Repentance (2nd Sunday of Lent, 21 February 2016)

 Repentance 

 [2nd Sunday of Lent, 21st February, 2016, Luke 13:31-35]
     

Today’s Gospel story is one of the more difficult ones. Jesus says, O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that killeth the prophets, and stoneth them that are sent unto her! how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her own brood under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate.
     That’s not exactly a happy speech. It’s one of Jesus’s harshest sayings. It sounds very much as of he’s writing off Jerusalem, and I suppose in a way he is. However, looking at it in terms of the Passion of Christ, there is what looks like a smidgen of hope:  and I say unto you, Ye shall not see me, until ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord. When Jesus returns to Jerusalem, the people will welcome him with just those words. But a few days later they will shout Crucify him! Crucify him!
     What’s going on here?
     When I read the Bible, I never stop with just the facts of the story. Any story about some specific people is also a story about us, about you and me. Every story shows us something about what it means to be human, about how people behave, about what matters to them, about the choices they make and why they make them. What makes the stories in the Bible so believable is that the stories show us all these things. And that means that every story in the Bible has some meaning beyond itself. Usually, the easiest of these meanings is how the story applies to us, here and now.
     So I will talk about how this incident in Jesus’s ministry applies to us.
     But Bible stories aren’t just about humans. They are also about God. Every story shows us something about how we relate to God, about how God relates to us, and how this relationship affects and shapes the way we relate to each other. I take it for granted that understanding the Bible means understanding these aspects of the Biblical story too.
     Let’s start with the story itself.
     Jesus was expanding his ministry, and that was causing trouble. People came and listened to him, and they wanted to know what they could or should do to enter the Kingdom of God. In chapter 13, Luke includes several parables. There’s the one about the fig tree, in which the keeper of the orchard asks for one more chance to fertilise the ground so that the tree might bear fruit. If it fails, it will be uprooted and burned.
     There’s the comparisons of the kingdom of God to a mustard seed, and to yeast. You are the yeast, he tells his disciples. You need yeast to make bread. And the one about the house shut against those who claim a right to enter it, but the door is barred against them. There will be weeping and wailing among those who are on the wrong side of the door.
     There’s a healing, too. A woman has suffered for eighteen years, bent double with what we would call severe arthritis. Jesus healed her. But he healed her on the Sabbath, which annoyed the rulers of the synagogue, who complained that Jesus broke the law. Whereupon Jesus pointed out that necessary work, such as watering one’s animals, was permitted, so why not the work of healing?
     There’s also one of the most famous of Jesus’s sayings, The last shall be first and the first shall be last. There’s no way around its meaning: What we think of as being important does not match what God wants.
     One of the major themes of Luke’s Gospel is that the established order of things will be overturned. The Kingdom of God is at hand, and the Kingdom of God is not, as Jesus says, “of this world.” It’s not organised the way this world is organised. It’s not based on the values of this world. It’s not one in which it’s enough to obey the law and be respectable and behave like everybody else and not cause trouble. It’s not a Kingdom in which the great movers and shakers will rule, as they do in this world. It’s not a world in which power and wealth matter.
     It’s radically different.
     Over and over again, in his parables and in his sermons, Jesus condemned power and wealth. Over and over again, in his talk and in his actions, Jesus warned against mistaking the outward show of piety and moral worth for the real thing. Over and over again, Jesus said that to seek the Kingdom of God means giving up the things that bring success in this world.
     And that’s why the authorities were more than a little annoyed at him. That’s why Herod wanted to get rid of him. A man who preaches radical moral and personal change preaches radical political and economic change, too. Radical change in one aspect of your life requires radical change in all aspects of your life. It’s all or nothing.
     Scary, really, to commit yourself to radical change. But that’s what Jesus expects of us.
     Some of the Pharisees were sympathetic to Jesus’s teachings, so they warned him about Herod’s plans, and for a while he escaped the danger. Some time later Jesus will return to Jerusalem, the crowds will welcome him with shouts of Hosanna, Blessed is he who comes in the name of God. And then he will be arrested, charged with blasphemy, convicted, and executed.
     But now, as he leaves Jerusalem, he says that he wished Jerusalem would hear his message. He wants to gather her in, he says, like a hen that gathers her chicks under her wings to protect them. He wants to save Jerusalem from itself, but it will not listen. It continues on its way, seeking wealth and power and worldly fame. He foresees that Jerusalem will be left desolate. Because it plays the game of power, it will be destroyed by people who play a stronger game. That is indeed what happened to Jerusalem more than once in its history. Just as it has happened to every city or nation that has played the power game.
     What does this mean for us?
     Well, I think we can see here several messages. Personal ones, that apply to how we choose to live our lives. Communal ones, about how we live and work and play together. Political ones, about how we do, and how we should, use power.
     But most of all, a warning: Choices have consequences. That’s obvious, but we keep trying to avoid those consequences. We sometimes say, But I had no choice. What we really mean is that the other choice was just too hard. And sometimes it is. But too often it was merely unpleasant or inconvenient. Or, like taking your medicine, it tastes bitter, but you need it. Children have a hard time accepting that. I trust that we grownups will take our medicine without complaining.
     It’s hard enough to accept that choices have consequences we may not like. It’s harder to accept that we have bad reasons for our choices. Ideas have consequences too, because ideas govern our choices. We choose what we choose because we believe some things are worth having. We justify our beliefs in all kinds of ways, with arguments, with appeals to habits, with excuses of one kind or another.
     And here is where it gets tricky. It gets up close up and personal. Because when we make a bad choice, we then try to excuse ourselves. Or we give an apology in which we claim that we take full responsibility, and do nothing. Or we blame someone or something else. We may even attack the accuser. Kill the messenger of bad news, and the bad news goes away, right?
     No, it doesn’t.
     We like to think of Jesus as meek and mild. Charles Wesley wrote a poem to this effect:
          Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,
          Look upon a little child;
          Pity my simplicity,
          Suffer me to come to Thee.
     But as Luke reminds us, Jesus was often the messenger of bad news. Like John the Baptist before him, he reminded people that they had made the wrong choices. Powerful people don’t like to be told they are doing bad things. Neither do we, the less than powerful people. If we can’t ignore the messenger, we turn on him:  O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that killeth the prophets, and stoneth them that are sent unto her.
     Lent is the time the Church has traditionally set aside for us to contemplate the bad news, that we make bad choices, that we fail to love each other, that we resist the reminder that we have sinned and need to repent. Gloomy and dark, right? Well, it’s not completely gloomy and dark. Tied up inside that bad news is the good news: That by God’s grace we may repent, and so enter into the Kingdom. Jesus does not condemn the sinner. He warns the sinner. He offers a way out: Repent!
     I’ll end with a few thoughts about repentance.
     It’s not enough to feel guilty. For that matter, feeling guilty is merely a kind of shame. It doesn’t get you very far. When Jesus says Repent! he doesn’t mean “I want you to feel bad, because you did something bad”. The grammar teacher in me reminds you that “Repent!” is a verb in the imperative mood. It’s a command. You can’t command someone to feel a certain way. You can only command someone to act, to do something.
     So what is it that we should do when we repent?
     We should change the way we make choices. We should examine our reasons, our beliefs, our values, and when these tend to lead to bad choices, we should drop them or change them. We should put a lower value on our own convenience and pleasure, and a higher value on what’s good for us, and what’s good for other people. We should think not in terms of Will I like it? but in terms of Is it the right thing to do? We should ask Is it necessary? and not Do I want it?
     In short, we should shift our perspective, our point of view, our way of looking at things. We should try to look at other people and the world as creatures of God, and therefore worthy of our nurture, our support, our protection, and our love.
     When we take the command to repent seriously, we accept another command: To love God, and to love our neighbour.
     Let us pray.
     Lord God, you created us, you saved us, you help us. Grant us the grace of repentance, that we may think and speak and act in accordance with your will. Show us to how serve you by serving each other, so that our present life may be a foretaste of your Kingdom. We ask this in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, now and forever. Amen.

Money (3rd in Lent, 2015-03-08)

 3rd Sunday in Lent: Money
(March 8, 2015)© Wolf Kirchmeir
 
[Exodus 20:1-17; Psalm 19; 1 Corinthians 1:18-22; John 2:13-22]

May the words of my lips and the meditations of all our hearts be ever acceptable in your sight, O Lord.

Dear Friends in Christ,

Today’s Gospel is St John’s version of the Cleansing of the Temple. St John tells us that Jesus made a whip, and drove the money changers and the sellers of sacrificial animals from the temple. It’s told in a few verses in each of the four Gospels.

It’s an exciting story. Many artists have painted the scene. Imagine, Jesus wielding a whip, overturning tables, shouting at people, using harsh language: Take these things away. Do not make my Father’s house a place of merchandise. In another Gospel, Jesus is quoted as saying My Father’s house is a house of prayer, you have made it a den of thieves.

Considering how few words are used to tell the story, it has attracted a lot of attention. Why is this? I think that it’s not just the drama of the event. I think it’s that this event touches on many questions which all relate to the single most basic one: What is life for? It does so in two ways. It shows us that money and wealth can be serious problems. And it symbolises the radical reorganisation of life, the universe, and everything, which Jesus offered in his ministry, and which culminates in his death on the cross.

Let’s have a closer look at the core of this event. Why did Jesus cleanse the Temple?  The simple answer is that he was deeply offended by the focus on doing business in the Temple. Sure, people needed to buy sacrificial animals, but trading in them was not what the Temple was for. Doing business was not the business of the Temple.

Does Jesus say anything about money and wealth anywhere else? He sure does. He points out how the widow who donates one dollar gives a much larger proportion of her wealth than does the Pharisee who gives a hundred. He tells the young lawyer that he should sell everything he has, give the proceeds to the poor, and become a disciple. He tells a parable about a man who has filled his storehouses with wealth, and plans to lead a leisurely life of retirement, except that he will die that night. He says that we cannot serve both God and Mammon. He holds up a coin and says, Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. And so on.

Jesus has a lot to say about money and wealth. So do the writers of the Epistles. So does the Old Testament.

And that leads to the obvious question: What does the Bible teach us about how to think about money and wealth?

Some people will no doubt say that the Bible is not an economics textbook. That’s true, if you think of economics as being all about the numbers. But the economy isn’t just about the numbers. In fact, the numbers are the least of it. The economy is the way we’ve organised our community life so as to produce and share the goods and services that we need. That’s all.

So what’s the role of money? Money is a method for making the exchange of goods and services easier. Sure, we can use it for many other purposes. We can use it track the costs of production and distribution. We can use it to account for debt. We can use it to calculate how much each partner contributes to a common enterprise. We can even use it to save for the future. Instead of storing actual wheat in actual storehouses for future use, we can create a money debt so that we have a claim on wheat that’s grown years later, when we need it.

Money is one of the great inventions of humankind. I put it right up there with the wheel. By the time the books of the Bible were written down, money was already important. It was so important that the Old Testament has many rules about fair wages and fair prices and fair measures, and how to handle debt, and how to deal with people who don’t follow these rules. And every seven years you were supposed to cancel all debts.

By the time Jesus came up to the Temple and attacked the money changers, money was already taken for granted as the main medium of exchange among strangers. The Temple was important because it was the only place at which the Jews could perform the sacrifices according to the law. The temple forecourt was where money and religious observance came together.

To perform a sacrifice you had to give an unblemished dove or lamb or other animal to the priests, who performed the actual sacrifice. Most people bought the sacrificial animal in the Temple forecourt. For this, you needed coinage without stamped portraits of emperors and such. Those are graven images. Using them to buy a sacrifice would be blasphemy. Hence the need for money changers.

There was a lot of money changing hands, and the Temple authorities got a cut of the proceeds. When Jesus tossed out the money changers, the Temple authorities were of course annoyed. How dare this upstart wandering preacher interfere with their business?

Let’s take a little side trip and think about money. Money makes the world go around, so they say. That’s an odd idea, when you think about it for a while. You can’t eat money, you can’t breathe it, you can’t drink it. You can’t drive it from here to there, you can’t plow it and grow wheat in it, you can’t do much of anything that you need to live, or that you like to do to make life more pleasant.
      In fact, it’s pretty useless in itself. It’s only useful when you spend it. Then you can eat or drink something, or you can put some gas in the car and get from here to there. Or you can get a tractor and a plow and a seed drill and plow your patch of ground and plant wheat in it.

So why do we think money is so important? Because we’ve created an economic system in which we need money to buy and sell. Money makes trading very convenient, which is certainly a good thing. It makes trading so convenient that we’ve built the most complicated economic system the world has ever seen. Most of the things we buy are made and brought to us by people we will never meet face to face. Amazing, when you realise that. Imagine: dozens, possibly hundreds of people do their jobs day in and day out, and the result is that you can buy a pen for 98 cents. Plus tax.

So money is very, very convenient. But that convenience comes at a price. The price is our ideas about and attitudes towards wealth. Money shapes our notions of what’s important. Money is a number, so we confuse price and value. We need money to buy what we need and want, so money distracts us from what makes life worth living. And money buys power, so it distorts our politics.

We take money for granted. About the only time most of us think about money is when something goes wrong with the economy. And then we have at best confused ideas about what money is, and too often we have wrong ones. Worse, many, perhaps most people, become frightened when the money economy begins to fail. The worst effect of this fear is hyperinflation. That’s when people no longer trust what money means, so they want more and more money, and eventually a wheelbarrow full of banknotes will just barely buy a loaf of bread.

Yes, no doubt about it. Money is important in our lives. But everything the Bible says about money and wealth elaborates on three themes. First, that we should share the wealth. Second, that trading requires justice. And third, that our relationship with money is problematic, to put it politely. Paul’s words are harsher: in his first letter to Timothy we read that The love of money is the root of all evil.
      In short, the Biblical record, in both Testaments, reminds us that ethics are at the heart of economics. An economic system that doesn’t promote ethical dealing and fair sharing of wealth is a bad one. If there are few or no incentives to deal ethically and fairly with each other, then something is seriously wrong.

There was something seriously wrong with the system for providing sacrifices for the worshippers who came to the Temple. Doves were the cheapest sacrifices, sold for dollar or two in our money, and supplied because poor people couldn’t afford lambs and goats and young bullocks. No problem with that. But as I said before, the Temple authorities got a cut of every sale. I think that’s the main reason Jesus was annoyed. The Temple authorities no longer saw the trade in doves and other animals as a necessary and useful service for the worshippers, they saw it as a way of making money. It had become a lucrative business. It was now a profit centre.

Trade is good. It makes life better for everybody. That is its purpose. But the traders and money changers and Temple authorities used trade as a way to enrich themselves. In economic language, they used trade to transfer wealth from other people to themselves. They did not simply exchange wealth for wealth.  Jesus called what they did robbery.

Jesus makes it quite clear that he disapproves of enriching oneself at the expense of others. Transfer of wealth isn’t what the economy is about. Sharing the wealth is what it’s about. Money is just a method for making that easier, and if used rightly, it makes sharing the wealth fairer.

So what’s the lesson for us?

Should we stop using money? Of course not. It makes trade easier.

Should we stop doing business? Of course not. Our way of doing business ensures that we have enough of what we need and what we like.

Should we stop making a profit? Of course not. Profit is on the one hand the seller’s income, his wage. And on the other hand, profit is an efficient incentive for pooling resources so that we can do things together that no one of us could do on their own.

Then what should we do?

And here’s where the symbolism of cleansing of the Temple comes in. What does Jesus’s cleansing of the Temple mean? It means that the Kingdom of God is not about doing business. That life is not about making money. That making a living is not the purpose of living. That these things are methods, not purposes. We need to do them so that we are have the time and the energy to do what really matters.

How do we apply this lesson to economics? The answer is simple. We should do business the same way we should do everything else: as a way of relating to each other in mutual service and love. Prices should reflect actual value. Contracts should be equitable, and not give one side an advantage. Profit should be enough for you to stay in business, and if possible improve the quality of what you offer. Wages should be sufficient for a decent life. Promises to pay should be kept. And so on. Any code of ethics will fill in the details.

Most of all, we should keep in mind that there are vastly more important things in life than making money.

There’s time spent with family and friends. Playing games, enjoying meals together, celebrating birthdays, hanging out at Timmy’s chatting about whatever comes to mind. There’s doing things that give you deep satisfaction, whether it’s reading a book, going fishing, playing a fiddle, building a table, growing vegetables, even organising and neatening up your house. Or just going for a walk and breathing fresh air and seeing how the sun makes the landscape glow. There are so many good things that we can do, so many things that bring us joy.

And there are needs to be met wherever we look, for the world doesn’t run on Jesus’s economics. People are cheated out of wages. They aren’t paid enough to enjoy a decent standard of living. Fraudsters trick people out of their life savings. Random accidents and illness make it impossible for people to work for a living.

Most of all, fear for our own future makes us selfish and unwilling to share what we have. No one will help us when we need help, we must look out for number one. But when everyone looks out for number one, none of us looks out for each other.

We are fortunate in this town. Most of us have enough income to live a good life. Jesus calls us to share what we have. His economic theory is simple: Share the wealth, and everyone will have enough. That’s the Economics 101 version of his command to Love one another as I have loved you.

Let us pray.
Lord God, give us grace so to trust in your promise of more abundant life that we may in this life share the abundance that you have provided of your bountiful goodness; and that in the life to come, we may share in the joys of your Kingdom. We pray in the name of him who gave his life that we might have life, Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, now and forever. Amen

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