Rich toward God?

     This Sunday we are blessed to host Rev. Kathryn Franzenburg of Wartburg Seminary who will preach and share with us about the importance of having a will and legacy giving.  We have chosen this Sunday for this event because of the gospel lesson from Luke 12.  In this lesson a young man asks Jesus to "tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me."  This is still an argument that goes on in families today, especially in cases where the will of the deceased is unclear or not up-to-date.  (In my own family after my grandfather's death the will was a nightmare because of how it was written.)
     But beyond even the legal ramifications of the will, Jesus takes this lesson one further to talk about greed, wealth, and God by telling the parable of the rich landowner.  In this parable the man benefits from good and abundant crops, and he decides to tear down his existing barns and build bigger ones so that he can store up his crop and wealth saying, 'Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ Yet that night God said to the man, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’
     It is because of this question from God that we will also talk about planned giving and about the ability to leave a wonderful legacy by wording something a certain way in your will.  I went to a continuing education piece about planned giving and was amazed at how little it takes to make a big impact in the name of Jesus even after you die.

But wills and planned giving are only legal details, and although they are important because of the world in which we live, Jesus is not as concerned with that as he is with your soul.  

     So it is, Jesus says, with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not 'rich toward God.'  So it is that those who do not take seriously that none of us know the day or hour that will be our last will squander precious resources planning for a future that won't exist.  So it is that those who put their security and comfort in worldly goods will find, once we wake up 'on the other side' that our true comfort and security comes only from God.
     The mystery I am pondering this week is what it means to be 'rich in God.'  After this last week and thinking about prayer, I was commenting that there are so many others in this congregation who could much more effectively preach about prayer and faith.  There is a generation of faithful saints who have seen more than I have, who have experienced more than I have, and whose faith is so much more solid than mine.  They are people who I would consider are 'rich in God.'
     How do you feel about your wealth in God?  I came across the following picture and comment this morning:

A lot of people fail to understand that we are made rich in God, what good is money if we have no hope, joy and love?

 

 

     It is important to remember that no matter our material wealth, we have all we need by hope in Christ Jesus.  As Paul says in our reading from Colossians, "So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory."
     So this Sunday as we talk about the importance of having a will and the ability many of us have to leave a wonderful legacy through planned giving, let us even more talk about being rich in God.

Ask, search, and knock for what?

     If you've ever prayed, then the promise from Jesus in this week's gospel from Luke 11 has come into question:

So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.

Illustration by Ted Slampyak

 I've asked, and not received, sought and not found, knocked and found the door to be locked tight.  But we all know that God is faithful and always keeps God's promises, right?  So how come it seems like on this promise in particular many people are let down and disappointed?  The obvious answer is that the people did receive, did find, and did have the door opened, it just wasn't anything they expected, or it wasn't exactly what they wanted. 
     But I wonder if the answer is that we don't read far enough in the text.  We get to the promise and say to ourselves, "Great!  Now I just need to ask and God will grant my wish.  But I need to be careful because I only have three wishes..."  Oh wait, that's the genie, not God.  Right.  God is NOT a genie.  I say this tongue-in-cheek, but that is the unfortunate view that many people have of God.  So what do we find if we keep reading?  Well, the story continues:

Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!

 Is it just me, or does it seem that this promise has an ending that not many know: How much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?  You mean this isn't a promise carte blanche for anything we could ever want?  And here I thought "God will give me the desires of my heart" (Psalm 37.4)
     When it comes to prayer and asking God, Jesus makes it clear that God will give abundantly of the Holy Spirit.  Nothing more is promised.  And, really, isn't the Spirit all we need?  Don't we believe that "by my own understanding or strength I cannot believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to him, but instead the Holy Spirit has called me through the gospel, enlightened me with [her] gifts, made me holy and kept me in the true faith, just as [she] calls, gathers, enlightens, and makes holy the whole Christian church on earth and keeps it with Jesus Christ in the one common, true faith"?
     If, then, the one thing we ask for and receive is the Holy Spirit, won't everything else we ask for align with God's desires for us?  As one very wise, very faithful woman said to me, when you have the Spirit, your inner stirrings usually come from God in the first place, and asking, seeking, and knocking will produce in you an act of true faith in which you will ultimately find God.
     Because, deep down in all of our desires, isn't there a longing for God?  Even in my deepest desire and craving for ice cream, I am really desiring to be satisfied - which ice cream will never be able to do for me.  That craving for satisfaction can only be fulfilled and satiated by the One who is life.
     What are you asking or searching for?  What doors are you knocking on?

    

Break the rules?

     Our readings for this week are once again giving us a lovely conversation starter: is it better to follow the rules or to put relationships first?
     Last week with the parable of the good Samaritan, we saw that the rules don't always work.  When the priest and the Levite followed the rules, they were not loving their neighbor, and so we had an 'exception to the rule'.  We discovered in conversation that the hard part is knowing when the rules don't work anymore.

Photo from http://blog.consumer-knowledge.com

     In this week's gospel lesson, we have a similar scenario, though the two texts are hardly ever compared in such a way.  This week we continue in Luke 10 with a story about Jesus visiting Mary and Martha.  Typically the story has been interpreted that poor Martha just misses the boat - she puts daily tasks above loving Jesus.  The moral of the story, then, is not to get too distracted with daily life so that you miss Jesus in your midst.
     This is a fine interpretation, and it impacts my life all the time - I tell myself not to get too caught up in the little details so as to miss five minutes of playtime with my daughter, or the quick chat with a neighbor on the sidewalk.  However, given where the text is placed in Luke, I think there is more to just paying attention to Jesus.
     Recall that Jesus, when we sent out the 70 disciples on their mission at the beginning of chapter 10, instructed them not to take anything with them and to rely on the hospitality of those whom they met along the way.  Jesus himself was reliant on the hospitality of his friends and acquaintances since he was a traveling teacher.  Martha, knowing the hospitality laws, was both fulfilling the law and fulfilling what Jesus had earlier commanded.
     There is also precedent for Martha serving honored guests.  In Genesis 18, our other reading for Sunday, the Lord appears to Abraham when three men appear outside his tent.  When he sees them, he invites them in, tells Sarah to make cakes, and prepares a calf for them to eat.  This was the tradition of hospitality, and the men gave permission for Abraham to prepare them a meal.
     It would seem then, that these two texts are at odds with each other.  In Genesis, Sarah is expected to be doing the 'traditional hostess role.'  In Luke, Martha expects that her sister Mary help her in the 'traditional hostess role' and Jesus chastises her by saying, "Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing.  Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her."
     Perhaps rather than focusing on the fact that Jesus is praising Mary for choosing to sit at his feet, we might think about Jesus praising Mary for not letting the rules get in the way.
     Think about it.  Why do we do what we do?  Who made up the 'chores' list for your house?  I once heard a story about a family pot roast recipe.  The recipe had been in the family for at least three generations - and it was a prize-winning, always-requested dish and source of family pride.  To begin, you had to cut one of the ends of the roast off and place it in a smaller dish, while the rest of the roast went into the roasting pan.  One day, however, one of the youngest generation family members asked, "Why do you have to cut it?"  No one knew, it was just because that's what the recipe said.
     After doing some investigation into the matter, one woman discovered that in the generation the recipe was perfected, the cook didn't have a roasting pan large enough to hold a whole roast.  So you had to cut the end off and cook in two batches.
     We often do things just because, without giving it much thought.  Jesus, in his interaction with Mary and Martha, is not necessarily only praising Mary because she is sitting and listening, but perhaps more because she has given the matter thought and decided that the rules of playing host to Jesus weren't as important as simply being with him.
     That is the freedom we have in Christ - we are totally freed from the 'rules' and can choose to live where the Spirit blows, rather than being confined by the rigid boundaries of societal pressures and unwritten rules.  For me, however, the sad reality is that I am often like Martha, unhappily confined by the invisible chains of living up to made-up expectations.
     While it is important not to live too distracted and therefore miss God's presence in your life, it is also important to live in Christ's freedom by surrendering all of yourself, including your expectations, and be willing to become new in the Spirit.  It is a challenge to throw all the rules out the window, trusting that God's Spirit won't let you go astray, and confidently stepping forward in faith knowing that living in Christ's freedom sometimes means breaking rules.

Live love?

The Good Samaritan by Paula Modersohn-Becker

     The gospel lesson this week is a well-known story, and even gets several pop-culture references (though I'm not sure anymore if people know the root of the reference or if they just know the idiom).  It is the parable of the Good Samaritan.  It is the story of a man, who on a journey, is stripped, robbed, beaten, and left for dead.  The first two people who come upon him are people you might expect to stop and help - a priest and a caretaker of the temple.  These two, however, knowing that their religious law prevents them from touching naked sickness without themselves being made ritually impure.  So the two likely suspects walk on the other side of the road.  The twist to this story comes with the third person who comes along.  This third person doesn't even belong to their religion, the third person is never clean and people who live the 'right' way don't associate with them.  Yet they stop.  And they go above and beyond the 'call of duty' for someone they don't know.  They pay for the victim to recoup at a local inn, promising to return and pay whatever else the man uses to care for this stranger.  We are all fairly familiar with the story, and we are familiar with its common usage now to mean someone who does something nice for another person they don't know.
     What we may be a little more unfamiliar with, however, is the reason Jesus told this parable to begin with.  In Luke 10, the parable begins with a lawyer questioning Jesus about eternal life.

'Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. ‘Teacher,’ he said, ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ He said to him, ‘What is written in the law? What do you read there?’ He answered, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.’ And he said to him, ‘You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.’

 But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’ Jesus replied, 'There was a man...

...and the parable of the Good Samaritan ensues.

It would seem then, that loving the Lord means more than just following the rules, since in the parable the two Jewish men did follow the rules but the non-Jew got it right.  This makes following Jesus all the more harder - are we supposed to follow the rules in the Bible, which are good, or are we supposed to break them and hope that doing so results in love and eternal life?  If we can't look to the scriptures to figure out what to do, how are we to know what kind of life is okay to live?  This conversation between Jesus and the lawyer seems to muddy the waters of salvation by grace through faith, if for the lawyer inheriting eternal life comes from reading in scripture that we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves.  For those of us who have been brought up knowing that we are absolutely not good enough to do this, that our sinful self gets in the way and messes it up, that Jesus came to die for us because we fall short, let me point you to the first lesson from Deuteronomy 30.
     It would seem that Jesus is having a conversation with scripture, that he is taking the teaching from Deuteronomy and reinforcing God's promises with a twist.  In Deuteronomy 30 we read,

 Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?’ Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?’ No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.

Sometimes I think that we use grace as a crutch, blaming our sinful selves on the fact that we didn't do what we knew we should.  As much as I loathe the so-called 'Lutheran guilt,' and joke that we have 'overactive guilt glands,' I sometimes think it is a healthy slap from the Holy Spirit.  After all, we have the word in our mouths and our hearts to observe - 'it is not too hard nor is it too far away.'
     The gift we have in grace and faith is that we aren't alone in living out our faith.  Christ who has faced every temptation we will knows what it is to know what is right and yearn to not do it.  The Holy Spirit who rushed in like a violent wind and set the world on fire knows what it is to be pulled in different directions, the right one the hardest path.  And that is where the grace and faith come.
     As gifts right when we need them most, to love the Lord our God with all our hearts, with all our soul, with all our mind, and with all our strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.  The mystery for me this week is how God can strengthen me (who I know to not want to do what is right all the time) to live out my life of faith in love - toward God and toward neighbor.  How is God calling you to live love?

How has Jesus sent you?

     Our gospel lesson for Sunday comes from Luke 10.  It is the first mission trip coordinated by Jesus and is actually two parts of the chapter - the sending and the return.  This is a text with which I am very familiar.  In seminary I took a class on 'missional church' my senior year and we had the privilege of starting EVERY class time by reading this scripture and spending the first 10-15 minutes in discussion around what the Spirit revealed to us.
     The interesting thing was that over the 16 week semester, while there were certainly themes that trended, there was always something new, some insight or some new understanding that made this scripture come alive in a new way for me.  Have you ever spent that long on a single text?  What would you think if your pastor preached the same text for a whole year?  (That might be a fun experiment!)  So when I come to this text again, three years later, it comes as an old friend with its familiar lines, sounds, and flavors.  Yet even old friends can surprise - and this old friend does not disappoint. 
     Since I have been thinking back to my seminary course, the missional church part of this text really stands out.  However, missional church might not be in your vocabulary, so here is a short, succinct video that does a good job of describing missional church:

Ok, now that you have an idea of what missional church is, here is where our gospel text comes in.  In our gospel text, which is all about the work of the church before 'church' existed, I see a mirror of what we are called (and only by the grace of God succeed) to do. 
     Jesus names and claims us in the waters of baptism, we are each given a mission in the world, with our 'hand to the plow' as we heard last week, and then we are sent into the world to proclaim that the kingdom of God has come near.
     How we do this depends on who we are, what we are doing, and where we are doing it.  Young people are called to be Christ's presence at school, on the bus, at their place of child care.  Older youth are called to be Christ's presence in the weight room, locker room, and on the sports field; on stage, in speech/drama club, and online playing COD.  Even older of us are called to be Christ's presence at work, at the unemployment office, out with friends at the local restaurant (Odie's in my town),  at our children's sporting events, in line at the grocery store, etc.
     Even though we gather in our church building once or more a week for worship, fellowship, and learning, we are church every moment of every day.  And, as it says in the gospel lesson, we often make way for the work of Jesus, "After this the Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go."
     Just as John the Baptist prepared the way for Jesus' coming into the world, just as these seventy others prepared the way for Jesus coming after them, we too prepare the way for Jesus to work in the hearts and lives of those we meet.  I myself have benefited from someone coming to me ahead of Jesus.  One of those times was in the months prior to a mission trip to Guatemala in 2005.  I met Pastor Katherine in the fall of that year, and then in January attended a retreat on baptism.  Five months later I found myself in Guatemala and it was in that time I discerned my call to ministry.  Now, 8 years later, I have been a pastor for almost 3 years, and all because Pastor Katherine came to me and proclaimed Jesus.  This prepared my own heart and life for the work the Spirit would do in Guatemala and in the months and years after that.
     This is just one story, and while there are many others, I still ponder how Jesus sends people ahead of him and the Holy Spirit so that people are ready to hear a word of good news, or a call to ministry, or receive much needed peace and forgiveness.   An even greater mystery is how Jesus sends me ahead of him - for whom am I preparing the way?