Month: September 2022

16th Sunday after Pentecost: Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15; Psalm 91:1-6, 14-16; 1 Timothy 6:6-19; Luke 16:19-31

Today’s readings from the Epistle and the Gospel are very clear: don’t get too hung up on money. In Paul’s words, “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil”. I read this as I receive yet another retirement planning email from my employer, and see stories in the national press about how to protect your money given the stock market. Today’s paper had a long story on how tech entrepreneurs have decided that they can treat others badly and there will be no consequences because they and their friends are rich. The love of money often seems to be a national religion.

What’s so wrong with it, the skeptical might wonder. Paul acknowledges that those who are wealthy in this world can do right, but they need to place their hope not in “the uncertainty of riches”, but on God. They should not be “haughty”, but humble, focused on God, not wealth. But that’s hard to do.

Jesus is even more explicit in the story of what is often known as Dives and Lazarus. The rich man, resplendent in “purple and fine linen”, feasting “sumptuously” daily, dies and suffers in Hades. The poor man, covered in sores, eating scraps from the rich man’s table, dies and is with Abraham. The rich man’s failure to acknowledge the poor man is at the center of the problem. He thought he was better than the poor man, only to find out too late he was not.

Paul’s letter to Timothy is one of what are known as pastoral epistles, concerned with helping Christians live in the real world. It acknowledges that Christians might be rich “in this present age”; they are not kicked out of the church, but asked to put their wealth in the right place, as a tool and not an object of love. They should be “rich in good works”. They are to “fight the good fight of the faith”.

We live in a world which is even more likely to worship money than did Jesus and Paul. Love of money is not the root of all evil, but of all kinds of evil. The temptation for the rich, as Jesus suggests, is to separate themselves from the poor, to think of themselves as better. We see this in many ways, from the increasing inaccessibility of housing for those with modest incomes to the new hobby of the ultra-rich, flying into outer space.

There are many in Merced who do not have enough, who work multiple jobs, or scrape through from week to week. This is the result of an economic system that prioritizes the love of money. Few of us live the life of the rich man Jesus describes. But many of us have enough, and can use the reminder “not to be haughty”. We can be “generous and ready to share”. This means putting God at the center, not money. It was a challenge in Paul’s time, and remains one now.

Lazarus and Dives, illumination from the 11th century Codex Aureus of Echternach, Wikimedia commons

Fifteenth Sunday of Pentecost: Jeremiah 8:18-9:1; Psalm 79:1-9; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13

For the past few weeks, we have heard Jeremiah passing judgment on the failures of the people of Judah and Jerusalem. Repeatedly he has told them of the disaster that faces them because they have not been faithful to the Lord. Two weeks ago we had the image of the potter, who would reshape the pot if the people of Judah did not mend their ways. Last week there was less hope, as Jeremiah described the environmental disaster that would soon come. Now we have a shift in tone. We learn that while the Lord passes judgment, such judgment does not come with joy.

“My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick.” Jeremiah’s lament is the Lord’s. Lament is important. When you lament, you sit with pain and sorrow. You do not offer comfort, and you do not try to fix things. You sit or stand and weep. In many places in the world, loud wailing is an important part of the process of grieving, often a role given to women. Such ritual mourning allows us to acknowledge loss, to register the human feelings of despair.

Much of the lament is in questions: Is the Lord not in Zion? Is her King not in her? Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored? What is wrong? Why are things still wrong? These are the questions we ask when grieving: they don’t erase they pain, but articulate its impact.

What I find comforting about Jeremiah here is that the Lord is with us in the abyss, when we are absorbed in loss. Like us, Jeremiah asks questions: why? Isn’t there anything that will fix it? Jeremiah doesn’t say, “See, I warned you”. He is not reminding people of why they deserved this, but is just sitting with them, joining their grief. The psalmist is the same: “How long will you be angry, O Lord?”

Those who live through terrible things find ways to hope. But always, they need to lament first: to name their suffering and the pain it has caused. In the midst of their enslavement in the southern US, enslaved people developed a vibrant musical and religious tradition. They knew pain: on Good Friday, when I hear, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?”, I know that they had been there. But they also found hope. They answered Jeremiah’s question, “Is there no balm in Gilead? ” with the confident assertion that “There is a balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole/ There is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin sick soul”. They turned to the Holy Spirit.

Jesus’ presence with us is the center of Christian hope. But we often forget Holy Saturday in our rush from Good Friday to Easter. There was a long day of grief and despair. The apostles and the men on the road to Emmaus did not know the end of the story that we live with. If we rush too fast to the hope offered by the Resurrection, we cannot be with people in the time between. Sometimes, with Jeremiah, we need to experience the pain, to lament. And later, may we proclaim that “There is a balm in Gilead.”

Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 19: Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28; Psalm 14; 1 Timothy 1:12-17; Luke 15:1-10

Today we get two sides of the story of our relationship with God, the story that is repeated throughout scriptures. We begin with a gift from God; humans turn away from that gift; God judges; humans repent and are forgiven, given new life. And then it begins again.

Jeremiah is reporting on the first part of the story: the Lord is speaking in judgment on his people, who “are skilled in doing evil, but do not know how to do good”. Jeremiah looks around, and the earth is barren, an ecological disaster. The Lord promises some mercy, but only after disaster: “The whole land shall be a desolation; yet I will not make a full end.”

It is hard not to see ourselves in the bleak ecological vision of Jeremiah, especially after we in Merced have lived through more than a week of extreme heat. We may not panic when the temperature goes over 100°, but when it reaches 115°, everyone thinks it’s too hot. We know we are living with the results of climate change, with more extreme weather of all kinds. The recent floods in Pakistan meant that one-third of the land was under water. This is perhaps not God’s judgment on us, but we are certainly collectively accountable for the overuse of fossil fuels that has created the climate crisis, a crisis that is most severe in the regions of the world that have done the least to create it.

The psalm continues the account of God’s judgment: “Every one has proved faithless; all alike have turned bad”. Yet there is hope: some have turned to the Lord, and “when the Lord restores the fortunes of his people, Jacob will rejoice and Israel be glad”.

Human beings fail and fail repeatedly. One of the things that makes the apostle Paul so powerful is his acknowledgement of his own wrongdoing. In the letter to Timothy, he recounts his persecution of Christians. “I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence.” Yet there was mercy, and he had been chosen to serve Christ. For him, “the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus”, making him a powerful example of the possibility of redemption.

In the parable of the lost sheep, Jesus focuses on how much repentence means. God welcomes the righteous, but “there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance”. The shepherd goes looking for the lost sheep, just as the widow searches for the coin. Each of us matters. And forgiveness and mercy are available to all of us.

The cycle of the biblical stories always ends one way: with forgiveness and mercy. It is what can give us hope as we confront our individual and collective failures. “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea”, our closing hymn (#470) proclaims. It is sometimes difficult to trust in that mercy, but it’s there.

Thirteenth Sunday of Pentecost: Jeremiah 18:1-11; Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17; Philemon 1-21; Luke 14:25-33

What a group of readings! Three of them are scriptures I really like, and then there’s the Gospel. So I’ll start with where I’m comfortable. Jeremiah likens God to a potter, who having made a mistake, destroys their work and builds a new pot. If the people of Judah are the pot, God is promising to shape something new against them. BUT if they change their ways, God will leave them.

For about 15 years before I moved to Merced, I regularly took a pottery class. A good potter controls the clay, just as God will do. (I was never entirely in control of the clay, so I was adequate but not a great potter.) I came to think that what made a really good potter was the ability to recover from their mistakes. And God is wondering, watching the people of Judah and Jerusalem, whether he’s made a mistake. If the pot starts going in the right direction, great, but if not, that’s it.

Psalm 139 is one of my favorite psalms, where the psalmist ruminates on God ongoing presence with them: God has “searched me out and known me”, indeed “you knit me together in my mother’s womb”. This sense of the presence of God throughout the psalmists life, alongside them, is truly comforting. It is not surprising that this is a psalm often used at funerals.

Then we get Paul’s letter to Philemon. Paul is writing to Philemon, Apphia and Archippus, and the “church in your house”. Philemon is Paul’s “dear friend and co-worker”, Apphia his “sister”, and Archippus his fellow soldier. These are people he trusted. He is sending Onesimus back to them from his prison. Onesimus had become “a son” to Paul while Paul was in prison: serving Paul, but also converting to Christianity. This relationship with Paul should, Paul thinks, change his other relationships. Onesimus was evidently a slave of Philemon; it is not clear if he had run away, or was somehow a problem. Now Paul wants Philemon to take him back “no longer as a slave, but. . .a beloved brother.” “Welcome him as you would welcome me.” Paul asks Philemon to do this out of love. But what Paul is asking is to upend a set of social relations, making a slave equal to his master. And he is not sure of the result. Still, at the center is Paul’s conviction that being a Christian changes our relationships to each other.

Last week, Jesus told the parable of the wedding feast, and like Paul he challenged the worldly hierarchies in which he lived, and we continue to live. This week, Jesus goes further, in one of the more shocking gospels, where he tells us that to follow him, we have to hate our families, and even life. That the price of following him may be separation from the people and even life that we hold dear. To say this is a difficult instruction is an understatement.

This might be a good time to think about how the Gospels were written. While they are written as if they are a first person account, they were in fact written down late in the first century. In the case of Luke, it was probably forty or fifty years after Jesus’ death. Luke’s report of Jesus warning about the costs of discipleship is descriptive of what is, not prescriptive of what should be. In Luke’s time, you might well put yourself at odds with your family by following Jesus, and you might well lose your life. It might be reassuring in the first century to know that Jesus recognized the danger. The challenges of following Jesus in the 21^st century US are not so dramatic.

The rest of the story is more useful than the opening. Jesus asks, who would start building without knowing the full cost? If you do, you get caught with a half finished house, and look like a fool. The costs we face are different from those faced by those to whom Luke wrote. In the Diocese of San Joaquin we know that our interpretations of Jesus’ gospel can lead to painful divisions. People lost friends, and a sense of a church home when the former diocese left the Episcopal church. The choices people made in 2008 were hard choices. The differences between what people think it means to follow Jesus are real; the costs of one’s position are not imaginary.

I am fortunate that I have not had to pay a high price for following Jesus. But I am always helped by the psalmist’s reminder that the Lord is with me at all times: “You press upon me behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.” With that confidence, it is possible to follow Jesus.