Author Steve Beckham

No One Can Serve Two Masters

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

Luke 16:1-13

“There was a certain rich man who had a manager handling his affairs. One day a report came that the manager was wasting his employer’s money.”[1]  That’s how one of the most confusing and challenging of all the parables of Jesus begins.  

A rich man discovers that his manager is squandering his assets, so he decides to fire him and insists on a final accounting so he can audit the manager’s books.  The manager, realizing that his future is suddenly not too bright, decides to curry favor with the people who are in debt to his boss by reworking the books in their favor.  To everyone’s surprise, the boss admires the manager’s shrewdness.  Even more surprising, Jesus tells his followers that they could learn a thing or two from the crooked manager.  

So what do you think Jesus is trying to tell us here?

Before we dive too deeply into this odd story, I want to say a word about parables in general.  As I mentioned, this is one of the most confusing and challenging of all the parables,  but frankly, all of Jesus’s parables should challenge us if we’re really listening to them properly.  If we think we have found an easy explanation for a parable, we’re probably short-circuiting its power.  Parables are supposed to stick with us and needle us and make us ask ourselves tough and touchy questions.

“What makes the parables mysterious, or difficult,” says Amy-Jill Levine, “is that they challenge us to look into the hidden aspects of our own values, our own lives.  They bring to the surface unasked questions, and they reveal the answers we have always known, but refuse to acknowledge.  Our reaction to them should be one of resistance rather than acceptance.”[2]  John Dominic Crossan says that a parable “shatters our complacency” and forces us to look outside of our comfortable assumptions about life.  Robert Funk said that a parable asks us to “cross over” into the kingdom, the mysterious land that Jesus is trying to evoke for us and in us. 

“A parable,” says Thomas Moore, “is the opposite of a gentle teaching story.  It confronts us, asking us to change our way of seeing things.  It turns conventional ideas upside down.  The very point is to make us uncomfortable.”

So think about this parable of the dishonest manager again.  Who do you side with?  Who in this story are you inclined to like?  Who are you inclined to dislike?  Is there someone in this story you maybe identify with?  The rich man who discovers that his manager is squandering his assets?  The manager, himself, who cooks the books when he finds out he’s getting the sack?  The debtors who have their debts reduced, who, by the way, don’t object even a little bit to what the manager is doing?

Would it surprise you to learn that the people who originally heard this story in the first century—people listening to Jesus tell it or listening to it being read from Luke’s gospel—those original listeners probably didn’t feel any sympathy for any of these characters.

The common belief in their world was that there is only so much good stuff to go around. If someone was wealthy, it was usually assumed that they had accumulated their assets by cheating someone else out of theirs, or by flat-out stealing.  So the people who originally heard this parable would not have felt any sympathy for the rich man whose assets have been squandered and who ends up with a reduced payback on the loans he’s made.

But what about the debtors?  Well, did you notice that the commodities they owe are in really large quantities?  The first borrower owed 100 Batous of oil.  A batos is a Hebrew measure of between 8 and nine gallons. So this man is in debt for 800 gallons of olive oil.  This isn’t some poor schmo who borrowed a cup of oil to do a little cooking and keep the lamps lit for an evening.  Same with the guy who has borrowed the wheat.  He owes a hundred korous  of wheat.  A koros is a Hebrew measure between 10 and 12 bushels.  So he owes a thousand bushels of wheat—that’s 30 tons of wheat!  

So, who borrows these kinds of goods in such large quantities?  Commodities traders.  Or resellers and merchants.  And people didn’t generally have a high opinion of them, either, because they marked up the prices on everything they sold as much as the market would bear, and with daily necessities like oil and wheat, the market would bear a lot, especially since the empire was the biggest customer for those things.  

There is also another important economic dynamic in the background of this parable that the original audience would have been well aware of but that we wouldn’t know about just from reading of Luke’s text.  Remember, Jesus was a Jew and most of his audience were Jews.  They would have assumed that the characters in the parable were also Jews.  There were very clear laws in the Torah, in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, that prohibited charging interest.[3]  The Jewish Virtual Library[4] sums up those laws this way: “The prohibition on interest is not a prohibition on usury in the modern sense of the term, that is, excessive interest, but of all, even minimal interest.  There is no difference in Jewish law between various rates of interest because all interest is prohibited.”

All interest on loans was prohibited.  And yet we know from abundant records that wealthy landlords in Jesus’ day were often loan sharks.  Since charging interest was prohibited, they created ways to charge interest without it looking like they were charging interest.  Most often they did this by rolling the interest into the principal.  New Testament scholar William Herzog says that the hidden interest rates appear to have been about 25% for money and 50% for goods.  The rich man’s manager would probably have also been taking his own cut of the profits on top of that 50%,  and then on top of all that there would be taxes owed to Rome.  And all those costs got passed down the line to the eventual consumer.

The upshot of all this is that when the crooked manager cuts the oil merchant’s debt from 800 gallons to 400, he is extracting his boss’s interest so that the oil merchant now owes something closer to what he actually borrowed.  Same thing with the wheat merchant, although the crooked manager doesn’t give him quite as big a break.

By reducing the debts of the oil and wheat merchants, the manager is bringing their debt more into conformity with the law—with Torah.  This is why the rich man who made the original loans can’t be seen to complain about it.  It would expose his own violation of the law.  So he smiles, takes his lumps, and admires the shrewdness of his former manager. 

So what does Jesus want us to get from this parable?  When you have all the information, none of the characters comes off looking like a role model.  It’s true that the crooked manager did a small good deed, a bit of a mitzvah, for the two merchants, but giving them a break was all about his own self-interest, and he gave his former boss the shaft in the process.  

 “If you’re not faithful with other people’s things, why should you be trusted with your own?” said Jesus. That question sounds like it’s directed at people like the dishonest manager.  But biblical scholar Barbara Rossing has suggested that Jesus might really have someone else in mind with that question.  She suggests that he’s talking to the wealthy landowners of this world, that he’s talking about being faithful to what rightfully belonged to the peasant farmers who were being financially squeezed into giving up their land by people like the rich man in this parable.  

When we read this parable it’s tempting to ask ourselves, “How does Jesus want me to judge these people?”  But maybe what Jesus is really asking us to do is to evaluate is the economic system they’re all trapped in.

Even the most benign economic systems create a kind of bondage.  In this parable Jesus was painting a portrait of common economic practices that trample on the poor, practices that lock them into bearing the heaviest load of a debt-driven economy in which the bondage of financial obligation rises all the way up to the bankers at the top.  And, of course, the Empire gets its cut.

It’s not all that different for us in today’s world.  Almost all of us live with some degree of debt—car loans, mortgages, credit card debt, student loans.  According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, as of June 30 of this year, household debt in the U.S. reached an all-time high of $18.39 trillion.  That’s up from 17.5 trillion last year.  According to Debt.org, that averages out to about $106,000 of debt per person in the United States.  

Credit card balances this past year saw their largest year-over-year percentage increase in more than twenty years, and aggregate credit limits on cards saw their largest increase in more than ten years.  All this debt is a major contributing factor to the top-heavy disparity in wealth distribution in this country, a system in which the gap between rich and poor keeps getting wider while the middle continues to shrink.

In this parable, Jesus was telling his followers—telling us—to pay attention to the world’s economic dynamics, to pay attention to how the game is played.  He’s telling them, as Luther Seminary Professor Matt Skinner said, “You either play the system or the system plays you.”[5]  

“No one can serve two masters,” said Jesus. “For you will hate one and love the other; you will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and be enslaved to money.”   If we’re not careful, money can become a kind of religion.  But it’s a religion that enslaves.  So pay attention.  Use your worldly resources to benefit others and make friends.  And keep an honest eye on who you’re serving, because no one can serve two masters.

[1] New Living Translation

[2] Amy-Jill Levine; Short Stories by Jesus, Introduction, p. 3

[3] Exodus 22:25, Leviticus 25:35, Deuteronomy 23:20

[4] JewishVirtualLibrary.com, Usury

[5] Matt Skinner, Sermon Brainwave #862, Luther Seminary

The Joy of Reconnecting

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

Luke 15:1-10

We have seen an alarming increase in violence in our country this year, especially in the last few months.  As of this week there have been 47 school shootings in the U. S.[1]  On top of that the strained remainder of our national equilibrium has been rocked by two political assassinations. 

I really don’t want to dwell on this situation.  I doubt if I could tell you anything you don’t already know.  I don’t have any words that could shed new light on our violence problem and I am all too aware that even when our words are written or spoken with the best intentions they can generate a lot of heat that enflames without bringing any light of healing.  I will say this, though.  I think part of the problem is that we, as a people, have been losing our joy.  And we’ve been losing our joy because we’ve been losing our overall sense of connection with each other.  

We sequester ourselves into like-minded cloisters, sifting ourselves into righteous versus unrighteous, clean versus unclean, and then we snipe at each other from our guarded hilltops, each group using its own specialized vocabulary to describe the wrongness of the others who are not us.  There’s nothing new about this.  It’s a dynamic as old as humanity itself.  

So how do we recapture our joy?  How do we reconnect when the connection has been broken?

Well, if we’re following the example of Jesus, we tell a story.

So this one time, some Pharisees and religion teachers were getting all cranky because Jesus was having way too much fun with the wrong crowd.  Tax collectors and known sinners—you know, those people who color outside the lines where the religious boundaries are concerned—these kinds of people kept coming to listen to him and he didn’t shoo them away or disrespect them or anything.  On the contrary, he would welcome them and invite them to join the discussion!  Sometimes he would even break bread with them.  Basically, he treated them like they were all old friends at a reunion.

This didn’t sit well with the holier-than-thou guardians of propriety.  They didn’t think associating with “those people” was appropriate for a well-known rabbi, especially one with such a growing following.  They thought he should be setting an example for the rabble.  Well, he actually was setting an example, it just wasn’t the one they wanted him to set.   So they were grumbling about him.

Jesus overheard all their crabby comments, of course.  He thought about calling them out on their snooty attitude, but what good would that do?  It would just make them defensive and even more stand-offish when what he really wanted was for them to loosen up and join the party.  So he tried to reframe their thinking with a couple of hypothetical scenarios.  Parables.  He told them some parables.

“Suppose a guy has a hundred sheep,” he said, “and one of them wanders off and gets lost.  “Won’t he leave the other ninety-nine in the wilderness to go search for the one that is lost until he finds it?  And when he finds it, he will joyfully carry it home on his shoulders.  And when he gets home, he will call all his friends and neighbors and say, ‘Rejoice with me because I have found my lost sheep!’  It’s like that.  There is more joy in heaven over one lost soul’s rescued life than over ninety-nine righteous people who don’t need rescuing.

“Or how about this—suppose a woman has ten silver coins on her necklace and she loses one.  Won’t she light a lamp and sweep the entire house and get down on her hands and knees to sweep under furniture and look in every nook and cranny until she finds it?  And when she does find it, she’ll call all her neighbors and friends and say, ‘Rejoice with me!  I’ve found my lost drachma!  It’s just like that!” said Jesus.  “There is joy and celebration among God’s angels when even one lost soul returns to God!”     

Now I am absolutely sure that some of the people listening to Jesus spin these hypotheticals were chuckling, and I am just as sure that some of them were scratching their heads because there is some obvious craziness in these little stories.  Leave ninety-nine sheep in the wilderness while you go off searching for one?  Who would do that?  And sheep don’t repent.  Coins don’t repent.  And is it really repentance?  The sheep didn’t do anything to help himself be found—he didn’t wander home all sheepish about being lost.  The silver coin didn’t roll itself across the floor to rejoin the other nine coins on the necklace. 

Or are these stories allegories maybe?  Is the shepherd God?  But does God leave ninety-nine obedient sheep at risk in the wilderness to go find the one that wandered off?  Maybe. But that does raise questions, especially if you’re one of the ninety-nine.  

So maybe God is like the reckless shepherd who puts everything at risk to find the one lost sheep.  Maybe God is like the woman who drops everything and lights a lamp and cleans house until she finds that one lost silver drachma.  Maybe.

Or maybe something else is going on here.  Sheep and coins don’t repent—at least not the way we usually understand repentance.  They don’t apologize.  They don’t have a change of mind or a change of heart.   

But what if Jesus is giving us a new definition of repentance?  What if repentance is not about clearing some kind of moral bar?  What if it’s not about moral rectitude or moral correction?  What if repentance is about being brought back to where you fit in God’s grand design, being brought back into the community and communion?  What if repentance is about crossing all those artificial barriers we put up between each other, those barriers that divide us into opposing camps?

Maybe repentance is about being brought back together.  Maybe it’s about reconnecting.[2]

That would explain this other thing.  Did you notice how many times Jesus mentions joy in these two little stories?  Five times!  The shepherd carries the sheep joyfully!  He calls out to his neighbors to rejoice with me!  Jesus says there is joy in heaven when a lost soul is reconnected with the community.  The woman who finds her lost coin calls out to her neighbors rejoice with me!  And once again, Jesus says there is joy in the presence of God’s angels when even one lost soul is reunited with companions.  It’s all about the joy!

Jesus wanted the Pharisees to understand that they were missing out on the joy!  He wanted them to understand that there is joy in making connections with people you might ordinarily be reluctant to associate with.  There is joy when we step out of our clique or private club of like-minded associates to go out and meet the wider world.  

Matt Harding is a guys who knows all about that joy.  

Matt was living the dream.  He was working as a Video Game Developer, creating new games for Activision, one of the biggest companies in the business.  He was kicking around ideas for a new game with his team one day, when somebody suggested, “Let’s do a ‘shoot-em-up’ game.  Those are very popular.”  Matt said sarcastically, “Sure.  How about Destroy all Humans?”[3]  Matt was being facetious, but the boss liked the idea and gave the game a green light. And that’s when Matt quit.  “I didn’t want to spend two years of my life writing a game about killing everyone,” he said.  

Now Matt had time on his hands, and a fair bit of savings, so he decided to see the world. One day in Saigon, Matt was in kind of a goofy mood so he did this funny little dance in front of a restaurant, which his travel buddy caught on video.  It gave them a good laugh, so they decided that they would do this everywhere they were going on their trip around the world. 

When they got home, they cut together all these fun little clips to create a three minute video of Matt dancing in all kinds of interesting places all over the world.  And that would have been the end of it, except that Matt’s sister uploaded the video to this new thing on the internet called YouTube™.     

Dancing Matt became an internet phenomenon almost overnight.  So Matt decided to go out into the world and do it again, only this time he would invite people to dance with him.  And dance they did.  Over a period of about 15 years he recorded and posted six Dancing Matt videos which have brought joy to people all over the world.  You can find all of them at www.wheretheheckismatt.com. 

When NPR asked Matt what he had learned as he danced through the world, he said, “Here’s what I can report back: People want to feel connected to each other. They want to be heard and seen, and they’re curious to hear and see others from places far away.  

I share that impulse. It’s part of what drives me to travel.”

In her TED talk about Vulnerability, Brené Brown said, “A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all people.  We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong.  When those needs are not met, we don’t function as we were meant to.  We break.  We fall apart.  We numb.  We ache.  We hurt others.  We get sick.”

Right now our country is in a grumbling mood…and so is much of the rest of the world. We are not functioning as we were meant to.  We have found too many ways to separate ourselves from each other.  We have turned too many people into “those people,” the ones we don’t want to be seen with.  As a result, we’re missing the joy.  We’re missing the celebration.

We need to repent, not with apologies or penance, but by reconnecting.  We need to find our way back into where we fit with each other in God’s grand design.  We need to find our way back into community and communion.  We need to bring ourselves back together.  And maybe even dance with strangers.  Because that’s where the joy is.

[1] CNN

[2] Special Thanks to Prof. Matt Skinner and Sermon Brainwave for this perspective.

[3] Destroy All Humans is in its 7th version and is available on multiple platforms.  Clearly there’s money in nihilism.

How Far Will You Go?

Steve Beckham 3 Comments

Luke 14:26-33

In the summer of 1972, when I was 19, my best friend, Mackay, and I decided that it would be all kinds of fun to ride our bicycles from Long Beach, California to Ensenada, Mexico.  And so one sunny morning in June, we set off pedaling down the Pacific Coast Highway with sleeping bags and a few other necessities strapped to our bikes. 

The miles flew by through Seal Beach, Huntington Beach and Newport Beach.  The hills of Laguna slowed us down a bit more than we had anticipated, but it was still too early for lunch when we reached San Clemente, so we decided to push on and have lunch in Oceanside.  But at the south end of San Clemente, we ran into a very big obstacle that we had not planned on.  Camp Pendleton Marine Base.  

We knew we wouldn’t be able to ride through Pendleton on the freeway, but we thought we could ride through the base on the old highway, which, according to our maps, still ran alongside the freeway.  The very nice Marine guard at the entrance to the base told us that that was not going to happen–  because the old highway was long gone.  

After some begging and pleading and a few choruses of “Gosh, We’ve Ridden All This Way,” he got on the phone and managed to get permission for us to ride through the base.   He sketched out a map for us and gave us very strict instructions to stay on the route he had outlined for us,  making it clear that straying off that route could have grave consequences, including but not limited to death, dismemberment or being imprisoned.  

An hour and a half later, we were utterly lost on a winding dirt road when a very perturbed Marine officer in a jeep came roaring up to us and asked us what the H-E-DOUBLE-Q we thought we were doing.  He also told us that we were perilously close to a live-fire range, then threatened to throw us in the stockade or make us enlist or both before finally deciding to guide us down to the southern end of the base.  He sent us off with a warning that if we ever set foot or bicycle tire on the base again there would be dire consequences unless, of course, we were in a Marine uniform.  

We had lost a lot of time on the confusing roads of Pendleton, so we powered through Oceanside and into San Diego without stopping for lunch.  Then came the ordeal of getting through San Diego on surface streets which proved to be far more complicated and took much longer than we had planned.  And just so you know, not even the military had GPS yet in those days, so we were at the mercy of outdated gas station roadmaps.  

The sun was getting ready to call it a day by the time we crossed the border into Tijuana.  We grabbed a couple of tacos from a taco cart then raced the sun for the last 14 miles to Rosarito Beach where we camped for the night.

The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful.  The ride from Rosarito to Ensenada on the old road up across the mountain—the only way bicycles were allowed to go—was a challenging but beautiful ride.  After a night in Ensenada, we turned around and headed for home.  

We spent the night at Rosarito Beach again, had a good breakfast at the cantina, then set out for the border.  We made good speed and got to Tijuana at about three in the afternoon which gave us plenty of time to make it to Silver Strand State Beach in San Diego where we were planning to pitch our tent for the night.

And that’s when we ran into another obstacle we hadn’t planned on.  There were three long lines of cars waiting to cross the border into California.  We rode our bikes up between the lines of cars to the state line expecting that the border guard would just wave us through—after all, where would a couple of guys on bicycles hide anything?   But the guard at the border wasn’t having it.  He gave us a lecture about trying to cut the line then told us to go all the way back to the end of the line.  Two hours later after standing in the heat astride our bicycles and breathing exhaust fumes from all the cars, we finally got back to the border where the same guard just waved us across without even asking for our I.D.   

At that point, we pulled over to the side of the road and took stock of where we were and what lay ahead of us.  We were exhausted, hot and sweaty.  Our legs were trembling and aching.  We didn’t even want to think about trying to get through Pendleton again.  What we wanted most was a good shower, a long, cold drink and a good meal. What we wanted was to be home.  

The bicycle ride that we had thought would be all kinds of fun had turned out to be all kinds of challenging.  Our stamina had evaporated in the exhaust fumes and unrelenting sunshine while we waited at the border.  We were fresh out of  possibility.  Our ride was over.  We made our way to the airport and, grateful for small miracles, managed to snag seats on a flight back to Long Beach.  

“Who would build a tower without first figuring out how much it’s going to cost?” asked Jesus.  “What king would go to war without first figuring out if he has a chance of winning?”  Who would ride a bicycle to Ensenada without making sure that they could actually get there and back?

Luke tells us that large crowds were traveling with Jesus as he made his way toward Jerusalem.  They had been watching him heal people.  They had been listening to him as he taught them about the kingdom of God and how radically different it is from the empire of Caesar.   The crowd was drawn to him.  They liked him.  They liked the different world he described, the better world that he told them is possible.  A lot of them were probably wondering what it might be like to be part of his inner circle—to be his disciple.

But there’s a big difference between being a fan and being a disciple.  

Jesus wanted to make it clear to the crowd that becoming a disciple means putting him and the kingdom of God first.  Jesus wanted them to understand that  becoming a disciple means you join him in making the kingdom of God, the commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness, a reality on earth as it is in heaven.  And Jesus wants us to understand that the other kingdoms of this world are going to resist you when you do that.  

The kingdom of family may be perfectly happy for you to be a fan of Jesus, even for you to embrace some of the things he teaches.  But they may not be so happy when you start giving away time and resources that they feel they have a claim to.  “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple,” said Jesus.  And no, he did not mean a disciple has to have some kind of intense animosity toward family, but he did mean that you, as a disciple, have to be willing to turn away from them, to let them go, when what they want is trying to pull you away from where Jesus is leading you.

The kingdoms, the empires of this world will resist you when you become a disciple of Jesus and set to work in earnest to make God’s reign a reality in your life and in the world.  

The kingdom of consumerism will sneer at you for not having the newest, shiniest, most fashionable, most advanced everything—clothes, gadgets, house, car or whatever when you, as a disciple of Jesus, learn to be satisfied with what you have and to give away what you don’t really need. 

The kingdom of capitalism will call you a socialist or maybe even a communist when you, as a disciple of Jesus, insist that those who have more should contribute to the well-being of those who have less.  When you remind them, as Jesus did, that God did not intend for the bountiful resources of the earth to enrich only a few, they will call you a radical and try to silence you.

The empire of power will oppose you when, as a disciple of Jesus, you stand up for the powerless, take the side of the marginalized and speak for the voiceless.  They will combat you when you  work to liberate the oppressed, fight for the dispossessed and lobby to set the captives free.  When you, as a disciple of Jesus, insist that all people are equal and beloved in God’s sight so the opportunities and benefits of life together in a civil society should be equal, too, regardless of race or gender or color or sexuality or country of origin.  They will call you a trouble-maker and try to put a stop to you…one way or another.

“Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple,” said Jesus, and those people in the crowd, especially the wannabe disciples, knew he wasn’t just using hyperbole.  They knew that the cross he was talking about wasn’t a metaphor.  He was telling them there would be a real cross with real nails and real pain…because when you try to establish the reign of God in the midst of the empire of coercive power, coercive power will try to stop you.  Brutally.  

If you want to be my disciple, says Jesus, then stop and think about what that might cost you.  There’s no shame if you can’t go that far.  There’s no shame if you just want to follow in the crowd and listen from a safer distance.  But you should know, eventually that won’t be enough.  

Eventually the Word of God will bring you to a place where either you will summon up the stamina and will to finish the ride… or call it quits.  Eventually either the vision of the kingdom of God will become all-consuming for you, or you will dismiss it as a nice but unobtainable ideal—or maybe some kind of prize in the afterlife if you are nice enough to qualify.

Traveling with Jesus sounds like all kinds of fun.  And it does have its rewards.  There are healings along the way.  He’s a marvelous teacher and the Way of life he envisions is beautiful.  He loves you and isn’t shy about making that known.   Jesus loves the crowd… but not everyone in the crowd is ready to go all the way to discipleship.  

Lots of people can ride a bicycle.  Comparatively few can ride it all the way to Ensenada and back.

How far will you go?

Entertaining Angels

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

Hebrews 13:1-2, 15-16; Luke 14:7-14

“Let mutual love continue.  Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”  (Hebrews 13:1-2, NRSV)

“The next time you put on a dinner, don’t just invite your friends and family and rich neighbors, the kind of people who will return the favor.  Invite some people who never get invited out, the misfits from the wrong side of the tracks.”  (Luke 14:12, The Message)

Every time I read these texts I think of Eric.  Eric showed up one Sunday night when we were doing Stories, Songs and Supper at Gloria Dei Lutheran Church where I served as pastor for 12 years.  He stood at the church door and asked what was happening as he saw people gathering, greeting each other, laughing, and we told him, “It’s a thing we do called Stories, Songs, and Supper.  We share a meal then sing a bunch of old familiar songs, then someone tells a story, then we sing a little more.”  We invited him to come in and join us. So he did.

I was pretty sure he was unhoused, although to be fair, his clothes were neater and cleaner than most of the other unhoused people who came by the church.  Eric had a gift of gab and while we were eating he told us a bit about himself then told us that this dinner was special for him because it was his birthday.  So we all sang Happy Birthday to him.  After supper, he helped to clear the tables, then joined us in the sanctuary for the singing and storytelling.  

I was more than a little surprised when Eric showed up for our Adult Ed class the next Sunday morning and stayed for worship.  The following Saturday, he joined in with one of our small groups in the volunteer work we were doing with Lutheran Social Services.  

Eric kept showing up for just about everything we were doing at church and in almost no time he became an important part of our little family of faith at Gloria Dei.

 “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers,” Hebrews tells us, “for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”

Well,  Eric was no angel.  But then again, maybe he was.  In ancient times the word angelhad a double meaning.  It could refer to a supernatural being who served God, or it could simply mean a messenger.   Eric was, in and of himself, a message to us—a gift to us all at the little church with a big heart.

We learned a lot from Eric.  We learned a little about life on the streets.  We learned more than we wanted to know about our neighbors’ attitudes toward the unhoused.  We learned how the police and the justice system in our city respond to those who are experiencing homelessness.  We learned about our own attitudes toward those living rough.  Most of all, though, we experienced an energy and vitality that stayed with us for a long time after he left us.  All this because we welcomed one gregarious man into our party on his birthday.

“The next time you put on a dinner,” said Jesus,  “don’t just invite your friends and family and rich neighbors, the kind of people who will return the favor.  Invite some people who never get invited out, the misfits from the wrong side of the tracks.  You’ll be—and experience—a blessing. They won’t be able to return the favor, but the favor will be returned—oh, how it will be returned!—at the resurrection of God’s people.” (Luke 14:12-14, The Message) 

“You will be—and you will experience—a blessing.”  Eric taught us just how true that is.

Jesus loved sharing meals with people.  Think about all the stories in the gospels that involve eating!  Jesus distributed food to multitudes.  Jesus dined with Simon the Tanner and Zacchaeus.  And, of course, there was that last Passover meal with his disciples.  After the resurrection he broke bread with the Emmaus travelers and cooked fish on the beach for the disciples.  Jesus shared a table with Pharisees even though some Pharisees had criticized him for sharing a table with “the wrong kind of people.”  “This fellow eats with tax collectors and sinners!” they said. There are so many Jesus stories that revolve around eating that some have suggested that his primary work was organizing dinner parties.  

Sharing the table—issuing a wide and inclusive invitation—this was one of the ways Jesus embodied the commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness, the kin-dom of God. 

“The gospel,” said Rachel Held Evans, “doesn’t need a coalition devoted to keeping the wrong people out.  It needs a family of sinners, saved by grace, committed to tearing down the walls, throwing open the doors, and shouting, ‘Welcome!  There’s bread and wine.  Come eat with us and talk.’ This isn’t a kingdom for the worthy, it’s a kingdom for the hungry.”

In the earliest days of what we now think of as the Church, many—maybe most—groups of Jesus followers looked like and operated like dinner-party groups—they organized their fellowship and worship around sharing a table, and everyone brought what they could to the banquet.  We see hints of this in 1 Corinthians 11 when St. Paul chastises the Corinthians for bringing their divisions to the table, but even more sternly for failing to make sure that the have-nots were included in the celebration when the haves were feasting.

“When you meet together,” he wrote, “you are not really interested in the Lord’s Supper. For some of you hurry to eat your own meal without sharing with others. As a result, some go hungry while others get drunk.  What? Don’t you have your own homes for eating and drinking?  Or do you really want to disgrace God’s church and shame the poor? What am I supposed to say? Do you want me to praise you? Well, I certainly will not praise you for this!” (1 Cor 11:20-22, NLT)

The practice of early Christianity was centered around the table.  When it worked it was egalitarian, transformative, and beautiful.  When it didn’t, it descended into another bad example of classism.  But the evidence suggests that most of the time and in most places it worked.  

The table of Christ was the one place in their world where they were all equal.  It was the one place where it didn’t matter if you lived in a mansion or a shack or  sheltered under the eaves of the town hall.  It was the one place where it didn’t matter if you were a slave or a free person.  It was the one place where it didn’t matter if you were male or female—at least not in those earliest days of the Jesus communities.  

At the table of Christ, all were equal and all shared in what was brought to the supper—but most especially, all shared in the bread and the wine of Christ’s presence.

In his book The Forgotten Creed: Christianity’s Original Struggle against Bigotry, Slavery, and Sexism, Stephen J. Patterson has recovered what is believed to be the earliest baptismal creed of the Jesus movement:

“For you are all children of God in the Spirit.

There is no Jew or Greek,

there is no slave or free,

there is no male and female;

for you are all one in the Spirit.”

If that sounds familiar, it’s because St. Paul quotes this creed in his letter to the Galatians with a slight twist at the end.  Instead of saying “for you are all one in the Spirit,” Paul writes, “for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28)

“The creed’s basic claim,” writes Patterson, “is that baptism exposes the follies by which most of us live, defined by the other, who we are not.  It declares the unreality of race, class, and gender: there is no Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no male and female.  We may not all be the same, but we are all one, each one a child of God.”  

In the weekly journal Journey With Jesus, Dan Clendenin described how his daughter’s friend wanted to invite everyone in her church to her wedding but the budget wouldn’t allow it.  So instead of having a fancy wedding meal for just a few family and close friends, they got the police to block off the main street in downtown Waco, Texas.  Guests danced in the streets and ate ice cream from a Baskin Robbins ice cream cart.  The wedding cake was under the gazebo in the park and they cut small pieces so everyone could get a taste.  The groom, a pastor, had worked a lot with unhoused people and many of them showed up for the wedding,  then helped to clean up the streets afterward.  The little African-American girl who lived next door to the bride brought her mother and her grandfather along to the wedding.  The grandfather quickly became the center of attention as he danced to the street music and soon the college girls were lining up to dance with him.  Passers-by strolling on the street were invited to join in the party.  And everyone was welcomed as an honored guest.

This is what the kingdom of God looks like.  A celebration that’s open to everyone.

It’s a family of sinners, saved by grace, tearing down the walls, throwing open the doors, and shouting, “Welcome!  There’s bread and wine.  Come eat with us and talk.

This is what the church of Jesus is supposed to be about:  radical hospitality.   

A kingdom for the hungry.

So let mutual love continue.  

And don’t forget to show hospitality to strangers.

Who knows… they just might be angels.

If Not Now, When?

Steve Beckham 2 Comments

Luke 13:10-17

Here’s a quick recap of today’s Gospel lesson.  One Sabbath day Jesus is teaching in the synagogue when he sees a woman who has been bent over double for 18 years.  Jesus calls her over to him and says, “Woman, you are released from your weakness.  He lays his hands on her, and instantly she stands up straight, and starts praising God.  But not everybody is happy about this. Now the leader of the synagogue is the one who is getting all bent out of shape.  He thinks healing and/or being healed on the Sabbath is a violation of the law.  “Now is not the time,” he says.  “Come back some other day.”

Why is it that no matter what good thing you’re doing or trying to do, somebody is going to get bent out of shape about it?

When the whole country was bent out of shape with the Great Depression of the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to straighten things out with a whole package of programs called The New Deal.  This package included the Works Progress Administration to provide jobs in a country where 24.9% of the workforce was unemployed and those lucky enough to have kept their jobs had seen their income cut by 42.5%.  The New Deal package also included Social Security to provide a guaranteed minimum income for retired workers or those too disabled to work.  

The well-off people of Roosevelt’s own social class opposed the New Deal.  They said that it was Socialism and un-American.  They said that putting people to work with the WPA would put the government in competition with private industry.  Other critics, like Huey Long, said the New Deal  didn’t go far enough or do enough.  Voices from a number of quarters said it was too expensive for a country suffering through a depression.  “Now is not the time,” they said.

When President Dwight D. Eisenhower decided to champion the interstate highway system, his critics called it “another ascent into the stratosphere of New Deal jitterbug economics.”  People who were concerned about the stability of the post-war economy said that the country simply could not afford it.  “Now is not the time,” they said.

When President John F. Kennedy declared in his State of the Union address in 1962 that we were going to go to the moon and take on other ambitious goals “not because they are easy but because they are hard” and because they would “organize and measure the best of America’s energies and skills,” he summed up his challenge by asking, “If not now, then when?  If not us, then by whom?”

“If not now, when?  If not us, then who?”  

I can imagine Jesus saying that to the synagogue leader who is upset with him for healing the woman who had been bent over for 18 years by “a spirit of weakness.” 

“You hypocrites!” he says. “You’ll untie your donkey on the Sabbath, you’ll let your ox out of its stall on the Sabbath and lead it out for water, but you don’t think this daughter of Abraham,  your sister, should be released from her bondage on the Sabbath?  What, 18 years bent over in pain isn’t long enough for you?  Now is not the time?  Well, if not now, when?”

“This woman, a daughter of Abraham,” he said “has been held in bondage by Satan for eighteen years.  Isn’t it right that she be released, even on the Sabbath?”  

Held in bondage by Satan.  The implication of what Jesus was saying was that anyone who would oppose her being freed from the “spirit of weakness” that had been keeping her bent over would be collaborating with Satan.  

There’s something evil about prolonging someone’s pain when you have the means and opportunity to provide relief.  

There’s something evil about prolonging someone’s bondage when you have the means and opportunity to set them free.  

More than 100 million people in this country are now dealing with some degree of medical debt.[1]  Eighty percent[2] of those with medical debt had medical insurance when the debt was incurred but found that their insurance did not cover the expensive treatment, meds or procedures they needed.  An estimated 550,000 people will file for bankruptcy this year because of medical debt.[3]  And it’s about to get worse, far worse, because the Great Big Beautiful Bill that congress just passed guts Medicaid which was the medical insurance 72 million people in this country have relied on.  The Congressional Budget Office estimates that somewhere between 8 million and 24 million will lose their coverage either partially or entirely.  All of them will lose some financial security.  Some will lose their homes.  

This is what happens when we are all in bondage to a for-profit medical system.  But when we talk about Medicare for all or some other form of universal health care like the kind every other industrialized country in the world provides for their citizens, the insurance companies all say in unison, “We can’t afford it.  The economy won’t sustain it.  Now is not the time.”  

There’s something evil about prolonging someone’s pain when you have the means and opportunity to provide relief.  

There’s something evil about prolonging someone’s bondage when you have the means and opportunity to set them free.  

We seem to be perpetually caught between factions that want to bring healing to our over-heating planet and forces who are worried about the costs and the changes that would come with fixing the problems we have caused.   As we talk about funding new infrastructure for producing renewable energy, as we talk about ways to make more electric vehicles and make them more affordable so we can reduce the pollution that produces global warming and climate change, as we talk about creating more and better mass transit, there is a chorus of voices saying, “It’s too expensive.  The economy won’t support it.  The technology is not all there yet.  Now is not the time.”

When we talk about how we can address the lingering and malignant nastiness of racism, and antisemitism, we run headlong into people who want to remove the books and curricula that teach about these things from our libraries and schools.  They don’t want their children to feel bad about the way their forbears treated people who were different from themselves.  They don’t want their children to know about our legacy of slavery, and they really don’t want them to know how de-humanizing and violent slavery really was.  They don’t want them to know about Jim Crow laws and segregation.  They don’t want them to know about all the ways that racism is still making life difficult to impossible for people of color.  “They’re just children,” they say.  They’re too young to be exposed to those things.  Now is not the time.”  

Well if not now, when?  If they don’t learn about the ugly hate and violence of our shared past, how will our children know not to make the same horrible mistakes in the future?  How will they understand the hate and violence they still see today?  

And what about the Black children and Brown children and Jewish children and Muslim children who are still living with the challenge of all that racism.  The redlining may be gone on the map but the neighborhoods it created linger on along with their diminished opportunities and services and quality of life.  These children of God have been held in bondage for centuries.  Isn’t it right that they be released?  Isn’t it right that they be freed from the things that have bent their lives out of shape?  Isn’t it right that in the name of Jesus and in the name of our common humanity we should stretch out our hands and help them stand up straight…even on the Sabbath?  If not now, when?  If not us, then who?

How will our children understand how destructive and wrong it is to treat others as something less than human, something less than children of God, something less than their siblings in Christ if they don’t learn about it when they’re still young enough to have some empathy?  How will they understand the brokenness of the world they are inheriting from us if we don’t teach them about the mistakes we’ve made?

Yes, they will feel bad about it.  Yes, it will make them sad.  That’s the point.  That’s how they will be moved to do better.  

Those who don’t want to see us address racism and antisemitism and all the other destructive and violent isms that are tearing our country and our world apart try to disparage and belittle those of us who are trying to create awareness and change things for the better.  They try to dismiss us by saying we’re “woke.”  They say it like it’s a bad thing.  

Do you know what woke means?  It’s a term that originated in the Black community.  Woke means you are awakened to the needs of others.  Woke means you are well-informed, thoughtful, compassionate, humble and kind.  Woke means you are eager to make the world a better place for all people.  Woke means you are aware of the systems we live in and how they can produce unequal opportunities and outcomes.

Jesus told us to be woke.  He told us repeatedly to stay awake.  Jesus told us to read the signs of the times.  Jesus told us to pray for God’s reign of love and respect to become a reality on earth as it is in heaven.  

Jesus himself ran headlong into that all-too-human propensity to defend the status quo.  He was continually challenged by people who were upset because he didn’t play by the rules. “There are six days of the week for working.  Come on those days to be healed, not on the Sabbath.”  But Jesus didn’t think anyone should have to wait for healing or to be set free from bondage.  Not even on the Sabbath.

Today’s Gospel tells us that the things Jesus said to the synagogue leader shamed his enemies.  Nobody likes to be shamed.  But sometimes that’s what it takes to humble us.  Sometimes that’s what it takes for us to learn.  Sometimes that’s what it takes to wake us up.

There is so much that needs the healing, freeing and restoring touch of Christ in our world.  There are so many who need to be freed by the love of God.  When we follow Jesus, we are choosing to do these things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”  When we follow Jesus, we are choosing “to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills” for the healing of our relationships, our communities and our world.  When we follow Jesus we are choosing to let the shame of our history move us in a better direction, to follow a more generous and loving Way through our present time and into the future.  When we follow Jesus we are choosing to help a society that is bent out of shape to stand up straight.  

If not now, then when?  If not us, then who?

[1] Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 2024

[2] Cornell ILR, Scheinman Institute

[3] Ibid

Burning Down The World

Steve Beckham 4 Comments

Luke 12:49-56

“I have come to throw fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already ablaze!”  Wow!  This is not “Jesus meek and mild” talking.  This is Jesus under stress.  This is Jesus who sees the cross bearing down on him.  This is Jesus impatient with everyone misinterpreting and misunderstanding him or just plain being dense.  This is Jesus on fire!    

Where did that idea—Jesus meek and mild—where did that idea even come from anyway? Is Jesus gentle?  Often.  Is Jesus compassionate?  Absolutely.  Always.  But meek and mild?  Not in my Bible. 

“I came to set the world on fire and how I wish it was already blazing!”  From the very beginning of his ministry Jesus has been announcing that the kingdom of God, the Commonwealth of God’s justice and mercy, is arriving.  A new reality is breaking into the old world order.  

Jesus did not come to maintain or reinforce the status quo.  He came to show us the heart of God and to share God’s vision of the world as God intended it to be.  He came to transform the world by transforming us. 

Jesus knew that life would be difficult for those who choose to follow him.  He knew that living in the stream of God’s love, proclaiming the radical equality and openness of God’s kindness, freely offering mercy and forgiveness, standing up for the oppressed, speaking for the voiceless, standing in solidarity with the poor and marginalized—he knew that this would create friction in a world that operated by other standards.  He knew that sometimes that friction would begin at home.

Jesus was a realist— he knew that the alternate and better reality he was proclaiming, his Good News initiating the reign of God, was going to cause division— not because he was unclear about it, but because this fire of transformation was going to bring a never-ending cycle of change.  And most people don’t like change.  He knew that conflict would be inevitable because God was entrusting this world-transforming, never-ending mission to everyday human beings— to us— and even on our best days, even when we’re filled with and empowered by the Holy Spirit, even when we think we’re seeing and hearing Jesus as clearly as possible, we can and will find things argue about.  

The church started arguing when it was still basking in the warm afterglow of the flames of Pentecost. Peter argued with James about including Gentiles in the family of faith.  Paul and Peter butted heads over authority and practice.  Paul and Barnabas argued over whether or not John Mark could travel with them and ended up going their separate ways.  In Phillipi, an argument between two important women pastors, Euodia and Syntyche, threatened to sink the congregation so Paul had to plead with them in his letter to the Phillipians, “Please, because you belong to the Lord, settle your disagreement.”  

“Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth?” said Jesus. “No, I tell you, but rather division!”

Jesus was so prophetic when he talked about the ways we separate ourselves from each other but I wonder if he ever imagined just how divided we would become.  There are 40 different church bodies in North America, in the US and Canada, that call themselves Lutheran.  There are 45,000 church bodies in the world that call themselves Christian.  And all of them have separated themselves from some other church body at some point in history.  Honestly, I think this makes Jesus weep.

The vision of the kingdom is that we are supposed to build bigger tables, not higher walls.  We’re supposed to open our doors wider, not close them against people who disagree with us.  The message of Jesus is that we’re supposed to embrace each other with love, not take intransigent stands in opposition to each other because of the way we interpret the Eucharist or the way we baptize or how we translate a few things here and there.

Whenever we take our eyes off of Christ and start focusing on other, lesser things— whenever we let those other, lesser things become more important than living in the way of Jesus, we end up fighting and going our separate ways.  When we get heated up about doing the right rite rightly or deciding who is and who is not acceptable in the body of Christ, whenever we start to think that we know who God does and does not like, whenever we start to think that our way is the only right way to read the Bible— whenever we start to think that following Jesus is about preserving the good old days and the good old ways instead of opening the door to the new thing that the Holy Spirit is doing,  the fire between us can flare out of control and become divisive and destructive.  

“I have come to throw fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already ablaze!” said Jesus.  Here in Southern California we are all too familiar with the destruction and devastation caused by fire.  We know all too well that fire can kill and destroy.  It can turn everything to ashes, soot, and pain. 

But fire can also bring us light and warmth.  Fire can clear the ground and enrich the soil to make way for new life.  There are trees who need fire for their seeds to germinate.  Fire can cleanse and refine and temper things.  

Martin Luther reminded us that “The Word of God comes, whenever it comes, to change and renew the world.” Jesus, the living Word of God, has thrown fire upon the earth, a fire of transformation that brings a never-ending cycle of change. Change can create tension if we’re not all changing in the same way or in the same direction, and tension can generate a lot of heat— but not always a lot of light.  

Change is going to continue because Christ has brought a transforming fire to the earth, a fire that has been burning for more than 2000 years.  For two millennia Jesus has been changing us and changing the world but we haven’t always handled it well.  When we align the story of our life together and the stories of our individual lives with the story of Christ, things move forward with light and warmth and energy.  When our stories diverge, the fire between us can burn us.

“Yet they meet as well as diverge, our stories and Christ’s,” said Frederick Buechner, “and even when they diverge, it is his they diverge from, so that by his absence as well as by his presence in our lives we know who he is and who we are and who we are not.

“We have it in us to be Christs to each other and maybe in some unimaginable way to God too — that’s what we have to tell finally. We have it in us to work miracles of love and healing as well as to have them worked upon us. We have it in us to bless with him and forgive with him and heal with him and once in a while maybe even to grieve with some measure of his grief at another’s pain and to rejoice with some measure of his rejoicing at another’s joy almost as if it were our own. And who knows but that in the end, by God’s mercy, the two stories will converge for good and all, and though we would never have had the courage or the faith or the wit to die for him any more than we have ever managed to live for him very well either, his story will come true in us at last. And in the meantime, this side of Paradise, it is our business (not like so many peddlers of God’s word but as men and women of sincerity) to speak with our hearts (which is what sincerity means) and to bear witness to, and live out of, and live toward, and live by, the true word of his holy story as it seeks to stammer itself forth through the holy stories of us all.”[1]

We align the story of our life together and the stories of our individual lives with the story of Jesus.  When all is said and done it’s important to remember that the story of Jesus is a love story.  He throws fire upon the earth to burn away everything that is not love, to clear the ground and enrich the soil so the seeds of love can germinate and we can grow into “little Christs” for each other.

If there must be fire between us, let it be the fire of love.

In the name of Jesus.

[1] A Room Called Remember; Frederick Buechner

Faith Without B.S. (Bogus Stuff)

Steve Beckham 1 Comment

Isaiah 1:1, 10-20; Genesis 15:1-6; Hebrews 11:1-4, 8-16; Luke 12:32-40

A pastor was just about to begin his sermon one Sunday when he was handed a note.  He unfolded the paper, looked at it a moment, then said to the congregation, “This says there will be no B.S. tomorrow.”  He paused for a long moment then said, “I’m pretty sure that means Bible Study, but I have to confess that for just a moment there I thought, ‘Oh, that would be nice.’”

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a day scheduled for no B.S.—no Bogus Stuff?  

In the alternate first reading for this morning from chapter one of Isaiah, Isaiah takes the people to task for their Bogus Stuff.  He tells the people quite plainly, “God doesn’t want your bull.”  Well, what he actually says is:  

10 Hear the word of the LORD, you rulers of Sodom!

Listen to the teaching of our God, you people of Gomorrah!

11 What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the LORD;  I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. 

12   When you come to appear before me,  who asked this from your hand? Trample my courts no more.

13 Bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and sabbath and calling of convocation— I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity.

14 Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them.

15 When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.

Somewhere along the way, the people had substituted the practice of their religion for the ethics of their faith.  They had fallen into the habit of thinking that as long as they performed the right rituals and offered the right sacrifices, as long as they celebrated certain festivals and observed certain holy days in the calendar, then everything would be okay between them and God.  

But Isaiah tells them in plain language, “No.  God thinks all of that is B.S.  Bogus Stuff.  God doesn’t want your bull…or your ram or your goat.”  So what does God want?

“Wash yourselves;” says Isaiah, “make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.”[1]

The texts assigned for today are all about faith.  They tell us what faith is and what it is not.  

Isaiah makes it clear that faith is not simply worship.  It is not liturgical worship or praise worship or any other form of worship.  Faith may move you to worship God.  Worship is one way to express your faith.  But it is not a substitute for faith.  And worship without faith is meaningless.

Faith is not mere belief.  Faith does not mean you accept or give your intellectual assent to certain propositions or truths about God, about Jesus, about the Holy Spirit.  Faith is not creeds or doctrine or dogma.  Those are tools that may help guide our faith in the same way a map can help you get somewhere you want to go.  But the map is not the journey.  It’s a depiction of the path others have traveled before you.   

So what is faith?

“Faith,” said Martin Luther, “is God’s work in us, that changes us and gives new birth from God… It kills the Old Adam and makes us completely different people.  It changes our hearts, our spirits, our thoughts and all our powers. It brings the Holy Spirit with it. Yes, it is a living, creative, active and powerful thing, this faith… Faith is a living, bold trust in God’s grace, so certain of God’s favor that it would risk death a thousand times trusting in it.”[2]

Faith is trusting God.  That’s Martin Luther’s definition. And that’s not always as easy as it sounds because God’s ways are not our ways and God’s timetable is certainly not our timetable.

Abram trusted God, but that didn’t stop him from complaining.  He had left his home in Ur to find a new homeland that God had promised.   Everywhere he went in the new land he prospered.  He acquired vast parcels of property.  His flocks increased.  Local kings respected and feared him so much that they tried to recruit him as an ally in their territorial wars.  He could have built his own city, but Abram continued to live in a tent because God had told him to keep moving.  But when  long years had passed and he and Sarah had not been blessed with children, Abram complained.

So God took Abram outside to look up into the night sky.  “Look up into the sky and count the stars if you can,” said God.  “If I can make that, do you really think giving you descendants will be a problem?”

Genesis tells us that Abram trusted God, and God regarded Abram as righteous because of his faith.

Faith is trust in God.  

When Jesus was on the road with his disciples announcing that the reign of God, the kin-dom of God is in reach, his followers started to worry about all the things one worries about in daily life.  Jesus turned to them and said, “A person is a fool to store up earthly wealth but not have a rich relationship with God.  That is why I tell you not to worry about everyday life—whether you have enough food to eat or enough clothes to wear. For life is more than food, and your body more than clothing.  Look at the ravens. They don’t plant or harvest or store food in barns, for God feeds them. And you are far more valuable to God than any birds!  Can all your worries add a single moment to your life?  And if worry can’t accomplish a little thing like that, what’s the use of worrying over bigger things?

    “Look at the lilies and how they grow. They don’t work or make their clothing, yet Solomon in all his glory was not dressed as beautifully as they are.  And if God cares so wonderfully for flowers that are here today and thrown into the fire tomorrow, he will certainly care for you. Why do you have so little faith?

   “So don’t be afraid, little flock.  For it gives your Father great happiness to give you the kingdom.”[3]

Faith is trusting God as we follow the Spirit-driven yearning of our hearts toward the better world that Jesus described for us.  It is trust that carries us through this in-between life—living between what life and the world are now and what we hope and dream life and the world will be as we work to transform them.  Faith is a holy restlessness.  A longing.  A hunger.  A desire.  Faith is not a destination, it is the road, the journey.

“Faith,” wrote Debi Thomas, “is the audacity to undertake a perilous journey simply because God asks us to — not because we know ahead of time where we’re going.  Faith is the itch and the ache that turns our faces towards the distant stars even on the cloudiest of nights.  Faith is the willingness to stretch out our imaginations and see new birth, new life, new joy — even when we feel withered and dead inside.  Faith is the urgency of the homeless for a true and lasting home — a home whose architect and builder is God.”[4]

Faith is a holy dissatisfaction with the world as it is.   Faith wants to tear down walls and build bigger tables.  Faith wants to open the doors wider so more can come to the feast.  Faith trusts that there will always be enough for everyone.  Faith trusts that Love is not diminished but multiplied when it’s shared.  Faith shows the reality of what we hope for; it is the evidence of things we cannot see except in our Spirit-inspired imaginations.

When we stand to recite the Creed on Sunday mornings, we begin with the words, “I believe, ” which is the common English translation of the Latin word Credo.  In his book The Heart of Christianity, the late Marcus Borg reminded us that Credo has a richer, deeper meaning than what we are typically thinking when we say, “I believe.” 

“Credo does not mean ‘I hereby agree to the literal-factual truth of the following statements.’  Rather, its Latin roots combine to mean ‘I give my heart to.’ . . .As the giving of one’s heart, credo means ‘I commit my loyalty to,’ ‘I commit my allegiance to.’

  “Thus, when we say credo at the beginning of the Creed, we are saying, ‘I give my heart to God.’  And who is that?  Who is the God to whom we commit our loyalty and allegiance?  The rest of the creed tells the story of the one to whom we give our hearts: God as the maker of heaven and earth, God as known in Jesus, God as present in the Spirit. . . 

  “Most simply, ‘to believe’ means ‘to love.’  Indeed, the English words ‘believe’ and ‘belove’ are related.  What we believe is what we belove.  Faith is about beloving God.”

Faith is about trusting God, but more than that, faith is about loving God.  “The only way I know how to love God,” said Richard Rohr, “is to love what God loves.”

Jesus tells us to trust God, to love God, and to travel light.  He tells us to free ourselves from excess everything and give to those in need.  Where your treasure is, he says, that’s where your heart will be.  So, let your heart go out to all those other children of God in the world around you.  Love God.  And love your neighbor as you love yourself.  Be dressed for service.  Keep your lamps burning.  And be ready.  The kin-dom of God is so close…and we don’t want to let Bogus Stuff keep us from getting there.

Have no fear, little flock.  It is your Father’s great pleasure to give you the Kingdom.

[1] Isaiah 1:16-17

[2] An excerpt from “An Introduction to St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans,” Luther’s German Bible of 1522 by Martin Luther, 1483-1546

Translated by Rev. Robert E. Smith from DR. MARTIN LUTHER’S VERMISCHTE DEUTSCHE SCHRIFTEN. Johann K. Irmischer, ed. Vol. 63 Erlangen: Heyder and Zimmer, 1854), pp.124-125. [EA 63:124-125]

[3] Luke 12:22-32 (NLT)

[4] Debi Thomas, Called to Restlessness, Journey With Jesus, August 7, 2022

How Much Is Enough?

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

Luke 12:13-31

There is an odd little detail at the beginning of chapter twelve in the Gospel of Luke that’s easy to overlook.  It could be utterly insignificant.  But, maybe it’s not.  Jesus had been invited to dinner by one of the Pharisees but it turned out to be a pretty unpleasant time with lots of verbal sparring between Jesus and the Pharisees and scribes.  When Jesus left the Pharisee’s house he discovered that, “the crowd had gathered by the thousands, so that they trampled on one another.”[1]

That’s the odd little detail.  They trampled on each other.   I think this peculiar little note is Luke’s metaphorical way of setting the stage for what Jesus is going to say about greed and hoarding and selfishness.  And fear.  

Someone in the crowd yelled out, “Teacher, tell my brother to give me my share of what our father left us when he died.”  Jesus replied, “Man, who made me your probate judge?” Well, words to that effect. Then he turned to the crowd and said, “Don’t be greedy!  Owning a lot of stuff won’t make your life safe.”  And to illustrate his point, he told them a little parable.

A rich man’s farm produced a huge crop, and he said to himself, “What am I gonna do? I don’t have a place large enough to store everything.”  But then he thought, “Hey, I know! I’ll tear down my barns and build bigger ones, where I can store all my grain and all my other stuff. Then I’ll say to myself, ‘Self, y ou have stored up enough good things to last for years to come. Live it up! Eat, drink, and enjoy yourself.’” But God said to him, “You fool! Tonight you’re going to die. Then who will get all your stuff?” 

Jesus paused for a moment to let that sink in then said, “This is what happens to people who store up everything for themselves, but are poor in the sight of God.” 

So what did this man do wrong, this rich fool in the parable?  Is Jesus saying that we shouldn’t save up for retirement or stash some cash for a rainy day when we get a bit ahead of the game?  

I don’t think Jesus is saying that it’s wrong to be rich, and I don’t think he’s opposed to saving for retirement.  But he’s also not a fan of hoarding wealth and surplus and thinking only about ourselves.  

The rich man talks to himself like he’s the center of the universe.  His surplus is all about himself.  In the culture of the people who originally heard this Jesus story, that kind of attitude would be frowned upon… to put it mildly.  Torah, the Jewish law, had some pretty clear things to say about sharing the wealth.  You didn’t harvest to the edge of your field, you left the margins for the poor.  You didn’t pick up windfall fruit in your vineyard or orchard, you left it for the poor.  And when you did harvest, you gave a minimum of 10% in a tithe for supporting the Levites and the poor.  The rich fool in this parable doesn’t even mention these things.  He only thinks of himself.  And he never asks himself, “How much is enough?”

Kurt Vonnegut, the author of Slaughterhouse 5 was good friends with Joseph Heller, who wrote Catch 22.  When Heller died, Vonnegut remembered a conversation they had once had at a party.  He recorded that conversation as a poem and read the poem at Heller’s funeral.  Here’s what he said:

True story, Word of Honor:

Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer

now dead,

and I were at a party given by a billionaire

on Shelter Island.

I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel

to know that our host only yesterday

may have made more money

than your novel ‘Catch-22’

has earned in its entire history?”

And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”

And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”

And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”

Not bad! Rest in peace!”

How much is enough?  

I’ve been asking myself that question for years.  How much is enough?  I like to tell myself that my needs are simple, that I don’t need a lot of stuff, but then I look around my office, my dresser, my closet, my garage and, honestly, I am inundated with stuff.  And a lot of it is stuff I don’t need or even much want anymore.  How did that happen?  

How did I end up with so much stuff?  And it’s not just my stuff.  I have stuff that belonged to my parents and grandparents and my in-laws.  My Beloved Spouse texted me two articles on Thursday on how to declutter.  So I guess we’ll be doing that soon. . . 

On the Sermon Brainwave podcast this week, Professor Rolf Jacobson told us that his grandmother used to say, “Possessions are their own punishment.”  Yep.  Possessions are their own punishment.

We cling to our stuff, and, it seems like our stuff clings to us.  Back in 1981 the late George Carlin had a whole standup routine about all our stuff.

“I bought a house,” said Carlin. “I needed a place to keep all my stuff.  That’s all your house is, a place to keep your stuff. If you didn’t have so much stuff, you wouldn’t need a house. You could just walk around all the time. A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it. You can see that when you’re taking off in an airplane. You look down, you see everybody’s got a little pile of stuff.  All the little piles of stuff.  And when you leave your house, you gotta lock it up. Wouldn’t want somebody to come by and take some of your stuff. They always take the good stuff… All they want is the shiny stuff. That’s what your house is, a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get…more stuff!”

What George Carlin said in 1981 is just as true today.  Maybe even more so.  Many people don’t have enough room in their houses for all their stuff, so one in 20 households rent extra space for their stuff!  Last year there were 52,301 self-storage facilities in the U.S. according to the Self-Storage Almanac.  That’s right, the stuff storage industry has its own publication.  The Almanac is projecting that in the U.S. alone, the market is expected to grow from $44.37 billion to $49.88 billion by 2029.  We can’t seem to create enough affordable housing for all our people, but we’re going to make sure we take care of all our stuff.  And it’s weird when you think about it because eventually you’re going to die.  And then who’s going to get all your stuff?  And do they even want it?    

How much is enough?  

As a culture, it seems like there’s no end to our desire for more stuff. . .or more money.  Which is really just a more portable kind of stuff.  Congress just recently passed what they called the One Big Beautiful Bill which will give the country’s estimated 900 billionaires a tax break of $60 billion dollars in federal taxes over the next two years.[2]  That averages out to more than $66 million per billionaire!  Nice.  If you’re a billionaire.  But the Congressional Budget Office also estimates that those tax breaks will add $3.4 trillion to the federal deficit by 2034.  And, of course, the bill gutted Medicaid and SNAP benefits to pay for all this largess to wealthiest among us which means that millions of the poorest among us will be without medical coverage or adequate food.

Mahatma Gandhi said that the world provides enough for all our need, but not for all our greed.

Thomas Hendricks, a psychologist who writes for Psychology Today said, “Most people, I believe, would agree that selfishness is not the basis for a healthy, sustainable society.”[3]  He’s got a point.

Stephen Hawking, the physicist, said, “We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity.” 

You want to try a fun little exercise?  Put the words “Greed and Fear” in the Google or whatever search engine you use.  Ninety percent of the results will talk about financial markets, and a lot of them will refer to the Greed and Fear index, a graph they use to tell us if Greed or Fear is driving the stock market right now.  But here’s the thing—what they don’t tell you is that Greed is rooted in fear. 

Greed is rooted in a fear of scarcity, loss, or not having enough, a fear that can drive us in a relentless pursuit of wealth or material possessions.  Greed is driven by a subconscious belief that our worth as persons is somehow tied to how much we have, and if we don’t have much, then we’re not worth much.  That is a story our culture often tells us in many not-so-subtle ways.  Some go so far as to say, “Greed is good.”  That was the unforgettable message of Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas in the 1987 movie Wall Street.  But the idea that greed is good doesn’t only appear in fiction.  More than a few politicians and financial commentators, Milton Friedman for instance, have talked about greed as a necessary and driving force in the economy.  

Maybe.  But one thing that is for certain is that greed is one of the ways we trample on each other.

“Take care!,” said Jesus. “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”  The Contemporary English Version simplifies it this way: “Don’t be greedy. Owning a lot of things won’t make your life safer.”[4]  It doesn’t get much clearer than that.

The letter to the Colossians tells us that greed is a kind of idolatry.[5]  It’s worship of a false god.  Martin Luther would whole-heartedly agree. “Show me what you trust,” said Luther, “what your heart clings to, and I will show you your god.”[6]

So. . .what do you trust?  What does your heart cling to?  How much is enough?  These are “come to Jesus” questions, are they not?

“I tell you not to worry about your life!” said Jesus. “Don’t worry about having something to eat or wear.  Look at the crows!  They don’t plant or harvest, and they don’t have storehouses or barns.  But God takes care of them!  You are more important than any birds.  Can worry make you live longer?  If you don’t have power over small things, why worry about everything else?”[7]

I hear Jesus say these things and I think, “Yeah, Jesus, I hear you.  I get what you’re saying.  That would be a nice way to live.  But the cost of living keeps going up.  And Elon Musk monkeyed around with the IRS so I haven’t got my tax refund yet.  And we’re still paying for our last vacation. . . And what if one of the cars needs new tires or the water heater blows or the dishwasher floods the kitchen or one of us gets sick or any one of a dozen other expensive things happens?

And then Jesus says this:  “Only people who don’t know God are always worrying about such things.  Your Father knows what you need.  So put God’s work first, and these things will be yours as well.”

Only people who don’t know God are always worrying about such things.  

So I guess that means that if I’m worrying about such things then I don’t know God as well as I think I do.  I guess that means that I need to get to know God better.  To spend more time with God.  To listen to God more carefully. To trust God more.  To love God more fully and freely.

“Do not be afraid, little flock,” said Jesus, “for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”  

So, I guess what it all boils down to is we need to trust God.  We need to trust that God will see to it that we have enough.  Maybe we could simplify our lives.  Maybe we could make do with less and learn that that’s enough.  And, of course, we should try not to trample on each other.

[1] Luke 12:1

[2] What The Big Beautiful Bill Really Means for Billionaires; Martina Di Licosa; Forbes,  July 9, 2025

[3] Hendricks, Thomas, Ph.D.; Greed and Fear; Psychology Today, August 3, 2017

[4] Luke 12:15 (Contemporary English Version)

[5] Colossians 3:5

[6] Luther’s Large Catechism

[7] Luke 12:22-26 (CEV)

A Prayer for Us

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

A Prayer for Us

Luke 11:1-13

How do you pray?  How do you talk to God?  What name or practice opens your heart to deep communication with the Maker of all things, the heart of Life and Love?    

Once, when Jesus was praying, one of his disciples said, “Lord, teach us to pray as John taught his disciples.”  John the Baptizer had apparently taught his disciples a special prayer for their community.  Jesus responded to this request by teaching his disciples the prayer that we’ve come to know as The Lord’s Prayer, or, if you’re Catholic, the Our Father, but I can’t help thinking Jesus would prefer for us to think of it as Our Prayer.  He gave it to all of us, after all.

The Lord’s Prayer was originally taught and transmitted orally, so it would naturally be remembered with some slight variations from community to community.  That’s probably why the version in Luke differs slightly from the version in Matthew, and both of them differ from the version in the Didache, the late first-century manual on how to do church.  

The most common version used today in English speaking communities is based on the wording that first appeared in The Book of Common Prayer in 1549.  That version was based on William Tyndale’s translation of the Gospel of Matthew from 1526 which is the only translation, by the way, where you’ll find “forgive us our trespasses” in Matthew 6:12 instead of “forgive us our debts.”[1]

I could talk all day about difficulties and variations in translation and transmission of the prayer.  It has even been a centerpiece of controversy a time or two in church history, but for now let’s use Luke’s version to take a deeper look at the meaning of this amazing prayer that Jesus has given to us.

“When you pray,” said Jesus—and the “you” is plural here—so, “when all y’all pray, say: Father, may your name be revered as holy. Your kingdom come.  Give us each day our daily bread.  And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.  And do not bring us to the time of trial.”  

We usually start a conversation by getting the other person’s attention. We often do that by simply by saying their name or title.  For example, my grandsons call me Pono.  When I hear one of the say, “Pono,” I know they want to talk to me about something or ask me something or sometimes just come sit with me—which is one of my favorite things in life.  It’s the same when we begin the Lord’s Prayer saying, “Father…”  We’re letting God know we would like to have a conversation.  Or that we’re ready to listen.

The word “Father” acknowledges that we have a personal relationship with God.  It’s supposed to help us feel like we’re sharing our hearts with a warm, nurturing, loving parent.  That’s the kind of relationship Jesus had with God and that’s what he would like for us to have, too.  

But the Father image, or for that matter the Mother image doesn’t work for everybody.  Some people have experienced abuse or conflict with their father or mother or both, so parent imagery isn’t inviting for them.  When that’s the case, it’s perfectly okay to address God in some other way.

In her book Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers, Anne Lamott wrote, “Nothing could matter less than what we call [God].  I know some ironic believers who call God Howard, as in ‘Our Father, who art in Heaven, Howard by thy name.’  

“Let’s not get bogged down on whom or what we pray to.  Let’s just say prayer is communication from our hearts to the great mystery, or Goodness, or Howard; to the animating energy of love we are sometimes bold enough to believe in; to something unimaginably big, and not us.  We could call this force Not Me. . .  Or for convenience we could just say ‘God.’”

Anne Lamott’s advice to call on God with whatever name opens your heart and draws you closer to God might seem contradictory to what comes next in the Lord’s Prayer: “may your name be revered as holy,” or to translate it directly from the Greek, “Let it be sacred, the name of you.”  So, are we treating God’s name as sacred if we call on God as Howard or some other name?  Well, I think that depends entirely on your attitude when you use that name. 

Devout Jews often address God as Hashem in their prayers.  Hashemmeans “the name,” and addressing God as Hashem gives them a way to address God by name, sort of, without actually saying God’s name, which they believe is too holy to be spoken.  In effect, Hashem becomes a name they use for God in much the same way that Pono is the name my grandsons use for me.  

Devout Jews avoid speaking God’s name, the name God spoke to Moses from the burning bush, as a way to ensure that they don’t break the commandment against taking God’s name in vain.  Taking God’s name in vain means a lot more than just saying God’s name at the wrong time or in the wrong way or saying “Oh my God” as an expletive.  

Taking God’s name in vain means using the name or authority of God in a way that draws ridicule.  It can mean claiming the authority of God for purposes that have nothing to do with God’s sovereignty or God’s desires.  It can mean using God’s name or authority to further your own ideas or agenda, to reinforce your own authority, or simply using God’s name or authority for show.  

When we say “hallowed by your name,” we’re saying, “Let it be sacred, Hashem, let it be sacred, the name of you.” When we pray this, it’s a way of saying, “Keep us humble in your presence and keep us honest, God.”

And now we come to the part of the prayer that is truly the most challenging if we really think about what we’re saying.

“Your kingdom come.”  I think sometimes that if we took this petition seriously our knees would buckle.  When we pray “your kingdom come,” we are volunteering to help build a civilization grounded in justice, kindness and love.  

This petition is where the Lord’s Prayer becomes subversive in the best possible way.  When we pray “your kingdom come,” the Lord’s Prayer can no longer be regarded as merely a nice religious artifact or a litany of devotion.  And if anyone wants to suggest that Jesus is telling us to pray for the establishment of God’s heavenly kingdom at the end of time, then I would suggest that they haven’t really read the gospels or understood the teaching of Jesus.  Jesus was not crucified because he talked about heaven; he was executed for proclaiming that the dominion of God was within reach and, in fact, had already begun. 

Your kingdom come is a declaration that we are in favor of radical changes in the way the world operates.  When we pray your kingdom come, we are asking God to work through us to make significant changes in economics, politics, religion and society in order to bring the justice and shalom of God to our everyday lives.  When we pray your kingdom come we are volunteering to live here and now in God’s shalomand also to do whatever we can to bring God’s shalom to others and to all of creation.

Shalom is what the Lord’s Prayer is all about.  Shalom is a Hebrew word that means peace, but it’s not merely a peace based on the absence or suppression of hostility.  The word Shalom comes from the Hebrew root shalam, which literally means “make it good.”  It is a word used to describe completeness and wholeness.  And, while it’s good for us to seek our own inner shalom, the real shalom of God’s dominion happens in community.  The Shalom of God’s kin-dom is a peace that recognizes that we are all interconnected and interdependent.  Shalom is built on justice and fairness and desires peace and well-being for everyone, not just for ourselves.  

Cherokee theologian Randy S. Woodley describes it this way:  “Shalom is communal, holistic, and tangible. There is no private or partial shalom. The whole community must have shalom or no one has shalom. As long as there are hungry people in a community that is well fed, there can be no shalom. . . . Shalom is not for the many, while a few suffer; nor is it for the few while many suffer. It must be available for everyone.”[2] 

When we pray Your kingdom come, we are praying for shalom in our homes, in our towns, in our churches, in our nation and throughout the whole world.  We are praying for peace and justice and fairness for everyone.  And that brings us naturally to Give us each day our daily bread, because in the commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness, in God’s shalom, everyone is fed and no one goes hungry. 

Give us each day our daily bread.  There are some variations in the ancient Greek manuscripts here.  Many of them have this petition exactly the way we’re used to hearing it or saying it: give us today our daily bread.  However, the insightful Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine, suggests that a more useful understanding comes from the manuscripts that say give us today our bread for tomorrow.  

In most households in Jesus’s day, the dough for the next day’s bread was prepared the evening before and allowed to rise during the night.  If you were going to have bread tomorrow, you needed to have the ingredients today.  So, “give us today our bread for tomorrow” is a way of asking for something very practical.  We’re asking God to save us from at least a little anxiety by giving us today what we will need tomorrow.  

This part of the prayer reaches beyond our family table.  It echoes a traditional Jewish table prayer called the motzi: “Blessed are you, Lord our God, ruler of the universe, who brings forth bread from the earth.”  It reminds us that God doesn’t just magically put bread on the table. God uses the generosity of the earth and the labor of the whole community to put bread on the table.  

When we pray give us today our bread for tomorrow, we are asking God to care for the land where the grain grows.  We’re asking for clean and gentle rains so the crops can grow.  We are asking God to guard and protect the farmers who plant and care for and harvest the crops.  We are asking God to care for those who transport the grain and mill it into flour.  We are asking God to care for the hands that make the dough and knead it.  We are asking for fuel for the fire in the ovens that bake the bread.  

Bread on the table depends entirely on the well-being of the community and on our relationships within the community.  God brings forth bread from the earth, but it is a team effort.  When we pray for both today’s bread and tomorrow’s we are once again praying for the shalom of God’s kin-dom. The next time you hold a piece of bread in your hand, or any piece of food for that matter, think of all the hands that labored to bring it to your hand.

Shalom is what makes it possible for us to have our daily bread.  But sometimes things we do or say disrupt our peace and fracture the cooperation and mutuality of shalom.  Sometimes our sins or the sins of others rupture relationships and forgiveness is needed to restore those relationships.  And that’s why Jesus taught us to pray Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.  

Luke says “forgive us our sins.”  Matthew says, “forgive us our debts.”  In both Aramaic and Hebrew, “debt” was another way to talk about sin. This petition reminds us that there is a reciprocity involved in forgiveness.  As Jesus said in Luke 6:37, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.”  Once again it’s about relationships all the way down, which means that this petition is also about God’s shalom.

But let’s go back to the language about debts and forgiving debts. Remember that Jesus was a Jew and he was teaching this prayer to his Jewish disciples.  This language about debts would have been a reminder to them of everything the Torah and the prophets had to say about economic justice.  Jesus is reminding them and us that we are called to live in an economically ethical way.  When we don’t, it’s a sin.  We accrue a spiritual debt.

Living a life of faith as a follower of Jesus means that sometimes we face difficult questions. Sometimes it feels almost as if we’re being tested. And so we pray do not bring us to the time of trial.  

When the Book of Common Prayer was revised in 1604, the phrase “lead us not into temptation” in that version of the Lord’s Prayer caused a huge controversy. The Puritans were quick to point out that the Book of James says, “No one, when tempted, should say, ‘I am being tempted by God’; for God cannot be tempted by evil and he himself tempts no one.” (James 1:13)  This was only one of several complaints they had about the Book of Common Prayer, but it was one they were not willing to compromise.

They had a point.  What the Greek says in both Luke and Matthew is “do not bring us into a peirasmon.  Peirasmon is a time or place of testing, trial or examination.  Temptation may be a kind of test, but not every test is a temptation.  In this petition, we are asking to be spared from any kind of catastrophe or stress, or any situation that would put our faith to the test. 

The Lord’s Prayer, Our Prayer, this prayer that Jesus gave us, is not only one of the great treasures of our faith, it’s also, in its way, a call to radical discipleship.  In this prayer we are asking God to empower us, guide us, and walk with us as we embrace a new way of life with new values and a new vision of what the world can be.  It really is, in six simple lines, a kind of manifesto for life as a follower of Jesus.

In this prayer we are asking for peace, health, and  wholeness for ourselves and for our community.  We are asking God to help us live in the shalom of the commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness here and now.  We are asking God to help us live in the Way of Love.  When we say “Amen,” we are not only saying “Make it so,” we are saying we will do whatever we can to live in that vision and make it a reality for others.  In Jesus’ name.

[1] I’m very grateful to Brian Stoffregen for this bit of history and other insights in his weekly Exegetical Notes.

[2] Shalom and the Community of Creation; Randy S. Woodley

Triangulating Jesus

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

Luke 10:38-42

So. . . this one time Jesus was on the road and he stopped into a certain village and a woman named Martha welcomed him, which means she invited him into her home, which was a very nice and generous thing to do since Jesus probably had an entourage travelling with him and it would be rude not to include all of them.  

That village may have been Bethany if this is the same Martha that is mentioned in the Gospel of John as the sister of Mary and Lazarus.  Luke doesn’t tell us the name of the village and Luke doesn’t mention Lazarus, so it may have been some other village and a different Mary and Martha altogether. 

For ages it was assumed that the Mary and Martha of this brief episode in Luke are the same Mary and Martha from chapter 11 in the Gospel of John, the Mary and Martha who lived with their brother, Lazarus in Bethany, about three miles from Jerusalem.  And maybe it is the same Mary and Martha.  But maybe not.  Some scholars are convinced that these two sisters in Luke’s story are not those two sisters in John’s story and that this village is not Bethany.

A few years ago an astute Bible scholar named Elizabeth Schrader Polczer was taking a very close look at some very ancient manuscripts of the Gospel of John as part of her doctoral work and she noticed some odd little smudges and scrapes and overwriting in the text in the papyrus she was examining.  It looked like someone a long, long time ago—like maybe in the 2nd century—had inserted Martha into the Lazarus story.  

Whoever did this long-ago editing may have assumed that Martha had accidently been left out of John’s account.  That’s one theory.  On the other hand, maybe Martha was inserted to downplay the importance of Mary the Magdalene—Mary the Tower.  Mary Magdalene, who is almost certainly also Mary of Bethany, the sister of Lazarus, was a very popular and important apostolic figure in the early church before the patriarchy boys club tried to diminish her influence by tarnishing her reputation.  That whole business about her being a lady of easy virtue?  No basis in fact.  Just some bad patriarchic exegesis with malice aforethought.  I’m looking at you, Gregory the Not-So-Great.

Anyway, another reason why this Mary and Martha in Luke are probably not Mary and Martha of Bethany is that Bethany is very close to Jerusalem, and there is no indication in the 10th chapter of Luke that Jesus was anywhere near Jerusalem or even going in that direction.  At the beginning of the chapter he was denouncing towns in Galilee and in the chapter before that he was in Samaria.  

Another thing to consider is that Mary and Martha were two of the most common names for women in that part of the world at that time.  There are, for example, no less than six different women named Mary in the New Testament.  And while there aren’t so many Marthas mentioned, it’s not much of a stretch to think there could be at least two.

And none of this has anything to do with this particular story.  So let’s get back to the story.

So. . . Martha invites Jesus and probably his ride-along disciples into her home then gets busy providing hospitality.  This was important.  Hospitality was serious business in their culture.  It was a holy obligation backed up by scripture.  Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed with fire from heaven for failing to provide hospitality.  Well, that and also for sexually assaulting the travelers who came through town.  But that counts as a failure of hospitality, right?

In a culture where so many people, even some wealthy and important people, were nomadic, hospitality was one of the most important cultural virtues.  When you invited someone into your home, the very least that was expected was that you would provide a good meal.  So suddenly Martha has a ton of work to do to cook some dinner for Jesus and his companions.  And maybe she needs to work out some sleeping arrangements.  And maybe she’s checking the pantry to make sure she has enough flour to make more bread and dried figs and parched grains to give them all a good breakfast.  The point is, Martha isn’t just busy for the sake of being busy.  She’s doing her best to be a good hostess and to fulfill an important social obligation.  Her busyness is honorable busyness.  Necessary busyness.  

Anyway, Martha’s got her hands full with all the hostess things and she looks across the room and sees her sister, Mary, just sitting there on the floor listening to Jesus.  

Just sitting.  

Listening to Jesus.

Martha tries to get Mary’s attention and gestures toward the food prep in progress on the table, but Mary doesn’t take the hint.  Martha picks up the water jug and tilts it toward the door, pantomiming that she would like Mary to make a quick trip to the well.  Mary doesn’t even see her because she is so caught up in what Jesus is saying.

Finally, Martha has had enough.  She storms across the room to Jesus (as politely as possible) and says, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself?  Tell her to come and help me!”

I wonder how she felt when Jesus said, “Martha, Martha! You are anxious and bothered about so many things, but only one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen what is best, and it will not be taken away from her.”

Oof.

So. . . Are you a Mary or a Martha?   Wait, don’t answer that.  The fact is, one of the things I really don’t like about this text is that far too often it tempts us to ask questions like that.  We turn a story of two good people doing two good things into a kind of binary contest with a winner and a loser and we make Jesus sound all judgy in the process.  

Let’s look again at what’s actually happening in this little drama in five verses.  Jesus arrives.  Martha gets busy to provide good hospitality.  She is fulfilling her expected role, what she believes is required of her.  Mary, on the other hand, sits down with Jesus, and listens to him.  She is giving him her time and attention which is also an important social duty.  

Notice that Jesus doesn’t say anything about what either of the sisters is doing—he doesn’t say anything critical to Martha or anything affirming to Mary—until Martha drags him into the middle of the tension between the two sisters.  That’s called triangulating.  

Triangulation happens when a person complains about another person to a third person instead of addressing the issue directly. Triangulation is very common in families, especially among siblings.  In its worst forms it can be abusive.  In its most common forms its used in particular moments or situations to establish or maintain dominance, to confirm who is in charge at least for the moment.

How often do we try to triangulate with Jesus?  How often do we try to draw Jesus in on our side of a dispute?  How often do we assume that Jesus is on our side in a disagreement with our siblings in Christ?  That’s something worth thinking about, so maybe jot that down in your notebook of Spiritual Growth Questions.  It’s a good one for keeping us honest.

When Jesus says to Martha that she is anxious and bothered about many things he is very subtly stepping out of the triangle she tried to rope him into.  He isn’t criticizing her, he is merely describing her state of mind to her.  Unfortunately, that kind of  truth often sounds like criticism, especially if we’re feeling the least bit defensive.  

When Jesus tells Martha that Mary has chosen what is best, he is, again very subtly, telling Martha to stop trying to control her sister, and he is reminding her that giving a guest time and attention is at least as important as all the hospitality duties that Martha thinks are so culturally crucial.  To emphasize this, he makes it clear to Martha that he will not allow Mary’s moment of spiritual communion with him to be taken away for the sake of housework or social propriety.  

These things Jesus says to Martha can sound a bit harsh until we remember that Martha also was free to stop and sit at the feet of Jesus any time she wanted from the moment he entered her house.  The lesson for her and all Marthas might be “before you get busy with all the things, take a moment to be with all the people.”

There were very clear social conventions in their world about hospitality and meals, but Jesus was already famous for disregarding or even criticizing these kinds of conventions, so  Mary and Martha had options.  

I think this little story in Luke wants us to think about our options so we don’t accidentally create tension and anxiety and open the door to triangulation, especially at times when we want to be welcoming and hospitable.  For instance, Mary could have stepped up to help Martha right from the beginning so they could get things prepared faster and then both sat down to a conversation with Jesus.  They could have asked Jesus when he first arrived if he wanted to eat first or sit together and talk first.  Better than that, any and all of them could have stepped in and pitched in when they saw that Martha was determined to fulfill her traditional role as a hostess. And, of course, Martha could have sat with Mary and listened to Jesus and then asked Mary—and maybe also Jesus and his crew, why not?—to pitch in and help make supper.  

There is no really satisfying ending to this very brief story in Luke.  There is no easy moral to take home here.  You can’t just say “be a Mary and not a Martha.”  We need Marthas.  Marthas make things happen in the world, and especially in the church.  Every Sunday when you come in and sit down to worship a crew of volunteer Marthas has already been hard at work.  Marthas chose the hymns and practiced the music.  Marthas prepared and printed the bulletin.  Marthas checked the sound system and the cameras for online streaming.  Marthas made sure there would be bread and wine for communion.  Marthas prepared the altar and lit the candles.  And Marthas made the coffee and snacks for the fellowship time after worship.

We need Marthas.  And we need Marys.  We need the people who listen attentively and ponder what they’re hearing.  We need people who hear the words of Christ, internalize them, and pass them along to others.  We need the teachers and counselors and preachers and theologians who keep us faithful and in tune with the heart of Jesus. 

The fact is that almost every one of us has been a Martha at one time or another and almost every one of us has been a Mary at one time or another.  Both were doing good things.  Both were serving, just in different ways.  Still, when Martha tried to triangulate Jesus into the unspoken tension with her sister, Jesus does say that Mary made the better choice. 

So maybe the message is this: before you get all caught up in the necessary busyness of life, take time to sit at the feet of Jesus.  Listen to what he says.  Internalize his Word.  Breathe in his Spirit.  Then your necessary busyness, and especially the busyness of hospitality, will be motivated by the Spirit of serving and the love of Christ that crosses all boundaries and welcomes all guests.

Oh, and maybe don’t triangulate Jesus into criticizing your siblings.