The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

The Ven. Richard I. Cluett

My, wasn’t that a comforting Word from the Lord Jesus? I have always wondered what was the origin of that saying about the job of the preacher being “to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.” I think we have found it in today’s gospel passage.

Wherever happened to the Jesus who said in Matthew; “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Is this the same Jesus? The simple answer is, Yes.

So, what do you think is going on with Jesus here? Did he get out on the wrong side of the bed? Is he just having a bad day? Perhaps his biorhythms are off. Maybe like the flight attendant who jumped down the emergency chute and out of his job, perhaps he had just had enough with how things are, and was ready now for some radical change. Was there some specific event or circumstance around Jesus that occasioned this outburst? Or maybe if not Jesus, then maybe around Luke, that would cause him to highlight this dimension of Jesus and the world?

Do you remember what John the Baptist said about Jesus way back before the beginning of Jesus’ ministry? In Matthew 3:11 we hear John say, “I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

Is it possible that the world is such – that the human condition is such – that the breaking in of the reign of God will cause radical change, will demand radical change? Is it possible that the kingdom of God looks little like the world we inhabit, looks nothing like some of the uglier aspects of the world? Is it possible that the best of human community is but a veiled shadow of what God has in store for creation?

God has declared through his prophet Isaiah that “They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”

If that is the case, then it would not be surprising that the breaking in of the reign of God will cause some breaking of old habits, some rejection of ingrained patterns of living, some necessity to separate, to divide oneself from the evil powers of the world and from people whose behavior or mission is to hurt or destroy.

We affirm that truth whenever we baptize someone and welcome him or her into the household of God. “Do you renounce the evil powers of the world that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God?” “I renounce them,” we say. I remove myself from them, we say. I place a divide between who I am and what they do, we say.

We may need to go even further than that. We may need to separate ourselves, to purify ourselves from some dimensions of our selves. What are my behaviors, my habits that are hurtful to others? Can I renounce them? Truly renounce them? What do I do that tears down, rather than builds up? Can I renounce them? What in my life keeps other people at a distance, keeps God at a distance, separates me from knowing the fullness of God’s love, God’s presence in my life, God’s power? Can I renounce them? What lives in the darkness in me that needs to be brought into the light? Can I renounce them?

What are “the false hopes, bad dreams, and reckless lies” that I love to love? Don Clendenin has come up with his partial list.

“* I deserve perfect health and the medicine to get me there, especially given how hard I work out.


* I'm entitled to all the passionate sex that the tabloids describe and the movies depict.


* There's a solution to every problem if I pray hard enough.


* I'd be happier in a bigger house in a better location, or in a smaller house with less upkeep. 


* I'd be happier in a newer house with fewer repairs, or in an older house with more charm.


* I wouldn't be such a mess if not for my family of origin.


* I'd find more fulfillment in a different job.


* My kids deserve straight teeth, the best universities, challenging jobs, financial success, and model marriages. And they should make me proud. 


* I will give a little more when I get a little more. Just a little more, enough to be secure.”

* … I expect "a front row seat in a life of miracles."


These are his, what might yours be? These are all false prophecies about how life is to be, about what one can expect, about what is of value. Jeremiah calls those who tout these false visions, those who sell these false visions of life, “false prophets”. Their words are not God’s Word. They promise what cannot be delivered. We read in Jeremiah, “Is not my word like fire, says the LORD, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?”

What the false prophets hold out to the world is gossamer; it blows away in the wind, as in “It ain’t ever going to happen like that for you.” Or sometimes what they hold out can capture us and blind us to any other way of thinking or living or being.

And yet, Jesus tells us that there is another way. In last Sunday’s NY Times Business section there was a column titled, “But will it make you happy?” The opening paragraph went this way: “She had so much. A two-bedroom apartment. Two cars. Enough wedding china to serve two dozen people. Yet Tammy Strobel wasn’t happy. … she was, as she put it, caught in the “work-spend treadmill.” So one day she stepped off.”

She just stepped off. She broke away. That’s something like what Jesus was talking about. Sometimes living fully, living truthfully, living deeply into the reign and life of God requires us to move away from, to break asunder, to be refined in the fire of repentance.

And the good news is that it is possible at any time, it is possible at every time to make the break that is necessary to find healing and wholeness. The human story is the story of God’s redeeming work at any time and every time throughout history, and for each of us that redeeming work will be completed in God’s time.

As Dylan Breuer has written, “(The human story) is a story of pain and tears and brokenness, but it is a story of love, joy, and hope that ends in wholeness, in the world coming to know, and you and I coming to know, just how high and broad and deep God's love and blessings for Creation are,” including the part of creation that bears your name.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

The Rev. Canon Mariclair Partee

So- how about these readings today? A little depressing, right? We have vanity (and vanity, and vanity) and greed and dying unaware, all in spades.

We are warned again and again in Ecclesiastes and the psalm of the sin of greed, of the risk of prizing things over relationships with each other and with God. We are shown, in the teacher character form Ecclesiastes, exactly how gloomy and fixated and anxious one can become when getting is all that we think about. Everything else loses meaning, and we find ourselves, bitter and jealous, sitting alone on a pile of money, terrified of who might get it once we die. That, truly, is vanity!

But then in Colossians, we are reminded that behind the sin of greed, there is an even greater sin- the sin of self-sufficiency, of believing that we can ever have so much stuff that we no longer need each other. In Jesus, we are reminded, God offers us another way.

I have a confession to make. I am a saver. For me, saving money is like a sport- when most of my friends were buying their first new cars, I was starting an IRA, I buy things for full price so rarely that I can pretty much remember each occasion in the last five years, and I get a thrill when I find a bargain online. Even as a little girl, when I came into money, whether a dollar from the Tooth Fairy or $5 in a birthday card or a quarter I found in the sofa, I squirreled it away somewhere, and saved it. My mother tells stories of finding little pockets of change and dollar bills folded ever smaller around my room, and my older brother constantly coming to me with “investment opportunities.”

All of that back story is to explain why, when I got a statement from the Social Security office in the mail earlier this week, it had the impact on me that it did. I was pretty excited to find out that I’ve finally worked enough units or whatever they call it to be a part of the program. I felt good about that, I liked the idea of having some security in that murky, hazy future, still so many decades off, when I am told I get to retire.

And then I read the sheet called: What young workers should know about social security. After detailing all the reasons the program will be vital in my eventual old age, it posed the question so many folks in my generation have been asking for a while now: will social security be around when I retire? I don’t think I will spoil it for you when I tell you the official answer was somewhere between probably and maybe.

Anxiety took hold as I looked at the graphs of how saving x amount of dollars now at y % would mean z in savings in forty years, and my chest got a little tight and I eventually had to just go do something else altogether because I was getting a little freaked out.

We all carry our false gods with us in life, and I realized, once again, that I had made something of an idol out of financial security. I know that I am not alone when I identify with the man in today’s Gospel who has worked hard and focused on the future and pinched and planned to insure his comfort and security, and in the process has lost sight, a little, of all those other important aspects of life.

We have felt the false peace of the farmer in Luke, relaxing, finally, with the feeling that we have saved enough, we have done enough, we have made the right decisions, and now we are assured of happiness and security. Except, like the farmer, we can too easily lose sight of the bigger picture. Because just as we say to our souls, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years, [now] relax, eat, drink and be merry!”, we realize that life is unpredictable, and none of us knows when its final day might come, and if we’ve staked our entire being on having enough, we have very little support when we find that we are lacking.

To quote Walter Brueggeman, theologian, we have been caught in the foolish destructiveness of self-sufficiency. Luke’s parable, Brueggeman says, portrays a fool who is a great accumulator and who imagines that his vast possessiveness adds to his well being. In the end he is talking only to himself, he is isolated, and his self-satisfaction is interrupted by death.

The message, as always, is that balance is key. Of course we should all live with an eye towards the future, we should all save and practice sound financial stewardship, but we cannot let that future security become an obsession- we must also live in the present moment, not become so attached to things and money that we squirrel them away, like my young self with my tiny folded bills, without enjoying them - we have to come to a place where we recognize that those bills are a means to an end, and that end is a life that includes the joy of charity, the pleasure of pleasures, and keeping ourselves open to the community we live in.

We know that greed is a way of worshipping the wrong gods, but it is easier to forget that security itself can be a false god, an attempt to wrest control from the hands of the God who made us.

To quote Brueggeman once more, this teaching is urgent in our society, not only because of the perennial seduction of greed, but because we live in an era in which credit and tax law and advertisements all seek to make greed into a civic virtue. We know better! We may choose against preoccupation with getting and having, and instead choose a life centered on compassion, on kindness, on humility, meekness, patience, forgiveness- we can choose a life centered on a new self, the one baptized into Christ.

Let us pray:

Lord, help us to relax.
Take from us the tension that makes peace impossible,
Take from us the fears that do not allow us to venture,
Take from us the worries that blind our sight,
Take from us the distress that hides our joy,
Help us to know that we are with you,
That we are in your care,
That we are in your love,
That you and we are one.
AMEN.