Genesis 15.1-6
Psalm 33.12-22
Hebrews 11.1-3, 8-16
Luke 12.32-40
Many of us carry around
devices that can tell us what’s happening on the other side of the earth, and
send pictures, whenever we want to know. You can find out what your bank
balance is or how much money you owe with a few taps on the screen. If you’re
worried about your health, there are plenty of opportunities to find out what
your risk factors are for one disease or another and get advice on what you can
do about it. If you’re looking for sources of anxiety, you have an excellent
selection at your fingertips and if what you fear seems beyond your control,
there’s a whole chorus of voices out there that will explain how you had a hand
in it – maybe by not saving enough,
planning ahead or living in a healthy manner. It won’t be long before you’ll
have some guilt to go along with the anxiety. If life in time and space is all
you see, there will always be something you missed out on or didn’t prepare
for. There will always be someone better off. There will always be something to
fear.
In the story of God’s mighty acts in
human history it’s very different. People receive blessings they’ve never come
close to earning or deserving. Abraham and Sarah, senior citizen parents,
become the mother and father of an entire nation of God’s people. All they ever
really do is believe that what they do not see or build or control could be
true and real because God promises it.
In today’s gospel lesson Jesus tells
his disciples the same thing – it is God’s pleasure to give them the kingdom.
Luke writes in the early second century – fifty years after Paul and nearly
eighty years after Jesus’ crucifixion. Underlying Paul’s letters is the fervent
belief that Jesus’ return was imminent. You can imagine how such a conviction
would change the thoughts and actions of a community that held it in common as
the most profound element of their identity. Luke’s audience has had decades to
consider that the expectations of their forbears have not been realized. The
centrality of Jesus to their faith is still very real, but they’ve come to
think differently about what it means and how their lives are to reflect it.
They still believe that God will self-reveal to the world again in the person
of Jesus but they are faced with the challenge of living out that belief in the
unspecified interval of time until it becomes reality. That’s a more difficult
way to wait than the innocent expectancy of Christian communities half a
century earlier. Doubt creeps in, believers are in a position to reply to the
skepticism of those outside the community who challenge their faith and seem to
live more easily and comfortably unencumbered by it. Jesus tells them do not
worry – it is God’s pleasure to give them the kingdom. Live your lives in a manner
that reflects what you believe to be true. For Jesus that challenge frequently
points toward our relationship with the material aspects of life – wealth and
possessions. The things that we are taught to value because they secure our
existence and free us from anxiety are the things that Jesus frequently advises
his followers to let go. In today’s gospel lesson he advises them to sell what
they own and give the money away.
There are Christians who have done
that literally in a time closer to our own. They made vows and lived in
religious communities devoting their lives to service and prayer, neither
owning nor earning anything for themselves. Even those communities are
changing. Nuns go out and get jobs now. Their paychecks go to their
communities, frequently to support elderly, retired members. Monastic orders
have developed new models in which their members take vows but live, not in
cloistered communities, but in their own homes. They follow a rule of life in
which prayer and service are emphasized, but they are also obliged to earn a
living, and possibly support a family.
Today’s lessons focus on the
importance of faith to our identity – the belief in the truth of what we cannot
see and what has not yet been fully realized. Luke’s audience had waited a few
decades for God’s great self-revelation. For us, two millennia have passed
since the events of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. Luke mediated the
culture and sacred literature of the Jews to an audience of gentiles. The
symbols and motifs of that culture may have been unknown and a bit odd to the
Christians in Thessalonica or Corinth, but in the second century neither Jew
nor Greek had seen photographs of the earth taken from space or used the
Internet. We read the sacred literature
they adopted and created across a vast distance of time, space and culture. The
knowledge gained in the 2,000 years since Luke wrote allows us to think in
terms of what that could mean for believers who seek to honor those writings
faithfully in very different times and places from the ones in which they were
written. We live in a culture that is
averse to risk and devoted to the idea of a proven track record. We are
encouraged to go with the sure thing and to protect ourselves against the
possibility that our plans and expectations will not be fulfilled. And yet we
still gather together to hear the words of Jesus telling us that it is God’s
pleasure to give us the kingdom.
One of the things we have come to
believe in the two millennia since those words were written, is that we have a
part in building that kingdom. We will not bring about its full realization,
but the belief that we have a hand in its creation is central to who we are. Very
few people are able literally to sell all they have and live lives devoted to
prayer and expectation of Jesus’ return. We could interpret that as a sign of
Christianity’s failure or we could re-imagine what it means to live out the
kind of hopeful expectation that Jesus commends to his hearers in this gospel
lesson. Will we live expectantly in hope or with fearful anxiety? What will we do while we wait?
No comments:
Post a Comment