1 Corinthians 12:12-31a
Luke 4:14-21
SERMON “What Is Yours?”
We are less than a week into the new administration in Washington, and they already find themselves defending a “Sieg Heil” performed by Elon Musk during the inauguration. It is not exactly a secret that Musk is a Nazi in all but name. He supports Germany’s modern-day incarnation of the Nazi Party, the Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, and interfered in Britain’s political system with blatant race baiting. Never mind the 13 children he has fathered by three different women. Nothing to look at… no eugenics going on here.
Musk wants you to believe that he is a genius who is entitled to his wealth because of his hard work and talent. He does not want you to believe he was born rich in a family made wealthy under the structural racism of apartheid as operators of South African emerald mines. His father Errol said they had “so much money we couldn’t even close our safe.”
In the same way, Donald Trump wants you to think about his self-proclaimed genius, not his countless bankruptcies, not the hundreds of contractors he has defrauded over the years, not the fact that he was born rich and that he and his late-father are both racists, structurally and specifically.
Also on the dais last week were Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. Zuckerberg continued to rake in money from Facebook even as his own staff warned him that the algorithms were dangerous, a threat to health, safety, and democracy. Bezos drove the entire industry of retail bookstores to the edge of extinction, and continues to profit as a platform for cheap Chinese goods manufactured under exploitative conditions. And most of us still help put money in both of their pockets.
Each of these men would want you to think that they have earned every dollar they have, through hard work and genius, that they are entitled to power due to their inherent superiority and hard work.
And then Jesus unrolls the scroll and read from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
When the rich and righteous young man comes to Jesus and asks what he must do to achieve salvation, Jesus says “Give it all away!” The rich young man instead walks away, sad. And Jesus lets him.
Jesus understands his mission as being a mission to and for the poor. He understands the rich and powerful of his time as basically being collaborators with the Roman occupation who exploit the injustices of the economic system. He welcomes powerful people like Nicodemus, he is clear in his expectation that they serve those less fortunate.
In his only act of physical aggression recorded in the gospels, it is the commercial activities of the Temple Jesus challenges, where the poor must find the money to pay for animals and other materials to sacrifice in exchange for blessings, cleanliness, and forgiveness, all to the financial profit of the merchants and the priests, who act as gatekeepers of the holy.
Pre-rabbinic Judaism rested on a transactional theology, the merchants in the Temple courtyard just one manifestation of that system. If you were righteous, if you paid God and the priests enough honor and goods, then you would be blessed with abundance in this life. It was an ancient snake oil no different than the prosperity gospel preachers of today flying around in their private jets fueled with trailer park dollars.
Except the people noticed that it didn’t actually work as advertised. Plenty of good people suffered, plenty of evil people prospered.
And so prophets rose up again and again.
The institutional church wants you to focus on the prophets as primarily concerned with spiritual matters, and they sometimes did concern themselves with spiritual matters, as they occasionally concerned themselves with geo-political matters. But more than anything, they concerned themselves with economic justice, and more broadly, social justice.
Jesus concerned himself with economic justice, with social justice. His public ministry begins in the Gospel According to Luke with his opening scripture and reading from Isaiah, proclaiming jubilee, which was not a party, but release, of debts and debt-slavery.
There was a mentally ill un-sheltered person living in the cemetery of a Gentile town and Jesus healed him. Of course, it always upset the self-righteous when Jesus served the vulnerable, for it challenged their sense of entitlement.
The man with the withered hand must deserve that disability, and Jesus healing it, especially on the Sabbath, disrupted the twisted logic of their theology.
Nowhere in this statement of his mission does Jesus state that his purpose is to make people believe in him so they can fly off to heaven. Jesus announces a political and earthly agenda, an agenda of healing and freedom.
It was power, wealth, and empire that demanded a go-to-heaven gospel with no application in this world. I firmly believe that suffer in silence now, go to heaven later is a perversion of the good news Jesus preached.
Who is my neighbor? And Jesus snatches that question out of the air and places it on a dangerous curve, as the Rev. Dr. King reminded us in his prophetic final sermon.
You came into this world vulnerable. Your existence in one particular context is absolutely random and unearned, a roll of the dice that one particular sperm found one particular egg, that none of the thousands of things that can go wrong went wrong.
What is yours? Nothing! You are a tiny little explosion of electro-chemical process, here one moment, gone the next.
What is yours? Everything! You are a miracle that should not even exist. The odds against you, against homo sapiens, against this little green jewel circling a star, are immense.
And here we are, together, locked in a web of life with every other living thing on a planet that is in constant transformation and renewal. Something magical happened. Or since this is a church, we’ll call it something miraculous, something holy. My late teacher thought of it as serendipitous creativity. Or maybe we can just go Old School and call it God, a placeholder for love and creativity and transcendence.
God happened and you are. And I am. And also, we are not.
The groundbreaking German Reform theologian the Rev. Dr. Friedrich Schleiermacher referred to our utter dependence on God in his 1830 work “Christian Faith,” a phrase I’ve incorporated into the Communion Rite.
Our cousins in the Unitarian Universalist tradition referred to the inter-dependent web of life. The late Zen Master, Thich Nhat Hanh, re-cast the Buddhist term “emptiness,” so misunderstood by Western minds, as inter-being. Quantum physicists refer to entanglement and weirdness.
Every physical thing in you has been something else. Every physical thing in you will be something else. Every non-physical thing in you, every thought and emotion, is the latest fluctuation in a chain of events that started while you were still in the womb.
You are contingent. If that is scary, it is only because we have convinced ourselves that it is scary.
I believe in hard work, in what Christian theologians call “kenosis,” which is a pouring out or emptying of self in service of others. But that does not entitle me to anything. “Mine” is an illusion.
Our entire economic system is based on “mine,” on self, on entitlement. It is based on proscription. You can do anything to take what belongs to others and what belongs to the earth unless it is specifically prohibited by government, and if you have enough money, you can buy the government.
That is not God’s law as seen in creation, in that inter-dependent web, in our entanglement with others. Dragons on a pile of gold are myth, not nature.
Love. Serve. Create. Dance.
These are verbs that befit a Christian.
And as tempting as it might be, hide is not a verb befitting a follower of Christ. Neither is ignore, exactly what the righteous did when they walked by the man who had been mugged and left to die in a ditch. And along came a Samaritan, the other, despised. And he, refusing compassion by proxy, went down into the ditch.
What is yours when you are God’s? Absolutely everything. Absolutely nothing. May we serve in justice, kindness, and humility, this day and always. Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
Let us pray.
Most Amazing God,
in this time of moral crisis,
there are the cowards
and there are those who are afraid
and they are not the same people.
We thank you for Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde,
speaking gospel to power.
We are mindful that attacks
on civil servants, academics,
and Christian resistors
are straight from Hitler’s playbook,
but we are today’s Confessing Church,
confessing that You are God,
and that Christ is Your Word,
an embodiment of the prophetic tradition,
modeling selfless service
and courage even in the face of terror,
so we pray as he taught us, saying:
Our Father…