8-4-2019 Readings & Sermon

A reading from Hosea.

When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.

The more I called them, the more they went from me.

They kept sacrificing to the Baals and offering incense to idols.

Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk.

I took them up in my arms, but they did not know that I healed them.

I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love.

I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks.

I bent down to them and fed them.

They shall return to the land of Egypt, and Assyria shall be their king, because they have refused to return to me.

The sword rages in their cities, it consumes their oracle priests, and devours because of their schemes.

My people are bent on turning away from me.

To the Most High they call, but he does not raise them up at all.

How can I give you up, Ephraim?

You like Adma.

How can I treat you like Zeboim?

My heart recoils within me, my compassion grows warm and tender.

I will not execute my fierce anger.

I will not again destroy Ephraim, for I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.

They shall go after the Lord, who roars like a lion.

When he roars, his children shall come trembling from the west.

They shall come trembling like birds from Egypt and like doves from the land of Assyria, and I will return them to their homes, says the Lord.

The word of the Lord.

The Psalm appointed for today is Psalm 107.

We will read responsively by the half verse.

Give thanks to the Lord who is good, whose mercy endures forever.

Let all those whom the Lord has redeemed proclaim that the Lord redeemed them from the hands of the foe.

God gathered them out of the lands, from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south.

Some wandered in desert wastes.

They found no way to a city where they might dwell.

They were hungry and thirsty.

Their spirits languished within them.

Then in their trouble, they cried to the Lord, who delivered them from their distress.

The Lord put their feet on a straight path to go to a city where they might dwell.

Let them give thanks for the mercy of God, for the wonders the Lord does for all people, for God satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things.

Whoever is wise will ponder these things and consider well the mercies of the Lord.

A reading from Colossians.

If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.

Set your mind on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.

For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.

When Christ, who is your life, is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.

Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire and greed, which is idolatry.

On account of these, the wrath of God is coming on those who are disobedient.

These are the ways you also once followed when you were living that life.

But now you must get rid of all such things anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth.

Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourself with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its Creator.

In that renewal, there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free.

But Christ is all and in all.

The word of the Lord.

Someone in the crowd said to Jesus, Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.

But Jesus said to that man, Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?

And Jesus said to them all, Take care, be on your guard against all kinds of greed, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.

And then Jesus told them a parable.

Then he said, I'll do this.

I'll pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods.

And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years, relax, eat, drink, be merry.

But God said to him, You fool, this very night your life is being demanded of you, and the things you've prepared, whose will they be?

So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves, but are not rich toward God.

The Gospel of the Lord.

You know, or we'll read this terrible story from the Hebrew Bible, and we always say, Thanks be to God.

Well, I don't know if I can make you thankful after that, but I hope you'll consider this with me through a slightly couple of different lenses.

The first is, and I don't think the story's about this at all, but if it's your takeaway, please make sure you have an advanced medical directive, a will, or a trust, and feel free to leave St.

Thomas in your will.

If that's all you get out of the story today, that's fine.

It's really important because the story reminds us life isn't ours, right?

No next day is promised, and it's really important.

And I will tell you, particularly, because here are two children bickering about their inheritance, a will and a trust can really deliver you from a lot of that.

Okay.

What is the story actually about?

Not that.

So digging into the story a little bit, um, this is a guy who has an abundant harvest.

And when you hear abundant, what you need to know is he sowed seed expecting a 100% yield, and essentially he got a thousand percent yield.

Right?

So he bought some stock at an IPO that all of a sudden was worth more than 10 times its value.

That's actually not a foreign narrative to us, right?

We we we understand these things happen, and honestly, thinking about an IPO is really helpful agriculturally because sometimes the land does have a hyperabundance.

He's got all of this unanticipated yield, and what will he do with it?

If he doesn't store it, it will rot or decay, your vermin will get it.

So he needs a storage facility for it.

Now, as a young boy in Sunday school, I learned he was foolish because he decided to keep it and he should have given it all away.

I mean, I think that's really nice, but we don't live like that.

I mean, let's just think through this.

This guy has what most of us would accept as a very understandable retirement strategy.

He gets a yield, he is responsible with what he gets, and then he decides he's gonna retire.

Um I learned, I'm really sensitive to this because my parents grew up as kind of sharecroppers in Kentucky, that maybe it's because he tears the barns down.

He should have just built more barns.

But you know, when you've got an agricultural like fief, and you build more barns, you now have less arable land.

So tearing down a one-story silo to build a three-story silo, actually, from a stewardship perspective, is not necessarily foolish, right?

It could be that this man has totally forgotten that life shouldn't be postponed until we have everything we think we need.

Now, now I want to say I'm not sure that's the point of the story, but I think it's a very, very fair point.

Because quite often, if you're like me, you tend to think, you know, when I get that degree, I'm done and I can relax.

And then it's when I get that next degree, or I'm gonna get that promotion, or when my kid gets out of high school, I'll be able to relax.

And there's always another target down the road.

And sometimes, sometimes we live our whole life that way, and we miss what was our invitation all along.

I don't want to sound too much like the Dead Poet Society and seize the day here, but I but I do think it's an it's it's a good reminder for us.

Um somebody just gave me this this book that is written, it's a it's a uh obviously a fiction piece.

It's written from God's perspective, and uh God is sort of thinking out loud in the book and says, you know, it's interesting that human beings often argue and bargain and try to get more life when they're in adverse circumstances.

How can I extend the life I have without ever having bothered to live in the first place?

This is a good reminder, I think.

I'm not sure that's what the story is about either, though.

Right?

I actually think there's no way to understand this gospel story apart from the interpretive frame, the thing we get at the beginning.

There's a boy that says, Jesus tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.

Now that's actually pretty countercultural.

We accept that inheritance should be divided by and large, but at the time of Jesus it sort of worked like this.

And depending on who you read, you'll hear different numbers.

The eldest son received somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of the goods.

I think 90%.

The second son got the residual 30 to 10 percent.

All other boys and every girl got 0%.

So who's asking the question here?

Probably not the eldest son.

He would not be interested in dividing the inheritance, I don't think.

He would not need an adjudicator to do that.

This is likely either the secondborn son who's saying, I'm supposed to get between 30 and 10, how about 50?

Or it's the third son who's supposed to get zero, how about something?

I didn't think Jesus is weighing in on that cultural practice.

Notice he completely sidesteps it, not because God doesn't care about that.

I think it's the colonel here that he says, Who appointed me to be arbitrator and judge over you?

I'm gonna step back from resources a second, and you know what, there's always this danger that I'm only talking to myself here, and that's that's fine.

But I tell you, uh, it's really enticing, don't you think, to weigh in on family squabbles?

I love deciding people's inheritances from us from outside, you know, it's great.

I say that a little bit jokingly, but I say it also seriously.

Because when in my family, I'm real happy to do it for you.

And it's not just about family squabbles like this.

Friends, I think Jesus is inviting us to really consider something that I think is increasingly dangerous for us as a church, and I don't just mean as a parish, I mean a world church.

I see this politically, and I see this in my home life, even this inability to talk to one another without being in the seat of judgment or evaluation.

The short bullet I want to give you, and then I'll come back to it a little bit more, is that it's very possible that this brother gets more stuff than he was supposed to at the total cost of his family.

Now I hope you have never been involved in an inheritance squabble.

I have done it vicariously.

Um, once upon a time there were ten children and a hundred-acre farm, and when the parents died, they split it up into ten pieces.

They died 33 years ago.

That hundred-acre farm still belongs to no one because, and increasingly every year, there are fewer siblings around to argue.

The three left out of the ten can't agree on the inheritance.

It doesn't matter that they've been into arbitration, they went, and that actually made things worse because then they bickered about whether the arbitrator was right and had listened to each faction.

And curiously enough, these children who had grown up together on a farm, they started going backward and saying, Well, you were always the selfish one, and you're just being selfish now.

Or you just want this because you're mad that mom gave me that banana that one time.

This is the kind of thing that happens.

Now, I'm sure that doesn't happen in anybody else's family.

But I will tell you this amazing thing, since I've seen it unwind in my own family, is that essentially siblings traded each other out for a property, the only value of which was to remind them that they grew up together in the first place.

I've seen it happen over pieces of furniture.

I want that furniture because it reminds us of growing up in mom's house, and I hate that you want it.

Really easy to hear it in my story because it isn't yours.

But if you've ever lived in one of those, I think it's really darn easy and tempting to sacrifice the relationship the possessions always were meant to represent in exchange for the token.

Of course, but I think this happens more often than not in our political commentary nowadays.

And honestly, it often comes across where we say, we do this really sneaky thing, right?

Where we say, What do you think about the democratic presidential nominee debate?

It sounds like we're interested in what you think.

In fact, what we want to do is judge what you think.

Or you believe in gun control, right?

You ever had a question phrased like that?

It's really clear what your answer must be in order to be accepted, because I have appointed myself judge and arbitrator over you.

My poor wife.

This is gonna sound crazy when I tell you this, but about a year ago I realized she would go swimming and I would say, Did you have a good swim?

And she would say, Why do you always have to evaluate my swim?

I said, I'll just ask it how it was.

Then ask how it was and don't ask if it was good.

I know that's a small thing because this is what we do normal.

Normally I see people on the road, I say, How are you?

And of course they need to say good, right?

That's the expected answer.

If you say, How are you?

and somebody says, I'm terrible, my mother died, you would say, Who would tell that to a stranger?

But we asked.

And this, I think, is this really interesting thing, quite honestly, if we'll allow it to spiral down, it's not just about inheritance, it's not just about our politics or our religious points of view.

I think Jesus is asking us to really consider do we focus on possessions and on rightness and on our opinions, or are we open to the inheritance of God's family?

Sometimes we say, I'm just asking because I want to know, and I think that's actually a really good spiritual discipline for us to think about this week.

When we ask somebody a question, do we really care what they have to say?

Are we really curious about their answer, or are we just measuring up what we've already decided ourselves?

That may not be what the story is about, but it is for me.

Because I see in so many areas of my life, be it friends or family or church or politics, really excitement to weigh and measure other people up instead of a willingness to actually be curious about them.

I think the good news for us, and this is really good news, we get to hear this story out of Hosea, and it really is giving us a I think the prophet is Hosea is wrapped up into sort of this emotional experience that I can tell you I've had a lot as a parent.

Like my kid didn't do what I wanted, and I knew better, and I told them, and now they're gonna get it, and God didn't like that.

Hosea is saying God wants to deliver us from living a parceled-out inheritance so that we can instead live together as a family.

Now, look, I'm not saying we're not gonna disagree with folks.

I'm not saying that informed opinions are not really important.

I'm saying that we often don't even bother listening or asking or talking because we've already decided not just what the right answer is, we've decided somebody's relative merit to us based on whether they share our opinion.

Jesus warns us, I think, to be on guard against greed.

Because that's what greed is never having enough.

Never.

And I sure think that God would like to deliver us from that.

Now, what I'm saying might sound like just being nice to folks.

It might sound like, hey, you're asking us to have some more manners.

And isn't the gospel bigger than that?

I am sure the gospel is bigger than that.

But if we don't start there, if we don't start there, I don't think it ever will be bigger than that.

Please join me as we pray our faith in the words of the Nicene Creed.