don't eat alone

Though the history of our Thanksgiving holiday is complicated and layered, observing a Sunday of Thanks feels worthy in any season. Here is my sermon this week. May we all find reasons for gratitude in the midst of everything.

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I ran into my friends Becky and Dave while I was grocery shopping yesterday. Becky is a CE minister and Dave is a pastor. We talked about a lot of things, but we ended up talking about church as well. For reasons I don’t now remember, at one point Dave said, “I just heard something the other day that really hit me: ‘Every tradition was new once.’”

He’s right. Just like nothing lasts forever, nothing has gone on forever either. Even long-lasting traditions change from year to year, sometimes in ways people don’t even notice. At the heart of any tradition lies a memory that people want to keep fresh and meaningful. When traditions lose meaning is when the story gets lost and what mostly remains is the repetition. A good tradition carries more than the idea that “we’ve always done it that way.”

What the word really means is a handing over or a handing down of experience and beliefs, and though we think of it in terms of generations, the real action happens much more in the present tense, in how we treat each other every day.

The young church at Philippi was not old enough to have many traditions. The Christian faith was not that old, either. Part of the reason Paul’s letters end up as scripture is because they were some of the earliest writings of the whole enterprise. They were still figuring things out, still making things up, without much to go on other than the oral tradition of the stories of Jesus and the face to face, heart to heart relational contact that brought people together.

Paul wrote this letter to the Philippian church not quite thirty years after Jesus walked the earth, and he was in prison at the time that he wrote it. Paul founded the church, which was located in Macedonia, part of what we now call Greece, and many historians consider it the first church in Europe, which speaks to why Paul felt so attached to them. Key to the church beginning was the conversion of a woman named Lydia, who was described as “a seller of purple.” She was a leader in that first church.

Once again we see that traditions get lost when we forget to tell the story.

Paul was in prison when he wrote the letter. What we are reading is the last page, the closing words, meant to wrap up what he had been saying to them and give them a word of encouragement and exhortation. So, from prison, he said,

“Be joyful in God at all times! Again I say, be joyful! Let your gentleness show in your treatment of all people. God is near. Don’t be anxious about anything; rather, bring up all of your requests to God in your prayers and petitions, along with giving thanks. Then the peace of God that exceeds all understanding will keep your hearts and minds safe in Christ Jesus.”

Joy, gentleness, trust, thanks, and peace are all interwoven together, and in the middle of it all he says, “God is near.” God is in the middle of it all, even though he was in a prison cell and the little church was trying to survive in a city that didn’t understand them.

This week, a folk singer named Todd Snider died suddenly. He was overtaken by a case of pneumonia. He was fifty-nine. Todd was an engaging, irreverent, and magnetic guy who had lots of friends, so his death hit the folk music community hard. A couple of days after his death, another singer named Will Kimbrough posted a song on his Facebook page as he tried to express his sorrow and the chorus said,

I will not get over you. I will live in disbelief
but if I know one thing that’s true
I have more gratitude than grief

I was just beginning to think about this sermon when I listened to the song, and it struck me that the last line kind of put our passage to music: I have more gratitude that grief. Will isn’t saying his thanks replaces his sorrow, just that it is what he choosing most to feel.

Paul wasn’t saying act like nothing is wrong. He was saying, in the middle of it all—where God is with us—choose to find ways to be thankful, to be gentle, to be trusting, to be joyful. Have more gratitude than grief.

Kimbrough’s song reminded me of another written by an artist named Glen Phillips who wrote a song for his daughters called “Grief and Praise.” The chorus says,

though all that you love will be taken some day
by the angel of death or the servants of change
in a floodwater tide without rancor or rage
sing loud while you’re able in grief and in praise

The best traditions—the things we repeat—are not things we hold onto for dear life because of we are afraid of losing something. When it comes to this life, we are going to lose everything. Those kinds of traditions foster fear and anxiety, even when they mean well.

The traditions that will feed us and foster growth and meaning are those that take our losses seriously and still keep going. Coming to the Communion Table is one of those because it is rooted in loss that knows death is real and love is stronger than death. So we sing loud while we’re able, in grief and in praise.

That what we call a Sunday of Thanks falls the week before Advent begins offers us a chance to expand our own traditions. I’m not thinking so much of the history of the American holiday of Thanksgiving, but of this being a day to focus on being grateful in the way Paul talked about it.

We, like many, name the Advent candles each week: peace, hope, joy, and love. I find myself thinking of this Sunday of Thanks as an early Advent Sunday. We may not have a candle, but gratitude is a good foundation to the other four because it calls us to open our hearts beyond our grief and pain. As we will sing in our closing hymn,

for the wonder that astounds us
for the truth that still confounds us
most of all that love has found us
thanks be to God.

Paul finishes his letter with this admonition, this version from the Message translation:

Summing it all up, friends, I’d say you’ll do best by filling your minds and meditating on things true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious—the best, not the worst; the beautiful, not the ugly; things to praise, not things to curse.

We can’t control much of what happens, but we can choose how we see it, how we interpret it, how we contribute to it. That doesn’t mean we act like nothing bad is happening or there is nothing wrong. It does mean we choose our focus. We sing in both grief and praise. When we look at the whole of our lives, we have more gratitude than grief.

And we remember God is with us, and we are all together. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

This week I preached on a passage that never shows up in the lectionary cycle: the parable Jesus told right after his encounter with Zacchaeus. It is not an easy story to digest, but it felt worth talking about.

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If you were to pick up a poetry anthology for a high school or college class, one of the poems that would most likely be in it is a short poem by William Carlos Williams called “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Teachers and professors love to read it with students, one, because it is only sixteen words long, and two, because it sounds simple and enigmatic all at once. Listen to the poem:

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

You can rest assured that there are volumes written to explain what Williams was saying in these sixteen words, even though the whole thing sounds pretty straight forward because the words are so simple. I will leave you to chase the meaning down on your own time; I simply want to use the poem as an example of something that is not as apparent as it seems because that is what we are dealing with in our parable this morning. We are going to have to do some work to get to the heart of what Jesus was saying in our passage for today.

To do that, we need to remember where we are in the story of Jesus’ life as told to us by Luke. As Mark noted when he read the passage, Jesus told the parable right after Zacchaeus made his promises of repentance. He was still standing next to Jesus, waiting for him to come over for dinner. But we need to back up a little more.

A quick recap: Jesus and his disciples were on their way to the town of Jericho (a stop on their way for Jesus’ final visit to Jerusalem) when Jesus started talking about prayer and told the parable about the persistent widow and the judge who had to learn how to listen; then he told the parable about the Pharisee and the tax collector praying in the Temple, underlining that God listened to both of them; then a bunch of little children came to Jesus and the disciples scolded their parents, saying Jesus had more important people to see, but Jesus corrected them and said there no was no one more important that those little ones; then came the ruler who had a good question about how to have eternal life but wasn’t willing to live with Jesus’ answer to give away everything; then, on the outskirts of Jericho, came the blind man who called out to be healed and Jesus told him his trust in God had given him his sight; and then came Zacchaeus, who climbed a tree and ended up seeing the world in a whole new way.

And then Jesus told this story.

A wealthy and powerful man—who had inherited his wealth and power—was planning to travel to a distant land to declare himself ruler there. Before he left, he called ten men whom he had enslaved and gave each of them one mina, the equivalent of four months wages, and told them to “do some business” while he was gone. He was not offering them a chance to get out of their enslavement; he just wanted them to make more money for him. When he got to the other country, the people there rebelled, but he seized power anyway. When he came back, he called the servants in for a report on their efforts. The first had earned ten more mints–1000% return–and the king put him in charge of ten cities. The second made five minas–not too shabby–and was given authority over five cities. The third (and we only hear about three of the ten) said, “I knew you were the kind of person who takes stuff you didn’t earn for yourself and harvests things you didn’t plant, so I just kept your money safe. Here it is, just as you gave it to me.”

The ruler went ballistic. He took the mina and gave it to the one who had gotten the biggest return, saying, basically, that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer (the ruler’s words, not Jesus’), and then he called for the people who had rejected him in the other country to be rounded up and killed.

Hey, Happy Thanksgiving.

If you search online for sermons about this passage, you will find any number of them that move quickly to talk about how the enslaved men invested the money and were appropriately rewarded or punished, but much like the poem about the wheelbarrow, we need to be willing to dig deeper because that seemingly obvious interpretation doesn’t add up.

First, if we read the parable that way, it makes the ruler is a symbol for God. The problem with that is the ruler is a ruthless, greedy, and arrogant man. He even admits he takes what he didn’t earn and harvests what he didn’t plant. God is nothing like this man.

Second, even though the enslaved men are “rewarded” for their return on investment, nothing really changes. They are still enslaved. This is not a story about how God rewards a strong work ethic, or that poor people are poor because they did it to themselves. Remember, one of the key threads that runs through Luke’s gospel is that God is unequivocally on the side of the poor. Jesus said that over and over. His message didn’t change here.

What, then, do we make of this parable?

To answer that question, let’s turn to the one in the story who is considered a failure, the one who simply returned what he had been given and basically said to the unethical ruler, “I know how you do things and how you treat people, how you have built an empire by taking advantage of others, and, even though I am fearful of you, I chose not to play your game. Here’s your money back.”

I wonder how Zacchaeus felt as he stood there, having just broken his ties with a system where he had inherited power and wealth and made more at the expense of others, but was now choosing to set himself apart by sharing rather than stealing. The way Jesus ended the story makes it seem, in a way, as though the servant’s integrity didn’t have much impact beyond his own actions, but he did what he could do, which is what Zacchaeus did also, once he realized the damage he had been doing. If we do the math, Zacchaeus must have come close to impoverishing himself by giving away half of his wealth to the poor and then repaying his debts four times over.

The very next thing that happens in Luke’s gospel is Jesus gave instructions about getting the colt so he could ride into the city on what we call Palm Sunday as one who was responding to an unjust ruler and an unjust system by saying, “I choose not to play your game.” Within a week, the Roman government had executed him.

Two thousand years later, here we sit, counted as among those who trust the story still matters, even when it feels like we are caught in the whirlwind of greed and violence, and we stand in the lineage of person after person down all the generations who did what they could do as they heard God’s call on their lives, who found their way to say, “I choose not to play your game.”

William Carlos Williams said so much depended on the red wheelbarrow; Jesus said so much depends on us and our willingness to take a stand and to do what we can. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

This week’s sermon continues working through the end of Luke’s gospel, as the lectionary year draws to a close, finding Zacchaeus by the shore of the Great Salt Lake.

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On our recent whirlwind trip to Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho, Ginger and I were reading about the Great Salt Lake and I learned a term I had not heard before: “terminal lake,” which sounded like another way to say Dead Sea.

Both the Great Salt Lake and the Dead Sea are terminal lakes because they have rivers that feed them, but they have no outlets other than evaporation and percolation (meaning the water sinks into the soil in the floor of the lake. There are about three dozen terminal lakes in the world, according to Wikipedia, and they are all salt water because of all the sediment that has been deposited there. Rich, in a way, because of the minerals there, but dead because they are unable to share their wealth.

Ginger and I looked at each other and said, “Well, that’s going to make it in a sermon.” And here it is.

The city of Jericho, where our story takes place, was about eight miles from the Dead Sea and about eighteen miles from Jerusalem, which is where Jesus was headed. A crowd was following him. On the outskirts of the city, Jesus had encountered a blind man who had called out to him for mercy as he walked by. Jesus asked him what he wanted and the man said, “I want to see again.”

Jesus replied, “See again! Your faith has healed you,” and he kept moving. Luke says he was moving through the city, trying to manage the crowds, when Zacchaeus entered the picture. He also wanted to see Jesus. Luke gives us a few specific details about him: he was the chief tax collector, he was personally wealthy, and he was short—short enough to not be able to see Jesus through the crowd. In human terms, we might say Zacchaeus was the human equivalent of a terminal lake. He had made a life out of taking in and not giving out. Still, he wanted to see Jesus.

He must have been relatively young, or at least in good shape, because, when he couldn’t get through the crowd, he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree so he could see Jesus when he passed by.

Unlike the blind man, Zacchaeus didn’t call out; he just hung there, watching. Jesus is the one who called to him: “Zacchaeus, come down because I need to stay in your home today.” It is the only time in the gospels that Jesus asked for hospitality from someone, and the request appeared to make Zacchaeus not only see Jesus but also see himself differently.

Zacchaeus climbed down and Jesus welcomed him joyfully, unlike the crowd gathered around them who might have been victims of Zacchaeus’ tax collecting. They were quite sure he did not deserve to have Jesus in his house. Based on his response to both Jesus and the crowd, Zacchaeus then seemed to see the people around him in ways he had not before, even as they complained about him.

He told Jesus he was going to give half of his property to poor people and then he was going to repay those he had defrauded four times what he stolen from them. He wasn’t making up random amounts. He was following instructions from the Torah about how to repent and reconcile. He was no longer a terminal lake. He was a river of love.

Jesus said, “Today this household has been rescued. I came to look for and rescue those who were lost.”

But Zacchaeus wasn’t the only rich man who came to Jesus on this part of the journey. Just before Jesus healed the blind man, someone referred to as a ruler came to Jesus and asked what he had to do to get to heaven. Jesus quoted the Ten Commandments back to him—the rules they had both grown up with. The man was quick to say he had done all of those things. Then Jesus said, “Then there’s only one thing left to do: Sell everything you own and give it away to the poor. You will have riches in heaven. Then come, follow me.” Luke says,

This was the last thing the official expected to hear. He was very rich and became terribly sad. He was holding on tight to a lot of things and not about to let them go.

He couldn’t stop being a terminal lake.

What, then, is the difference between the two men? Commentators say what both shared in common was that they were relatively young and their positions and wealth were inherited. They also both came looking for Jesus seeking some sense of wholeness. They both knew their lives were not what they needed to be. And both of them heard that what it took to be rescued from themselves, what it took to be reconciled to God, to make things right with God and with the people around them was not to cling to their financial security as though it would save them, but to give it away so everyone had enough.

A good storyteller builds to a big finish, and Luke is a pretty good story teller.

After Jesus encounter with Zacchaeus, he told one more parable (which we will talk about next week) and then he gave instructions to his disciples about getting the donkey he would ride into Jerusalem for what we know as Palm Sunday. We are nearing the climax of the story, and Luke sets that up by telling Jesus’ parable about the persistent widow and the judge who had to learn how to listen; then he told the parable about the Pharisee and the tax collector praying in the Temple, underlining that God listened to both of them; then a bunch of little children came to Jesus and the disciples scolded their parents, saying Jesus had more important people to see, but Jesus corrected them and said there no was no one more important that those little ones; then came the ruler who had a good question but wasn’t willing to live with the answer; then came the blind man who called out to be healed and Jesus told him his trust in God had given him his sight; and then came Zacchaeus, who climbed a tree and ended up seeing the world in a whole new way.

At the heart of all of these stories is a theme that runs through the whole gospel: God created us to take care of each other. Our piety is not enough, if we keep a death grip on our possessions. Just like the Great Salt Lake, we cannot survive if all we do is collect and we never share. If we need more examples, just pick up a newspaper, and we can see those consumed with holding their grip on wealth and power, and we can see how deadly it is.

Zacchaeus was changed because Jesus demanded hospitality. That sounds like a strong word, but Jesus said, “Come down at once because I need to stay in your home today.” He wasn’t asking, he was telling, the same way my mother insisted (well, demanded) us to sit down at dinner when it was ready. We did what she said because we knew she meant it. Jesus’ demand opened Zacchaeus’ heart to seeing his wealth as a way to build and heal relationships, to let things flow out of and through his life so he could thrive.

That same demand of hospitality applies to us, as well: either we share, or we die. We were created to be more than terminal lakes. May we open our lives like Zacchaeus did, not tighten our grips like the ruler. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

Here is my sermon for All Saints Sunday, based on Luke’s version of Jesus’ beatitudes and woes.

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Years ago, I was a member of a wonderful church in Dallas called Royal Lane Baptist Church. They, like many Baptist churches, had a tradition of a Wednesday night meal and prayer service. On most Wednesdays, we were offered a full meal, but one week the menu was different because our speaker for that night was a person who worked trying to respond to the world-wide disparity of the availability of food, so we had what they called a World Hunger Meal.

What that meant was when we got in line we were given a colored ticket that determined what and how much we got to eat. I forget the exact percentages, but the majority of folks got a small portion of rice and beans, and there was a pitcher of water on the table to share; the next group got rice, beans, and some sort of greens; the last group, which was only a handful of people, got rice, beans, greens, ham, cornbread, dessert, and ice tea.

One of the men in the church was quite vocal about his dissatisfaction at being in the majority. He complained from the time he got his tray until he sat down at his table, and then he continued ranting about how he didn’t need this kind of object lesson to know people were hungry.

About that time, one of the children in the church who had drawn the full meal, sat down next to him and was unaware of the man’s complaints, looked at his plate and said, “Wow! You didn’t get much food at all and I have a bunch. Have some of mine.”

The little boy didn’t have a frame of reference to understand world hunger, but he somehow knew how to recognize the need in front of his face, which is at the heart of Jesus’ words in our passage this morning.

Starting with that story is telling the punch line before the joke, in a way, so we need to back up a bit in Luke’s account.

We are reading this morning from early in Jesus’ ministry, not long after his baptism. There were some who pressed him about how his new gospel fit the mold of established religious norms. They wanted him to tell people that what mattered most was to keep the rules. Instead, Jesus gathered a group of disciples around him from different walks of life and social standing and talked about relationships as more important than regulations.

Luke says Jesus went up on a mountain to pray all night long and when he came down he gathered those we know as the twelve disciples and the first thing he said are the words we just finished reading. Many commentators draw connections between this passage of what we commonly call the Beatitudes, which are in Matthew’s gospel, and there are similarities, but the two accounts are not describing the same event. Matthew tells of Jesus preaching to a large crowd, and the sermon goes on for three chapters. Luke says Jesus was talking to his disciples, and the sermon is short, though a little longer than what we read.

It is also more direct. Where Matthew writes that Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirt,” Luke says, “Blessed are the poor”—and the word means those who actually don’t have enough to provide. The same with those who are hungry, those who are weeping, and those who feel marginalized and rejected by society because of who they are. Jesus’ words in Luke then take a turn the sermon in Matthew does not. Jesus turns to those who are rich, those who don’t have to worry about where their next meal is coming from, those who have enough and says, “You have it coming”—this is not going to end well for you.

But before we talk about what all that means for us, I want to read part of the sermon left out by our lectionary. These words follow immediately after what we read.

“But I say to you who are willing to hear: Love your enemies. Treat well those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who mistreat you. If someone slaps you on the cheek, offer the other one as well. If someone takes your coat, don’t withhold your shirt either. Give to everyone who asks and don’t demand your things back from those who take them. Treat people in the same way that you want them to treat you.

“If you love those who love you, why should you be commended? Even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, why should you be commended? Even criminals love those who love them. If you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, why should you be commended? Even criminals lend to criminals expecting to be paid back in full. No, love your enemies and be helpful and lend without the hope of getting anything back. Then your payment will be generous and you will be acting the way children of the Most High act, for God is gracious to the ungrateful and to those full of wickedness. Be compassionate just as God is compassionate.”

Be compassionate just as God is compassionate, which means to love others in a way that understands the equation will never even out. We talk a lot about God’s enduring love that never lets us go. It helps to remember as we read these verses that God never breaks even. God always loves us more than we love in return.

When we start keeping score, when we think love and compassion can be measured like a profit and loss statement, we not only miss the point, but we become part of the problem that causes the disparities in the world—in our country—that make us to things like that Wednesday night Hunger Meal.

It is heartbreaking to me that our passage for today seems so poignant. The lectionary cycle would have had us read this passage no matter what the headlines; that it falls on a day when forty million Americans are losing their access to food they need to live makes Jesus’ words even more essential for us to hear.

Earlier in the week, as the deadline drew closer, a small pub in Guilford put out word on social media that anyone who was losing benefits could come by and get a free meal. They are not a big corporate restaurant. They don’t have a large profit margin. They know they are not going to break even on this. And they are feeding people. Some of the other places in town followed suit, basically saying what that little boy at the church dinner said years ago: “Wow! You didn’t get much food at all and I have a bunch. Have some of mine.”

All Saints’ Sunday reminds us of the lineage of love in which we stand. It also invites us to recognize and affirm our common bond and union with all humanity of all economic standings, all ethnicities and races, from all times and places. We are joined together not because of what we have, or what we’ve done, but because we are all created in the image of God and worthy to be loved, which also means we are capable of great compassion because we were made to be agents of God’s grace and goodness to one another. The heart of what it means to be human is to be compassionate, not to keep score. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

My sermon on Jesus’ parable of the pharisee and the tax collector hinges on a re-translation by Amy-Jill Levine that opened up the story for me.

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In the early days of Saturday Night Live, one of the repeating characters was a priest named Father Guido Sarducci. He was not a priest of course, but he played one on TV. One of his ideas was what he called The Five Minute University. He said people spend a lot of money on college and then forget most of what they learned, so he could save anyone a lot of time and money by enrolling in his university that lasted only five minutes, graduation included.

The idea was that in five minutes you would learn what the average college graduate remembers five years after they get out of school. For Spanish, you would learn to say, “¿Como está usted?” which means, “How are you?”, and also the response, “Muy bien,” which means, “Very well.” Economics class boiled down to supply and demand: you buy something and then you sell it for more than you paid for it. Theology was simply, “God is everywhere because God likes you.”

I was actually in college the first time I heard Guido do his routine and, I have to say, it sounded pretty tempting. Sometimes it feels like it would be nice if more things could be distilled into sentences that were easy summaries that we didn’t have to think about again.

But that’s just not the way life goes.

Jesus’ approach to teaching was quite different that Father Sarducci because he didn’t offer a whole lot of easy summaries or catch phrases. Sometimes he listed things, like the Sermon on the Mount, or he said what he meant in a sentence or two, but there was always more for his followers to learn. Jesus taught in layers that require of us to keep digging, to keep looking, as our Congregational forbearers said, for more light to break forth.

To keep growing, we have to keep learning. Part of that, particularly when we come to scripture and theology, is to read and listen in a way that we can be caught by surprise, rather than living with expected summaries as though it were a course in the Five Minute University.

With that in mind, the sermon is going to feel a bit more like a Bible Study because we need to dig in a bit.

Last week, as we talked about the widow and the judge, we saw the way Jesus took characters that could be stereotyped and broke those images wide open so we could see something else. The same is true in today’s parable.

Once again, the story is brief. Two men came into the Temple to pray. One was a Pharisee. I want to stop there for a moment and ask what image comes to mind when you hear the word Pharisee. My guess is it is not very positive. Across Christian history, we have often painted them as arrogant and even dishonest. We even added the word to our language to mean someone who is self-righteous and hypocritical.

Theologian Amy-Jill Levine, who is a Jewish New Testament scholar, reminds us that to most of Jesus’ audience, the Pharisees were respected teachers “who walked the walk and talked the talk.” The apostle Paul was a Pharisee and saw it as a mark of distinction. They were not priests, so the man in our parable was not on his home turf in the Temple. He, like the tax collector, had come to pray as part of his faith commitment.

The tax collector was a Jewish man who worked for the Roman government, which meant he was not necessarily the most popular man in town. People often thought of tax collectors as dishonest, and he might have been, but this man was in the Temple praying for forgiveness. The conventional reading of this parable would have us hear it much like the painting on the front of our order of service, where the Pharisee appears rich and well-dressed and the tax collector looks poor, worn, and left out. Amy-Jill Levine says that’s not the case. He lived in the center of society and probably did pretty well for himself.

This is not a story of a rich person and a poor person.

Instead of comparing and contrasting the men to get meaning from the parable, Levine invites us to read the prayers of the two men at face value: the Pharisee is offering a prayer of gratitude, and the tax collector is offering a prayer of repentance. She says people in Jesus’ day would have had a hard time thinking that the tax collector’s prayer would have been answered, that he would have been justified. They would have expected it, as far as the parable goes, but they would not have liked it.

Then she went on to say that part of the problem we have with the parable, as modern readers, is that our translations play to the stereotypes that have been handed down. For her, it all swings on one key preposition in the sentence in today’s passage, “I tell you, this person went home justified alongside of the Pharisee.”

If you were to open our pew Bible and turn to Luke 18, the sentence would read, “I tell you, this person went home justified rather than the Pharisee,” as if Jesus were making a point about the religious teacher.

Here’s the thing: Both translations are accurate because the Greek word—para—can mean both things. It comes into English in words like parallel, paradox, parable, even Paraclete, which is one of the names for the Holy Spirit. We are used to it meaning alongside, or with. To understand why most Christian translators have chosen words that separate the two men would mean talking about church history for longer than you would want to stay this morning. For now, let’s stay with the text.

Last week, I said that in the parable of the widow and the judge Jesus was asking us to pray for justice, which meant looking at whoever we see and not seeing adversaries or enemies; but seeing people who hurt like we do; about listening to the voices God puts in our ears and answering them in love.

In this companion story, then, wouldn’t it make sense that Jesus was making connections rather than comparisons as a reminder that God’s love can heal all kinds of brokenness when we come willing to be healed. Whatever issues we might have with the Pharisee or the tax collector, God listened to both of them. As I have said before, faith and life are team sports.

Immediately following this parable, Luke says people were bringing their babies to Jesus to have them blessed and the disciples scolded the parents, telling them Jesus had more important people to see. Jesus intervened to welcome the little ones and say they were the ones who really understood how God was at work in the world. That is followed by a visit from a rich young man who what it took to find peace with God, but prefaces his question about what he had to do to be right with God by saying he kept all the rules, much like the Pharisee in our parable. Jesus told him to give away all of his wealth to those in need—to see himself as alongside of everyone.

The young man couldn’t do it. Can we?

Life is hard and stressful and sad, which makes it tempting to reduce those with whom we struggle to convenient labels, to decide we know who they are and what they think, and then write them off, making our Five Minute University Theology class sound like, “Jesus loves you but I’m his favorite.”

Life is also beautiful and surprising and complicated, which means we are called to drop the labels and look at the people, to tell stories rather than sling slogans, to do the wonderful and messy work of living alongside of each other so that everyone gets to know what love feels like.

May we have the courage to find translations the create greater room for God’s love to envelop us all. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

My sermon this week is from a parable of Jesus often called “The Persistent Widow.” It is not one of my favorites but seemed worth wrestling with. What I found is the title shares the story short. There’s a lot going on in the parable worth talking about.

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I grew up in a family that thought if a story was good–really good–then it was worth repeating, especially to people who had heard it before. Kind of like a good recipe, in a way. You don’t make a dish you really like one time and then stop for fear of serving the same meal to your family and friends. In our house, stories were that way as well.

I don’t mean you told them once a week, but you didn’t have to flinch when the story came to mind and seemed perfect for the moment. You just told it again so everyone could enjoy it.

I know I’ve told some of you this story, I’m sure. It’s worth repeating.

My friend Terry, who lives in Durham, North Carolina taught me how to deal with customer service calls when you need help. You know the kind I am talking about. You have an issue and you spend what feels like four hours on hold listening to the same thirty second loop of music and the occasional robotic voice thanking you for your patience and then finally a human being answers and tells you that you are being recorded for training purposes.

I have had a long and checkered history of conversations I wish had gone differently because my anger and frustration got the best of me in one of those moments of helplessness and frustration. I voiced that one day to Terry and he said when he called and finally got a human being on the other end of the line, he said, “Hi, my name’s Terry. I am calling because I have a problem and I need to know if you are the one who can help me or the one who needs to connect me with the person who can help me,” offering an invitation for the person to be an ally rather than an adversary.

That story changed my life as far as customer service calls go because it works.

I tell you that story (again) because we could categorize the parable we read this morning as a kind of New Testament customer service call, before there were phones and Muzak and robots. Jesus said there was a judge in a certain city who didn’t have any regard for God or for other human beings, and so he was known for abusing his position of power. There was also a widow in that city. Most of the time when widows show up in scripture, it is their helplessness that gets underlined. But this was a widow who was tenacious and persistent in her demand for justice, though we are not told who had harmed her or what kind of justice she was demanding, other than she had an adversary. Nevertheless, she persisted and, after a while, he gave in saying, “I know I don’t care about God or anybody else, but I am going to do what she wants because she is making me look bad.”

(Our translation says, “she keeps bothering me,” but it literally means, “she keeps giving me a black eye.”)

Can’t you picture the widow saying, “Are you the judge that is going to help me, or the one who is going to connect me with someone who can?”

That’s the whole parable. Nothing is resolved. It is even more puzzling that Luke sets it up by saying that Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray continually and not be discouraged, which could set us up to think God is the judge in the story, so it matters that we remember a parable is not an analogy or a fable. It doesn’t unpack that easily or make such direct connections. We are supposed to be puzzled. Jesus told parables to get people to raise questions they had not thought to ask that would allow them to see God and themselves in new and hopeful ways.

The way Jesus described the judge (and the way the judge described himself)—as one who “neither feared God or respected other people”–gives us kind of a baseline of what justice is by giving us the definition in reverse. When we show our awe for God by the way we respect and love other people, we live justly. We help create a more just world. That fits the definition of justice I heard from Dr. Cornell West: justice is what love looks like in public.” It also follows Micah 6:8, which we repeated once again in our call to worship this morning: What God requires of us is to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.

The man whose job it was to mete out justice knew he was not up to the task. And seemed to be not too bothered by that. He had the power and money he wanted. He saw no need to be concerned.

The widow who had nothing left to lose kept knocking on his door. She was relentless in her pursuit of justice and was determined to keep going until she got what she wanted, but my guess would be that she was as surprised as anyone that the judge actually did the right thing. She didn’t expect to win; that’s why she kept knocking. She knew she was probably not going to see things set right, so she might as well die trying, trusting that somehow it mattered to persist.

And it did.

As we work to hear what this strange story has to say to us, I want to add a line from one of my favorite Dire Straits songs says, “sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug.” Well, I want to paraphrase it: sometimes you’re the widow, sometimes you’re the judge.

Another thing I have repeated more than once is that our faith in God, who is Love, calls us to trust that Love wins in the end; if Love has not yet won, then it’s not the end. To trust that those words are true is to be like the widow: to keep working for justice even when we know the ears we need most to hear our please are not listening very closely; we keep reaching out to others when they don’t offer much regard for our invitations and trust that God is at work in ways we cannot see comprehend.

On the other hand, sometimes we’re the judge. By that I mean, sometimes we need to ask ourselves, who is pleading that we are not hearing? Who is calling for our help that we are not answering? One commentator put it this way: “Can our communities be the one place where we recognize that while issues and causes matter, the people behind them and affected by them and advocating for or against them matter even more?”

Sometimes we are the people answering the phone when someone like Terry calls and asks, “Are you the one who can help me, or the one who needs to connect me with the person who can?”

How do we answer? How long does it take for us to be willing to help?

Notice that Luke set up the whole parable by saying, “Jesus was telling them a parable about their need to pray continuously and not be discouraged.” Jesus followed the parable by saying, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. Won’t God provide justice to the people who cry out day and night?” Jesus wasn’t comparing God to an unjust judge. Jesus was saying, if an unjust judge could be shamed and pestered into giving justice, how much more can we trust that God will bring justice to every last one of us.

Don’t give up. Keep knocking. Keep showing up. Persist in justice, in kindness, in trust that there is more at work than we can see or understand. If we long for relationships to be healed, keep longing and looking for ways to reach out. If we have trouble reading the newspaper without feeling heartbroken, keep reading and looking for ways to offer healing and hope to those being crushed by the system. If Love has not yet won, it’s not the end.

In that sense, we can understand this parable as Jesus asking us to see that prayer and the need to cry out for justice are kind of the same thing. Prayer is not simply asking for our personal needs to be met, or only holding up those we love and who are in need. Prayer, at its core, is about asking for justice; about crying to those in authority until all are treated equitably; about lamenting the systems and institutions that dehumanize so many; about looking at whoever we see and not seeing adversaries or enemies; but seeing people who hurt like we do; about listening to the voices God puts in our ears and answering them in love.

In that sense, part of praying is to be the one answering the phone and saying, “I am the one who will do whatever I can to help you get what you need.”

If we truly show our awe of and love for and devotion to God by the way we love and respect other human beings our hearts will be changed by prayer, whether we are the widow or the judge. That’s a story worth repeating. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

We almost had a show-and-tell sermon this morning.

I seriously thought about bringing Elena, one of our Schnauzer rescue pups. We have had her almost two years, though we got her thinking it was a hospice situation and she would only be with us for a couple of months. We were going to be her soft place to land.

Elena was found abandoned in a house in Paterson, New Jersey, along with twelve cats. When they found her, she had bladder stones the size of tennis balls—and she only weighs about twenty-five pounds. The shelter paid for surgery to get her out of her misery but thought the bladder infection that had caused the problem would be ongoing, which is why they didn’t expect her to live.

When Ginger drove to Paterson to pick her up, the woman at the shelter told the pup, “You’re moving up: you’re going to Connecticut.”

We named her Elena because we learned she understood Spanish. In the early days, we had to say, “Aqui, aqui” to get her to come inside. She has become bilingual, but one of our nicknames for her is Señorita Elegante. Anita, our vet, bombarded her with antibiotics when she first came home and managed to eradicate the infection we thought would kill Elena, and now, two years later, she is living her best life. She is, as Ginger says, just happy to be in the room.

She is content with her life, which is why I wanted to bring her, because the heart of our passage this morning is about being content. I pictured Elena stretched out on the carpet here next to me, as she does in our kitchen, with her tail wagging like a metronome and a smile on her face. Maybe you can picture it as well.

The writer of Hebrews calls his readers to be content with what they have—to live like Elena—but the spirit of the whole passage is about more than choosing not to be acquisitional or greedy.

In the first part of the paragraph, the writer says first, “Keep on loving each other like family,” but then he widens the definition of who each other is: “Don’t neglect opening your homes to strangers because you never know who you’re letting in—it might be an angel.” Then he says, “Remember prisoners as if you were their cellmate,” and, “Remember those who are suffering and abused as if you were in their place.”

Those are all things integrally connected to contentment. The root of our English word means “to hold within limits” or “to hold together,” which makes the word about more than what we do with our desires for stuff, but also about how we treat each other.

There is not a human being in the world to whom we are not connected. To think of family in the widest definition is to face the reality that the children in Gaza who are starving are not an idea, they are children like ours. The people filling our prisons are not statistics, but human beings with families and friends who are being crushed under the weight of a dehumanizing system. The people who need food stamps are not concepts but hungry people who don’t have a way to get food.

To be content is to see beyond the issues and see the people—to see ourselves in their eyes—and to respond to them with compassion rather than seeing them as competing for the things we need and want to stay comfortable, which is the way the needs of poor and hungry people are often viewed.

Most of the time, we think about contentment being the opposite of greedy or needy. I have already made that connection in this sermon. But the writer of Hebrews adds something else. Right after he says we should be content with what we have, he says,

After all, God has said, “I will never leave you or abandon you.”
This is why we can confidently say, “The Lord is my helper, and I won’t be afraid. What can people do to me?”

Contentment is what holds us together to get beyond fear. Fear of not having enough. Fear of being alone. Fear of . . . the list goes on and on.

A few months after we got Elena, Ginger and I went on a trip and were gone a couple of weeks. Rachel, my mother-in-law, cared for the pups, as she has done for many trips over many years. When we got back, everyone was glad to see us, but Elena was beside herself. She jumped in our arms and let out a mournful moan that felt like it came from deep in her soul. It brought tears to our eyes. We each held her for a long time and she stayed close the rest of the evening.

The meaning of her moaning struck us a bit later when we realized this was a little dog who had been abandoned. Her people left her locked in a house with a bunch of cats and never came back. Every day of our trip she must have wondered if it was happening again, even though Rachel was there, she had food every day, and she could get outside. Her fear of abandonment runs deep, and for good reason, so I am grateful for the evenings when she lays on the rug and smiles at me—when we can help deepen her sense of trust and contentment.

The reality of life in our nation right now is frightening. There’s a lot to be scared of and it seems like it is going to get worse before it gets better. Fear is our greatest commonalty. We are told to be scared of pretty much everyone and everything. As we feel the fear rise up the way Elena worried we weren’t coming back, let’s remember that nothing separates us from the love of God. Let’s remember that, though we have legitimate reasons to be afraid, fear is not the last word. Love and trust are what hold us together, on beyond wars and panics and dictators.

I am not saying it’s going to be easy. I am saying we will survive if we take care of each other—all of the each others. To paraphrase the apostle Paul,

I’m convinced that nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus: not death or life, not angels or rulers, not present things or future things, not powers or height or depth, not social media or artificial intelligence, or any other thing that is created.

May we be content. May we hold things together as the beloved children of God, opening our homes and our hearts to all that love can do.

Peace,
Milton

It’s getting down to crunch time in the baseball season, which means it doesn’t take much for my sermon to intersect with the Red Sox. Here’s what I said on Sunday.

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In the fall of 2004, I was the Associate Pastor of the First Congregational Church of Hanover, Massachusetts, which is about halfway between Boston and Cape Cod. We had two morning services, at 8:30 and 10, and there was a group of five or six women who got there early on Sunday morning to put on the coffee as they prepared for the coffee hour between the services. They were all in the seventies and they were all serious Red Sox fans, which meant they talked baseball while they got things ready. I quickly developed the habit of getting to church early on Sunday morning so I could be a part of the discussion.

The summer of 2004 had been hopeful, if you were a Red Sox fan, but so had several other summers between that one and 1918, the last time the Sox had won the World Series. No one in the church kitchen had been alive when our home team had brought home a championship. We stood in the lineage of the broken-hearted faithful who trusted that if we just kept playing things would be different one day.

Every time the passage we read this morning comes up in the lectionary, I think of my early morning coffee and conversations with those wonderful women: “Not one of these people, even though their lives of faith were exemplary, got their hands on what was promised. God had a better plan for us: that their faith and our faith would come together to make one completed whole, their lives of faith not complete apart from ours.”

We are all a part of the lineage of the faithful.

If there was ever a week when it was evident that our scripture passage started in the middle of a larger story, this is the week. Look again at the first two sentences you have printed in front of you:

I could go on and on, but I’ve run out of time. There are so many more—Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jepthah, David, Samuel, and the prophets.

Hebrews 11 is sometimes called the Hall of Fame of the Faithful because the writer goes down a list of people from Hebrew history whose relationship with God had a profound effect on those who followed: Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Joseph, Moses, Rahab. Some of the names are immediately recognizable and some, perhaps, are not. All of them are a part of the story of God’s relationship with humanity, but the list is far from exhaustive, even within scripture. And most all of them were flawed in some way and fell short of what God called them to do. Still, the writer of Hebrews notes, they endured many things to live out their trust in God, sometimes painful and difficult things.

The writer of the letter to the Hebrews didn’t know anything about baseball, so he turned to another sports metaphor, running. He likened our trust in God to an endurance race, exhorting us to run and not quit, to keep our eyes on Jesus who ran the race before us, to remember those who ran before us.

The problem with sports metaphors is that they make us think in terms of winning and losing. When we hear life or faith compared with running a race, we think we somehow have to win, which runs counter to the reality of life or faith in a way. The Greek word used for race can also mean a heat, as in a qualifying race or one that is not the winner-take-all. There are more races still to come. Everything is not riding on us. We are running our segment of the relay, doing what we can do in our race. It’s not as much about winning as it is about completing our segment, doing what we can, and remembering we aren’t the final runners.

I keep coming back to this verse: “Not one of these people, even though their lives of faith were exemplary, got their hands on what was promised.”

That is a shocking statement that is a bit unnerving. Not one of those people—not Abraham or Moses or Sarah or David or whoever else we want to list—received on what God had promised. They only got part of it. The writer of Hebrews goes on to make it sound as though his readers were the completing piece of the puzzle, the anchor of the relay:

God had a better plan for us: that their faith and our faith would come together to make one completed whole, their lives of faith not complete apart from ours.

And yet here we sit over two thousand years later and the race is still on. If I can return to my Red Sox metaphor, we haven’t broken the Curse. The same exhortation the writer of Hebrews gave those he wrote still applies to us: keep looking at the way Jesus ran the race. He never lost trust in God and the love he had come to share, no matter what it cost, even his death.

I was watching the Red Sox play one night this week, which has been a week when they have struggled a bit, and the commentators were talking about one of the young, promising players who was also struggling. Kevin Millar, who played on the Red Sox team that broke the Curse in 2004, said something that caught my attention. He said, “The guy has good fundamentals and he is going to be great. But baseball is a game built around failure, so he’s going to have to learn how to fail.”

I should probably let him know he helped with my sermon. Theologian Frederick Buechner wrote a book on the Crucifixion entitled The Magnificent Defeat that looked at Jesus’ life and death as failures, in a way that allowed his trust that God’s love was stronger than all of it to bring him back to life and offer us hope and comfort in knowing the point is, as the prophet Isaiah said, “we will mount up with wings like eagles; we will run and not be weary; we will walk and not faint.

Sunday morning, October 31, 2004 had a different feeling when I got to church early to meet the coffee ladies because earlier that week the Sox had won the World Series for the first time in eighty-six years. The cemetery adjacent to the church was filled with Red Sox banners and hats and signs, where people had festooned the tombstones of those who had died before we finally broke the Curse. I was grateful my coffee buddies were alive to share the moment. I was glad to be there, too, since it was a new feeling for me as well.

But even with the championship came the reality of next year. There was another season, another team to field, another game to play, another failure to learn, and another Sunday to gather for coffee and talk and hope. When the Sox won a second championship in 2007, I was speaking to a guy at a different coffee hour in a different church. He had a five-year old son who was dressed in a Sox shirt.

“Look at him,” his father said, “he seven and the Sox have won twice. He has no idea how to be a true Red Sox fan. He thinks we always win.”

Considering that kid is now almost twenty and the Sox have not won every year, I will assume he has a better idea now about both life and the Red Sox.

We are all a part of the lineage of the faithful and the legacy they have handed down is not one of victory, but of perseverance and trust, whether we are talking about the biblical characters named in our passage or those we could name from the history of Mount Carmel Congregational Church. There are very few mornings that we wake up to news that offers hope that love is stronger than greed or power, yet that is what we are called to trust. That is the race we are called to run. That is the failure we are called to learn how to live through. That is the race Christ ran before us. Come, let us run together for as long as it takes. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

Last week’s lectionary passage is one of my favorites. Here’s what I had to say on Sunday.

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Right after Ginger and I got back from our trip to Durham last month, we noticed a plant that had sprung up along our back fence line. It was not there because we planted it, but since it had taken the energy to grow and it wasn’t hurting anything, we left it alone, allowing it to grow along with the volunteer cherry tomatoes along the barn wall and the squash vine that is growing in one of our flower beds.

We are quite good at growing things we didn’t plant it seems.

We’re not good at identifying plants, as a rule. When we got back from the Cape earlier this week, we were delighted to find that the giant mystery plant was a sunflower, now in full bloom. When I realized that, I was really glad we had let it grow. As I sat down to write this sermon, I couldn’t help to paraphrase our passage:

Consider the sunflowers and how beautifully they grow. They don’t exhaust themselves with work or wear themselves out spinning thread. But I tell you not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed as well as one of these flowers.

Right before Jesus talked about the flowers and the birds and what they understood about the generous economy of God that is often lost on us humans, he had replied rather sternly to a man who asked Jesus to tell his brother to share their inheritance. He first said that he had no intention of playing referee between the two siblings and then he told a parable about a rich man who brought in such a big harvest that he couldn’t store it all. Instead of sharing it, he tore down his barns and built bigger ones so he could hoard his wealth and make sure he would be rich for years to come. In the parable, God came to the man and said, “You’re going to die tonight. Now what happens to all that you have hoarded?”

Then Jesus turned to his followers and said, “Therefore, don’t worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will have to wear. Life is more than food and your body is more than clothing. Pay attention to the birds, consider the sunflowers . . .”

Jesus knew he wasn’t talking to rich people. He knew they worked for a daily or weekly wage—fishers, farm hands, manual laborers. None of them would have had the chance to think about building bigger barns so they could hoard their wealth. How did he expect to be taken seriously when he said, be more like the flowers and birds and don’t be afraid?

The answer is in the way he described the economy of God.

Over the past months, I have used that translation—economy—of what is most often rendered as the kingdom of God. I have done so for a couple of reasons, the main one being that kingdom is an outdated metaphor that is difficult to make come to life. The other is that an economy is a system of relationships. The oldest root of the word means “household management,” so we might say an economy is system of taking care of each other, at least from a theological sense. Over centuries of empire, the word has come to mean an exchange of goods and has gone from being relational to transactional.

With that in mind, let’s go back to the garden. We are learning more and more about the interrelatedness of plants and animals, whether we are talking about the mycorrhizal networks of fungi in the soil that transport nutrients between plants even across great distances, or the ways bees and birds foster plant growth. The reason that sunflower is growing on our fence line is probably because a bird fed on one of last summer’s flowers and then dropped the seed in our yard. That is the heart of the economy of God: everything lives together, works together, thrives together.

Jesus’ point wasn’t just for us to learn from the birds and flowers, but to realize we are a part of them. Humans are not managers or owners of other created beings, even though that’s the system we have set up, we are on the same level as the crows and lilies, squash vines, and sunflowers. We are built to share and support whatever life is around us, not hoarding for later but making sure everyone has what they need now because all of us, from plants to people, are only here for a short time. In the parable, God told the rich man he was going to die that night, then Jesus talked about the lily and said, “This is God’s greenery that is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire.

So when Jesus gets to the part where he said, “Don’t be afraid,” he is not rattling off some greeting card platitude, but he is saying in the face of all that is beautiful and temporary (including us), choose trust instead of fear. Look around at the creation you are a part of and be overcome by the generosity of God rather than be worn down by the human economy of perceived scarcity.

Everyone he was talking to had bills to pay and mouths to feed. Jesus wasn’t telling them to pretend that wasn’t true. He was telling them—and us—to be aware of what matters most because, he said, where our treasure is our heart will be as well. Another way to say that is Jesus said that the treasures closest to our hearts are those we can actually clarify in a way that another person gets what we mean and can sense that it matters a great deal. If we want to know what matters most to us, look and what (and who) we hang on to.

I had coffee Friday morning with a friend in Guilford who works for Connecticut Food Share. Her entire job is to make connections between Dollar General Stores and food banks or pantries so that Dollar General can donate the food they can’t use instead of throwing it in the dumpster. There is enough food involved that it is worth Connecticut Food Share to support a full-time job. And it’s kind of a human version of a sunflower on the fence line. Someone had the generosity of imagination to make the necessary connections for fewer people to go hungry.

We are like the lilies and the crows and the sunflowers. We are all part of the integrated, connected web, not just of humanity, but of all creation. That is the world God delights in giving us. That is the treasure that should capture our hearts. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

I think this is the first time that thinking about prayer took me to both Robert Frost and ice hockey. Here’s my sermon for this week.

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My twelfth grade English teacher Ms. Morse is responsible, in part, for my love of poetry—particularly the poems of Robert Frost. When Ginger and I lived in Boston, we loved driving up to Frost’s farm in southern New Hampshire, which is a national park. They had a self-guided walking tour that came with a pamphlet of poems to read at certain places along the trail that matched the words. We would walk, I would read the poems out loud, and Ginger would lovingly mock me.

In English class, Ms. Morse led us to “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” as well as some of his more familiar poems. Then we came to one called “The Death of the Hired Man” that was not like the others. It was long. It told a story. And it didn’t rhyme.

The poem starts with Mary sitting at the kitchen table waiting for her husband Warren to come home. When he does, she gives him the news that Silas, a man who had worked for them off and on over the years—and who had left on less than good terms—had returned. He is a sad and broken man on his return and seemed to have nowhere else to go. Mary has some compassion; Warren wants nothing to do with him because of some old hurt that we don’t know much about. Finally, Mary pleads for Warren’s kindness, saying Silas has just come home to die, and that causes Warren to question what home really is. What he said has stayed with me ever since:

‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.’

I moved around so much growing up that I have had a hard time figuring out where home is, and I also know not everyone feels like their families of origin are where they most belong. However, most of us have a place where they know that when they go there they have to be taken in.

I thought about Warren and Mary and Silas when I read Jesus’ story about the person who wakes their friend at midnight, imposing on their relationship, because another friend had imposed on them showing up in the middle of the night and asking for a place to stay and they were trying to be hospitable. The man did what friends do: they asked for help, even though it was inconvenient for the one they asked.

Jesus said, “I assure you, even if he wouldn’t get up and help because of his friendship, he will get up and give his friend whatever he needs because of his friend’s sheer shamelessness.” That’s what it means to be a friend—and sometimes that is a costly choice.

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to let you in.
That’s what home is. That’s what true friendship is. Maybe that’s what prayer is as well—that place where, when you go there, God lets us in.

As you heard in our passage, the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray the way John the Baptist had taught his students. Jesus responded with a short prayer that makes it sound like Luke couldn’t remember the words to the Lord’s Prayer, since it doesn’t match what we pray every Sunday. Still, it boils it down to the basics: feed us, forgive us, protect us.

Then Jesus told the story about the persistent friend who shows up at midnight asking for help, which is what friends do. We wouldn’t call a stranger in the middle of the night and ask for help, but we would call a friend because I know they love us. That’s what friends are for, as we said. They get up and do what is bothersome or inconvenient because we were audacious enough to ask and because from time to time we get a bill for what our friendships cost us, if you will, and if we are friends, we pay it.

Another way to look at it is to say that the requests we make of one another—even the impositions—happen in the context of relationships. The little things we do with and for one another are deposits in a Trust Bank, if you will, so that when the time comes to make a midnight withdrawal, the inconvenience is not the headline to the story, but a chance instead to make a memory together.

“Remember that time I called you in the middle of the night . . .”

The small story is a contagion of trust and need. The friend who showed up in the middle of the night needed a place to stay. The one answering with a room needed food for their unexpected guest. Our need for help and our ability to offer it are the things that weave our lives together. Their calls for help also remind us that we often impose on those we know will answer. We ask for help where we know—or at least we hope—we can get it.

After telling the story, Jesus said, “Ask and you will receive. Search and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you. Everyone, in fact, who asks gets, and whoever searches finds, and the door will be opened to whoever is knocking.”

Then he switched to family examples to illustrate what he was saying. When a child asks for a fish, a parent wouldn’t give them a snake, or if the kid wanted an egg, the parent wouldn’t hand them a scorpion. When we love someone, we listen to them. We respond to their requests. Can’t we trust God the same way?

I would like to point out here that all of these words come on the heels of Martha asking Jesus to tell Mary to get up and help in the kitchen and Jesus responding by saying, “No.” Jesus wasn’t saying God is a vending machine where we punch our selection and out comes the item. He was saying that God is even more trustworthy than those we trust most to get up in the middle of the night when we call, if we are willing to trust. God is an open-all-night kind of God.

And that leads us to one of the things we can infer from Jesus’ words, which is when we pray, we articulate our theology: we say out loud who we think God is and what we think God is like.

Do we trust God is merciful or compassionate? Do we think God is too busy? Do we think God looks at the world the way we do? Do we think God will alter the universe to make us happy? Do we trust God will be with us no matter what happens? Do we think God will get up in the middle of the night and help?

Here’s one more: Could God be the one knocking on the door in the middle of the night asking for our help in taking care of others?

The theology Jesus articulated in the prayer he offered his followers and the stories that surrounded it is a picture of a God who calls us into relationship, who expects us to trust, to ask, to listen, and to act. If we don’t ask—if we don’t risk—we don’t give God the chance to respond nor do we give God the chance to call us deeper into relationship.

Which brings me to ice hockey; specifically, a quote from Wayne Gretzky, whom hockey fans know as “The Great One” because of his goal scoring ability. He said quite famously, “You miss a hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.”

When I searched for the origins of his quote, I found that there was more too it. The full version is, “You will never get what you don’t ask for. You can’t find what you aren’t looking for. You miss a hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.”

It sounds like a paraphrase of our passage: seek and you will find, ask and you will receive, shoot and you will give yourself a chance to score.” I found an interview with a movie producer named James III who said he thought what needed to be added to Gretzky’s words was “the more shots you take, the better at shooting you’ll be.”

I like that addition because it calls us to practice, in the spiritual sense of that word, repeating the words and actions to deepen our connection to God. When we pray shamelessly like the friend, in a way that leans into our relationship God, a way that makes a withdrawal from the trust bank, we deepen that relationship and open our hearts to be changed.

Remember, when we pray, we articulate our theology: we say out loud who we think God is and what we think God is like. And also remember that our theologies can grow and change. Our image of who God is and what we think God is like can grow and change.

Jesus didn’t answer Martha shameless request to make her sister come and cook by telling Mary to go into the kitchen. He answered by offering Martha a larger view of God and her sister and of the moment they were all sharing together that included her hospitality but challenged her view that Jesus would agree with her even as he it clear that both sisters belonged, which wasn’t the answer Martha was hoping for, but it gave her a new way of looking at both Jesus and her sister.

Prayer is that place where, when you go there, God lets you in. Because that’s what love does. And God is love. So, pray because we don’t get an answer to one hundred percent of the prayers we don’t pray. If we don’t ask, nothing will happen. If we don’t seek, we will never find. If we don’t knock, no one will answer.

Prayer is also the place where, when we go there, we let God in. If we don’t answer the door in the middle of the night, we will miss the chance to help and grow. To pray is to open our hearts to God. When we do that, who knows what can happen. Amen.

Peace,
Milton