Blessed are the Poor

The Gospel for All Saints Day begins with a difficult teaching of Jesus.  “Then [Jesus] looked up at his disciples and said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.”  (Lk. 6:20)  For one thing, we do not normally associate being poor with blessedness.  It gets stranger when we realize that the Greek word translated here as blessed literally means happy.  What Jesus is saying is, “Happy are the poor.”  We certainly do not normally associate poor and happy. 

The strangeness of this teaching may have a lot to do with why the church started trying to soften it right from the very beginning.  Matthew has Jesus saying something along the same lines, but with a difference:  “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”  (Mt. 5:3).  Poor in spirit somehow makes it a little easier to take, although being poor in spirit is no more something I would normally associate with blessings and happiness than being just plain poor.  But is this really a softening?  Or is it more of an invitation?

I had the joy of speaking to the Diocese of Kansas this weekend at its convention.  As you have heard me do many times, I spoke about relationships of solidarity with people who are poor as being sacramental in nature, a way Christians experience the real presence of Christ in exactly the same way we do in the Eucharist.  As is almost always the case when I speak on this topic, someone asked me if the priority on Jesus’ concern for the poor in the Gospels was not really a priority on the poor broadly understood to be any type of need and not really about being poor literally.

Well, maybe.  What I’ve come to wonder, though, is if Matthew really understood the change to “poor in spirit” to be a softening of the way Luke put it, in other words, a way of saying the same thing as what has been attributed (incorrectly) to Mae West:  “I’ve been rich and unhappy and I’ve been poor and unhappy.  Rich is better.”  (What she actually said was “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor.  Rich is better.”)  If so, that would certainly be a big difference between the teaching in Matthew and the teaching in Luke. 

What I’ve come to believe, though, is that Matthew isn’t changing what Luke recorded at all.  He’s making it an invitation to the rich to take on the spirit, which is to say the very life and breath, of the poor.  Luke’s version is more exclusive.  It only extends the blessing to “you who are poor.”  Luke’s version acknowledges there are some who do not receive it because they are wealthy.  But in Matthew, the blessing is opened to all.  The rich, too, have the opportunity to take on the spirit of the poor.  If anything, Matthew makes the teaching more generally applicable by not letting the rich off the hook. 

Blessed indeed are the rich, for they are given the opportunity to become one with the poor.  And in that is the kingdom of heaven.  It’s just an entirely different Gospel if we don’t have to struggle with the blessedness of the poor.

Peace,
+Stacy

Being Thankful

When my children were young, my mother gave them a book.  It was called I Never Say I’m Thankful but I Am.  It was about all the things parents do for their children, especially when they are little, including especially the dirtiest tasks and the ones that try our patience.  It had a picture on the cover of a little boy sitting on the potty.  You get the message. The implicit message was that children never express their gratitude for all the things we do for them, but that they are learning to be grateful human beings nevertheless.

The book, and the concept behind it, relate to the gospel for this week (Lk. 18:9-14).  It is a parable about a Pharisee and a tax collector going to the temple to pray.  It doesn’t really have anything at all to do with saying thank you.  It does have something to do with the need to.  It is the basic issue of Christian life, it seems to me—living thankfully.

The Pharisee prayed, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.  I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.”  The man was only being truthful.  The Pharisees were good people.  The best people.  They were the most religious people.  They did what they were supposed to do.  They followed the law.  They went beyond following the law.  They were the good church going people.  They were, if you’ll pardon me, us.

The tax collector prayed differently, but he, too, prayed truthfully.  “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”  Tax collectors, known for being extortionists among other things, were not the best people.

Here, I think, is the point.  The person who left justified to God was the one with little to be thankful for.  The one who left not justified was the one with the most to be thankful for.  The one who had received the most grace from God was not justified.  The one who did not, was justified.

Here is the most disturbing lesson I’ve learned in nearly 25 years of trying to be a pastor.  The very people who have received the most very often have the hardest time being followers of Jesus, myself included most of all.  The very people who have the most reason to be thankful, rarely are. 

And here is the disturbing reality of how I see this playing out.  The people who have received the most grace from God are very often the ones who have the hardest time showing grace to others.  It is the people with the most who are very often the ones who get what they’ve been given confused with what they’ve earned, what has been entrusted to them with what is owned by them, what is compassion shown to them confused with what they are owed, what is mercy confused with what they deserve, what is a gift to them with what is the result of their own moral superiority, which is precisely what the Pharisee in the parable did.  It is a paradox of how God works that is difficult to understand.  The greater the grace, the danger is that the more it tends to separate from God rather than draw to God. 

We must not let that happen to us.

Peace,
+Stacy

A New Name

Then the man said, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.”  Gen. 32:28

My son Andrew and his new wife Jessica had barely left on their honeymoon when I received a phone call.  The caller ID startled me.  It was the first time I had seen my new daughter-in-law use her new name.  Who is Jessica Sauls?

Taking a new married name is much more an intentional choice these days than when Ginger and I got married.  It makes my daughter-in-law’s enthusiasm about it more powerful and laden with meaning than if she had done it because of tradition or someone else’s expectations.  Instead, she had made it an expression of herself and what she was making for herself. 

Jacob also took on a new name at a crucial moment in his life.  His had to do with returning to a family left behind years before in betrayal, but as a new person shaped by his experience away.  Jessica’s had to do with her choice to start a new life with my son.  Both represent adventures, and like all adventures, both have an element of striving in them, which is to say having some strife. 

I think my daughter-in-law will find, as did Jacob,  that the blessing is in the striving itself.  Blessing is found in the striving that comes with building a new life.  That’s how God will shape her . . . and us into new creations.  It is how she will answer the question she has taken on for herself:  Who is Jessica Sauls?

Peace,
+Stacy

Manners

I often get Jesus and my mother confused.  It is understandable.  My mother spoke on his behalf with some regularity. One of his lessons according to my mother was this:  “Remember the magic words—please and thank you.”  And that for a long time was how I understood this story about the healing of the ten lepers (Lk. 17:11-19), the fact that only one of them went back to say “thank you.” That’s the one who was the good boy.  But I had missed the details of the story. 

One of those details is that the only one of the ten lepers to come back after being restored to health was a Samaritan.  I have always thought that detail was there because Samaritans were not noted for having good manners. 

I now don’t think that is what this story is about at all.  The thing to note is that there is no reason at all for the Samaritan leper, even though healed, to go show himself to the priests, as Jesus has instructed all of them.  The priests at the Temple in Jerusalem would have had no more use for this Samaritan as a healed leper than they had before.  He was just as much an outcast as he was before he got rid of the leprosy.  He could no more be restored to the life of the community now than before.

And so this one leper, the Samaritan, does what people who could not be accepted anywhere else typically did in those days, and typically do still.  He returned to Jesus.  The place for the outcast, the marginalized, the oppressed, the misfit, the foreigner is in Jesus.  Polite society—the priests and the Pharisees and the decent folks in town—has nothing to do with these people.  Jesus, however, did.  And if we seek Jesus, we will, too.

Peace,
+Stacy

Just Another Rich Man

OK, this one is troubling.  It’s the story of a rich man and Lazarus, the poor man just outside the rich man’s gate.  (Luke 16:19-31)

The rich man “was dressed in purple and fine linen and . . . feasted sumptuously every day.”  On the other hand, there was Lazarus, “covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table.”  It is quite the contrast.

Lazarus died.  The rich man also died and was buried.  Only in his torment in Hades does the rich man realize the chasm between him and God.  He asks Abraham to have Lazarus bring him water.  Abraham refuses.  “Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things.”  Then he asked Abraham to send Lazarus to warn his brothers so that they would not meet a similar fate.  Again, Abraham refuses.  “They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.” 

The rich man’s torment in Hades is not what is meant to catch our attention or even scare us.  What ought to scare us is the detail in the parable that the poor man has a name, Lazarus, and the rich man does not.  Something about the rich man’s life leaves him nameless.

It is not, I think, that the rich man was bad.  We certainly have no reason from the parable to think so.  It is not, I think, that the rich man had great wealth.  I see no reason to think from the parable that the rich man is punished for his wealth.  It is not, I think, that the rich man’s gain was ill gotten.  Again, the parable gives us no reason to think so.

The point is that names are superfluous unless we are in relationship with one another.  I do not need to know the name of someone with whom I have no contact.  I do not need to know the name of someone who does not affect my life.  I do need to know the name of those I love.  And without love, I myself might as well have no name at all.

It seems to me that the rich man’s failure is that he bypassed the opportunity to love Lazarus because there can be no love without sharing.  His failure to share the scraps from his sumptuous table is startling given the picture of the man just outside his gate, covered with sores, starving, and fighting off the dogs.  Sharing is what gives us a name.  It is what makes us who we are.  Otherwise, we’re just another rich man unknown to anyone who cares.

Peace,
+Stacy

I’m Too Old

Charlie Skinner is a character on a TV series called “Newsroom.”  He is played by Sam Waterston, one of my favorite actors.  Skinner is a bit crusty and rather heavy-drinking.  But he also has vision and a heart for adventure, and he knows when he’s getting sabotaged.  He is willing to take risks to pursue that vision, even in the face of resistance, and that’s what I admire most about him.

It is in the face of such resistance that he delivers a line to which I have already referred back many times.  “I’m too old to be governed by fear of dumb people.”

It’s a little bit shocking at first.  One should be careful about dismissing people who see things differently as dumb, of course.

Still, I wonder if Jesus wouldn’t have liked Charlie Skinner.  He himself once told a parable about a rich man and his property manager (Lk. 16:1-8).  It’s a little bit shocking, too.

The rich man was displeased that the manager was squandering his property, and so he called for an accounting.  The manager, realizing he was about to be discovered, quickly called in his employer’s debtors and used his authority while he still had it to reduce their debts to the rich man so that they would owe the manager a favor after he had been dismissed.

The rich man found out about it.  You would think he would have been furious.  Instead, he commended the manager’s ingenuity.  “And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.”  (v. 8)

It turns out smart really is the new rich.  It was the old rich, too.

The church is ambivalent about smart, I think.  Sometimes we find smart people too “in their heads” and not enough “in their hearts.”  The church has a significant anti-intellectual streak from time to time.  Jesus also said, after all, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants.”  (Mt. 11:25)  There are times when smart gets very much in the way of seeing as Jesus might. 

Still, I think Jesus may have had an appreciation for smart people, at least that they had their usefulness.  Maybe he didn’t want them to get too big for their britches, but a little smart in the service of the reign of God isn’t such a bad thing either, because the reign of God is something there is always going to be resisted by “the children of this age.”  And not just by dumb people.   

But here’s where Charlie Skinner certainly has it right.  Life is way too short to be governed by fear of just about anything.  Smart sometimes helps us get beyond it.  In fact, the more fearful we get, smart turns out to be just about the only way out.

Peace,

Three Parables

There is a series of three parables in the fifteenth chapter of Luke.  They come together because they are meant to be read together.  Most unfortunately, our lectionary separates the third from the first two.  The first two are the reading for this week (Lk. 15:1-10).

The first two involve a shepherd who leaves 99 sheep behind to go in search of one that is lost and a woman who searches diligently for one of ten silver coins that has been lost and then throws a party to celebrate.  In both cases, Jesus asks a question:  Who would not do likewise?

The correct answer is no one.  I know we like to assume it is everyone, but I don’t think anyone who actually heard Jesus tell these stories would have made that mistake.

A shepherd with 100 sheep leaves 99 to go in search of one.  It’s a sweet picture, but it would be insane.  No one in their right mind would put 99 sheep at risk, leaving all of them at the mercy of the wolves, to go in search of one.  For one thing, it makes no economic sense at all, and sheep in Jesus’ world were not pets; they were commodities.  But even if you want to project compassion onto the shepherd’s motives, it is not compassionate to put one sheep in harm’s way, to say nothing of 99, in order to rescue another.

And the woman with the coin is certainly just a matter of economics.  She loses one coin and searches diligently for it.  Perhaps anyone would do that.  It makes perfect sense.   But what does not make sense is to throw a big party to celebrate finding the coin when the party probably cost more than the coin that was lost.  The woman would have been better off financially to just leave the coin lost. 

And that’s where the third parable comes in, the one that is saved for the next week’s readings.  We know it as the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

Now a son or daughter, everyone would indeed agree, is of much more value than a sheep or a coin.  And the lost son in the story clearly did break his father’s heart.  But unlike the shepherd or the woman, the father does not go looking for him.  That, I suspect, was as difficult for Jesus’ hearers to understand as it would have been for them to fathom the shepherd leaving the flock or the woman’s response to finding the coin.  At least it is difficult for me to understand.  If Jesus had pointed out that the father did not go after the boy and again asked those around him who would not do likewise, I suspect they once again would have exclaimed, “No one.” 

Nevertheless, I think Jesus knew what he was talking about.  At least when it comes to lost sons or daughters, they rarely come home by pursuing them.  Pursuing them, in fact, quite often has the opposite effect.  Keeping a distance, and maybe even increasing it, works better.

It’s much harder to do.  But, God knows, it’s probably the only way.  One can only hope it works as to us.

Peace,
+Stacy