Letting freedom flow

Jeremiah 2:4-13
Psalm 81:1, 10-16
Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16
Luke 14:1, 7-14

Sometime last year I decided to do more to conserve water at my house.  I’d already stopped irrigating my lawn a year or two before, but with the severity of the ongoing drought here in California I considered what further measures I might take.  I’ve never been a big one for washing my car, or taking long showers, or letting the tap run while I brush my teeth or shave my whiskers, so I didn’t see much room for improvement in those areas.  But there are the toilets.  We have two of them, and as far as I know they might very well date from when our house was built in 1972, because they have those big old tanks that probably use five gallons every time they are flushed.   So, when I was at the hardware store one day getting something else and spotted a product on the shelves that seemed to offer at least a partial solution, I took a closer look. 

It was a fancy replacement for the old flapper valve, and instead of a handle like a little lever it has a couple of push-buttons, one of which will measure out a smaller flush when less water is required.   And, though I was skeptical that the thing would really work, it was inexpensive and I figured “what have I got to lose?”  I only bought one, to begin with, and installed it in the bathroom off the hall, which gets the most use, and for a while it worked as advertised.   But after a while the valve started getting stuck the majority of the times you use it.  You can release it, if you wait a second or two after flushing, and then do this thing where you push the bottom button in and then release it rapidly a couple of times until you hear the little “click” of the valve snapping shut. 

Which would only be a minor inconvenience if we remembered to do that every time.  But human nature being what it is, we don’t.  And of course the times we forget are, often enough, when we’re rushing out of the house to go somewhere, and there has been more than one occasion when I’ve returned home to find the toilet running and I know that no one has been in the house for hours.  So it’s hard to say at this point whether the contraption has saved more water than it’s wasted, and I’m grudgingly coming to accept that it’s time to bite the bullet and buy a couple of new, high-efficiency toilets. 

It hurts to know that my plumbing wastes water, but I have been able to live with the pain of it longer than I otherwise might, because there is a layer of abstraction that distances me from the problem and softens the blow.  It costs me money, of course, but lots of things cost money, and many of them cost more.  And there’s the emotional cost of feeling guilt about it, and ashamed of myself for procrastinating, because I know that we are in a drought and I am wasting a precious resource, but my actual lived experience is that there is plenty of water and however much I use, I can always get more.  That is because my toilets are hooked up to the pipelines and pumping stations of a modern municipal water system.  And that system has access to the reservoirs and the aquifers of the Russian River watershed, which not shown any signs, even in this historically-bad drought, of running dry. 

It would be far different if I lived in Judea in the 6^th century BCE, which also had a summer-dry Mediterranean climate like ours, and if my household water system was a cistern containing what I’d been able to catch of last winter’s rain.  If that cistern leaked, it would soon be empty of water, and there would be no way to get more.  It is to people in a dry land, who were acutely aware of the precious and tenuous supply of water on which their lives depended, that the prophet Jeremiah spoke. He was not addressing them as individual householders, but rather, as he makes clear at the beginning of today’s first reading from scripture, he speaks to the whole “house of Jacob, and all the families of the house of Israel.”   And he did this during a time, when the nation faced an ongoing existential threat, with the shadow of expansionist Mesopotamian empires constantly looming over the land.   But there is a greater crisis, says Jeremiah, a religious crisis of which this political precariousness is just a symptom.  Speaking on behalf of Israel’s God, he says: “my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water.” 

In the eyes of our secular and pluralistic age, prophets like Jeremiah can seem kind of ridiculous.  The conventional wisdom about religion, if people are willing to accord it any value at all, is that all faiths worship the same god.  Their essential truths are the same, they just have different outward forms, different rituals, and languages, and names for the divine.  But when Jeremiah accuses Israel of having gone after worthlessness, and so become worthless, and of what changing their glory for that which does not profit, he is not talking about making the wrong choice from a menu of equivalent and interchangeable options, all of which are good.  He is talking about a critical difference in the way we think about and relate to God, a difference that we are prone to lose sight of no matter what “religion” we say we “belong to”.

As human beings we can, through various ingenious means, build an artificial fountain; but even our most advanced technology cannot create a spring.  If a spring goes dry, we can dig a well, and if the well goes dry, we can dig it deeper, but we can’t replace an aquifer.  The domain of things we can produce, predict, and control may be vast.  But it has its limits, and the Word of the Hebrew prophets comes from the other side of those limits, from the realm of the infinite and free.  From that strange and awesome remove it speaks, and strenuously, even violently, resists our attempts to give the things that we have made the honor that rightfully belongs to that which made us.   Any image of the divine in a created form, any sorcery that tries to steal power or knowledge from heaven or hell, any cultic sacrifice that claims to be able to pacify or animate the deity, is an insult to the freedom of God.

And this freedom matters to us, not least because it is the source of our own.   Jeremiah says to the families of Israel that they are in danger of losing their freedom, and this is because they stopped asking “Where is the Lord who brought us up from the land of Egypt?”  They stopped seeking the God who broke them out of the house of Pharaoh, and saved them from his army.  They stopped looking for the God who brought them through the drought, and darkness of the desert, to a land whose abundance was their gift of freedom and equality.  They contented themselves instead with a god who was a kind of domestic pet.  Forsaking the fountain of living water, and dug cracked cisterns for themselves.

In a Presidential election year in the United States, you can count on a lot of talk about greatness and freedom—our greatness, and our freedom—though very little is said about what these words might really mean.  You also hear a lot of passing references to “God”, whose job, it seems, is to bless us, in a manner of our choosing.  And none of these glib invocations shed any light on God’s greatness, let alone God’s freedom.  For that, you have to come to a place like this, where people still listen for the Word that speaks from beyond the sphere of our illusions and contrivances.   That word reminds us that freedom is a gift that grows out of the land, when we dwell there in equality and justice; that it is still an arduous journey to get there, one that leaves the false peace and illusory stability of domination and subservience behind; and that our only sure guide on that journey is a true and living God—a God who is free. 

Cooking the books

Jeremiah 8:18-9:1
Psalm 79:1-9
1 Timothy 2:1-7
Luke 16:1-13

Last Monday, as I usually do, I dropped my daughter off at school and then went surfing.  I have a standing arrangement with Susan Stewart that I can park on the street in front of her house, from which place I can put on my wetsuit and carry my surfboard down the hill to Dillon Beach.  It’s a little extra work, especially on the way back up after a couple hours of hard paddling, but it’s well worth it, because it saves me the nine dollar parking fee every time I go.  Or almost every time.  Last week I arrived at the road junction at the entrance to the village at Dillon Beach and met with a flag stop and a road crew with some heavy equipment getting ready to work. 

They waved me by, and I turned onto Susan’s street only to find it lined with orange-and-white-striped sawhorses and placards that said “No Parking: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. September 16.”  My heart started sinking as I saw those sawhorses marching away up the hill and along all the side streets and in front of Susan’s house.  I kept going around the block and the story was the same.  I turned back out onto the main road and tried the last street before the beach—more sawhorses.  I finally resigned myself to paying for parking, and then I remembered that my wallet was empty of cash.  Now the surf wasn’t exactly epic that day, but that doesn’t really matter much to me.  I go out there mainly just to exercise my body and let the ocean wash the stress and strain of my life on land off of me—if I happen to catch a few waves that’s the frosting on the cake.  So the prospect of having to turn around and head back to Petaluma completely dry didn’t exactly fill me with joy.

So I decided to drive down to the parking lot and see what would happen.  I pulled up to the little kiosk and rolled down my window.  The attendant was a young woman, perhaps eighteen or nineteen years old.  I told her the whole story about how I usually parked up on the hill but that the road work had blocked everything off so I needed to use the lot, and didn’t have any cash.  She told me I could pay with a debit card.  I started to pull out my wallet and she said, “No, not here—up at the store.”

I paused for a second before saying—“Ok, I guess I’m off to the store.  See you in a minute.”  And I put my wallet back and was reaching for the keys, when she spoke again—“Do you live up in the village?”

So I repeated my story-- “No, my friend does.  She lets me park in front of her house, but everything’s blocked off today because of the road work.”

“Road work,” she said to herself.  There was another moment’s pause while she considered.  Then she wrote something on an orange slip of paper and handed it through the window of the kiosk--a parking pass with 9/16/13 written on it, to put on the dashboard on the driver’s side. 

Our everyday exchange of society’s goods and services is facilitated by a wonderful thing called money.  And one of the reasons that money is so useful is that it’s not personal.  If you have something that I want, I have something I can give you in exchange for it that everyone has already agreed has value.  It doesn’t matter if I don’t have anything that you want in return, and we don’t have to have a long argument about how much my plumbing services are worth compared to your sweet corn.  You name your price, I pay it, and that’s that.  And it doesn’t matter whether you know me or I trust you, as long as we’re dealing in cold, hard cash.  Thanks to money, I can be in a mutually-beneficial economic relationship with people in China that I’ve never met and never will.  

But there’s something about this impersonal quality of money that’s seductive.  The way that it works seems so simple and clear and impartial, that it can make the value of other things seem kind of vague and uncertain in comparison.  That’s particularly true for the kinds of things that are prized for their moral or spiritual value.  We can all agree that things like wisdom and wilderness and community spirit are important, but just how much value they have, relative to other things, is difficult to say.  But because the rules that govern the exchange and accumulation of money appear so rational and predictable and precisely proportioned, we can start to imagine that they are transcendent, like some kind of natural, or even divine, law.  We can start to believe that the challenging and perplexing questions about how to be a good person and a responsible member of society can really just be boiled down to charging a fair price and paying one’s debts on time.

 But then there are those moments when we find ourselves, like that young parking attendant at Dillon Beach, in a position where the clear and simple rules about money are at odds with what we feel in our hearts is the right thing to do.  There are times when the kind thing, the generous thing, the courageous and admirable thing to do, is to reinforce the shared moral values and personal bonds that keep society healthy, by breaking the rules about money.

The manager of the estate in Jesus’ parable that we hear today finds himself in such a position.  There must be some truth to the charge that he has mismanaged his master’s affairs, because he has no doubt that he is about to lose his job.  And he also knows that, left to follow the pitiless rules of the labor market, he’s not going to make it.  If he’s going to survive, it will be because people behave towards him in a way that defies their supposed rational self-interest.  So he takes a risk that might just make a bad situation worse.  He acts irrationally, and unpredictably, and violates the clear-cut rules of wealth.  Instead he banks on relationships, and on the value of kindness, generosity, and mercy. 

The manager cooks the books, to the cost of his boss and the benefit of his debtors, so it’s hard to understand why the Master would approve of him, or why Jesus would hold him up as a model to follow.  I don’t think this story literally means that we should be dishonest in our business dealings.  But the master appreciates what his manager has done because it exhibits a kind of shrewdness that is more admirable than frugality or even integrity.    It’s the shrewdness of knowing that that in the last analysis, the human economy is personal, and that love, friendship, hospitality, generosity, and compassion are its real currency.

In the coming weeks our national political representatives will be facing many grave responsibilities of national and world affairs.  They will even address some of them.  So we should pray for them—they, as much as anyone, are in need of Christ’s grace and truth.  But watch out when you see them parading across the airwaves talking the nation’s wealth as if it were governed by some self-evident and inflexible law.  When they start talking about the federal budget and the national debt as if there are no real alternatives, as if it is a foregone conclusion that the elderly, children, the hungry, the unemployed, and the working poor must sacrifice on the altar of economic necessity, and the debate is only about how much, Christians need to remember that this is what idolatry looks like.   

When Jesus tells his disciples to make friends for themselves by means of dishonest wealth he isn’t just teaching the conventional wisdom that worldly goods are fleeting and you can’t take them with you.   He’s also suggesting that the rules that govern the exchange of those goods, which seem so impartial and rational and pure, are actually unjust.  The manager might be cheating his master by changing the amounts of oil and wheat that the debtors owe.  But the game of landowner and sharecropper is one that was already rigged in the master’s favor.  And on the other hand, Jesus remind us that the laws of relationship—those indeterminate, always voluntary, ever-being improvised and negotiated rules of hospitality and generosity and forgiveness and love—those are the laws that govern the eternal economy of the Kingdom of God.

  

Sitting at the lower place

Jeremiah 2:4-13
Psalm 81:1, 10-16
Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16
Luke 14:1, 7-14

Every year the seminary that I went to gives out a prize for the best preacher in the graduating class.  And by the time I was a senior there, I thought maybe that prize would be mine. I’d given sermons at my home parish in San Francisco before I even went to seminary, and many more at and my field education site once I got there, and the responses I received gave me confidence that this was something I was good at.  It’s a tradition at the seminary that on Tuesdays throughout the year, one of the seniors gives the sermon at the mid-day Eucharist.  And from what I’d seen and heard there, I thought I measured up well against the competition.  I was proud of my own senior sermon, and when the call went out later in the year for a student volunteer to fill an open date on the preaching calendar, I jumped at the chance to give another. 

So I liked my chances to win the prize; and as our class was lining up for the commencement ceremony, and bishops and rectors of cardinal parishes of the church were coming down the line, giving us their congratulations, I couldn’t help fantasizing about that moment when I would hear my name called and, in front of my classmates, and the faculty, and all those distinguished guests, I would walk up to the podium to claim my reward.  And when the ceremony began, and we’d marched in, and were in our seats, and the big moment was drawing near, my heart was racing.  Finally, the Homiletics Professor and Dean of the seminary went to the microphone and announced that the winner of the Rt. Rev. Richard Millard Prize for Excellence in Preaching for the class of 2005 was…Katherine Kelley. 

I was stunned.  I didn’t know until that moment just how much I had wanted that award, and how certain I had been that they would give it to me.  As I struggled with my emotions, I thought I saw some of my classmates stealing glances at me, as if they knew that I’d been expecting to win, and I imagined that the color of my face betrayed my disappointment, and I was ashamed.  Suddenly I was no longer paying attention to what was happening around me.  The ceremony kept moving along toward the moment when I also would be called up to the podium, to receive that diploma that I’d worked so hard to get, that only a few years earlier seemed forever out of my reach, but I was stuck back there, thinking of the honor I had been denied: “Kathy Kelley?  The one with the voice like a rusty hinge?  How is this possible?”

Finally, I pulled myself together.  I recalled that I had missed Kathy Kelley’s senior sermon, and that for all I knew she was an outstanding preacher.  As the commencement exercises ended, and I looked for her in the crowd to congratulate her, I remembered the Baccalaureate dinner a couple of nights before.  After dessert, the seniors had the opportunity to get up and make some farewell remarks to the seminary community.  Mine were pretty lame—your basic “I want to thank everyone who made this moment possible” kind of speech.  But Kathy Kelley’s was oratory, a wise and heartfelt tribute to the lay people at Trinity, Sacramento who had nurtured her faith and her call to ministry.  She ended by admonishing us all to honor the laity of the church, and lead them and serve them with humility and love.  When she was finished the room was completely silent for a long moment, and then burst into applause.

Academic prizes are only one way our society singles people out for honor.  The cultural code that assigns us our places in the pecking order is extremely complex, and it depends on everything from the brands we display on our clothes and our cars, to the neighborhoods where we live and the places where we work and the schools where we send our children, from how we spend our vacations to where we sit when we go to the ball park.  But in Jesus’ day the code was simpler.  There weren’t that many ways to stake a claim to prestige.  And one of the main places it was done was at wedding feasts and dinner parties.  Who could hold the most lavish banquet, and who would be invited, and who would not, and who would accept the invitation, and where they would sit when they came—these were the things that mattered in the high-stakes game of social standing. 

And that is why the documents of the New Testament contain so many passages about wedding feasts and social banquets.  That is why the Gospel of Luke remembers Jesus’ remarks to supper guests in the house of a leader of the Pharisees.  Because in this passage Jesus isn’t giving advice about banquet etiquette—he’s pointing out the senselessness of fighting with your friends over rank.  It’s all just based on someone else’s opinion, and honor can turn to shame in an instant, and starting out at the bottom is just as promising a strategy as starting out at the top.   This is also why it is so radical for Jesus to tell his host that he’d be better off inviting the kind of guests to his party who don’t get invited to the better sort of affairs and can do nothing to burnish his reputation.  Because the only reputation that matters in the end is the one we have in the eyes of God, and God’s idea of who is honorable, and who is not, is not like ours.   

There was a time, not so very long ago, when attending a church like St. John’s was one way to lay claim to social prestige.  If you wanted to establish your credentials as a solid citizen and a moral person, someone of good character, whose acquaintance would reflect well on others, it paid to belong to a church.  And I would guess that this church gave its members that extra touch of distinction that some of the others did not.  Now I’m not saying that there weren’t a lot of genuinely devout and faithful people here, at every stage of the 167-year history of St. John’s.  But I do think it’s safe to say that there were also some of the other kind.  And somewhere along the line those folks stopped coming here, because it was paying diminishing social returns.

Today going to church is no guarantee of respect.  Indeed, there are some circles where it marks one out as a bigot, or a credulous fool.  There are others for whom church is still valuable for social climbing, but they tend to prefer places a little more fashionable than ours.  And we, who used to sit at the highest place at the table, now find ourselves nearer to the lowest.  But I think that if we’re truthful to the wisdom of our tradition, we’d have to say that it’s a better place to be.   At the low place it’s easier to remember that social status is an idol, a cracked cistern that holds no water. It’s easier to remember that honor is just shame that hasn’t shown up at the party yet.  At the low place it’s easier to remember what it is like to be uninvited, to be on wrong side of the codes of social acceptance.  In the low place it’s easier to remember how treating others on the basis of what they can do for our social standing is an affront to God.

It’s also a place where it’s easier to remember Jesus, and the dinner parties that he had, where he ate and drank and celebrated the Kingdom of God with tax-collectors and prostitutes.  It’s easier to remember how he sat at table with the one who would betray him, and the ones who would desert him, and said, “this is my Body, given for you.”  From the low place we keep the feast that he commanded, holding in highest honor the last meal of a condemned man.  Everyone is invited to this feast, where we come not for distinction, but forgiveness, where we belong, not to an exclusive social set, but to the eternal kingdom of the love of the one creator of us all.