Sermon for the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Wealth, power and status do not belong in the Kingdom of Heaven. I’ve said this before and tonight’s Gospel is another example of this, particularly emphasizing status. Yet quite frankly, other than in a remembering to check your privilege sense, none of us here this evening have all that much status. And I expect that not many of us desire to seek it, though only God knows what’s in a person’s heart, so I’m not going to get into that. What I’m going to get into, what stood out to me in the Gospel as I read it this time, is what Jesus had to say about repayment or reward.

 

Before we get to what Jesus said, I want to make clear what Jesus did not say. “You’ll get your reward in heaven” is a concept that has been wielded as a weapon of religious abuse. Jesus never said, “Do nothing to defend yourself or better your situation because you will get your reward in heaven.” He never said, “God wants you to suffer hear on earth so you earn your reward in heaven” Nor did he say, “Love your neighbor instead of yourself.”

That last one reminds me of the saying, “there’s no such thing as altruism” which is usually followed by an example of how there is some selfish motivation behind helping anyone. So what? I mean, Jesus is not saying don’t be selfish in tonight’s Gospel. He’s actually suggesting a very selfish motivation. The question here isn’t do you want to be rewarded, the questions is what kind of a reward do you want to get? Not when do you want your reward, but rather do you want an earthly reward or a heavenly one?

Now I confess in my personal piety, I’ve fooled myself into thinking that I’ve rejected reward and punishment as motivations.  I must admit I’ve been rather self-righteous about it at times. What I’ve confused with reward and punishment in general, is the specific wielding of promises of Heaven and threats of Hell as ways to control people, or as a very twisted moral compass. There are moral arguments in the Bible, the Golden Rule is a moral argument for example, one rooted in empathy. “Do it or God will punish you” is not a moral argument, though.

So in rejecting Heaven and Hell as motivations (which in my case motivated me in the wrong direction, the more I worried about the afterlife, the worse my behavior was) I instead embraced “We love because God loved us first.” I sought out connecting to God’s love for me in prayer and meditation and reflection on the Gospels. This led to my actually falling in love with Christ. And while I don’t think I ever saw that as altruistic, I think I was blind to loving and being loved as a reward in and of itself.

Perhaps this is what Jesus was getting at when he said his yoke was easy and his burden light, despite the suffering that is inevitable in leading a Christian life; inevitable, by the way, not demanded. The first commandment love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind and with all your strength is its own reward.

Now I have said, but really had no right to say, that living out this love will inevitably lead to loving one’s neighbor as oneself. There is still effort and work to do to get there and so we need a second commandment to summarize the law. What I can say is that having felt the love of God, and spending time with that, actively seeing yourself through God’s eyes, it is much easier to see others as God sees them. We can transfer the feeling onto others. We cannot see into their hearts, but we can see the image of God in us all; even in those who cannot repay us for inviting them to our banquet, cannot repay us for our kindness, who in fact may be incapable of loving us back. 

It is true that Jesus refers to a future reward for this behavior, at the time of the resurrection, but I believe that the being blessed, the actual righteousness (as opposed to self-righteousness) is a present reward; the reward of loving and being loved by God. And certainly I look forward to the beatific vision, of seeing God “face to face” so to speak. But why deny yourself the reward of living in God’s love, of having a love affair with God here now as much as possible? For it is possible. Like any relationship it takes work. Prayer and meditation and reflection on the Gospels is work, but the rewards are great. And while they happen on earth, they are not earthly rewards.

We can make all the earthly changes we want, but without love, without God, as Paul has told us, it is empty and just a lot of noise.  Soon we will be participating in an enactment of the Heavenly Banquet. We will be feasting on God’s own self. We will be participating as the body of Christ. This all came about from God loving us so much that God became us, so that we are not just in the image of God, but God’s own flesh and blood. This is here now, both earthly and heavenly.

• Sirach 10:12-18 or Proverbs 25:6-7 and Psalm 112  • 
• Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16  • 
• Luke 14:1, 7-14

Sermon for the Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,” said the Lord. And don’t we store up treasures on earth to the point that we’re making the earth inhabitable for ourselves. Tomorrow all our lives will be demanded of us. But that does not mean we shouldn’t eat drink and be merry, just not in the way we usually think of eating drinking and being merry.

Outside the context of the Bible, I’ve heard “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die” used to mean a couple things: One is basically party like there’s no tomorrow, another is let’s celebrate now, while we have a respite before facing something rather gloomy. I’m not advocating it in either of those ways. I believe both of those ways betray a specifically American outlook on consumption. Consume with abandon, and consume to make ourselves feel better.

We consume to an alarming degree here in the U.S.  Some time ago, it was calculated that if the rest of the world consumed at the level we do here, it would take the resources of 5 and a half earths to fulfil the demand. We are using a criminal amount of our fair share of God’s bounty. I rather imagine this statistic is even higher now.

George Romero’s second “living dead movie,” Dawn of the Dead, is deliberate social commentary on consumerism. Most of the film takes place in a shopping mall. The living dead, who are commonly referred to as zombies in later films of this type, hover around a mall due to -as one character muses- “some kind of instinct. Memory of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.”

The small band of folks who are not dead manage to hold up in the mall, thinking initially that it’s a great place to hold out in. All the mod cons are available to them, and they set up house. But soon the emptiness of an existence of pure consuming begins to dawn on our protagonists. One says, “I'm afraid. You're hypnotized by this place. All of you! You don't see that it's not a sanctuary, it's a prison!”

This movie came out in 1978, when Carter was president. This president became hated by many the next year, because he warned us that we were overconsuming and rationed gasoline. There was such a strong reaction against slowing our consumption that people flocked to Reagan’s unsustainable economic theories. And the mad consumption continued.

And one of the most frightening things about consumerism is how easily it absorbs any resistance to it. A while back I started hearing of a movement to simplify. Clearly some folks were reacting to our overconsumption and like the folks in the movie, saw it for the prison it is. Shortly after the people who were promoting this lifestyle got public attention, a magazine showed up in the supermarkets, called “Simplify.” The magazine was full of things you could BUY in order to simply your life. It’s insidious!

So, let us ask ourselves, where are we a little mad in our consumption? What are the earthly treasures we store? My weakness is books, yours of course may be entirely different, but let’s use books as an example. At the community we have 16 floor to ceiling bookcases full of books, plus a few smaller bookcases and boxes of books in the closet and down in the storage locker. We’re actually going to have library hours soon. And while I do believe books are good things and valuable, I know also that I horde them.

Now a great many of these books are religious books and I genuinely believe they help me to store treasure in heaven; they help me know and love Jesus better. And certainly while I need to cut down on my book consumption, I wouldn’t eliminate books entirely. The question is where is my treasure? In the books themselves, or in the knowledge they bring? Or even in the joy they bring? I’ve seen how joy can be contagious. When I’m sharing with joy about a story I read or say, a horror movie I watched, I’ve seen others find joy in my joy.

Which brings me back to enjoyment of earthly things and how that can be different than storing up treasures on earth. “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die” Which is a combination of two phrases in Ecclesiastes

Ecclesiastes is a rather gloomy cynical book, as we heard tonight. The first is the one that mentions being merry, “Therefore I praised joy, because there is nothing better for mortals under the sun than to eat and to drink and to be joyful; this will accompany them in their toil through the limited days of life God gives them under the sun.”

You see the author of Ecclesiastes sees the emptiness in toil and labor for the production of abundance, what the rich man in Jesus’ story fails to see. The rich man sees eating, drinking and being merry as something to be done after abundance has been achieved. The author of Ecclesiastes sees it as taking joy in things. Joy in fact that carries over into the labor itself. This is a joy independent of results. Results are transitory, they do not last.

Paul in First Corinthians quotes the other saying from Ecclesiastes, the one without merry in it. He quotes it while talking to people who are doubting the resurrection of the dead. “If the dead are not raised,” Paul says (and here he quotes) “‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.’” The author of Ecclesiastes asserts that there is no joy in the land of the dead. Paul insists there is joy that abides, because Christ has proved the resurrection of the dead.

I personally cannot doubt the resurrection because Christ is always present for me in the breaking of the bread. Though I must admit, that assurance of the resurrection doesn’t always bring me joy, for we are now still toiling through the limited days of life God gives us under the sun. And as I’ve put forth rather strongly tonight, the world is a mess, and we keep making it worse. But I will tell you this, without joy we are our toil is vanity.

I’ve said before that I believe Hope is a virtue because it does not come easily. As Christians, we attach Hope to the implications of the resurrection. That Hope also includes a belief in the promised coming of the kingdom here on earth. And we should rejoice in that. But more than that, I believe in these dark times of trouble and despair, we have a responsibility to lift each other up. We are the body of Christ here now under the sun. In that way the resurrection is here now and present.  Let’s find our joy in each others company. Soon we will eat and drink God’s very self, let’s be merry doing so.

 The Texts:

• Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14; 2:18-23 and Psalm 49:1-12  • 
• Colossians 3:1-11  • 
• Luke 12:13-21