11 August 2013

“Your Father’s good pleasure”
Luke 12:32-40
OT 19C
11 August 2013


Two weeks ago, our Gospel text was Luke’s conveying the words of what we’ve come to know as the Lord’s Prayer … words for Jesus’ disciples and for us, Jesus teaching us how to pray, with the second petition or subject matter very clearly stating “Your kingdom come.”
Last week’s text was about the great unknown of life … when, how will it be for me when I die? … and Jesus’ insistence that placing our bets on having “larger barns” … more material goods than anyone else … isn’t worth much in the Kingdom way of things, if those barns are meant to simply hold more stuff for ourselves.
Now, today, we get a merging and melding of both those stories.
Our text starts innocently enough – but wow! does it pack a punch, if we’re paying attention.
The Kingdom of God … it’s not something we have to seek after … not at all.

Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom.

Right there, in that one brief sentence, is the end of religion as we know it.
It’s pointless for us to go seeking after the Kingdom of God, striving, toiling, doing stuff to try and earn it.
Because it’s God’s good pleasure to give it to us.
That’s right. God wants to give us the Kingdom. Give us the Kingdom. A gift. For us.
Can’t work for it. Can’t pay for it. Can’t do anything for it.
It’s. All. Gift.
So what does that mean for how we use our time … and our stuff … now?
We’re to give it all away.
Well, DUH. After spending nearly three quarters of a year steeped in Luke’s Gospel, we should have gotten this by now. Luke’s Jesus has little good to say about material possessions … wealth … stuff. For Jesus in this Gospel, the best use of material wealth is to help our neighbor … especially our poorer, sicker, down on their luck neighbor.
There is no such thing as “Jesus’ favorite economic system” – capitalism, socialism, communism, that’s how WE humans arrange things here on earth. Jesus’ word is clear here … his “Kingdom economic system” isn’t investment for ourselves, but divestment … and investment in our poor neighbors. “Give alms,” Jesus says. “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
Now, yes, we can and should be historically-critical of texts like this. We need to study what first-century economic conditions were like. And when we do that, we find that New Testament time people believed that wealth was a closed system – unlike today’s American capitalism, through which we believe that anyone can, through hard work and economic opportunity, amass their own fortune, or at least, make for themselves a comfortable living.
For New Testament people, they believed that for anyone to gain wealth, someone had to lose it. Acquisition was always considered stealing, so for the poor to escape poverty, the wealthy had to willingly share their possessions … the wealthy had to become poorer in order for the poor to economically gain … because, as I said, it was a closed system. There was a limited amount of money that people had to spend.
In some ways, today, though, this is still true. In rural America, when a big-box store moves to the edge of town, the little mom and pop stores in downtown usually end up closing. A community only has so much money to spend.
The number of charitable organizations in pursuit of donations has risen dramatically in the past 15 years … there is more competition for the charitably given dollar … and giving to religious organizations has been steadily dropping over the past 15 years.
There is a limited amount of money that most people can spend.
And yet, Jesus still wants us to give it away … to give away our treasure … and treasure is not necessarily just money, but it’s also our time and possessions. Whatever we value, that is our treasure. And Jesus says that what we do with our treasure affects our hearts – it determines who we are inside. It determines what sort of people we become.
Jesus wants us to become people who want the kingdom God wants to give us, want it with all our heart and soul and mind and strength.
Do we want the kingdom?
Remember once again that we’re in Luke’s Gospel here.
And remember a couple of weeks ago, when we read these words in the prayer we call “the Lord’s,” remember that praying “Your kingdom come” needs, must inexorably drive us back to the most well known statement about God’s kingdom coming upon us and all of creation … Mary’s song of joy and praise in Luke’s first chapter, we know it as the Magnificat …

My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior …
He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.

Martin Luther, in his commentary on the Magnificat, said this:

Behold, how strong a comfort this is, that not man but God gives to the hungry, and that (God) not only gives them this or that but fills and fully satisfies them. Mary says, moreover: “with good things.”
On the other hand, how could one bring a more damning accusation against riches, or more grievously terrify the rich, than by saying that God sends them empty away? Oh, how great and overflowing are both God’s filling and God’s sending away! How utterly vain here is the help or counsel of any creature!

Remember that whenever we pray “Your kingdom come” to God our Father … this is a wildly, revolutionary, counter-cultural, political prayer. Because the coming of God’s Kingdom among us means the end of inequality, poverty, rich oppressing poor, strong oppressing weak, racism, sexism, discrimination of any and all kinds … in short, it’s The Great Leveling For All Creation.
So do we want it? Do we want the Kingdom that God takes good pleasure in giving to us?
Jesus’ next words in our text are about two different ways we can receive it.
The first – best, right way – Jesus’ way - is to be prepared.
Jesus’ example of good preparation is of servants waiting for their master, their Lord, to return from a wedding banquet. It’s a thinly disguised reference to himself – his word for master, is  – really, Lord – a reference to himself, and those servants – disciples - who would follow him.
Be ready like these servants who stay awake for their master to come back, no matter what time it is, so they can let him in, Jesus says. And look what awaits them as their reward for being alert ... a total reversal of reality, indeed, a new reality – the kingdom of God ... the master will serve the servants. All because they were alert, they were ready, they did what they were supposed to do. And the implied message from Jesus is, just as these servants did for their master, so should you do for me.
But Jesus knows us well, very well. And so he gives us another little scenario -- the one about the owner of the house and the thief.

But know this ... if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into.

The reference here is to both the now of the text (how the religious of Jesus’ day reacted to Jesus) as well as the later (how people would think and behave about Jesus’ return, through the days, weeks, months, years, centuries later ... including today). The religious of Jesus’ time thought surely they knew how the messiah would come -- as a great military king, who would drive out the Romans. They thought they were the great householders of the faith, and that Jesus was the horrible thief, trying to mess up and take away all their traditions.
But they were wrong. Jesus was and is the true householder – the Lord and Master of all. And those religious leaders of Jesus’ time, in keeping their religion – and their treasure - to themselves, they were the real thieves.
But there’s still more going on in this little parable, another word for us.
Knowing the date and time of Jesus’ return means exercising control over it. We might even try to prevent it ... after all, it means an end to the little power games we play here on earth, who’s in, who’s out, who’s in control, who gets what. And so the real irony of this parable hits home for us. We who are the “haves” of this life might think we are the owners of the house, and that everyone else is a thief, trying to take away the power and the stuff we’ve got. But Jesus flips things around. This Jesus who makes himself known through Luke’s gospel knows that “having” does not make one rich with God.

Blessed are you poor, blessed are you hungry, blessed are you who weep ... woe to you who are rich ... and full ... and laughing.
Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

What it finally comes down to is: how do we see Jesus’ return, to us ... his return we confess, his return we look toward in the words of the Creed, his return which is a cornerstone of our faith?
We’d surely like to think we are the good servants, prepared, waiting, satisfied only in the knowledge that the master will be coming soon ... but then … sometime … sooner or later, don’t you know we all end up like the poor misguided “homeowner,” staying up all night, eyes bloodshot and weary, grabbing whatever we can to protect our stuff, our position, our power and place, determined to hang onto “what’s mine.”
CS Lewis, in his final volume of the Chronicles of Narnia series, “The Last Battle,” paints a fine word-image of such a scene … the children, Eustace and Lucy, accompanied by Aslan the Lion-King, see that they have entered into a beautiful paradise-world … surely, an analogy for the Kingdom of God … but the dwarves refuse to be taken in by what they believe is a sham-promise. They won’t give up and give in … they’re like the homeowner of Jesus’ parable.
So there they sit, huddled, fighting and miserable, in a dark ugly stable of their imaginative-creating, while around them is, in reality, a beautiful new world.
Aslan puts it well:

You see, (the dwarfs) will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.

The bad news of this text is that we would rather choose cunning instead of belief. That we choose to be the homeowner protecting ourselves against thief Jesus, rather than the servants who wait expectantly for his return.
But the good news is that Jesus does not leave us there, like Lewis’ dwarves, in the prison we make for ourselves, victims of our poor choices.
For his word keeps coming to us ... relentlessly pursuing us ...

... do not be afraid, it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.

So how can we not be afraid?
Hear Jesus’ Word of love and forgiveness, undeserved kindness, mercy, grace and peace, for us. His word which comes freely to us as a promise ... a gift to us ... we don’t and can’t do anything for it.
See and hear the signs which he gives us as down-payment-proof on his promises ... in words and signs such as these:

“Your sins are forgiven.”
“You are baptized – made part of me and my will for this life – given new life in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
“Take and eat, this is my body, this is my blood, given and shed for you.”

See and hear, eat and drink, and TRUST, that God’s Spirit is alive and moving among us, that God’s Spirit has created and is still creating, in this community of faith we call Nativity, part of the body of Christ in the world.
Be ready ... be prepared ... because the Kingdom is coming, God’s Kingdom is coming to and for us, to and for all of God’s creation ... the Kingdom is coming … so be prepared to receive it with joy ... and do not fear.
Trust Jesus’ word ... hear Jesus’ Word ... feel and eat and drink Jesus’ Word ...

Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.

Amen.