The Gift that Keeps on Giving—A Snarky and Heartfelt Sermon on Gratitude

I preached this sermon to the good people of St. Mark's Lutheran Church in Fairfield, CA on the Sunday before Thanksgiving.

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.

As was said at the start of the service, I’m Pastor Casey Kloehn Dunsworth, your Lutheran campus pastor to UC Davis, and Program Director for LEVN, the Lutheran Episcopal Volunteer Network. I spend my days, and evenings, and weekends with young adults—undergraduates, graduate students, and recent graduates. It is a privilege to serve in this capacity, accompanying students and service corps members through some of the most formative years of their young adult lives.

With my students, I gather for worship and dinner each week, and meet for Bible Study and to engage in different spiritual practices. The rhythms of the quarter system take some getting used to; students revel in the deep breaths and slowed down time we spend together. I am grateful for the opportunity to guide them through the challenges they face, praying for them, celebrating with them, and grieving with them.

The LEVN program, too, gathers weekly for worship and dinner, as our seven young adults navigate life in intentional Christian community and 40 hours per week of service in a local non-profit organization. Throughout their year with us, we provide formation—theological and educational resources that can help frame their work in the world, appreciation of the natural beauty God has created here in Northern California, strategies for living together harmoniously, practices they can carry with them in their life after LEVN.

One of my favorite practices that we do together is an annual Thanksgiving-ish evening of gratitude and affirmations.  We read some scripture and some other inspirational words around gratitude, from sages like ee cummings and Oprah Winfrey. And then we spend several minutes reflecting on all of the people and things for which we are grateful. And then we write each other words of affirmation that we can hold on to for those moments where our own assurance of our belovedness falters.

I love this practice, because it reframes our relationships and our community as one of gratitude and abundance. The close quarters of young adult life do not always lend themselves to such feelings, as the day-to-day messes of shared kitchens and shared experiences become heavy.

Though I am sure you encounter your fair share of messiness, I doubt that you all live with six or seven other adults, sharing one kitchen and 2 showers. Or that you came across the country to do so in a city you’d never seen, on a small stipend, while serving full-time in a busy non-profit.

Our LEVN volunteers have been invited to live counter-culturally for their year of service, and this shows in so many ways. We talk often about the difference between “scarcity” and “abundance” and how for people of faith, they can be two sides of the same coin.

It is not hard to reflect on our lives from a position of scarcity. There is never enough time, or enough money, or enough sleep, or enough energy, or enough...whatever just popped into your mind to fill in that blank.

The countercultural practice we invite our LEVN volunteers into is to reflect on their lives from a position of abundance. If this is not something you occasionally, deliberately take part in, I wholeheartedly encourage you to give it a try.

What, in your life, is abundant?

For what, in your life, are you grateful?

Because our annual national day of Thanksgiving is fast approaching, these themes are fresh in our minds and hearts. In celebration of this thanks, what happens if we approach the lectionary texts for this week with gratitude and abundance in mind?

The text this morning from the Gospel according to Matthew, another parable about slaves and money, is a classic head-scratcher. Which character did the right thing?

Which character is Jesus saying we are like? Which character is Jesus hoping we will strive to be more like? Which character is acting as God acts? How do we know? How do we translate this scenario into the world we live in? Should we?

The dissection and interpretation of the intricate math of this parable is less important to our story today than the question it leaves us with: what have we done with what we have been given?

Maybe we even have to start earlier than that: what have we been given? What have you received, throughout your life, from God?

This can be a tough one, because as we are Christians we are also Americans and we are very convinced that we have worked hard and earned everything that we have. You have worked hard, and you have earned so much.

As your guest preacher this morning I am excited to let you in on a very freeing truth: everything comes to us from God, who created us in their image and loves us unconditionally. There is no such thing as a self-made man.

The nation of our birthright citizenship, the families into which we are born, the socio-economic factors that shape our upbringing, the schools we attend, and the employment opportunities available to us are largely outside our control or influence.

Yes, within a set of parameters we make choices about our lives, but the gift of our life comes from God. The gifts of our intellect, our interests, our passions, and our vocations come from God. The gifts of our talents, abilities, and skills come from God. Our bodies are gifts, within our wide spectrum of ability and capacity. Some of us are all too familiar with the deterioration or sudden loss of those abilities or capacities; how precious those gifts have been.

Everywhere we have been, God has been with us. God has been accompanying us, and providing us all of the other people and institutions that carried us on our way.

That one family member or dear friend who has always been your greatest champion; that school teacher who really encouraged you; that mentor that showed you the ropes; that teammate who always had your back; that supervisor who gave you a chance; that doctor who walked with you every step of the way—gifts from God, each and every one of them. Our entire social fabric has been laid out for us by God and entrusted to us. This good earth, in its vastness and its fragility, was created by God and entrusted to us.

What have we done with what we have been given?

In our Gospel story, one slave is given 5 talents, another 2, another 1. The 5- and 2-talent-having-ones double the money. The single-talented-one squanders his. Buries it in the ground.

I have to admit that this slave’s behavior is most like mine; out of fear of the risk of losing the money entrusted to me, I’d likely just sock it away until the master returned, too. But this ignores the purpose of handing the money over in the first place. The goal was not to have the same money in hand when he returned; if he wanted that, he likely would have just kept his coins to himself.

Now, I’m making huge interpretive leaps here, because we know nothing of this scenario other than that it entailed a master and some slaves, and we know that masters never gave gifts to their slaves or treated them with dignity and kindness—this is a human rights violation, not a friendship.

But if we are the analogy-making types, we might wonder about how the story would play out of it were God doling out gifts and us standing to receive them.

Does God provide us every good gift and expect that we will squander that which we have been given? Does God provide us every good gift and expect that we will hoard it all to ourselves?

No, dear ones, of course not. God has provided us every good gift in the hope that we will use those gifts for the sake of the world. In gratitude to God for all that we have received, it is obvious that our next move is to give, too.

To which family member or dear friend are you the greatest champion? Which children in your community are you encouraging? Who do you mentor in your professional field or vocational sector? Whose team are you always on? Who are you giving a chance? Who do you walk alongside?

Our gospel text closes with this cryptic sentence: “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away” (Matthew 25:29).

In this time of holiday preparation, it can be easy to assume that our gratitude is supposed to be for our things. Our homes, our prized possessions, our earthly treasures. It is a good practice to be grateful for things, but it is dangerous to stop there. When our gratitude is only for things, we can end up leaving the Thanksgiving table to get in line for Black Friday sales, elbowing other customers for the last big screen TV. Those who have much and those who have little can be equally guilty of this mentality of scarcity.

When our gratitude extends to all that we have, all that we are, all that we will be—no matter how much others may judge us to be—it is in this depth of gratitude that we truly know abundance.

If we believe that there is not enough, there will never be enough. If we believe that we are not enough, we will never be enough. You are enough. You are more than enough. And for that, thanks be to God. Amen.

Back to Work—A Sermon on Economic Justice and the First Week of Classes

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.

Welcome! Welcome back! Welcome home!

Writing the back-to-school sermon is such an exciting and odd experience for me. Throughout the year, when I’m writing, I’m thinking back to who was here in the chapel the week before and what did we talk about after dinner and what have y’all been up to this week and what’s going on in the world...but for the first week back, there’s so much mystery!  I am thinking about returning students and what y’all have been up to all summer—research, internships, summer session, working, sleeping. But also I am imagining the possibilities of new students, and who might be wandering into our little yellow house this week for the very first time.

Perhaps you just moved to Davis a few days ago, or have been here a year or more, but today seemed like the right day to come. Perhaps you saw the sign that said Free Dinner, and that sealed the deal. Whatever brought you to this table, welcome.

Here at the Belfry, you know or will come to know that we get together for a few pretty specific reasons: to eat food, to make friends, to laugh a lot, to sing songs, and to hear stories from scripture. Sounds simple enough.

In the Gospel stories, Jesus has a habit of telling parables—sort of riddles—that cause a lot of confusion. Sometimes, the people to whom he’s telling the story within the story aren’t sure what the moral of the story is; or, they totally get it, and they realize he’s telling them that they are wrong, and they get very upset; or, they get it backwards and they think he’s calling them good when he’s really telling them to get their act together.

And we’re not so different. Sometimes, we hear the words of Jesus and we sit back and say, “huh?” And other times, we hear the words of Jesus and realize that we are not living into the Christian life quite the way we thought, and we feel convicted. And other times, we hear the words of Jesus and we think we’re doing all right but then someone points out that it’s not so simple. Every once in awhile, though, we hear the words of Jesus and something clicks.

I don’t know if tonight’s story puts you in any of these camps, and it’s pretty okay if you’re solidly in the “huh?” zone. That’s where I hang out a lot of the time.

Luckily, many Christians and many scholars have come before us, and they can offer us some wisdom to help us on our way. One of the best people that I like to turn to when I read a parable and go, “huh?” is a professor named Amy-Jill Levine. She’s a Jewish woman who teaches the New Testament to people studying to be Christian ministers. She is very snarky and she is a genius. She wrote a book called Short Stories by Jesus, in which she lays out how the people Jesus was talking to would have heard these parables. Such a helpful lens to look through! She had excellent things to offer me, as usual, about tonight’s.

Let’s think back to a few minutes ago when I read that. In the parable, we’re in a vineyard, with the owner of the vineyard and some hired laborers. He hired some of them first thing in the morning, and promised to pay them “what is right,” a day’s wages. He hired some more at 9 and at 3 and even at 5. He paid them, at the end of the work day, one full day’s wages. Those who had worked since sunrise, since 9, since 3, and since 5.

Now, I think most of y’all have probably worked an hourly job before, and absolutely could not expect to be paid for hours you did not work. And probably would have been upset to find out that someone who worked for fewer hours than you did was paid the same as you were. It is pretty easy to understand the laborers who “grumble” against the landowner.

The landowner has behaved sort of oddly, paying them this way. He gives them all a day’s wages—a right and just thing to do, as these people probably have families to support, and the work they did for him was all the work they could get that day. He doesn’t pay them based on the quality of the work they’ve done, how much they’ve achieved, how effective they’ve been. He pays them what he believes everyone deserves.

Naming this parable “The Laborers in the Vineyard” encourages us to identify with the laborers as opposed to the landowner, whom we are then free to identify as God.[1] Easy enough. No matter what we do, God has claimed us in our baptism and we will all receive grace upon grace. End of sermon, see you later.

Not so fast! What if we change that? What if, instead of interpreting this as “God is generous with salvation”—thought that is true, and a good thing to remember—what if we thought about this as a much more literal example for how to treat one another? I will rarely encourage you to engage in Biblical literalism, y’all, so when we go down that road, it’s for a good reason.

You could interpret this parable as “no matter what you do, God loves you, and so it doesn’t matter.” But complacency is not the best look for Christian life. Showing up at the end of the day and hoping to eke out the same benefits as those who have worked all day is not recommended. Especially when we turn this into a prescription for the work of justice. Looking at a situation that will take a day’s labor, we cannot assume that if we do the bare minimum, that’s “enough” to get the real, long-term work accomplished. We can take it one step further towards the literal, and wonder about who is receiving benefits for whose work.

Amy-Jill Levine, the professor I mentioned before, she puts it this way: “If we refocus the parable away from ‘who gets into heaven’ and toward ‘who gets a day’s wage,’ we can find a message that challenges rather than prompts complacency. If we look at economics, at the pressing reality that people need jobs and that others have excess funds, we find what should be a compelling challenge to any hearer.”[1]

As residents and citizens of the United States of America, we are well aware that there are disparities in our society—racism, income inequality, sexism, heterosexism, xenophobia, white supremacy, and more.

A report by PayScale.com and Equilar says that “the average CEO-to-worker pay ratio….stands at about 70-to-1, with some CEOs making more than 300 times the median salary of their employees.” And, for the data-driven among you, that is only talking about cash, before stock options and other compensation provided to many executives.

Truly seeing who is doing the work and who has the most money at the end of the day, this parable does not mirror the way our society is structured. In this parable, the landowner freely gives away his money to those who need it. He seeks out those who need work, and he pays everyone a living wage. Even those who have not done what the rest of the market might deem a day’s work.

This landowner should “not only be a reference to God, for what God does is often what those who claim to follow God should do.” [1] As Christians, we should seek to be so generous, so just. We should seek to find all those who look for meaningful work, and provide it to them. We should ensure that everyone has enough resources to live well in our communities. We should ensure that even those who cannot work—the chronically ill, for example—are not forced into poverty because of it.

We should notice if any of this makes us feel uncomfortable. We work hard for what we earn. Yes, and we should be paid appropriately for that work. We should not, though, have to sentence a huge segment of our population to a life of poverty because there isn’t enough to go around. There is enough. There has always been enough, and there will always be enough.

God, who is rich in mercy and abounding in steadfast love, serves as an example for us of how well we can treat one another, if we want to. We learn from these stories big truths about God, like these, and big truths about ourselves, too. As we gather at the table for communion, there will be enough. It is my prayer that we will carry that fullness and richness out into the world together.

It’s a new day here in Davis. It’s a new quarter, a new school year. As we go through the motions—get settled into the new schedule, figure things out with new roommates, remember how to ride a bike—we can decide what this new year will be like. We can wonder about how our life and work is related to all the lives and all the work happening around us. It is my joy and privilege to be among you this year, wondering along.

Amen.

[1] Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: the Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi, HarperOne, 2015.

Stick to the Fundamentals—A Sermon on 'Moses and the Prophets'

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.

As you spend more time here at the Belfry, you will see that I do not go anywhere without a certain book. It is leather-bound (fake, vegan leather, don’t worry); it is full of information that guides my daily life; it is full of wisdom for my self-improvement; it is full of history (mine and others’); it is full of scribbles and highlights and post-it notes; I refer to it before I make plans or do anything important. No, dear ones, this book is not the Bible. It is my Passion Planner.

Whether you keep your schedule in your phone, or in your UC Davis academic planner, or scrawled on a napkin and shoved in your pocket, you are probably aware of the benefits of an organized mind.

Every once in awhile, I get really busy with unexpected stuff and I don’t even open my planner for a couple of days. Maybe this does not sound dire to you, but this is dire. I am so to-do-list centered, that when I start several projects without adding their component parts to the list, I run the risk of losing track of them completely. On one of these occasions, I’ll open my planner and see that nothing on the list has been accomplished, and that I’d even forgotten something—having been busy non-stop for days!

The solution to this problem is so easy, it’s almost impossible for me to understand why I don’t just do it the right way every time. I just have to take a deep breath and head back to basics: write down the stuff that needs doing and then do it. Genius, right?

There are plenty of complicated things in our lives that we started out with basics. You take Spanish 101 before Spanish 201; you learn to catch and throw a baseball before you learn to pitch a curveball; you start small with a 5K before training for a marathon; you learned to read at your grade level before moving onto the next.

Our life in faith is the same. Our introduction to the gospel is not likely to be a jaunt through The Complete Works of Martin Luther. That would likely be somehow simultaneously boring and overwhelming at the same time. Too much deep detail too fast, right? You’d skip right past the fundamentals.

When you were in Sunday school, or confirmation, or wherever you were introduced to learning Christianity, you may have started with the Lord’s Prayer or the 10 Commandments or the Apostle’s Creed. In mainline Protestant churches, we often look to these places for the fundamentals of our church. These come out of our scripture directly and from the first few centuries of Christians interpreting our scripture.

In the gospel lesson for today, Jesus is talking to some Pharisees—religious leaders—long before the word “Christian” entered the fray. From what we read of them, these men are Jewish leaders, teachers, and rule-enforcers, it seems. They're the ones who are always just off-stage, ready to jump in and ask Jesus a “gotcha” question. They’re just trying to do their jobs.

Jesus answers them by telling a story, called a parable, in which there is more to the story than just the literal, face-value. No parable is intended to encapsulate the entire gospel, but each tells a particular piece of the story for the listeners at hand. In today’s parable, a rich man and a poor man (Lazarus) live and die in the same community. Lazarus spends eternity with Abraham, while the rich man is in “agony” in “flames” (v 24).

Through these three characters, we learn that this rich man did not do all he could have—or, perhaps, anything—to help Lazarus or anyone else other than himself in his life. It would be easy—but inaccurate—to say that this is a cause and effect story about the afterlife. The life you live does not dictate your salvation or not, so don’t worry about that. If you’re going to worry about something, worry about what causes us to treat each other the way we do.

In this parable, “Jesus is describing the effect of living by the chasms of our world, not prescribing God’s eternal response to our sin.” [1] Jesus is not warning us about eternal consequences, but present-tense realities that we have the power to change. The rich man is worried about his brothers, and so wants them to be told about his fate so they might not suffer the same. This is my favorite part of the whole story. I can just hear Abraham chuckling, and with maybe even an eye roll or a knowing sigh, saying “they have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them” (v 29).

There’s a rad scholar named Amy-Jill Levine, who I think I’ve preached about before; she’s a Jewish woman who teaches New Testament at a Christian seminary. She knows a lot about Jesus the Rabbi. She wrote a book about parables, and there’s a chapter about this one. I highlighted like the whole thing, but here’s what I think the crux of it is:  “The rich man knows Abraham’s name and Abraham’s role, as he knew the name and the circumstances of the man in anguish by his gates. Knowledge without action will count for nothing. He refused to recognize on earth that Lazarus too was a child of Abraham and so should have been treated as a welcome member of the family. He had the resources; he had the opportunity; he had the commandments of Torah. He did nothing, and he still does nothing.”[2] Oof.

Through this story and the words attributed to Abraham, Jesus is reminding his listeners that they have all the tools they need to build a more just society: the Torah and the prophets. “The problem,” Amy-Jill Levine says, “ is not the message. The problem is that people don’t listen.”[2] If they are truly good people of faith—which they would claim to be, just as we would—they will have learned these fundamentals. It is not that there are more proscriptions to follow, more rules to learn, more admonishments to hear, more commandments or laws. If they would just follow all the ones they already have, they might get somewhere.

Throughout his ministry, Jesus rarely said anything new. He reiterated—often verbatim—Moses and the prophets. Stick to the fundamentals. There are things we can and must do to better our world, on a personal level and on a communal level. The rich man did neither.

And so, “The parable is not simply an indictment of personal behavior; it is an indictment of institutional behavior. It asks us, as the church, to look at the gates we have erected and to consider who lies just on the other side, suffering. Have we listened to ‘Moses and the prophets’?”[3]

There was a system at work in the society that the rich man and Lazarus lived and died in, and there is a system at work in ours.[4]  So what are we to do, then? Stick to our fundamentals. Take stock of our society—our Church, our school, our city, our nation—and notice the ways in which the systems we have built, participated in, benefited from—or been oppressed by—can be changed through the love of God.

Since we live in the United States, we are among some of the wealthiest people to have ever lived. However, we also live in a deeply stratified nation, where income inequality is as wide a chasm as the one between the rich man and Lazarus. The way our society is structured, wealth for a few is made possible only by the poverty of many. [5] This is not a critique of comfort, per se, but of disregard for those who lack. [6] It is not money and wealth intrinsically that are bad, but rather the love of money and of wealth that endangers us.

As we engage with one another in many and diverse ways—in class, at the grocery store, in our romantic relationships, in our families, in our churches, at our protests, in our voting booths—we must be conscious of our interconnectedness. We must not pursue domination or control over one another; we must not pursue wealth and material success at any cost; we must not devalue the lives of our siblings in the family of God. As we have read in the Torah and in the words of Jesus alike, we must love our God and love our neighbor. And like it is written in 1 Timothy, we must “pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of...eternal life” (v 11-12).

Stick to the fundamentals.
Stick together.
Amen.

____________________

[2] Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories By Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi

[3] Noelle Damico, "Proper 21 [26]" in Preaching God's Transforming Justice

[4] Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder, "Luke" in True to Our Native Land

[5] Clarice J. Martin, "1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus" in True to Our Native Land