Sunday, December 2, 2012

This Week's Sermon: "Fat Wallets, Empty Lives"

Isaiah 3:13-15

13 The LORD rises to accuse; he stands to judge the peoples.
14The LORD will enter into judgment with the elders and princes of his people: You yourselves have devoured the vineyard; the goods stolen from the poor are in your houses.
15 How dare you crush my people and grind the faces of the poor? says the LORD God of heavenly forces. (CEB)


“How Much is Enough?  Hungering for God in an Affluent Culture,” Week One

I realize this is a time when many of you want to hear about what is happening here, but I want us to begin by going halfway across the country to my hometown of Kansas City, because it has vaulted to prominence in the national news over the last 72 or so hours.  First, it was because one of the winning Powerball tickets—one of only two that promised the riches of the widely-publicized $587.5 million jackpot—was bought by a family in one of Kansas City’s Northland suburbs.  Of course, the national press descended, especially after the family’s identity was revealed, and the sports world even got involved, with one of the newspaper’s sports columnists writing a half-serious, half-joking column asking the family to donate some of its proceeds to increase the payroll of our woeful Major League Baseball team, the Kansas City Royals.

But just a couple of days later, the headlines on the papers were very, very different, as a four-year member of the Kansas City Chiefs football team shot and killed his 22-year-old girlfriend early in the morning in a domestic dispute before driving to the team’s practice facility and, in full view of his head coach and general manager, shot and killed himself.  He was younger than me—only 25 years old—and left behind a three-month-old infant daughter.

Both stories centered around people of no longer ordinary means.  The husband and wife of the Northland family who won the Powerball have both already given notice at their jobs.  And the athlete who committed a murder-suicide had made millions playing a sport that many children happily play for free on playgrounds across the country.

And in both stories—ranging from celebration to sorrow in great extremes—a common theme has already emerged: the importance of having something to live for, rather than something merely to destroy…a theme that, perhaps more than ever, applies to this church today.

This is a new sermon series for us as a church, as well as a new year.  This Sunday marks the first Sunday of the new church year, which doesn’t quite adhere to our January-through-December calendar—it usually runs November-through-November, and it begins with this first season that we call Advent.  It is a time of, as John the Baptist preached to us, preparing the way for the Lord who is to come to us on Christmas Day.  And we’ll be doing so this Christmas season by reading together one of the great forerunners in the Old Testament to Jesus, the prophet Isaiah.  He is the one who prophesied the coming of a virgin who would give birth to a child called Emmanuel, but Isaiah has so much more to share with us than that.  And we’ll be looking at what he had to say early in his prophetic career in light of the book “How Much is Enough?  Hungering for God in an Affluent Culture,” by Arthur Simon, who founded the Christian nonprofit organization Bread for the World.  We’ll be juxtaposing a passage from Isaiah with a chapter from “How Much Is Enough?” beginning with the chapter entitled, “Fat Wallets, Empty Lives.”

I’m not going to pretend that discovering the devastation to the sanctuary provided any sort of epiphany, that I was overcome with emotion, or forgiveness, or even with God’s presence.  It was a void of numbness.  I felt nothing.  I could do nothing, say nothing, think nothing.
But that’s the sort of pain that others feel every single day by the abuse and misery that is heaped upon them in their own lives, the result of all sorts of evil—abuse, violence, homelessness, poverty.  The all-consuming nothingness that I felt, that you may well have felt as well, is a daily experience for many of God’s children.

And that is what necessitates Isaiah’s prophecy here.  It is what necessitates a God who will go to the mat for us, who will, as Isaiah says, “rise to argue His case,” who challenges those who do wrong by saying “What do you mean by crushing MY people?”

If nothing else, that is what I hope God is asking the people who broke into our sanctuary, who violated God’s house, and who personally affected each and every one of us, that God is asking them, “What do you mean by hurting my people so?”

Because I have already given up on asking that question myself.  I have received no answers.

I imagine that is probably how it is meant to be.  I may not know why someone did this, but I do need to know how to forgive them.  We may not know why people do things to one another, but what we do need to know is how to respond with grace, and with compassion, and with love.

It is something that is perhaps easier this time of the year, to respond to destruction with reconciliation.  It’s perhaps a bit more natural during the holidays to be nicer.  It shouldn’t be that way, but if we are honest with ourselves, it is probably that way.  And it is that way precisely because of what we have grown to value, and what, in turn, we have grown to neglect.

As Arthur Simon puts it, there “lies a widespread myth that God and life in God are nice but largely irrelevant—mere superstition to some, for others a bit of religion we tack on to the rest of life.  The natural world, on the other hand, is real.  What matters in life is what we can get and enjoy for ourselves…(so) the problem is not that we’ve tried faith and found it wanting, but that we’ve tried mammon and found it addictive, and as a result find following Christ inconvenient.”

Make no mistake, this is one such time in which we might decide that following Christ is inconvenient.  This is the Messiah who is loopy enough to, when asked, “How many times do I forgive my neighbor?  As many as seven times?” respond by saying, “Not seven times, but seventy times seven.”  This is the Savior who is radical enough to dare to say to us, “You judge by human standards, but I judge no person.”  And this is the Christ who is so connected with what God wants that He can actually say to us, “Forgive, and I tell you, you shall be forgiven.”

If anything, what has happened to us puts to lie the notion that Arthur Simon writes about here: that the natural world is real.  It may be real, but it is also finite.  It’s tangible.  Limited.  And, as we’ve learned and re-learned this week, ultimately destructible.

Your faith, and your capacity to forgive, does not have to be that way.  It does not have to be so easily destroyed as an altar flower arrangement, or so easily burnt as a paper hymnal.  And I think that God would not want our faith to be that way either.  He wants us to have faith that when we are hurt, when our vineyards have been devoured, when our spoils are taken from us, that He will rise to argue His case for us.  He wants us to have faith that He will go to bat for us.
And that is what we have to live for, as people of faith—a God who loves us so much that He actually tells us to knock it off in Romans—He says, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay.”  This is a God who has got our backs, even if it doesn’t feel like it at the time.  And I know it may not feel like that now for you.  But it is still so.

It is so because, in the end, we cannot be expected to keep up with every extreme, every ebb and flow, of this wild, painful, incredible, sinful, life-giving world that God has left to us.  Someday, the things that happen this week will be replaced in our short-term memories by the things that happen next week—things good, bad, and indifferent alike.  The identities of the Powerball winners will no longer be the topic of converastion, the horror of a murder-suicide will no longer be at the forefront of our minds, and the damage done to our sacred space will be erased by all of the love that this sanctuary holds.

Which is, in the end, probably for the best.  This isn’t forgetting.  This is catharsis.  This is a form of healing.  After all, to catalog every wrong, every grievance, and to file it away deep in the recesses of our anger and our rage serves no one.

Unless we actually do something about it.

Which is the ENTIRE point of Isaiah.  We can do something—we can turn to the God who does not just politely request, or gently ask, or calmly inquire, for peace and justice for His children.  He demands it.  He commands it.  And He is willing to do whatever it takes to ensure that there will, in the end, be peace—including sending His own Son to us.  The proof of God’s commitment to us and to our wellbeing will be lying in the manger, gurgling and crying, just a few short weeks from now.

This is the church season of Advent—a time of waiting and of preparing for the Lord’s coming.  This is a time when we are called by John the Baptist to make straight the paths of the Lord.  And these aren’t just literal paths, the paths that our feet trod on by the lake or on the street.  These are the paths into our very selves where we can carry the hurt and anger that has been building up for an entire year—anger that maybe we thought would be temporary, but that has solidified like stone into something far more permanent.  My own anger this week is one such thing that I pray is temporary, and that I pray will not become a fixture in my soul.  Which is why this sermon is for me as well.  It is why John the Baptist’s command is for me as well.

Make straight the path of the Lord into your own heart.

Make straight the path of the Lord into your own soul.

And I promise you, you will be amazed at the ways God wants to work in your life.

By the grace of God, may it be so.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
December 2, 2012

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