November 17 revised, Proper 28; Contradiction 11: The Worst of Times and the Best of Times

Malachi 4:1-2a,
Psalm 98,
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13,
Luke 21:5-19

Live recording of the sermon

The Lord Jesus says this during the last week of his life, a few days after Palm Sunday. He’s teaching in the Temple in Jerusalem. The Temple is busy with pilgrims arriving to celebrate the Passover.

The Temple is a grand complex of buildings and courtyards; it’s a combination cathedral, White House, and Capitol Building. The Temple has been under construction for fifty years, since 19 BC, in a long-term project of expansion and lavish aggrandizement, with the general backing of the Roman government, and it’s being paid for by taxes and donations. It won’t be finished for another thirty years, in AD 64, and then only six years after that, in AD 70, the whole thing will be burned and demolished by the Roman army of Titus Caesar.

The Lord Jesus was predicting it. He was not speaking here about the end of the world, despite how many Christians keep on reading it this way. He was speaking to his own context. He was predicting the impending catastrophe of Israel. The demolition of the temple. The destruction of Jerusalem. The expulsion of the Jewish population from their own capital city. The exile once again. All of this at the hands of the Romans.

The Lord Jesus could see it coming. He wasn’t the only one. The Jewish leaders feared this too — they who had to manage the Roman occupiers from the underside and keep the lid on their own turbulent people and their aspirations for independence. Over six decades, Jesus was just one of some fifteen patriotic agitators claiming to be “messiah”. Most of them were open to using violence (just as we did in 1776). In the name of God their followers ambushed Roman soldiers and terrorized Samaritans and murdered each other, and finally the Romans had enough, destroying the Temple just forty years after Our Lord’s prediction.

I leave it to your own judgment whether Jesus predicted this out of clear-headed political insight or from some miraculous vision, or both. Biblical prophecy is always both literal and metaphorical, always both political and spiritual, local and global, historical and eternal. In that sense it was the end of the world. Jesus was speaking of a catastrophic adjustment in the religion of the Bible.

He was non-violent, but he was a revolutionary, and he caused a global change: from a religion that was centered geographically and focused politically and defined by ethnicity to a world-embracing and supra-political movement claiming universality, addressing every nation and the life on earth of every human being. It was a whole new way of serving the God of the Bible, and a whole new way of living in this world.

What I do not leave to your own judgment is whether this trouble for Jerusalem was the result of God’s manipulation of historical events or the predictable result of human politics — that is, the cause and effect of what happens when subject peoples act in certain ways against their brutal overlords. It was the latter.

The only manipulation of historical events was God’s incarnation in the Son of Mary and Joseph, and his teaching, and his crucifixion and his bodily resurrection. That was enough for God to do.

That one great singularity has been quite enough for God to insert into the ordinary course of human events in order to catalyze the long-term judgment of the world. So that the nations judge themselves. The principalities and powers expose themselves. The living Word of the Lord Jesus is the once-for-all and perfectly sufficient catalyst by which the truth keeps coming out about the world, and about the pretensions of our empires and our self-destructions and our devices and desires, and about our simple daily hopes and fears.

In this judgment of the world we are given a critical part to play, and that is by means of a very strange strategy: little communities of Jesus scattered through the empire. Little congregations, fragile, powerless, like in Thessalonika. What a contradictory strategy for the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, by which to exercise his Lordship and dominion over all the earth. I mean the Thessalonian Board of Deacons needs instruction on whom they can give free food to and whom not, and the Thessalonian Board of Elders needs advice on what do with those freeloaders and busybodies that every church attracts, and is this the strategy of God for overcoming the world?

Yes, our little communities of Jesus are the squadrons and battalions in the army of the Lord of Hosts. But our only weapon is our witness, our only strategy is our testimony to the Word of God. We’re like United Nations peacekeepers, we’re like the Canadian army, we have to have the same instinct for world domination as Canadians do. Hah!

This strategy of witness is not based on the testimony of individuals, despite the emphasis of evangelicalism, but on the testimony of congregations, even little congregations; and that not by their public statements or pronouncements, but by their life together — how their mutual behavior with each other gives form and shape and character to the Words of God which they rehearse. We are the witnesses. That’s all. We are not the judges, nor the juries, nor prosecutors nor public defenders, we are just the witnesses. That’s enough. And because it’s from our life together more than from what we say, that’s a lot. 

I know for myself that often I just want to go to church and worship God and then go home. No coffee hour, thank you, no gossip, no nervous conversations, no membership, no committee work, all the stuff that comes with congregations, pledging, tithing, obligations, weeknight meetings, it’s like one more co-op to go with the food co-op and the building I live in.

That’s why I always go to church when I’m on vacation, because that’s when I can just walk in and worship God and walk right out again. I don’t have to do all this other stuff. Do you wish for that when you come here? You’re allowed to. We give you room for that, as long as you need it. We will not judge you, because we are not your judges.

But you know you can’t love God if you don’t love your neighbor, and being forgiven of your trespasses means you forgive those who trespass against you, especially church members, and the worship of God requires ethics, so you practice your ethics on your fellow worshipers. And thus a group of worshipers who practice their ethics on their fellow worshipers is what you would call a community of Jesus.

That’s why we do this, Old First, this community of Jesus within the community of Brooklyn: contradictory but not antagonistic, contradictory but not fearful, contradictory but not angry, not defensive, not different, not even distinctive, but fully engaged in the same life of the world with everybody else, in the same schools and the same soccer leagues and the same restaurants — but then also by our life together as a fragile congregation bearing witness to the foolishness of the Cross and the impossibility of the Sovereignty of God.

It is the best of times and the worst of the times. We live with the great contradiction of the absolute sovereignty of God on the one hand, and on the other, the freedom and success of pride and prejudice and vengeance and violence and hatred and destruction in the world. The obvious temptation is for us to live defensively in anger and in fear, as if our Christian duty in our culture is to defend a better past, or preserve a Christian nation or Christian civilization, or protect our Christian values. Many Christians feel the need to do that in America, but that is like fighting to defend the temple in Jerusalem. As Jesus says, “Do not go after them.”

Of course America is under judgment, but not by us. We are not the judges nor the jury, for every nation must now judge itself against the standards of the gospel, exposing to itself its violence, exposing to itself its greed, exposing to itself its disregarding of the poor. Of the contradictory patterns of healing and generosity and love we are witnesses. Even in our weakness, especially in our weakness, for then it is Jesus who is exposed in us and in our common life.

The whole point of this sermon is to encourage you, congregation of Old First, so that you “not be weary in doing what is right.” You are tempted by our weakness and by your experience of suffering which contradict the promises of God. And even the promises can be contradictory. Jesus says, “Some of you they will put to death, but not a hair of your head will perish.” So, you’ll die but with a full head of hair? Of course, prophetic language is never not both literal and metaphorical. How about this: “Old First, you will be betrayed by your colleagues and even hated because of the name of Jesus, but not a rib from your sanctuary ceiling will ever fall.”

But of course it’s how we deal with the falling of our ceiling that is our chance to witness. We bear witness by the priorities that we set for our community in such a trying situation, where we put our energy and love. Because as our preacher (Rev. Dr. Steve Pierce) said to us last week, Old First, you are not your building. You are not your pastor, you are not your history, you are not your program. You are your community of Jesus within the community of Brooklyn welcoming persons of every race, ethnicity, and orientation to worship, serve, and love God and to love your neighbors as yourselves. You just do this, and you let God take care of judging the world and saving it. It is God who loves it, after all, and more than you do!

Copyright © 2013 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

November 3, Proper 26: Contradictions 10: Zacchaeus

Isaiah 1:10-18, Psalm 32:1-8, 2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12, Luke 19:1-10

One of our elders was in the Midwest at one of our Christian colleges, and a professor there who is an acquaintance of mine introduced herself to him. He told me that she said that she wanted to meet him because Daniel was always boasting about Old First. She meant it well, but when I heard this I thought to myself, “Oh dear, I do go on, I must be such a bore.” So I was comforted by the epistle for this week, 2nd Thessalonians 1:4, where St. Paul writes: “Therefore we ourselves boast of you among the churches of God.”

I do boast of you. I know there is significant self-interest in my doing so, it makes me look good, so please forgive me, but I celebrate the possibility of a real and vital Christian congregation. You exhibit what St. Paul writes: “Your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of everyone of you for one another is increasing.” Yet, while it’s true that Old First is facing some daunting challenges, we cannot really say that our church has to endure persecutions and afflictions, not compared to what churches endure in Syria and Egypt and Indonesia. Still, as individuals many of you are enduring great afflictions and even some persecutions, and yet you remain steadfast and faithful. And yes, we could always do better, and yes, we must always be praying that God will make us worthy of his call, but you can believe that God will continue to fulfill by his power every good resolve that you make, and every work of faith that you attempt, that the name of Jesus may be glorified in you, Old First. Oh yes, I boast of you.

You as a congregation are evidence that the Christian faith is not just an ideal, and it’s more solid than a mystery up in the air. It’s a real live thing for real life in the real world, and you give it shape and space within the structures and systems of the world.

True enough, our churchly structures and systems are always compromised, and always at least a bit complicit in the corrupted systems of the world, and we always fall short of the glory of God. As I said last week, the gospel both calls you to religion and also tells you that your religion never measures up. That ongoing contradiction we heard again this morning in Isaiah’s condemnation of the very sacramental practices which the Law of God ordained.

Of course the problem was that the sacramental practices were not accompanied by the more costly practices of seeking justice and rescuing the oppressed and caring for the poor. But then immediately the prophet offers cleansing and absolution if they confess the truth about themselves. That confession and absolution is what I’m going to call today a “feedback-loop”.

We can say that even though our practice of the Christian faith is never pure and that it never reaches its own ideal, it has built within it a number of effective feedback-loops for repentance and reconciliation and revival, which make the whole thing very doable in real time. It is doable and you are doing it. Yes, there are contradictions built into the Christian faith, as we have seen for ten weeks now, but those contradictions are not discrediting—they are rather honest to God and to our experience, and they are not deadening but generative and creative, and we can work them out in real terms in real life. It’s doable.

Which brings me to our gospel lesson, the story of Zacchaeus. I will offer an interpretation that contradicts the common one, including all my previous sermons on this passage. Until today I have always followed Calvin and other interpreters in assuming that Zacchaeus was converted here, that his encounter with the Lord had turned him from being a bad guy tax-collector to a penitential tax-collector. This common interpretation is what you would expect from our English translation (NRSV) of verse 8: “Look, half of my possessions I will give to the poor, and if I have defrauded anything to anyone I will give it back fourfold.” Notice the verbs in the future tense, “I will give to the poor, I will give it back fourfold.”

But this past week I noticed that the Greek verbs are in the present tense. The Greek original reads thus: “Look, half of my income I give to the poor, and from whomever I have wrongfully exacted anything, I give it back fourfold.” He’s already doing it. Do you believe that such is possible of a government official? I don’t think the crowd does. I don’t think the Pharisee would from the parable last week.

But he’s rich! Jesus just accepting him would contradict what Jesus said in Luke chapter 6, “Woe to you who are rich now,” and what Jesus said in chapter 18, that “it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” But at the same time, how about if the rich man has built in a feedback loop, by giving the half of his income to the poor? Remember from last month the parable of the Crooked Steward, when Jesus said, “Make friends for yourselves with unrighteous mammon, so that when it runs out, you will be welcomed into the eternal habitations.” Isn’t that what Zacchaeus is doing?

Okay, he’s not perfect, indeed, he is complicit in a corrupting system, but who of you are not? (This is the true meaning of the doctrine of Total Depravity---we're all corrupted.) Look, the Romans would demand those taxes be collected anyway, so why not do it in such a way to benefit the poor? And if it also makes him rich, is there anything good that anyone of you does without some small measure of self-interest? Like when I boast of you?

You will ask why he wrongfully exacted anything from anyone to begin with. Well, that will have been inevitable, the way the system worked. As I said last week, the Roman system of taxation required some level of legalized extortion. But Zacchaeus, to his credit, had a feedback-loop, and the fourfold repayment was generous compensation for the trouble the system had caused. And so in complicated and complicit circumstances, Zacchaeus manages to find a way to demonstrate the economic values of the kingdom of God. I think this must have encouraged Jesus the week before he died.

So then why are the people grumbling? Are they’re jealous that he’s rich? Or that, even for all the good he does, he’s still complicit with the Romans, and he’s unkosher from handling unclean money? It’s really Jesus they are grumbling at, because he contradicts their expectations of whom the Lord accepts. They grumble at the sovereignty and freedom of the grace of God.

But the free and sovereign grace of God is very great comfort when you face the truth that everything that you do in your Christian life has some fault or flaw within it and always some complicity. Nothing you do is pure. Even every good thing that you do has some small measure in it of self-interest. And so you have to repent and be reconciled, and build into your life some realistic feedback-loops, some actions of selflessness and sacrifice. Not because God needs your sacrifice, but because you do. Not just to keep you humble, but to keep you tuned in to the grace of God. You have to build some contradictions into your own life in order to keep yourself on the homing signal of God’s free and sovereign love.

Tithing is one such thing. Because to be a Christian in the real world, in real time, with real things, must include your money. Tithing is a feedback-loop. It’s how you contradict the constant whispering of your evident self-interest, and how you set real limits on yourself. It’s a combination spiritual and economic exercise you need to do to keep in tune.

What we mean by tithing is that you give back to God the top percentage of your income. The Biblical goal is the top ten percent, but you can start with one percent if it is new to you, as long as it’s the top one percent of your budget, before you budget for anything else. And then every year you try to raise yourself by one percent again, till you reach ten. And yes, there is self-interest in your tithing, because of the services the church gives back to you. You get community, you get the Word of God in real terms, you get the means of repenting of your sins and reconciling yourself to God. You get music and education Look, you get back from what you give.

It goes without saying that teaching you to tithe is in the obvious self-interest of the church. Like, “you should tithe, and give it to us.” Which is why we build in many feedback-loops in the systems of Old First. But at the same time, it’s a realistic part of your participation in the Kingdom of God, because it’s in the form of congregations, like the Thessalonians, like the Park Slopians, like the Israelites, like the Brooklynites, it’s in the form of churches that the Christian faith takes real form in the real world. Old First is a "salvation-reality."

A church is not an end in itself, it must always look beyond itself and find its meaning in the larger scope and larger purposes of the Kingdom of God, and yet the Lord has made the church the necessary witness and first-fruit of the Kingdom of God. Your congregation makes the Christian faith something more solid than a mystery up in the air. Your congregation makes the Christian faith a real live thing for real life in the real world, and you give it shape and space within the structures and patterns of the world.

This shape and space deserve your participation. Every Sunday the Lord Jesus says to you, “You come down, because I’m going to your house today. And you are happy to welcome him. Today salvation has come into this house.”

Copyright © 2013 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

October 27, Proper 25: Contradictions 9: The Gospel Contradicts Religion

Jeremiah 14:7-10, 19-22, Psalm 84:1-6, 2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18, Luke 18:9-14

The Pharisee and the tax collector. The patriot and the collaborator. The Pharisee wants the Kingdom of God, literally and politically, and the tax collector works for the Empire of the Romans.

The Pharisee keeps himself clean and pure to be qualified for the Kingdom of God when it comes. The tax collector’s employment makes him unclean, handling unclean Roman coins, stamped with that idolatrous image of Caesar, which makes him a traitor to his own nation, and which makes of him a constant thief, in the eyes the people, as he earns his living by his surcharge on the tax, a sort of legalized extortion.

The older translations of the Bible styled the tax collector a “Publican,” so this is called the Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican, and despite our dislike of the Pharisees, this Publican would not have been your friend.

We miss the force of this parable if we read as if their prayers were Protestant private prayers. So let me give you its original context. There was only one temple in Israel, the one in Jerusalem. There were many synagogues, in all the towns. You could pray in synagogues, every week, on the Sabbath, as still is done, of course. But in the temple the prayers were offered every day, and not led by rabbis but by Levites and priests. Plus, the prayers in the temple were centered on the daily sacrifices, sacrifices of animals, of lambs — one at dawn and one at the ninth hour, say 3:00 pm, the sacrifices which made atonement for the sins of Israel. Once their sins were covered by the blood of the lamb,  they were permitted to make their prayers to God. The Levites ignited the incense, and as the smoke of the incense rose, the prayers rose up, from the Levites around the altar of the sacrifice, making supplication for the whole of Israel, from the people in attendance, making their own supplications and intercessions.

Also praying is this Pharisee. He’s not interceding or supplicating, he is lifting up his hands in thanksgiving. He’s off to the side so that he won’t get touched by anyone who might contaminate his purity. He is strict and more than strict, fasting more often than the Torah mandated, and tithing more completely than the Torah required. So we would love this guy to be a member of Old First, even if we’re irritated by his self-righteousness in thanking God that he’s such a righteous guy.

Also praying is that Publican, far off in the back, and quite unwelcome. He’s a bad man. Maybe he’s the guy who was giving all the trouble to that poor widow from the parable last week! He knows he’s bad. So he’s praying with his head down, and he’s beating his breast, like we did last month in the synagogue on the night of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. He prays, not just “God be merciful to me, a sinner,” but more literally and specifically, “God, let the Atonement be for me, the sinner.” He’s guilty, and he knows he has no right to talk to God apart from the bloody sacrifice which is offered to cover his sins.

And that’s why he’s the one who’s justified. That’s why he is rectified and qualified to enter the Kingdom of God. That’s the contradiction, that the righteous guy is reckoned as unqualified, and the unrighteous guy is reckoned as qualified. This is the gospel’s contradiction to religion, this is the paradox preached by Martin Luther, this is the antithesis instituted by John Calvin, this is the quite contrary doctrine of the Reformation, and because it is contrary we need reminding of it every week, we need to hear it every Sunday as the morning news.

It’s not that God prefers the Publican to the Pharisee. God would just as soon justify the good guy as the bad guy. But the Pharisee has not offered up himself. The Publican did. It was his bad self that he offered, but it was his true self. My wife put it this way: the Publican knows his life is a dirty business. The Pharisee doesn’t know that being human is a dirty business. The Pharisee doesn’t admit, not even to himself, that he’s just as needy of God’s grace as the Publican. It’s that tragedy of unawareness that I spoke about three weeks ago.

The Publican is aware of himself. And all the Publican has to offer to God is his own sinful self. The only gift he has to give to God is his need of God, and his need of God giving freely and indiscriminately back to him, without regard for his deserving it. The Lord Jesus does not say that the Publican went home to make amends, or try to be better to show how sorry he truly was. We’d like him to do that, we’d like him to stop extorting money from the people, but that would miss the point of the parable, that the grace of God is not conditioned by our proving it in our behavior.

Both of them are in us all the time. Don’t say, “Oh, I’m like the one and not the other.” You are always both. You have both in you. You have the contradiction running in you all the time. You compare yourself to others, and you justify yourself. You also know your guilt and you bow your head in shame. The gospel both judges you and comforts you. It resurrects you to new life but first it lays you dead. The gospel calls you to religion and it tells you your religion cannot measure up. The contradiction between religion and the gospel is one you recapitulate each week.

So what do you do? Take a clue from the epistle, from what St. Paul wrote to Timothy. He sounds a little like the Pharisee, almost like he’s boasting. “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race,” I’m not a loser, I’m a winner, “I have kept the faith. From now on there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give me on that day.” Well, St. Paul, aren’t you special.

Of course, considering the fact that he’s got prison chains on him while he writes this, he’s sort of got the right to speak like this. And he does not exalt himself by degrading other people. He does admit that other people did him wrong, that they did not support him, that they deserted him, but he asks that it not be counted against them. He wants grace for them too. He forgives them. He has to keep on forgiving them in his own mind, no doubt, because in his prison cell he’s reminded of their desertion every day again. His reason to forgive them is not in them, and not in himself, but in God, and the love and the grace of God, which is what he wants to be true to. 

So yes, take this clue from the epistle. Thank God for where you are, and what God has done for you, and then also love your enemies, and pray God’s grace and favor on those persons who have done you wrong. Be thankful to God, and reckon yourself among the Publicans who know their need of God. What God loves to see in you is your desire for God.

Today we will baptize Ronald, who has acted upon the desire of his life for God. We heard his testimony here last Spring, and he told us that from his childhood he believed in God, but that when in his youth he requested baptism, he was refused. He was not welcome in the Temple, so to speak, he was not welcome at the sacrifice or in the prayers. But like St. Paul, he kept his faith. That’s the remarkable gift of grace that Our Lord Jesus was working in him through the years, that Ronald did not reject his faith because of his rejection by the church. As St. Paul wrote, “no one came to my defense, but all deserted me.” But then, “May it not be counted against them,” which he has demonstrated today by seeking out the church again. He fought the good fight, he is finishing the race, he is keeping the faith, and the water and oil we will put upon his head will be his crown of righteousness.

His baptism is a gift of God for him but also for the rest of you. You are to see in the sacrament today a story of requited love. Not unrequited love, but requited love. It is the love of God that touches the contradictions in our lives to comfort them. This is the love of God which converts the tragedy of your unawareness to the comedy of your acknowledgment and the feast of your recognition. Look up, you belong here. Look up, there is love coming here. Look up, receive the little gift, behind the little gift is the boundless and inexhaustible love of God for you.

Copyright © 2013 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

October 20, Proper 24: Contradictions 8: The Unjust Judge

Genesis 32:22-31, Psalm 121, 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5, Luke 18:1-8

We have two contradictions today. The first one is forthright: that God is compared to a judge who is unjust. Jesus compares that spiritual being who is most righteous to a human official who is not. Such a comparison is offensive in Islam, but the parables of Jesus force us to get used to Our Lord doing this, using contrary characters. Not just to make his point, but to shake us up, to open us up.

Of course we often do find God to be unjust, both philosophically and personally. Philosophically, if God is responsible for the world as we know it, and if God is all-powerful and omnipotent, then the fact of so much unrelenting injustice in the world must finally be God’s fault, and it therefore follows that God must be unjust. 

Speaking personally, how much of my own experience as a Christian, as a pastor, has felt unfair, and even if I do confess the faults of my own, and my own responsibility for most of my losses and my suffering, still there is a surplus of unfairness in the lives of those I care about. And God just lets it go unanswered. I can testify that there were many years of my life when I felt God was being unfair to me.

Wisdom would say, Buck up and bear it. Get over it, get on with it. When I was a kid I used to get lots of trouble from my older brother. I would go to my dad, and he would say, “Fight your own battles.” Which meant, implicitly, don’t be like the widow in the parable.

None of you wants to be like her either. We’d call her shrewish. Not shrewd, but shrewish. A nag. A cry-baby. Who wants to keep crying to God day and night? Who wants to be so tiresome? Get real. Accept the realities of life. If you expect justice all the time you’re asking for constant frustration and you’re no fun to be with.

In America our justice is relatively good. In much of the world a bribe is just assumed. When Jesus told his parable, the obvious solution was for the widow to pay the judge the money he was waiting for. Which, in other terms, is the basis of so much religion. You want something from God, so you offer something in exchange. “Dear God, give me this, and I promise I’ll be a better person, or I’ll do this or that, whatever.”

But in the parable the widow offers nothing to the judge beside her pure demand. So when you pray to God for something, it doesn’t help if you offer something back. That would be a bribe. You should just ask for it and ask for it and ask for it, for no reason other than that you think it’s right for you to receive it. But even that gets tiresome. Who wants to keep on praying like that?

Now let me ask you this. Why do you come here on Sundays? Do you come here because you’re looking for justice? Likely not. In other times and places that is what congregations were praying for. Like in Montgomery, Alabama, in the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Or like in Syria right now, in the Syrian Orthodox Church, that most ancient of Christian churches, whose members are in danger of their lives from either side. For thirteen centuries these people have been crying to God for justice day and night.

Do we ask enough of God? Do we demand enough of God? Do we expect enough of God? Do we keep our expectations minimal, limited, and well-controlled? If we don’t ask much, we won’t be disappointed. We are modern people after all, we are not superstitious, nor fundamentalist, we don’t go round saying “God did this for us” and “God did that for us.” We know what life requires and what life offers and we deal with it. So we do not ask enough of God, we let God off the hook. We want to be respectable, we don’t want to come off like that widow.

So you need this balance: You should allow yourself to make every request of God that seems right to you. You should not filter your requests to God. If it seems right, ask it. But, at the same time, commit yourself to long-term learning of what it is that God desires to offer you. For example, if you want to be wealthy, ask for it. Be true to yourself and be honest in your relationship with God. If you want justice, ask for it. And if you are doing the long-term learning of what God desires to offer and expect, then you learn that God is a lot more interested in giving you justice than wealth. Your goal is that by long-term spiritual training your deepest requests begin to conform to what God offers and expects. Your honest and candid prayers are balanced by humble and costly learning.

Which brings us to the epistle, Second Timothy. It is recalling us to scripture, to the trustworthiness of scripture, the necessity of scripture, and the discipline of scripture, for our proficiency and our equipment in the world. The epistle reminds us that there is sound doctrine and bad doctrine, and the bad doctrine is often more attractive and appealing than the sound doctrine. And a great deal of bad doctrine purports to tell you want God offers and what God expects, and what you should pray for and what you might as well forget about. You need to learn what’s right in this and what is wrong, and the way to learn it is through the mature and patient study of the public documents of scripture. Pray for what you want, and study to learn what God wants.

The gospel lesson tells you to pray exactly what’s on your mind, and do not filter it. But we’re not talking about a couple of prayers, or what you are asking for this week, we’re talking about long-term prayer, we’re talking about months and months of prayer, years and years, we’re talking about prayers that wear God out, like the Civil Rights Movement, and like the churches in Syria, who have been praying for justice for 1300 years. If that’s what you’re willing to do, and stay at it, then go ahead, tell God exactly what’s on your mind.

So then, is it possible that the prayers you offer have an influence on God? That’s certainly what Jesus seems to say. Your prayers do have an influence on God. Not based on how long you pray or how often you pray — it’s a parable, it’s comic, you can get past that overly literal conclusion — but based on the character of the teller of the parable, the nature of the God who became incarnate, the God who allowed his person to be taught by a mother and trained by a father and surprised by a leper and moved by Mary and Martha. In Jesus we see that God is taken by your prayer. Not by how often you pray it or how long, but by who you are and what you ask. You have an influence on God.

And that’s the second contradiction. How can that be so if God knows everything already and has chosen already and predestined already and elected already? This contradiction is one that Our Lord himself will not resolve. Not logically, and certainly not philosophically, to the frustration of theologians over the centuries who have wrestled with the problem of God’s sovereignty and our freedom, God’s predestination and our free will, God’s omnipotence and our responsibility.

What I like about Reformed Church doctrine is that we don’t let the obvious reality of our freedom and our free will and the evident necessity of our responsibility diminish the less obvious promise of God’s predestination and the less evident truth of God’s omnipotence and sovereignty. These two truths have a difficult marriage, but “What the Lord hath joined together, let not man put asunder.”

The resolution has to be in prayer. The wrestling you do with God in prayer. The back and forth you have with God in prayer. The resolution of the contradiction is not in the logic on the page but in the wrestling of your heart. Like Jacob in our first lesson. You have to grapple the contradiction in the dark night of your soul and in your darkest passages of grief and loss. God will surely bless you, but it will surely cost you, and you’ll be limping in the morning, but don’t let go of God.

God wants you in partnership. You have to consider your influence on God. But even more, you have to accept God’s influence on you. Keep at it; your long-term praying works back on you to shape you and transform you, so that your mind begins to merge with God’s mind, and also that you yourself become part of God’s answer. The answer to your prayer begins to flow back through you into the world. You will discover that what you get from this is hope. Hope. Real living hope. You will feel that the God who is gripping you in your struggle is the God who is embracing you in love.


Copyright © 2013 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

October 13, Proper 23, Contradictions 7: Dirty Water, Faithful Denial

2 Kings 5:1-3; 7-15c, Psalm 111, 2 Timothy 2:8-15, Luke 17:11-19

We have four contradictions today. The first one is in the gospel lesson, when the Lord Jesus speaks contrarily. First, he tells the ten lepers to go to a priest to get certified as healed, which they do. On the way, they realize they are healed, but they keep following the Lord’s instructions, except that one of them turns around and comes back to him. The Lord gives him credit for this, which is fine — but the problem is that he questions the other nine for doing what he had told them to do.

Unless his questions are not rhetorical but real. That is, the Samaritan leper had surprised him. There was a surplus in the Samaritan’s response, a surplus which surprised Our Lord, and then, having seen it, Jesus says, “Hey, I wonder why this one is the only one who did this?” We can allow the Lord Jesus to have his surprise and wonder too.

The second contradiction is the standing one we saw again last week, the contradiction between God’s promises and our experience. If it was his faith that made him well, then why am I still sick? I have faith, I've prayed, and I’m still sick. The answer of conventional religion is that there must be a  problem with my faith, that it isn't great enough. But Jesus contradicted that last week: he said your faith should be the size of a mustard seed, so the greatness or smallness of your faith is immaterial.

I have to tell you that our English translation of what Jesus said doesn't help. He doesn't say, “Your faith has made you well.” He actually says, “Your faith has saved you,” which is more than a little different. Think about the story: all ten of them were made well, all ten of them were healed, and not by their faith, but by the free and invisible action of Jesus as they walked away from him. It’s only the tenth one who was both healed and saved. And getting saved — what it means to get “saved,” in the Gospel of Luke, is to accept and enjoy the Lordship of Jesus, to get saved is to enter the Realm of God, right then and there, to get saved is to receive the Kingdom of God. Which is what only the tenth one did when he turned around and returned to Jesus.

So from Luke’s point of view, you are saved. You here. You came here today to say, Lord, have mercy on us, and then also to offer up your thanks to God, so you are within the Kingdom of God right now. You are saved, you are safe, even in whatever you are suffering. You are within God’s sovereignty, and God will keep you safe.

In the case of our first lesson, the prophet Elisha did more than make General Naaman well, he also saved him — he made him receive the Kingdom of God. That’s why Elisha told him to bathe himself in the dirty waters of the Jordan. To Naaman it sounded contradictory — our third today — and at first he wouldn’t do it. You wouldn’t either. Go wash in the Gowanus, and you’ll be healed.

The story is intentionally comic. It’s a joke on the king of Israel, who thinks it’s a set up. It’s a joke on Naaman, when he shows up at Elisha’s door with his horses and chariots and all his retinue, and the prophet doesn’t even get up from his crossword puzzle, but sends out his servant with the message. Then, at the edge of the river Naaman has to endure the shame of getting undressed and exposing his nakedness, not to mention his awful skin, before the eyes of his lessers.

It’s comic that he has to go seven times into the water. Once, still leprous. Twice, still leprous. Three times, everyone is looking to see if there is any change. Four times, Naaman is humiliated by the show, but he can’t stop now. Five times, any hope? Six times, what if this doesn’t work, what a fool he’s been, but he goes in the seventh time, and then, the laughter of relief, and maybe tears as well.

The reason for this whole show, and why Elisha did not just heal him while he stood outside his door, is that Naaman had to get baptized. The water was symbolic. Just as the Israelites had to cross the Jordan to enter the Promised Land, so did this foreigner, this enemy of Israel. He had to brave the boundary waters, seven times to test his faith, like marching seven times around the walls of Jericho. He had to enter the Kingdom of God and receive the Kingdom of God. He’s been saved. So he doesn’t go straight home. Like the Samaritan he returns to the man of God to confess his faith.

Naaman confessed his faith, and the Samaritan offered thanksgiving. To practice gratitude is to practice your faith. That’s a take home for today. If you want to live by your faith, then practice thanksgiving. Thanksgiving to God is the best way to express your faith and the best way to rehearse your faith and the best way to maintain your faith. To practice gratitude is to practice your faith. For does it not take faith to do it — to be grateful to God even when you are suffering, even when you keep on waiting to be made well. That you still return to God, that you still worship God, that you still give thanks to God, that you still keep wanting to live within the Kingdom of God—that’s what faith does and what it takes faith to do.

It is challenging. You need encouragement. Your faith runs thin. You have your doubts, and you know you have your weaknesses. The Bible is full of positive characters who stumbled in their faith, or failed in faith, or even lost their faith. From our Second Lesson it looks like Reverend Timothy was facing that and he needed encouragement. His church was small and struggling. His mentor was in jail, and the whole Christian movement looked very weak indeed.

St. Paul reminds him of one of their early Christian hymns. It's a poem with four lines. The first two lines are fine: “If we’ve died with him we’ll also live with him, if we endure with him we’ll also reign with him.” So far so good. Not just for the future. Living right now, reigning somehow right now. Often it doesn’t feel like it, but see your life that way, like Malala Yousafzai, for example.

The third line is the hard part: “If we deny him he’ll also deny us.” Uh oh. Does that mean eternally? Does that mean that even though God says Yes to you, your No to God can overturn that Yes? That contradicts the Reformed Church doctrine of the Perseverance of the Saints, that doctrine of comfort and consolation, that if God has called you to salvation, nothing weak or sinful that you do or say can overturn God’s call on you, so that God, who began a good work in you, will see it through to completion, no matter how you stumble or fail from the sin which still lives on in you.

Could we make sense of this third line by saying that there’s a denial that comes from strength, when you just plain say No to God, and God will let you have your way, and there’s also a denial that comes from weakness, or fear, or shame, or guilt, and God will not let your No be the last word? Think about St. Peter and his denial of Jesus three times before the cock crowed on Good Friday, and yet Jesus did not deny him back. Do I dare say that what Jesus denies is your denial?

And is the fourth line not contrary to the third? "If we are faithless, he remains faithful — for he cannot deny himself.” Even when you break faith, he will not break faith. Well, there’s the promise, and that’s the promise you have to hold on to. Not that I can make these four lines add up nice and neat, but no matter what the third line says it’s not the last line.

Your faithless denial never gets to be the last word. The last word is always God’s. And God’s last word is always Yes. To you. I know you doubt God, you look away from God, you strike out at God, you rage at God, you even say No to God, but God gets the last word, and God’s last word to you is always Yes. Because God’s love is as eternal and unfathomable and unending as God’s own self.

It’s hard to believe. And so you have to rehearse the thanksgiving. Which is why our liturgy is set up the way it is, it’s designed to help you rehearse each week the process of believing. We go from the promise in the sermon, to the “Okay, I believe it” of the Creed, which then leads you to the “Lord have mercy,” which then leads you to the intercessory prayers for all the suffering — for all the people who still need in one way or another to experience that Yes — which then leads you to the Great Thanksgiving.

We do that Great Thanksgiving every week in order for you to keep your faith alive, because how you practice having faith in God is to rehearse your Thanksgiving to God. And what God gives back to you is more than just faithfulness — what God gives back to you is love. For God cannot deny God’s self, and God is love.

Copyright © 2013, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

October 6, Proper 22, Contradictions 6: Free Grace and Obligation

Habakkuk 1::1-4; 2:1-4, Psalm 37:1-10, 2 Timothy 1:1-14, Heidelberg Catechism Q1, Luke 17:5-10

Note: We mark today our 359th Anniversary.

We have three contradictions today. The first is the contradiction of obligation and free grace. Your obligation is the message of our gospel lesson. Your faith is an obligation that you have. You think of your faith as something you freely chose, your choice to add meaning and fulfillment to your life, but the gospel says that it was your duty anyway, your faith is obligatory, you owe it to God, you are accountable for it. What you have freely chosen is only not to be delinquent, not to have defaulted on your obligations, and what credit is that to you? You are only doing what you’re supposed to do.

For most of history, people lived their lives in terms of obligations. You behaved yourself according to the expectations of a whole thick web of obligations. But the evolution of modernity in Western civilization has changed all that. We put a premium on freedom. We believe in self-fulfillment. Your truest obligation is to yourself. The ideal of our education is our self-discovery. So everybody gets rewarded, everybody gets applauded, everybody gets a prize just for showing up. Every Park Slope toddler who manages to get his foot somewhere near that soccer ball gets a great cheer from his parents looking on. We've changed the meaning of “praiseworthy” from the object to the subject. We teach our children to perform expecting praise. I get that. I’m a performer, and I love approval and applause. But the gospel says this to me: “Okay, you preached a good sermon; you were supposed to, what do you want, a medal? You want recognition? Go visit some prisoners in jail.”

My uncle in the Netherlands was recognized as a “Righteous Gentile” by the Government of Israel for the Jews he protected during World War II. He did not care to be recognized. He did not think of himself as a hero. He felt he had no choice but to do what he did. He knew that doing the right thing might mean his own suffering, and of course he always tried to minimize the suffering, but he also believed that the potential for suffering did not negate his obligation.

Your religion is your obligation. You are supposed to worship God. It’s what you’re made for. You’re supposed to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind, and you’re supposed to love your neighbor as yourself. You’re supposed to keep the Ten Commandments. So if you do these things, you should not expect any extra consideration back from God. You should not expect any less suffering or any more success than anybody else. What the gospel is saying.

But what about free grace? What about the passionate love of God for us, the God who comes to find us and pays the cost for us with God’s own blood? Doesn’t God keep promising to bless us?

The contradiction is the open secret of the gospel. Your life is not your own, you owe it to God, and you’ve defaulted. Your life is not your own, and you belong to your faithful savior Jesus Christ, who has fully paid for your default. The resolution of this contradiction is not so much logical as personal, in the person of the Lord Jesus, whose death upon the cross is the guarantee of grace and the incentive of your obligation. “Because I belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit, makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.”

The resolution of the contradiction of obligation and free grace is the person of the Lord Jesus. We maintain the contradiction in order to witness to the necessity of his Lordship. Maintaining the contradiction and pointing to the solution in his Lordship is a particular characteristic of Reformed Church doctrine. As in the Heidelberg Catechism.

Let me say a word about the Heidelberg Catechism, because it is part of the Constitution of the Reformed Church, and I am required to teach it from time to time. It was written in 1563, so this year is its 450th anniversary. It remains the most widely used catechism ever, in the most translations, around the world. Only 91 years after it was written, we began to use it here in Brooklyn. Do the math. Our church was established in October of 1654 by order of Governor Pieter Stuyvesant.

This morning we are marking our 359th Anniversary. Next year is 360. We should have a celebration. We should give out hard-hats and hold it in the sanctuary. I guess we’ll need a committee. We have a lot of choices about the how and when, because there is much about our early history which is lost to us. Most of our early records have been lost. We have no reliable picture of our first building. But we do have these precious heirlooms from 1684, these Communion Beakers.

Just think of how many hundreds of our mothers and fathers have drunk from these cups, our grandmothers Lois and our mothers Eunice. How small the beakers are, compared to our building, but how much they carry. If people think of Old First Reformed Church, they think of this great big Gothic building, but these little beakers carry much more sacred power.

Over these many years our congregation has been through thick and thin, and it has been thick and thin, and twice we almost closed. Our faith has been no bigger than a mustard seed. But that’s big enough, and small enough, because the size of our faith is immaterial. That’s the second contradiction: the smaller your faith, the better. The power of the mustard seed unleashes only when it’s planted in the ground. The strength of your faith is not in your faith itself but in what you plant your faith and in whom you put your faith. You can have a very weak faith and still live by your faith. Good news for every one of you. Good news for this congregation.

The third contradiction is the standing one which we have spoken of before, that contradiction between the promises of God and our experience. As the prophet Habakkuk wrote, “How long, O Lord, shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you, ‘Violence!’ and you will not save?” We repeat those lovely affirmations in Psalm 37, and we think, “Yeah, right.” We read about Timothy, that young pastor, whose preaching of the power of the Lord Jesus was contradicted by the suffering of his little congregation and by the imprisonment of Paul, its greatest herald and apostle. So that he was tempted to be ashamed of that gospel and ashamed of Paul. And he kept at it only out of obligation. We today are tempted to be shy and hesitant about our message and ashamed of the Reformed Church which has entrusted it to us.

How long, O Lord, how long must we keep this up? 360 years, 390 years, 490 years? As long as the message is still required. As Habakkuk continues, “Write the vision, make it plain on tablets so that a runner may read it. For there is still a vision for the appointed time: it speaks of the end, and it does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay.” Are you ashamed? “Look at the proud! Their spirit is not right in them, but the righteous shall live by their faith.”

Your faith is not the solution to that third contradiction, because that contradiction will keep standing as long as human history endures. Your faith is how you get beyond that contradiction to the vision, the vision of God that our human experience desperately needs but cannot imagine on its own. Your faith is where you live in order to survive your experience, in order even in the midst of suffering to survive and thrive. This is the life-giving vision which God has given to our church, and to keep on presenting this vision is the enduring obligation of this gift to us. The gospel lesson tells us that the long survival of Old First is no great credit to us, it’s only what we’re supposed to do. Not so much keep the congregation going, but keep the vision alive, and gather around it. And whenever we are suffering, whenever we come to the end of our own resources, then God’s power works in us to reveal to the world the same free grace which came to find us to save us.

So don’t be ashamed of yourself or your performance or your experience. Your life is beyond your own capacity to manage its future, but “you know whom you believe in, so be persuaded that he is able to keep that which you’ve committed unto him against that day.” Commit your future to God for God to hold on to till that final day. All your obligations, which are many, and you have defaulted on, all the service that you owe, all the love that you have shorted on, commit that all to God for God to make good on till that final day. Not because your faith is so great, but simply because of who God is. Considering your obligations, your only choice is to surrender to the love of God.

Copyright © 2013, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

September 29, Proper 21, Contradictions 5: Poverty and Wealth

Cartoon from the Brooklyn Paper, November 2007

Amos 6:1a, 4-7, Psalm 146, 1 Timothy 6:6-19, Luke 16:19-31

I am very proud of our congregation’s work for the relief of homeless men. It was only six years ago that I first started working with the homeless. Not that I wanted to; it’s not my specialty, but there they were, sleeping on the church’s stoop and begging out front. At that time the Bloomberg administration was initiating an optimistic vision to really address homelessness, and the Department of Homeless Services regarded me as their local agent. I was able to get housing for all of our guys, and for nine more guys besides.

Suddenly the door slammed shut. I couldn’t get housing for anyone. The policies had changed. The men now had to prove that they were homeless, and they had to prove it by being sighted, sleeping out on the sidewalk, by an observer driving around the city, on any given night over a period of several months. The guys wouldn’t do it, they know it’s not safe to sleep out there, so they never got sighted.

We figured out why the policies had changed. The new priority was simply to get the homeless off the streets and out of sight of the tourists and visitors. Out of sight, out of mind. That earlier optimism had crashed against the realities. The new vision failed because it never addressed the root cause of homelessness, which, in the aggregate, is very simple, and that is the cost of housing. When real estate goes up, when rents go up, then homelessness goes up. It is not a contradiction that an increase in wealth brings with it an increase in poverty. What the realities do contradict is the “trickle down effect,” except for the “down” part.

The “trickle down effect” is what the rich guy in the parable was practicing, quite literally. The crumbs would trickle down onto the floor, and the servants would sweep them out the door, where the beggar could pick at them. Well, at least the beggar could lie there at the gate. Here in New York, he’d never make it into the lobby of your building, and if he dared to camp out under your stoop he could be arrested for trespassing.

But the really nasty thing was the licking of the dogs, which, in the culture of Jesus’ day, was shameful and humiliating. Dehumanizing. The beggar was dehumanized, so the rich guy owed him nothing. He could just step around him when he left the house and step over him when he came back. There’s a contradiction: proximity with invisibility. Not out of sight, out of mind, but in sight and yet out of mind. Up close and impersonal. We practice it in this city every day. We feel like we have to, it’s nothing personal, there are just too many people, but in the aggregate it’s dehumanizing.

Both of them die, they’re both in Hades, Lazarus in the Paradise part and the rich guy in the Gehenna part, burning up. He sees the beggar there with Abraham, but still does not respect him. “Father Abraham, tell him to do this, tell him to do that.” No respect. Father Abraham said that there was a great chasm fixed between them, so there was no crossing from one side to the other, but there was a chasm inside the soul of the rich guy, a portable chasm he carried around inside him, by which he could remove the beggar from his life. The danger is there for all of us, to have fixed such a chasm inside ourselves, and portable, to keep us untouched by the great need of the world outside our door. Proximity with isolation. I do it too. How else can you function in this city?

It is costly to have this chasm inside ourselves. It takes energy to maintain it. We get defensive, and defensive even to ourselves. You hear it when the rich guy complains to Abraham. He acts like he didn’t know. He acts like he wasn’t told, that it was unfair, that it’s not his fault because it was not made clear to him. But it was made clear to him. He didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t want to pay the cost of the enjoyment of his wealth so he ended up paying the cost of himself.

This parable has several layers of meaning. One of its meanings is the judgment on Israel for not believing in the Lord Jesus when he came back from the dead. I spoke about that three years ago. Today I will stay with the economic meaning, and that’s to continue our themes from last Sunday. My message today is not for America, or for the American economy, or the political economy of New York City, although our scripture lessons apply to all of that, but I am not sufficiently expert to make those applications. My applications are for the church, to us, to you specifically as Christians.

First, consider this contradiction to conventional wisdom: that poverty is actually the cost of wealth. That our wealth is costly to the poor. I suppose in some principle of theoretical economics you could have increasing wealth without increasing poverty, but what about actual reality, when we have to factor in the practical truth of human sin and the aggregates of sin, and the awful truth that the more successful we are, the more accomplished is our sin. Let us consider this, let us not walk around it nor step over it. Can anyone show us, either from scripture or from human experience, that our wealth is not costly to the poor, somewhere, whether far away or proximate, or that it is not so that as our own wealth increases, so does poverty for someone else?

We do know this for sure, the wealth is costly to us who are wealthy. I’m talking now about the social cost, and the spiritual cost, and the moral cost. Again, in theoretical principle wealth should be morally neutral, but the clear witness of all three of our lessons today is that in actual reality it’s not. As I said last week, your wealth, your ordinary wealth, is your constant moral problem, no matter how much or little of it you have. It offers you enjoyment and security and it demands your attention and your service and it becomes an idol. It seduces you and it becomes a jealous lover. So that your love of your money is the root of so much evil in your life. Evil to yourself, evil to others like yourself, and evil to the poor. This message is uncomfortable. It is uncomfortable to be preaching it, and I hope Jesus talks about something else next week, but there it is.

This week our scripture lessons do not contradict each other. What they contradict is us, and any exemptions we might claim because of our basic decency or even our indebtedness. Let it contradict you, don’t try to negotiate or defend yourself. Say to yourself, “Okay, even if I don’t see it I will admit it, to God and to others and most important to myself.” From the Reformed Church point of view, repentance is less about self-examination than simply believing what God says about us. So that this repentance is a step towards freedom. The second step is your giving in to eminent domain of the Lord Jesus. Your wealth is not your own, neither to possess as you see fit nor even to enjoy as you see fit. The government should treat it so, but you should not within your soul.

And the third step in your freedom is to share your wealth. Your wealth is loaned to you by God for you to share. The epistle agrees with what Jesus advised last week. Not that you have to become poor yourself. But that the increase of your wealth means an increase in your obligations for loving your neighbor as yourself. In the sharing of your wealth you loosen its grip on you and lessen its hold on you. The name Lazarus means “God helps.” Do you see how God was helping the rich guy all along, by giving him such a close by neighbor whom he could love as himself?

The tragedy of the rich guy was a tragedy of unawareness. He was unaware that he could love the beggar, and that loving the beggar would add more richness to his life, a richness greater than in the sauces on his table. What turns this tragedy into comedy is the laughter of love, and the effort to love, the effort which brings awareness, and that means freedom. So, if you want to know what to do with your wealth, think in terms of love. You love yourself. How do you spend your wealth on yourself? So then love your neighbor as yourself.

Do it freedom, do it in creativity, use your wealth as currency for love. You might have to confess that this is what God has done for you. I mean that if you have any wealth at all, you really don’t deserve it any more than some other person on this planet who did not enjoy your circumstances. It is a mystery what you should have it, so finally you have to chalk it up to the mystery of God’s love for you. Lazarus means God helps you. God helps you because God loves you.

Copyright © 2013, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

September 22, Proper 20; Contradictions 4: The Crooked Commended

Amos 8:4-7, Psalm 113, 1 Timothy 2:1-7, Luke 16:1-13

This gospel lesson is considered the most confusing speech that Our Lord Jesus ever made. But we can make sense of it, as long as we think in terms of contradictions. The lesson is in two parts, and I think they’re intentionally contradictory.

The first part is a parable, verses 1 to 8. The parable is comic, it’s meant to be a little funny. It’s in the form of a fable, like Aesop’s fables, with a wily fox, or like Uncle Remus, with Bre’r Rabbit, who outwits his enemies, or even like Bugs Bunny, who gets away with everything.

So there’s this wealthy man, the master, and he’s a decent guy. He owns an estate, with tenant farmers on it, like sharecroppers, who pay their rent in kind. He employs a manager to run the place. He hears complaints that his manager is squandering his goods, so he calls him in. “What’s this I hear about you? Hand over your records. You’re done.” Uh oh.

The parable switches to the manager. He doesn’t bother to defend himself, he doesn’t waste his breath. And at least he wasn’t thrown in jail, which was decent of his boss. “But now what am I gonna do?” (Think cartoon here.) “I could dig. Nah. I could beg. Nah.” Light bulb comes on. “I got it. He still wants the accounts, and they don’t know I’m fired yet. If I work fast I can put them in my debt.”

He goes to the tenants. “How much do you owe the master? 800 gallons of olive oil? That’s a lot of olive oil! (It’s a fable, folks.) Quick, rewrite your contract and reduce it by half.” No problem. “And you, how much? 1000 bushels of wheat? That’s an awful lot of wheat you owe. Reduce it by 20%.”

It’s like when the Fed reduces interest rates. You go change your mortgage quick to get that rate. My bank didn’t like it so much when we refinanced our apartment, because of how much less interest they would collect from us, and they kept adding new paperwork to hold us off, but they finally yielded and we refinanced. And so the master, when the manager’s scheme comes out, is not going to force his tenant farmers to pay their former rate. He’s already shown he’s not that kind of guy. He’ll be as decent to his tenants as he was decent to the manager.

Which is what the manager was counting on. That’s where he was shrewd. He calculated on the decency of the master. He did not bother to excuse himself or defend himself. He counted on the mercy of the master, that the master would never be untrue to himself, no matter how crooked the manager was. That’s the shrewdness that’s commendable.

So when it comes to God, you can count on God to be true to God’s self, and God is merciful, and the quality of God’s mercy is not strained, no matter how often or how much you need it. So just don’t bother to be self-righteous, don’t stand on your rights or reputation, don’t waste your breath on your explanations and excuses. No matter how good or bad you are, no matter how much you have gained or how much you owe, all you really have to stand on, all you can resort to is God’s mercy. And you can also thank the Lord Jesus for being that wily rabbit, that crafty manager who comes to you and who cancels your rightful debts to God for you. That’s the good news.

The second part of our lesson is the bad news. It’s as critical as the first part is comical. The second part is a poem. It’s hard to recognize as such, because the form of the poem is not typical in Western literature. The form is more like Arabic poetry, or like the verses of the prophets of the Old Testament.

I will skip the literary analysis, but only say that the poem develops like a wave upon the beach. It gathers, it rises, it crests, and then crashes and spreads and recedes. Its climax is in the middle, at verse 11. Its climax is the challenge, “If you then have not been faithful with unrighteous wealth, who will entrust you with the true?” The true? The true what? True wealth? Or the Truth? Either, or both. It’s ambiguous and suggestive. What is of real value? In the world? In your own life? What are you really worth? What is your true value, what do you value?

What does the Lord Jesus mean when he says “unrighteous wealth”? He means to be allusive and imprecise. This is poetic language play. His term for “wealth” is the Aramaic word mammon. You may have heard this word before: “You can’t serve God and mammon.” Mammon means ordinary wealth, ordinary capital, your savings, your 401k, your equity in your home, all that you have to report when you apply for a mortgage or a loan. All of you have mammon, more or less.

Why is it unrighteous? In principle, wealth itself is morally neutral. It can be good, as with the landed property which God had guaranteed in the Torah to every Israelite. It is your security, and the birthright of your children. But the Lord is saying that it’s really never neutral and always compromised and crooked, no matter how respectable you are. It always tempts you and it always pulls on you, no matter how upright you are. It is your constant moral problem. Do not pretend to yourself that your small amount of wealth is righteous, or deserving, or clean. You could have an ethical investment policy, you could divest, you could boycott, you could even occupy, but you cannot escape the corruption of what you value and hold dear. You’re all complicit, not one of you is innocent, no one is exempt.  No excuses. Don’t waste your breath.

The Lord Jesus has assaulted your integrity. Don’t defend yourself. He has impugned your reputation. Don’t defend it. Accept it. Plead his mercy. Fly to his mercy. He gives you the parable to show you how to survive the wave of his judgment crashing down on you. He shows you your place of refuge for when he comes to assault you. He has given you the place of grace in which we stand.

Grace and forgiveness, righteousness and morality. Mercy and justice. These can be contradictory. What is the purpose of being a Christian? What are we baptized for? Is it not to become a better person, more righteous, more ethical, a better example of humanity? Or is it to keep coming back for mercy, coming back again and again as diggers and beggars who have nothing to stand on but God’s mercy? Which is it? It is both. God calls you to be ethical. Yet all you have to stand on is God’s mercy. Being a Christian is to work them both, to learn the interplay, to work the balance.

Today we will baptize Clyde Li Williams. He knows how to walk, he has learned to balance in his body the opposing forces of tension and compression and of gravity and thrust. He’s learning to balance his food on a fork. Before you know it, his parents will be teaching him how to balance on a bicycle. And they will also teach him the balance of mercy and morality. The God he belongs to expects him to be moral. The older he gets, the more that will include. The more he comes to value the more pressing it will be. His parents will teach him how to take care of his things, to put his toys away, to clean up after himself, to respect the rights of others, to only take his share, but also how to have a share, to build up capital in the world, to be thrifty but also generous, a model citizen. I am not joking. And they will also teach him how much he needs mercy. How much in need of it he is, with no excuses, and how endlessly he can find it in the God he belongs to.

All of us are complicit. All of us enjoy the benefits of a global economy that is increasing the wealth of the wealthy and the poverty of the poor, exhausting our resources, and risking our very planet. What do we do? Don’t waste time defending it or denying it. Deal with it from out of mercy. Which means don’t waste time feeling guilty either. Do what you gotta do. The trick is in that strange advice which is the bridge from the parable to the poem: “Make friends for yourselves with your crooked wealth, etc.”

Okay, you’ve got it, so now be generous. Share it as if you believe that you don’t really have the right to it. The Rev. James Forbes famously said that, “Nobody gets into heaven without a letter of reference from the poor.” You have some wealth? Okay. Maintain it but don’t fool yourself. You’re always more in bondage to it than you think, so be more generous with it than makes sense. This is not for guilt. It’s for joy. It’s for welcome. It’s for celebration. Your resort is not in anything you can do, your first and last resort is in the mercy of the God whom you belong to, who gently laughs at your pretensions, and who loves you like you’re a little child.

Copyright © 2013 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

September 15, Proper 19, Contradictions 3: If God Finds Us, How Did God Lose Us?

Exodus 32:7-14, Psalm 51:1-11, 1 Timothy 1:12-17, Luke 15:1-10

Jesus poses these two parables as questions. “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep,” and then, “What woman, having ten silver coins.” To the second one the answer is obvious: “Any woman would.” But to the first one the answer is the opposite: “No one would.” No one would stupidly risk the ninety-nine for the sake of the one. Realistic management simply writes off that last sheep. A one percent loss is not so bad, and it’s way less than standard depreciation.

The answers are contradictory, so you have to work the parable back and forth. You use the second answer to reverse the first answer, as in, “Any woman would, who having a hundred sheep,” and you feel like the parable is playing with you, and then it finally hits you that Jesus is saying, “I’m with the woman, I  would too.” This Messiah would. This Messiah would because he thinks God would. Every last, lost person is of inestimable worth to God, the most despicable, the least acceptable, the most unfit. To bring in such a one is what God rejoices in.

Is it really true? Does God come after you like this? Will God come hunting high and low to find you? You are one of seven billion people, and our planet is one speck in the galaxy, and our galaxy is one of billions in the universe, and is God so aware of you? Does God get that specific? Does God get that personal? Do you, your little self, make God happy?

Would you like it to be true? Would you like God to notice when you’re missing? Would you like God to come and find you? Do you want God to be so personal? Or should God be more objective? More the like spiritual energy of the universe? Less sentimental, more philosophical?

How can it be true? If God is God, then how can God ever lose us in the first place? If God is God, then God already knows where the coin is, and God already knows where every last sheep is. These parables are contradictory to the doctrine of God’s omniscience and omnipotence.

There is another contradiction underneath. Let me draw it out. Jesus eats with tax collectors and sinners. And we saw two weeks ago that he also eats with scribes and Pharisees. Jesus does not discriminate, he treats everyone the same, saint or sinner, pious or polluted. He’s not against your being a good person, it’s good that you’re good, but he’s going to treat you the same as he treats a bum. He believes that every single last person, irrespective of performance, has the very same value to God. And that value would be immeasurable, infinite.

How can that be, really, that any one person should have infinite value to God. How can this balding primate weighing 93 kilograms have more relative value than, say, the planet Jupiter? Maybe that made sense 500 years ago, when we thought the planet earth was the physical center of a very much smaller universe, but not with what we know about the universe today.

It might help to remark that “infinite” does not necessarily mean “vast”. That’s a category mistake. The interior of an atom is also infinite. Some scientists suggest that the size of the human body is about half-way between the size of an atom and the size of the universe. It might help to remember that our categories of space and time do not apply to God, God can enter space and time but is outside them, so God is neither conditioned nor limited by the laws of time and space in which we live, so at least it’s conceivable that God is so aware of you, that God finds you that important, and that God is so personally invested in you.

But what about the contradiction of our life experience. Doesn’t God abandon some people anyway? All the suffering millions we pray for every week, the starving children and their dying mothers? Isn’t it our experience that God allows some people to get lost and stay lost? Why didn’t God save Joseph Stalin? Little Joseph started out a lamb like everyone else, and in his youth he studied to be a priest, so when he wandered off, why didn’t God go find him and bring him back, especially before he caused the death of seven millions? And you have some acquaintances whose lives are unfortunate or miserable, and you grieve their loneliness and bitterness, but God just seems to let them go. If it makes God so joyful, then why doesn’t God save everyone? Why does God let anybody go?

These parables attract us and resist us, positive and negative, because they suggest a God who is passionate and emotional, a God who reacts. You see it in our first lesson, how God reacts to the quick and easy idolatry of the Israelites, and it’s Moses who is the steady one, the more mindful one, who gets God to settle down. So which is it? Does God react and change his mind, is God passionate and personal, or is God constant and faithful and ‘unchanging as light”? Most of our friends and neighbors prefer a God who is impersonal, that spiritual energy of the universe, more mystical, less historical, less hysterical, less jealous, less angry, less passionate.

It is a problem. The Christian doctrine of God has built-in contradictions, and Our Lord Jesus only adds to them. He allows the contradictions in order to protect this truth: that whatever else does not add up, this has to be maintained, that this God is such a God as to be able to say, “I want,” and “I desire,” and “I prefer,” and “I choose,” and “I will,” and “I do,” and “I love,” and “I love you.” Do you want that to be true, do you want to believe in a God who can talk like that?

The down side is that such a God can also say, “I do not want” and “I do not desire” and maybe even “I do not love.” Someone who can love can also get angry. Whoever can desire must also judge. The god that is just the spiritual energy of the universe does not judge and has no anger.

Passion means heat. What if God has to burn me to save me? What if God has to judge me to rescue me? If God seeks out the lost sheep, will God also seek out a lost wolf? As in the case of the Apostle Paul. He confesses in our epistle that he was the worst of sinners, a blasphemer, a persecutor, a man of violence. He was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and yet God sought him and found him. And knocked him down and blinded him and sent him off to the desert for a few years. Paul always regarded his salvation as a surprise, a wonder, he never took it for granted.

I cannot explain to you why God lets some coins not get found and some sheep not get rescued. I can say that it’s not a matter of the value of the coin or whether the sheep is worth the rescue. Worthiness is immaterial. We are all worth it, infinitely. But why some and not all?

We should not infer from this that God doesn’t care, that God doesn’t passionately care. That God doesn’t love them too, the coins not found and the sheep not saved. Many things are not explained to us, and this is one. Salvation is like physics, that getting certitude about one factor forces uncertainty on something else. We have to hold up the contradiction, that God loves everyone infinitely, and that it is you whom God is coming to find.

You are left with this promise: Your little life is huge to God. God chases you fanatically. God is the woman with the broom, and she’s moving the furniture of history to find you, she is sweeping the dust of your life to expose you and to grab you. Can you be so childish, so silly, as to regard yourself as the center of God’s universe, if only for yourself, and even momentarily? It is what Jesus is inviting you to believe.

But why else repent, why do such a risky and vulnerable thing, unless the sacrifice that Jesus made of his own life exposes the deepest secret of the universe? When you repent of your sin you are opening yourself to that infinite person, that passionate being whom we call God, the one who is behind all the matter and energy of the universe. Your repentance gets at the joyfulness of the universe. The joy that God has over you is the excess of the God’s love for you.

Copyright © 2013 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

September 8, Proper 18. Contradictions 2: Choose God or Choose Life.

Deuteronomy 30:15-20, Psalm 1, Philemon 1-21, Luke 14:25-33

The first contradiction is obvious, between the lessons from Luke and Deuteronomy, between what Jesus says and what Moses says, between possessions and possessing, between possessions to be given up and possessing the land as a gift. Which is the way of life, the way of blessing?

Moses was giving his final summation to the Children of Israel as they were poised to cross the Jordan and take the Promised Land from the Canaanites, who were already possessing it, thank you very much. Moses had just reiterated the Torah, with all its commandments and decrees and ordinances. It was their constitution and their code of law. Moses summed it up with God’s deal: you observe the commandments and decrees and ordinances, and God will keep you in possession of the land, God will bless you in it with prosperity, and God will protect you from the enemies around you who will soon enough attack you to plunder your prosperity. God will protect you and bless you but only if you keep the commandments and decrees and ordinances; that’s the deal. Choose it, Moses tells them, choose life, choose for prosperity.

But Jesus says to choose death and adversity. "Whoever does not carry his own cross cannot be my disciple. If anyone comes after me and does not hate father and mother and wife and children, even life itself, cannot be my disciple." Hate life, not choose it. Hate your parents. What about the fourth of the commandments, that we should honor them? Jesus contradicts the commandments and decrees and ordinances. No wonder so many good Jewish people declined to follow him. Which is the result he seems to want. He makes it hard to follow him.

The contradiction is less extreme if you look into the commandments and decrees and ordinances which Moses had reiterated. The deal that God offered them would make them sitting ducks, from the Egyptian or Syrian or Philistine point of view. The constitution of the Torah made absolutely no provision for an organized defense. The radical equality which the Torah gave to every man in Israel meant there was no upper class, not any nobility, and thus no military officers. The deal was that the Lord of Hosts would defend them if they just observed the commandments and decrees and ordinances. Is that a deal that you would take? If you were Senator John McCain, what would you advise? If you were Barak Obama? Would you not hedge your bets? Would you count the cost? Would you have your intelligence services evaluate the numbers of your enemies and the realities of their threats? Is the deal God offers too great a risk of death and adversity?

The commandment and ordinances included the decree of the Sabbath year, when they should give the land a rest, and every seventh year plant no crops, and have no harvest, and depend on God to somehow give them daily bread, and they should forgive all their debtors and any land they’d bought during the last six years they’d give back to its prior owners, all of which looked like a recipe for recession and adversity and hunger and death. No investments, no capital, no crops, no harvest, no food. If you were Timothy Geitner, would you advise this deal?

So from the worldly point of view, from the perspective of conventional wisdom, the deals of Moses and Jesus are about the same. They come at it from opposite ends and meet in the middle, at an deeper contradiction, the general contradiction between the blessing which the Lord God offers us and our experience, and thus what our experience teaches us about the realistic way to security and prosperity. We have facts in our lives which give us doubts that we can count on God to protect us and defend us and give us life. We get sick. We lose jobs. Our enemies attack us. We experience no less than unbelievers do all the vicissitudes of life, the unfairness and injustices and pain and loss.

We want to choose for God and thereby get God’s blessings. That isn’t wrong. I pronounce a blessing on you every week as the last thing in the service. I don’t say that as empty words. We give you personal blessings at Holy Communion after the passing of the cup. We mean them to be real. But we don’t control these blessings. My benediction is not a blessing from myself, I only dare to say it on behalf of God, and I have to leave the reality of that blessing to the promise of God and the mystery of God. And how long do you wait, how often don’t you go for very long stretches when you cannot feel that the face of the Lord is shining on you.

Do I wish I could say that there is a cause and effect connection between choosing for God and getting blessings? I understand that is the message of Joel Osteen on television, and that’s why he’s so popular. I don’t think he’s faking it, I think he must really believe it, and it’s only natural to want to believe it. It’s the most natural kind of religion, that if we do the right things with the gods then they have to bless us, that’s their job.

But this convenient god is not the god of our scripture lessons. Both Jesus and Moses are warning us of the necessary contradiction between the promises of God and our experience of prosperity, between the offer of God and our ordinary vision of the good life. We want to take the short cut by hedging our bets and squeezing the law and gospel into the expectations we prefer, but Jesus tells us we have to go the long way round, the whole way to the cross, and there give all that up.

So from what Jesus tells us here we all have to give up our possessions and our families and take vows of poverty and celibacy and become like monks and nuns. No, that’s not the right take home. That misses the deeper contradiction. That suggests that your righteousness is something you can achieve by means of sacrifice and exercise, like good grades or great muscle tone. Now, we do need to say that God really no interest in blessing you with possessions. The expansion and protection of your material prosperity is immaterial to God, doesn’t care either way, except God does care about how much we are tempted by our possessions.

So here’s the right take-home. You may choose to keep your possessions, but then you must repent of your possessions every day. “Oh God, I ask you once again today to forgive me for my possessions. I confess that I cannot justify any last one of them by any righteous reasons I propose. I admit that I may hold on to them only on your sufferance, only on your indulgence, as they are yours.”

In my reading of this passage I am quite certain that the Lord Jesus is telling you to give up your self-possession, to give up your right to your own life. He’s telling you to surrender your self-determination. Your life belongs to him. Everything you possess about yourself. Your mind, your soul, your ambitions, your opinions, your self-control. He’s talking about abandonment. He’s talking about surrender. He’s the king who comes against you with his 20,000 troops, and you must sue for peace with him. He has conquered you and he requires as his booty not less than everything you possess, from your coffee-maker to your marriage to your children to your own image of yourself and your hopes and dreams. He is your adversary, he is your adversity, he is your death, he is your contradiction. That is how he saves you: he conquers you and you must abandon yourself and all you have to him.

This all is parable, and as with every parable he is telling it about himself. That’s why his words are so hard, because of how hard it was for him. He has to surrender himself, he has to abandon himself. He is the rightful king of Israel with only 10,000 troops who is facing his Father in Heaven, the Lord of Hosts with 20,000 troops and he must give up, he must give up himself and all his possessions, even the right to his own life. He is the best man that has ever lived, and does God protect from his enemies? He is the most honest man who ever lived, and does God defend him from the lies they use to convict him? He is the most loving man who ever lived, and does God bless him with a wife? He has honored his father and his mother, so the fourth commandment says he should live long in the land that God has given him, but all he gets is thirty-three years. Jesus is talking here about himself, and the contradictions of his own life.

Why does he do this? To get to the cross, that constant contradiction. To accomplish the atonement, that troubling resolution. To win the forgiveness of your sins before the face of God, the only lease on life you have. He died the death of a slave to set you free from your slavery that you might be his brothers and sisters. So once again it’s love. Behind the hardness is his suffering, and the motive for his suffering is his love. The situation is desperate, it is the only way. Yet once again it is the love of God for us.

Copyright © 2013, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.