What Santa Taught Me

Luke 2:1-20

There’s a particular Christmas song that’s been stuck in my head a lot this month.  You might know it, too:

You better watch out, you better not cry

You better not pout, I'm telling you why

Santa Claus is comin' to town

sing along!

He's making a list and checking it twice

Gonna find out who's naughty and nice

Santa Claus is comin' to town

He sees you when you're sleeping

He knows when you're awake

He knows if you've been bad or good

So be good for goodness sake

Ohhh, You better watch out, you better not cry

You better not pout, I'm telling you why

Santa Claus is comin' to town

I think it got into my head because so many of my Facebook friends had something to say this month about an Elf on a Shelf in their house: watching the family, taking notes, and reporting in to Santa at the North Pole.

This North Pole spy phenomenon has gotten so big that The Atlantic magazine recently ran a story about it in which they had to point out that it is not, in fact, part of a NSA surveillance program, but rather a part of our Christmas culture that’s been familiar for generations.

There are a number of cultures in which Santa has a sidekick who keeps tabs on the naughty children and brings them “consequences” at Christmas time while the good children get rewards. And our own Santa has a reputation for dropping lumps of coal into the stockings of misbehaving kids.

I can clearly remember childhood Decembers in which I evaluated each day based on whether Santa would approve, and worried over the advice in that Christmas carol: 

no crying, no pouting, be good even when you're sleeping.  

(How could I be naughty in my sleep? Apparently Santa knows!)

Was yelling at a very provoking younger brother enough to cost me new bunny slippers?  Would volunteering for chores make Santa happy?  Was I praying enough? Keeping my room clean?

Christmas is more like Judgment Day than the advertisers want you to believe.

Which actually brings us right back to the Christian story.

After all, some two thousand years ago, while the Roman Caesar Augustus was taking his census, and Joseph and a heavily pregnant Mary migrated to Bethlehem, the people of Israel weren’t looking for a charming story of hope and love, but praying for God to send a Messiah who would bring Judgement Day — for the Romans, at least.

God’s people were longing for God to finally give the wicked their comeuppance and the good their reward.  

That’s the Messiah we were supposed to get.

And instead, we got a baby.

A poor and powerless baby, in no shape whatsoever to judge the Roman oppressors or reward the righteous.

And when he is born, tucked in a feed box in an obscure stable, angels roust out a pack of nearby shepherds to make the astonishing point that this child is good news for ALL people. 

Not some.  

Not good, righteous, well-behaved people, but ALL people: Poor, rich, good, bad, cop, criminal, illiterate, smart, smart-aleck, noisy, quiet, old, young, religious, agnostic… even, perhaps - no, almost certainly - the rotten Roman oppressors.  

All people.

Which brings the circle back around to Santa Claus.
Because every single year, Santa showed up at my house.

Santa brought fantastic stuff to my brother, who clearly was not perfect.

Santa came to my cousins, and friends, and kids on TV,

and Santa brought me wonderful things, even when I had been flat out rotten on Christmas Eve.

All people.

Even the naughty ones.

It kind of embarrasses the seminary-trained theology nerd in me to admit this, but I learned one of the most essential lessons about God not from the Bible, or Sunday School, or from seminary, but from Santa.

Santa sometimes shocked me with generosity and forgiveness, replacing the coal I thought I might deserve with thoughtful surprises and pure delights, rewards I’d never earn in a million years.

And it slowly dawned on me that that’s the story we tell in the church at Christmas, too.

That God — who sees us when we’re sleeping, and knows when we’re awake — shows up to judge the world as a lovable, gentle, heart-melting baby, and wakes up the good-for-nothing drifters on the outskirts of town to announce that good news, salvation, and love are here for EVERYone, today.

Everyone.

Even the naughty ones.

God’s decision to give us that baby, to come among us as a vulnerable, poor, messy but lovable little child, is shocking in its generosity and forgiveness.

Shocking in that generous lack of discrimination between rich and poor, wisemen and day laborers, in the unambiguous announcement that God sends good news to ALL people.  

Shocking in the forgiveness implied in becoming a helpless infant, chased around the earth by imperial whim, vulnerable to all the nastiness and indifference that human beings can manage, accidentally or on purpose.

Shocking, because it's meant to stun us into great, overwhelming joy.

I learned from Santa that God loves nothing better than to give, 

and to give more than we can try to deserve. 

God so delights in giving that nothing we can do will stop God.

I learned that from Santa, too.

By high school, I’d found that it was a lot of trouble to wait for Santa.  

I could buy some of the stuff I wanted for myself; I found it harder to be thankful for surprises (instead of exact wish-fulfillment); and I didn't expect miracles in my stocking the way I once did.

So I kept mentioning to my parents - and anyone else who might have an "in" at the North Pole - that Santa didn’t come to fifteen-year-olds, to eighteen-year-olds, to college students… (Surely college students couldn’t be considered kids anymore right? right?)

But every single year, Santa came. I couldn't stop him.

All people.

Naughty and nice, hopeful and bored, young and old, even when we are way too cool for God.

God’s generosity and forgiveness, God’s loving giving, isn't confined to those who are hoping and praying for joy.

God keeps on giving, redeeming, and forgiving even - or maybe especially - after we’ve gotten a little bored with the story and don’t want much from God anymore.  Even - maybe especially - when we don’t have time to pray and dream, when we’ve gotten buried in disappointment or heartbreak and trouble, or given up on expecting the world to be worth saving.

That baby — stable-born but announced by angels — that baby is a miracle for all people,

and God is never going to give up on that.

Because you see, it’s true that God sees us when we’re sleeping, and knows us when we’re awake. 

God knows the bad and the good,  all the stuff in between,

and every exasperated “for goodness’ sake!” in our hearts.

And God’s response to all of that is shocking, extravagant generosity and forgiveness.

So make space in your heart tonight for your inner child,

creeping anxiously down the stairs,

and overwhelmed with astonished delight at unearned gifts in a stocking or under the tree.

Because that’s the gift of the child in the stable each Christmas,

shocking generosity and forgiveness,

and astonished delight,

and it’s for all people.

It's for you, tonight.

Merry Christmas!

Say Yes

Luke 1:26-38

When was the last time someone asked you to do something that scared you?
Did you say, “Yes”?

Mary said yes.

But did you notice that Mary argues about it, first?

She’s not at all pleased when Gabriel appears in her life with what can sound like a bad pickup line: “Hello, beautiful! You’re the luckiest of women! God’s got an eye on you!”

That’s a fairly free translation from the Greek, but that’s how it might have sounded to Mary.  Or possibly it sounded more ominous, since Luke reports that she’s very upset about this.

That, by the way, is a perfectly natural reaction to an angelic visitation. 
Despite the fact that they are charming and bright on Christmas cards and some TV shows, in the Bible angels are pretty universally scary. They always have to exclaim “Don’t be afraid!” before anyone listens to them. Gabriel eventually remembers to say that to Mary before going on to explain that she’s going to have a baby for God.

When Mary hears God’s plan for her life, her response is also right in line with centuries of Biblical tradition.  Hearing what God has in mind for her, she promptly protests that she’s not the right one, and maybe God should check the number before dialing again.

“How can this be?” sounds mild enough in translation, but Mary clearly knows enough about God and angels – and about the world she lives in - to know that this is definitely not going to be a nice idea for her.

Getting pregnant without a husband’s help is social and possibly real suicide.  They had stoning back then. 

And walking around telling people “this is God’s baby!” won’t sound a lot more convincing to her first-century family and neighbors than it would to you and me used to modern ultrasounds and DNA testing.

So Mary, in the strong tradition of Moses and the best of God’s prophets and leaders, is denying that she’s up to the job, and offering the best reasoning she can to get out of this.

Wouldn’t you?
If you were asked to do something you knew would be at the very least highly awkward, nerve-wracking, and probably completely disruptive, wouldn't you try to gracefully decline? Or suggest that there must be hundreds of people better qualified for something you don’t know how to do and never particularly wanted to learn?

I do.

I’ve probably done it recently, too. 

It’s easy enough to forget the challenges we say “No,” to.

It’s the challenges you say “Yes,” to that stick around, mess with your heart and mind and comfort, leave you different than you used to be, and sometimes - just sometimes - change the world.

Not every challenge we face is a gospel challenge.

Some are just life. And some are my own damn fault.

And the gospel ones are sometimes only clear in hindsight. 

I feel that way about the emergency room.

One of the training requirements for priests in the Episcopal Church is to spend a few months working as a student chaplain in a hospital or similar institution.  This was fine with me until the orientation tour of the hospital, when it became very clear to me that I had never wanted nothing to do with the emergency room.

I’d only watched a couple of seasons of ER, with its high drama of life-and-death hanging by a thread, but I’d somehow absorbed the conviction that if I so much as entered a trauma room, I’d trip over an essential wire or tool and kill somebody.

So every single hour on the on-call pager terrified me.

Turned out I had the fewest emergency calls of anyone in my group that summer, and never unplugged anything. (Thank God!)

That didn’t make me any more enthusiastic about uninvited challenges than I ever was, but I’m more comfortable in hospitals now, and I learned something else in spite of myself.

It’s something that Gabriel says to Mary, after she points out that there must be thousands of women better equipped to be having God’s baby.

“The Holy Spirit will come upon you; God’s power will engulf you.” And that’s when Mary agrees.

Being overwhelmed by the Holy Spirit isn’t any easier than tackling many challenges on your own, but it’s the nature and promise of a gospel challenge.

The very last night I was on call, the pager never stopped beeping.  There was a child hit by a car, a deadly motorcycle accident, an infant being taken off life-support, and a few other odds and ends. 

I didn’t sit down for eight hours, and for eight hours it suddenly did not matter that I had no idea what to say most of the time or that critical wires and tubes were constantly in my way.

All I knew that night was that wherever I went in the hospital,

God was already there.

When you say “Yes,” to God, you’re never agreeing to do it alone.

The Holy Spirit finds you the words, or the skill, or the time, or the power that God needs to get the job done right.

That doesn’t mean God won’t stretch you and work you and pull you much further than you ever meant to go, but it does mean that miracles might happen, and that God most certainly will act.

So this Sunday, will you take a moment to open your heart to the challenges around you, and find one where you’ll take a chance on saying “Yes,” to God, and making room for the Holy Spirit to come over you?

The “Christmas season” can offer plenty of relationship and family challenges; disappointments and grief that feel too hard to face, or expectations you’d hate to try to meet.

And maybe there are not-so-seasonal challenges that God’s been offering you for a while; at work or at home;  to your creativity, for your health, to your confidence; to new tasks or relationships.

It’s very likely there’s a challenge, great or small, quiet or obvious, in your life right now. Accept it - say “yes!” - or just offer it, and let the Holy Spirit in.

And if you’re not quite ready to say “yes,” you can just offer the challenge itself as a gift to God.

Mary said yes. But she didn’t do it blindly.  She accepted God’s crazy challenge fully aware of how risky it would be.

Then she kept saying yes long after Jesus was born. 

And the whole rest of the story is full of the Holy Spirit, vivid in Mary, in Jesus, and in us.

God might not ask you to mother the Messiah, (once should have been enough for that task!) but soon or late, God is going to call you to something that scares you, something you know someone else could do better, but God is asking you.

It’s okay to argue, if you have to,

but listen carefully to God’s challenges,

listen for the Holy Spirit,

and make the effort to say, “Yes!” at least once.

Because the Holy Spirit is waiting for you to open that door,
and you never know when you’re going to be the one to change the world.

Longing

Isaiah 64:1-9, Mark 13:24-37

“Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and come down!

Oh, that the mountains would quake!!!”

How bad would it have to be to make you beg God to destroy the fabric of our world,

rip open sky and earth and space, and arrive with destruction more dramatic and terrifying than any Hollywood special effects department could dream up?

How bad would it have to be, before you and I would pray for that kind of drama and destruction in Lombard?

Can you imagine it?

It’s that bad in Ferguson.

It’s that bad in the communities near St. Louis and around this country that are bleeding and devastated this week, protesting and praying and sometimes lashing out in pain that was focused this week by news that a grand jury did not indict the police officer who shot Michael Brown in August.

It’s that bad in Chicago, even if the protests here are quieter.  It’s that bad in parts of Lombard, too, even if you and I never hear about it here.

Is it that bad for you?
How do you feel, when you see this news? what do you pray?

It can feel far from Lombard; it can feel like it doesn’t affect us.

After all, this happens often enough that it barely ripples the news in most cases: a black or brown unarmed man or child is shot, and often the shooter is exonerated.

Our world is not set up to punish police who shoot and kill in the line of duty.  Our world is set up to protect those who act in self-defense.

That’s good.

But our world is also set up – by the same system – to punish young black and brown men for expressing themselves, to punish the victims of systemic, impersonal racism
for anything that makes the rest of us uncomfortable, and to kill young men whose opportunities are already limited, whose lives are already bound by other people’s fear.

That’s what’s driving protest and heading the news in Ferguson and around the country. Not just one incident, but that whole system.

The words are different, but people not too far from us are living that cry of Isaiah’s for God to tear open the heavens and shake the earth; for God to bring desperately needed change so radical that it will feel like our world is torn apart.

The people of Israel knew something about despair and distress when Isaiah pleaded for God to come with power and fire and destruction. And Jesus speaks to that kind of pain, acknowledges a suffering community, when he promises the coming of the Son of Man heralded by the ruin of the heavens, by a darkened sun and falling stars.

Today, on the first day of Advent, Jesus and the prophets invite us to stand with them in that place of desperate longing, to feel the unrelenting pain and grief of prejudice, oppression, fear, and division, so that we, too, can cry out for the coming of God in unimaginable, scary, power.

In the prophets’ Israel, in Jesus’ Jerusalem, they yearned for freedom from invading empires, for dignity, and for a world where God’s care for the poorest and most vulnerable could actually be lived out in the gritty business of everyday life.

Those things are disruptive.  Those things require the powerful to lose their power, and most of what’s comfortable about our everyday life to radically change. All those things cause protest and prophecy in the streets, and moderate challenges in the courts, in Jesus’ time and in ours.  And those godly longings also spilled over into riots and destruction in Jesus’ time, just like in ours.

In Ferguson, and around this country, protesters and activists long for a world where black and brown children are treated with real care and protection and love –

especially when those children are 6’4, and strong,

and even more vulnerable to other people’s fear.

In Ferguson, and here at home, people long for a world where oppression and racism aren’t embedded, hidden, in the systems of law and commerce, so that we are bound by them, even if we don’t want to be racist.  A world where hearts that long to be fair and loving actually can be free of the fears and divisions of racism.

I long for those things. 

I long for God’s justice in this country – justice that brings more balance and healing than courts or laws or death ever do. 

I long for a world where no police officer is ever scared of an unarmed 18 year old; where no one is scared of that teenager, not in the dark or in the daylight, and no matter the gender of that teenager or the color of their skin. 

I long for a world in which my own heart, my own life, are as affected by Michael Brown’s life and death as they are by the health of my family and the life of this congregation.

I long for those things, and I tremble, because I know that to achieve them would mean a transformation of my life and of our world as disruptive and dramatic as falling stars, torn heavens, and quaking bedrock.

I don’t like it,

but it feels like Advent.

Because Advent, this season of preparation – and Advent, that final coming of God that we pray for in every Eucharist – Advent demands that kind of longing.

Advent demands that we long for deep, radical justice and peace and healing; long for it so strongly that we plead for even the most disruptive transformation of this world.

Maybe you don’t long today for the same things God’s people are crying out for from Ferguson, the kinds of things that Israel longed for at the time of Jesus,

but we could.

We can pray to God to expand our love, and break down the barriers – often invisible – that keep you and me from demanding justice in the streets this week.

And I expect you do long for something.  For healing or peace or justice or love, small and personal or the size of the whole world.

It’s Advent.

It’s time to stop being shy about the transformation we long for,

it’s time to deepen our yearning for God
so that we are ready for anything.

So take a minute, right now, to reach deep into your heart.

What is it that you long for?

I suspect – I hope – that you do yearn for something more in this world.

The coming of God – as an infant, or in glory and power – depends on that.

What love or peace or justice or healing – small or large – would you be praying for if you stopped being practical, if you were willing to risk your comfort and stability?

Write it down.

Offer it to God as a gift, the first of our Advent gifts this season.

Write it down, open your heart wide to that yearning as we pray, share peace, bless the bread and wine, and bring it as a gift to God as you come to communion.

And all week long, all Advent long, practice yearning. Practice a longing for God that is more powerful than fear, or comfort, or stability.

Because it could still be this year that God comes in power and glory, tearing the heavens, or transforming the earth.

“Stay awake,” Jesus said, because it could be this year that our longing transforms the world.

Power

Matthew 25:14-30

I used to like this story a lot. When I was a kid, and good at school, feeling smart and successful at the thing that seemed to be most important to authority figures, it was easy to like this idea:

God gives us resources, we're supposed to do good work with those resources, then we get rewarded. Great!  And if we do nothing, well, then God gets mad. Makes sense.

Work hard; earn heaven.  I’m in!

But the more I read the gospel, the more that sounds a little fishy, and I don’t think that this is a story about how we earn our way into heaven. So this week I did a little research and a little math, and I want you to listen to the beginning of the story again:

Jesus said, "It's like when a CEO goes on an extended trip, and before he goes, he leaves some of his own money in his employees' hands.

To one, he gives something over three million dollars. To another, he gives about 1.2 million, and to a third, between six or seven hundred thousand* – and leaves it in their hands for a very long time.

Wait a minute! Who gives three million dollars to one individual, with no instructions, other than "I'll be back - eventually..."?  This is hardly pocket change! And how many people really double their money by hard work? Or even by trading and investing?  (Do you?)

This is not a Main Street story, it's a Wall Street story.

And that makes me think: On Wall Street – and in the places influenced by Wall Street – money is not just money. Money is power. And I think that’s as true in this story as in the nitty gritty world of our political, social and practical life.

So the two new millionaires in the story immediately start using their power.  They buy, sell, trade, influence, invest, and generally make the most of the power and authority that’s left in their hands.   For this, they are praised and rewarded.That’s the way it is on Wall Street, too.

But the third servant is baffled by what he receives. He’s never thought of himself as powerful, and even several hundred thousand dollars doesn’t change that.  He’s more aware of the master’s power, and he’s afraid that power corrupts.  So he buries it, ignores it, and can’t wait to wash his hands of it by turning it back over to the master.  He probably never wanted power; he didn’t recognize it when he had it – and that gets him tossed into outer darkness, a place of despair and bitterness.

I don’t particularly like this story any more, but it’s started to haunt me. It’s started to make me wonder about the power that’s in my hands, and what I do with it.

Honestly, I don’t feel powerful most of the time.  Do you? 

I watch avalanches of super-PAC funded campaign ads and what passes for the business of government in Congress, and even on the day I vote, I feel extremely powerless.

I pay for groceries and gas, write out the checks for my mortgage and ever-increasing condo fees, get stuck in traffic, feel the weeks go by faster and faster as I try to catch up…  and I growl and complain because I don’t believe I can change any of that.

I grieve the deaths of friends and family, pray for healing for so many people struggling with physical pain or emotional injury, and I’m full of hope, but also of helplessness.

All those things get my heart into the habit of helplessness, and they help me forget that the kingdom of God puts power into our hands, yours as well as mine, whether we want it or not.

And when we meet God once and for all,  God’s going to expect us to have used that power wisely and well.

That’s what Jesus’ story about talents tells us.

And it’s what Facebook tells me, often this fall.

You see, I have a lot of friends in St. Louis, and they don’t let me forget about Ferguson.

They don’t let me forget that after one of the hundreds of times in our lives that police officer shot a black teenager, a whole lot of ordinary people – clergy and mothers and small business owners and teenagers and teachers and bus drivers and police – are suddenly dealing with extraordinary power.

It’s extraordinary to be a suburban police officer, and suddenly be responsible for assault weapons and tanks.

It’s extraordinary to be a busy parish priest, pulled unexpectedly into the front of a march and a movement to pray and lead.

It’s extraordinary to be a teenager, reaching out to hold hands with a police officer, and bridge an unthinkable social gulf.

It’s extraordinary to be a mechanic, a waiter, a teacher, and discover that the power of riot and the power of reconciliation are in the palm of your hands and the words on your lips,

to discover that by that, you have the power to dramatically change the whole world.

Those are extraordinary discoveries. But God puts that kind of power into our hands, yours and mine, much more often and much sooner than we are usually ready for.

You and I have all kinds of power that we may accidentally bury, or genuinely fear, and God gives it to us to see how we’ll use it, day after day.

Loving, and being loved, by parents, children, spouses, friends, gives each of us incredible power to heal or hurt.

What we buy, how we do our jobs, and where we choose to live, even – maybe especially – how we spend our time; all these are ways we exercise power, especially power we don’t realize we have.

You and I have power, every single day, to name oppression where we see it, and to encourage others to break down barriers between races, faiths, class, and gender.

We each have power to forgive and to reconcile – often small hurts, but also systems of injustice and opposition.

We each have power to spread grace and joy and peace – with small smiles or large political action, our silence and our speech.

If all this feels a little scary, that’s good.  Power is a messy thing.

Nobody gets it all right in this parable –  not the frightened servant who buries his riches,

not the master who gets called out for his exploitation and shady business practices and doesn’t deny it, and not the successful temporary millionaires who no doubt copied some of those practices to double their master’s money and power. 

Nobody gets it all right, but the successful servants find that with great power comes increasingly great responsibility – that’s their reward.  And the damnation to outer darkness, the condemnation to despair and bitter yearning, is reserved for the only one who denied and buried his power.

You and I have been given the gospel. We’ve been given love and influence and time – in the millions or simply hundred thousands, and God is eager to see what we’ll do with it.

So what do you think God will find in us, when we meet God once and for all?

*These numbers are very approximate. They are based on commentators' assertions that a talent was either 15 or more wages for a laborer, and a $19.50 current hourly average US manufacturing wage (googled and found here). 

Prepared

Matthew 25:1-13

Did you hear that story Jesus told?

Ten bridesmaids wait for the groom to come and get the party started.  They’ve brought festive and necessary light for the celebration, but the groom is late.

Very late. Everyone falls asleep waiting.

And when the groom finally arrives, half of them have run out of lamp oil.  If you’ve run out of phone battery at a critical moment, you know how they feel.

So only the “wise” or “clever” bridesmaids get to party. The ones who ran out of oil get shut out, rejected and ignored.

And the moral of the story is…..???

Yep. "Be prepared."  You screw up, you lose heaven once and for all. (Not high stakes at all.  I’m sure my blood pressure’s fine.)

That’s a useful warning in some ways.  It is important to be ready for God, to be ready for heaven, and ready for Jesus to come at any moment – soon or long delayed. But I’m not sure Matthew actually gets the moral of the story right when he tells it to us.

Since Jesus has just been warning that God comes like a thief in the night, it’s natural that Matthew is still focused on the importance of “staying awake” to be ready. But everybody falls asleep in this parable, even the “wise” women, and that’s not what gets them in trouble, so that can’t be quite right.

And I’m not even sure that the traditional interpretation of "preparedness" is what Jesus is after.  The way I usually hear the story, it sounds like when God finally comes, you’d better be not just ready, but over-prepared, and it’s every one of us for herself.

Something doesn’t feel right about that.

But I couldn’t put my finger on what until I read this parable with the Vestry recently.  It didn’t take long for someone to ask the question that changes the story:

“Why didn’t the bridesmaids share?”

Honestly, isn’t that the entry-level lesson about what Jesus expects us to do?  Share what we have with people in need? So why don’t the bridesmaids in this story share their oil?

Well, it’s a disruptive, chaotic, scene, and they’ve all been woken from a sound sleep without coffee.  Few of us are generous and flexible under those circumstances. 

Jesus is intentionally setting that up. He’s telling us a story about how it will be in the chaos before God’s final coming.  We’re probably going to be afraid, and off balance.  It’s very human to become self-protective and hang on to what you’ve got in those circumstances.

But I think that the question about sharing is one Jesus wants us to ask about this gospel story.
Think about this: What would have happened if they did share?

If they did share, there would be twice the number of festive, welcoming lights and ladies for the bridegroom’s arrival, for the start of the party.  It would have been better hospitality.

If they’d shared, no one would be shut out of the party.  The bridegroom wouldn’t have broken relationships with half the bridesmaids, and all the women would belong to the holy and festive community.

If they’d shared, it would have deepened the relationships between the women. Gratitude and generosity have a lot more staying power than selfishness and resentment.

If they’d shared, it would mean everyone let go of the fear of running out.  There’d be more peace in the whole community.

Isn’t that what the kingdom of God is supposed to be like? 

Jesus is awfully big on caring for the outcast, welcoming the stranger, and healing the broken. So maybe that’s why he’s telling this parable. Maybe he’s telling it so we can see how scary it is not only if we are unprepared, but if we fail to share.

ANY time we worry that there’s not going to be enough for us – enough money, enough time, enough love, enough patience, enough anything – any time we believe that there is not enough, we get selfish.

We don’t usually mean to.  But it happens. If it feels like there’s not enough for me it’s very hard to give away – or even share – whatever I may have.

And we live in a world that’s very good at telling us there’s not enough.  That’s the subtext of every political ad.  It’s the limited-time-offer, winner-take-all, work-smarter-and-harder water we swim in.  It’s the fear of loss every time we face unexpected change.

So every day, there’s a way that you and I don’t share.

Every day, there’s a way many of us don’t share our money.  Not just by turning down panhandlers and tossing out the charity appeals that show up in your mailbox – but perhaps by spending it on disposable things that don’t really satisfy; pouring away what you could have shared.

Every day one or another of us fails to share our time.

Not just by turning down a volunteer opportunity, but by not getting around to that phone call you’ve been meaning to make, or not making the effort to meet a new neighbor.

Every day many of us fail to share our faith, our dreams, our talents.  We might fear rejection or ridicule. We might fear that we’re not good enough.  We might just be tired or busy. 

Those are all forms of the same fear of “not enough” that keeps the bridesmaids from sharing their oil.

So Jesus tells us about how bad it can get when we forget to share.  This story tells us that the people we didn’t share with are left lonely and rejected in the dark, closed out of even a glimpse of the abundant feast at which they’d been expected.

I don’t think anyone in Jesus’ story today was really prepared for the coming of God.  Not even the Boy Scout bridesmaids with their jugs of oil. 

Because being prepared for the coming of God means being ready to let go of every fear and convention,  ready to share what you don’t have enough of,  prepared to light a lamp without oil or matches, ready to join the celebration and welcome strangers even if you’ve screwed up your part of the planning beyond recognition.

Jesus tells a story that isn’t finished – a story that’s still happening, because we’re still in that time of worry and waiting that precedes the coming of God.  The end of the story is still up to us.

We can listen to Jesus’ story, and share pre-emptively.  We don’t have to wait until we have enough, or until our friends and neighbors run out. We can listen to Jesus and get ready to celebrate in spite of every mistake and inadequacy and failure you can find in yourself when God shows up in front of you.

Because the kingdom of God is like that: abundant, disruptive and joyful, demanding and relational, and never when or what you expected.

Wallets

Exodus 33:12-23, Matthew 22:15-22

How many of you brought a wallet to church today?
Why did you bring it?

I carry my own wallet because it has my driver’s license.  And cash. And credit cards. And insurance cards, receipts, and of course some Calvary gift cards.

 All that stuff provides a certain security when I leave my house – an ability to solve problems or take advantage of opportunities – that’s the cash and the credit cards and the gift cards. It’s also a symbol of a safety net (the insurance cards) and a guarantee of identity – that driver’s license stands between me and becoming “Jane Doe.”

I like my wallet, and I depend on it.

So, like the Pharisees and Herodians who set out to trap Jesus, I’d have had it with me in the Temple. Which is actually sacrilegious, unlike bringing your wallet to church.

You see, when the Pharisees produced a Roman coin inside the Temple, where Jesus is teaching, a coin with a picture of the emperor and an inscription calling him “divine,” they’re violating their own interpretation of the commandment against idolatry. There was a whole system of currency exchange in the Temple Court just to make sure that sacrilegious Roman money didn’t come in to the holy spaces of God’s worship.

Oops.

It just goes to show how dependent we can become on the things that are the emperor’s – the things like money, rules, and security that tie us to a secular system, a world run by self-interest and profit and certainty and personal power.

That’s what’s in your wallet.

It’s what’s in mine.

Jesus points out to the religious leaders – and to us – that it’s in the emperor’s interest to provide us with symbols of power and identity and security.  If we feel confident and comfortable and like we belong, we don’t rock the boat.

And Jesus agrees that it’s fine to pay our taxes and stay out of trouble with the emperor. But it gets really, really easy to depend on those things that ultimately belong to the emperor – not to you, yourself, or to God.

And that’s dangerous. Deeply, insidiously dangerous to our hearts and souls. Because getting dependent on the emperor begins to make us belong to the emperor, and that is certain to divide us from God, whether we want it to or not.

It happened to Israel in the wilderness. They wanted something more manageable and stable and visible than God to depend on, so they made a golden calf.   And though God was persuaded not to wipe them out for the sin of idolatry, God does decide to get some distance from the people. God tells Moses to take those people away to the promised land without God.  Their tendency to demand security from someone or something other than God made it too likely God would have to destroy them on the way, so God won’t hang out with them.

The Israelites didn’t much like getting kicked out by God. (Would you?)  So Moses pleads with God to stay with the people – not just to take care of them at arm’s length, but to be present, as noticeably there as the person next to you.  That’s the conversation we overheard today in our story from Exodus.

Don’t abandon us, Moses says, or we’ll lose everything that makes us special. The only thing that matters about us is that we belong to you, God.  And God does agree to go with the people.

And then Moses asks for the wallet.

Moses asks for the kind of tangible assurance from God that the emperor – in the form of the finance industry and the state of Illinois – is so fond of giving us.  Concrete tokens of relationship and power.

He doesn’t get it from God.  Instead, God offers Moses a quick peek at God’s back. 

That’s a profound experience of glory, but it’s also a profound experience of the way we can’t catch up to and hold on to God, of how we can’t control our relationship with God, or the way it affects us.

God tells Moses we can’t have God the way we have the empire.  But we have the goodness of creation which surrounds us, the tradition and the personal experiences that describe God to us, and God’s unpredictable generosity.

All of them things we receive and cannot hold. Enjoy, but don’t control. Utterly present, but not dependable.

That’s what it means to belong to God. To live with love and gratitude, but not status and security. And that’s what Jesus is telling us to do.

Remember what belongs to the emperor: Rules and power and comfort and status and most of all, security. 

Give that back to the emperor.

Because otherwise you become dependent on the emperor, and you belong to the emperor. But what Moses said is still true now: the thing that makes us special, the thing that gives us life, is when we belong to God.

So pay your taxes. Use your cash and your credit cards for gas and groceries and possessions and payments and treats.  Buy your legally mandated car insurance, carry your driver’s license.

But don’t ever get to depend on that. Because that makes it way too easy to forget that you – every bit of you, heart and body and soul – belong to God. And God’s presence isn’t secure, it’s just glorious.  It’s not comfortable, it’s just necessary. It’s not manageable, it’s just generous.

I could preach today that you should throw away your wallet.  But I don’t really want to have to bail you out of jail for driving without a license. So instead, let’s try to teach ourselves to trust God the way the emperor needs us to depend on our wallets.

Try praying with your wallet in hand - before you leave the house for the day, or when you’re coming home at night. Hold your wallet and pray to God that using these tools of empire, these symbols of power and status and anxiety, will help you lean even more on the presence of God.

Or make a new habit.  Every time you take out your wallet, or pay your taxes, or order something online, add a habit of stopping to notice a particular part of the goodness of God’s creation: tasty and healthful food, a person you love, the beauty of sunset, the scent of rain….

Measure the time you spend on bill paying and shopping and keeping your finances and insurance straight.  Take an equal amount of time for prayer – by singing holy music, using your creative gifts, reading the Bible, or breathing meditation.

Keep the balance, then tilt it toward God.

Whatever it takes, DO it.

Practice your awareness of God’s presence, because the emperor will make himself felt without help.  Practice your risky trust in God, because the empire makes it so easy to depend on idols.

Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.  We’re going to anyway.  But never, ever, give to the emperor what is God’s – your heart, your soul, your self.

God's Way

Exodus 32:1-14, Matthew 22:1-14

What an awful story Jesus tells today.

It starts out with happy news: a prince’s wedding. But when the day arrives, the guests blow it off.  Some invitees even go so far as to kill the messenger. (Overreacting much?)  The king’s reaction is swift and violent:  He sends the army and destroys the city of the rebellious guests.

Meantime, the feast is quite ready – I imagine it sitting over sterno cans in an empty hall – so the king sends out to invite anyone and everyone, “good and bad,” from the streets. The party goes on, and this ought to be a happy enough ending.  But Matthew tells us Jesus wasn’t done there.

The king is mingling with his oddly assorted guests when he discovers one who hasn’t bothered to follow the dress code (and if everyone there was surprised off the street into a party, you have to imagine that if only one hasn’t dressed right, then it’s been pretty easy to do.) So when this guest won’t answer why he didn’t wear wedding garments, the king has him thrown out – not just out of the banquet hall, but into utter damnation.

This story is a nasty, illogical mess of insults and inhospitality and overreaction.

And Jesus says God’s kingdom is like this?
Yuck.

But sometimes God-life is like that.  It starts off with good news – acceptance, welcome, abundance, love, a new identity among God’s people, new self-respect.  But then happily ever after is more complicated than it looks. Sometimes all that love and abundance doesn’t actually solve the problems you find yourself in.  Sometimes the struggle you brought to God gets worse instead of better. Or you just get bored.

You find yourself waiting

and waiting

and waiting:

for the Messiah to show up, for prayer to be answered, for other people to come to your party, for that mountain-top feeling or joyful certainty that those folks advertising God’s kingdom seem to have, but you just don’t feel.

And waiting stinks.

Because all too often, it can feel like you’ve been blown off, ignored, or abandoned. And you really don’t want to feel that way about God.

That’s where the golden calf comes from in the wilderness, you know.  It doesn’t come from greed or deliberate idolatry.  It comes from the people’s feeling that they’d been duped and abandoned. 

They’d gambled their lives on this God who called them out of slavery, they’d committed themselves to God’s commandments, and God’s promised to guide and protect and love them, and they’re still stuck endlessly in this wilderness, waiting and waiting for guidance and freedom and security and any further sign from God.

Have you ever felt like that, even just a little?

Like God is great and all, but faith just isn’t the primary thing in my life – it’s not urgent right now, and there’s a lot of other critical stuff to focus on.

I’ve felt it.

God’s time can work that way – long periods on our clock or calendar when nothing’s really happening.  God’s not demanding much, the kingdom hasn’t come, it all feels kind of back-burner-ish.

So there’s more emotional urgency, more stability and reward, in focusing on family matters or work challenges or financial security.

It’s natural to feel that way.

But when we act on it, we’ve built ourselves a golden calf.

Or we’ve blown off the wedding invitation without even realizing it.

And that has dramatically dangerous consequences.

That king in Jesus’ story destroys cities and pitches people into “outer darkness” when he’s dissed. God disowns the people in the wilderness and offers to destroy them.

It turns out that we can’t have it both ways.

Our spiritual history is pretty clear on this: We’re invited – over and over, and without limit or preconditions – to have it God’s way: love, abundance, radical welcome, deep and holy intimacy with God. 

But to have it God’s way, we have to let go of having it our way – having predictability and security, a sense of control, and our own choice of priorities.

God’s time isn’t our time.  While the people are feeling bored and abandoned after endless days in the wilderness, God is working swiftly and intently with Moses on plans for how to build God a way to be physically present with those people. 

And God is flexible.  The king doesn’t take an initial brush-off for rejection. He sends a tantalizing, welcoming description of the feast to the first folks who ignore him, hoping they can still be persuaded. In fact, he wants to throw this party so badly he invites the good, the bad, the unexpected and the unprepared to a sumptuous feast.

But that doesn’t mean God’s okay with our temptation to have it our way when God’s way isn’t convenient or comfortable for us.

The world you and I live in – even the church around us – tends to advertise the false idea that we can have it both ways.  That relationship with God – instead of requiring us to leap off a cliff with trust – instead can provide predictability, a secure place in the world, mainstream comfort, direct guidance when we want it and easy freedom when we want that. 

But it’s not true.

Being God’s people is a much, much, more intense, risky, fantastic and festive thing than it looks in contemporary Lombard. We can’t show up on our own terms, prepared to taste-test the banquet, but not wholeheartedly committed to the party.  We need to show up dressed – outside and in – for action and joy, even if we think we’ll be bored.

We can’t trust God only when there’s not much at risk  Those are our terms. God insists that we have to risk everything and lean into that trust when we’re lost and alone and insecure and everything is at stake.

Our world makes it easy to feel like we can have it both ways. But when we live as though we can, we all lose.

Faith left on the back burner dries up. 

Being too cautious with joy – your own or other peoples – hardens your heart.

Letting work or family concerns set the terms by which you feel secure makes it harder to trust God when those things fail.

And when any of that happens, God’s heart breaks at losing you.

To live God’s way takes tremendous patience and hope and loving vulnerability. But God will keep inviting us to the feast; expecting us to commit ourselves to God’s party.

So see what happens for a week or a month if you consciously and repeatedly try to pull God’s love and generosity into the center of all those things that clamor for your attention – email, family, work, school, groceries and chores. 

See what happens when you insist on trusting God on something even when it would be easier to just do it yourself.

Parties – feasts and joy and abundance – truly are a risky business.  But God really, really wants you at this one. 

Are you coming?

Positively Unfair

Matthew 20:1-16

How many of you had to learn the hard way that life just isn’t fair?

(If there’s an easy way, I haven’t heard of it.)

After you learned that, did you hold out hope that at least God is fair, and heaven should be? 

Then how do you feel about the story Jesus told today?

The kingdom of heaven is like a businessman who hires day laborers – some first thing in the morning, at an agreed-upon basic wage, and others throughout the day with a verbal promise to pay “whatever’s right.”  He hires the last of them a bare hour before the workday ends. Then he pays them off – latecomers first – at the full day’s wage.  No bonus or acknowledgement for the early birds or hardest workers, which – not surprisingly – leads to complaint and protest.

Show of hands:  fair?  not fair?

If this story doesn’t make you cranky, confused, or just uncomfortable in some way, then you’re probably not listening seriously.

      

It certainly made us uncomfortable when we read this story in our Vestry bible study on Tuesday, but it got noticeably easier when we began to speculate that this is Jesus’ assurance that God won’t treat the deathbed conversions and late bloomers in Christianity any differently than those who’ve been dedicated followers of Christ all their lives. 

Phew.

“It’s a good thing it’s about salvation and not money,” said Ken Pardue, “because if it’s about money it’s not fair.”

He’s right.

Except, of course, that it actually is about money. And it’s not meant to be fair.

Jesus talks about money all the time.  More than he talks about morals, divorce, worship practices, or even sheep. And the money is never just a metaphor.  And it’s almost never fair.

If this parable made you uncomfortable, then your gut reaction is absolutely right:

God is not fair.

And expecting God to be “fair” just sets us up for disappointment. The kingdom of God won’t be fair, either. So Jesus may be trying to upset us enough to shift our assumptions.

Listen to it again:

A businessman (you know, stereotypically level-headed, focused on the bottom line) goes out to hire day laborers. He makes a sensible contract with some and puts them to work.

Then all day long, he goes back out looking for people who haven’t found work. Whatever time he finds them – morning, midday, last minute – he promises to pay them something appropriate, and sets them to work. Then he publicly demonstrates that he’s paying the last-minuters a full day’s wage, the same as his contract with the early birds.

He has to know he’s going to annoy the first workers. 

He has to know he’s going to shock everyone and that word is going to get around.

He’s not being fair, and he’s not simply being generous.

He’s being provocatively, aggressively, generous.

And that’s what the kingdom of heaven is like: In-your-face generosity to those who definitely don’t earn it. 

That’s definitely what God is like.  Our scripture is filled with human wrestling with God’s benefits to the unworthy. And righteous complaint about good things happening to “bad people” is as familiar to you and me today as it would be to Jesus first disciples in Jerusalem under Roman occupation.

Ken Pardue and the Vestry were right about something that matters in this story – it tells us something about salvation that we can be glad about.  It’s well worth remembering that God is proactively generous to those of us who don’t earn our own salvation (Me, for example.  Maybe you?)

But it will also be worth remembering that God doesn’t hesitate to demonstrate that generosity when it’s unfair to us, too.

It’s not fair that my adorable foster nephew and niece become such a holy, joyful, life-giving part of our family – and then get abruptly pulled away to live with biological parents after their foster family has spent love, sweat, tears and years on them.

Giving loving, healthy, grace-filled children to their biological parents who come late to nurturing is wonderfully, aggressively, generous on God’s part, and God doesn’t hide that provocation from the all-day laborers like my sister-in-law, when the parting breaks her heart.

God is like that. Heaven is like that.  

Illogical, sometimes heart-wrenching, generous acts of God that just aren’t fair.

And God is inviting us to find a way to love it, because the reign of God on earth is going to be full of it.

In fact, I think that provocative generosity might even be our job – yours and mine – in the coming of God’s kingdom on earth.

Think about it.

What would it be like to give out second chances to people who didn’t earn them?
To give from your treasure – time, labor, love, money and hard-won skill – to people who don’t especially deserve it?

And to do it as visibly as you can. (Yep, that’s the part that makes me most nervous.  It might upset those people who’ve earned or waited for or expected my attention and skill, and that’s never fun.)

Most of us gathered here aren’t small business owners with the opportunity to overpay our employees on a regular basis.

But you can over-tip a restaurant server who’s clearly having a rough day and didn’t give you their best.

You can give time and heart, by going over to the PADS parking lot or the library on a Tuesday or Wednesday and listening – really listening, nothing else – to the story and life of someone who is probably buried under all the negative assumptions made about the homeless.

You might defend some generally disrespected group that’s done nothing for you – used-car salesmen, prostitutes, Congress – in a conversation, and plant a more forgiving and understanding spirit among your friends or family.

You can find other ways to be irrationally generous.  The opportunities abound – our world is full of people who don’t seem to have earned love or grace or daily bread.

So try it, at least once. Really try it, take the risk of provocative generosity, and see what it’s like to live, for a moment at least, in the kingdom of God on earth.

It will never be fair.

But we’ll never earn it, either.

So irrational, aggressive generosity may just be the best way to go.