Sermon: Sunday, June 16, 2013: Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

Texts:  1 Kings 21:1-21a  +  Psalm 5:1-8  +  Galatians 2:15-21  +  Luke 7:36-8:3

Not quite two months ago, in the capital city of Bangladesh, an eight-story building collapsed killing over 1,100 people, and injuring an additional 2,500.  The building housed a garment factory, one of many in Bangladesh which pays some of the lowest wages in the world. According to reports by the Center for American Progress and the Workers Rights Consortium, garment factory workers in Bangladesh earn about $136 per month and labor in “buildings largely unpoliced by local officials, many of whom themselves own stakes in the factories.”  So, even though cracks had appeared in the building and the owners had been warned to evacuate the factory, the labor force had been ordered to report for work on the morning the building collapsed.  It was the deadliest garment-factory accident in history, and the cost of clothing manufactured cheaply in Bangladesh cannot be correctly counted if it does not include the cost of those lives.

About a year and a half ago the New York Times ran a series of reports on the “iEconomy,” by which it was referring to the economy that has grown up surrounding high-tech industries.  Their reporting highlighted the harsh working conditions and frequent injuries in manufacturing plants that produce products for Apple, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, I.B.M., Motorola, Sony, Toshiba and others.  In one case “137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens.”  Reports of underage workers, excessive overtime, and hazardous waste continue to haunt the high-tech manufacturing sector.  The cost of the smooth, shiny, miracle devices so many of us — myself included — have come to love cannot be correctly counted if it does not include the cost paid by the workers and even the environment.

For the purposes of sermonizing, the “iEconomy” couldn’t have been better named.  It’s not just high-tech devices and cheap clothing that come with unbearable costs.  We all know that.  We’ve seen the documentaries, we’ve even screened some of them here at St. Luke’s, about the costs of an unsustainable food-subsidy policy, of fracking for natural gas, of cheap oil.  Here in the United States, and throughout much of the northern hemisphere, we reap the benefits of the “I-Economy,” an economy that caters to the wealthy at the expense of the poor.

We don’t like to think of ourselves as wealthy in the United States, we like to think we’re all in the middle.  We’re all middle class.  But, objectively speaking that’s just not true. We are living in an era in which the gap between the rich and the poor has been expanding faster than at any time in recent history, not just here in the United States, but globally.  The Bangladeshi factory worker earning $136 each month does not buy the clothing she makes.  The Chinese factory worker cannot afford the iPad he polishes.  The undocumented farm laborer in the United States could never shop at a Whole Foods or a Mariano’s.

The “I-Economy” exists to serve those with money and power, to give us what we want at the price we want to pay, and there’s nothing new about it.

In this morning’s story from First Kings, we return once again to King Ahab and his wife Jezebel.  The king spies a vineyard in the fertile Jezreel valley, next to his palace.  He wants it, regardless of the fact that it belongs to someone else, so he offers to buy it from its owner, Naboth.  This may sound fair to us, but in the context of the story something affronting has already begun to take place.  During these times, the land was understood to be more than a commodity, more than real estate.  Land was the source of a family’s income and security, but even more, it was understood to be a God-given gift.  It was a birthright passed from generation to generation.

The connection between land and lineage is symbolized in the story by the crops each owner would grow.  Naboth has established a vineyard on his land, and as anyone who loves wine and knows how it is made can attest, vines are precious and require cultivation over generations.  When immigrants came to the United States from the wine countries of the Mediterranean they would sometimes bring cuttings from the vines of the old country to plant in the new world as a sign of continuity with their ancestors.  By contrast, King Ahab wants the land for a vegetable garden, the kind of crop you plant again and again at the start of each new season.  Ahab proposes to destroy a lineage and an inheritance for the sake of a fast crop, a quick profit.

In Bolivia, where quinoa has been cultivated for over 4,000 years — so, literally, since the time of Ahab — the global demand for this cash crop has actually begun to destroy traditional agricultural practices as farmers take cash incentives from the government to abandon other crops in order to keep up with the demand in American health food markets.  As a result, farmers have stopped rotating crops, and the land is quickly becoming depleted.  This has devastating local impact in this nation, where one in five children suffers from chronic malnutrition.  The cost of quinoa cannot be correctly counted if it does not include the cost paid by the families whose own children are not being fed.

But the king wants what he wants when he wants it.  When Naboth rejects his offer, Ahab takes to his bed in an almost comical tantrum.  He didn’t get what he wanted, and so he feels like he is the aggrieved party.  Isn’t this how the “I-Economy” works?  It so distorts our sense of what is fair, that we can actually imagine that we are the injured party when gasoline prices rise, or food prices rise, or manufacturing prices rise.  We punish our legislators with angry phone calls and the threat of being ousted if they touch our crop subsidies.  We look the other way when troops are sent to protect oil, knowing the bottom line lines our pockets as well.

There is, however, another economy in the world.

We catch sight of it in the gospel story from Luke, in which a woman comes to the place where Jesus is sharing dinner with Simon the Pharisee.  This woman is known to be a sinner, what kind of sinner the scriptures don’t say, but whatever her debts are, Jesus has forgiven them.  Her jubilee tears are the signs of joy you might experience when a crushing load is lifted, an unimaginable debt is forgiven, an incurable illness is healed.  She spends her tears on his feet and she pours precious and costly oil over his skin to anoint him.

Simon is confused by Jesus’ interaction with this woman, his transaction in this economy of gratitude and grace.  It did not fit within the accepted business practices of the day.  Simon was a Pharisee, the woman was a sinner.  We don’t even know her name.  She could have been one of the women crushed in Bangladesh.  She might have been a factory worker in China.  She may have picked the quinoa served for dinner that night.  But to Jesus, she was a person who mattered.  Her suffering in the I-Economy was seen by God, and challenged by Christ, and this nameless woman was grateful, so grateful, to be seen and loved by such a good and gracious God, that she poured herself out at Jesus’ feet.

Sisters and brothers, we live in the tension between two economies as well.  We all know this.  Our cupboards and our closets are filled with signs of one economy.  Our church is filled with signs of another.  We are so tightly entangled in systems of production and consumption that distance us from one another, that benefit some while punishing others, that we barely know how to begin to extricate ourselves.  But we must begin, we must continue, to try.  Because the woman who stitches our clothes, the man who polishes the glass on our smart phones, the children who pick our crops do have names, and they belong to God, which makes them members of our family.

When we baptized Zoey Charlotte White this morning we washed her with water and anointed her with oil, just like the nameless woman who touched Jesus’ feet.  Like that woman in Simon the Pharisee’s house, we too are sinners.  We too have been caught in systems of suffering and oppression that have lured us away from our birthright, our baptisms, our utter belonging to God.  But today, in this baptism, in this naming, we see how good God is.  We see that before we ever chose God, God chose us.  We see that no one is nameless before God — not the workers in the factories and the fields, not the woman at Jesus’ feet, not Mary, called Magdalene, or Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, or Susanna, or Zoey or me or you.

In our baptisms we were called out of the “I-Economy” and into the economy of grace.  That means it matters what we eat, and what we wear, and what we buy because somewhere, another child of God just as beautiful and precious as Zoey has labored to bring these things to you and me.  May we learn to love those whose names we do not know as deeply as God has loved us.

Amen.

Sermon: Sunday, March 17, 2013: Fifth Sunday of Lent

Texts:  Isaiah 43:16-21  +  Psalm 126  +  Philippians 3:4b-14  +  John 12:1-8

File it under “weirdest dinner party ever.”

The story begins, “six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead.  There they gave a dinner for him.”  We’ve all had friends over for dinner, and we’ve likely all had dinner parties.  This is more of the latter than the former.  They’ve thrown a dinner for Jesus and his disciples and the reason for their celebration would seem quite clear.  Their brother Lazarus, who once was dead, is now alive through the power of God at work in Jesus.

The story of the raising of Lazarus from the dead appears only in John’s gospel, and it is presented there as the cause for the Pharisees’ plot against Jesus.  In the context of worship we generally read the story of Lazarus’ resurrection right up to the point where Jesus calls him forth from the grave, wrapped in grave cloths, and Jesus demands that the crowd of witnesses “unbind him, and let him go.”

After that climactic moment however, John’s gospel goes on to say that

many … therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him.  But some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what he had done.  So the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the council, and said, “What are we to do? This man is performing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.”  But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing at all!  You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.” He did not say this on his own, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus was about to die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but to gather into one the dispersed children of God.  So from that day on they planned to put him to death.  (John 11:45-53)

In response, Jesus withdraws for a while from the public eye and goes to stay in a town called Ephraim near the wilderness until the Passover.  As the festival of the Passover drew near, John’s gospel says,

They were looking for Jesus and were asking one another as they stood in the temple, “What do you think? Surely he will not come to the festival, will he?”  Now the chief priests and the Pharisees had given orders that anyone who knew where Jesus was should let them know, so that they might arrest him. (John 11:56-57)

And it is at this point that the story of this odd dinner party is told in the fourth gospel.

So, a miracle-worker on the run from the authorities and a man who used to be dead are sitting at the same table.  This is already a strange, electrically charged event.  Then Mary, sister to Lazarus and Martha, bends down to anoint Jesus feet with costly perfume made of nard which Judas says could have fetched 300 denarii at the market.  A denarii was a day’s wage.  Let’s work this out with rough numbers.  The minimum wage in Illinois is $8.25, so an eight hour day paid at minimum wage will earn you $66.  Multiply that by 300, and you get $19,800.  The terms don’t translate quite this neatly, but for the sake of comparison, let’s go with it.

So, a miracle worker on the run from the authorities, a man who used to be dead, and his sister — who has just emptied almost $20,000 in perfume on the guest of honor’s feet and mopped up with her hair — are at a dinner party.  What we have is a really weird joke, waiting for a punchline, which Judas provides.

Judas Iscariot, the disciple who betrays Jesus to the authorities, who acted as treasurer of the group, is indignant at this waste of money.  He asks, “why was this perfume not sold for [the $20,000 it’s worth] and the money given to the poor.”  As readers we’re given to understand that he didn’t actually care about the poor, but that he wanted to get his hands on a portion of this wealth.  Publicly though, he is appealing to Jesus’ core values, mercy for the poor.  Why would Jesus condone such a waste of resources?

This is where the party goes from weird to awkward and uncomfortable.  Answering Judas’ question, Jesus says, “Leave her alone.  She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial.  You will always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”

At a dinner party thrown in his honor, seated near a man he’d restored to life, Jesus cuts through the religious pretense of his friends and followers, who want to quibble over how to spend their budget, to talk about the real cost of discipleship.  It will cost everything.  It will cost them their lives.

In John’s gospel, the logic of power is this: to confront the death-dealing forces of this world is to make yourself their target.  Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, knowing that the cost of a life is another life.  To say this in church, as we now pivot from the season of Lent and into Holy Week, is to begin to speak plainly about the mystery at the center of Christian faith.  What does it mean for the church to confess that Jesus Christ died for our sins?  What does it mean to say that he gave his life for ours?

There isn’t only one way to answer that question, and we don’t all have to use the same words or agree to the same set of beliefs to be included in the conversation.  In fact, sometimes there are simply no words to say in response to this grace.  Sometimes we simply find ourselves overwhelmed, like Mary, who saw the forest while Judas focused on the trees.  Jesus wasn’t just organizing charity work, redistributing wealth from the kind-hearted rich to the hungry poor.  Jesus was confronting the death-dealing powers of the world, challenging their dominion over God’s creation, in ways that would cost him his life.

In response Mary, wordlessly, pours herself out over the body of her Lord.  She sees what the others are too scared or confused to understand at this point.  She knows the price Jesus has paid to restore her brother to life, and she is overwhelmed with gratitude.  She acknowledges his impending death and, together, they prepare for what is to come.

The rule of etiquette for dinner parties, or so I’m told, is that you don’t talk religion or politics.  You don’t comment directly on the wealth of the host.  You keep your conversation to the sorts of topics acceptable in polite company.  If the subject of illness or death comes up, you acknowledge it briefly to offer your sympathies, but you don’t linger on the topic.

Jesus and Mary need something deeper that that, and — whether they know it or not — so do the disciples, so do we.  There are dinner parties, and there’s having friends over for dinner.  This was supposed to be the former, but it ended up the latter, thank God.

The same is true for us, who gather here at this table each week for a meal that is intended to be a meal among friends.  How often have we sat next to one another, nursing our private grief?  How often have we passed the peace, while harboring our unspoken anger?  How often have we shared a meal at the Lord’s Table, while hiding our multitude of hungers — for forgiveness, for acceptance, for love?

Dear friends, the community of the church is not a dinner party, it is friends over for dinner.  It is people who can speak openly of the death that surrounds us in the world.  It is Mary wordlessly pouring herself out at great cost, offered gratefully, willingly.

We are open about this, from the very beginning.  If you’ll open your hymnals one last time to the Rite of Baptism, and turn to page 231, I want to draw your attention to something.  After a person is baptized we offer up prayers of thanksgiving that, like Lazarus, we have been raised, given new life.  Then, like Mary, we wipe that person with oil.  We acknowledge that, in baptism, we have been joined to Christ.  In baptism, we have been grafted into the body through which God is at work, confronting the death dealing powers of this world.

I’ll say it: so often even the rite of baptism looks and sounds like a dinner party.  Everyone in their Sunday best, and enjoying the company of friends and family.  But see what we actually say? “Child of God, you have been sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ forever.”

This Lent we have heard the story of God’s love and mercy, God’s justice and grace, as preparation for the sacrament of baptism, and as a call to repent, or turn from, all the ways we have departed from the fullness of baptismal living.  Now we remember that in our baptism, we were anointed too.  We have been wiped with the costliest oil in preparation for a death of our own.  A dying to priorities and purposes of this death-dealing world, and a rising with Christ to the new life of solidarity with all the world’s suffering that calls us again and again to enter Jerusalem and to face the cross.

Amen.

Sermon: Sunday, March 10, 2013: Fourth Sunday of Lent

Texts:  Josh 5:9-12  +  Ps. 32  +  2 Cor 5:16-21  +  Luke 15:1-3,11b-32

I remember reading or hearing at some point that when you’re analyzing a dream it can be helpful to keep in mind that each of the characters in the dream may represent some element of yourself.  So, for example, in one of those classic chase dreams where you’re on the run from someone — a boss, the mob, aliens, whatever — you might ask yourself not only what you’re running from in your life, but also what you’re chasing after. You get the idea.

I think the same can be said for parables.  These stories that Jesus told often present characters we can immediately relate to, as with this morning’s parable of the prodigal son, but can yield some of their richest insights when we allow ourselves to imagine less obvious correspondences.

The story doesn’t actually begin with the man who had two sons.  It begins,

“now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’”

Before we even get to the parable, we’ve got three characters in complicated relationships.  There are the tax collectors and sinners, there are the Pharisees and the scribes, and there is Jesus.

The tax collectors are hated because they collaborate with the enemy.  Imagine what it would feel like to do back-breaking work, hauling fish in from the sea, or bringing in the crop of wheat, only to have foreign soldiers come and take a portion of your goods as a tax that would be used to make your occupier even more wealthy.  Now imagine that, in order to know who to collect that tax from, the soldiers turned to one of your neighbors, someone you grew up with, and that person gave them the list of people from whom to collect, and a sense for how much each could give.  You might hate the soldier in a vague, general way; but I imagine you would hate that neighbor, that childhood friend, that tax collector, in a very specific way.  A collaborator, an informant, a snitch, a traitor.

Who the sinners were is somewhat hard to say.  They might have included people who’d broken moral laws, or ritual laws.  They might have included thieves and liars.  They might also have included people who showed little regard for religion and its rules.  People who practiced a little of this and a little of that.  People considered unclean in the temple

These are the people who have come near to listen to Jesus: collaborators, informants, snitches, traitors, thieves, liars, and the religiously suspect — atheists, agnostics, syncretists, and those who, perhaps, just found nothing in religious life that meant anything or made a difference to them.  And you have to wonder just what Jesus was saying or doing that could draw such a collection of people together, people who you’d never see in a church.  And you have to notice that Jesus isn’t in a church, or the Temple, either.  He’s out wandering in the world, meeting these people where they are, where he finds them.

So along come the Pharisees and the scribes.  The Pharisees were religious leaders and teachers, though not the kind that worked in the Temple.  They were Protestants of a sort, you might say, reacting to what they saw as the failed religious leadership of those who ruled in the Temple, the Sadducees.  Their teaching emphasized holiness, and gave the people a way of being that was different from the occupying powers and the surrounding nations.  Their very name, Pharisee, loosely translates as “set apart.”

The scribes were elites of another sort.  In a world before laptop computers and mobile phones, before printing presses and hardbound books; in a pre-literate world, scribes could record contracts, could keep ledgers, could copy documents.  Part lawyer, part judge, part local government, scribes kept the law.  And among the laws that they kept were strict guidelines for purifying themselves before transcribing the holy name of God.  If, in the process of writing, a scribe needed to set down in ink the most holy name of God, the name we often translate as Jehovah or Yahweh, the scribe was required by law to wipe clean the pen and to cleanse their entire body as well before doing so.  In fact, the scribe had to repeat that process over again each time the name needed to be written.

The Pharisees and the scribes didn’t simply dislike the tax collectors and the sinners, they were deeply committed on a religious and national level, in theological and political terms, to a way of life that had no room for them.

It is to these people — strangers, enemies — that Jesus tells his story, the one we have come to know so well.

A man had two sons.  The younger one broke with all law and convention and asked for his inheritance before his father was even dead.  In essence he said, “I can’t be bothered to wait around for you to die.  Give me what’s mine now.”  He betrays his family.  He gets in bed with foreigners.  He wastes the treasures of his inheritance and only comes to himself once things have gotten so bad that he starts coveting the pig’s slop.  The unclean food given to unclean animals.  Sounds like the tax collectors and the sinners, right?

The son decides it’s time to come home, where there’s always enough for everyone, so he plans his return and prepares his confession, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.”  Doesn’t really sound like the kind of thing the sinners and tax collectors would have said.  Sounds more like a fantasy of what the Pharisees and scribes have been waiting for the tax collectors and the sinners to say.

Then, before he can even get the words of his confession out, the father comes running out to greet him, he throws his arms around him and kisses him.  Love precedes confession.  Grace precedes penitence.  Sounds like God, to us.  Not to the Pharisees and scribes.

The Pharisees and scribes didn’t live in a world of talk-show confessions and televised reconciliations between estranged parents, children, spouses.  Theirs wasn’t a world of self-help spirituality and live-your-best-life wisdom.  Theirs was a world of honor and shame.  A world where the conduct of a father, of a head of household, reflected on the rest of the family.  In that kind of a world people weren’t self-made, they were inter-related.  In that kind of a world, a child who ran off to squander the family fortune was disowned in a way from which there was no coming back.  A father who paced the fields looking for a prodigal son wasn’t an image of love, he was an image of weakness.  His running to greet the younger son wasn’t a display of enthusiasm, it was a foolish spectacle.  A father like this was an embarrassment to his family.  A God like this would be a scandal and a source of mockery.

The Father bestows a robe and a ring, sacrifices the fatted calf and prepares a banquet to celebrate the return of the prodigal.  But someone is still missing, someone is set apart from the feast.  So, the older brother enters gets his scene.  “Listen,” he demands,

“for all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!”

Sounds like the Pharisees and the scribes, right?

What I find so moving about this last scene in the parable is the anger and agony of the elder brother.  He rails at the injustice of having spent his life doing what is expected, what is right, and what has it gotten him: “You have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends.”

I can imagine it must have felt like that to the Pharisees and scribes — keeping the law, teaching the law, enforcing the law — all as an act of identification with, loyalty for, devotion to the God of Israel.  Yet, still they were occupied by foreign powers.  Still their harvests were taxed and their incomes sent away to line other people’s pockets.  All that hard work, and life was still no party.

When I picture it in my head, Jesus telling this story to these people, it’s hard to imagine that any of them knew what to make of it.  How would the tax collectors and sinners make sense of the idea that they could ever be welcomed at the dinner tables of people like the Pharisees and scribes?  How would the Pharisees and scribes make sense of the story’s logic that those people were in fact their own brothers and sisters.  Not only not enemies, but family.

In my own life I have been both younger sibling and older.  I have wasted my cultural inheritance, using the power and privilege that come with being educated, white, middle-class, American, clergy — you name it — on projects and priorities that break solidarity with the rest of God’s creation.  I have cashed in on the wealth of my various identities to enjoy cheap food, cheap oil, safe streets, good education, clean water, and access to medicine, knowing that others pay the price for my inheritance.  Over and over I wake up to my continual wanderings away and I wonder if there is a way back, a way home.

And I have stood out in the field, nursing all the grudges that come with being an actual, literal older brother, and also a rule-keeper, a grade-earner, a goal-setter, a high-achiever, a self-starter, an entrepreneur, a redeveloper — you name it.  I have looked in from the outside on gatherings of late-comers, coasters, failures and cowards and scorned their weaknesses.  I have preached a gospel of grace and lived a life defined by works.  I have stayed stuck in the fields, refusing a party not thrown on my terms.

But if, as with our dreams, we are encouraged to consider that we might be any and all of the characters, then there is another option in this parable that we might consider, an invitation to people who call themselves the body of Christ.  There is a final character we might yet consider, and that is the father.  Pacing the edges of the field.  Keeping watch for those who are lost and wandering.  Making fools of ourselves for the sake of love.  Rushing out to meet those who are looking for a way home with all the signs of welcome — a robe, like the ones worn in baptism, and a feast like the one served weekly at this table.

Parables are not simply metaphors, there are no simple correspondences.  We are not simply the elder son or the younger son or the father.  Parables are open ended.  The endings are unresolved.  We don’t know if the younger son stays home this time.  We don’t know if the elder son comes in from the fields.  We don’t know how the story ends.  We are invited to write the ending with our lives.

Amen.