want to see immigrants treated fairly. Perhaps you want to stop the death penalty. Perhaps you want to see to see the people who grow our tomatoes receive a fair wage and access to decent health care. Perhaps you want to help end the scourge of addiction in this community. Today we offer a diverse community of people a hot meal. Where else in this county are we called to bring people together in peace?

And world peace? “Not in my lifetime,” you say. Yet, all over the globe, Episcopal Relief and Development, the United Thank Offering, and many other organizations are showing us how we might make it possible for “all people” to come together. An example. For generations different tribes have fought each other in Kalinga, a region of mountain villages in the Philippines. The region struggles with chronic economic hardship. In November 2012, three Episcopal congregations came together to begin planting trees. In the face of climate change that has denuded their mountains and eroded their soil, these communities have overcome decade old feuds to undertake a massive tree planting. In so doing they have helped various ethnic and tribal groups to come together in peace and to advance themselves economically. Is ERD on your Christmas gift list? Perhaps it should be.

And just one more example. This coming February, the Rev. Abeosah Flemister, a priest of our diocese, will visit us and tell us about Partners in Ministry in Liberia, a mission of our diocese that brings diverse people together to provide education for children. Are we called to be one of the partners in this ministry?

In any of these activities we are doing no more than accepting God’s invitation to follow where Jesus led and to share God’s peace with all. And we engage in any of these activities not because we rely on our own strength, or our own political leaders, but because we believe God’s promises. We especially trust that the end of all things, as God’s seers have taught us, is God’s shalom, peace, justice, and well-being for all creation. May it be so.

1. The Divine Dance (New Kensington, PA: Whitaker House, 2016), 109.
2. https://kaitlincurtice.com/

O Wisdom from on High

Is it All Saints Day? We began our worship singing that glorious All Saints Day hymn, “For all the saints who from their labor rest….” Then our sequence hymn, the between the New Testament lesson and Gospel, called us to rejoice with the saints and angels. So is it All Saints Day? Yes and no.

No, it is not All Saints Day, which traditionally falls on November 1st. This year we observed the day by welcoming Haven Rose into the Body of Christ through baptism. But also yes. The Revised Common Lectionary, which gives us all our Scripture readings for our three-year cycle of readings, recognizes that most people will not observe a feast of the church that falls on a weekday, even a major feast such as All Saints. So the RCL allows us to celebrate the Sunday following November 1st as All Saints Sunday, which we have done in previous years.

So why is it important to keep All Saints day in some form? Why not just bypass it and read what’s appointed for the 25th Sunday after Pentocost? One reason we keep All Saints Sunday is that All Saints was traditionally the end of the liturgical calendar, especially in the English church. And you can see why. We have come full circle through the two cycles of the liturgical year. First we had the cycle from the birth of Jesus through his resurrection, i.e., Christmas through Easter, what’s called the incarnation cycle. Then came the long season following Pentecost, which emphasizes deepening our understanding of God and God’s purposes and strengthening our Christian community, including mini-communities like this parish.

On All Saints we celebrate the culmination of all that growth in the lives of real people. This includes all the people officially on the calendar of the church before the Reformation: the martyrs, teachers, and theologians of the early church and the medieval saints and mystics. We also remember those, since the Reformation, who especially modelled the holy life for us, and especially those in the English and American churches. But we also remember on this day all those whose lives are known to us and God alone, those who showed us more clearly what a holy life might look like. Hear a few lines of a litany by priest and writer Barbara Crafton, that gives us a glimpse of some of those people:

O Rosa Parks and Thurgood Marshall, pray for us. O Oscar Romero and Raoul Wallenberg, O Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Medgar Evers, O William Wilberforce, pray for us. O all you whose names we do not know, who lived your lives or gave your lives in the struggle for freedom and justice, pray for us that we will be worthy of your sacrifice.
O Thomas Merton and Dame Julian, O Father Damien and Mother Theresa, O Thomas Beckett and Li Tim-Oi, pray for us. Blessed Augustine of Hippo, pray for us. Blessed Paul pray for us and help us to pray.

After mentioning authors, musicians, artists, and scientists, Crafton then comes to her own family: O Mom and Dad, O David, and O my little David who never saw the sun, pray for us. And we could all add the names of those saints who have blessed our own lives, as we pray with Crafton,

We give you thanks, O God, for setting us among the community of the saints, and for allowing the grace they showed in their lives to continue in ours – for in your kingdom, nothing is ever completely lost.

So All Saints is important, even if, in most years, we have to observe it on Sunday. But guess what: today is also the first Sunday in Advent. And why, you might wonder, are we starting the new season so soon? On All Saints we are essentially looking back. We see what God has done in Jesus, in the church, and in the lives of real people. After All Saints, it’s as if the church turns around and begins to look ahead. The readings for the last three Sundays of the traditional liturgical year, i.e., the next three Sundays, have an eschatological focus. That is, they focus on the end times, on the fulfillment of God’s promises and the coming of God’s reign. This focus continues into the next liturgical year in the traditional calendar, until the Sunday before Christmas, when we begin to look forward to the birth of Jesus and the beginning once again of the incarnation cycle.

Since our readings already call us to look ahead, we have elected to join the Advent Project. Along with other parishes in this diocese and elsewhere – with the bishop’s permission – we are bringing together the two parts of the focus on end times into a single season, a seven-week Advent. In doing this, we are not trying to compete with cultural Christmas, which in most of our stores has already begun. And we are not sourpusses, who adamantly refuse to be part of the “Christmas season.” Rather, we are taking the time to focus on God’s promises to us and, through our worship, to express our hope that God will speedily bring in God’s reign.

So what will change? Not our appointed Scripture readings, which already look ahead. However, our sermons may reflect more clearly our hope for the coming of the reign of God. Our paraments, the colored hangings in the church, and our vestments, next week will change to blue, the color for Advent. The collect of the day and the prayers of the people will be different. The service music will be a little different, and we’ll chant the opening of the Great Thanksgiving, which we’ll practice right after the announcements. And we’ll put up the new Advent wreath. See if you observe any other changes, as we move through this longer Advent.

And what might change for us personally in this longer Advent season? Despite what the stores and web sites tell us, it’s not Christmas yet. It’s not even Thanksgiving! Actually, as twenty-first century Christians, we live in what one German theologian called, “das Mittel der Zeit,” in the mid-times, the in-between time. We live in between the time frames of All Saints and Advent, between the past of what God has done and the saints have modelled for us, and the future of what we hope for and pray for when the “eyes of our hearts” are open. We live in the already-not yet.

As we hope and pray for the fulfillment of God’s reign, we seek to continue to grow in our relationship with the Holy One. We seek to more visibly reflect our commitment to Christ through the way we live. And we seek to continue working for justice and peace, so that the reign of God might at last be fully realized.

This week we stand at a decisive moment in the history of our nation. As followers of Jesus who embrace the Anglican tradition, we know that it is always appropriate to pray for the leaders of our nation. Indeed, on page 822, the Book of Common Prayer gives us a prayer for an election. And as you know, every week in the prayers of the people, we pray for our nation and its leaders. And so, as we exercise our right to choose our nation’s leaders and our elected representatives, we pray for all who vote. We pray that all who vote on Tuesday will do so thoughtfully and wisely.

In the end, in this Advent season, we continue to remember the hope to which we press. We remember that we are citizens not only of the United States but also, and more importantly, we are citizens of God’s realm. Even so, for many of us, this has been a more difficult election season than we have seen in many years. And so, remembering whose we are, and whose kingdom we yearn to see fulfilled, I offer you another litany, this one by historian and theologian Diana Butler Bass. Join me in saying, “May it be so,” after each petition.

I believe God creates the world and therein good, even very good, no matter how far from that goodness human beings wander; may it be so.
I believe Love casts out fear, and that living with compassion is the path to joy;
I believe Gratitude threads all of the connections in the web of life;
I believe Wisdom dwells among us, embodying both divine insight and human intellect;
I believe Hope banishes cynicism, always drawing us toward a creative future;
I believe Awe opens us to an awakened life that reaches out to the world to restore and save;
I believe Justice flows all around us, like a healing river;
I believe All Shall be Well. May it be so.

I Must Stay at Your House Today

What made Zacchaeus so eager to see Jesus? In his world, he was perhaps the least likely person to be eager to see an itinerant rabbi? The evangelist tells us that he was the chief tax collector. That means that he was not only an agent of the hated Roman government in Jericho, the city that was the entry point for goods coming into Israel from the east, but he was no doubt also a supervisor of other tax collectors. Which means that he was able to not only extract from the people the taxes that the Romans demanded, he was able to skim off a portion of what those under him could extort from the merchants and petty farmers who were forced to pay the Roman taxes.

Zacchaeus was obviously good at what he did, since he was not only a supervisor but also rich. And he was also deeply hated by the entire community of pious Jews. He was not welcome in the synagogue, and he was probably also intentionally blocked by the crowds who had come out to welcome Jesus to Jericho.

Since he was s a rich man, in Luke’s account Zacchaeus was also not likely to be someone curious about Jesus. If you read the gospel straight through, you would notice that rich men resist Jesus’ call to acknowledge the nearness of God’s reign and change their lives accordingly. In fact, Jesus begins his preaching in Luke with the sermon on the plain, in which he shouts, “… woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.” Then Jesus tells two stories about rich men. One is about the rich farmer who built bigger barns to house his abundant crop, but as the barns are finished God demands his soul. The other, we just heard a few weeks ago, the story of the rich man who dressed in fine purple clothes and Lazarus, who lay outside his gate, starving and so ill that the dogs licked his wounds. And in the chapter just before this one, we hear of the pious young ruler who is so attached to his wealth that he sadly leaves when Jesus suggests he give his money to the poor. In fact, after the rich young ruler leaves, the disciples ask Jesus, “Then who can be saved?” Perhaps the story of Zacchaeus is the evangelist’s answer to that question. Yet, we might also wonder, is Zacchaeus’s response to Jesus likely to be different from that of rich young ruler?

And, more important, after all this, what does the evangelist suggest about what really made Zacchaeus so eager to see Jesus? What made him race ahead of the crowds that blocked him and do something he probably had not done since he was eight years old, something that was so unseemly and incongruous for a man in his position? Was he moved by mere curiosity? Did he perhaps want to see if he might gain some business advantage from seeing this rabbi? Or maybe, just maybe, something was stirring inside Zacchaeus. Maybe, just maybe, God’s Holy Spirit had already begun to work in Zacchaeus. Maybe, just maybe, God seized the initiative and started a process that would radically transform Zacchaeus.

And us? Why are you here? Just as was the case for Zacchaeus, there is no earthly social or economic reason for you to be here this morning. To be sure, if this were the Middle Ages or Puritan New England, you would be punished or fined for not showing up to church on Sunday. Even as recently as the 1950s in the U.S., there was strong social pressure to participate in some faith community. Now, we have come a full 180 degrees from those earlier eras. Church support and attendance have declined precipitously. The majority of Americans, especially those under thirty, identify themselves as “nones,” i.e., having no religious affiliation, or as “spiritual but not religious.”

So why are you here? Are you just curious? What will the preacher say today? Is coming to church “icing on the cake” of the good life for you? Are you afraid of God’s wrath if you don’t come? Or did something stir within you and push you, pull you, or bring you here?

Or take my own experience with my first week-long silent retreat four years ago. The longest silent retreat I had done before that was for two and half days. What impelled me to sign up for a retreat directed by the Spirituality Network, drive four hours on a Sunday afternoon, and stick it out for a whole week? Maybe, just maybe, God had taken the initiative, stirred something within me, and pushed me, pulled me, sent me to a retreat center in Fremont, Ohio for a week.

So there is Zacchaeus incongruously perched in a tree when he finally gets a glimpse of Jesus. Then the unthinkable happens. The rabbi stops, looks up, and addresses Zacchaeus by name. Even more unthinkable, he tells Zacchaeus to hurry down from the tree, and he invites himself to dinner. Wouldn’t you have liked to be a fly on the wall during that dinner conversation? While the respectable, pious people wondered if this rabbi were ignorant of his host’s way of life, or naïve, or worse, clearly something was happening to Zacchaeus. Once face to face with Jesus, something life-changing was happening to Zacchaeus. We might say that he had a conversion experience, from which he gained a new understanding of who God is, and, more important, a new understanding of how he needed to change his life.

For, as Luke makes abundantly clear throughout his gospel, repentance and faith do not mean belief in a set of statements about God. Repentance and faith do not mean acknowledging that Jesus is God’s anointed one. Rather, repentance and faith always have an ethical dimension. A deep experience of the reality of God must always produce a changed life. Having faith always means being transformed by God to live a life closer to God’s expectations, a life modeled for us by Jesus. So, unlike the rich young ruler, when Zacchaeus experiences the reality of God in his encounter with Jesus, he is led to giving up his previous way of life and offering recompense to those he has wronged, far above what the Law of Moses required. And maybe, as Zacchaeus stood there and said all this to Jesus, maybe his joy was so deep that he was the happiest man that day on the Jericho road. Perhaps he was finally free of his sin and isolation. Perhaps indeed health and wholeness, salvation, had come to his house.

In seeking out Zacchaeus, Jesus demonstrates God’s relentless desire to bring us back into community with Godself and with each other, to be in relationship with us, and enable us to be in relationship with each other, to transform us into the people we were created to be. So why are you here? Did you come seeking the transformation that Zacchaeus experienced? We don’t have to climb a tree to see Jesus. As we come to the altar he calls us by name, invites himself into our lives, strengthens our bond with him, and continues that same transformative process that he initiated in Zacchaeus. Maybe, just maybe, that experience of Jesus’ bond with us enables us to see our lives differently, to know our connection with God, with each other, with all creation. Maybe, just maybe, when Jesus dines with us, he enables us to deepen our commitment to treating all with justice, compassion, and love. Perhaps he enables us to better work to bring nearer the reign of God. Maybe, just maybe, Jesus’ food and drink strengthen us to do the work that only we can do.

And maybe, just maybe, when Jesus calls us out of our hiding places, as he called to Zacchaeus, perhaps he also calls us to examine our use of our God-given resources. As Zacchaeus did, are we called to examine our use of our money? Are we called to share our resources more generously with the rest of God’s people? Are we serving God’s people in ways that use our gifts of time, of memory, reason, and skill? Are we called to change our lives in a way that might astonish those around us?

My sisters and brothers, the truth is that God, through God’s Holy Spirit, relentlessly pursues us. God stirs in us a desire to seek God. When we respond to God’s stirring, when we climb a tree to better see Jesus, when we sit in God’s presence silently listening for God’s voice, when we come to church to be nourished by Word and Sacrament, God delivers on God’s promises. God nourishes us, and enables us to become the loving people we have been created to be. But, watch out! You and everyone around you might be surprised by what happens next!

What do You See?

How good is your imagination? Can you picture where we are in the gospel account? We’re still on the move with Jesus, still heading for Jerusalem and everything that will happen there. Luke was a gentile, and his geography of Israel is a little sketchy, but we seem to be in some place inhabited by both Jews and Samaritans. Jews and Samaritans hated each other, so most probably they lived in separate villages. Jesus is approaching one of those villages, most probably a Jewish village.

So imagine yourself back in ancient times and put yourself on the outskirts of some dusty village. What do we see? I see a band of shunned people, united perhaps only by their shared disability. Are there only ten of them? They seem to be both men and women. Are they Jews or Samaritans? We’ll find out that at least one of them is a despised Samaritan. Actually, you can smell them before you can see them. Their clothes are so ragged it’s a wonder they can cover themselves. They are gaunt and scrawny, since all they have to eat are the scraps that kindhearted people give them.

What have they done to bring this misfortune on themselves? Absolutely nothing! They must have some kind of skin disease. If they have true leprosy, what we today call Hansen’s disease, they’ve probably lost fingers or toes, maybe even noses. Hansen’s is a disabling and disfiguring disease for which, in the ancient world, there was no cure. Unfortunately, the Law of Moses lumped many different skin diseases under the word “leprosy,” and declared those afflicted by these diseases to be unclean and unfit for normal society. So what do we see? We see a band of broken, starving, diseased people doomed to a life of exile and expected to stay as far away from the “clean” people as possible.

What did these doomed people see? They saw a holy man. Who knows how they knew who he was? They were desperate for help, and so they cried out to him.

What did Jesus see? Jesus saw them. He saw living, breathing, real people – not people defined by their disease – but real people needing help. He saw wives without husbands, he saw homes without fathers or mothers, he saw fields lying fallow with no one to work them, and he saw hopelessness and despair. And when Jesus saw them, he stopped. He allowed himself to be interrupted. And then he did something startling. He told them to go to the priests and begin the elaborate process of rituals and sacrifices through which they would again be declared clean.

What did the now former lepers do? All but one of them presumably did exactly what Jesus told them to do. They went and found the nearest priest and asked to be declared free of disease. One of them took a good look at himself. He saw what had happened. Samaritans didn’t follow Mosaic Law, so he knew he had little to gain from going off to see a Jewish priest. So he turned back to find that holy man through whom he had been cured. He shouted out his praises to God and then threw himself at Jesus’ feet in thanksgiving.

My friends, this is a story about seeing, and our response to what we see. It is not a healing story like others in Scripture, in which healing occurs when Jesus touches someone or someone touches him. Here, the healing occurs offstage so to speak. Remember that we’re in the part of this gospel account where Jesus is teaching his disciples about how a faithful community lives out its commitment to him. So here, we have a story that asks us consider what we see, and what we do when we see. And, not surprisingly, the story also challenges us in several different ways.

What do you see? The first challenge is to see the need of others. Can we see when someone is in need? Can we see when a friend or coworker is facing a health problem or difficult situation at home? Can we see when an international student is far from family and alone on university holidays? Can we see when someone who comes to Loaves and Fishes needs help? Can we see a homeless person as a child of God, and not just some dirty tramp? Perhaps further away, can we see the people in Haiti who again need help in recovering from a natural disaster? Can we see the need in the non-human world? Can we see the elephants whose numbers are plummeting because of our insatiable desire for ivory? Can we see our wonderful national and state parks as places that need our protection, so that our children and grandchildren will also be able to enjoy them?

And if we see, what do we do? Jesus saw the need of the people who called out to him. He stopped. He took action. He did something very concrete for them. What do we do when we finally see need? Do we ignore it, pass by, or hope that the people, the need, the cause, will all go away? Or, like Jesus, are we moved to take some kind of concrete action? Do we find the time to visit those who are lonely or grieving? Do we find ways to provide food for those who are hungry? Do we work for justice for those who are falsely accused? Do we reach out to those who have lost their homes in disasters? Do we support those who are working to make sure that wild animals and wild landscapes don’t disappear from the earth? I invite you to look around you, see a need that breaks your heart, and then follow the master in addressing it.

And finally, do we see God at work in the world? Do we see God as active in our own lives? The leper saw that he had been transformed by his encounter with Jesus, that something awe-inspiring and holy had happened to him. He didn’t break out a bottle of champagne and pat himself on the back for his cleverness. He didn’t return home to his village. He didn’t stick with the other lepers. He returned to Jesus to praise God and fall on his face, filled with gratitude for what had happened to him.

And here’s the challenge to us: to see what God has done for us and, more important, to be truly thankful for all the many ways in which God has blessed us. The truth is that gratitude may be the real measure of our spiritual health. Do we think we are self-made people? Do we think we deserve everything we have – and more? Or do we take the time to examine our lives, to really look at our lives? Do we take the time to look at our day or week and see where we have met Jesus in that day or week?

Anne Lamott has a wonderful little primer on prayer entitled Help, Thanks, Wow. It’s a book about basic forms of prayer. We know about “help.” All our intercessory prayers, for ourselves, for others, for the world, our prayers of the people in the Eucharist, are all forms of “help.” For most of us, if we pray at all, our prayer is usually a form of “help.” “Wow” is our praise of God. It’s a way of expressing our awe for who God is, for the great mysterious yet loving creator, for the God we see in the face of Jesus, for the spark of God that lodges within us. “Wow” is mostly what we do in liturgy and worship.

“Thanks” is something else. Yes, the Eucharist – the very word means thanksgiving – is a way of offering sacramental thanks for the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. But “thanks” should also be part of our daily walk with God. I invite you to take the time – lots of people do it at the end of the day – to look over your day and see if you have met Jesus anywhere in that day. If you come to the quiet day on October 22nd, you’ll even learn a simple form for looking over your day in order to discern God’s presence in it. And when you discern God’s presence in your day, when you can see how God has blessed you – and continues to bless you – then fall down on your knees, or raise your hands, or open your mouth in thanksgiving.

What do you see, and what do you do when you do see? Does it matter that you have committed yourself to following Jesus? Do you see as he sees? Do you see the need of others and respond to it? Do you see God at work in your own life, and do you say to God, “Thanks?” In a short while, we will leave this place after singing, “Now thank we all our God, with hearts and hands and voices, who wondrous things hath done, in whom this world rejoices.” It’s a hymn that sends you out into the world. So get up, go your way. Spend your life helping others, praising God, and thanking God for all of God’s gifts.

The Size of a Mustard Seed

Uprooting mulberry trees and planting them in the sea? If you’ve ever taken down a tree, you know it’s very hard work. First, of course, there’s the chopping or sawing. Then if the tree was on a lawn or public space, you’d probably either rent a stump grinder or pay someone else to take out the stump.

What is Jesus talking about here? We are still on the road with Jesus, heading toward Jerusalem and all that will take place there. In this middle section of the gospel, the evangelist has collected a variety of Jesus’ teachings and sayings. No doubt the evangelist has also tried to arrange them in some coherent order. We’ve heard parables and stories about lost sheep and lost coins, and we heard about a dishonest manager and the rich man and Lazarus. In most of these stories and sayings, the evangelist has shown Jesus using overstatement and exaggeration, one of the favorite rhetorical tools of the rabbis.

As we come to this place in the gospel narrative, the disciples are clearly feeling overwhelmed and downright puzzled by all that Jesus has called them to be and do. So they make what seems like a simple request: “increase our faith.” But what exactly are they asking for? Is a faith a quantity that can decrease or increase? What would more faith look like in real life? If they had “more faith” would the disciples fast, give, heal, and teach more? Would they stop complaining as they trailed behind Jesus? Would they willingly let themselves be executed with Jesus?

Do you find Jesus’ response to his disciples perplexing? At this point, you might not even like the Jesus you see here. He doesn’t reassure the disciples. He doesn’t make a joke or pat them on the back. He barks at them, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed….” Then he uses the image of a master and slaves – overworked slaves – to suggest something about what faith really means. Although the image of hardworking slaves would have been perfectly acceptable to Jesus’ disciples and to the evangelist’s audience, it of course grates on our ears. And more than that, both the sayings about the mustard seed and the image of slaves are surely further examples of overstatement and exaggeration.

So what is the real message here? What is the evangelist suggesting to his own community – and by extension to us – about what faith is? Let’s unpack that word “faith” and look for a minute at what we might think it means. Is faith supernatural power, especially power that, if I believe hard enough, I can make God do what I want? Is faith acceptance of all the traditional statements of the church, believing seven impossible things before breakfast, as one wag put it? Do I have deep faith if I understand and accept every statement in the Nicene Creed? Do I have faith if I take the Bible literally, especially if I believe that creation happened according to the account in Genesis, or that every miracle occurred just as it is depicted? Do I have faith if I adhere to a set of specific devotional practices? Am I person of deep faith if I fast, tithe, and read Forward Day by Day every morning?

The truth is that faith – or perhaps, better, faithfulness – the faithfulness we are called to have as followers of Jesus, is none of these things. To begin with, faith is a gift of God. But it is not something that we earn as a reward for hard work. It is something we already have just by virtue of being a creature made in God’s image. We may have models of people who have faith, like the women Lois and Eunice mentioned by the writer of the second letter to Timothy, but we must still acknowledge God’s gift for ourselves.

Perhaps faith is more what we moderns might call a mindset. When we acknowledge God’s gift, then we can begin seeing the world as God sees it. We can acknowledge ourselves as part of God’s creation, and as such deeply and truly loved by God. We can also understand ourselves as only a small part of God’s creation, as one of God’s many children. And we can begin seeing ourselves as connected to everyone we meet, looking out at those both near and far, not with our egocentric desire to possess and control, but rather with compassion and a desire to help others grow and flourish.

What’s more important, faith is not something static, it is not something that comes in a quantity that Jesus or God can increase at our request. It is not something that we can throw away. We can ignore God, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we have no faith. And more important, our faith, whether it’s in God or in anything else, is dynamic. It grows, flourishes, and unfolds throughout our life’s journey. It’s apt really that Jesus used the image of a seed for faith. Remember Jesus’ image of the mustard seed that grows to be a great tree, in which even the birds can nest? If we water and tend our faith, it too can become a green living quality within us that will reflect God’s presence within us and in the world.

The most important thing about faith is that it is ultimately a verb. Jesus was right in suggesting that if we have faith we do something. Jesus might have been exaggerating in using the image of the uprooted mulberry tree, but the truth is that ultimately if we acknowledge the divine gift within us, then we show forth our faith “not only with our lips but with our lives.”

And how do we do that? Not surprisingly, faith is a verb that calls us to look in two different directions at once. If faith enables us to see ourselves as one of God’s beloved children, then to remain faithful we must also hear God’s call to us. We must leave ourselves open to God in regular prayer and times of silence, however briefly, and go beyond our rote prayers or our spontaneous calls for help, to reach the God within us, to connect more deeply to the God within us, to hear more clearly the words of that God. And we do this not to prove anything, not to buy God’s favor, not to placate an angry God, but so that we might follow more closely behind Jesus, so that our God-given faith may indeed become that great green tree.

And then we must do our faith out in the world. Writer Debie Thomas reminds us that that to do faith is “To do the loving, forgiving thing we consider so banal we ignore it. Why? Because the life of faith is as straightforward as a slave serving his master dinner. As ordinary as a hired worker fulfilling the terms of his contract. Faith isn’t fireworks; it’s not meant to dazzle. Faith is simply recognizing our tiny place in relation to God’s enormous creative love, and then filling that place with our whole lives.”1 We do our faith by doing what God calls us to do, in our ordinary given lives, and, to the extent that we fallible humans can, with the mindset of Jesus. Doing our faith will look different for each one of us. For many of us, living out our faith will mean truly accepting ourselves as God’s beloved children. And it also will mean looking hard at our lives, forgiving those who have hurt us, forgiving ourselves for the hurt we have visited on others, and asking for forgiveness where we can. Doing faith will mean seeing Christ in the faces of strangers, especially of those who ask for our help. For some of us, doing faith might mean embarking on a new educational or career path, or taking in an unwanted child. For all of us doing faith will mean using our God-given financial resources intentionally, especially to support people and organizations that are helping us to care more intentionally for the earth, and that are working to bring God’s reign nearer. Doing faith will mean working for justice, especially among those falsely accused. For some of us, doing faith will also mean working to abolish the death penalty. And for all of us, and especially in this contentious political season, doing faith will mean using our right to vote thoughtfully and intentionally.

We have a myriad ways to fulfil our call to do faith in the world. And the truth is that we have all the faith that we need. As we do our faith, God may deepen and strengthen our faith. But even now, every one of you has all the faith that you need to do God’s will. Because, “the tiniest fragment of real faith, real fidelity to responding to God’s prior fidelity to us, can work wonders. Not only a sycamore tree, but even much more deeply-rooted problems, can be dug up and planted in to the sea, if we have that basic, deep-down trust in God.”2 May it be so.

1. http://www.journeywithjesus.net/lectionary-essays/current-essay .
2. Patrick J.Ryan, America (September 26, 1992), quoted in Synthesis, October 2, 2016.

Seek the Lost

“There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea; there’s a kindness in God’s justice, which is more than liberty.” We just sang those words. Do you believe them? Do you believe “there is welcome for the sinner and more graces for the good….”? Or is there a part of you that still believes you have to do something to get God to love you? Or worse, do you think that you’ve botched up your life so badly that there’s no way that God could love you? Or maybe it’s all those other people out there – whoever “they” are – who don’t deserve God’s love: the murderers, drug dealers, crooked politicians, child abusers, and streetwalkers? Or perhaps you believe that when “bad things happen to good people,” when people are caught in floods or tornadoes, or their cities are bombed, it’s because they deserve it, that God is punishing them – or the rest of us on their behalf. On this day fifteen years ago, some of us heard claims like that. So does any of this reflect your beliefs?

If your only idea of the God of the Hebrew Bible is what we heard this morning in the reading from Jeremiah, you might think that all those statements about God are true. Remember that Jeremiah originally wrote his prophecies at a time of great political upheaval, when the Babylonian armies had destroyed the temple in Jerusalem and were herding the Judean leaders into exile in Babylon. The prophet is very clear about God’s judgement of the people of Judah. Clearly God is enraged at them. God calls them foolish and stupid, skilled in evil, and ignorant of good. They have even violated creation. God pronounces judgement: God will destroy the land and make the earth mourn. And God is fiercely determined to carry out God’s plan.

And yet. Did you notice the hints that God did not intend to wreak total destruction? Did you notice something else besides God’s fierce anger? Did you hear “my poor people?” Did you hear that “my people” are foolish, like stupid children? Did you hear God acknowledge God’s deep relationship with God’s people, the hint of God’s compassion for them? Did you hear God say, “Yet I will not make a full end?”

Throughout this long book, the prophet continues to rail against the wrong-headed political alliances that eventually led to the triumph of the Babylonians over the Judeans. Yet, in chapter 30, God declares, “… have no fear my servant Jacob … and do not be dismayed, O Israel; for I am going to save you from far away, and your offspring from the land of their captivity.” And more: God declares, “I am going to restore the fortunes of the tents of Jacob, and have compassion on his dwellings; the city shall be rebuilt upon its mound, and the citadel set upon its rightful site.” Most important of all, God promises to make a new covenant with the houses of Israel and Judah. “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” The prophet Ezekiel, who also experienced the exile, also trusted God to seek out and restore God’s people. Using the familiar image of God as a shepherd, Ezekiel repeats God’s declaration that “I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out. As shepherds seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered ….”

Perhaps Jesus had that very section of Ezekiel in mind as he responded to the implied criticism of the Pharisees and scribes. And here let me remind you that, despite what you hear in the Gospel, in Jesus’ time the Pharisees are the good guys – literally. Though the gospels often show them arguing with Jesus, they strove to keep the Law of Moses, to “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” it. They also continued the process of reinterpreting the law – which rabbis do to this day – so that the law remains relevant for those who try to observe it.

Like all good people, the Pharisees tend towards self-righteousness. Focused on their own efforts to be good, they exclude those who miss the mark more visibly. It is understandable that they might wonder why this charismatic rabbi not only seemed to avoid the obviously good people but sought out the least, the lost, and the left behind. Why would a self-respecting follower of God’s law do that? Here in Luke’s telling, Jesus answers their concerns by telling three stories, two of which we just heard. Just as we heard in last week’s gospel, Jesus uses hyperbole to make his point. Using images that would resonate with ordinary people, Jesus pictures a shepherd who chases after a lone sheep, leaving ninety-nine “in the wilderness,” then rejoices when he finds the lost one. Would a sane shepherd, even imagining that he had a flock that size, really leave them all to chase after one? Jesus then uses the image of a woman searching for a lost coin and rejoicing when she finds it. Would a person expend that much effort just to find one coin?

Wondering about what happened to the ninety-nine sheep left behind or the woman’s effort entirely misses the point of these stories. Jesus is not saying anything here about sheep, women, or even us. In answering the complainers, Jesus is saying something about God’s intentions. He is reminding his hearers – and us – that God takes the initiative to seek and rescue the lost. And maybe we’re all lost – only the ninety-nine “good” sheep and the nine coins hanging around the woman’s neck – that’s how the poor kept their money – don’t know that they’re lost. So God starts with those who do know that they’re lost, those who’ve wandered away and can’t find their way back, those who fall in between the cracks, or end up behind the drapes. And God not only takes the initiative to go looking for the least, the lost, and the left behind, God welcomes them, even eats dinner with them. To show what God was really like, “Jesus welcomed the people we ignore and despise. The sexually suspicious. The religiously impure. Ethnic outsiders. Rich tax scammers and lazy poor people. Soldiers of the Roman oppressors. The chronically sick and the mentally deranged. Women with multiple marriages, widows, and children. His closest disciples who betrayed him.”1

And why does Jesus – or God – take the initiative to seek out those on the margins? Of course in the parables, the sheep and the coin are forms of wealth. And you know what? So are we! So are all of us, even those who we good people wouldn’t be caught dead embracing! God loves all of us. And even more important, the least, the lost, and the left behind people are part of the community, and the whole is not complete without them. God’s search for us – all of us – is ultimately a quest for restoration and wholeness. “In this sense, all of us who are part of God’s creation should be just as anxious as God until the lost are restored and we are made whole again by their presence.”2

And so, what of us? If God always takes the initiative, if God always seeks us out, are we willing to be found? If we are, how do we let ourselves be found? On Tuesday, we wondered how to discern God’s will – which may be another way of asking the same question. No surprise: we discovered that we have to open ourselves to God’s presence in our lives. We realized that a deeper relationship with God helps us to be found by God and to let God lead us – even when the next steps aren’t always clear. The means? Intentional silent prayer is a good first step: letting go of our own ego, our own small needs and concerns, and simply sitting silently in God’s presence. Intentional reading of Scripture is another good practice. Daily examen, looking over your day and seeing God’s presence in the events of the day, is yet another good practice. We will experience all of them at next month’s quiet day, but I’ll be happy to give a preview of both practices to anyone interested.

But. Practices of prayer are never ends in themselves – if Jesus is our example. After taking time away for prayer, Jesus leapt right back into active ministry, healing, teaching, proclaiming the reign of God. Once God has found us, welcomed us, fed us, healed us, and strengthened us, then we have a responsibility to share God’s welcome with others, to actively seek the least, the lost, and the left behind, both those who come to us and those who don’t find their way through our doors, who may not even know that we exist.

Today, we remember all those first responders and everyone else who went out to help victims and family members of those who lost their lives in New York, Washington, and Shanksville, PA. And here’s another example. Every Wednesday evening, the Lost Sheep Ministry reaches approximately 250-300 people under the Interstate Bridge in downtown Knoxville, Tennessee. Many volunteers take part in this ministry. After a brief prayer service, they serve hot meals, give away gently used clothes, including work and interview clothes, staff a prayer table, provide dental and medical assistance, hold an annual flu clinic, and provide risk-free tuberculosis screening.3

Who are the homeless bridge people around us? To whom are we called to reach out with God’s love? “I once was lost, but now am found.” As God has found us, as God has showered us with love and great blessings, with whom are we called to share that love? Who needs to be found, so that the Body may be made whole?

Let your God love you. Then go out and to seek the lost, to share God’s love with them.

1. Dan Clendenin, “A Trustworthy Saying,” http://www.journeywithjesus.net/lectionary-essays/current-essay .
2. Jennifer Copeland, “Clean Sweep,” Christian Century, Sept. 07, 2004, http://christiancentury.org/article/2004-09/clean-sweep
3. http://lostsheepministry.org/under-the-bridge/

Are You All In?

We’re still on the road with Jesus. For the last month or so, ever since Jesus “set his face for Jerusalem,” we‘ve been walking the dusty roads between Galilee and Judea with him. All the while, Jesus has been flinging hard words at us. If you become one of my followers, be prepared for conflict with your friends and family, he told us last month. Just last week he told us not to assume that we are the high-status people, and to invite the riffraff to our parties rather than our families and friends. It’s hot, we’re tired, and we’ve had enough of Jesus’ hard teachings. “That’s it, Master, no more. Leave us alone.”

Maybe Jesus can already see Jerusalem and the events that will happen there – if not with his naked eye, then perhaps in his mind’s eye. So he flings his hardest teaching yet at us. He tells us to be prepared for the cost, the full cost of truly following him. “You have to hate your family members,” he says. “You have to follow me all the way to unjust execution, if necessary.” “You have to give away everything you have.” “Wait, wait, you can’t mean all that Jesus, can you?” He can, and he does.

OK, the rabbis of Jesus’ day were given to hyperbole. Maybe Jesus overstated his expectations for their shock value, so that he could get our attention. So what, as Luke tells it, did Jesus want his followers – and by extension us – to hear? In a nutshell, it’s not a piece of cake to follow him. We don’t follow him because it feels good. We don’t follow him when life calms down and we have time to get around to it. Being Jesus’ disciple is not a spectator sport, as if you can watch the clergy try to do it, but sit in the bleachers yourself.

When we decide to follow Jesus in a serious way, we are making a deep commitment. We are committing ourselves to putting God before all the other commitments in our lives, before family, social class, nationality, before all those pieces of our lives that are not God. We are committing ourselves to a way of life that puts the needs and desires of others ahead of our own needs and desires. We are committing ourselves to working for the good of all creation. We are committing ourselves to travelling lightly with our achievements and our “stuff,” while acknowledging our responsibility to share what we have. We are making a commitment to letting ourselves be transformed by God. As we travel behind Jesus, we promise to be ready to respond to God’s call to grow in ways that may seem difficult, risky, and strange. And we know, that, at some point along that road, Jesus will turn to us and say, “Are you all in?”

In effect, Paul posed that same question to Philemon and the others to whom the brief letter bearing Philemon’s name is addressed. Oddly, this letter is the only truly personal letter of Paul’s that has been preserved. And sadly, we don’t know much about it. You can easily figure out the broad outlines of the story. The slave Onesimus ran away from his master, Philemon, possibly also taking money or property. He met up with Paul in prison, where Paul converted him. Now Paul writes to Philemon asking him to take Onesimus back as a fellow follower of Jesus and promising to reimburse Philemon for any expenses. What we don’t know are where Paul was imprisoned, how he and Onesimus got together, and, most important, what Paul means when he asks Philemon to receive Onesimus “no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother.”

We do know this: whatever we now think about slavery – and some would criticize Paul for not taking a strong stand against slavery – Paul was following Roman law in returning Onesimus to Philemon. Upon Onesimus’s return, Philemon could have severely punished him, hobbled him, as was done to African slaves in the American South and in South Africa, or sold him away. Instead, Paul asks Philemon to treat Onesimus very differently, to treat him as a fellow member of a Christian community, and even, if possible, to send Onesimus back to Paul. In effect, Paul has forsaken the expectations of his culture, and is subtly undermining the system of slavery by reminding Philemon of his common humanity with Onesimus as a fellow follower of Christ. He is further asking Philemon to treat Onesimus differently than what law and custom would permit. And he does this, not by trying to coerce Philemon, but by gently requesting that Philemon follow his own example and treat Onesimus with love.

I wonder what we would do in Philemon’s place. I couldn’t help thinking of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and another letter, the letter that Huck Finn planned to write to turn in the runaway slave Jim. The laws and the customs of the day tell Huck that Jim should be returned to his owner. Huck even drafts a letter. But then when he realizes all that Jim has done for him, how Jim has been a friend and father to him, Huck tears the letter up. Huck is definitely all in. I wonder if I would have had the courage to do what Huck did.

Even the reading from the prophet Jeremiah indirectly poses a question of commitment to us. Here Jeremiah uses the image of the potter shaping and reshaping the pot to suggest the way God works God’s transformations within us. However, Jeremiah is not addressing individuals but rather the covenanted community, the Israelites who have promised to follow God’s law. As we hear throughout this long book, the Israelites get entangled in untrustworthy political alliances, amass wealth, exploit the poor, and visit all kinds of injustices on each other. Jeremiah warns them here of the dire consequences of forsaking the promises they made to God. He assures them that God will force then to undergo a period of transformation, which indeed, as it turns out, happens when they are sent into exile.

And so: are you all in? Are you committed to Jesus and willing to pay the cost of following him? What examples might we choose to illustrate what full commitment looks like? Actually, we have some wonderful examples of what such total commitment to the beliefs of one’s heart actually looks like – even when those beliefs challenge the status quo of the culture around them. Think about those who enter vowed religious life, convents and monasteries. They truly give up all their possessions, traditionally even their clothes and their name, and they commit to a life in common with others, traditionally a life of poverty, chastity, obedience, and stability. How about those who took part in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s? The Freedom Riders challenged the status quo of segregated buses by riding interstate buses in the South in mixed racial groups and by defying local laws or customs that mandated segregated seating. Those who took part in the Montgomery bus boycott to protest segregated municipal buses walked to work for 381 days until the city finally caved in and allowed people of all races to sit where they pleased. Those of you who are athletes know the single-minded commitment that is necessary to excel in any sport. We were all charmed last month as we watched Simone Biles, Gabby Douglas, Alys Raisman, Laurie Hernandez, and Madison Kocian defend the USA’s gold medal title in the team all-around gymnastics event in the Olympics. Those young women had practiced for years to get to that place. They were definitely all in!

And are we? What does being all in look like for us? John Calvin suggests that there are four different ways in which we can show our commitment to Christ. The first is through self-denial, i.e., not seeing ourselves as the center of the universe, but rather recognizing that of God in everyone else and affirming our kinship with all people. Second, we can bear our cross, i.e., face whatever suffering comes our way in life without complaint, knowing that Christ bears it with us, trusting in God for the outcome of what we bear, and sharing the suffering of others. Third, we can meditate on eternal life, i.e., we can seek to understand ever more deeply who we are and whose we are, that we are all beloved children of God. And fourth, we can use God’s gifts properly, i.e., we can live a simple life, knowing that we are on a spiritual pilgrimage. We are called to live neither ascetically nor overindulgently as we remember that we will ultimately be accountable to God for how we have used God gifts. To which I would add one more: we are called to recognize that salvation, spiritual wholeness and health, are not do-it-yourself projects. We are all in this together. Just as Paul wrote to Philemon and the others in his Christian community, so we are also called to build up each other and to call each other to greater and greater love.

Are you all in?

Not Good News?

No wonder neither A.J. nor Carolyn wanted to preach today! Here we are on a lazy summer day, about to enjoy a lovely picnic, and we’ve just heard some of the hardest lessons of the liturgical year. Honestly, what were the crafters of the lectionary thinking when they set these lessons for the summer? Winter maybe, but not warm, lazy summer, and especially when our groaning potluck table beckons!

But we are part of a tradition that respects Scripture and has given us a broad three-year system of Scripture readings to be heard in public worship. And hear these lessons we must, for our spiritual health, and for our growth as followers of Jesus.

Unquestionably, the lesson from the prophet Isaiah is hard to hear. Through the prophet’s voice we first hear a love song, in which God describes all the tender care that God has lavished on Israel. The prophet then lets us hear God’s profound disappointment when Israel does not live up to God’s expectations. Did you hear the poignancy, the infinite sadness, in God’s “Why did it yield wild grapes?” Did you hear the grief in God’s decision to abandon Israel to her own ways? Our psalm echoes the same themes, but it ends with a promise both we and the psalmist know that Israel will never be able to keep: “And so will we never turn away from you….”

Our lesson from the Letter to the Hebrews isn’t a lot better. The writer gives us examples of people who were faithful to God’s call. But what did many of them get for their faithfulness? Torture, mocking, and imprisonment. And the writer’s counsel? Look to Jesus – who endured all that and more! Really God?

Our gospel lesson is perhaps the hardest of all to hear. We’re in the middle of the gospel of Luke. As we heard in chapter 9, Jesus has “set his face to go to Jerusalem.” While Jesus is no doubt already focused on the events that will happen in Jerusalem, in the narrative we are on a road trip with Jesus and his friends. This and the following chapters, approximately through chapter 17, are only loosely structured in terms of story, time, and place. They seem to be more a collection of Jesus’ sayings, as the earliest community of Jesus’ followers remembered them. It’s as if the writer wanted to make sure that everything the community remembered was included. So these chapters have a cobbled-together feeling, with some sayings addressed to closer disciples, and some to wider crowds. Thus in today’s reading, the saying about conflicts within families is addressed to the disciples, while the saying about interpreting changes to come is addressed to a wider audience, perhaps curious villagers who gathered around Jesus as he passed through their area.

Even so, it’s important for us to hear Jesus’ words here. First, it’s important to hear the passion and sense of urgency in Jesus’ voice, as he wishes for his work in Jerusalem to be finished. It’s also important for us to hear what those who take his message seriously may face, those who seek to follow his example of loving self-giving, those who seek to welcome all, especially the poor and those on the social margins, and those who seek to produce good fruit and work for the justice and righteousness that God so clearly expects.

Jesus’ warning is clear: those who take the gospel seriously and seek diligently to follow him will inevitably face conflict with those around them. Certainly, Jesus’ followers will face conflict with the powers that be: the rich and powerful never want to hear that God loves the entire cosmos, all of creation, and that God especially has a preference for the poor and marginalized. And more: Jesus’ followers will also face conflict within their own families. It is not that Jesus desires that family members be at odds over following him. It is more that Jesus is realistic – and wants his followers to be realistic – about the real costs of taking the gospel seriously. So consider yourself warned!

And why should his followers face such conflict? Here and elsewhere in Luke’s gospel we hear Jesus’ reminder that he is calling together a new kind of community, not one based on blood ties and the unequal social structures sustained by traditional patriarchal family roles. Rather, Jesus is calling together a new kind of community, a community that is united not by devotion to clan or tribe, but a community that finds its identity solely in Jesus, a community where everybody matters, a community that looks “to Jesus” as it pursues its commitment to follow him and work for the coming of God’s reign.

We know only too well that our commitment to Jesus’ way and our attempt to work for God’s justice and righteousness lead to conflict, even conflict with beloved family members. We also know that when we commit ourselves to a particular faith community, we may have to leave behind our families and all that was once comforting and familiar to us.

There are so many stories of the cost involved in our faith commitments. In many stories from the early church, we encounter those who faced martyrdom. Perhaps no such story is more heart-rending than that of Perpetua and her maid Felicity. Perpetua was a high-born Roman matron in third-century Carthage whose family begged her to turn her back on the strange new religion of Jesus and return to them. Instead, Perpetua left behind her newborn infant and, with Felicity at her side, bravely faced death. A thousand years later, Clare of Assisi, whose family traced its lineage all the way back to the Roman republic, heard St. Francis preach. Although she was probably betrothed, she defied her family, left behind her riches, and joined Francis’s mission, later founding her own order, now known as the Poor Clares. During the English Reformation, family members were also deeply divided. Some, like Thomas More, refused to break with the Catholic Church in England, and was the only one of his family to be put to death. Others, to the dismay of their families, eagerly embraced the new church. And there are so many others. Here are just a few more. Elizabeth Seton, who left behind her proper Episcopalian family to join the Roman Catholic Church, eventually founded both the first Catholic girls school in the US and the Sisters of Charity. Samuel Isaac Joseph Scherechewsky was a Russian Jew, whose family expected him to become a rabbi. Instead, he found the Church of England, eventually became Anglican bishop of Shanghai, and translated the Bible into Chinese. Alice Paul, a champion of women’s suffrage, endured force-feeding in prison when she attempted hunger strikes. As we know only too well, Martin Luther King, Jr. was a martyr to the cause of civil rights, while his followers endured unspeakable hatred and violence in their segregated communities.

And with all that, we also know that sincere Christians – or members of any faith community – can wind up on different sides of religious, social, and political issues. Witness the many families in this area who wound up on different sides of our Civil War. I have just finished a book about Americans who joined the Spanish Civil War. There too, families were deeply divided. Today Republicans and Democrats – uneasily perhaps – coexist in the same family.

And so then, what are we to do? As people who profess to follow Jesus, who are willing to hear the hard words of today’s Scripture readings, how are we know how to produce the good grapes that God calls us to produce? How are we know whether to continue on course, despite conflict with family members and the wider community, or whether to heed the words of those who would pull us back? In effect, how are we to discern whether it is truly God who is leading us, and the path that God calls us to follow?

The answer to those questions is the one given by the writer of Hebrews: look “to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith….” In practice, that means regularly engaging in worship and prayer, letting ourselves be nourished in Word and Sacrament. It means intelligently reading Scripture, with both some understanding of the history and context of any particular book or passage, and openness to letting Scripture address us where we are. It means thoughtfully and prayerfully engaging with the issues of the day, knowing that even reasonable people can disagree. And it means admitting that, in order to remain true to the call we hear from God, we may have to disagree with those we love, over the way we express our faith, and over the way we seek to bring in God’s reign.

Yes, today’s Scriptures are not easy to hear. God often challenges us to hear what we don’t want to hear. As followers of the one who gave his life as a ransom for many, we stay open to new ideas, even as we pursue our visions of justice and righteousness. We seek the truth in ideas with which we disagree, recognizing that none of us has a corner on truth. And still, with Jesus, we continue on our journey, trusting God’s transformative work in our lives, and knowing that, despite our own imperfections and limitations our futures are always in God’s hands.

What is Faith?

What is faith? Is faith agreeing with a set of intellectual statements? Do you have faith if you can recite – and understand – all the statements of the Apostles and Nicene creeds? Is faith conscientious observance of all the traditional spiritual disciplines and practices? Do you demonstrate great faith if you receive communion every Sunday, fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, or dress up in fancy vestments? I think our reading from the prophet Isaiah this morning had something to say about that! Is faith being able to quote Scripture? Do you show great faith if you can win an argument by proof-texting your opponents by referring to verses in the Bible – or the Torah, or the Qur’an, or the Bhagavad Gita?

If you were listening to the reading this morning from the Letter to the Hebrews, you already know the answers to those questions. You already know that the answer to each one is “No.” Actually, all four of our readings have something to say about what faith is. Our reading from Isaiah, from whom we will hear again next week, and our psalm warn us about relying on religious rituals alone, especially when our rituals don’t connect with how we live our lives outside the temple – or on the other side of the red doors. In our reading from the gospel of Luke, we hear Jesus encouraging us to hang in there, stay alert, and keep on doing what we discern God has called us to do – words that strengthened Luke’s community and still comfort us.

However, it is the reading from the Letter to the Hebrews that provides us the most compelling description of the nature of faith. Actually, we don’t often hear from the Letter to the Hebrews in worship – and probably less in preaching! Most of us would rather preach about Jesus! Hebrews was probably written sometime after the fall of the temple in Jerusalem, i.e., after 70 AD. Although its author is anonymous, we are virtually certain that it was not written by Paul – its language and subject matter are very different from those of the rest of Paul’s letters. Actually, it’s not really a letter. Rather, it’s an extended sermon – and far longer than most Episcopal priests would dare to preach! And despite its traditional title, it was probably addressed to a mixed community of Jews and Gentiles, not to an exclusively Jewish Christian community. Even so, clearly its author expected that his hearers knew about the details of temple worship, and that they were well acquainted with the Hebrew Scriptures.

One thing we can surmise from reading this sermon is that it was addressed to a community facing hostility and conflict with the wider culture around them, and that its members were ridiculed and shamed for professing to be followers of an itinerant rabbi who had been executed as a common criminal. These early followers were not subject to martyrdom yet, but they were possibly also wondering when Jesus’ promise to return would be fulfilled. So this sermon was written to console and encourage them and to bolster their commitment to Jesus. The writer sought to reassure them that, despite their hardships, they had made the right decision to follow him.

Much of the early part of this sermon deals with various aspects of temple worship. The writer argues that Jesus is the fulfillment of all sacrifices, the final sacrifice, and that sacrificial worship is now no longer needed. At the end of chapter 10, just before today’s reading begins, he gives his hearers a charge: “Do not, therefore, abandon that confidence of yours; it brings a great reward. For you need endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was promised” (10:35-36). Chapter 11, some of which we have just heard, is his attempt to flesh out that endurance, by offering a definition of faith and examples from the Hebrew Scriptures of faithful people.

Our passage opens with that definition a faith – actually a definition that is often quoted but not well understood, since the Greek uses words that are extremely difficult to translate accurately. Essentially, what the writer is telling us is that faith is absolute assurance that God is real, that there is a spiritual dimension to the ground of life, that there is a deeper reality to life than we can see on the surface of things. Faith is the conviction that all that we see and know, the cosmos, all creation, has been brought into being by God and is sustained by God. Faith is the deepest possible trust that God has made promises to us, that God has fulfilled God’s promises to us in the past, and most especially in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and that God will continue to fulfill God’s promise to renew all things. Most important of all, the writer is certain that faith is a dynamic force that leads us to answer God’s call to us, even when we are not certain where God might be leading us.

The writer then provides examples from Scripture to illustrate his definition and encourage his hearers. In the verses omitted from today’s reading, the writer mentions Abel, Enoch, and Noah, who especially displayed trust in God by heeding God’s warning and building the ark – even under cloudless skies. However, for this writer, Abraham is the primary example of faithful response to God’s call. The early chapters of the book of Genesis tell us in detail how God called Abraham and Sarah to leave their ancestral home in Ur and to journey to a completely new land. God also promised that Abraham and Sarah would have thousands of descendants, even though they had reached old age without any children. For new followers of Jesus, who were hearing this sermon, Abraham and Sarah must have been truly encouraging and apt examples of faith in their willingness to follow God’s leading and trust God’s promises, even when they could see the end of their journey only in the distance.

And so they are for us too. We too trust in God’s leading, even when we are not sure where we are going. Certainly anyone who has agreed to go back to school, take a new job, have another child, retire, or discern for ordained ministry, has faced that moment when we say, “Are you sure, God? Is this right?” Even Thomas Merton, a deeply contemplative Trappist monk, knew such moments, when he said, “My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end…. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.”

Like Merton, who in his last years also developed a profound respect for Buddhist contemplation, we too are called to continue our spiritual journey. We know that the font was just the beginning of the journey. We acknowledge that we are called to not stop permanently at any stage of spiritual practice or understanding, but to “live in tents,” to continue to grow in wisdom and compassion. We too understand that we are called to put our faith into action, to embrace others, and to work to make God’s promises real in our own time.

And do we too have examples of faith in action? Certainly, like the hearers of the sermon to the Hebrews, we can find models of faith in the Bible, in Isaiah and Jeremiah, who struggled with the political movements of their own days, and in Jesus’ friends and followers, who sought him out for healing, and who witnessed his death and resurrection. The Apostles creed reminds us that we believe in a “communion of saints.” Open a copy of Holy Women, Holy Men. Examples of faith in action, both of people traditionally on the calendar of saints, and those closer to us in time, will leap off the pages for you.

And we also have examples of faith right in the world around us. Twice a week, volunteers from All Saints Episcopal Church near Brussels, Belgium travel twenty miles to the central Brussels trains station. There they serve a meal and deliver much-needed clothing, toiletries, and sleeping gear to the refugees flooding into Belgium, people often arriving with only the bare minimum: the clothes they are wearing, and their only link to home – a cell phone. In support of this ministry, members of All Saints donate some of the food supplies to serve approximately 100 people at each meal, supplemented with additional food purchased with parish funds and special fundraising efforts. Like the volunteers, who have ventured forth trusting that God would bless their efforts, the refugees, most of whom have come from Syria and other war-torn areas, have also been people of faith, who have left everything in search of a better life. For the refugees, “The Episcopal community in Europe has been inspiring in its compassionate effort to bring safety, comfort and fellowship to those who are displaced,” said a program officer for Episcopal Relief & Development, which helps support this ministry. “The people of All Saints’ Church in Waterloo especially have taken initiative, continuing to increase their activities and motivating the wider community to get involved in outreach efforts as well.”

We have not been refugees. We have not been tortured or murdered for our faith. Most of us have not been ridiculed for our faith. Even so, as we continue to commit ourselves to following God’s leading, we too are called to faith. We too are called to live our lives knowing that the ground of all is love, that Jesus has shown us the nature of that love, and that there is a divine spark within each of us that helps us to trust the promises of Scripture and work to bring nearer the reign of God.

All Things Come of Thee

“How much Land Does a Man Need?” That is the title of a story by the nineteenth-century writer Leo Tolstoy. In the story a peasant makes a deal. He can buy all the land he can circle on foot in one day for only 1,000 rubles. However, if he doesn’t return to his starting place by sunset, he gets no land – and he loses his money. The greedy peasant frantically races the sun as he tries to cover as wide a circle as he can. Just short of his starting point, he drops dead of exhaustion. He is buried in an ordinary grave, only six feet long. In his death, Tolstoy thus gives us the ironic answer to the question posed in the title of the story.

How much is enough? What do we, as Jesus’ followers, truly need? What do we, as people called to seek the “things that are above,” truly require? Be warned: I am about to cross a great taboo. No, I’m not about to preach about sex or politics! I am about to talk about money, in the church – and maybe more than once between now and All Saints Day. We in the church are so reluctant to talk about money! Like most Americans, we think of our use of money as strictly our own affair – not something a preacher should be addressing. Many of us might even secretly agree with Gordon Gekko, the corporate raider in Oliver Stone’s film “Wall Street,” who told a group of stockholders that greed is good. Alan Greenspan, the billionaire Koch brothers, and other influential business and political leaders openly follow the philosophy of author Ayn Rand, who titled one of her books The Virtue of Selfishness. You may not be a follower of Rand. Even so, Jesus’ talk about money might still make you uncomfortable, especially his decided preference for the poor in Luke’s Gospel. But we’d better listen to Jesus, because our use of our money is at least as much an expression of our faith as anything else we do. Show me your checkbook, and I’ll know what you really believe!

Indeed, our lessons today offer sobering perspectives on wealth and possessions. In our gospel reading, Jesus minces no words as he explicitly inveighs against greed and the stockpiling of possessions. “Be on your guard,” he thunders, “against all kinds of greed, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” Then he tells the neat parable of the rich fool. Does the rich man in the parable remind you of anyone you know? Make no mistake: Jesus reminds us that, because death strips us of all our possessions, we must instead be “rich toward God.”

The writer of the letter to the Christians at Colossae couldn’t agree more. Here too we hear a caution against greed – as well as other behaviors that attach us to this world. I wonder. As you heard the catalogue of sins, did you also hear that greed is idolatry? And did you remember that idolatry – worship of false gods – is just what the Israelites were doing to anger God in our reading from Hosea? What is more important, the writer to the Colossians reminds us that, as Jesus’ disciples, as people who have been dressed in the new clothes of baptism, we are to live a new and different kind of life from that which we lived previously. We are to direct our lives toward God, and we are to “seek the things that are above, where Christ is….”

How are we to do this? What does it mean to be “rich toward God,” or to set our minds on “things that are above?” The reading from Hosea reminds us of God’s great love and compassion for us, but offers us no alternative to a life of idolatry and fleeting pursuits. Jesus, in our Gospel reading, implicitly condemns the rich man for his self-centered intent to build bigger barns and live a life of ease. However, Jesus does not tell us what the rich man should have done instead, nor does he tell us what being “rich toward God” means. The writer to the Colossians lists the bad habits we need to give up. However, other than suggesting that Christ has overcome all ethnic divisions, he does not tell us what habits and virtues we need to cultivate. How shall we give up our attachment to earthly things and seek the “things that are above?”

Beginning in the fourth century, women and men sought to follow Jesus’ teachings about possessions by withdrawing from society and living in isolated communities. In Egypt and North Africa, communities sprang up in the desert, dedicated to the simple life. In the sixth century, Benedict of Nursia wrote his famous Rule for monastic communities that stressed living the simple life in common, forsaking most pleasures of the flesh, respecting the needs of others, and committing oneself to remaining in community. Benedict’s Rule proved to be so influential that it still provides the template for the rule of almost every Roman Catholic and Anglican vowed community. Most of us are not prepared to join monastic communities. Even so, there are ways to create a “monastery of the heart,” to use the phrase of Benedictine sister Joan Chittister. And as her commentary on Benedict’s Rule so insightfully suggests, it is possible for Benedict to guide even us secular twenty-first century followers of Jesus.

What are some ways we might begin becoming “rich toward God” and seeking “things that are above?” For starters, we can be honest about the source of our wealth. The rich man in Jesus’ parable behaved as if he alone were responsible for the abundant produce of the land. In truth, it was the fertile soil, good weather, hard work of his farmhands, and domestic support of his womenfolk that produced the abundance. The same is true for us – all of us. None of us is self-made. If you are sitting here, you have been gifted – even if you received no inheritance from your parents, even if you struggled to finish school with scholarships and loans, even if you’ve worked hard every day of your life. Many of us were fortunate to have had supportive families, enough food, and an education provided by other people’s taxes. Our parents took us to the doctor and dentist. We’ve had roads, and street lights, police and fire protection, hospitals and churches. We’ve been fortunate to live in a web – a village if you will – that has helped make us what we are and enabled us to enjoy much good fortune and comparative wealth. None of us lives on the streets, and all of us have a good idea of where our next meal is coming from. Understanding that it is by good fortune that we have our houses, clothing, food, Kindles, Ipads, and whatever, and that we are alive and able to do God’s work, is the first step towards being “rich towards God.”

Second, we can look at our checkbook. Where are we actually using our resources? Do we have a balanced life? Or are we tied down by possessions? Can we simplify our lives? In her commentary on the Benedictine Rule, Chittister reminds us that our possessions tie us to the earth. “They clutter our space; they crimp our hearts; they sour our souls. Benedict says that the answer is that we not allow ourselves to have anything beyond life’s simple staples….” What areas of our lives can we declutter and simplify? What are we no longer using that we can give to others?

And then we need to actively consider how we might share our wealth with others. In the first half of life, that may mean especially providing for the needs of our own families. However, in the second half of life, sharing our wealth should mean considering the needs of others outside our families. In both halves of life, we need to be intentional in our use of our resources. We need to be intentional in our gifts to the church, as well as to other institutions that we support. John Wesley is reported to have admonished his followers, “Do you not know that God entrusted you with that money (all above what buys necessities for your families) to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to help the stranger, the widow, the fatherless; and, indeed, as far as it will go, to relieve the wants of all mankind? How can you, how dare you, defraud the Lord, by applying it to any other purpose?” Ultimately, being “rich toward God” and using our wealth to seek the “things that are above” mean using our resources to benefit others. If we want to leave a lasting legacy, if we want to ensure that our lives are more than “vanity,” then we must have a plan for how that is to be done – a will. The Book of Common explicitly directs me to instruct you to make wills, younger people to ensure that their dependents are properly provided for, and older people to ensure that their legacy honors God.

Finally, we need to remember that concern for possessions – of any kind – makes it difficult, perhaps impossible, to be open to God. Ultimately, we are all naked and empty-handed before God. We begin our lives naked and empty-handed, and we end them that way. In between our birth and death we thank God for God’s great love and compassion. We seek to learn how we can become rich toward God. We ask God to help us to travel light, to help us to let go of all that gets in between ourselves and God. Then we pray to know how to intentionally use our possessions to further God’s agenda in the world. Truly blessed are those who can say, “All things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee.”