Readings for 15th Sunday after Pentecost, September 29, 2019

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

"Forgive it Now!" Pastor Fred
The Great Recession of 2007 changed the way we live.  Literally, changed what kind of place and where we live.  People in the city and the suburbs lost their homes.  And now we see, there has been a trend away from the long-time goal of becoming a home-owner, and towards renting, becoming an apartment dweller. 
 
And, Millennials are leading the way in this!  Not that I have any experience as a Millennial, but from second-hand knowledge anyway, I’ve learned this!  The biggest boom in rentals, is in the West Loop.  “Three out of four residents of a West Loop ZIP code (60661) are millennials, the highest concentration of millennials in any urban ZIP code in the nation.” (https://www.chicagobusiness.com/residential-real-estate/chicago-zip-code-has-highest-concentration-millennials-us) Though, the largest concentration of Millennials, those born between 1983 and 2000, in Chicago, is in the neighborhood of Lakeview, with over 41,000. 
 
Millennials live in traditional Chicago apartments – and in new developments.  Some of those new developments include co-living apartments, or units that combine private space with shared space, like sharing a large well-equipped Kitchen, and other common spaces, where you might share your favorite Netflix shows on a shared Video screen, or enjoy a micro-brew around a shared fireplace.
 
 
And this makes sense, it seems to me, considering the social trends brought on by the Great Recession.  Millennials – as Melanie Curtin of Inc.com says – “are more transient, they have a lot of [student] debt, people are moving to cities and want to own less… there's a shift in values toward experience over ownership.” 
 
Some Millennials are also ‘couch hopping,’ or sleeping on friend’s couches, because they don’t have a place of their own, due to lots of things, including that high debt, also high rates of job turnover, or maybe being rejected for one’s sexual orientation or gender identity.  
 
In Jesus parable today, he begins talking about a rich man, and ends up talking about our home in the age to come.  It’s about, dirty dealing money managers and owners, and how we are to live in this hard world, by keeping our eye on the prize of the world, and age to come, Jesus revealed to us. 
 
So, this is a difficult parable to digest.  But The Message translation, a modern paraphrase translation by Pastor and scholar, Eugene Peterson, can help, I think.  Peterson entitles this parable, “The Story of the Crooked Manager,”  
Jesus said to his disciples, “There was once a rich man who had a manager. He got reports that the manager had been taking advantage of his position by running up huge personal expenses. So he called him in and said, ‘What’s this I hear about you? You’re fired. And I want a complete audit of your books.’
  “The manager said to himself, ‘What am I going to do? I’ve lost my job as manager. I’m not strong enough for a laboring job, and I’m too proud to beg…. Ah, I’ve got a plan. Here’s what I’ll do… then when I’m turned out into the street, people will take me into their houses.’
  “Then he went at it. One after another, he called in the people who were in debt to his master. He said to the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’
  “He replied, ‘A hundred jugs of oil.’
  “The manager said, ‘Here, take your bill, sit down here – quick now – write fifty.’
  “To the next he said, ‘And you, what do you owe?’
  “He answered, ‘A hundred sacks of wheat.’
  “He said, ‘Take your bill, write in eighty.’
  “Now here’s a surprise: The master praised the crooked manager? And why? Because he knew how to look after himself. Streetwise people are smarter in this regard than law-abiding citizens. They are on constant alert, looking for angles, surviving by their wits. I want you to be smart in the same way – but for what is right – using every adversity to stimulate you to creative survival, to concentrate your attention on the bare essentials, so you’ll live, really live, and not complacently just get by on good behavior.” 
 
And yet another translation, of just the last verse, I really like, is from the New Jerusalem Bible: “And so I tell you this: use money, tainted as it is, to win you friends, and thus make sure that when it fails you, they will welcome you into dwellings [in the age to come].” (for “age to come,” see N.T. Wright, How God Became King, pp. 44-45)
 
Jesus’ parables were meant to shake us up, and to offer a surprise.  To lure us into a common, everyday story, that then flips the script, and leads us into a new understanding of the kingdom and realm of God Jesus was announcing, for the sake of our lives and the world. 
 
The behavior of the Manager, though crooked, is somewhat understandable – isn’t it – in that he’s trying to insure that, even if he loses his job, he’ll have somewhere to land, someone to ‘couch hop’ with.  He does it by leveraging the relationships he has as Manager with those in debt to his Master.  And specifically, by erasing, on the spot, 50% of the debt in one case, and a 20% in another!  We might expect that when the Master finds out about this crooked behavior, even if it is ‘Streetwise,’ he’ll be punished, fired for sure! 
 
And so, as The Message translation makes clear, that’s the surprise!  The Master instead ‘commends’ and ‘praises’ the crooked, unjust Manager, for his streetwise, and shrewd, action. 
 
One way we can make sense of this, is if we see the Manager’s action through the lens of the Lord’s Prayer, which Jesus teaches his Disciples.  Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer is unique when it comes to the petition on forgiveness.  It’s the one that prays: “And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.”  That is, as we forgive monetary debts, that were so very common in Jesus’ time, please forgive us our sins. 
 
And what else did the crooked and shrewd Manager do, if not forgive debts!?  He forgave them!  Maybe it wasn’t for altruistic reasons.  Maybe it was for personal gain, and for getting a couch to sleep on, down the line.  But this, according to Jesus, is what delights the Master!  The Master praises his shrewd ingenuity.  And Jesus concludes that that is what we have to do, “be smart in the same way – but” of course, “for what is right” and just!
 
And so, if the Master in the Parable is God, what is God telling us?  We know how in Luke’s gospel, forgiveness is major theme throughout, and finally, even on the cross, Jesus forgives the criminal who is repentant in his last dying moments, and says, ‘today you will be with me in Paradise!’ 
 
The Master in the Parable recognizes forgiveness in the action of his Manager.  It doesn’t matter why the desperate Manager forgives, only, that he forgives.  Forgiveness is a key to right living between neighbors, and the restoration of our relationship with God.  It doesn’t matter if you forgive for noble reasons, or all the wrong reasons.  Jesus says, forgive it all.  Forgive it now.  Forgive it for any reason you want, or for no reason at all.  God is the font of forgiveness, and the abundance of grace, that begins to pour out, wherever forgiveness happens. 
 
“And so I tell you this,” said Jesus in conclusion of his Crooked Manager Parable, “use money, tainted as it is, to win you friends, and thus make sure that when it fails you, they will welcome you into dwellings [in the age to come].”
 
What’s your living arrangement, here in the present age, and in the age to come?  How much is it costing to you?  Are you a good steward of it? 
 
The Great Recession, with its lost wealth, changed home ownership for the Millennial generation, who shrewdly and creatively are crafting a new way of renting.  The Crooked Manager, faced with his own lost wealth, found redemption in the wild abandon of forgiving – for when we forgive others we are faithful with the riches God entrusts to us. 
 
Let us learn forgiveness, the key to entering a dwelling in the age to come!  ‘Forgive us our sins,’ O LORD, ‘as we forgive those indebted to us – and that we may be welcomed into homes now, and by God’s grace, in the new age to come!

Readings for 14th Sunday after Pentecost, Sept 15, 2019

• Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28 and Psalm 14 
• 1 Timothy 1:12-17  
• Luke 15:1-10

Dinner with Sinners, by Pastor Fred Kinsey
"Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to [Jesus.] 
And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, this fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”
 
Jill Levine, in her volume, The Jewish Annotated Notes of the New Testament, says simply of  ‘Jesus eating with the tax collectors and sinners,’ that “it suggests he approves of them.”  He approves of them!  Or as Eugene Peterson says, “he treats them as old friends!” 
 
No wonder they’re coming near to listen to him, and sitting down to have dinner with Jesus.  They were lost, outcast, and now they are found! 
 
Jesus is directing these two parables from our Reading today – not to the tax collectors and sinners – but he’s telling it to the righteous ones who were grumbling about Jesus’ behavior. 
 
‘I know you’d have compassion and go and look for them,’ Jesus tells the righteous ones, ‘if you were to lose even just one out of a hundred sheep.  I know that you’d go search for it diligently until you recovered it!’  Of course, they weren’t Shepherds.  Whether they would, go searching, or not, is hard to tell.  Everyone knew the terrain in Israel for sheep herders was notoriously hilly, full of crags and ravines, trees and bushes.  Lost sheep could easily disappear.  And leaving the 99 behind, might expose all the rest of them to foxes and wolves, and the prospect of losing even more. 
 
But, in this parable, the Shepherd is the allegorical stand-in for God.  And God searches diligently – searches for us, around every bush and ravine, whatever it takes, until we are found.  And ‘when he has found the lost sheep,’ says Luke, ‘the Shepherd lays it on his shoulders and rejoices,’ and gathers all his friends to join in a party of celebration too!  For Jesus, it’s all about the searching God does for us, and then the abandon, and over the top celebrating, for returning what was lost.
 
This image of, laying the sheep on his shoulders, is one of the most frequently found on the walls of the Catacombs that the early Christians drew.  The Icon we use in the Prayer Area is a re-creation of that.  Jesus the Good Shepherd!  Jesus the Shepherd who searches diligently for us until we are found!  Jesus, like the Shepherd-boy Moses, who became the Shepherd who rescued his people Israel, freeing them from slavery in Egypt, and bringing them into the promised land. 
 
God is relentless!  God never wearies of the search for us! 
 
But you know what?!  Sometimes we don’t want to be found!  Sometimes we like where we’re at!  Like the Pharisees and Scribes, who were profiting off the way the system was.  It was working for them.  They were able to define what was righteous, partly just by demonizing who was socially unacceptable and lost.  Which is why they grumbled and weren’t pleased with Jesus ‘turning the tables.’ 
 
So for them, it wasn’t good news really, that “there is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons” like them, “who need no repentance!”  The same was true for the older brother in the story of the Prodigal son, which is the Reading that comes right after these two parables about the lost sheep and the lost coin.  It’s sometimes called the Parable of the Lost Son, the one the ‘gracious father’ throws a party for.  But the other son, the son who stayed home and did the right thing, the older son, is like the Pharisees and the scribes, and maybe like us too – the ones who are not lost, the ones who have found a worshiping community, who have found love and acceptance.  But instead of grumbling, says Jesus of the older son in the parable, we should come into the Banquet and join the celebration for the one who was lost!
 
But of course, that’s only half the truth too!  If we’ve learned anything here, it’s that we are all sinners and fall short of the glory of God.  Or as Martin Luther liked to say, even in our baptism, we are always, saints and sinners at the same time!  We can learn to trust God’s loving grace and forgiveness, but we are not perfect, and are terribly caught up in the structures of sin, like racism and sexism and capitalism, and need to be found, need to be rescued, over and over again!  We need to return to God with all our heart, to turn around and go in a new direction, which is literally what repentance means. 
 
And I think we can even dig a little deeper into our hearts, yet!  So, I’ll speak for myself.  I know I didn’t want to be found for a long time.  I thought ‘I’ had to find myself, that it was all up to me, that I had to do this good-work, when all the while I was really just pushing God away from finding me!  Probably because I wasn’t sure I was ready for what God was calling me to do.  And for me, I wasn’t confident I had the right skills for ordained ministry.  And when my pastor told me I did, it filled me with both gratitude, but also with trepidation!  How could I be worthy?!  ‘I’m just a boy,’ as the prophet Jeremiah said.  I was filled with doubts, and didn’t know how to let myself be found, even though it’s all I could think about! 
 
But God desires to find the lost, and never wearies of the search to bring them into the fold.  No one is worthy on their own.  But in the community of faith, we experience how God makes us worthy.  We’re all sinners and saints together.  We all feel unworthy and not totally up to the job, until we’re supported and accepted in faithfulness, together.  This ambivalence, is actually a healthy feeling, as opposed to a Messiah, or dictator-like, complex! 
 
But this both/and, sinner & saint, can be even more complicated in the real world, as I’m sure you probably know.  This week for example, I glimpsed it in the story of a 16 year old from Sweden.  You may have heard of her, Greta Thunberg, who’s tenaciously pushing us to ‘do something’ about the climate crisis!  She’s been visiting the United States the last couple of weeks.  And some people clearly don’t like her and what she’s been up to.  In fact, Maxime Bernier of the People’s Party of Canada, who knows Greta has autism, never-the-less Tweeted that she’s “clearly mentally unstable, and a pawn of the climate movement.” 
 
After a major backlash on behalf of her supporters, Mr. Bernier has apologized – well, sort of!  But Greta is actually one of the most clear-thinking among us – and no one’s pawn – and her autism, as she says herself, has actually enhanced her tremendous rise to leadership in this movement. 
 
It was at age 15 that she decided to stop doing the one thing all kids are supposed to do to fulfill their righteousness: go to school. Every Friday, she skipped classes to stand outside Sweden’s Parliament with her handmade sign that said simply: “School Strike For the Climate.”
 
She left the ranks of the “righteous,” as Jesus called it, and became a target, an outcast, one of the lost sinners.  But to Thunberg, the question was, “Why should we be studying for a future that soon may be no more, when no one is doing anything whatsoever to save that future?” 
 
Who needs the repenting, the turning around more, I wonder?  Greta, who skipped school?  Or us, who even if we are afraid of climate change and how fast it’s coming, continue on with our lives – maybe even doing good, and responsible, and righteous things – but without acting on our imperiled future? 
 
Karoline Lewis says: “These [2 parables of Jesus] elicit rather interesting adjectives [for] God, perhaps ones we do not use as often as we should – [God is] relentless, stubborn, insistent, tireless. After all, some of us would rather stay hidden, even wish to be lost or left alone, if not forever, at least for the time being, at least longer than a short-term stint.  A kind of ‘lost-ness’ that is even a mode of self-protection. ‘Just leave me alone. Let me be. I’m fine.’”
 
But Jesus, our Good Shepherd, has been bringing the lost into the fold for a long time now.  God does not let us wander alone, un-counted!  God finds us and enlivens us, again and again!  God won’t let our self-doubt and ambivalence undo us! 
 
Jesus the Good Shepherd, lifts us up and carries us on his shoulders – brings us in to the banquet of celebration – where all the ‘lost and found’ are rejoicing together.  Only God can make us righteous.  Let us, once we are found, become searchers too, and bring everyone into the never-ending Banqueting Table of the Lord!

Readings for Pentecost 12C, September 1, 2019

• Jeremiah 2:4-13 and Psalm 112 
• Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16  
• Luke 14:1, 7-14

Spicy Banquet, Pastor Fred
Jesus is an itinerant wandering preacher!  A prophet with nowhere to lay his head!  And always at odds with his nation’s leaders!  So what is Jesus doing, dining at the house of Israel’s upper-class elite leadership?!  But this isn’t the first, nor the last time he sits down to dine with them.  It’s complicated!
 
The Pharisees were actually a diversified sect in Jesus’ day, including many working class folks, as well as a few well-off leaders, like the one who threw the invitation-only Banquet in our Gospel Reading.  But Jesus was a leader with a reputation too.  He may not have had the same wardrobe of fine linens, but the Leaders of the Pharisees were interested, and in dialog with, what learned people like Jesus had to say.  And the skirmishes that Jesus had with them in the Gospel of Luke, shows how they thought about many of the same things.  But it just wasn’t true that all Pharisees, espoused the principles, Jesus was criticizing.  Nicodemus comes to mind!
 
And Jesus, no doubt, had an interest in debating with them too, most obviously, so he could invite them into the kingdom and realm of God, as he envisioned it, knowing that the Spirit of God rested on him, and these debates were not just prosaic exercises, but had consequences.
 
This is now the 3rd time Jesus was invited to a banquet along the way, on this, his momentous and final road to Jerusalem, and he must have caused quite a stir!
 
How about you, have you ever been invited to a banquet of upper-class socialites? 
 
The closest I’ve come, has been, ever since my dad left some money in his Will to the Lutheran Seminary in Hyde Park, and Kim and I have been invited to the donor’s banquet. It usually takes place at the exclusive, ornate Quadrangle Club, of the Univ. of Chicago, just a few blocks away, when the Board of Directors are in town, some of whom are million dollar givers.  But most are more like us, or, somewhere in between. 
 
First there’s the cocktail hour, with fancy hor’s devours coming by on trays every few minutes, delivered by a well-dressed wait staff.  The guests, of course, are dressed in their finest dresses and suits, and theoretically, you can rub shoulders with the elite.  But Kim and I mainly talk with the professors we know, who, coincidentally, or maybe not, happen to inhabit the same financial world we do! 
 
Then comes the dinner!  There are a few tables up front reserved for the honorees, some Board members, and speakers, like the President of the seminary.  But no one, as far as I know, has ever asked them ‘to move down’ and take ‘a lower place!’ 
 
Today, we don’t live in an ‘honor/shame culture’ like Jesus and the disciples did.  To be asked to be lowered from the best, to the worst seat, was pretty much the end of your life and status in ancient Israel – you would be shamed and cast out of your upper social standing, which had major consequences. 
 
That’s not exactly how it works for us.  There are other rules we have.  Being disloyal to your family, or your boss, for example, can bring shades of retribution.  The corporate world can be especially nasty.  The bigger and richer the company, the deeper the control from the top down, that’s possible.  Government, by our democratic rules, works different, or is supposed to, at least.  Hierarchy has mostly been regulated out.  The standard for elected leaders is supposed to be measured against how they serve us, their loyalty is to the voters and to the people.  Which is why, being a successful business man in the corporate world, does not always mean you’ll be a good executive leader in elected office!
 
What’s more notable for us in our gospel, I think, is Jesus’ instructions to the leader, the top dog, who threw the banquet.  It came, just after his admonition, ‘For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.’ 
 
And ‘Jesus said also to the one who had invited him, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid.  But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.  And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”’  Luke insisted that the lowly – like Mary the mother of Jesus, or any number of those he heals – would be lifted up, and the rich sent away empty, a strong and recurrent theme in Luke’s gospel. 
 
In religious circles, we try to put this into practice, in any number, and variety of ways.  We give to Care for Real, for example, while some churches host meals that the poor can freely attend.  We give to Lutheran World Relief and UNICEF, to those victimized by hurricane, earthquake, and flood.  We canvass, and work for better housing for people with low incomes, and assemble hygiene kits for people experiencing homelessness.  We greet refugees at the airport, or immigrants fleeing violence and poverty, and we befriend them and provide them housing, and there are probably hundreds of other ways. 
 
Perhaps it’s the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews that has been our teacher, for 2 millennia now, “Let mutual love continue,” they said.  “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it (Sarah and Abraham).  Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured. ….. Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.” 
 
So the kind of church, country, and world we want to live in, is up to us!  We could invite just our friends to our banquets.  We could invite neighbors like us, hoping they might invite us in return – as Jesus said.  Or, we can invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind, immigrants and refugees, those who cannot repay us.  For then we are honored in the kingdom of God! 
 
What kind of a country and world will we have, if we reject those immigrants at our doorstep fleeing violence, who are poor and in need of health care?  Who will we be, if we turn them away?  What kind of country and world are we making by insisting on fencing them out?  Who are we fooling, when people of color are targeted, and then out of ‘the other side of our mouth,’ the rich northern-most European countries are praised?  What kind of people will we be, if, as the Trump White House wants to do, we implement caging families without due process, for as long as we want? 
 
And then, who will they come for next? 
 
The prophet Jeremiah had words for such as these:
7I brought you into a plentiful land (O house of Jacob)
  to eat its fruits and its good things.
 But when you entered you defiled my land,
  and made my heritage an abomination…
12Be appalled, O heavens, at this,
  be shocked, be utterly desolate,
 says the LORD,
 
We too, have lived off the fruits of this rich land, sometimes living in peace and harmony with its inhabitants, sometimes using people as cheap and free labor.  Sometimes we’ve done well, welcoming the ‘tired and poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the homeless and tempest-tost,’ but sometimes we’ve sent boat loads of refuge seekers, back to their executioners. 
 
Who will we be?  Are we able to have an honest conversation together, rich and poor, proud and prophet? 
 
Isn’t this why Jesus accepts the invitation to the banquet of the rich leader?  So he can sit down with them, even though he knows there is yet a truth he must tell, a counter invitation he must offer to the outcast, they may not want to hear?  It’s complicated – but Jesus leads the way through all difficulties.
 
When Jesus arrived at the registration table at the house of the elite leader, on the road to his cross and resurrection, and put on his name-tag, to eat with them on the Sabbath, Luke says ‘they were watching him closely.’  And they knew, their table conversation would be spicy! 
 
The banqueting table of the Lord includes, not just the elite conversation partners of society, who can repay you, but everyone is invited to the Feast of Thanksgiving around God’s Table! 
 
Go and do likewise!  Invite the poor, ‘the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the homeless and tempest-tost,’ and then, the kingdom and realm of God, has already begun to dawn amongst us. 
 
“For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”