Category: Sermon

The title of my sermon this morning, The House of Bread, is a translation of the Hebrew word for the town in which Jesus was born. The place was called Bethlehem, or House of Bread because it was situated on a fertile plain where, the original settlers, the hoped, would be able to make a decent living supplying the region with bread. Bethlehem was not a holy city — it was a modest, hard-working, blue collar town. But it was also a town with a rich past.
Even now, in Bethlehem you can find a monument to Rachel. Rachel, that richly interesting figure of the time of the patriarchs drew her last breath and was buried in Bethlehem. It was also here that Ruth, lived with her husband Boaz. Ruth you will recall is the daughter in law of Naomi, an exiled and widowed woman who urged her daughters-in-law to leave her and find new husbands.
More important to the story, here though, is the fact that Ruth is a Moabite, an unwelcome immigrant. And of course, we know that Bethlehem is the home of Ruth’s great grandson, David.
Our reading today from the prophet Micah lifts up this little and quite ordinary town, and puts it forth as an example.
Though it is tempting to read Micah from our current Christian vantage and offer that Micah lifted up Bethlehem as an exemplary town because Jesus would be born there, it is not good scholarship to do so.
It is in fact better to go at it from the other direction. The story people told about Jesus’ birth was unlikely historical fact. But it was very likely told because of these allusions that I have just mentioned.
In other words, Micah shines a light on this town, because it is the least among the great towns of Judah. Its breadmaking is significant — but again, bakers are not kings or princes. Micah, we need to recall was distressed by the great cities of Judah, by their wealth and worldly splendors. Micah writes during some time of trouble — a time of community disintegration, high levels of poverty, and great riches; extreme poverty and extreme wealth both concentrated in close vicinity. It was also a time of terrorism from outside the city walls, from enemies like the Moabites, and he offers that at times like this we should look for great things, not from the great principle actors, the wealthy cities and kings, but from the least.
An unknown poet could have been writing about Micah’s intentions:
Small things are best;
grief and unrest
to rank and wealth are given;
but little things
on little wings
Bear little souls to heaven.
In other words, where you least expect to see God’s grace, it appears — working out the purpose of God in small, ordinary ways. The prevalent theme at Christmastime being that God’s purpose is echoed by the angels when they announced to the shepherds, “Peace on earth and goodwill to all.” It is yet another signal to nations like ours that the solutions to our problems are found in the words and ideals of our president’s Nobel acceptance speech and not in his actions.
In our Gospel reading lies further evidence that we are to read Jesus’ birth according to this thought of Micah’s that peace is worked out through the lives of ordinary bakers and butchers and brewers and that from them shall come the slow working out of the purposes of God.
I know that reading the genealogy of Jesus is relatively boring — but think for a moment about the practice. If you have ever spent some time with people who like to research their genealogy you know that they do it to establish themselves in a context of famous people or events, but also of infamous ones. Both say something interesting to us. The genealogy of Jesus includes David — we know this — that’s the famous part.
But if we are careful about reading the genealogy, we notice that after working all the way through the generations, thirteen of them, we notice at the fourteenth generation, that Joseph is not listed as the father of Jesus — There is no direct DNA link between David and Jesus.
The literal mind has a problem here — but we might view it as an opportunity to see this whole genealogy as a parable — in fact the first parable of what amounts to a book of them. And as with most parables, there is a surprise at hand and that surprise functions to shock the hearer into a new world.
In order for us to be so shocked we need to understand the actors — and most of them, I wager, we don’t know much about.
I’ve already mentioned Ruth, she’s in there. One of the other women is named Tamar. Tamar’s story is even curiouser. She is picked out as the bride for Er, son of Judah, grand-son of Jacob, the one for whom Israel is named. But before they can be married, Er “does something wicked in the Lord’s sight,” and is killed by God (remember this the the Old Testament). Judah, then tells his other son to sleep with Tamar and produce a son, fulfilling his obligation to produce an heir. But Onan is suspicious and “spills his seed on the ground” . God kills Onan too. Tamar is twice widowed and still childless. Judah, desperate, tells Tamar to wait for his youngest son to be old enough — and that she should move out of his house. Which she does.
The plot thickens when Judah’s wife dies and the youngest son comes of age. But Judah makes no move to marry him off to Tamar. Instead the story continues with a description of Judah leaving for Timnath that he make sheer his sheep. Tamar, angry at Judah hears that he will be coming to town, where she lives, and she devises a plot to catch him in an embarrassing act of prostitution by disguising herself. He does and she has a child by him, which she is later able to prove by stealing his seal at the time of the act.
This is not your typical sentimental stuff of Christmastime.
While I know that Christmas time lends itself to sentiment, and that we need some sentiment in our lives — it is the oil of moving and changing families – Christmas itself, does not represent a cozy sentiment about God. Instead Matthew’s parable of the birth of Jesus asks his readers and hearers to see the Messiah, again, as a different kind of Savior. While Jesus’ kingly credentials are second to none, being directly related to King David — we are given a notice — this is no birth meant to address our desires to be sentimental about the great and powerful past of our histories. Christmas instead, belongs to those who recognize his birth as for the little ones who struggle against the dynasties we so often, against our better judgment, want to worship and set for ourselves and encourage on our behalf.
Next week our story continues this theme with the wise men who face off with the other dynasty of the time, the Roman Government. The story gets more complex because governments are forces for good too.  But for today, let us remember, that from our relatively affluent perspective, the forces of powerful empires like ours,  are generally at odds  with the Tamars and the Ruths who struggle against the realities of the local disruption they cause, who struggle with the very real matters of starvation and death in their lives.  And for us, may these minor characters,  characters, about whom some would not even attribute human qualities, yet characters none-the-less, given a place in the royal lineage of Jesus, may they encourage us who are the butchers and brewers and bread-bakers today, to see oursleves in that direct lineage, and so responsible to Jesus and his story of the locus of peace in the world.   Amen.

Someone recently commented to me that he did not call himself a Christian because it seems presumptuous. God alone makes that call.
I understand the impulse behind this hesitation. This world seems too full of people who call themselves Christian and act very much unchristian like. Some Christians talk of their God and then make the claim, “My God is the Christian God.” They use the adjective in order to make the truth of their statement and their actions unassailable.
I want to spend a little time on this third Sunday of Advent, while I have it, to think about this word Christian. Regarding its cognate, Christmas, it is commonplace to state that we do not know the precise date of the birth of Christ, that December 25 was chosen as a day on which to celebrate his birth so as to coincide with the winter equinox. We nevertheless celebrate the chosen day because the importance of the story resides, not in its correspondence with history, but in the strength of its central metaphors to lead us in our living. The question for us today, is what kind of living does this story want us to do? Because if it’s merely Christian living, we’re back were we started — some Christian living seems patently unchristian.
I want to get at this question by taking a look at incarnation. Incarnation is that explicitly theological word used historically to express the nature of Jesus.  It comes from the latin to be made in the flesh.  Our gospel reading is an explicitly incarnational  text when it says “The word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
But I am less interested in the doctrine of the incarnation.  Something the church put forward a thousand years ago so as to put a check on the different arguments about who Jesus was or is.  I think this is sadly the wrong way to go in thinking about Jesus — that his very life calls out to be interpreted and lived.  As a doctrine incarnation is full of all sorts of troubles for us today — not only are its concepts outdated, but more importantly a doctrinal approach to Christmas leaves us hungry and unsatisfied because the call of Jesus has always also been about the religious question — who is God for us?  In other words the faith that Jesus calls us to is not a static thing, but a constant re-appraisal of our own self in light of the self’s need to live morally.
II.
The title of today’s worship service bulletin, “The Lure of Christmas,” could be taken a few ways, I suppose. Every year, people ask me when we’re going to sing Christmas carols. Christmas has a certain lure that calls out to sing that music most closely associated in our minds and hearts with it. Certainly the crass commercialization of Christmas stems from its lure — even before Thanksgiving stores are luring us to Christmas with visions of the best gifts under our trees. We can all remember, even if only through the eyes of the children around us, what the anticipation was like for that magical day when time stands still to open some presents, and lounge around with a new book to read, while the ham bakes in the oven, with its own allure. All of these lures are real.
But the lure of Christmas I want to talk about is that something that Luce Irigaray calls incarnation. She calls it incarnation, but she purposefully avoids all talk of Jesus even though her subject is Jesus’ — the bond of love. Her book is called To be Two and is about the immersion of the self in the other. In that immersion, she suggests we discover the lure of love.

Joy’s laughter ripples. The iridescence of this morning leaves union chaste: in us, between us. One hears clear and crystalline notes, outbursts of children’s laughter, songs of birds. One also imagines angels whispering, souls quivering, while leaves and flowers grow to become living bouquets. The flowers are light, without pretense; ethereal, colored or only white. Smiles of the spring, they bear witness to a muted hope. Life whispers. The earth, like a great nest, houses us, nurses our rebirth. p. 2.

I’m not sure if Irigaray is a Christian or not. That’s not the point anyway. The point is that the love she describes, this chaste union, is chaste not because it is asexual but because it is pure — because its lure has to do with something  primal. It is an original love. It is a love that leads us to love and to be let loved.
Christianity has too long limited its conversation to a different kind of love we have taken to calling by its Latin name — agape. Christian love as agape has always been burdened with a sense of duty, and so the joy of union is never chaste, but always sacrificed and the sense of self is lost in the immersion of the other. For Irigaray, this is way incarnation has always had the unfortunate overtones of sacrifice. And in fact, one of the classics of Christian devotional literature, a little piece written by Saint Anselm in the 11th century called Cur Deus Homo, or Why God Became Human — is less a work about incarnation that it is about sacrifice. Anselm would re-write John’s prologue so that the word that was God died and became love.
I grossly caricaturize Anslem. That idea, though, about love leading to sacrifice, or sacrifice leading to love, has nevertheless struck some great thinkers since Anselm as unbefitting God. Perhaps it was befitting a part of God to imagine God’s love as duty, but not the whole of God. Perhaps God was instead reaching out to the world in the sort of alluring way Irigaray describes incarnation. Perhaps God is in fact, the “poet of the universe” (Whitehead) — a divine Eros which is felt in each creature as a lure toward rebirth, toward “life, not for the sake of life itself, but for the evolving network of relations in which my life is worth living . . . ” (Keller 100)
I felt strongly enough about Wislawa Szymborska’s words, after reading them last week, that I quoted them today in the bulletin. While Szymborska speaks to an audience of poets, her intent as a poet is to speak of fundamental things, to discover what life is at a primal level, for all of us. In one of her most famous poems, called “Astonishment,” or “Wonderment” (she writes in Polish, so the translations differ) she writes that whatever else humans might think, know, or not know about this world, “it is astonishing.” And what is most astonishing is that we feel this even though the world is not deviating from some norm we already know, but it is simply astonishing per se, even though there is nothing to compare it with. For her wondering eyes, there is nothing usual or normal about the world, she says. It is extraordinary, and we cannot cease to be amazed by it.
Szymborska’s Nobel acceptance speech is a reflection on this poem and a criticism of a kind of stale incarnation — an incarnation which, according to some biblical authors, the author of Ecclesiastes included, God does not change. She is astonished by this assertion. The world is constantly changing and in experiencing the wonder of it, each moment becomes an incarnation of that wonder, of that bubbling joy.  We are lured away from ourselves and into a mystery.
III

While many parts of our biblical tradition clearly affirm Ecclesiastes view that anything that is subject to change is imperfect, and therefore that whatever is really real, because related to the divine perfection does not change, the author of our Gospel reading, John, does not buy that.  For John, incarnation is an embodiment of possibility.  The prologue to the gospel, which we read, famously describes a becoming of God into the world through the word.
Perhaps that seems rather more staid and dry that the eros-driven lure that I’ve been talking about.  But we have to understand that in Greek thought logos, translated here as “word,”is a term in ancient  philosophy loaded with ideas about being and becoming.  These ideas are much like Szymborska’s poetry — A poem, a word, is a possibility of incarnating  a moment of wonder, of living out of a sense of sublimity for a moment of sharing.  Martin Heidegger, who studied the Greek logos in depth, wrote, in what could be a commentary on our reading from John, that the logos that is to come is no mere word — because it gets at the originality of life more than words can.  The logos he says, “gathers language [of words] into simple saying.  In this way language is the langauge of Being, as clouds are the clouds in the sky.” In other words logos is the divine eros — and God is the poet of the universe driving us to experience the infinite joys and wonders of a love like his.
And here is the most remarkable thing.  Even more remarkable than John’s wonderful, but non-orthodox description of Jesus’ incarnation is that this incarnation is no exclusive thing for God to share with Jesus alone.  Because the intimate one-ness of God with Jesus’ becoming has to do not with God, but with the world — that same intimacy is offered.  John describes this open process powerfully: ‘to all who received him, ‘he gave the power to become children of God.’  In other words, to embrace this logos is to become gods.
IV.
We began by talking about what it means to be a Christian.  Perhaps now it is clearer that the word Christian describes a process, and not a state of being.  And as a process, the word does not define superiority, but intent, possibility, hope.  To be a Christian is to read the poetry of the world and to add to it.  As Szyborska notes in her imagined conversation with Ecclesiastes, at a point somewhat after our reading, to add to the poetry of the world becomes life-giving when we treat the world, not with a sense of superiority some kind of human or another, a poet or a Christian, for example, but when we treat it with openness to the moment.  Let me finish by reading a short poem by this poet of incarnation — Wislawa Szymborska called “A Moment.”

I’m walking on the slope of a hill newly green.
Grass, small flowers in the grass,
just as in a children’s book.
Hazy sky, already turning blue.
A view of other hills spreads out in silence.
As if there had been no Cambrians or Siluries here,
rocks growling at one another,
upthrust abysses,
no fiery nights
nor days in clouds of darkness.
As if no plains had moved through here
in feverish delirium,
in icy shivers.
As if only elsewhere had the seas been churning,
tearing apart the edges of the horizon.
It is nine-thirty local time.
Everything is in its place and in genial accord.
In the valley, the small stream as a small stream.
The path as a path from always to ever.
Woods in the guise of woods world without end amen,
and on high, birds in flight as birds in flight.
As far as the eye can see a moment reigns here.
One of those earthly moments
implored to linger.

Texts:  Malachi 3:1-11; 8-12
Luke 20: 20-26

At the Lighthouse Church of all Nations in Alsip, Illinois, at each of the three Sunday morning services, the pastor draws a number from a bag.  The occupant of the seat with that number gets a cash prize of $500.  Apparently the attendance has surged from 1600 to about 2500 people a week.
Because I have always assumed that the supreme quality of the teaching of Jesus is that in it morality is religion and religion morality — that there is nothing which does not reach up to God and down to every trial in life — I look a bit askance at the bait and switch idea at work in the Lighthouse Church.  If we’re going to talk about money — and the pastor of that church does — he encourages winners of the doorprize to spend down their credit cards with it — let’s think about it so that what we say and what we do are not two different things.  To separate right acting from right thinking is to make it not right acting.
II.
In our gospel reading today — Jesus, who has been under attack in the whole chapter by the leaders of the temple, is questioned in hopes, as the text says, “to trap him.”  They want to do anything to make the people see that he’s not worth following.  That he is a law-breaker.  They ask him the famous double-bind question — is it lawful to pay taxes to the Emperor or not?” No matter which way he answers the question, he’s in trouble with one side or the other.  And yet, as Henry David Thoreau famously commented it seems that Jesus left his hearers no wiser than before as to what is the proper answer.
If that were the case, why would the story have made it?  In fact, all three synoptic gospels record the story.  What is so important about it?
It is quite likely that paying taxes to the Romans was deeply resented by the people in Jesus’ community.  In fact, the Romans levied all kinds of taxes on the people even before the official tax bill came around.  In many ways the taxation issue which drove the colonists to war in Colonial America is a parallel.  In Matthew’s story the question was put to Jesus, like we might imagine a Loyalist questioning a patriot on the street in Boston — in an attempt to trap him and prove that the colonists were a bunch of upstarts who should be punished.  If Jesus replied that he should pay the king, the people would generally think of him as a traitor, and if he replied that the money was God’s he would put one more brick in the prosecutorial case against him.
His cryptic reply, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s,” none-the-less did the trick.  Why?  Why where his hearers impressed while we are left none the wiser?
Jesus seems to imply, for us thinking about our tasks of the distribution of our limited incomes between family, state and church, that that tripartite division is a reasonable and proper division — that some things belong to each one of these categories.  This is, no doubt, the way we most often hear the story told.  But would this have impressed his Galilean listeners?  Would the slant taken by those who argue that to be a good Christian is to be a good law-abiding, tax-paying citizen, have impressed the oppressed peasants Jesus always seemed to have about him?  I don’t think so.
If not — than what, in his answer, did impress them?
III.
On the one hand, the Romans let Jesus go, having heard a proper answer that simply you have to pay taxes.  But we know that the Romans are not the ones in the Gospels whose thinking we are to take as a guide for the kind of thinking Jesus would have us do.  As I said — the supreme quality of the teaching of Jesus is that everything we think and everything we do is to have the quality of being moral and the Romans are not held up as such.
What is held up, in Jesus’ ministry, as an example of right thinking and right acting, is the Hebrew prophetic tradition.
The prophets taught a kingdom of freedom, which by personal insight and consecration delivers people from all slavery to desire or pleasure or lust, and so from a final trust in material safeguards.  They did this not simply by stating that insight in some form of abstract doctrine, but by their own ordinary civilian insight into what it must mean that tragedy has not crushed their spirit, but only fanned the flames of the spirit.  These are not members of any religious guild, but plain farmers, or artisans and family men who know themselves to be part of a human society trapped by all sorts of pleasures and lusts and wants that rip communities apart, and who yet  discovered that God’s meaning and purpose was as a parent to her children, holding them, as one prophet put it, close to her bosom, wrapped in her arms.
As a result, the prophetic tradition took the poor and the wronged to heart because it believed that God did the same.  The prophetic tradition would not abide any parsing of the ancient commandment to love the Lord our God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.
IV.
Jesus calls this prophetic insight the great commandment because in a sense, all other laws follow from it, are articulations of it, or are applications to it.  We are called to love God in all that we do and this means to treat people  as individuals who belong to God — and not to Caesar.
What Jesus’ peasant friends understood from this little interaction was simple — if not profound — everything, in truth, belongs to God.
What they also understood was that Jesus’ answer amounted to more than a tricky response — it amounted to a challenge.  The question is not simply, what belongs to the church, and what belongs to the state and what belongs to the family?  The question is “how should we, who do want to seek the way of Jesus, be related to our money? How should we use it morally?”
That’s the question we’ve been after for some time now.  There’s not an easy answer to it.  If there were, this story would, I suppose, not attract the kind of attention it does.  To get at a take-home from this story, for this time, relating to this question let me share a commonplace story.
It is told by Eric Lonergan, author of a new book on Money which is part of a series called the Art of Living.  The story is of his daughter and her school which got caught up in the pokemon trading card craze.  Don’t ask me what they are all about — some of our younger members would be better than I at that — but suffice it to say that it seems to be like baseball trading cards on steroids.  Anyway Lonergan notes that the pokeman cards had become a kind of currency on the school ground.  Children would swap sought-after cards for food or for toys.  Bubble-like behavior soon emerged.  Older pupils would fleece younger, less sophisticated ones to get hold of prized cards.  Children bought more cards with credit advanced by their parents.  Eventually the headmaster was forced to step in and ban the trading.  He comments — whatever form it takes, the use of money as a means of exchange seems to be hardwired; so does its capacity continually to distort human behavior.
That said, Lonergan’s book is call to see money, including debt and credit cards, as tools fostering interdependence.  On the playground, the pokemon cards created an environment of interest and creativity.  In the market, money is not just an excess either, but enables all sorts of basic structures to be put in place, without which our societies would be almost unidentifiable.  Money, he says, depends on society and strengthens it.
Given this Janus faced, complex characteristic of money — it can be Roman-like in destroying community, or it can be Hebrew-like in strengthening community — here’s an interesting idea.  While the recession has clearly drained money from society — we have not seen a draining of creativity, nor a pause in community support.  We have, seen, on the contrary, a strengthening of one sector of our society.
According to a recent report from the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, while US household net worth declined nearly 18% in the past year, individual giving to churches climbed.  Obviously with less money in the system some charities suffered.  And indeed they did as larger charities saw their giving rates drop by 6.3 percent.
This recession has taught us again the lesson of the prophets — we get by with a little help from our friends.  I do not mean in anyway to belittle the suffering that has been caused by the recession — that’s not my point — but it has roused us to see that we can be creative and helpful and caring in ways that are perhaps more profound than in times of financial boom.
Malachi, the prophet of our reading today, writes to a people mired in economic and social despair.  Fifty years after the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, following its destruction by the Babylons and 40 some odd years of exile, conditions in Jerusalem were bleak. As Edgar Goodspeed puts it, “ritual was carried on in a slovenly fashion . . . priests were as lax in teaching the law as they were in obeying it.  The people offered their poorest instead of their best, and they withheld tithes . . . all sorts of vulgar vices prevailed.”
This roused Malachi to proclaim that a bright, new community could be their business. That depression would not defeat their call to be caring children of God.  A Messenger would come, he said, who would jump-start us, who would visit us with the courage and the strength to be creative and caring in the midst of suffering.
Malachi is clear that this Messenger will not fix the economy.  The financial wellbeing of his people is important, but it will be as a result, and only a result, of being responsible community members, caring, working, seeking justice.  The Messenger will lead us to see, as though as if we’ve been put through a refiner’s fire — that our offerings, our ritual, should not be perfunctory, but should be all of a fabric –all of one moral piece — that they will reflect their sense of being in the bosom and care of God — they will serve to set the people free and they prepare the way for a community of justice and hope and peace.
Then, says Malachi, they will live in a land of delight.  The temple may still be a ruins, their economy may still splutter and struggle, and the people may still dress in sackcloth for having nothing else — but they will live in a land of delight for the offerings of their lives will be of a piece with their worship.  And they shall see and their hearts thrill. Amen

Texts:  Jeremiah 33:14-16; Luke 12:13-21
I came across a story last week that made me think about today’s topic for our ongoing discussion about the economy and our money.

A new luxury hotel in France offers guests the chance to live as a rodent for the night – complete with fur costumes and a romantic hamster wheel for two.  The place is called Hamster Villa.

It is almost too good to be true.  A metaphor on a silver plate for today’s sermon.
I want to spend the next few minutes thinking about our search for happiness.  This is more complex than the simple argument that money can’t buy you happiness.  It seems reasonable to say that not having enough money to spend on the basic necessities of life and not having anything left over for a vacation once in a while is to be in a position of some dissatisfaction.  The question economists are finally asking, however, is when is enough, enough.  Because it is just as clear to say that raising our incomes does not necessarily raise our level of happiness.
II.
It was in the 1990’s that we as a society had reached the pinnacle of our apparent ability to do whatever we wanted.  We were at the top of the world, and our money seemed to be growing on trees.  Our glory was short-lived.  We begin to feel uneasy even before the descent.  As one economist put it, “Our proud self-image of the sovereign consumer shrank to that of the pitiful character of a Caspar Milquetoast, the helpless consumer who gets oppressed and harassed, cheated and shortchanged, even poisoned, from every side.”  The dream of stuff and even the actual stuff, was no longer making us happy, if it ever did.
Why has this happened?  Like other issues we’ve dealt with, the answer to that question has to do with the way we have uncritically assumed the economists view that a good state of affairs consists of one in which the greatest number of people are able to seek the greatest happiness.  Happiness, in the classical economic view, is at the very center of our evaluation of the success or failure of economic systems. The problem with that idea is that we make a claim that nothing else matters so much; things like liberty, equality, peacefulness , philanthropy, do not count in the economic metric.
Even more troubling, is that in the process of making happiness central to our evaluation of economic success, we link happiness, with economic well being.  When we are frustrated in our goals for happiness, it can only be because we have not properly engaged the economic engine to our fullest capacity.  I  remember thinking to myself back in the 90’s as I was  about to  embark on a career in the ministry that if I had the chutzpah what I’d really be doing is get into the dot-com world and make my millions. In other words — part of the language introduced to me as a new entrant in the world of the free market told me that my happiness would be dependent on a choice I was about to make — ministry or venture capitalism, relative only to the money that choice would yield.  And in fact, economists generally consider what a person chooses in the market to be synonymous with what a person can do most lucratively.   But I had just come off of a few years serving a couple of autistic men, not making much money, a summer at a hospital as a chaplain, making no money and realizing in that I was happy.
III.
Next November, about a year from now, many of you, I hope will be part of a trip to the Gulf Coast to do some continuing and much needed reconstruction after the last few severely destructive hurricanes ripped through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.  We’ll be going, for a few reasons, at least.  Of course, we’re going because we think Jesus is right — to serve others is to serve him — meaning that in our service to others, we find our deepest satisfaction, we discover really, what it means to live, and to live fully.
We also go, to be enriched by people of a different culture.  We go for a chance to take a “meaningful vacation.”  For many of us, these kinds of vacations were pivotal in our formations — our minds broadened, our perspectives on need, want and happiness enlarged, and we discover, in a way that we can’t seem to be able to in our ordinary circumstances, the hard truth of Jesus’ story today — disasters and tragedy may strike at anytime and in anyplace.  The stuff we have amassed do not do anything toward making these facts of life easier — in fact they may make it harder.
But our culture, shouts at us that Jesus is a liar, that in fact abundance of possession is the secret to happiness and contentment.  If my  psyche is anything like yours, we struggle with these competing claims.  We say that our lives do not consist in the abundance of possessions, but we live sometimes as if they do.  We take vacations that are only a different version of the same expensive rat race we want to escape.
Our mission trips go a long way toward helping us all live better lives by being reminded that people in many parts of this world that have been stricken by disaster, natural or otherwise, still find joy in sharing what little they have, and in some places I’ve been, that little bit is indeed a paltry little bit — and it is shared is if the sharing were truly their life blood — and it is.
IV.
When Jeremiah wrote that the days are surely coming when the Lord would fulfill the ancient promise, he was clear that it would not be a fulfillment of the Israel’s dream for security — an ancient equivalent of our modern day desire for stuff.  Instead Israel’s security, our happiness, would be found in a turn-about from the ways that lead to discontentment and frustration, a turn-about from the anxiety about our security and the race to accomplish it, as though we could outrun the rain that will fall on the just and the unjust alike.   Jeremiah knew nothing, of course, about Jesus.  What he knew was that God would not simply ignore God’s people, even when we set our faces on Hamster Villa and all it stands for.
Further, Jeremiah argued,  so strong was this urge of God’s to lead us to contentment and to honesty in living, to a turn about from the ways of dissatisfaction and frustration, that God would cause a shoot to spring up in our midst — that God would visit us with righteousness — that no amount of distance that we put, whether consciously or unconsciously, could separate us from the love of God.
We will find our contentment, again and again, as we turn from the lure of the fantasy of the successful to jump on the hamster wheel and run like hell, and find our satisfaction in a fuller view of happiness; happiness as participation in what the economists call our general welfare.  Happiness as an expression of our general welfare will go more toward rebuilding our economy, some economists are finally arguing, than the self-engaged concern for personal economic advantage.  An economy that takes happiness seriously now sees our success not in the self-directed metaphor of the hamster wheel, but in participating in other’s wellbeing, in giving our time and money to others, by enlarging our freedoms, as well as by the wise use of our money to provide for our selves and our families things that interest and support us in our journey to the good life.  The advent angels leave us with a metaphor to live by: “Build peace on earth and goodwill toward all!”  Amen.

Today in our continuing effort to talk about our financial well-being  in the midst of famine, to use the parable’s metaphor for our time, I want to talk about how we could think about our personal budgets in a way that not only feels good, but actually contributes to a more just social order.  That is a tall order — and I will only have the time to outline the basic idea, but it begins by recognizing the nature of the problem.
We tend, of course, to not want to acknowledge our problems.  And I wonder if this psychological tendency, is the reason that despite the volumes of ink put to paper about this parable, next to nothing is said about the famine.  I suppose it seems obvious:  several years of unsuitable growing weather and you have yourself a famine, those nothing we can do about the weather.
But one man, an economist by the name of Amartya Sen, has dedicated a good deal of his life’s efforts to studying famine.  I am convinced, though I’m not going to go into details that his thesis is correct:  famines are a product of injustice, not the weather (Cf. Development as Freedom, chapter 7).  If the parable can be about more than the usual reading of the lost being found, and I think it can, there is evidence, in fact that that line from the parable is a Lukan addition to the story Jesus likely told, then one thing it might be about is the economics of two worlds — one in which injustice is perpetuated, and another in which justice is sought.
II.
A parable, we must remind ourselves, is an extended imaginative exercise in which Jesus draws the listeners into a reality  that is created in the telling of it, so that the hearer becomes a participant in it.  The parable does NOT tell about God or about God’s world, so much as it allows you, the listener, to experience this world,  in such a way that your present reality is shocked by the world the parable puts you in.  In other words, a parable is more than a story — it is an event that demands some response from you, the listener — “which world will you choose?”  If you choose the world of the parable, then you are invited to avail yourself of its reality and venture into its future — a future, I propose more likely to eliminate famine.
Let’s begin with the younger son.  He is clearly reprehensible.  The request he makes of his father puts them both at great risk.   In Palestinian culture, shame  could be conveyed from the top down, or across from peer to peer, but never from the bottom up, except in rare cases.    The younger son knows what he is doing when he asks for his share of the inheritance.  His intentions are honorable — like many a younger child, he is eager to prove, perhaps before he is ready, that he can be a responsible, honorable householder.  The prodigal son and the father, are both aware that failure would bring shame on the son and something even worse than shame on the father for having come from beneath.  If the son fails in his endeavor to find his fortune, he will be painted forever the prodigal son, and the father the fool who let it happen.
The usual interpretation focuses on the reunion of the father with the son — the prodigal child is utterly surprised by the gracious response of the father.  He is a bigger fool than he thought.  He has no honor, for if he did, thinks the young man to himself, he would make me his servant.  That’s the system he bargained for when he asked for his inheritance.  But the father greets him with a kiss thereby indicating the expansive grace of God.  That’s fine, as far as it goes, but there is more.
The father invites the older, “wiser” son to join in the extravagant feast.  Now the older son’s dilemma takes center stage.  He is the only one in the family with any honor.  If he accepts his father’s invitation that shred of honor remaining in the family will disappear.  But if he refuses, he also dishonors himself for breaking the commandment to honor one’s father and mother.  In other words, shaming his father who is without a shred of honor brings shame to himself.  He is in a lose-lose situation.
The first thing that happens in the parable then, is that it paints the world of the sons, a world in which famine is a constant fear, as our world of competition for scarce resources and for wants, that no matter our level of wealth, are never met.  Their world in contrast to the one the father offers, leads us to have to make a shocking realization:  the injustice of this world is a function of our acting like the prodigal son.  But wait — that’s not all.  It’s also a function of our acting like the older son.  The two seem to be logical opposites.  On says spend, the other save.  But this is why it is the better called, by the title Jesus gives it, the parable of the two sons.  The sons present the same dilemma because they buy into the same arms race for stuff.
Jesus knew as well as we do today that famines are a product, not of the weather, but of a world in which the powerful name the rules, determine who plays, and how, and how close they can get to the finish line before they are dispatched.  Will this be our world?  Or shall we seek an alternative?  Will we too, step into the dilemma of the worlds of the younger and older sons? Or will we, like the father, be able to choose an alternative world?
III.

Classical western economics suggests that there is no alternative to the world of the two brothers. It argues that there is no other rational way for humans to interact than to look out for their own self-interest.    Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, expressed it first, and most succinctly:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.  We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self love. (11-12)

Economists since,  steadfastly argue that the only world that makes sense, is the one in which agents act with regard only to their own self-interest.  Charity is for churches, and for fools. But we have seen, in the intelligent parable of Jesus, just where that argument fails, how it involves its actors in a dilemma with no answer other than to periodically suffer the famines and then figure out ways to make their effects less severe.
I have shared the excerpt from Whitehead because his comparison of the two types of religions roughly parallel the two worlds of our parable. In one, marked by what he calls a social consciousness, the principle of right conduct is self-interested behavior, or at least tribal or group-regarding behavior.  In a socially-conscious religion, there are always people who are in and people who are out; people who gain and people who cannot.  Whitehead notes that as these religions lived out their useful function in bringing a society from chaos to order, they became a stumbling block to attaining to a higher ideal.  It “became a religion of the average, and the average is always at war with the ideal.”
I think that one of the reasons that we keep on gathering for worship is that we have an abiding sense of the ideal and the intellectual capacity to realize that even when that ideal strains under our own betrayal of our ideals, as when we act selfishly, as when we live in ways that pollute our planet, as when we go to war because we our way of life is threatened, the ideal is yet worth pursuing.
Last week, I suggested that we could rebel against the prevailing economic ideology that puts you in the center of awhirl-wind of stuff, and never leaves you satisfied,  and attempt to live yet again by our ideals, by practising skills that encourage us to live within our means, like constructing responsible home budgets and thinking long and hard about using credit and that if we bucked the trend by saving our money, we could level out the ups and downs that cause us, in the turmoil, to forget our ideals.
Today’s discussion of the parable of the two sons, will, I hope, help us to see that in constructing our personal budgets, we might embrace the alternative, non-contradictory world that the parable presents as the way to go.  A generous world-consciousness is the exemplification of that other, justice-making world.
I haven’t mentioned the word yet, but I will now.  Tithing.  I hope that this discussion of the parable of the two sons has helped you to see that it’s not about a mathematical calculation, as I simplified it for the children with the 10 jelly beans.  Instead tithing is the expression of our commitment to live in the alternative world presented by the father — where the jig is up regarding the competition for scarce resources, and the only satisfactory option, is to cultivate a generous world-consciousness with regard to our income.
So as you set your budgets for the coming year, perhaps the wisdom of the prodigal father could guide us.  This coming week, our pledge committee will be sending you a letter that will include in it a pledge card.  We hope you think of it as a tool — a tool that allows you to live into a full and generous world-consciousness.  Amen.