On Finding Family…

Tags

blessing, church, crisis, family, friends, genuine, harm, imbalance, invitation, invite, Jesus, love, rich, unconditional

Photo credit:  https://www.psychologies.co.uk/five-ways-better-family-conversations

Families are a funny thing.  We are born into them, and have no choice about their makeup.  Some of us are blessed with large or small families that nurture and care for us.  Some us are born into hurtful, abusive families.  And some of us navigate our way as we age, realizing who in our immediate and extended family build us up, and who we can minimize time with or avoid altogether because they do not know how to love us.  As we age, we redefine family – perhaps with friends and lovers who love us better than the family members we were born into, or perhaps with groups of people who understand us and create a sense of “home.”

For some of us, that group is Church.  Now I know churches have been some of the worst offenders – places of pain, abuse, or just meanness.  But Church can also be the family you choose – the place where you are loved unconditionally, feel a sense of belonging, and discover a sense of purpose and meaning.  Church is the place where an unrelated elder can offer care and wisdom you have longed for, where a child teaches you what joy, laughter, and love feel like, and where a once (and maybe still) stranger can pray for you in ways that reaches your soul like never before.  The people of Church can be the vehicle through which we experience the unconditional love of Christ.

What has struck me about this time of separation is how much the separation has made it easier for us to invite people into that family of Church.  Whether a neighbor sharing about their seriously ill parent leads us to invite them to join us for online prayers; whether a friend is struggling with their children and finds our invitation to enjoy online Godly Play or accessible teaching materials; or whether someone who has not been able to step foot on a church property feels less threatened by a Sunday online worship service – we are finding invitation to be a much more organic, genuine experience – because we need that sense of family, we need that love of Christ.

But what has struck me even more deeply has been the shifting dynamic within our Church “family.”  Instead of inviting people “in” to the church, this has been a beautiful time of us being invited “out” – finding how much malleability our family has.  Invitation during this time has not simply been about inviting people into “the family” so that they can experience the blessings we have, but has also been about inviting people into the family because our family is not complete – there are people we did not even know could make us feel whole who we are meeting because Church looks so different right now.  That kind of role reversal can create a sense of imbalance and vulnerability – but it can also create a richer sense of family and loving community.  In our separation from the body of Christ, we are learning just how vast the body of Christ really is.  We may not have been looking for it, or even realized we needed it, but I am grateful for the ways this crisis is growing our family, and expanding the ways we can experience Christ’s love.

Sermon – Luke 12.13-21, P13, YC, July 31, 2016

Tags

accountability, barn, community, financial management, God, greed, Jesus, money, relationship, rich, rich toward God, self-centeredness, Sermon, wealth

One of the last things that happens when you graduate from seminary is the staff from the Church Pension Group comes to talk to you about money management.  They help you understand how retirement funds work for clergy, encourage you to make sure you are doing some additional savings and investment planning, and remind you that, like tithing, how you manage your finances is a witness to your congregation for being good stewards.  That lesson is reiterated each year, as the priest is encouraged to be a smart investor through email reminders.  We even go to a wellness conference a few times over the course of our ministry to make sure we are tending to our financial wellness in addition to vocational, spiritual, and bodily wellness.  The lesson to clergy again and again, is to be good stewards of our financial resources.

So imagine my discomfort with the parable from Jesus today.  At first glance, this is a story about smart financial investments.  A man has a bumper crop – the land produces so abundantly he cannot fit the excess crops into his current barns.  Knowing that the land is fickle, maybe even having taken some notes from our ancestor Joseph who prevented a seven-year famine by stockpiling during a seven-year boon, the man decides he will just have to build a bigger barn to hold all the extra crops.  Quite frankly, his actions do not sound that far off from what any investment counselor who might tell us to do – store the excess away so that when a rainy day comes, or even when retirement comes, we can still “eat, drink, and be merry.”  All in all, his logic sounds pretty spot-on to me.

Here is the kicker though:  the day the newly enlarged barn is finished is the same day that the man will die.  All those plans, hopes, and dreams for a secure retirement are gone.  He never gets to enjoy the fruits of his labor.  He never gets to retire in comfort.  He never gets to eat, drink, and be merry.  Our immediate reaction to this tragedy might be to proclaim how life or God is not fair.  But into our disappointment, Jesus says, “So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

In these last words from Jesus, Jesus takes the wind out of our sails.  Jesus reminds us that being a good steward of our resources means lots of things:  being smart with our money, saving for times of famine, giving to the church, and caring for our neighbor.  But most importantly, being a good steward of our resources is not just about sound financial practices.  Being a good steward of our resources is also managing our relationship with our money – and more specifically, managing our relationship with God in relation to our money.

Now some of you may be thinking, “Here she goes.  She’s going to tell me how I need to give more money to the church to right my relationship with God.”  No need to get too anxious today.  I do not think Jesus is looking for a specific action today – as if to say, “Do not be like the man with the barns.  Give your full ten percent to the church and all will be well.”  No, what Jesus is trying to do is help us see that our relationship with money matters.  Unlike a polite dinner guest, Jesus never shies away from talking about money.  He is constantly warning us about the potential of riches to corrupt our relationship with God.  So the answer to what the rich man should do may not be a clear-cut formula, but we get some obvious clues about what Jesus means about being rich toward God.

Going back to the story is particularly helpful.  The most obvious thing that we see happening in the parable is that the wealthy man has become completely self-absorbed and ego-centric.  Listen again to the words of the parable, “And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’”  The list is long:  What should I do?  My crops, my barns, my grain, my goods, my soul.  All the words of the wealthy man are self-referential.[i]  Nowhere does he talk to God.  Nowhere does he talk to his family or a trusted friend.  Nowhere does he consult his property manager, or the local priest.  He never praises God for the abundance.  He never acknowledges that the land has provided.  He never even considers sharing his abundance.  He is self-interested, self-protecting, and self-centered.  And all of that focus on the self comes from a relationship with money and with God that is out of whack.

So how do we avoid the slippery slope that leads to self-centeredness and greed, luring us to constantly redefine how much is “enough”?  What exactly is being rich toward God?  Jesus tells us the answer to our quandary throughout Luke’s gospel.  As one scholar explains, “Being rich toward God entails using one’s resources for the benefit of one’s neighbor in need, as the Samaritan did (10:25-37).  Being rich toward God includes intentionally listening to Jesus’ word, as Mary did (10:38-42).  Being rich toward God consists of prayerfully trusting that God will provide for the needs of life (11:1-13, 12:22-31).  Being rich toward God involves selling possessions and giving alms as a means of establishing a lasting treasure in heaven (12:32-34).”  In other words, “Life and possessions are a gift of God to be used to advance God’s agenda of care and compassion, precisely for those who lack resources to provide for themselves.”[ii]

Last year, while serving on the board of the Episcopal Ministries of Long Island in New York, we were surprised by a bequest of about 1.3 million dollars.  The bequest came from a woman who had seemed to be of little consequence.  Each year she had probably given the charitable group about $25 a year.  We assumed that was about all she could do.  So when the gift came in, we were stunned.  After some prayerful discernment, we elected to put one million into our endowment, to ensure that we could keep helping ministries on Long Island.  But the three hundred thousand would be for us to try new and innovative ministries – and luckily for us, there was already a proposal on the table that we thought we could not afford:  a food truck that would take food around to the homeless in Brooklyn, and maybe even host a social worker and or nurse.  I do not know what sort of life this woman led or how she managed her money.  But even in death, her richness toward God was obvious to us all.

The challenge of Jesus this week to be rich toward God is not just a challenge for self-centered men of means.  Though we may be tempted to finger-point, Jesus and we know that money has the power to corrupt all of our relationships with God.  And unfortunately, the consequences are not limited to our relationships with God – our ability to live lives rich toward God impacts our neighbors too.  The good news is that we have a community of faith sitting right next to us who can be our support system as we work to turn our hearts and our riches to God.  Now I know we all value being respectful dinner guests, but this time, we are going to need to follow Jesus’ lead.  In order to really turn our hearts and riches toward God, we are going to need to start talking with our friends about the place of money in our lives and in our relationship with God.  We are going to need to talk about our struggles and failures.  And we are going to need to celebrate our victories and successes.  We are basically going to need to become a giant support group for becoming rich toward God.

I once heard about a “congregation who invited families to not buy any unnecessary new thing for six months in order to break the culturally-induced habit of trying to buy happiness.  But they didn’t just invite people to do this, they formed a culture in which they supported each other.  They read and talked about a common book on abundant life, they kept in touch via small groups and email, they shared where they were succeeding and struggling and what they were learning.  In short, the formed a community so that they could stand against the all-too-human and culturally supported belief that if we just had a little more we’d be happy.”[iii]

I do not know what model or what goals are going to work for each of you.  But I do know that just by our very citizenship in this country, we face more temptation toward greed than in probably any other country.  If we are going to follow Jesus, to avoid a life of self-centeredness, and claim a life of being rich toward God, we are going to need each other.  Whether you want to form a small group or just find a trusted friend, this is the important work Jesus invites us into today.  My guess is that building up a community of support that is rich toward God will create much more opportunities to eat, drink, and be merry, than any bigger barn could ever give us.  Amen.

[i] Audrey West, “Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Yr. C, Vol. 3 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 312.

[ii] Richard P. Carlson, “Exegetical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Yr. C, Vol. 3 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 315.

[iii] David Lose, “What Money Can and Can’t Do,” July 29, 2013, as found at http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=2668 on July 27, 2016.

Sermon – Luke 16.19-31, 1 Timothy 6.6-19, P21, YC, September 29, 2013

Tags

boldness, generous, God, Lazarus, other, rich, Sermon

Today’s scripture lessons are a bit uncomfortable.  The gospel and the epistle lesson really hit the rich hard.  We hear that familiar tale of the rich man and Lazarus and we almost sympathize with the rich man.  As he blindly goes about life ignoring Lazarus, we want to shout out to him, “Pay attention to Lazarus!  Take care of the poor!”  Of course, our reaction is much like the rich man’s once he realizes how doomed he really is.  He begs Abraham to send Lazarus or anyone from the dead to warn his brothers.  But Abraham responds with a deafening, “no,” and the silence at the end of the lesson is heart-wrenching.  This stark judgment is only heightened by our Epistle lesson, which boldly proclaims, “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.”  The writer does not simply say that wealth can be dangerous, but instead declares that the desire for wealth drives people to ruin and destruction.  There is a little bit of grace at the end of the lesson, which declares that the rich can somehow mitigate this fate by not being haughty, by setting their hopes on God, and by doing good, being rich in good works, generous, and ready to share.  Not all hope is lost, but we are also clear that the rich have a lot to worry about and a lot of work to do.

The biggest challenge about our lessons today though is not just the judgment of the rich, but the fact that we do not think of ourselves as being rich.  We can think of hundreds of thousands of people who are in better financial positions than we are.  Many of our members are struggling to get by – either because of fixed incomes or unexpected situations.  And even if some of us are making all our bills, we still have to watch our budgets – perhaps spending less on leisure, clothing, or the foods that we might like.  The last two parishes I served had a one and two million dollar budget respectively – we could easily look at our budget and the last two years of deficits and say that St. Margaret’s is not a place of rich people.  All you have to do is look around at our come-as-you-are culture, and assume that our parishioners in jeans and t-shirts do not have much money.

Of course, all of this is false.  All of our rationalizations and mind-games can never erase the fact that based on worldwide standards, simply by living in this country, we are rich people.  These lessons are not about “those people.”  These lessons are about us.  That is what makes them so hard.  We secretly want them to be about other people, but at the end of the day, we are the ones in danger of stepping over Lazaruses everyday and we are the ones who must struggle with our own love of money.  We are the rich in today’s lessons.

In the aftermath of the crisis of the Kenyan Westgate Mall Terrorist attack, an article surfaced about the media’s treatment of the crisis.[i]  In the first days of coverage, the mall was described as “being popular with ‘wealthy Kenyans, expatriates, and diplomats.’  It was also referred to as an ‘upscale mall’ ‘frequented by foreigners.’”  On the face of things, the description seemed relatively accurate and harmless.  But what the author of the article noted was that the sentiment that began spreading was that maybe the rich were getting their due, being terrorized in ways that the poor feel terrorized everyday.  But by the second day of reporting, the language started to change.  People began to see that not just the rich were suffering in the attack – ordinary people were being injured and killed too – in fact, even Muslims were being killed, despite the fact that the attack was committed by the so-called Islamist terrorists.  As pictures emerged of Kenyans helping internationals, and Muslims helping Christians, the vulgar labeling of “otherness” had been put to shame by the people’s common humanity and decency.  What I appreciated about this article is how the author saw our tendencies to not see ourselves in the other – how quickly we want to remove ourselves from judgment instead of seeing ourselves in the sinfulness of the world.  What happened in Kenya is not far from what happens every time we open our wallets and decide that we are not the rich man in our gospel or epistle lesson today.

Seeing our own culpability in our lessons today, what can we do from here?  There are two gifts in our scripture lessons today.  First, by watching the story of the rich man and Lazarus unfold, we get the benefit of what the rich man wanted for his brothers.  We are reminded through Abraham that the warnings are all there for us.  Though the rich man’s opportunity for repentance and renewal is gone, ours is not.  We have Moses, the prophets, and even Jesus himself rising from the dead as our reminder that our wealth is gifted to us to use for good.  Second, the hope of the epistle lesson is our hope as well.  We too can be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share.  Even when we feel like we have nothing left to share, all we have to do is remember that our sharing is our active relinquishing of the power that the love of money has over us.

This week, a priest friend of mine was featured in a story in Chattanooga, Tennessee for the bold move his church is taking.  Another church in town erected three 100-foot crosses on their property at the cost of $700,000.  On reflection, my friend and the Episcopal community of faith that he has gathered began to wonder how else they could spend $700,000.  In response, the community established the Southside Jubilee Fund.[ii]  They will raise $700,000 themselves in order to give all the money away.  Considering the call for Jubilee in Leviticus, the requirements for receiving money from the funds will be biblically based – any group doing work feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing those in need, caring for the sick, loving your neighbor, forgiving your enemies, honoring widows, or healing the land can receive from the fund.  Who knows whether the church will be able to raise the full $700,000, but that kind of boldness is the kind of boldness our epistle lesson calls for today.

We at St. Margaret’s are embarking on some of our spending.  We are finally fixing a long-term water problem that has been plaguing our undercroft.  As we repair the years of damage, mold, and old asbestos tiles, and as we restructure our outdoor drainage, we will also be reconstructing a space that not only holds our social events, but facilitates education and formation for adults and children, welcomes support groups, and perhaps can become used for more community gatherings.  This kind of expense may feel like the expense of the rich – but I actually think this kind of spending is a bit like the kind of spending the epistle encourages.  We will have to be both generous to fund the project, but also use the space for good works and share the space with others.  And if we are really embracing the call to share, perhaps we can consider some sort of matching program – matching the dollars we spend on our building with the dollars we spend on outreach.  That matching might not be dollar for dollar like in Chattanooga, but the invitation for boldness is there.

But the invitation for boldness is not just for St. Margaret’s.  The invitation for boldness is for each one of us here.  I would like us each to take a moment and pull out our wallets.  Look at how much cash you have in there.  I want you to make a mental note of that amount, and then I want you to watch over the coming week or weeks how you spend those dollars.  I want you to watch where the dollars go and what your spending says about your relationship with money.  Even if you cannot be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share those specific dollars, perhaps you can spend the next month watching the ways you do and do not share your other dollars and what that says about the power that the love of money has in your life.  If you find that those dollars are not being used boldly for good works and generous sharing, perhaps you and your family can consider how you might live differently:  how you might, as our epistle says, live the life that really is life.  And as you make those observations, I hope you will share that experience with me and one another – so that we might encourage one another on the journey toward bold living.  Amen.

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[i] Charles Onyango-Obbo, “Nairobi Westgate Mall Terror Attack, And The Folly Of ‘Otherness’ – What Al-Shabaab Revealed About Us,” as found at http://nakedchiefs.com/2013/09/24/nairobi-westgate-mall-terror-attack-and-the-folly-of-otherness-what-al-shabaab-revealed-about-us/ on September 26, 2013.

[ii] As found on http://southsideabbey.dioet.org/ on September 25, 2013.