Sermons - St. Augustine's Oak Cliff

Welcome to St. Augustine’s this Christmas. It’s our hope that each one of you would come to know the same great joy that the shepherds knew that first Christmas night; that like them your fear would turn to rejoicing; that you too would hear the good news of glad tidings that the God of all creation has declared his everlasting good will toward men, that he himself is our peace, that his very name is Immanuel, God-with-us, the God who came this holy night to forever be with us and for us in our flesh and blood, our poverty, our hopes and fears, our loneliness, our need, our rejoicing, our dear shabby sorry little corner of creation that matters so much to the eternal Almighty God that he emptied himself of everything except love to be born here among us in a barn, a poor boy reaching out his arms for his mother, and for you, and for me.

You have to imagine that John was sitting there in prison thinking to himself, “This isn’t how it was supposed to work. Herod’s days are supposed to be numbered but it still looks like he’s on the throne. Violence and injustice still sit on the thrones of power and the poor are still crying out for salvation. I’m not supposed to be in jail at this point in the story, Herod is! Did I miss something? Yes, I heard the voice from above saying that Jesus was the one; yes, his very name means savior and deliverer, but I don’t feel very delivered right now. Israel doesn’t look very delivered. Is this the one who was to come, or are we to wait for another?”

We see the lion attacking the calf; we see addiction overcoming the will of our loved ones; we see cancer or illness or age wasting away the bodies of our friends; we see death prowl. But what our eyes see and what our ears hear is not the ultimate truth, is not the most trustworthy revelation, is not the reality of the kingdom of God. And there’s a hint of it right here, my brothers and sisters, and it’s why we come to church each Sunday, to be reminded that what we see out there is not the final word, is not where our hope rests, is not the reality that we’re called to place our faith and hope in.

Life is short. What are we living for? Can we see who we are and who we’ve become? Can we see the world six inches past our own nose? Are we ready to meet God? Are we awake or are we asleep? I need to be clear: St. Paul called death “the last enemy to be defeated.” I repeat, death is not a good thing in and of itself. But the God who loves us more than life itself uses death to try to wake us up from our slumber, to shake us up like the grandmother in O’Connor’s story and open our eyes to the reality of the state we’ve gotten ourselves into and the life that really is life. How many people there are who’ve come near to death for the first time and realized how precious every day is, how so much of what we think matters really doesn’t, how much we’ve made a mess of things or how foolish we are to hold onto some grudge, and how we may not have many more chances to change our lives.

We are, all of us, refugees, aren’t we? All searching for a safe place to dwell, all looking and longing for a home to call our own, a place to rest and to thrive, a place to heal and be well. This psalm, and St. Augustine, tell us that this refuge we seek is found only in surrendering all our life and all its content and all our ambitions and all our worries and brokenness to God in Jesus.

What does Jesus have to do with the institution of the church? Why should I give time and money to support it? I want to focus this morning on two answers to that question. First and foremost, the answer is that Jesus wants to pitch his tent here among us. In Jesus the eternal Word of God became flesh and moved into the neighborhood, and God wants to set up shop and take on flesh here in this neighborhood too. That’s the first reason.You might call it the incarnational logic of Christianity—God wants to be as real and present here in Oak Cliff on Kiest Boulevard as the coffee shop or the elementary school or the 7-11. The second reason is tied to the first—when God moves into the neighborhood he wants to gather together a people, a forgiven and reconciled community drawn from every nation and tribe, doing what Jesus does and going where Jesus goes. Jesus has a mission for us, and it’s a mission that we can only carry out together.

One reason we celebrate All Saints Day is that the saints show us that when we truly do rely on God, when we seek his will in prayer, when like Ruth we follow him to places that don’t make sense unless God shows up in power and keeps his promises—we see in the saints another way to live. The lives of the saints surprise us because we see in them a way of life that doesn’t make sense unless Jesus is risen from the dead and the Holy Spirit is alive and very present in the world today, in our church, in our lives.

If you look around at the many injustices of our time and pray day and night that God would grant justice to the downtrodden and the oppressed and the voiceless, look out: God may be calling you to go and do something to help him make your prayer come true. Prayer is action, calling on God to open up the floodgates of his power to make God’s kingdom come, God’s will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Prayer is action and prayer calls us into action, getting us involved with what God is doing in the world to do battle with the powers of darkness, proclaim good news to sinners, fill the hungry with good things, and lift up the lowly.

Naaman discovers that the world of the Lord — that is, the Kingdom of God, the authority of God given to Elisha the healer and prophet, is not the same plane as worldly authority, indeed, it is opposite in many ways. What might we learn from this revelation, how might it apply to our daily lives?

Love and costly grace showed up in the story of Ruth and Naomi, you might even say in person, and brought about redemption and new life in the village of Bethlehem. One day years later in the very same place, in the very same family, love and grace showed up in person once more, and began to work redemption and new life into the story of the whole world. It’s a story that’s still being written. Your lives, our lives, this city, this country—we too can follow the footsteps of Ruth and Boaz, with faith and grace and costly love, and be written into Christ’s story of redemption. May we all have faith, like Ruth, and trust that the way of steadfast love, no matter what, and costly grace is the way of new life, God’s way to bring redemption into your life and our world.

What did Ruth stand to gain from leaving her home and following Naomi to a strange place where they’d have nothing? What did Boaz have to gain from buying a farm and giving it away, and from marrying a Moabite nobody with less than nothing? In the selfish kind of calculation that the world calls common sense, nothing, zip, nada.But there’s another kind of love at work behind the scenes in this story than the common-sensical kind the world knows.It’s a love that sees what others don’t see.It’s a love that doesn’t look for gain or extract a pound of flesh for every injustice.It’s full of grace.It’s patient and kind, not irritable or resentful.It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.It’s a love that never ends.It’s a love that creates new loveliness in the world, and brings new life into the valley of the shadow of death.It’s the love that lives in the heart of God, the passionate love that God has for you and for me by which we are born again; Christ’s passion that brings us back to life

The God of Israel is a good God and he wants what’s best for us. But he’s not a safe God, and the path he asks us to take, like that of Ruth, will not be a safe one. Following the God of Israel, if we’re really relying on him, is going to mean following him out on some limb where we need God to show up in our lives and keep his promises. If you’re not out on some limb somewhere, taking a risk, doing something that only makes sense if God is real and keeps his word, ask yourself this morning: Do I really trust God to protect and provide in my life? Or am I really assuming that at the end of the day I need to look out for myself?

Ruth had every reason to think that by giving her life away to an Israelite woman and the people of Israel, she was making a sacrifice that would end only in suffering and death. But as we’ll start to see next week, that isn’t what happens when you give your life to the God of Israel. When you give your life to him, you get your life back again. New life and a new future spring up from the bitter ashes of death. Because Jesus walked the way of the cross, the way of hesed, faithful commitment to his people no matter what, when we like Ruth walk the way of the cross what we’ll find on the other side is healing, new life, and redemption—just like the God of Israel, the redeemer, gave to Ruth.

What does it say about God that this story is in the Bible? It’s not a story about yet another great and powerful man—instead it zeroes in on two poor women and their hopes and troubles. It’s not even primarily about an Israelite—it’s about an immigrant, a foreigner, an outsider who comes to Israel with nothing and winds up becoming the great-grandmother of Israel’s greatest king. Just the fact that this story exists is remarkable. These are not the kinds of stories that normally got written down and passed down in the ancient world. The fact that this story is in the Bible must mean that God cares about people like Ruth and Naomi, the widows, the foreigners, the poor and the hopeless. God sees them; their struggles matter to him; his will is for their redemption, to bring them into his people and give them a future and a hope.

I think we sometimes come across healing stories in the Gospels and don’t really know what to do with them. They’re out of our everyday experience, not the kind of thing that we Episcopalians do. A healing story isn’t just about a promise that applies to eternal life. And it isn’t a moral teaching that we can go and apply to our lives this week. It’s actually about Jesus laying his hands on a bent-over woman and standing her up straight. And what do we do if we’re numbered among those whom Jesus didn’t pick out of the congregation to heal?

When the next test comes for you—and it may very well come as soon as Sunday brunch after church—ask yourself two questions first. Will my response to this injustice or wrong put me in some way at risk? Is it costly for me; does it make me vulnerable? If it doesn’t, then you may well be choosing the path of the easy surface-level peace that papers over injustice instead of confronting it when the time comes. Second, can my response contribute to a pathway toward reconciliation? Am I truly acting in love toward my friend or family member who’s done me wrong, or in love for my enemy? Or am I just seeking to defend myself, to signal how righteous and superior I am, and to land a good hard counter-punch at someone who’s attacked me? If the answer to either question is yes, then it may not be the way of Christ.He’s given us the ministry of reconciliation, and it will always mean walking the way of the Cross.

Our Lord said, “Let your light so shine before men that they may see it and give glory to your Father in heaven.” St. John said that this light is Christ, and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness shall not overcome it. You and I at St. Augustine’s can by God’s grace be such a light, a community where many nations and peoples come to give glory to God, where we find our deepest identity in Christ and truest community in Christ’s body, where we burn with anger at injustice while also loving our enemies, where we find a hope and a joy deeper than any despair and more powerful than any gun, in the Gospel of the Almighty God who created a good world and redeemed us in Christ, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, who reigns even now from the Cross and will reign forever in the Kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven.

It’s easier if we just think of the parable as about risking your neck to save a stranger. It gets harder when we see that Jesus isn’t just talking about strangers—he’s talking about enemies. He’s talking about the people who get on your last nerve, who make you so mad you can spit, who you can name ten reasons why they don’t deserve the time of day. What would happen if you were beat up and lying somewhere in a ditch, and the people who are on your side, the great and the good people, passed on by on their way to do more great and good things, but then… some sinner who’s got it all wrong is the one who stretches out his hand and cleans your wounds and gives you a place to stay? What then?

When we sow to the Spirit, it’s like we’re reaching out our hand and asking Jesus to deliver us from evil and make us new, born again, set free. When we pray, we’re not just working on ourselves to become more meditative or spiritual. We’re asking the sovereign power of God to reach into our lives and renew our hearts and reach into the world around us and make it more like God’s kingdom. When we worship, we’re not just coming to hear about how to be a better person. We’re joining in the one sacrifice for sin in Christ by which we’re made children of God our Father, making our dwelling-place to be in Christ and he in us.

When Martin Luther wrote his little book on the freedom of a Christian, based in large part on Paul’s letter to the Galatians, he wrote that “a Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.” That’s the paradox of Christian freedom, perfectly put. A few days from now, I’ll celebrate the freedom of an American like everyone else watching the fireworks. But when we do, let’s not forget what freedom is for—the freedom of a Christian is the freedom for love, to love the Lord our God and our neighbors as ourselves, and that means the freedom to become the servant of all.

That leads me to the second reason we need the Bible’s teaching about evil, which is that no matter how comfortable we may feel, we all need deliverance in one way or another. We misread this story if we think that it’s about someone else, one of those hard cases whom no one knows what to do with. No: this story is about us. Whether we’re too proud to admit it or not, you and I are like the man in the tombs too. The prayer book says that “we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves.” Growth in the Christian life, the ordinary season of growth that we’ve just started, is not primarily a matter of good advice and good habits and getting our acts together. We misunderstand this season if we think that everything that we celebrated just past, from Advent to Pentecost, is the season of what God did for us, and now it’s the season for us to show what we’ll do for God. No: before we grow, we have to be delivered from evil powers that are beyond our power to control. We have no power in ourselves to help ourselves, until God sets us free to come to our senses and come back to life again.

God isn’t so high and lifted up that he can’t be bothered by us, except maybe to give us fifteen minutes of his day. God glorified himself in his Son, Jesus Christ, a poor Jewish handyman with no power except the truth. Just like the one God in three persons gave himself to himself in a perfect dance of love and glory, God gave himself to his children in Jesus Christ, and poured his entire life out for us when he was lifted up high on the cross. The glory of God is no distant, abstract majesty. The glory of God looks like a love so strong that it shows up on the streets of the downtrodden and the forgotten, down among the prodigal sons, the sinners, the tax collectors, the prostitutes, and gets all mixed up with their hurts and their needs and their problems because they’re his sons, his daughters, and as long as their hearts hurt then the heart of God hurts too.

Why do we celebrate Ascension Day? The story almost seems a little cruel. Jesus had come back to his disciples from the grave, and the forty days he spent with them after his resurrection were a time of healing and joy and being filled up for the new mission Christ gave to his disciples to go into all the world and make disciples. But then, after just forty short days, he left. If Jesus is risen and alive, why doesn’t he stay down here with us? Given my experience of the church and probably yours too, I have no doubt that the church could use better management. Even if we believe that the pope is the Vicar of Christ, why not just give us Christ? Why can’t Christ stay around to overturn the moneychangers’ tables in the temple and tell off the Pharisees and the false prophets, tell us who’s right and who’s wrong in our endless disputes, and run off all of the scoundrels who dare to abuse and deceive God’s children in Christ’s name?

Worship does make us happier and more fulfilled and it should make us better and more moral, but worship isn’t primarily about any human purpose or earthly benefit. Worship is about God. We worship God for no other reason than that God is to be worshipped. We lift up our hearts because it is right and meet so to do. In worship we declare the worth-ship of God. We give God glory and honor because of who he is: the almighty and eternal God, dwelling from before time and forever, Wonderful Counselor, Prince of Peace, Lord of lords, source of life and light, the lovely God of love, Beautiful Savior, giver of all good gifts, God of amazing grace. If we saw even for an instant just a fraction of the reality of God, we would fall down in awe and fear and thanksgiving, and then leap to our feet with joy, lost in wonder, love, and praise.

I have bad news: the Kingdom of God is not like Burger King. Really, this is Good News, we might even say it’s the Good News, but just like the questioners in John’s Gospel this morning, I wonder if we often expect that the Kingdom of God, that the way of Jesus, that the call of the Cross, will be somewhat more familiar than it is, that the habits we’re called to take up would fit a bit more seamlessly into our lives as is, that the modes of thinking and talking and relating that God often inhabits himself would be a bit more accessible, comfortable, more common sensical to our current proclivities and desires.

Peter was not too proud to race to Jesus’ feet, Peter longed for communion and companionship and forgiveness and redemption, and in his longing, on the other side of the grave and death, God in Jesus Christ gave him exactly the thing for which he so longed, the thing that Peter must have been asking for in his heart every moment since his great betrayal, had been seeking in his every thought and action in the days following the trial and crucifixion, had been knocking at the door of God’s heart to receive redemption. And so as disciples ourselves, we are promised in the actions of Jesus written here, that we, too, will receive whatever restoration for which we long, that we will gain whatever forgiveness for which we strain, that we will enjoy whatever redemption it is that we seek, whether this side of heaven or the other.

In this morning’s Gospel passage, Jesus breathes on his disciples. It’s the way that the writer John expresses Jesus gifting the Holy Spirit to his followers. While we’ll celebrate Pentecost in June as the feast of the Holy Spirit with tongues of fire and all… I want to sit this morning with the analogy of the Holy Spirit as breath. The words that Jesus uses around this strange action he takes give us clues to what’s happening here, and how we might understand Scripture and its underlying truth to continue to shape and determine our lives. When Jesus appears to his disciples in the passage this morning, he says first, “Peace be with you.” When we take deep breaths, we slow our heart rates, we force our bodies to calm down, to enter a state of deeper peace, just like Jesus tells us.

What you and I celebrate here today certainly isn’t that we who walk the way of the cross are better than anyone else. We looked down and saw that the hammer and nails were in our hands, and the jeers of scorn and violence were on our lips. We have no righteousness of our own to commend. What we celebrate today is the final acceptance of defeat—the defeat of man, the defeat of God—and the final victory that was won in defeat and death’s darkest hour.

Have you ever wondered that his post-resurrection body still had nail marks in his hands and feet? That there was still a spear wound in his side? Why didn’t God, when he was drawing the breath of life back into Jesus human flesh, just wave his fingers and erase those scars, “good as new”? Wouldn’t it be better, less upsetting, more hopeful, to just ignore the recent unpleasantness and move on to the Easter brunches and egg hunts and chocolate overdoses without the bloody scabs of torture staring us in the face?

Throughout Lent we are called to examine, to look honestly at our lives and habits, to offer to God’s judgement our ways of relationship and our rhythms of life. This week it all comes to a head, and rather than sit at home in our little prayer closets, we’re called this week to join as a community in our examination, in our looking honestly together at ourselves and our lives. The parade of Holy Week, beginning out in the courtyard as we did this morning, continues on Thursday as we imagine that we are invited into the upper room where Jesus feasts with his disciples and then to the garden where he brings his closest companions to pray. On Friday we journey with Jesus to the cross and to the site of his death, to face what our sins do to those whom we love, to those who are innocent of evil, to those who do not deserve suffering and death at our hands. On Saturday night, we join Jesus’s path out of death, we gather again in the courtyard, in a garden, to sing and pray around the new fire that God gives in the resurrection of his Son. We will read of God’s path, walking with His people, throughout the Old Testament, we will baptize a child into the new life of Jesus Christ, and we will celebrate the first feast, the first Eucharist of Easter and of the resurrection.

Whatever has brought you to this wilderness, whatever brokenness and anger and guilt and shame and messiness have traced your steps here, “do not” “consider the things of old.” God is not about rubbing our noses in our mistakes or berating us over our foolishness. Whenever you realize and recognize that you are in the wilderness, surely that is enough suffering -- to know that you are parched, to feel, finally, that you are clumsy and tired, without strength and without a way out for yourself. And into that realization, into that opening of the eyes of your heart, God comes.

The apostle Paul is trying to tell us something, show us something, that by definition is impossible for us to see with our own eyes. He’s not just telling us to see something in a different light; from a different point of view; to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. That’s hard enough but with effort it can be done. No: Paul is telling us that we are to regard “no one from a human point of view.” Let alone trying to see things from the perspective of another person—he’s saying, the problem is the human point of view! The perspective of human beings living in the world—that’s what’s all wrong, he says. You see, there is now a new creation—everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!

What would happen if there was someone who knew and understood me so well that nothing he said about me was unfair or untrue? What if there was someone who understood me better than I understand myself? What if there was someone who confronted me in my sin not to tear me down, but to show me that what I’m doing will wind up destroying everything that really matters in my life?

Jesus’ message is for everyone -- not just the prostitutes or the notorious sinners, but also, as Scripture describes Joseph of Arimathea, those who are “seeking the kingdom of God.” Jesus doesn’t only spend his time in drug dens or brothels, but also with the lady in the nursing home whose Bible’s pages are wearing away at the corners from use. Jesus doesn’t only spend his time on street corners or with the lepers, but also around family dinner tables and snuggling with kids on his lap.

But even more messy, we’re not called to just relinquish, or abandon those things on the altar, not just throw them at the feet of God and walk away. Because what do we do every time we gather together? We bring up our offerings -- not just the offering plates, but the very bread and wine that becomes Christ’s body and blood -- those offerings are blessed by God through the hands of the priest on God’s own altar, and then what happens to them? What happens to that bread and wine, and what happens to the money in the alms basins?

We can call this glory because God in Christ walked the way of the cross and found in it not an end, not defeat, but instead walked through it to the joy of Easter morning. If there were no Easter morning victory then again: Peter would be right. It would be better to avoid the pain and the suffering that comes along with loving our enemies, and seeking reconciliation with people who have done us wrong and frankly don’t deserve it. Isn’t that what Peter said? “Forget them! They don’t care about you; they want to kill you! Tell them off and leave them alone. If you try to love them you’ll just wind up getting hurt.”If Jesus were not raised from the dead, that would make a whole lot of sense. It’s easier all things considered to just give up on people…But that’s not what Jesus did to us. He could have stayed up on that mountain. He didn’t have to go to Jerusalem and suffer and die at our hands. He could have stayed up there and waited for us to come to him, and to hell with everyone else. But that’s not what he did. He went down from the mountain. He went to the cross. He came to us. And that’s where he revealed his glory.

How easily we forget the real discomfort we invite into our lives when we take just one step forward. It’s one thing to read “from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt,” and to organize a clothing drive. It’s quite another, when someone new comes into your life, and you graciously offer them a welcome-to-the-neighborhood casserole, and after they accept it, they ask if you’d watch their dog next week while they’re out of town, and gather their mail and water their plants, too. Until the gift we offer starts to hurt us, it isn’t anything to do with the Gospel. We might give away our coat out of the goodness of our own heart, but shedding our shirt can only come by the grace and strength of God. We might invite a new couple over for dinner, but showing up to babysit their kids each month so they can take a date without paying an arm and a leg, that commitment comes by the grace and strength of God.

Why in this passage do the people of Nazareth become so angry at Jesus? And what does it tell us about the real Jesus? I think we can sum it up with two words. The real Jesus in this story is both too exclusive and too inclusive for the people to take. Both sides of it tick them off and if we’re honest, they may very well tick us off too.

So here’s the rub. It looks awfully clean around here. Out in the world, we’re told all week long to cover up our messes, to hide our shame in the dark, to paint over our struggles and to minimize our pain. Brothers and sisters, we’ve brought some of that in here. Here into this sacred space where God opens his arms wide on the cross -- can you think of a bigger mess? -- we sometimes bring that lie which says that we can only be loved and accepted if we cover up our messes. Adam and Eve covered up their mess with fig leaves. We cover up our messes with glossing over and cheerfulness and keeping the closet doors closed and using mirrors to shift shadows around so that other people don’t see any mess. I’m not saying that you need to regurgitate your whole sordid history to the person in the pew next to you; I am saying that we need, humans need, God longs for us to enjoy, truth and transparency.

I’ve found it’s the same with our marriages and rearing children, living with our aging parents, and caring for them with our cantankerous siblings. The easiest and least-suffering that we can experience in these relationships is to be a doormat, or to put up a wall, to let others and their desires and their directions just run your life, or just do their own thing. This is suffering, too, just like if Jesus had said, “Yes, Ma’am,” and gone along with what Mary said. But this kind of suffering, passive suffering, suffering without your taking part in it, without you choosing it, this is not holy suffering. It is cursed. It is the suffering of the battered woman is never God’s call. The suffering of the starving child is not ever God’s call. The suffering of the kid passed around foster care is not ever God’s call. The suffering of being bled dry by an addicted family member is not ever God’s call.

Advent began in the dark as we waited for God’s salvation to come, and then at Christmas the light came on all in a rush: Joy to the world, the Savior reigns! Epiphany is meant to be the season where we all like the three wise men come to Bethlehem to see the Lord. It’s a season that focuses on seeing Christ. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us at Christmas, and now in Epiphany we stay awhile with this one called Jesus. Who is he? Have we really seen who Jesus is, or is the Jesus we thought we knew much smaller than the real thing?

The fact remains, my friends, that for these wise men from the East, God used a star. He showed up in the heavens, not riding on a chariot of clouds or as an old man with a great, flowing beard, but as a light, a ball of gases moving across the sky, a common constellation which St. Matthew tells us the astronomers “observed… at its rising.” If God revealed himself by way of a star to these pagans, and indeed, that sciencey-ball of gas led these Gentiles exactly to the foot of Jesus, I wonder where God might be showing up in our own lives today.

God didn’t have to be born of a woman, you know. The miracle of the virgin birth and the Incarnation is great enough that I suppose God could have sent his Son as a full-grown man, all grown up and able to take care of himself. But that’s not what he did. God sent his son in the relentless, all-consuming, adorably cute, dare I say even manipulative love of a little child.

If you find yourself in the bleak midwinter of life, the Christmas feast we’ll celebrate tomorrow is especially for you. If your health is failing, if your marriage is struggling, if your loved ones are dying, if you look at the mess of your life and are suffering the heartache that sin always brings, Christmas is for you. Christmas isn’t just for the kids. It’s for the grown-ups. It’s for us when we’ve reached the end of the line, when our hope is gone, when our hearts are frozen in the bleak midwinter of grief and anger and we wonder where God went. When that’s where we are, our lives are in the season of Advent.

Do we see, or witness, or experience, a wave of God’s grace and immediately run off to spend it? Do we respond to a prompting of God’s spirit by jumping into action, running off to Home Depot for lumber or to Target for Christmas gifts or to the kitchen to clean up, or make a casserole? I wonder if we might be cutting off the Holy Spirit, if we might be curtailing God’s hand. Not that we wield so much power as to derail almighty God, but like toddlers, I’m afraid we might get up and start running around before the conversation is over, before God is finished speaking.

We can’t get rid of John the Baptist’s call to repentance and we shouldn’t try, but neither do we have to be afraid of it. The experience we’ve had of false accusation and self-interested blame may give us every reason in the world to get defensive, to get our hackles up, to counter-punch and deny we’re at fault even a little. But the God who revealed himself to us in Jesus Christ is a loving God, full of both grace and truth.

Jesus said, "There will be signs… on the earth distress among nations... People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world.”And so what does Jesus tell us to do about this? We may agree or disagree about what exactly the signs are or which are the scariest of the swirling powers in the world, but the one thing we can control and change, something over which, in this tangled up and chaotic world, we do have power, is the way we choose to respond to fear and to insecurity, the way we choose to behave when we’re vulnerable.

So in the spirit of stewardship season, in addition to examining our bank accounts and our spending habits, I urge us to consider those things that we hold close to our hearts, the things that, when knocked around or displaced or challenged, we rise up quickly to defend, to put back in the same spot, to restore equilibrium as quickly as possible. Because those are the things that have weaseled into our hearts. Whatever leaves us feeling adrift when it’s removed, whatever shoves us into irritation when it’s shifted, whatever makes us all twitchy when it’s disturbed, that is what we’ve been making into a god. That’s the thing that’s been controlling our thoughts and spinning up lies in our heads.

Don’t give just because this church needs it. Give instead because we need God, and so that we can reach out to our neighbors who need God too. Give because we all need to be free of the grip that money has on our hearts, of greed and pride and the anxious worry that we need every cent because we can’t depend on God. Give because when you give, to God and to the Kingdom of God, that is what your heart will begin to love.

Stewardship isn’t just a season about raising money and getting volunteers. Not at all. It’s about learning to see our whole lives as a gift from God, and offering it back as a gift. It’s not about how many zeroes are in your bank account. It’s not about how talented you think you are or how well you can sing. It’s about taking whatever gifts God has blessed you with and offering them back with a cheerful heart and a generous spirit. It’s not just about what we give to God here in church; it’s about what we give to God in our whole lives, at home, at work, in our neighborhoods, and everywhere else.

We might think it’s obvious that if we were blind, we’d ask to see again, but is that really true? Being blind, after all, can be more comfortable than the alternative. We have blind spots because there are things that we don’t want to see, either about ourselves or the world we live in. How would I live with myself if… Who would I even be if I were wrong about… What if I had to admit that they’re right… What would I have to give up if I really followed Jesus? Bartimaeus wasn’t afraid. He wanted to see, really see, however hard it was, whatever it cost.