God's Got You

Haggai 2:1-9

Have you ever started a project – maybe home improvement, or setting up a budget, or planning for the future – and find there’s a piece of information you’re going to need to chase down?

And looking up that information reminds you of another task that’s due soon, so you complete that task quickly, which reminds you to get a different piece of information…

until you find yourself googling plumbing supplies for a whole different project you are not yet sure you’re even going to do at all, or browsing the internet to find exactly the rug you’ll need after your next home improvement project is done?

 

And then you look back at your original plan or budget and it looks hopeless to balance or solve or complete, and you just leave it open in the background, haunting you?

 

Well, that’s the situation God’s people are in when we hear the prophet Haggai talking to them this morning.

They’ve been in exile in Babylon for a generation or two – most of them were born in exile – and now Cyrus of Persia has conquered Babylon and sent them back to their ancient homeland and told them that they should rebuild God’s Temple in Jerusalem. The enormous, splendid Temple that King Solomon built with the wealth of nations, long ago.

 

It’s important – even essential – to the present and future of God’s people that they rebuild the Temple. That they create this center for community, this anchor for identity. Restoring the Temple to the beauty and power it held before the Babylonians smashed it is about reclaiming, establishing, their sense of self and purpose and nationhood as the people of God.

 

And here they are, a small group sent back and commissioned to rebuild the Temple, and no doubt they started out with focus and enthusiasm, but now…

They don’t have everything they need.

They need to put their own homes together, and get their own business organized so they can eat.

They have other stuff to do to get resettled after a generational exile disrupted them.

 

And they’ve gotten stuck on the Temple project. Maybe they’ve gotten as far as a half-restored wall, and rebuilt foundations, but it’s a massive project. Most of them don’t have any memory of – and no vision for – the splendor and solidity they are trying to build. And they don’t know where the time and materials are all coming from.

 

Have you ever been at that place in your life?

At work, or school, or in some community you’re part of? Or your family or personal life?

 

Just thinking about it, my shoulders feel heavy and I would like to go back to bed.

 

Enter Haggai, the prophet, speaking for God.

“Oh, hey there, look at that one row of stones you’ve laid. Doesn’t look like much, does it?

Yeah, I know.

Take courage!

Be strong, Zerubbabel and Joshua, you leaders!

Take courage, all you people!

Work because I am with you.”

 

I got you, God says to the people.

I promised I’d take care of you and set you up, I’m living among you now so that you have nothing to fear.

Count on me.

You do not have to pull this off alone.

 

And I’ll take care of providing the stuff you don’t have. The treasure of all nations and silver and gold and all the splendor that you aren’t going to find in poor, occupied, slowly recovering Jerusalem.

Phew!

My shoulders are relaxing again, a bit.

 

How many of us need to hear someone say that to us, now?

Need to hear God say, “I got you. Count on me. You do not have to pull this off alone.”

 

Maybe you’re managing a health or financial crisis in your family.

Maybe you’re looking at career change, or retirement, or some other life transition or celebration, and the road ahead just looks too steep, too rocky, to believe you can get to the end of it (so why try now?).

Maybe you really need to taste an old family recipe at Thanksgiving this year, but no one is selling one of the essential ingredients.

Maybe you want to figure out how to do something to help folks who are going hungry and working unpaid through the federal shutdown, and you keep running into dead ends of impenetrable and inadequate systems of support.

Maybe you’re trying to balance a budget that just won’t balance.

Maybe you just needed to get on a plane this weekend and you saw an hour-long security line and heard a voice in your head moaning “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here”.

 

And you just need to hear God say, “I got you. Count on me. You do not have to pull this off alone.”

 

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

Listen.

 

God’s got us.

The obstacles, and the tedium, and the friction of gritty daily evils and selfishness and greed are real, but God’s got us.

We aren’t doing this alone.

We’re not alone in any work of healing, community building, hope.

Any work of building practical supports for faith and trust and identity and mutual support. Not alone in any work of sharing vision, reaching toward God; any work of love.

 

Listen again, and hear God say, “I got you. Count on me.”

 

So let’s refocus. Let’s get back to work on this essential, core-community project.

 

I’ve got you, God says, so let’s quit distracting yourselves. Take heart, take courage, and get back to work on what matters.

Count on me. I’ve got what you need, even if you can’t see where or how. I’ll help you complete this work.

You’re not alone in this. God is with us. And you’ve got God’s people to support you, and God’s people looking to you, to support others; be part of the work.

 

God’s got us, friends.

Not so we can give up, and wait for God to just appear and change the world.

God’s got us so that we can do the work of building and restoration, whatever that work may be for us. So that we can care for one another. So that we can build hope, and share love, and grow, and make our community and our world a better, more healing, more awe-inspired, more joy-filled place. So that we can sense the presence of God, and share the love of God with the folks right around us who need it, too.

 

Today, God is calling us – as well as those ancient rebuilders of Jerusalem – calling you and me to take a deep breath, know that God is here among us, and refocus our hearts and our daily work.

 

Because we can do what God invites us to do.

With God among us, we can unknot the things we don’t know how to solve.

We can rebuild what was once destroyed.

We can overcome the challenges to make a home for God’s people in a broken world.

We can create beauty, and wonder, and hope and trust.

We can relieve our exhaustion, cut loose from despair, outlast our impatience, be braver than our fears.

 

Not instantly, but consistently.

Breathing in the presence of God with us,

leaning into God’s invitation to “Count on me,”

and taking courage, taking heart to work with God in the daily, ongoing, enormous and splendid, project of building hope, and healing, and love.

Dishonest Wealth

Luke 16:1-13

Why??

Why would a business owner, a landowner, praise the employee who cheated them?

 

Is this guy in Jesus’ story crazy? Corrupt himself? Just…weird?

 

And then, because this is a Jesus story, a parable, you and I might be wondering whether, and how, we are supposed to imagine God praising a cheater, a thief.

 

Eww.

 

And “eew” is, apparently, the reaction that generation after generation of disciples and scripture scholars have had to this story. No one has an explanation that they are satisfied with.

In fact, it’s probable that Luke himself, writing this story down for us, was confused about what point Jesus is trying to make by telling this story. He piles on a bunch of other things he remembers Jesus saying about dishonesty and wealth and trustworthiness, maybe hoping that something in those quotes will make sense of a story that…just doesn’t make sense.

 

So, when we’re stuck with an uncomfortable story about praising a cheater, it’s probably worth noting that Jesus has been telling us all along that our assumptions about who is closest to God, and who is not, are often wrong.
For early hearers of Jesus’ stories, it might not be that much more shocking to hear a dishonest manager praised than to hear that the tax collectors – graft-ridden collaborators that they are – are going to be among the first in God’s kingdom. And Jesus himself, as we heard last week, tends to eat with and celebrate people who the religious establishment thinks of as uncorrected “sinners”.

 

In fact, if you look back at the whole history of God’s people, there are a bunch of times when God picks out a shady or weaselly character and turns them into a “hero”.
That might be comforting when we reflect on our own imperfections, and the limited qualifications for heroism that many of us have. Though it’s still itchy and uncomfortable to consider God praising and congratulating a cheater right in front of us, when many of us also know very well exactly how it feels to be cheated.

 

So it’s helpful to me to remember that one thing I have learned about parables, about these stories Jesus tells, is that however easy it might be to label one character in the story “God”, or “us”, there’s never actually a one-to-one correlation.
It’s not that the “rich man” – the landowner or business owner – in the story is God.
(In fact, more often than not “rich men” are the losers or bad guys in Jesus’ teachings.)
Nor is the manager, nor the people who got their debts reduced, a direct equivalent to God. Or to us.

 

So maybe our best clue in the story is Jesus’ comment about “dishonest wealth”, and that other comment about how you cannot serve both God and money (or really any other idol).

 

Maybe all the money in this story is dishonest already. Not just after the manager cheats the owner, or after he makes all those unauthorized discounts and debt reductions. Maybe all the wealth is “dishonest” even before the rich man gets it and starts trying to use money to make more money, creating debts and obligations.

 

Oof, that’s messy.

Because humans being what we are, we can’t be fully honest and innocent and pure when we’re fully immersed in a dishonest system.

Maybe that’s why the dishonest manager gets praised – because he uses the dishonest resources of the system he’s in to try to build something else: relationships that will matter when he doesn’t have those already messy resources to spend.

 

I’m speculating there, and I’m not entirely happy with it.

But this story came to us because other people, over the centuries, have trusted that there must be some useful wisdom in it, so we all keep trying to find it.

 

And I am curious whether Jesus is trying to tell us about what it means to follow Jesus while we live and work in a world of “dishonest wealth”.
Because the all money that you and I handle – however much or however little we have, hold, or distribute – is money that is the currency of an imperfect system that has been corrupted, broken, accommodated to injustice, and exploited for self-interest as long as humans have had currency.

 

It's not that dollars haven’t also served justice, bought healing, or been used for holy purposes, but any system in which wealth makes one person more powerful than another attracts self-interest and dishonesty.

 

So maybe Jesus is telling us something about how to live in the world we actually live in.

To “make friends” in the world of dishonest wealth. Build relationships. Spend, or “squander” money and wealth in ways that build for eternity.

 

I’m pretty sure Jesus is not trying to encourage us to dishonesty and cheating. But I suspect Jesus does want to stir up our discomfort about money. To provoke an awkward consciousness that the money you and I have or manage – cash, or credit, or digital bits in some banking software – is already tied up in all the dishonest and honest acts that brought it to us. The acts of our employers and clients; of our ancestors, our government, our families and friends and a lot of people we don’t actually know. That we live with money in a messy, sticky, system, and we have to reckon with that.

 

Jesus also might want us to notice that money doesn’t give us – or buy us – peace of heart. Or love, or eternity, or the wonder and glory of the presence of God. Or any of the things our souls long for. So we can – should – look to something other than money to place our trust in.

God, for example.

 

So that maybe instead of “serving wealth” – letting money steer us – we’ll have opportunities to serve God with “dishonest wealth”. Maybe “squander” money – ours, our employer’s, the government’s, our families’ and friends’ – on things that do help make love, and peace, and eternity, and the presence of God more real in the messy ordinary world.
To spend money we can’t trust to be honest on the things that God would spend love and resources and power on.

 

I don’t know if that’s what Jesus meant the first time he told this story, two long millennia ago. But I believe it’s one thing Jesus might want us to consider; to try.

 

And I think the same principle applies, in slightly different ways, to a lot more than money. To success, influence, rank in the office or school or any organization, political power – anything else that gives us power in the messy, often dishonest, world we live in today.
And perhaps to prayer – which gives us power in God’s care for us – and still has to work in the messy world we live in.

 

Pray for the king, we hear Paul advise Timothy today. Pray for the people in power, the government. (Which, by the way, we often do in the prayers of the Episcopal Church, including in our service today.)

 

For some of us, some of the time, praying for political officials, or for people with unchecked power, feels just as uncomfortable as watching a cheater get praised by someone we were hoping we could trust.

 

So – since we have to deal with the powers that be, just as we have to deal with money – we can “squander” our other resources on the things God would love, that God would do.

We can pray, should pray, lavishly for the “king”: for our own government officials, and the politicians we dislike or despise, and for our employers and for media monopolists and far distant corporate officials – all those powers that be.

Pray, so that we so that we are focused on the will of God for those in power – and for all who are subject to, affected by, that power – instead of being caught up in whether the government or boss or whatever is dishonest or honest or evil or righteous.
Pray that by God’s work in and around the powers of this world, more and more of God’s people are brought into the gifts of peace of heart, the wonder and glory of God; into love and eternity and wholeness.
Pray so that our souls and hearts are tuned to the mind and heart of God when we consider the powers of this world, instead of being steered by the will of those worldly powers.

 

And even as we pray and spend our resources as close to God’s heart as we can, we may still be asking, “Why?”

Why, God, do things go so wrong?
Why do the cheaters seem to have your favor?

 

And we may never get the answers that make sense, but at least we will have our hearts and actions immersed in the love of God, working in us and through us, always, to heal our selves, and all the world.

 

Rejoice With Me

Luke 15:1-10

Imagine, if you will, this scene:

Someone walks up to the door of a church, knocks, and says “Rejoice with me! I have found your lost friend!” and a crowd peering out from behind a door opened only a crack responds “oh no. they don’t belong here. We kicked them out.”

 

Can you imagine any of the dinner guests of Jesus, or the Pharisees and scribes around him in today’s story, responding like that when Jesus brings in someone new?

Can you imagine the possibility of yourself responding like that?

 

That’s certainly not how we want to think of ourselves here at Trinity. Many of us are here, after all, because we felt like we didn’t belong in some other community, and found a welcome here.

 

But it might be exactly what the Pharisees and the scribes are thinking, as they watch Jesus seek out and eat with the ritually unclean and the folks whose profession or “lifestyle” does not – cannot – fit into the traditions and requirements of the holy community. The pharisees and scribes were probably genuinely convinced that those folks were excluded from the holy community for good reason.

 

And I’ve known congregations and church communities that would respond just that way to the return of individuals that don’t fit their boundaries of the holy.

 

In fact, that scenario is so much a possibility, sometimes probability, in churches and communities in our own time and culture that cartoonist David Hayward has not one, but several often-quoted sketches of a crowd of sheep rejecting the sheep that Jesus has carried to them on his shoulders – the rainbow-colored queer sheep, the trans sheep, the non-binary sheep, the ordinary white sheep.

“That one wasn’t lost! We kicked that one out!”

 

That might even be how ninety-nine well-behaved, committed-to-community sheep could want to respond to a shepherd actually abandoning them – in the wilderness! – to chase down one trouble-making wandering sheep.

 

And I suspect that while Jesus is looking for the lost in our time and place, there are some “sheep” that one or another, or many, of us would prefer not to have to welcome in our own communities – people who feel dangerous to our community. People who advocate or celebrate what you or I experience as evil. People who make being church too much work. People who seem uncomfortably “political”.

 

And Jesus would not be surprised at resistance, or resentment, being a natural reaction to his lost-sheep story. In fact, he includes the resentment of the stay-at-home, the hardworking “good son”, in his very next story – right after the part we read today – of the “lost” misbehaving son and over the top welcoming father. He understands how hard it can be to see the problem child, the “squeaky wheel” get all the attention, get celebrated just for being “found”.

Hard even if, in fact, you or I have also, at another time in our lives, been the one who desperately needed to be found, to be rescued and brought “home”.

 

Jesus knows this isn’t a comfortable story. (He almost never tells comfortable stories, after all.)

But he wants us to know it’s a good story.

That it’s about joy.

 

The bottom line of this sheep story, and of the story of the woman searching for a lost coin, is “Rejoice with me!”

And that there is joy in heaven.

 

These are joyful stories, because the finding of the lost restores wholeness to the flock of sheep, the set of coins, the community of the righteous – or the community of restored sinners.

A joy that needs to be shared with others. A joy that Jesus tells us is bigger than we would first guess it is.

 

(I’ll admit that Jesus’ declaration that there’s more rejoicing over one repentant sinner than over ninety-nine righteous that need no repentance…itches at me. I’m pretty sure that’s there as a pointed nudge to Pharisees and scribes – people who work very hard at maintaining a strictly defined holy righteousness – that their way is not the only, or even the most joyful, way to God’s heart.

But I don’t think Jesus minds if it nudges or itches any later hearers convinced of their own righteousness. Or the part of those of us who know our own need for repentance which still feels that seeing someone who has been dangerous to us brought back into the fold and changing their ways is less satisfying than seeing that person get a well-deserved helping of consequences.

Then again, maybe it’s even meant to be a joke. Because, as someone pointed out when we read this story in a Vestry meeting, how often do you actually find ninety-nine people who genuinely need no repentance?)

 

But the fundamental point of these stories is not actually about those who “need no repentance” – or the ninety-nine sheep, or the never-lost coins.

These stories are not even, I suspect, about the one lost and found sheep, or coin, or sinner.

Not primarily about us in any of these roles.

These stories are about God’s joy, and the invitation to us to share that joy.

 

“Rejoice with me!” the finder says, in both of the stories we hear Jesus tell today.

They summon their whole community to share their joy, their delight in the finding and restoration.

 

And I suspect Jesus, telling these stories, is inviting the Pharisees and scribes to the radical act of forgetting the rules of righteousness, forgetting all measures of merit or fault, to join in God’s joy in the reconciliation of all humanity.
That Jesus is inviting us, down the centuries, to share in God’s joy in the restoration of the wholeness of all creation – not matter how much we have invested ourselves in God’s work, or withheld ourselves from God’s work.

 

What a compliment, to be the ones with whom God wants to, needs to, share God’s joy. To be so important to God that we are those God turns to to celebrate.

 

Think for a moment about who you turn to to share your joys.

 

Sometimes we want everyone to see the baby pictures that melt our hearts. Sometimes we need specific individuals to rejoice with us in a hard-won success, or an unexpected blessing.

But think for a moment about who you need to have share in your joy. The people without whose joy your own joy isn’t as complete, or as full, as you want it to be.

 

And imagine being the people whose sharing in joy is important, even essential to God.

 

In that case, can you really withhold your shared joy when even the most troublesome sheep is found?

 

It’s a spiritual discipline – a practice that strengthens our spirits and our hearts – to pay attention to God’s joy. To share in God’s joy, whether we never actually knew the person restored to community, or whether we, well, hated that person. Or felt any level of resentment or indifference in between.

 

To practice sharing God’s joy in restoring sinners, in finding the lost, in making God’s people whole, will strengthen the muscles of our hearts and spirits. Will make it easier to pray for people we don’t like, make it easier to see the holy in the midst of chaos or despair. Muscles we need, day by day, to meet the challenges in the world around us, and in our own personal lives.

 

And practice in sharing God’s joy at the restoration of others will open our spirits and hearts to God’s loving pursuit of each of us in our failings or self-righteousness. To God’s joy in finding us, God’s delight in making us – and all humanity, all creation – whole.