Luke — Blog — Casey and the Sunshine

Grace and peace from God our Creator, hope in our Redeemer Jesus the Christ, and the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit are with you, always.

Imagine for a moment that you are one of those disciples on the road to Emmaus. You’ve been walking a while—slowly, because it’s pretty warm and you’re exhausted from the chaos of the last few days. The two of you were together the last year or so, travelling with Jesus and learning and teaching and spreading the good news. Just last week you were with him when he rode into Jerusalem for the Passover—what a day!

The next few days are where it starts to get blurry because everything happened so quickly. One moment you were all in the garden together, praying, and the next those men from the chief priests came and arrested Jesus, took him away. And it sort of seemed like your friend Judas had something to do with that, but, you and the rest of your friends can’t really figure out exactly what happened—all you remember is running.

You heard through the mess of the city that he was going to be killed—crucified!—on the hillside just out of town, so you went there, hoping to see him, maybe talk to him, maybe find your friends, maybe find a way to free him, even! But when you finally saw him, it was too late. There he was. Your teacher, your friend.

Even now, as you remember the scene, you try to cover your ears to keep from hearing the echo of the hammer and nails, the cries, the jeers from the crowd as they mocked him. When it was too much to bear, you left. You’re not even sure what you did the next day—wandered around Jerusalem, looking for a friend to travel with. You’ll go home, you guess. What is there to do, here, anymore? Jesus is dead. All of your work, all of your plans, everything has been ruined. The man who was supposed to bring about this kingdom of God has been wrenched from your grasp.

The two of you, walking to Emmaus, have been rehashing what you can remember and trying to fill in the blanks and the blurs. The weirdest thing is that your friend, Cleopas, with whom you’re walking, said that some of your friends, the women, went to Jesus’ tomb this morning and found it empty. They said they’d seen a vision of angels that told them Jesus has been raised from the dead! You can’t even begin to believe that. Others went, after the women had told them what had happened, and saw that the tomb was truly empty, but, what did that prove? Someone took his body away. You don’t even like thinking about that.

There are so many stories to hear and to tell, so many things to try to explain.

And that man you just met on the road, who was he? He was coming from Jerusalem just as you were, and yet, when you mentioned the things that happened, he asked, “What things?” How could you even hope to express to this stranger what you have been through? How could he possibly understand?

You explained, to the best of your ability—even mentioning the thing about the women believing Jesus to be resurrected—and he had the audacity to tell you that you should have been prepared for this, because if Jesus really was the Messiah, like everybody said he was, it had to end this way. And then he talked about scripture, the whole rest of the way to Emmaus. It was stories you knew about your people’s history, and Jesus had told them to you a hundred times. It was a little bit like he was telling them to you, again, then, through this stranger on the road.

Not knowing where he was headed, you invited him to eat with you. Jesus was always inviting everyone to the table, so you felt it was the right way to remember him, today.

Lo and behold, in the breaking of the bread, it is him! Jesus the Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, your friend, your teacher, your God. There at the table where he had always made God’s love known to you and to your friends, he made himself known, once again.

And isn’t that the way it always works? We venture out into the great unknown, disciples of Jesus to the best of our abilities—which, fortunately, we have a great example set by the 12 of doing a very poor job of following Jesus perfectly—and encounter God in the most expected and the most unexpected places.

Y’all might know of Sara Miles, an Episcopalian here in the city—she feeds people over at St. Gregory of Nyssa. She wrote a book that’s mostly about food—kind of like the Bible. She wrote a few chapters about her sudden and slow encounter with God in the Eucharist, and how it extended to pretty much all food. She worked in some kitchens and was around an abundance of food (and food waste) and then, as a journalist, she covered the civil wars in Latin America in the 1980s, where food was very scarce.

Once she’d experienced the eucharist at St. Gregory’s, she spent the better part of a year trying to figure out how this food and faith connection worked.

About that process, she writes these great words: “Poking around in the Bible, I found clues about my deepest questions. Salt, grain, wine, and water; figs, pigs, fishermen, and farmers. There were psalms about hunger and thirst, about harvests and feasting. There were stories about manna in the wilderness and prophets fed by birds. There was a God appearing in radiance to Ezekiel and handing him a scroll: ‘Mortal,’ God said, ‘eat this scroll,’ and Ezekiel swallowed the words, ‘sweet as honey,’ and knew God.” Hmm.

And Jesus by no means abandons that medium! She keeps writing that “in the New Testament appeared the astonishing fact of Jesus, proclaiming that he himself was the bread of heaven…. he said he was bread and told his friends to eat him.”

And when we talk about Jesus' “friends”, remember who those friends were. Nobody fancy or important by their societal standards. Jesus made a point of eating with whoever was at the table, whoever would invite him to their table, whoever had never received an invitation to a table, before. Like Sara, I love how ordinary Jesus’ work was. That Jesus simply and radically ate with people, walked with people, talked with people. She even writes about this walk to Emmaus, and how it was in the breaking of the bread that his friends could recognize him.

Where is it that we recognize Jesus? Where are we being fed and where are we feeding others that serves as an encounter with the face of God? Certainly here in the Bay Area, bustling with people and noise and trains and taxis and bicycles, there are endless faces to see. But do we? There are stark contrasts in this city and in this nation between those who are seen and those who are unseen. Here at St. Francis I know that y’all have a history of making unseen people seen. A history of speaking the truth in love to our dear ELCA, and facing the consequences. It is in these acts of radical hospitality that you have provided access to the table for those who had never received an invitation, before.

At this table, there are no restrictions. If you’re in this room, you’re invited to eat. Jesus the Christ sets the table for us, welcoming those who see themselves as the least to take their place at the head of the table.

At this very communion table, and at the table of God’s grace in the world, you may find yourself sitting next to someone you didn’t really want to see, thank you very much. It’s very easy to make a list of who should not, in fact, be welcome at the table. Or maybe, it’s very easy to find yourself on someone else’s list of the unwelcome. Truth is, Jesus’ mandate that we sit with sinners guarantees my right and your right to be at the table, too.

When we emulate Jesus’ open-table practice, we break down barriers between friends and strangers, and open ourselves to addressing issues of one another’s injustice. When we join together at this table, we tell and retell and retell the story, reigniting those encounters with the crucified and resurrected Christ. Once we’ve eaten together, we can walk together. So let’s eat, and then let’s walk.

Amen.

1 Kings 8:22-23, 41-43

Psalm 96

Galatians 1:1-12

Luke 7:1-10

"Ain't No Reason" -- Brett Dennen

This liturgical year, we’re in the year of Luke, and it’s been a while since we actually had a Gospel text from Luke, so I’m so glad to be back here! Because what I love about Luke, as a gospel author, is that everything he writes is so intentional. Luke is not in the business of telling us a story about Jesus just to listen to himself speak.

In Luke’s stories, every character is acting out of his or her social location, and we’re meant to notice that. And Jesus and the disciples are interacting across borders and through social boundaries, and we’re meant to notice that. The words and work of Jesus here are enmeshed in a society that did not have ears to hear or eyes to see, but that they do see and they do hear cannot be overlooked. The power of God to overcome our complicated human nonsense and bring a message of radical inclusion and social justice to a weary world cannot be overlooked. [Sometimes, I look quizzically at the lectionary compilers, and wonder just what common thread they’ve expected me to find between the texts they’ve selected. This week is one that restores my faith in them.]

As we journey through the history of the people of God in these texts, we hear first from Solomon the Wise, calling out to God and to his community that all should be welcome in the temple, that all should be here, offering their prayer and their praise in the name of this God, YHWH, who is the breath of their common life. That where you come from should not bar you from this community. Our God is the God of all people. The good news is for the whole people of earth.

It can feel a little sticky, though, in our postmodern world of political correctness, to proclaim that our God is the God above all other gods. And so a theologian named Diane Chen reminds us, for that reason, that we must not only tell the world of our God’s salvation, “but also be agents of that salvation in a hurting and unjust world.” I love best what she writes, next, “proclaiming God cannot be done at a safe distance,” she says. “Christians cannot insulate themselves from the ills of the world and settle for a holy huddle. God's compassion and justice are organic and tactile. They require engagement in the messiness of poverty, marginalization, exploitation, and all other atrocities human beings do to themselves, to one another, and to creation on individual and systemic levels.” She then asks if, now that we’ve talked the talk, if we’re willing to walk the walk. This deep dive into human ills is exactly where Luke’s stories of Jesus take us.

This story of the healing of the centurion’s slave could not be richer. Our cast of characters come from markedly different social locations. Jesus, a transient Jewish rabbi—the centurion, an authority of the Roman empire—the slave, the least powerful it is possible to be. We’re looking at a microcosm of this whole society.

This Roman centurion is unusual in a few ways. He’s seeking the healing of one of his slaves—presumably, he has many, and could just as easily be rid of this one and get a healthy one without another thought, but Luke tells us that this centurion “valued his slave highly.” And Luke also tells us that the centurion was a benefactor of the local Jewish community, having contributed to the building of their house of worship. That’s pretty unusual.

He sent some Jewish friends of his to talk to Jesus on his behalf, because that’s what someone with his civil authority would do. These Jewish elders implored Jesus on their centurion friends’ behalf, listing just how positive an influence he’d had on the community, and expressing his worthiness of having Jesus heal his slave.

Jesus had any number of options, here. He could have simply dismissed these Jewish elders because he didn’t have time, or because he was on his way to somewhere more important, or because he had no business healing the slave of a Roman centurion, or because he had no business communicating with a Roman centurion, or because he couldn’t be bothered to enter the ritually unclean house of the Roman centurion…

Instead, he notices that he’s not far from the place where the centurion lives, and will just head on over there and see what’s happening. Having been informed of Jesus’ impending visit, the centurion panics, sending more messengers to meet Jesus on the road and explain that Jesus should stop right where he is—the centurion cannot allow Jesus to enter his ritually unclean house, cannot imagine that Jesus himself would actually come out to his house of all places and heal his slave of all slaves, and says that certainly Jesus can just say the word, from out there on the road, and all manner of things will be made well.

A great thing is happening here. Simultaneously, Jesus’ willingness to come into this place makes the centurion fear that he is unworthy of the generosity and healing headed toward his household, and Jesus’ willingness to come has declared the centurion worthy. Jesus’ willingness to cross all sorts of social boundaries has rendered them all inert.

There are no roadblocks to the healing presence and life-giving word of Jesus, the Christ. The rules that govern this society—so deeply entrenched that the rules themselves make this story worth telling—have been bent and broken by the faith of this centurion—simultaneous cautious optimism and bold assertion of his place in the family of God.

We, as human people, have put walls between us and God, even though our own scriptures proclaim that nothing can separate us! Clearly, grace such as that is for others, who are more than worthy to receive it, but us? Oh, no, we have done something to render us unworthy. If you only knew just what it was we’d done.

Luke has written this story down so that we might be assured that the love of God in Jesus, the Christ, is not restricted by the boundaries we’ve constructed.

And now that we know that neither death nor life nor angels nor rulers nor things present nor things to come neither height nor depth nor all of creation can ever separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord…now that we know that, we can proclaim ever-so-boldly, the freedom that is ours. Certainly, the weight of the world hangs over our heads, but the love of God liberates us from all of that. Untangles us from the webs we weave. Unmires us from the muck of oppressive systems set up to keep us down.

In his letter to the Galatians, Paul warns against the dangers of the “nongospel” that he fears will ensnare them. We had some great conversations at Bible Exploration earlier this week about all the things that this “nongospel” could be in our world. We hear the prosperity gospel—the first shall be first and the last shall be last, right?—all day every day in our national consumer struggle to own everything. We are lured in to place our faith in the false gods of power, and money, and sex, and violence, and politics, and empire, and fear of other.

The human systems of Jesus’ social order were not designed for equity and neither are the systems of our social order. The impoverished, the marginalized, and the exploited are still as such. The violence we inflict on ourselves, each other, and our planet—whether we are directly complicit or simply do nothing to stop it—make our world heavy and dark.

We are drawn, therefore, to these nongospel gods, that promise us release from that darkness and weight. We are drawn to them by our secular world, totally, but we’re drawn to them out of the mouths of preachers, too. This myth of the gospel as individualist self-help manual comes to us from church after church. But this morning, His Holiness Pope Francis tweeted that, "the world tells us to seek success, power, and money. God tells us to seek humility, service, and love." And so anything preached as gospel that is remotely contradictory to “love your God and love your neighbor as yourself” should cause us to, at the very least, raise our eyebrows.

What’s alluring about these nongospels is that they sound wayyyyy easier than what the words of Jesus are calling us to do and be. The Apostle Paul’s loyalty to the radically equalizing gospel of Jesus the Christ leads him to admonish the church at Galatia for their quick and easy fall into the nongospel. He writes that he is, “astonished” that they are “so quickly deserting the one who called” them “in the grace of Christ.” But what he doesn’t write is that it’s going to be easy or popular to follow in the example left for them by Jesus, the Christ. Instead, he writes one of my favorite sentences in all of his letters. “If I were still pleasing people,” he writes, “I would not be a servant of Christ.” And by pleasing people, he doesn’t mean being friendly and nice—because certainly that is within the scope of being a Christian.

But that is far too soft. The message of Jesus the Christ—and with it the mission of the church—is to proclaim the radical notion that all of us are equally worthy of the love of God, and that we ought to express our belovedness in our love for and service of one another. And Paul is reminding the church at Galatia that this is a new way of being. This doesn’t sidle right up to business as usual. This is a new life. We are a new creation. This is unlike any community of which we’ve ever been part—and unlike any community from which we’ve ever been excluded!

At worship on Thursday, a song called “Ain’t No Reason,” by Brett Dennen, served as a companion to this Gospel text. In it, Brett laments that our current world doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, a whole lot of the time. He sings, “There ain’t no reason things are this way—it’s how they’ve always been and they intend to stay. I can’t explain why we live this way, but we do it every day.” He talks about a plethora of social ills that he could do without—poverty, hate, political corruption, odious debt, slavery, homelessness, the prison-industrial complex, weapons of war, sweatshops—but he croons in a breathtakingly simple, repetitive chorus, that love will come set us free. Though there is chaos and commotion wherever we go, he sings, we try to follow in the alternative way of love.

And so, like Brett, we know that the world is dark and dreary and heavy and that our own hearts can be dark and dreary and heavy. And our needs to be healed and to be freed and to be fed imply that there is sickness, and there is imprisonment, and there is hunger and thirst. The gospel we hear and proclaim to all nations does not suppose that these realities are covered up or sugar-coated or neatly-packaged. Or that you—or anyone—is not worthy of being healed, freed, and fed—but rather, the love of God in Jesus the Christ has brought about new realities of liberation and wholeness and community. Love has come and set us free.

Thanks be to God. Amen.