Christian Economic Theory

The Common Lectionary Gospel reading for the third Sunday after Epiphany is from the fourth chapter of Luke. Luke tells the story of Jesus' first sermon in his hometown synagogue... and tells how Jesus had to sneak away from the crowd to escape their anger. I think this is a good time to share some uncomfortable thoughts about Christian living. Check it out; I welcome your comments!

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Fulfilled in Your Hearing; or,

You Heard It Here! It Just Came True!

A sermon preached at Wesley Church, United Methodist,Medford, MA, January 24, 2010

The Rev. Dr. Joan M. Saniuk

In this Sunday’s Old Testament reading, all of the exiles who have returned to Jerusalem come together to hear an amazing document. A scroll of the ancient Law has been found in the ruins of the Temple, and the people listen all day as Ezra reads and explains it. In the reading from Luke’s Gospel, we hear Jesus’ first sermon in his hometown, in which Jesus says, “Scripture has just made history! It came true, right here.” What is the Word of God saying to us today?

One of my favorite people at the Episcopal Divinity School was its previous president, Bishop Steven Charleston. Steven is a bit unique among Episcopalians; he grew up in a Pentecostal church, and he brings that charismatic style of preaching to his ministry. I remember that sometimes, when he wanted to emphasize his point... or, when he wanted to say something challenging, he would say to us: “Do you hear me?” Of course, we would reply yes, and then he would ask the same question again. Again, we would say “yes,” and then he would stop and say “I don’t think you heard me” before launching into a more challenging idea. I want to play a little bit, today, with that notion of “hearing” God’s word. Do we hear Jesus? Do we really hear what he is saying to us?

The writer of Luke has Jesus giving his first public teaching in his hometown, and as Fate (or the Holy Spirit) would have it, Jesus’ text is from Chapter 61 of the Book of Isaiah. This is the passage in which Isaiah promises that those who have been carried off into exile in Babylon will come home again; that all they have lost will be restored; that all their shame and humiliation will be erased. To Jesus’ audience, living at a bare subsistence level in Roman-occupied Galilee, the prophecy brings with it the hope of a complete restoration of their nation and of their fortunes, hope of a jubilee which the Messiah will usher in. These are great hopes. Jesus says, it has just come true in your hearing. I have been anointed, deputized, sent, to bind up the brokenhearted. To bring good news to the poor. To proclaim release of prisoners and freedom to those who have been oppressed. Do you hear him?

Do you really hear him?

Too often, I think, the Christian church has not really heard Jesus. It is easy to over-spiritualize his proclamation. Likewise, it is easy to interpret his promises as a promise of prosperity with no strings attached.

It is easy to over-spiritualize Jesus’ message in this sermon. He has been anointed to bring Good News! We say it with capital letters: The Good News. To those of us who have been blind, not understanding our purpose or God’s ways, we are enlightened; we can see that God loves us and has a wonderful plan for our lives. We can tell other people about the Good News, Jesus Christ. We have been, as St. Paul says, enslaved by sin and death, but by our faith in Christ we have been set free, delivered, forgiven, and promised eternal life after our death: Hallelujuah!!

Hallelujah! It’s worth shouting and praising about. It is a precious gift to know that we are loved by God, forgiven by God, important to God. Do you hear me?

Please hear me. All of this is important. Having said that... do we hear Jesus?

If we take this good news to be purely spiritual, I believe we aren’t hearing all that Jesus wants to tell us. In Jesus’ time, and certainly in a place like Jesus’ Nazareth, 95% of the people were living at a bare subsistence level. Almost everybody was living hand to mouth. In this context, salvation has a practical connotation as well as a physical one. Do you hear me?

You know, a lot of people believe that being Christian is a way to be successful in the world. If you go to church, if you live right, then God will bless you with prosperity. I remember reading an article, a few years ago, about a man who was an elected official, in Texas or Oklahoma or someplace like that, and about how his wife talked to reporters who were at a function in their home. She pointed out some beautiful, and quite expensive, Oriental carpets and said that they were led by the Holy Spirit to buy them. She said, “the Lord just laid it on my heart that we were to have them.” I have to admit that I cringed when I read that story. It doesn’t connect at all with the way I was brought up to think of the Holy Spirit. Do you hear me?

Is it God’s will that we should be rich? Maybe, but the Bible is very clear about at least one thing: it is not God’s will that some should be rich at the expense of others’ poverty. Is it God’s will that those of us who are doing well, right now, should hang on to what we have for dear life, and under no circumstances share it with anyone else? Do you hear me? I don’t think we are hearing Jesus if we expect to be rich as a reward for loving God, and especially if we then fall into the trap of thinking that other people are poor because they are morally challenged. Do you hear me?

The Biblical concept of Jubilee means, among other things, that debts will be forgiven, that the environment will go for an entire year without being abused, and that people will get their ancestral lands back. It is the opposite of an economic system in which people can lose their homes, in which creditors can charge any rate of interest that they can get away with, in which the rich get richer while the poor get poorer. Jubilee means that wealth is redistributed, to restore the balance in the community. Oops! Can I say that here, in the USA? It sounds...Communist. Unthinkable.

Do you hear Jesus?

I don’t think we are all hearing Jesus clearly... yet.

The Good News is about more than knowing that we do not need to fear death. The Good News is also about living in such a way that we, AND OTHERS, are not ground down by want or humiliation in the here-and-now. I know that Methodists understand this; that’s why I like hanging out with you all. Jesus is calling us to make Scripture come true by bringing that same Good News to others, not just by telling them about Jesus, but also by our acting to bring about justice.

Do you hear me?

There are some really easy ways to ease want. For example, I can take my cell phone and send a text message to 90999, with the text ‘HAITI’. When I do this, I will get a confirmation message back, and when I reply again to that message, the phone company will charge $10 to my cell phone bill and forward that amount to relief of the horrible disaster.

Do we have the power to do even more? As citizens of what is still probably the wealthiest nation on the planet, even when we fall on hard times, we have better access to the necissities of life than most of the rest of the world. Do we have the political and exonomic power to not only give charity, but also to change the rules of the game? To end the outrage of seeing families become bankrupt because they cannot pay their medical bills? To end financial practices that impose higher rates of interest, and higher fees, on precisely those people who are least able to pay off their debts? To insist that recovery must be for all of us, and not just some of us? For each person is a beloved child of God, and God’s will is that we be restored in community.

In her book “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” Annie Dillard writes: “there is not a guarantee in the world. Oh, your needs are guaranteed, your needs are absolutely guaranteed by the most stringent of warranties, in the plainest, truest words: ask, seek, knock. But you must read the find print. “Not as the world giveth, give I unto you.” There is a catch...” the catch is that the God who ensures that we will have all we need also requires something of us: that we allow God to use us in return. Even if it takes us by surprise, even if it changes us in ways that we never imagined.

Do we hear Jesus?

Do we hear what Jesus is asking of us, today?

Whatever it is, rest assured, it is all good news. And I give you my testimony: I have trusted in God at the same time that I have kept my heart and my pocketbook open to help others, and I have never, ever been disappointed.

Today, may we hear Jesus, and may we follow. AMEN.

The Mayor's Christmas Present

I preached this sermon on the Sunday after Christmas. Your feedback is welcome!

The Mayor’s Christmas Present

A sermon preached at Wesley Church UMC, Medford, MA, December 27, 2009

Text: Matthew 1: 18-25

As we continue celebrating Christmas, I wanted us to hear the account of Jesus’ birth from the Gospel according to Matthew. The usual telling of the Christmas story, as you probably know, is a tapestry woven from bits and pieces of the account of Luke and the account of Matthew. When we take the time to read Luke’s and Matthew’s stories separately, though, we find some interesting differences. One of these differences is illustrated in the story we just heard; it concerns how it is that God communicates with us.

In Luke’s Gospel, people receive visits from angels, in the middle of the daytime, or in the middle of the night-time; the glory of God shines out with lots of special effects. When we look closely at Matthew’s Gospel, written for a Jewish audience rather than a Greek-speaking one, we don’t find so many special effects. There is the star, of course, that leads the Magi, but that star is a sign that is only understood by those few. Messages from God still come from an angel, but they come by way of dreams. The presence of God comes in a subtle way, a very ordinary way.

Sometimes we look for wonderful signs that convince us that God is with us. My mother, God rest her, was a devout Christian woman. About twenty years ago, she made a pilgrimage with her sister to a town in Bosnia called Medugorje, a place where it was said that the Virgin Mary was appearing in visions to three young people. Mom told me that she had seen the miracle: she had seen the sun change colors, had seen silver rosary chains turn to gold. I was a bit skeptical, and I’m a little sorry to admit that I sort of teased her about it. I said that I was glad that she had the chance to see the miracle, but that I didn’t have to go all the way to Europe to find miracles -- I regularly saw miracles only a block away from my home. This morning, I’d like to tell you about one of those miracles, one that came in the form of a very unexpected Christmas present.

It happened when I was in graduate school at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I spent seven years at UC Santa Barbara working on my Ph.D., and like many graduate students, I spent quite some time stuck... and procrastinating. For me, that procrastination consisted of spending my energies volunteering with poor and homeless people in my neighborhood.

I lived in a neighborhood next to UCSB called Isla Vista, or I.V. for short. Isla Vista was not just a student neighborhood. It was also a place where poor people lived. There were street people and old hippies, some of whom would be out every day panhandling the college students. There were also Hmong Lao refugees, newly settled in the U.S. and doing whatever they needed to (including gardening on the parklands) to survive. Increasingly, there were Latin@ immigrants, working for minimum wage jobs and doubling up in Isla Vista’s relatively inexpensive apartments. In short, many of my neighbors were people who went hungry. A Catholic friend of mine, named Joe, one of Joe’s friends, and the local Methodist minister finally called a meeting in response to the sight of people picking through dumpsters to find food. The result of that meeting was a non-profit organization called “Let Isla Vista Eat” or, LIVE for short.

My friend Joe soon roped me into volunteering with LIVE and, I have to say, it changed my life. We offered a free breakfast of cereal, hard-boiled eggs, and toast every weekday. We hosted distributions of USDA surplus foods. At Thanksgiving and at Christmas, we put on turkey dinners at the University Religious Center for whomever wanted to eat -- usually 200 or 300 people. And for two winters, we opened the Center at night as a temporary shelter for those who were homeless and (at least relatively) sober.

The homeless people, the street people, were an interesting mix. I remember E., who didn’t seem to have a job and who lived off whatever castoffs she could find. There were some like R.-- or to use his street name, Leprechaun -- who had a warm and dry place to sleep but not much else. Leprechaun would earn some pocket money -- well, really, beer money -- sweeping sidewalks, and made it a point to flirt with all the college women. And then there was The Mayor.

His given name was D., but everyone called him “The Mayor” -- I guess because he acted as if he owned the town. D. could usually be seen every afternoon sitting on the steps of a local store, drunk, looking scruffy, and playing a boom box at full volume. D. didn’t flirt with the college girls, the way Leprechaun did. He didn’t flirt with anybody. He ranted, and he scowled, towards anyone who came past him or, maybe more to the point, to nobody in particular. In short, nobody much hung out with the Mayor. I know I didn’t. I was afraid of angry drunks. I was so afraid of encountering D. that I would even cross the street to avoid being where I could hear him.

Every year, as Christmas time came around, my friend Joe went through his usual routine of inviting all the folks on the street to come over for Christmas dinner. We would of course expect to see our usual breakfast crowd, folks like E. and Leprechaun, but Joe also made it a point to invite everyone who was on the street, maybe especially the folks who were usually too drunk or wasted to come around for breakfast, at 8 AM, clean and sober. In this particular year, lo and behold, two days before Christmas, the Mayor came over for breakfast.

D. had shaved and cleaned up, and he was sober and polite. I somehow got up the nerve to greet him -- which, after all, was my job. He spoke pleasantly and intelligently to me -- something I had never experienced from D.. He came the next day, too, and the following day, for Christmas dinner. One one of these days, as I was standing in the lobby of the building, Doug came up to me with a brown sweater in his hand.

“Here,” he said. “This is for you. I found it in the Free Box”-- which was a place where people put their cast-off stuff for others to claim -- “and it looked like it might fit you, so I took it home and washed it. Merry Christmas.”

I was astonished. I don’t remember what I said -- probably something like, “Thank you, D. That was really sweet of you.” I took the sweater home with me that night. As it turned out, the sweater was a little small on me, so I didn’t wear it much. But I kept it for a very long time. It was the most unexpected present I had ever received. I had thought of myself as being well off, as doing something for people who didn’t have what I did, but here was a guy who spent his days on the streets... and found a way to reciprocate the gift he had received.

It was a miracle that D. had shown up sober for those days up to and including Christmas. Sadly, it didn’t last; alcoholism is a disease that takes years to develop and is not healed overnight. In the coming weeks, I would again see D. the Mayor holding court on Embarcadero del Mar, playing his music loud, and scowling at the passers-by. And since I was still too afraid of angry drunks to come near D., I went back to trying to ignore him. But I remembered that for a few days, he had been a sociable and agreeable human being. His few days of sobriety were among many miracles that I witnessed during my time with LIVE -- miracles that came about because one human being had treated another human being with love instead of contempt, had been kind and thoughtful instead of dismissing a street person as lazy, sick, or disposable. Miracles that came about because of the generosity of one or two people, given for no other reason than that the love of Christ impelled them to pass on that same love.

By the end of this week, I am quite sure, most if not all of the stores will have removed their Christmas merchandise. By the end of next week, I am willing to bet that some will already have Valentine’s Day merchandise on display. The business of America will have moved on to the next thing. The business of followers of Jesus Christ, however, is precisely to stay on this one thing: that Infinite Love became one of us, and is with us still. The Christmas story teaches that through Jesus, God became one of us, and in so doing made our lives holy. Not just your life, or my life, but every one of the six billion - odd lives on this planet. All the people who have been, and all the people who will be.

My wish for us, as we complete this Christmas season in the next week or so, is that we will remember the healing power that can come from even the smallest act of kindness. Especially in a year such as this one, when so many people are hurting economically and so many more are afraid of what might happen, actions of kindness and mercy are even more important... and more powerful.

The world may return to business as usual. For those of us who are pledged to follow Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, however, our task and our call remain the same all year round. We are called to see with the loving eyes of the infant Jesus. We are called to love with the generous heart of the Holy One who gave one hundred percent of Godself, to us. When we see each other through those eyes, when we love each other through that generous heart, we will know that there are still miracles on earth. So may it be.

Merry Christmas, and a very blessed and miracle-filled New Year, to you all.