Year C, Proper 17, "Healing affluenza with a different perspective on playground status"

 

C Proper 17 22 Ord Paul 2025

Luke 14:1, 7-14

August 31, 2025

Maybe your grade school playground had a bully like mine did. Maybe it wasn't even a bully so much as a few eighth-graders who enjoyed their physical superiority by interrupting any form of play or fun that up and coming fourth-graders could muster. Even to this day, I remember the rage I felt because the football or kickball or basketball we had checked out from the gym had been taken by an eighth-grader for the upteenth time. What right, I remember thinking, did those eighth-graders have to do this? What right to take away what was checked out by a fourth-grader?

It was the time to turn the tables.

It was the day I erupted. We had been the victims for far too long.  I had had enough. Injustice had persisted for far too long on the Metamora Community Consolidated Grade School playground. It was time for fourth-grader wrath. Steve Scrhamm, tall and lanky eighth-grader that he was, had taken our football again. He stood there, smug, tossing the football from hand to hand, smiling at the lot of us. In a full display of “can't take it any more” stupidity, I decided to act. With no teacher or administrator to be found to correct these injustices, it was time for the masses to rise. “Sic semper tyrannis est.” Crying and screaming all at the same time, I launched myself at Steve Schramm's left leg and pulled and tugged and beat as hard as I could.

I must have bewildered him so completely, or my attack was the equivalent of a single gnat on the leg of a huge beast, such that Steve stood there and took the punishment from my tiny, little fists—whapping and whapping against his left leg. That is, until I bit him, and he promptly kicked me to the side. But I remember what I was thinking as I whapped and hung on for dear life. I remember thinking over and over again, “Wait till I'm in eighth-grade. Wait till I'm in eighth-grade, and then we'll see who runs the playground and how it is run.”

These were not the early signs of ordained Christian ministry in the cards. Au contraire! I even hate to complete the thought of “Wait till I'm in eighth-grade.” For what I was thinking, was not some benevolent change in the system and structure in the playground. I was looking forward to my turn, when I was at the head of the table.  “Wait till I'm in eighth-grade, I'm the king of the hill, I get to be the big cheese, I get to snatch any basketball or kickball or football I want. I'll be in power, and I'll get to interrupt play time, tease and make fun, and steal all those footballs from fourth-graders.”

Now that may not be the most Christian sentiment, but I do believe it is a very human one that survives with us long into adulthood. When we are on the outside looking in, part of the crowd that is not in power, instead of imagining a day when we will create a different kind of playground, it seems to be human nature for us to dream of the day when we will get to do exactly what has been done to us.  And we have been fed a line, that we are the victims, the dispossessed.  

It is almost like a revenge fantasy, where we have the expectations that those dispossessed will rise up and do to others what has been done to them.  This is a violent game we play day after day, deciding who is victim so that we might justify our violence to gain our rightful place at the table.  

The author of Luke has the habit of grouping healings with teaching.  The sickness or the condition coming before Jesus embodies the presenting problem in the wider world.  In the ancient world, the physical condition of “dropsy,” a swelling of the soft tissue due to excess water, represented the spiritual problem of avarice or greed.  It was said that the person suffering from “dropsy” had a need to drink more and more water without ever being sated.  Dropsy was like a greedy person could never accumulate enough wealth or possessions.  The Roman philosopher Cicero said: “Diogenes used to liken greedy men to those suffering from dropsy.”   

The healing of the spiritual condition, a form of affluenza, is then what Jesus addresses in his teaching.  Eating together is an intimate and communal act.  In the ancient world, eating defined social position and status.  Dining at the home of a Pharisee on the Sabbath, the social stakes are heightened as all eyes are on Jesus to see what he brings to the table.   Jesus heals the physical condition for the man with dropsy.  He then instructs how the spiritual, societal question shall be healed.   As we hear his teaching, we should remember that Jesus’s contemporary listeners are not the usual poor and dispossessed.  He is speaking to those people who have climbed the ladder of the Jewish religious aristocracy.

Jesus does not counsel that social status should be wholly abandoned.  Instead, he advises that for healing, one should consciously and deliberately live beneath presumed social status, to not thirst after social status or higher honor.  To displace oneself to a lower seat is a way of bringing back social health and well-being.  When Jesus tells the host who he should invite to a dinner party, he tells him: “Invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.”  For readers of the gospel of Luke, these groups should be a memory cue.  They are a reminder of Jesus’s original mission statement when he first begins his public ministry, standing in the synagogue and reflecting on the scroll of Isaiah:  “The Spirit of the Living God is upon me.  For God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the Year of God’s Amnesty.”   This is a cue that Jesus is speaking into being, enacting a different way of life, a life that has the ability to end the violence of affluenza, that will bring about a spiritual health.  

And the reason Jesus gives for this way of life?   Is that the Divine Host . . . this is the way God acts in the world.  And so as we act in this way, we come into the home and being and practice of God.  It is God’s good wish, God’s deep desire, that our chasing after status and affluence, on the playground or at the dinner table, in the board room or among the nations, the violence and sickness of affluenza, come to an end.  

Usually this Scripture appears on the first Sunday of September, a Sunday when most congregations like ours share in the holiest of meals, a practice that remembers the many meals Jesus shared on this good earth in a way that was counter to the sickness and death found in the wider world.  We est this meal to steel our courage, enliven our hope, and say that we would once again recognize that as God asks us to take a seat at the front of the table, we are willing to live in some discomfort, and we waive our hand to say, “No, no, I am afraid you don’t understand.  I am confident in the good gifts you intend for me, Gracious One.  I defer.  Rather, this person who is poor or beaten down by the world should sit next to you.  It is only right and well.” 

And in that moment, when we enact the mission statement of Jesus, God smiles, smiles broadly, and says, “In my house, this place, you shall always have a home.”  And in that moment, we share in God’s joy.  Amen.  

Sermon, Year C, Proper 16, "Being seen and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre"

 

C Proper 16 21 Ord Paul 2025

Luke 13:10-17

August 24, 2025

           The story is told of the bent-over woman who entered the synagogue with a crippling spirit that had kept her that way for 18 years.  Eighteeen years!  Can we imagine any person that we know our love in our faith community walking into the place of worship for eighteen years without asking or the leaders of our church asking, “What ails you?  Why has this become your lot?  What can we do?  How might we help?”

`          In reading the Bible, one of the first lessons we learn is that ancient peoples did not necessarily see themselves as a-part from the wider society.  When we read the beautiful hymns from the Psalms, and hear one of the voices say, as in my favorite Psalms, “As a deer longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for you, O God.  My tears have been my food day and night, as my enemies say to me, ‘Where is your God?’”  The point is that that is not just a singular voice crying out to God.  We are to read that Psalm as a voice of the community, crying out on behalf of the community.   “People who want our destruction think that you are a joke, God.  Where are you in the midst of such suffering and pain in our lives? Why have you been silent, O God?”  Psalms like that one made it into holy Scripture because people heard voiced in that Psalm their own voice, the voice of their people.

           So  many Scriptural stories are written not to tell the story of one individual but of the whole community.  Like a good movie or a good story, the stories are meant to be something the whole community understands and experiences.  When we hear of a bent-over woman who walks into the worship place with a spirit that has her crippled, unable to stand up straight, think of what that might be saying about the plight of the whole people during the time of Jesus. 

           If we could step back for a moment from seeing this story literally, imagine the story being told to reflect a dispute going on within the Jewish faith.  At the core of Jewish faith is the Exodus story which also reflects all the rules and regulations for keeping the Jewish people right before God and maintaining their freedom. 

           The most common phrasing for understanding the Exodus story is that the Egyptians and their Pharaoh held the Jewish people in bondage, and through God’s deliverance, God liberated or loosed them.  Moses then taught the Hebrew people through what was called The Way, what was bound (not permitted, and reflecting a life of slavery) and loosed (permitted and what reflected a life of freedom).  In the same manner, everyday Jewish teaching then became about what was bound (not permitted and slavery) and loosed (permitted and freedom).[1]

           These are the same verbs found in Matthew, where the author of that book strongly alludes to Jesus as the second Moses.  Not unexpectedly then, Jesus says to the apostle Peter, a verse often quoted by the Roman Catholic Church to reference the authority of the Pope, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven.  And whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”[2]  Because the Roman Catholic Church traces all of the Pope’s authority back through Peter, they are drawing a beeline back through Peter to Jesus and then back through Jesus to Moses and the Ten Commandments to say, “Whatever the Pope says . . .goes.”

           Ok, I took a small detour there.  Let’s get back to our story to see the Jewish dispute that is going on.  On one side in this story are the synagogue leaders who believe the Exodus story and the giving of God’s Way which includes the rules and regulations around the Sabbath, that whole story, is about a personal morality that must be observed and honored to maintain integrity before God.  Honor the rules to honor God.  Those who do not honor the rules bring shame upon themselves and their community. 

After all, and this is important, if you start asking why this woman is bent-over, is to invite the hard work of analysis, looking upstream, to see who is really responsible for her suffering.  And that just begins the hard work, the conflict we might have to endure, to be involved in bringing healing to an entire people.  And remember, going back, this story is a story intended to be a metaphor for the whole of Jewish people living in rural Galilee.  Do you see the suffering?  Do you hear the cries of the people?  Bent-over and crippled these 18 years?  But who is ready for that?  Who wants to enter that conflict?

Jesus notices.  Though he is teaching in the synagogue, he notices a woman held in bondage.  He hears the cries of his people, as God did and said to Moses when the Divine Deliverer first related the reason for speaking to Moses out of the burning bush.  “I have heard the cries of my people, and I have come down to deliver, to loose my people from slavery.” 

Throughout the Scripture passage read for us today, the verbs used repeatedly are “bind” and “loose.”  What does it mean that this bent-over woman is bound by this spirit and that Jesus says in response, to characterize what happened to her, “[W]as she not bound to be loosed from this bondage on the day of the Sabbath?”?  The overt repetition of the language tells us what is at issue here.

Jesus is effectively saying, “It is necessary to alleviate her suffering, for her to be freed.”  Jesus does not say that she is healed.  “Heal” is the term used by the synagogue leader—a term he uses to invoke the rules and regulations.  The synagogue leader is trying to say this is about this woman and the woman only.

The synagogue leader does not blame Jesus for this interruption.  He blames the suffering woman.  Jesus says that she is not healed but “loosed”[3]—a term that invokes the deeper meaning of the Sabbath, rooted in the Exodus story, and invites the Jewish people to collectively see themselves in this woman. 

The Jewish crowd in this story gets it.  They, collectively, know this story and suffering.  They rejoice at her being loosed, knowing God’s intent for all of them.  The Jewish crowd know themselves to be the bent-over people whom God necessarily frees. 

Again, the synagogue leaders try to do a go-around.  They see the bent-over woman as an easy target and try to move around a conflict with Jesus.  They do not cast their aspersions at Jesus but point the finger at the easy target, a woman, who is shaming their synagogue for being free from her suffering, the Satanic spirit.

Today we are still arguing over the interpretation of the Exodus story.  Who is right?  The synagogue leaders?  Who invoke individual rules and regulations to say religious faith is about shaming those who do not abide by the rules, regardless of how they suffer?  Is it the easy play to make faith about personal morality so that we do not have to do the hard work to do the critical analysis, look upstream, and seek to loose a whole community bound in the suffering slavery?  Is suffering a signpost of sin?

Or is Jesus right about the Exodus story?  Does real physical suffering call us to do the hard work to bring about freedom?  Is true suffering a signpost a wider sin of societal breakdown which we then necessarily move against?  And are we willing to enter into that conflict?  Because my reflection is that many of the world’s ills are a result of an unwillingness to enter into conflict, to look deeper.  Like the synagogue leader, we take the easy way out and blame how things are going on those who suffer.

One of my favorite writers, Sarah Kendzior, revealed in her column this past week that she is a big fan of horror movies.  And now I cannot love her more.  I pray that I don’t offend anyone by admitting that. 

Kendzior was traveling in Austin, Texas, this past week and wrote of her fandom for the movie, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  In particular, during her college years she had interviewed the actor who played Leatherface, Gunnar Hansen, and had become somewhat a friend to the guy who played Leatherface, the wielder of the titular chainsaw. 

Hansen had been a former graduate student in English, and a Herman Melville scholar, the writer of Moby Dick.  And he was philosophical about the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, referenced that Raiders of the Lost Ark was much more explicit in its violence.  And to remember, Hansen said, that was a movie aimed at kids  But that the violence in Raiders of the Lost Ark was a polished violence, a polite violence.  The problem in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre was that it was filled with impolite violence.  Hansen went on to explain,

What’s happening is that we’re going after these films not because of their violence.  We see the violence as something we can hang on to.  We’re offended by horror movies because we’re middle Americans who don’t want to see things in which the values are not the same.  The vision in horror films is often very dark.  We want to have a movie that tells us that everything’s okay.

        A horror film does not pretend that death is not horrifying.  It does not pretend that violence is not bloody, grotesque, and painful.  What’s irresponsible are the films that show violence with no ramifications.[4] 

        For the writer Sarah Kendzior, Gunnar Hansen made her feel normal, to recognize that the violence and the resulting suffering in the air could not be polished to become palatable.  And to complete Kendzior’s thought, I think that we often demand polite violence so we can get our necessary fill of it.  Or we find ourselves turning aside and shunning the real effects of violence, the people who remind us of what it does in the world.  We just want them to go away.

           I think that is why when I imagine God personified, I always imagine God with kind, weathered eyes, because God refuses to do individual rule-making to turn aside from suffering.  God knows the horrors of it.  God openly weeps through it and rails against it.  God’s heart grieves the suffering, wailing and screaming against it. 

           There are times when I am a very poor excuse for a Christian.  But then there are other times when I am aware that God is moving through me to move upstream, seek answers, and ask, “Were they not bound to be loosed from this bondage on the day of the Sabbath?”  I remember this past winter, going out to one of the piers on Lake Michigan in the midst of a snowstorm, and shouting out into Lake Michigan on behalf of one of my kids who was going through continued, tremendous pain, begging for them to be loosed from it, to be impolite, the snot flying in my face, my tears and the snow making it impossible for me to see anything, the biting wind whipping into me.  I cried and screamed for them until I lost my voice.  I opened my mouth to scream against it and all that I had was a hollow hoarseness. 

It was not only me crying out to God on their behalf but also a promise that I would do “whatever” to loose them from the bondage in their lives.  For one moment and following, I was faithful.  Would that I could find the strength, the courage, the wherewithal to do that when there is so much polite and polished violence and suffering in the world. 

           There are any number of peoples and places in the world bent-over by Satan, maybe that describes you in your time of life, feeling like the suffering is too much to bear.  We know of whole peoples who are bound to be loosed and necessarily need to be freed.  When we speak of our faith, can we talk about how our suffering and deliverance is wrapped up in the suffering and deliverance of others?  Do we hear Jesus critiquing the polished and polite religious faith which shames individuals, those bent-over women?  That religious faith too often saying that if the woman had only been of more character, followed closer the morality code, been more faithful, learned their lessons, only did things legally, God would have delivered them by now?  Are we enslaved by a faith that speaks of individual sin so that we do not have to do the hard work of taking on the wider systemic and structural issues that break our backs?

           So it is that when we pray today, we bind ourselves to others who suffer or rejoice so that those who are bound may be loosed and those who are loosed may hear our shouts of gladness and jubilation. 

           What the Scripture teaches is that others may not even know us by name or just refer to us as “bent-over,” but Jesus and his followers notice, go to our place in the sanctuary, make eye contact . . . maybe for the first time in eighteen years and declare God’s will for us to be loosed in the world.  Certainly . . . as God wills that for us, God wills it for people, communities, and nations today. 

           May the followers of Jesus, the ones who believe that Jesus’s interpretation of the Exodus story carries the day, join in crying out.  May they bind themselves to one another so that they know God’s will for them to stand up straight, to be lifted.  May they see the suffering in the world and recognize that the sons and daughters, siblings and cousins of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar deserve our notice and our hard work.  May it be so.  Amen.

---

[1]http://www.ed-nelson.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=59.

[2] Matthew 16:19; D. Mark Davis, “A Bound Woman Bound to be Loosed from Bondage,” Left Behind and Loving It.  http://leftbehindandlovingit.blogspot.com/2013/08/a-bound-woman-bound-to-be-loosed-from.html. 

[3] Ibid.

[4] Sarah Kendzior, “My Friend Leatherface:  Remembering a creative conservationist as plutocrats take a chainsaw to Texas,” @sarahkendzior, Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter on substack, August 20, 2025. 

Sermon, Year C, Proper 14, "Investing in the Economy of God"

 

C Proper 14 19 Ord Paul 2025

Luke 12:32-40

August 10, 2026 

           As we read along in the gospel of Luke, according to the Revised Common Lectionary, we see Jesus teaching God’s economics over and against the economics that destroys the life of his people on a daily basis.   You have heard me preach from the economics related in the Lord’s Prayer in Luke, chapter 11, doing things like forgiving debt.  But earlier in Luke, chapter 12,  I believe you have probably heard more eloquent preachers talk about how Jesus chastises the rich farmer who builds a bigger barn to store up all his wealth, seems to be oblivious to the needs in his wider community, and seem content that their 401K will pump out retirement income to keep themselves high on the hog. 

In that telling, Jesus equates storing treasure up for oneself as an enemy to God’s economics and the sharing of resources with the whole community.  Jesus implies to hoard resources is to go against God’s economy.  The rich farmer’s market security blinds him to how God’s economy works.

In Scripture not included in the Revised Common Lectionary, just before our Scripture today, Jesus outlines God’s economy.  The Greek word Jesus uses is a command, a command so many interpreters diminish.  This command requires urgent action.   Katanoesate, is “Pay attention!” or, in context, better, “Hey, refocus your attention!  Over here!  This is the way God’s economy works with the good earth.”  Jesus then talks about how God feeds the ravens.  Invoking ravens reminds Bible readers of God provides for ravens in the book of Job[1] and in those ancient songs of the Psalms[2], or how ravens provided for the prophet Elijah when he was in exile during a famine[3], a story, by the way, that just precedes Elijah confronting Ahab and Jezebel for how they have sought to hoard wealth in Naboth’s vineyard.

“Hey, pay attention.  Refocus to what God is doing over here.  Those wildflowers, they don’t punch in for work, or grow anxious about what they shall have the next day, and yet, King Solomon, hoarder of wealth he was, was not as beautiful or decked out like one of these wildflowers!  So stop being anxious, Jesus says, God’s got you through all the goodness this good earth provides.  Hear it in the Lord’s prayer?  That economy.  Give us this day, our daily provision. 

Don’t be anxious.  Again, this is put in command form.[4] 

Throughout the Gospel of Luke, God is also communicating another message through angels, mentors, and Jesus. “Do not be afraid.”  Luke’s gospel begins with the angel telling an unmarried, soon-to-be-pregnant teenager, soon-to-be migrant and then a refugee, a peasant (meaning a farmer without land), “Do not be afraid.”  An angel appears to shepherds, those who did not own the fields they slept in, who did not own the sheep, stinking to high heaven, “Do not be afraid.”  Again, it is this assumption that the status quo for the poor and destitute, life is so hard, that they would be terrified God might visit them, might be a part of their lives.  For certainly, didn’t the life they were living, the violence that was a part of their everyday lives, indicate God was against them?  Angels must remind people like Mary, the shepherds, and this week, the disciples, not to be afraid of God or what God has in store for them.

           Jesus begins the Scripture reading today with, “Do not fear, little flock, for it is the loving Creator’s good wish to give an entryway, an on-ramp to the empire as God lays it out.”  If you are hearing these stories told of this Jesus fella’, you hear “do not be afraid” repeated over and over again.  It sets the tone.  It reminds you, that as you step out into the world, you can risk boldly when God is ready to act in the world.  And much like “Do not be anxious,” “Do not fear,” is a command.

           Two weeks ago I tried to say that the Lord’s prayer and Jesus’s teaching bracketing that prayer taught that God is good.  “Come out, Eunice!  Apparently God does not wish to smite us!”  No, “what person of you would give their child a snake when they asked for an egg, or a scorpion when they asked for bread?”

           Fundamentally, Jesus had to teach the disciples a message that was counter to the world they saw around them, a counter-cultural message, a message that was opposite the one Rome intended for them, The Roman imperial economy bit, devoured, and consumed the people.  Do not confuse the status quo of Roman Empire with God’s economics.  “No,” Jesus is saying, “God wants to give you the keys to the kingdom.  For God is good.”

           For people living in poverty, death, and violence, they had to wonder.   Was life some cruel joke?  If God ordained the status quo, what kind of arbitrary and punishing god was this that we, and our people, the Jews, and particularly the most faithful among us, live these short and harsh lives?  Who would want to follow such a God, be the disciple of someone who regularly encouraged us to be their followers?  The Roman gods love to be in charge in their quest for power over us.  But what kind of God is this? 

Jesus has to go about reminding the disciples that their God is the God of the slaves and not the taskmasters.  Remember?

           Share bread and resources.  Heal one another and make healing possible for one another.  Turn your attention to the communities you are creating so that the most vulnerable and those with their backs against the wall might have their daily provision as well.

           Jonathan Roberts, a gay, disabled, poor person, shared this last week, “[W]hen you say,  ‘[W]e just disagree politically but we can still be friends,’ I need you to understand something:  your politics decide whether I eat, get healthcare, marry, survive.  This isn’t just a disagreement.  It’s my life.”  God wants us to pay attention.

           Joey Yochheim, a Christian coach and consultant, who works in areas of fitness and health management, shared something this past week I thought related where many of us are.  He asked first if we knew what was considered the most obese town on the planet, thinking that many people would assume it was in the United States.  Instead, the most obese town in the planet is Ebbw Vale in the United Kingdom (Great Britain).  80% of the people in the town are obese.

           Yochheim related his findings, how that obesity is not related to laziness or lack of willpower.  Instead, what happened is that Ebbw Vale lost the steel and coal industries that helped it to thrive economically.  And, as a result, they lost community.  When you’re broke, calories become currency, and a McDonald’s meal can feed a family of four for 14 pounds.  A meal with fresh veggies is about 25 pounds.  When you have to choose between rent and groceries, ultra-processed foods win every time. 

           Ebbw Vale has what is referred to as “Takeaway Alley,” a section of town where multiple fast food joints are stacked on top of one another.  Some residents order fast food delivery 2 to 3 times a day.  When healthy food is scarce but junk food like McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, and Wendy’s are stacked right outside I-94, guess what happens?

           The physical infrastructure in Ebbw Vale to encourage health and exercise collapsed too: they have no accessible gyms or sports centers, there is limited green spaces for walking, there is poor public transport to reach better grocery stores, and jobs went from physical labor to unemployment.  When 80% of the people around you are obese, the societal pressure for change disappears.  Everyone thinks this is normal. 

           Nobody learns to cook.  Kids think takeout for each meal is just what you do.   Children have never seen their parents exercise.  Nobody learns nutrition.  Poor habits, Yohheim writes, are passed along like family heirlooms.

           In this example, our economy is subsumed under the quick buck and profits of the fast food industry.  And it has no relation to ravens and wildflowers.

           Yochheim believes this English town is a lesson for what our country faces in this present moment, an understanding of where we orient our economy.  When economic opportunity dries up, healthy food is not based in the earth but in ultra-processed alternatives, exercise infrastructure crumbles, education is no longer valued, and government support for communities vanishes.  Ebbw Vale’s failure is not a personal one, but a societal one.[5]

           Turn your attention to this economy, Jesus says, in parts of Luke chapter 12, just before our Scripture passage for today.  And then Jesus exhorts us in what was read for today that we should, “Stay awake!” and “Get ready.”  For that other economy comes like a thief in the night to take the very essence of our communities like it did from Ebbw Vale.  Before you know it, what God had intended for your community, God’s economy, is leveled by those who seek to build the bigger barns.

           And we have somehow interpreted the leveling of our communities as the work of God.  That seems to be a part of our human condition, right?  Many of us have been taught that faith is not to question and to know that God is in heaven and all may not be right with the world . . . but it’s just because you dummies haven’t got it figured it out yet.  Cancer visits . . . multiple times.   We lose a child early in life.  We see addiction destroying our life.  Or the life of someone we love.  Mental illness makes our life anxious.  Or a living hell.  If I trusted in a God who cared about being almighty and worked by having power over, just one of these tragedies in my life would have me storming the halls of heaven with serious questions.  Maybe regardless of how we picture God, those questions should be front and center. 

           I know there are times when I find myself raging at God through an addiction I cannot shake.  “Where are you??  Is this what you intended for my life?  I have asked and asked . . . and you, you are nowhere to be found!  Who do I feel like I walk through this all alone?  How can you be called ‘almighty’ when I see you have no power over me?”

           Sometimes, only sometimes, the silence after my raging gives way to a far deeper wisdom which reminds me that Christ crucified is not about a God who cares about being almighty or winning or showing off power.  Rather, what we have, is a God, who through Christ’s life and ministry, reminds us the power of what it means to walk with hurting folk, who finds true treasure and value in making sure our neighbor makes it through another day, a God we touch and feel in the brown earth as we garden or smell a wildflower, a God who wants us to piece together systems and structures in ways that are not about hoarding and fear—but about love and compassion.  What if we were to risk that?  Tell others we’re just repeating the small fractals, rhythms and practices, God is doing in our hearts?

           Jesus seems to know, he seems to know, that taking such risks only happens when we know that God is good, the fear dissipates, and MMMmmm . . .MMMM, we know we are loved.  Again, our Scripture verse begins today with Jesus saying, “Don’t be afraid, little flock, because your loving Creator delights in giving you the empire, the kingdom.  All of it is yours.  God wants you to have it.  God wants to give it to you.”  Become a murmuration, little flock, a murmuration of God’s love. 

           One of the ways I depart from the worship and liturgy taught to me in seminary is a reformed notion that we come before God as sinners, as somehow deserving of God’s judgment and punishment.  Many worship services will begin with a prayer of repentance and assurance of pardon that indicates somehow we are guilty but, in God’s mercy, God does not punish.

And I really think that is wrong and abusive.  I try to tell you every week of God’s love in worship so it gets deep into you.  Because I know it can be hard to trust. 

           You are loved.  You are cherished.  And in being loved and cherished, you are now free to risk dreaming the dream and living the life God invites you to follow.  Little flock, God loves you and wants you to have the keys to the kingdom, an entryway and onramp to the way God wants us to be in the world..  Jesus makes it clear that it looks nothing like the kingdom Rome has constructed—concerned about who is no. 1, who is the winner, who has the most power, and then reinforces their status through escalatory violence.  So you had better build bigger barns, amass wealth and weapons in protection, make sure your people are taken care of.

           How ironic that this same Jesus seems to be worshipped by so many who wish to make him no. 1, proclaim him as the ultimate warrior and winner, have an ever greater bloodlust for more and more power, declaring who is in and who is out, understanding the chosen people as the ones who have a license to destroy.  Our culture has so transfigured what it means to grow into an authentic life. 

           Once we are loved, we are free to risk great things:  to not find our wealth in our material things but to sell possessions and give alms to the poor, that our purse or wallet may concern itself with the things of God, to act outside the violence of a violent world.  For if I know that God cares about the dwindling hairs on my head, that now seem to be found growing out my ears . . . if we know that God pays attention, cares for our daily needs even as God cares for the daily feeding of ravens, and if God looks at the wildflowers and sees such beauty, how much, even more so, God will look at us and say, “You beauties!”  We would then know what we could risk.  We would be awake and ready to not let the thieves take our communities.

           Would that that still our anxious voices just enough to risk something great for God, our neighbor, and this good earth.  You . . . are loved.  God cares for your daily needs.  And God finds you insanely, naturally, spectacularly beautiful.  Risk accordingly, grow communities that share, heal, and bring life into the economy of God.  Amen. 

---

[1] Job 38:41

[2] Psalms 147:9

[3] I Kings 17:4-6

[4] Ched Myers, “Pay Attention to the Great Economy (Lk 12:13-21),” Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries, August 7, 2025, https://bcmonline.org/2025/08/07/pay-attention-to-the-great-economy-lk-1213-21/.

[5] Joey Yochheim, @joeyyochheim, X, August 7^th thread, https://x.com/joeyyochheim/status/1953451948436255064

Sermon, Year C, Proper 14, "To know we are loved, then to risk something great"

 

C Proper 14 19 Ord Pilg 2022

Luke 12:32-40

August 7, 2022 

           As I shared two weeks ago, it is the oft-repeated phrase in Luke from God to humankind.  “Do not be afraid.”  Luke’s gospel begins with the angel telling an unmarried, soon-to-be-pregnant teenager, soon-to-be migrant and then a refugee, a peasant (meaning a farmer without land), “Do not be afraid.”  An angel appears to shepherds, those who did not own the fields they slept in, who did not own the sheep, stinking to high heaven, “Do not be afraid.”  Again, it is this assumption that the status quo for the poor and destitute, life is so hard, that they would be terrified God might visit them, might be a part of their lives.  For certainly, didn’t the life they were living, the violence that was a part of their everyday lives, indicate God was against them?  Angels must remind people like Mary, the shepherds, and this week, the disciples, not to be afraid of God or what God has in store for them.

           Jesus begins the Scripture reading today with, “Do not fear, little flock, for it is the loving Creator’s good wish to give you the kingdom.”  If you are hearing these stories told of this Jesus fella’, you hear “do not be afraid” repeated over and over again.  It sets the tone.  It reminds you, that as you step out into the world, you can risk boldly when God is ready to act in the world. 

           Two weeks ago I tried to say that the Lord’s prayer and Jesus’s teaching bracketing that prayer taught that God is good.  “Come out, Eunice!  Apparently God does not wish to smite us!”  No, “what person of you would give their child a snake when they asked for an egg, or a scorpion when they asked for bread?”

           Fundamentally, Jesus had to teach the disciples a message that was counter to the world they saw around them, a counter-cultural message, a message that was opposite the one Rome intended for them, “No,” Jesus is saying, “God wants to give you the keys to the kingdom.  God is good.”

           For people living in poverty, death, and violence, they had to wonder.   Was life some cruel joke?  If God ordained the status quo, what kind of arbitrary and punishing god was this that we, and our people, the Jews, and particularly the most faithful among us, live these short and harsh lives?  Who would want to follow such a God, be the disciple of someone who regularly encouraged us to be their followers?  The Roman gods love to be in charge in their quest for power over us.  But what kind of God is this?  Jesus has to go about reminding the disciples that their God is the God of the slaves and not the taskmasters.  Remember?

           That seems to be a part of our human condition, right?  Many of us have been taught that faith is not to question and to know that God is in heaven and all may not be right with the world . . . but it’s just because you dummies haven’t got it figured it out yet.  Cancer visits . . . multiple times.   We lose a child early in life.  We see addiction destroying our life.  Or the life of someone we love.  Mental illness makes our life anxious.  Or a living hell.  If I trusted in a God who cared about being almighty and worked by having power over, just one of these tragedies in my life would have me storming the halls of heaven with serious questions.  Maybe regardless of how we picture God, those questions should be front and center. 

           I know there are times when I find myself raging at God through an addiction I cannot shake.  “Where are you??  Is this what you intended for my life?  I have asked and asked . . . and you, you are nowhere to be found!  Who do I feel like I walk through this all alone?  How can you be called ‘almighty’ when I see you have no power over me?”

           Sometimes, only sometimes, the silence after my raging gives way to a far deeper wisdom which reminds me that Christ crucified is not about a God who cares about being almighty or winning or showing off power.  Rather, what we have, is a God, who through Christ’s life and ministry, reminds us the power of what it means to walk with hurting folk, who finds true treasure and value in making sure our neighbor makes it through another day, a God we touch and feel in the brown earth as we garden or smell a wildflower, a God who wants us to piece together systems and structures in ways that are not about hoarding and fear—but about love and compassion.  What if we were to risk that?  Tell others we’re just repeating the small fractals, rhythms and practices, God is doing in our hearts?

           Jesus seems to know, he seems to know, that taking such risks only happens when we know that God is good, the fear dissipates, and MMMmmm . . .MMMM, we know we are loved.  Again, our Scripture verse begins today with Jesus saying, “Don’t be afraid, little flock, because your loving Creator delights in giving you the empire, the kingdom.  All of it is yours.  God wants you to have it.  God wants to give it to you.”  Become a murmuration, little flock, a murmuration of God’s love. 

           Before the Scripture lesson for today are verses left out of the lectionary which are my favorite.  I have chosen them for my installation.  And you will hear me repeat them over and over again as evidence of God’s love.

 

Therefore, I say to you, don’t worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear.  There is more to life than food and more to the body than clothing.  Consider the ravens:  they neither plant nor harvest, they have no silo or barn, yet God feeds them.  You are worth so much more than birds!  Who among you by worrying can add a single moment to your life?  If you can’t do such a small thing, why worry about the rest?  Notice how the wildflowers grow.  They don’t wear themselves out with work, and they don’t spin cloth.  But I say to you that even Solomon, the wealthiest and most powerful person in our nation’s history, he could not adorn himself or make himself more beautiful than one of these wildflowers.  You beauties, you!  If God dresses grass in the field so beautifully, even though it’s alive today and gone in a season, how much more will God do for you? . . . You beauties!

 

Do we hear what those verses are saying over and over again to Jews living in poverty, violence, and death?  Can we let them sing into the marrow of our boens and melt into our bloodstream.  I try to tell you every week of God’s love in worship so it gets deep into you.  Because I know it can be hard to trust. 

           You are loved.  You are cherished.  And in being loved and cherished, you are now free to risk dreaming the dream and living the life God invites you to follow.  Little flock, God loves you and wants you to have the keys to the kingdom.  Jesus makes it clear that it looks nothing like the kingdom Rome has constructed—concerned about who is no. 1, who is the winner, who has the most power. 

           How ironic that this same Jesus seems to be worshipped by so many who wish to make him no. 1, proclaim him as the ultimate warrior and winner, have an ever greater bloodlust for more and more power, declaring who is in and who is out.  Our culture has so transfigured what it means to lean an authentic life. 

           I know I am pulled that direction all the time.  With 35 years in ordained ministry, I see colleagues praised and celebrated in the wider church.  And I wonder what happened to me?  What ladder do I need to climb?  What book do I need to write?  What great thing do I need to do that will have the Michigan Conference and the wider United Church of Christ shouting, “Yea, verily, he hath done well.  Let us accord him all pomp and circumstance that he so rightly deserves.”  I have the princess wave thoroughly practiced for when they throw me my parade.

           Charles Dickens lived at a time when the Industrial Revolution had begun to take its toll on the populace and those who led out the French Revolution saw a light for something more egalitarian and fraternal, for a different tomorrow because today was full of suffering.  The story begins and ends with the iconic words, “It was the best of times.  It was the worst of times.”  And indeed it was.  Even though the revolutionaries sought a different day, the time was one of unspeakable horror and violence—the guillotine used as a tool for punishing a violent, autocratic rule which offered little solace for the poor and suffering.  While legend has it that Marie-Antionette offered, “Let them eat cake,” in response to the poor asking for bread, the revolutionaries countered with their own Reign of Terror in which heads, literally, rolled.  Violence upon violence.

           It was a time of crisis—a time when the hands on the clock of human history stood still as the world teetered on the horns of the old and violent and the new and violent.  In the midst of this crisis, this turning point, Dickens drops this tale.  As in many good stories, Dickens tells a personal story on the horns of old and new within the wider, sweeping story.

           A young couple is married.  The bride, Lucie, literally meaning “light,” brightens every corner she is on.  She is loved by all those who come into contact with her for the love and compassion she shares.  Living out her Christian faith, Lucie’s goodness and mercy transform every situation.

           But she is heartsick.  Her husband, Darnay, has somehow become entangled in the French Revolution.  The revolutionary Jacobins have thrown Darnay into the Bastille, the legendary prison, awaiting his later execution by the guillotine. 

           Enter the cynical, alcoholic attorney, Sydney Carton, who has long embodied all the stereotypes of what it means to be an attorney—thinking himself intellectually superior and compassionately detached.  Though we learn Carton bears a striking physical resemblance to Darnay, he bears no ethical resemblance.  Carton cares only for himself.  He has led his life without concern for circumstance or injustice only to dazzle others with his brilliance in the courtroom. 

           But there is a deeper wisdom that Carton recognizes in the Christian woman, Lucie.  Even though Sydney is hated and beyond the pale by many, Lucie offers him kindness, and warmth, and love.  It goes beyond just doing things.  It has so much more to do with who she is—inviting and loving and true.  Carton is brilliant . . . but there is something deeper she seems to understand about life.  When Carton sees Lucie hurting and sobbing over her soon-to-be-executed husband, Sydney Carton recognizes that a love he has known through her now calls him to great risk. 

           Using his skills as an orator, Carton negotiates himself into the prison cell of Darnay and tricks him into changing clothes with him.  After changing clothes, he drugs Darnay so that the young man will not argue or protest.  Thus, Darnay leaves the prison free to be with his life, the light of so many lives, Lucie.  Sydney Carton leaves with the rest of the prisoners to the guillotine.  In that moment, Dickens gives him the immortal words at the end of A Tale of Two Cities, words that transcend the violence found all around them, “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”

           Once we are loved, we are free to risk great things:  to not find our wealth in our material things but to sell possessions and give alms to the poor, that our purse or wallet may concern itself with the things of God, to act outside the violence of a violent world.  For if I know that God cares about the dwindling hairs on my head, that now seem to be found growing out my ears . . . if we know that God cares for our daily needs even as God cares for the daily feeding of ravens, hopefully chocolate is involved; and if God looks at the wildflowers and sees such beauty, how much, even more so, God will look at us and say, “You beauties!” 

           Would that still our anxious voices just enough to risk something great for God, our neighbor, and this good earth.  You . . . are loved.  God cares for your daily needs.  And God finds you insanely, naturally, spectacularly beautiful.  Risk accordingly.  Amen.