Sodom and Zacchaeus

Isaiah 1:10-18

Hear the word of the LORD, you rulers of Sodom! Listen to the teaching of our God, you people of Gomorrah! What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand? Trample my courts no more; bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and sabbath and calling of convocation - I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity. Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them. When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to of good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow. Come now, let us argue it out, says the LORD: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become wool.

Psalm 32:1-7

Happy are they whose transgressions are forgiven, and whose sin is put away! Happy are they to whom the LORD imputes no guilt, and in whose spirit there is no guile! While I held my tongue, my bones withered away, because of my groaning all day long. For your hand was heavy upon me day and night; my moisture was dried up as in the heat of summer. Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and did not conceal my guilt. I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the LORD.”  Then you forgave me the guilt of my sin. Therefore all the faithful will make their prayers to you in time of trouble; when the great waters overflow, they shall not reach them. You are my hiding place; you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with shouts of deliverance.

2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12

Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy, to the church of the Thessalonians in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. We must always give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing. Therefore we ourselves boast of you among the churches of God for your steadfastness and faith during all your persecutions and the afflictions that you are enduring. To this end we always pray for you, asking that our God will make you worthy of his call and will fulfill by his power every good resolve and work of faith, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of God and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Luke 19:1-10

Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through it. A man was there named Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was rich. He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. So he ran on ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way. When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today.” So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him. All who saw it began to grumble and said, “He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.” Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.” Then Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.”

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It would sure be convenient not to have had the first reading this morning about Soddom and Gomorrah, just to focus on the cute children’s song about Zacchaeus, the ‘wee little man,’ who climbed up a tree, but it would be irresponsible to ignore the prophet Isaiah today. Not only today, of course, but my own context as a member of the LGBTQ community means that I cannot ignore a story showing up in the lectionary that has been used against my people for too long. It’s one of those trigger stories because of how it’s been weaponized. We know the Bible can be used as a weapon, we hear it being used as a weapon still, even quietly when we simply tolerate difference. Zacchaeus sure knew how scripture could be turned against a person. We had a tax collector in last week’s parable of the tax collector and the Pharisee at prayer, and here is a real-life encounter Jesus has with a man who makes his living by gathering money from his own people to pay those who colonized and sought to erase his culture and history with violence and threats of violence.

Religion has used power for centuries to oppress and control, just like any other human institution which seeks to organize and impose authority. Whether we’re fighting over land or food or ideals, we’ve seen and known a history of violence for far too long, often using religion as the excuse to back up our personal fears, rather than as it should be, which is to set us free from those fears.

This is the reason prophets like Isaiah are so relevant today, because we keep repeating history and need the reminders again and again that we have nothing to be afraid of. See, Soddom and Gomorrah were completely awful to guests and travelers, to those in need and those who sought sanctuary within their borders. Their sin was not homosexuality, as many have said, but their will to violate outsiders and devalue their own who did not make them comfortable, either by class or gender or economy. The way the story of Sododm and Gomorrah has been turned against my people has turned those who use it into violently inhospitable Sodomites themselves. Ironic, isn’t it? Every time we try and use scripture to exclude other people from God’s vision and God’s kingdom, we cut ourselves out of that vision. Because the kingdom of God is all-inclusive, values every single life, and does not depend on uniformity or assimilation to function. God made a world of space for diversity and curiosity and seeing one another as we are rather than as we would want others to be for our own ease. Somehow we decided we could order the world better on our own terms, and in came the black and white thinking of either/or extremes, shutting down community for the sake of efficiency and shame-laden competition. How can we learn to actually see one another if we insist on these externally-imposed definitions of who is acceptable and who isn’t?

When Zacchaeus climbed that tree to see Jesus, it was to get his own contact with God that the community around him did not allow him to have. They did not make room for him in the crowd, they did not take his shortness of stature into account, they saw only the tax collector, and not the child of Abraham’s covenant with the Divine. God, however, saw Zacchaeus, and Zacchaeus’ own home became a sanctuary for the very God his neighbors claimed to serve by excluding him. He may not have been socially acceptable to his community, they may have been terribly offended at Jesus’ decision to eat with ‘that sinner,’ but ‘that sinner’ was as much a child of God as any of them, indeed behaving more like one of Abraham’s offspring than those who would exclude him on account of their piety.

When the people of God gather, there are always more people present than we see, always more voices than we hear, always more history than we are aware of. God’s kingdom is bigger than our imaginations of what it should or could or might be. And the Spirit of God is constantly working in and among us to unchain us from our fears and set us free from our anxieties. Our God is a God of salvation, and the judgment we fear is only that we might have wasted our living on being afraid of dying, killing ourselves and one another in an effort to protect ourselves from some false threats of being wrong or less right or not good enough to love and value. Jesus went to be the guest of a man whose reputation was tarnished by his neighbors’ insistence on imposed and impossible social perfection. Jesus made himself vulnerable to loving those who considered themselves insiders and to those who were made outsiders. Wherever you find yourself on that spectrum these days, whatever you are afraid of losing or never even accessing, your value and worth lie not in your piety or religiosity but in the love which has already been poured out for you, the love which died at the hands of our fears to take those fears to the grave, the love which comes to us in so many different forms and kinds and colors that we are never without it even when we refuse it.

Whatever your context, God lives in that real space and time alongside you and within you. Whatever your fears about being good enough or right enough, God is bigger than those fears. Whatever you struggle to accept, either in yourself or in others, remember God who created the world in the beginning called it good and blessed it. We do not have to live in a world that runs on divisiveness and suspicion of others, of ranking people good to bad, because the sacrifice of God on the cross showed us both the outcome of that path and the hope of a reality greater, the promise of resurrection and new life and second chances and reconciliation. We, too, are children of the covenant, and God’s prophets speak to us today as much as to their own time, of a vision that sustains our hope in God’s promised future come to us in the here and now.

Reformation

The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt - a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the LORD. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, said the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the LORD,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, said the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth be moved, and though the mountains shake in the depths of the sea; though its waters rage and foam, and though the mountains tremble with its tumult. There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High. God is in the midst of the city; it shall not be shaken; God shall help it at the break of day. The nations rage, and the kingdoms shale; God speaks, and the earth melts away. The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our stronghold. Come now, regard the works of the LORD, what desolations God has brought upon the earth; behold the one who makes war to cease in all the world; who breaks the bow, and shatters the spear, and burns the shields with fire. “Be still, then, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations; I will be exalted in the earth.” The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our stronghold.

Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For “no human being will be justified in his sight” by deeds prescribed by the law, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin. But now, apart from law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus. Then what becomes of boasting? It is excluded. By what law? By that of works? No, but by the law of faith. For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law.

Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you remain in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” They answered him, “We are descendants ofAbraham and have never been slaves to anyone. What do you mean by saying, “You will be made free”?” Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not remain in the household; the son remains there forever. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.”

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What would your life look like without the law? Without any rules about how you ‘should’ behave, nobody telling you what was ‘proper’ or ‘acceptable,’ for your age or gender or social class? What would life be like without the pressure of legalism or the shame of pietism?

See, religion has earned the reputation of being all about the law. Who has what rights to sit where, to be comfortable and welcome where, and how do we know who’s ‘acceptable’? Whose church is this? Whose pew? Whose organ? Who decides what happens to the money, to the building, to the liturgy? Seriously. And that’s not even getting to the question of who deserves to be buried in the church graveyard. Law after law after rule after assumption after judgment… 

Then again, what about traffic laws? Dietary recommendations? Are we really so unaware of ourselves and our surroundings that we need the threat of punishment for making decisions on the daily? People can be both better and worse than we give them credit for, but the compassion that rises out of freedom, the passion of the Holy Spirit toward leading us all to freedom, surpasses all the legalism and pietism that we impose on ourselves and on each other.

Since it's Reformation Day weekend, we recall as Lutherans the movement of God that led Luther to question and counter the legalism of the church in his day. Threats of Hell and Purgatory bombarded the people, and only the priests had the education, the authority, and resources to be able to say anything about how people ought to be living according to their view on God’s will. But science was not being trusted by people of faith, and poverty and sickness tore at communities, while the institutional church decided a good road to take would be to overtax the poor so they could build big impressive buildings. The Law was abused in service of greed, and the needs of God’s living, suffering, people were ignored. Luther had internalized all of that guilt and law from his youth and young adulthood, and so believed more in the terror and damnation of God than in the grace or mercy or even the righteous passionate love of God. He put on the monk’s robes as insurance against his fear of judgment, because apparently it promised salvation to make such a sacrifice, but it did not soothe his anxiety. In fact, Luther lived in constant fear of never being good enough for God’s forgiveness and love, until he saw the abuse poured out on the poor who struggled to stay alive while being pressed to give their livelihoods to the church as a way to purchase salvation, and he in his distress came to this reading from Romans which put all of humanity into the same boat. All have fallen short, therefore all must be justified freely as a gift, because none can earn righteousness, he found.

This was huge. This took the crushing abuse of the Law and turned it into fertilizer for the garden of grace. And not only was it a stunning revelation of hope for Luther, but since the printing press had just been invented, it was possible for any who had even the slightest sliver of literacy to read his arguments against the church’s abuses and in favor of honoring a more merciful and forgiving God. Then of course those who had grown tired of those power games had their own diversity of responses to this growing reformation, some turning to revolution and revolt and even to violence once they knew the chains they had been carrying were false. Can we blame them? Of course not! All those years of fear and anger and pain getting pent up, hidden away under the rules that had to be followed for salvation, and suddenly the floodgates were open and the barrier between people and God, in the form of priests at the time who were not exactly righteous themselves, that dividing wall had to come down again, and it stirred more than a few people to action.

We’ve always been building up walls even when God tears them down, time after time. We make it so hard to feel loved, and accepted, and validated, when our laws prescribe how we ought to feel and act and think if we want to be ‘good Christians,’ or even good people worthy of salvation. But the truth of Jesus remains with us, and we remain in that truth of the Gospel through our fellowship and study and through the challenges of daily living with other people who are different than we are. The Spirit of God blows through the world in ways we cannot always anticipate, surprising us with love and forgiveness in unexpected places and people, while also confronting us in places of comfort so that our hearts may be open to growth and new life, over and over again.

When the truth sets us free, then, free from the law and from the threats of punishment, it means we can remove our masks of always being ‘good’ or ‘nice’ or ‘righteous,’ and be honest with ourselves and each other about the things that frighten us, because they have no real power over our eternal souls. When the truth sets us free, it frees us from all kinds of chains and laws and walls that we put up to set ‘us’ apart from ‘them.’ Because in Christ there are no dividing walls anymore, not even between parts of our own selves that we like and those parts of which we are embarrassed. The marriage contract between us and our God is not written on paper for debate and academic discourse, but on our hearts, where we know how we would like to be loved and where we must remember how much more God loves us than we can even perceive or make sense of most days. Brothers and sisters, we live in this complicated mess of freedom and captivity, experiencing the back and forth between good days and bad days, but our ultimate reality is the relationship between God and the world which is a promise of faithfulness and resurrection. The ultimate reality is that there are new beginnings, that the law is not the thing which defines us or contains us. This is God’s free gift to us. To each and every one of us. And it is setting the entire cosmos free. 

high or low but all together

Sirach 35:12-17

Give to the Most High as he has given to you, and as generously as you can afford. For the Lord is the one who repays, and he will repay you sevenfold. Do not offer him a bribe, for he will not accept it; and do not rely on a dishonest sacrifice; for the Lord is the judge, and with him there is no partiality. He will not show partiality to the poor; but he will listen to the prayer of one who is wronged. He will not ignore the supplication of the orphan, or the widow when she pours out her complaint.

Psalm 84:1-7

How dear to me is your dwelling, O LORD of hosts! My soul has a desire and longing for the courts of the LORD; my heart and my flesh rejoice in the living God. Even the sparrow has found a home, and the swallow a nest where she may lay her young, by the side of your altars, O LORD of hosts, my king and my God. Happy are they who dwell in your house! They will always be praising you. Happy are the people whose strength is in you, whose hearts are set on the pilgrims’ way. Those who go through the balsam valley will find it a place of springs, for the early rains have covered it with pools of water. They will climb from height to height, and the God of gods will be seen in Zion.

2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18

As for me, I am already being poured out as a libation, and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. From now on there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have longed for his appearing… At my first defense no one came to my support, but all deserted me. May it not be counted against them! But the Lord stood by me and gave me strength, so that through me the message might be fully proclaimed and all the Gentiles might hear it. So I was rescued from the lion’s mouth. The Lord will rescue me from every evil attack and save me for his heavenly kingdom. To him be the glory forever and ever. Amen.

Luke 18:9-14

Jesus also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating at his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

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This weekend some of my friends are gathering in Chicago with a great many others to do some work called “Dec-colonizing.”  What does this mean? It means there are a great many cultural minorities within the Lutheran church who have decided the centuries of assumptions about what it means to be Lutheran have actually been sucking this church dry of its Gospel power, and they are re-claiming the radical hospitality and world-shaking possibilities that are alive and active in the Good News of Jesus Christ. While they are there this weekend, Westboro Baptist Church is across the street protesting at University of Chicago. You know Westboro Baptist, right? They protest at Marine funerals, they have all those picket signs about who God hates, they call down God’s wrath upon just about anybody who isn’t them. Now I know that while I was in Chicago at seminary there were many of us who were very proud to say that we are most definitely NOT affiliated with Westboro Baptist, yet it has only been a year or two since someone in the seminary community wrote the words “white power” on the pane glass windows of the seminary cafeteria, during Black History Month. We may not be Westboro Baptist, but we have a long way to go to get to where we need to be.

It’s our nature, though, isn’t it, to compare ourselves to others in order to feel good about ourselves. How many of us even hear this parable today of the Pharisee and the tax collector and say to ourselves, “well, at least I’m not a Pharisee.” Or maybe we’d like to be as lawful and religiously righteous as the Pharisees nowadays. It’s complicated, after all, isn’t it? We’re Pharisees sometimes, and sometimes we’re tax collectors. The opening to the parable tells us right off what the point is: regarding others with contempt is not the way of God’s kingdom. But even the most religious among us fall into this trap. 

Looking at the ways we try to grow churches today, welcoming outsiders or making our mission as clear as a bell, we are already stuck, like both the Pharisee and the tax collector, in this “us and them” system, this “insider/outsider” mentality. It’s the snag that gets in the way of the Gospel, the shame of being different, the dehumanizing of those with whom we disagree just so we can feel superior, or at the very least, safe.

We see this all the time, especially in church culture. That old song “they will know we are Christians by our love” is laughable to anyone who has ever been hurt by the church, and yet when hurt happens, we try our best to distance ourselves from it, thanking God that at least we’re not ‘those terrible Christians,’ because ‘we’re different,’ right? We don’t actively kill black people here in this congregation. We don’t support so-called ‘reparative therapy,’ or tell certain groups of people that they’re going to hell. No way, no how. At least we’re not ‘those’ Christians. But what about those of us who are? Setting ourselves apart is only going to set up barriers to real reconciliation. Cutting off a part of the body of Christ because it feels easier than confronting our own pain and privilege leads to more damage being done, not to healing.

That’s what the tax collector in the temple seemed to understand. “Have mercy on me, a sinner,” he prayed. One of this week’s commentaries noticed the complexity of being a tax collector in those days. It wasn’t just black and white, good and bad, in a situation where oppression and shame came from both the colonizing culture and the religious authorities. That tax collector must have felt so stuck in his situation, working to feed his family while at the same time knowing that work took advantage of his own community. And naming the struggle is half, is most of, the battle, isn’t it? From the Pharisee’s willful blindness we have the contrast of the tax gatherer’s painfully clear vision of things as they were. It’s the way Luther talks about the Theology of the Cross, calling a thing what it is. Call a spade a spade. Call injustice injustice. Don’t offer a dishonest sacrifice, or sugar-coat it with “well, it’s not as bad as it could be,” or “at least we’re not Westboro Baptist Church.”

Because making excuses for the awful ways we mistreat each other or avoid confronting those mistreatments is equivalent to giving them our consent. Staying silent in the locker room when somebody makes a sexist comment is offering support to the guy who dares to talk about a woman like her worth is his alone to judge. Keeping quiet in the break room when people make jokes about violence against Muslims only offers support to the violent. And naming our part in these silences is so painful. I was part of a panel last week that perpetuated a lot of misinformation about the LGBTQ community, because I thought it could be a good thing, I really wanted to be part of a church that was better than the stereotype, and I refused to see the ways it was set up poorly from the start, on account of my own wanting to prove that “at least we’re not Westboro Baptist Church.” Sure, we meant well, but we were under informed to begin with and told a lot of the same stories one might find on a very quick internet search of “gays and Christianity.” It was more than awkward to be on that panel, more awkward than when I came out here almost two years ago. And it didn’t have to be, but because I refused the advice of those who saw more clearly than I where the cracks in our system are, I got myself stuck.

So how do we find healing and strength for this work of having our eyes open to one another and to ourselves when we continue to isolate from each other, to name call and point fingers and interrupt and avoid? I mean, there’s a good reason Paul says he has fought the good fight, not that he has avoided trouble well. He was imprisoned often for his proclamation of the Gospel, and even though we Christians in this country have a lot of assumed power, breaking out of those assumptions into actual freedom for everybody is not an easy task, especially for we who are in the positions of cultural privilege.

God have mercy on us all who are living in these systems of fear and suspicion, because whether we’re top dog or scraping the bottom of the barrel, we’re all in this together. The mercy and grace of God is that we have each other’s lives as witness to realities outside of our own limited experiences. It is good news that the world God made is large and diverse and creative and beautiful and painful and always being made new. The good news is that we are still alive, still have time to turn walls into bridges, still have prophetic voices among us like those at the Decolonize event this weekend in Chicago, and even here among us in Chatham, who are brave and passionate and guided by the Spirit of resurrection, turning over the tables of death and uncovering springs of living waters.

God have mercy on us all who are living in complicated times, interesting times, who have decisions to make not only about governments but about the smaller, day-to-day micro-aggressions and little injustices all around, those things ‘done and left undone, said and left unsaid.’ It is good news that God has given us each other in these days, for challenge and for freedom. That the Christ, the God enfleshed who lives among us, does not let us go on our way willfully ignorant, but wakes his disciples up to the world around us. So that we may live in the world fully engaged with our neighbors and fully alive without fear of judgment or shame. The forgiveness and mercy of God comes in these gifts of one another, these opportunities to work together for justice, these new beginnings that our world is full of, morning after morning, day after day. We are all in this together, disciples of the crucified and risen lord Jesus. Never alone, never forgotten, always receiving new life.

Prisoner of war, living in freedom

2 Kings 5:1-15c

Naaman, commander of the army of the king of Aram, was a great man and in high favor with his master, because by him the Lord had granted victory to Aram. The man, though a mighty warrior, suffered from leprosy. Now the Aramaeans on one of their raids had taken a young girl captive from the land of Israel, and she served Naaman’s wife. She said to her mistress, ‘If only my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.’ So Naaman went in and told the king just what the girl from the land of Israel had said. And the king of Syria said, “Go, now, and I will send a letter to the king of Israel. So he went, taking with him ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold, and ten sets of garments. And the brought the letter to the king of Israel, which read, ‘When this letter reaches you, know that I have sent to you my servant Naaman, that you may cure him of his leprosy.’ When the king of Israel read the letter, he tore his clothes and said, ‘Am I God, to give death or life, that this man sends word to me to cure a man of his leprosy? Just look and see how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me.’ But when Elisha, the man of God, heard that the king of Israel had torn his clothes, he sent a message to the king, ‘Why have you torn your clothes? Let him come to me, that he may learn that there is a prophet in Israel.” So Naaman came, with his horses and chariots, and halted at the entrance of Elisha’s house. Elisha sent a messenger to him, saying ‘Go, wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored and you shall be clean.’ But Naaman became angry and went away, saying, “I thought that for me he would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of the LORD his God, and would wave his hand over the spot and cure the leprosy! Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, far better than all the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them and be clean?” He turned and went away in a rage. But his servants approached and said to him, “Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he said to you was, ‘Wash, and be clean’?” So he went down and immersed himself seven times in the Jordan, according to the word of the man of God; his flesh was restored like the flesh of a young boy, and he was clean. Then he returned to the man of God, he and all his company; he came and stop before him and said, ‘Now I know that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel.”

Psalm 111

Hallelujah! I will give thanks to the LORD with my whole heart, in the assembly of the upright, in the congregation. Great are your works, O LORD, pondered by all who delight in them. Majesty and splendor mark your deeds, and your righteousness endures forever. You cause your wonders to be remembered; you are gracious and full of compassion. You give food to those who fear you, remembering forever your covenant. You have shown your people the power of your works in giving them the lands of the nations. The works of your hands are faithfulness and justice; all of your precepts are sure. They stand fast forever and ever, because they are done in truth and equity. You sent redemption to your people and commanded your covenant forever; holy and awesome is your name. The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom; all who practice this have a good understanding. God’s praise endures forever.

2 Timothy 2:8-15

Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David - that is my gospel, for which I suffer hardship, even to the point of being chained like a criminal. But the word of God is not chained. Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect, so that they may also obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory. This saying is sure: If we have died with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will also reign with him; if we deny him, he will also deny us; if we are faithless, he remains faithful - for he cannot deny himself. Remind them of this, and warn them before God that they are to avoid wrangling over words, which does not good but only ruins those who are listening. Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved by him, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly explaining the word of truth.

Luke 17:11-19

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

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Kindred in Christ, it would be worse than neglectful if I didn’t name the recent big news this morning. Now, I’m not pretending to be political, though I can’t say I don’t care who you vote for, but republicans or democrats of independents aside, we have got to address the rampant rape culture in this country. We can do all kinds of pointing of the finger against ‘those’ people, rather we claim it’s some supposed evils of radical Islam being all against women’s rights, or we pretend the problems of misogyny belong to somebody else. But the tapes released this week of Trump talking about sexual assault like he’s ordering a sandwich, and the amount of support he is still getting, the excuses being made that this is just ‘locker room talk,’ or it’s just ‘men will be men,’ reveal again that we have in this country a serious problem with sexism, and it is absolutely not okay.

Does anybody remember when Obama was first running against Hillary for the Democratic nomination? The conversation in Hyde Park, Chicago, where I was living at the time, were around whether it was more socially acceptable to be racist or to be sexist. We’ve seen that both issues are really big, and if we can’t name them we can’t deal with them. Now we’re trying to excuse this mess, pretend it took us by surprise. But one in three women in this country has been sexually assaulted. One in three. And most of that happens before they are even adults. Why in the world do we allow this world to continue in this way? Half of the human population is being treated like property, like entertainment, like disposable commodities. It doesn’t matter that a woman might be somebody’s wife or mother, whose daughter she is, a woman is her own person, and to treat her any less is to deny the Image of God, to spit in the face of the God who made her.

So today we have a story from the First Testament where a woman who has been stolen from her homeland as the spoils of war basically saves the life of the man who basically destroyed her life. Did you notice her there in the folds of the narrative? She was only briefly mentioned, but it’s very important that she was there. “Now the Aramaeans on one of their raids had taken a young girl captive from the land of Israel, and she served Naaman’s wife.” Did you hear that? The Aramaeans were Israel’s enemies, had abducted and scattered God’s people, and here one of the girls they stole, and probably abused as a sign of victory during their conquest, here she is declaring the power of her God to the very people who tried to tear her away from that God by stealing her from her culture and her people by force. 

It might seem like the ‘man of God,’ Elisha, is the hero of the story. He is, after all, the one who proclaims the word that sets Naaman on the healing path. Naaman is used to getting five star treatment, having the red carpet rolled out for him, and he’s none too happy that Elisha only sends a servant with a word for a simple thing. Naaman is used to getting what he wants, getting a spotlight, being the most important and powerful one in the room. Even with leprosy he commands a certain respect. He was important enough for his king to send him to the king of the country they had conquered, which is quite an admission of powerlessness and had to be embarrassing. But without that girl they had stolen, none of this healing would have come about. Without the dressing room conversations of the women, none of this story would have happened.

See, our Scriptures aren’t angled toward the full inclusion of women as equal human beings, that’s how we’ve gotten away with making women second-class for so many generations. That’s what you get when a bunch of men with narrow world views, under social pressure and with assumed power, put the books together and decide what’s true and what’s worthwhile. But every now and again we find stories of strong women heroes among the mix, even when they’ve been ignored or mistreated. If you read with an eye to where the women are and where they’ve been left out, you’ll find a lot more than we’ve been led to believe. You might also be surprised at how little is there, which is why we need to lift up those missing voices as often as possible. Not only women, but any minority group, any outcast people, any colonized group. Tomorrow has been called Columbus Day since the late 18th century, but lately folks are remembering that it’s a day named after a man who brought about the destruction of an entire nation of people. In fact, our national church body made public repudiation of the so-called ‘Doctrine of Discovery’ this past summer, and cities across the country are re-directing the holiday toward an Indigenous People’s Day celebration.

Because our God is no respecter of persons, but God does stand on the side of the oppressed. Just when we think we know who’s in and who’s out, we are reminded by Paul in his second letter to Timothy, that “the word of God is not chained.” We cannot contain where grace and mercy begin and end, who is considered ‘worthy,’ who ‘deserves’ healing. That’s happening here in the story of Naaman, here. God’s own chosen people have been overrun and scattered by an enemy nation - a fate they were well warned about because they were awful to the widows and orphans, to the poor and outcast among them - and God not only used the so-called ‘enemy’ to finally bring about justice, God did not withhold healing salvation even from Naaman, who would to the Israelites be called a terrorist today. God even used one of the prisoners of war to bring about that salvation.

Maybe it's the ones who have been outcast by society who are more aware of God’s mercy and welcome. The ones with nothing left to lose. The ones who have already been thrown away who understand what value there really is in belonging without earning. If you didn’t have any of the things you measure your worth by today, job or family or community or history or whatever, do you understand that you would still belong to the kingdom of God? None of those things that we find our power in are actually where our power comes from. No amount of privilege or authority can determine our salvation. If we depend on privilege or authority to save us, we’ll be lost, we’ll lose ourselves and our connection to the rest of God’s people. Because power and authority fluctuate, standards change, but the power of God to create and heal and save is not dependent on the changing tides of our beliefs or behaviors or moods at the moment. It does not go in and out of style. 

People of God, the life we are created for, the world we partner with God to recreate each day, is rooted and grounded in that promise of steadfast love, that bigger-than-us truth for the salvation of the entire cosmos, including all of humanity. We do not own one another like property to be pushed around and used for entertainment without our consent, but we do belong to each other. We do not have the power to erect lasting barriers between types of people based on our whims and traditions of segregation. God does not respect those divisions between us. God will see to it that the outcast are made central, again and again, even if we do not acknowledge it openly. God lives among the trafficked, among the abused, among the homeless and those who have been thrown away by our arbitrary standards of value. That is who Jesus was, who Jesus is, as a refugee and as a political figure standing against both the oppression of the Romans and the pure-blood pieties of his own religious leaders.

We are part of this story, friends, like it or not. We are part of this salvation history in the here and now. What does this new reality look like in your life?

Mulberry trees ain't nothin'

Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4

O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you “Violence!” and you will not save? Why do you make me see wrongdoing and look at trouble? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise. So the law becomes slack and justice never prevails. The wicked surround the righteous - therefore judgment comes forth perverted… I will stand at my watch post, and station myself on the rampart; I will keep watch to see what he will say to me, and what he will answer concerning my complaint. Then the LORD answered me and said: Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so that a runner may read it. For there is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay. Look at the proud! Their spirit is not right in them, but the righteous live by their faith.

Psalm 37:1-9

Do not be provoked by evildoers; do not be jealous of those who do wrong. For they shall soon wither like the grass, and like the green grass fade away. Put your trust in the LORD and do good; dwell in the land and find safe pasture. Take delight in the LORD, who shall give you your heart’s desire. Commit your way to the LORD; put your trust in the LORD, and see what God will do. The LORD will make your vindication as clear as the light and the justice of your case like the noonday sun. Be still before the LORD and wait patiently. Do not be provoked by the one who prospers, the one who succeeds in evil schemes. Refrain from anger, leave rage alone; do not be provoked; it leads only to evil. For evildoers shall be cut off, but those who hope in the LORD shall possess the land.

2 Timothy 1:1-14

Paul, and apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, for the sake of the promise of life that is in Christ Jesus, to Timothy, my beloved child: Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord. I am grateful to God - whom I worship with a clear conscience, as my ancestors did - when I remember you constantly in my prayers night and day. Recalling your tears, I long to see you so that I may be filled with joy. I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lives first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you. For this reason I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands; for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline. Do not be ashamed, then, of the testimony about our Lord or of me his prisoner, but join with me in suffering for the gospel, relying on the power of God, who saves us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works but according to his own purpose and grace. This grace was given to us in Christ Jesus before the ages began, but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. For this gospel I was appointed a herald and an apostle and a teacher, and for this reason I suffer as I do. But I am not ashamed, for I know the one in whom I have put my trust, and I am sure that he is able to guard until that day what I have entrusted to him. Hold to the standards of sound teaching that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. Guard the good treasure entrusted to you, with the help of the Holy Spirit living in us.

Luke 17:5-10

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

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I have to admit (though if you've seen the church Facebook page this week you already know) that the first thing that stood out to me in this reading of the Gospel was the whole ‘we are worthless slaves' line. Some translations say ‘unworthy’ instead of ‘worthless,’ which is just about as bad. It comes across as completely bogus, totally uncalled for, bordering on the edge of abusive, if you think about it. One more story for the “sometimes Jesus is a jerk” collection. God doesn’t want us in that kind of relationship, where we bow and scrape and consider ourselves worthless, not even ‘unworthy.’ Our Eucharistic prayer includes the lines thanking God for ‘making us worthy to serve you as your priestly people,’ remembering that in the beginning we were created good. So what in God’s name is Jesus talking about here!?

Well, as usual, it’s complicated. So let’s start by looking back a few verses to where Jesus’ disciples are coming, to get a bit more context. We have this section of Luke's Gospel where it seems at first to be just a random collection of Jesus’ sayings and teachings sort of piled together because Luke had nowhere else to put them. That happens sometimes, or feels like it. I mean, there were so many stories being shared by word of mouth, sometimes the order of things got mixed up, or the exact details were a bit conflated before they got collected and written down. That’s why we take the Bible seriously, but not literally. But the author did have something serious in mind, we assume, when putting things in order, and so we look at what came immediately before this passage to try and make sense of it: Jesus has said to the disciples that those who cause these little ones to stumble would be better off drowned with millstones hung around their necks. And if that weren’t harsh enough, he follows it up with the admonition to forgive those who sin against us, each and every time they repent, no matter how often. 

That makes sense, though. I mean, tripping up kids on legal technicalities is not okay. Causing little ones to stumble, on the scale of righteousness, is lower on the scale than the bottom of the ocean. It’s things like the school to prison pipeline that he’s talking about. Trying children as adults or over-sentencing them because of the color of their skin, which we cannot pretend isn’t happening, this is ‘causing the little ones to stumble.’ So this saying of Jesus is one I can get behind, and standing up against it, really doing something about it, will take some serious justice work. It will mean a lot of confrontation. It will mean we make some enemies and maybe some folks will mistreat us in return. So we will also need to learn to forgive. Heavily. Often. Because holding grudges is a sure way to get off track from God’s mission to bring liberation and healing to the world.

No wonder the disciples asked for more faith! God’s work of setting all people free is something that the whole system is rigged against. It’s not comfortable for those who have power, and those who have power make it darn uncomfortable for anybody who would threaten that way of living. We’ve seen it in the news, we’ve seen it in the way people fight in public discourse as conversations and debate unravel into interruptions and bullying tactics. Stirring that system up, waking people up to what racism and classism and phobias we’re swimming in, it’s holy work to be sure, but it’s not going to be easy. So the disciples ask for more faith.

We, too, might, if we’re paying attention. Then Jesus does this curious thing where he says that mustard seed faith is enough to uproot a mulberry tree and have it plant itself in the ocean. Some days it feels that such a miracle would be easier to expect than forgiveness or changing the way a system is broken. But faith isn’t for big showy signs to prove ourselves to ourselves or to others. We don’t have faith or use faith to do arbitrary miracles while avoiding the hard work of justice and forgiveness. Yes, we need faith to forgive, we need faith to keep in front of us the reason and the vision of what it is we are living for. The story of Jesus is one that drives us out of our own shadows of fear and contempt and into the heart-wrenching work of honesty and struggle with those grey areas where we’d like for a clear-cut black-or-white answer.

So, no, we’re not worthless, unworthy slaves just coming in from the fields to serve our master dinner. That’s not how we are created, and that’s certainly not the God who deserves our worship. But sometimes Jesus says this stuff that doesn’t sit right with us, and we can’t explain it away or pretend it means something pretty and wholesome and nice, and learning to live in that tension is hard. It’s hard like forgiveness is hard. It’s hard like living in any grey area is hard. It’s why we have a God who is so big and complicated who comes to us incarnate and is still big and complicated even as a person - just as complicated as any person is. Any person who we might need to forgive is a complicated person, any person who we might want to fight for is a complicated person, any person who we might want to convince of our point of view is a complicated person. Being human is a lot like being God, and being God is a lot like being human, it’s part and parcel of what it means to be created in the Image of God. We aren’t simply either/or, and we aren’t always comfortable, with ourselves or with one another. Jesus’ life is a reminder of that holy discomfort which we live in every day. 

We need faith, we need focus, we need vision and reminders that this life is not either/or, not simply either good or bad, either sinful or blessed, either sacred or secular. But our work is not to throw mulberry trees into the ocean. Our work is much more difficult, much less visible, much slower and deeper work. The Holy Spirit works in us on this mission, too, shaping and reforming as we encounter conflict and celebration day after day. Like Paul said in his second letter to Timothy, “God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.” And the prophet Habakkuk calls to our minds the immediacy of this work, in the begging for justice and the assurance of hope coming soon. What if we are part of that hope today? What if the grace of Jesus Christ is to set us free from the need to always prove ourselves right by proving others wrong, setting us back on balance in the struggle to find our way through the complicated work of forgiveness and justice?

Because we are free, my friends. We don’t live in a world of either/or, and we don’t have to make it so. We can live in the grey areas without anxiety about rightness or purity or deserving, there is no earning the love of God by always doing or saying the right thing. Our faith is rooted in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ Jesus, who has lived a complicated and often uncomfortable life, who would probably today be killed just as swiftly as he was two thousand years ago, who would come among us still, anyhow, to be with us and to bring us into freedom. Our God walks among us, grants us grace to forgive and be forgiven, lives in the grey spaces with our conflicts and in the sweat of our labor, in our very skin and in our very communities. Justice is coming. Freedom is coming. We get to be part of it. And that is a far bigger miracle than throwing mulberry trees into the ocean.