A sermon from the Rev. Linda Mackie-Griggs for Pentecost 18

And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly.

If the words that describe your feelings about today’s Gospel lesson include, “frustrated”, “shocked”, “stumped”, or “baffled”, you are in good company.

All of these words were used by scholars who wrote commentaries on this passage. It seems to fly in the face of everything we understand of proper moral/ethical behavior. Why would dishonesty in business dealings be commended by Jesus? How is it possible to be faithful with dishonest wealth? Just the disjointed nature of the narrative—a puzzling story followed by a series of aphorisms—this belies Luke’s usual reputation as a fluid master storyteller.

There is no getting around the fact that this is a parable about money. Whereas in last week’s sermon Fr. Mark talked of Jesus being political,today we see Jesus focusing on economics. Look at where this story nestles within Luke’s Gospel: First, in the verse immediately following this passage, Luke writes: “The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all this, and they ridiculed him.” Further along in the chapter, we see a parable about a rich man who suffers in Hades after having ignored a poor man at the gate of his home.

And finally, the parable that comes right before today’s story is the Parable of the Prodigal Son, which is all about God’s economy of mercy and forgiveness; a kingdom vision of generosity and prodigious welcome. So from context alone, we can see that this is an invitation to look at money through the eyes of the Kingdom. Which brings us back to the original question, all in red capital letters, how in the world does the kingdom vision connect to a dishonest manager? It just doesn’t make sense.

Yet. Think for a minute about Jesus’ relationship with money. Think, for example, about his calling of Zacchaeus the tax collector. When Zacchaeus chose to follow his Lord he immediately rejected the economic system from which he had made a dishonest living, saying that he would give half of his wealth to the poor and repay fourfold the amount that he had cheated from people. The Jesus that Zacchaeus follows is the same Jesus who will rail in fury as he overturns the tables of the moneychangers in the Temple. The same Jesus who blesses the poor and urges his followers to store up treasure in heaven where moth and rust will not corrupt nor thieves break in and steal. The Jesus who says that where your treasure is there your heart is also.

Now think about what connects these images to each other, and to what we hear today. It’s all about inversion. Turning things turned upside-down. The ways of the Kingdom are not the ways of the status quo; of the principalities and powers; of the unjust economic priorities. It’s all subverted in the Kingdom.

That’s what the Gospel does. A manager, responsible for his wealthy employer’s property, squanders it; we don’t know how—but we do know that to squander is to scatter all over the place—you can just picture this guy throwing money around—and we know that because of it, he was about to be fired. And his thought process was all about making sure that even if he wasn’t in his boss’s good graces

he would still have a few favors that he could call upon in the lean times: “…so that, when I am dismissed as manager people will welcome me into their homes.” So he has his customers alter their statements of indebtedness to the master: One cuts his debt by half, the other by twenty percent. This seems to be adding insult to injury. The manager has already squandered his master’s property and now doubles down by unapologetically doing it again. And of course, we expect that the master will be furious to see his property being treated so cavalierly.So we are stunned when the master commends the manager for his shrewdness. 

Many discussions of this story hinge on this point, saying that Jesus is exhorting his hearers to pursue the treasures of heaven with the zeal and shrewdness of the manager. This is a fair interpretation; why should we not be shrewd and crafty and creative as we seek the riches of the Kingdom?

But perhaps we can go a little deeper. Maybe it’s not just about what we go after; it’s about what we leave behind.So here’s a question: Under what circumstance is it commendable to treat earthly wealth with abandon; to hold it as lightly as the manager does? Jesus’ paradigm for money is just such a circumstance; a paradigm where earthly wealth and security are weighted differently from the riches of the Kingdom.

Scott Bader-Saye points out a small but significant detail in translation that may be helpful here. He notes that there are two different references to ‘home’ in this passage: The first, that I just mentioned, is where the manager wants to be welcomed into the homes—the houses—of his hoped-for benefactors. The second reference is where Jesus says, “And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone they may welcome you into the eternal homes.” According to Bader-Saye the word here for ‘homes’ can also be translated as ‘tents.’ This is the kind of home that represents pilgrimage. It represents a transformative journey of learning to let go of things that possess us. When Jesus admonishes us to ‘be faithful with dishonest wealth—or mammon—might he be asking us to hold wealth as lightly, and maybe to even to squander it as the manager does, but not for the purpose of the kind of false security of possessions; but instead to gain the true security of faith in the God who provides for his beloved flock? So this isn’t just about treasures in Heaven; it’s about living in such a way that we help the Kingdom break in right now.

This is not an easy parable. Sometimes it feels to me like the biblical equivalent of looking at an MC Escher print of one of those staircases that endlessly seems to be going upstairs and downstairs at the same time. It is puzzling, and sometimes frustrating to wrap our minds around these twisty images.It can also be frustrating and puzzling, in contemporary consumer culture, to wrap our minds around a Kingdom vision that prioritizes a prodigal attitude toward money.

A very timely article appeared in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago. In the regular ‘Your Money’ column, Ron Lieber asked, ‘What if You Weren’t Afraid?’, and Four More Money Questions from Readers.

Each of the responses revealed what people had learned about letting go, not simply of money, though that was part of it, but letting go of external expectations of material success, and focusing on the core values of generosity

and of understanding that living abundantly isn’t about an abundance of things. One woman in particular stood out in Lieber’s story. She had grown up learning from her Depression-Era parents that when it came to finances, she should always, always hedge against scarcity. She decided that she wanted to derive more joy from spending her money and discovered that spending it on herself wasn’t nearly as delightful as spending it on others. Of her newfound perspective of her finances, she observed, she would rather ‘dote on people’ because thrive is the root word of thrift’.

So Jesus hasn’t asked us to jettison our ethics after all. He’s invited all of his children to thrive; to jettison instead the mentality of an economy of scarcity; and to live every day as if on pilgrimage; lightly, creatively and generously, helping to make an earthly reality of a Kingdom vision of God’s prodigious, squandering grace.

Text and context

In Table Talk I noted the tension inherent for us in reading the gospel accounts of Jesus relationship with the Pharisees – the product of a later period – back into the time of Jesus ministry. What by the time of the Evangelists had become a deep communal animosity between emerging Rabbinic Judaism and fledgling Christianity, had been in Jesus own lifetime simply a legitimate disputational relationship between advocates of a progressive approach to Torah interpretation. Both Jesus and the Pharisees drew from strands within the prophetic tradition to arrive at different conclusions about the nature of the Kingdom of God – the reign of shalom. Remember the Talmudic saying – two Jews, three opinions – at least.

Luke 15 opens with a continuation of the running dispute between Jesus and the Pharisees over the consequences of different approaches to the ritual proprieties of table fellowship. Jesus’ was willing to eat and drink with a general category of ‘sinners’ – for him, an expression of the open invitational nature of the kingdom. For tax collectors, we must read collaborators with the occupation, and for various other sinners, we must read those ritually unclean because of their choice of lifestyle or because of their inability due to circumstances to follow the strict observances of the Law of Moses. As a result, Luke tells us that many of these people began to flock to Jesus; Let’s hear Luke:

Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. 2 And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” 3 So he told them this parable:…

Parables political statements of the kingdom

In chapter 15 we have three parables concerning the good shepherd, the diligent woman, and perhaps one of the two most famous of parables, that of the prodigal son. What’s distinctive about these three parables is that they only appear in Luke’s gospel and therefore, we can deduce, go to the heart of Luke’s understanding of Jesus’ politics.

I use the word politics deliberately because Luke presents Jesus with a highly political message, one the places him in the direct line of the Hebrew prophets. A definition of politics is activities and attitudes concerning governance or government. Luke understood Jesus to be political because the whole way Luke presents him in his gospel reveals Jesus being deeply concerned with the politics i.e. the activities and attitudes, values and expectations at the heart of his understanding of the kingdom of God.

The lectionary offers the possibility of stopping at 15:10 or continuing on to include the parable of the prodigal son, which should be renamed the parable of the forgiving father. I choose to stop at verse 10 because the prodigal son is such a dramatic parable it tends to suck all the air out of chapter 15 leaving the parables of the good shepherd and the diligent woman  – somewhat deflated.

What interests me is the way the parable of the diligent woman is sandwiched between two parables in which men are the focus. The diligent woman is usually noted en route – in passing as it were, between the images of the good shepherd and those of the father and his two sons.

Luke’s presentation of Jesus’s politics

One of the characteristics of Luke’s view of Jesus’ politics of the kingdom is Jesus’ concern for women and children. More specifically, within the categories of women and children, Jesus is particularly concerned for widows and orphans. Widows and orphans come last in the politics of patriarchal societies, but first, it seems, in the politics of God’s kingdom.

The diligence of the woman who turns her house upside down in what amounts to the spring-clean of spring-cleans in search for her lost coin speaks to me in two ways, one general, the other specific.

Beginning with the general message, this parable presents an image of diligence.To be diligent means to exert constant and earnest effort to accomplish what is undertaken. Diligence requires a persistent exertion of body or mind. In my experience, diligence is a key quality displayed by women because diligence is a quality that is particular to the arena of everyday life.

Diligence and gender

Diligence is not heroic. Its practice is not dramatic. Because diligence has a quiet quality its practice goes largely unnoticed. Diligence involves an attention to the details of relationship. It is a taking care in ordinary everyday circumstances. Diligence is a characteristic of the feminine principle in the spiritual life. It’s a gentle competence in ordinary things. It’s an unsung characteristic of discipleship.

In the politics of gender, in my experience diligence is a quality more often displayed by women than by men. Even in the modern world where the gender divides of traditional societies have been greatly eroded, the parable of the diligent woman symbolizes the many women’s lives of service to relationship building and nurture. Whether this is in the traditional areas of service to others in the family or now more commonly in areas of service to wider communal, national, and international political life, diligence and service as gentle, yet determined competence strongly shape women’s experience in ways that are less evident the lives of men. Men are less focused on nurturing relationship beyond those of mutual advantage. Competitiveness and the drive of ambition are more culturally acceptable in men. In an age of apparent gender equality, many Americans still seem to have a cultural aversion to women seeking power.

None of us needs reminding that in our media-driven world where news is now entertainment, diligence is not sexy, it is not sound bite-y. It mostly goes unappreciated in the clashing and discordant cacophony of the politics of bread and circuses[1]. As a society can it be true that we have lost our appreciation for diligence in public service as well as private life – preferring instead the peacock display of self-serving egotism?

Diligence and community

I have already noted that diligence is a quality of the spiritual life, and though many of us chafe against this, it is so. My specific observation from this parable can be applied to the challenges facing the parish community in which I live and work. In many aspects of community life, the pace dramatically picks up after Labor Day. We face into a new program year – but for what purpose? Is our purpose only that of maintenance; keeping things nicely ticking over, or is it more than this. As I discern it, the challenge my parish community faces is the need to grow.

In the culture of populist American religion, growth is a sign of success. I am not interested in growth as success. I am concerned with something more fundamental – growth as a sign of becoming more fit for purpose. My community needs to grow because growth is the indication that we are moving from the passivity of being a so-called welcoming community, to the magnetism of being an inviting community. I believe the diligence exemplified in the parable of the diligent woman expresses the persistent exertion of body and mind in pursuit of a recovery of that which has become lost to us. Diligence, the perseverance to do what needs to be done with the resolution of heart, mind, and body, is the quality we most need to mirror for one another.

Politics of the kingdom

In the politics of Jesus, as Luke presents them, God does not welcome us into the kingdom, God invites us into the kingdom. We are not to wait within our walls and smile sweetly to those who venture through the doors, although in many parish communities to do this is to take a much-needed step closer to the kingdom. God sends us out into our lives, the lives we live in the world among friends, neighbors, and colleagues – sends us out in order to invite them in.

Invite them in for what purpose, to simply mimic the signs of success? No! The invitation is to engage in the struggle to realize in our own time and place the expectations of the kingdom of God. We are they who are called to embody the future hope of the kingdom as if it is already a reality. And we invite others – into solidarity with us – as together we fight to realize the expectations of the kingdom; expectations of inclusion, justice, and peace.

[1] A phrase used by a Roman writer to deplore the declining heroism of Romans after the Roman Republic ceased to exist and the Roman Empire began: “Two things only the people anxiously desire — bread and circuses.” The government kept the Roman populace happy by distributing free food and staging huge spectacles.

Around 55 AD, from prison, Paul wrote a short letter to his friend and wealthy supporter, Philemon. Philemon seems to have been the lynchpin in the Christian community in Colossae for it is in his house that the church meets – a fact that gives us an indication of Philemon’s social standing within the community. 

Paul’s letter to Philemon reveals him at his most vulnerable, most loving and self-effacing, yet also persuasive – in short, at his most skillfully adroit. The letter to Philemon addresses some very sharp tensions, indeed. Paul is asking Philemon to step well beyond the boundaries of his socially conditioned imagination on a particular matter. His is a worldview conditioned by an unconscious acceptance of the institution of slavery.

Paul is making a difficult ask of Philemon. In doing so, he challenges Philemon, tests his fidelity to the cause while at the same time avoids alienating a man upon whom he relies for vital material support in the Colossian mission. This is every parish priest’s nightmare and we could do well to study Paul’s skilfulness in his letter to Philemon.

The story

Most of us know the broad outline of the story. Onesimus, a name that means useful is a runaway slave belonging to Philemon. Runaway slave! Though we live at a distance of 150 years from the legal institution of slavery in the US, we can still viscerally register the danger explicit in the plight of a runaway slave. A slave, to begin with, has no rights and is totally dependent upon the good will of his master. To run away is to forfeit life, or at the very least limb. Onesimus’ good fortune is to have run away to Paul, for whom he has become a much-loved son through baptism.

Paul’s letter to Philemon was often appealed to by the defenders of slavery on the basis that Paul clearly seems to disapprove of run-away slaves. For why else would he have returned Onesimus to Philemon?

Yet, if we read Paul’s words and listen to his tone, his intention behind returning Onesimus is not about restoring Philemon’s property rights. He desires reconciliation. The former slave and slave owner are for Paul – now brothers in Christ. We note Paul skillfully weaving this message.

Playing on the meaning of Onesimus’ name- useful, Paul bolsters his request pointing out that in becoming useful to himself while imprisoned, Onesimus is once again: useful both to you and to me. Paul reminds Philemon that in sending Onesimus back to him, he is actually sending him his own heart, with the implication that he had better treat Onesimus kindly.

I so admire the way Paul navigates the tensions inherent in his request. On the one hand, he shows his love for Philemon. He honors him as his co-worker and there is such love in his tone as he addresses not only Philemon but others in the house church at Colossae. Mindful of his dependence on Philemon’s support for the work in Colossae -for Paul has no wish to offend an important supporter – he subtly links acceptance of Onesimus with acceptance of himself. Hear the words of this wily apostle:

….though I am bold enough in Christ to command you to do your duty, yet I would rather appeal to you on the basis of love—and I, Paul, do this as an old man, and now also as a prisoner of Christ Jesus. … I preferred to do nothing without your consent, in order that your good deed might be voluntary and not something forced. Perhaps this is the reason he was separated from you for a while, so that you might have him back forever, no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother—especially to me but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord. So if you consider me your partner, welcome him as you would welcome me.  

What is Philemon to do?

This is a heartfelt request of a man Paul honours and loves as a generous co-worker on behalf of a young man Paul has come to love as a son. We see not only the full range of his rhetorical skills employed, we also experience Paul with his heart open. Yet, Paul is still Paul. As supplicant, he offers to make good –charge it to my account– any wrong Philemon feels he has experienced by Onesimus’ absconding. For Paul, supplication can be endured only for so long. He can’t resist reminding Philemon of the order in which things really stand. Just when Philemon might feel he has the whip hand (pun intended), Paul reminds him that when it comes to who is indebted to whom: I say nothing about your owing me even your own self – a less than subtle reminder and then a return once more to smiles as Paul ends with:

Yes, brother, let me have this benefit from you in the Lord! Refresh my heart in Christ. Confident of your obedience, I am writing to you, knowing that you will do even more than I say. 

The Lectionary ends the section at verse 21 which is a pity for we miss the explicit threat in verse 22 where to add for good measure Paul tells Philemon to prepare a guest room for him:…for I trust that through your prayers I shall be granted to return to you all. 

What has the letter to Philemon to say to us?

This letter represents one of the most skillful and eloquent challenges to the status quo, and as such applies as much to the status quo in our time as it does to that in Paul’s. As we look around us at the world of 2016 we see how we have fallen prey to a delusion that other people’s minds are changed through force of argument. The current deafening cacophony of the culture wars, the hue-and-cry in the battle between left and right result from each side’s inability to hear the other. We are reminded of the Englishman’s version of speaking French – just speak louder.

The right believes that it can vanquish the opposition with insult and blame, stoking the forces of fear and division. While the left marshals the forces of moral superiority in the hope of humiliating its opponents, forcing an admission from them that they are stupid as they slink off to the dunce’s corner. We live in a culture of deafness where ideas and debate fall into the silence of a vacuum created when the importance of forging relationships is so despised.

How do you change someone’s mind when they have yet to glimpse the possibility of another way of viewing the world? Paul’s approach is simple. He does not rely on mounting a protest campaign. He does not threaten nor cajole. Neither does he belittle and humiliate while haughtily parading his moral superiority. He gently reminds Philemon of what they hold in common, i.e the mind of Christ. He invites him to take the next step into a new awareness of what that means, namely that among those made new in Christ the old distinction between slave and free no longer pertains. For Paul the Pharisee, Christ is the fulfillment of the ancient Hebrew encounter with a God who delivers all people from bondage.

Paul does not collude with Onesimus’ escape. He recognizes that the consequence of running away has to be faced. Paul does not say: Philemon because there is no such thing as slave or free within the community of those who belong to Christ, your claims on Onesimus are null and void.  He models for Philemon what the new order looks like:  Philemon, I  trust you will enjoy a new relationship with Onesimus like the one I already enjoy with him. Paul’s appeal to his relationship with Philemon is a first step only. One more step is required. Paul knows that persuasion is only effective when it is modeled.

Without the presumption of relationship and the ability to model the behavior you seek from another, whether you issue a command or employ gentle persuasion, neither will achieve the desired goal.

The divisions in our society can only be healed when we reach across the divides recognizing that the old order is ended and we can no longer be content with business as usual. Our baptism requires us to be transformed by a higher set of values than those embraced by the world.

Can we take this to heart? If so, then we know what we have to do as we challenge the prevalence of the spirit of contempt. Contempt for those who disagree with us corrodes the possibly for forging a culture where relationship affords the opportunity for disputation. In last week’s sermon post I wrote about table fellowship providing a context for necessary disputation. Disputation is an important element of a healthy social debate. Creative disputation requires a sense of commonality, a sense of connection afforded by relationship. It’s the current lack of this that results in disputation being simply a chorus of the deaf.

In Paul’s letter to Philemon, we see how difficult issues can be handled within a presumption of relationship. The absence of relationships across social and political divides prevents us from seeing that we are all in this mess, together. Only through the forging of relationships of mutual concern will we be able to face the difficult tensions of the age; an age which requires us to risk exposure to one another in order to craft a new vision of our common future.

I am realizing more and more how lucky I am to have been raised at the time when families still had a regular pattern of eating together at the kitchen table. Growing up we ate together in the evenings and in my earlier childhood my mother still kept to the custom of Sunday lunch together, although this was something that began to fall by the wayside as my sisters and I grew older. Yet, the template of experience of common meals forms a significant experience in my socialization.

Common to families like mine, at least one parent usually mother, was always anxious to ensure that her children had good table manners and knew how to use a knife and fork properly so that we would neither shame her or ourselves in public. To this day I still cast my eye around restaurants to note how oddly some people manipulate their eating utensils. Traveling this summer with our extended family both Al and I continued to fulfill our grandfatherly role of remonstrating with our 11-year-old granddaughter about the poor quality of her table manners. A common exhortation from us was: Claire, remember spoon to the mouth not mouth to the spoon!

 Table fellowship- Pharisees and Jesus

These are the strange associations that come to mind as I hear Luke’s account of Jesus’ behavior at the dinner party of a wealthy and important Pharisee. Jesus seems to have spent a good deal of time attending dinner parties. So much so that it led to the accusation of his being a drunkard. He was much criticized by his Pharisee friends for eating in some unsavory company in the homes of tax collectors, and in the company of prostitutes and other sinners of the like.

Luke is the writer who gives us the clearest picture of the importance of dinner parties, or to use the proper term, table fellowship in Jesus’ ministry. Yet, as well as eating with the socially outcast Jesus also shares table fellowship in the best Pharisee company.

He knew important Pharisees and was welcome in their homes. It seems likely that his own religious formation owed much to the network of Pharisee scribes responsible for much of the education of village boys. It comes as a surprise for us to learn that Jesus and the Pharisees were natural allies. Among the contentious factions of Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots, and Herodians that contended for power under the Roman occupation the Pharisees and Jesus shared the same religious and political outlook.

The reality was that the Pharisees and Jesus, both represented a progressive approach to the interpretation of scripture. Both Jesus and the Pharisees believed that under the inspiration of the God’s spirit, the scriptures could be interpreted to speak to new situations unforeseen in the original time the text was written down. Both believed that the primary duty was owed towards God.  God remained the primary focus of ultimate allegiance. So long as the legal responsibilities imposed by the foreign occupation, keep the peace and pay your taxes did not directly interfere with the primary allegiance to God, then the maxim render to Caesar etc expressed a tolerable level of practical accommodation. It was among the Pharisees that Jesus may well have encountered the concept of in the world but not of it.

Family disagreements are often the fiercest. Those differences between Jesus and the Pharisees lay in a divergence of interpretation. As the Talmud saying goes: two Jews, three opinions. What lay between Jesus and the Pharisee who had invited him to dinner was a legitimate difference of interpretive vision. This difference in vision led each to different conclusions. For the Pharisees, table fellowship maintained ritual- spiritual purity. In a tainted world of secular and political accommodation and compromise, the purity of table fellowship was a necessary expression of the hope for the coming of God’s kingdom. Pharisees took very seriously their preparedness for the coming of the Messiah. Table fellowship was where they disputed with one another about Torah interpretation, and Jesus seems to have entered into this process with gusto.

For Jesus, table fellowship was an expression of the open-ended inclusiveness that lay at the heart of God’s reign. For Jesus, God’s kingdom was not something to prepare for by remaining careful to guard one’s spiritual identity as a member of a pure Israel. It was rather an invitation to participation. God’s kingdom while still to come was also already here. The realization of the kingdom demanded embracing the prophetic dream of God’s inclusion of all in sundry within the scope of the salvation of Israel. Both Pharisee and Jesus’ interpretations flowed from the richness of Israel’s prophetic tradition. From a common root, different shoots leaf.

We who receive the Gospel in the early decades of the 21^st-century need to know that the disputations between Jesus and the Pharisees, in this instance argued out around the dinner table, were during Jesus’ lifetime legitimate interpretive differences within the larger shared and religiously progressive approach that sought to apply Scripture to the needs of everyday life. It is crucial that we also recognize that by Luke’s time such disputations had evolved and escalated into bitter arguments between competing Rabbinic and Christian communities. Paul Hanson notes that:

this transformation of learned disputation into bitter invective and finally unspeakable violence represents one of the most horrific tragedies of human history.[1]

Jesus’ message to his fellow diners is that humility rather than certainty of election is the core attribute required in relationship with God. For Jesus, table fellowship was a place where connection is made, brokenness is healed, and all invited to participate in God’s rich blessings, regardless of the state of their table manners. Je we take our seat at the bottom of the table, here we will find ourselves sitting beside persons who are not like us and whose table manners may well not come up to our standards.

The Contemporary Challenge

In my anecdotal experience, for many today, eating together around the common table with family or friends is no longer a common routine experience. In a world of food quickly prepared and instantly consumed – on the run as it were – eating becomes an individual activity performed while attending to the endless distractions of TV and social networking. The state of one’s table manners ceases to have any social relevance when eating is no longer a shared experience.

One of the most important spiritual disciplines for us to recover in the kind of world in which we live is the discipline of table fellowship. … We need a recovery of the spiritual significance of what we eat, where we eat, and with whom we eat.[2] 

The real takeaway for me from our recent family holiday is not the memory of Claire’s sketchy table manners but the experience of our enjoying table fellowship together on a daily basis. After three Sunday’s away it is good for me this morning to be present again within the St Martin’s community of family and friends to participate in our Eucharistic table fellowship together. Eucharist is a continual reminder that table fellowship lies at the heart of our Christian life.

In the story from Luke about Jesus at the dinner party of a notable Pharisee the message for me is this: that although it matters how we eat, the really important emphasis is upon with whom we eat.

An issue for our future centers on whether we become a community where to invite others: friends, neighbors, and colleagues to share Eucharist with us – becomes second nature? For many of us this is a tall ask. Perhaps one way to work towards this is to do what many of us still know how to do best. Before inviting others to Jesus, we should invite them to dinner first. 

[1] The Political History of the Bible in America 505-06 Kindle Reader edition

[2] Barry D. Jones dts.edu The Dinner table as a Place of Connection, Brokenness, and Blessing

In the Eucharist, the Book of Common Prayer begins the Lord’s Prayer with the following words:

As our Savior Christ has commanded and taught us, we are bold to say “Our Father”.

It’s easy to read the tone of this as a command, an exhortation to obedience. Yet, taken within a wider context it’s really an invitation, although a rather formal sounding one.

We are being invited to pray as Jesus himself prayed. In giving his disciples this simple form of prayer Jesus invites them into a different kind of relationship with God, the kind of relationship that he enjoyed with God. In short, the Lord’s Prayer is Jesus invitation for us to model our relationship with God on the relationship he shows himself enjoying with God. Through the Lord’s Prayer we are being invited into the life of the Divine Community of the Lover, the Beloved, and the Lovesharer.

Intimacy -Father/Our Father

Our granddaughter Claire will be 11-years old on the 15^th of August. When she was younger, she often referred to her father not simply as daddy, but my daddy.  Hearing Claire utter the words my daddy, produced in me a kind of melting sensation; a sensation carrying the strongest intimations of warmth and intimacy, born of trust and an unquestioning presumption of safety. When Jesus told his disciples: when you pray, say Abba; is my melting experience what Jesus had in mind? Abba most directly translates in English not as father but as daddy or the more adult friendly  papa.  Yet, even when I address God as papa let alone daddy, why is it so hard for me to capture the experience I glimpse that Claire has in relation to her daddy?

This intimation of warmth and the intimacy can only arise from a sense of unquestioned trust and safety. This is the experience Jesus clearly had in mind when he told his disciples: when you pray, say Abba, hallowed be your name.  Like nearly everything Jesus said to his disciples, this would have provoked in them the error message of this does not compute.  Intimacy, affection, and unquestioning trust were not expectations they had when addressing God. For them, God was the God-of-our Fathers, the Creator of the universe. 2,000 years separate us, and yet we are not so different from them in our expectations when addressing God in prayer.

Paradoxically, I feel more comfortable with a little distance between God and me. Temperamentally, I am more comfortable addressing God as our Father, rather than as my Papa and to be truthful, Papa leaves me feeling a little silly. Maybe that’s because I am an Episcopalian? There is something in our religious DNA the balks at too much intimacy. It’s our Cranmerian legacy, the courtier bishop Thomas Cramer addressing God in the BCP in the same tones he approached Henry VIII. How can you hallow, which means to honor and respect as holy the name of God, if you call God daddy?  This quality of intimacy is the very thing our parched souls cry out for? It is this quality of love and trust that Jesus shockingly holds out to us as the fruit of prayer that always begins with, My Papa- holy is your name.

Vision – Your Kingdom come – your will be done

Jesus believed himself to be the embodiment of God’s in-breaking kingdom. In his first teaching in the synagogue at Nazareth recorded in Luke 4:18 he proclaims the vision of Isaiah and tells them that: 

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, … 

The notion of the in-breaking of the kingdom plays havoc with our sense of time, for it is both now and yet also something yet to come. We are all acutely aware from the evidence around us that in so many ways our world is still waiting for this vision to become a reality. When we pray these words we recognize that in Jesus the Kingdom of God, the age-old dream of the prophets of Israel, is already inaugurated, yet not fulfilled. Our task as Christians is to fight for the kingdom’s fulfillment in our own time and place as we pray: your kingdom come, you will be done on earth, dear Lord.

Confidence – Give us today our daily bread

In the time-span between the inauguration and fulfillment of the kingdom, we journey through a wilderness where there is no sustenance apart from what God gives us. Our Christian life unfolds within the New Exodus experience, evoking the memory of the Israelite’s dependency on the manna God provided in the wilderness of Sinai. Give us today our daily bread becomes both a personal and social request as we pray that we will receive that which is sufficient for our needs. For it is together we journey towards the Promised Land. In the wilderness, we pray give us not me that which is necessary unto this day. The potency of this request lies in the fact that it is intrinsically an inclusive one.

The rub – Forgive us our debts/sins as we forgive others….

Healthy societies need a periodic social reset. We feel ourselves today catapulting into the unpredictable because we have no ready to hand mechanism for social reset. In forgive us our debts as we forgive others …, we hear Jesus echoing the Jewish concept of the Jubilee, the year in which all debts were canceled. The English translators chose to use the word trespasses here. I find this very helpful because the definition of trespass is to find oneself where we have no right to be. In our relationships, we encroach upon one another and structure our social and personal relationships as instruments of self-assertion. Holding others in our debt and being in debt to others in relational terms, is a gross example of trespass. Jesus is inviting us to enter into an experience of the relationship he enjoys with God. His invitation is predicated on God’s prior forgiveness. Being forgiven requires us to also be forgiving.

Endurance – Lead us not into Temptation, but deliver us from the Evil One

What is the temptation here and who tempts whom? A traditional reading is that it’s God who tempts us as a way of testing our resolve and capacity for endurance. However, it’s not from the time of trial sustain us, but in the time of trial sustain us, good Lord. In last Wednesday’s daily E-message Obedience –Brother Give Us A Word, Br. David Vryhof SSJE noted:

There are times when the path to which God calls us leads us into trouble or difficulty. Being faithful to that path, being obedient to that call, can prove to be very costly. We have only to recall Christ’s agony in Gethsemane to know that this was true for Jesus, and he assures us that it will also be true for many of those who choose to embrace and follow him on the way. 

The temptation to take the line of least resistance is a continual danger for us as we work for the realization of the kingdom in our own contexts.  Whether we locate the source of evil in a being – the Devil, or in a collective malignancy that thrives in what Augustine called a privation of good, evil’s continual attack is real. We must always be mindful that the conditions that allow evil to thrive require only that good people do nothing.

Parables of prayer

Jesus does not simply hand his disciples a form of words. He demonstrates what the praying of the words involves in the three parables that follow his giving this prayer.

In the story of the man waking his neighbor at midnight for three loaves of bread, we can note a startling characteristic of Jesus’ attitude to prayer. The request for three loaves is an excessive request given that bread was baked fresh each morning and not kept longer than the day of baking. No one would have at midnight that much bread left over from the day. Therefore, we note that prayer involves the audacity of asking for a lot rather than a little.

We are told that his neighbor gives-in to his insistence not because he pities the man or feels generous, but because of the man’s anaideia mistranslated into English as perseverance. Yet, perseverance is not the meaning of anaideia. The correct English translation is not perseverance but as shamelessness, as to not care what anyone thinks of our behavior. Prayer involves abandoning our cherished self-respect and exposing ourselves to the shame of wanting and longing. For us, it’s a shameful thing to be at the mercy of our longing and a fearful thing to risk the humiliation of exposing our neediness to another. In our prayer with God, we must be audacious, impudent, and also beyond shame in our expression of our need of God.  

When we pray in the only words Jesus has given us to pray we become audacious and shameless, reveling in the intimacy of a loving relationship in which trust and safety are assumed. When we pray in the only words Jesus gave us we strive to make present the future fulfillment of the kingdom as we live according to its expectations in the here and now. Forgiveness becomes the hallmark of our mutual relationships, and as we face up the costs of discipleship, in doing so we loosen the grip of evil in the world.

Prayer involves the courage to ask in order to receive, to seek in order to find, to knock so that opportunities will open to us. This text is put into perspective in the famous Holman Hunt painting The Light of the World, now hanging in London’s St Paul’s Cathedral. Jesus is pictured standing with a lamp, knocking at a door overgrown with ivy and brambles. He clearly seeks entry, yet on closer inspection the door has no handle. The implication is that it can only be opened from the inside. What is depicted here is the door of the heart. Hunt captures who it is that knocks and who it is that opens to the knock. Paradoxically, it is Jesus who is doing the knocking, and it is we who have the power to open, or not.

In a sermon some time ago I mentioned the film The Way in which Martin Sheen plays the role of a father who undertakes to walk the Camino de Compostela, the ancient pilgrimage route to the shrine of Santiago (St. James) in the Basque region of northern Spain. It’s a film about love’s redemption through transformative action by a father driven to repair his relationship with his son who has tragically died some weeks earlier while undertaking the first stage of this pilgrimage.

To make a pilgrimage is to set out on a journey. To follow a way is a metaphor for more than the physical road taken. Pilgrimage is an action. One takes or makes a pilgrimage. We commonly think the goal of this kind of journey-making is to arrive at a location of spiritual significance. Yet, perhaps more significantly than arriving at a place, a location, pilgrimage is the experience of transformation along the way. The film The Way poignantly captures this process.

The Gospel

The short passage appointed for the gospel on the 9^th Sunday following Pentecost is comprised of five short verses from Luke describing Jesus’ visit to the house of Mary and Martha. In John’s Gospel, we encounter both women as the sisters of Jesus’ friend Lazarus. Yet Luke offers no such biographical connection.

This story is one of those stories that Christian’s over the centuries have loved to moralize about. It’s a story that has given rise to two strong archetypes. In common parlance, we invoke the Martha and Mary of this story as epithets for the competing tensions in the spiritual life. The Tradition has popularly read Jesus’ rebuke of the complaining Martha to justify placing contemplation before action. The Church has often taught that the life of contemplative withdrawal is a higher calling than that of active life sullied by the taint of worldly carnality.

However, we should hold this passage within the larger context of Jesus being on his journey to Jerusalem. Like any pilgrimage, it’s the journey itself that is transformative, as along the way Jesus uses incidents and events to teach his followers what it means to travel the way of discipleship.

Action and/versus contemplation?

Last week’s parable of the Good Samaritan, when taken together with this week’s story of Martha and Mary, focuses the spotlight on the tension between action and contemplation in Christian spiritual living. In the Good Samaritan story, Jesus ends with the words go and do likewise. In the Martha and Mary story, he seems to be advocating the very opposite.

Beginning with the story of the sending out of the 70 disciples to all the towns of the Galilee the connective theme of Jesus’ Lucan journey to Jerusalem seems to be the importance of hospitality as a central attribute for those who seek to travel along the discipleship trail.

The story of Martha and Mary and it’s larger archetypal projection of do-ers and pray-ers, of action versus the inaction, focuses on the centrality of hospitality in the spiritual life. Hospitality, or the lack of, it is the key theme in the sending out of the 70. It goes to the heart of the Good Samaritan parable, where the unlikely neighbor recognizes his obligations towards an injured man. Hospitality is the central theme of the Mary and Martha story. Martha’s practice of hospitality is active. Mary’s is contemplative. In short, hospitality provides the connective tissue for the various elements of the spiritual life.

Martha practices the responsibilities of hospitality. She welcomes Jesus and then busies herself with the necessary preparations of the host upon a visiting guest’s arrival on the doorstep. Mary practices the responsibilities of hospitality in her welcoming of that which Jesus has come to bring, his teaching and presence. But Martha has something else going on inside her. There is often a danger of feeling aggrieved or feeling put upon that can afflict those who are drawn to the active side of the spiritual equation.  Jesus does not rank Martha beneath Mary. It is to Martha’s accusative sense of grievance that Jesus speaks sharply.

Assessing the tensions

We become busy and we use activity to distract ourselves from something that is feared to be more challenging. Being preoccupied with action avoids needing to go deeper. Noise and action cover over our anxiety concerning silence. If we have nothing to do then what might happen in the seemingly empty spaces that open before us. For most of us Descartes’ declaration: I think, therefore I am, easily degenerates into I do, therefore I am.

Action and contemplation are opposite sides of the same coin. Both are essential elements of a balanced spiritual life. Action ceases to hold spiritual value when our busy-ness causes us to feel resentful. We become resentful, feeling aggrieved as out actions slip, often imperceptibly from a generous regard for another’s needs to a meeting of our own.

Contemplation is the development of a capacity to sit in silence in order to welcome God speaking through the spaces between actions, words, and thoughts. Yet, it ceases to be of any spiritual value when it degenerates into self-preoccupation.

I struggle with my own personal impoverishment. I do not possess the reservoirs of charity and compassion towards others that leads me to automatically place their needs before my own. I lack the reservoirs of courage and resilience that would otherwise propel me to get involved in another’s struggles. I find myself turning away from opportunities for Christian action and I fail to stand in solidarity with others because I am afraid of getting involved. I fill my time with busy-ness, always having something to do, something to worry over, something to be preoccupied by, because this is an easy way, not of actually helping others, but of serving my own needs and avoiding the challenges of contemplation. Yet without the renewal of contemplation, my addiction to action leads me only to burnout.

Somewhat paradoxically, I am also drawn to the idea of contemplation and have a fantasy of what such a practice should look like. Yet my experience of contemplation is usually a frustrating one. I never get to that state of awareness I long for. I continually fail to achieve that degree of spiritual high I crave. Meditation as a practice of contemplation becomes an arid experience of a kind of emptiness where I interpret emptiness as an absence, something missing.

My title for this entry is taken from the well-known book Contemplation in a World of Action by the great 20th-century contemplative, Thomas Merton.  He observes:

….as long as man thinks that the solution of his ‘identity crisis’ consists in achieving this capacity for self-assertion, we can have no peace.

The problem is that there is too much me-I  in my contemplation, as there is too much me-I in my life of action. If my contemplation does not open me to the sense of spacious hospitality within which God is welcome, then it fosters only a frustrated sense of isolation and the ego reproach of I can’t even do this right! Note the verb do as in accomplish in this reproach.

A matter of temperament

Temperamentally, each person has a default towards one pole of the tension between action and contemplation. Some of us are very action oriented, while others are more withdrawn and inwardly focused. The task is to balance our predisposition through the cultivation of its opposite. In each practice, however, the essential element is that of a spirit of hospitality, which is a spirit of curiosity, a spirit of openness, a generous welcoming of otherness. When we work to reduce the centrality of our own ego, it becomes possible to become transformed into a conduit for the Holy Spirit – the love sharer –in action.

Redressing imbalance

In the film The Way, Martin Sheen plays a father struggling in his relationship with his
son. The father is a busy dentist with an onerous load of work and social responsibilities that are part and parcel of being a successful American professional. If he is not working, he’s playing golf. Playing implies pleasure or recreation. But this kind of golf has little of either. It’s just another form of work, using the game as a social networking device. This father is critical of his son’s decision to take a break from the rat race and waste his time with what the father feels is the self-indulgence of spiritual seeking. Martha is peeved with Mary.

The news of his son’s death on the first part of the Camino has a devastating effect on him. He becomes compelled to complete what the son cannot now finish. His whole life becomes transformed in the process. Sheen’s character had failed to reconcile the tension between action and contemplation in his own life, and this became a tension acted out in his relationship with his son. Like Martha, he was critical and resentful of the way his son’s spirit of hospitality to the spiritual enabled him to sit at Jesus’ feet.

Through an act of redemption the father is led to a new self-understanding. Through completing his son’s unfinished action the father incorporates his son’s spiritual hospitality, making it his own. The film’s ultimate conclusion is not the arrival at the shrine of Santiago. The rest you will have to find out for yourselves.