9 September 2012

“Yes, it’s another sermon about the poor … ”
Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23 / James 2:1-17 /
Mark 7:24-37
23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time series B
9 September 2012


A couple of days ago, someone asked me if I had chosen last Sunday’s psalm with the day’s current events in mind … in particular, the election cycle returned again, and the political conventions.
The words of the psalm … Psalm 15, which was last Sunday’s gathering word, go like this:

LORD, who may dwell in your tabernacle? Who may abide upon your holy hill?
Those who lead a blameless life and do what is right, who speak the truth from their heart;
they do not slander with the tongue, they do no evil to their friends; they do not cast discredit upon a neighbor.

Well, along with Nativity’s Worship and Music leaders – though we do at times choose texts based on a theme (“Strange Stories from the Bible,” for example, which I led several years ago) or a reading through of an entire book of the Bible (as we did last fall in exploring the book of Judges) ... most of the time we at Nativity, as well as thousands of other Christian congregations around the country, indeed, hundreds of thousands around the world, we use the Revised Common Lectionary ... a three year rotating cycle of Scripture readings which have been the texts for worship for hundreds of years ... many of them chosen by church leaders nearly a thousand years ago. And this was the case last Sunday with those words of Psalm 15.
As it is the case with this week’s texts. And once again, it sounds like a commentary on current events ... today, the readings are all about the poor … instruction, comment on how the poor should be treated, and in particular how the wealthy should act toward the poor.
Yes, it’s another Sunday, another set of texts, another sermon about the poor.
Now, listen … there’s no cabal at work here, no “they” with a particular political agenda to push, no well-honed axe to grind even sharper in cutting remarks made during election season. Once again, these texts are the historic ones chosen well in the past … before there were Democrats and Republicans, before there was an Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
Nor is it “my thing” at work here either. I would be a poor pastor if I stood up here and proclaimed my agenda or my politics. This isn’t MY church. We are, rather, a people gathered from many places and widely diverse political understandings … gathered as one under the cross, people who believe all have sinned and fall short of God’s glory, a people walking wet in our baptism, flowing streams of living water, who confess our sins and receive Christ’s word of forgiveness, who gather at Christ’s invitation and eat and drink at his table … and then are sent out into the world, to proclaim not ourselves, but Christ – crucified and risen.
And what that means for our worship, is that we don’t “twist Scripture like a waxen nose” to use Martin Luther’s wonderful phrase … we don’t piecemeal pick and choose Scripture, massage it so that it fits a narrow political agenda … but rather, we receive it whole as it comes to us … we read, discuss, meditate, pray on and inwardly digest it … taking it into our entire lives … private, and public … living out this living word, through our lives, into the world.
So the simple truth today, for us, is this: The Scriptures are literally dripping with texts concerning the poor; namely, God’s particular care for the poor, as well as God’s admonitions to those who are not poor, especially those who have much; encouragement, charges, to treat the poor with respect, care and honor … and, that those who have much are called by our God to share with those who have little … this is the proper use of wealth.
It’s God’s Word for us … God’s agenda … literally, God’s politics. But again, be careful ... this is not a word about party platforms and government programs, but rather, if you take the original meaning of that word, politics ... it simply means, “how we are called to live together as people, created by God, with each other, in the world.”
We have three of those texts before us today.

First, from the Book of Proverbs.
Proverbs, like other books of the Hebrew Scriptures, carries forth an ethic of care for the poor, special care for them, because they don’t have the wealth or the power of the world behind them. Proverbs was likely written “in the middle times” of the Hebrew Scriptures … meaning, after the Torah books … Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy … and their words laying down God’s Torah, a word we translate as “law” but which means so much more, a way of living as people on earth called and gathered by God as God’s very own, “blessed to be a blessing to the world.” These Torah books are full of their own words about how the poor and powerless … in particular, the widow, the orphan, the foreigner, the stranger … how they are to be treated, how they are to be given special preference by God’s people as they come into their inheritance in the Promised Land.
And Proverbs was written before the prophetic books of the Hebrew Scriptures … those books which carry a more threatening tone, words sent by God through the prophets, words of condemnation because Israel had not heeded the words of Torah; in particular, they had treated their poorer brothers and sisters with disrespect and dishonor; in the words of Isaiah, “grinding their faces” into the dirt.
And so Proverbs … here … has a particular word which is Wisdom … advice, admonition, guidance, God’s truth for God’s people … and … no surprise … it is a Word full of call for justice for the poor.

The rich and the poor have this in common: the Lord is the maker of them all.
Those who are generous are blessed, for they share their bread with the poor.
Do not rob the poor because they are poor, or crush the afflicted at the gate; for the Lord pleads their cause and despoils of life those who despoil them.

Those whose voices are weak, God says, I will be their voice, I will be their strength. That is a word which cannot be clearer … treat the poor poorly at your own risk, is what God is saying here.
How you treat the poor, God says, is really how you treat me.

Our reading from James was written much later, around 100 AD, most likely for a group of Christ-followers who were quite familiar with the Hebrews laws about showing care and mercy for the poor. Its words, though, are timeless, for all generations, most certainly our own:

For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, “Have a seat here, please,” while to the one who is poor you say, “Stand there,” or, “Sit at my feet,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves ... Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that God has promised to them? But you have dishonored the poor.
If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

Yes, it’s true ... early in his reforming career Martin Luther did not like the book of James ... calling it “a right straw epistle” ... because he believed it to proclaim “works-righteousness” – that we are made right, saved before God by what we do, not by what God does for us.
But Luther later acknowledged that he was wrong about this Epistle, this letter of Scripture. For the point of the book of James isn’t that we are saved by our works, but rather, that faith ALWAYS must make itself shown, alive, vital, in service ... ESPECIALLY SERVICE TO AND FOR THE POOR.
It was on that point ... service to the poor ... Luther most certainly agreed with the Epistle of James ... setting up one of the first social welfare systems in Europe (run by a church-state partnership, a community chest for the poor in the city of Leisnig, Germany in the 1520s). And Lutherans have always been about serving the poor, through hospitals and schools and social service organizations. It’s what we have done, and do, and still do, in Jesus’ name. Not to be better Christians. But to Live Christian.

To Live Christian. That’s the Word behind the word of the Gospel reading.
Here, the text doesn’t come right out and say that the Syrophoenician woman and the deaf man in Sidon were poor ... but I think it’s quite fair to say they were both low on the day’s economic scale.
The woman – had she been someone of means – she would not have been roaming the streets trying to find someone to cure her daughter. She would have sent her servants to do this work for her.
And Jesus, in his encounter with this woman, sounds like he’s being one of those people James is speaking of ... one who makes distinctions between people ... people of means, and people who are poor.
After all, he calls this woman a dog, doesn’t he?
Actually, in our English we miss the meaning of the exchange between this woman and Jesus. We need to remember that this woman is a Gentile, a non-Jew – and Jesus, a rabbi, is not supposed to be in close contact with Gentiles ... especially, a Gentile wife out in public without her husband.
But Jesus’ words here in the original language of the text reflect a playful exchange between the two; Jesus, showing that he is not going to be one who treats people with distinction and separation ... no, he is going to show God’s impartial love to ALL ... Jew, and Gentile ... Israelite, and foreigner ... and actually, to drive home that point given modern politics, if you really want to know the modern translation of “Syrophoenician” ... you’d say “Jesus was speaking with, and healing the daughter, of a Lebanese woman.”
The same applies with the deaf man in the second part of the reading. Certainly his deafness ... and his speech impediment ... would have meant he was unable to make much of a living for himself, because he would not have been able to communicate. Plus the burden of deafness ... and the thinking of those times ... seeing any kind of physical imperfection as a mark of God’s disfavor upon you ... all this would have added up to a man at the bottom of the social strata of his day.
Yet, again, note what Jesus does. He not only takes this deaf man aside ... he touches him, in his ears and on his tongue ... and now ... remember last week’s Gospel text, the Pharisees and Scribes’ criticism of Jesus because his disciples didn’t wash their hands according to “the tradition of the elders” ... making them “unclean,” “dirty,” ... now here, this one who would surely be considered “unclean” and “dirty” by those same Pharisees and Scribes, he is the one Jesus touches most intimately... Jesus, touching him, to heal and make him whole.
It is another example building on last week’s Gospel text, that those whom the world calls “dirty,” the poor, the sick, those ‘not from around here,’ those are precisely the ones to whom Jesus goes, to hear, to heal, to make whole.
And that’s the Word for us today. Treat the poor ... widows, orphans, the sick, the sojourner, those on the outside of society ... treat these people with respect, with honor, indeed, bend over backwards for them, especially, you, we who have relatively much ... God calls us to share what we have with those who have less.
And by now you’re probably saying, “Well, that’s sure not much good news for us this morning.”
Well, it depends on who you are, doesn’t it?
It’s plenty of good news if you are one of these people who fit into that category of “the poor.” God is on your side, God is with you, God is calling others to be with and for you in this life, too.
But most of us aren’t poor, are we? We have relatively much. And so to us, this Word from God comes as a different kind of Good News ... charge, and challenge, for this life.
Now, listen ... this is not a word of salvation.
That has already come to us in baptism, in receiving the Word of faith, in forgiveness, in new life ... in the Word and grace-filled flowing streams of living water ... not what we do or have done or will do, but what God does for us in Jesus Christ ... the gift of eternal life, with God, in Jesus, forever.
But there’s more to this life than just the assurance of what will happen to and for us later.
THIS LIFE, THIS WORD FOR US, IT’S ABOUT WHAT WE’RE CALLED TO BE ABOUT, NOW. FOR OTHERS, FOR THEIR SAKE, FOR OUR SAKE, NOW.
There is another crossing between these texts and this life we are living. This past week marked the 15th anniversary of the death of Mother Teresa –she who spent her whole life in ministry to and with the poor ... not seeing them as a group ... “the poor” ... so “they” can easily be categorized, shelved, set aside, ignored ... but rather, as brothers and sisters ... poor people.
Mother Teresa left us many words about her ministry to and for these brothers and sisters. I found one in particular which is a fitting close to these words today ... our call to live as Jesus lived ... to bring Jesus, to be Jesus to the world ... because he has given himself so freely and completely to us, so we are free to give ourselves.

Let us touch the dying, the poor, the lonely and the unwanted according to the graces we have received ... and let us not be ashamed or slow to do the humble work.

Yes. Let us ... send us, Lord. Amen.