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.

September 1, Proper 17, Contradictions 1: Fear God, Fear Nothing

Proverbs 25:6-7, Psalm 112, Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16, Luke 14:1, 7-14

This past July 21st I was in Newfoundland, Canada, in the fishing village of Lark Harbour, and I tried to go to church. Across the road from the gas bar is St. James Anglican. It has no sign of the service time, so on the Saturday, when I saw some people standing out back, I asked them the time of the service and they looked at me strangely and said 11 AM. Okay, so I got there at 10-of, and I was impressed. There must have been fifty cars parked around the church, and even young people entering in Sunday clothes. Wow, the locals are pious! Inside the usher handed me a bulletin and asked if I was family. What? No, I said, and went into the sanctuary.

The organ was playing and the acolytes were busy at the altar, and all the front pews were full and all the back pews were full and the middle pews were empty. That’s strange. I went back out to the usher and asked where I should sit. He said, Are you family? Then he said, This is a funeral.

I stood there stupidly for a moment, and then I asked if there would be communion. No. I think that’s tonight at 6. Oh, I’ll be on the ferry to Nova Scotia. Well, I did try to go to church.

If I sat in the middle, all by myself, everyone would have been watching me. If I sat up front they’d be watching me: Who is he and how did he know Billy Cavendish? If I sat in the back, the usher would not come and tell me to sit up front, nor would he tell any of the Cavendishes to go sit in the back, or there’d be trouble in Lark Harbour.

Seating has its protocols, and Jesus tells a parable on it, and like most of his parables, this one has several layers, and you have to keep working your way down into the layers, you have to unlock it like a combination lock, turning it back and forth. The outer layer is the good advice on how you can be deferential to your own advantage. Did we need the Messiah to tell us that? It’s already in the book of the Proverbs. You could get it from Emily Post. But thank you, Jesus, for confirming that we may look to our advantages. And you can leave the parable right there and be satisfied.

You could turn the parable the other way and go a layer down. Does it really matter where you sit? Do you care whether people think you’re either high or low? You can be free of that. Be free. Be free to sit alone. Wherever. The status that you need is what’s in your own mind, your advantage is your own to give yourself. There is wisdom in that.

But then Jesus adds those words about inviting the poor and the lame and guests who can’t invite you back, which turns it back the other way and goes another layer down. It’s not about yourself, do not sit alone, do not be free of other people, gather them around yourself but to your potential disadvantage. You give advantages away. When you are standing on line for tickets, you let other people in ahead of you. Practice a freedom of radical generosity and selflessness. God does.

That’s inspiring, but how much chaos will result from that. We need order, we need structure, we need patterns in our lives. We are animals, not angels. The customs of society have wisdom in them. If you let people cut in line ahead of you, what about the people behind you. At weddings and funerals it makes realistic sense for friends and family to have their special places. We cannot leave the parable at this point.

We have to go one more layer down. We turn it the other way again. The final combination is what Jesus says at the center of our lesson: “For all who exalt themselves will be humbled and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” Is that true? Is that really true about the world? Often, but not always. We can think of plenty of humble people who are made to stay that way and worse. But Jesus does not say this as a truth about the world, he is giving the riddle of what God does within the world. God humbles the exalted and God exalts the humble, all the time, round and round, up and down.

Jesus was taught this by his mother. She sang of it in her song, the Magnificat, thirteen chapters earlier in this same gospel, and he echoes the language of his Mum. It’s about what God does. God freely acts this way in the world, with no regard for our advantages or our status or our sense of our deserving what we get. That’s the center of this parable, the freedom of God, the freedom of God from where you sit, God’s freedom from our conventions and patterns and good behaviors and predictions, which, of course, we know is right but still it is a fearful thing.

The Pharisees feared Jesus because he was so free like that. That’s why they were watching him closely. And we would have to say that the kind of fear they had of him was a negative thing. So why is it that the Bible tells us to fear God as a positive thing? Isn’t the fear of God a contradiction? Isn’t it a contradiction for us to repeat what repeated in Psalm 112, “Happy are who fear the Lord”? How can that be good?

I get that question frequently and it can’t be answered easily or quickly. You have live with it, you have to give this contradiction time and space within your life. You to let it open up a space in you, maybe a new space inside yourself for that special kind fear which is a good and loving fear.

They say that lion tamers have to love their lions but never lose their fear of them. You can’t domesticate a lion, it’s finally always wild. And powerful and dangerous. God is wild, and powerful and dangerous, and is absolutely free in front of us. In such a relationship fear is natural, and it’s why we should fear God. We cannot manage God, we can’t control or predict God, except only upon the promises which God has freely made to us. You can hold God to those promises, but you can’t even predict how and when those promises will be kept. Even when God is faithful God is free. And dangerous.

To fear God is to enter that space inside yourself where you feel the implications of the dangerous freedom of this God, this God who loves you for your good, but who has no regard for your status or your advantage or even your self-respect. What God has any regard for, as far as you’re concerned, is God’s own promises to you which are conditioned only upon God’s self. Which leaves you uneasy, to say the least.

But from this we get two benefits, but to get to them you have to make a couple jumps. The first jump is the benefit that if you fear God, you need not fear anything else. Fearing God, fear nothing else. You repeat to yourself what our epistle says, “The Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid, what can anyone do to me?” It’s not your courage, it’s your hanging on God’s promise, “I will never leave you or forsake you.” God reminds you of that promise time and again in scripture.

Once God confirmed it to me silently, by suddenly becoming present to me, locally but not physically, next to me in our back room on President Street, when I most needed it, when I was more than humbled, when I was humiliated. “I will never leave you or forsake you.” Upon that promise I am still learning not to fear, not to fear other people or situations or possibilities of loss or disadvantages and even not to fear myself. Fear God, fear nothing.

The second jump is the benefit that your freedom from fear is your freedom to love. You see that today in both the epistle and the gospel. You can love despite the restrictions of the conventions and the familiar order in the world.

So let me tell you a story which is true. Her name was Brenda-Lynn. She was a member of my second congregation, in Ontario. Brenda-Lynn was a nurse practitioner. She worked in a group home for the mentally-handicapped, some of them severely so, including cerebral palsy. That was her job. Brenda-Lynn got married to a guy named Evert, whom we all loved, and I did the wedding. They represented two big Dutch families, and it was a big reception.

Have you ever been to a Dutch-Canadian wedding reception? There’s nothing like a Dutch-Canadian wedding reception. And I think more than half our church was there. And you know whom the bride had seated up at the head table with her and the groom: the residents of her group home; they were the special honored guests of Brenda-Lynn. I watched them off and on, how they were watching her. They loved her, they were proud of her, because Brenda-Lynn was a beautiful bride. And she was beautiful in her freedom from the conventions of receptions, and we could see in her what God's own love for us is like.

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

July 7, Proper 9, A Geography of Prayer 6, The River

Isaiah 66:10-14, Psalm 66:1-8, Galatians 6:1-16, Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

Dearly beloved, this is the sixth sermon in my series entitled “A Geography of Prayer.” This week’s feature of geography is the River, from Isaiah 66. For the most part, until my final paragraph, I shall be using the image otherwise than Isaiah did. I am lifting the image out of Isaiah and applying it to our Psalm today, Psalm 66, with its verse after verse of praise to God.

I’m calling the prayer of praise a River (allow me an epic simile): like the mountain stream which is its source, to the length of the river as it bends through the landscape, as it defines the valleys it flows through, and cuts its way through canyons, as it gathers its tributaries and develops its current and increases its power as it goes, and then widens in its lower length and meanders through its plain until it forms its delta in the sea, like the Mississippi, or, like the Hudson, it widens into a great long channel and an inland sea and then into its greater bay. The river is life-giving to every thing along it and destructive to whatever stands against it, peaceful in its reaches and raging when resisted, forceful in fluidity, inexorable, inexhaustible, ancient, primeval, eternal, the prayer of praise to God.

What is praise? What do we mean by Praise? It’s when we call God “Holy, Majestic, Great, Wise, Beautiful,” and other attributes. Praise is close to Thanksgiving and of course they overlap, but we can distinguish Thanksgiving as what we offer God for what God has done for us, and Praise is what we offer God simply for who God is, irrespective of what God does for us. Of course, we believe that we can only know who God is by what God has done for us. So Thanksgiving comes quicker to us than praise does. But I think the ultimate is Praise, for it is the least self-interested form of prayer and the least regarding of ourselves. I don’t mean we lose ourselves. We still maintain our minds and skills and our abilities, we fully use our arts and crafts, the fullest efforts of our speech and song and dance. The point is that the pay back is irrelevant, and you could call it, as one writer has, a “royal waste of time.” That’s the point.

There is legitimate self-interest and self-regard in prayer. That’s usually where we start in prayer, with our petitions for ourselves. Let me remind you that for Christians there are six kinds of prayer, in three pairs:  Petition and Intercession, then Confession and Lamentation, and then Thanksgiving and Praise. From Petition to Praise you move from the most self-interested to the least.

You can think of it as a continuum, but Jesus remarkably bends the line around into a circle, from Praise back to Petition. He does it in the Lord’s Prayer. The way he teaches us to pray is to  make our first petition all about, not ourselves, but God’s self: “Hallowed be thy Name.” You are asking God to be honored as “the Lord” in the world, and that implies that the desire for God is in your deep self-interest. Then you petition that “Thy Kingdom come, thy Will be done,” which must include the business of your life, and then you petition, “Give us this Day our daily bread,” when your self-interest is obvious and legitimate and as basic as a little child’s. And then you move to legitimate self-regard, when you pray, “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.” Implied in this Petition is also Confession, and also Lamentation. And because you make your petitions in the first person plural, using “our” and “us” instead “mine” and “me,” these also are Intercessions. This prayer comprises so much in such small compass, it is a wonder and a sign. It is a very good thing that everybody knows it, out of everything else in the Christian faith.

But there is so much more to prayer, and there are so many prayers the people used to know but now we don’t, especially the prayers of praise. I’m not saying that Christians are not giving praise. I’m saying that in our freedom of invention and our desire to be relevant we have lost the disciplines of prayer and the rich traditions of doxology. Our contemporary praise is strong when it’s immediate, like a thunderstorm upon the grass, and the weather changes and we dry up. I’m speaking of knowing how to sing the Te Deum. Or the Gloria in Excelsis. I’m speaking of knowing the Psalms from memory. These are almost lost to us today, and we are the less for it.

So here’s a take-home: The secret to the prayer of Praise is to not depend on generating praise from within yourself, and with our own ideas, but on stepping into praise, the praise which is around us and has been before us and extends beyond us, which does not depend on us, and which carries us in its current. You step into this stream when you praise God, and you give yourself to it. It offers you a force and motion greater than your own. You say things you did not come up with, but what you heard was said before and what you repeat. You don’t lose yourself — you gain a world. Psalm 66:3, “All the earth bows down before you, sings to you, sings out your name.”

Praise wants company. Even when you praise God privately, in your closet or your room, you know that you are praying along with millions of other people round the world. That’s why I like to pray from a prayer book which is being used by many other Christians at the very same time that I am using it. No matter how far away they are from me I know that I am praying in their company.

So yes, you can praise God in the woods. The other creatures do. You should. But the prayer of praise is richer and fuller when it follows on the other forms of prayer. As it does within our Sunday morning liturgy. After the sermon we pray the prayer of Confession. After that we pray our prayers of Petition and Intercession, and sometimes Lamentation. Then we gather round the Table for the great Prayer of Thanksgiving. We render thanks to God for our creation and our redemption. And then we rise to the climax of the service every week, pure exalted praise of God for who God is, “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts, heaven and earth are full of your glory.” We sing it together with angels and archangels and with Catholics and Orthodox and Protestants and Jews. God is worthy to be praised.

Maybe you’ve heard the criticism that God must be a narcissist to have set up the world in such a way as to be getting all this praise. Well, who can presume that God’s experience of praise is like our own? Who of us know how our praise engages God? I do think we can say that God deserves our praise, but does not need our praise. We say that God requires our praise in the Aristotelian sense that a knife requires to be sharp, or good food needs to be eaten, or music requires to be heard. I think it entirely appropriate that God requires our praise. And it is appropriate for us, and good for us.

I love that in my life, that I can give such praise, I like what it brings out of me and where it takes me. I for myself would be less of a person if I did not praise God. That’s the conviction of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, when it asks, in other words, “What are people for?” The answer is, “To glorify God and enjoy God forever.” That is what it is to be a truly human being.

I love this river. I like to get into it and then get out of it and camp along it as I live my ordinary life and do my business in the world. If I were not a Christian I would miss it very much. It’s one of the chief reasons I believe in God. I have close friends who do not. They raise the very credible arguments that there is no God, especially not the barbarian god of the Bible stories. I find myself inadequate to answer all those arguments, though other brilliant writers have (Marilynne Robinson comes to mind, for one.) But apart from all the arguments, I know for myself that I want to believe in God, I want what I get from this belief, and not least is the entry into praise.

And it is God I want to praise. Yes, there are others in my life to whom my praise is due: my wife, my children, my seminary students, so many of you within the congregation. But my praise for you all cannot help but be conditional. There is only One whom I praise without condition and without second thought, and who is free from needing anything back from me. The praise of God is pure.

Now I come back to Isaiah’s meaning of the River. It comes from God. Yes, the praise of God begins with God, it flows from God, and out into the world, including us, and back to God. Just like God’s love. I think you could call praise and love the same thing but in different states of matter: praise is liquid (the River) and love is vapor (the Wind, the Breath). God’s love embraces you and so does praise, and so, of course, you praise the one you love, and you love the one you praise. God invites you into this great stream because God loves you.

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

June 30, Proper 8, A Geography of Prayer 5: The Boundaries

1 Kings 19:15-16, 19-21, Psalm 16, Galatians 5:1, 13-25, Luke 9:51-62

Dearly beloved, this is the fifth sermon in my series entitled “A Geography of Prayer.” For this sermon in the series, I’m relying a great deal on the reflections and insights of my wife, Melody. My geographical feature this week is the Boundaries, from our Psalm, verse 6, “My boundaries enclose a pleasant land, indeed, I have a goodly heritage.”  Both Jesus and Elijah are crossing the boundaries of that pleasant Promised Land which was the goodly heritage of the Children of Israel.

In the case of Elijah, he gets his message while he’s over the southern border down at Mount Sinai. His message will take him back over the northern border into Syria to anoint the next king of the Aramites. After he anoints Elisha as his successor he will cross the eastern border over the Jordan where he will be taken up, as you remember, in the fiery chariot.

In the case of the Lord Jesus, he crosses the border between Galilee and Samaria on his way down to Jerusalem. Samaria is unfriendly territory for Jews. The Jews and the Samaritans regard each other as heretics, like the Shiites and the Sunnis, and their religious feud goes back for centuries. So it’s with righteous anger that the disciples James and John suggest to Jesus that he call down fire from heaven on the Samaritan villagers who have not welcomed them.

They got that from the stories of Elijah. Two times Elijah called down fire from heaven on the soldiers which the king of the Samaritans had sent to get him. Elijah is on the mind of James and John. They had just seen him for themselves, up on the mount of the Transfiguration, conversing with Jesus — maybe giving him advice? And they are excited now, for they heard the voice from heaven confirm their leader as the Messiah, the Son of God, the rightful king of the Kingdom of God. Should he not judge his enemies, like these no good Samaritans?

The Samaritans had no interest in the Messiah. They believed that the whole thing about the house and lineage of David was an heretical innovation of the Judeans and in contradiction to the Torah of Moses, which certainly said nothing about Jerusalem as the holy capital. So why is Jesus taking this way to Jerusalem, instead of going around along the Jordan? Is he making his claim that this province rightly belongs within the Messiah’s goodly heritage, and that by right his kingdom’s boundaries enclose this pleasant land? So the disciples seem to think.

But Jesus does not push his claim. Nor does he deny it. He calls himself the Son of Man, and then he has these off-putting encounters with individuals along the road. Jesus is a powerful and charismatic figure who approaches people in both predictable and unpredictable ways, and he is also constantly being approached on the road by all sorts and conditions of humankind. Why does he push them off? What he says to them we should not take as reasonable. He is speaking recklessly and in extremes.

It’s like he’s clearing the space in front of him as he goes, pulling on people and pushing them off from side to side. Not out of anger or vengeance, like James and John, but because he has set in motion a lava flow, a river in its flood, a great migration, a world in motion within our world but with a different energy and with different rules. The boundary is not a static border but a dynamic edge in motion, pushing and pulling on the ground it’s passing through.

The momentum is from the entry of God into history, in the person of Jesus. The urgency is not of Jesus’ own making, and you need not take it as a general behavioral model, that you as a disciple need to follow Jesus this recklessly, this hastily. Yes, be awake and be ready to move, but the point here is God’s activity in history, in the person of Jesus Christ. It’s not about our making the kingdom come by our haste. So Jesus tells his disciples to cool it with the Samaritans. “Guys, we don’t have time for that anger stuff now.”

God’s kingdom is coming. God is doing it. We don’t make it come. We don’t bring it. Despite what many Christian leaders say, we don’t advance the Kingdom of God, we don’t build it, and we certainly don’t have to defend it. God can do all that, and God does all that. What you need do is receive it. Pray for it. Desire it. Recognize it. It often contradicts the world, as with freedom and slavery. In Galatians St. Paul writes, “For freedom Christ has set you free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” Good. And then he writes, “through love to become slaves to each other.” Not so good. What does that mean? Realistically? At a congregation like Old First? Do you really want to be a love-slave to other people in this congregation? Is that how you receive the Kingdom of God?

Recognize slavery in the so-called “works of the flesh” and recognize freedom in the “fruits of the spirit.” The list of the works of the flesh is long and specific; the list of the fruits of the Spirit is short and sweet, and oddly vague. (Paradise is less interesting than hell.) These sins don’t feel like slavery; they feel more like strategies for dealing with slavery. They feel like ways to forget your suffering for a while. Or to actually do something about your suffering. Some of the strategies don’t sound like fun, like “strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions,” but those strategies are seductive and they feel righteous when you are caught up in them. Most of you avoid fighting, but don’t you feel righteous when you’re in the middle of a fight you had tried to avoid?

So here is where we come to prayer. We are used to praying for what we want, but we have to learn to want what we pray for. We pray for what we desire, and we keep praying in order to desire what we pray for. We pray for God’s kingdom to come in order desire that kingdom and what that kingdom brings.

This is why it’s important to pray more than the prayers we make up ourselves. Yes, you need to pray for your own desires, but you need to develop your desires, you pray the prayers that have been written down by other people, the prayers that are still a bit beyond you, the prayers you don’t yet understand. You pray the Psalms beyond your understanding, the prayers of the liturgy, the prayers of the Christian tradition, praying things you never thought to pray for, to develop your desires. You can pray for what you desire, but you can also desire what you pray for. Pray outside yourself, pray beyond your current boundaries.

Pray to want what is freedom in reality. Who wants to be generous? Who wants to be patient? The fruits of the Spirit. Who wants self-control? Nobody likes to be told, “Control yourself.” If someone says of you that you are “controlled,” that means you are no fun, or you can’t access your emotions. It’s an insult, it’s feeling constricted. When Jesus rebukes his disciples on their desire for righteous judgment, he’s inviting them to freedom, to cross the boundary from the normal life of paying-back into the moving stream of love, joy, and peace.

We live on both sides of the boundary. The Kingdom side is fluid and dynamic, and it makes us nervous, while the normal side feels more solid and familiar. But the good news is that the two sides are unequal. On the Kingdom side, the fruit of the Spirit is successful and the works of the flesh are powerless. On the normal side the works of the flesh claim much success. But the fruits of the Spirit are no less powerful here as well, although in different ways, in ways that you can learn to recognize. It is his power that works on both sides of the boundary, and so you work it best by praying for it. And when you’re praying it’s like you’re breathing only on the one side, you’re breathing the fresh wind of that side instead of the stagnant air of this side. The breeze of the Spirit makes this urban jungle still a pleasant land.

Pray for what you desire, and pray so that you may desire what you pray for. Pray for that new job, if you desire it. And pray for faithfulness and gentleness and self-control, to desire to be faithful and gentle and self-controlled. Pray for patience, kindness, and generosity, so that you desire them. You pray for peace, you pray for joy, and you pray for love, to grow in your desire for them. The first fruit of the Spirit is love. You grow your love for others out of the love God has for you. You love God back with the love God has for you. The first way to love God is to pray.

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