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Luke 12:32-48
I’d like to check something out with you all, OK? I’m going to assume you know that if you get an email from a Nigerian prince saying that all you need to do is wire him your bank account information and he’ll send you 3 million dollars, not to respond…yes? And I’m going to except that if you know that the IRS does not leave voicemails on your phone asking for your social security number. And I’m going to guess that when someone – anyone – comes along telling you that they are the solution to all of your problems you know that it’s the first sign that they aren’t…right?
We are not a gullible people. And yet we have been sold a version of Christianity for the past few decades, centuries even, that is theological snake-oil. We have been sold a contractual Christianity, a transactional faith that told us that if we only said the right magic words, prayed the correct prayer, asked Jesus into our hearts and got baptized, the right way of course…then we’d have our golden ticket and we could go right back to life the way we have been living, minus some drinking or dancing or cussing. We were told, many of us, that we actually had no chance and that who we are, who God created us to be, was hated by God and we were doomed to an eternity of fire…but Jesus loves us. We were told that our faith and our society were a perfect match and we need not question anything about country, culture or capitalism to be a faithful Christian. None of this is true, but the promise of certain eternal heaven and the lure of being “in the club” without really having to change anything about how you view the world, or who you hate, is just too intoxicating to let loose. So maybe when you hear Isaiah’s harsh words, you hear the many times that “God’s wrath” has been called down on “sinners”, by people who pick and choose sins that leave them on God’s “good side.” Or perhaps in the passage from Luke you are reminded of the bumper sticker that says, “Don’t be fooled by the car, my treasure is in heaven”, which only serves to place us in this same weak theology pattern, where Jesus serves only as a key to heaven’s door.
Such faith can be comforting, but it is hardly worthy of the days in which we live. We need a faith that operates from a place of humility, disarming our certainty, disabling fundamentalism and disenfranchising the theology of entitlement. St. Augustine, perhaps one of the most pivotal figures in Christian history, once wrote, “If you have understood, then what you have understood is not God.” A much more contemporary saint, Barbara Brown Taylor, who is sainted only by me (and perhaps a few others) has written, “No matter how hard I try to say something true about God, the reality of God will eclipse my best words.” Both of these people, and many, many others, know that God is not something that can be so readily grasped as to create hard and fast dogma about, for as soon as you think that you have God pinned down, God changes shapes or appears from thin air. The Bible is not religion, nor is religion faith. They both point at the existential struggle for us as human beings – a search for a slippery God. That is a faith that can enable us to work for a world that is fair and just and kind without requiring us to be absolutely right, or to be at war with anyone.
As a pastor I have to tell you that years of deep reflection, lots of writing and many profound, spiritually moving encounters don’t leave me feeling any closer to a definition of God that is satisfying. So I continue to search, as we all do. But this is not a search without parameters. It isn’t a feeling around in the dark blindly. We have a map. If we believe that God is love, and we have a healthy understanding of what love is, then claims made on God that are not loving are not God. In our first passage this morning, Isaiah was bluntly and directly clear with his audience that there is a map, and that they aren’t using it. Instead of seeking to walk with God, the people of Isaiah’s time were getting confused by the mechanics, caught up in the rituals, performing them woodenly, their hearts and minds fixed on the clock like a student in 5th hour, waiting for the bell to ring so they can go back to the things they really care about. This is what Isaiah calls out. God doesn’t want your rote recitations or your empty gifts you call “sacrifice”, God wants your investment. It is the same prophetic call that Jesus is handing out to his disciples when he calls for them to sell what they have and give it to the poor. This is not “stuff-shaming”, looking down his nose at a closet full of clothes or possessions. He’s making a claim on their identity, and our alignment. For Isaiah and Jesus, the question isn’t whether or not you have stuff, the question is when the Syrian refugee seeks shelter, do you worry about what will happen to you or what is happening to them?
Before he warns his disciples of this dilemma, Jesus reminds us that God loves us and desires good things for us. God is not hoping that things turn out OK, or waiting on us to earn our reward, or willing to give us some stuff but not others…no, Jesus teaches us that it is God’s good pleasure, as Luke puts it, to “give you the kingdom.” And that’s not an empty phrase, for what we call here the “kin-dom” is wrapped up in the dream of Jesus, and the vision of the prophets, and the hope of Sarah and the kindness of Ruth. God is with us and working for us, but not in whatever way we’d like, and not in any direction. For God has an orientation, too. Our scriptures are full of claims on God’s desire, and God’s heart is for the poor and the brokenhearted, the weak and the oppressed. Isaiah and Jesus speak this voice of God, placing the claim on their audience, and on us, that our wholeness is connected to other people’s wholeness and the “kin-dom” cannot be the “kin-dom” if it isn’t for everyone. Our wholeness, our salvation if you will, is found alongside God, doing justice, loving kindness and being the image of God in the world, to borrow the words of the prophet Micah. For the map to God follows a certain trajectory, and it starts not with ritual or religion, but with the alignment of our hearts. This is especially true for those of us who have resources, who possess power and privilege, for when you have more than you need, you don’t build a higher wall, you build a longer table.
The world into which Isaiah spoke was a broken one, people were selfish and mean, prejudiced and egotistical and they wrapped that up in plastic piety. They warped the rituals and rites of faithful life to fit their already arrived at conclusions, ending the search for God in their midst and replacing that search with concrete certainty about God’s nature and how much God approved of exactly what they were doing. They confused grace with privilege and power with identity. It was the world when Jesus came to teach, too. It is the world now. If there is an original sin, something we seem “born into” as human beings, then it is our desire to build higher walls instead of longer tables.
And yet here we are again. Sunday morning, at church, singing some hymns and going through the motions, the rituals, the routine of worship. While God floats all around us, waiting to be heard. One of the things that we have all brought with us into this place, where we are trying to leave those places of fundamentalist certainty, is the idea that we’ll find God here. I have to tell you, I’m not so sure. Don’t get me wrong, I love worship. I work hard at this stuff! This is hours and hours of my week on display every Sunday. And I think you should come…and bring friends! But I have no illusion any longer about what we’re doing here. This is our classroom. We are learning to see differently, learning to hear and smell and touch a different world so that when we do leave this place, we can experience God, who is a treasure waiting to be found. We are tuning our God detectors, so that we might be reminded of what is eternal and good, and how often it clashes with the very values with which we have been raised.
I am not hopeful about the church…the big, capital “C” church. I think that it might be more like the slave, eating and drinking and not aware that the master is dropping by for a visit, a metaphor that Jesus uses to say that we might be in for some trouble. No, I’m not hopeful about the Church. But I am extremely, extravagantly, extraordinarily hopeful about God and God’s ability to bring life from death, to enter into our existence, wake us up, and set us free. That will almost certainly mean the death of the church as we know it because it seems unable to see the map any longer…the map that tells us our best and most faithful action is to care for those who are uncared for, to set the oppressed free and to do our best to align our hearts with God’s heart. Ironically it might be outside the confines of ritual and platitude that we begin a re-alignment through the investment of our time, our resources and our attention…for, as Jesus taught us, where our treasure is, there will our hearts be also.
We are on a journey as followers of Jesus, as a community of Christ. Our climate is peace, our currency is love, and kindness is our law. And to really “walk this walk” requires us to do more than just say the right things. It requires us to do the right things. And, I would also argue, it requires us to say some wrong things…things like love your enemy and welcome the stranger and to choose forgiveness over judgment. Things like “Muslims aren’t terrorists” or “Black Lives Matter.” Those things are wrong in our culture. We must even push back against some of our own traditions, for when ritual and tradition demand that you show your membership card to eat and drink at this table, it must be our requirement, a demand placed upon us, to fling wide the doors and loosen the locks…welcoming everyone who would come to the meal of God’s grace. I have not earned this table, nor have you. This is no place of privilege. It is a place of grace and hope, open to everyone. This will mean, of course, that we might have to sit next to somebody we don’t know yet, or to share food with a person who you have been taught to hate, or maybe to drink from the same cup as your enemy. But we have a term for that in the church, a term that must be resurrected if we are to be relevant any more. We call this the good news.
Come and eat.