“Playing with the Wild Things”, A Sermon preached by The Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, February 26, 2012 at St. Mark’s, Newark, NY
And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. (Mark 1:12-13)
When my children were little one of their favorite books for me to read to them was Maurice Sendak’s classic tale, “Where the Wild Things Are.” In that story, a little boy named Max is sent to his room without his supper by his mother who loses patience one day with his “wild” behavior. As Max sits alone in his room, cut off from family and friends, with no supper to eat, his room becomes at first a forest and then the walls become “the world all around.” Then “an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max and he sailed off through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to where the wild things are.” When Max gets to the place where the wild things are he is confronted with strange creatures who “roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws.” At first Max is frightened by these creatures, but then he shouts at them “BE STILL” and he tames them with a “magic trick of staring into their yellow eyes without blinking once and they were frightened and called him the most wild thing of all and made him king of all wild things.” I could not help but think of Sendak’s wild things when I read Mark’s gospel account of Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness. “He was with the wild beasts and the angels waited on him.”
In Mark’s gospel, the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness follows immediately after the story of his baptism in the River Jordan by John the Baptist, where, upon coming up out of the water, Jesus sees the Holy Spirit descending like a dove upon him and hears the heavenly voice proclaim, “You are my son, the Beloved. With you I am well pleased.” Mark tells us that “immediately” after that voice came from heaven the Spirit “drove” him out to the wilderness where for forty days he was tempted by Satan. And he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. Mark’s rendition of this story is spare yet powerful. Where Matthew and Luke tell us that the Spirit led Jesus to the wilderness, Mark says he was driven there. Where Matthew and Luke tell us specifically how Satan tempted Jesus Mark tells us only that he was in the wilderness forty days with the wild beasts and angels. We have no idea what that experience was like for Jesus but we do know that he was alone, in a place filled with wild things. Mark gives us a different angle on the wilderness experience and one that bears reflection as we begin another Lent.
Our Old Testament reading today from Genesis takes us again to the place of chaos and wild things. When the waters of the great flood covered the earth, Noah and his family survived that watery holocaust closed in the ark along with the wild beasts of every kind, clean and unclean. One can only imagine what that voyage must have felt like to its human passengers, encased in that ark, tossed about on the stormy waters of the flood accompanied by all the beasts, birds and creatures of every kind. Talk about confronting wild things! Noah and family had no choice but to look into the eyes of the wild beasts of creation and learn to live with them. Somehow they managed to survive living cheek to jowl with mountain lions and grizzly bears, rabbits and iguanas. And when that perilous journey was over, they emerged into the open air to the resplendence of the rainbow in the sky, the sign of God’s covenant with them.
We begin our Lenten observance with two powerful stories that offer us a vivid metaphor for our Lenten journey. Learning to live with the chaos and to befriend the “wild things” in our culture and our own personal lives is a worthy endeavor for this special season. With Mark’s version of the wilderness sojourn and the story of Noah and the ark as models for our Lenten observance we could take these forty days of Lent to go alone into our own personal wildernesses and spend time with the wild beasts and the angels that await us there. Perhaps life has already driven you to the wilderness, in which case your Lenten observance is right at your fingertips. If you’re not in a personal desert time right now, Lent is an opportunity to make the time for some serious introspection and self-examination, to go deep and find the wild beasts who challenge you in your life so that you can befriend them and go to Easter strengthened by the serenity that befriending the wild things brings with it.
In our comfortable middle class American way of life, we rarely allow the chaos and wildness of God’s creation to invade our reality. We live in heated and air conditioned homes, with electric lights to see by, and refrigerators to keep food cool and stoves to cook it on without serious effort on our part. We live in a well ordered society and those of us in this area have the luxury of being able to live in a place that is safe and where we can walk streets and neighborhoods without fear. We don’t really want to confront “wild things” whether they be in the form of external realities that are scary like people who are different from us or who challenge us, or diseases that grip our mortal bodies and do their relentless destruction, or whether they be internal wild things like our own fears, frustrations, anger, grief, loneliness or even despair. During Lent, however, we are invited to walk into the wilderness and live with the wild things for awhile.
What is compelling about the two Biblical stories of spending time with the wild things is that both Noah and his family, and Jesus appear to have been able to somehow befriend and co-exist with the wild beasts. Noah and his family were living through a time of complete destruction and chaos as the entire world was awash in the raging waters of the flood, and somehow in the midst of that chaos, they managed to survive along with the wild things God had also created and wanted to save. Notice that God did not want the wild things to be destroyed – indeed God went to great lengths to be sure they survived. In the wilderness, Jesus had to survive in a place without shelter, subjected to the intense heat of the day and the deep cold of desert nights, where flash floods and winds can erupt at any time, with no warning. This is not a climate hospitable to human habitation, so Jesus had to survive using his own inner resources and, presumably learning from the wild beasts how to weather the desert climate. There is no suggestion in Mark’s account that the wild beasts were necessarily dangerous for Jesus, simply that he had to co-exist with them.
Lent is a time for us to go to the wilderness of our own lives and live with the wild beasts that reside there. Each of us has a different version of the wilderness. For some it is depression, for some grief, for others anxiety or stress, still others fear for themselves or loved ones. For some the wilderness is a place where they are trying desperately to keep the wind and elements from blowing away the precariously built sand castle of their lives. These are folks who have so denied the pain and struggles of their own existence that they have completely shut themselves off emotionally from their families, friends, and neighbors and their own inner selves. For some the wilderness is loneliness, for others the diminished capacity of advancing years. Whatever form your wilderness takes, Lent is a time to consider befriending the beasts that reside there because those beasts are not going anywhere and you will find more peace by learning to live with them than by fighting them.
In the Sendak story, little Max first stares the wild things into submission, then becomes their king. Once he has put himself in a place where the wild things are not ruling him but he rules them, he is able to let them be wild. He plays with them. “Let the wild rumpus start!” he shouts and the book shows pictures of Max and the beasts living it up. When we truly confront the wild beasts of our own wilderness, we too can befriend them and then let them have their day. It’s when we try to avoid those beasts, when we try to deny their existence that we remain captive. One cannot get over grief, one has to live through it, embrace it even. Anyone who has ever been through the twelve-step process will tell you that you don’t overcome addiction by pretending it isn’t there. It’s only when the addict looks it in the face and embraces it as a destructive reality that it begins to lose its power over the person. A troubled or difficult relationship is rarely strengthened by avoiding the real issues between people. It’s only when those issues are brought into the open and stared down, through painful hard work sometimes, that they lose their ability to corrode the relationship and love between two people.
The important thing to remember about this sometimes painful wilderness sojourn to which we are called in Lent is that although it may be a solitary journey it does not have to be a lonely one. Each of us must do our own interior work to confront and befriend our own wild beasts. In the Sendak tale, Max doesn’t get to the place of the wild things until he is sent away by himself into his room. While he’s busy playing, he doesn’t find the wild things. We do not do that interior work alone, however. Each one of us is God’s beloved child in whom God is well pleased. When we embrace that foundation of love on which we rest, we enter the wilderness confident that angels will be there to care for us amidst the beasts. God protected Noah and his family even as God ensured the continued existence of the “wild things” and then God sent the rainbow as a symbol of God’s never-failing love and commitment to all God’s creatures. In the Sendak story, after Max cavorts with the wild things, he gets in his ship and sails back into “the night of his very own room where he found his supper waiting for him.”
When we return from our Lenten wilderness sojourn, supper will be waiting for us in the paschal feast on Easter Day. In the meantime, let us journey this Lent to “where the wild things are.”
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Friday, February 3, 2012
Epiphany 4B, 2012
“No Stumbling Blocks in Church” , A Sermon preached by the Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, January 29, 2012 at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Newark, NY
But take care that this liberty of yours does not become a stumbling block to the weak. (1 Cor. 8:9)
It is a busy weekday in the Greek city of Corinth circa 54 CE. In the temples of Apollo and Mithras, and of the Emperor and his family, devotees bring animals to be sacrificed ritually upon the altars, an offering to the gods in thanksgiving for blessings bestowed or for healing or for prosperity and good fortune. In the synagogues the Jews gather three times a day for their daily prayers. In the Jewish sections of the city, the market teems with stalls selling fruit, vegetables and meat butchered according to the dietary laws of the Jewish Torah. The Jewish Christians gather for daily prayers before going to their respective jobs, and on Sundays gather early in the homes of some of the more prominent of their members to share a meal, and enact the ritual of the Lord’s Supper, breaking bread and blessing wine and “sharing in the Lord’s death until he comes” before dispersing to their varied occupations. Paul is a tentmaker, and when he’s not preaching or spreading the gospel of the Risen Christ to any who will listen, he is busy making and selling tents to keep himself afloat.
The Christians are a growing sect within Judaism in this busy metropolitan Greek city under Roman rule. Paul is an effective evangelist, pulling in many new converts from those devotees of Apollo or Mithras or the Emperor. Word has it that the Christian community is suffering from some internal discord and Paul is kept busy instructing them in appropriate behavior towards one another, particularly those who are new to the Christian faith. Apparently, many Christians in Corinth routinely buy and consume the meat leftover from the sacrifices at the temples of Apollo and Mithras and the Emperor, as that meat is plentiful and tasty and readily available in the town market. Some among the Christian sect seem offended by this practice, while others see no reason not to eat the perfectly good meat especially as it is affordable and easily procured on a daily basis. They could care less that it was offered on some so-called “religious” altar, since they are so firm in their commitment to the One God whom they worship and the Lord Jesus Christ from whom they take their name. To them the meat is simply food, not something with any religious significance whatsoever.
On the other hand, there are some new Christians, recently converted from the Greco-Roman religions, who are reluctant to eat this meat because they recognize it as meat that has religious significance in the traditions of Apollo and others. Now that they have converted to the new Christian religion they find themselves feeling confused and torn as they remember with some fondness the religious rituals and practices of their youth, even as they embrace this new religion and its ritual of the bread and wine. The growing Christian community has had to contend with a number of issues with respect to converts. It has been decided that non-Jews who convert to this sect don’t have to undergo circumcision, but the issue of what to do about food offered to the Greco-Roman gods in the holy temples continues to cause considerable controversy. Apparently, members of this new sect have nearly come to blows on this thorny issue. Paul is twisting himself into a pretzel to try to bring the warring sides of this controversy to the table in some amicable fashion. On some days he’s more successful than on others. The Corinthian Christians are a conflict-ridden bunch and they don’t seem particularly eager to come to the dialogue table and resolve their differences. Those who see no problem with eating the meat sacrificed to Apollo do not see any reason to incur extra expense or go to greater lengths to acquire kosher meat, just to appease the new converts who are uncomfortable with the ritually slaughtered meat. They either don’t care or don’t recognize that their cavalier attitude to the ritual meat is causing significant pain to others in their Christian community.
Fast forward 2000+ years: The Christian community in the Northern Hemisphere is now the majority religion in a pluralistic environment where there are people from many different religious traditions living side by side in a bustling 21st century society. In the United States, a recent Gallup poll finds that fully 82% of people call themselves Christian, although a huge percentage of those people do not actively practice the religion. The numbers of people who designate themselves as “unaffiliated” has risen dramatically in the past 50 years, and secularism pervades the culture. Materialism and nationalism are heavy influences on the value systems by which most people live and the spirit of rugged individualism is pervasive in American culture.
While the Christian religious tradition is the religion of the empire, Christianity itself is now widely diverse, having split into hundreds of different denominations as conflicts like that early one in Corinth ultimately led to separation and division when warring factions simply could not come to agreement on the many issues that divided them. The older, “mainline” Christian denominations are in decline, struggling to retain members and desperate to determine how to attract new members. By and large, the younger generation of adults, those in their 20s and 30s are absent from Christian churches, particularly those in the mainline traditions. Evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity has become a significant political force in the United States in the past thirty years, and many of those churches are thriving, often buying into the cultural embrace of materialism and nationalism, preaching a “prosperity gospel” that encourages the quest for wealth and affluence as signs of God’s favor.
In Corinth the controversy over food sacrificed to idols tore the community apart. In 21st century America Christian communities struggle over different issues of inclusion and religious practice, such as:
Should the church help undocumented immigrants working in the local community when they are threatened with arrest or deportation and should Christians work for immigration law reform to protect those undocumented workers?;
How can the Christian community atone for centuries of complicity in racism and become an active force in eradicating racism within its own ranks and in the communities where the churches do their ministry?
Should the church exercise its tradition of radical hospitality by reaching out in friendship to Muslim brothers and sisters at a time when Islamophobia is rampant in the culture and popular media, creating a climate of hate and mistrust that is damaging to the larger community and to national security?
Should gay and lesbian people be ordained and should their relationships be blessed by the church?;
Is it permissible to offer communion to unbaptized people, is it permissible to offer grape juice along with wine at communion, how can we introduce inclusive language for God into our liturgy?
In the church at Corinth, Paul confronted a controversy that at its core was about behaviors and attitudes among those in the Christian community that were likely to tear at the fabric of Christian community and that might get in the way of some believers being able to maintain their connection with God. Paul encouraged the Corinthian Christians to behave in ways that provided a safety net for the weakest among them, admonishing those who were more mature in the faith to make space for those who needed more help to live into their Christian faith with integrity. Paul reminded them that “knowledge puffs up but love builds up” encouraging them to act first out of love and not to get too hung up on what they thought they knew, or understood or believed. Paul firmly believed that love would be the glue that would hold the diverse body of believers together, not agreement on doctrine or theological propositions of one kind or other. For Paul, it was more important that Christians be loving than that they prove to themselves or anyone else that they were right.
Paul begins his preaching on love in this part of the letter, and he goes on to write an outstanding hymn to love a few chapters later. The love of which Paul speaks is not a sticky sweet, fuzzy Hallmark card kind of love by any means. Love, as Paul understands it, is love that takes us to the cross, that calls us to sacrifice our own ego, our own impulses, needs and desires for the good of God’s kingdom, so that we become compassionate lovers of humanity in our broken world. We are called to love even those we dislike, those who repulse us, those who push our buttons and drive us crazy. When human conflicts erupt it is important for each of us to remember “it’s not about you” and then to take the conflict into our prayer time, offering ourselves and our adversaries to God’s grace and wisdom. In Christian community rugged individualism has no place. Personal freedom and liberty is tempered by the command to love the neighbor.
In Christian community and in the world beyond our church we are called to take people as we find them, to love and nurture them as whole people of God, respecting the dignity of every human being in their full humanity. Paul is quite clear with the Corinthians that believers in Christ are to bend over backwards not to become a stumbling block to the weak. If something we say or do gets in the way of someone else’s relationship with God, we need to think twice about what we’re doing. My guess is that if Christians throughout the ages had listened to Paul’s advice more closely we might not be suffering the decline in attendance that we are seeing in our modern church. Our contemplative tradition is full of spiritual practices that we can each take on, practices like meditation, contemplative prayer, intercessory prayer, regular self-examination and confession, the Jesus prayer, that help us become the kind of loving Christians that Paul envisioned. Sadly, Christians have all too often become stumbling blocks to others and to themselves and the result is fractured community and declining participation.
Life in Christian community will always be fraught with controversies and conflicts. It is inherent in our humanity. How we handle conflict and controversy is what marks us as faithful disciples of the Risen Christ. Paul gives us a good measuring rod – “Take care that this liberty of yours does not become a stumbling block to the weak.” The highways of life’s journey are full of stumbling blocks. Our baptism calls us to get out on the road and join the crew removing as many of those barriers as we can so the love of God in Christ can flow freely into our broken world through us and through our way of loving in the world. Amen.
Sunday, December 11, 2011
A Time to Dream
“A Time to Dream”, A Sermon preached by The Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, December 11, 2011 at NPEM, New York
When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, then were we like those who dream.
Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy. (Psalm 126)
“The dreamers are the saviors of the world.” So writes spiritual author James Allen in his book entitled, As A Man Thinketh. Dreaming is Advent work. As we prepare for the coming of God into our hearts, as we prepare in the wilderness a highway for our God we are invited to dream, to reach for the stars, to envision a whole new world, a new creation. This is after all, what the biblical writers are talking about when they talk of the second coming of Christ. This is what the waiting and expectation of Advent is all about.
Dreams are funny things. Fantastic and uncontrolled, often weird, always uninhibited, dreams carry a power many of us would like to discount if only we could. The Bible consistently maintains that God speaks to humans through their dreams, and the insights of depth psychology, particularly Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung confirm that dreams connect human beings with a dimension and realm of reality with which we are often out of touch in our waking lives. Carl Jung believes that when we dream, many of the images that come to us are part of what he called the collective unconscious, that is, they come not only from our own personal life experiences, but actually originate in the collective memory and experience of all of humanity. Archetype is his word for the fundamental images that speak to all human beings throughout history and that actually connect humans to the divine realm. There are a number of archetypal images that appear in human dreams and a Jungian analysis of a dream would include reference to those archetypes and what they mean, not only for the individual but for the individual in his or her social context. The spiritual realm where God resides becomes available to us when we dream, when our unconscious is able to tap into the stream of energy flowing from God without the filter of our conscious inhibitions and fears.
Then there are those waking dreams, those flights of imagination and creativity that have spurred humankind on, that have led peoples and civilizations into new and exciting futures. Where would the world be without the dreamers? Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, the Wright brothers, Beethoven, Mozart, Michaelangelo…all the composers, sculptors, poets, prophets, sages, scientists, politicians throughout history whose genius and creativity turned the world around. James Allen describes these people as “the architects of heaven, the makers of the after-world. The world is beautiful because they have lived; without them laboring humanity would perish.”
The prophet Isaiah was a dreamer of this sort. In Isaiah 61 he speaks to a people returning from exile, a people returning to a home that has been ravaged and destroyed, that is in ruins. The Israelites returned to Jerusalem after their exile in Babylon but their homes, their temple, their city had been destroyed. The prophet speaks words of vision to them, he paints a picture of a future in which their city will be rebuilt, their temple restored and the righteousness decreed in their covenant with Yahweh will be seen by all nations, for whom they will be a guiding light. To an oppressed people these were visions of hope and glory that must have been hard to believe, even though they were welcome pictures of what might be, of the future that could be theirs.
John the Baptist was another of these visionary dreamers who point the way to the future that God is making for God’s people. The author of John’s gospel tells us that he was sent to “testify to the light” – the light of God that was to come after him. His words were words not only of repentance, calling people to turn around and live their lives differently, but they were also words of hope. Dreamers always talk like that – they have hope even in the face of hopelessness and despair. I think of all those years that Nelson Mandela languished in prison, never losing sight of the dream that someday apartheid would end in South Africa. I think of all those rebuilding lives in the Joplin, Mississippi, or Japan or Turkey, after this year’s spate of natural disasters. Those who can see a future in the midst of rubble and destruction are the ones infused with the dreams of God. Today we are paying tribute to the first responders in our community – police, ambulance, firefighters, EMTs - those who rush to the scene of disaster and mayhem and immediately begin to live the dream that out of the pain and chaos of accident, crime, disease or disaster, new life and new creation can indeed emerge. First responders are their own special kind of dreamers without whom our communities could not weather the travails of human life.
Those who dream dreams are those who cling to hope, even when the facts before them suggest that their hope is futile. Those who dream dreams are willing to try something new, to take risks, to experiment and be unconventional. They are willing to be ridiculed and laughed at, derided and put down, because they are tuned into a different frequency from the rest of the world –they are tuned into what God is doing to make the new creation that God so wants for the world and so they act accordingly. Without the dreamers, humankind would still be living in caves.
In our world today we desperately need dreamers. We need those who are willing to say that violence and war are not the answer to aggression and terrorism, that preferencing the wealthy over the poor and the middle class is not the way to bolster the economy and put millions of unemployed back to work, those who say that all people in our nation are deserving of quality health care, education and safe neighborhoods. We need the dreamers to help us find environmentally sustainable ways to live on this earth. It is the dreamers of history who have always been especially attuned to the whispers of the Holy Spirit. The dreamers of the world are those who understand the old adage that declares insanity to be doing things the same way and expecting a different result.
Being one who dreams also means being someone who does not fall prey to cynicism. Jesus reminded us that to enter the kingdom of heaven one needs to approach it like a child. The childlike ability to be open to the twists and turns of imagination and fantasy is an important quality to nurture as part of a mature spirituality. The story we celebrate in two weeks is not a story of a God who cares much about how things have always been done. God is always calling us forward to new things, a new creation, a brighter vision.
Being a dreamer is important for all of us who are people of faith, even if we are not called to invent the next light bulb, or discover the cure for cancer, or find the secret to achieving peace in the Middle East and even when we don’t actually live in exile or find ourselves imprisoned. To live abundantly as Christ calls us to do requires that we be willing to dream. When we’re stuck in a rut, or weighed down by life’s travails, it is the ability to dream that will connect us with God and impel us into a brighter future. Whether we’re struggling to find a job in this tough economy, or trying to work through problems in a marriage or with a child, or fighting a chronic illness, it is the ability to envision a different future, a brighter future and to believe deep down in the reality of that dream that keeps us going and enables us to endure and thrive.
Dreaming is an important part of congregational life too. Vibrant and healthy churches are communities that dare to dream, to take risks, go out on a limb, to reach out to their world in new ways. Nothing that is alive and thriving fails to dream. Dreaming is crucial for staying connected with God, and with the ever moving Holy Spirit that enlivens us for doing God’s will in our world. The visions of the prophet Isaiah could only be achieved when the Israelites took hold of the dream and worked to make it a reality. We need the dreamers of the world to tell us their visions, and then we all need to jump at those visions and work to make them reality.
“Rejoice always, pray without ceasing…do not quench the spirit” writes Paul to the church of Thessalonica. He urges them to stay attuned to God’s spirit as that spirit informs and enlivens their daily lives. Do not quench the spirit. Those are good words to remember in this holy season as we approach the festive celebration of the birth of God into the world.
“To desire is to obtain; to aspire is to achieve….Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become. Your Vision is the promise of what you shall one day be; your Ideal is the prophecy of what you shall at last unveil. The greatest achievement was at first and for a time a dream. The oak sleeps in the acorn; the bird waits in the egg; and in the highest vision of the soul a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of reality.” (James Allen, As A Man Thinketh)
Dreams are the seedlings of reality. Advent is a time of waiting and a time for dreaming, a time for envisioning a new future that is within our grasp. As the psalmist says, “then were we like those who dream. Then was our mouth filled with laughter and our tongues with shouts of joy.” In these last two weeks of Advent 2011 what dreams will we dream? What new reality will we envision for ourselves, our families, this church community and our nation as we enter a new year together? Advent is the season for dreamers, it is a time to dream. Between now and Christmas, on these long, cold winter nights, I wish you sweet dreams.
Amen.
Comfort in Exile
“Comfort in Exile,” a Sermon preached by The Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, December 4, 2011 at St. John’s Church, Sodus, New York
Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, her penalty is paid…(Isaiah 40:1-2)
4John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.(Mark 1:4)
Finley Peter Dunne, American journalist and author of the early 20th century is credited with coining the phrase about journalism that it entails “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.” Between the words of the Prophet Isaiah and the words of John the Baptist, our lectionary texts this week do a very good job of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. Thanks to Handel’s Messiah, many Christians are familiar with the section of Isaiah’s text that we heard today. And every year on this Second Sunday of Advent we encounter wild and wooly John the Baptist, appearing in the wilderness offering his baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, clothed in camel’s hair and munching on his locusts and wild honey. During this Advent season of waiting and expectation, of longing for the coming of God’s reign in our world, we are offered the tender words of the prophet as a soothing reminder to God’s people that despite all the vagaries and travails of human life, “the word of our God stands forever.” They are words of hope and comfort to a world aching for the inbreaking of God. And we are exhorted by John the Baptist to re-order our life priorities in order to “prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”
It is a well known fact that many people find this holiday season emotionally and psychologically difficult. People who are living with serious illness, those who have lost loved ones in the past year or who continue to grieve a significant loss, those who are experiencing crises in their intimate relationships, those who suffer from addiction all find this season of forced merriment and celebration hard to take. In the tough economic times in which we live, those families enduring prolonged periods of unemployment face a season of overspending and consumerism that only serves to intensify their economic distress as they struggle to put food on the table and pay the rent while everyone and everything around them screams “spend, spend, spend!” CNN reported a poll this week which indicated that 35% of Americans dread the holiday season because they dislike the social imperative to have to be nice and cheerful for the entire month even when they don’t feel like it and most especially those for whom life is very difficult, sad or stressful.
In Advent, the prophet Isaiah sends us words of comfort and promise, words of hope. G.K. Chesterton once observed that words of hope mean little to those who have never known hopelessness and I imagine that is true. I wonder, however, if there is anyone alive who has not known hopelessness at some point in their life’s journey. We all have emotional aches, places of emptiness and loneliness, places of despair and desolation. Those places of emptiness and desolation become more pronounced in this season of short days and long nights, especially when they contrast so poignantly with the required merriment of the season. Isaiah’s words of hope and comfort, coupled with John the Baptist’s call to reorientation of our life priorities provide a welcome antidote to the false joy of our secular season.
If you’re fortunate enough to be in a place in your life where experiences of despair and emptiness are not paramount, just look at the daily news and you’ll get more than enough to send you there. Sex scandals breaking out at university sports departments and the Republican candidate races, the debt crisis fueling fears among investors and eroding trust in banks, violence erupting in Egypt as elections continue in that country that so recently saw a peaceful revolution, American Airlines goes into bankruptcy, British public workers stage a nation wide strike protesting cuts in pension benefits, the Occupy Wall Street movement continues in the wake of violent clashes with police in various cities, most significantly this week in Los Angeles. Unrest, un-ease, financial worries, polarized politics, violence and war, not to mention the aftermath all over the world from months of natural disasters –earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires that have devastated communities in our country and around the world in this calendar year. We go into this holiday season with more than enough trials and tribulations of human life to keep us grounded in clouds of worry and fear. And into the midst of this world, come the words of Isaiah and John the Baptist.
The prophet known as Second Isaiah was speaking to the ancient Israelites during the time of their exile in Babylon. They had been sent away to Babylon when the first temple in Jerusalem was destroyed and they spent forty years in exile, away from their homeland. Oddly enough, over the decades of exile, many of the exiled Israelites adapted to life in Babylon and were not eager to go back to Jerusalem when the opportunity arose, where they would have to rebuild their temple and their pre-exilic way of life. Some of them had grown comfortable in exile and the rigors of the journey home did not much appeal.
Being comfortable in exile. An interesting paradox. On the one hand the prophet utters words of soothing comfort, and yet at the same time calls the people out of the comfort of their exile into the challenges of going home to Jerusalem, the holy city where they had known God. Jerusalem is a metaphor for that holy place where the reign of God is realized. In Advent we await the coming of God into our world. In a sense we too are called on a journey home, home to the heart of God. Journeying home to the heart of God may or may not be a comfortable trip. At least comfort in the sense of familiarity and ease and predictability. Just look at the imagery Isaiah uses. Valleys being lifted up and mountains brought down does not suggest that the journey will be a stroll. The breath of God withering the grass is also not particularly calming imagery. And yet, the prophet promises that God will “gather the lambs in his arms and carry them at his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.”
Advent is a season for we who have become too comfortable in exile to reconsider the promises of our God and muster up the hope required to live as if those promises will be fulfilled. The secular culture in which we live is a place of exile for many of us. As we live through this month of conspicuous consumerism, we know that something is awry. Despite the slick ads on television and the internet, new gadgets and do-dads will not bring the joy and happiness that the gospel of consumerism promises. Yet it is easy to fall prey to the frenzy of the season, to get sucked into the mass marketing blitz and lose touch with promise and hope of Advent.
The prophets Isaiah and John the Baptist call out in the wilderness of our modern lives, reminding us that so long as we remain captive to the values of materialism, success and greed we are in exile. The comforts we take for granted are false comforts, as fleeting as that grass that withers, something many of our brothers and sisters in Joplin, Mississippi, and Turkey, Texas and Japan learned the hard way this year. Going home to God, to the holy city Jerusalem takes us from exile into the promised land. As John the Baptist reminds us, we cannot do that without turning around, turning away from the temptations of our secular culture and back to the covenant with God. Those early Judeans went out to John the Baptist in the wilderness and got immersed in the waters of the Jordan as the first step back to a life lived with and for God.
It’s no wonder that so many people feel depressed during this season. In many ways that is a healthy reaction to the denial that our secular culture shoves down our throats every December. Advent makes much more emotional sense and is more true to human experience. We long for deliverance from war and violence, from poverty and social injustice, from addictions, debt, illness and loneliness. We long for God to come into our world and the only way to help that happen is for us to leave the comfort of our exile and be the hands of God in this world. Our God is a God of comfort. God comforts us in the dark nights of our prayer and in the ear of a friend over coffee. God comforts us in the hand held at the deathbed and the chicken soup delivered when the flu hits. God comforts the victims of disasters in the money sent for relief, the relief workers who rush to bring immediate help and the people dedicated to long term rebuilding.
This Advent, there are many exiles in the world in need of comfort. Relief agencies and charities of all kinds cry out for donations and contributions as the calendar year comes to a close. “Alternative gift catalogues” are widely available, offering us the opportunity to spend our holiday money giving food, animals, microloans, medical and educational tools to people all over the world who live in poverty. I visited Thailand, Laos and Cambodia this past summer and saw firsthand how far the American dollar can go in these developing countries where the things we take for granted here – running water, electricity, public education, quality medical and dental care – are beyond the reach of thousands of people in remote villages mired in poverty. In the midst of the holiday spending orgy, those of us who honor Advent can make a point of making additional donations to organizations that bring comfort to those in need.
Comfort, comfort ye my people says your God. In this season of preparation and waiting, expectation and hope let us live Advent in all its haunting beauty. Let us bring comfort to those we live and work with as we seek comfort in the arms of our loving God. Advent is about hope in the face of despair, light breaking into winter darkness, joy returning to lives marked by sorrow and grief. It is about leaving even the comfort of exile to make our way to God’s promised land. It is about the journey from exile across the desert on a highway paved by God. Advent is one of the most precious gifts we have in this season of gift giving. Let us live into it with gratitude.
Amen.
Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, her penalty is paid…(Isaiah 40:1-2)
4John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.(Mark 1:4)
Finley Peter Dunne, American journalist and author of the early 20th century is credited with coining the phrase about journalism that it entails “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.” Between the words of the Prophet Isaiah and the words of John the Baptist, our lectionary texts this week do a very good job of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. Thanks to Handel’s Messiah, many Christians are familiar with the section of Isaiah’s text that we heard today. And every year on this Second Sunday of Advent we encounter wild and wooly John the Baptist, appearing in the wilderness offering his baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, clothed in camel’s hair and munching on his locusts and wild honey. During this Advent season of waiting and expectation, of longing for the coming of God’s reign in our world, we are offered the tender words of the prophet as a soothing reminder to God’s people that despite all the vagaries and travails of human life, “the word of our God stands forever.” They are words of hope and comfort to a world aching for the inbreaking of God. And we are exhorted by John the Baptist to re-order our life priorities in order to “prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”
It is a well known fact that many people find this holiday season emotionally and psychologically difficult. People who are living with serious illness, those who have lost loved ones in the past year or who continue to grieve a significant loss, those who are experiencing crises in their intimate relationships, those who suffer from addiction all find this season of forced merriment and celebration hard to take. In the tough economic times in which we live, those families enduring prolonged periods of unemployment face a season of overspending and consumerism that only serves to intensify their economic distress as they struggle to put food on the table and pay the rent while everyone and everything around them screams “spend, spend, spend!” CNN reported a poll this week which indicated that 35% of Americans dread the holiday season because they dislike the social imperative to have to be nice and cheerful for the entire month even when they don’t feel like it and most especially those for whom life is very difficult, sad or stressful.
In Advent, the prophet Isaiah sends us words of comfort and promise, words of hope. G.K. Chesterton once observed that words of hope mean little to those who have never known hopelessness and I imagine that is true. I wonder, however, if there is anyone alive who has not known hopelessness at some point in their life’s journey. We all have emotional aches, places of emptiness and loneliness, places of despair and desolation. Those places of emptiness and desolation become more pronounced in this season of short days and long nights, especially when they contrast so poignantly with the required merriment of the season. Isaiah’s words of hope and comfort, coupled with John the Baptist’s call to reorientation of our life priorities provide a welcome antidote to the false joy of our secular season.
If you’re fortunate enough to be in a place in your life where experiences of despair and emptiness are not paramount, just look at the daily news and you’ll get more than enough to send you there. Sex scandals breaking out at university sports departments and the Republican candidate races, the debt crisis fueling fears among investors and eroding trust in banks, violence erupting in Egypt as elections continue in that country that so recently saw a peaceful revolution, American Airlines goes into bankruptcy, British public workers stage a nation wide strike protesting cuts in pension benefits, the Occupy Wall Street movement continues in the wake of violent clashes with police in various cities, most significantly this week in Los Angeles. Unrest, un-ease, financial worries, polarized politics, violence and war, not to mention the aftermath all over the world from months of natural disasters –earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires that have devastated communities in our country and around the world in this calendar year. We go into this holiday season with more than enough trials and tribulations of human life to keep us grounded in clouds of worry and fear. And into the midst of this world, come the words of Isaiah and John the Baptist.
The prophet known as Second Isaiah was speaking to the ancient Israelites during the time of their exile in Babylon. They had been sent away to Babylon when the first temple in Jerusalem was destroyed and they spent forty years in exile, away from their homeland. Oddly enough, over the decades of exile, many of the exiled Israelites adapted to life in Babylon and were not eager to go back to Jerusalem when the opportunity arose, where they would have to rebuild their temple and their pre-exilic way of life. Some of them had grown comfortable in exile and the rigors of the journey home did not much appeal.
Being comfortable in exile. An interesting paradox. On the one hand the prophet utters words of soothing comfort, and yet at the same time calls the people out of the comfort of their exile into the challenges of going home to Jerusalem, the holy city where they had known God. Jerusalem is a metaphor for that holy place where the reign of God is realized. In Advent we await the coming of God into our world. In a sense we too are called on a journey home, home to the heart of God. Journeying home to the heart of God may or may not be a comfortable trip. At least comfort in the sense of familiarity and ease and predictability. Just look at the imagery Isaiah uses. Valleys being lifted up and mountains brought down does not suggest that the journey will be a stroll. The breath of God withering the grass is also not particularly calming imagery. And yet, the prophet promises that God will “gather the lambs in his arms and carry them at his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.”
Advent is a season for we who have become too comfortable in exile to reconsider the promises of our God and muster up the hope required to live as if those promises will be fulfilled. The secular culture in which we live is a place of exile for many of us. As we live through this month of conspicuous consumerism, we know that something is awry. Despite the slick ads on television and the internet, new gadgets and do-dads will not bring the joy and happiness that the gospel of consumerism promises. Yet it is easy to fall prey to the frenzy of the season, to get sucked into the mass marketing blitz and lose touch with promise and hope of Advent.
The prophets Isaiah and John the Baptist call out in the wilderness of our modern lives, reminding us that so long as we remain captive to the values of materialism, success and greed we are in exile. The comforts we take for granted are false comforts, as fleeting as that grass that withers, something many of our brothers and sisters in Joplin, Mississippi, and Turkey, Texas and Japan learned the hard way this year. Going home to God, to the holy city Jerusalem takes us from exile into the promised land. As John the Baptist reminds us, we cannot do that without turning around, turning away from the temptations of our secular culture and back to the covenant with God. Those early Judeans went out to John the Baptist in the wilderness and got immersed in the waters of the Jordan as the first step back to a life lived with and for God.
It’s no wonder that so many people feel depressed during this season. In many ways that is a healthy reaction to the denial that our secular culture shoves down our throats every December. Advent makes much more emotional sense and is more true to human experience. We long for deliverance from war and violence, from poverty and social injustice, from addictions, debt, illness and loneliness. We long for God to come into our world and the only way to help that happen is for us to leave the comfort of our exile and be the hands of God in this world. Our God is a God of comfort. God comforts us in the dark nights of our prayer and in the ear of a friend over coffee. God comforts us in the hand held at the deathbed and the chicken soup delivered when the flu hits. God comforts the victims of disasters in the money sent for relief, the relief workers who rush to bring immediate help and the people dedicated to long term rebuilding.
This Advent, there are many exiles in the world in need of comfort. Relief agencies and charities of all kinds cry out for donations and contributions as the calendar year comes to a close. “Alternative gift catalogues” are widely available, offering us the opportunity to spend our holiday money giving food, animals, microloans, medical and educational tools to people all over the world who live in poverty. I visited Thailand, Laos and Cambodia this past summer and saw firsthand how far the American dollar can go in these developing countries where the things we take for granted here – running water, electricity, public education, quality medical and dental care – are beyond the reach of thousands of people in remote villages mired in poverty. In the midst of the holiday spending orgy, those of us who honor Advent can make a point of making additional donations to organizations that bring comfort to those in need.
Comfort, comfort ye my people says your God. In this season of preparation and waiting, expectation and hope let us live Advent in all its haunting beauty. Let us bring comfort to those we live and work with as we seek comfort in the arms of our loving God. Advent is about hope in the face of despair, light breaking into winter darkness, joy returning to lives marked by sorrow and grief. It is about leaving even the comfort of exile to make our way to God’s promised land. It is about the journey from exile across the desert on a highway paved by God. Advent is one of the most precious gifts we have in this season of gift giving. Let us live into it with gratitude.
Amen.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Waiting for God
“Waiting for God”, A Sermon preached by The Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, November 27, 2011 at NPEM, New York
35Therefore, keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, 36or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. 37And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.”(Mark 13:35-37)
Today begins the liturgical season of Advent, probably my very favorite season of the liturgical year. Advent, these four weeks leading up to the celebration of Christmas is probably one of the times I most feel the disconnect between our modern culture and my Christian faith. As the secular world begins to celebrate Christmas, with decorations and lights, Christmas trees, wreaths and Christmas muzac filling the air, we change the altar colors to blue and sing songs of longing and waiting and expectation, songs that speak of the end of the world and of the coming of God into the world at the end of time. It is the beginning of a new year in the Church and we speak of the end of time. Beginnings and endings are all of a piece in Advent. In these weeks before we celebrate the nativity of Jesus of Nazareth we look forward to the end of the world as we know it, with a mixture of hope and dread.
The passage from Mark’s gospel this morning is known as the “little Apocalypse” with its ominous portents of the end of life as we know it, the sun darkened, the moon failing to give light, stars falling from heaven. In the portion of the gospel that immediately precedes what we heard this morning, Jesus warns his followers of the signs that the end-times are coming. False prophets and false messiahs will arise, wars and rumors of wars will abound, his followers will be handed over to authorities to be persecuted and flogged, parents and children will be set against one another – all manner of bad things will be happening, and those will all be signs of the end-times approaching. But then, he says, after giving us all these signposts to watch for, only God knows when the end will come so all we can do is watch and wait. The tension that the early church was beginning to feel between its belief in an imminent return of Christ and the reality that the time wasn’t arriving as soon as they expected it to is reflected in this gospel text. This gospel writer was already starting to do what later Christian writers and theologians would have to do, which is to accept that God is in control of history and that perhaps, God works in ways that humans cannot predict or fathom. Only God knows how the world will end so we need to quit trying to predict the unpredictable and adopt an attitude of expectant watchfulness.
Advent, contrary to popular belief, is not simply about getting ready for Christmas by shopping, baking, entertaining and indulging in an orgy of consumerism and bacchanalian partying. It is about quiet, watchful waiting. Waiting for God to be born in our hearts, waiting for God’s kingdom to break into our world, waiting for the fulfillment of our highest dreams and aspirations as individuals and communities, dreams of a world marked by peace and justice, a world in which hunger and homelessness and disease do not claim so many human lives.
Waiting is something that we 21st century folk have become unaccustomed to doing. We are increasingly impatient and desirous of instant and immediate gratification. With cellphones and computers, high speed internet access, digital photography, microwaveable dinners and other technological wonders, we no longer have to wait for anything. Waiting is its own form of spiritual discipline and one that has almost been lost in modern life. On the few occasions in life where it is still unavoidable, many of us find it excruciating. Whether it is waiting for a child to be born, or waiting for the results of important medical tests, or waiting at the bedside of a dying loved one, or waiting to hear about an important job offer or professional appointment, we tend to find waiting to be a painful and agonizing process. Yet our forebears in the faith knew well what we have almost forgotten. Waiting is an important and crucial spiritual discipline. Advent invites us to rediscover it.
Holly Whitcomb, author of a book about the spiritual gift of waiting puts it this way:
Waiting presents an enormous challenge. We are impatient, I-can-fix-it kind of people… but not all situations can be fixed. We assume that everything in life can be made better by taking action, but sometimes it just isn’t so. … Yet waiting is an enormous opportunity if we regard it as a wise teacher. Waiting offers us a great deal when we choose to learn.
Waiting is an important guest to honor in the guest house of our humanity. If we consciously allow waiting to be our teacher, we can accommodate waiting more peacefully. If we welcome waiting as a spiritual discipline, waiting will present its spiritual gifts and some of our richest spiritual opportunities if we are conscious enough and courageous enough to name them and live into them.
Bingo halls and casinos often post the sign, ‘You must be present to win.’ In order to convert the inescapable lessons of waiting into deliberate spiritual gifts, we too, have to be present; we need to pay attention. (Seven Gifts of Waiting)
A famous preacher once noted, “Advent begins in the dark.” Advent is all about waiting in the dark, and that is something we humans find very hard to do, despite the fact that it happens a lot in the course of a human life. The author of Mark’s gospel exhorts us to keep awake, to be constantly on edge, to be ready for whatever God may do, but it’s hard to do that when the waiting seems endless. Sometimes waiting can be exciting, like waiting for the birth of a child. You may know the general time period that the birth will happen but you never know exactly when, and those last few weeks and days can seem endless as with every twinge you wonder, “Is this it?” Waiting for death is a remarkably similar process. Often doctors and nurses can tell a family that a patient is actively dying, but never can anyone predict exactly when the moment will come. The vigil at a bedside is full of the kind of agonized expectancy that our Advent texts speak of and it is excruciatingly difficult for we humans to let go and let God control the process, even though that is what we say we want to have happen.
Waiting is tough. Active, expectant watchful waiting is even tougher. Its too easy for us to lose heart when the waiting seems endless, to give up and go to sleep or to become not fully present by filling our lives with activity and busyness, noise and distraction so that we don’t have to contemplate the very thing for which we are waiting. Our Buddhist brothers and sisters understand well what Jesus is saying in today’s gospel text, as their spiritual practice is fully focused on becoming “awakened ones” which is what the term “Buddha” means.
Advent is the liturgical way our church reminds us to live our lives in an attitude of expectant, alert watchfulness. The kind of waiting that we are called to in Advent requires us to pay attention to our world, to keep an eye out for God, by paying attention to the signs and wonders around us that hint at God’s presence in our world and God’s inbreaking into our existence. Jesus reminds us to look at the world around us for signs of God’s work in that world, to be alert to discern the hand of God working through the chaos of human existence. It’s tempting to dull our senses with busyness or apathy, but in Advent we are called to live life on the edge, to be poised to move with God, to respond when God breaks into our world in whatever way God does in this time and place.
Advent is all about expectant, watchful, hopeful waiting. This kind of waiting is actually the hallmark of the spiritual life. It requires discipline and trust in God in the face of struggles and agonies that may seem unendurable. Advent is our liturgical reminder that much of our life of faith is comprised of waiting. While we wait we remain alert, awake and hopeful. We don’t tune out or give up. Our Advent observance reminds us that we must remain active and involved and committed to the furtherance of the reign of God. We are called to be part of the process of bringing God’s kingdom into our world.
During Advent we are reminded to live our lives like people on the verge of some exciting discovery, like an expectant mother in that excruciating 9th month. When there is nothing to do but wait we are forced to center ourselves, to be present in the moment and to give up our need to control the events and processes of our lives. When we are waiting for something to happen, we have no choice but to surrender to God, to let go and empty ourselves and allow things to unfold in their own mysterious way. “O Come O Come Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel, who waits in lonely exile here, until the Son of God appear.” Waiting can feel like a lonely exile until we remember the promise of God with us. Advent invites us to focus on the new beginning embedded in every ending, the ending inherent in every new beginning and to relish the waiting that is an integral part of the birthing of God’s kingdom in our lives and our world. In those lonely waiting times let us pray the Advent hymn, “Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel shall come to thee O Israel.”
Amen.
Obedience to Love
“Obedience to Love”, A Sermon preached by The Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, November 20, 2011 at Grace Church, Lyons, NY
Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; 35for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, 36I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”(Matt. 25:34-36)
Some statistics for our consideration: Hunger in the US – in 2010 14.5 percent, or 17.2 million households in the United States were “food insecure” meaning that they experience hunger and inadequate food supply at some point in every month. Of those households with children in the home, 9.8% were “food insecure.” With more than 2.3 million people behind bars, the United States leads the world in both the number and percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving far-more-populous China a distant second, according to a study by the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States. In 2007, nearly 50 million Americans did not have health insurance, while another 25 million were underinsured. (Source: Commonwealth Fund Biennial Health Insurance Survey 2007) The total annual premium for a typical family health insurance plan offered by employers was $12,680 in 2008. (Source: Kaiser/HRET Survey of Employer-Sponsored Health Benefits, 2008) Even after health care reform, millions of Americans are un-or-underinsured, meaning that the high quality medical care otherwise available in our country is beyond the reach of the poor and most vulnerable. On November 8, Russell Pearce, Arizona Senator who was responsible for a draconian immigration law in Arizona lost his seat in a recall election which was motivated in no small measure by reaction against his inhospitable stance with respect to immigrants in Arizona.
In the midst of these statistics, the Gospel comes to us this morning as a living Word of God with something pretty clear to say about the world in which we live out our faith today. As we end our liturgical year with another of Matthew’s parables of judgment, Jesus describes God’s judgment upon humankind using the famous parable of the separation of the sheep and the goats. This is a parable that has troubled many thinking Christians over the centuries for a variety of reasons. Theologically, it seems to suggest that “salvation” is something that we can earn, a concept that is anathema to Protestant theologians in particular. The mantra among such theologians is we are saved by grace alone through faith alone. It is not anything that we do that brings our salvation, it is entirely up to God. This parable of the sheep and goats seems to contradict that theological position. It seems to suggest that if we do the acts of mercy that Jesus names in the parable, we’ll be judged among the righteous. What ever happened to salvation by grace?
This is one of those theological mind games that demonstrates the extent to which theological positions need to be based on more than one isolated quotation from scripture. It is in considering the scriptural texts as a whole that we evaluate any given portion and from that full consideration develop our theology. And if there is one issue on which both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Testament are clear, it is that our duty as children of God is to care for those that Jesus calls the “least of these” in today’s parable. The poor, the homeless, the outcast, the prisoner, all of those on the margins of society are to be the focus of our loving attention. That we serve Christ when we serve those he calls “the least of these” suggests that we cannot truly claim to believe in him nor to be disciples of his if we do not act on those claims in a real way. And today’s parable also suggests that we must care for those “least” amongst us because it is the right thing to do, not because we want to earn our own salvation. Those who were judged righteous in the parable were not even aware that they were serving Christ when they did what they believed to be right. Their hearts had been so transformed in the love of God, that they automatically did what God expects, because God who is love truly lived within them.
The duty to serve the poor, the outcast, the homeless and oppressed is universally required of people of faith in all of the world’s religions. In every major tradition, parables and sayings like the parable of the sheep and the goats abound. In the Hadith of Islam, interpretations of Qu’ranic verses, it is written, “On the day of judgment God Most High will say, "Son of Adam, I was sick and you did not visit Me." He will reply, "My Lord, how could I visit Thee when Thou art the Lord of the Universe!" He will say, "Did you not know that My servant so-and-so was ill and yet you did not visit him? Did you not know that if you had visited him you soon would have found Me with him?"” In the writings of the Tao, is the following:
Relieve people in distress as speedily as you must release a fish from a dry rill [lest he die]. Deliver people from danger as quickly as you must free a sparrow from a tight noose. Be compassionate to orphans and relieve widows. Respect the old and help the poor. Taoism. Tract of the Quiet Way
In the Buddhist tradition is a story about a man who gave water to a wandering pilgrim who showed up at his door, even though it meant that he and his family would go thirsty. The sacred writings of Hinduism also have many stories extolling acts of charity and kindness to the poor and downtrodden.
Given the overwhelming weight of the wisdom of sages from every religious tradition, it is abundantly clear that God Most High expects that we will care for those who are less fortunate than we are because it is simply the right thing to do. If we claim with our lips to love God, then we have no choice but to behave in charitable and loving ways to our fellow human beings. “Salvation” is something more than getting to heaven when we die. It is very much about what kind of a world we create while we live. God saves freely and through God’s abundant grace, but God judges us based upon our real world actions during our lifetimes.
This parable of judgment in Christian terms offers images of separation from God for those who did not render loving service to “the least of these.” Whether or not you believe in heaven and hell in the medieval, Dante’s Inferno kind of imagery, the notion that one can choose to put oneself outside of the embrace of our all loving God is also a universal religious belief. While not all religions speak of salvation in the way Christians do, and indeed, other world religions do not focus on the concept of “being saved” in the way some Christians do, all world religions share the fundamental concept that people’s actions in this life affect what happens to them in the next. In East Asian religions – Hinduism and Buddhism – the concept of karma suggests that what you do in this life has consequences that extend beyond this life. If you are a good and loving and generous and charitable person, you build up good karma, and go to a better place in the next life, whereas if you do bad things to other people bad consequences will follow you into the next life.
Our Abrahamic religious cousins, Muslims and Jews, also share the fundamental belief that one must care for those who are called the “least of these” by Jesus. Muslims believe that upon death the soul appears before God for judgment and that all the deeds one has done in one’s life will be weighed in balance and God, who is merciful, will judge accordingly. Since Muslims do not share our concept of salvation by faith through grace, they die with somewhat less assurance of the good outcome, but I have heard many of my Muslim friends declare with faith and trust that they know God to be merciful and compassionate and they rest their faith in that. And one of the five pillars of Islam is zakat, charitable giving, the requirement to give 2.5% of one’s savings to charity every year.
The universality of this command to care for those Jesus calls the “least of these” is underscored in the gospel text itself – “all the nations will be gathered” is a very universal image and one that suggests that ultimately God is far more concerned with how we do love in this world than with what we profess to believe about God. As our nation enters a national election year very soon, we people of faith do well to keep in mind this measuring rod of God’s judgment in light of the statistics about hunger, health care deprivation, imprisonment, immigration struggles and other issue of human rights and social justice that are part of our modern life. God doesn’t care what people say they believe or how they worship God or even if they worship God. God commands that we serve the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, the hungry, the outcast. God cares for the 99% that the Occupy Wall St. folks are purporting to represent.
God cares about how the needs of those least of these are met by our society. And God will judge those who have the power in society to address the needs of those people, based upon whether or not they do feed the hungry, visit the imprisoned, heal the sick, house the homeless. It does matter to God what we do in this world especially with and for those on the bottom rung of our society. A Nicaraguan peasant Christian engaged in a gospel dialogue astutely summarizes what the gospel demands of us and it is not easy because it does require that we confront the systems in our culture that produce the statistics we recited earlier: “Obedience to love. Obedience to love is very revolutionary, because it commands us to disobey everything else.” (The Gospal in Solentiname, Ernesto Cardinal, 1978, p. 18)
Amen.
Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; 35for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, 36I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”(Matt. 25:34-36)
Some statistics for our consideration: Hunger in the US – in 2010 14.5 percent, or 17.2 million households in the United States were “food insecure” meaning that they experience hunger and inadequate food supply at some point in every month. Of those households with children in the home, 9.8% were “food insecure.” With more than 2.3 million people behind bars, the United States leads the world in both the number and percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving far-more-populous China a distant second, according to a study by the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States. In 2007, nearly 50 million Americans did not have health insurance, while another 25 million were underinsured. (Source: Commonwealth Fund Biennial Health Insurance Survey 2007) The total annual premium for a typical family health insurance plan offered by employers was $12,680 in 2008. (Source: Kaiser/HRET Survey of Employer-Sponsored Health Benefits, 2008) Even after health care reform, millions of Americans are un-or-underinsured, meaning that the high quality medical care otherwise available in our country is beyond the reach of the poor and most vulnerable. On November 8, Russell Pearce, Arizona Senator who was responsible for a draconian immigration law in Arizona lost his seat in a recall election which was motivated in no small measure by reaction against his inhospitable stance with respect to immigrants in Arizona.
In the midst of these statistics, the Gospel comes to us this morning as a living Word of God with something pretty clear to say about the world in which we live out our faith today. As we end our liturgical year with another of Matthew’s parables of judgment, Jesus describes God’s judgment upon humankind using the famous parable of the separation of the sheep and the goats. This is a parable that has troubled many thinking Christians over the centuries for a variety of reasons. Theologically, it seems to suggest that “salvation” is something that we can earn, a concept that is anathema to Protestant theologians in particular. The mantra among such theologians is we are saved by grace alone through faith alone. It is not anything that we do that brings our salvation, it is entirely up to God. This parable of the sheep and goats seems to contradict that theological position. It seems to suggest that if we do the acts of mercy that Jesus names in the parable, we’ll be judged among the righteous. What ever happened to salvation by grace?
This is one of those theological mind games that demonstrates the extent to which theological positions need to be based on more than one isolated quotation from scripture. It is in considering the scriptural texts as a whole that we evaluate any given portion and from that full consideration develop our theology. And if there is one issue on which both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Testament are clear, it is that our duty as children of God is to care for those that Jesus calls the “least of these” in today’s parable. The poor, the homeless, the outcast, the prisoner, all of those on the margins of society are to be the focus of our loving attention. That we serve Christ when we serve those he calls “the least of these” suggests that we cannot truly claim to believe in him nor to be disciples of his if we do not act on those claims in a real way. And today’s parable also suggests that we must care for those “least” amongst us because it is the right thing to do, not because we want to earn our own salvation. Those who were judged righteous in the parable were not even aware that they were serving Christ when they did what they believed to be right. Their hearts had been so transformed in the love of God, that they automatically did what God expects, because God who is love truly lived within them.
The duty to serve the poor, the outcast, the homeless and oppressed is universally required of people of faith in all of the world’s religions. In every major tradition, parables and sayings like the parable of the sheep and the goats abound. In the Hadith of Islam, interpretations of Qu’ranic verses, it is written, “On the day of judgment God Most High will say, "Son of Adam, I was sick and you did not visit Me." He will reply, "My Lord, how could I visit Thee when Thou art the Lord of the Universe!" He will say, "Did you not know that My servant so-and-so was ill and yet you did not visit him? Did you not know that if you had visited him you soon would have found Me with him?"” In the writings of the Tao, is the following:
Relieve people in distress as speedily as you must release a fish from a dry rill [lest he die]. Deliver people from danger as quickly as you must free a sparrow from a tight noose. Be compassionate to orphans and relieve widows. Respect the old and help the poor. Taoism. Tract of the Quiet Way
In the Buddhist tradition is a story about a man who gave water to a wandering pilgrim who showed up at his door, even though it meant that he and his family would go thirsty. The sacred writings of Hinduism also have many stories extolling acts of charity and kindness to the poor and downtrodden.
Given the overwhelming weight of the wisdom of sages from every religious tradition, it is abundantly clear that God Most High expects that we will care for those who are less fortunate than we are because it is simply the right thing to do. If we claim with our lips to love God, then we have no choice but to behave in charitable and loving ways to our fellow human beings. “Salvation” is something more than getting to heaven when we die. It is very much about what kind of a world we create while we live. God saves freely and through God’s abundant grace, but God judges us based upon our real world actions during our lifetimes.
This parable of judgment in Christian terms offers images of separation from God for those who did not render loving service to “the least of these.” Whether or not you believe in heaven and hell in the medieval, Dante’s Inferno kind of imagery, the notion that one can choose to put oneself outside of the embrace of our all loving God is also a universal religious belief. While not all religions speak of salvation in the way Christians do, and indeed, other world religions do not focus on the concept of “being saved” in the way some Christians do, all world religions share the fundamental concept that people’s actions in this life affect what happens to them in the next. In East Asian religions – Hinduism and Buddhism – the concept of karma suggests that what you do in this life has consequences that extend beyond this life. If you are a good and loving and generous and charitable person, you build up good karma, and go to a better place in the next life, whereas if you do bad things to other people bad consequences will follow you into the next life.
Our Abrahamic religious cousins, Muslims and Jews, also share the fundamental belief that one must care for those who are called the “least of these” by Jesus. Muslims believe that upon death the soul appears before God for judgment and that all the deeds one has done in one’s life will be weighed in balance and God, who is merciful, will judge accordingly. Since Muslims do not share our concept of salvation by faith through grace, they die with somewhat less assurance of the good outcome, but I have heard many of my Muslim friends declare with faith and trust that they know God to be merciful and compassionate and they rest their faith in that. And one of the five pillars of Islam is zakat, charitable giving, the requirement to give 2.5% of one’s savings to charity every year.
The universality of this command to care for those Jesus calls the “least of these” is underscored in the gospel text itself – “all the nations will be gathered” is a very universal image and one that suggests that ultimately God is far more concerned with how we do love in this world than with what we profess to believe about God. As our nation enters a national election year very soon, we people of faith do well to keep in mind this measuring rod of God’s judgment in light of the statistics about hunger, health care deprivation, imprisonment, immigration struggles and other issue of human rights and social justice that are part of our modern life. God doesn’t care what people say they believe or how they worship God or even if they worship God. God commands that we serve the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, the hungry, the outcast. God cares for the 99% that the Occupy Wall St. folks are purporting to represent.
God cares about how the needs of those least of these are met by our society. And God will judge those who have the power in society to address the needs of those people, based upon whether or not they do feed the hungry, visit the imprisoned, heal the sick, house the homeless. It does matter to God what we do in this world especially with and for those on the bottom rung of our society. A Nicaraguan peasant Christian engaged in a gospel dialogue astutely summarizes what the gospel demands of us and it is not easy because it does require that we confront the systems in our culture that produce the statistics we recited earlier: “Obedience to love. Obedience to love is very revolutionary, because it commands us to disobey everything else.” (The Gospal in Solentiname, Ernesto Cardinal, 1978, p. 18)
Amen.
Risky Business
“Risky Business”, A Sermon preached by The Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, November 13, 2011 at Grace Church, Lyons New York
For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. (Matt. 25:29)
If ever there was a biblical saying that could appear to justify giving tax breaks to the rich and taking welfare benefits from the poor, those closing lines of today’s gospel parable of the talents seems tailor made for the occasion! One might argue that when the Wall Street bankers who brought down the economy got their year end, seven figure bonuses even in the years when the government was bailing out their institutions, that this parable was coming to life in the 21st century! Given Jesus’ frequent teachings and preachings on the potential dangers of money, particularly its ability to corrupt the soul, it seems absurd that he would tell a parable in which he appears to conclude that those who are wealthy deserve to get more wealth while those who are poor somehow deserve to lose yet more. What on earth are we to make of this parable?
The parable of the talents is a tough one to swallow and it takes a fair amount of thinking to make any sense of it at all. This parable comes late in Matthew’s gospel and is part of a series of parables that Jesus tells about God’s judgment on humankind. Using a story about the various ways a group of slaves invested money entrusted to them by their master, this parable invites us to think not only about how we handle money and material resources given to us by God, but also how we use all the gifts God has given us for the furtherance of God’s mission. This parable is about judgment and accountability and calls us to be conscious of how we live out our faith in the mundane aspects of our daily lives. On one level the parable forces us to face the reality that we are accountable to God for how we live our life, for what we do in this life with all that we have been given. On another level the parable calls us to be mindful of the nature of our relationship with God and to reflect upon just how much we truly trust God to provide what we need in this life.
This is a stewardship parable and not just in its teaching about money. It calls us to think about how we manage the abundant resources that God has given us. Jesus reminds us that we all have a responsibility to make the most of what we have. In the story, one slave got five talents, another got two and another got one, each “according to his ability.” God gives gifts differently to different people, but all receive some gifts and all are called to make the most of that which has been given. While the vehicle for the story is money, the parable really invites us to think not only about our financial resources but about all the gifts we have received from God, tangible and intangible. One message of the story is pretty clear: take what God has given you and make more of it. Be responsible with the gifts you’ve been given so that you can offer back to the donor (i.e. GOD) more than was originally given you. Remember that what you have that you are investing is not really yours, but remains, in fact, the possession of the master who will expect a good return when the time for accounting comes.
On a deeper level, this parable talks about stewardship, not just of money, but of our entire lives. This parable suggests that God has given to each of us gifts, abilities, and talents that are unique to us. God expects, indeed, demands, that we make the most of those gifts, talents and abilities for the furtherance of God’s kingdom. When the master in the parable excoriates the slave who hid his one talent, he is very harsh – “you wicked and lazy slave” he cries out. Given that the guy didn’t lose the money, he did after all, safeguard it so it would not be lost or stolen, that seems a harsh and severe judgment, don’t you think? Is the guy wicked because he wouldn’t go out and take a risk and try to grow the money? Wasn’t he just a prudent and risk-averse investor, someone who preferred safety to risk, who just wanted to hedge his bets? This guy only had one talent – what if he had risked it and lost it? What was the sin here that brought about such a strong reaction from the master?
The so called “wicked” slave seems to have made two fundamental mistakes in dealing with the talent he was given. First, he insulted the master when questioned about his failure to invest the money and make it grow. He flat out told the guy that he didn’t trust him, that he considered him “a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow and gathering where you did not scatter seed.” Now it is no surprise that the master didn’t take kindly to that kind of insolence. If the master in the story is God, then what we have here is a person telling God, “I don’t trust you to deal fairly with me or to manage the resources of the world fairly, so I decided to play it safe and give you back what is yours.” This is not a recipe for an intimate and trusting relationship! Lack of trust is a big issue in any relationship, as much in the relationship we each have with God as in any human relationship that we pursue. Stewardship, it turns out, has a lot to do with trust. Trust that God will provide for our needs, trust that we can take risks with the gifts we have been given and God will be there when we do so.
The second mistake the “wicked” slave made was being afraid to take a risk. He was so afraid of losing the one talent he had that he merely hid it rather than working with it to make more of it. His risk averse strategy preserved the “talent” but didn’t multiply it or spread it around so that there would be more of it. Indeed, in order to keep it safe he had to hide it. How often do we hide the talents we have been given so as not to have to do the work that using them entails? And how likely is it that our talents will grow and increase if we hide them away from sight? Jesus seems pretty clear as he tells this story that risk taking is an important part of our relationship with God and is crucial to being able to make the most of the gifts God has given us.
Jesus calls us all to be risk takers, to live out our lives of faith in daring and shrewd and active ways. A life of faith is a life dedicated to moving out in the world, taking the resources God has given us and multiplying them for the good of all God’s people. The commandments to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves suggest that our duty as people of God has something to do with using our “talents” to do love in the world. Doing love always involves significant risk and abundant trust, as anyone who has ever loved another person can attest. Nothing that is worth doing is risk free – any successful entrepreneur will tell you that. Jesus doesn’t expect us all to be able to do the same kinds of things – we each get different gifts and therefore different results are expected, but results are expected from all. Our fear of taking risks is directly proportional to our trust in God. If we really trust God, we are more able to take the risks that will grow our talents for the good of everyone.
All of us have taken a risk this morning. We have come to the feast of Life itself. We have put ourselves in the way of an overpowering Spirit, so that even if we are here only out of force of habit, or because we to see our friends, or because it feels safe and peaceful, not at all risky and dangerous, we are at risk of being caught up and filled with a life-changing, life-giving call to freedom and servanthood in the name of Christ. We have taken the risk of hearing the Word of God proclaimed and broken open, we have taken the risk of opening ourselves to the power of prayer in community, we have risked meeting the Risen Christ up close and personal at the communion table this morning. Putting ourselves in the way of God is risky business because God has been known to do wild and wooly things with people God calls to life in Christ!
Finally, lets think about what this parable means for Grace Church as a faith community. You have tremendous gifts and talents here –people with the gift of compassion and mercy who naturally reach out to those in need, those who have the gift of managing financial resources, those with gifts of music and singing, those with spiritual gifts of prayer, outreach, hospitality and teaching children. When God gave all of those gifts to this community, God expected you would take risks and multiply the gifts many-fold in ministry to God’s world. Each of us individually is called to make the most of our gifts and we are called as a church body to pool our resources and collectively take risks for the kingdom. If we take that call seriously, amazing results will follow.
That troubling last line of the parable may reasonably be interpreted to mean that those with a wealth of trust in God and the concomitant willingness to take risks for faith are those who will receive more – more trust, more love, more courage to keep on taking risks. From those who have not, that is those who lack that radical trust, even more will be taken away. If we do not trust God, we will not be able to take the risks that will lead to abundant life and fruitful ministry. Stewardship is about generosity and being truly generous is risky business. Being truly generous takes immense trust. To all those who have, more will be given and they will have an abundance. May we all be risk-takers for the kingdom of God, growing in an abundance of trust and love in the God who sends us into the world to do the mission of reconciliation, healing, justice, freedom and peace.
For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. (Matt. 25:29)
If ever there was a biblical saying that could appear to justify giving tax breaks to the rich and taking welfare benefits from the poor, those closing lines of today’s gospel parable of the talents seems tailor made for the occasion! One might argue that when the Wall Street bankers who brought down the economy got their year end, seven figure bonuses even in the years when the government was bailing out their institutions, that this parable was coming to life in the 21st century! Given Jesus’ frequent teachings and preachings on the potential dangers of money, particularly its ability to corrupt the soul, it seems absurd that he would tell a parable in which he appears to conclude that those who are wealthy deserve to get more wealth while those who are poor somehow deserve to lose yet more. What on earth are we to make of this parable?
The parable of the talents is a tough one to swallow and it takes a fair amount of thinking to make any sense of it at all. This parable comes late in Matthew’s gospel and is part of a series of parables that Jesus tells about God’s judgment on humankind. Using a story about the various ways a group of slaves invested money entrusted to them by their master, this parable invites us to think not only about how we handle money and material resources given to us by God, but also how we use all the gifts God has given us for the furtherance of God’s mission. This parable is about judgment and accountability and calls us to be conscious of how we live out our faith in the mundane aspects of our daily lives. On one level the parable forces us to face the reality that we are accountable to God for how we live our life, for what we do in this life with all that we have been given. On another level the parable calls us to be mindful of the nature of our relationship with God and to reflect upon just how much we truly trust God to provide what we need in this life.
This is a stewardship parable and not just in its teaching about money. It calls us to think about how we manage the abundant resources that God has given us. Jesus reminds us that we all have a responsibility to make the most of what we have. In the story, one slave got five talents, another got two and another got one, each “according to his ability.” God gives gifts differently to different people, but all receive some gifts and all are called to make the most of that which has been given. While the vehicle for the story is money, the parable really invites us to think not only about our financial resources but about all the gifts we have received from God, tangible and intangible. One message of the story is pretty clear: take what God has given you and make more of it. Be responsible with the gifts you’ve been given so that you can offer back to the donor (i.e. GOD) more than was originally given you. Remember that what you have that you are investing is not really yours, but remains, in fact, the possession of the master who will expect a good return when the time for accounting comes.
On a deeper level, this parable talks about stewardship, not just of money, but of our entire lives. This parable suggests that God has given to each of us gifts, abilities, and talents that are unique to us. God expects, indeed, demands, that we make the most of those gifts, talents and abilities for the furtherance of God’s kingdom. When the master in the parable excoriates the slave who hid his one talent, he is very harsh – “you wicked and lazy slave” he cries out. Given that the guy didn’t lose the money, he did after all, safeguard it so it would not be lost or stolen, that seems a harsh and severe judgment, don’t you think? Is the guy wicked because he wouldn’t go out and take a risk and try to grow the money? Wasn’t he just a prudent and risk-averse investor, someone who preferred safety to risk, who just wanted to hedge his bets? This guy only had one talent – what if he had risked it and lost it? What was the sin here that brought about such a strong reaction from the master?
The so called “wicked” slave seems to have made two fundamental mistakes in dealing with the talent he was given. First, he insulted the master when questioned about his failure to invest the money and make it grow. He flat out told the guy that he didn’t trust him, that he considered him “a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow and gathering where you did not scatter seed.” Now it is no surprise that the master didn’t take kindly to that kind of insolence. If the master in the story is God, then what we have here is a person telling God, “I don’t trust you to deal fairly with me or to manage the resources of the world fairly, so I decided to play it safe and give you back what is yours.” This is not a recipe for an intimate and trusting relationship! Lack of trust is a big issue in any relationship, as much in the relationship we each have with God as in any human relationship that we pursue. Stewardship, it turns out, has a lot to do with trust. Trust that God will provide for our needs, trust that we can take risks with the gifts we have been given and God will be there when we do so.
The second mistake the “wicked” slave made was being afraid to take a risk. He was so afraid of losing the one talent he had that he merely hid it rather than working with it to make more of it. His risk averse strategy preserved the “talent” but didn’t multiply it or spread it around so that there would be more of it. Indeed, in order to keep it safe he had to hide it. How often do we hide the talents we have been given so as not to have to do the work that using them entails? And how likely is it that our talents will grow and increase if we hide them away from sight? Jesus seems pretty clear as he tells this story that risk taking is an important part of our relationship with God and is crucial to being able to make the most of the gifts God has given us.
Jesus calls us all to be risk takers, to live out our lives of faith in daring and shrewd and active ways. A life of faith is a life dedicated to moving out in the world, taking the resources God has given us and multiplying them for the good of all God’s people. The commandments to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves suggest that our duty as people of God has something to do with using our “talents” to do love in the world. Doing love always involves significant risk and abundant trust, as anyone who has ever loved another person can attest. Nothing that is worth doing is risk free – any successful entrepreneur will tell you that. Jesus doesn’t expect us all to be able to do the same kinds of things – we each get different gifts and therefore different results are expected, but results are expected from all. Our fear of taking risks is directly proportional to our trust in God. If we really trust God, we are more able to take the risks that will grow our talents for the good of everyone.
All of us have taken a risk this morning. We have come to the feast of Life itself. We have put ourselves in the way of an overpowering Spirit, so that even if we are here only out of force of habit, or because we to see our friends, or because it feels safe and peaceful, not at all risky and dangerous, we are at risk of being caught up and filled with a life-changing, life-giving call to freedom and servanthood in the name of Christ. We have taken the risk of hearing the Word of God proclaimed and broken open, we have taken the risk of opening ourselves to the power of prayer in community, we have risked meeting the Risen Christ up close and personal at the communion table this morning. Putting ourselves in the way of God is risky business because God has been known to do wild and wooly things with people God calls to life in Christ!
Finally, lets think about what this parable means for Grace Church as a faith community. You have tremendous gifts and talents here –people with the gift of compassion and mercy who naturally reach out to those in need, those who have the gift of managing financial resources, those with gifts of music and singing, those with spiritual gifts of prayer, outreach, hospitality and teaching children. When God gave all of those gifts to this community, God expected you would take risks and multiply the gifts many-fold in ministry to God’s world. Each of us individually is called to make the most of our gifts and we are called as a church body to pool our resources and collectively take risks for the kingdom. If we take that call seriously, amazing results will follow.
That troubling last line of the parable may reasonably be interpreted to mean that those with a wealth of trust in God and the concomitant willingness to take risks for faith are those who will receive more – more trust, more love, more courage to keep on taking risks. From those who have not, that is those who lack that radical trust, even more will be taken away. If we do not trust God, we will not be able to take the risks that will lead to abundant life and fruitful ministry. Stewardship is about generosity and being truly generous is risky business. Being truly generous takes immense trust. To all those who have, more will be given and they will have an abundance. May we all be risk-takers for the kingdom of God, growing in an abundance of trust and love in the God who sends us into the world to do the mission of reconciliation, healing, justice, freedom and peace.
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