A Sermon on Luke 18:9-14 for Reformation Sunday
One day about ten years ago, I sat down in the freshman dining hall at my college. It was early in the year, and friendships hadn’t really formed yet, so I had arrived alone, and sat down to eat lunch with two people I recognized. We all had met briefly in the whirl of orientation events, but we didn’t know each other particularly well.
“What does your necklace say?” the young man asked, gesturing at the young woman’s silver necklace.
"Sola scriptura, sola gratia, sola fide,” the young woman replied.
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“Scripture alone, grace alone, faith alone,” she answered.
“So it’s a religious thing?” he continued.
“Yes, she answered, it’s a Christian thing.”
“I’m Christian, and I’ve never heard of it,” he mused. So she began to explain.
She was a devout Lutheran, as it so happened, and the words on her necklace were three of the most important theological tenets of the Protestant Reformation. “Sola scriptura” means “scripture alone.” This was a core principle propounded by the Reformers, people like Martin Luther and John Calvin, who were the spiritual ancestors of Lutheran churches like hers, UCC churches like ours, and many other denominations as well. Against a church that claimed the authority to speak on behalf of God, the Reformers declared that all Christian teaching must be based on the Bible – putting the authority to study and discern the will of God back into the hands of any person, clergy or lay, who had access to a Bible and the ability to read it. “Sola gratia” means “grace alone”; the Reformers taught that God’s love is not meted out based on our merits; we do not, and cannot, earn God’s love. God’s love simply comes to us, regardless of anything we do or fail to do. “Sola fide” means “faith alone”; Reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin saw that many Christians – lay and clergy – treated the life of faith as if it were a to-do list: check off all of the boxes, and you would be saved. Against this, they asserted that faith in God is all that is required for salvation, and is the only path to salvation – not going to church, not refraining from sin, not praying every morning and night, not giving all your money to charity – simply faith.
The young woman at the dining hall table explained the three tenets to us (although perhaps not in those exact words) - beliefs that I would later encounter again and again in my studies as a religion major and then a seminary student. And she concluded with something like, “So that’s why Catholics are wrong.”
“Are there a lot of Catholics where you’re from?” the young man asked.
“No, I’ve never actually met one before,” she answered.
“I’m Catholic,” he told us.
“…Oh…” she said, with obvious discomfort.
We all hurried through our lunches, talking about the weather and our class schedules, and I haven’t seen much of them since. But the story comes to mind on this day, Reformation Sunday, as we remember the Protestant Reformers who are the spiritual ancestors of our faith community. And it comes to mind especially as we encounter today’s Gospel lesson, a parable from the Gospel according to Luke.
Speaking to an unfriendly audience, Jesus tells them this parable: two men went to the temple to pray. One was a Pharisee. Now, the Pharisees and the early Christians were often at odds with each other, and so the Christian tradition has come to hear the word “Pharisee” as if it simply meant “bad guy” or “hypocrite.” But the Pharisees were more than that. In a culture where religious observance was largely the purview of religious elites, the Pharisees advocated for more robust religious practice in the daily lives of everyday people. They wanted religion to be practiced by the people, not just seen to by the priests – a concern that they shared with the Protestant Reformers hundreds of years later.
So a Pharisee went to the temple to pray, and he said, “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.” Well, that’s pretty repulsive, right? Giving thanks for his superiority to others is a rather arrogant prayer. And yet, he does have reason to boast: he fasts twice a week and gives a tenth of his income, he says. That is to say, he is really making some serious sacrifices to put his faith at the center of his life. One commentator I read observed that churches would be glad to have more members like this Pharisee – who pour their energy into their religious community and life of faith.
Meanwhile, the tax collector also prays. Tax collectors are another set of stock characters in scripture who are unfamiliar in our modern context (they’re not at all like IRS agents), but unlike Pharisees, who get cast as bad guys because they were in a theological debate with the early Christians, tax collectors were universally despised in Jesus’ context. They paid the Roman authorities a fixed amount for the privilege of extracting exorbitant taxes from Rome’s colonial subjects by any means necessary. They collected as much money as they could bully and brutalize out of the people of their region, paid a set amount to Rome, and got to keep however much was left. They were collaborators with an oppressive imperial regime, their income was squeezed out of people who often were barely subsisting, and they were hated for it. But this tax collector goes to the temple to pray and, Jesus says, he “would not even look up to heaven” to pray; his posture is humble. He beats his breast and prays, “Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.” Jesus declares that the tax collector “went home justified,” unlike the Pharisee. “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted,” Jesus concludes.
It is an apt parable to hear on Reformation Sunday, and the temptation would be to cast the Reformers and those who follow them as the tax collector, and the Catholic church they stood against as the Pharisee. Unlike the Pharisee, who believes he can earn his way into God’s heart through fasting, prayer, and tithing, the theology of the Protestant Reformation places the emphasis on God’s love and forgiveness. The emphasis is on God’s faithfulness, not on human faithfulness. Reformed theology emphasizes that we are imperfect – that we mess up and fall short. It teaches that our relationship with God is not predicated on our being good enough. God will always be reaching out to us, because God is loving and gracious and merciful. This parable is kind of a prime example of “sola fide” and “sola gratia.” It would be tempting to conclude that, like the tax collector who puts his faith in God’s grace, we must remember our spiritual heritage and cling tightly to the legacy of the reformers.
The problem is that, if we followed that interpretation through to its logical conclusion, we might then conclude with a sentiment like this: “God, we thank you that we are not like the Pharisee. We understand theology. We believe in grace and mercy.” And then we would be right back where we started: like the Pharisee, we would be patting ourselves on the backs for having it right, and looking down our noses at those whom we think have gotten it wrong – defining our faith not as a positive expression of our relationship with God through Christ, but in contrast to inaccurate stereotypes of other faith traditions.
Like that young woman in the freshman dining hall, like the Pharisee in the parable, it is tempting to define ourselves based on our assumptions of our own superiority. God, we thank you that we are not like the tax collector. God, we thank you that we are not like the Pharisee.
God, we thank you that we are not like the Catholics, or the fundamentalists, or those fancy Manhattan churches where you’d better have just the right clothes and plenty of money. God, we thank you that we are not like the churches that oppose LGBT inclusion. God, we thank you that we are not like all those people who show up at church only on Christmas and Easter. God, we thank you that we are not like those people who think watching a televangelist counts as going to church. God, we thank you that we are not like that young woman in the freshman dining hall.
Jesus tells us this parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector not so that we can judge the judgmental Pharisee, but to invite us to reconsider how self-righteousness and judgment might stand in the way of our own relationship with God. The Pharisee’s prayer reveals that he is so concerned about how he measures up in God’s eyes that his view of God’s creation is distorted. “I thank you that I am not like other people,” he says. But the other people he names are all children of God, created in God’s image, people who make mistakes and fall short, people who judge others and doubt themselves, people who are capable of love and courage and faithfulness. People from whom the Pharisee might learn something about God, if he had ears to hear. And as we hear this parable, the judgment we feel toward the Pharisee reminds us that we, like him, sometimes slip into judgment and condemnation. Like him, we sometimes forget that in God’s eyes, we are all equally beloved and beautiful, not because of what we have done or failed to do, but simply because we are children of God. And God loves us not because we are better or more correct than other people, but simply because God loves us.
So as we hear this parable on this Reformation Sunday, let us give thanks for our spiritual heritage not because it makes us better than other traditions (I'm not sure it does), but because it draws us closer to the God who made us all, Pharisees and tax collectors and everything in between. The God who loves us all, Protestants and Catholics and everyone else. The God who has mercy on us all, saints and sinners and those of us – all of us – who are a little of both.
Amen.
A sermon on Luke 16:1-13
Note: The sermon will make more sense if you read the parable first.
It’s a little bit embarrassing that I have opened so many sermons in the last couple of months by telling you how difficult it is to preach on whatever passage has been assigned for that Sunday. I had really hoped not to do it this week. So I opened my Bible with hope and determination, and found myself utterly puzzled by the Gospel passage. Not to be deterred, I opened my commentaries and navigated to my favorite lectionary blogs to find a little interpretive assistance. Commentator after commentator declared unequivocally that this week is known as Jesus’ most inexplicable parable.
Perhaps the problem is not with the parable, but with how we are trying to interpret it. Christian interpreters have a tendency to approach the puzzling and confusing passages of the Bible as if they were algebra problems. If we just do enough research, we imagine, the correct answer will emerge. Find the right theological concept, or Old Testament reference, or alternate meaning of a Greek word, and solve for X. The Jewish tradition, of which Jesus and the disciples were part, has other modes of interpretation that might fit better for us today. The practice of “midrash” takes those puzzling places and intriguing gaps in scripture as jumping-off points, imaginatively fleshing out characters and events with a rich tradition of stories. From this point of view, a confusing scripture is not a problem to be solved, but an opportunity for faithful imagination. Rather than an algebra equation with one correct answer, we could envision it as a melody line in need of harmonization. It’s not that “anything goes”: there are plenty of notes that will create jangling discord rather than transcendent harmony; but with study, prayer, and inspiration, there are countless ways to add to the music.
In that spirit, I am going to tell you three very short stories today, stories in the voices of three of the characters in this parable, as we imagine together what Jesus might have been saying in this parable about the rich man, the manager, and the debtors.
I
This is the first story, the story of the debtor:
A hundred jugs of oil is a lot of oil. I didn’t know if I would ever be able to pay it back. Olive oil isn’t cheap now, for all your industrialization and mechanization, but imagine what it cost us then, how much labor went into cultivating those olive groves and pressing out the oil in presses of rough-hewn stone and wood. A hundred jugs of oil I owed! Even the fifty I originally borrowed was a lot – too much – but what choice did I have? My kids needed to eat. You all talk about credit card debt and student loan debt and home owners’ debt as if debt were a twenty-first century problem, but believe me, debt is an old, old thing.
I knew that I had borrowed fifty, and Josiah the manager knew I was borrowing fifty, and the rich man Nicodemus would have known I was borrowing fifty if he kept his own books. But the Torah laws forbid charging interest. And in a world like ours, that was never going to work – no one was going to lend out of the kindness of their hearts – so everyone just knew the workaround. You would just write down the larger amount, as though that was what you had borrowed to begin with. Oil you have to pay back double, because it’s risky. The jugs can crack, or the oil can go rancid, and then the lender is out of luck.
Anyway, word got around one day that Josiah had been less than scrupulous with the books – something about sneaking food to someone and trying to cover it up. Nicodemus had caught wind of it and was firing him. When I got word that Josiah wanted me to come and see him right away, I was afraid that my loan was about to be called in. I didn’t have the hundred jugs of oil. I might, someday, be able to repay the original fifty, but not a hundred. Not today. I rushed to Nicodemus’s property, terrified by visions of what would happen to me and my children when I couldn’t pay up. Debtor’s prison? Slavery?
But that’s not what happened at all. “How much do you owe?” Josiah asked. “A hundred jugs of oil,” I replied. “Are you sure?” Josiah inquired, looking at me significantly, “I could swear I only gave you fifty.” He was right, of course; fifty is what I’d borrowed. “Let’s correct this bill,” Josiah said smoothly. And it was done, the illicit interest forgiven and my debt halved in the stroke of a pen. The reduction of my debt gave me relief, peace of mind, hope, a chance at freedom, finally, from the debt that had weighed on me. Did he do it for selfish reasons? Maybe he did. But blessing came from it anyway: when Josiah came to my door, I had something to offer: a place to stay and a warm meal for someone who had once been a debt collector, but was now a friend in need. It was a blessing and a gift to have something to offer; I, who had always had to ask and borrow and receive, was able to extend hospitality and kindness, grace freely given, as I had freely received. Thanks be to God.
II
This is the second story, the story of the manager:
You start off with the best intentions. Or at least, I had. I was hired to manage Nicodemus’s property and I swore to myself that I wouldn’t be like those other managers. You see, managers didn’t get a fixed salary, paid by the employer. Instead, their income came from extra charges to the borrowers. Someone borrows fifty jugs of oil, say, and pays back a hundred to the property, and a few to the manager as well. Tax collectors make their money the same way, but they’re even less popular, since they work for the Romans.
I never wanted to be one of the bad guys, squeezing wealth out of the desperation of the poor, but what could I do? You have to feed your kids somehow. And you want a decent pair of sandals, and maybe to eat meat at dinner every so often, and some wine. And would it really be so bad to get one piece of jewelry for your wife? Next thing you know, you’re charging as much as those guys you hated – or even more!
I felt so guilty all the time, but I just didn’t know what to do. I lived every day with this gnawing, vague sense of helplessness and shame. Sometimes I’d try to soothe my conscience – someone would come who would never be able to pay back their debt, and I’d lend to them and just never follow up. Someone in terrible need, just on the edge of ruin. I’d try to make it come out right in the books, but it never quite did.
I guess Nicodemus must’ve found out about one of them, because one day he sent me a message: he was going to need an accounting of the property, because he wasn’t going to employ me anymore. I summoned everyone who was indebted to Nicodemus, and I could feel this palpable sense of dread, as they all waited to talk to me. I could see them all, the ones I had given a break to, and the ones I had overcharged to try to cover for it, and I knew they all just hated me.
But here’s the thing: I knew my job and my comfortable life were slipping away; there was nothing I could do anymore to try to hold on to them. And once I knew that, all of the rules that had kept me bound up with guilt and worry melted away, and I knew what to do. There would be grace and mercy poured out into my life in the days to come, but I didn’t know that yet. I just knew that in the few hours I had left managing Nicodemus’s property, I finally could be faithful to the one who made me, instead of the one who employed me; I finally could serve God instead of wealth. In that room, I turned away from everything I was supposed to do, and I canceled debts left and right. I proclaimed good news to the poor, and release to those captive to crushing debt. And the Spirit of the Lord was upon me. Thanks be to God.
III
This is the third story, the story of the rich man:
I know that, comparatively speaking, I never had much to complain about. Feeling conflicted about being rich doesn’t hold a candle to the worries of families who can’t feed all their kids. I know. But there it was: I felt conflicted about my wealth. Guilty, even. I knew that the scriptures didn’t look kindly on the rich. I tried to figure out what to do about it, sometimes, but I just felt stuck. I didn’t go around making “the ephah small and the shekel great,” as the prophet Amos once wrote, but the laws against charging interest? I couldn’t just give out free money. I was rich, not stupid.
There were nice things about being wealthy, but the lending and the collecting and the accounting… it was all so uncomfortable. I was relieved to finally hire Josiah to handle things. He seemed to be doing a fine job, so mostly I just let him handle things; it was easier that way, and the less I thought about it, the less guilty I felt.
Everything was going smoothly until one evening when I was at a dinner party, where I heard from a friend that Josiah had given a winter’s worth of food to a poor widow out of my storehouses. I guess he thought he’d be able to cover it up, but she’d let it slip to the other women at the well. The story was all over town, and I was a laughing stock. I would have been willing to give the widow the food if Josiah would have just asked me, but to find out that he’d been stealing from my stores like that and trying to cover it up? I was furious. I got up the next morning and went to demand a thorough accounting, sending a messenger ahead of me.
By the time I got there, though, Josiah had taken matters into his own hands. He had canceled the interest on every single loan, and I’m pretty sure that some debts had been canceled altogether. Pride, fear, and defiance mingled on Josiah’s face. I know I should’ve been angry, but to be honest, we were so far past that that all I felt was a kind of relief, a sense of freedom. It was like all the wealth I’d accumulated had trapped me under its weight, and I didn’t realize how constricting and suffocating it was until it started to lift.
I think Josiah expected me to fire him, or worse. I probably could’ve had him thrown in jail. But I looked around at the people he had freed from debt and fear and anxiety, and I knew he had freed me as well. And so I thanked him, and I asked him to do one last thing as the manager of my property: to give it all away to whoever needed it. That night, with little more than the shoes on my feet, the clothes on my back, and the walking stick in my hand, I left my old life behind and started down the road. I’d heard there was a rabbi traveling the countryside, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, and teaching about a kingdom where grace and mercy flow like cool water. I set out to follow him.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
Sermon on Luke 13:1-9
What do you think of when you think of Jesus? What words and stories come to mind? For many of us, I imagine it is famous stories that Jesus told, like the parable of the Prodigal Son or the Good Samaritan, or his teachings, like the beatitudes: “blessed are the hungry… the meek… the peacemakers.” Others may recall miracle stories of Jesus healing people with the touch of his hands, or feeding crowds with a few meager loaves and fishes. Or we may think first of Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross, and his glorious resurrection on Easter morning. What you probably don’t think of when you think of Jesus are stories like the one we find in our lectionary for today, stories of Jesus saying things that are dark and cryptic, threatening and foreboding.
Two of the young people at my church are preparing for confirmation this year, and as part of our studies, we all read through the Gospel of Luke together, from beginning to end, over the course of about a month and a half. One of the surprising things about the Gospel of Luke – and, in fact, all of the gospels – is how often Jesus’ teachings sound frightening, apocalyptic and mysterious. So it is with today’s reading – in my study Bible, each little section has an italicized heading, and today’s reading is entitled “Repent or Perish.” We may not be familiar or comfortable with these teachings, but if we want to walk with Jesus this Lent, we would do best to walk with him through unfamiliar parables and enigmatic teachings, as much as we walk with him through the green pastures and still waters of familiar words and comforting stories.
You probably noticed that today’s lesson actually has two pretty distinct sections. In the first, Jesus hears news of a tragedy. Apparently Pilate, the Roman governor who oversees Judea, has slaughtered some Galileans, people who had probably traveled to the temple for religious observances. Not only has he killed them, but he has mixed their blood with the blood of the sacrificial animals that were sacrificed at the temple – an act of desecration, of disrespect for Jewish faith and practice, beyond the cruelty and injustice of killing these people for no reason we are ever told. Jesus is told of this atrocity, and challenges the common notion – as common today as it was two thousand years ago – that bad things only happen to people who deserve it. He asserts that neither the Galileans nor those who died in another tragedy, the collapse of a tower in Jerusalem, were deserving of their fate. The listeners’ sins are just as bad, he says, as he calls the crowd to repentance. That is the first section of the lesson.
The second section of the lesson is a parable. Parables, as I’m sure you know, are symbolic stories, meant to teach deeper spiritual truths illustrated by ordinary things. They tend to look simple at first glance, but as we explore them, we find deeper layers of meaning and multiple angles of interpretation. Like a kaleidoscope, we turn them over and over and find new and beautiful reflections of sacred truths. This parable is an unfamiliar one, a parable about a fig tree. There was a man who owned a fig tree, Jesus says. Like many land-owners of the time, he did not farm the land himself, but was more of an absentee landlord. One day, he comes to inspect the fig tree and finds that, once again, for the third year in a row, it has not born any fruit. “Why should it waste the soil,” he asks the gardener. “Cut it down at once!” But the gardener intervenes: “Let it alone for one more year,” he says, “I’ll dig around it to aerate the soil, and put manure on it to fertilize it. Maybe it will bear fruit next year. If not, you can cut it down.”
The parable is left, in a way, unfinished. When I told friends about the text I was studying this week, I would tell them the parable and they would respond, “And then the next year the fig tree bears fruit?” We don’t know, in fact we don't even know how the landlord responds to the gardener – we are left wondering what will happen to this fig tree. Will it get one more chance? And if it does, will it produce fruit? Perhaps a year later the landlord will come back and find it fruitless again. Will the gardener allow it to be cut down then, or beg once again for more time? And by the way, does this have anything to do with the first part of today’s reading, about the slaughtered Galileans?
If you’ve heard this parable before, and perhaps even if you haven’t, you may be familiar with the most traditional interpretation of the parable: the landlord is God, interpreters have tended to assume. The gardener is Jesus, and the fig tree is either humanity in general or the Jewish people in particular. (This last interpretation is because there are some scriptural images in the Old Testament that envision Israel or its people as a fig tree.) The fig tree is fruitless, the standard interpretation goes, because humans are unrepentant sinners, refusing to turn toward God, to love and serve God and neighbor. God is ready to call us to account – to chop that tree down. Jesus, according to the traditional interpretation, is the gardener who intervenes on our behalf. In the face of an ax-wielding God, Jesus intercedes for us, asking God to have mercy on us. Jesus’ love for us may yet nourish us into fruitfulness, if we just have a little more time. In this interpretation, the parable is a call to repentance, telling us that Jesus has intervened with God and bought us some time, but we had better repent and produce fruit before that landlord’s patience runs out. Or so the traditional interpretation goes.
As you may be able to tell, I am not a big fan of the traditional interpretation. Too often, we forget that the doctrine of a triune God means that God is one, one as well as three. If God is one, how can we imagine a creator God eager for our destruction, held off temporarily by the merciful and compassionate Jesus? If God is one, then not only does Jesus Christ, our savior, love us and want to show us mercy and nurture us into fruitfulness, but God, our creator, loves us just as much and wants these very same things for us. An interpretation of a parable that imagines God and Jesus squaring off against each other, arguing over whether to be punitive or merciful, seems to my mind to be on theologically shaky ground. That’s not the God I know, and that isn't the God we proclaim.
What other option is there? What other ways could we interpret this parable of the fruitless fig tree? When we consider that Jesus has just heard bad news of senseless violence done to innocent people, we could hear the story this way: the merciful gardener is the triune God, and the ax-happy landlord is the powers that be, the powers of violence and empire and oppression that demolish and destroy whatever gets in their way, whatever doesn’t conform to their desires. The landlord is human violence, evil, and sin, individual and systemic. This interpretation offers a bit of an answer to the question that the crowd may have posed to Jesus, and the question that has been posed so often since then: where is God when bad things happen? This interpretation imagines God as the gardener, trying to stand in the way of destruction, at work in the world to protect us, time and again. If God is the gardener, then God is always trying to intervene with those who hold the power to do violence, although God’s pleas sometimes go unanswered.
Perhaps, then, this parable is not a warning that Jesus can only protect us for so long from the destruction that God wants to bring upon the fruitless fig tree. Perhaps this is a promise that God is at work on our behalf, trying to protect us from forces of violence and evil.
But what if we are not the fig tree at all?
What if we are the landlord, so quick to judge and find lacking, so ready to condemn, if someone or something doesn’t meet our standards or benefit us? Before telling this story, Jesus has just heard the news of the deaths of the Galileans. He hears the news and he asks, “Do you think they were worse sinners than you?” It sounds like he’s responding to a familiar old refrain; perhaps the crowd is starting to wonder whether the Galileans somehow had it coming. So often when a tragedy befalls someone, voices start to rise up saying that they brought it on themselves; it was their own fault; they had it coming. When natural disasters strike, far-right-wing pundits often blame the calamity on the affected cities or regions for being debaucherous, irreligious, or politically liberal. When a woman is assaulted, people ask where she was, and what she was doing there at that time, and how she was dressed. And how easily do we slip into explaining away everything from heart disease to homelessness as the result of personal irresponsibility, trying to convince ourselves that we are safe and protected from calamity by our own diligence? When we are quick to explain away the misfortunes of others, though, we can become slow to extend compassion, grace, and mercy.
When we hear this story, we tend to assume that we are the vulnerable fig tree, and perhaps that might lead us to look at our lives to see whether we are being spiritually fruitful. That is a fine question. But a more interesting question is this: are there places in our lives where we are too quick to judge, to condemn, to chop down, and too slow to offer grace?
A recent New York Times article entitled “Can Forgiveness Play a Role in Criminal Justice?” told a stunning story of a married couple named Kate and Andy Grosmaire. After their teenage daughter was murdered by her boyfriend, they were grief-stricken and angry, but in their grief these two faithful Christians discerned God urging them toward mercy and forgiveness. In their home state of Florida, this sort of crime would most likely lead to life-long incarceration. The bereaved couple sought reconciliation with their daughter’s murderer, and intervened on his behalf. He will serve a very long sentence, and then he will be released, and he plans to devote the rest of his life to anti-violence work. It is not exactly a triumphant story of redemption and rejoicing; there is still pain and sorrow and bitterness; but two people have made the hard decision to choose mercy instead of vengeance, reconciliation instead of retribution.
Choosing mercy and grace does not always come easily to humanity. We struggle to forgive each other; we respond to violence with more violence. We may not always rejoice when we chop down a fruitless fig tree, but we do it with a shrug and a clear conscience. When we hear stories like this one from the Gospel of Luke, we hear them as dark and ominous. But perhaps the dark and ominous presence in this story is not God, but humanity. Perhaps that landlord with the ax in hand is not a vengeful God, but our own vengeful selves. Perhaps we are not the fig tree, threatened with imminent destruction, but we are the landlord, invited to turn away from our own destructive tendencies and towards God’s way of grace, mercy, and regeneration.
If we say yes, if we set the ax down – today or ever—it is because God the patient gardener has been working, year after year, lavishing all of us sometimes-fruitless fig trees with love, mercy, and grace. Thanks be to God.
A Sermon on Matthew 14:22-33
Before seminary, before college, before I first felt called to ministry, I learned a lot about what it means to offer pastoral care. I learned it in my first job, when I was in high school. I was a swimming teacher.
I know, you don’t think of swimming teachers as spiritual leaders. But I challenge you to watch the first day of preschool swimming classes someday, as the anxious parents start corralling anxious children toward the pool. Watch the panic and the fear and the tension, and tell me those children and those parents don’t need some spiritual comfort. Being a swimming teacher taught me something that Jesus definitely knew: getting in over your head – literally over your head – brings out your spiritual hunger, your brokenness, your need. And it also opens you up – opens you to relationship, opens you to trust, opens you to grace.
Jesus definitely knew about what happens spiritually when we get in over our heads, and we can see it in today’s Gospel lesson. The lesson picks up after Jesus has fed the five thousand, and we find Jesus anxious for a moment of solitude and prayer, hungry to be alone with God – for some time now, Matthew has been mentioning that Jesus was trying to get away to pray as the crowd followed him, but finally, in today’s lesson, Jesus has fed them with loaves and fish and good news, and sent them away, and he sends the disciples away as well – the Greek actually says he forced or compelled them to go away, he drove them away. And finally alone, he goes up to a mountain to pray while the disciples go ahead of him in a boat.
In the world of the Bible, water was seen as a place of swirling primordial chaos, as far from God as it is possible to be. Think of the Jonah in the belly of the whale, and of all the miracle stories of God pushing back the water. The water is a place of fear and danger, even for fishermen like Peter, Andrew, James, and John. There they are, alone on a boat at sea in the middle of a storm, until the fourth watch of the night – the period from about three to six in the morning – until Jesus comes walking toward them over the waves. And in the midst of their terror, they don’t recognize him. They think he’s a ghost. And who can blame them? To the minds of people in the biblical world, they are in one of the spookiest possible places – a boat on a storm at sea in the eerie pre-dawn hours. It’s like a horror movie setting – they might as well be in an abandoned insane asylum.
The disciples begin to tremble with terror, and they cry out in fear. In this short little story, the word for fear is repeated three times – fear whispers and echoes throughout the story, and Jesus stands against fear over and over again. So the disciples cry out in fear, and Jesus calls to them across the waters: “Take courage! It is I! Fear not!”
Each of those sentences is resonant in the Greek. “Take courage” is a command Jesus uses frequently in healing stories: “take courage, your sins are forgiven.” “Take courage, your faith has made you well.” Those are warm words, words of blessing and comfort.
“It is I” in Greek is ego eimi. Ego eimi. Eimi, all by itself, means “I am.” Eimi is a complete sentence – it includes the “I” and the “am” all in one word. Ego means “I” – he repeats the I, emphasizing it by doubling it: “It is I!” Ego eimi is what Jesus says in the Gospel of John’s famous “I am” statements: “I am the bread of life”; “I am the good shepherd”; and so on.
But ego eimi is also the Greek translation of God’s declaration to Moses at the burning bush. When Moses encounters God and says, “who shall I say sent me,” God answers, “ehyeh asher ehyeh.” “I am that I am.” “Ego eimi.” Ego eimi evokes awe; it is a phrase that tries to capture the indescribable power and presence of God. IT. IS. I.
And then Jesus goes on: “Mei phobeisthe.” “Be not afraid.” If those words sound familiar, they should. Those are the words of the angel to Mary. They are the words of the angel to Joseph. They are the words of the angel to the shepherds. They are the words of the angel to Mary Magdalene at the tomb. They are the words of the resurrected Christ when the disciples see them. And here, they are the words of Jesus to the disciples as he walks toward them on the water.
Take heart. It is I. Be not afraid. Those words are not so different from the words swimming teachers use with children out in the middle of the water.
There’s a paradox about teaching swimming to a terrified child. You would think that the approach to take would be to let that child go gradually, let them become accustomed to the water, let them cling to the wall, let them sit on the side and stick their toes in, until they adjust and they’re ready. Well, that might be helpful for the first three minutes of class. But if you wait for a nervous kid to be ready to jump in, you might wait for years. If you have a really nervous kid in your swimming class, your only chance of helping them learn to swim is to get them out in the middle of the pool by themselves with nothing to cling to but you. So you pry them away from the wall, and you ignore their anxious mother who is sure he’ll be ready in a minute or two. And you go straight to the middle and you just stay there. And you say, over and over again, “I’m right here. I won’t let you go. You’re safe here with me. I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you. Don’t worry. Everything is fine. I’m right here.”
That nervous child has been thinking that he can stay safe through his own caution, that if he just clings to the wall tightly enough, just stays on the top step, just doesn’t venture out into the water, he can stay safe that way. My role as a swimming teacher is to lead the child to trust not in his own firm grip on the wall, but in me and my commitment to keeping him safe. And if that child will trust in me to not let him go, he will begin to relax his body, to stop resisting the water and start learning to move in the water. One day, to his utter shock, he will discover that the water is fully capable of supporting his weight. He will discover that water, like the grace of God, is able to hold him up if he will let it.
That might be what’s going on when Jesus sends the disciples out into a storm at sea and then comes to them over the waves with his words of comfort: he is asking them to trust in him, to know that anywhere they go, no matter how terrifying, they are not alone; they can rely on him to be with them, to come to them; they do not need to be afraid. And so he calls out to them, “Take heart! It is I. Do not be afraid.”
Peter takes that leap of faith. He replies, calling out to Jesus across the waters, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” Jesus replies “Come!” and Peter steps down, over the side of the boat, and begins to walk along the surface of the water toward Jesus. But suddenly, his focus wavers. He notices the strong winds around him, and Simon Peter, the one whom Jesus called petros, the rock, begins to sink like the stone he is named after. “Lord,” Peter cries out, “save me!” And before Peter’s head even goes under, Jesus reaches out his hand, catches him, and brings him back to the boat.
When they arrive at the boat, Jesus speaks to Peter: “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” As a child, I was taught that Peter lacks faith because he takes his eyes off of Jesus; he lets the wind and waves distract him; he allows his focus to waver and he notices the storm crashing around him. Peter sinks because he lacks faith. Maybe so. But I wonder if that is the moment that Jesus is talking about when he calls Peter one of “little faith”? These bodies of flesh and bone are not made to skim along the water’s surface like whirligig beetles, after all. I wonder if Peter’s moment of doubt was not the moment before he began to sink, but the moment after it. I wonder if Jesus reprimands Peter not for beginning to sink, but for doubting that Jesus would catch him. What if Jesus is chiding Peter not for sinking like a stone, but for thinking that Jesus might let him drown?
Often, we hear the story of Peter walking on the water as a story urging us on to better faith. If we just try harder than Peter, have more faith than Peter, than we will do better than Peter. We will walk across the water, like a skipping stone, and we will make it to Jesus. But I don’t think that’s the point of this story. I think we are called not to flawless faith, but to faith in a God who will not let us go under. We are called not to walk on water, but to learn to trust the grace of God to hold us up, like a child learning to swim. We do not need to do better than Peter and make it to Jesus – Jesus will come to us.
Working as a hospital chaplain last summer, I often found myself in over my head. I felt like I was in over my head as I stood by the bed of a child recovering from spinal surgery, in more pain than a person should have to experience, and I tried to find the words to say to her mother, who could do nothing to relieve her daughter’s pain. I felt like I was in over my head when a woman who clearly needed love and support and pastoral care began to insult me and my family, bringing me almost to tears with hurtful words and refusing to talk about herself. I felt like I was in over my head when I talked with a family fighting about whether to take their beloved grandmother off of life support. The needs were huge, and the people’s stories were heartbreaking, and I felt like I had so little to offer.
One day, a fellow chaplain reminded me of this very story, the story of Peter walking to Jesus over the waves. “Maybe,” the chaplain said, “all we need to do is offer a hand. Just a hand is all it takes, sometimes, to keep people from going under.” That was true – and it was a reminder that offering a little could mean a lot. But hearing that was like a hand keeping me from going under. And I began to see, in my work, all the ways that grace was sustaining me, all the ways that God was holding me up, all the ways that hands reached out to me to keep me from drowning. When a wonderful, wise patient asked if she could say a blessing for me and my work before she went home, God was holding me up. When a colleague met me for coffee to share stories and support one another, God was holding me up. When I heard words of grace and comfort echoing through worship services and scripture readings, God was holding me up.
God’s call to us is not to walk on water. God’s call to us is to get out of the boat. God calls us out of all kinds of boats. Maybe getting out of the boat means offering some kind words to people you see on the street. Maybe getting out of the boat means speaking up when you hear hateful language or jokes based on stereotypes. Maybe getting out of the boat means working toward tithing. During the shooting in Norway that took place a couple of weeks ago, getting out of the boat actually meant getting into a boat for two women, as they paddled into gunfire to save children fleeing the massacre. Getting out of the boat is a leap of faith out of our own comfort zones, the places that seem safe and secure, to follow Jesus wherever he calls us. But getting out of the boat does not mean we need to walk on the water without failing or falling. We are not called to perfection, but we are called to follow Jesus.
And the good news is that, when we start to falter, when we feel that we have gotten in over our heads, when we don’t know whether we can go on, the grace of God will catch us and hold us up. Like water supporting a swimming child, like Jesus catching the hand of Peter, God reaches out to buoy us up. God buoys us up through scripture, as we turn to words of comfort and strength, stories that remind us of God’s grace and love. God buoys us up through glimpses of grace in our lives and the world around us, through dinners with friends and cool breezes on hot days. God buoys us up through community, through kind words from friends and smiles from strangers. God buoys us up through that still, small voice that speaks in our hearts in moments of prayer and contemplation, in moments of celebration and rejoicing. And knowing that we can trust in a God who does not expect perfection, a God who is always ready to reach out, to take us by the hand, to support us in our need, we are called, with Peter, to get out of the boat.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
A Sermon on Isaiah 55:1-13
The only riot I have ever been in was in a library. It was spring of 2006 and I was a junior in college. One evening, it was long after the dining hall closed, I was halfway through a paper, and I was so hungry. Out of ramen noodles and low on cash, I opened my email and saw something from the student council with the subject line “Free Felipe’s and Finale.” Those were like magic words to me. Felipe’s was the Mexican place on campus – not very authentic, but so greasy and salty and carbalicious. And Finale was the fancy-schmancy dessert place that made tiny, perfect desserts topped with gold flakes and architectural spirals of chocolate. These were the crème de la crème of campus food, and they were free for the taking if I just went to this party in the library celebrating the longer library hours which the student council had convinced the administration to agree to.
Well, it turns out that some other people also were interested in free Felipe’s and free Finale desserts. One thousand, five hundred people. Fifteen minutes before the reception was supposed to begin, the library lobby was as crowded as a mosh pit, and security guards were standing like bouncers at the library doors. Then the food arrived: about a hundred burritos, and two medium-sized catering trays of desserts. It was pandemonium. Hundreds of students lunged for the food. There was screaming and shoving and scratching. The student body president, fearing for his safety, started throwing burritos into the crowd as a diversionary tactic. I saw one girl stuffing four or five quesadillas into her pants. And I do not mean the pocket part of the pants. The food was gone within seconds. That’s when the police arrived. My feet made only the most fleeting contact with the ground as the crowd began to stampede toward the doors. I was terrified; the crowd was crushing me and I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t move and finally I got swept out onto the quad panicked and shaken. All for some free burritos. What was wrong with us?
Nothing that hasn’t been wrong with people for as long as we can remember. It would have been understandable if we were starving. But no one in that library lobby was starving. (And I know that because you needed a valid student ID to get in, and every student was required to buy a full meal plan.) I think in the Great Lamont Riot of 2006, I saw a particularly dramatic expression of this dark part of human nature – a drive to conserve our resources and lay in supplies. An old and deep anxiety that someday in the future, there might not be enough and we had better get what we can while the getting’s good. A fear that we’ll miss out and someone will get what we ought to have for ourselves. It happens around a lot of things, but it happens especially around food. You see it on that television show Hoarders – have you ever watched that show? These people just cannot stop acquiring stuff, and their houses fill up and become unlivable and hazardous and unsanitary, and so often their fridges and cupboards and whole kitchens are full of more cans and boxes of food than they would need for the rest of their lives. You see it when you look at the sizes of drinks you can buy at Starbucks shops and convenience stores and movie theaters – we buy coffees and sodas in these bucket-sized cups, as if we were preparing for a month in the desert! And you see it when fifteen hundred college students stage a riot over burritos and chocolate cakes. We sometimes let stuff – and food – take over our lives. We are sometimes deeply afraid that there is not enough, and sometimes we let that fear drive our shopping and our consuming and how we treat one another.
There’s nothing wrong with a bargain. Nothing is wrong with planning ahead, and nothing is wrong with being prudent with the resources you have, and God knows nothing is wrong with not having much money to spend on food. But something is wrong – very, very wrong – with the way our society relates to food, and stuff, and money.
Arturo Rodriguez in his article, “Cheap Food” in the companion to the documentary Food, Inc., tells the story of a young farmworker named Maria Isabel Vasquez Jiminez. “Young grapevines thrive in the fierce summer sun of California’s Central Valley,” he writes “But the same early summer heat that helps bring life to the bountiful produce millions of Americans enjoy can also destroy. Unlike the young grapevines, assured of constant irrigation and hydration, farmworker Maria Jimenez had to do without water as she labored in the fields in direct sunlight on a 95-degree day in May 2008. After almost nine hours of work, Maria became dizzy and collapsed to the ground. Her boyfriend Florentino Bautista ran to her, held her in his arms, and begged for help. The foreman walked over to them and stood over the couple, reassuring Bautista and telling him that ‘this happens all the time.’ . . . By the time she arrived at the hospital, her body temperature was 108.4 degrees.” Maria died three days later. The grapes she was picking are part of the supply chain for Trader Joe’s line of “Two Buck Chuck,” the wine which costs two dollars per bottle – although this is New York, so of course it costs three.
So on the one hand, we have this society which wants cheap food, free food, at all costs; and even if we only pay two dollars for the bottle of wine, even if a hamburger can be purchased for a dollar, there are other costs. Costs to the environment, costs in the lives of farmworkers and food workers and their families, and costs to our own bodies. On the other hand, we have the imagery from today’s ancient testimony: “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” This is a totally different image of free food – and it undercuts everything about the way our society deals with food. We live in one kind of “free market” – an economic system which crushes people in order to sell me a bottle of wine for two dollars; an economic system which sees very little value in human life or human dignity or wholeness or wellness or caring for this planet; an economic system which plays on our anxieties and insecurities and worst impulses so that you and I will buy more and more and more.
But the text today speaks of another kind of “free market”: a marketplace where everything is free because it flows out of God’s abundance. A marketplace that speaks not to our fears and anxieties, but to our needs and, yes, our delights! A marketplace that says, instead of “buy two, get one free,” “everything you need is here. There is enough. Enjoy it!” And the text connects this free marketplace directly with covenants – in this case, God’s covenant with Israel, since this book was written to Israelites in the Babylonian exile. But that idea of covenant – that idea is crucial; because part of the idea of covenant is that we are called to relate to one another as human beings, not to take advantage of one another in order to get ahead. In contrast to our “free market” with its cheap food, this is a “free market” of abundance in community.
The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke of the difference between “cheap grace” and “costly grace.” Cheap grace is when churches try to water down religion, to make it all about feeling good and not at all about living well. Cheap grace says, “your sins are forgiven! Go back out into the world and don’t change anything. Go ahead and harm people, if you want. Don’t fuss with trying to change the world, it’ll be fine. We’ll see you next week.” But costly grace, he wrote, is free but not cheap. Costly grace is the love which calls us to transformation. Costly grace means taking a hard look at ourselves and our world, and knowing that we are good and beautiful and beloved and worthy, and so are all the other people around us, and trying to live that out even when it is really, really difficult. Costly grace means entering into the hard and scary task of standing up to a world that crushes people. Cheap grace is a two-dollar bottle of wine. Costly grace is trying to live as if food is from God, and the earth that produces it is from God, and the farmers who grow it are from God, and the workers who transport it and sell it are from God, and our bodies that need it for nourishment are from God. And trying to live that way is hard.
I think that costly grace is what God’s free market of abundance is all about. It is about a lot more than food. It is about treating people as if God made them and they matter. It is about naming and resisting the things in the world and our own minds that tell us that we should be afraid, and anxious, and fighting all the time. It is about seeing one another as human beings rather than objects.
But in a way, it is about food as well, because every spiritual teaching we have in Christianity plays out simultaneously in the tangible, material world of food and eating. Every single high-minded, abstract theological idea we have – grace, redemption, creation, justice – is connected somewhere in our scripture and tradition with what we put in our mouths. We embody what we believe through communions and coffee hours, feasting and fasting, saying grace and sipping wine. The Christian tradition is full of food stories and food teachings and food rituals because food is one of the places where what we believe meets how we live.
God’s ways are not our ways, the text says, and God’s thoughts are not our thoughts. It is really difficult to break away from a world which tries to teach us to fear scarcity and look out for only ourselves. So this is not about guilt and shame and feeling bad every time you buy something other than organic, fair trade quinoa. But it is about imagining what it would look like if the ways that we bought and sold and ate food honored what is sacred. I don’t know what it would look like for you. Maybe it looks like giving away some of the extra cans you keep “just in case.” Maybe it looks like a discernment process about what God wants for your grocery budget. Maybe it looks like pausing to give thanks before meals, and seeing how that changes things.
Or maybe it looks like this: There’s a wonderful movie from 1987 called Babette’s Feast. In that movie, two sisters live in a rural village in Denmark, leading a small Christian sect that their father founded, practicing total austerity and solemnity. One day, a French woman arrives at their door, a friend of a friend, fleeing political persecution, and asks them to take her in as their housekeeper because she has nowhere else to go. For ten years, she lives with them, making their terrible bleak soup and cleaning their cold and dreary house, until one day she gets word that she has won a large sum of money. She asks the two sisters whether she can prepare a feast for them and their friends as a gesture of gratitude for welcoming her in, and they agree. They start to regret their decision as her supplies begin to arrive – rare and expensive wines; live turtles in crates; exotic fruits that they have never seen before. What is this, they wonder? It must be sinful to eat so extravagantly; maybe even satanic. They meet in secret with their church, and they agree that everyone will eat the feast, but they will all do their best not to take the slightest pleasure in it. But as they gather and Babette expresses her love and gratitude through the medium of food, a transformation begins to take place. The austerity begins to break; there are smiles and laughter; old grudges are mended and old romances are rekindled. Joy breaks through the solemnity, and they begin to delight in God’s abundance and each other’s company. And finally we learn that Babette, the first great female chef in all of France, has joyfully spent her fortune to offer this one meal, this one experience of taking joy in God’s creation. It is costly grace, freely given.
And that is the vision that echoes through the text today; it calls us to delight not in two-dollar wine or free burritos, but in God’s gifts of creation and community. It invites us to care for one another, to share out of our own abundance when we can, rather than fearing scarcity. It declares that God’s vision for the world is a different kind of free market, a table where everyone is welcome, a feast where everyone is fed. And although God’s ways are not our ways, and God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, it challenges us to live our way into it. May we have the courage to try. Amen.
