It's Time to Talk About Money (Sept 22 2013)

Homily:  Yr C P25, Sept 22 2013, St. Albans

Readings:  Amos 8:4-7; Ps 113; 1 Tim 2.1-7; Lk 16.1-13

Photo by MyEyeSees. Flickr Creative Commons.

It’s time to talk about money!  Because in today’s gospel, and in the gospel we’re going to get next week, Jesus talks about money.  In fact, Jesus talks about money a lot, especially in the gospel of Luke.  And the reason that money is one of Jesus’ favourite subjects is because he knows that how we use our money has an awful lot to say about our priorities, our values and our faith.

So let’s take a look at today’s story.  There is a rich man.  Most likely he’s a landlord who makes his money from charging rent to tenant farmers and loaning money to people.  He obviously does well out of this arrangement, after all we’re told that he is rich.  And this man, the master, has a manager who works for him.  The manager’s job is to deal with the people who work the rich man’s land, who pay the rents and borrow money.  They would be poor people for the most part.  The manager in our story sets up the deals, signs the contracts and collects the payments.  It’s a good job, no physical labour involved and it pays pretty well.  But there’s a problem.  Apparently this manager is not managing his portfolio very well.  He’s not making as much money as he should, as the other managers do.  He’s squandering the rich man’s property and somebody’s ratted on him.  We’re not told exactly what the problem is.  But the rich man hauls the manager into his office, tells him what he has heard and asks to see the financial statements immediately.  And, the master tells him, if the poor performance is confirmed, the manager will be fired.

As you might imagine, the manager is desperate.  He’s in a state of crisis.  After years of working for this master as a manager, he knows that he’ll never get a job anywhere else.   But then, in the midst of his desperation, he has an idea.  “I know what I’ll do.  I’ll go and forgive the debts of all my master’s debtors, so that when I’m fired, they will welcome me into their homes, and at least I’ll have some place to eat and live.” And so he goes to each one of the debtors, takes out their contracts and reduces the amount owed to the master.  A hundred jugs of oil, which might be several years of production for a small olive farm, is reduced to fifty jugs.  He does the same with all the debtors.

But the rich man finds out what the manager has done.  You can imagine the rich man’s reaction – or can you?

This is where the story takes a strange turn.  We expect the rich man to condemn the manager for what he has done.  We expect him to say “you have no right to fiddle with the contracts.”  We expect him to tell the debtors that the original debts still must be collected, that the manager had no authority to change them.  We expect the master to have this dishonest manager thrown in prison.

But that’s not how the story ends.  Instead the rich man praises the manager because he had acted shrewdly.  And Jesus himself concludes his story by praising the manager and holding him up as an example for the disciples, and for you and for me.

Why does Jesus praise the dishonest manager?

[time for discussion groups]

Now, if you had a hard time figuring our why Jesus praises the manager, don’t feel too badly.  Many commentators and scholars have said that this is actually the most difficult of all of Jesus’ parables to understand.

What’s going on here?  Surely Jesus isn’t advocating dishonesty, is he?  Surely he’s not advocating breaking the rules or fiddling the books?  The dishonest manager is basically self-serving isn’t he?  What is it about him that makes him a model for the disciples, a model for us?

It’s a bit of a dilemma isn’t it?  We’ve been taught all our lives to be honest and to play by the rules.

But what if the rules aren’t just?

I think that one of the reasons that this parable poses such a dilemma for us is that we operate out of the assumption that the economic system with its associated rules and practices, and the court system that backs them up, is basically good and just.

But what if the economic system is not good?  What if it is not just?  What if it is an oppressive system by means of which the rich are able to exploit the poor so that the rich get richer and the poor are oppressed?  What if the usual way that society operates simply perpetuates injustice?  Would this change our perspective on the actions of the manager?

Why is the rich man so rich?  Well, it’s because he seeks out poor people in distress and exploits them by providing loans which enable them to feed their starving children today, but at interest rates they cannot afford to repay.  When they default on their loans, he takes possession of their land as collateral, and they become tenants on the ancestral lands of their own families.  The absentee landlord lives in the city and becomes rich off the excessive rents paid by the peasants.  It’s an economic system called sharecropping, and it existed in Jesus day, and it still exists in many parts of the world today.  And the manager who worked for the rich man was supposed to play by the rules and make the system work, work that is, for the benefit of the rich man.  I think it’s interesting to note that in our text, the manager is referred to as a dishonest manager.  But I think that’s a bad translation.  If you actually look at the original Greek, the literal translation is that this man is the “Manager of Injustice”.  This isn’t a parable about honesty.  It’s a parable about justice.  Economic justice.

We don’t need to go back 2000 years to find examples of economic injustice.  Starting in about 2004, commissioned salespeople at financial institutions all over the U.S. and elsewhere realized that they could take advantage of relaxed lending rules and a housing boom to convince people who really couldn’t afford it to buy houses and take on mortgages.  These were called sub-prime mortgages and they boomed between 2004 and 2007 and the interest rates and the profits were high.  The people selling these mortgages knew in many cases that the customers wouldn’t be able to make the monthly payments for very long, but these same salespeople simply pocketed their commissions and moved on to the next sale. 

And the bosses of the salespeople didn’t worry about it too much either, because they figured out a way to bundle all these sub-prime mortgages together as derivatives called Asset Based Commercial Paper and they sold them to the big investment banks who were always looking for ways to get bigger returns for their customers.  And because the investment banks were making these higher returns, they were able to borrow lots of money from the big banks where you and I deposit our money.

As you know, all of this came crashing down five years ago this month in the financial crisis of 2008.  Homeowners defaulted on their mortgages.  The housing market in the U.S. and other countries crashed.  Asset Based Commercial Paper was frozen. Lehman Brothers, one of the big investment banks went bankrupt and the entire global financial system came to a grinding halt and was only saved by the fact that governments handed billions of dollars of taxpayer money, including $750 billion in the USA alone, over to the banks to prevent them from collapsing.  We are still dealing with the after-math of the 2008 Financial Crisis:  prolonged economic recession, job losses, high unemployment for young people, and high government debt loads which we will have to be repaid by the next generation.

And you know what?  Nobody committed any crimes.  People didn’t break the rules.  In fact, the main players followed the rules, and they obeyed the incentive systems that had been put in place, and they made big commissions from 2004 to 2007 and almost all of them kept them because according to our economic system, they had earned them.

But God has another vision of economic justice.

God’s vision of economic justice is revealed through Moses in the law given to Israel, where every fiftieth year was to be a year of Jubilee, and in that year of Jubilee, all debts were to be forgiven, all property which had been taken as collateral was to be returned and all people who had been taken into slavery because they were unable to pay their debts were to be freed.

God’s vision of economic justice is revealed through the prophets.  Amos, in today’s first reading, declares God’s judgment against those who commit economic injustice:  “Hear this, you that trample on the needy and bring to ruin the poor of the land, and tremble.”

God’s vision of economic justice is revealed in today’s psalm:  “God raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap to make them sit with princes.”

God’s vision of economic justice is revealed in Jesus, who in the first public declaration of his ministry declared, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor and to proclaim the year of Jubilee.”

God’s vision of economic justice is revealed in the gospel of Luke, from which we can distill the following basic economic principle:

Everything you and I have actually belongs to God and has simply been entrusted to us for a time and a purpose.  I do not own it.  I have not earned it.  I have no right to do what I please with it.  I am simply a steward, a manager, a caretaker who has been entrusted with both a gift and a responsibility.

Despite what the laws of our society say, despite what our economics tells us, despite what it says on our employment contract and the deed to our house, wealth and possessions don’t belong to us.  They belong to God and they are given to us so that we can use them in accordance with God’s purposes.

Amen.

Questions for Open Space.

Q1.  If we really believed in Luke’s economic principle how would this change our relationship with money?

Q2.  How can we serve God, not wealth, but still navigate our way through the economic situation we find ourselves in?

That's What God's Like (Sept 15 2013)

Homily:  Yr C Proper 24, Sept 15 2013, St. Albans

Readings:  Jer 4.11-12, 22-28, Ps 14; 1Tim 1.12-17, Lk 15.1-10

Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus.  And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling, and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”  And wouldn’t you be grumbling too?  After all, these tax collectors aren’t like the nice polite auditors we have at CRA.  Tax collection in the Roman Empire was, let’s say, a tad more aggressive.  We’re talking about thugs, mafia types.  Traitors who were in league with the occupying army that oppressed your country.  The ones who would threaten to kidnap your children if you didn’t hand over the money you made from selling your crops.  These were people who bullied you and kept you dirt poor.  They were the ones who had abandoned their faith, their law and their own relatives in order to get rich.

Surely God isn’t with people like that!  Didn’t we just hear in our psalm this morning that “those evildoers should tremble with fear, because God is in the company of the righteous”?  So why did Jesus, who claimed to be sent by God, why did Jesus even tolerate the presence of these tax collectors, let alone welcome them and share meals with them?  And so the good people grumbled.

Jesus hears the grumbling, and in response he tells three stories.  Two of them we heard today, the story of the shepherd who goes after the lost sheep, and story of the woman who searches for the lost coin. 

Surprisingly, perhaps, given the context, the two stories that Jesus tells are not about the difference between the righteous and the sinners.  The only difference between the lost coin and the others, the lost sheep and the rest, is that they are lost.  And the stories focus not so much on the lost sheep and coin anyways, but rather on the shepherd and the woman who are doing the searching.   Because the real point of these stories is to answer the question ‘what is God like?’ and to reveal the essential character of God not as the one who is found in the company of the righteous, but rather as the one who seeks the lost and then throws one heck of a party when he finds them.  In fact it even goes beyond this.  Not only do the characters representing God in these stories,search for those who are lost, but they do so in a fashion that perhaps would be best described as obsessive. 

Let’s take the shepherd for example.  “Which of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?”  Well, actually, I don’t think any of us would do that.  No good shepherd in his right mind would abandon 99 sheep in the wilderness in order to pursue one sheep that had wandered off.  That would be totally reckless.  The wilderness is a dangerous place for sheep.  That’s why there were shepherds in the first place.

Or take the woman.  “What woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it?”  Think about it.  The reason she’s lighting a lamp is because it’s night time.  Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to simply close the door, go to sleep and look for the coin in the morning?  Why stay up all night, sweeping in the dark?  Why such a rush, the coin’s not going anywhere.  But she lights the lamp and sweeps the house and then when she finds the coin, maybe it’s about 3 in the morning now, she wakes up all her friends and neighbours and throws a big party.  And if you do the math, that big party she throws for all her friends and neighbours, it’s going to cost her more than one coin.  By the time the sun comes up, she’s actually going to be worse off financially than she was before she started searching.

How would you describe these people?  Reckless?  Impatient? Foolish? Relentless?  The shepherd and the woman in these parables abandon all the normal considerations of costs, benefits and logic in pursuit of that which is lost.

That’s what God is like.  The God Jesus is telling us about is a bit crazy, maybe even a little obsessive in the way he searches for the lost and then rejoices when he finds them.  So why, Jesus asks the righteous people, why are you surprised that I seek out those who are lost, and when I find them, we celebrate by sharing a meal together?  That’s what God is like.

You see the fundamental difference in these stories is not the difference between being righteous and a sinner, a good person or a bad person.  That’s the way the Pharisees and the scribes characterize people.  It’s a way of defining and distinguishing ourselves by what we have done, and of course we do that all the time don’t we.  But in the parables that Jesus tells, the important distinction is between being lost and found.  And the difference between being lost and found, the transition from lost to found, is much more existential, and much more relational.  Those of us who once were lost and now are found have a new awareness of our relationship with God, and have experienced first-hand the essential character of God as the one who seeks the lost and rejoices when he finds them. 

Who are the lost?  Who are the ones that God is actively seeking like a crazy sweeping woman or a reckless shepherd?

The scribes and the Pharisees thought that they knew who the lost were, those tax collectors and sinners, and they were probably right.

But one of the ironies of today’s text is that good people can be lost too!  Oh, we don’t like to talk about it, we don’t even like to admit to ourselves, but we can be doing all the right things, and we can be in all the right places, and we can still be lost.  The scribes and Pharisees who grumbled in today’s gospel were good people who prided themselves on their knowledge of God and yet as it turns out, they really had no clue.  They had never experienced what God is really like.  They were lost.

Who else is lost?  Do you think there are any lost people in here today?

Could it be the person who just lost the job that was such a big part of their life?

Maybe it’s the ones whose relationship is having a rough patch?

Might it be the parent who dutifully signed their children up for all sorts of activities and now finds that life consists of driving from event to event and sitting in cold arenas?

Could it be the person who would have a great pension if she can only put in 10 more years at a job which she hates?

Might it be the priest whose ministry seems to consist of going from meeting to meeting and dealing with stacks of paper work?

Maybe it’s the student who’s got one year left to go in a program that she really isn’t interested in any more.

Might it be the teacher who realizes he really doesn’t enjoy being around children much?

I think that all of us are going to experience times of “being lost” in our lives.  In fact it’s even possible that ‘being lost’ might be one of the defining characteristics of our time.  We live in an age that has been described as a massive social experiment in learning to live without God.  The proposed charter of values in Quebec is just the latest manifestation of this social experiment.  However, if God really is the one in whom we live and move and have our being, as St. Paul put it so eloquently after his own lost and found experience of God, then the results of our current social experiment may well appear in the form of losses:  loss of meaning, loss of purpose, loss of identity, the loss of our experience of and our relationship with the divine.

So, yes, there probably are some people here with us today who know what it is to be lost.  And there are some people here with us today who have experienced what it is to be found.  And there are some people here with us today who are somewhere in between.

But there is also here with us today a crazy, relentless, even reckless, divine presence who is looking for us and who will find us, and will be so overjoyed at finding us that it’s only appropriate that we’ll share a meal and then have a bit of a party together.

Because that’s what God’s like.

Amen.

Are You "All-In"? (Sept 8 2013)

Homily:  Yr C, Proper 23, Sept 8 2013, St. Albans

Readings:  Jer 18.1-11; Ps 139.1-5,12-17; Phil 1-21; Lk 14-25-33

Photo by Jason Empey.  Creative Commons License.

There is an organization that started in the United States and that now operates in Canada called Focus on the Family.  The mission of Focus on the Family is to promote Christian family values.  And I’ve got to believe that the folks at Focus on the Family would be totally offended by today’s gospel.

Because Jesus says, “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.”

What sort of family values is Jesus promoting here?

And if you think that Jesus’ statement about hating your family is offensive today, just imagine how much more offensive it was when it was first uttered.  In Jesus day, family was the linchpin that held society together.  You never left the family home.  Unless you were very very rich, you couldn’t survive economically without your family.  All of society was organized around kinship.  Even in the law, in the ten commandments, the first commandment that talks about our relationships with each other is, “honour your father and mother”.

Now, we know that Jesus is using a little hyperbole here to get our attention.  We know this isn’t about hatred, after all, Jesus loved his mother, we know that from other parts of the gospel.  This isn’t about hatred, but it is about priorities, about the ordering of commitments and the sacrifices that this entails.  Jesus loved his mother.  But he also left home instead of taking up the family business like he was supposed to.  Jesus was a good Jewish man.  But he didn’t get married like he was supposed to.  Why?  Because he had a higher priority.  God had given him a job to do, to proclaim the good news of God’s kingdom to the people of Israel.  And he was committed to doing whatever it takes to fulfill that mission.

Next week, a week Monday, I’ll be heading up to the Laurentians for our annual clergy conference for all of the priests of the Anglican Diocese of Ottawa.  It’s a great opportunity for us to spend some time with each other, catch up on news and listen to a guest speaker.  And in the evenings, some years, a few of us like to get together and play some poker.  Don’t worry, there’s no money involved, just chips and pride.  Our favourite poker game is Texas Hold’em.  Do you know how that works?  It’s the one you see on TV a lot.  You get two cards initially, and then you bet before each of the other cards is turned up.  And the trick in the game is figuring out how to bet.

If for example, I get a pair of aces as my opening cards, I know that I’m “all in”.  I’m willing to bet all my chips to see the rest of the cards and stay in the game right to the end.

If, however, I get something like a two and five, then I know that I’m out.  It’s not my hand, no sense sticking around or wasting any chips to see more cards, I’m just out.

The more difficult decision is when I get something like a King and a seven.  In that case, my cards are good enough that I could win if the right cards come up, but there’s no guarantee.  And so what I want to do is to “hedge my bets”. I want to try to hang around in the game at a low cost long enough to see the next card turned up.

In today’s gospel, there’s a lot of people in the crowd hedging their bets, hanging around and waiting to see the next card turned up.

You see, Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, and there’s a big crowd traveling with him.  They’re curious.  They’ve got some interest.  Maybe there’s something they’ve seen or heard about Jesus, or heard him say that captures their imagination.  And so they’re along for the ride, they’re not committed, they’re not “all in”, but they want to see what card turns up next.

But Jesus, he’s “all-in”.  He’s taking his proclamation about God right to the capital city of Jerusalem.  He knows that his won’t be a popular message with the authorities.  Already the religious leaders and political masters are out to get him, they’re plotting to kill him – when he gets to Jerusalem, he’s a dead man.  Jesus knows this, and he’s still all-in.  But the crowds haven’t figured it out yet.  And so in today’s gospel, he’s actually doing them a favour.  Look, Jesus tells them, if you want to follow me, there’s going to be a high cost to pay.  You might be arrested, you might have to give up everything you own, you might be separated from your families, you might even be killed.  Now, I need some of you to follow me, I need disciples who will be witnesses to what happens in Jerusalem.  But only come if you’ve counted the cost and you’re committed to being all-in.

I’m willing to bet that the crowds who traveled with Jesus on his way to Jerusalem became a lot smaller that day.

I think I get what Jesus words meant for the crowd that traveled with him on that day some 2000 years ago.  The bigger question is, what do they mean for us today?  What do we do with all this talk of choices and priorities, of commitment and of sacrifice?

Well much as we might like to avoid it, we all have to deal with this stuff, don’t we?  In all sorts of areas of our life we have to deal with questions of choices and priorities, of commitment and of sacrifice.

I remember when my son Jonathan was younger, he was a good hockey player and so he tried out for a competitive hockey team.  Just before the final selections, as the try-outs were winding up, the coach called a parents meeting.  And at that meeting he laid it all out for us.  “If your son wants to be part of this team, here’s what you have to do.  There’ll be two practices and two games a week.  Your son needs to be at all of them, and be at games 60 minutes before they start.  There’ll be six tournaments, three in town and three out of town.  You’ll need to volunteer for three fundraising activities.  And the total cost for the season will be $1500.  These are the costs.  This is the commitment required.  Before I make the final selections for the team, you have to tell me if you’re in or out.”

Some of you here today are pursuing a university degree.  In order to embark on that degree, you’ve had to move away from home and family.  You’ve had to pay big tuition fees and living expenses.  You’re going to take on debt that you might not be able to repay for years.  You’re going to work your butts off and at times endure tremendous stress.  That’s the cost.  That’s the commitment and sacrifice required.  Are you in?

One time when I was doing marriage preparation with a couple, I had the sense that they hadn’t really gotten their heads around the sort of commitment they were making.  And so I asked them to open up the prayer book and to read the marriage vows, for better and for worse and so on.  And I turned and said to them, that means if your partner gets hit by a truck and ends up in a wheelchair, you’re the one that’s going to be pushing that wheelchair around for the rest of your life.  You have to be all-in.  Are you ready to make that promise?

You see, there are areas in our lives where we’re all-in, and there are other areas where we hedge our bets.  There are things that we prioritize, that we commit to and for which we are willing to sacrifice.  And when we do commit and when we do sacrifice, psychologists who research this stuff will tell us that those things become even more valuable to us.  Or as my grandmother would have said, the more you put into something, the more you get out of it.

And so as we move into our open space, I want to leave you with two questions to discuss:

1    1.  In what areas of your life are you “all-in”, and where are you “hedging your bets”?

     2.  And, what does it mean to you to be “all-in” as a follower of Jesus?

Amen.

After Open Space (a time for conversation):

I hope your conversations about what it means to be “all-in”, and what it means to be “all-in” as a follower of Jesus were fruitful.  I must admit, to me, at times I find this to be a bit of a scary topic, and I’m tempted to hedge my bets.  But one thing that I find helpful is to remind myself, first of all, that God is “all-in” in his commitment and his love for us, and secondly that God knows us intimately, God knows us so well, that whatever it is he might call us to, whatever vocation or ministry or mission that might be given to us, it will resonate with who we are, with our deepest passions and gifts.  The psalm that we’re about to read together reminds us of just that.

Psalm 139:  1-5, 12-17

Lord, you have searched me out and known me; *

you know my sitting down and my rising up;

you discern my thoughts from afar.

2 You trace my journeys and my resting-places *

and are acquainted with all my ways.

3 Indeed, there is not a word on my lips, *

but you, O Lord, know it altogether.

4 You press upon me behind and before *

and lay your hand upon me.

5 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; *

it is so high that I cannot attain to it.

12 For you yourself created my inmost parts; *

you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

13 I will thank you because I am marvellously made; *

your works are wonderful, and I know it well.

14 My body was not hidden from you, *

while I was being made in secret

and woven in the depths of the earth.

15 Your eyes beheld my limbs, yet unfinished in the womb;

all of them were written in your book; *

they were fashioned day by day,

when as yet there was none of them.

16 How deep I find your thoughts, O God! *

how great is the sum of them!

17 If I were to count them, they would be more in number

than the sand; *

to count them all, my life span would need to be like yours.

Fear, Faith and Treasure Choices (August 11 2013)

Homily:  Yr C Proper 19, August 11 2013, St. Albans

Readings:  Isaiah 1:1, 10-20; Ps 50.1-8,22-23; Heb 11:1-3,8-16; Lk 12.32-40

Fear, Faith and Treasure Choices

It must be summer!   Because the last time that I was up here preaching, we were still in Paul’s letter to the Galatians.  And if you can remember that far back, we talked about the great promise that Paul made to the Galatians, the promise that he called the gospel of grace.    Paul told the Galatians that they were good with God, that they’ve already been made right with God through Jesus, and that God loves them and cares for them and wants what’s best for them, no strings attached.

In today’s gospel, Jesus makes us the same promise.  Did you notice?  Maybe not, because the language is different.   Jesus, as  he often does, uses “kingdom” language.  But here’s the promise:  “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”

What an amazing promise!  God wants to give us the kingdom.  We don’t have to earn the things of the kingdom, we don’t get them as a reward for good behaviour, no, God wants to give them to us and even gets pleasure out of doing it, just as a loving parent wants to and enjoys giving good things to his or her children.  Now, you may ask, “What is the kingdom, what are the things of the kingdom?  Well, God knows that we need food to eat and clothes to wear, and that’s part of it, but it’s about much more than that.  As we sang together in our opening song, “in your kingdom broken lives are made new.”  The kingdom is about being in good and right relationship with God and with each other.  It’s about authentic community.  It’s about learning to love one another and seeking justice for those who need our care.  It’s about eternal life and salvation yes, but it’s also about God’s kingdom coming on earth, an end to war and violence, a blossoming of joy and peace and freedom and all the other good things that God wants us to have, individually and in community.

This promise is the anchor of today’s gospel.  Everything else we hear in today’s gospel is about movement.  It’s about a movement to try to get us from here to there.  It’s about Jesus wanting to help us and give us some advice on how we can learn to lean in, to live in to the promise.

Because there’s always a gap in the promises of God.  Something that David Lose calls an “irreducible tension”.  Because, to be perfectly honest, it’s not at all obvious that it really is God’s pleasure to give us the kingdom.  Take a look around.  God’s kingdom has not yet come on earth as in heaven.  There is civil war in Syria.  There were two kids crushed to death by a snake last week.  There’s the stuff happening in your lives and the lives of your friends and family.  The promise that God wants to give us the things of the kingdom, all that good stuff that we talked about may be something we hope for, but it’s not something we can see clearly yet.  We may see signs of it, we may get glimpses.  But there is a gap, there is a tension.  And so the promises of God must be taken on faith.  Faith is, as the author of the letter to the Hebrews puts it, “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

Last week in our gospel and in Zack’s sermon we started talking about treasure choices.  We heard the story of the rich man who wanted to build bigger and bigger barns so that he could store more and more stuff.  This week, we have Jesus urging us to sell our possessions and give alms, and warning us that where our treasure is, there our heart will be also.  Now on the one hand these sayings relate clearly to money and what we do with it.  But they’re also about more than just money.  This is about our priorities.  This is about where we choose to put our time and energy and the things that result from these choices as we live out our lives.

But I think that Jesus realizes that before we can really talk about treasure, about how we establish our priorities we need to talk about fear.  Because fear may well be the most destructive force on this planet, and whether we like it or not, it is often the driving force behind our priorities and our treasure choices.  Henri Nouwen, whose book we read in our most recent book study, puts it this way:

“The more people I come to know and the more I come to know people, the more I am overwhelmed by the negative power of fear.  It often seems that fear has so invaded every part of our lives that we no longer know what a life without fear would feel like.  Fear pervades our bodies, individually and communally.  So many people let their thinking, speaking and acting be motivated by fear.”

We know that fear is pervasive.  Fear’s close cousin, anxiety, has reached epidemic proportions in Canada, so much so that one in nine Canadians will be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder at some point in their life.  What effect does all this fear and anxiety have on our priorities.  Or to put it another way, what do our treasure choices look like when we are afraid?

We’re going to talk about this in a moment, but first let me give you a few examples.

Psychologists have certainly figured out that if we have a fear of rejection or abandonment, we may have a hard time forming close relationships.  Instead of opening ourselves up to be close to others, our efforts may go into building up defenses and creating mechanisms to keep distance in our relationships.

Or perhaps you’re worried about what other people think about you.  And so the treasure you might choose is to develop a great image, to dress well, to have a good public persona, and maybe even to pursue fame, which will reassure you that other people hold you in high opinion.

I know a man who shortly after he got married, hit a rough spot in his relationship with his wife.  Things he did started to irritate her, and he became so afraid of upsetting her that he started walking on eggshells, being extremely careful not to say or do anything that might set her off.  He became so withdrawn and passive that before long his wife had a hard time recognizing the man she had fallen in love with.

I have a friend who grew up in a poor household, and it affected him as a child, and he resolved that when he was grown up, he would be wealthy.  And so he pursued a career that paid him well, and he arranged to live in tax-free havens and he learned to finagle his expense reports so that he could make a little extra money that way.

Selina and I were talking recently about the Stewardship Under Forty conference that she just went to.  It seems that many people under forty, and many over forty as well, have tremendous anxiety about their finances.  And even though there have been a slew of recent studies that have shown how generosity is good for our health, and that we experience more happiness when we spend money on others than when spend it on ourselves, many people are sufficiently anxious about their own financial situation that they just aren’t able to commit to charitable giving.

You can probably think of many other examples of how fear and anxiety influence our priorities in life.  You may be your own best example!  So I’d like you to take a few moments and discuss the following question:

What do our treasures choices look like when we’re afraid?

***

Now I know that these are not easy things to reflect on.  And I also know that fear is not always bad, that some of our fears are well-founded, and that sometimes the priorities that come out of these fears might be appropriate.  And I’m certainly aware that getting a handle on fear and anxiety doesn’t happen simply because someone tells you “don’t be afraid” or “stop worrying”.  But I do hope that at least we can agree that fear is a powerful thing and that has a powerful impact on our treasure choices.  Because then we can move on to my next question for you, which is, what would our treasure choices look like if we weren’t afraid?  If we could let go of all the things that you were just reflecting on and talking about?  Or to put it another way, what would our treasure choices look like if we really had faith in the promise that Jesus proclaims in today’s gospel, that it really is God’s pleasure to give us the kingdom.

Well, our treasure choices would be different wouldn’t they?  For one thing, our source of treasure shifts.  Instead of striving to generate our own treasure, we’d realize that much of what is really valuable is given to us by God.  Our treasure becomes our identity as children of God, our inherent worth as a child of God, loved so much that God was even willing to die for us.  Our treasure becomes lives that are infused with meaning and purpose, and the knowledge that we were created for a reason and that we’ve been given everything we need to participate in the building of God’s kingdom here on earth in our own particular way.  Our priorities would become kingdom priorities:  a deep and sustaining relationship with God, loving relationships with others and those priorities that Isaiah points us to in the first reading this morning:  learning to do good, ceasing evil, seeking justice and caring and advocating for those who are weak and vulnerable in our society. 

Because when we start to overcome our fears and replace them with faith, faith in the promise of God, then our priorities shift.  We start to build up treasure in new places.  We begin to see the kingdom emerging in our midst.

But for most of us, the movement from fear to faith does not happen overnight.  It is a journey.  It is a challenge.    How do we move from fear to faith?

Let me close with words from Henri Nouwen:

“When we begin to understand at a deep, spiritual level that we live surrounded by love and in communion with God no matter what the external circumstances, we can let go of the fear that lurks on the outskirts of our minds.  Hardly a day passes in our lives without an experience of inner or outer fears, anxieties, apprehensions and preoccupations.  But we do not have to live in fear.  Love is stronger than fear.”

Amen.

The Fuel and the Roadmap (Galatians Part 5, June 30 2013)

Homily:  Yr C P13, June 30 2013, St. Albans

Readings: 2 Kgs 2:1-2,6-14; Ps 77.1-2,11-20; Gal 5:1,13-25; Lk 9:51-62

The Fuel and the Roadmap

Finally today, we reach the climax of Paul’s letter to the Galatians, and the final installment in this series of sermons on Galatians that we’ve been doing together over the last month.  But as was the case with my daughter’s high school commencement that I attended on Friday, this isn’t really an ending but rather a beginning, a new beginning.  Or as T.S. Eliot puts it, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

“For freedom Christ has set us free” is the climax of the gospel of grace that Paul proclaims.  But what is this freedom that’s been gifted to us?  Are we now in a world of “anything goes”?  Of “whatever”?  Of “randomness”?

Not at all.  If there is one man living today who knows something about being set free, it is Nelson Mandela, who at this moment is in critical condition in a South African hospital.  I remember watching live on TV in 1990 when Mandela was set free from prison near Cape Town after 27 years of incarceration.  Now Mandela could have chosen to pursue vengeance against his oppressors.  Or, he could easily have retreated into private life to do whatever he wanted, he was after all already in his 70’s at the time of his release. But that’s not how he understood freedom.  “To be free,” said Mandela, “is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”

You see, we’ve been given our freedom but we have not simply been given our freedom.  We have, in Paul’s words, been called to freedom.  We have become people who are capable of acting, not simply of being acted upon.  And so we are called to act.

When we talk about freedom, we need to talk both about “freedom from” and “freedom for”.  What has the grace of God freed us from?  We are free from all the voices that tell us we’re not good enough.  We are free from worrying about whether we’re going to “make it” in life.  We are free from not knowing whether we’re worthy of love, honour and respect.  We are free from rule-bound religion which tries to make us earn our relationship with God.  We are free from all the conditions, all the strings that so many try to tie us down with.  We’re free from all these things because we are children of God, good with God, justified by faith, loved by God and worthy of love, honour and respect.

That’s what we’ve been freed from.  What have we been freed for?  Why have we been called to freedom?  How shall we live?

Here I want to return to the image of the car rental that we started with a month ago.  You remember.  We arrive at the airport, we go to the car rental lot, we fill in the papers, get in the car, follow the lanes and the arrows and the direction markers, and at last we drive out the exit and over those big metal spikes embedded in the road.  Here we are at last, free to head out onto the open highway, with all those other cars whizzing past and the lane changes and intersections and we’re not even sure whether we turn left or right to get out of the rental car lot.

Sometimes freedom is terrifying.  At the very least, it can be unsettling or confusing.  Life is easier sometimes when someone just tells you what to do. 

At a very minimum, it seems to me like we need two things.  The first is fuel in our tank, cause without that we’re not going very far.  And the second is a roadmap that at least gives us the lay of the land as we head out onto the open highway.

And those are precisely the two things that Paul gives us in today’s reading from Galatians.  Well, not Paul, actually it’s God who gives them to us, but at least Paul tells us about them.  And both the fuel and the roadmap are directly related to the identity that we talked about last week, our identity as children of God.

Because you are God’s children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts.  That’s our fuel, the gas in our tanks.  Live by the Spirit, Paul says, be guided by the Spirit.  Because you are Spirit-Led.  Anyone heard that phrase before?  It’s the first part of our vision statement for this St. Albans community.  In fact, it’s even the password for our WiFi!  We are Spirit-Led, our vision is to be Spirit-Led, and that vision comes right from this passage in Galatians.  And when we are Spirit-Led, what happens?  Well, amazing stuff happens.  Love happens.  Joy happens.  Peace happens.  Patience happens.  Kindness happens.  Generosity happens.  Faithfulness happens.  Gentleness happens.  Self-control happens.  Is that the sort of stuff you want in your life?  Is that the sort of stuff we want in the life of this community? 

Yup.  Be Spirit-led.  That’s our fuel.

And the roadmap?  What’s our freedom for?  Here’s what Paul’s got in his letter to the Galatians, it’s pretty simple really.  You were called to freedom brothers and sisters so that through love you become servants to one another.  You’re asking how you should live?  Live like this:  Love your neighbor as yourself.  That pretty much sums it all up.

Now I don’t know about you, but I’d like a little more to go on.  I mean, I know Paul that you’re big on this freedom thing and you don’t want to give us a whole new rulebook cause that would kind of defeat the point of the gospel of grace.  But can’t you give us a bit more to go on?

And you know what?  I think that we weren’t the only ones to ask for a bit more to go on, few more details if you like on the roadmap.  Because two years later, in a letter that Paul wrote to the Christian community in Rome, he does give us a slightly more detailed road map.  It goes like this:

Dear Romans,

This is how you should live:

Love from the center of who you are; don't fake it. Run for dear life from evil; hold on for dear life to good.  Be good friends who love deeply; practice playing second fiddle.  Don't burn out; keep yourselves fueled and aflame. Be alert servants of the Master, cheerfully expectant. Don't quit in hard times; pray all the harder.  Help needy Christians; be inventive in hospitality.  Bless your enemies; no cursing under your breath.  Laugh with your happy friends when they're happy; share tears when they're down.  Get along with each other; don't be stuck-up. Make friends with nobodies; don't be the great somebody.  Don't hit back; discover beauty in everyone.  If you've got it in you, get along with everybody.  Don't insist on getting even; that's not for you to do. "I'll do the judging," says God. "I'll take care of it."  Our Scriptures tell us that if you see your enemy hungry, go buy that person lunch, or if he's thirsty, get him a drink. Your generosity will surprise him with goodness.  Don't let evil get the best of you; get the best of evil by doing good.

I’ve got three things I want to say about this:

First, this roadmap flows directly from who we are, which is why we talked about identity last week.  The way of life described here flows directly from your identity and my identity as a child of God.  This is how we live in the family of God, this is what makes us who we are.  Love from the centre of who you are;  don’t fake it!

Second, none of this is a way to earn God’s love or to be justified with God, or to become a child of God.  We don’t have to do anything to be a beloved child of God, good with God for all eternity.  That’s a given.  Everything else, all the roadmap stuff, comes after.

And finally, this is what your freedom is for.  By the grace of God, you were called to freedom, so that you could live as a child of God, fueled by the Spirit, with this as your roadmap.  Bon voyage.

Amen.