The sermon from last week in which I try to explain the hardest parable in the Bible

Sermon for Proper 20C
Luke 16:1-13


I hardly do anything that my preaching professor taught me.
He said, “Don’t self-disclose! Nobody wants to hear about your wife, your vacation, or the cute things your kids say.” Of course, I talk about my family all the time in sermons. He says, don’t preach yourself, preach the gospel! I agree with that in sentiment and principle but the truth is, the gospel lands somewhere and that somewhere is me and it’s you.
There is one thing that my professor taught me that I actually grudgingly accept. He taught us that we must always preach the hardest text. The lectionary gives us four readings every week: the Old Testament, the Psalm, the New Testament epistle and then a reading from the Gospels. So typically I will heed my professor’s injunction to preach the hard texts because it is the hard texts that you, the congregation, are wondering about.
Which brings us to the gospel. One writer that I consulted this week about this text said that today’s reading is the weirdest story in the gospels. And I’d agree whole-heartedly. Let’s dive in and see what sticks and catches, what’s tough and hard to understand.
The whole passage seems to be divided between the parable that Jesus tells and then his comment on it. He tells the story of a rich man who has heard some rumors about some mismanagement of his property by the man he hired to manage it. So he summons the manager and says, “What’s this I hear about you? Show me your books, because you’re about to be fired!”
The manager then goes on to hatch a scheme, he goes to those who owe the master and he essentially cooks the books. He makes their debts smaller, for one he cuts it in half, for another he also gives a huge reduction. The manager says that his motivations are basically to win friends and influence people so that when he gets canned he’ll have made some friends, who I suppose can help him out later.
Now, let’s pause here for a minute because everybody wants to argue about what the exact financial arrangements were. Was the manager not so much cooking the books as uncooking them? You see, back then it was common practice among the tax collectors to collect the required tax and then add a little more to the top for their own benefit. Was the manager doing something like this? Maybe.
Or maybe the manager was cheating his boss. Maybe since he knew he was caught in a bind and in no way would be keeping his job, he decided to buy some favors and friends with money that wasn’t his. Maybe he was counting on losing his job so he thought he’d seal the deal with this underhanded deal; you know, in for a penny in for a pound!
Whatever the reason for his actions, one of the more vexing parts of this passage is that the master commends this behavior and Jesus seems to in some way as well.
What’s going on here? The manager is a hero of sorts in the story and the master embraces him for his shrewdness. It is indeed strange. Are we to applaud and emulate the manager for undoing the usury that he had been engaged in? Are we meant to look to the manager as a paragon of virtue as he buys friends with money that isn’t his?
Let’s have Jesus clear this whole thing up. Take it away Jesus: “I tell you, make friends for yourself by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.”
Huh?
It’s more than a little confusing because it doesn’t sound very Christian. Is Jesus saying that we should be manipulative and cheat? Is he saying that we should be like those in the world?
Well, he kind of is. It turns out that this manager, this “Saint Shyster,”as I call him, may have a thing or two to teach us. I think the point of this whole story is that Jesus is taking us to the side and saying, “Look, I’ve been doing a lot of talking about lost sheep, and coins and sons, it’s all about the economy of the Kingdom of God. This economy of God stuff is upside down. God will come after you and all kinds of other people, no matter the cost. It’s not fair. It is actually unfair and gratuitous how gracious God is, you will be offended, offended! at how loving and forgiving God can be.” “But,” Jesus seems to be saying, “the Kingdom of God is not here fully yet. I don’t want you children of light to be caught unawares.”
You see, Jesus is showing us that the gospel does indeed land somewhere. The gospel lands in the world, in our world. This invasion by God of history and our lives lands right here, and it’s alien. And then each of us has to figure out how this life will now look. And Jesus doesn’t want us to be naïve about it. He wants us to have open eyes, without the rose-colored glasses.
Jesus says, go ahead and be smart with the ways of the world. Get some friends by those means. It’s ok.
But he doesn’t leave it there; Jesus gives us a stark reminder that the money will be gone. He says today, “when it is gone,” not if it is gone, but when. Jesus knows that it’s not about the money, that stuff is fleeting. But go ahead and know how to use it, get some friends.
It’s funny; it’s not necessarily the ends justifying the means but the ends justifying a new end: the friends who will welcome us into the eternal homes.
This might be the key to our beginning to understand this parable: all this talk of cheating and cooking the books, friends and eternity, homes and hating. Maybe, just maybe, this is Jesus’ way of telling us that this gospel-life, this Jesus-living is a messy business. It is never a once and for all affair. Instead, our discipleship to Jesus is a daily encounter with honest and dishonest wealth, with a million little ethical dilemmas. If the devil is in the details, you can be assured that Jesus is also in the details of how we live, how we buy, how we sell, how we relate to those we love and those we don’t.
The money is going to be here, and then it will be gone. It’s a symbol of our common life, and that’s why Jesus says to make friends by it. And we do.
Look; I’ve been to your houses. I’ve been to the swim meets and the scout meetings. You all are friends. I’d bet the majority of you are here because you have made friends first and then were invited to Saint John’s. And that is good. This is how Saint John’s has grown over the years. And this is precisely what Jesus is talking about. The money and the sociability is a means to friends but those friends are now the means to the larger end of being the Church. Of being that beloved community that is engaged in the work of justice and peace, and reconciliation and love. We were made friends first by our social standing and common neighborhoods and swim teams and the PTA, but now; wow, now we find ourselves at this table.
How did we get here? You were just some guy I played tennis with.
How did we get here? You were just a lady I met at book club who offered me chardonnay.
How did we get here, you were just on my soccer team and asked me if I wanted to go to something called EYC.
How did we get here? Now; now we are gathered at this table where the most unusual prayer is said, where it describes this other world where God is breaking through to show us what reality has been all along: a creation that is not broken or in strife but is loved and loving, where there is enough for everyone and we are all made whole in God’s widening embrace.
Here we are, a people brought together by dishonest wealth, but that wealth has brought us friends. And we friends are surprised to find that God had a lot more in store for us here, because we are a lot more than friends, we are fellow travelers on this road, even more than that, we are siblings in the family of God.
Huh! I thought this reading was tough. Turns out that it’s not so bad after all; this life following Jesus can be hard, but it’s not all hard, after all, I’ve got you to help me: my friends.

Sermon for Luke 14:25-33

Here is the Scripture
A Strange Case of Identity

“Whoever comes to me and doesn’t hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sister, yes, even life itself cannot be my disciple… None of you can be my disciple unless you give up all your possessions.”
You know, I could use a break from all these tough readings the lectionary has been giving us. For the past three months it’s just been one difficult saying of Jesus after another. You know: “Let the dead bury their own dead, this very night your life is being demanded of you, the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour, I came to bring fire to the earth!” And the zinger of them all: “You hypocrites!”
I could use a break from all these hard sayings. Why can’t we get the touchy-feely Jesus, where is the Jesus of the hallmark cards? Where is the Jesus carrying me on the beach? If I could choose which readings come up I’d choose one where he’s a real nice guy; maybe one of the infancy stories where he doesn’t say anything at all. That’s the Jesus that is best for me, the one that doesn’t say anything. But alas, no luck today; today we get the tough Jesus.
“Unless you hate…” I’ve wrangled with this passage all week and I can tell you it’s not good news. The Greek word used here is , it means “hate.” There’s no getting around it. Jesus is saying that we cannot be his disciples unless we hate our families, our possessions, even our own lives. The word is hate, if you wanted to you could squeeze a slightly softer definition of what Jesus says,  could mean, sometimes; detest. Isn’t that so much better? “Unless you detest your children and spouse, you cannot be my disciple.” Nice.
You know, in the gospel today, it doesn’t sound very Christian, but to me it certainly sounds a lot like Jesus. Can you hear that today? He doesn’t sound very Christian, but he certainly sounds like Jesus. I think that is what is so shocking about what Jesus is saying today, it’s because we have warped Jesus’ radical message to such a degree that we have equated Christianity with mere niceness, manners, and good citizenship. But here it is, it’s unavoidable, he says, “Unless you hate your life, you cannot be my disciple.” It occurs to me that Jesus would have done very well with a press agent, you know, someone to clear his messages before they went public. I mean, how exactly are we supposed to grow the church with such a strange thing to say? People like their lives, people like their possessions, people, generally at least, like their families. What’s he getting at anyway?
If you take away all my possessions, all my family, and even my life; you aren’t left with much at all. It seems that Jesus is stripping us of all our many identities so that we can rediscover our primary identity in him. Jesus is showing us how we need to be willing to let go of the most fundamental identities and subdue all of them so that we can be identified through him and him alone. To follow Christ means to let go of all other possessions all other identities. We have to be Christians first and foremost. We let go of being parents, and children, male and female, gay and straight, black and white, American and Southern, paleo and vegetarian, even Carolina and State! All these many identities which shape who we are need to be taken off in favor of putting on Christ.
And this following of Christ first and foremost, before all other identities, complicates everything! Some people think that when we follow Christ everything comes into stark focus, everything is “just easier.” We don’t follow Christ to get the easy answer to life, we follow Christ because Christ is true! And our following of him complicates life. Wouldn’t it be easier to carry grudges and write people off that have wronged you? It would! But instead we have to forgive and seek reconciliation. Wouldn’t it be easier to say about our enemies: Kill ‘em all? Yes, it would, instead we are supposed to pray for our enemies and be peacemakers; even though advocating for peace sounds utterly crazy right now.
The cost of discipleship is time, and energy, and life. This Jesus-life will cost you your life; meaning you may actually die as a result of living the Gospel, but more likely it will cost you your life as you now live it. Following Jesus will make you live in a different way that can look strange to those around you.
But God does a funny thing in this whole arrangement; he hides good news in the midst of all this hate and loss of life: when we drop our foundational relationships and our defining possessions and we enter into his heart, we find that we can love our family, neighbors, and our enemies more than we possibly could have on our own. All this hating of our families and our own lives actually gives us the wherewithal to love them all the more, but this time through the expanding heart of Jesus Christ.
It’s no wonder that C.S. Lewis used the peculiar symbol of a wardrobe as the access to the land of Narnia. Through this dark and confining wardrobe one is able to break through to a larger wondrous world. It’s through this difficult teaching of Jesus, through this dark work of detesting our families and possessions that we can get to the foundational and fundamental relationship with Jesus which will allow us all to, in turn love them all the more.
Step through.
Do the hard work of letting go of those people and things you possess and that possess you: your children, your relationships, your security, your pride, and even yourself. Do this painful work of going through the wardrobe so that you can enter the larger world of Christ’s unconditional love for all.
Leave everything behind. Leave it all behind and enter a world of so much more.

Crisis of the imagination

I'm going to go ahead and say this out loud. I don't have all the answers to how Christians ought to respond to all the various problems of the world. Big surprise right? 

 I might be a pacifist though justified war is attractive. Though I confess that just war is mostly attractive because it allows for violence which I harbor plenty of in my heart and mind.

What it boils down to is that I haven't had occasion to think these things through, and it's usually not something I'd do unless I had to. (this is the bugbear of parish ministry by the way, too many meetings and not enough study, don't get me wrong I love my work and I don't expect to study for a living, but the Christian tradition is HUGE and to think that we got all we needing seminary is laughable.) I don't feel up to the task of responding to this very large question, I will work hard to get some clarity. I will pray too.

What I will do. I will commit myself to getting educated about Christian responses to war and violence and I will review my findings here as often as I can. I hope you will join me in this exploration.

Here is a good analysis of the situation in Syria:

And this:

Finally: Eternal God, in whose perfect kingdom no sword is drawn
but the sword of righteousness, no strength known but the
strength of love: So mightily spread abroad your Spirit, that
all peoples may be gathered under the banner of the Prince of
Peace, as children of one Father; to whom be dominion and
glory, now and for ever. Amen.

On being a hermeneutical, symbolic guru

In seminary I had some business cards worked up. I had no business so I put on it: dad, banjo player, student body president, hermenutical person. For those non-theological nerds; a hermeneutic is an interpretation, a lens by which we view the world, and also texts, like the Bible. I was keenly aware then, and even more now, that the life of a minister is essentially to help people interpret their lives in the light of the gospel.

Being a symbolic person can be fraught with problems and opportunities. A few years ago, a community that I belong to began to tell a different kind of story about me and began to invest me with authority, there was even a special ceremony when one of the leaders of my community prayed to God to, in some way, inhabit my life and make me a priest. It's called ordination.

Since then I have settled into a job as a spiritual leader, a preacher, and a pastor to a community of faith in Charlotte NC. I almost always wear a special uniform that signifies to all who see it that I am a representative of the Church. When I go in public, most people do a double take when they see me. Many years ago, I had a conversation with a friend and we lamented the necessity of small talk. I suggested that we wear a signifying article of clothing whereby it would tell the world that we were open to deep conversation, and were willing to get to it quickly. Now both he and I wear a collar. When people come into my office they usually start crying. I usually don't say anything more than, "So what's on your mind?" They cry, I think, because I'm listening. I'm listening, but also I represent and symbolize a larger reality. and they are primed to have their lives interpreted and plumbed to see where God is moving.

Sometimes I see that being a symbolic person means that for some of the people in my community that I stand as a proxy for their own faith; "I may not have faith, but my priest does." There are some priests who support this sick notion so that they can hold more authority; but to hold ourselves up as the paragon of faithful living will eventually take its toll. The Pew research Council has shown that this kind of thinking has a debilitating affect on clergy health.

The film maker, Vikram Gandhi has pulled off an amazing experiment. As a young student of religion, the U.S. born Indian-American became disillusioned with religion and especially the gurus of his family religion, Hinduism. Gandhi decided to become a guru himself, cultivate a teaching and a following, and finally reveal himself as a charlatan. This is no spoiler of course, since the first few minutes of his documentary, Kamure, show him anxiously rehearsing for the "Great Unveiling."

One might question the ethics of one who would purposely dupe the naive but that would miss the point of Gandhi's intentions. Gandhi and his teachings as his "ideal self," Sri Kamure, is that each person has within them what they need to cultivate their own happiness. Indeed, as Kamure's students grow they develop as their own gurus and even teach their teacher their own individual teachings. It is this convolution which makes the film and the man, Kamure, so charming.

What I find so fascinating about this film is that the teaching is so overtly anti-guru; which garners him more and more devotees. His students even routinely look into the camera and earnestly talk about the non-necessity of gurus and then look longingly toward the reluctant objection of affection.

Alan Watts said that a guru is someone who will pick your pocket and then sell your watch back to you. Kamure, the guru and the film, do just that.

The Real Economy, a sermon

Luke 14:1, 7-14
The Real Economy

Has Miss Manners has invaded the gospels today? Why is Jesus so interested in seating arrangements anyway? It seems that he is trying to show how life will be lived for those who choose to follow him. And this life will look a little bit, or maybe as today’s reading shows us, a lot different, from the surrounding culture.
It’s a question that has plagued the church from the very beginning: “How then shall we live?” Every generation of Christians from those who originally heard Jesus’ words up to today have asked the same question, “How do we live in this culture, the one I was born into, the one I live in now, yet still respond in an authentic way to the call of Jesus?”
It’s a tough question, with a complex answer. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something. Trust me on this, if the answer to the question of how do we live in response to Jesus? begins with the words, “Well, you just…” Walk away, because you are about to be handed a parcel of goods that are not so good.
This is complex because we have all, before we could talk, were enculturated, conditioned, and otherwise trained to think in the cultural language and economies of our society. And that society is not the one that Jesus is talking about.
Our modern, western society has its own values. We value hard work, perseverance, innovation, wealth, competitiveness, pursuit, and enjoyment. All these things are good, but our system, our economic system, does not have an inherent moral center, nor ought we to expect it to. The Invisible Hand is neutral and we have learned time and again that mutual self-interest for the collective betterment of society is fraught with problems, not the least of which is the crazy assumption that all people are equal in society and have the same access to the resources which build wealth.
More insidious than the obvious injustice of our system is the spiritual crisis that it perpetuates. All of us have a void within us; a void that we try to fill with things that satisfy us. And it just so happens that our economic system is tailor-made for finding more and more to satisfy us. Look, I’m not blaming capitalism. I’m a capitalist. I have a pension, never mind that I am paid by other capitalists who voluntarily give money into a community chest which we redistribute to various staff members, ministries, and outreach opportunities. Economies are complex, all economies. People living within a totalitarian socialistic state also suffer from this human void I am talking about. We have this hole in our lives and we are on a search to fill it, to satisfy this hunger. Economies are created to deal with, and capitalize on, that void.
Economy is an interesting word. It comes from the Greek word oikos, meaning household. When we talk about the economy we are talking about the household of a society, how it is managing its household. This is why budgets are called moral documents. Have you ever heard that: a budget is a moral document? If you want to know what someone thinks is important, look at their budget. This works for nations and people alike.
Today Jesus is teaching us about the economy, the household, of the Kingdom of God. Jesus is showing us how we are to live in this world, but his way. And it’s counter-cultural. Instead of the culture that teaches us to be better, faster, stronger; Jesus is urging us to take a back seat. He is telling us that the humble will be exalted, and also that those who exalt themselves will be humbled. Not only that, but that we should be about the business of giving to those to whom we have no hope of getting paid back! Not getting paid back? That’s just bad business! No wonder Jesus stopped being a carpenter! I imagine Jesus would go bankrupt thinking like that, he probably made furniture and doors for poor folks who couldn’t pay him a dime!
But that’s the teaching, this is what he says, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you.”
It’s interesting, many economic historians assume that economies were initially built on barter systems, and they generally are; but what we are finding out is a little more interesting. It seems that the straight barter doesn’t really work like that. For example, let’s say I have an ox and you have goats. You need the ox, but I don’t need the goats right now. So I give you the ox, and now you are in my debt, for, say, five goats. That debt, right there is the beginning of all economies. That debt gets moved around and re-symbolized and re-symbolized into currency and now into ones and zeros that the banks move around and invest.
But here, in the words of Jesus we learn about another economy, an economy that is almost unimaginable: an economy that is based on the gift with no hope, or expectation, of re-payment. This is the grace economy. This is the economy of the good news of God. Jesus is removing the debt, the debt, the void, the thing that we are all after to satisfy; Jesus is inviting us to leave it alone, don’t try to fill it.
This is the meaning of Christian freedom: whereas the culture endeavors to give us freedom to pursue our desires which we think will satisfy us, but Christ gives us the freedom from our need to always seek satisfaction. The economy of God usurps the normal ordering of our lives. And why shouldn’t it? People at Saint John’s are always asking me, “Why do you always have to talk about being counter-cultural?” My answer is because God is counter-cultural! If he were just like us, we wouldn’t worship him! God is different from you! And he aches in that difference. God says in the prophet Isaiah, “your thoughts are not like my thoughts,” and how he aches for our thoughts to be more and more similar.
My brothers and sisters. You will never be satisfied with getting more and more. There is always something more to be had, something more to be. The world will never ever ever ever say to you, “You’ve done enough. You are enough. Why not just rest awhile and enjoy your family, don’t buy anything you don’t need. Just…be.” The world will never say that, nor should we expect it to. But Jesus is calling us to imagine a gift economy, a grace-living where we stop trying to fill the void, we stop keeping track of debts and keeping score.
Let me close this with a story, [this is from Peter Rollins' Idolatry of God, used with permission]
It seems that there was a successful Texan. (all stories that feature Texans are automatically good, in my opinion) Well, he had done quite well for himself and had a sense that he wanted to find out more about where he came from, so he did some looking around in his family tree. Low and behold the Texan found out that he had a cousin in Ireland.
Well, the Texan flew out there and walked up to the door and met his long lost cousin Seamus. Seamus said, “Well, I suppose you’d like to see the family land.” “Yes I would indeed,” said the Texan. SO Seamus takes his cousin out in the back yard and says, “You see that old chicken coop over there? That’s the southern boundary of my land. You see that fence right there? That’s the eastern boundary of the land. You see that lawn mower? That the western boundary of the land.”
The Texan scoffed. “Well, let me tell you, I could drive all day south and never reach the southern boundary of my land. And I could drive all day east and never reach the eatern boundary of my land, and I could drive all day west and never reach the western boundary!”
“Yeah,” says Seamus, “I used to have a car like that.”
You see, Seamus is so outside the game of being in the seat of honor that he can’t even understand that his Texan cousin is trying to belittle him.
The gift economy!
Take the lower seat, invite those and give to those who cannot pay you back.
Give it a try.