Sabbath and Freedom - Proper 16 - Isaiah 58:9b-14, Luke 13:10-17

if you honor (the Sabbath), not going your own ways, serving your own interests, or pursuing your own affairs; then you shall take delight in the LORD, and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth (Is. 58)

Keep the Sabbath holy. This notion dips in and out of Jesus’s ministry, showing up particularly at times of conflict. Keeping the Sabbath holy was, to Jesus and his contemporaries, not simply a matter of having a day-off from work; to keep Sabbath was how the Jews understood their life with God: their obligation to define time in a particular way that reflected the act of God in creation, and God’s deliverance of Israel from their slavery to the Egyptians. To break the Sabbath was akin to rupturing the order of things. It was to fall back into a kind of slavery.

The version of the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy directly links the Sabbath with liberation from bondage: ‘You shall remember that you were a servant in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out thence with a mighty hand an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day‘ [Deuteronomy 5.15]. Under this description, Israel is liberated from bondage into bonds with its God. These are bonds, however, that do not tie them down but that make them at home with God and each other. Left to themselves, without the bond of Sabbath, the people looked for gods to enslave themselves to. But if they lived under the law, in the kind of society that refuses the idol of productivity and the compulsive need to be a success story, then they will preserve the freedom God has given them. In other words, freedom for Israel was not automatic and certainly not a birthright. It could not be taken for granted. It depended on how people related to each other, what sort of community they had their lives in. 

Jesus unquestionably believed this: he thought the whole point and purpose of the Sabbath and the Torah in general was, and always had been, to enshrine and maintain a certain way of living together which he called love. It was not the case that Jesus placed love in opposition to law; rather through his teaching, his life with others, and even in his death, the obligations expressed through keeping the Sabbath were the ways in which he showed how we can abide in relationships with other people, and with our God. For love is a sign of those enduring fidelities which give us stability and identity. True freedom, Jesus taught, is found through being grounded and connected with God and others. When we lose Sabbath and its bonds of fidelity and stability, we become adrift as people, making secure our lives to whatever passes these days as solid: our possessions, our work, perhaps even our passing interest in God. 

Are we a people without Sabbath, without, that is, fidelity and stability as religious believers? Sociologist Richard Sennett refers to our age as one of ‘fleeting forms of association’ whereby strong social ties like loyalty and long-term connection have ceased to be compelling.  "No long term", Sennett continues, means keep moving, don't commit yourself, and don't sacrifice.[i]  Instead of friendships, we have transactions of products and people; instead of rest, we have entertainment; instead of freedom, we are in bondage to our own determined self-sufficiency. We become bent over like the women healed by Jesus in today’s gospel, unable to stand erect as members of a stable community bound together in love. The enslavement the women experienced was like a demonic burden that limited not only mobility, but her freedom to live and share in the life of others. In releasing her, Jesus showed us and his detractors the shape of life with God, the promise of his enduring care.

The Sabbath is a sign that none of us are ultimately slaves, neither of work nor of any human being nor even of God. The Sabbath is a sign of the dignity of every human being whom God has called to share his life. The erosion of fidelity to friendship, rest, and stability bear witness to a society that does not recognize this ultimate shared dignity. We go on producing and consuming without interruption. The vision of Jesus gestures towards something else; he points to our liberation, where, in the words of Isaiah, we shall take delight in the LORD. 

Our freedom is ultimately what it means for us to live into the space God opens up for us; a space where we can share friendship and be healed of our broken hopes, our ruined relationships, and the rest of our  ‘fleeting forms of association’. We were made for stability; we were created for joy. To keep the Sabbath and to do so as an expression of holiness, is to embrace our purpose and destiny as a people defined by our bonds. The gift God gives through the Sabbath is the basis for our freedom; to abide with him is the beginning of our liberation from our slavery to patterns of life that restrict human wellbeing. When we are free, we can, like the healed woman, stand secure as a member of a community shaped by love, and under a God who in Christ, has called us into new life.

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[i] Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (W. W. Norton & Company, 2011), pp. 24–25.

On God and Goals - Proper 14 - Luke 12:32-40

Jesus said to his disciples, "Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”

There are a number of important themes that run through our scripture readings for this morning. The vision of Isaiah speaks to the place of purity and obedience for God’s people, while our lesson from Hebrews outlines a program of faith, such as exemplified in Abraham and Sarah and their journey into the unknown under God’s care. For his part, St. Luke lifts up the message of hope: the kingdom of God, Jesus announces in today’s reading, is for those who maintain focus on God’s arrival in their midst, even as God comes in unexpected ways and in God’s good time.  A key for God’s presence being the desire that God’s people live richly through serving each other.  What I would like to explore this morning is how all of our texts gesture towards an understanding of human life as having a goal, an end if you will, and this goal is a graced humanity through which we are united one-to-another, and ultimately with God himself.

The first thing to say is that such a goal of human life operates within a climate where many alternative goals seem also to exist. Isaiah’s poetry is pretty clear on this point. Isaiah pictures wasted sacrifices and even oppression as activities associated with the wayward Israelites. “I cannot endure solemn assemblies of such iniquity”, God declares to the people. Despite their elaborate cult of worship, oppression and injustice were the defining marks of the community. In the book of Hebrews, we find a tamer context, yet there remains the real possibility that Abraham and the ancestors could have stayed put, instead of venturing in faith to the place of God’s calling. “But as it is”, the writer declares, “they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one”. It would be reasonable to consider the plight of Isaiah’s listeners, and the objects of the admiration in Hebrews to be as a result of choices: the oppressing people choosing poorly, while the faithful ancestors choosing well. And of course, choice does have something to do with it. Yet there exists in scripture a deeper reason for human activity than personal choice; one that assumes as a basic premise that to be human in the simplest sense is already to possess a direction in life that is only fulfilled completely in the company of God.

This deeper reason, as I call it, this inclination in us, operates with a different set of assumptions to what is often accepted today as common wisdom in matters of what counts as a goal and purpose for human living. This common wisdom goes like this: people first of all just are, and what categories they may fit into, what kind of being they are, what relationships they have with others, is a subsequent and secondary matter determined, in the case of ‘authentic’ people, by their own choices. Human beings may, for their own purposes, ascribe functions to things. I may make a spoon in order to eat my breakfast cereal, and it will be a good one if it fulfils the purpose I have given it, and a bad one if it does not. In a similar way, a group of people may invent the art and institution of sailing and similarly decide what makes for good sailing and what for bad; all these purposes are ascribed by the decisions human beings make. We cannot, says this common wisdom, in the same way speak of human beings themselves as having been ascribed a purpose or role. Of course, human beings can be given roles, as when we appoint them as teachers or carpenters, and then they may be judged on objective grounds as good or bad teachers or carpenters. But we do not appoint people to be human beings, and so we cannot on any objective grounds say that a person is living well or poorly only that they are performing particular tasks well or not. For this way of thinking, purposes and roles are always human artifacts. There are no purposes prior to human decisions; there are no purposes for human beings in themselves. We simply exist, and through our choices, determine what our purpose is, and what it is not.

Such wisdom operates in such a way that to suggest an alternative is to threaten some form of determinism (so popular with the new atheists), or worse, the failed social experiments of totalitarianism in all its varieties. Any view that hinders our freedom must be suspect. Or so the common wisdom purports. The deeper reason that I am suggesting is evident through our readings this morning begins with the assumption that to be human is already to have a goal before any choices are made. And this goal is understood as what human life is when it has reached its best state, its perfection and completion in and for itself. An example may be called for here. We may decide to be a doctor or a lobsterman, and this decision will require a whole host of considerations, plans and choices, as well as matters such as family expectations, financial resources and the rest – and depending on how things go, we may succeed or fail to be a doctor or lobsterman. Having a goal in as much as we are human, however, is not like having a purpose in life: it is more like having a job – the job of living humanly well, in succeeding to act, think, and generally exist in the world in the most humanly way possible. 

What it means to live humanly well is what Isaiah is calling for in a community that seeks justice, rescues the oppressed, defends the orphan and pleads for the widow. Living humanly well is what the writer of Hebrews suggests as what having faith means. Faith is not just a feeling or a mood, but a kind of understanding or knowing that God loves us, and that such love is proper because we are creatures of God’s creating. Likewise, to do the job of being human, and do it well, is what Jesus refers to as the Kingdom that God desires to make real in those whose lives are prepared to receive it. There are some who limit the goal of human living to various subsets of moral activity, concluding that following particular rules and abiding by specific ethical teaching is equivalent to living well. What I am suggesting is that while moral behavior is part of our goal for living as human beings, the deeper reasoning evident in our readings is not reducible to only moral considerations: again, to simply exist as a human is to have a goal, and this goal includes not just our actions, but also the reasons for our actions, the shape of the communities to which we belong, and way we are open or not to showing love to friends, neighbors and even enemies. Such a goal is more than a series of choices; it means that in the midst of our complex lives and world, there are myriad purposes for us to explore, and a single goal towards which we are drawn. The significance being that as we grow deeper into living humanly well, the better we see ourselves as sharing in the mystery of goodness and joy that are gifts of God.

To claim that to be human means to have a goal, and this goal is a life with God shared through a community of goodness and joy, is to claim the same things as Isaiah does with Israel, and Jesus does for his disciples when they reminds us of God’s desire to shape us into God’s people who are invested in the work of salvation, justice and worship. This work – the job of being human – is discoverable at one level as we consider the kind of life that we might consider full and rich. Yet, it is God’s good pleasure to reveal and help us see the broader and deeper implications of our humanity through the gift of faith. And what faith does is show us that is that our journey to God as our goal is not completed under our own power. Through learning to see our way in the world by means of divine goodness and joy, we begin to recognize that as we journey, we are sometimes subtly, sometime surprisingly, being drawn to what we were made for: the eternal love which is the Father. What we discover is that all along, the closer we come to God, the more we learn what our humanity is all about.

As people, we not only have purpose, we have an end to which our life is moving. What we do and say, how we live and who we love is not inconsequential, for all of our decisions shape our lives in one way or another. What doesn’t change is the path on which the fullness of humanity is learned and lived. The good news that is presented in scripture, is that it is God’s desire that we grow into living well, and this is neither a reward for good behavior nor a carrot placed before us as we travail. God in Christ has opened the way for us to reach our proper end. For in Christ, we discover the fullness of human life; a life that is perfected in faith by the delight of God.

On God and Greed - Proper 13: Luke 12:13-21

But God said to (the man), `You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God."

It is unsurprising that Jesus is against human greed. Most people are. Despite the ease with which it is condemned, greed is a multi-headed hydra, existing and reemerging in forms and shapes that conceal its essence behind social, political and economic facades that are not always identifiable as simply as the farmer in today’s gospel. One man’s greed is another man’s responsible investment strategy.   Rather than considering the evils of greed, I wish to take a few moments this morning to examine what it might mean to be rich toward God, the very thing the greedy farmer was not.

Before we attend to what it means to be rich toward God, it is worth noting two general arguments that have arisen over the ages that question the involvement of God in the kind of everyday social and economic issues that we face as humans. First, there is the concern that religion  in  its  Christian  conception  divides human loyalties, placing our longings beyond this world and rejecting  the  view  of  human  nature  as  most  fundamentally  grounded  in self-interest  for  material  comfort. In the modern era, the goal, this position holds, is not that of redemption and human perfection by an other-worldly entity, but the domain of productive channeling of the enormous energies of self-interest toward the mastery of the natural world of resources and the internal world of desires and needs.  While religiously minded people are considered too heavenly minded to have any earthly good, the modern and enlightened person sees fit to make of this world what they can in order to live comfortably and securely with a minimum of distress. To such a person, society does not require agreement in matters of religion or ‘private morals’ when it comes to concerns around wealth or greed; these belong to the sphere of comment and are relegated first to private judgment and then, as their social irrelevance becomes clearer, to the subjective world of ‘values’.

The second argument against bringing God into the mix of human enterprise is one that has haunted modern atheism since Nietzsche. It has to do with how we understand the way God and humanity relate. The concern is not that God is a cruel and dangerous boss who orders us mere mortals around, demanding that we pray and always give to the poor, but that God is boss at all. A kindly and considerate slave master is still a slave master, and for Nietzsche the relationship of God and creature could not be other than one of master and slave. God and therefore God’s involvement in matters like finances is rejected not in the name of human happiness but in the name of human freedom. Better to rid ourselves of a divine taskmaster and get on with becoming better humans, this position holds, then to live with the illusion that God has our best interests in mind when calling for us to help strangers and give our money to charity. God is an excuse for our failure, Nietzsche and his disciples contend; better that we strive and struggle for human excellence on our own terms.

To summarize the two positions: one, God is what we appeal to as a matter of private belief and personal values without the social significance of say, the marketplace or political policy, and two, our freedom as humans consists in rejecting the divine moral arbitrator of religious belief in favor of a more assertive and presumably, more human human existence. Both are part of our social framework and are appealed to in some form whenever religious fervor threatens to cross over into the actual day-to-day living as political, social and economic animals. I am lingering a bit on these points primarily because of their potency in reducing something like today’s parable to a fairy tale rather than a call for living a certain kind of life. If God is a symbol of our moral weakness, or if we desire to share what we have with others because it earns us points in heaven, then being rich towards God is a lovely metaphor, yet it lacks any coherence - let alone power - to help us live and grow as people.

This is unfortunate, for the message of Jesus is one that promotes a vision of human wellbeing against the paucity of life represented in the genteel farmer and his growing crop yield. Yes, the farmer can eat, drink and be merry, and yes, these things are good things worthy of human endeavor; however, the whole episode displays a serious lack. At the end of the day, nothing in the farmer’s life is received or indeed, shared, as the gift it actually is. From his life to the bumper crops, the farmer has thought that to possess and have is equivalent to a full life. To this, Jesus offers a critique: true richness is a life ordered to God as a generous creator.
What this parable shows us is that we do not live by building ever more secure fences of possessions around ourselves, but by giving to others space to live. This is to give life to others. The human animal and human society flourishes, not to the extent that it possesses riches, but to the extent that we give life to each other, to the extent that we imitate the creativity of God. For God's creative act is an act of God's poverty, for God gains nothing by it. God makes without becoming richer. His act of creation is purely and simply for the benefit of his creatures. We are sometimes tempted to ask what motive God had for making the world - meaning 'What did he hope to gain by it?' But, of course, this question is absurd. It is only creation that gains by God's act. It is a purely gratuitous act of love, that characteristic act of love which is the giving of life.

To be ‘rich towards God’ is shorthand for a learning to pattern our lives on the creativity of God. This is not about some blandly generalized benevolence that on occasion and for tax purposes we extend to individuals and institutions in need. It is always a worthwhile act to give, yet there is a tendency in us to see such giving as a transaction alone. What is missing is the risk associated with opening our lives through our giving. The richness Jesus has in mind is the kind of direction our lives display in opening the barriers associated with securing and defending the goods that are common to us as humans – goods as basic as food and as complicated as justice – not simply to share, but to actually participate in as part of what it means for us to thrive as people. Such goods to be participated in are neither mine-rather-than-others’ nor others’-rather-than-mine, but instead are goods that can only be mine insofar as they are also those of others, that are genuinely common goods, as those defined through giving and receiving. This isn’t the stuff of some idealized utopia or some weird 60’s era commune, but a particular direction for living that is attuned to a sustainable economic and political path that reflects the loving abandon God demonstrates in securing us moment by moment as beloved daughters and sons.

We cannot act, as God does, for no benefit to ourselves. But we can  live  (either more or less)  by the  free  gift  we  make  to  others.  It is a question of which direction we are aiming for through our ordinary, everyday living. All this can be summarized by saying that as humans, we live by sharing and participating in mutuality with others, in friendship if you will, and that our location to God is learnt partly through such relationships. It’s a bit platitudinous to claim this, I know, but what I want to make clear is that the process of living in friendship, the tasks associated with making life possible for others through holding as common those things implicit to a thriving human life; all of this is patterned on and a reflection of a God who creates freely with gratuitous love and who has befriended us in Jesus. To live as though such love and friendship is true, is to move beyond the position that holds our religious belief as a private affair, and likewise to shatter the idol of the taskmaster god. It is to be rich toward God; to draw on his grace and participate in his joy without bland benevolence or naïve appeals to simply getting along.

As Jesus’s own life demonstrates, to live with such richness is to challenge the ways and means by which we isolate and inflict violence upon one another. For to be rich toward God is to live more deeply into our humanity as we have received it: as a gift from a gracious God. At the end of the day, it is how we live out of such giftedness that shapes our wellbeing. This path of life may not yield bigger and better barns for what we possess and subsequently have to defend; but it will provide a richness in human living that will satisfy us down to the very fiber of our being.