Stress Fractures

 

Luke 12:49-56   

Some years ago, I was at a meeting for a national church committee on which I was serving, and during a break in our work I asked one of the other pastors what he was preaching on the next Sunday. That’s how pastors make small talk.

He told me he was preaching on Luke 12:49-56, and he was none too happy about it. He told me that he had been avoiding this passage for 30 years. Whenever it came around in the lectionary, he would look for something else to preach on, because this one made him too uncomfortable. But he had reached the point where his avoidance of it was making him even more uncomfortable, so he was going in. He would gird his loins and dive in.

It’s a good thing he finally did that, because this is one the church needs to hear, frequently. There are no people in the world more conflict-averse than church people. We firmly believe in the commandment Moses brought down from the mountain: Thou shalt be nice.

And so we really don’t understand why Jesus is being so mean here.

He says that he will bring division within households – father against son, mother against daughter, and so on.  And that really hurts, because we know all about conflict amongst our loved ones.  Mothers who won’t speak to their daughters because of some argument from years ago.  No one quite remembers what it was about or why it was so important yet, nonetheless, the anger and hurt are as fresh as ever.  Sons who cut off contact with their fathers for reasons that remain unspoken and, therefore, unable to be reconciled.  Brothers who divide over business disputes and only speak to one another through their lawyers.  We know about conflict amongst loved ones. 

We know about conflict among church members. The ones who just stop coming and we wonder why, if it was something that we did or said, but are afraid to ask. We know about the pastors who get pushed out – maybe it was their own fault, maybe not. In any case, it left wounds on the body that are hard to heal.  We know about conflict. But how it hurts to hear Jesus say that this conflict comes from him, and that he meant to inflict it.

It is a dangerous thing for him to say. Because as much as we hate it, it’s true: We always have conflict.

And often it is about the most unimportant things. 

Many a congregation has been brought to the brink of civil war over the matter of carpeting. Or paint color.  These are classic church conflicts – things that seem so small.  It is always surprising when they turn out to be so big.

Horror stories abound. Someone once told me that if their church ever started clapping, they would leave. Someone else told me that their congregation split apart because they disagreed about the music. One church I knew split apart because the senior pastor and the assistant pastor couldn’t get along, everyone had to choose a side – or so they thought.

Sometimes you listen to these stories and think, “Really? This is the thing you are willing to break the body of Christ for?” You think Jesus died on the cross for this?

And the answer is almost always no. Because rarely can you point to one thing. The presenting problem, whatever it is, is not usually the real problem. The real problem is the stress fractures.

A stress fracture is a tiny hidden fracture. It’s when a bone gets a very small crack in it – so small you might not even know it’s there. Maybe your foot swells up a bit, maybe it’s painful to walk on, even painful to touch. But you can’t really see anything wrong with it, so you just keep going, ignoring it until you can’t.

So it is with the body of Christ. I knew a congregation where they liked to say, with a mix of humility and pride, that they never have conflict. They just don’t. But what that meant was that they always have conflict.

It’s true. Because if you don’t acknowledge the little conflicts, the stress fractures, they don’t go away. They only multiply. Before you know it, you have a hundred stress fractures zigzagging through the body.

And then something happens – big or small, it can be anything. Maybe it starts as a trivial thing. But to the surprise of everyone, it grows and grows. The conflict can’t be hidden, can’t be smoothed over, it demands change. 

A pastor who does interim work was describing an interview he had with the elders of a congregation who were considering hiring him. Oddly enough, they weren’t asking him many questions; they were telling him everything they didn’t want.

They said, “Don’t tell us we need to change.” They said, “Don’t get into politics.” They said, “Don’t talk to us about healing. We’ve heard it all before.”

They had heard it all before. All of it, apparently, they had heard before and they didn’t like it. This was a church that was still hanging together. But it was as though they were a bowl that had been shattered in a hundred pieces and scotch-taped back together again. It was nominally intact, but it wasn’t going to be very useful.

They might do better to just hang it up. Turn out the lights, lock the door. Take down the sign and call it done, because in their pain they have decided not to be the body of Christ anymore in any meaningful way.

There does come a time, tragically, when conflict is just too hard to tolerate and there is nothing left to do but split.  Divide. Fracture the body.

The story of a church that breaks apart might not be that different from the story of a marriage that ends, I think. If you sit them down and ask them, when did it start? How did it happen? It would be hard to say.

This stuff happens, we know.  But it hurts to think of it as something that God intends.  Where do we look to understand this immensely troublesome notion?

Perhaps we need to look at the cross.  That is definitely what Jesus was looking at.

Listen to him. “What stress I am under until it is completed!” And we know that, as Luke would say, Jesus has turned his face toward Jerusalem, and everything that means for him:  confrontation with the priests at the temple, clashes with religious and civil authorities, tensions among his followers, betrayal, denial, arrest, torture, rebuke by his own people, and finally death on a cross.

Conflict of the most intense and painful and powerful kind.  And would we dare suggest that this is not necessary?

William Penn, good Quaker, founding father of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and champion of freedom, said this: “No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross, no crown.”  He wrote these words while he was a prisoner in the Tower of London because of his religious convictions, which were in conflict with the Church of England.  I remember these words every single Holy Week; words that speak to the truth that there is no peace without conflict; no salvation without rejection; no glory without struggle. 

Crisis is actually a part of God’s plan.  The word comes from the word crux, a word we use to talk about the essence of something, the nub of truth therein.  When we refer to the crux of the matter, we are saying here is the glimmer of truth in this particular problem. 

But did you know that crux is also the Latin word for cross, from which we might understand that the cross is not just an unfortunate thing that happened – it is the essence of God’s plan of salvation. 

Conflict cannot be swept under a rug and forgotten.  Brokenness cannot be patched up with tape and ignored.  True reconciliation with God requires a willingness to face the brokenness in ourselves and others, to confess and to forgive, to speak our truth and listen to another’s truth.  None of these are easy.  It is sorely tempting to opt for the easier path, but the easier path will not take us where we want to go.

To be the church of Jesus Christ demands that we follow his path and that means we will walk into conflict at times.  That we will be confronted with changes that are not to our liking. That we will need to forgive, and probably, ask for forgiveness.

We probably won’t want to.

We will probably look for that easier way.  We will fall back on the old knee-jerk reactions to problems: resist; get angry; find multiple things to get upset about and pick fights with one another; or walk away.  But these reactions will not be helpful and they will never get us to reconciliation.

So what can we do?  What should we do? I offer you three words:

Be realistic. Life is change and change brings conflict.  In fact, the presence of conflict is the sign that change is happening.  Simply understanding this is helpful. 

Be hopeful. In some families, some communities, where things have been pretty stable for a good while, they are ripe for change.  There are bound to be negative reactions to the change.  However, change is necessary for life to exist, so take it as a good sign if people are unhappy. It could be a sign of life.

Be kind.  Not necessarily nice, just kind. We know there will be disputes.  We know there will be divisions.  We know that when there are changes there will be the possibility of some people being wounded by it.  But we can make a choice to respond with kindness and love to whatever comes our way.

We really do know how to read the signs, this is what Jesus is telling us.  And with God’s help, we will.

Picture: ChurchArt.Com

Wedding Banquet People

Luke 12:32-40

Last week I told you a story about a family that was so caught up in the consumer culture that it just about destroyed them – until, mercifully, they realized they could intentionally back away from it. Disentangle themselves from the consumer treadmill. And one of the first things they did was to sell or give away some of their possessions.

In last week’s gospel reading, Jesus told his listeners, “Your life does not consist in the abundance of your possessions.” And sometimes we need to get out from under the mountain of our possessions to begin to know that. 

He told them a parable about a man who was living his life, trying to take care of his stuff, and then out of the blue was told he was a fool for doing that. That his time was up. “Your life is being demanded of you this very night.”

And then, maybe, Jesus looked into the faces of the people who were listening to him and he saw fear. Because they recognized themselves in that man – the “rich” man. Maybe they, themselves, were not rich, but it is what they were striving for: to have enough. Always it is about having enough. 

Maybe Jesus saw the fear in their eyes and he felt compassion for them. I say this because his next words are, “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear.” He appeals to their common sense: did worrying ever do a bit of good for you? Can worry add a single hour to your lifespan? 

He asks them, can you not see how much God values you? But perhaps they could not see that. Perhaps their expressions still held uncertainty. Confusion. Fear.

Fear is our natural reaction, whether we like to admit it or not. Because every day of our lives we know that we might lose what we have. This world holds a constant threat of scarcity, in so many ways.

If we are employed, we could lose our job. And if we lose our job we probably lose our health insurance. So we could also lose our health. 

If we are self-employed, so many things could happen: an accident, a lawsuit, a downturn in business, a supply chain problem. There are so many hazards.

Inflation causes us to worry about making our dollars stretch far enough and worry about how much worse it might get. Bad days on the stock market cause us to worry about the size of our savings and whether we have enough. 

We can lose anything and everything, including our life, and so we take measures to protect ourselves, like the man who built bigger barns to store all his grain. But, still, we know nothing is guaranteed, don’t we? And so we worry. We worry about being caught short, just as the ones who stood listening to Jesus that day worried.

So he softened his tone a bit more. “Do not be afraid, little flock. For it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” He wants them to really believe this, to shed their fear and know how much God cares, and so he does the thing Jesus does best: he tells them a parable.

“Be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks.” 

As is so often the case, we can better grasp the meaning of the parable if we have an understanding of the first century culture in which he lived. The scholar Kenneth Bailey is helpful in this way.

Bailey suggests we should understand the banquet as taking place within the master’s house (because of the language that is used in the Greek manuscripts.) He hasn’t gone to a banquet somewhere else; he is actually hosting the wedding banquet in his home. And so he most certainly has servants serving in the banquet hall, and servants serving in the kitchen. But he also has servants waiting in his bedroom. Bailey says we should assume these last servants are at the lowest rung in the household servant hierarchy. These ones are, as Jesus might say, the least of these.

These who are the least know their job as well as the other servants do, and they do it. Just like little Daisy at Downton Abbey whose job it is to get up before everyone else to light the fires throughout the huge mansion, they know their job and they do it.

And so these servants wait. All throughout the banquet, they wait, ready to perform their duties when they are needed, when the master comes in from the wedding banquet. They are dressed for action with their lamps lit, ready. No matter how late the hour, they are ready.

Is this a burden for them? Is it an unpleasant chore? We might think so – until the master returns and we see what he is like.

He leaves the banquet that he is hosting because he is thinking about the servants upstairs, waiting to serve him, no matter how late the hour. He has compassion for them, so he brings the banquet up to them.

Were the servants surprised to see him? In a sense, no, because of course they knew he was coming. In another sense, yes, because they had no idea when to expect him.

Were they surprised by the sudden appearance? They could hear the banquet still going on down below. Guests were still celebrating, the party wasn’t finished, but here stood their master before them. And he was carrying bits of the banquet in with him.

He walks in. He cinches his belt, hoisting up his tunic, just like a servant, so it will not get in the way of the work. He invites his servants to sit and he begins to serve them. The master serves the servants.

And if these servants knew him to be the kind of master who would do this? then, no, this work is not a burden at all. Their job is not an unpleasant task because they have the most loving, most generous master one could imagine. They have a master who will be sure, no matter how far from the action, to bring the wedding banquet to them. to make them, also, a part if the banquet.

These servants are not just lowly slaves. They are not just the lowest peons in the kingdom. These men and women are wedding banquet people. Because they know their master for who he is, they know that they are wedding banquet people.

Isn’t that a lovely phrase? I have another preacher, Chelsey Harmon, to thank for it. We need not be afraid, as Jesus tells us in so many ways. There is no need to be afraid because we, too, should know ourselves to be wedding banquet people. And as wedding banquet people we share in the celebration, and also in the sharing of the gifts, the joys, of the banquet with everyone else.

Joy is a gift of the Spirit. And, as another talented spiritual writer put it, joy is our first line of defense. Against weakness, against failure, and I would add, against fear. Our master is one who wants us to know and embody joy and so we are also invited to participate in the banquet.

Every time we celebrate the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper that is just what we are doing. I am sometimes bothered that we tend to do it so somberly, with all our attention on the death of Jesus, the sacrifice that gives us the bread and the cup. After all, this is not a funeral feast. This is a wedding banquet.

This is the joyful celebration of the victory of life. We are all invited guests. 

 Do not be afraid, little flock. For it is our Master’s good pleasure to give us the kingdom.

All thanks and glory and love and joy be to him. Amen.

Photo: Lana Foley Photography

The Good Life

Luke 12:13-21   

Let me tell you a story. It’s a familiar story. Maybe you know it.  A man and a woman fall in love.  They realize they want to spend the rest of their lives with each other.  They begin to talk about a possible future together and what that could look like. So the man begins to make a plan.  Searching on Google, he finds “7 Tips for Planning the Perfect Proposal,” and he’s off. He enlists her best friend as his co-conspirator and he scouts out the perfect location to pop the question. He hires a professional photographer who will lurk just out of sight and be ready to capture the big moment. Everything will be shared on their social media accounts – Facebook, Instagram – with tons of “likes” and “Congratulations!”

Once they are engaged, the couple begins planning their wedding.  They know that the planning phase will take about two years, because they have friends who have gone through this.  So they begin with the first step:  visit the potential wedding venues so they can compare them on size, attractiveness, availability, price, and other variables.  Once they make this decision, they can set a date and proceed through the following steps, which include finding a wedding photographer and videographer, caterer, baker, band, florist, dressmaker, and so on. 

The big day arrives, or should I say “days” – because along with the wedding itself there are the pre-wedding parties (bachelor party, bachelorette party, rehearsal dinner; then there’s the wedding and the reception; and the post-reception brunch.  Then a honeymoon trip, after which the husband and wife settle in to begin their life together. 

They want to buy a home, but the truth is they are financially tapped out from the wedding event and all the accompanying events.  This would be a problem, except that there are mortgages available for first-time homebuyers who don’t have the standard down payment.  If they play their cards right, they can start the home buying process with only a few thousand dollars – and that much they are hoping they can get from a cash advance on their credit cards.   

Now they are homeowners … sort of.  I mean, they don’t actually own anything; the fact of the matter is the banks own them.  But they have their dream house, and they tweet about it to all their friends, post a picture of the happy couple standing in front of the “Sold” sign on all the social media sites, so it’s official.  And now they can start their family.

One happy morning she takes the home pregnancy test and it’s positive!  She doesn’t tweet this, though they do share it with a few family members and close friends.  She’s pregnant.  We all know what this means: let the baby-shopping season begin!  Because, of course, babies need so many things:  diapers, diaper bags, diaper genie, onesies, snugglies, blankies, spit cloths, bottles, pacifiers, rattles, Baby Einstein toys so baby’s genius potential can be realized, cribs, pack & plays, swings, bouncy seats, high chairs, portable high chairs, strollers, baby monitors, sound machines … I think there are many more things that I don’t even know about, but whatever they are, they are things that babies need, things that mothers and fathers need, things that will be an important part of their happy home.

Finally the baby arrives – and the event is recorded. And shared. Now they are three. 

They want the best they can possibly offer their beloved child – the best toys to stimulate this developing mind, the best and safest car to travel to baby gym class.  The best neighborhood…the best schools…they’ve been thinking.  This house of theirs may not be suitable anymore.  The schools are not great – they’re ok, but not great – and the parks are a little sketchy, and besides that it’s starting to feel kind of small, what with all this baby gear that takes up so much space.  They have been thinking…and they think it’s time to start looking for a bigger and better home.  The problem is they don’t really have any equity yet.  But they think that they can sell the house and break even; then if they use what they’ve saved up in a retirement account they can get the house they need.

Are we getting tired of this story yet?  I know I certainly am. 

This modern American lifestyle is just the latest incarnation of the problem that’s plagued humankind since the beginning, since humans discovered stuff.  This adorable couple is just the latest version of the rich fool who had to build bigger barns to store his grain.  So it would have a nice place to sit and rot.

We shouldn’t judge this man too harshly.  The farmer Jesus tells us about in the parable is not a bad man.  Clearly, he has worked hard and been a good steward of the land.  It has produced well for him and that is good from any perspective.  That is something with which he can be satisfied – even proud.  But what happens next is not.

He sees that he has an abundance of food.  He has a lot of food.  He has too much food…more than he can consume.  But all of a sudden, his perception changes and this abundance is not too much at all.  It is just what he needs!  He absolutely must have all this food, so the problem becomes how to manage it.  His storehouses are full and there is still much more food waiting to be stored.  He’s on the verge of panic.  The only possibly solution is to build more storage.  Only then can he feel secure and be at peace.

Maybe you already know this, but peace won’t come from full storage barns.  Security will not be the reward for hoarding food.  True contentment does not arise from having enough of the right stuff.

Maybe you know what really happens.  As soon as you have acquired as much stuff as you thought you needed, you realize there is something else; you realize that there is more stuff out there that you don’t have.  Until now, you had no idea you needed that stuff; but now that you know about it, you can’t rest until you have that stuff too.  You need it.

Or so we think.  This is a story about some of the less attractive qualities of being human: envy, greed, anxiety.  “Tell my brother to share our father’s inheritance with me, Jesus.  It’s not fair.  Jesus, help me; I should have as much as he has.”  And the anxiety is an inevitable byproduct of living in the material world.  From the moment we discover there are things we don’t have that we must acquire, to the moment we acquire it and have to figure out how to manage it, to the moment we discover that there is yet something else we don’t have, and so on.

Our lives are spent chasing after things to acquire– and experiences to check off our bucket lists – but we are so occupied with the chase that we barely enjoy the experience.  We are barely present to experience them. We are too busy orchestrating photo ops to organize in scrapbooks or upload to social media sites. 

We buy products that have built in obsolescence, so we’ve no sooner gotten used to it that we have to replace it with a new and better product which we will try to figure out how to use.  We order, we buy, we service, we fiddle with our stuff.  We marvel at these amazing new things.  We nearly go cross-eyed trying to read the instructions and we give up and hand it over to our grandkids in the hope that they can intuitively work it out.  This is normal in the modern American life.

The young couple in my story are on the upward side of the trajectory, of achieving the American dream. Many of us are on the other side, but we are not immune to the lure of acquisition. We still watch TV and see the ads for everything we must have which we didn’t know until this moment. We still use shopping as a form of therapy and entertainment. And now we have grown kids who come to our house and tell us, “it’s time to replace that ugly fluorescent fixture in the kitchen, no one has those things anymore, for heaven’s sake, get some pendant lights.”

But now we watch our retirement accounts fearfully. When the stock market goes up, we breathe relief. When it goes down, we toss and turn at night wondering if we will be okay, if we will have enough.

+++

The story of the young couple isn’t over.  They get their bigger house in the better neighborhood and empty their little retirement account in the process.  Over the next few years there are two more children, more stuff, and all the camps and lessons and activities that you would expect.  They keep thinking they’ll get ahead next year; that they’ll get their situation under control; get a little breathing room soon.  But every year is the same as the one before – only worse. 

One morning they wake up.  They realize they can’t live this way anymore because they aren’t really living.  They have to find another way, and the only way will be to rid themselves of some of their possessions.  They sell the house and buy something much smaller and simpler.  They sell one of their four cars (well, it’s a start).  They give some of their furniture and books and other things to the church rummage sale, to the homeless shelter, to the Goodwill – knowing that they will not replace these things with newer versions, like they normally would do.  They learn how to unsubscribe from email lists that scream at them to buy more stuff.  They learn to cook and eat at home.  And they discover some of the simple joys in life they had always been too busy for.

They are learning how to disengage from the consumer treadmill, where the fundamental creed is the more you have, the happier you are, because they’ve finally realized it’s a lie.  They are learning that if they value their lives by the quality and quantity of the stuff they have, they will never really believe their lives have value at all.

They are learning the secret of having plenty and of being in need, as the apostle Paul wrote.  They are learning to be content. 

They are learning to be content. Which is a journey itself.  

Photo by Ruchindra Gunasekara on Unsplash

What Is Needed

 

Luke 10:38-42   

I served a church that had a board of deacons made up entirely of women. And so the first year I worked with the nominating committee I strongly encouraged them to consider some men who might be called to serve as a deacon.

Not too long after that I got a visit to my office from Doreen, the moderator of the Deacons. She was in a fit. She said, “I heard you all nominated Ty for deacon. Just tell me: what am I supposed to do with him? He can’t bake!”

I tried to argue that there was really much more to the ministry of the deacons than baking cookies, but Doreen was still doubtful. “Well, besides,” I said, “How do you know he can’t bake?”

I had no idea at all if Ty could bake a batch of cookies, but mostly I wanted to get beyond the ideas everyone had about women’s work and men’s work. There are some pretty resistant ideas about gender roles in the church, and when people step out of bounds, you never know what might happen.

You might be surprised that this little story about Mary and Marth and Jesus arouses as much passion as it does. In its own little domestic way, it is about as provocative as Jesus’ most shocking parables. Everybody has something to say about it.

Most people, based on my informal assessment, seem to disagree with Jesus. People feel very strongly that Mary really should have been in the kitchen with Martha. But not necessarily because they believe a woman’s place is in the kitchen. Most people seem to feel this way because they are sympathetic to Martha and the burden she is carrying.

When good church people look at Mary – let’s admit it – we think she is lazy. She should be helping her sister.

But that is not to say that Martha doesn’t have every right to sit at Jesus’ feet, too. Sitting at Jesus’ feet to learn is a very good thing, right? It’s not just for men, right?

It’s pretty easy to get tied up in knots with this story. Most of the women’s voices I have heard speaking about this – you can tell they’re tied up in knots – they will say, yes it would have been fabulous for Martha to go sit beside her sister at Jesus’ feet. But we just have one question: is anyone going to eat? Who will prepare the food?

I don’t know if anyone here needs to hear this, but here it is: food doesn’t just cook itself.

No one in the story seems at all concerned about what any of the male disciples were doing. Where were they? Hanging out in the yard smoking, telling stories, waiting for someone to call them in for dinner?

Not to say the men were useless. If Martha needed a jar opened, or if she needed something from the top shelf, they would have been right there. But they’re not going to be much help stuffing the little mushroom caps or putting the toothpicks in the bacon-wrapped water chestnuts.  For that she’s going to need Mary.

A story like this pushes our buttons. Because as much as things have changed, and they really have – I always thought my father would have starved to death if there wasn’t a woman around to put a plate of food in front of him – it is still true that women do the majority of the domestic work.

But, as Jesus said to Martha, let’s not get worried and distracted by these things. Because I don’t believe this story really has anything to do with gender roles or housework. It’s about figuring out what the one thing is that’s needed. At any particular time and place, what is needed?

Churches, maybe Presbyterian churches in particular, are full of Marthas. Both male and female Marthas. Because we know, what would happen otherwise? If it weren’t for Martha, how would the coffee get made, the candles get filled, the paraments get changed to the proper color for the season? How would we have music or sound or flowers? Would we just let the light bulbs all burn out until eventually we were sitting in darkness? On communion Sunday, would we just have to imagine we are eating the bread and drinking the cup because no one bothered to prepare the elements? Would we let the bulletins sit in the office and figure that if people want one, they can just go to the office and get one?

There are so many things that need to be done. What is this “one thing” Jesus speaks of?

I once took it upon myself to teach a small group of Presbyterians how to practice contemplative prayer. I told them this is what it is: a simple practice of sitting in a comfortable position, closing your eyes, and clearing your mind of all distracting thoughts. For about 20 minutes.

Go ahead and clear all that stuff out of the way and wait for God to speak to you. And if, while you’re waiting, your mind starts to run off chasing some thought, gently pull it back. Okay? So we gave it a try.

After about five minutes, one of the men in the group, Steve, let out an exasperated sigh. “O man, my mind was everywhere,” he said. “I was thinking about everything I have going on at work, at home, all the things I need to do.”

His wife Connie, sitting next to him, smiled. She said, “I just imagined myself sitting at Jesus’ feet. And whenever a thought or a worry came in my mind, I imagined taking it in my hands and laying it down at his feet. And it was easy to let it go.”

Such a showoff that Mary can be. But, really, answer me this: How is the church going to show love to our neighbors if all we ever do is sit at Jesus’ feet?

Who is going to collect the groceries and take them over to the food pantry for the poor? Who is going to pack up the backpacks and take them to the school so kids will have food in their homes over the weekend? Who is going to greet newcomers and let them know they are welcome here? Who is going to teach the children and let them know that God loves them, and we love them?

There are so many things that need to be done. What is this “one thing?”

I don’t think anyone seriously questions the idea that there are many things the church should be doing. There are many things Jesus told us we should be doing: feeding the hungry, healing the sick, clothing the naked and housing the homeless, comforting the afflicted and freeing the oppressed.

Jesus wants us to work for justice as well as for peace, to do God’s will on earth as it is in heaven. You know, not much.

I once participated in a program that was intended to revitalize congregations. The focus was on figuring out what the congregation’s particular gifts are, then figuring out what the community’s particular needs are, and then making a plan to do something. Just do something.

The consultants who led this program were so energetic and creative and just great at coming up with heaping handfuls of ideas that would help a congregation get moving, get working. But at a certain point I had to admit to myself that I felt something lacking. There was one thing, one thing needed, that was missing for me. To sit at the feet of Jesus.

And without that I felt empty. And tired. Anxious. And maybe a little cranky.

Connie, who was in that contemplative prayer group I led – you know Connie, who bears a very strong resemblance to Mary? It wasn’t surprising that she felt at ease with contemplative prayer. Connie was a powerful pray-er, everyone knew it. She walked around with something almost like an aura, she radiated spirituality.

But do you know what else Connie did? Connie ran a soup kitchen in the church every Saturday. This kitchen fed hundreds of people every week. There were dozens of volunteers. Every church in the community, and other organizations, too, contributed to the soup kitchen in some way.

The people came to this soup kitchen to have their bodies fed with good food, and their souls fed with love and joy. There was no one, no matter how difficult, who did not get loved and fed. Connie was the heart and the energy behind this. And Connie could not have done it if she did not, regularly, spend time at Jesus’ feet.

You know, I have been to other soup kitchens that aren’t like that. Places where you see people bustling around the kitchen, tired and short-tempered, resentful. Maybe a little bit like Martha was that day when she came storming out of the kitchen complaining. The people I see at those places, I think maybe they have forgotten why they are doing it.

Because it turns out there really is just one thing that is needed. To stay close to Jesus, to listen to Jesus.

All good things will flow from that.

Photo:  Yes, I can bake.

A Plumb Line

 

Amos7:1-17     

Luke 10:25-37   

Kim told me recently that I am about due for a lighthearted sermon. I told him I would certainly keep that in mind. Honestly, I would like nothing more than to make you smile and even laugh. Even though the world keeps lobbing grenades at us.

There is a film I love called Four Weddings and a Funeral. It is a comedy that follows a group of friends as they attend weddings together. Hilarious things happen – disastrous best man speech, lost wedding rings, a very nervous and stuttering priest, and so on. Then at one of the weddings they attend, someone dies, which is not funny at all. The funeral follows, a very tender scene. Then the comedy resumes, but now they are all, somehow, changed. Life does that to a person. We wear the hardships in our bodies. All of us do.

You don’t forget the traumas you have been through; they live somewhere within you. You don’t slough off the weight of grief. These things simply become a part of who you are, they change the way you see and how you live.

And so I spent some time this past week thinking about how changed the people of Highland Park are now from one week ago. Last Sunday they were enjoying a holiday weekend, like we all were. And the next day their world changed.

This one is personal for me because I have family in Highland Park. I have spent many beautiful summer days on the very same streets that were covered in blood last Monday. My cousin and her family were planning to be at the parade – her son was supposed to be in the parade – until her husband came down with COVID. The realization that COVID might have saved their lives gave me a feeling I can’t describe.

No one who was there on that day will be the same again. But even the people who did not attend the parade will be changed by this. Because random acts of mass gun violence have come to their hometown.

And we who are watching this from a distance, once again, are sad and angry and bewildered, because it’s just not the way it is supposed to be. We would all like to shout out in protest: This is not the way it is supposed to be!

Every third year in our Common Lectionary we have the summer of the prophets, and this is that summer. And every time it comes up I think, really? Does that feel appropriate to you? These guys, they lack a summery vibe – they’re so heavy, no lightheartedness in them at all. Over the years, I have become pretty good at ignoring the prophets. 

But this may be the time to listen to them. Because the prophets come bearing the message that things are not the way they are supposed to be.

And here we have Amos, the man who rejects the title altogether but still bears the prophetic message: Things are not the way they are supposed to be.

Amos was, in his own description, a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore trees. He had plenty at home to keep him busy, but apparently out of the clear blue sky, like a random bolt of lightning, God called him to deliver a message to the kingdom of Israel. A message that put in the strongest terms possible: This is not the way it is supposed to be.

He shared it using the image of the plumb line. The Lord would set a plumb line in the midst of Israel to show how far the people had strayed from God’s way.

And truly they had strayed far off course. Things were not the way they were supposed to be in Israel. The rich were unspeakably rich; the poor were devastatingly poor. And the rich and powerful were more than willing to sacrifice the lives of the poor for the sake of increasing their riches.

They paid lip service to God’s law, but their actions betrayed what was in their hearts. They observed the sabbath, but anxiously waited for the day to be over so they could get back to cheating and exploiting their neighbors. You don't have to take my word for it. It’s all there, written in Amos’s book.

Amos said, “They trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth and push the afflicted out of the way.” (See what I mean about heavy?) They would abuse their brothers and sisters to the max, even to death. No, this is not the way it is supposed to be in the world God created.

See how the plumb line reveals the truth: Amos, the herdsman, the reluctant prophet, the plumb line who shows us how things are supposed to be.

Don’t we need a plumb line in this world of ours! We have the scriptures, and we have the ability to read them. But the truth is we are tempted to read them in a way that lends justification to our desires, righteousness to our actions. It’s not hard to delude ourselves.

We need a plumb line, because the naked eye is prone to distorting things. We think we have that picture hung straight. But later we stand back and look at it, we see our mistakes from a different vantage point. 

We think we were fully justified in our action, but later when we are telling a friend about it, we see the look in their eyes that tells us, no, we were not justified.

A plumb line might save us from ourselves sometimes. If we could just check ourselves against it we might see the right way before we go off and do something stupid, possibly even dangerous. A plumb line might make us pause, think. And, a plumb line might stir us to action when action is needed.

We have always struggled with the conflict of wanting to do right and wanting what we want. As much as the young lawyer who approached Jesus on that day, struggling with his desires. He wanted to inherit eternal life. Which was something he felt deserving of, it went without saying. In his own estimation he had lived a life without blemish. He had crossed all the T’s and dotted all the I’s. He was just taking this opportunity to do a final check, to have the rabbi confirm for him what he already knew.

Then Jesus dropped a plumb line.

There was a man who fell into the hands of bandits, who robbed him and left him half-dead on the road. A good priest came upon him – but he quickly crossed over to the other side. A good Levite came upon him, and he too quickly crossed over to the other side. Then a lousy Samaritan came along. This worthless soul picked the man up, dressed his wounds, and took him to a place where he could receive medical attention – and he paid for the man’s medical care. That miserable, good-for-nothing villain did this.

The clever young lawyer saw what Jesus did there, and this was a life-changing opportunity for him. He could become a new man, even better than he was before! Less self-satisfied. More compassionate. He could even become a man who carries the word out to the world: this is not the way it is supposed to be. But let me show you the way it should be.

Like Amos.

A person can be changed when the plumb line drops. When you see just how off-course things are, you can’t go back to seeing things the way you did before.

I called my aunt last week to see how she was doing after the July 4 shootings. And she said to me, “This is a life-changing experience for us. But you know what? Just as many people died of gun violence that day in the city of Chicago and no one seems to care. How horrible is that?”

My prayer today is that we will see the plumb lines around us clearly and recognize what they show us about the way things are, and the way things should be. That we will no longer shrug our shoulders in the face of tragedies, saying that’s just the way it is, nothing you can do. And that we all might be plumb lines for others in the world, showing others the way things might, and should, be.

Picture: ChurchArt.Com

Overwhelmed

 Luke 10:1-11,16-20    

It was about 25 years ago and I was working as a Director of Christian Education in a Presbyterian congregation. I was in my late thirties. And I was in conversation with another member, Marilyn, who was interested in teaching an adult class in the church. She had never taught in the church before. She was a clinical psychologist. She had been a member of the church for years, although not much involved. But now she was interested in becoming more involved and teaching seemed like a good avenue to her. Her reason, she told me, was that she was getting older – in her seventies, I think. And, she said, the closer she came to the end of life, the more interested she became in matters of faith.

I don’t know offhand what the average age is in our congregation, or any congregation for that matter. But I do know that I hear often about the “graying” of the church. We have more retired than working people here. We know this is largely because older folks are members of generations in which churchgoing was the norm, while younger folks are part of generations that are less likely to see the value in church attendance. But there’s more to it than that. It is also true that even older folks who have not been life-long active church members have a tendency to find their way to a church as the years go by. Maybe we all, like Marilyn, find our priorities shifting as we see heaven drawing nearer.

In the gospel of Luke, we are in a section in which, as Luke tells us, Jesus has set his face toward Jerusalem. We know what this meant for him – in Jerusalem was his death, so this means he was beginning to look beyond this world. This seemed to be a bit off-putting for some people, but for Jesus it was essential.

To prepare his disciples, he began sending them out on their own, to try their hand at ministry. First, he sent out the 12, the inner circle. Their mission was to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal. Later, in this passage, he sends out a much larger group to go in pairs to all the places he, himself, intends to visit. He sends them with instructions to bring peace with them and virtually nothing else – no purse, no bag, no sandals. Just peace. And healing. And the message that the kingdom of God has come near.

The kingdom of God is near. And just as it was a bit off-putting for some of the people Jesus approached, it probably had the same effect on some towns and villages the disciples entered. Jesus gave them instructions about what to do when their message is rejected. I suppose that some people didn’t understand what the kingdom of God had to do with the world in which they lived.

I don’t blame them. Sometimes, it can seem like the peace of Christ is just a temporary escape from the world in which we live.

I heard a sermon this past week that was just posted online. The preacher described hiking in the redwoods of California with his wife. It was such a peaceful experience; it felt like nothing else mattered but just being there in that moment. But then it was time to leave, and they got in their car to drive home. They turned on the radio and heard the news of the day: a mass murder. The war in Ukraine. Leaked reports from the Supreme Court. Toxic politics in primaries of one state after another. And just like that, their peace was gone.

When they went back into the world, their peace evaporated, and they wondered if what they felt was really peace at all. Or maybe just an illusion.

I know that there have always been hard times, but it does seem as though we have had more than our share of bad news in recent years. The COVID-19 pandemic, a once in a lifetime experience (I hope), has been very hard. But if it were only COVID it would be so much easier.

Instead, we raise the temperature by politicizing everything – masks, vaccines, providing help to those in need. And, instead of supporting one another as we go through a hardship together, we attack one another. Our distrust of one another grows. Our distrust of our institutions grows. Conspiracy theories, accusations, and attacks are constantly in the air. It feels like our whole system is broken. And there is no peace.

The preacher went on to say that he was growing to understand that true peace is a whole lot more than just the nice feeling you get when you’re not fighting with anyone; true peace is the presence of real justice. And it seems like justice is in short supply in our world.

There are so many kinds of injustice, which are all interconnected. Martin Luther King said that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere; that we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. That is to say, we are all in this together. If we try to separate ourselves from the needs of the world, we do harm to ourselves as much as to the needy. Justice is complicated. The need is overwhelming.

And so, the preacher I was listening to said, when we feel overwhelmed we might just decide to pull back. We feel inadequate to the task. Let someone else, someone better equipped, try. And when we pull back, we leave a vacuum that might be filled by more injustice, more hate, more violence. The answer, this preacher said, is for each of us to take back our moral autonomy and be a force for what is right, for justice. And in this work, we may find that ever-elusive peace.

He said a lot more, which I won’t go into, but I will tell you it was inspiring. This was not a Presbyterian preacher, though. This was not a preacher from any church, actually, or even any other religion. This was a sermon delivered at a gathering called Civic Saturday, where you find people who may not have an affinity for religion have a hunger for meaning. They come together for community, for healing, and then they go out into the world to make a difference.

They are a lot like church – without Jesus. But there may be another important difference: They are not looking for heaven somewhere down the road, pie in the sky in the sweet by and by. They are looking for that kind of peace and love right here in this world.

I’m not going to join Civic Saturday, as appealing as certain aspects are, because I would miss Jesus too much. I need church. But I also need the church to say loud and clear, “The kingdom of God is near.” And to do our very best to bridge the gap between this world and God’s kingdom, to bring the kingdom to more of this world.

I cannot think of a time when our nation has been more needful of Christians who will do this: bring healing, bring justice, bring peace.

I once asked a group of church people how they felt about the notion of being sent out into the world as Jesus sent out the 70 disciples. They all said they felt inadequate. And it’s true, we are inadequate. We are easily overwhelmed with the needs as we see them – the fighting, the toxic politics, the gross inequality, the ways we see our civic norms breaking down and raw power taking their place. It’s enough to make you withdraw into your prayer closet.

But let us remember that Jesus sent his disciples out. He sent them with instructions to heal. He sent them with peace to share. He sent them with a little bit of the kingdom of heaven, which was more than adequate.

In these days of fear and distrust and polarization, may we know that the kingdom of heaven is not for some time later. It is not for our escape. The kingdom of heaven is for here and now, and it is given to us. When you are overwhelmed, remember this: the kingdom of heaven is here. May we share it.

Photo by أخٌ‌في‌الله on Unsplash