Giving A Good Accounting: A Sermon for the 11th Sunday After Pentecost

I am preaching this Sunday at the Parish of North Essa while the rector there takes some well deserved vacation. This two-point parish in the Diocese of Toronto is a gem of rural ministry and I am looking forward to being with their people again.

 

Texts this Sunday, Proper 13C, 11th Sunday After Pentecost:  Hosea 11:1-11 or Ecclesiastes 1:2,12-14; 2:18-23; Psalm 49:1-12; Colossians 3:1-11; Luke 12: 13-21

 

A story from Saturday’s New York Times made helped me understand today’s Gospel reading from Luke in terms of how God expects a good accounting of our lives, and what that good accounting might look like.

In 1994, doormen working at a posh apartment building on Manhattan’s East Side befriended an elderly man.   They first noticed him because as he walked he would often bend down and pick up scraps of trash, doing his bit to keep the neighbourhood tidy.  His first words to the doormen were written on a scrap of paper:  “Hi, my name is Bernhardt but call me Ben.  I can’t take, but I can hear.”  Over years of friendship, Ben would bring the doormen coffee and Spanish newspapers, and teach them, via his written notes, how to improve their English.  Like others on the block, the doormen learned that Ben lived on social security in a small one-room apartment that cost ten dollars a day, and had almost no possessions.  Nevertheless he was unfailingly happy, loved talking to people and would stop to pet their dogs.  In return people showered him with shoes and clothes, and even tickets to the opera, which he loved.

 

Ben’s doormen friends would arrange Ben’s appointments for his many medical issues, and when he died of prostate cancer earlier this month, they raised the money for his funeral.  Because Ben had served in the military during the Korean War, they arranged for a military honour guard to be at his funeral.  One of his doormen friends, Mr.Jorge Grisales, kept the US flag presented at the funeral and plans to frame it and display it in his house.   Mr. Griasales told the New York Times that his friend “always smiled.  He never complained.  He was just wonderful. “  His colleague, Mr. Arias, said that Ben “had plenty of reasons to be unhappy.  But I never saw him unhappy.”

 

One could see Ben’s story as the polar opposite of the story of the wealthy man in today’s gospel from Luke.    While Ben had no wealth, he was rich in spirit and rich in his connections with other people.   His kindness, his interest in others, and the generosity he inspired are all important values in Luke’s gospel, as we have heard if we have been following the lectionary these last few weeks.  From the parable of the Good Samaritan to the story of Martha and Mary welcoming Jesus and his disciples (possibly a great number) into their house, this part of Luke’s gospel stresses hospitality, the generosity, love, and attention fo those around us that are demanded of those who wish to love and follow God.

 

By contrast, the prosperous farmer in Luke’s gospel may have abundant crops, but he seems impoverished in human relationships.   As Jesus tells the parable, we hear nothing of the man’s connections with others.  When he thinks about how he will cope with all his harvest, he doesn’t take counsel of family or friends.  All we hear is that he “thought to himself”.   His conversation with himself — “And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry” (Lk 11:19) also has a solitary quality to it.   There is no of any others that he wishes to share his wealth with, which is not surprising, considering that if he shared his abundant crops with others, he would not have the problem of needing to build bigger barns.

 

Of course, it doesn’t work out sa the rich man planned, because he dies suddenly in the night.  Jesus finishes with the ironic comment, “And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ (Lk 11:20).  That comment reminds me of the end of Dickens’ Christmas Carol, and the scene which horrifies Scrooge so much, of his possessions being haggled over by others.   Jesus’ final comments may be addressed to the man in the crowd who asks him to intervene in a dispute over an inheritance.   Perhaps Jesus is saying to the man, do you not realize that just as you want your share of someone’s estate, so one day, perhaps soon, after your death others will want what you have?

 

I was thinking of this last week, when I helped a friend take home a piece of furniture she had bought at an estate auction.    As I walked through the warehouse and saw all of the small things of someone’s life being carted off by others - tables, spoons, plates - I found it impossible not to think of my own things one day being divided among strangers.   I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with estate sales, indeed, I would like my things to be enjoyed by others when I am gone, but there is a certain healthy awareness of our mortality that comes from attending an estate sale.  The knowledge that we can’t take our things with us should be healthy reminder that God judges us by what we do in life, rather than what we leave behind at our death.

 

As Christians, we believe that however long our lives may be, and however much we are blessed in life, we should live with the knowledge that on some day we will have to give an accounting to God for how we have lived.   Today’s gospel makes that point indirectly.  Jesus states this idea much more clearly in the Parable of the Talents, where three servants are judged by a king for how they have used the money he has entrusted to them (Matthew 25:14-30; see also Luke 19:12-28).   Later in Luke 12, Jesus makes the point another way, when he speaks of servants who must be ready at any time for their Master’s return (Lk 12: 35-39).  In all of these passages, Jesus reminds us that an accounting may be asked of us at any time, and warns us to be spiritually ready for that day.

 

At the beginning of July I learned of the death of a dear friend, whom I had met in the Army.  My friend had retired five years ago, returned to his home time, and was building a successful second career.  He had a lovely and loving family, and at age 49, should have had many happy years ahead of him, but on a Saturday morning he died suddenly on a golf course.  My friend’s funeral was amazing and showed a life that was truly, as Jesus said, “rich towards God”.   His wife and children showed the resilience of a marriage and family built on love and strength.  Army friends, all senior officers in middle age, carried his casket.   Family and friends spoke of a man man who gave freely to others as a father, a friend, a soldier and a colleague.   While everyone who filled that large church was shocked and saddened by this untimely death, we all knew that this was a life lived well, a life lived for God and for others, and we all knew that we were blessed by that life in so many ways.

 

It’s natural to want a long and healthy life, one that we can live to the full measure.   However, we also know that we are mortal.  Indeed, the church reminds us of that each year, on Ash Wednesday, when we are told to remember that we are to dust, and to dust we shall return.  Any congregation that worships beside a cemetery, like Christ Church St Jude’s where we were last week, knows this.  Our lives come from God, and at some point, perhaps sooner, perhaps later, we will be accountable to God for them.   My Army friend was very different from Ben, the man in my opening story.  Some would say that my friend could count more blessings, in that he had a comfortable life, a nice house, a family, a rewarding career.  Sometimes it is easy to mistake these things are goods in and of themselves, and to believe that blessings are things we should hold tightly, for feat that we lose them.  In fact, both men, my friend and Ben in New York City,  both lived good lives with good priorities.  For these two men, if the words of their friends and loved ones are any indication, and I believe that they are, then they gave a good accounting to God.  May the same be said of us at our passing.  Amen.

War and Memory: The Example of Fromelles

An excellent piece on the War on the Rocks blog this week offers some interesting comments on the social and cultural rationales for war memorials.


Fought on 19 July, 1916, Fromelles was the first major action by Australian troops on the Western Front.   What was intended to be an attack in support of the British Somme offensive turned out to be a costly and pointless disaster.   Over 5,500 Australian soldiers were killed, wounded or captured in one day, the bloodiest in Australian history.

Australian Army memorial service at Fromelles.

As Joan Beaumont notes in her article, it wasn't until the 1990s that Fromelles became well known to Australians, and significant and expensive efforts to identify the dead began, including a dedicated Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery (the first in 50 years) and DNA tests on exhumed remains to identify living descendants in Australia.

Here is a passage from Beaumont's article that I found highly interesting.

No one questioned why many millions of dollars was spent on this exercise. No one, at least publicly, debated the precedent of using DNA to identify the missing. Nor did any one query whether “closure” was needed for relatives who had never known the missing of Fromelles, nor truly experienced grief.

The missing of Fromelles, it seems, spoke to phenomena that have fueled the growth of war memory globally in recent decades: the explosion of genealogy and the desire to locate family stories in bigger, more universal narratives of the past. The new rituals of Fromelles also testified to the continuing salience of the implied contract between citizen and state that underpins a voluntary system of enlistment for military service. In a liberal democracy, where the rights of the individual are a core value, those who choose or are required to die in the defense of the state are considered entitled to be honored individually. This was the ideal that informed the work of the Imperial War Graves Commission in the years after World War I, one of the first mass conflicts in which rank-and-file soldiers were granted their own grave and headstone carrying their name, age, and date of death.

It is a message that still resonates in a society that, for all its individualism and intolerance for the death of the young, requires some individuals at least to be willing to die for the collective good in defense of the nation. Be that service in Afghanistan, Iraq, or United Nations humanitarian interventions, these men and women must be assured that their deaths will be honored, as were those of the men who served before them. Hence, press accounts of the reburials at Fromelles invoked the high diction of war (devotion and honor) and spoke to the need for “a proper send-off” and “a fitting farewell at last” for the “fallen sons” who “can finally be laid to rest with honour.”

What I find striking here is the absence of reflection on religion and spirituality in this analysis.  While the Christian cross continues to be used on the graves and monuments, a holdover from the religiosity that influenced the establishment of War Cemeteries and monuments after the Great War,

the emphasis now, as Beaumont sees it, is on personal meaning (genealogy) and the social contract between the liberal state and its present and future soldier volunteers which offers the consolation of a fitting memorial to any potential sacrifice that may be asked of them.  

Troops of the Australian 53rd Battalion wait for the order to attack at Fromelles.  Only three of the men shown here survived the battle

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Having matured beyond the ethos of God, King and Country that motivated the volunteers of 1914-1918,  the increasingly secular, independent countries of the former British Empire today must find their own rationales for commemorating the past.   For Australians, like Canadians, the fallen of that war may embody the price that our nations had to pay to win their independence from the paternalism of the imperial era.

I recently had a conversation with a retired Canadian military chaplain, a Newfoundlander, about Beaumont-Hamel, a Somme battlefield where the Royal Newfoundland Regiment, part of the British Army, was essentially destroyed in an hour.  Beaumont-Hamel was essentially the Newfoundland equivalent of |Fromelles, on a smaller scale.   As elsewhere on Day One of the Somme, the Newfoundlanders were ordered into interlocking zones of machine gun according to a plan that, in hindsight, was criminally flawed.  According to my Newfoundlander friend, Beaumont-Hamel exposed the colonial nature of the war, in which British generals and politicians were willing to sacrifice colonial troops just as readily as their own.  It became harder for Newfoundlanders and others to be willing junior partners in the imperial project after the First World War, and the Second World War finalized the dissolution of imperial ties.

This July Canadian soldiers visited Beaumont-Hamel and other parts of the Somme battlefields for ceremonies marking the hundredth anniversary.   For these young soldiers, those resting in the war cemeteries of Europe are honoured national ancestors, and in some cases, as with another chaplain friend of mine, an actual great uncle who never came home to Newfoundland.   For the officers, one hopes that these cemeteries are salutary lessons of how great a responsibility they have to learn their craft and learn it well, for in war mistakes are paid for in lives.  For all of us these places should be, as Beaumont notes, reminders of the social contracts we make with volunteer militaries, and of the care we should take in deliberation before we call on them to make more sacrifices.

MP+





The God of Justice and Love

Tenth Sunday After Pentecost

Lections:  Hosea 1:2-10 or Genesis 18:20-23; Psalm 85; Colossians 2:6-19; Luke 11:1-13

This Sunday (24 July) I was filling in for the rector of the Anglican Parish of North Essa in the Diocese of Toronto.   Essa is a region of farm country set in rolling hills, between the city of Barrie to the east and Canadian Forces Base Borden to the west.  The two churches of the parish are little gems of rural ministry, filled with warm and welcoming folk.  I had a great time.  I'm not sire what they thought of me.   For some reason, I felt called to preach on Genesis 18, where Abraham pleads with God not to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah for the sake of the few righteous who may live there.  A wiser preacher might have avoided the text altogether, but I suppose I felt the need to say a good word on behalf of the Old Testament / Hebrew Scriptures, a voice that isn't always heard in the church these days.   MP+

Far be it from you to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” (Genesis 18:25)

 

 

This Sunday our Old Testament reading and our Gospel both tell us something about the God we worship.   Our first reading from Genesis 18, which precedes the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, shows us what we might call the God of Justice.  To use a theological word, God is righteous, he is opposed to wrongdoing (sin) and he wants us to be opposed to it as well.   However, because we often find this side of God to be intimidating, we have a tendency to avoid the Old Testament, because we don’t believe that the God of Justice can also be the God of Love.  Some Anglican churches even cut the Old Testament from their Sunday readings of scripture.   It’s not uncommon to find Christians who say that they want nothing to do with the Old Testament God who seems like a stern and merciless judge who would execute whole cities and peoples.  The New Testament God, represented in the love of Jesus, is far more acceptable to many Christians.   The problem is that both our readings this morning, Genesis 18 and Luke 11, show is the same God, a good and loving God who is engaged with the world, who loves us despite our sin, and who wants nothing more than to show mercy.

 

 I’ll get to that in a moment, but first let me ask you to take part in a little experiment to find out what we think about justice and mercy.

 

Let’s say that you’re driving along a busy highway, say the 400 on Friday afternoon, wit everyone headed to the cottage, and you see car recklessly driving at twice the speed limit, changing from lane to lane without signalling, and putting others at risk.   How would you feel?  Would you feel irritated or even angry?  Why do you think you would feel angry?

 

So, let’s go on and imagine that a few minutes later as you keep driving, you see that same car pulled over by the police.   How would you feel now? Would you feel satisfied, or even pleased?    Why do you think you would feel satisfied?

 

Now, let’s say a week later you read in the paper that the judge lets this driver off with a warning.  He could have had been stripped of his driver’s license and lost his car, but the driver says he’s sorry and the judge says fine, don’t do it again.   Now how do you think you would feel?

 

According to a Harvard psychologist named Joshua Greene, morality is something that helps humans to cooperate with one another and thus to live together.  When we see someone behave in a way that is selfish, whether it’s cutting into a line or driving recklessly on the 400, we naturally want that person to be punished, because selfish behaviour makes it hard for humans to cooperate and live together.   Our society depends on people agreeing to wait their turn in line, or driving sensibly.

 

I think the same thing happens sometimes with religion.  We have a code of behaviour that that comes from the bible and is based on things like the ten commandments.   That code of behaviour allows us to tell righteous and sinful behaviour apart, and helps us to live as God wants us to live.  The only danger is that, like the good drivers on the 400, we can have an instinctive, gut-level desire to see the sinful punished.

 

I’ve been thinking about this since I saw some photos that were taken in Cleveland last week during the Republican Convention.   As you may, protestors of all stripes and convictions came to Cleveland to demonstrate, including Christians. 

 

 

In one of the photos I saw, a man is holding a sign warning America that God hates sinners, including adulterers, thieves, drunkards, and sodomites, to repent before they face “Hell Fire”.   Next to him another man holds a sign that says “Stop Being a Sinner and Obey Jesus”. 

 

Signs like these are a gift to atheists because they fuel the perception that God is hateful and Christians are intolerant, and these signs reflect a particular error that some Christians fall into.   I think there is a special temptation in religion for faithful people to identify themselves with the justice and righteousness of God, and who call on God to punish the sinful.  I am guessing that these protestors want the sinful to repent, or else I don’t think that they would carry those signs.  However, because these Christians focus on a God who hates sin, they make God himself out to be hateful and horrible.  This is an error because it is makes it obscures the love of God that we see clearly in Jesus, thus making it harder to preach the gospel, and exposes the believer to the toxic and corrupting power of hate itself.

 

In Genesis 18 it is true that we see a God who hates and punishes sin, but we need to put that in context.   By this time in Genesis, God has a special relationship with Abraham, whom God has rewarded because of his goodness and faithfulness.   God has promised to turn Abraham’s descendants into a great nation, Israel, which seems unlikely given that Abraham and his wife Sarah are elderly and haven’t produced many descendants.  Just before our passage in Genesis, three mysterious visitors, perhaps angels, visit Abraham and promise that Sarah will give birth, and she laughs in disbelief, God replies, Is anything too wonderful for the Lord? (Gen 18:14).  So God as we see him here is a God who loves the faithful and wants to bless them.  

 

The problem is that the people of the nearby cities of Sodom and Gomorrah don’t love God and don’t love good.   As the three visitors leave, it’s as if God takes Abraham into his confidence.   To read a few verses back before today’s lection, 16 Then the men set out from there, and they looked towards Sodom; and Abraham went with them to set them on their way. ¹⁷The Lord said, ‘Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, ¹⁸seeing that Abraham shall become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? ¹⁹No, for I have chosen him, that he may charge his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice; so that the Lord may bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.’

 

So God explains that he is going to punish Sodom, and a conversation ensures in which Abraham appeals to God’s sense of mercy?   Will you destroy the whole city if there are fifty good people living there?  What about forty five?  What about twenty, or ten?   In this conversation it’s as if we see God struggling between his desires for justice and mercy.   It is a conversation similar to the one in Exodus, when Moses pleads with God not to destroy the people of Israel because they have turned away from him to worship the golden calf (Ex 32:11-14).   The difference is that whereas in Exodus God agrees to spare Israel, in Genesis he only finds one righteous man, Lot and his family, and so Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed.

 

It’s important to note here that we don’t know what exactly the sins of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah are.  Based on one verse (Gen 19:5b), there is a tradition in Christianity of assuming that the sin was homosexuality, and so we have a very ugly English word, sodomite, which is fortunately falling out of use.   As our General Synod this year reminds us, Anglicans are slowly moving away from the idea that homosexuality is a sin, and in fact, the bible seems to say that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was that its people lacked hospitality.  Whereas Abraham in Genesis 18 receives God’s messengers as honoured guests, the people of Sodom try to attack and harm them.   In Matthew (10:5-15), when Jesus sends out his disciples and tells them to depend on the hospitality of strangers, he warns that it will be worse for those who turn the disciples away than it was for Sodom and Gomorrah.  So if there is any sin that these two cities stand for, it is a hatred and denial of God and what he stands for, which is why God punishes them. 

 

Now it may well be terrifying to think that we worship a God who would obliterate whole cities, however wicked they may be, just as it is uncomfortable to think about Noah’s flood.   However, it is worth saying that God never does this again.   Luke tells us of a time when the disciples are turned away from a village, and they ask Jesus to call down fire.  We are told that Jesus rebuked the disciples, because he was heading to another place, Jerusalem, where the people would call for his death, and where, from the cross, he would plead with his Father to forgive them, for they did not know what they were doing.   Here we see the God of Justice but also the God of Love.   Unlike Abraham, Jesus does not ask his Father to spare Jerusalem for the sake of fifty righteous men, or even five.  He just says, Father, forgive them.  Forgive them all.   So God forgives, and he does more than that.  Through the death and resurrection of Jesus, God opens the door so that all may be saved.

 

In today’s gospel, Jesus teaches his followers to pray, not only for themselves, but for all the world.  He teaches us to pray to God that “thy kingdom come”.   When we pray “thy kingdom come”, we pray that God’s justice will come to fix all the things that are wrong because of human sin. When we pray “thy kingdom come” we pray, like Abraham, for God to spare the world.   We pray that God will set right the world where inhospitality persists, where the poor go hungry and the rich grow wealthier.  We pray for a world where rich countries turn away the refugees.  We pray for a world where cities are still burned and destroyed, except that God does not destroy them, we do.   Before we are outraged at a God who could destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, we need to ask ourselves, did God destroy Coventry, or Dresden, or Hiroshima?   When we watch the news and see the destroyed cities of Syria, the refugees fleeing the wars of the Middle East, and the drowned children washing up on the beaches of Europe, we need to ask ourselves, did God do this, or did we do this?  If we are honest, we will say that we humans did these things, as we have always done them.    If we are honest, we will admit that the God of Justice has the right to hold us accountable for these things, and even to punish us for them.

 

Fortunately for us, the God of Justice is also the God of Love.  Our job as church, as it has always been, is the same as Abraham’s - to pray on behalf of the world, to ask God in our prayers to spare us and save us from our sins and from ourselves.    When we pray the Lord’s prayer, and we pray to God these simple words, “thy kingdom come”, trusting, like Abraham, in God’s promises to save us and the world from our sins instead of treating us as we might deserve.

 

As I said at the beginning, it is natural that we should want to see justice upheld and people punished.   It’s natural to feel glad when we see that speeding car pulled over.    However, I too have been pulled over.  I have also received speeding tickets.  I’m not always a good driver and I can’t afford to be too smug.   The gift of our faith, I think, is that while we are grateful for the justice of God and while we long for the coming of God’s kingdom, we also know that we are dependent on the mercy of God, for without the love and mercy of Christ, which of us could stand before the throne of judgement?   Our worship teaches us this each Sunday, when we confess our sins together before we approach God’s table, where we don’t deserve to be, and yet where we are invited anyway.   So let us be thankful for a God who hears our prayer, who loves us despite our sins.  And when we pray, whether on our own or during the Prayers of the People, to pray, like Abraham, for God’s justice and mercy for the world that needs them so badly.