It's hard to be humble

Remember that old song "It's hard to be humble"? It's true, though not for the reasons the song had. The truth is that humility comes from standing on a razor's edge of self-consciousness and selflessness.

In the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector from this week's lectionary Jesus introduces us to two people through their prayers. The Pharisee's prayer is a congratulating God on doing such a good job of creating him. It is hardly a prayer of humility! On the other hand, the tax collector simply asks for mercy. Both prayers arise from the person's conscious view of themselves. The one as the epitome of righteousness, the other as a sinner.

This is where self-consciousness is important. Just how good are we? We may put on a good show, but do we really live as God would have us? How often do we compare ourselves somewhat smugly with those who don't, in our eyes, do as well as we do? When we are truthful with ourselves we are more like the tax collector than the pharisee.

Yet oddly, we can, if we stay in that place, form a perverse pride in how bad we are. We look around and are sure that no one is as great a sinner as we are. While it is true that we are hopeless sinners, so is everyone else!

This is where the selflessness comes in. After we confess our sin we are to turn away from ourselves and focus on God. Repentance doesn't do us much good if we turn in a full circle to end up facing the same old direction. Focusing on God instead of our self means that we are facing a new way and our feet are on a new road. As long as we focus on God and not on ourselves we keep our way straight.

Inevitably we look up one day and congratulate ourselves on being so good and the whole cycle starts again.

It really is hard to be humble.

Our God is a Stubborn God

I officiated at a funeral last week in which the adjective that most described the person we were celebrated was "stubborn". It was never said in a pejorative sense, but the family and others were very clear. This man was stubborn.

That got me thinking. There are a lot of stubborn people in the Bible. People who argue with God, who run away, who do their own thing in spite of anything that God might say. But that didn't take me far enough. I ended up talking about God's stubbornness.

After all we are talking about a person who kept on trying to make things with Israel work for centuries. God sends judges and prophets to shout, cry, whisper her love for the people. Always he is there waiting for them to turn around and finally see.

Then there is Jesus who surrounds himself with twelve men who just don't get what this whole dominion of God thing is about. He preaches, heals, tells stories, he even explains in words of one syllable and they still don't understand. Does he give up? Not a chance.

Then there is my own experience of God. Every time I tried to make a career anywhere else but in God's service I was patiently, but inevitably dragged back into the church. God out stubborned me (and that's a miracle in itself).

Paul talks about how God doesn't want anyone to be lost. Our God is a stubborn God. Stubborn in love. No matter how far we wander God stubbornly refuses to give up on us.

There is a reason we call God the rock of our salvation. He is as stubborn as a rock.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jesus - the dinner guest from h...

The reading this week is about Jesus being invited to dinner. I find that a lot of people like to question the pharisee's motivation in inviting Jesus, but I think that's a red herring. If we can make the pharisees the bad guys in the story then what Jesus says to the pharisees doesn't really apply to us. We, after all, are the good guys. We follow Jesus. We do all the right things.

Yeah, right.

The truth is that the pharisees, like us are a mixed bunch. Some days they were close to getting it, other days they were way off. Pretty much like us.

So Jesus shows up for dinner and starts saying the kind of thing that make hosts cringe and swear they are never throwing another dinner party. He talks about place. Not physical place as much as social place. How important are we? Do other people think we're as important as we think we are? I think that Jesus saw at that party, as he would see at any of our gatherings, the kind of jostling for place that both reassures and terrifies us.

What if people don't like me? What if they do? Can I keep it up?

What Jesus is suggesting is not just a face saving strategy. Taking the lower seat may result in me being left in the lower seat - humiliating. I'm not worth as much as I thought I was. Rather what I hear him suggesting is that I am fighting for a seat at the wrong table. This isn't about my place in the worldly hierarchy of popularity and power. It is about my relationship with God.

If I measure myself against God, of course I am going to take the lowest seat. That's all I deserve, if I even deserve that. What God does is move me up to the head table, not because I belong there, but because God wants me there. The comments about the guest list are another hint. None of those people can reciprocate with anything but love, just as I can't give God anything but my love.

So the parable lifts me out of my concern for place in this world by assuring me that I have a place in God's world. Once I'm freed of that, I am freed to serve without fear of damaging my place in society. The only place that matters is my place with God.