Beyond the Call of Duty

Church of the Advent, Federal Hill • Proper 18c 2019
Though I am bold enough in Christ to command you to do your duty, yet I would rather appeal to you on the basis of love.+

A mother once tried to teach her daughter about stewardship. She gave her a dollar bill and a quarter, and said, “It is up to you which you put into the offering plate.” During the sermon, the mother watched her weigh the possibilities — dollar in one hand and quarter in the other. Finally, when the plate came into her aisle, she nodded to herself and confidently put the quarter in the plate, then sat back with a contented sigh. After worship, her mother asked, “Why did you decide to put in the quarter?” The child responded, “Well, I was going to put in the dollar; but then the priest said, ‘God loves a cheerful giver,’ and I thought I’d be more cheerful if I kept the dollar.”

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Many Christians take this subjective view about stewardship: how does giving make me feel? This is the “Feel Good” school of giving. Problem is that while some may feel a glow of discipleship when they give generously, many — like this child — feel a glow of satisfaction when they hold on to as much as they can.

Our gospel today presents us a different view, not based on feelings but practicalities: considering how much it costs to build a tower or wage a war. This is the “Balanced Budget” school of giving. Its advantage over the “Feel Good” theory is that it is better engaged with the reality of what it costs to maintain a church. But it too has a down-side, as giving becomes commercialized, the church itself “monetized” (to use the modern term of art). Just as with “feel-good,” this view is focused not on God or the church, but on the giver, as it appears to say, “I support the church, for what I get out of it.”

Most people realize that this approach is too much like building a tower or waging a war. And while it smacks of common sense, it derives more from the spirits of Scrooge and Marley than those of Christmas past, present, and to come. If people think giving to the church is exchange for a product, a kind of “give and get,” they will come to see the church as if it were just another shop on the High Street where you pay your money and take your choice, a kind of vending machine that dispenses spiritual satisfaction when you put money in the slot. Such an attitude transforms believers into customers.

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Ultimately both of these views run aground on the astounding statement with which today’s gospel ends: “None of you can become my disciples if you do not give up all your possessions.” How shallow both “feel good” and “balance the budget” look in contrast to this astounding clam that Jesus makes on the disciples — including us! Even those who devote a significant portion of their income to the church — the ten percent of the biblical tithe — even the most generous must feel like pikers in light of the astounding challenge from Jesus: “None of you can become my disciples if you do not give up all your possessions.” What is five or ten percent or even more compared to all! What could Jesus mean by this astounding, ultimate demand?

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We will find an answer to this question in today’s second reading — the bulk of Paul’s letter to Philemon. We heard how important the runaway slave Onesimus has become to Paul as he suffered in prison; and how Paul trusts that when Onesimus returns to his master Philemon with this letter in hand, he will not suffer the fate imposed on runaways. Paul trusts Onesimus will be welcomed back as a brother in Christ; for he has become a Christian while with Paul, perhaps even a deacon. Paul’s poignant letter suggests as much in noting how Onesimus has been of service to him: how he has “deaconed” to Paul in his imprisonment. What’s more, Paul notes that Onesimus after all had not been a very good slave — beyond having run away, Paul says he had been “useless” — making a joke out the slave’s name, which in Greek means Useful. Upon his return, Paul suggests he will live up to his name and be “useful” indeed as more than a slave, not less: a brother in Christ, perhaps even to serve with him as a deacon. Paul assures Philemon that he is not demanding this: he wants Philemon to do a voluntary good deed, not something forced — even though Paul does remind him that he owes him more than he can possibly repay: “I say nothing” — thereby saying something! — “about your owing me even your own self” — echoing the teaching of Jesus.

Paul is saying Philemon can have his cake and eat it too! He can have the free service of a useful brother in place of the half-hearted work of a useless slave, by giving up a slave-master’s control-over, and instead cooperate-with him as a brother in Christ.

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And it is that “giving up” that connects with that hard saying of Jesus: “None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all of your possessions.” We don’t just owe God our possessions, after all, but, as Philemon owed Paul, our selves! Yet Jesus does not say, I’m taking your life — he wants us to live our lives in service, not throw our lives away. So too he doesn’t ask us here to “give away” all of our possessions, but to “give them up.” And the difference is suggestive: this is about surrender, not commerce. He wants us to “give up” to him, as the old hymn says, to “surrender all” to him! It is about learning how to loosen our grip on what we have, treating it not as something controlled by us, but as ultimately coming to us as a gift from God — as indeed our lives come as a gift from God, and God wants us to give them up in return as well. We are called to treat what we have been given with the same kind of liberty with which Paul counseled Philemon to treat his former slave, and to do so voluntarily, not under compulsion or as doing our duty, but as going beyond the call of duty into the realm of the freedom of the children of God. In that realm there are no more slaves, but all are free — free because we have given up, we have surrendered to God, whose service is perfect freedom.

We are not called simply to balance the books and pay our share so that we get what we pay for
and what we think we deserve. Friends, I assure you that if we got what we deserved we would be neither cheerful nor proud!

But when we treat all we have been given — including our very selves, our souls and bodies — not as “ours” to control but as the free gift of a generous God, and which we return to God as a reasonable and holy sacrifice — then we will find ourselves going beyond the call of duty to maintain the church. We will be embarking on the mission of spreading God’s kingdom of freedom, in which all are God’s children.

Yes, it is our duty to maintain our little corner of the kingdom here on South Charles Street, to do what it takes to support its work and worship. But we are called to do much more; to be God’s servants, not slaves working only because they have to, but children of God who work so hard because they love their Father in heaven, and love their brothers and sisters so very much.

If this spirit of generosity and freedom can fill us all who knows what might happen? Let me tell you one last thing. Onesimus the runaway slave became so useful in the church that decades later he shows up again in Christian history — as bishop of the church of Ephesus! Who would have thought a useless runaway slave could become such a useful servant of God?

When we give up and surrender all to God, who knows what God might make of us? When we go beyond feeling good; when we go beyond balancing the budget; God will surprise us with amazing grace, doing infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Though I am bold enough in Christ to suggest you do your duty, yet I would rather appeal to you on the basis of love. To God alone — who is Love — be the glory, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.+

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Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

People, Places, and Things

Looking at the big picture of Creation, and hearing how it groans in expectation...

A sermon for Proper 11a 2014 • St James Fordham • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Jacob woke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place — and I did not know it!” And he was afraid, and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”

After my mother passed away, my youngest sister took up the task of trying to make some orderly sense out of the boxes of loose photographs that my mother had accumulated over the years. Not only were there a number of photos from her own mother and grandmother, but of those taken in my generation — and I was the oldest of six, so there were a lot of photos. There were literally hundreds of them, and it was a challenge to sort through them.

One response to organize such pictures is to divide them up into three familiar categories, at least to begin to get a handle on the task: to sort them into three piles of pictures: people, places, and things. For some pictures, the sorting is easy: the baby pictures, the school pictures, the graduation pictures, first communion, confirmation — those all go into the “people” pile; while the views of the Grand Canyon or the Belvedere Fountain in Central Park go into the “places” category; and the photos that my dad took of his model airplanes are clearly to be numbered among the “things.”

But what do you do with the picture of Mom and Dad standing in front of the Washington Monument? Is that a “people” picture or a “place” picture — or even a “thing” picture if you have a collection of pictures of monuments? How do you categorize something that seems to fit in many different categories?

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This morning’s Scripture readings face us with just such a challenge. At first glance, as with some pictures, it seems to be easy: the reading from Genesis is clearly about Jacob’s experience at the place, about Jacob’s experience of the place that he would come to call Bethel. The reading from Romans is clearly about people, in particular about us as we become children of God. Finally, the reading from Matthew is about the weeds and the wheat and the harvest — all of them things.

But when we look bit closer the categories are not quite as clear as they appear at first. The reading from Genesis is about a place — a place in which Jacob begins by making a pillow out of a stone, lying down to sleep and to dream. Clearly this is no ordinary place, and Jacob recognizes it as the gateway to the house of God — which is what Bethel means in Hebrew.

But in addition to it being about that holy place — there are those things: the stone, to oil, the ladder, the gate; and the people (or perhaps I had better say the personalities) of Jacob, the angels, and the God of Abraham and Isaac — now to become the God of Jacob as well, as he makes with him a covenant of adoption and promises to be with him to keep him wherever he goes. Whatever place he goes to, God will personally be with him.

Which brings us to the second reading, which is clearly about people, and how we are adopted, through the Spirit of God as children of God, as the Spirit leads us to cry out, “Abba! Father!” Yet no sooner does Paul describe the personal aspect of adoption, than he turns around and applies it to a thing — the thingiest thing there is, the whole creation, the very embodiment of thingdom! For what is more a creature than creation? And Paul is bold enough to claim that redemption is not just for people, but for that whole creation; that somehow in God’s good time and place, “the whole creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God!” This is one of the Scriptures I point to whenever people ask me if I believe whether our pets, our animal companions, will share with us in the resurrection. I am also comforted and encouraged by the words of the Psalms. For they not only call upon all things that have breath to praise the Lord — and believe me, if you have a pet cat or dog, you know they have breath! — but also for the trees to clap their hands and even for the hills and mountains to leap for joy. This brings us back to Saint Paul is saying — “the whole creation” must mean “the whole creation” — that is, there is nothing outside God’s grace and redemption, for God hates nothing — no thing — that God has made.

Finally, in that reading from Matthew, we appear to be dealing with just such things — the seed, the weeds, the wheat, the harvest — but then Jesus offers an explanation of this parable to the disciples and he immediately brings in places — all places, for the field is the world. He then he tells of those people: the Son of Man and the children of the kingdom and the children of the evil one, and the enemy, and the very angels themselves, the same ones whom Jacob saw ascending and descending upon that ladder.

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So what are we to make of this? What categories can we use? Perhaps the key after all lies in that lesson from Romans. Perhaps what God is trying to tell us this morning is that the categories we create to divide up the world aren’t quite so clear as we think them to be — that we and the angels, and the beasts of the field and the birds of the sky, and the seed of the fields, and the trees of the forest, and the forest itself, and the hills and the valleys and the mountains — indeed that the whole of creation is groaning in the pains of childbirth until now.

Instead of an assortment of little pictures, there’s just one big picture: a view such as perhaps the first man who walked on the moon had, forty-five years ago today, looking back and seeing that the world was not split up into many different things, but is one beautiful thing, hanging there in the sky. The whole creation is awaiting the redemption that is not just our destiny but the destiny of all that God has made.

Perhaps God is saying to us that we are all in this together — that although human beings do hold a special place in God’s creation, as people who are more than mere things, yet we still share the role of creatures, with all of God’s creation. I mentioned pets, our animal companions, but there are others: we usually treat our pets fairly well, but there are others we don’t so well. It does not take a great stretch of imagination to look into the eyes of a captive orangutan, whose young have been stripped from her, sent off to a zoo somewhere — confined now to a cage in a forest in which she once ranged freely, but has now been torn down, burned down so they could plant a plantation for the production of palm kernel oil — it doesn’t take much to look into the depth of those sad, sad eyes of the captive orangutan and ask, What have we done to our fellow creatures? It does not take much of a great stretch of experience — although it seems to be a stretch too far for some — to see the collapsing ice sheets of Antarctica, the disappearing glaciers of northern Europe and Canada and the Alps, the polar bears vainly trying to swim because there is no more ice left for them to climb upon — it is no great stretch to see our profound impact on creation — and, oh, how it groans! It does not take a great stretch of imagination to look at the raging wildfires of the American West, or the smog in China so thick you can cut it with a knife, and not ask yourself, “What have we done?”

Perhaps God is trying to tell us in these powerful lessons — lessons written not only in the pages of Scripture but in the black and white of the world itself — that we do not live in heaven — we are still sleeping here on earth on our stony pillows and our dreams of ladders. And it is time to wake up, and out of our stony griefs to raise up Bethel. To take our part in making this world what God means it to be: God’s world, in which we dwell as guests. Too long have we thought that this world was just a place we could despoil and neglect, because we were headed for a better one up that ladder into the world to come. What does Saint Paul say? The creation has been waiting, waiting with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God? And when we are revealed, what are we revealed to be? Will we be seen as those who did not care, who despoiled and neglected God’s creation; or worse: will some of us be seen as enemies of God’s creation who spread bad seed upon God’s field, so that it brought forth weeds instead of wheat? Is it not written, as you have sown, so shall you reap?

My brothers and sisters, these are sobering questions for us today, far more important than the mere categories of people, places, and things. It is the whole creation — the big picture — of which we form a part, and which we change — for better or for worse — by our actions. We are not called to divide things up, but to pull them together: not to divide, but to unite. God intended humanity to care for creation — pulling it all together. Let us, my friends, be responsible stewards of that which has been committed to our care — and for which — one day — we will be called to render an account.+

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