Managing Our Money

            There is an ad from Publisher’s Clearing House offering $5000 a week forever.  What they mean is that they will pay you $5000 a week for all of your life and then you can designate another person to receive $5000 a week for all of their life.  That sounds like quite a deal.  It raises for me again the problem of wealth and what it does to human life.  I can hardly imagine what such wealth given to a baby upon my death would mean for them.  Wealth is, of course, neutral.  It can be used in wonderful or terrible ways.  Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have done wonderful things with their money and have made charity a cornerstone of their lives.  Others haven’t reacted this way to money.  The great temptation is to lift up the self as the owner of the wealth and to look down on those who have less.  This is the great problem that confronts our society these days. 

            Someone occasionally raises the question in a wonderful way:  “Wouldn’t it be great if the soup kitchens and the food pantries would be adequately funded and the Defense Department had to have bake sales to fund its work?”  Well, we know that will never happen, but it puts into perspective the problem that we have in this society with our wealth.  We spend it as a people on the things that protect us and leave the poor to mostly fend for themselves. 

            Rosie and I do Meals on Wheels every week.  Recently the “Sequester” has cut funding for this extremely important service and the routes have all been cut back and some of the clients assigned to the county who are only able to deliver meals three days a week.  This means that for two days, excluding weekends, there is nobody to check on the recipients of these meals.  There was one ninety some year old lady on our route who I had to sometimes look for all over her house to be sure she wasn’t lying somewhere immobile.  This, for me, was the main reason that I was coming to her house every day.  This is a terrible state of affairs.  We are only a small program, but this illustrates the great difficulty that we have with our resources as a nation.  Why can’t we take care of the impoverished among us and just let the wealthy fend for themselves?  It seems to me that this is what we are called to do as the people of God. 

            The wonderful words of Psalm 49: 9-11 seem to cry out to me: 

For we see that the wise die also;
like the dull and stupid they perish *
and leave their wealth to those who come after them.

Their graves shall be their homes for ever,
their dwelling places from generation to generation, *
though they call the lands after their own names.

Even though honored, they cannot live forever; *
they are like the beasts that perish.

            I once knew two rich women who were sisters of a member of my parish.  When they died, I did their funerals.  Each of them was buried in a heavy mahogany casket that cost a great deal of money.  Their wealth followed them into the ground.  It was a terrible shame to see this happen.  They had no sense whatsoever that their wealth could do some good for people beyond their own lives.

             In some sense, we all live like this.  Jesus told us to love one another as we are loved.  That is a very simple commandment, but it had a great deal to do with how we manage our money.  It isn’t hard to remember the poor, as long as we understand that we are just like them.  With our help, their poverty can be eased and their lives made much better.  It really doesn’t hurt us at all to do this.  It just takes a little bit more than winning the Publisher’s Clearing House lottery.

Constant Prayer

            Prayers are always on our lips.  We pray before our meals, pray before meetings, offer prayers constantly during our worship.  Our prayers are cries to our God because of our needs, our worries, our guilt.  The prayers that we offer come from our heart and are given to God because of our incredible need not only to have our prayers answered, but to somehow know that God is indeed in charge of this incredibly complex world. 

            My own prayer life fluctuates.  Sometimes I have no problem whatsoever offering prayer not only for my own needs and the needs of my family, but for the many other people who I know who are in crisis or are sick or are at some kind of a moment of decision in their lives.  My prayers for them are that God will touch them with his Love and help them through whatever is messing up their lives.  Other times, because of my own difficulties, my prayer life flags and I wander through my life needing, sometimes desperately wanting somehow an outside force to help me to get through the brambles that hold me back from real joy.  This is when I know that I depend on the prayers of others to get me through. 

            Jesus disciples also had problems with their prayers.  In Luke’s gospel, they ask Jesus to “teach us to pray as John taught his disciples”.  Jesus responds with the elegant formula that we call the Lord’s Prayer that has been a part of our worship tradition from the beginning.  I love this prayer because of its completeness.  It acknowledges God as holy and asks for the coming of the Kingdom, for the providence of our daily food and the forgiveness of our sins with the marvelous caveat that this be based on the way that we forgive each other.  That’s a tough hurdle to get over, but it is certainly a firm part of our belief system.  Jesus then goes on to talk to them about the persistence of prayer with the story of the man who bothers his neighbor over and over again because a friend has come and he has nothing to give him.  Jesus says that the persistent prayer will bear fruit, the man will provide what you need because you are a pain in the neck.  If this is an allusion to the nature of God, it is a wonderful comedy, but it is a useful reminder that the constancy of our prayer is necessary to having the prayer answered.

            Lots of people have stories that speak to this, how their persistent prayer has brought healing, jobs, other good things.  But there are many other people who have also prayed constantly and have not been rewarded with answers.  I don’t have a resolution to this except to again listen to what Jesus told his disciples.  Keep at it.  Prayer is necessary.  It not only asks God for what we need, but it keeps us connected with each other.  Sometimes that is the most wonderful thing that comes out of prayer.  Loving our neighbors as people like ourselves brings our prayers into focus.  We all need each other, including our prayers.  They are the essence of community. 

The Mission of the Church

            We live in a curious time.  Our congress can’t pass simple legislation, neither can our state legislature.  Roads and bridges are decaying, transportation is in decline.   Politics seems to drive everything.  When the Republican Party was defeated in our last election, it seems that they resolved not to allow the Democrats to have any victories at all.  So nothing gets done, not even simple budget proposals that everyone supports.  The farm bill has been trimmed of all of the food stamp sections that have been there for a long time.  The effect of all of this is to hurt the poor to the benefit of the rich.  But what else is new?  We have been doing this kind of thing for a long time.  When the Republican nominee made his speech speaking of the “47 percent,” the people in need, who drain the resources of the country, many people were horrified at the callousness of the comment.  But this has been reflected in the policies that his party has pursued. 

            Care for the poor and the outcast is firmly ingrained in the Gospel.  We are commanded to take care of those who have nothing.  It isn’t our job to judge them and investigate why they are in poverty.  Their poverty speaks for itself.  Our mission is to do what we can to alleviate their suffering.  That isn’t easy.  We are the fortunate ones who have been blessed with many resources.  That puts us in a position to really help those who have very little.  But our focus remains on ourselves.  Even in our religious decisions, we favor the rich over the poor.  Our windows, dedicated to those who have provided them, and the plaques on our walls that celebrate the donors of wealth tell us where our hearts lie.  Our problem is with our outreach budgets that are the first place that we cut when money becomes scarce.  It is more important to fix up our buildings and maintain our worship space and staff than it is to take care of those who are in need. 

            This is true not only in this country, but in most of the world.  The majestic cathedrals of Europe were built by people who needed to work, who found in that work a meaning for their lives.  But in this age, those cathedrals are often falling apart and the money that is contributed to the benefit of the church is going to rebuild and refurnish these massive churches rather than being used to further the mission of the church.  The mission of the church becomes secondary to the buildings and the staffs that show the church to the world.  Our religious discussions center around issues such as sexuality and abortion and whether women may be ordained, and stay away from the most meaningful things that we can talk about: the needs of those whom we meet on our path.

            In his prophecy, Amos the “dresser of Sycamore trees and herder of sheep” tells the people of Israel who are rich, that God will destroy their wealth and that they will find that God’s wrath is impossible to take.  He tells them that the word of God will be impossible to find.  He says that the time is coming when God will send a famine on the land, not a famine of bread or water, but a famine of hearing the word of God.  He tells them that they shall wander from sea to sea looking for it, but that they shall not find it.

            This is a terrible prophecy against people whom Amos accuses of bringing ruin to the poor of the land, buying the poor for silver and selling the needy for a pair of sandals.  His point is to show up the incredible difference between rich and poor in that society.  These are the people who are in charge of the wealth of the land, to whom the poor look for help in their great need.  But the rich are spending it on themselves and dismissing the poor as worthless.

            I don’t think that there is much difference between us and them.  We are still looking out mainly for ourselves.  We have a terrible problem doing really good things for the poor.  It tears us apart when we try.  Our hearts rush to judgment and our purse strings stay closed.  I’m not happy to say this.  

            In the north of England, in Yorkshire is a place called Fountains Abbey.  It was built by Cistercian monks who were trying to bring the Gospel to the people in that area.  The whole place was built by the poor peasants of the area who earned their living by their work.  It is a ruin now, torn apart by the religious wars around the time of Henry VIII.  A mile and a half down the road is Ripon Cathedral, a fading church that is a fair representation of the reality of the Church of England.  When we wandered through Fountains Abbey, I found a remarkable peace that I have a hard time describing.  God is in that place, and was in that place for all of its existence.  In Ripon Cathedral, I saw only the trappings of church; the vestments, the candles, the wall hangings, but not the mission.  It seems to me that both Fountains and Ripon are ruins.  One just doesn’t know it yet.  

            It worries me that our churches are heading in the same direction.  The Gospel is the issue.  How is it preached to this world?  When people look at our churches, what do they see?  Are we caring for ourselves, or for those around us?  If it is mostly for ourselves, I think that one of these days the Word of God will be hard to find and our magnificent buildings will fall down around us.  May God bless us as we look for mission and find significant ways to provide care for those who are in need, and who are loved so dearly by the one who created them.  Our true calling is to do no less.

Compassion and Convenience

           When I was in seminary, I did my fieldwork in a horrible section of Washington, D.C., the upper 14^th street corridor which was burned after the assassination of Martin Luther King.  I was appalled at the misery of the people who lived there.  There was rampant crime, prostitution and drugs.  Many of the people on the street were alcoholics, and they threatened passersby all the time.  My wife’s then cousin was the commander of the police district that patrolled the area.  We had dinner with them one night and he told us in blatantly bigoted language about the job that he was trying to do and what a herd of misfits that he had to control.  I was as appalled by his comments as I was by the area itself. 

            One day when I was driving home, about to turn right on 14^th street and go across the bridge to my apartment home in Alexandria.  I was stopped at a light.  A man banged on my window and cried out to me, “Preacher, give me ten dollars so that I can go into this liquor store and get me something to drink!”  I don’t think I had ever heard a request with less guile.  There wasn’t any doubt at all about what he wanted, or what he would do with whatever I gave him.  I didn’t comply with his request, the light changed and I got on my way back to the relative safety of Alexandria.  I am not proud of that moment.  It was propelled by fear and a great desire to get out of that area. 

            The lesson from Luke is that great parable of the Good Samaritan.  A man is beaten by robbers and left for dead beside the road.  Two men, a priest and a Levite pass by on the other side of the road because their religion doesn’t allow them to become impure by touching a man who is nearly dead.  A Samaritan, a member of a group of people considered to be impure by the Jews, stops and comforts the man, binding up his wounds and taking him on his own animal to an inn where he is lodged for the night.  The Samaritan gives the innkeeper some money and instructs him to do all that he can for him and that he will repay him when he returns.  I have to tell you, when I read that parable and think of what I didn’t do for that alcoholic in D.C., I feel like the priest who passed by on the other side of the road. 

            Jesus offers this parable to a man who has asked him what he needs to do to inherit eternal life.  He asks him “what is written in the law?  What do you see there?” The man answers with the standard formula that Jesus offered:  “Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul and strength, and love your neighbor as a person like yourself.”  Jesus said to him, “that is the right answer. Do that and you will live”.  Then the man, wishing to justify himself, asked Jesus, “and who is my neighbor?”   This is when Jesus offers to him the parable of the Good Samaritan.

            And who is our neighbor?  That is the best question that you can ever ask.  It is about dealing with all of the pain of the world.  The answer, of course, is that your neighbor is the one in pain on your path.  Whoever needs you is your neighbor.  The problem with that is that it is seldom convenient to deal with our neighbor. 

            What this points to is the difference between compassion and convenience.  We are asked to love our neighbor as a person like ourselves.  There isn’t any exclusion here.  This includes everyone.  The point of Jesus’ ministry was to deal with the hurt and pain that he saw all around him.  When he found someone in misery for whatever reason, he took care of them.  I know that there are a hundred stories about his healing and comfort that were left out of the bible because there just wasn’t room for them.  He was always looking out for the people in his path.  What was their need?  How could he help?  That was how Jesus approached every day, every person.  It is also what Jesus was asking that man with the questions about his neighbor to do.  Can you imagine what this world would be like if we simply did what our Lord asked us to do?  It would be infinitely better.  The homeless would find places to live, the naked would be clothed and the hungry would be filled with good things.  We do some of this, but not enough.  We need to be Samaritans in this world.  We need to look for the wounded and the sorrowful and to take care of them.  When we do this, all of Heaven is in great joy.  

            In last week’s Gospel, Jesus sends the seventy out to be the Gospel in all of the places where he was going to go himself.  When the seventy came back and told him that even the demons responded to them, Jesus said not to be in joy because the demons submitted to them; but to rejoice that their names were written in heaven.  That is the only reward that we can expect, and it is enough.

Faith and Belief

            Every once in a while somebody tries to find Noah’s Ark on Mt. Ararat in Turkey.  They never seem to succeed, but they try anyway.  It always makes the news, and somebody is always disappointed when there is failure.   I’m always amazed at the attempt because it again points to the problem that we have about the Bible when we try to prove the things that are in it.  Where was the Tower of Babel?  Can we find the Garden of Eden?  If we were somehow able to do these things, what would it matter?  The problem that we have is that we confuse faith and belief.  We think that belief is about facts, provable facts that can be determined by investigation.  Faith is a different thing; it is something in our hearts that doesn’t require factual proof. 

            Archbishop Ussher decided a couple of hundred years ago that the earth was created in 4004 BC and that all things began with that.  That has been a cornerstone of fundamentalist thought ever since.  That is why there is confusion over why the dinosaur remains seem to be dated so much earlier and that fossils seem to show up of things that predate everything else.  For those who are enamored of 4004 BC as a starting place for earthly life, this kind of thing needs to be explained.  Mostly, explanations don’t work very well, and the fundamentalists are left with a need to find a way to continue to believe these things when the facts seem to say otherwise. 

            Story is the primary ingredient in the Bible.  Jesus taught in parables.  We don’t need to have proof that the Prodigal Son lived at such and such a place, or that the woman who lost her coin had a particular house.  We understand these to be stories that tell truth, not that are truth.  We get terribly confused when we try to create facts to back up biblical stories.  It isn’t really important when, where and how.  What is important is the truth that these stories tell.  The Gospels tell us that Jesus taught always in parables.  That is because stories are the best way to convey real truth, particularly about moral issues. 

            One of the great problems that we have is the nature of our religious belief.  Over the years, the churches have split away from each other, generally because of differences in doctrine.  The Anglicans became the Church of England after Henry VIII left the Roman Catholic church because of his disagreement with them about divorce.  Luther posted his theses on the cathedral door and began the Protestant Reformation.  This, in turn broke into a number of other denominations, and we haven’t stopped.  Religion has been the cause of most of the terrible wars that have been fought.  Certainly the Sunni-Shiite division is fueling the war in Syria and the revolutions in Libya, Egypt and other Middle Eastern sites have had their basis in religion.  When we fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, our opponents were all religiously oriented people who had their own agenda.  Religion has been most often a cause of division, seldom has it been a solution.  

            Jesus taught us to love one another.  He showed us the depth of his own love by laying down his life for all of us.  What he asks us to do is to help one another with our pain; to feed, clothe and shelter those of us who have nothing and to provide for the widow and the orphan in their need.  He did this continually while he was with us and he sent his followers out to continue that work.  Our mission is to keep faith with each other.  That is really all of the religion that we need.

Christianity and Community

           The essence of Christianity is community.  If we don’t have each other, we don’t have much at all.  We need each other to get through the things that drive us crazy or cause us pain.  That isn’t a particularly new thing to say, we all know it.  We have all had times of loneliness when we didn’t know what we would do next.  It is at times like this that having somebody close to us makes a radical difference.  We don’t always know this.  It is hard to reach out when we are lonely.  Sometimes it takes another’s touch to reach us. 

            Rosie and I do meals-on-wheels every week.  One of our clients is a little old lady who is blind and who has a cat.  The cat is probably her only relationship.  She talks about her late husband every so often and we know that she misses him.  She always greets us with great joy, takes the meals that we offer and spends a few moments telling us that she hopes that we have a nice day.  That is always nice to hear, and I know that our touch of her makes her day a bit brighter.  That isn’t a small thing.  

            Meals-on-wheels is currently under threat.  There isn’t enough money because of the “sequester” to take care of all of the people on our route, to pay the tiny salaries of the people who run the program and to do what is necessary to keep the program viable.  That is really tragic.  We do what we do for free, as volunteers.  That is profoundly necessary, not only for the program, but for us.  We do what we do because it needs to be done, and for what it does for our day.  I can’t imagine how the program would survive if they paid people to deliver the meals.

            Jesus taught us to care for each other.  He brought his disciples into community so that they could take care of each other and take care of the people whom they met in their ministry.  There is a section in Luke’s Gospel when Jesus is described as walking along the road and he calls people to follow him. They all want to, but they also have excuses. There are things at that moment that are more important than following Jesus.  They sound like me.  I always seem to have something more important, too.  Jesus says to them, No one who puts his hand to the plow and then looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God.  This sounds harsh, but it is simply the truth.  Jesus was trying to build community, to bring people together.  The Kingdom of God is always immediate.  It is always before us.  It always requires our attention.  When we have our eyes focused elsewhere, we miss what is essential.  That is what Jesus is trying to tell the people who want to follow him.  It is a full time job that takes all of our attention.  That’s why it isn’t easy.  But easy isn’t the issue.  If we want this world to be better and fairer for all of us, we desperately need community, and community demands our constant attention.  God bless us as we struggle with all of this and try to build community in a world that isn’t particularly interested.

Life, Death and God's Love

            There is a strange desire among humans to hear the voice of God speak clearly and with great power.  Television evangelists tell us all the time that God is condemning humanity for one fault or another.  We love abortion, homosexuality, etc, they say, and God visits us constantly with terrible storms, earthquakes or wars to punish us for our terrible sins.  I think if that were really the case, that the world would have been destroyed long, long ago.  We have come through massive, horrible experiences and have continued to live our lives.  I know that God’s love speaks more loudly than the devastation; and the hope that remains after destruction is greater than the incredible damage that we so frequently see around us.

            I know that God is a loving, forgiving God, who accepts humanity as belonging to him, faults and all and has worked constantly to redeem us from the things that plague us.  I don’t want to excuse our faults, but they pale in the light of the goodness that has also been created by human works and care.  Think of the way that we seem to come together to help storm victims and counsel those who have experienced tragedy.  We do that well, and I believe that is a God given virtue of humanity.

            I love Dylan Thomas’ poetry.  He captures the essence of life and doesn’t dismiss death by any measure.  In his elegy to his father, he fairly yells at him to “Go Not Gently into That Good Night”, and he speaks of a burned baby and its mother, also burned and dead in his marvelous poem “Ceremony after a Fire Raid” with great grief and yet with hope.   Thomas has always spoken to me of life and what it means.  His own life was a mess.  He was alcoholic and had titanic fights with his wife Caitlyn, but yet taught us all about the power of life and death.  

            I can hardly grasp what it meant to walk down the burned out streets of London after a Nazi fire raid and to see the burned corpses piled up on one another, or to think of the chaos after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 with the desperate people jumping to their death from awesome heights.  Thomas helps me with this by not dismissing death at all, but including it as a natural part of life.  When I watched the motion picture Titanic I was horrified by the loss of life and the destruction of so much.  When Leonardo Decaprio’s character slipped beneath the waves, we all cried, but when his love, the now ancient Rose years later dropped the incredibly valuable gem Star of the Sea into the ocean in memory of him, we saw hope emerge from the darkness of the water.  I am reminded in Thomas’ poetry of the hope that resides in all of us, even after tragedies. 

            I know that our soldiers come back from battles in Iraq or Afghanistan with unseen trauma that shows up as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and plagues them in their attempts to reconstruct their lives.  Hopefully, we are creating ways to counsel and help these good people so that their lives can be put back together and resumed with some measure of hope.  It is never easy to do any of this.  It requires people who have strong faith and commitment to each other to overcome the problems that arise.  And it also requires a loving God who gives us all the faith and hope to do what is necessary in this life to get us through to the next one.

            Walt Whitman, in his poem Assurances gives us a measure of what life and death means:

                        I do not doubt that the passionately-wept deaths of young men are

                             provided for, and that the deaths of young women and the deaths of

                            little children are provided for,

                        (Did you think Life was so well provided for, and Death the purport

                            of all life is not well provided for?)

                        I do not doubt that wrecks at sea, no matter what the horrors of them,

                             no matter whose wife, child, husband, father, lover, has gone

                            down are provided for, to the minutest points,

                        I do not doubt that whatever can possibly happen anywhere at any

                            time, is provided for in the inherences of things,

                        I do not think Life provides for all and for Time and Space, but I

                            believe Heavenly Death provides for all.