Lectionary post

August 3, 2016

Least Expectations

Saudade (Longing) by José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior, 1899

Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost | Luke 12:32-40

Some of us may find that we are not as intelligent as we once were. I am not, I am afraid. I cannot remember so well or so quickly as once I did. I cannot make new associations, realize connections, or work through problems so well as in years past. In learning some new skill, I find that while I once may have sought mastery, I now settle for sufficiency.

One grows old.

Still, there are compensations. Perhaps I am not so quick witted, but I may be wiser. It may take me longer to work out a problem, but I have a better idea of which problems are worth working out. There are the things that matter, and there are the things that merely distract. There are many more distractions.

The things we own begin to own us, if we are not careful. Sometimes it happens even if we are. Jesus makes radical suggestions in Luke’s Gospel account—sell your stuff, give it away. Treasure eternal things. (If you are not sure which things are eternal, there is a simple test. If you can touch it, taste it, see it, hear it, or smell it, it isn’t.)

Then, he says, get ready.

Ready for what? He tells a story to illustrate, full of servants and an absent master, people dressed and waiting in the middle of the night, a master who puts on a servant’s garb and upends all expectations, a master serving his servants.

Be ready, Jesus is saying, for the presence of God.

Though the Spirit of God is not named in this passage, and though most people understand these verses as referring to the return of Christ himself, we might understand these sayings better if we consider that Jesus is talking about the Spirit of God, another aspect of himself, another person of God.

In John’s later Gospel, Nicodemus is bewildered to hear Jesus say that the wind blows where it chooses, though we do not hear the sound of it, and we do not know from where it comes or where it goes. Or when, John might have added.

“The Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour,” says Jesus. We always cast our minds forward when we hear it, wondering when the most unexpected hour could be. In the middle of the night? At our death? Long after we are gone?

How about already?

I suggest that is the most unexpected hour of all—already. We almost never expect the thing we anticipate to have already happened.

I don’t mean like when we expect the meeting to start at 2:00 in the afternoon, only to find that it is already 3:00, or that it was scheduled yesterday when we thought it was today, though these things sometimes happen with age.

Live long enough, and anything is likely to have happened, or nothing at all. Wonderful things, important things, happen, and we do not notice. A child’s smile, or a friend’s grief, eternal things happen, things that we should have noticed if we had been paying attention, if we had not been distracted, if we had not thought that all of the things gathered around us were so important. We miss the eternal things, the things we cannot touch but that would have left a mark on us had we bothered to notice.

Maybe Jesus did come at the unexpected hour. Maybe the Spirit of God has been present all along, the entire time, waiting to upend our world, to turn over our expectations, to join us at the moments of our real, eternal, need. We just haven’t been paying attention.

We want trumpets and angels. The more harsh minded among us want plagues and famine, judgements and end times. Maybe some people get those things. I do not know; I do not want them.

I know that Jesus is telling us that God is like a thief, always anticipated but never expected. Just as a thief might already be standing quietly in the back room of a house, undetected, so God may be already waiting in the back rooms of our minds, waiting and watching from the corners of our souls.

July 28, 2016

Where the Heart Lives

Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost | Luke 12:13-21

It is a double warning we hear—watch and keep guard! Jesus is warning, if not against accumulating wealth, at least against valuing it so very highly. We might imagine a circle filled with coins, and a line drawn through it. It’s odd. It was no doubt a strange warning for that first century audience to hear, perhaps almost as strange as it is for us.

Much of our culture seems centered on the accumulation of wealth. There are no reality shows about getting poor, no self-help books on not getting rich. Magazine covers picture the future to which we are supposed to aspire—more glamorous, more sexy, more wealthy.

There is another place, in Matthew, where Jesus summarizes his thoughts: wherever your treasure is, there is your heart also. It is another warning, as much as anything. Be careful what you treasure, for in choosing your treasure you give away your heart.

The rich man in the parable dies suddenly, unexpectedly. Death comes like a thief and demands his soul. Sometimes death is like that, slipping in as quick and as silent as a shadow, unnoticed in the noonday sun or blending into the darkness of night. Other times death comes like an army laying siege to a castle. Those within see their death coming, delayed, but inevitable.

In some ways death is like the kingdom of God as it is described in the gospels. The seed of our demise, the idea of our death, is already present within us, but has not come to pass. Like the kingdom of God, it is a thing that is both already becoming and not yet perfected, and we reflect on it, our personal eschatology of the soul.

Brevity. Transience. We want to ignore them, like children whistling past a graveyard. Yet no matter how well we build our houses, we cannot keep them. One day we leave them behind us, as legacy or ruin. Our monuments, our accomplishments, our piles of coins are all so transitory, but we work at them implacably, using them as blinders to keep us from seeing what waits in the edge of our vision.

Jesus built nothing. At least, he built nothing material that the gospels describe in any detail. We cannot go to Capernaum and find a museum with the brass plaque, ‘Home of Jesus of Nazareth.’ He built no businesses, held no patents, left no monuments. All that we have of his life are four gospels, second hand collections of his words and of the stories told by the people who followed him around, sometimes sleeping outdoors so as to stay near him, listening to him, watching him.

Of course, there is no greater legacy than that of Jesus. If the treasure he left shows where his heart was, there was only one thing Jesus treasured that could be touched—people. People, ideas, faith, but no one can lay a finger on faith or touch an idea.

We like to talk about the eternal. We talk about the future, a heaven we hope to see, one day. I wonder whether all of that is just a distraction, a way to diffuse the gaze of time. We do not rest easy in the present moment, the brevity of it reminding us of our own, but that is the key—presence. Now is all of eternity that we can truly comprehend.

This moment is an aspect of eternity, swirling past our feet like a wave returning to the sea, liquid treasure slipping through our hands.

July 21, 2016

The Two Hands of God

Tenth Sunday after Pentecost | Luke 11:1-13

The Two Hands of God

Maybe there are secrets in it, this prayer that Jesus taught to his disciples when they asked him how to pray. Maybe it is just that we find what we seek. Maybe it is that simple, and it has less to do with the nature of God than with the nature of the universe, and with our own natures.

It is the Lord’s Prayer this Gospel gives us, but not as we learn it, not the version Matthew gives us with the verses added at the end. The Lord’s Prayer is short, direct, but it is even shorter here, as Luke records it, given to a group of disciples when they ask and not as part of the Sermon on the Mount.

The disciples claim that John the Baptist taught a prayer to his followers. If so, we do not have it. It is difficult to imagine John, that great shaggy loudmouthed prophet out in the wilderness, pausing to teach people how to pray. Still, it is one more place in the gospels where John is mentioned, one more indication of interaction between the cousins, Jesus and John.

So Jesus gives them a prayer, but he isn’t teaching them how to pray. He is teaching them about the nature of God. On the one hand, it sounds as though Jesus is comparing God to a lazy friend or an evil parent. On the other hand, if even a lazy man will eventually get up, and if even an evil father may feed a child, how much more will God respond? The God whom Jesus is revealing is not a God with evil in one hand and good in the other, punishments and rewards, judgment and mercy. We are not the toys of a manipulative puppet master. In this Gospel we hear that we are children, and children with a good and benevolent parent.

In the prayer he gives his lack wit followers, Jesus asks for bread. In the illustrations that follow, he speaks of bread again, and fish, and eggs–good simple food for good simple people. In the end, the final point, Jesus doesn’t compare God to the lazy friend and the poor parent, he shows how they are different.

If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?

There it is, if we are paying attention, the thing that we are to ask, the point of our prayer—the Holy Spirit. Surely God already knows that we need food, clothes, means to make our lives endure in a challenging world? Reminding God of those things is akin to reminding gravity to hold us down. There is no need.

And we note the conclusion, the great gift that God waits to share, and it is not bread, not the kind that we eat. Or maybe that is why Jesus uses such a peculiar word, επιούσιος, a word for which we in translation settle upon “daily”, though we do not know just what it means. It does not occur anywhere else in ancient literature but in the Lord’s Prayer. Maybe it is daily, or needed, or necessary, this sort of bread for which we are to pray.

Does Jesus mean for us to identify the bread as the Holy Spirit? Or, to cast the idea in different words, the opportunity to merge with and to become aligned with the Divine? Perhaps for that gift, God waits until we recognize our need and ask.

We may prepare wonderful things for our children, hoping that they will grow to recognize their need, grow to ask for the gifts we have prepared. A bicycle for a two year old? Maybe not. We can put the bicycle aside, though, and one day, when her legs are long enough to reach the pedals and her courage has grown to join her curiosity, she will ask for it. And that is how we know she is ready. Then, unsteadily at first but with growing grace, she will begin to ride out into her world.

That is what awaits us, when we know our own need for something more, something that transcends our humanity, something divine. And so we ask, praying yet again the Lord’s Prayer, but finally understanding that it isn’t about bread, not really. It is about something harder to touch but longer lasting.

All that is eternal, all that is divine, has been waiting for us to know our need. Ask, and it will be given you…

July 14, 2016

One Thing

Christ in the House of Mary and Martha by Vermeer, c.1655

Luke 10:38-42 | Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

One Thing

Luke tells us a story about the two sisters, Martha and Mary. We think of the sisters of Lazarus from John’s Gospel, but a second look at Luke’s story shows us that there is no mention here of Lazarus, nor of Bethany, where John tells us they lived.

Still, they must be the same sisters: the same names, in the same relationship, in both gospels. As in John, we see the differences in their temperament. Martha busies herself with the necessary things, food and hospitality, while Mary sits listening, a true disciple.

Jesus tells them that Mary, sitting and listening to Jesus, has chosen the only needful thing, the only necessary thing.

We think so many things matter. We cling to the details of life—meals, clothes, money—and all of those things do matter, all of them are necessary, but all of them are so temporary. When we share a meal, is it the food we remember or the company? And clothes? Our designer labels will be forgotten as soon as the food we ate yesterday.

It goes deeper than food and clothes. We love to dwell on having our way, on being right. It seems so important at the time. In a week? In a month or a lifetime? Most of the points we thought so important dwindle to obscurity, like dust on the ledge of a window where we used to sit and look out at the world.

Christ in the House of Martha and Mary by Diego Velázquez, c.1618

A few verses earlier in this same passage, Luke tells the story of Jesus and of the lawyer who answered his own question. What must I do to inherit eternal life? Love the Lord your God with your heart, strength, soul, and mind, and your neighbor as yourself. Jesus told him that he was right, but he did not tell him to go and keep being right. He didn’t even tell him to go and do things that were right. Jesus told him to go and love.

Love God. Love your neighbor.

Food, clothes, houses—we need these things, though seldom do we need them to be so rich as we think. They matter, but they are temporary, transient, as real and as lasting as raindrops.

What did Mary choose that was so needful? She sat and listened to Jesus speak a few words. We don’t even know what they were—Luke does not record them, because those words, whatever they were, mattered for Mary. Like her, we have to be quiet and listen for ourselves.

It may be that God has been speaking to us all this time, and we have been too busy to hear.

July 7, 2016

The Trouble with Neighbors

Eighth Sunday after Pentecost | Luke 10:25-37

The Trouble with Neighbors

He already knew the answer, this lawyer, but he asked the question anyway. Scripture commands, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” This much he knew, and the commandment is plain, but this lawyer, much like ourselves, lived for the wiggle room between the words.

We have to love him. That’s what Deuteronomy says, right?

A straightforward answer would have done the job, but Jesus, true to his nature, didn’t give one. Instead, we and this lawyer get a story. It’s pretty famous, as stories go. We’ve even named it—the Parable of the Good Samaritan, we call it, as though this Samaritan were an exception, different from other Samaritan cretins we might know.

The Good Samaritan by Rembrandt c.1630. Wallace Collection, London. — The Good Samaritan. Rembrandt, c.1630. Wallace Collection, London.

Samaritans were nearly Jewish, which made them more loathsome to the Jews than had they been completely gentile. They were the product of centuries of exile, a people group who filled the void left when the Assyrians destroyed Israel and the Babylonians hauled off the best and brightest of Judah. The Samaritans worshiped the God of Abraham, but in the wrong places and in the wrong ways, at least in the eyes of the Jewish people.

We most hate those people who are most nearly like ourselves. Long tailed monkeys are amusing, but chimpanzees make us uneasy.

In the story, the priest and the Levite fail, but the Samaritan shows mercy and compassion, and he rises to God’s expectations. He spends his money, invests his time. He gets involved.

That is the trouble with neighbors—their nearness. If they were far away, an orphaned kid on a poster, we could write our checks and feel compassionate. Neighbors? They are right here. They know where we live. They might come back. Get involved in their messes, and we may not get free.

They’ll want handouts and money, time and favors. And Jesus is telling us not to say no?

Not exactly.

“Love your neighbor as yourself” is an odd way of shaping a commandment. In particular, there is much that it does not say. For one thing, it doesn’t say to give people anything they want. That’s not love, that’s indulgence, or stupidity. It doesn’t say to destroy our own lives, families, or peace.

The Samaritan took the injured man to an inn, but he did not devote the rest of his life to looking after the man. He engaged, he helped, and he also brought the social resources he had available to bear—in this case, some of his wealth, some of his time, and the future help of the innkeeper. His response was loving, it was reasonable, and it was directed at returning the injured man to health and to his own recognizance.

Sometimes we refrain from helping the needy neighbor because we recognize that the neighbor is in the business of seeking help. It is a reasonable response. Standing on a street corner passing out twenty dollar bills is not reasonable. It is the difference between helping our neighbors out of their problems and perpetuating them in their problems.

Fair warning, though—that is no reason not to help. It is a reason to think of constructive ways to help.

The Samaritan came up with the idea of carrying the injured man to an inn because there were no hospitals. Perhaps had there been hospitals, ambulances, and social services available, he would have gotten help for the man in a different fashion.

The point Jesus makes is that the Samaritan saw a need—no, saw a person who needed help—and helped. We have to wonder what the other characters in the story saw. What did the priest see? Maybe he saw a man who fell prey to robbers because God had judged him. Maybe he saw a man whose situation was the result of his own sins. There was plenty of that kind of theology 2000 years ago; there is plenty of that kind of theology now.

The Good Samaritan, Dutch, 17th century — The Good Samaritan. Pen & ink. School of Rembrandt, 17th century. Harvard Art Museums.

What did the Levite see, this man whose role was somewhere between the priest and the laity? Perhaps he saw trouble, and obligation. He knew that to lay aside one’s obligation to the stranger was wrong, but was it wrong if he never took up the burden? Perhaps he pretended to be blind, because that helped him pretend to be decent.

And where were they all rushing? What awaited them that was so urgent as to justify leaving a man to bleed by the roadside? We might supply many answers. All of us have plenty of experience justifying ourselves. No doubt we would recognize their answers as our own.

We like to picture ourselves as Samaritans, at least in this parable. Some of us have found ourselves in ditches. The hard truth Jesus is telling is simple, and we don’t appreciate it. We are the priest and the Levite, of course. We turn a blind eye to the needs of our neighbors. Worse, we resent the clear implication that if we fail to help, we have failed in the eyes of God.

We want to point out that God does not understand how complicated it gets, but even in our most self absorbed moments, we suspect God manages.

It is simple.

We need to stop imagining that our destination is more important than the people we pass along the way. Theologically speaking, spiritually speaking, we might say that the people we pass are, in fact, our journey. And when we see them, we need to look long enough into the mirror of their eyes to see ourselves. Maybe then we can love them.

Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost | Luke 12:32-40

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Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost | Luke 12:13-21

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Tenth Sunday after Pentecost | Luke 11:1-13

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Luke 10:38-42 | Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

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Eighth Sunday after Pentecost | Luke 10:25-37

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