Ten Per Cent Return – Sermon on Luke 17:11-19

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Would you consider ten percent to be a good return on an investment?  Of course, it depends a lot on the investment doesn’t it? Investing in a fast food franchise will look different from a certificate of deposit at the local bank. Even in an uncertain economy, if you put something in, it’s usually with the expectation that you will get back something more.

By now, you have read the sermon title, and you may be thinking that you’re in for the annual stewardship sermon, that sermon you never like to hear because it makes you feel guilty about the amount of money you contribute – or don’t – to the church budget. If you’re looking for an easy way to sneak out of the sanctuary about now, you can relax. I already preached the stewardship sermon for today.  It’s sitting over there in that apple core. No, in today’s gospel lesson, Luke tells us of a kind of investment that goes beyond money. Luke isn’t talking about finances here, but about faith. While it might seem that Jesus sees only a ten per cent return on his investment in an outcast’s life, the actual return cannot be measured as easily as a savings account balance. Here’s the Good News, as recorded in the 17th chapter of Luke’s Gospel, verses 11-19.

On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him.  Keeping their distance, they called out, saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” When he saw them he said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were made clean.  Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice.  He prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him.  And he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus asked, “Were not ten made clean?  But the other nine, where are they?  Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?  Then he said to him, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.”

Luke reminds us that Jesus is on the march toward Jerusalem, toward the cross. But there’s a slight problem with Luke’s geography: Samaria isn’t really “on the way” to Jerusalem. Maybe Luke isn’t talking about geography as much as he’s giving us a time frame for this story. Though Jesus has been traveling to Jerusalem for several chapters, he’s still nearer the beginning of his journey than the end. Luke doesn’t want us to lose sight of the final destination, however. Jesus may be taking the scenic route, but Jerusalem is where he will eventually go.

We have our first hint that something unusual is about to happen when Luke tells us that these ten lepers approached Jesus. Leprosy could mean any of a number of skin diseases, but whatever the disease, being “unclean” meant being an outcast, unable to participate in normal society. By law, lepers were supposed to maintain a safe distance from others, warning people away with shouts of “Unclean!  Unclean!” But these lepers draw near to Jesus, at least near enough to call out to him.

So here we have ten lepers outside a village. But instead of warning Jesus to stay away, the lepers do something that is highly remarkable. Not only do they call out to Jesus to have mercy on them, they call him “Master” – a title that no one else uses to address Jesus in all the gospel accounts, except for the twelve disciples. It’s worth pondering how these ten outcasts, who have been excluded from social interaction with the general population, could possibly know who Jesus was, or that he had the authority to help them. But they readily appeal to that authority.  Instead of warning Jesus to keep his distance, they put themselves at his mercy.

This particular healing story appears only here, in Luke’s gospel. These ten lepers don’t get as much publicity as the one in chapter 5, whose story also gets told by Mark and Matthew. But this is a much more dramatic healing, because Jesus doesn’t even have to touch these lepers in order for them to be cleansed. He simply sees them.

A couple of weeks ago, we heard the story of the rich man and Lazarus. The rich man passed right by Lazarus, day after day, and never saw him until it was too late. His wealth and his self-centeredness did not allow him to really see Lazarus. It is so easy to ignore the needs around us as we go through our daily routines. It’s easy to look the other way whenever we see a beggar on the street corner, or a single parent struggling with young children and no support network, or a person facing physical or mental health challenges. How often do we turn away from people who make us uncomfortable, only because they are different from us?

But Jesus sees these ten lepers, and immediately tells them to go show themselves to the priests. This must have sounded a little strange to these lepers. Showing yourself to the priest was something you did after your skin disease had run its course and you were well again. Jesus was acknowledging the faith these lepers had shown when they called him “Master.” The lepers had already demonstrated their willingness to submit to Jesus’ spiritual authority. When he sends them off to the priests, they don’t ask questions. They just go.

And as they went, they were made clean. 

But only one of them seems to notice what has happened. Only one of them saw that he had been healed, just as Jesus saw him to heal his disease. Only this one turned back toward Jesus, praising God with a loud voice. The same loud voice that, moments before, should have been yelling “Unclean!  Unclean!” had called out “Have mercy!” instead. Now, this very same loud voice was whooping and hollering in praise to God. He knew that it wasn’t some magic trick or the number of steps he had taken toward the priests that had healed him. He knew it was God’s work, accomplished through Jesus. The leper saw. And the leper’s awareness is, quite literally, the turning point in the story.

The leper turned back. What a beautiful picture of repentance Luke paints for us here! The leper turned away from mindless obedience to empty rules, as he turned toward the Source and Giver of Life. The leper’s response was spontaneous and authentic. The leper praised God, but he also prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. The leper’s faith had shown itself in action as he headed for the priests, but the glory he gave to God showed itself in humility and thanksgiving.

Then we get to the punchline: And he was a Samaritan.

Luke loves to remind his readers that Jesus came to reverse the status quo, and one of his favorite ways of doing this is to call attention to Gentiles whose faith brings them into the family of God. First century Jews thought they had exclusive rights to God’s love and goodness. Luke, who was Greek and addressed his writing to a Gentile audience, delighted in pointing out that God had promised salvation to all nations, that God loved all people, and that Israel had no more claim to God’s grace than any other nation.

But there is more at work here than the theme of reversal that threads its way throughout Luke’s writing. Luke carefully sets up the story so that one might assume all ten lepers, though they may be outcasts, are acceptable outcasts. Their leprosy at least has the potential of disappearing after a time of quarantine, and they therefore have the potential to become acceptable again, welcomed back into society. But to a first-century Jew, Samaritans were a particularly distasteful type of outcast. Samaritans were un-redeemable because they refused to acknowledge the Temple in Jerusalem as the only appropriate place to worship God. No Jew in his right mind would ever welcome a Samaritan into fellowship.

Like a good mystery writer, Luke has planted a tiny detail at the beginning of his story that seems unimportant at first. Jesus was passing through the region between Samaria and Galilee. We don’t know exactly where the village is located. We don’t know if the lepers are Jewish or Samaritan, or some unusual combination of outcasts from both nations. When they head for the priests, we don’t know which direction they go.

But this tiny detail sets the scene for Luke to shock his readers with the punch line: oh by the way, the guy that showed the right response to God’s grace? The only one who came back to glorify God and give thanks? That guy? Yeah, HE was a Samaritan! He was someone you would avoid at all costs on at least two counts: a leper and a Samaritan. A double outcast! And yet, Jesus saw him and healed him. What’s more, this Samaritan leper was the only one of ten who saw Jesus for who he really was, the only one who returned to thank Jesus and give glory to God.

Then Jesus asked, “Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? 

For the first time, we get a hint that Jesus is not traveling alone. The disciples have not been mentioned in this story. But now Jesus begins to teach by asking a series of questions, so we get the feeling that the disciples have been nearby all along, watching the story unfold before them. Interestingly, the word given to us in the New Revised Standard Version as “asked” really means “answered” in the Greek. Jesus is answering, or responding to, what has just happened, and he grabs this teachable moment to show his disciples again that the Kingdom of God is not what they expect it to be.

All ten of the lepers had faith enough to call on Jesus, submit to his authority, and ask for his mercy. All ten responded to Jesus in obedience, and all ten received physical healing. But where are the other nine? The obvious answer is that they are still headed toward the priests. Whether this is because of their blind obedience to the Law, or simply their eagerness to be restored to society, they are still going the other way. They may have recognized Jesus’ power to heal, but they have missed the point. They have not seen, as the Samaritan has seen, that faith means more than blind obedience.

Jesus asks, “Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” The word “foreigner” is used only in this one instance in the New Testament. Jesus calls attention to the fact that this one, born outside the people of God, is the only one who behaves in a manner appropriate to a true child of Abraham. Only this foreigner, who could not enter the inner courts of the Jewish temple, has shown the kind of faith that responds in gratitude to God’s grace.

Jesus restores the one at his feet by telling him to get up. As he has done before, and will do again before he finally reaches Jerusalem, Jesus announces, “Your faith has made you well.” Jesus is talking about more than leprosy here. He is proclaiming the Samaritan’s salvation as well as his physical health. Another pastor friend once commented, “All ten lepers were saved from leprosy, but only one is saved from despair.” Only the one who came back to give thanks, praising and glorifying God, showed the kind of faith that leads to salvation.

The lesson Jesus teaches is clear: The only authentic response to God’s saving grace is faith shown in action, and gratitude that erupts in praising God. So what keeps us from showing our faith by acting on it? What prevents us from being so grateful we can’t help but give God our praise?

I find that I’m a lot like the nine lepers who disappear down the road: it’s a lot easier for me to simply act on my faith than it is for me to praise God out loud for all the world to hear. I’d like to think I remember to be grateful for God’s goodness to me. I do say prayers of thanksgiving every day, but, if I’m honest, I also know that I’m a little embarrassed when I hear someone praising God for the traffic light staying green until they are through the intersection, or for the price on the gas pump going up just after they’ve pumped a tank-full of gasoline. “How nice for you” I think. “What about the person right behind you?”

But the truth is that, while I am judging others for being self-centered in their gratitude, I’m not giving God very much glory in my day-to-day life. I can’t honestly say that praise erupts from my lips whenever I notice how good God has been to me. I’m a little embarrassed, to tell you the truth. What kind of weirdo would people think I am?

Luke gives us Jesus’ answer over and over: the kind of weirdo who turns away from the status quo and worships shamelessly at Jesus’ feet. It is no accident that the one who gets it right in this story is the Samaritan, the double outcast. The truth is that we don’t like to identify ourselves as outcasts, as undesirables. But that is what Jesus does time and again throughout the gospel story. He not only reaches out to the dregs of society, he identifies with them, eats with them, walks with them.

Luke often describes society’s “undesirable” people as models of faith and examples of Kingdom living, and the Samaritan leper is a prime example. Luke forces us, along with his first century readers, to recognize that God loves every single person ever born, and God wants every single person ever born to participate in Kingdom joy and fellowship. Luke reminds us that everyone is eligible to participate in the Kingdom of God.

Luke uses the theme of reversal to keep us on our toes, to keep us from falling into the trap of thinking we’ve made it into the “desirable” club. The truth is that God doesn’t care how “desirable” we are by the world’s standards. In fact, if we take Scripture seriously, God loves the ones we consider ‘undesirable’ at least as much as He loves anyone else. And he calls us to love them, too. Not judge them. Not scold them. Not ignore them. Love them.

God wants each of us to become the full person we were created to be, so that we can enjoy God’s fellowship. That transformation can only take place when we put our complete trust in God, even when it doesn’t make sense to do so, just as the ten lepers started walking toward the priests before there was any evidence that their leprosy was gone.

To be fully transformed, however, means that we not only let our faith show in what we do, we express our thanks in ways that give glory to God. As we repent of our sin and turn toward Christ, God continues to transform us and we become people who, like the Samaritan leper, spontaneously give glory to God. Through the power of his Holy Spirit, God changes us into the more and more perfect image of God we were created to be. And it is this image that God uses to attract others – outcasts like us – into the Kingdom of God.

So how does this fit with stewardship? It’s simple, really. As God continues to work in us, and as we continue to trust him, we become more and more like Christ. As we see with the eyes of Jesus, our hearts are moved to compassion just has Christ’s heart is moved. We may not have the gift of healing that lets us say, “Go your way, your faith has made you well.” But we do have gifts we can share. Trusting God to use them for his glory, we offer them as our own act of worship. When we begin to see the other outcasts around us, and we admit that we are outcasts, too, we become free. We’re free to give God thanks and praise for the work he is doing here. And God calls us to be part of that work, sharing our gifts, meeting the needs we see, contributing whatever we can to the ministry God has given us to do in this time and place.

The Parable of the Ten Apples

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First, let me give credit where it’s due.  This isn’t my story.  I stole it from Rev. Phil Stenberg, who used to offer this little parable every year on Stewardship Sunday as the children’s sermon. I publish this story here so that the first paragraph of my sermon, “Ten Per Cent Return” makes sense. It needs props: ten apples. They need to be small, but not too small.

So, here’s the parable, as I received it from Phil, along with instructions for telling it:

Once upon a time, there was a man who had nothing … and God gave him ten apples.  He gave him three apples to eat, three to trade for shelter from the sun and rain, and three apples to trade for clothing to wear. He gave him one apple so that the man might have something to give back to God to show his gratitude for the other nine.
The man ate three apples (distribute apples to three children).  He traded three for a shelter from the sun and the rain (distribute these, too). He traded three for clothing to wear (hand out three more apples). Then he looked at the tenth apple.  It seemed bigger and juicier than the rest.  He knew that God had given him the tenth apple so he could return it to God out of gratitude for the other nine.  But the tenth apple looked bigger, and juicier than the rest.  And he reasoned that God had all the other apples in the world …

so the man ate the tenth apple

(this is where you must actually eat the apple as the children watch)

– and gave God back the core.

(Place the apple core in a prominent place, where it can be seen throughout the remainder of the worship service.)

How Big Is Your Faith? – Sermon on Luke 17:5-10 (October 6, 2013)

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When Bruce and I first moved to Minnesota, we became acquainted with an invasive plant called buckthorn. European Buckthorn was introduced to Minnesota by landscapers who liked its appealing look. It often came under other names, such as black dogwood, alder dogwood, arrow wood, or Persian berries.Though it is sometimes called a dogwood tree, it is not related to North American dogwood species. Buckthorn has become an invasive nuisance in North America, partly because it blocks the sun from native plants, but also because it spreads quickly. Buckthorn bark and berries have a medicinal use: they are very effective laxatives, and the berries provide the harshest laxative effect. That’s the problem with buckthorn: birds like the berries, but they can’t digest the seeds. Buckthorn propagates through bird droppings.

As I considered today’s scripture passage, I was reminded of buckthorn. Like buckthorn, mustard weed also propagates through bird droppings, because birds cannot digest the seeds. Mustard weed was ancient Palestine’s version of buckthorn: a nuisance plant that was difficult to get rid of. Mustard plants grew rapidly, and could easily be more than six feet tall. They sprang up in the middle of wheat fields, and blocked the sunshine from the growing grain. It didn’t do much good to pull up the weeds, because birds would just drop seeds somewhere else in the field. Mustard seeds are tiny, but their impact on Palestine’s agriculture was huge.

In today’s passage, Jesus begins by comparing faith to a tiny mustard seed, but he goes on to explain that it isn’t how much faith you have that matters. It’s how you use it.

The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” The Lord replied, “If you had faith the size of amustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.
“Who among you would say to your slave who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the field, ‘Come here at once and take your place at the table’? Would you not rather say to him, ‘Prepare supper for me, put on your apron and serve me while I eat and drink; later you may eat and drink’? Do you thank the slave for doing what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, ‘We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!’” – Luke 17:5-10

If you’re thinking this saying about faith and mustard seeds sounds familiar, you’re right. We also hear Jesus make this statement in the Gospel of Matthew. But Matthew puts Jesus in a different setting than Luke does for this teaching.  In Matthew 17, Jesus has just cast out a demon that the disciples couldn’t get to budge. When they ask him why they couldn’t get rid of the demon, he tells them, “Because of your little faith. For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.”[1]

But here in Luke’s gospel, Jesus is answering the disciples’ request for increased faith. Jesus had just been teaching them about forgiveness, and the importance of forgiving. Perhaps they realized that the kind of forgiveness Jesus was asking them to offer required more faith than they had. At least the disciples understood that faith wasn’t something they could manufacture on their own. They had figured out that it doesn’t develop by following a “Greater Faith in Thirty Days Plan.” They knew that faith is a gift from God.

Jesus says it doesn’t take much faith to do great things. The tiniest amount of faith can plant a tree in the ocean, or move a mountain from one place to another. In Matthew’s version, it sounds like Jesus is chiding the disciples for having so little faith, but here in Luke, we get a little different slant.

Jesus doesn’t tell the disciples how to get more faith. He doesn’t give the disciples a discipleship plan, or assign them each a faith journey partner, or ask them to write in their faith building journals. They might have been expecting a miracle, but they don’t get that, either. Instead of waving a magic wand and saying, “Poof, have more faith,” Jesus says, “It doesn’t take much faith to do what you need to do.”  In other words, “You have plenty right now.”

You have enough faith. It doesn’t take much. God has already given you all the faith you need.

Have you ever noticed how Jesus often manages to avoid answering questions that are put to him, by answering a different question altogether? This used to annoy me, particularly when I really wanted to know the answer to a question myself. Wouldn’t it be great, on those days when you feel like you need a little more faith, to look up Luke 17:5-6 and have the instruction manual right there in front of you? But instead of answering the question, Jesus goes off on some tangent that doesn’t even seem related to the current topic of discussion! It took me a long time to figure out why Jesus does this so often throughout the gospels. This passage is just one more example of Jesus telling the disciples they are asking the wrong question. Instead of asking for more faith, or bigger faith, the disciples should have been finding opportunities to act on the faith they already had. Instead of treating God like a short order cook who could be expected to slap a scoop of faith onto a plate, they needed to be living into the faith they’d already been given. To show the disciples how they’d gotten it backwards, Jesus tells a parable. And to understand the parable, we need to understand what slavery meant to the disciples who heard the story first.

Even though it was against Jewish law to own another Jew as a slave, slavery as an institution was quite common throughout the first century world. Slavery was the most common means available to get out of debt in that time. It was like taking out a loan with yourself as the collateral. You could sell yourself to another, to be that person’s servant for a contracted period of time, and use the money to pay off your debts. Once your agreed period of service was done, you were free again. Slavery was an institution that was taken for granted, and it apparently crossed common boundaries between social and economic classes. But the distinction between slavery and freedom remained clear. As a slave, you were bound to obey the authority of your master. And as a master, you were not beholden to your slave for the service that slave provided to you. As Jesus tells the story, he draws on the social construct of the day, assuming a small landowner with only one slave who works in the field as well as in the house (jobs that would be divided among several servants in a larger estate), a slave who does his duty, and expects nothing from his master in return for his labor. Jesus says, “Would you tell your slave to eat first, before serving you? Of course not. Wouldn’t you be more likely to say, ‘Serve my dinner, and then you can go eat yours?”

Then Jesus does something between verses nine and ten that we might miss if we aren’t careful. Up to this point in the story, Jesus has had his listeners identifying with the master of the house. Suddenly, he changes the viewpoint of his listeners to that of the slave. “So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, ‘We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!’” In other words, being faithful and obedient to God doesn’t make God owe us anything. It’s what we are supposed to do. We need to be more faithful, serving with no expectation of praise or recognition, in true humility. Our obedience is by no means a way to gain honor, and good works aren’t something we do in order to receive a reward. We obey and serve because Christ calls us to follow him in obedient service. He gives us plenty of faith to do this, but it’s up to us to be faithful followers.

Not only does Jesus switch us from “master” viewpoint to “servant” viewpoint, asking us to identify with the humble servant who does what he’s asked to do without expecting any special reward, Jesus makes an even bigger shift. Notice how the pronoun changes from “I” to “we”? Once again, we are reminded that we can be believers in isolation, but to become true and faithful disciples, we must live out our faith in community.

Faith depends on this idea of community, because, when you get right down to it, faith is bigger than believing. The Heidelberg Catechism characterizes true faith not only as certain knowledge, but also as a “wholehearted trust, which the Holy Spirit create in me through the gospel.” Faith is trust, and trust requires relationship. As we put our trust in Jesus, we give up any illusions of depending on ourselves only, and we recognize that faith cannot be measured; it can only be lived.

We don’t need more faith; we need to be faithful. And it’s also possible that we need a different kind of faith. Maybe what we need is the kind of faith that, like mustard weed, spreads contagiously wherever it is dropped, grows persistently, and cannot be easily destroyed. Maybe what we need is the kind of faith that is willing to enter the process of Christian character formation with humility, spiritual discipline, and patient trust. When we understand that faith is trusting God, we can begin to live out that trust through discipline and humility, becoming true servants of God who do the work God gives us to do.

What work is that?  How can we be faithful servants who trust our Master?

Next Sunday, we will receive new members to this congregation. As we do so, we will promise to uphold one another through our prayers, our presence, our gifts, our service, and our witness.

We promise to pray for one another, and with one another. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if some of us decided to meet together regularly to pray with each other for the needs of this congregation, this town, and Christ’s ministry among us?

We promise our presence. There’s a popular quote that floats around the internet. The percentages vary, but the most common version goes like this: “Ninety per cent of success is showing up.” No one seems to know who said it first. Most people ascribe the original quote to Mark Twain, but Woody Allen’s version, “Eighty percent of life is showing up” comes pretty close, too. The point is simple. You have to be present to participate in the full life of the Body of Christ. It isn’t something you can do via e-mail or text. It isn’t something you can pencil into your calendar, and erase when other events crowd into your time. Your presence among the people of God is not only important for you, it’s important for the rest of us.

We promise our gifts. Not only our tithes and offerings, but our spiritual gifts help to build up the Body of Christ. We have each been given a variety of gifts, and using them is part of our discipleship. It’s how we follow Jesus.

We promise our service. Not to be thanked, not to be recognized, not to receive honor, but because God calls us to serve.

And we promise our witness. This promise was added to the membership vows just a few years ago, to remind us that we are called to be witnesses to God’s work among us in the person of Jesus Christ, and his continued work among us through the power of the Holy Spirit. No one is asking you to stand on the street corner and preach. But as followers of Jesus, we are called to tell others the good news that God loves us so much he sent his own Son, that whoever believes on him will have eternal life.

Trust God. Be faithful. Have a contagious kind of faith that can’t help but share the good news. This is discipleship.

Recently, someone interviewed Christian author, educator and pastor, Eugene Peterson, who is probably most famous for his version of the Bible called The Message. Peterson is now eighty-one years old, and he shared his opinions about what it takes to become a devoted follower of Jesus. He was asked, “As you enter your final season of life, what would you like to say to younger Christians who are itchy for a deeper and more authentic discipleship?” Peterson answered, ”Go to the nearest smallest church and commit yourself to being there for 6 months. If it doesn’t work out, find somewhere else. But don’t look for programs, don’t look for entertainment, and don’t look for a great preacher. A Christian congregation is not a glamorous place, not a romantic place.”[2]

Go to the nearest, smallest church, and stick it out for six months. Here we are, smack dab in the middle of New Ulm, Minnesota. We have plenty of faith. It only takes faith the size of a mustard seed, dropped where it can take root, to do what God is calling us to do. God is calling us to be faith-ful, to trust him, to do the work he has given us, as obedient servants. God is calling us to promise our prayers, our presence, our gifts, our service, and our witness as we live out our faith together in this community we call ‘church.’ As we do that, we may discover that our faith does, indeed, grow – not because of anything we do, but because of the One we trust and obey. Amen.

Compassion Sunday – September 29, 2013

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First United Methodist Church of New Ulm, MN observes “Compassion Sunday” on fifth Sundays throughout the year. Since September has five Sundays, we will be worshiping briefly at 9:30 this week, then heading out to visit the home-bound, cook and freeze meals, make sleeping mats for the homeless out of plastic shopping bags (here’s a link to another First UMC Church that does this down in Grapevine, TX), and kick off our prayer ministry. There might be another project or two I’ve forgotten to mention. The idea is that we put hands and feet to our worship, and worship by doing something for others.

The preaching text for this Sunday is the story of the poor man Lazarus (the only character in the parables of Jesus who actually gets a name!) and the rich man who ignored him until they had both died. You can read Luke 16:19-31 here. I know some of you read this blog only when you missed the sermon on Sunday, and this week you won’t be able to do that, because I’m not going to post it. If you want to hear the homily about “Trading Places” you’ll just have to show up. It won’t make much sense outside the context of Compassion Sunday.

For the other two or three of you who check this blog on a regular basis, enjoy your week off from trying to make sense of my attempts at theological reflection. You’re welcome! But don’t get too comfortable. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get inspired to write a bonus post this week. Among other things, I’ve been thinking a lot about worship lately …

What is essential to worship? Can you truly worship God without things like scripture, prayer, confession, declaring what we believe? I recently observed a Eucharist in which the celebrant skipped over the confession, but offered an assurance of pardon, and it made me wonder … what do you think?

 

 

It’s … Complicated – Sermon on Luke 16:1-13

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Then Jesus said to the disciples, “There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. 2So he summoned him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.’ 3Then the manager said to himself, ‘What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. 4I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’ 5So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ 6He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’ 7Then he asked another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘A hundred containers of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill and make it eighty.’ 8And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. 9And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes. 10“Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. 11If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? 12And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? 13No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” – Luke 16:1-13

Scholars cannot agree on the meaning of this passage. Every commentary I consulted this week began with some version of  “This is a very difficult text.”  One preacher suggests that most people can do an adequate job of explaining most parables, but not this one. “This week,” he admonishes, “without a trained professional, you interpret the gospel at your peril. Welcome to Luke 16; don’t try this at home.”[1] It’s even hard to find a consensus on where the parable actually ends and the explanation – such as it is – begins. I wrestled with these words all week. I tried looking at them from top to bottom and from end to beginning. I tried dividing the chunks into smaller chunks. I examined individual words. All my study and pondering left me frustrated, unsure of the lesson Jesus was trying to teach. I kept struggling to identify what it is we, as a church, need to take away from this passage that we haven’t already covered, but my frustration only grew. So bear with me as we work through it together.

Let’s start at the top. At the very least, we can identify the original audience. Jesus is talking to his disciples. This probably refers to a larger group than the twelve disciples who followed Jesus most closely, but at least we know Jesus is addressing followers, and not opponents. Those Pharisees who have been giving Jesus so much trouble may be lurking around in the background, but Jesus is not dealing with them at this moment. He is teaching his own students, the sheep who belong to him. And that means that, if we claim to follow Jesus, he is speaking directly to us, too.

Jesus introduces us to two characters: a wealthy master, and the manager of his estate. Right off the bat, we see the conflict in the story. The manager has been accused of squandering his master’s property, and he is about to be fired. Before we can go further in the story, we need a little background information.

First, we need to know that a manager of an estate could act in every capacity as the owner’s agent. The manager had full authority to buy, sell, and handle the property of his master. His decisions were equal to the master’s decisions, and his character was considered to reflect his master’s character. The manager’s behavior was an extension of the master’s own behavior, if the master did not publicly object to it. Whatever the manager did was as if the master had done it himself.

We also know that Luke tended to represent wealth as a negative attribute, and this went against the commonly held belief that wealth indicated God had rewarded the rich for their righteousness. There are exceptions, of course, but usually Luke presents material wealth as a bad thing. Here’s our first question to ponder: Is the master a good guy or a bad guy? He clearly does not want the manager’s squandering to reflect badly on himself, but is this because he is an upstanding businessman who would never squander his resources, or because he wants to keep up appearances, and make himself look better than he really is?

Jesus doesn’t tell us.

Moving on.

When faced with the prospect of getting fired, the manager panics. “What shall I do?” he asks himself. He’s too weak for even the lowliest manual labor available, and he’s too proud to beg. At least he is honest with himself, even if he has been dishonest in his job. But he’s shrewd. He has street smarts. So it doesn’t take him long to come up with a plan.

This plan depends on that social structure we saw at work a couple of weeks ago, when Jesus was invited to eat at the Pharisee leader’s house. If you missed that sermon, here’s the recap:

Remember that the foundation of Roman class structure was Patronage, an intricate system of benefactors and clients. Favors were the currency of this system, and the more favors that were owed to you as a benefactor, the higher you could rank in society. That ranking was also affected by the number of favors you, as a client, owed to your own benefactors. Social advancement was everyone’s goal, and putting yourself forward by associating with those who were one rung above you on the social ladder, while making sure you were owed enough favors by others who were one rung below you, required constant maneuvering – and a good memory for who owed what to whom.

Our friend the shrewd manager had a good memory. He knew who owed his master the greatest debts, and a couple of quick calls put him back in business.

Now, this is where biblical scholars start to disagree with one another, as they interpret this parable. Some say the manager was clearing the books of overcharges. Overcharging was the most common means of collecting interest on a debt without calling it interest – which would have been a flagrant disobedience of Jewish law. If the master was in on the game, he would not want it known that he had overcharged his customers, so he would willingly go along with the scheme to save face.

Others insist the manager was simply deducting his own cut of the profits that he had added to the debt without his master’s knowledge. Still others think the master knew full well that his manager was padding the books for his own benefit, but didn’t care because the master was just as crafty as the manager (we’re back to that business of an agent fully representing the character of his boss). Some think the manager was getting revenge on his master for firing him, by reducing his income while ingratiating himself with the people who owed his master the most. Everyone agrees that it would be easy to make friends among the master’s customers by decreasing the debts they owed. And everyone agrees that a manager who cheats his master in order to make friends with his master’s clients is anything but righteous.

It’s the master’s reaction to the scheme that takes us by surprise.

Instead of firing the manager first for squandering his wealth, or later for cutting his profits, the master commends the manager for acting shrewdly. Why on earth would he do this? Luke gives us no clues, and we must be careful to not read too much between the lines of this story.  But there are a couple of possibilities.

Perhaps the master praised the manager because the outcome was a good one, and the manager’s actions corrected the wrong he had done when he mismanaged the master’s business. The manager repents of his wrongdoing, the debtors are happy, the bill is collected, and the master’s conscience is clear. Or maybe the master praised the manager because the outcome was a good one, even though the manager and the master were both dishonest. The manager’s quick thinking makes the master look more righteous and caring than he really is. The debtors are still happy, and the bills are paid, but there is no repentance in this picture for either the manager or his boss. Either way, the master praises the manager for his quick thinking and his smart plan to provide for his own future.

This brings us to the moral of the story, and this is where things get really confusing. Listen again to Jesus explain this parable:

For the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. 9And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.

What?

What does he mean? The parable itself is confusing enough, and now the explanation just makes things worse. Let’s look at it again.

Jesus is identifying two different groups of people: the children of this age –which surely includes the manager, and maybe even includes his boss – and the children of light – I hope that means you and me, as followers of Jesus. What Jesus is saying here is that the manager knew how to handle the system of worldly wealth to his best advantage. He got it. He knew the ropes. But we, as children of light, do not always know how to live within our “system” of the Kingdom of God. We do not always act like we know the kingdom is already here, already transforming the world, and we are already part of it. We fumble back and forth between two worlds, and can’t really move fluently in either one.

And it’s almost always money that trips us up. The word in older translations was “mammon” and I like this word, because it is rich in meaning. It says more than the words “money” or “wealth” can convey. Here’s why: According to New Testament scholar Klyne Snodgrass, “What is not obvious in Greek or English is that ‘faithful,’ ‘entrust,’ and ‘true’ in Hebrew and Aramaic all derive from the same root as ‘mammon’ – a word that means ‘that in which one places trust’ and is derived from ‘amen.’[2] So Jesus is playing with words in the native language of his hearers. We may think of Mammon as evil money, but it’s really whatever you trust when you aren’t trusting God.

Think about it.

What do you call that fund your wealthy parents set up for you, from which you could start drawing income after you reached a certain age? Right: a trust fund. (Don’t feel bad if you didn’t get one, I didn’t either.)

And who is the person that manages that fund for you? Right: a trustee. What is printed on our money in that fund? In God We Trust. Ironic, isn’t it?

Don’t put your trust in the wrong thing. Put your trust in God, because money won’t do you any good when God’s kingdom is fulfilled and Christ comes again in glory.

We could paraphrase that troublesome verse nine to read, “Put yourself in a good position through your wise use of money, instead of trusting in it, so that when this age is over God will receive you into his eternal home.” The children of the world might know how to manage earthly resources to their advantage, but we are children of light, and we need to manage our spiritual resources just as wisely, so that we are prepared to give an account before God.

The point Jesus is making is starting to sound very familiar. You cannot serve both God and wealth. If you want to be a disciple, you have to go all in, turning away from every form of Mammon, everything you trust in that isn’t of God. Yes, we have heard this lesson before – Hasn’t Jesus been pounding it into our heads over and over again?

Maybe that’s the point. Jesus has to keep teaching the same lesson over and over, getting more and more radical in his approach and crazier with the examples he uses, because we just don’t get it, any more than his original listeners got it. We still keep trying to live our lives according to the rules of this world, instead of living lives of total devotion to God. What will it take to get through to us? To make us change our ways and start questioning our motives and drastically changing our behavior? The stakes are getting higher and higher, and we still aren’t paying attention. Do we think this Word of the Lord doesn’t apply to us?

There’s a story that goes around the operatic world of an American tenor who finally realized his dream of singing at La Scala in Milan, Italy. La Scala is considered the greatest opera house in the world, and when you get to sing there, you’ve really made it. You’re a star. So this tenor performs at La Scala, and his big aria is met with thunderous cheering. “Encore!  Encore!” the crowd yells. So the tenor nods to the orchestra conductor, and the music begins again. He sings his big aria, and again the crowd goes wild. “Encore! Encore! Sing it again! Sing it again!”  they scream. The tenor is deeply moved at this reception, and he obliges. He sings it again. And again. Finally, the tenor quiets the crowd and steps to the front of the stage. With hands on his heart and tears streaming down his face, he thanks the audience. “But my friends, I cannot sing it again. My voice is nearly gone from all these encores, and we still need to finish the opera!” In the very back of the opera house, a little man gets to his feet and says, “You’ll sing it till you get it right.”

Jesus is asking us to rehearse this lesson over and over, until we get it right. The parables he uses may get crazier and crazier, but until we get it right, he keeps repeating the lesson for us.

So here it is again.

God’s radical love for us demands a radical response.

If you want to call yourself a follower of Jesus, you have to give up everything you think is important, and start living a radically different life.

If you want to be ready for the Kingdom of God, you have to give up everything that matters most to you, and start living a radically different life.

If you want to be seated at the head of the table, you have to give up your pride, and start living a radically different life.

If you want to recognize the signs of the times, and be ready for the time when we are all held accountable to God, you have to be willing to focus all your energy and attention on following Jesus. You have to give up everything, and start living a radically different life.

It isn’t easy. It doesn’t make sense. It costs everything.

But when we turn away from trusting our money or our own wits, and we start trusting God to save us and to provide for us, we find that our real debt, the debt for all our sin, has been paid in full by the One who loved us so much he died for us. And when this age, this earth is done, God will receive us into his eternal home, where we will live with him forever.

Jesus says, “If then you have not been faithful with earthly wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches of heaven?  And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own?  You cannot serve both God and Mammon” – whether that “mammon” is money, or your own shrewdness, or anything else that prevents you from trusting God.

How you take care of a little will be a good indicator of the way you take care of a lot. If you can’t manage a small amount entrusted to you, you can’t be given your own wealth. God’s claim on us is an exclusive one. You can’t serve God on Sunday and ignore him the rest of the week while you serve whatever your personal “mammon” happens to be. Because you are a representative of Christ, just as surely as that dishonest manager was a representative of his master.

When Paul was writing to the church at Corinth, he told them: “Think of us in this way, as servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries. Moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found trustworthy.”[3]

There it is again. Trust. Christ calls us to trust him, and also to be trustworthy stewards of our faith, the mysteries of God. As faithful stewards, we are called to show the same character as our master, Jesus Christ. We are called to serve.

Next week, the nominating committee will be meeting to recommend some of you to serve in particular ways within the congregation of this church. I know that several of you already hold multiple responsibilities, and others of you may have gifts and talents that are going unused. This is not really good stewardship of our energy and time, of our gifts and abilities. So I urge you, if you already serve on a committee or give more than two hours of your time each week in church work, say “No” when the nominating committee calls you. We don’t want any member of this congregation burning out. But prayerfully try to think of someone else in this church who might be able to do what you are being asked to do, and encourage that person to participate in the life of this congregation in that way. And if you haven’t yet been asked to serve, but you sense God calling you toward a particular area of ministry, go ahead and volunteer before someone asks you!

Together, as faithful and trustworthy stewards of God’s mysteries, we can share the good news that Christ died for our sins, Christ rose from the dead, and Christ reigns in glory. He invites us to accept him as our only Lord and Master, so that we may have eternal life with him in the Kingdom of God, but he also invites us to live into that kingdom reality here and now as children of the light. When Christ comes, will he find you faithful? He’s trusting you to be a good manager, a good steward. Will you trust him?

[2] Snodgrass, Klyne. Stories with Intent, 414.

[3] 1 Corinthians 4:1-2

Getting Found – Sermon on Luke 15:1-10

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It’s a common practice for schools to encourage parents to check the Lost and Found collection during Parent/Teacher conferences. One year, to attract parents to the area where the Lost and Found items were displayed, an administrator posted a sign at a school’s entrance that caught everyone’s attention. A simple stick figure had been made from scraps of wood. The mannequin was propped in a pair of snow boots that had been stuffed with Lost and Found gym socks. It wore a pair of Lost and Found sweatpants, a Lost and Found jacket, a hat and scarf and gloves – all from the Lost and Found. Hanging from one “arm” was a lunch box. The other carried a backpack. A sign was pinned to the front of the scarecrow that read “Are you missing something? Do I belong to you?”

As Jesus continues on his journey toward Jerusalem, followed by those crowds that include people of every description, his teaching is becoming more and more intense. Last week, we heard him insist that no one could follow him who had not renounced everything else – family, wealth, or reputation – for the sake of being a disciple of Jesus. Scribes and Pharisees had challenged Jesus, but they were still part of the crowd. At first they had come out of curiosity. Later, they came to discredit this new, unauthorized teaching. Now they were following Jesus with the intent of catching him in some heresy. Whatever their reason for being there, people came and listened. As they listened, they asked questions about the things Jesus said that didn’t make sense to them. And there were plenty of questions!

Over the past few weeks, we have already seen how Luke’s gospel is filled with examples of the many ways Jesus challenged the status quo. The theme of reversal threads its way throughout Luke’s story, and by now, it should come as no surprise that Jesus is going to flip things topsy-turvy whenever he opens his mouth. As the scribes and Pharisees listened to Jesus, they wondered where did he get authority to say such things? Were they missing something? Did Jesus belong to God? And if he did, did they? Hear the Word of the Lord, as found in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 15, verses 1-10:

Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”

So he told them this parable: “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’  Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.

“Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’ Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

The three parables that make up chapter fifteen all focus on the central theme of the lost getting found, and the joy that is shared in the finding. Many scholars believe they were told as a single unit from the beginning of the Christian era, passed along through the oral tradition that Luke used to compile his gospel account. Today’s reading focuses on the first two of these parables, saving the parable of the prodigal son for the season of Lent. As I read these stories again and again, I am struck by the realization that, in order for the lost to be found, it had to belong to someone first. The lost sheep was not a wild sheep that the shepherd happened upon and added to his flock. That sheep had belonged to the shepherd from the beginning, and had strayed away. The coin that the woman lost had been part of her life savings. It belonged to her. When she found it, she rejoiced with her neighbors that something of her very own had been restored to her. When Jesus told these stories, he was describing things that had once been where they belonged, but had somehow gone missing.

As you ponder that thought, you might be thinking of things that have gone missing from your life over the years. Maybe you have lost touch with people who were once dear to you. Perhaps you have allowed a broken relationship to remain broken, and you have lost the sense of freedom that comes with forgiving and being forgiven.

Maybe you have lost the habit of reading God’s Word on a daily basis, or the diligent practice of prayer. Maybe you have lost faith in God, wondering how God could allow evil to persist in the world. Perhaps you’ve lost purpose, or joy, or the assurance that you belong to a loving God who cares for you. Whatever you’ve lost, Jesus tells these stories to you, just as surely as he told them to his disciples and the crowds around him as he traveled to Jerusalem.

Remember that Jesus was responding to the grumbling he heard from the scribes and Pharisees, as they complained about the company he was keeping. In last week’s passage, Jesus ate with a respectable Pharisee, but this week, he has accepted hospitality from the opposite end of the social spectrum. Those Pharisees who entertained Jesus a few verses ago are now upset because he also eats with sinners and tax collectors. (Apparently, tax collectors were in their own class of sinfulness, apart from regular sinners such as liars, adulterers, murderers, and thieves.)

Yet, while these righteous teachers and leaders are criticizing Jesus for hanging out with the wrong crowd, Jesus is trying to teach them a short lesson in how the Kingdom of God really works. He isn’t too worried about the people who already believe in God and worship God.  Jesus is concerned about the ones who have been excluded, the ones who are lost.

So he tells two stories, and the main character in each of them is someone from the bottom of the social ladder. Shepherds were notoriously despised in Jewish society. They could not be called upon as witnesses, because they weren’t trusted to tell the truth. They were considered no better than robbers, partly because they sometimes tended to let their sheep wander onto land that belonged to someone else. In the parable of the lost coin, it’s a woman who searches diligently for her silver drachma. Women had no social standing at all in first century Palestine, and were completely dependent on their fathers or husbands. They too could not serve as witnesses, not because they were considered dishonest and untrustworthy like shepherds, but because they were not considered at all. Yet, here Jesus uses these two outcast figures to demonstrate how carefully God searches for his own, how diligently he pursues his children, how joyfully God celebrates whenever one of his lost ones repents, and returns to be loved and embraced.

It’s easy, sometimes, to get lost in the details of one of Jesus’ stories. We can get caught up in trying to assign specific meaning to each element. What does the coin stand for? Who does the shepherd or the woman represent? What is the significance of sheep, instead of, say, cattle? Jesus wasn’t too concerned about these issues. When Jesus told these two parables, and the one that follows about the prodigal son, his focus was on the certainty of searching, and the celebration at finding what was lost.

Neither the searching nor the celebration was really new to the crowds listening to Jesus. They had heard, and maybe even sung Psalm 27:

“One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple. … Hear, O Lord, when I cry aloud; be gracious to me and answer me! You have said, “Seek my face.” My heart says to you, “Your face, Lord, do I seek.”[1]

And the idea of God doing the searching was also not new to them. They were intimately familiar with Psalm 139: “O Lord, you have searched me and known me.” The reading we heard from Jeremiah today describes a God who searches for any who are good, any who are righteous, but a God who finds a world lost completely to evil. Within a few years, the Apostle Paul would write to his friend Timothy of his own dependence on God to find him in his lost-ness. Time and again, we get lost, and time and again, God searches for us to bring us home.

Here’s the thing: We belong to God. When we stray, lose our way, or even run away from God, he will persistently look for us, and he is always ready to welcome us back home with joy, because he loves us. God wants us to be in loving relationship with him, because that is how he created us. We are his; we belong to God. The question each of us must answer is simply this: do we want to be lost, or do we want to be found? We can choose to stay lost and suffer the consequences of our rebellion against God’s love for us. But Jesus came to restore us to God, to bring us home to the one who loves us more than we can possibly imagine.

You don’t have to run away from God to be lost. Even if you do everything in your own power to be right, you can still be lost. To get found, you have to turn toward God, and away from everything else. Last week, Jesus challenged us to give up everything that matters to us most, in order to put him first and be his true disciple.

Getting found requires admitting that we belong to God, and being willing to live our lives in a way that shows others we belong to God. And that means that, when we see people turning to God who might not be our idea of “good,” we welcome them into the family with open arms, just as Jesus welcomed sinners AND Pharisees; just as God welcomes us.

Jesus is saying that sinners and tax collectors, the scum of society, all belong to God, just as much as anyone, and God is eager to restore all of us to himself. Once we accept that we belong to God and choose to serve him, we can’t slam the door in other people’s faces. It’s our job to hold the door open for everyone, even those we might consider outcasts. Especially those we might consider to be outcasts. We are to rejoice with God whenever one of these outcasts ‘gets found’ because all are precious to God. And we are also to join with God in the work of finding lost ones, and pointing them toward Christ.

The parables were given to religious insiders – Pharisees and scribes. Whether or not we want to admit it, we fall into that category, too. We are the religious insiders in our society. And if we read these parables closely, we may realize that the ones who need to repent are the ones hearing the story. A coin or a sheep cannot repent. Perhaps Jesus is asking us to repent, as members of the “already found” group of insiders. Perhaps Jesus is asking us to repent of our smugness, our complacency, our failure to include sinners and tax collectors as part of “us.”

Verse one says that the sinners and tax collectors were “coming near” to Jesus – and that can be threatening to insiders. We don’t want to lose our place in the inner circle, or be shoved out of our spot at the head of the table. But Jesus says there’s room for everyone who seeks him in the Kingdom of God. And he also reminds us that the ones he seeks are already near to him. If they were going to shove you out of your spot, it would have happened by now. So, instead of fretting over keeping your place near Jesus, he invites you to rejoice with him that another has been found! The table keeps getting bigger! Quick, draw up another chair and welcome into your midst the ones Jesus welcomes!

It’s easy to focus on the redemption of the “lost” around us, and we should be joining God in the search for those he seeks to bring home. But our role in this search is different from God’s part.  Jesus says, “The Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost.”[2] It’s God’s job to search and save. It’s our job to search and welcome. Theologian Penny Nixon writes, “Religious insiders are often more comfortable with saving the lost than welcoming those whom they perceive to be lost. Saving is about power, whereas welcoming is about intimacy.”[3]

Christ calls us to welcome the outcast, because we were once outcasts. Christ calls us to rejoice when one of the least of these discovers that this is home! Christ calls us to fully embrace each person he brings into our midst – not as a project to be worked on, but as one of us, redeemed by God’s grace alone.

Remember the Lost and Found scarecrow’s sign? “Are you missing something? Do I belong to you?”  If you feel lost, know that God wants to pull you out of the Lost and Found box, and bring you home. If you know you’ve been found, it’s time to welcome others into the family of God, into the life and community of this congregation. It’s time to rejoice over each one of us whom God has found.  Amen.

[1] Psalm 27:4, 7-8

[2] Luke 19:10

[3] Nixon, G. Penny. Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 4, 71.

What’s it worth to you? – Sermon on Luke 14:25-33

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September 8, 2013
Note: There’s a newer (and I think better) sermon on this text here. 

As we prepared to move to New Ulm, Bruce became an expert at selling things on EBay. Books and other items we had accumulated over the years went out the door each week, and Bruce’s PayPal account grew accordingly. The people who shop on eBay are constantly looking for deals, but they also search for one-of-a-kind items that are simply not available anywhere else. For example, Bruce once sold an out-of-print book to the author who had written it. On eBay, any item is worth exactly what the market for that item will bear. It’s worth what the buyer is willing to pay – no more, and no less. EBay shoppers know how to count the cost.

A high school economics teacher summarized her subject to a group of parents by telling them, “Everything has a cost. Everything has a benefit. In this class, students learn how to weigh the benefit against the cost, with the goal of gaining the greatest benefit at the lowest cost.” Even high school students know how to count the cost.

I am not a “shopper.” I don’t really enjoy strolling through store after store, admiring merchandise and looking for deals. But I have friends who like to shop, and when we get together, we inevitably end up at the mall or in a department store. Once, as we browsed through an exclusive furniture store, I did see a chair that I liked. I looked for a price tag, but couldn’t find one. My friend nudged me and whispered that familiar adage: “If you have to ask how much it costs, you can’t afford it.”

In today’s passage, Jesus explains the cost of true discipleship to his followers. Jesus is on the move again. He has left the hospitality of the Pharisee’s table, and is headed once again toward Jerusalem. The crowds are gathering. Can you imagine what it must have been like to work out in the field and see this cloud of dust rising from the road off in the distance, to see the swarm of people moving along that road, and to hear the distant buzz of their conversation? It wouldn’t take much to compel you to run in that direction, just to see what all the commotion was about, would it? The question is, once you got close enough to see and hear Jesus, to realize who this must be, and to listen to his teaching, would you mosey back to work, or leave it all behind to join the crowds that flocked after him? Hear the word of the Lord, from the Gospel of Luke, chapter 14, verses 25-33.

25 Now large crowds were traveling with him; and he turned and said to them, 26 “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. 27 Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. 28 For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it?  29 Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, 30 saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’ 31 Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? 32 If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. 33 So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.

Wow. It almost sounds as if Jesus is trying to get people to stop following him, doesn’t it? Have we ever heard Jesus be so negative? Ten times in these few verses, he uses the word “not” – three of those are in the phrase “cannot be my disciple.” Jesus has seen the crowds growing behind him, and he knows that some of these followers are only tagging along to see another miracle, especially if that miracle includes getting a free lunch! Some of them are following only because they’ve been caught up in the mob mentality that has begun to develop around Jesus and his disciples. With the noise of this growing rabble rising, I’m sure it was difficult for Jesus to talk with his true disciples along the way. So he turns to the crowd and says, in essence, “Unless you’re serious about following me, go away!”

It reminds me of walking to school with my older sister when we were young. Though our mother had asked her to watch out for me on the way to and from school, she wanted no part of this assignment. As soon as we turned the corner, and were out of my mother’s sight, my sister would make me walk behind her – and the farther behind her I could get, the better! “You’re too close!” she would say. “Stop following me!” To her credit, she would always wait for me at the curb when it was time to cross the street. To her relief, I’m sure, we only lived four blocks from school.

But Jesus is not trying to get rid of followers. He just wants them – and us – to know what is involved in being a true disciple. The cost is high, and we need to know what we’re getting into when we say we want to follow Jesus.

This brings us to another problem with this passage: the word, “hate.” Specifically, Jesus says we must hate our families if we want to follow him. This was pretty strong stuff in a culture where family was everything, and loyalty to one’s family was the highest loyalty expected. So let’s take a look at that word, “hate,” to see what Jesus means.

To quote Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride, “ You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” First, we must realize that this kind of “hate” is not an emotion – it’s an attitude of perspective. Keep in mind that the Greek vocabulary Luke used had relatively few words in it. Fewer than 6,000 words or word stems can be found in the New Testament. By comparison,

“the Second Edition of the 20-volume  Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries.”[1]

Rather than creating new words for every nuance as we do in English, first century Greek gave each word a broad range of meaning. So, the Greek word miséo can be translated as “hate” but it also means despise, disregard, be indifferent to, or love less. In this particular instance, Jesus is offering a comparison between the devotion one would normally hold sacred only for family members and the devotion required to become one of his disciples. Jesus is saying, “Love me more than you would even love your family, as important as that is to you.” To us, he says, “Love me more than whatever holds first place in your life, whatever matters most to you.”

Not only must we be willing to put Jesus ahead of all other priorities, he raises the price of discipleship even higher. “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple,” he says. Keep in mind that, at this point in his ministry, his own cross wasn’t even on the horizon yet. His original listeners would not have been aware, as we are twenty-one centuries later, of the connection between this challenge and the suffering Jesus would soon experience at his own crucifixion. To them, taking up one’s cross was a general expression of accepting the burden of great suffering, suffering that would surely end in death. It was the same responsibility a soldier would accept, going into war. If following Jesus meant taking up a cross, it meant staying loyal to him through certain suffering, to the point of death.

Jesus must have seen the joyful faces around him become more somber as his words started to sink in. When Jesus found that his teaching was too hard for people to hear, he often turned to one of his favorite strategies – parables.

“If you were going to build a tower, wouldn’t you first figure out if you could afford it? You wouldn’t want to become a laughingstock because you failed to plan your project well! And if you were a king going into battle, wouldn’t you first figure out if your army had the strength to defeat the enemy?”

But here’s the thing we may miss if we gloss over these little parables too quickly. In both cases, the building and the battle, Jesus indicates that the cost is too high for the resources available. No matter what accounting system you use, no matter what assets you think you have, when it comes to following Jesus, you don’t have enough to pay the cost on your own. Your resources are not sufficient.

This is where God’s economy takes over, and our attempts to balance the books fall woefully short. If we are willing to commit everything we are and everything we hold dear to the purpose of following Jesus, God will be faithful to do what he has promised. God has already offered us his entire Kingdom. God gives us eternal life with him.

Jesus isn’t finished. “So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions,” he says. Remember the rich and foolish farmer from a month ago? The one who decided to tear down his barns in the middle of harvest, to build bigger ones? It seems we are back where we started, with Jesus preaching a stewardship sermon. But he isn’t talking about our tithes and offerings. Another way to translate “give up” might be “leave behind” or “bid farewell.” Bidding farewell to all we have, leaving it behind us, might be an appropriate image, given the setting of Jesus on the road to Jerusalem. But here’s another Greek lesson for you. Present tense in Greek doesn’t just mean “now.” It also means that the action has not yet been completed, that it is continuing, in progress. When Jesus says you have to leave behind everything that matters to you, whether it is family, or good standing in the community, or the things you own, he means you have to leave it behind now, and keep leaving it behind.

Our response must be all or nothing. All those lessons Jesus has been teaching us the past few weeks about hypocrisy, letting our fears get the best of us, placing a higher value on material wealth than spiritual wealth – it all boils down to this: go all in, or go home.

The cost is high, but the cost of not following Jesus is even higher. The theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote “The Cost of Discipleship” and I recommend it to you if you have never read it. Bonhoeffer practiced what he preached as a member of the Confessing Church in Germany, a group of clergy who resisted Hitler’s regime. Bonhoeffer was executed near the end of World War II for his participation in a plot to assassinate Hitler. Bonhoeffer knew the cost of remaining loyal to Jesus, but theologian Dallas Willard takes it a step further. In his book, The Spirit of the Disciplines,  Willard considers that the cost of NON-discipleship is even higher than the cost of following Jesus. Yes, Jesus asks us to leave everything else behind, to make him our first priority, but what price do we pay if we decide to not follow Jesus? What is the cost of refusing to be a true disciple? Willard writes:

Non-discipleship costs abiding peace, a life penetrated throughout by love, faith that sees everything in the light of God’s overriding governance for good, hopefulness that stands firm in the most discouraging of circumstances, power to do what is right and withstand the forces of evil. In short, it costs exactly that abundance of life Jesus said he came to bring.

So what does it mean to be a true disciple? What does it look like? How do we do it? Following Jesus is an ongoing process that begins with doing the things Jesus did, and caring about the things Jesus cares about. Bishop Bruce R. Ough says in his September column on the Minnesota Conference website:

“The scriptural imperatives to cultivate spiritual vitality, reach new people, and heal a broken world are more than a vision for every United Methodist congregation in Minnesota; these imperatives are Jesus’ very methodology for fulfilling his mission.”

Friends, it’s hard to reach new people and heal a broken world if we haven’t already begun to cultivate spiritual vitality first. Let’s start there, and see what God might do among us as we become more and more like Jesus. Here are some possibilities:

Jesus prayed. A lot. To be a true disciple, we need to maintain an ongoing conversation with God through an active prayer life. 

You could join the prayer team. Every endeavor of this church must begin and end in prayer. Otherwise, we are not being faithful disciples who do the things Jesus did. Maybe you think you don’t have any special gift or talent to offer the ministry of this church, but every single person here can pray. For some of you, this is your spiritual gift. We need you to be on the prayer team. I urge you to prayerfully consider being part of an active and vital prayer ministry here at First United Methodist Church. Check the prayer insert in your bulletin, and contact the prayer team coordinators.

Jesus knew the Scriptures, and referred to them often. His true disciples need to be students of the Word.

New Bible Study small groups are forming for October and November. See Dennis J. for more information. Better yet, tell him you’d like to lead a group. During October and November, on the table in the narthex, you will find study questions for the day’s sermon text, and the text for the coming week, so you can go deeper into the Word with other disciples. Our hope is that there will be groups meeting throughout the week, so you can find a time that works for your schedule. If you’re already involved in a Bible Study group, be faithful in your attendance and participate actively in the discussion of Scripture. The Word of God is not just marks on a page – it is God’s living, breathing means of showing us how we can be transformed into the people God created us to be.

Jesus enjoyed fellowship – table fellowship whenever possible! – and true disciples also enjoy spending time with other believers.

You can participate in the Wednesday night Family time. There’s no better way to do that “fellowship” thing than over a meal! Come share food and life together as we grow more and more into the church God calls us to be.

If you are not already a member of First United Methodist Church, think about joining the church. Bruce and I would like to invite you to join us after worship on Sunday, September 22 – that’s two weeks from today – for brunch and an opportunity to learn what it means to belong to this congregation. We’ll talk a little about what it means to be a Methodist, but mostly what it means to follow Jesus in this place with these people. If you are curious and want to know more, just make a note of that on the friendship register – have you signed the friendship register in your pew today? Please do, whether you’re a member or not.

Which brings us to service.

Jesus served others through acts of compassion, mercy, and justice, and he calls us to find ways to serve others. Help cook a Wednesday night meal. Help with one of the many Wednesday night activities. Volunteer in the nursery. Mentor a confirmand. Serve on a committee. Join me next month at Ridgeway on 23rd for a hymn sing with the residents of the memory unit. Carry communion to someone who isn’t able to come to church. Be the hands and feet of Christ.

True disciples do what Jesus did, and care about the things Jesus cares about. Are you willing to commit to a life of following Jesus? Can you leave behind the things that matter most to you, and make the things that matter most to God your highest priority? The cost is great, but the cost of non-discipleship is even greater. The choice is yours. What’s it worth to you, to follow Jesus?

Sacred Pace

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One morning, a few years ago, I followed a young couple through a college campus on my way to an appointment. These two, walking with their arms around each other’s waists, walked in perfect step, steadily and rhythmically. Their pace was not hurried, but neither were they strolling slowly. I could keep up with them, but I felt no urgency to move past them as we walked the same path through the campus. As I watched them, I realized they were not consciously working at staying in step with each other. The rhythm of their walk was perfectly timed, and very natural. They were at peace.

I thought about walking with Jesus that way. Keeping a sacred pace that was neither too fast nor too slow, a pace that came naturally, allowing me to talk with Jesus while staying in perfect step with the Master. The young couple reminded me that in order to maintain ‘sacred pace’ we must keep in step with Jesus, and let him keep his arm around us as we embrace him in return.  We must also keep our arms around each other as we walk together. Sometimes it is slow, so slow, in contrast to our daily frenzy.

As I shared these thoughts with a friend, he said, “Yes, but sometimes it means gearing up.” Sometimes, we need to add some energy to our steps, lengthen our stride, and work to keep up with Jesus as he leads us along the pathway. Sometimes, sacred pace may even mean gearing up into a full, exhilarating run. Keeping in step with Jesus could make us break a sweat.

Finding that sacred pace is not so much about speeding up or forcing myself to slow down. It isn’t about speed. It has more to do with staying aware of the pace set by the One who moves beside us, and maintaining a rhythm. It’s about being in step and keeping your arms around each other’s waists, walking in an embrace with Christ. Early Pietists asked one another a question that we might do well to repeat to one another, too: “How goes your walk with the Lord?” Are you keeping sacred pace?

This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. – I John 1:5-7

Where Will You Sit? – Sermon on Luke 14:1, 7-14

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September 1, 2013
An updated sermon on this text can be found here. 

Several celebrations this week focused on civil rights and equality for all. On Wednesday, you may have heard excerpts from Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream” speech as the nation remembered the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, a major event in the struggle for racial equality, a struggle that continues even today. On Monday, we also observed Women’s Equality Day, celebrating the 93rd anniversary of the certification of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. Were you aware that Monday was Women’s Equality Day? Among the historic events noted in that celebration was the women’s equal pay act of 1963, the same year of the March on Washington.

This particular law had a great impact on my family. My mother had been working two jobs as a single parent of five children, and we were all happy for her when she landed a job at the local company that printed city directories, because this meant she could work one job. She ran one of two large Xerox machines, and often came home with black printing dust spattered on her clothes. But it was a good job, and the hours roughly coincided with our school day, so she didn’t have to feel guilty about leaving us at home alone. An added plus was that the print shop was only a couple of blocks from our house – within walking distance! – and even at 29 cents a gallon, gas for the car was a precious commodity. One day, her supervisor called her into his office to give her good news – she was getting a raise! She thanked him, then asked how much the guy was getting who ran the other Xerox machine, doing exactly the same work as my mom. The supervisor spluttered and stuttered. The other guy had a family to support, after all. “What on earth do you think I’m doing?” my mother asked him. Equality isn’t always something you can legislate.

In the passage we have before us today, Jesus is talking about Kingdom equality. Hear the word of the Lord, as given to us through the Gospel of Luke, chapter 14, verse 1, then skipping to verses 7 through 14. Luke writes:

Luke 14:1  On one occasion when Jesus was going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees to eat a meal on the sabbath, they were watching him closely.

7  When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable. 8 “When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host; 9 and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,’ and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. 10 But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher’; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. 11 For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”12  He said also to the one who had invited him, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. 13 But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. 14 And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

The Jesus of Luke’s gospel has a strong interest in eating. There are more references to eating, banquets, and being at table in Luke than in any other gospel. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I like reading Luke so much – I share his affinity for all things associated with food! So here we find Jesus at table with a large group of people, and –as is his habit – Jesus is teaching while everyone eats. Jesus isn’t particularly interested in the food being served. What he’s really interested in is the people at the table.

Jesus was not giving a Miss Manners lesson for table etiquette here. He was explaining, once again, how different the rules are in the Kingdom of God. To understand just how radical this teaching was for the people gathered at that Pharisee’s table, we need to remember the social system that was in place at the time.

Jewish Palestine, where Jesus lived, was a part of the Roman Empire and governed by the Roman class structure. Birth, wealth, position and citizenship determined the social classes. You were either a patrician eligible for the senate, an equestrian – one small step down from a patrician, or a plebian – of the lowest class, just above slaves. There was no middle class. Women were in the same class as their fathers or husbands.[1]

The foundation of Roman class structure was Patronage, an intricate system of benefactors and their clients. Favors were the currency of this system, and the more favors that were owed to you as a benefactor, the higher you could rank in society. That ranking was also affected by the number of favors you, as a client, owed yourself. Tied up in this system of favors owed and collected was a strong sense of honor and shame. It would be extremely embarrassing to owe someone a favor and be unable to repay that debt when the benefactor requested it. Such an embarrassment would certainly lower your social standing. At the same time, there was some stigma attached to calling in a debt that you knew could not be repaid. Social advancement was everyone’s goal, and putting yourself forward by associating with those who were one rung above you on the social ladder, while making sure you were owed enough favors by others who were one rung below you, required constant maneuvering – and a good memory for who owed what to whom.

But Jesus has a different idea for the way things ought to work. By now, we should be familiar with Luke’s focus on turning expectations upside down. As Jesus watched the guests at this Pharisee’s house jockeying for good positions at the table, he saw a double teaching opportunity, and he grabbed it.

First, he addressed the guests. He reminded them of the advice found in Proverbs: “Do not put yourself forward in the king’s presence or stand in the place of the great; for it is better to be told, “Come up here,” than to be put lower in the presence of a noble.”[2] While this was practical social advice for his listeners, it carried with it a reminder that the people present at the table belonged to God, not Rome. Jesus was reinforcing their identity as children of Israel, an identity that had eroded as Roman customs and attitudes had been adopted over time. The Roman practice of self-promotion did not fit well with the prophets of old, who had encouraged “walking humbly with your God.”[3]

Within a few years, the early church would sing a hymn about Jesus that the Apostle Paul would record in his letter to the Philippians. Paul writes:

3 Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, 4 not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. 5 In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: 6 Who, being in very natureGod, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; 7 rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very natureof a servant, being made in human likeness. 8 And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross!

9 Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, 10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.[4]

Jesus was telling the guests at this feast, “Instead of seeking glory for yourself, spend your time and energy giving glory to God.” While the guests chewed on that food for thought, Jesus turned to his host, the leader of the Pharisees.

Knowing what we do about social customs of the time, and recognizing that any self-respecting Pharisee would invite to a dinner only those who could be considered at least equals, one has to wonder what Jesus was doing there in the first place. Granted, not all Pharisees were opposed to Jesus – in fact, some had warned him earlier when Herod was looking for Jesus to kill him. And it’s possible that Jesus was invited to this particular banquet simply so the Pharisees present could watch him, to see if he broke Sabbath rules again. But it is also possible that this particular Pharisee did, in fact, consider Jesus to be at least an equal. He may have even seen Jesus as a step up the social ladder from himself. Jesus had demonstrated a keen understanding of scripture, and had been an effective teacher in synagogues wherever he traveled. Jesus certainly had a following. Whatever the connection was, Jesus had no intention of letting his host off the hook when it came to table etiquette in the Kingdom of God.

“You’re inviting the wrong people,” Jesus told him. “By including only friends, family, and those who can advance your status, you are no better than these guests who are fighting over the best seat in the house. You’re trying to make yourself look good by surrounding yourself with “important” people, while you ignore the ones who should be enjoying your hospitality.”

Jesus always knows how to cut to the chase, doesn’t he? He recognized both the guests and their host as social climbers, and he wanted to urge them toward true generosity, real hospitality that expected nothing in return. It was time to throw out the old guest list of relatives and members of the same social class, and replace it with a list of people who would never be the natural choice, people who could never return the favor. It was time to throw out the old order of self-promotion and realize that we are all in equal need of grace and mercy in the eyes of God. And if we are in equal need of grace, how can we continue to participate in a system that places more value on some people and less value on others?

Treating others, such as the poor, the sick, the blind, the crippled in spirit, as if they were our equals still places barriers between “us” and “them.” Treating others as equals is only the first step toward becoming equal as joint-heirs in the family of God. And this is what Jesus came to accomplish. Jesus came to level the playing field between the haves and the have nots, between the wealthy and the poor, between the healthy and the sick. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. All of us need grace. Jesus wants us to understand that our all-too-human drive to seek the best seat in the house does not show genuine participation in God’s mercy or love. Even treating others as if they were our equals is not enough. Only true humility can give us the right perspective.

Think about it. How often do we draw attention to what we are doing for God, in an attempt to justify ourselves? This is the same thing as taking a “better seat” at the table. We do not need to justify ourselves before God – he has already justified us through the death and resurrection of his Son, Jesus Christ.

Or maybe we are trying to prove to others that we are good Christians by doing more and more. We wear our hyperactivity like a badge of honor – see how much I love Jesus? Look at all the good works I am doing for the Lord!

But Jesus says, you don’t need to try to impress anyone with your righteousness. The only one whose opinion of you matters is God, and he knows your heart. He knows how far short of his righteousness you really fall. And he loves you anyway.

The one who issues the invitation has the final say about the ranking of guests. As we accept Christ’s invitation to join him at Table in the Kingdom of God we must admit that we are only there by grace. We don’t deserve such grace, and we aren’t any better than anyone else because of it. Taking our place at the bottom of the table, where we know we belong if we’re really honest, allows us to respond with joy when Jesus, our host, taps us on the shoulder and says, “What are you doing down here? Come on up and sit by me.”

Getting Unbent – Sermon on Luke 13:10-17

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August 25, 2013
An updated version of this sermon can be found here. 

10 Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. 11 And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. 12 When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” 13 When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. 14 But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.” 15 But the Lord answered him and said, “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? 16 And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?” 17 When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing. (Luke 13:10-17)

It was extraordinary, really. I mean, I didn’t even know Jesus was going to be teaching at the synagogue that week. I only wanted to come in from the heat, and hear the Word of the Lord. I waited until all the others were in their usual places before I slipped in at the back. I knew that some of the women would look down their noses at me, but I was past caring about what others thought of me.  I knew that some people were convinced I had committed some terrible sin, to have suffered for as long as I had.

Eighteen years. My back had been bent for eighteen long, painful years. At first, it was just a little hunching over, poor posture you would probably have called it. But the fact was I couldn’t straighten my back, no matter how hard I tried. And over the years, it had grown worse, until I was completely bent over, completely crippled. Oh, I could walk with a stick to lean on. But I could never stand up straight. I couldn’t look you in the eye, or see the stars at night. I couldn’t watch a hawk soar through the sky or admire a rainbow. Mostly, the only direction I could see was down. If I craned my neck, I could see what lay ahead of me in the street, but that took a lot of effort, and the pain was just unbearable. It was easier to stick to pathways I knew well, stay out of the way, and get by as best I could. I had resigned myself to being bent. I managed.

So on that Sabbath, when I slipped into the back of the synagogue, behind all the other women, I wasn’t expecting much more than rest in a cool place while I listened to the readings from the Law and the Prophets. When I heard a strange voice speaking, I tried to look up to see who was teaching. I knew it wasn’t one of our regular rabbis. It was some visiting teacher – someone who spoke with authority, but also with kindness in his voice. It was good teaching, too. I actually understood most of what he was saying, as he explained the scriptures in words that were simple, yet somehow profound at the same time. As this new teacher spoke, I felt – I don’t know how to describe it – peaceful isn’t really the right word, but there was peace in it. I know what it was.

I felt … loved.

The other women were whispering about him. I caught a name – Jesus of Nazareth – and I remembered hearing about this man. He was the one who had nearly started a riot when he taught in his own hometown synagogue a couple of years before. Everything had started out well, as he read the words of the prophet Isaiah:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”[1]

When he had rolled up the scroll to teach, he said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” But when the people asked him to give them some sign, he reminded them of the way God’s own people had rejected him, and how God had been merciful to people who were not even children of Abraham. This made the crowd angry, and they even tried to throw him off a cliff! Somehow, he got away. And now, here he was, teaching in our synagogue.

Suddenly, everything got quiet. Jesus had stood and was walking into the room, past all the men in front, through the women, and …. right to me. I was so embarrassed! Here I had tried so hard to slip in quietly so no one would notice me, and this stranger, this Jesus fellow, was calling out to me, making everyone look right at me.

 “Woman,” he said, “You are released from your sickness.” All at once, I felt the pain go away and my back loosen up. When I looked up, he was reaching out toward me, and the look on his face was so kind, so full of compassion. He wasn’t trying to embarrass me. He actually cared about me! Then he put his hands on my shoulders, and it was like a lightning bolt had struck. Such power in those hands! Such warmth and tenderness, too! My back straightened up for the first time in eighteen years, and I stood up! I stood straight up!

What else could I do? “Hallelujah!” I shouted. “Praise God! I have been set free by the power of the Almighty God! Praise the Lord!” The other women around me were astounded. A couple of them hurried over to help me, but I didn’t need any help! The room buzzed as we all began to realize what had just happened. This teacher, this Jesus, had healed me.

I didn’t ask him to do it. I wasn’t even hoping for healing. But he came to me, right where I was, and put his hands on me, and I stood up straight.  He touched me – something no one had ever done. They were all afraid that touching me would make them unclean, so – for eighteen years – people had been careful to stay away from me. No one wanted to risk being made unclean. But when Jesus touched me, it was as if he welcomed me back into life. He made it okay for others to touch me, too. He made me clean again, after eighteen years.

Of course, the ruler of the synagogue wasn’t too happy. He started yelling at the crowd, “There are six days in the week for work, come get healed on those days!” He didn’t yell at Jesus – that would have been rude, since he was probably the one who had invited Jesus to teach that day. But it seemed so silly for him to be ranting about when it was okay to be healed, as if such a miracle could be bothered with checking to see what day it was!

To be fair, it’s his job to make sure the Sabbath is kept holy. He’s the one responsible for making sure we all follow the rules, and if you start making exceptions for miracles, pretty soon you find yourself making exceptions for other things, and before you know it, the Sabbath isn’t set apart for rest anymore. But still…. no one had asked Jesus to work a miracle. He just did it.

I wonder if the synagogue ruler was more worried about losing his own position of importance. I mean, no one had ever seen him heal anyone! If this visiting rabbi Jesus was going to be a better teacher and go around healing people, it stood to reason people would start following him instead of the local rabbi, right? I wonder if he was a little jealous of Jesus. But he had to be careful not to show it, for that would be breaking the tenth commandment. So he lashed out at the crowd about the fourth commandment, instead of facing Jesus directly.

But Jesus knew his heart.

Even though the rabbi would not talk directly to Jesus, Jesus spoke directly to him. “You hypocrites!” he said. “Don’t each of you untie your donkey and lead it to water on the sabbath? Isn’t this woman worth more than a donkey? Shouldn’t this daughter of Abraham, whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?

When Jesus called the rabbi a hypocrite, or “actor,” the crowd gasped. But, as I thought about it later, I began to see what he meant. The rabbi was worried about sticking to the letter of the law, but he really wasn’t concerned with fulfilling the spirit of the law. Sabbath rest is supposed to give us rest and refreshment, to renew life after a hard week of work. Healing a poor old woman’s bent back certainly does that.

Some people think my story is strange. Some people think I made it up. But I know what happened that day in the synagogue, and I’m standing here in front of you as living proof that my back is straight, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. I don’t know why Jesus decided to walk into a huddle of unimportant women and put his hands on my back, but I do know that I cannot stop giving thanks to God that he did. I will praise the Lord my whole life long, for he came to me and touched me. He released me from the pain and humiliation of my poor, stooped back, and set me free. Praise God! Hallelujah!

So, if you don’t mind my asking, what is Jesus calling out to you to do? How is Jesus calling you to stand up straight, to be released from your bound up spirit?

And what is your response to such grace?

You don’t even need to ask him – Jesus is already working among you. Jesus is calling out to you, inviting you into his presence, inviting you into his grace. Jesus is reaching out to touch each one here, to heal you and to include you in his love.

How will you respond? Will you keep acting out your traditions and rules, like the synagogue leader? Or will you stand up and join me in heartfelt praise?

Are you willing to applaud the One who made you? Will you sing and pray and give thanks with joyful abandon? Will you bow the knees of your heart and humbly adore the God who reigns over heaven and earth? Will you live a life that oozes joy out of every pore of your being, a life that makes others turn and say, “That one is a child of God!”

For Jesus is walking toward you, reaching out to touch you, ready to heal you of your brokenness, to restore you to wholeness, to claim you as his own.

Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!

[1] Luke 4:16-21