What does resurrection mean? Luke 20:27-38

Before I begin, how many of you have thought about the willingness of the seventh brother on the eve of his wedding? When I was in catechism and had to study this story as a means of getting us to talk about what the resurrection meant to us, I have to admit that the only thing I could think of was, “How dumb are these guys?” I was 14, and I knew that I would be heading for the hills if I were the seventh brother. Actually, I thought that I might be on the road if I were the fourth brother. I imagined that I didn’t really like my third brother, so I didn’t want to warn him, but I knew my place. I had no idea about the resurrection and what it meant, but I knew that I would have serious concerns about my future wife’s mental health.

Although this is the alternate text for All Saint’s Sunday, I feel that it is wonderfully appropriate that we read this parable today. How wonderfully rich to question life in the resurrection at this time in particular as we celebrate All Saints Sunday. So let us consider this brazen affront to Jesus and to our faith in this time of grateful remembrance.

Within the context of this day and the challenge of this text, we are confronted with “What does the resurrection mean?” We have to understand that life after death was not a new idea in Jesus’ time. But that there was a debate between some Jewish people about life after death. Those who only read the Books of Moses, thought that there was no after life. The Sadducees were part of this group, but they were already in the minority in Jesus’ time. Many of the cultures around the Mediterranean Sea and around the world already believed in an afterlife, but they would be vastly different from what our Christian understanding of heaven is.

The Greeks had hades, a place where warriors could fight and die day after day, only to awaken the next day to fight again. Okay, it wasn’t all that great for women and children, but none-the-less, they had a place of life after death.

The Egyptians had the great necropolis, the city of the righteous dead, who passed the judgment of Osiris, where they lived in comfort, served by those who were righteous enough but not the most righteous. They ate well and were able to take many of their earthly riches with them. Life in the necropolis was highly ordered and reflected the order of the society and culture they had lived in during this life time. It was a great place for the wealthy who had many possessions to bring with them, but not so hot for the poor.

The Norse had their own twist on life after death with Valhalla. It was a place of drinking and fighting, with valorous storytelling and songs, great feasts, and dancing. It was not a place where women faired very well either. They were expected to cook the meals, brew the beer and mead, serve at the tables, clean the victory halls and entertain the men throughout eternity. Women were sent to Valhalla with their men as sacrifices. Children need not apply.

These conceptions of the afterlife were highly restrictive. Only the best of the best were welcomed. At best it was a segregated space for the elite of the world. It reminds me of the story. When this man died, Saint Peter welcomed the person at the pearly gate and said, “Well, there are several places in heaven that you might want to live in throughout eternity. So, let me show you around. He and the person went from place to place. Saint Peter was excited to point out the high points of each place and why the person might choose that location. As they were walking along one of the golden paths, Saint Peter suddenly said, “Now you are going to have to be very quiet until we get to the other side of those trees.”

The person wanted to ask why, but Saint Peter put his finger over his lips. As they tip-toed by, the man saw all kinds of people singing and laughing, playing games and having a picnic. It really looked like a lot of fun.

So when they got beyond the trees, the person finally blurted out, “Why did I have to be quiet there. They were making more than enough noise by themselves. I doubt that they could have heard me if I shouted. What’s the deal?”

Saint Peter said, “We have to be quiet because they are the pious Lutherans and they think that they are the only ones up here.

These stories of heaven as a place of privilege depend on a significant part of the population not being allowed in. Those people are usually resigned to hell. I mean, what kind of fun is heaven if there isn’t a hell? How can the presence of God be open to just anyone?

When we say those words, “He descended into hell, and on the third day he rose again,” we aren’t really saying that Jesus might have taken those people with him into heaven are we? Seriously, when I get to heaven, am I going to have to live next door to that person who never mowed the yard and left trash all over the place am I? We have all kinds of ways of asking the Sadducees question about whose wife will this woman be? And when we do that, we miss the point that Jesus is trying to make.

Living in the eternal presence of God means that life will be different. We will be able to live in a place where God will be first in all that we do. The order of this world will no longer determine our behaviors. Jesus tells us that in a world that thinks of women as property to be sold, traded, or given away in marriage, that that will no longer happen. All people are going to be recognized as valuable and loved. We will no longer belong to one another, but we will belong to God, in relationship with one another in ways that lift up our value. Indeed, this is not a land of the dead that practices deadly games of war. Heaven is not a place that continues to grant privilege to the wealthy, at the expense of the poor. It is not a place where we celebrate our own actions on earth like recounting the tenth inning of the Cubs/Indians game. Heaven is that place where we are invited into Sabbath time to be guests in God’s presence with the angels and like them we will die no more but be called the children of God. As such, we will live in the fullness of our relationships with God and one another.  

In the meantime, in anticipation of that great banquet time with Christ, we continue to see the imago dei, that is, God’s image. reflected to us in the face of our neighbor. We mourn and celebrate the relationships we have with those who have gone before us and value those around us. And, with the promise and hope of the resurrection we continue to lift our neighbors up into the relationships we have with one another and Christ. Claiming, with confidence in the one who is risen from the dead, that God is God of the living, and, although some are dead to us, that they continue to be alive with Christ in the fullness of their relationship with God. In the midst of the craziness and chaos of this world, in the midst of the pain and the sorrow that we know, we can still say with Job, “I know that my redeemer lives and at the last he will stand upon the earth...Then…I shall see God.” With the writer of 2 Thessalonians we can say to one another, “Now may our Lord, Jesus Christ himself, and God our Father, who loved us and through grace gave us eternal comfort and good hope, comfort your hearts and strengthen them in every good work and word.”

What will heaven be like? I really can’t tell you, but I can say that the one who is risen from the dead, that is Jesus Christ, has gone before us and waits for us there with welcome and love.

There, But for the Grace of God, Go I Luke 18:9-14

Bradley Hanson in his book, Introduction to Christian Doctrine, says that how we think about God shapes and determines what we think about God. In a like manner, I believe that how we think about prayer shapes and determines what we pray. If prayer is to be a public event, then the language of the prayer may be very formal. We hear these prayers in our worship service in the prayer of the day, the offertory prayer, the prayers of the people, and the prayers contained in the Eucharist. These prayers have various functions, but the language is pretty formal and may use metaphors and similes to call forth emotional and psychological energy for worship. If prayer is about speaking justice, then the language may be challenging and abrasive to the ears of those who hear those pleas while evoking God’s empathy and care. If prayer is our personal conversation with God throughout the day, prayer may sound a lot like how we talk to our friends and may contain utterances of thanks, amazement, cries for help, assistance, spiritual strength, and forgiveness.

How we think about prayer even determines the frequency of praying. If prayer is a public thing, then we may not pray more often than once or twice a month, maybe weekly. If prayer is about crying for justice, depending on how satisfied you are with your life, you may only pray once or twice a year. But if prayer is a conversation with God, then you may be praying constantly even with base and common words. A professor I knew once said that within the most profane oath lies a prayer for help. Again I want to say, how we think of prayer shapes and determines what we pray.

If last week’s text was about the need to pray always without losing heart, then this week’s text is teaching us how to think about prayer and what to pray for. Let us first recognize the relationship between these two parables. Last week we heard about the judge that was not just, that is unrighteous, who does not fear God nor respects people. Yet because he thinks highly of himself, he grants justice (righteousness) to the widow who threatens to make him look bad in public.

This week, in another parable told at the same time, Jesus tells us of a Pharisee who has convinced himself that he is justified (righteous) by his own works, and, because of these great works that he has done, he is more important than the people around him. He regards those who are not like him as literally being nothing, of no value, not worth thinking about. Those other people are so far from him socially that he doesn’t even stand with the other person; he stands by himself. He is so self-satisfied that, when he prays, he begins with thanking God that he is not like those other disgusting people.

The first of the list of people that the Pharisee does not want to be like are thieves. The word in Greek is more than stealing, it carries with it the sense of rapacious people or animals like wolves that tear at the flesh that they eat until they are so utterly sated they may vomit their food and leave it in order to eat more; or, more often, after vomiting their food, they will eat it again. They take and consume because they can, not out of need. Thieving at another level includes people who have more than what they need while others do not have enough. Thievery here is not actively taking something from another, but it includes withholding what our neighbor needs when we have plenty.

The second group of people are described as rogues. The word in Greek literally means unjust or unrighteous. Merchants who don’t use accurate weights for weighing or maybe put their thumb on the scale to add a little weight for a little more money are unrighteous. Bankers who charge interest and especially high interest are unrighteous. Anyone who misrepresents themselves or their work or people who do not care for the widow, the orphan, the stranger, and the poor are unrighteous.

The third group are adulterers. Biblically speaking adultery is unfaithfulness to one’s spouse, but, in our relationship with God, adultery can mean putting trust in someone or something other than Godself. As a matter of fact, adultery is much more often cited as being the behavior of Israel consorting with other gods and nations than it is used for the relationship between a man and a woman. In terms of last week’s story, it is not revering or fearing God.

The last and lowest category that the Pharisee is thankful he is not like is the tax collector, the one responsible for money flowing from the masses to those in charge. Now in Jesus’ time, the job of being tax collectors was particularly difficult. They represented the government or the ordering body. When the Roman government decided it needed a certain amount of money to be raised in various parts of the empire, that is, the people were to be taxed, the governing bodies of the various parts of the empire would decide where that money was to come from. Then they got a person to collect the taxes from the designated people, but they did not provide for the salary of the tax collector. If the tax collector only collected what was demanded, he might starve so, of course, he had to collect more than what the empire and governing bodies wanted. By collecting the money from the people and delivering it on time to the people above him, peace was maintained in the empire. But, if the flow of tax money was interrupted, the full weight of the Roman government could come down on any given province.

To make taxes more complicated, the Roman government was not the only entity collecting money. The temple also taxed the people through the tithe, which was a temple tax. The temple too believed in a trickle up-economy. Governors also taxed the people for local building projects and urban improvements. Lastly, the land owners taxed the farmers on their produce from the land. Today we would call it share cropping, but it was a tax none-the-less. The assessed tax could be as high as 80%.

Each of the taxes was based on the gross amount that the people made. By taking 10% here and 10% there, by the time the poorest people paid for their food and clothing, there was often not enough to go around. To not pay the tax was to be jailed and die, but paying the tax also often meant that starvation and even death were nearby. Land and home would be sold first. Even children, your spouse, and your very person might need to be sold into slavery in order to pay the money needed. In the sense of an hour glass, the tax collector was the one responsible for the sand flowing up instead of down. No wonder he was detested.

It is not enough to the Pharisee to be thankful for not being like those other no-accounts though; he needs to state why he is better than those others: he fasts twice a week and he gives 10% of all that he acquires. This then is his case of being righteous.

Biblically speaking, however, righteousness is not an individual state. Righteousness depends on the life of the neighbor. If the Pharisee lives in comfort, but his neighbor lives in poverty, then Biblically he cannot be righteous because his comfort is at the expense of someone else. If the Pharisee is living in comfort, and his neighbors are suffering and in poverty, then Biblically he is stealing from them; he has broken his relationship with them. The Pharisee has chosen to serve himself and has not trusted God for what he needs; he has taken from others for his own sake and not served God and his neighbor—he has become a thief, a rogue, an adulterer, and, yes, a tax collector.

He may be fasting twice a week, but we all know that only the well-fed can fast. The poor and the starving call it, “We have no food.” When it comes to taxes, the wealthy may give 10% of what they receive, but when you receive nothing, paying taxes is not possible because there is no money. You might call it, “being broke”.

As last week the unjust judge cared nothing for God, so now we see that the Pharisee does not trust in God. He trusts in himself. He thinks that prayer is about elevating himself over others rather than lifting up the people around him.

We compare the Pharisee to the lowly tax collector who is far off and cannot even bring himself to look up to heaven praying. His prayer is that God would be merciful or have compassion, that is, would suffer with him in the midst of his life. Jesus says this one was made righteous. What makes him righteous or justified is that the tax collector asks or begs God to be in relationship with him. As the widow begs for a relationship of equity, so now the tax collector prays for a relationship of understanding and love with God.

Although we too long for this relationship of understanding and love, not only with God, but with one another, there are times in our lives when we run to the place of the Pharisee. How often have I heard, even said, “There, but by the grace of God, go I!” In saying these words, we separate ourselves from the event even while recognizing that we might have been there or done that ourselves, but, thank God, our actions did not result in calamity—we were not caught. “There, but by the grace of God, go I!” does not mean we are somehow better by our actions, but we believe that a better outcome resulted because God favored us more. Now we look more and more like the Pharisee.

Poverty is not that far away for the average American family which is only two paychecks from not being able to pay the bills. In worship we pray, “We offer with joy and thanksgiving what you have first given us--ourselves, our time, and our possessions, signs of your gracious love.” But when we leave worship, we may separate ourselves from the people who can’t pay their bills anymore, saying, “There, but by the grace of God, go I.” We like to think that God has favored us because of our hard work. We think that we are responsible for creating the world around us as if God’s creative work stopped on the sixth day of creation. In so many ways, we, as a society, say “We’ve got ours, the heck with the rest of you—you who can’t find jobs that pay a living wage, you who are starving in war-torn countries; you whose homes have been taken away by cartels and people who only think about their own wealth and power.

We thank God for our own lives of privilege and wonder at the chances that might lead to us living in those conditions of disaster in Haiti and say, “There, but by the grace of God, go I.” How much harder our prayer lives might be if we, with the tax collector, said, “Have mercy on us sinners, Lord, for we have so much and there are so many that have so little. Help us to share the abundance of your creation. Help us lift up the lowly, and let us be humbled in your presence and the needs of all that you have created good.”

How we think of prayer really does determine and shape what we pray. Being in relationship with God and one another, we pray that all may know God’s presence and that all people will have respect, re-spect, that is, be seen again. We pray that we may engage and honor the people that God has given us to welcome in God’s kingdom on earth, anticipating God’s rule as it is in heaven, with daily bread for all and forgiveness of sins. In this state of God’s abundance and forgiveness, we then are able to forgive as we have been forgiven and are saved from the trial that would judge our works alone. Lord. save us from ourselves, and, in your loving arms, deliver us from evil. Indeed, your kingdom, your power to save, and your glorious resurrection are what will last forever.

It is in this relationship of forgiveness that we know relationship with God and one another that continues to sustain us, and so we rejoice in those words of help and hope:

“In the mercy of almighty God, Jesus Christ was given to die for us, and for Christ’s sake, God forgives us all of our sins. Therefore, by Christ’s authority, I declare to you the entire forgiveness of all of your sins; in the relationship of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

There, in the grace of God, we go.

Lost Community--Luke 16:19-31

I think of this as the last of the five parables begun in Luke 15. The frame of these stories is the grumbling Pharisees and Jesus eating with the tax collectors and sinners. Between the fourth and fifth parables the Pharisees, who loved money, ridicule Jesus. In turn, Jesus rebukes them with some serious charges and then tells this story of shattered community. We must remember, however, that by the time Luke is writing, the temple already has been destroyed and the Pharisees no longer exist as a faction of Judaism.

In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, we witness the breakdown of relationship between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots, the powerful and the powerless of the world. The relationship between these two groups has become so contentious that communication between them is no longer possible.

The rich man celebrates life and his good fortune in a public way drawing attention to himself without regard for others. There is an empty decadence in the purple finery he wears; the linen is like a shroud casting a pall over his lifestyle. The poor named Lazarus (God has helped) also wears purple advertising death. Lazarus’ purple is from the ulcers that cover his skin. And rather than eating regularly as the rich man does, Lazarus is being regularly eaten: the dogs come to lick his open sores sampling the meal that is to come.

When we hear that the rich man dies and goes to Hades where he is tormented (tested), we may have a self-satisfied joy concerning the rich man’s demise. If we end our time with this parable, however, rejoicing for Lazarus and are satisfied with the treatment of the rich man and his brothers, then we miss the great tragedy and challenge within the parable.

Unlike the previous parables of lost and found, this parable leaves us with only loss. As such it is the most challenging of the five parables. Within the telling of the story, opportunity is offered for community whenever the rich man comes out to eat, but he does not cross the chasm that divides them. In this life, the rich man cannot go beyond the safety of his wall. Nor is Lazarus able to break through the wall to receive the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table. Not even the dogs receive the crumbs as they do in Mark 7. Instead, they get Lazarus.

In death, the rich man is still unable to recognize Lazarus as a person. He sees Lazarus only as a means to bring him water for easing his torment (testing). The allusion is that he wishes the covenant of baptism, that he longs for the baptismal (dipped) sacramental water in death as a convenience rather than as an expression of faith. Even his plea to send someone to warn his brothers is more about sending a poltergeist to scare them into right behavior and less about faith. He continues to desire avoiding the torment of Hades for the pleasures of the life he left. This is not an act of repentance or a statement for grace-filled resurrection-living.

On the other side of this parable lies Lazarus who suffered in life without community, and, although he is now in the arms of Abraham, he continues to have no community. He was not able to break through the wall that separated him from community in life, and he is unable to bridge the chasm that separates him in death.

The telling of this parable leaves both the rich man and Lazarus without community. The parable depends on the hearers of the story finding and living into the new community that is lost. Luke includes this story for the gathered worshipping community of his time. As such, it is the final statement, “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced, even if someone rises from the dead,” that makes Luke’s audience smile.

With those first hearers of Luke’s Gospel, we smile and chuckle to ourselves as well. Yes, we know that as Jesus is looking to and traveling toward the cross in the Gospel, that Jesus has already risen; that our lives in Christ’s resurrection world means that we know the value of forgiveness and resurrection justification. We know of Moses and the writings of the prophets, and we know that these writings point to Christ. We are so much better than those silly Pharisees, and we know that we are saved because of this radical new community, after all most of us are the unclean gentiles of the world who are included in Christ’s new covenant: Baptismal water and Eucharistic body and blood, bread and wine table fellowship. Because of this, we know the value of the community Christ is calling us to.

Paradoxically, we also know the great chasm that separates us from many of our brothers and sisters. Racism continues to plague our world to the extent that we cannot admit to our lives of privilege. We cannot see or understand the suffering of those outside the walls of our own experience. Our children do not all have equal opportunities for education and employment. We are not always treated equally by law enforcement officials. We are not given equal opportunities of housing We are not given equal treatment in the courts of our land.

We are so oblivious to the lives of those suffering outside our walls that we think that just because a Black man has been elected to the highest office in our land that racism is over. Of course, there are some who think that racism didn’t exist until we elected a Black man to the presidency.

We are separated from one another by our politics, our sexual orientation, social position, our educations, whether or not we have work. By those who are temporarily able bodied and those with disabilities, we even hide behind the walls of our democracy as a way to condemn those who do not live with the freedoms we know.

We chase after higher profits building pipelines that potentially threaten our watersheds and the sacred lands of Indigenous People thereby widening the chasm between our own culture and that of others while reassuring ourselves of its safety even as the Colonial and Exxon Mobil pipelines rupture and threaten the water table in Alabama and others rupture and the Yellowstone river valley.

Yes, we smile at Jesus’ last comment about believing in the one who is raised up from the dead, but we have yet to embrace the radical community living that Christ models and embodies. We have a long way to go to be the ones who lift up the social dead of our world, the poor, the lame, the maimed, the deaf, the blind, the widows, the orphans and the strangers into the promise of the community of wholeness of the resurrected body of Christ.

Yes, we see that there is retributive justice for the rich man in this story, and we smugly gloat over his demise, but, if we can recognize ourselves mirrored in the rich man, we thank God that we are saved by grace, through faith, in Christ alone. And then, seeing ourselves in the rich man, we see, in Lazarus, the reflection of Christ at his crucifixion in his robe, described as elegant by Luke and purple by Matthew and Mark, with open ulcers from the crown of thorns, the whipping stripes, the nail holes, and the wound from the spear. Now we can begin to understand that we, the privileged, with the rich man, need to reach out in faith recognizing those whom God gives us where we live, those whom God has helped, that is Lazarus, in order to find that radical community of life.

Finding it, we also come to know the ways of using unrighteous wealth as a way to be welcomed into the eternal house communities of faith (parable 4), to be open to those who have gone astray and returned to gracious welcomes (parable 3), to know the value of the one who with radical love, searches for us (parable 2). We will celebrate the finding of the lost in ways that may have greater value than those things that are lost for the sake of the one whose radical love has searched us out when we were wandering off by ourselves (parable 1). We will see God’s image in all whom we meet and lift them up into the community God has invited us to be part of since that first Sabbath time of creation. We will find the community of peace that surpasses all understanding, in the community we lost and rediscovered, reveling in the wholeness of Christ.

Living Well--Luke 16:1-13

The sixteenth chapter of Luke begins with what I have come to think of as the fourth “lost and found” parable. The first three were in chapter fifteen. Each of these parables gets slightly more difficult to understand and much more complex. So let us first review the previous “lost and found” parables. First there is the lost sheep. The shepherd leaves the flock in order to find the one who is lost. This is followed by the woman and the lost coin. Here, the woman sweeps the house clean in order to find the lost coin. Each of these parables end with radical celebration. The level of celebration is possibly even greater than the value of the sheep or the coin.

In the third parable we read of the lost son. He is not so much found as he finds himself and returns home on his own. The result is great celebration. In this parable an added layer of the human condition comes when we are confronted by the attitude of the older brother and his resentment of the younger brother who has come home.

Now in the fourth parable (I call it the parable of “lost justice or righteousness”), we meet a manager described in the NRSV as dishonest. He is called in Greek ἀδικία (adikia means injustice), but I believe that unrighteous captures the description of him much better. Although in this story we are told charges are brought about the management of the rich man’s estate, that the manager is squandering or wasting the rich man’s property, we do not know whether this is true. We only know that charges are made and that these charges result in the dismissal of the manager.

Because our unrighteous manager is able to later cut the amount of the debts owed to the rich man, we know the manager has been handling the affairs of the estate in a manner that benefited the rich man. We are invited to understand that the manager has been putting energy into his relationship with the rich man and gaining wealth at the expense of the share cropper/debtor. The Levitical law declares this as unrighteous. And yet, when the charges are made, the manager is given his walking papers seemingly without a process for appeal or audit that might vindicate his work.

Much time has been spent on the manager’s ethics. Was his unrighteousness cheating the rich man? Or, was his unrighteousness cheating the people? How is it that he can suddenly reduce the bills of the people owing goods to the rich man? Does the reduction of debts make the unrighteous manager righteous?

The parable doesn’t really help us understand any of that, but it does help us understand something about living in righteous relationship with others, or how to build trust in an adversarial world. In his life of acquiring status and wealth, the manager developed a relationship with the rich man at the expense of the share cropper/poor. We come to know that this relationship is unrighteous. The manager’s status and wealth depends on the status and wealth of the rich man.

Like Joseph of Egypt in days of old, the manager’s authority is always second to the rich man/Pharaoh. But that place in the world lasts only as long as the temporal authority allows it. As Potiphar’s wife is able to cast Joseph down, so now an outsider casts down the manager.

Faced with being put out on the street, the manager does what the manager is best at: he builds relationships. This time the relationship is with the debtors of the rich man’s world at the expense of the relationship with the rich man. Here the strains of the Magnificat come echoing down from Luke 1. “[God] has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty. [God] has helped his servant…in remembrance of his mercy according to the promise he made to [the] ancestors; to Abraham and his descendants forever.”

At this point, I believe the parable raises the question of righteousness (δικαιοσύνη, dikaio-synē), what is a righteous or healthy community, by addressing the relationships that sustain us through the actions of the manager. Are they the relationships of power, wealth, and status? Or, are they the relationship of people who gather in co-operative work together? Is the lasting relationship the fight to the top? Or, companionship of the poor? In the terms of Luke 15:1-2, is it life among the grumbling Pharisees and scribes, or at the table, eating with tax collectors and sinners?

As the whims of Egypt sent God’s people into the wilderness to find God’s mercy and promised relationship of constancy, as Luke’s Gospel proclaims a preference for the poor and the promise of always having one another, so now the manager finds trust and relationship among the people he formerly oppressed. This new relationship is more sustainable than the relationship the manager had with the rich man. It is a relationship of mutual support. The manager gives up something of himself and in doing this, he reduces the debt burden on those around him. Shrewdness, guile, cleverness, even wisdom help the manager find mercy among the people that has lasted at least to the forever of this day. In this new place of mercy, he attains righteousness in relationship with the people.

No wonder the rich man commends the shrewdness of the manager. I sometimes wonder if there is a touch of jealousy in the commendation. Instead of being shamed, shunned, and shattered, the manager finds lasting new relationship of welcome, mutuality, and mercy (embracing each other, needing the forgiveness of debt on the one hand and the forgiveness of oppression on the other). In this new relationship the unrighteous manager finds his lost righteous state. No longer is he advancing his place in the world through interest on goods; instead he has found a way to live among God’s people with what is enough. He has found a way to use unrighteous wealth or dishonest standards as a means for building up and enriching the lives of the people.

We are reminded of Abraham’s bargaining for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham and Sarah’s laughter, Jacob’s bargaining for his birthright and his foiled bargain for Rachel. We are reminded of the tricks Joseph plays on his brothers and his ability to interpret dreams. We recall Moses and his bargaining with Pharaoh and the visitation of the plagues. Yes, we remember the long history of Abraham’s descendants up to and including a clever carpenter who died on a cross in order to conquer death, making righteous or justifying the world through himself. Is this not God using the unrighteous power of Satan and the world against itself in order to redeem God's people? All of this comes to us in this little story of a rich man, his manager, and the working people of the world. We may even get a glimpse of Paul’s ministry begun on the Damascus road.

About four hundred years ago, George Herbert wrote, “Living well is the best revenge.” In the last century this statement became a bumper sticker and people took living well to mean living large. It was a statement made to support consumerism, but I am convinced that living large is not what he meant.

What I believe George Herbert meant was that we should live ethical lives in our times, i.e., in caring relationships with one another. As such, I think that this little saying encapsulates this parable in a single sentence. If you want to live a life that does not seek advancement based on the oppression of others, that does not depend on racism or classism, a life that does not risk our environment and access to fresh water for the sake of a few dollars, then build relationships that nurture the lifting up of all. Indeed, living life like this is living well.

When we live for wealth and status, we only serve ourselves and a privileged few, but when we live for others, we make space for Christ’s reconciling presence to redeem and reclaim us making us right with God and one another. God’s work is always with and among the people. It is not the accumulation of money and power.

May you live well this week knowing the best revenge in the relationship of wholeness found in the reconciling body of Christ.

Lost and Found--Luke 15

These texts of lost and found things probably bring many snippets of panic and fear to all of us. “Where did I leave the keys? Where did I park the car? I know I had that most precious of things (my coffee cup, the handouts for worship, the coupons for the grocery store), just a moment ago, but where did I put it or them?” In our hymnody, many of us will echo, “I once was lost, but now am found,” but few of us will spend any time reflecting on those things that are lost to us and cannot be restored.

A couple of years ago, my wife, Susan, and I were doing some radical pruning in our yard. I got to use the switch-blade-like pruning saw my mom had given me for Christmas one year. My mom had died the previous year and so as I used the saw I also heard my mom’s delight with new designs of tools and if not actually using those tools, her anticipation of being able to use the tool sometime in the future.

As I sawed through the many overgrown branches of the bushes around our new house I could almost feel Mom’s presence and satisfaction of knowing that she had given me something that I could really use.

When I was done for the day, I put my tools away, got into my truck and hauled all of the debris from the day out to the city waste disposal site where it would eventually become mulch for some other project.

The following summer I went to get my pruning tools to do some clean up on the new growth on those same bushes after discovering a few more branches that needed to be pruned out. My anvil pruners were where they belonged, the scissors pruners were there too, but my switch-blade pruning saw was nowhere to be found.

Yes, I pulled the shop apart. I went through the entire tool chest. I pulled it out from the wall. I checked under the work bench and on all of the ledges I might have laid it on. I even checked the laundry room and the shelves in the pantry, but the switch-blade pruning saw was not to be found.

I finally decided that some youthful transgressor had seen this novel tool and naively absconded with my prize tool not knowing of the sentimental attachment and my personal joy I felt using it. It was gone.

Well, I had other pruning saws, I thought. They weren’t as much fun or as convenient, but they were certainly usable. I went to work and tried to get over the grief and yes, anger over having had that wonderful tool taken away from me. Later that year I found the identical saw in a hardware store, but I was not able to bring myself to replace it. After all, I had gotten the job done without it, and even though I would have the tool, I would always know that it was not the tool my mom had given to me.

Over the years, I have thought about that saw with regret and wondered whether the person who had ended up using it appreciated it. I wondered if I could ever really justify replacing it? I really didn’t need it, but it didn’t really cost that much. Yet that lingering thought of having lost the gift that was given prevented me from being able to fully move past the loss of that simple tool. Each time I needed to do some pruning I revisited the sense of loss and violation I felt over the loss of the switch-blade pruning saw.

A few months ago I found an old tool box that I had been using at the time and I opened the box to check whether I had put the saw in there, but no. I kept looking in the past trying to reconstruct my movements that day trying to locate that saw. On some occasions I concluded that I had inadvertently put the saw among the branches I had trimmed that day and that the saw was part of some mulch pile somewhere and that the workers had gotten angry when the metal saw blade had gone through the shredder blades dulling and possibly chipping them. At other times I concluded that I had forgotten to pick it up at the end of the day and someone had come by and picked it up thinking that it had ben abandoned. Okay, I obsessed about it.  I even dreamed that I found it one night and had very carefully put it in a safe place to be used later, but when I went to that safe place the next day it was not there.

This searching for the saw continued as a way to restore something that was lacking in my life. It was something that was broken that I thought could be made whole again if I just put all of the parts together again. These parts were in the past and so I kept looking in the past revisiting the pain, nurturing the pain, feeding the pain and frustration each time I thought about it. I longed to have that sense of accomplishment and belonging that I felt that day I trimmed the bushes.

I thought that I had put it all away until I heard Joni Mitchel sing the iconic song of 1969 (Woodstock). In this song she sings, “We are stardust. We are golden. We are trapped in the devil’s bargain. And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”

I thought about my saw, I thought about our lives of faith and struggling to find the lost relationship of the Garden of Eden, the 15^th anniversary  of 9/11, and even the language of our election this year. how all of these things are trying to recover and restore something lost that cannot be made whole again.

Okay, I know that the loss of my saw had something to do with my mother’s death and that I was not going to be able to bring her back again, just as I know that the relationship of the Garden is not something that we can get back to. The mindset of our nation before 9/1`1 in gone forever, and  the rhetoric of trying to make us something again is not possible. So why do we keep trying so hard to do exactly that?

These events of loss in our lives can become fixations that anchor us in an unhealthy past. It is not that we should not feel grief or remember loved ones and the past with fondness and a sense of loss, but the wholeness we knew before these events continues to be part of our wholeness today. These particular events make us who we are and testify to our ability to cope and adapt to our new world situations.

The joy of recovering the sheep, the coin, and the son (in the prodigal son), are not about restoring a wholeness that was, rather, these stories are about creating circumstances for celebration in the present/future. These times of finding are opportunity for creating new communities of celebration and understanding. Even the great losses of life and property that we have witnessed around the world these past fifteen years are not events of paralyzing times of destruction only, they are also times for us to learn new ways of living with one another, listening to one another, and new opportunities of finding peace in ourselves and in our world.

There are those who say that our world was forever changed by 9/11, and to some extent that is true, but the loss of life and property is a daily event too. There are those who say that the greatness of our country has been lost and that we need to recover that greatness, but we cannot rest upon the laurels of the past. We must continue to build for the future. We cannot even get back to the Garden because God intervened in history, finding us when we had gone astray and changed the relationship forever. So we are given this amazing gift of letting go of our sins of the past in order to live into a new future having found not lost things, but our relationship with God.

Stanley Hauerwas responded in a pacifist response to 9/11 writes, “Our response [to life in a post 9/11 world] is to continue living in a manner that witnesses to our belief that the world was not changed on September 11, 2001. The world was [forever] changed during the celebration of Passover in A.D. 33.” Indeed, the consequences of that celebration resulted in the losing of one more thing. There was a body that was lost in the tomb. That loss has resulted in us being found finding new life in Christ. Finding that, all else is changed.

A friend asked if he could borrow my truck the other day. Wanting to clean out some of the detritus that had accumulated, I pulled out odd pieces of paper toweling, oil rags, and ancient maps. Reaching into the map pocket to see what was preventing the new maps to seat properly I found my switch-blade pruning saw. Suddenly I remembered getting into the truck that night and sitting on the saw which was in my hip pocket. Wanting to put it somewhere safe I threw it into the map pocket and promptly forgot it. So, in celebration I am inviting all of you to come to a shrubbery trimming party. If I can riff on an old saw, “[It] once was lost, but now [it’s] found. I’m blind and yet I see.