Readings for Pentecost 14/Proper 16C

• Isaiah 58:9b-14 
• Psalm 103:1-8 
• Hebrews 12:18-29 
• Luke 13:10-17

Bent Over Lives, Sermon by Pastor Fred Kinsey, 


Christ has died.  Christ is risen.  Christ will come again.  A simple, and a basic creed.  

Or we could say it this way: Lives are bent over.  Lives are straightened up tall again.  The powers of oppression and abuse that bend our lives over, will be conquered forever.

Or, in the words of Isaiah:

(1) “If you remove the yoke from among you,
the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,

(2) if you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted…

(3) The LORD will guide you continually,
and satisfy your needs in parched places,
…and you shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water, whose waters never fail.” (Is. 58:9-11)  

Or, in the words of Martin Luther King, 50 years ago this week, when he said: “There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, ‘When will you be satisfied?’ … and, quoting another OT prophet, “we will not be satisfied,” said King, “until ‘justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.’”  Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

Two Saturdays ago, when I came home from my Zombie Apocalypse class, after being gone for a week, my poor tomato plants were droopy and bent over.  Our neighbors promised to water them while we were gone, and maybe they did, but not enough.  Their limbs were dry, arthritic and curling down.  It made me realize not only the physical discomfort that the bent over woman must have felt, but also the position it put her in, in regards to the world.  Her view was downcast, bound toward everyone’s feet, and so she would not have been in sync with other humans around her.  And yet, her perception was not as crippled as those leaders of the faith who derided Jesus for lifting her up on the Sabbath Day, and freeing her from this bondage.  Their view, was more arthritic, and more self-righteous, by far. 

In Luke’s gospel story Jesus publically enacts the power of healing in the realm of God, when he encounters the woman bent over by a spirit that had crippled her for 18 years.  The woman has not asked to be healed. She simply finds herself in Jesus’ presence—and that leads to healing and life for her.  Jesus laid hands on her and said, Woman you are set free from your ailment. And she stood up straight and began praising God, as so often in Luke, the downcast are chosen to sing the praises of the realm of God among us.

Lives are bent over.  Lives are straightened up.  The powers of oppression and abuse that bend our lives over, will be conquered forever.

Or, we could also tell the story this way: Jesus came into our world, offering himself as the ultimate righteous scapegoat, whose innocent death opens our eyes to our own violence we do to one another, not just war and abuse, but oppression and duplicity of all kinds, the half-truths and lies we trap ourselves in, for both personal and institutional gain. But because God raised Jesus to new life – a tangible embodied symbol of victory over this old way of life arose for us, the same promise of the realm of God Jesus announced and enacted in his ministry of baptism, healing and celebratory meal of forgiveness.  And, the coming again part, is Christ renewing the world and allowing us to see the change from one age to the next that has already been offered, and lives here now, if we chose to embody it ourselves, and have the courage to call-out the old world that continues to push it’s destructive agenda, even as we now know better.

This Wednesday, there is a big celebration planned for the 50th Anniversary – to the day – of the “March on Washington for Jobs, Justice and Freedom” where The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.  Earlier that year in April, King had already written his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” addressed to the largely sympathetic, middle-of-the-road, white clergy of Birmingham.  It was a risky but necessary move, in which he alternately derided, cajoled and challenged them for their lip-service thus far, to the civil rights movement – how they gave their verbal assent, but caved on the movement’s direct action.  Like the prophet Jesus, who addressed the religious leaders he encountered in our gospel today, those that thought they could separate the holy spaces of worship from our moral responsibilities in the world, King lit a fire under his white privileged colleagues.  

“I must confess,” King wrote, “that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the ‘white moderate’. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; … who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." … Lukewarm acceptance,” said King, “is much more bewildering than outright rejection. … I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities.”

In other words, their position, King is saying, in regards to the world, was downcast, bound toward everyone’s feet, and was not in sync with other humans around them – especially the black community they purported to support. 

This is largely the tact King took in his I Have a Dream speech from the Lincoln Memorial too, widening its challenge a few months later to the whole white community to join the movement.  The speech is much more than the sound-bites we know through the couple of popular quotes we always hear repeated, like: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skins but the content of their character.”  A beautiful dream in itself, of course, but often misinterpreted through the lens of “mythical time,” to use King’s words, that is, as a future we have no control over, a pie in the sky, that delays the responsibility, Christ calls us to.

Instead, the civil rights movement under Martin Luther King, lived and died by the creed: Christ has died.  Christ is risen.  Christ will come again.  Lives are bent over.  Lives are straightened up.  The powers of oppression and abuse that bend our lives over, will be conquered.  And King knew, none of the three creedal statements can ever be divorced from the other.

Jesus, healing on the Sabbath, is not just happen stance.  Just as the March on Washington for Jobs, Justice and Freedom was many years, even decades, in the making.  Jesus knew his movement, standing up for justice, embodying God’s healing, was a threatening tactic that was likely to be challenged as un-faithful, and against the religious norms of Sabbath worship.  Why then did he do it?  What did he hope to gain?

Each of our interpretive lens’ may yield different and new insights.  One thing I see, is that Jesus interjects himself into the bent-over-ness of our lives, not by happen stance, but by the power of the Holy Spirit breaking into the world to offer a continuous moment of universal redemption that brings healing to the suffering bent over seekers of justice, and calls-out the spirits of oppression.  By this embodied presence, Christ the Good Shepherd, makes a safe place for us to stand, and enables us to live lives more fully, and more joyfully already. 

And finally, this creates a holy space for us to take and eat from the bread that is his life, and to drink from the common cup that binds us together, as we proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes, with one voice, a united community.  Our response, of course, is that powerfully simple creed:  Christ has died.  Christ is risen.  Christ will come again.  

Or we could say, Lives are bent over.  Lives are straightened up.  The powers of oppression and abuse that bend our lives over, will be conquered.

Unveiling Community, Pastor Fred Kinsey
“Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled,” said Jesus! "From now on five in one household will be divided… father against son, mother against daughter, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law.” 

Strong language from Jesus!  Grating to our ears, even!  We are much more likely to respond and subscribe to Jesus’ words of, “love your neighbor,” and “Peace be with you,” than to this description of “divisions,” being created among us. 

One tool that’s helped me in understanding it better is to understand that this reading is in the genre of apocalyptic language, like in the book of Revelation.  Apocalyptic is about the travail of changing times, announcing the end of an era, and the imminent birth of a new one.  And how the birth pangs will entail divisions in family and society.  Apocalyptic is by nature metaphorical and allegorical.  But, instead of my explaining it to you, let me tell you a story about family.

The family is a family that by all appearances was happy and well adjusted.  They got along, taking vacations together and celebrating every holiday at each other’s homes.  They loved these regular reunions, and greeted each other with hugs and kisses, with love and affection.  The mom and dad had four kids, and eight grand-children, and 3 great-grandchildren.  When the father died suddenly of a heart attack, however, something happened.  With grace, charm and craftiness, he had held together the family relationships that were strained and difficult.  No one had really noticed how he had worked behind the scenes in his quiet but strong way.  But now that he was gone, things began to unravel in surprising ways. 

It turned out that, mother and the daughter-in-law, Sandra, were so similar it was scary.  They agreed on most everything, whether it was meal planning and recipes right down to how to make pancakes from scratch, or who should host the next holiday gathering.  Most of all they agreed the family was happy and everything should remain the same.  Together they were a mighty force.  It was if they were the same person!  But consequently, the dynamics between mother and her oldest daughter, Tammy, suffered.  She was left out as never before, and it created a division between mother and daughter.  They fought at the Christmas dinner for the first time since Tammy was a teen-ager, and after that, she stopped coming to the family gatherings all together. 

When her sister, Ruth, abruptly dropped out of the family gatherings too, Tammy, called her up to talk.  Tammy started out by telling Ruth she should continue to go to the family gatherings, that she shouldn’t let this rift between her and their mom hold Ruth back from being part of the family.  But that’s when it came out!  Ruth had felt ostracized for some time already.  It turned out that Ruth had been sexually abused by an uncle back in high school, and when Ruth had told her mother about what her brother did, the mother didn’t believe her, and Ruth had kept that secret all these years. 

But in that encounter between sisters, sharing their ostracism, which couldn’t be acknowledged within the happy family proper, they became sisters in a new way, at a deeper more profound level of trust and understanding.  They were tied together, not just as blood relatives, but as friends who had been through an ordeal, and had come out safely on the other side.  They had revealed their scars to each other, tattoos of suffering, that made them more vulnerable and authentic to one another. 

Last week, when the North Park group I was with arrived in the evening of the rural and remote UP, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, for the course called “Zombie Apocalypse,” the stars were shining brightly. You could even see the Milky Way.  It was the height of the Perseus meteor shower, and we were easily able to see them streak across the sky, coming in one’s and two’s every few minutes or so, directly over-head.  It was an awesome and eerie spectacle!  And you can see why shooting stars are one of the signs of the coming Apocalypse in the gospels, along with earthquakes, and wars, and rumors of war. 

The literal meaning of Apocalypse is, “to pull back the curtain,” an unveiling, or revealing before the end-times.  Apocalyptic literature always arises out of times of crises, and it unveils both the beast of oppression, as well as the source of life that will bring us through the ordeal.  It points us to a deeper truth, and strengthens the foundation of life-giving community, here and now.

The book of Revelation was written at the height of Rome’s persecution of Christians, and the vision of redemption is a renewal of the society they lived in.  Not an escape, but the New Jerusalem would come down to earth, and the new age, divinely ordained, would soon come. 

The apocalyptic signs – division in families, wars, racial discrimination, etc. – are the ‘push-back’ of the powers that are offended by this unveiling and threatened by the kingdom and realm of God, ushered in.  But by the revelation, the unveiling of our scars and abuse, our hidden power plays we perpetrate on each other, unjust society is ‘outed’ for all to see.  The façade of smoothly running families and institutions, either covers up these wounds, or is complicit in veiling greater injustice on the scapegoated victims of society – or both!  Divisions arise, or come to light, as never before.

“Jesus also said to the crowds, "When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, 'It is going to rain'; and so it happens.  And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, 'There will be scorching heat'; and it happens.  You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?”

If Jesus came to give us a new understanding of family and society, then we must learn to read the signs of the times. We must stop the hypocrisy of the insider-outsider games we play and look around us at the whole human family that surrounds us. How do we read the signs of our times? How do we read our current politics and economics? Do they help us to reach out to the oppressed and suffering? Or do they help us to ignore those who suffer…? to write them off as outsiders and monsters who must somehow deserve their fate? Are we striving after a false peace at the expense of those we have exploited and demonized?

Jesus, who referred to himself as a prophet, one that would be rejected and killed in Jerusalem – in a long line of martyred prophets – also brings the promise of the kingdom of God, a new community, that will be based not just on blood relatives, but on the New Jerusalem, coming down to us.  He enacted it in Palestine in his open table-fellowship meals, as he toured around from town to town, ‘eating even with tax-collectors and sinners,’ and anyone who shared his agenda of loving your enemy, and, your neighbor as yourself.  It was a clear and resonant metaphor of the Messianic banquet, which we continue to celebrate here in this gathering every week, in solidarity with many other communities, and which we enact in so many other ways out in the world the rest of the week. 

Jesus, our brother, offers us the formation of a new family and society.  These are the ones who see and understand the apocalyptic revealing of this ‘never ending circle of violence’ we do to one another, and we refuse to participate any longer.  But far from dropping out of society, Jesus invites us all to the Messianic banquet of holy communion, integrating and transforming religion and blood-family ties, where all are welcome to live in the new eon, the realm of God already gifted to us. 

Like a shooting star burning through the sky, ‘Apocalypse’ reveals both beauty and dangerous vulnerability.  But the signs of the times are clear.  The world, a new and just, a peaceful and safe, realm, is here being made anew. 

Genesis 15:1-6
Psalm 33:12-22
Hebrews 11:1-3,8-16
Luke 12:32-40

Fear, Faith, Hope, Community and Freedom

A week ago, our government closed 20 foreign embassies because of threats from the avowed enemy
that calls itself Al Qaeda. 
Throughout the week, floods have devastated southern and southeastern states and yesterday Colorado. 
In California, the latest forest fire to claim lives and property was added to the more than 90 fires which have ravished the West. 
And in our own city, children have to learn new ways just to travel to school in designated “safe zones.” 
And Jesus tells us today, “Have no fear, little flock.”

“Have no fear;” “Do not be afraid” is one of the hallmark phrases spoken by God and God’s messengers
throughout the entire Bible. 
In today’s First Reading, Abram’s vision begins with God telling him,
“Do not be afraid; I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.” 
Believing God’s promises and believing especially the promise that God made
that he would have an heir, Abram seems to challenge God by reminding God that he still did
not have a son, only a slave he had adopted as heir. 
So God takes him in his vision out under the stars. 
Now, looking into the night sky in the desert, Abram was used to seeing the entire Milky Way. 
“Count the stars if you are able,” God said to him. 
“So shall your descendants be!” 
And two chapters of Genesis and 14 years later, God finally blessed
Abraham and Sarah (so old that Hebrews accounts them “as good as dead”) with a son.

Throughout the history of the chosen nation, God supports
promise after promise often with the words, “Have no fear; do not be afraid.” 
And when a young woman from Nazareth wonders how a virgin can have a child,
God’s message begins with “Have no fear; do not be afraid.” 
And when shepherds see the same heavens their ancestor Abraham saw open
up to reveal a whole host of angels, God’s message which announced the birth of
that blessed child, the message began with “Have no fear; do not be afraid.” 
Again and again when Jesus taught his followers, he told them, “Have no fear, little flock; do not be afraid.”

So, here we are, centuries later, so easily fearful of terrorists around the world and disasters at home. 
And Jesus tells us, “Have no fear, little flock; do not be afraid.”  

But in today’s Gospel, Jesus tells us just why it is that we should not be afraid. 
“It is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” 
It’s as if we had listened to our local meteorologists and spent the night last night at the
lakeshore to watch the Perseid meteor shower. 
And while we watched the wonder of “stars” falling in the night sky, we heard God say to us,
“see all those stars up there, so many that you really cannot hope to count them.  
Just as Abram’s children are counted among them, you are counted among them too.” 
God’s whole kingdom, which began with the very first word God spoke and continues to grow and grow as each
minute goes by;
it is God’s good pleasure to give you this kingdom. 
God’s kingdom is understood by Luke as the ongoing creation and creative activity of God:
for unexpected individuals such as Mary and Elizabeth;
for communities like the disciples who followed Jesus and the disciples who saw him first on their way to Emmaus; and for a world beyond their understanding and beyond our understanding.

This is the first good news for today. 
In the big picture, it is God’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom! 

And here begins the second good news for today. 
Karoline Lewis, Associate Professor of Preaching at Luther Seminary, says: “Being without fear;
knowing the source of your treasure – that is, your identity, your worth – makes it possible to be prepared for and an actual participant in God’s kingdom.” 
Knowing this, listen again to the rest of the Gospel reading for today.

“Sell your possessions and give alms……..for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” 
We have a tendency to think of this is a punitive way. 
Don’t be greedy, we think to ourselves. 
Don’t make money and power and prestige and economic position your aim in life or else! 
When, in fact, Jesus is telling us that, as his very Body alive for this day,
giving our whole selves is the way to find the treasures of the kingdom of God. 
“Be ready for action; have your lamps lit;
be like the servants who can’t wait for their master to come and sit down and eat with them –
in fact, God will come and serve them!” 
“Be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at every unexpected minute of every unexpected hour.

You see, when we live in the faith that we have already been given the kingdom of God,
we, as the living Body of Christ on earth today, will open up the kingdom to others. 
When our nation opens our very lives to the rest of the world with words
and actions of peace, love, and sharing our good gifts, the rest of the world
will greet us as the unexpected Son of God. 
Ask Robert and Rose why it is that Ghanaians love Americans and they will tell you that Ghana has experienced the
goodness of the American people. 
When our nation speaks and acts as though another people are not welcome,
that nation will see only our selfishness, our distrust and our fear.  

When we give of ourselves to help fellow citizens who have experienced floods and fire, tornadoes and tragedies; those in other parts of our country see the living Body of Christ in our hearts. 
This is the treasure that gives hope to those who have plenty and those who have little.

When we spare some of our own time and treasure to help projects
like Refugee One and PCO; Famous Fido and so many other neighbors in our own community,
then Unity Lutheran Church is seen as the living Body of Christ. 
They will see us all as a people whose treasure and whose heart is one with the goodness of God.

Now, when we hear about all of those terrible people and events that bring fear to the hearts of most people,
we hear Jesus tell us, “Have no fear, little flock. 
For it is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” 
Go out with my light and bring your treasures, your hearts, to those people. 
Do whatever you can to bring them into God’s kingdom too.

This is not always easy to do.  So I would like to ask you this week to make a special effort to pray
for everyone here today every day this week that we may all be open to see the unexpected Son of God acting in our lives and in the lives of others.

Jesuit Father John Kavanaugh tells the story of being with Mother Teresa one day after Mass. 
After being introduced, she asked him “What can I do for you?” 
“Pray for me,” he answered. 
“What do you want me to pray for?” she asked. 
“Pray that I have clarity,” Father Kavanaugh said. 
She said no.  That was that. 
“But why?” he questioned. 
She announced that clarity was the last thing he was clinging to and had to let go of. 
When he responded that she herself always seemed to have the clarity he longed for, she laughed:
“I have never had clarity; what I have always had is trust. 
So I will pray that you have trust.”

Trust, little flock, that your Father has given you everything! 
And then, go out and spend that kingdom of everything the way that God spends the everlasting love that made that
everything and makes everything possible through
you.


   


  


 

Readings for: 
Pentecost 11, Proper 13C, Lectionary 18

• Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14; 2:18-23  
• Psalm 49:1-12  
• Colossians 3:1-11  
• Luke 12:13-21

We Want More
Who doesn’t love that AT&T commercial?!  You know, that one with the deadpan goofy guy, Beck Bennett, talking with the cutest most adorable kids, as they sit in a circle together on a classroom floor?  My favorite is still the one where Beck starts by asking, “Who thinks more is better than less?”  And when every kid raises their hand, Beck calls on the girl who raised hers first, and she spits out an astonishing reply, “More is better than less, because if stuff is not less... if there's more less stuff, then you might, you might want to have some more and your parents just don't let you because there's only a little.”  Beck calmly feigns agreement: “Right.”

But the Girl continues: “We want more. We want more. Like, you really like it. You want more.” Beck furrows his eyebrows: “I follow you.”  It makes me laugh every time! They’re so adorable!  Finally, the voice-over says: “It's not complicated. More is better…”

And you figure, it’s gotta be real, at least it sure looks like it – like somebody just turned the camera on, and Beck asks a couple innocent questions.  I mean, you couldn’t script answers like that with kids that age, could you?  Those broken, garbled utterances, straining for articulation, on the verge of being intelligible, and then suddenly, the clarity of that punch line which hits you right between the eyes: “we want more!”   

It’s so innocent, yet profound.  I mean, “out of the mouths of babes!”  But it’s also sort of frightening, too!  How did she come up with that?  Is this handful of kids, all raising their hands to, “more is better!” representative of America?    Is this feeling innate?  Or is it something we learn? 

Jesus, in our gospel reading today, is on a real tear about, “more,” and greed of all kinds.  Not just in this story, really, but for the past couple of chapters of Luke, he’s been on a negative, judgmental-jag.  This time, he takes a breath to tell the parable of, “the rich fool,” the one who builds up bigger and bigger barns, so he can store up “more and more” of his abundantly bountiful harvest.  But unlike the girl in the commercial, he’s not cute or innocent, he doesn’t even use the plural pronoun, “we,” but says, “I” will build more.  “I” have ample goods.  And he holds an internal dialog with only himself: “Self, you have done so well, you might as well retire already, and eat, drink, and be merry!”  “I,” want more!” 

Here in Chicago this past week, and in major cities across the country, Fast Food workers staged walk-offs from their jobs.  Their demand?  Bump their pay up to a living wage!  To walk off, was risky.  But the payoff is that they made a pretty big splash, and their demand for justice is starting to catch on.  These aren’t just teenagers looking for a little pocket change, these are 20 and 30 something’s.  These are 65 and 70 year old seniors.  Many work more than one job, because minimum wage isn’t even close to a living wage.  Some are on public assistance and social security, as well as working at McDonald’s, or KFC, or Walmart, or Macy’s, or Burger King. 

They too want more, but it’s a different kind of “more.’  It’s not a greedy “more.”  A “greedy more,” might look more like the Fast Food CEO’s average salary – a whopping $25,000, a day!  $25,000, a day – that’s more than twice as much than what the average fast food worker makes, in a year! 

And so, “the economy” has been on trial in recent years, as it limps along.  And the thought, the hope, is that it will to return to its former glory.  Some economists have been hinting that, that just ain’t gunna happen!  Which begs the question, how do we reform the economy in a creative way, to make it work better for all?

The term “economy,” by the way, has its roots, in the Greek language – “oikonomos,” which means, “manager of a household.”  Not only does this imply that “economy” has something important to do with us at the level of our home life, but that our collective household requires a manager, one who will insure that the it runs, “economically.”  Today, ironically, the economy is conceived of as something that happens completely outside of our households, something that is so big, that it has a life of its own.  Something that’s too technical for us, and must be run by professionals, and if anyone raises pointed questions about its inequity, they are told then the opposite, that if we all just leave it alone it will work best, this miraculous laissez-faire economy!  And so all we’re left to do is watch the news and see what the economy has done to us this time!  As if we have no control, or deserve no say, in this fickle monster.  Is the stock market up or down?  Are interest rates steady or inflationary? Where can we cut taxes next at the expense of services and added fees? How far in the hole is our national debt?  We are more like hostages than participants.

The biblical Palestinian economy is based, not on money and markets, but on the land.  God gave the land to Israel as a gift, and they were to be care takers of the land, to till and keep it, and like a trustworthy friend, it would give back to them.  It was the land “flowing with milk and honey!”  And as a way of saying Thank You, they offered a tithe of their first fruits to the Temple economy. 

At the end of the 40 year Exodus journey, when Joshua and leaders of the 12 tribes were sent in secret to scout out the land they were about to enter, they returned from their mission to the jaw-dropping delight of all the people, bearing gifts of “grapes, pomegranates, and figs.”  It was a sign of the good gift God was giving to them.  They were given the land, not to possess, but in effect, to rent.  God owns this land, and Israel is a tenant.  It was not “private property” but what was called, a “loose ownership,” to be cared for until the Jubilee Year when any cheating or mismanagement would be redistributed equally again.  And so, originally it was called the “holy land,” because it belongs to God. 

While I was waiting for Kim to meet me at our local Revolution restaurant and Brew Pub the other day, the guy next to me offer to buy me a drink.  He was back from his tour of duty in Georgia – not the Peach State – but the former Soviet Republic.  ‘It’s been six years,’ he said, ‘and it seems like my Chicago has changed.  My friends don’t want to go out and party with me.  The hipsters have taken over and everybody’s vegan and rides bikes.  I just want to eat burgers and have a good time.  This is the land of plenty, isn’t it?  We can have whatever we want, right?’  He wanted more!  He was used to bigger barns and enough stored up for a life-time.  The economy he expected was a land of plenty he could claim as his own “private property.” 

What is the economy that God is calling us to?  When some are hoarding more than they need, are they taking away from those who don’t have enough? 

God asks us to be rich toward the realm and community of God, says Jesus in the parable of the rich fool.  This demands an economy of reverent spirituality, respecting the land and earth we inhabit, and learning how to share it.  Jesus worked creatively at building a new community where we can be rich toward God: one where blood-relatives are based on the faith of Jesus, and his example of servant-hood, loving your neighbor as yourself, and even loving your enemies.  On an economy, or community of healing the sick, but shaking the dust off your feet in the face of rejection and hypocrisy.  And Jesus gathered community in open celebration meals of bread and wine, with those who desired “living rich toward God.”  That’s what we want “more” of. 

The economy is not something that should be used against us, but, as something we all live within, it should arise from honest managers that care about every household, regardless of where you come from.  As Paul said, it’s a matter of redefining the community on the example of Jesus, for “there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free.”  We are all made one. 

Sure, there is probably an innate part in all of us that “wants more.”  But much of our understanding of economy is learned behavior, too.  And so we are invited to learn from the realm and kingdom of God, which is really what Jesus calls a, “living rich toward God.”  We learn as we come to the font to be baptized, that we may drown ourselves to the ways of “more,” and coming out of the muddy waters, we rise up to share in the feast and celebration of the meal where all are welcomed as equals, and there is always enough – an abundantly bountiful harvest.  Sharing in this economy, is a “living rich toward God.”  Of this – “we want more!”