Who’s in Charge Here? - Matthew 6:24-34 (CEV)

I wonder about this passage. Being the child of a materialistic culture, the wealthiest the world has ever produced, I have always been taught that the accumulation of things was a sign of the good life. And more, that the more things you own, the better proof of your goodness as a person.

The poor you have with you always - Jesus told Judas. They are the godless ones; or so we assume. Say “welfare” and immediately, images come forth of worthless women having babies in order to collect money from the state - surely an evil practice and one worthy of our scorn.

We are Calvinist and we believe we are saved by faith, not by good works. The Calvinist pushed the logic of that belief a step further and declared that God alone knows who will be saved because God alone chooses the “elect”. Work for salvation all you want, your efforts are pointless.

But — since God is a just God, stern in judgment and always fair, he surely would not allow a bad person to be prosperous. That defies logic. We cannot prosper without the implied blessing of God.

Well, what a convenient logic! If one prospers, one automatically must be good - it makes sense. Add to this logic the theory of evolution - what we call social Darwinism - and you can be happy in the knowledge that only the fittest survive. Those who survive and prosper must be the elite, the creme de la creme.

Which all adds up to one thing - material goods do matter. They are a barometric reading of our spiritual condition. We live in a prosperous country. We are prosperous ourselves. Therefore, we must be good.
Only Calvin didn’t say this, and neither did Jesus. Calvin said such worldly prosperity was no guarantee of holiness, it was a blind chance, nothing more. He knew wealthy men and he knew that wealth - what Paul called the love of money - is the root of all evil. Read a history of the builders of the transcontinental railroad, for instance, and you will discover these men were rascals to the core. They not only showed no mercy for their neighbors, they saw no point in such mercy. Selfishness and greed was their rule and they lived by it.

Jesus also knew how corrupting material goods can be. The King James Version of the Bible uses the word “mammon” and that translates into a love of things. It is a god, a demanding god, a god with a voracious appetite. What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine too, if I can figure a way to get my hands on it. Serve mammon, and you push God out of your life.

We are confronted with a choice here - and it is not simply a choice between having things and not having things. (God forgive me, but I cling to my toys like any other man. My computer, my DVD’s, my books, my fine dining - all indulgences of the flesh and the spirit that make life worth living - I can scarce contemplate life without them.

As I said, the choice is not just about things. The choice is as it always was - what will be my God? What will dominate my life? What will motivate me to action? What comes first? Some of you remember Jack Benny, the comic with a reputation for being a miser. One of his famous moments was when he was confronted by a thief who was pointing his gun at the comedian. “Your money or your life” the thief demands. There is a long pause, “Well?” the thief prompts him. “I’m thinking, I’m thinking!” protests Benny.

I see at least two things going on here: one is pride. As I pointed out earlier, our wealth stands as a measuring stick for our success, our worthiness. I remember the first season of “The Apprentice” when Donald Trump invited one of the winning teams up to his penthouse to show off its glittering walls of gold. Everything was gold. How can one doubt the worth of such a man who has so much to show for his wealth?

The other is fear - and this Jesus points to with unswerving insistence. In his eyes, the accumulation of wealth has to do with fear about tomorrow. It has to do with anxiety that there won’t be enough food to eat, clothes to wear. Existence itself is threatened by the lack of worldly goods.

The fearful man is the loner, eking out a meager existence and in constant dread of the next day. Soren Kierkegaard asked “What is anxiety? Anxiety is the next day.” It is that mythical tomorrow we expect to come, the one for which we must always be prepared, the one that can bring blessing or disaster - we never know which one. So we must be ready.

We must be. Only that isn’t a “we” it’s a “me”. Me, me alone, only me.

Here Jesus parts company with conventional wisdom. He points to another possibility. No, this is more than a possibility - he points to another reality, a certainty, an unshakable faith. We are not alone.

You see, we are not in charge, God is. Somehow our anxiety has clouded our vision. Our lives become misdirected in our search for safety. We become driven by our need to secure ourselves and perpetuate our own immortality.

At the moment, the world watches as men of power are growing old and weak. Their insatiable appetite for wealth and power has consumed so many they can no longer hold on to their wealth and position. And they don’t know it. They have lived their privileged lives so long they can’t imagine any other way of living. They are desperately alone.

Recall the eccentric Howard Hughes who died a pitiful death, with no more dignity, no more stature, no more self-worth than the most common beggar. His wealth proved nothing. Mubarek may have escaped Egypt with untold riches at his command, but who is he in the eyes of the world now? Ghadaffi faces exile, declaring he’d rather die. Hussein’s statue was toppled and he himself died cursing his enemies and defying them to the end.

All alone. All thought they were successful. All thought they had limitless power. All worshiped themselves and relied on their own powers, their own brains, their own indomitable will. And they all were alone in the end.

Jesus would also die. But even in the darkness of Golgotha, and in spite of that terrible moment when he cried out “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”, he would cling to one more word of faith. “Father, into your hands I place my spirit.”

The prophet Isaiah said God will never forget you. “I’ve got your names tattooed on the back of my hands!”

That unshakable confidence is at the core of the Christian life. Now please understand, Jesus does not say everything will turn out all right. There is no promise here that we will be happy, healthy, and successful in the manner of a Donald Trump who can gild every inch of his penthouse with 24 karat gold. The presence of God is an assurance that whatever we face, whatever we are called upon to experience and endure, is faced with the presence of God.

I think you might say, God is there with the reassuring words, “I’ve got your back”.

That’s what Jesus is talking about here. Whatever comes, God is a part of the story, we are not - and we never will be alone.

We like to think we’re in charge. Well, we aren’t. History has proved that again and again. We’d be willing to trust God if we could be sure he’s in charge. Jesus seemed to think that’s so. But remember, history can be tricky. Things don’t always go the way we wish. Events occur that seem quite out of the realm of the control of God. Jesus would suffer and die.

The good news is - God brings victory out of even the most disastrous defeats.

Don’t worry folks - when you do, you’ve taken back control. You are laboring under the delusion that you’re in charge again - and you’re not. Trust God, he’s got your back! Amen

Living Gospels

Sermon  (Based on Matthew 5:13-20)

When Jesus called his disciples “salt of the earth, and “light of the world” he did something important. He made them “living gospels”. They became the conduit through which the Holy Spirit of God passes into the world.

In previous generations, God spoke through priests and prophets. The people waited hungrily for words of guidance and courage, for correction and consolation that came to them through the lips of a Moses or a Samuel, an Isaiah or a Micah. Then, after a long waiting, a Messiah was to come and all that had gone wrong with mankind and our world would be set right. Jesus was that messiah - or so his disciples believed, and so have we Christians through the ages.

But our expectations did not change. The messiah brought hope, but it was not the hope we had looked for. He spoke of a new Kingdom of Heaven, but it did not look like a kingdom. Rome still ruled, the Jews still suffered, and the new believers, now calling themselves Christians, resumed their waiting - only this time it was for a radical end of this world and the beginning of an entirely new one. The Book of Revelation came to be understood as a promise of cosmic warfare, the humiliation and defeat of Satan, and the launching of a new heaven and a new earth with a kingly Christ returning to usher in this promised paradise. Somehow, the simple message Christ taught his disciples got diminished in significance. It has the sound of a coach’s pep-talk before the game begins, rather than the unexpectedly startlingly new message - we are now the messengers, we are the medium and the message (to borrow a notion from Marshall McLuen). We get the part about how we could do better, make a greater effort, but we miss the crucial edge of this teaching - we already ARE the medium and the message. Now we must ask what kind of living gospels have we become.

I say, “we missed it,” or was this only an unfortunate oversight on my part? Did I hear and see but fail to understand? Perhaps you caught the message better than I. It occurs to me that many Christians are under the false impression that they should be the salt Jesus speaks of, or the light Jesus expects the world to see. If I read his words properly, that’s not the point. Put simply, we ARE salt, we ARE light. The question is, what kind of salt shall we be, what do we do with the light that shines through us?

Have you seen the bumper sticker that reads, "I have no problem with Jesus, it’s his friends I can’t stand"? That’s a pretty damning statement, and all too unhappily true. We all know people who profess Jesus but manage to make us feel inferior and unwanted. They may be Jesus’ friends, but they do little to make us want them to be our friends. Charles Dickens, novelist and crusader for the poor and the oppressed, loved to point out the hypocrisy of pious church goers who agonized over the plight of natives in Africa while turning a blind eye to the misery that surrounded them in London or Liverpool. Mark Twain took an equally jaundiced view of religions that seemed to be good for nothing more than making people ashamed of themselves. I remember Myrna who spoke of her teenage years being so fraught with fears that she was an unforgivable sinner rushing toward damnation she made rededicating her life to Christ a regular Sunday morning ritual. Her father once said "I wish to God I knew what you’ve been doing every Saturday night!"

My wife the nurse came home from the hospital one day and reported a conversation she’d had with the volunteer chaplain. "I don’t know how to talk to an alcoholic who’s in here again to get over another drinking binge." "Why?" she asked, "he’s just sick like everybody else, isn’t he?" "I know," he protested, "but his sickness is self-inflicted. His suffering is his own fault." "So’s my being overweight," she replied, "but that doesn’t take away my suffering. If anything, it adds to it." We all suffer from our sinful ways, but that doesn’t mean we are no longer entitled to the mercy and redemption of God.

And I remember pastor Ralph, who served a church that devoted itself to knowing the truth and preaching it unflinchingly. When invited to make a donation to the United Way, he was actually shocked. "We don’t participate in such worldly things."

Is it any wonder that there are people out there who take a dim view of Jesus’ friends? And don’t protest that this isn’t fair. We must not condemn Christianity because there are church people who don’t live up to the ideals Jesus taught. Of course the world condemns hypocrisy. Of course the world notices when we proclaim good news but don’t get around to living it. Why wouldn’t they? What else do they have to go on? That’s not our fault.

Wasn’t it? Where was the light? What happened to the salt? It was there, but it was pretty dim and tasteless. The Gospel of John said the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has never been able to put it out. And when Jesus called us "salty" he knew that salt doesn’t really lose it’s flavor. Salt is always salty. It can be diluted, it can be hidden by other flavors, but it’s there all the same.

So what happened?

What flavor of faith are you giving out? It’s not enough to say you believe in Jesus, you need to show it. We are not performing good deeds to make ourselves righteous and worthy of a place in heaven. We are living our faith so that the world might see what the grace of God looks like. The minister who labors over producing a great sermon should not be surprised to discover that what people heard wasn’t necessarily what he said. Nor should he be offended when he learns the kindness of a faithful church member meant more than his carefully worded interpretation of John 3:16. What gospel am I living? That’s the real message.

What look is on my face as I go down the sidewalk? What tone of voice do people hear when I call them on the telephone? How promptly do I pay my bills? How considerate am I on the highway? How attentive am I to the needs of others when I have my cell phone in my hand?

Why do I ask these questions? What do they have to do with your faith? They demonstrate your faith. They are a visible, indelible impression of who you are. But they are more than that: they are a witness to who God is and what God is like.

Jesus cautioned his disciples to beware the mistaken notion that, just because they were friends of God, that did not mean they could ignore the good works God urges us to do. True, the legalism of the religious pharisee is misplaced. We cannot aspire to holiness just by assuming the appearance of holiness. But neither can we ignore the rules of good behavior as irrelevant. To accept the grace of God in Jesus Christ and then rest on our laurels as if we now belonged to some privileged class is equally wrong.

We are now on duty. We have a task. We are the extension of God’s saving grace. We are the salt that gives flavor to faith. We are the ones who make the gospel tasty, appetizing, appealing to the world. We are the light that helps people find their footing.

We are, in a word, living gospels. We are God’s good news. We are God’s models of new life. We are hope in living flesh. You “I can’t do this, it’s too much for me. Remember Moses? Remember Isaiah? They tried that line and God over ruled it. Jesus has already hired us on. The issue now becomes what kind of witness will we be?

Jesus talks about our citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven being somehow linked to our salt and our light. A hasty reading might suggest that we need to clean up our act so we can qualify for going to heaven. But look again. Jesus says we will have a lower position in heaven. Or perhaps another way of putting it, we will have less significance. Diluted salt and flickering light are of little use to God. You see, this isn’t about getting into the Kingdom, it’s about our status in the Kingdom already.

The Kingdom of Heaven, as I read it, is not what we’ll find after we die. The Kingdom of Heaven is the fellowship of saints who have gone before us and who will come after us and who are presently surrounding us in our world right now. It is nothing more than that place where God is acknowledged as our King, our higher power, our supreme being. If you live as a child of God, you are already a citizen in the Kingdom.

Then once more I must ask, what kind of citizen am I? One who embodies the grace and mercy of God? Or one who wears a God face to look good in the world but is actually motivated by selfishness, greed, prejudice, a desire to be my own God. Does the zest of Christ permeate my being, or am I cold porridge hardly fit to feed the dog? Am I the light house people seek out in the midst of their raging dark storms, or have I satisfied myself by preserving a waning battery in an old flashlight, turned on only in emergencies? You know, that proverbial foxhole prayer?

Think about it. The question is not, will you be a sunbeam for God? The question is what kind of sunbeam are you now? Amen.