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Thursday, July 29, 2010

"The Rich Fool"

For Sunday, August 1st, 2010
(Photo of an icon in Galway, Ireland, of Jesus teaching his disciples. Taken by Fergal OP, posted on www.flickr.com and used under Creative Commons license.)

Lectionary Scripture Reading – Luke 12:13-21

Someone in the crowd said to him, "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me." But he said to him, "Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?" And he said to them, "Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one's life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.

Then he told them a parable: "The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, 'What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?' Then he said, '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.'

But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God."

“The Rich Fool”

This week’s Lectionary scripture is part of an extended period during which Jesus alternates between teaching the crowds and teaching his disciples. Sometimes in teaching his disciples, Jesus did so publicly. This created opportunity for other people to gather around often with the hope they’d glean some gem of insight or wisdom they had not heard from Jesus previously.

It is in such a setting that Jesus tells the "parable of the rich fool" as this particular passage of scripture has come to be known. What prompts the story is a man who breaks into the conversation Jesus is having with his disciples. Like a bull in a china shop, this self-absorbed self-centered man has no awareness for what he’s disrupting. Narcissistically, he pushes everyone aside and demands Jesus attention.

The character of the man’s personality is all too apparent to Jesus as he pesters Jesus to make a judgment between himself and his brother. At issue is the estate of the parents. It’s likely that the man feels he is getting the short end of the stick and that may be true. For in the Mishnah, a Jewish book of laws, the elder son gets twice the amount of inheritance as does the younger son. Then like now, people quibble and fight and contest things before authority figures to get the estate portion they feel should be theirs.

Wisely, Jesus refused to enter into the debate as a judge between the brothers; whether he did this because he believed the man seeking his judgment was unworthy or Jesus was simply unwilling to get involved in the haggling is not important. What Jesus decides to confront is the man’s greed and selfishness. So he turns from the man to tell the disciples and crowd the tale of a rich fool. He does so because the man’s situation demonstrates a need to counsel against any kind of greed and selfishness. And what Jesus teaches is that one’s “life” is not about what one possesses.

As usual, the object lesson from Jesus’ stories provides both a warning and commentary. So he tells about this man who is already rich and who then has a plentiful harvest. The bountiful harvest is not the result of the man's wrongdoing. He did not cheat anyone to achieve his gain. He is careful and conservative. He planned well and planted well. In turn, the soil and rain and sun and wind rewarded him with a lavish harvest. Eventually the man has an internal conversation and makes a decision and says to his soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, and be merry.”

The decision he makes is that he’s going to use his wealth to ensure a life of ease for himself. So he plans to stop accumulating and instead "store up" all his grain in bigger and better barns. He then anticipates sitting back and enjoying the good life.

Jesus does not praise the rich man for tearing down his barns to build bigger ones but neither does he condemn him for that action. What Jesus speaks to in the story is the man’s behavior and foolishness. This rich man believes that he is capable of hoarding up enough stuff to sustain and protect his soul for as long as he lives. Clearly however, he envisions only his own pleasure over the coming years. What makes him the fool is that he lives for himself, talks to himself, plans for himself, and congratulates himself.

The rich fool has forgotten that his soul does not exist apart from God and its well-being lies in hands other than his own. His soul is not his possession and not under his control. When life inevitably or suddenly ends, the soul moves on to God. All that one has had on earth, one must leave behind. And whatever one leaves behind, it passes to others in some form or another.

What Jesus points out that should have occurred to the rich fool is that our souls can go to God at any time. This happened to my father the morning of April 2nd, 2005. Having been out enjoying a breakfast of biscuits and gravy with friends and then returning home, a fatal heart attack suddenly took his life. I know this because my brother found the restaurant receipt next to my father’s body. And so it is that death continues to happen abruptly and tragically. We never know when death will come for us. For Jesus, he knew that God’s mission for him would require his soul and he knew that death would happen tragically and brutally as it had happened for many martyrs.

The rich fool in our scripture story never considered such possibilities. He’d done a great job of looking out for his self but failed to adequately instruct his soul in terms of its welfare and security. As scripture in Luke 9:25 puts it, "What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit his very self?" The rich fool had forgotten about God. He’d forgotten about death. Anticipating and providing only for his mortal happiness, it never occurred to him that he should also have a plan for his soul’s eternal joy. Had he planned for such a need, he would have known that such joy comes from knowing that his resources in this mortal life had helped and nurtured others. "How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!” Jesus says, “Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom."

Throughout this year’s lectionary focus on the Gospel of the Luke, we’ll see this physician and apostle continue to set the standard for the disciples as persons who voluntarily share their resources with others. He will lift up the importance of being generous individuals, of being persons living outside the barn or box we construct for ourselves and who do so with the conviction that one's bounteous possessions are to be shared.

Often such teachings are lost on the rich, especially the rich who are narcissistically self-centered and self-absorbed. They do not see that sitting on their resources and accumulating wealth for themselves and their own enjoyment deprives others. And yet, it’s very easy to lose perspective on this in the course of life for us who do not consider ourselves wealthy. For me, it was very intriguing three years ago to hear a representative from an international non-profit development agency share that it would require four more planets like Earth to bring the rest of the world up to the average standard of living for most Canadians. Since the United States is much larger than Canada, the statistic is that it would take four more Earths to bring everyone in the world up to the poverty level as identified by the United States government.

So take a little time this week to consider how well off you are. And then think about whom will die today from starvation and the lack of access to healthcare and from the lack of safe and sanitary living conditions. Think as well about who will die tomorrow from those things and let us ask ourselves, do we really need all the stuff we surround ourselves with. Is there a better way for us to use our resources for the cause of God’s Peaceable Kingdom here on Earth? Let’s get outside the box we’ve constructed for ourselves. Let us share Christ’s conviction that our bounteous possessions are to be shared and shared for one reason only -- for accomplishing the Peaceable Kingdom that God has entrusted to us all.

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Resources utilized for this post:
• New Revised Standard Version of the Bible
• Community of Christ worship helps for August 5, 2007
• Luke 12:13-21 commentary for August 5th, 2001 from Homiletics Online at http://www.homileticsonline.com/.

Friday, July 23, 2010

"God's Dream"

For Sunday, July 25th, 2010


(Graphic is a January 2009 photo by Lawrence Op, a Dominican Friar. Photo used under Creative Commons License. Photo is of a 1946 stained glass window done by Comper. The window is on the east side of St Cyprian's church in London. The window depicts Saint Paul holding a book, open to Colossians 1:23, exhorting one and all to: "continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel... of which I, Paul, became a minister.")

Lectionary Scripture – Colossians 2:6-10 NRSV

"As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority."

God’s Dream

Chris Haslam of the Anglican Diocese of Montreal provides commentary noting that Colossae was a city in what is now southwestern Turkey. In his commentary, he also notes that Colossae had flourishing wool and textile industries and a significant Jewish population. It seems however that most Christians in Colossae were Gentile. Although this letter to the Colossians was long thought to be written by Paul, today it’s considered by a number of scholars to have been authored by someone else. There are a number of reasons for this. The most compelling is that it emphasizes what God has already done for God’s people and what God is going to do in the future. The author then goes on to provide detailed descriptions of teachings incompatible with this future as well as being a follower of Jesus. Problem is that the things the author speaks of were promulgated after Paul had died. So for many scholars, this represents evidence of later authorship. It also fails to reflect the broader more inclusive view of God’s love that Paul espoused -- a love in which I am deeply grounded and which I hope will one day heal our troubled and distressed world.

The day of God’s great inclusion for all souls is what I believe the Apostle Paul saw in his own dreams and visions. For me, I have seen such a day in my own dreams and visions, but there’s a dreamer and visionary who many of us know of and whom I’ve had the pleasure of listening to twice in person through my ecumenical and interfaith work. His name is Archbishop Desmond Tutu and it’s his dream I’d like you to be aware of today.

Specifically, the Archbishop put it this way in his book God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Time. He puts it this way in terms of the Spirit’s inspiration to him, “I have a dream, God says, please help me realize it. It is a dream of a world whose ugliness and squalor and poverty, its war and hostility, its greed and harsh competitiveness are changed into their glorious counterparts, when there will be more laughter, joy, and peace, where there will be justice and goodness and compassion and love and caring and sharing. I have a dream that swords will be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, that My children will know that they are members of one family, the human family, God’s family, my family. And in God’s family, there are no outsiders. All are insiders. Black and white, rich and poor, gay and straight, Jew and Arab, Palestinian and Israeli, Roman Catholic and Protestant, Serb and Albanian, Hutu and Tutsi, Muslim and Christian, Buddhist and Hindu, Pakistani and Indian – all belong.”

And then Tutu shares some unsettling thoughts, “Sometimes we shocked them at home in South Africa when we said, the apartheid state president and I, whether we liked it or not, were brothers. And I had to desire and pray for the best for him. As Jesus said, “I, if I be lifted up, will draw all to me” Not just some would be drawn, Tutu says, but all. And then he goes on to say what a radical thing it is that Jesus says, that we are members of one family. We all belong for God tells us that all are his children. It’s a dream Tutu says that has been passed down through all the prophets and great humanitarians of our times. In particular he points out the Reverend Martin Luther King Junior who at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 shared his dream that one day the children of former slaves and the children of former slave owners would be able to sit down at the table of brotherhood; and then Mahatma Gandhi who in 1929 wrote that his goal was not just the brotherhood of Indian humanity but rather the brotherhood of all human beings. The truth, Tutu says, is that we need each other and that we cannot survive nor thrive without one another.

To that end may we engage in the work of God entrusted to us all -- for you are called, and each and every one of us is called according to the gifts of God to us. For soon comes God’s Peaceable Kingdom and all who believe shall be redeemed.

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Resources for this post:

• New Revised Standard Version of the Bible

• Tutu, Desmond – God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Time, 2004.

• Lectionary commentary for Colossians 2 by Chris Haslam at http://www.montreal.anglican.org/comments/

Thursday, July 15, 2010

"Listen and Learn"

For Sunday, July 18th, 2010


(Painting titled “Christ with Mary and Martha”, done in 1654 by Johannes Vermeer, located in the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, Great Britain.  Used under Creative Commons license.)

Lectionary Scripture - Luke 10:38-42 NRSV

Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to what he was saying. But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, "Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me." But the Lord answered her, "Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her."




Listen and Learn

Progressives, where would we be without them? And visionaries, where we would be without them too? This week’s lectionary scripture contrasts the ways and behavior of traditionalists with that of progressives while a renowned visionary is among them.

For Martha, the traditionalist in the above scripture story, attending to matters of religion and theology was not her place or lot in life. Millennia of tradition dictated that as a woman, she should focus on being a meticulous host for the men who had come to her home. If she managed to glean meaningful crumbs from the discussion taking place beneath her roof, then it couldn’t be helped. Most certainly it wasn’t intended.

We’re not exactly clear as to the reason for Martha’s complaint about Mary. Was she truly annoyed with her sister? Was she envious of Mary sitting at Jesus’ feet? Or was she simply overwhelmed with the crowd in her home and upset that because of her duties as host she might miss out on crumbs of wisdom that would have been hers to hear once the men had been attended to?

Clearly the situation was something altogether new and different for Martha. The men had just arrived from where a lawyer in a crowd pressed Jesus about who one’s neighbor is. The teaching Jesus offered stunned the crowd who included not only lawyers, but priests, scribes and anyone else who had been listening carefully. Jesus’ words in that situation turned the notion of neighbor on its head. Now the neighbor could be someone from a despised ethnic group. Now the neighbor could be a seemingly dead person lying beside the road. Tradition and laws about defiling oneself no longer meant a thing when an innocent party had been wronged and maliciously injured, even if that led to loss of one’s livelihood, or loss of one’s standing in the community, or expending precious resources to care for one who had been wronged. A good neighbor was nothing less than one who showed and extended the greatest mercy despite the circumstances confronting them.

So in one fleeting story told by a phenomenal young rabbi, the whole world had changed for those following Jesus and with it thousands of years of tradition. The followers would have questions, want further explanation, some might even fear the fallout from the religious establishment and want to prepare and strategize for it. Quite possibly, these things were the purpose for gathering at Mary and Martha’s home. My guess is that Martha didn’t want to miss a moment of the conversation which is why she petitioned Jesus to have Mary help her.

Tradition took over however for Martha. Whatever progressive or curious piece in her had been touched by the news and story of who our neighbor is, it had been tossed out the window by Martha in a mindless sort of way. Jesus’ gentle and loving rebuke was a means of calling Martha out of tradition and out of her habits and typical way of doing things so she could do what she really wanted to, i.e. be at Jesus’ feet listening and learning as was Mary.

Have you ever had a time where you should have been listening and learning but your habits, usual expectations, or typical manner of doing things (i.e. your traditions) got in the way? I remember several years ago being approached by a YWCA youth worker trying to help teens learn skills for living on their own. The worker shared about a teen for whom she had grown quite concerned. The teen would have moments where she seemed quite detached in class and would lay her head on the table while closing her eyes and covering her ears. The worker later discovered that the teen suffered from hearing voices and seeing things that weren’t there and these happened quite frequently. At first I thought the young woman might have a form of childhood schizophrenia or depression with psychosis and suggested that the teen be further evaluated. Problem is that I didn’t feel quite right about what I had surmised.

Eventually, I realized my mistake. I had spent so much time working with persons suffering major mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, psychotic depression, bipolar disorder that it I failed to understand what the teen was actually struggling through. Finally, it came to me, but not until I had been through an opportunity to sit and listen and learn regarding PTSD, i.e. post-traumatic stress disorder. I later had a chance to speak with the youth worker and learned that the teen had been in a very disturbing home environment resulting in the need for foster care. There, she finally escaped her traumatizing upbringing.

In Jesus’ time as well as in ours, numbing and traumatizing circumstances readily occur in the religious establishment. Things had become so mindless and numb at the Temple that Jesus overturned the tables of moneychangers and chased out the merchants with a whip demanding that the Temple return to a place of prayer. On another occasion, he condemned the scribes for swallowing up the property and resources of widows. And in this week’s scripture story, he compassionately but straightforwardly differs with Martha and does so by telling her that listening and learning are at times more important than our usual expectations or ways of doing things.  And as most of us know, eventually enough listening and learning occurred that a whole new faith movement came into being and now billions claim to follow Jesus Christ.

In our time, I suspect Jesus would say to some followers that their busyness and typical way of doing things on his behalf is little more than a Martha approach to life. He might compassionately but straightforwardly say that a "Mary way of being" needs to be recaptured as there’s been too much loss of the kind of listening and learning necessary for making Peaceable Kingdom progress. Too much of it has been lost in terms of a greater preference for mindless ritual or proscribed behavioral expectations that support some form of tradition that no longer serves a good purpose.

On that note, I remember a few years ago meeting with some lay ministers regarding their distress that certain denominational rituals and traditions were no longer being upheld. One of those issues involved that an ordained minister should always lead congregational worship services.  For me, I never understood the magical thinking accompanying such a thing or why the intermediary of an ordained minister was considered as always necessary for ensuring Spirit filled worship.  After all, wasn't it because of Jesus that humanity had listened and learned that relationship and encounter with God was primarily personal?  Only until I produced documentation from denominational leaders saying worship services could be led by non-ordained persons was the issue finally moot. Just proves that today, as in Jesus’ time, there will always be the Marthas, the traditionalists, and the legalistic individuals who value more that which limits others rather than frees them.

Meanwhile - and thankfully - there will continue to be those progressives and visionaries who emulate Mary and Jesus and other followers who down through time sought after "the better part", the "listening and learning part", they will do so because they want God's Peaceable Kingdom to be reality for all living souls.

To that end, summon the courage to be a Mary – to be a person who sits at the sage’s feet listening and learning so you can be for others whatever is needed whenever it’s needed.

Thursday, July 8, 2010

"Go and Do Likewise"

For Sunday, July 11th, 2010


(“The Good Samaritan”, done in 1973, is part of JESUS MAFA, a response to the New Testament readings from the Lectionary by a Christian community in Cameroon, Africa. Each of the readings were selected and adapted to dramatic interpretation by the community members. Photographs of their interpretations were made and transcribed to paintings.)

Lectionary Scripture Luke 10:25–37 (NRSV)

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. "Teacher," he said, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" He said to him, "What is written in the law? What do you read there?" He answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." And he said to him, "You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live."

But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?" Jesus replied, "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead.

Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, 'Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.' Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?" He [the lawyer] said, "The one who showed him mercy." Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise."

“Go and Do Likewise”

Jews in Jesus time incurred a status of being unclean if they came into contact with a dead body. It was considered, and still is by some, the ultimate impurity. If I have it correct, cleansing involved a person being sprinkled with the ashes of the red heifer. The rarity of such an animal (and perhaps the expense of its ashes) could have meant that a priest or Levite might never return to their religious duties or responsibilities. So checking to see if a seemingly dead person was truly a corpse represented too great a risk to one’s livelihood and social standing. Thankfully Judaism and most other faith traditions have largely moved on from such thinking. It doesn’t mean however that we don’t get squeamish around seeing a dead body or coming into contact with one. What it does mean is that we extend generosity like that of a Samaritan when the situation calls for it.

For me, this occurred some years ago while serving as pastor for a congregation in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Our family had come into friendship with another young family. They were not members of our Canadian church family but they seemed drawn to us and the life of faith we lived. I believe they even came to church with us a time or two. Not long into our association, the wife and mother in this family discovered that she had colon cancer. Determined to fight it and be around to see her two kids grow up, she bravely engaged in every chemotherapy and radiation treatment she could. For my part, I would make visits to see her in the hospital during those treatments and had opportunity to meet her parents and some of the extended family, most of whom described themselves as lapsed Catholics.

Eventually however the cancer won out and early one morning her husband called me from the hospital just down the street from our home. He met me outside on the sidewalk and hugged me so tightly as waves of grief and sobbing consumed him without stop. I don’t know how long we stood there but in some ways it seemed an eternity. Time had stopped and with it Mary had stopped. All I could think was, “Mary, why you, why your family?” Eventually I said to her husband that we should go in and be with Mary and the rest of the family. On arriving to the room, Mary was lifeless. The nurses informed me they would need Mary’s body quite soon in order to obtain her corneas for transplant.

As the priest on the scene, I sensed from the grieving family members that they needed me to do something in order that they could have closure in the moment and then leave the hospital room. Knowing that something akin to last rites would have the most meaning for them I searched my heart in terms of sacramental options out of my own tradition. Just the previous day, the family had witnessed me engage in anointing Mary with consecrated oil and then laying hands on her head to pray. They saw this ritual providing peace and comfort to Mary. Despite the sacrament’s intent for the living, I felt led in the moment to offer it for the dead, though one could say it obviously blessed all the living now in that hospital room. Anointing Mary’s forehead, I gave thanks for her life, thanks for her valiant struggle, thanks for all who loved her and cared for her throughout her life, and thanks for all whom she had loved and cared for in return. I then gave thanks for her generosity and the choices she had made to bless and benefit others through the gifts that would now come from her earthly body even as she was assuming her heavenly one. All I can say of that experience is that Christ’s Spirit and Christ’s Peace filled the room blessing every one present with the calmness and love needed for the days ahead.

I have shared the above story with precious few in my faith tradition primarily because some legalistic individuals will consider my use of anointing and laying on of hands in the situation as sacrilege -- sacrilege because I provided it to a lifeless body that no longer possessed a living soul. If that’s the case for you I apologize for my offense, but know this, I have no regrets. I did in the moment what I felt I should do. As a result lives were blessed and understanding of “neighbor” enlarged. If you disagree, feel free to tell me which was the greater mercy -- to have or have not provided the ministry I was led to offer.