Sermon for Pentecost 20 (Proper 23B), October 11, 2015

Text: Amos 5:6-7, 10-15; Mark 10:17-22

            Beloved in Christ, the Israelites in the Old Testament reading and the rich man in the Gospel had this in common: they were called to walk in paths of great righteousness, but in the end they walked away. They couldn’t bear the particular burden that God was setting before them. And so they simply walked away.

            Both the Israelites in the Old Testament reading and the rich man in the Gospel thought of themselves as pious people of God. If you read Amos carefully, you see that he was writing to the church-going people of northern Israel. Yes, there were Baal worshippers around in that society, but Amos didn’t address them. Nowhere did he excoriate the Israelites for worshipping Baal. Instead, he looked specifically at the people who were worshipping the LORD God at Bethel. They thought of themselves as good people. After all, their king’s ancestor had gotten rid of much of the Baal worship in the land and reinstituted many good laws that had fallen into disuse. They faithfully brought their sacrifices to the LORD and thought that they would inherit eternal life.

The Prophet Amos
Gustav Doré

            But God was deeply displeased with them. It boiled down to the way that they perverted justice. They saw that the poor often had no one to stand up for them and were not articulate. The poor didn’t know the ins and the outs of the law. It was easy to hoodwink them. And those who did justified it all as socially acceptable. If their customers were too stupid to realize that they were putting their thumbs on the scale or mixing a little of the chaff with the wheat, that was too bad for them. Buyer, beware! And if their customers were going through some misfortune, that just gave the merchants all the more power to drive a hard bargain and get what they wanted cheaply. They didn’t think it was a matter of right or wrong. It was just plain business.

            But God called them to be more righteous. He asked them to do one simple thing: stop bullying the weak and the poor. God didn’t command Amos to preach that the Israelites should give alms to the poor. That is found elsewhere in Scripture, but not in Amos. Instead, he makes an even simpler request: don’t oppress the poor; that is, don’t be unfair in your dealings just because you are more powerful than they. It was a simple request, but the Israelites couldn’t do it. They were disheartened by what Amos said and “went away sorrowful, for [they] had great possessions”—and that was all that mattered to them. A generation later they went away in exile, never to return to the land of Israel again.

            Nearly eight centuries later a rich man came on the scene. He had devoted himself to great acts of piety. He had tried never to break any of the commandments. In fact, when Jesus rattled them off, he couldn’t think of any that he had ever broken. He had always been a well-behaved child. He had never committed a felony or even a misdemeanor. Sure, he longed to do something even greater for God, but it certainly wouldn’t be something too difficult, given how well schooled in piety he was.

            And at first it looked as if Jesus agreed. Jesus told him, “You lack one thing.” It was just one thing, one simple little thing. “That’s great,” the man must have thought. “I’ve done 99% of the work; now all I have to do is this 1% remaining. Easy-peasy. Go ahead, Jesus tell me what it is.” And Jesus replied: “Go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.” If he were a man of great piety, as he professed, it would not have been a problem, for he would have known that our Lord is the greatest treasure of all. But instead we are told that “disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.” Two simple requests to live righteously—and neither the Israelites in Amos’s day nor the rich man in the Gospel can fulfill those requests.

            Would we? Do we find it easy to treat those weaker than ourselves with the respect that they deserve? Isn’t it easier to take advantage of them? Sometimes we can do this rather crassly, as when bullies beat up or pick on their marks, or when con artists run a scam. Other times we do it more subtly, such as when we push and shove our way to the top at work. And if we have a hard time saying no to that type of unjust behavior, how would we ever heed our Lord’s call to put Him above all things? We are tempted to be disheartened by what our Lord has said and to go away sorrowful.

            But our Lord hints in today’s Gospel that He wants us to look at this question in a deeper way. The man approached Jesus as one good man coming to consult another. To be sure, Jesus would have been a tad wiser, since He is the “Good Teacher,” but the man assumed that it was a meeting of like minds. But Jesus asked him to consider the matter more deeply. If Jesus is the Good Teacher—and He is—then He must be true God, for “no one is good except God alone.” And so we are invited to consider how this is so.

            Amos had said that a hallmark of piety was not being unjust to the poor. Our Lord took that a step further and allowed Himself to be treated unjustly. Not only did He not harm others, He also allowed Himself to be condemned unfairly. His enemies took advantage of His silence. When He refused to stand up for Himself, they beat Him. When He stood humbly before Pilate, they clamored for His death. And Pilate figured a little injustice was an acceptable price to pay for peace and quiet in his realm.

            But we shouldn’t think of our Lord as just a victim who got swept away by circumstances beyond His control. He actively chose this route of obedience. For the very things He commanded of the rich man He embraced Himself. The rich man was not being completely truthful when he said that he had kept the commandments from his youth. He may have refrained from gross violations of them, but he had not kept his heart pure from anger, lust, greed, envy, and rebellion. But Christ had kept all those commandments perfectly. He did so because He delighted in righteousness and because He wanted to live the completely holy life that we and the rich man and every other human being have been unable to live.

            But Christ knew that couldn’t be the end of it. It wasn’t enough just to live a pious life Himself. And so He took everything that He had and gave it away to us poor human beings, who had no spiritual riches of our own. He emptied Himself of every right and privilege that He had as the Son of God. Instead, He humbled Himself to the point of being grabbed by a mob and then led to the cross after a couple of show trials. But He did this, not so that He would “have treasure in heaven,” but rather so that we would. And so Jesus walked away. But He didn’t walk away from God, as the Israelites and the rich man did. Instead, He walked away from all His prerogatives and went on the lonely path to the cross. And because He did so we have all the treasure of heaven.

            What does this mean? It means that we are completely forgiven. All the times we have behaved like jerks to the people who were weaker than us; all the times we have thrown our weight around rather than serve humbly; all the times we have clung to our wealth and power rather than yield to God and His kingdom—all these things have been forgiven. You have been set free. You are God’s beloved children because Christ has paid the price for you to become so.

            So what do we do now? We stop asking silly questions such as “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Have you considered how stupid that question is? What do you have to do to inherit anything? Nothing. The person leaving you the inheritance has to do all the hard work of setting up the will and the even harder work of dying. What must we do to inherit eternal life? Nothing. Christ has died for us and has left us in His will.

            Instead we simply treasure the gift that God has given us. We “seek the Lord and live.” We enjoy the forgiveness of sins that He has already given us. And we enjoy the new life and fellowship we have with Him. As part of that new life, we will take seriously the call to put Him first—above all our material possessions and everything else we treasure. Because we delight in Him, we learn to “seek good and not evil.” In fact, we learn to “hate evil and love good” so that we can “establish justice” wherever people need our help. All of these things simply flow from the gifts that God has given us.

            Because Christ has not walked away from us, we are not disheartened and therefore we should not walk away from Him. In Jesus’s name. Amen.

Sermon for Pentecost 17 (Proper 20B), September 20, 2015

Texts: Jeremiah 11:18-20 and Mark 9:30-37

            Beloved in Christ, can you believe what Jeremiah is saying? “Let me see Your vengeance upon them.” That’s just wrong. That’s wrong and unchristian. Someone needs to sit down and have a little talk with Jeremiah and warn him that that is not how Christians talk. We are not to ask God’s vengeance to fall upon anyone. We are never to complain about injustices that we see or experience. Instead, we are to be happy and cheerful, no matter what happens. We are to smile and be tolerant of everything. But maybe we should give Jeremiah a pass. After all, he is from the Old Testament—you know, that benighted age when they didn’t know anything about grace or forgiveness or Christ.

            I dare say that’s what many Christians would say. But that is because of our prejudices about the Old Testament and the New Testament. We think that God was angry in the Old Testament, but mellowed out by the time of the New Testament. But that is just not true. Our Lord Jesus Christ had far more to say about hell than you will find in the entire Old Testament. And in the Revelation, one of the newest of the New Testament books, you see the martyrs crying out to God to do something about those being slaughtered for Christ’s sake. Meanwhile, the prophet Jeremiah himself would go on to write eloquently about the forgiveness God would impart to His wayward people and the new heart He would implant in them. So maybe our prejudices about both testaments is getting in the way of us hearing God’s law in the New Testament and His gospel in the Old Testament—and thus of understanding what God is about.

Jeremiah Lamenting over the Destruction of Jerusalem
by Rembrandt van Rijn
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Home : Info. Licensed under Public Domain
via Wikimedia Commons - SK-A-3276.jpeg

            We in our post-modern society struggle to pray the words, “Let me see Your vengeance upon them.” But there are two reasons why we might decline to pray this kind of prayer. One is that we are cold-hearted robots without a shred of human empathy in our teeny, tiny hearts. We have no time to consider anybody else’s sorrows and problems. If they are the victims of injustice, well, they should just suck it up and soldier on instead of asking us or God to get involved in their troubles. The second reason is that maybe we do not want to be called out for our injustices. If we complain too much about the injustices that we ourselves experience or that we see going on around us, we might become the target of God’s avenging wrath. And so we pretend that God has no reason whatsoever to be concerned with the injustices in this world.

            But God does not shrug off injustice the way we do. You must understand that in both Greek and Hebrew there is only one word that means “righteousness” and “justice.” They are not two separate concepts, as they are in English. Thus, God is opposed to injustice even as He is opposed to unrighteousness. At most, He may delay His punishment until people have shown themselves to be fully guilty. He warns Cain about the anger and hatred lurking in his heart, but He doesn’t intervene until Cain has shown himself to be the murderer that he was. And so we shouldn’t assume that God is indifferent to the injustices of the world. Instead, He is giving enough rope to people to see if they will hang themselves with it.

            Nowhere do we see God saying that injustice is okay. And so we do well to consider the injustices of our day, that is to say, the injustices that are praised by our society and that we have a hard time avoiding. You see, every era, every culture, and every ideology is marked by some kind of injustice and we are no exception. We are unjust to the elderly, whom we are willing just to stick in some corner and neglect. We are unjust to the unborn, whom we are willing to kill because they are inconvenient. We are unjust to children, because we prefer to hop from one bed to another rather than create a stable household with a lifelong mother and father for our children. We are unjust to the poor, whom we despise for not having made it in our land of plenty. We are unjust to the gullible, whom we try to exploit for our advantage and then excuse it with “Buyer, beware!” We are unjust to people who do not look like us or talk like us or think like us. Injustice is not to be found just on the Left or on the Right or in the Middle. It taints our whole society.

            Now you might say, “But I do my best to respect and help the poor, the unborn, the elderly, the weak, and the vulnerable. I try not to be part of the problem, but part of the solution.” Good! That is a fine and Christian thing to do. But it is not always easy to extricate ourselves from the injustices of the world in which we live. Think, for example, how in our country the people in early 1800s New England were quick to denounce the evils of slavery in the South and bristled at all of its horrors, but they didn’t think much about using the cotton in their mills, even though the cotton had been planted and harvested by slaves. And they didn’t think much about forcing children to work long hours in their mills and putting them at risk of losing life and limb on the dangerous machinery. Often we find it difficult to extricate ourselves from the evil and injustices around us, and we find it easy to see other people’s injustices, but not our own.

            Moreover, we tend to rely on force (whether real or threatened) to end injustice, and this often leads to further injustices. The Communists in Russia claimed to be avenging the wrongs the tsar had done, but they ended up creating a bigger gulag than had ever existed in human history. The Nazis claimed to be helping Germany when it was being picked on unfairly by its neighbors, but they ended up killing millions of innocents. To be sure, there is such a thing as righteous indignation—and Jeremiah and the saints in the Revelation are examples of that—but it is a rather rare phenomenon. Usually our righteous indignation is soon channeled into unrighteous directions.

            But the good news is that God has come to put an end to the injustices of the world and to do so in a most unusual manner. Christ didn’t overcome evil by the ballot or the bullet. Instead, He Himself became a victim of the world’s injustices. He was falsely accused. He was framed. He was given a show trial. He was executed, though He was innocent. But it isn’t just that He was a victim. No, He took on both our injustices and the vengeance God wreaks upon those injustices. We cannot reconcile victim and victimizer, but Christ did so through His body on the cross. For there He was the victim but He also endured the just vengeance God poured out. Jeremiah’s prayer was heard. Injustice was ended. Righteousness was established. Peace began to reign.

            And that affects the way that we live now. Christ gives a new future to both victim and victimizer. Justice is rendered to the victim as evil is dealt with once and for all, and forgiveness and new life are offered to the victimizer—and both at great cost to our Lord. But this opens up to us all sorts of new possibilities. We are not bound to continue in the same old pattern of perpetuating injustice or excusing it or overlooking it. Instead, we show what God’s true justice looks like in the way we treat other people.

            The people who are victims of injustice are almost always the weaker people. Most people don’t pick fights with someone who can overpower them, since they don’t want to be hurt. That’s why it is the weak and the vulnerable and the lonely and the outcast who are most vulnerable to injustice. And that is also why we strive after power and try to be the greatest, because we know that we will be picked on mercilessly if we are a nobody. But if we understand that Christ has come to defend the weak and to turn the hearts of the mighty away from their pride, then we can look at ourselves and other people differently.

            That is what our Lord was doing after the disciples argued about who was the greatest. He held a child in His arms and said that the greatest person was someone who would receive such a little child. On another occasion, He would hold up a child as an example of the greatest person in the kingdom of God. Here He is saying that the greatest person is someone who would receive such a child and in so doing receive and honor Christ. These two ideas complement each other. The humble and lowly are great, and so are those who receive the humble and lowly and care for them.

            The child was apparently small enough to be held in Christ’s arms. We’re not talking a twelve year old or so. This is a small child. What can such a child do in God’s kingdom? Not much—just receive the gifts that Christ gives. But what use are even the best of us to God? Not much. All we can do is receive His gifts. But what makes the child and us valuable to God is that He loves us. And, therefore, we are the greatest in the world to Him. But so too are our fellow believers in Christ. The best thing we can do then is to love and to help our brothers and sisters in Christ, especially the weaker ones.

            If we counted others as our betters and received in humility whatever gifts God gives—in other words, if we acted with the humility of a small child who knows how dependent he or she is upon others—we would stop many of the injustices in the world. It would hold us back from participating in those injustices ourselves. And if all Christians would live their lives consistently this way, it would change the world.

            Yes, I know that we have not yet attained a perfect world nor will do so ever as long as the world lasts. We will remain part of the problem until the day we die. But Christ has come to listen to the pleas of Jeremiah and to take up his cause—and that of all who suffer unjustly at other people’s hands. Therefore, let us pursue humility and let the love of Christ flow through us. In Jesus’ name. Amen.