Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Money, faith and evil.

I got busy last week and didn't get the chance to talk about money in my blog. In one of the articles I read about the Lazarus and the Rich Man there was a challenge about how many times we preach about money without asking for it.

I decided I would take up the challenge. My take off line was Uncle Ben's line from Spiderman. "With great power comes great responsibility." By just changing one word in that line I had the theme of my sermon. "With great wealth comes great responsibility" We are, by any measure, a wealthy people. I talked about how we share, save and spend our money reveals our faith.

I hadn't really thought about it, but this week's readings take that notion of faith and responsibility a step further. The Hebrew Scriptures lament injustice and pain in the world. They lay the responsibility for that at God's feet, and God doesn't turn away from that. It isn't that God wills evil, but yet evil comes and God allows it. Yet we are told to wait and serve.

The Gospel reading talks about faith and waiting in service. So this week's sermon will be about a faith that is patient, but also a faith that serves. Our faith may not move mountains, but it will move us, and sometimes I think that is the greater task. While there is evil in the world it will find patient people of faith serving justice and waiting on God.

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

He did what?

The Gospel reading this week is a challenge to preachers everywhere. In Luke 16 Jesus tells the story of a dishonest manager who is about to be fired for his mismanagement of his wealthy boss's money. To stave off starvation because he is just not up for ditch digging or pan handling he goes to some of the people who owe his boss money and tell them to cut their bills. The boss commends the manager for his shrewdness.

The implication of the parable is that Jesus approves of the manager giving away his boss's money. The good guy is a bad guy in this story! What are we going to do with this?

I would start by saying that we shouldn't just avoid the story. The more a Bible reading makes us cringe, the more important it is that we look at it seriously and see what it is teaching us.

Who do we identify with? Probably the rich boss whose money is being given away. We take money so very seriously in our society, we can't help but get upset when it appears to be misappropriated. But what if the rich boss is God? What if we are the dishonest managers who have been living it up on our boss's tab? We've been putting a lot of money into ourselves - nice buildings, professional ministers who take care of us first. We've been using God's gifts to make our lives comfortable.

Now God is saying, "That's not what I had in mind." After all the church was created as a vehicle to spread God's mission of justice and peace. It can only justify its existence as long as the Gospel is being preached. So now we're in for it. God is going to heave us out on our ears and find someone else to spread that Gospel.

What do we do? We start giving away God's stuff. You know, the love, joy, peace, the forgiveness of sins, the keys to the kingdom, the invitation to the banquet. All the stuff that we've been keeping inside the church to keep it safe. Let's give it all away. Let's tell people that their debt to God has been canceled. We could even give away some of that stuff we've accumulated in God's name!

I think God would approve.

Thursday, September 9, 2010

The joy of being lost.

One of the things that I like about traveling to new places is the possibility of getting lost and discovering new and perhaps wonderful places to explore. Yet the truth is that I am not really lost. I can always backtrack, consult a map or even ask directions. It may take me a while but I will get where I am going.

The kind of lostness described in the first two parables of the fifteenth chapter of Luke is of a different nature neither the sheep nor the coin have any ability to find themselves. The only way for them to be found is for someone to seek for them. We all have stories of people looking for lost things, my favourite personal story involves a diamond necklace and a landfill.

Yet I don't think that these parables are really about looking for what we value. Everybody will look for something that has value it is just common sense.

What strikes me in reading these stories this week is the sense that the apparent value of the things being sought is far out shadowed by the effort put into finding them. The entire focus of shepherd and woman becomes finding the lost.

The parables state that this is how God seeks for us, with total focus and abandon. The Good News is not just that God is looking for us, but that God values us which such fierceness and depth of love. It is as if for the time we are lost we are the only thing that matters to God.

To paraphrase Paul, should I lose myself so that God may seek me? By no means, yet to awaken myself to my present lostness will open my life to the infinite grace of God and the joy of being found.

Thursday, September 2, 2010

Family Idol

I remember getting in terrible trouble while running a Bible study. I suggested that our culture had made an idol of the family. In many of our country's discussions of morals and relationships the family is held up as the essential unit of our society. We want to protect the family at all costs. It is amazing how many things can be frowned upon on the basis of protecting the family.

This isn't to say that the family isn't important. God created families to raise children and prepare them for the responsibilities of living faithfully in the world. Ironically stories of well adjusted families are scarce in scriptures. Truthfully we don't do much better. Though we have got better at acknowledging the damage that families can do to each other, we don't do much about creating healthy families.

What got me most in trouble was the idea that God asks us to put God above our family. In this Sunday's Gospel: Luke 14:25-33 Jesus challenges his listeners by saying they need to hate their families to follow him. Reading sermons and commentaries on this saying you will find that a lot of people try to explain away the word hate. We want to preserve the sanctity of the family, even when it appears that God is challenging it.

I would suggest that a lot of people hate their families, not all of them teenagers. People who look back on their lives as children and blame their parents for everything that is wrong with them. I have had to mediate between children as they argued around their mother's death bed.

Once we take away the family's sacred position and place it in it proper relationship to God. Things become clearer. Families are just as corrupted by our brokenness as any other relationship. To follow Jesus we need to be willing to leave behind all the things that we want to blame our failure on.

To really follow God leaves no space for other idols. We must give all our life to God. Paradoxically dedicated ourselves fully to God means that we will live more as more loving people in our other relationships, including those of our family. We are freed to see clearly, speak the truth in love and offer both confession and forgiveness.

I believe the only true way to save our families is to realize that they are NOT sacred. The only holiness in our relationships comes from God's love flowing through us, not from the nature of the relationship itself.