The One Whom God Helped: A First-Person Account (sermon, September 26, 2010)

Luke 16:19-31

Thank you so much for having me with you today. It’s truly a privilege to be here and share my story with you.

Did you notice what is unique in this parable that Jesus tells -- the one about me? Maybe you didn’t realize that usually, when Jesus tells parables, he never refers to people by name. But in this parable, when he tells my story, he gives me a name. That has always made me feel good. After all, in my lifetime there were so many people who looked right past me as if I wasn’t there, as if it was easier just to pretend like I didn’t exist. Something about hearing Jesus speak my name when he told my story, well, it gave me a sense of peace and pride like I’d never known before. But if you’ve spent any time at all around Jesus, then you probably know: he has a way of doing that.

I’m assuming most of you don’t speak Hebrew, and if that’s true, then you probably don’t know what the name Lazarus means. It means “the one whom God helped.” When I first got sick, when I lost my job and then when I lost the ability to even walk and I had to count on my neighbors and my family to carry me each day to the rich man’s gate where I begged, there were a few months there where I hated my name. Clearly, God had no interest in helping me. Or so I thought. And I wasn’t alone in that thought, either. Most people believed that God was punishing me, sometimes even I believed that, although I didn’t know why. I had always tried to live a faithful life, studying and keeping God’s laws, observing the Sabbath, giving what I could to help those in need.

So when I first got sick, my name, Lazarus -- the one whom God helped -- just seemed like a cruel joke. Especially when I was reduced to begging at the gate of the rich man. Now, I don’t know exactly how it is in your time, but when I was alive, most of the wealthy people felt entitled, they believed that they had earned what they had, that it belonged just to them. They looked down on the rest of us, as if it was our fault we hadn’t been more successful. And when I got sick, they sure looked down on me, as if I had done something to deserve the terrible sores that broke out all over my body.

You heard about it in the story, how I used to go to the gate of the rich man every day. I didn’t want money, all I wanted was a little bit of food to take away the gnawing hunger that made my stomach ache constantly. And the rich man had huge banquets every day -- even on the Sabbath! I had friends and family, but they were poor, too. I didn’t want to take from them what little food they had. I would have eaten the leftovers from those daily banquets the rich man had; I would have even eaten the scraps off the plates!

Back then, villages were different than they are today -- everything in your country is so big! -- they were very small, even the most lavish houses. And the rich man’s house was certainly lavish by our standards -- he had not just a house, but also a garden, and all if it surrounded by a gate. The rich man and his family and friends would have their meals outside in the garden, just beyond the gate. It was close enough that I could hear them eating and drinking and talking and laughing. I could see them as they came and went through the gate. Surely they could see me, too, but if they did, they preferred to ignore me. I guess it was easier that way.

You heard Jesus talk about it in the story, and he wasn’t exaggerating. As I lay there at the rich man’s gate, the only positive attention I got was from the dogs. In fact, it was because of those dogs that I actually started to believe again that maybe God was helping me in spite of my suffering, that maybe my name wasn’t so ironic after all.

I guess I need to explain that, because most of you probably don’t think it’s a positive thing that the dogs were licking my sores. I know it sounds kind of gross, but the truth is, those dogs showed me the only bit of kindness I knew.

You see, those dogs weren’t pets -- the rich man had dogs because he had the biggest house and property in town. They were guard dogs and they were not friendly; in fact, they could be vicious -- I saw plenty of evidence of that. But for some reason, after I’d been coming and lying at the gate for a couple of months, hoping against hope that the richest man in town might take pity on me, they began showing me a kind of mercy that their master did not. And when they licked my wounds, it was a good thing. It actually relieved my pain, if only for a short time, and sometimes even helped the wounds to heal. And frankly, it meant something to me that a creature -- any creature -- would treat me kindly.

Once the dogs began showing me kindness, it restored a sense of dignity to me, as shameful as it was to lay there every day, begging. And gradually, the frustration I felt with the rich man and his rich friends dissolved. That’s how I knew that God was helping me, even in my suffering. Because the anger and frustration I felt never could have gone away on its own.

You see, even though the rich man and his wealthy colleagues pretended like I didn’t exist, I couldn’t bring myself to hate them. A lot of people have asked me why, once I got to heaven and received mercy and comfort from Father Abraham, why I didn’t gloat over the fact that the rich man was condemned to a life of torture in Hades. The truth is, I felt sorry for him. I don’t think he was a bad person, but all that money, all that wealth, just made it hard for him to see clearly. I mean, even in Hades, when he saw me up in heaven with Abraham, he still seemed to think that I was beneath him even then, and that he could order me around, to get him water or to go warn his brothers. And the truth is, I would have. I would have gladly helped him. Because maybe then he would have seen the truth: that none of us are so different from one another. Even in my earthly suffering, I eventually came to see that God helped me -- even me. I had a place to go each day and even though sometimes it was awful to hear the rich man and his friends feasting just beyond the gate, sometimes it wasn’t so bad. I could close my eyes and pretend I was one of the ones feasting. And the dogs comforted me. Even in my suffering, I was still Lazarus, the one whom God helped. And, of course, once my earthly suffering was over, I received eternal comfort and peace in heaven.

Which brings up a question: why would I ever come back? Especially when, in the story Jesus tells, Abraham refuses to let me go back to the rich man’s brothers and warn them to change their ways. Well, I’m not back to warn you. You’ve got the Bible, you have the words of the prophets like the ones your pastor read from the book of Amos. You have the words of Jesus. And all these make it pretty clear that God wants justice, and for us to have justice on earth, the ones who have the most are going to have to recognize that what they have comes from God, and God calls them share with the ones who have the least. But, like I said, I really didn’t come back to talk about that.

What I want to tell you is this. I’m not the only one named Lazarus. The truth is, no matter what name your parents gave you, you are one whom God helps. We all are. That’s what I came to realize when I discovered that I could find peace even in the midst of my suffering. Our God wants, more than anything else, to be with us in all things, in every circumstance. If you are one of the fortunate ones, someone who has material resources, enough to share, then you will experience God’s love when you help God’s people, especially the ones who are suffering. If you are one of those in the midst of a time of terrible suffering, for whatever reason, then God especially longs to be with you and to give you some measure of comfort in the midst of your suffering, something that tells you that you are one whom God loves and you never have to doubt that. And God is preparing a place for you where you will know peace and comfort and an end to suffering, just as I have.

I guess I’m really here because God’s love -- the kind of love that Jesus shows us -- is contagious. I want to tell my story because I want to spread that love around. If you’re here today, it must be, at least in part, because you have experienced that love -- in some way, it has touched your life. So I want to tell you to share that love, spread it around however you can, tell your story to whomever will listen. Who knows? You might just bring comfort to one who has forgotten or who never knew that we are all Lazaruses -- those whom God helps.


Endnote:
Credit goes to Kenneth Bailey’s chapter on this parable in the book Jesus through Middle Eastern Eyes which offered excellent historical background and informed my interpretation of this passage.

Lost (sermon, Sept. 12, 2010)

Luke 15:1-10
Exodus 32:1-14

When I was in the sixth grade, my class had the opportunity to spend three weeks in London. One day, thirteen of us, two teachers and eleven students, set out to go sightseeing, which involved riding the subway. We waited a few minutes on the crowded platform for our train, and when it finally arrived, we pushed ourselves on, the teachers bringing up the rear. But when only half of our group was on the train the car simply ran out of room and before the rest of the students and the two teachers could get on, the doors began to close. For a moment, as the train began to pull away, we were terrified, and our teachers looked panicked. Then one teacher began frantically shouting, “Get off at the next stop! Get off at the next stop!”

We got off at the next stop and waited for the rest of our group to catch up, which they did within ten minutes. For years, I kept a framed picture in my room of those few minutes we spent on the subway platform, waiting. My friends lounged on a bench, with expressions on their faces that revealed the delicious sense of freedom we felt and the total absence of fear or worry. When our group was together again, the teachers made it clear that from then on, if we got separated, we were to stay put, and wait to be found, since to do otherwise would just get us more lost.

Not long after the Israelites escaped their life of slavery in Egypt, their leader, Moses, received the Ten Commandments from God and passed them on to the people. The very first commandment was this: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.”

Seems pretty straightforward, right? But God has a few other things to talk to Moses about, so shortly after Moses delivers the Ten Commandments to the people, he disappears again up Mount Sinai, leaving the Israelites waiting...and waiting...and waiting for his return. And the longer they wait without Moses, their leader, the one who represents God for them, the more they feel hopelessly, profoundly lost. But instead of staying right where they are and trusting that Moses would return to find them, they start looking for ways to feel like God is right there in their midst again.

Last week, just in time for all the back-to-school excitement, the New York Times published an article called “Forget What You Know about Good Study Habits.” As the title suggests, science has shown that most of the assumptions we have about good study habits are, in fact, wrong. The researchers also learned something surprising about tests. It turns out that tests aren’t just a way of assessing how well a student has learned the material, they are also a powerful tool for helping students retain what they’ve learned. When you sit down to a test that challenges you and makes you think hard, all that information gets more deeply anchored in your mind and you have a better chance of recalling it later. Tests are some of the best tools we have for learning. (1)

With Moses back up on Mount Sinai with God, the Israelites face a test for which they feel woefully unprepared. Without their leader, without their representative from God, they begin to think that maybe God isn’t with them anymore, that maybe God has in fact abandoned them. They feel utterly lost.

When we feel lost, creating idols is one of the first things we do. Sometimes we substitute something else for God, usually something that makes us feel good, that masks the fear we feel when we sense that we are lost and alone: money, food, alcohol, and work are just a few of these things. The other way we create idols is more subtle, but no less dangerous: we make God into something God is not, often something that looks like what we think God should look like. Sometimes we decide God must look just like a certain person, a spiritual mentor, whether a pastor, parent, or teacher. Sometimes we associate God too closely with a beloved tradition in the church, like a particular style of worship. No matter how we do it, though, the outcome is clear: we distort God’s image and begin to worship something that is not God.

Most people who read this passage believe that what the Israelites did was the first thing: they took something that was not God and worshipped it as a god. It’s no wonder we make this assumption, since the text says that after Aaron made the golden calf he brought it before the Israelites and proclaimed, “These are your gods, O Israel!” But in Hebrew, the original language of the text, the word for gods in the plural is the same as the word for the one true God. So it is just as likely that Aaron said, “This is your God, O Israel.” In other words, it’s not that the Israelites are trying to replace God with the golden calf; instead they’re trying to create something that can represent God for them while Moses is gone. (2)

It’s an understandable mistake. After all, they were on a long journey, far from home, even if home was slavery in Egypt. They want God to stay with them, to be a tangible presence. As long as Moses was around, they had that. But they soon forgot that it wasn’t Moses who had brought the Israelites out of the land of Egypt, even though Moses was their leader: it was God! Remember the first commandment: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt...” The Israelites were not unlike the four year-old who says to her friend, the pastor’s daughter, “You’re so lucky that your daddy is Jesus.” It’s an understandable mistake for a preschooler, but the Israelites are supposed to know better.

In the children’s book The Kissing Hand, a raccoon who is afraid to go to school gets a kiss from his mother on the palm of his hand so that all day during school, he can look at his hand and know that his mother’s love is with him. (3) Children need these reassurances that their parents are near, even when they feel alone. This is why so many children have special blankets or stuffed animals from which they become inseparable. Because without these tangible representatives of their parents, they feel scared. They feel lost, alone. Only over time do they understand and truly believe that when their parents say goodnight or leave the room, they will eventually return.

At this point in their salvation history, the Israelites have not yet learned to trust that whether they can see, feel, or sense God, God is still with them. It’s a difficult lesson for all of us. We all tend to revert to our childlike fears when we face a time of confusion or doubt, and it is incredibly tempting at those times to make God into something we can handle, something that makes sense to us, something that is predictable, that we don’t have to fear.

When God sees what the Israelites have done, God is furious -- furious enough, in fact, that God is ready to to give up on the people altogether. But with a little reminder from Moses, God does remember, and God’s love for the Israelites overcomes God’s anger. Wronged by a fickle, fearful people, God refuses to let them stay lost. God refuses to abandon the people God loves and instead commits once again to pursuing them, to doing whatever it takes to find them, no matter how lost they are.

This is the God Jesus describes in the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin. He tells these parables because the Pharisees and the scribes, the ones who thought they had figured out exactly what God was like, were infuriated that Jesus, this prophet, this God-representative, was hanging out with sinners, those who were utterly lost. So Jesus asks a question, “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?”

The answer? Well, sorry, Jesus, but none of us would do that. I mean, if we were shepherds with a hundred sheep and one went missing, would we really leave ninety-nine sheep alone to find the one? To do so was to take a huge risk that another sheep would get lost or, worse, eaten by a wolf. No decent shepherd would do that. And Jesus knows it. No, you wouldn’t, Jesus is saying. But God would. (4)

The same logic holds with the woman who lost a coin. Yes, we would probably all do what she did and search the house for a lost twenty dollar bill, but would we then turn around and spend a hundred bucks on a party for our friends and neighbors to celebrate? No, of course not. But God would. God has promised to be our God. God has promised that we are God’s people. And God will find us. No matter what it takes, no matter how lost we have gotten ourselves. God will find us. Every time.

My friend Amy has terrible eyesight. Without contacts or glasses, she can barely see this far in front of her face. As a child, she loved to go to the beach with her family and play in the ocean, and she would inevitably stay in the water longer than anyone else, usually drifting with the current far from the family blanket. Since she couldn’t wear her glasses in the water, when she would come back onto the beach, she couldn’t see her family. The only way she could find them was to get as close as she could to the people lounging on their beach towels. That method never worked well and was always embarrassing. So Amy finally learned that the only thing to do when she came in from the water was to stand on the beach and wait for her family to come to her and lead her back to their blanket. And they always did.

On this journey of faith we all have times when we know Amy’s momentary sense of terror, as we wait, vulnerable and afraid, wet and cold, utterly alone, completely lost, wondering if this time God really has abandoned us for good; waiting and hoping against hope that God will see us standing there and claim us and take us home. In those moments may we remember, may it be imbedded deep in our souls, that very first commandment, “I am the Lord Your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.” And may we trust that our God -- who has already claimed us in the waters of baptism -- will search high and low until every lost soul is found. Amen.

Endnotes:
1. Benedict Carey, “Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits.” The New York Times, Sept. 8, 2010. Online here.
2. Thanks to Rolf Jacobsen for this interpretation, found in his commentary on the passage at Working Preacher. Online here.
3. Audrey Penn, The Kissing Hand. Tanglewood Press, 2006.
4. David Lose suggests this interpretation in his Dear Working Preacher column “Desperate” for September 12. Online here.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (sermon, August 29, 2010)

Isaiah 25:6-9
Luke 14:1, 7-14

Tonight, several families from our church will be sharing a meal in their homes with other church members. Some families will be the hosts and thothers will be their guests. The event is called “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” because although the guests know whose house they will be dining in, the hosts don’t know who their guests will be. In fact, they won’t know until the guests show up on their doorsteps. So, how does one get ready for a party when you don’t know who the guests at the party will be? Well, I suspect it’s about the same as usual. The hosts will have spent time cleaning house, preparing food, and creating an hospitable, welcoming experience for their guests, even thought they don’t know who the guests will be.

Well, it just so happens that on this day, we hear a gospel story all about hosts and guests and dinner. Jesus is invited into the home of a Pharisee, one of the religious leaders of his day. This was not an uncommon practice; when there was a traveling rabbi, or teacher, in town, it was the custom of the religious leaders to have him over for dinner and get to know him. Make no mistake, the Pharisees, both the host and the guests, knew exactly who was coming to dinner, because back then, every social interaction revolved around one thing: status. Who are you, in comparison to me?

In the ancient world, comparing yourself to others was something people did all the time.It was a means of survival; every social situation required an astute knowledge of pecking order: who’s above you and who’s below you. To function in society, you needed to know exactly where you stood.

The text tells us that the Pharisees who gathered for dinner with Jesus were watching him closely, to see where he stood. But they weren’t the only ones doing some close watching. When the time came for the guests to take their places at the table, Jesus watched as each person attempted to sit in the most prestigious seats -- without, of course, actually making it look like they were jockeying for position. Seeing this game of musical chairs, Jesus decides it’s time for a parable, although what he says sounds more like advice from Miss Manners than eternal wisdom. He warns those gathered not to take one of the best seats at the table, because it would be humiliating to be displaced by someone who was considered to be better than you. Better to sit in one of the humbler seats, and if you’re lucky, you’ll be asked to move up to a better spot.

It sounds like rather mundane advice, but remember: this is a parable. And when Jesus tells parables he uses everyday examples like meals and farming and relationships to teach us about the kingdom of God. Jesus isn’t just giving the Pharisees good advice about their next dinner party, he’s offering them -- and us -- a glimpse into what things will be like when we finally arrive at THE dinner party -- God’s heavenly feast.

Jesus isn’t the first prophet to talk about the heavenly table that will someday be set. In our first reading from the prophet Isaiah, the prophet describes a banquet of rich foods and fine wines that will be served to all peoples, a banquet during which the host -- none other than God -- will go from person to person at the table, wiping away their tears and shame and suffering so that each person may feast with dignity and joy and peace.

Believe it or not, there was a time when the Israelites found this passage scandalous and downright offensive. Particularly after the time of the Israelites’ exile in Babylon, where people from other nations treated them so horribly, the religious leaders simply could not accept this prediction that in God’s heavenly kingdom God’s chosen people -- the Jews -- would feast together with non-Jews and that God would see them as equals. It was so offensive, in fact, that some later translators of the Hebrew Bible changed the words to the passage to indicate that this was a feast for Israelites only and the people from all other nations would be rejected and shamed by God. (1)

Like the passage in Isaiah, when Jesus tells the faithful Jews at that dinner party that in the kingdom of heaven, they had better not assume they have the best seats, it was offensive! After all, the Pharisees were the ones who worked so hard to do the right thing in God’s eyes...to obey the laws, to uphold the traditions of their faith, to make sure that children learned about God. They were a lot like those of us who try hard to be faithful disciples and who do whatever we can to support the church with our time, treasure, and talents. And wouldn’t it be offensive to us if someone came to one of our church dinners and said “hey, you better not assume that when you get to the pearly gates, God is going to say ‘well done, good and faithful servant.’”?

That’s pretty much what Jesus says to the Pharisees. It’s rude! It’s offensive! And he doesn’t stop there. He then turns to the host of the gathering and advises him on the guest list: “Next time, don’t just invite your friends and family to a party in hopes that you’ll get a return invitation someday. Invite those people who would least expect it -- like the poor, the lame, and the blind -- those who least expect it and who could never repay you.”

No doubt the silence that followed that remark was deafening. Now remember, table fellowship meant everything in this culture. If you sat down at a table with someone and shared a meal with them, then you declared to all the world that you and this person were equals, that you shared the same social status...and when you extended an invitation to someone, it went without saying that you expected an invitation in return.

There is an ancient proverb in the Middle East: “I saw them eating, and I knew who they were.” In other words, if you could see what someone ate and who they ate with, you knew all there was to know about them...or, at least, you thought you did. When Jesus told the Pharisees to invite outcasts to their dinner tables, Jesus is messing with deeply held cultural assumptions. And it doesn’t stop with the Pharisees, either. We make assumptions about who we eat with, too. I can’t speak for the rest of you, but the only meal I’ve had with someone who couldn’t repay me was when I stood behind a buffet at a homeless shelter, putting food on people’s plates and maybe offering them a smile. As a church, we give food to those who can’t repay us, but it usually involves taking our leftovers to a shelter which can use them to serve those in need.

It’s a hard word to hear and a hard word to preach, but Jesus is saying quite clearly here that instead of helping others from a distance, we ought to be bringing the poor and homeless into our homes, sitting them down at our dinner tables, opening a bottle of fine wine that we’ve been holding on to for a special occasion, and filling their plates with the best food we have to offer, like that beef tenderloin we were saving for the family Christmas dinner.

All week I have twisted and turned Jesus’ teaching around in my head to try and figure out how to make it palatable. I simply couldn’t figure out a way to stand up here and tell you that we are called to invite the outcasts of our society -- the runaways, the homeless, addicts, the poor -- into our homes, to eat with us at our dinner tables. I’m sorry to have to tell you that I failed to turn these hard words into something that would go down easy. I think it is wonderful that tonight many from our church will share a meal together in their homes, but today’s text makes quite clear that as a church, we are called to do more than that...we are called, not just to serve a meal to, but to sit down and eat with those people our society considers outcasts, those at the bottom of the pecking order, those who can never pay us back. We are called to humble ourselves.

Heather was my best friend in high school. We spent countless hours talking on the phone, hanging out at each other’s houses, and sometimes even studying together. But Heather’s schedule was always complicated by the fact that every night at 6:15, her family ate dinner together. Heather had three other sisters, all with busy schedules and activities, but eating dinner together was absolutely a non-negotiable for their family.

Well, whether they knew it or not, it turns out that Heather’s parents were on to something. Study after study by social scientists have proven that of all the things you can do for your kids, having dinner together on a regular basis is the best. Kids who eat dinner with their families “are more emotionally stable and less likely to abuse drugs and alcohol. They get better grades. They have fewer depressive symptoms...And they are less likely to become obese or have an eating disorder.” And for all of us who thought reading was the best thing we could do to increase our children’s vocabulary and set them up for success at school, here’s a shocking fact: family dinners are more effective than reading in terms of preparing kids for school. In turns out all those interactions children have and observe at the dinner table are the best possible preparation for school and for life. (2)

Now when social scientists talk about “family dinners” they mean, of course, a dinner shared by members of the same biological family -- parents and children, maybe grandparents and cousins too. But this isn’t the only family we belong to, and Jesus’ teachings -- not just here but in other places as well -- make clear that our family goes beyond shared DNA. We have a church family, yes, but in the kingdom of God, our family is all people, because all of us are God’s beloved children. Jesus calls us to start manifesting the kingdom of God here and now, by sharing meals with those who are not like us, and particularly those we might consider beneath us...because in the kingdom of God there is no rank, there is no status, there is no pecking order to be established. As offensive as it may be, in the kingdom of God, all are equal in God’s sight, and everyone is invited to the banquet.

What would it look like for us to extend a dinner invitation to someone who could never repay us? This is the questions I have pondered this week and I don’t know if I came up with any good answers, except to say that it will probably look different for each of us. It certainly wouldn’t be the easiest or most enjoyable meal we ever had, but it might just remind us that, here on earth, as in the kingdom of God, we are guests. The only host here is God, no matter whose table we are gathered around. We are guests at this incredible banquet of life God has prepared for us, and Jesus is calling us to share that good news with others, since all people are honored guests at the Lord’s table and none of us, no matter how faithful or righteous or wealthy we are, can repay God for what God has done for us.

And to remember what God has done for us we need look no further than the words of our first hymn today: “He came down to earth from heaven, who was God and Lord of all. And his shelter was a stable, and his cradle was a stall. With the poor, the oppressed, and lowly, lived on earth our Savior holy.” (3)

Humility is never easy. Yet it’s what Jesus tells us to do and it is what Jesus did for us, right up until he died on a cross. May we find the courage and humility to follow his example, knowing that one day, no matter how well we have succeeded, we will find ourselves at God’s heavenly banquet, freed, forgiven, and beloved. Amen.


Endnotes:
1. Kenneth Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes. IPV Academic, 1998.
2. Christine Carter, Raising Happiness. Ballantine Books, 2010.
3. Verse 2 of “Once in Royal David’s City,” Hymn #49 in The Presbyterian Hymnal, 1990.

Slow Enough to Listen

As a parent of two small children, I feel like I spend my days trying to get them to a move a little faster: to get dressed, get in the car, eat their dinner, get ready for bed. One of my favorite parenting bloggers lamented this fact in a recent post that reminded me that allowing children to move at their own pace is a good thing -- and it might even help me to be a bit calmer and more "in the moment" myself.

Not long after reading that blog entry, I came across this quote (thanks to an evotional from my friend Mark Ramsey at Grace Covenant Presbyterian in Asheville, NC):

"I urge you to still every motion that is not rooted in God. Become quiet, hushed, motionless until you are finally centered. Strip away all excess baggage and nonessential trappings until you have come into the stark reality of the presence of God. Let go of all distractions until you are driven into the Core."

- Richard Foster, from his book Freedom of Simplicity

What an important reminder that slowing down and taking a moment to anchor ourselves in the presence of God is not just a good thing for parents but for all of us who are God's beloved children. How many days do we go through the motions -- working our way through to-do lists, tackling each unexpected task that arises as it comes -- without ever taking a moment to revel in the awesome fact that what matters most is that we belong to God. May you find a moment today -- every day! -- to spend time in the presence of God and savor that truth.

Sabbath Freedom (sermon, August 22, 2010)

Deuteronomy 5:1-15
Luke 13:10-17

What does Sunday mean to you? Maybe it’s your day to catch up on housework, yard work, homework, sleep. Maybe it’s a day for lazy afternoons spent watching the game. But since you are in church, at least today, let’s assume for a moment that Sunday is the day you set aside to worship God. Why? Do you wake up on Sunday morning longing to encounter the God who created you and saved you, to confess your sin, to hear readings from the Bible, to pray? Or do you come to church because someone else in your life, maybe a parent or spouse, encouraged--or, let’s be frank, demanded--that you join them? Maybe you come simply out of habit, because it’s what you’ve always done on Sundays, church on Sunday is where you see your friends, hear music that you don’t hear anywhere else, and get filled up with a satisfied feeling that hopefully lasts at least until Monday morning. What does Sunday mean to you? (1)

For Laura Ingalls Wilder, who grew up on the midwestern frontier in the 1870’s and 1880’s, Sundays meant tortuous boredom. On Sundays, she and her sisters were not allowed to shout or run. They could not quilt, sew, or knit. They could look quietly at their paper dolls, but they couldn’t make anything new for them. They could look at the pictures in their family Bible or in the one other book in the house, The Wonders of the Animal World. For an energetic five year-old, Sundays were miserable.

But Laura’s father assured her that her grandfather and his two brothers had it even worse. When Laura’s grandfather was a boy, Sunday, or, more accurately, the Sabbath, began at sundown on Saturday night, when all work or play must stop. On Sunday morning, they ate a cold breakfast, since nothing could be cooked, and then they slowly and solemnly walked to church, since hitching the horses to the wagon was considered work. The boys had to sit straight and still and perfectly quiet through a two-hour church service and then walk slowly home, where they ate another cold meal. For the rest of the afternoon they sat on a hard bench and studied their catechism until the sun went down and the Sabbath was over. (2)

Although we may not take it quite so seriously as they did back then, most of us probably still associate Sunday with a day of rest from our labors. After all, wasn’t that the whole reason behind the Sabbath commandment? In Exodus 20, the first place in the Old Testament where the Ten Commandments occur, the Sabbath commandment goes like this: “Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work...For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day...” (Exodus 20:8-11)

In this version of the Ten Commandments, observing the sabbath is about creation and work. God created the world in six days but on the seventh God rested. The idea behind the sabbath seems to be that if God can create a universe out of nothing and still have a day left over to rest, then there is no reason we shouldn’t be able to get our work done in six days either.

The problem is, once the Israelites received that commandment they got confused about what exactly God meant by “work.” In an attempt to clarify this, Jewish scholars and religious leaders came up with 613 additional laws that laid out exactly what people could and could not do on the Sabbath. That made the Sabbath a day during which people constantly worried they might unintentionally do some work and break the commandment.

The story we heard today from the gospel of Luke wasn’t the first time Jesus messed with people’s understanding of the Sabbath, and it wouldn’t be the last. The work Jesus came to do was the work of teaching and healing and loving all people, and he did his work just as freely on the Sabbath as on any other day of the week, and it always, always provoked anger in the religious leaders. Rules are there for a reason, after all, and the leaders were there to make sure the rules were kept. It was their job to keep things at the synagogue running smoothly. Their frustration at Jesus’ habit of disrupting and, in their eyes, dishonoring, the Sabbath was understandable.

In today’s story, Jesus doesn’t even wait for someone to ask for healing. He’s up in front, teaching when suddenly he sees her...a woman, bent nearly double by what in those days was called a spirit. For eighteen years, this woman had to look at the world from an awkward, painful angle. She was an outcast, an object of sympathy. Jesus doesn’t wait for her to maneuver herself into a position from which she could see him. Instead he interrupts his own teaching to call out to her, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment!” And he goes to her and he touches her, this woman everyone else considered untouchable...and her pain disappears and her disease leaves her and she stands as straight as a young woman, lifting her arms and praising the Lord.

But before the first full Alleluia is out of her mouth, the leader of the synagogue is running over, ready to put a stop to it all. “Come on!” he says to Jesus. “You have six days a week to do your work, why do you have to do it today?” He does have a point. I mean, that woman had lived with a bent back for eighteen years. Was one more day really going to make a difference? Why did she have to be healed today of all days, the day on which God commanded us to do no work?

Well, if Exodus chapter 20 was the only place we find the Sabbath Commandment, that leader would have had a point. But as we heard earlier, the same commandments are repeated in the book of Deuteronomy. There, all of the commandments are the same as those in Exodus 20, except for the commandment about the Sabbath. The Israelites are commanded to do no work on the seventh day, not because God rested, but as a way of remembering that the Israelites were once slaves in the land of Egypt until the Lord set them free. In other words, Sabbath-keeping is a way of remembering our freedom. It is a day of redemption, of being saved, of being set free. In fact, the early Christians moved the observed day of the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday because it was the day Jesus was set free from his grave and the day we too were set free from bondage to death.

The religious leaders may have thought that the point of the Sabbath was to do no work, but Jesus knows there is more to Sabbath than that. If there are people bound by disease or addiction or any other kind of evil spirit that never takes the day off, then there is no better day than the Sabbath to unbind them. “Woman,” he says, “you are set free from your ailment.”

Too often our rules and perceptions about Sunday have been rooted in tradition rather than in freedom or creation. Jesus makes this clear to the leaders who criticize him for healing the woman. One of those 613 Sabbath rules was that you could untie -- in other words, set free -- your ox or donkey so that they could get a drink. So how could anyone argue that on this day of all days, a beloved child of God should not be set free from her physical bondage, free to praise God with all her body, heart, mind, and soul, free to proclaim to all who would listen the power of the living God?

Jesus simply refuses to be bound by the rules and regulations we create for God and for ourselves as Jesus’ followers. In Jesus, God comes to us, not to chastise us for the rules we have broken, but to set us free from the chains that have bound us.

When was the last time you got up on Sunday and came to church out of a delicious sense of freedom? Not out of obligation or because you thought it was what you should do, but because you wanted and needed to be reminded of the ways God has set you free? Free from the demands of our materialistic culture, free from the guilt that clings to us throughout the week, free from the fear of what others will think if we reach out to those on the margins, free from our fears about what the future holds and how death will come for us. Too often we don’t experience that longing for freedom on Sunday or any day, because, just as in Jesus’ time, our traditions and expectations around how we are supposed to look and act in church and as a church stifles the very freedom Jesus came to bring.

The good news of this story is that Jesus is not concerned about rules and regulations and what is considered the “right” way to behave in church or as a church. Jesus just wants to set people free, no matter how crippled you are, no matter what binds you, no matter how long you have been bound, no matter if Jesus just freed you a week ago and you’re back again all tangled up in the same old chains. Jesus came to set us free...and not just so that we can worship and serve God according to rules we’ve created. As Jesus tells the religious leaders, our freedom is not just for us, but also for others. We are set free to reach out to the least of these--the outcast, the sinner--with deepest love and compassion. We are set free to do what Jesus would do, no matter what day of the week it is.

In the projects of LA, there was a church that decided to open its doors to homeless immigrants during the week. Every night, homeless and undocumented workers would sleep in the church. On Sundays, the priest and some of the dedicated women of the church would come early and do everything they could to eliminate the smell the men left behind. They’d sprinkle “Love My Carpet” all over and then vacuum like crazy. They’d put scented candles and bowls of potpourri in strategic places. They’d burn incense. But the smell persisted and people grumbled.

Finally, in worship one day, the priest decided to face the problem head on. During the sermon, he asked the congregation a question: “What’s the church smell like?” People were mortified. Women began to search diligently in their purses, men looked anywhere but at the pulpit. “Come on,” the priest said, “What’s it smell like?”
Finally, an old man who never cared what people thought anyway, called out, “Smells like feet!”
“Exactly,” the priest replied. “And why does it smell like feet?”
“Because many homeless men slept here last night,” a woman answered.
“Why did we let that happen?” asked the priest.
“It’s what we committed to do,” said someone else.
“And why would we commit to that?” asked the priest.
“Because it’s what Jesus would do,” someone said.
“Well then...what does the church smell like now?” the priest said.
“It smells like commitment,” one man called out.
“It smells like roses!” another woman shouted, and the everyone there nodded and smiled. (3)

That church smelled like Sabbath freedom. And freedom doesn’t often smell so sweet. Let’s face it: rules are easier; it’s easier to try to control people than to set them free. But every time Jesus heals on the Sabbath he reminds us that he came to set us free, yes, so that we might now the wonder of the love and freedom he offers, but also so that we might share that freedom with others, family and friends, strangers and outcasts. Jesus sets us free and sends us out to proclaim the good news, so that all people, no matter what they look like, smell like, or act like, may stand up straight and freely praise the Lord, on any day of the week. Alleluia! Amen.

Endnotes:
1. Thanks to David Lose for his article “Sunday, Sunday” on Working Preacher for this approach.
2. Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods. Harper Trophy, 2004, pp. 83-89.
3. Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart. Free Press, 2010.

Rich (sermon, August 15, 2010)

Luke 12:13-21

The musical “Children of Eden” by Stephen Sondheim tells the story of Adam and Eve. Many years after Eve is tempted by the serpent’s promise of immortality and she and Adam are expelled from the garden of Eden, they sing a song about the life they have fashioned for themselves and their two sons, Cain and Abel. Listen to the lyrics:

We tried to make a home
Heaven knows the life’s been hard
Summers brief and arid
Winters bleak and numb
Look what we call home
These old walls are stained and scarred
I can still remember
What each scar was from
You could call it run-down, worn out, threadbare
and I guess you’d come close to home.

On this barren plot
We’ll plant our wheat and dig our wells
And we’ll be a family
Steady as a star
Look at what we’ve got
Only what we’ve made ourselves
Though it’s next to nothing, look how rich we are
Funny now how Eden doesn’t seem so far.


We’ve all heard it said at one time or another in one way or another: you don’t need things to be rich. Things don’t make you rich. You can be rich in love. You can be rich in friendship, rich in knowledge.

But it should come as no surprise that although we’ve heard that things don’t make us rich, the truth of that expression doesn’t always sink in. After all, according to one recent statistic, Americans are now subjected to five thousand advertisements a day. Five thousand! How can a wise grandmother’s words -- things don’t make you rich -- compete with five thousand declarations a day that if you only had this car or that phone or a house like that, then you would be happy, satisfied, content... then, you would be rich?

Now before I go any further I should make it clear that this is not a stewardship sermon. Well, let me put that in a different way, because it is a sermon about money, and any sermon about money is about stewardship. But this is not a sermon when I am going to ask you to give more money to the church. We think of stewardship season as October or November when the church leaders are working on the budget for next year and people stand up and talk about why giving is an important part of faith. Giving is important for your life of faith and for the church, but that’s not what today is about. It’s the middle of August, so it’s not stewardship season. The text before us has nothing to do with a particular season and everything to do with what it means to be human. Because no matter how much we may believe the old saying that “things don’t make you rich,” we all know how it feels to want something more or bigger or better and to want to keep it all to ourselves.

And that’s exactly what’s going on with the man Jesus describes in this parable. He was a rich man, and he was indeed rich in things. He owned land, presumably a lot of it, and his land was fertile. He not only had more crops and goods than he could use for himself, he even had more than he could fit in his storage units.

Now remember, this text comes from the gospel of Luke. And in Luke’s gospel, being materially rich isn’t good or even neutral. It is inherently bad. In Luke’s gospel, back in chapter one, Mary sings that God “has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly: he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” Mary’s song declares a major theme of the gospel story Luke tells, a story in which God sets out to bring justice to a world in which the poor have too often suffered at the expense of the rich.

The problem is, it looks like that justice still hasn’t come. Two thousand years after Mary sang that good news of what God would do in Jesus Christ we look around and see this huge divide, in our city, in our country, in the world, between the wealthy and the poor. The story Jesus tells offers us a glimpse as to why this might be, how it is that we can live in a world with such vast resources, where some people literally throw away food every day while others starve to death.

Jesus offers us an explanation for this when he tells us the rich man’s response to the abundance of crops the land produces. Listen to what the man says: “What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?...I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.”

The answer is right there in that abundance of first-person references. This man’s sin is not that he is wisely preparing for the future. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. His sin is that he is totally and completely preoccupied with himself. As one commentator put it, “he has fallen prey to worshipping the most popular of gods: the Unholy Trinity of me, myself, and I.” (1) He has no regard for anyone else, not for the poor in his own community who desperately need just a portion of his abundance, and certainly not for God, who created the earth that produced that grain and the clouds that sent the rain and the sun that made the plants grow. This man lived in a universe populated by no one but himself. It doesn’t even occur to him to honor God who made the abundance possible or to share with his fellow human beings in need. He was rich because he had many things, and, as far as he was concerned, he had earned them all himself.

The writer David Sedaris tells a story of when he was eight years old and moved to a new town on a street where the only family on the block who didn’t own a television were the Tomkeys. Instead of a TV, the Tomkeys had a boat, and on the weekends, they would leave town and head for the lake.

That year, Halloween fell on a Saturday. David and his sisters dressed up and went from house to house collecting candy. The next night, as David and his family sat watching TV, the doorbell rang. David, his mother, and sisters all went to answer it, and there, on their doorstep, stood the Tomkeys, the parents dressed normally and the two children in Halloween costumes. The father explained that they had spent the weekend at the lake and so the children had not been able to trick or treat. “So I guess we’re trick or treating now, if it’s not too late.”

“Of course it’s not too late,” David’s mother said. Then she told her children to go and get the candy.
“The candy’s all gone,” one of David’s sisters said. “We gave it all out last night.”
“Not that candy,” their mother said. “The other candy.”
“Do you mean our candy?” another sister asked. “The candy we earned?” The children knew this is what their mother must mean, especially when she fixed them with that look that only a mother can give. They hurried off to their bedrooms.

In his room, David grabbed the brown paper bag marked “My Candy. Keep Out.” He dumped it on his bed and started searching for the crummiest candy, the only things he would even consider giving away. As he divided his candy into piles according to what he liked best he knew that any minute his mother would come into his room and indiscriminately grab whatever she could to give to the Tomkeys. Then it occurred to David that the only thing to do was to eat as much as he could right then and there. So he started unwrapping the miniature chocolate bars and cramming them into his mouth.

Moments later, his mother entered the room, and in desperation, he started breaking apart the candy he couldn’t fit into his mouth because, as he explained, “while it hurt to destroy them, it would have hurt even more to give them away.” As his mother grabbed a roll of Necco wafers, he pleaded with her, “Not those. Not those,” and as he did, bits of chewed up chocolate sprayed from his mouth.

His mother just looked at him and said, “You should look at yourself. I mean, really look at yourself.” (2)

If there is anything good that has come out of the global recession we are in, it is that our society has been forced to take a good look at itself. So many of us fell prey to those thousands of advertisements that come at us every day and became consumed with the belief that we must accumulate more and build bigger houses and storage units to put it all in so that we could finally relax, eat, drink, and be merry. Instead, most of us are learning the hard way that the money we stored up in things or in the stock market really had nothing to do with our ultimate security or even our happiness.

Last week, on the online edition of the New York Times, the second-most emailed story was called “But Will It Make You Happy?” The story was about how, in the face of the current recession, Americans’ patterns and ideas about consumption are finally starting to change. We are saving more and spending less and we are discovering that what truly makes us happy is not buying things, it’s having experiences. People have found out that making memories with their friends and loved ones is worth a lot more than a new couch or a fancy car. (3)

In the same way, Jesus tells this story, not to frighten us into believing that all wealth is bad, but to remind us that what we earn and what we have cannot be where we place our ultimate sense of worth and security, because in the end, these things will fail us. (4)

Things don’t make us rich. And we all know it, deep down. It’s not that having things is inherently bad. It’s when the things we have distract us from the deeper truth that our security comes not from anything that can fit in our house or garage or bank account but from the knowledge that God has freely showered us with the greatest gifts we could ever possess: the gifts of identity, meaning, love; the gift of relationship with the One who created us and of relationships with our fellow human beings who are also created in the image of God. When we remember this, when we live secure in this knowledge, we are able to recognize the abundance around us, no matter what “things” we have or don’t have, and we will be generous with that abundance just as God has been so astonishingly generous to us. Look around you and see -- see! -- how rich we are. Amen.

Endnotes:
1. David Lose, commentary on Working Preacher.
2. David Sedaris, “Us and Them,” from Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. Read it online here.
3. Stephanie Rosenblum, “But Will It Make You Happy?” The New York Times, August 7, 2010.
4. David Lose, commentary on Working Preacher.

The Main Course (sermon, August 1, 2010)

Last week we heard the story of the so-called “Good Samaritan.” Today’s gospel passage immediately follows that story and it is another passage that is familiar to many of us, the story of Mary and Martha. Although last week I encouraged you to try to find yourself in the Good Samaritan story, this week, I encourage you to just listen. This is a passage we bring many preconceptions too, which makes it hard to hear it for what it is. Again this week, I am going to read from Eugene Peterson’s translation, The Message. Hear now Luke 10:38-42.

As they continued their travel, Jesus entered a village. A woman by the name of Martha welcomed him and made him feel quite at home. She had a sister, Mary, who sat before the Master, hanging on every word he said. But Martha was pulled away by all she had to do in the kitchen. Later, she stepped in, interrupting them. "Master, don't you care that my sister has abandoned the kitchen to me? Tell her to lend me a hand."
The Master said, "Martha, dear Martha, you're fussing far too much and getting yourself worked up over nothing. One thing only is essential, and Mary has chosen it—it's the main course, and won't be taken from her."

Let me just say right off the bat that this is one of those texts that, in my professional opinion, could have been left out of Luke’s gospel. I don’t like it, and not just because I personally feel the sting of Jesus’ criticism of Martha. I don’t like it because it’s confusing and contradictory. Look back at the very end of the Good Samaritan parable. Jesus asks the religion scholar which of the three men on the road was a neighbor to the injured man. The scholar correctly answers, “the one who showed him mercy;” in other words, the Samaritan. Jesus says to him, “Go and do likewise,” which clearly suggests that a life of discipleship is about doing: doing justice, showing mercy, reaching out to others with compassion, serving others and showing hospitality.

And then, in the very next four verses we have this story in which Jesus seems to say quite clearly and none too kindly that a life of discipleship is about being -- being attentive to the Word of God, coming before Jesus like hungry bird, hanging on every word that comes from his mouth. So which is it? Devotion or service?

In Luke’s gospel, there are all kinds of stories that seem to suggest the answer is service, and not just any kind of service but that particular kind that Martha provides -- hospitality to a visitor in one’s home. Do you remember when Jesus went to Simon’s house and criticized Simon because he didn’t wash Jesus’ feet or anoint his head with oil, leaving those tasks instead to an unnamed woman off the streets? Then, when Jesus sends the disciples off on their own to proclaim the kingdom of God and heal, he tells them that if they enter a house and do not receive a welcome, they are to “shake the dust off [their] feet as a testimony against them” as they leave. Clearly hospitality and service are the most important things.

But, to be fair, there are lots of examples in Luke’s gospel where prayer and devotion seem to be the most important thing. People are healed, not because they serve someone in need or show hospitality, but simply because they exhibit some small measure of faith: the woman who pushes her way through a crowd, convinced that if she can just touch the edge of Jesus’ cloak she will finally be healed; the centurion, who is not even Jewish, but who believes that Jesus can heal his beloved slave, which Jesus does. Then, in the story that follows this one, the disciples ask Jesus to teach them how to pray and he gives them the gift of the Lord’s Prayer and the beloved words, “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.”

So which is it then? Exactly what kind of disciples does Jesus want us to be? Good Samaritans or quiet, attentive Marys?

To which Jesus would certainly respond, “Yes.” (1)

This is yet another story on our journey with Jesus in which Jesus refuses to give us simple answers. It’s easy to read it with all the baggage we have in our culture and in our churches about the concept of “women’s work” and think that Jesus is saying that Martha did the wrong thing and Mary did the right thing. But if we stay with this story a little longer, if we dig into the text a little deeper, it will give us, if not the answers we long for, at least enough to satisfy our hunger.

When I spent a year in Belfast, Northern Ireland as a student pastor in a Presbyterian Church, I experienced hospitality like I’d never known before. I can count on my hands the number of Sundays I didn’t have an invitation to go to a church member’s home for a three or four course Sunday lunch after worship. Fortunately, before I left, a fellow seminarian who had spent time there informed me of two important customs of Northern Irish hospitality. First, when you go to someone’s house, you never show up empty-handed. A simple bouquet of flowers or perhaps a bottle of wine -- it doesn’t have to be anything fancy, but you always bring your host a gift. And if ever someone offers you a cup of tea -- and the custom is that as soon as you step foot in another person’s home you are offered a cup of tea -- you accept it. Over the course of that year, I’m quite sure I bought over a hundred bouquets of flower and drank thousands of cups of tea. Those were the expectations of giving and receiving hospitality in that culture.

In Jesus’ day, there were also certain expectations about hospitality, and at the minimum they were this: when someone enters you home, be it friend or stranger, you offer him is a place to sit and a meal. By welcoming Jesus into her home and preparing him a meal, Martha is simply following the customs of her day. In fact, given the other examples in Luke’s gospel, we can assume that Jesus expected and appreciated her efforts.

The surprising thing about this text is not that Martha was slaving away in the kitchen. The shocking thing is that rather than doing her part to extend hospitality to Jesus, Mary was sitting at his feet. You see, in Jesus’ day, women were not permitted to assume the status of students, only men were, and sitting at the teacher’s feet was what students -- what men -- did. When the earliest readers of Luke’s gospel heard this story, they would have been appalled at Mary’s behavior, because she is assuming a role available to men.

So the first people to hear this story would have fully expected Jesus to criticize, not Martha for fulfilling her duties as hostess, but Mary for presuming that she was worthy to sit at Jesus’ feet. Instead, Jesus turns all these assumptions on their heads. When Martha has finally had enough of being left alone in the kitchen, she marches out and demands that Jesus set Mary straight. But Jesus refuses, instead scolding Martha and praising Mary.

But listen carefully to Jesus’ words. “Martha, you’re getting all worked up over nothing...only one thing is essential...” Jesus isn’t criticizing Martha for being a good hostess, but for taking the whole concept of roles a little too seriously. And I’m not talking about dinner rolls, here, I’m talking about the roles we all assume, the roles we choose and the roles society gives us.

Frederick is a children’s book by artist and illustrator Leo Leonni that tells the story of a family of mice. During the summer and fall, the mice get ready for the winter, when they will retreat into a stone wall with all the food they collected when the weather was warm and the nuts and grains were abundant. The problem is that Frederick never does anything to help. While the other mice gather food, he suns himself on a rock. When they ask what he is doing, he says, “I’m gathering sun rays for the cold, dark winter days.” Another day, he claims to be gathering colors and another day, words. But to the hardworking mice it looks like he is simply lazy.

Then, winter comes, and the mice retreat into the wall. Gradually they eat their stores of grains and nuts and tell all the stories they can remember. They fall into a cold, depressed silence. Then they remember Frederick. “What about the sun rays, and colors, and words?” they ask. He tells them to close their eyes and then, with his words, he begins to paint beautiful, vivid pictures for them, so real that they can feel the warmth of the sun on their skin and see the bright colors of the flowers and birds and trees as if were summer again. When he is finished, they open their eyes, astonished. Why, he really was doing something when it looked like he was just sitting around! “Frederick,” they say, “you are a poet!”

To which Frederick just smiles shyly and replies, “I know it.” (2)

This wonderful story reminds us that we all have different gifts. It also suggests that we all have different roles to play, and, of course, there is truth to that. It is that same truth that causes this story about Martha and Mary to resonate so deeply within us, because we all have roles, some we have chosen, some that have been heaped upon us, and we have all had times when we resented our roles, when we would rather be the one making conversation with the guest in the living room while someone else fixes the meal, or vice versa.

According to the roles given them by their society, Martha is the one in this story doing the “right” thing and Mary is the one doing the “wrong” thing. The problem is, Jesus isn’t interested in right or wrong. And thank God for that. Jesus doesn’t care that the centurion or the woman who touches his cloak weren’t Jewish or didn’t wait their turn before they came up to him and demanded his healing. They had faith, and that was enough for him. Jesus doesn’t care that a Samaritan isn’t supposed to interact with a Jew. The true neighbor is one who shows mercy and compassion to someone in need. Jesus doesn’t say that we have to ask for things in just the right way to receive them: ask and you will receive, search and you will find... As far as Jesus is concerned only one thing matters, as he tells Martha, there is only one essential thing, and that is...

Well, the final infuriating twist to this story is that Jesus doesn’t actually explain what the “one essential thing” is. But I can’t help but wonder if it has something to do with the fact that there is no one right way to be a disciple. The Bible is quite clear that at times we are to go and do and at times we are to sit and listen and there isn’t one of us here that can live a life of true discipleship if we only do one or the other...no matter what we feel our particular role is in the church or on this journey of faith. And if we spend our time judging the way other people live as disciples and getting worked up because they’re not doing it right, then we can be sure that we have gone off in the wrong direction.

There is no one right way to be a disciple. And there is no one role in life that we must fulfill at all cost. In the end, there is truly only one role that matters on this journey, and that is the main course of which Jesus speaks, our truest, most important identity: we are the beloved children of God, the faithful disciples of Jesus Christ. “Martha has chosen the main course and it won’t be taken away from her,” Jesus says, reminding us all that when we claim our one true role, not the one society gives us or the one that comes from our job or social status, but our fundamental identity as children of God, once we claim that, then no one -- not even we ourselves on our most judgmental and resentful days -- can ever take it away. Amen.

Endnotes:
1. Fred Craddock makes this point in the commentary Luke (Interpretation, a Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching), WJK Press, 1991.
2. Leo Leonni, Frederick, Dragonfly Books, 1973.