A Hopeful Farce

Proper 21C
Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15
September 26, 2004

A Hopeful Farce

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

There is a difference between optimism and hope. Let me take a stab at stating it. The pessimist sees that glass as half empty. The optimist sees the glass as half full. The person with hope knows where the well is. No, that’s not quite it. I’m not sure I can put it simply, but I know it when I see it. I see it in our text.

Zedekiah was an optimist. He walked along the city walls and he felt how firm they were beneath his feet. Jerusalem had never fallen to an enemy if there were men to defend its walls. He had an army at his command. It wasn’t anything like the armies of King Nebuchadrezzar who had besieged the city. There was no army in the world that was like the armies of Nebuchadrezzar, at least not in Zedekiah’s world. But the walls were strong.

All Zedekiah had to do was to outlast Nebuchadrezzar. He had water, plenty of it. He had food which, admittedly, was in short supply. But for now there was enough.

Besides, he had friends. Powerful friends. The Pharaoh of Egypt was his friend. He had said so, many times. Many times Pharaoh had promised that, if Zedekiah broke his treaty with Babylon and refused to pay Nebuchdrezzar the tribute money he demanded, Egypt would come to Judah’s aid. Zedekiah had sent his messengers to Egypt. Pharaoh would come. Zedekiah had only to wait. Zedekiah was an optimist.

Jeremiah was not. And, just so we can get this out of the way, Jeremiah wasn’t a bullfrog, either. Jeremiah was a prophet. Jeremiah’s calling was to look into the heart of the events of his day and into the heart of God and to announce the path that God was calling the people to walk. There are times when this calling is a delight. Jeremiah did not live in one of those times.

Jeremiah looked out from the same walls as Zedekiah. He looked toward the northeast, toward Anathoth, the town of his birth, the town where his ancestors had settled, the town where his family had lived, at least until the armies of Nebuchdrezzar had come. It was just three and a half miles away. Jeremiah could see it clearly.

But he could also see that the armies of Nebuchadrezzar swarmed over the landscape between Jerusalem and Anathoth and, indeed, in every direction, like ants whose hill has been disturbed. Nebuchadrezzar was not going to go away. Pharaoh was not coming. As far as Jeremiah could see, there was in the heart of God no hint of rescue and no promise of a miracle. No, the path that God was calling Jeremiah’s people to walk was the path of exile and the sooner they surrendered to that path, the better for them.

Prophets don’t just see the truth of a situation; they announce it. That’s what Jeremiah did. In a besieged city Jeremiah went about calling on the people to surrender. Jeremiah was not good for morale. Jeremiah was a problem for Zedekiah the king.

So Zedekiah had Jeremiah arrested and kept imprisoned in the courtyard of his own guards where at least he wouldn’t have access to public spaces and the frightened people who had taken shelter in the city.

Among those frightened people was a cousin of Jeremiah’s named Hanamel. Like hundreds of people, Hanamel had fled to Jerusalem at the first news of Nebuchdrezzar’s invasion. He grabbed whatever he could carry and sought refuge behind the strong walls of the city.

Hanamel, like the other refugees, had a problem: he was hungry. The price of bread kept rising and Hanamel’s purse kept getting lighter and lighter. Like the other refugees, Hanamel was looking to liquidate some of his other assets so that he could continue to eat.

Hanamel owned a field at Anathoth. The field was pretty much useless to him, what with the Babylonian army using it for a motor pool and all. He could sell that field and have money for food. If he could sell the field. If he could find a buyer willing to pay anything at all. As any realtor will tell you, though, the three most important things to keep in mind about real estate are...location, location, and location. Located as it was under the chariot wheels of the Babylonian army, this field was not going to be worth much. Who would be crazy enough to buy Hanamel’s field at Anathoth?

Of course! As soon as Hanamel asked the question, he had his answer: Cousin Jeremiah! Jeremiah might buy the field. After all Jeremiah was Hanamel’s cousin. Land in those days was not quite the commodity that it is now. You couldn’t just sell your land to the highest bidder. Land was supposed to stay within extended families. Family members were morally obligated to buy the land, if they were able to do that, to keep the land from being alienated from the family. Jeremiah was not only Hanamel’s cousin, and obliged for that reason to buy the land if he could, he was also nuts. Buying useless land was just the sort of gesture that Jeremiah did all the time!

So Hanamel went to crazy Jeremiah who was confined in courtyard of the royal guard. He offered him the field at Anathoth. Even though Hanamel had thought all this through, I still think he was surprised when Jeremiah said yes. He not only said yes, but gave him a fair price for it: seventeen shekels. I have found nothing to suggest that this wouldn’t have been a fair price under normal circumstances and circumstances were far from normal.

But you couldn’t have figured that out by watching Jeremiah. Jeremiah got his secretary Baruch son of Neriah and grandson of Mahseiah—a very formal way of referring to Baruch—to make out the deeds setting out the terms and conditions of the sale. There were two copies: one deed was left unsealed so that it could be consulted and the other deed was sealed so that it could not be tampered with and could be available as a comparison in case there were ever a doubt about the open deed. Jeremiah weighed out the seventeen shekels in front of witnesses—bored, off-duty guards I suppose.

Everyone was waiting for what came next. Jeremiah had a way of turning the most normal of acts into an Event. Jeremiah was always bringing God into things. He did not disappoint. Jeremiah gave his secretary instructions: “Take these deeds, both this sealed deed of purchase and this open deed, and put them in an earthenware jar, in order that they may last for a long time. For this is what Yahweh of the Armies, the God of Israel, says: Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.”

And there is the difference between optimism and hope. Jeremiah is no optimist. Jeremiah does not look on the bright side of things. Jeremiah does not work to keep his own or anyone else’s spirits up. Jeremiah knows nothing of that optimism that seems to be a part of the American character. Jeremiah never faces disappointment with Scarlet O’Hara’s famous line: “Tomorrow is another day!”

What Jeremiah does instead is to stake himself on God’s future even as he lives in the midst of a present that is broken or even disastrous. He places himself in the gap between the world as it is and the world as God longs for it to be and entrusts himself to the world as God longs for it to be. This is what it means to hope.

This shouldn’t be too hard to understand. We do the same thing every time we pray the prayer that Jesus taught us. Jesus, too, was a prophet and he taught us a prophet’s prayer. In the midst of a reality that does little to render God’s name holy, we pray for God’s name to be hallowed. In the midst of self-serving empires we pray for God’s reign instead. In the midst of egos competing for scarce resources, we pray for God’s will to be done. In a world of hunger we pray for daily bread for all of us. In a world that keeps score and holds grudges we forgive and ask forgiveness. In a world of hard testing we pray not to be tested to destruction. In a world where evil seems to run rampant, we pray that no one would become evil’s victim.

When we pray as Jesus taught us, we pray a prophet’s prayer. But when we move from simply saying the words, to living this prayer that Jesus taught us, something profound happens. We, with Jeremiah and Jesus, place ourselves between the world as it is and the world that God longs for. With Jeremiah and Jesus we stake ourselves on the world that God longs for even as we live in the world as it is.

This is the beauty and the tension of a life lived in covenant with the God of Jeremiah and Jesus. And this is the life offered to the people who are called the church:

We are the people who commit ourselves to peace even in the face of war.

We are the people who commit ourselves to generosity even in the face of scarcity.

We are the people who commit ourselves to justice even in the face of privilege.

We are the people who commit ourselves to resurrection even in the face of death.

©2010, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

An Elegy for the Cubs

Proper 20C
Jeremiah 8:18—9:1
September 19, 2010

An Elegy for the Cubs

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

The regular season record for the Chicago Cubs stands at 66 wins, 88 losses for a percentage of .449. It is cold consolation that the Pittsburgh Pirates who are bringing up the rear in the National League Central Division—and indeed in all of major league baseball—have a .333 winning percentage. The Cubs have quite simply stunk all season long. It is a measure of their misery that they do better on the road than at home. A depressing fog is generated by the gathering of large numbers of Cubs fans. On the road, the mental and emotional air is cleaner and the Cubbies only have to deal with outright hostility.

Cubs fans live perpetually and painfully in the gap between the world as it should be and the world as it is. As fundamentalist Christians long for the Second Coming of Christ, so we Cubs fans long for the day when all the children of Abraham will gather from the east and from west, from the north and from the south, to sit together in the centerfield bleachers of Wrigley field to watch the Cubs win game seven of the world series, preferably against the White Sox. But it is not to be, not this year. Next year is the year, we say, just as Jews gather at Passover meals and vow, Next year in Jerusalem, the only difference being, that they can go to Jerusalem while the world in which the Cubs win the series remains closed to us, a world of imagination and longing only, not one that we can enter into fully.

My favorite living Christian scholar is Walter Brueggemann, now retired from Columbia Theological Seminary where he taught Old Testament. He is my favorite even though he is an ardent Cardinals fan. He has said that there is a biblical text for Cubs fans and that text is found in today’s reading: “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.”

Of course, we might say that the text is about exile, not baseball. The whole of the book of Jeremiah was written under the shadow of a looming and then present disaster. The Babylonian Empire that had emerged explosively from within the old regional super-power Assyria in the early 6^th century. In the opening years of that century the Babylonians would push past the boundaries of Assyrian Empire. The king of Babylon would demand tribute payment from Judah for the privilege of maintaining its independence. Kings of Judah would be tempted by promises from Egypt into denying these tribute payments.

Under King Nebuchadrezzar the armies of Babylon would lay siege to Jerusalem in the summer of 587 before Christ; starving it out in 586, looting its temple and treasury, burning the temple, and destroying the city gates, and leading away its leading citizens in chains to Babylon itself. Jeremiah’s work as a prophet, as God’s spokesperson in Jerusalem, took place in this time. He saw the disaster coming. He argued for surrender as the only way to soften the disaster only to be branded as a traitor. When the catastrophe finally fell he urged the Judean captives to make a life for themselves as exiles, strangers in a strange land, and to remain God’s people, and to become a people of hope.

This exile, which lasted some forty-eight years, was one of the most important things that ever happened to the people of Judah, known ever after that as Jews. In a sense they became Jews during the exile. Most of the writings of what we call the Old Testament took their final form during or just after the exile. During the exile Jews developed ways of worshiping and of being God’s people that did not involve the Temple or its sacrificial system. The exile became the lens through which the Jews understood everything that they had experienced up until then and through which they experienced the world from then on.

The exile in Babylon became Exile with a capital E. For today and for the next four weeks we will explore life as God’s people in Exile with a capital E. I have two reasons for choosing these texts from among the lectionary texts in the up-coming weeks. The first is that, no matter how well our lives are going right now, no matter how at-home we feel, all of us will experience Exile in one form or another at some time, and many of us living in Exile right now. The second reason is that I am convinced, and have been for some time, that we in the United Methodist Church and mainline churches in general will best understand our situation by seeing ourselves as God’s people in exile.

Looking closely at these texts from Jeremiah and Lamentations can help us live faithfully as God’s people and as individuals when our life’s journey leads away from home and into exile. For we live in exile anytime we are forced to live in a place we cannot call home.

It can happen geographically. There are real exiles in the world, refugees who have been forced away from their homes by famine, war or political strife and who live as sojourners in places that are strange to them. But people can also be dislocated even as they continue to live in the places they were born. Southeastern Michigan is filled with exiled factory workers who have lost their identities along with their livelihoods and their homes because of the collapse of the domestic automotive industry. Countless neighborhoods are places of exile for the people who called them home just three years ago.

Exile can happen as a neighborhood or even a country change around us and leave us no longer at home in our own homes. Some of the people of Postville at least have welcomed wave after wave of newcomers in the past thirty years only to find themselves feeling like strangers in their own town.

Some of us have experienced a kind of technological exile as forms of communication have changed and we have struggled to keep up. Now our kids are more at home with texting than we are with email and, even if we could master the technology, we are faced with a foreign language: l-o-l, o-m-g, r-o-t-f-l, and others too fierce to mention. We might as well be immigrants!

A wife and mother finds herself living as an exile in her own home when her husband announces that he is through, no longer willing to invest any effort in the marriage that she had thought was having its troubles but was well worth the work it would take to make it good. The routines are the same, the pieces of furniture are all where had been, but their bed is an empty place and so is her heart.

And when we are sitting across from the oncologist after telling our family doctor about the nagging symptom that wouldn’t go away hurled us into a whirlwind of hospital admissions, tests, biopsies and consultations and the oncologist tells us that, yes, it’s cancer, we find ourselves living as exiles in our own bodies.

In our text for today begins with a cry: “My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick.” A catastrophe threatens Judah or perhaps it has already arrived. The prophet can see it, hear it, feel it, and taste it. The prophet is overwhelmed with grief and anger?

If it has not already arrived, it must be close enough that even the people of Jerusalem can see. Or does the prophet anticipate what the people will say when the armies of Babylon loom over the horizon: “Is Yahweh not in Zion? Is not her King in her?...The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.” But these outcries seem formulaic, stilted, rote. Does Judah hope to stave off the disaster with formulas? Does it hope that religion-as-usual will return it to business-as-usual?

Don’t we always try to make some kind of bargain in the face of unbearable loss? Like ants dashing this way and that seeking escape from a flood that will overwhelm them momentarily, like politicians facing a recession—Democrats calling for more spending and Republicans for lowering taxes when neither of them has a clue, we hope to fix everything without changing anything. “We want our country back,” some are crying. But it’s too late. Time moves in only one direction and it is inexorable, relentless and unpitying.

The only things that can be done are to face the magnitude of what has happened, to cry out our anguish, and to grieve: “My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick.”

If we ask, “What is the picture of the church that emerges in this text?” as I have promised that we will often do, then the answer must be something like this: The church is a community of people who give voice to the pain experienced both by its members and by the wider community in which it lives its life. We do not shrink from discomfort. We do not sit by in silence while we or others suffer. We name our anguish in the presence of God. We grieve. We lament. We do this for each other. As Paul says, we weep with those who weep, just as we laugh with those who laugh. We give voice to our own suffering, but we also give voice to the suffering of the voiceless. We do not rejoice in the growth of the economy if the poor remain in their poverty. We do not fail to count their dead among our own when we go to war. When we weep with the shrimpers and the oilmen of the Gulf of Mexico in their loss of livelihood we do not fail to give voice to the sea turtles, the pelicans, the tuna and the marsh grasses that die without a sound.

We, too, cry, “O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep day and night for the slain of my poor people!”

But whose cry is this? The text isn’t clear. This lack of clarity has prompted the scholars to go to work. A commonly recognized solution is to see these verses as a conversation or drama with various actors speaking various lines, the cast of characters including Yahweh (Judah’s God), Jeremiah the prophet, and the people of Jerusalem. But they can’t seem to agree on who is speaking when.

I suspect that this confusion of voices is a result of the situation and the overwhelming anguish that comes with it. A catastrophe threatens Judah or perhaps it is already here. The prophet can see it, hear it, feel it, taste it—or is it Yahweh who sees, hears, feels and tastes? Is it the prophet who is overwhelmed with grief and anger or is it Yahweh? Or are Jeremiah’s grief and Yahweh’s grief finally two separate things at all?

If Jeremiah is God’s prophet, then Jeremiah is not just speaking for God when he announces judgment. Maybe it is true, as Jeremiah says on God’s behalf, that the people have brought this disaster upon themselves. Maybe they have failed to recognize that their nationhood is distinct from the nationhood of the nations around them, maybe they have decided to forsake their distinctness so that they could play the same games being played by their neighbors and so, having lost at these games, they will suffer the consequences.

Maybe we do bring a lot of troubles on ourselves. We spend our time in front of televisions and computer screens and wonder why our children are obese. We work more and more so that we no longer have the time for meal preparation that would avoid using high-fat, high-salt, high-sugar processed foods that agri-business shoves in our direction and then we wonder why our health care costs keep going up. Perhaps Jeremiah’s accusations are on target; perhaps Yahweh is justified in bringing judgment against the people.

But Jeremiah announces more than judgment. Can we clearly distinguish Jeremiah’s anguish from Yahweh’s? Can we distinguish Jeremiah’s grief from Judah’s? I don’t see it. And here is the strange good news that lies within this morning’s cries of woe. Yahweh suffers in Judah’s suffering. Yahweh mourns in Judah’s grief. Jeremiah’s prayer that his eyes could become a fountain of tears so that he would have enough to shed on Judah’s behalf is God’s prayer as well.

No matter what the judgment being brought against them, to God Judah is still “my poor people,” literally, “my daughter-people.” They are family. Nothing can break that. Nothing can change that. If Judah suffers, God suffers. If Judah weeps, God weeps. If Judah cries in anguish, God cries in anguish. If Judah goes into exile, it does not go alone; God goes into exile with them.

So our hope lies in this, not that we are better people than our neighbors, nor that we believe the right things, nor even that we have had the right religious experiences. Our hope goes further than what we heard last week: “It doesn’t matter who you are. It doesn’t matter where you’ve been. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done. It doesn’t matter how lost you are. God will hunt you down. God will never give up on you.”

Our hope goes further than that: It does not matter where we go. It does not matter what we do. It does not matter how lost we may become. God will go with us. When we suffer, God will suffer along with us. No matter where we have to go, we will not go alone. God will go with us into suffering, into exile, into death itself if need be. Even in our God-forsakenness, God will be God-forsaken, too, right alongside us. We are not alone. We will never be alone. God will be us always.

This is something we can learn only in exile, so in some strange way this cry of grief is good news, and even if it can never be home, exile is a place of blessing. Blessing or not, of course, I’d still like to see the Cubs win a series.

©2010, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

Crazy Love (Luke 15:1-10)

16th Sunday after Pentecost
Luke 15:1-10
September 12, 2010

Crazy Love

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

It has been a strange week. While our national economy continues to stumble along, gaining ground not nearly quickly enough, and national unemployment hovers just under ten percent (not counting the underemployed and those so discouraged they have stopped looking for work), the national media focused its attention on—wait for it—a Christian lunatic named Terry Jones who called for burning of copies of the Qur’an yesterday. First he was going to burn the Qur’an. Then he suspended the Qur’an burning, claiming to have worked out a deal with Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the leader of the organization that plans to build an Islamic community center in lower Manhattan, to build it further way from the site of the World Trade Center. Then he cancelled all plans to burn the Qur’an.

I have this to say about Mr. Jones. He is a little man with little ideas and a little heart. He is unable to distinguish between the Voice of God and any hateful notion that pops into his head. His fifteen minutes have expired.

But what shall we say about a world in which his ravings are taken seriously, a world in which the media give him an international pulpit, a world in which his words spur civil unrest, a world in which some—including the President of the United States—feel they must publicly condemn his plans, while others—who have been vocally anti-Islamic—distance themselves lest they their anti-Islamic statements be viewed in the bad light cast by Mr. Jones?

But this is the same world as it was back in June before the world became aware of Mr. Jones’s babblings. This is the same world in which religious tolerance, to say nothing of religious acceptance or even appreciation, is the exception to the rule. There are many ways of approving of what we do and disapproving what others do. Some of those ways are obvious and ugly, like Mr. Jones’s. Others are sophisticated and elegant, like mine.

This is not a new problem.

Jesus, as you may remember from last week, had warned his listeners about the high cost of being a follower of his and urged them to consider carefully before committing themselves. He finished with a common phrase of his: “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!”

Our text picks up with the words, “Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to [Jesus].” It was precisely what Jesus had asked for, but that didn’t make everyone happy. It didn’t make the Pharisees and scribes happy. These were people like me whose ways of disapproving of others were sophisticated and elegant and they were grumbling about the company that Jesus was keeping. If he was welcoming “sinners” and sharing meals with them, what kind of authority could he possibly have?

So Jesus told three stories that are unique to Luke’s gospel, stories we call parables. Parables are sketches of ordinary characters, situations or events. But they are sketches which when held up against ordinary life cause us to ask that deeply theological question, “Huh?” In these three cases the parables achieve their effect by sketching pictures that are illogical to the point of absurdity.

Unfortunately, our reading for today only contains two of the three stories, probably because if it included all three it would be too long. I’m not going to try to fix that. Instead we’ll look at the first two stories and you’ll get the idea and I’ll leave the story of the Prodigal Son to you to work out as an exercise.

The first story then is about a shepherd who had a hundred sheep. One of them wandered off as sheep do. So, the story says, the man left the ninety-nine sheep and went in search of the one who had wandered off. “Which one of you,” Jesus asked, “having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?” And the answer, of course, is, “No one!” No one would abandon ninety-nine sheep and go looking for the imbecile that had gotten lost. No one would do that. It wouldn’t make any economic sense at all. Retrieving sheep is what you have dogs for. If a sheep has wandered away, the shepherd needs better dogs. You can’t fix that problem by leaving incompetent dogs in charge of the sheep while you go in search of one lost sheep.

Nevertheless the story that Jesus tells is of a shepherd who throws financial wisdom to the winds in a foolish effort to find a lost sheep. Jesus tells an entirely implausible tale and then compares the joy of this foolish shepherd to the joy in heaven over the repentance of one sinner.

Then Jesus tells another story, a less familiar story, about a woman who had ten silver coins, lost one of them, and swept her house looking for the coin until she found it. This seems less unlikely until we look at the story more closely. The coins in question were drachmas. The drachma was a silver coin in circulation in the eastern part of the Roman Empire that was worth enough for three people to subsist on for about two days. The woman’s ten drachma stash was worth about a thousand or perhaps twelve hundred dollars.

A woman with a thousand dollars cash was not, repeat not, the sort of woman who knew how to use a broom. She would have been a wealthy woman. She would have had slaves to do her sweeping for her. Upon discovering that a drachma was missing she would have begun interrogating her slaves to find out who had stolen it!

Nevertheless, the story that Jesus tells is of an upper class woman who tosses aside her social standing, humiliating herself in front of her household, in order to find a lost coin. Jesus tells an entirely implausible tale and then compares the joy of this self-abasing woman to the joy in the presence of the angels of God over the repentance of one sinner.

We would not behave as the people in these stories did. We would cut our losses or start investigations, but this is not how things are done in heaven. We aren’t told this directly, but we are left to assume that God does things differently. God, faced with the choice of tending to the ninety-nine who are where they belong and are doing what they are supposed to be doing, foolishly abandons them and goes searching for the one lost sheep. God does not stop until the lost sheep is found. God will then rejoice over the one found sheep. God, faced with a lost coin grabs a broom and begin sweeping. God will not stop until the drachma is found. God will then rejoice over the one found coin. God is crazy. And God’s love is crazy, too.

The tax collectors and sinners who heard Jesus’ message heard him say to them something like this: It doesn’t matter who you are. It doesn’t matter where you’ve been. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done. It doesn’t matter how lost you are. God will hunt you down. God will never give up on you. God will find you. God will bring you home. This is God’s greatest joy. God’s love for you is crazy love.

That’s pretty good news, isn’t it? Especially if we had thought that God wouldn’t love us until we had gotten ourselves fixed up, patched up, and cleaned up. “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!”

Of course, it wasn’t just the tax collectors and sinners who were there to hear Jesus. The text says “So Jesus told them this parable,” but it doesn’t tell us who “them” are. It could mean just the tax collectors and sinners, but the sentence about the grumbling Pharisees and scribes is closer, so I’m thinking that maybe Jesus’ primary audience wasn’t the tax collectors and sinners, though they are welcome to over-hear what he is saying. No, he’s talking first of all to the Pharisees and scribes, those sophisticated and elegant folks (you know, the people like me) who looked down their noses at others whose religion was not so genteel.

This is where I start to squirm. This is where I begin to realize that Jesus has been talking to me. I have my ways of judging other people’s religion, but I have to admit the possibility that my ways are not God’s ways. In fact God doesn’t seem to be much like me at all. God loves the unlovable with crazy love. Me not so much. God’s love is foolish and uncalculating. Mine is not. God’s love is self-humiliating. Mine is not. God’s love is prodigal (there’s your hint for the third story!). Mine is not.

It doesn’t matter to God who someone is, where they’ve been, what they’ve done. All those things matter to me, but not to God. God isn’t like me. I’m not like God.

But as I live into these crazy stories about a God who loves with crazy love, there is every reason to expect that this crazy love won’t seem so crazy after all. As I live into these stories about God’s crazy love, there is every reason to expect that I’ll go a little crazy, too, and more and more I’ll love with God’s crazy love. I might even find it possible to love Terry Jones, instead of despising him the way I do. And then there will be joy in the presence of the angels of God over one more sinner who repents.

©2010, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

Sticker Shock (Luke 14:25-33)

15th Sunday after Pentecost
September 5, 2010

Sticker Shock

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

Our cocker spaniel Angus is a spoiled dog with many toys. He has a thick rope for playing tug-a-war, several objects of different sizes for playing fetch and—perhaps his favorite—a thing called a Kong. For Angus it is nearly the perfect toy. It’s made of hard rubber—Angus will shred nearly anything else in short order. It’s an irregular shape so it bounces unpredictably. It’s hollow so that you can put dog biscuits inside and occupy him for hours trying to get them out. Like I say, Angus is a spoiled dog with many toys.

Angus has a problem, though: no opposable thumbs. A dog with more than one toy is a worried dog, because of the lack of opposable thumbs.

We don’t have that problem. We have opposable thumbs. We can carry two toys at the same time. We can even defend a toy without having to let go of it. Dogs can’t do that. We can also use our marvelous hands to build boxes, small boxes to hold our toys and big boxes to hold our small boxes.

We can even convert our big bulky toys into money which long ago was copper, silver or gold. So, you see, instead of having big bulky toys scattered all over the place, we could have compact money that we could keep in one very heavy box that was easy to watch and hard to carry off. More recently we began using little green pieces of paper that were even handier than precious metals. Now we use information composed of digital zeroes and ones that we store in mainframe computers and can move around at the speed of lightning. In whatever form, money is easier to watch and keep track of than toys, but money can be turned into toys anytime and anywhere we want.

But we have something even more powerful than opposable thumbs or even mainframe computers to keep track of what belongs to us. We have language. We have a simple word that does the trick: “mine.” Like most of our really good words “mine” is short. It’s also one of the first words that we learn. We do that because we recognize—even as we are just learning how to talk—that the words “mine” and “my” are powerful words that powerful people are constantly using to frustrate our desires and that, if we are going to make our way in the world, we had better master them.

We learn them early and then we set out to use these words to map the universe. We cart a teddy bear around with us, one that’s been sharing our bed. “Mine,” we announce. Mom and Dad beam proudly. “That’s right, dear. It’s yours,” they say. Cool. They don’t realize at that moment that what they are witnessing is not simply a little triumph in language, but an attempted takeover of the world.

Big sister’s cell phone is next. It’s brightly colored, makes funny noises. She certainly gives it plenty of attention which must mean that it’s a good thing to have. Plus, it might taste good. So we use our new-found power and make a grab. “Mine,” we assert triumphantly.

Sis disagrees loudly and Dad unfairly sides with her. “No,” he says, “this belongs to your sister. You must not touch it.” We promptly let everyone know that this is the wrong answer.

And so it goes. We discover that there are three kinds of things in the world: the things that are mine, the things that are not mine, and things along the boundary between mine and not-mine that are contested in some way. “Mine” is a measure of who I am and how important I am in the scheme of things. “Mine” is sometimes a tool and sometimes a weapon but it is always powerful.

We all use “mine.” I suppose that makes us all “miners.” But we don’t stop using “mine” when we grow up, so minors aren’t the only miners.

“Mine” isn’t the only word we use this way, just the first. We say “my” and “mine.” We also say “our” and “ours” and that’s even more powerful, since there are a lot more of us in “we” than there are in “I.”

We use these words carelessly and sometimes even violently. Some men say, “my wife,” and then they assume that they are allowed to beat her when she frustrates them. Some adults say, “my children,” and then they think they can treat their kids however they want. We say “our planet” and think we can do whatever we want with it and that we’re accountable to no one for how we live here. We say “our territory” or “our way of life” and use that as a warrant for invasion and war.

Against that sort of thinking we in the church assert that “my” and “mine,” “our” and “ours” are not a license. They signify a covenant relationship. We didn’t notice that when we were fifteen months old. All we noticed were the privileges that were contained in the word “mine.” We didn’t notice the responsibilities and obligations.

We know all this, but it’s still a shock to see that “mine” is a barrier to following Jesus.

Unless we “hate” or father and mother and wife (and apparently Jesus is only talking to men?) and let’s add “or husband” and brothers and sisters and even life itself, we cannot be Jesus’ disciple. Not “may not” or “should not”—“cannot.”

Let’s dispose of the word “hate.” This is a case of what the scholars call “Semitic hyperbole.” It was a feature of language among the peoples of the ancient near east that they routinely used extreme exaggeration. Hate in this case doesn’t mean the deep-seated animosity that we call hate. But it does mean that family must be placed lower on the scale of value than being a disciple.

And we also need to remember that “family” isn’t a constant. Family means different things in different times and places. Family for Jesus’ hearers was their most important source of identity and power in the world. People were known as “son of this person” or “daughter of that.” Extended family was the basic unit of a community. Your extended family was how you made a living, how you defended what was yours. It determined whom you could marry and what sort of work you could do. Jesus’ followers were supposed to repudiate all that.

Jesus then told two parables both of which urge us to consider carefully what is involved in following Jesus and to decide upfront whether we can afford it. Maybe we can and maybe we can’t. But it’s better not to start to build a tower at all than it is to lay a foundation and then discover that we don’t have the resources to finish and leave ourselves open to the ridicule of all who see a monument to our lack of foresight. It’s better not to pick a fight with our neighbor if don’t think we can win. Better to make the best peace we can and get on with our lives.

“So therefore,” Jesus tells us, “none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” These are very hard words.

When people become members of the United Methodist Church we ask them if they will support the church by their prayers, their presence, their gifts, their services and their witness, but we don’t ask them to give up all their possessions. We can hardly ask them to do that if we haven’t. And I can hardly ask you to do that if I haven’t. If I claimed to have given up all my possessions, you wouldn’t believe me. I’ve already told you that we arrived here with eight and half tons of stuff, not counting our two cars and everything we could cram into them. Some of you who have seen just how much stuff we have are sure to tell others.

So here we are. Jesus tells us that we can’t be disciples unless we have given up all our possessions. I haven’t done it. You haven’t done it. We can’t ask anyone else to do it either. So where do we go from here?

There is a way forward, but first let’s agree that we’re not going to soften what Jesus says. He said, “None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” Let’s assume that he meant it. Let’s also assume that as followers of Jesus (even if we’re following from a distance) we are living in this direction. And in fact we will give up all our possessions, whether we do it willingly or not. When we die, if not beforehand, everything we own will fall into someone else’s hands. We will not appear before our Maker carrying anything at all, our wonderful opposable thumbs notwithstanding.

So the question in front of us is not, How do we avoid giving up all our possessions? but, How do we live toward that goal?

Let’s conduct a thought experiment. Let’s imagine that you are unable to pay your mortgage. Some of you may not have to imagine that and, as we all know, far too many in our nation are living this experiment as a reality. Imagine that you are unable to pay your mortgage. Let’s imagine further that the mortgage holder is someone you can actually talk to, say, a local bank. So you go to the bank and you say to the loan officer, “I’m sorry, but I’ve lost my job and I cannot pay my mortgage and I cannot even guarantee that I will be able to pay.”

Now for the biggest leap of imagination. Imagine that the loan officer says, “I don’t need a house and you and your family need a place to live, so here’s what we’ll do. You deed the house back to us. We will mark your loan as paid. Then we will write a lease so that you can stay in the house. We will write the amount of the lease down by the value of your work to us as a caretaker of our property.”

Pretty far-fetched, huh? But notice how the relationships among you, the house and land, and the bank would have changed. Although from the outside nothing had changed, you would no longer own the property. You would have moved from ownership to stewardship. You could no longer say “mine” when referring to it.

I’m convinced that it’s this word “mine” that is the heart of what keeps us following Jesus in the way that we would want. Possessions are just stuff. The world is full of stuff. As Genesis tells us, stuff is good. It’s not stuff that keeps us from the level of discipleship that we want to have. It’s our relationship to it that does that. It’s calling it “mine.” It’s that little pronoun that keeps from being the kind of followers of Jesus that we want to be.

What we need as we live toward “giving up all our possessions” is a strategy for containing and restraining the force of the pronoun “mine.”

The first thing that we can do is to give away a lot of our income. We can give it to God’s work in the church or we can give it to people who need it more than we do. Whether it’s a tithe or not doesn’t matter. I think that the tithe can be a kind of reality check: it’s hard to be making six figures, giving away fifty dollars a week, and calling ourselves generous. But the point is not to give away ten percent and then regard the rest as ours. The point is to give away a lot; our tradition tells us that this is perhaps the best way to loosen the grip of our possessions.

We can ask ourselves hard questions about what we really need to have. A friend of mine went for a retreat at a monastery. The guestmaster showed him his room, told him when meals were served in the dining room and when the monks gathered for their prayer services through the day. “If there is anything else you need,” the monk concluded with a smile, “ask us and we’ll show you how to live without it.”

And last of all we can practice living with the things that have our names on them as if they did not. We can regard our legal ownership as stewardship. We can be God’s stewards and agents. Then we can ask questions like, If I regarded this house or this car or this paper clip as belonging to God, what would I do with it? How would I live toward it?

And what does this mean for the First United Methodist Church of Decorah, Iowa? What is the portrait of the church in this text? The church in this text, I think, is that community of people who, in the midst of a culture in which ownership is everything, have called the value of ownership itself into question. We don’t have it all figured out. But if we struggle to follow Jesus it’s not because we don’t think he’s worth following. It’s because everything around us is covered with Velcro and so, it seems, are our fingers and, yes, even our marvelous opposable thumbs. The church in this text is the community of people who will encourage us in the direction of getting free. We’ll get there. With God’s grace we’ll get free, even if it takes a lifetime.

©2010, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.