More to Life

Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.

—Luke 12:15

Introduction: Sibling Rivalries

He’s beside himself—the guy who comes to Jesus with his problem at the beginning of this morning’s scripture reading. He is angry in the way only one sibling can be angry with another sibling. Maybe you don’t know this, but fights between brothers, or between sisters, or between a brother and a sister, can be one of the most intense and long-lasting of any kind of human conflict. Remember the first murder in the Bible? Cain was jealous of his brother Abel, and he killed him. And the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors is described in the Bible as basically a sibling rivalry.

Sibling rivalries go back to earliest childhood. They’re about the most basic kind of jealousy. And because they’re so long-lived, there’s been a great deal of time for the competitors to nurse their wounds. I don’t believe all siblings have this kind of rivalry. For example, Sophia and Hannah certainly won’t. But there’s enough of it to go around, and sometimes—as we’ve already seen—can grow into biblical proportions.

A.D. 1916

My church's building was built in 1916 and dedicated on the first Sunday of August of that year. So this August 7, we're going to rededicate the church building, remove the 1916 cornerstone and see the time capsule inside, and place a new time capsule in it before replacing it.

As we prepare for this auspicious occasion, I did a little research to see what the world looked like a century ago. Here's some of what I found out...

Another Meditation on Prayer

This meditation is the second one I gave on the same Sunday and speaks about prayer from the viewpoint of process theology. The first discussed the same subject from the more traditional Reformed point-of-view. It can be read here.

If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!

—Luke 11:13

If you listened at all to the verses of scripture that immediately followed Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, then you learned that Jesus taught that we can indeed change God’s mind. Or at least cajole God into acting more quickly on our behalf. I won’t say that this necessarily contradicts my first meditation of the morning. But it certainly doesn’t fit comfortably with what I think of as the traditional Reformed view of prayer.

But don’t worry. If you prefer to think of a less omnipotent but more omnipresent God, then you are in the right church. Though most of the United Church of Christ’s roots are in the Reformed tradition, the contemporary UCC looks elsewhere for its theological inspiration. Though we don’t now have a theological confession that we’re required to subscribe to in order to be UCC pastors (let alone church members), a school of thought called process theology holds sway among many (if not most) of our clergy.

If you’ll remember, I’ve talked about process theology a few times over the past eleven years. It is not the theology I subscribe to, but I feel comfortable recommending it to people whom I think it might help bring closer to God. And one of the areas where many find it the most helpful is the area of prayer.

A Meditation on Prayer

This meditation is the first of two on Luke 11:1-13. Here is the second.

A Reformed View

He was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.”

—Luke 11:1

The cosmology described in the Hebrew Bible

The authors of the books of the Bible—both Hebrew and Christian—had a very different cosmology than we have. If you were to ask any of them what the center of the universe was, they would tell you without question that it was the earth. They would also have had no doubt about the fact that the pinnacle of all creation—indeed the purpose of creation itself—was the human being.

By the time of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century of our era, that view had changed somewhat. The universe had grown, and the earth was no longer its center—the sun was (though this would still have been contested by some “conservatives”). But there was still no question that the highpoint and goal of creation itself was the human being.

Think about what this cosmology might tell us about prayer—its purpose and the way it might work.

Heaven & Earth

Martha's Place, and Mary's

Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.

—Luke 10:41b-42

Introduction: Promises, Promises

We all make promises we don’t keep. Many of our promises we don’t even remember making. But I made a promise on March 6 of this year that I’m going to keep today. On that day, I talked about the Parable of the Prodigal Son—a passage of scripture intended to make traditional religious people question the value of their religion and their attitudes. And when I preached that sermon I promised another sermon on a very different text, but another one which forces dedicated church members to re-think their religion. That text was read this morning, and so the words that follow are a fulfillment of a 19-week-old promise.

The story of Mary and Martha that we just heard is different from the Parable of the Prodigal Son, in that it’s a biographical detail of Jesus’ life, and not a story Jesus told in order to help his listeners better understand the nature of God’s love. But both are stories about family dynamics, and both challenge our view of our own place in the Christian faith. This is why, when I talked about the Prodigal Son back before Easter, I also got a request to address this story—the one about Mary and Martha.

Quote for an INFP

The Good & the Bad

But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity.

—Luke 10:33

Introduction: Updating Our Dictionaries

We all know the story just read to us as the Parable of the Good Samaritan. This, along with the Parable of the Prodigal Son, is the best known of Jesus’ parables. And like the Parable of the Prodigal Son, it’s so well known that it’s transformed our internal dictionaries.

I say this, because—though the word prodigal means so generous as to be practically wasteful, most of us (even many of us who know the actual meaning of the word) tend to think of prodigal as meaning wayward. And so it is with the word Samaritan. Intellectually, I think we’re all aware of the fact that the Samaritans are an ethnic group. But that definition takes a back seat to the phrase Good Samaritan, which refers to somebody who helps a person in need. There are even many hospitals called Good Samaritan.

But the naming of hospitals wasn’t really Jesus’ intent when he told this parable. In fact, when he told this parable, he never even used the word good. Those who heard it the first time didn’t even think those two words—good and Samaritan—could even go together. And that was actually the point.

Happy 4th of July!

 

This is the first part and office of justice, 

to perform the debt we owe to our country, 

for public interests 

must be preferred before private. 

—Thomas Manton

Foxes & Birds

Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.

—Luke 9:58

By now we know who The Twelve are—the ones we normally refer to as Jesus’ disciples, most of whom would later be called apostles. But who else was there? Who else would follow Jesus? Who would accompany him on his earthly pilgrimage? There were, in fact, others, even if we don’t know their names. And in this morning’s reading from Luke, we catch a glimpse of the nature of their discipleship—that is, what it was that following Jesus meant.

And what it meant was commitment and sacrifice. Jesus wasn’t interested in those who followed him just because they thought he said good things. Instead today’s gospel makes three things about discipleship perfectly clear:

1. It meant giving up on comfort and security: The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. 
2. It meant creating new relationships—even family relationships: Jesus criticism of the man who wanted to bury a parent. 
3. It meant not living in the past: Nobody who starts the work and then looks back is fit for God’s kingdom. [1]

And though we don’t want to believe it, what it meant then it still means today. For us, “following” has come to mean something entirely new of late. We follow blogs. We follow people on Twitter. We want updates about what they’re saying and doing. We are conveniently notified by a ding on our cell phone whenever they publish and update—whether it’s their deep thoughts in a blog post, or their random musings via a tweet. This kind of following is accomplished without us ever leaving our seat.

Imago Dei