Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

 

"You cannot serve both God and mammon."

The word “mammon” means more than money.  At its root, it implies anything that we rely on for our lives.  Luke Timothy Johnson suggests in his commentary on Luke that Jesus might have been using the word as a bilingual pun with the word for faith.  An intriguing prospect: instead of the pairing of God vs. Money, it is now a pairing of “what we place our faith in other than God” versus “our faith in God.”  This isn’t to suggest that we can safely exclude money from our understanding.  Clearly, given the context of Jesus’ teaching to his disciples, money is the key element; however, it does broaden our concern not to exclude anything else that we might place our faith in other than God.
            As in Jesus’ time, money is a fundamental source of security. Money provides for our basic needs, but it can also afford us an independence that is inimical to the gospel.  Paul Piff, a psychologist at UC Berkeley, recently completed a study that suggests that the wealthiest Americans are less likely to engage in ethical behavior than the poorest. Most striking was, however, the relative likelihood of giving to charity.  Piff found that the wealthiest Americans donate 1.3 percent of their income; the poorest, 3.2 percent.  Piff speculates that the poor live dependent upon one another more than the wealthy.  In a nutshell, independence from one’s neighbor is the defining social aspect of being rich.
            The gospel understanding of wealth regarding insulating the wealthy from the community is at the heart of Jesus’ and Amos’ admonitions in today’s readings. William Sloane Coffin once declared in a sermon, “To believe you can approach transcendence without drawing nearer in compassion to suffering humanity is to fool yourself. There can be no genuine personal religious conversion without a change in social attitude”.  This is key in today’s gospel. 
            The spiritual toxin of wealth is the building of barriers between oneself and those who suffer. But we can do this wall building, to some extent, without great riches.  All it takes is the desire to avoid those who suffer, and make it a priority to avoid any form of suffering at all cost. If the gospel teaches us anything, it teaches us to join in the mess and suffering of those on the margins of society, to need less so that we may share more of what we have.  Wealth, for St. John Chrysostom, was associated with thievery:  
"Not to share our wealth with the poor is theft from the poor and deprivation of their means of life; we do not possess our own wealth, but theirs." [St. John Chrysostom (+ 407 A.D), On Wealth and Poverty, p. 55, SVS, Crestwood, NY 1984]
          For Christians, the wealth we have to share is the amount we have that we do not need.  Jesus needed nothing and admonished his disciples to “carry nothing with you.”  Poverty as a Christian virtue isn’t the poverty of not having enough, but rather it is the grace of not seeking more than we need.  The widow who gave from her need was blessed rather than the person of means, giving proportionally less from his wealth.  One gave in faith; the other gave secure in the knowledge that his sacrifice could not result in any hardship. Ultimately, for the Christian, it is the giving of our greatest gift, our life, for others.  To live for others and with others is the real ethic of Christian wealth. God gave himself to humanity, all he had to Jesus, that we might have all that God has; he has held nothing for himself. He came into the world poor and died with only a purple cloak on loan, but gave humanity the gift of Himself.

Exaltation of the Cross

 

The Way of the Resurrection 

     Sunday's celebration of the Exaltation of the Cross has resonances with Good Friday in that the Cross, with Jesus upon it, is at the center. As Paul points out in scripture, the crucified Christ is a scandal to non-believers. Why would it be a “scandal”? Why would they care?

     They care because, if true, it has rather uncomfortable implications. If it is true that Jesus was God’s presence on earth as a human, then God’s own creation crucified its creator! What’s more, God allowed that to happen. Christ is the Cross. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life of God, and we are called to follow him to the cross. But the story, as we well know, is not complete.

     We follow Christ to the cross so we can follow Christ through the cross to the resurrection. So, the cross is not the goal of the Christian life, but resurrection; however, to be resurrected, one must first be crucified. Saint Paul suggests that “...if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his “(Rom.6:5).

     Specifically, St. Paul preaches that we need to crucify our “old self” with Christ. In other words, we must seek the death of the false self, the self that rejects the Good News of Christ. Paul’s poetic language can be a bit difficult to navigate, but in essence, it is part of Paul’s notion of the “new man", the person who is reborn in Christ by “crucifying” the old one.

     Few, if any of us, will be called to be physically tortured and to die for the Gospel, but we know of Christians for whom daily this is a reality in Syria and other parts of the Middle East. Most likely, ours will be the daily sacrifice of our selfishness and self-centeredness in favor of a life of grace, of living for others the way Christ lived for the world. That God’s grace triumphs over sin and death is the Triumph of the Cross.

Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

 How much is this going to cost me?

               

“…grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: "ye were bought at a price," and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.” ---Dietrich Bonhoeffer The Cost of Discipleship

                I think it is important to notice in today’s gospel that “great crowds” were following Jesus.  Let’s face it, after curing the sick, raising the dead, and “sticking it to the man” publicly, Jesus’ popularity grew, and the setting of today’s teaching parables is the home of a local prominent Pharisee on the Sabbath.  Jesus wasn’t there for a salon of philosophers, but to cure the Pharisee of “an abnormal swelling of his body”.  This time, it is Jesus asking the difficult question: “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not?”  The gospel records that everyone remained silent, and Jesus healed the man. This healing was preceded by last week’s gospel of the Parable of the Great Banquet, which was chiefly about humility.  Today’s gospel follows and is about the cost of discipleship.  Imagine the great interest in what Jesus had to say on the heels of healing on the Sabbath, and healing a Pharisee to boot! But instead of handing out applications for discipleship and encouraging his audience to enlist, Luke’s gospel shows Jesus admonishing his followers to consider the cost of discipleship; that following Him involves renunciation, the “hating” of one’s family, and one's security, and “yes—even life itself.” What follows is a couple of illustrations of the prudence of calculating the cost; ironic, since the demand from Jesus is that unless you give up everything, you cannot be a disciple of his. Notice the two actions that are essential: carrying one's cross and renouncing all that one has.  If your hands are busy holding on tightly to things, or even to relationships, such that you can't pick up your cross, you need to let something go; multitasking is as dangerous behind the wheel as it is in the spiritual life.  It is called a divided heart.

            Of course, Jesus isn’t suggesting that one hates his family as a precondition, but rather be willing to find one’s security and honor apart from one’s family—a tall order in first-century civilization.  Those without families were those without standing in society, without security.  This is what Jesus means by “hating” one's family.  But what about “life itself”?   Jesus knew the ultimate cost is martyrdom.  Jesus knew he was headed for the cross that awaited him in Jerusalem, and he knew those who followed him could suffer a similar fate.  Even today, Christians around the world are being martyred for their faith.

            A genuine sacrifice of Christians today, though, is not primarily the sacrifice of one’s life in a decisive moment but comes less apparently in the sacrifice of oneself lived for others over a lifetime.  The gradual giving away of one’s youth and figure to mother a family; the life of those dedicated to living among the poor to ease their suffering, or to love the stranger whom no one has time to love.  We can sacrifice our time to listen to a friend whose life is a train wreck, or go without something we like to share what little we have with a stranger who has even less.  Let our fasting also arise from refraining from eating so that we may be free to stay longer with one who needs us rather than default to the need for bodily sustenance.  These “crosses” may not make headlines, but they transform the hearts of those for whom we sacrifice, and they change us; that is the point of Jesus’ message: to sacrifice “even life itself” for others outside our family, friends, and those for whom we are naturally inclined to sacrifice. So many of us, myself included, are not condemned by our great lives of scandal and sinfulness, but our regular lives of prudent engagement where sacrifices are far too carefully planned and controlled.  Christianity, when lived as good news for the world, is less about acquiring interior peace and tranquility in mystical rapture and more about realizing that mystical rapture is always preceded by sacrificial love. What transforms us into a disciple is ultimately our commitment to following Christ on the way to the cross and praying every step of the way for a resurrection.