Dishonest. Honestly.

Luke 16:1-13

“And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly…”  --Luke 16:8

Jesus’ parable in this week’s lesson reminds me of the Disney film, Pirates of the Caribbean.  I have always enjoyed this swashbuckling adventure (or should I say, “mis-adventure”) story.  In the film, the character of Captain Jack Sparrow is very much like the manager in the parable.  He is a pirate.  He is a self-serving thief and con-man who loves treasure, women and rum.  Hardly a character to emulate!  And yet, somehow, Captain Jack keeps doing the right things for the wrong reasons.  Somewhere deep beneath the crusty barnacles of his irreverent and immoral life, lies a kind heart and a weird kind of compassion that oozes out in spite of him. At one point in the movie, someone says, “Yes, he is a pirate…  And a good man.”  And there’s truth in that.  In the end, his miscreant behavior manages to bring together the hero and the heroine for a happy ending to the story.  

The dishonest manager in the parable is, well, dishonest.  As Jack says in Pirates, “You can always count on a dishonest man to be dishonest.”  That is true of this manager.  All attempts at scrubbing this man to make him seem more noble require us to read things into Jesus’ parable that simply aren’t there.  Even his own boss says he is dishonest while he is commending him!  But, in the end, his miscreant behavior significantly reduces the huge debts of the two people whose bills he adjusts.  I would guess they were grateful.  Somehow, in spite of himself, he manages to do the right thing.

Jesus seems to join the master in commending the man’s dishonesty. But, I don’t think he is suggesting that his disciples become dishonest scoundrels who squander their property. (Any more than Jesus commends the behavior of the Prodigal Son who squanders his inheritance in the parable that immediately precedes this one).  No.  Instead, I think Jesus wants the disciples  to understand that even scoundrels can do the right thing…  even if it is for the wrong reasons.  The point is, if a scoundrel like this dishonest manager can do the right thing, so can they.  

In Luke, Jesus talks a lot about wealth and possessions.  He commends those who use what they have for the sake of others (even if it is in spite of themselves!) and is critical of those who hoard their possessions or use them for their own benefit.  Jesus is trying to teach the disciples, and us, that we need to think about how weuse our possessions and wealth for the sake of others.  

Recently, I heard someone ask the question, “Do you control your money or does your money control you?”  I think that’s a good question.  Or to put it another way, “Do you serve your wealth or does it serve you?”  Or, to push it a little further, “Do you serve your wealth or do you use it to serve God?”  Or maybe even to push it a little more, “Do you serve your wealth, or does God use it, through you, to serve the world?”  Maybe even in spite of you?  Jesus’ frequent teaching throughout the Gospels suggest that how we use our money and possessions is a spiritual matter.  Generosity is good for you. It will open your heart to others and to God’s eternal generosity for you.  In the end, I like to imagine that the dishonest manager and maybe even Captain Jack Sparrow figured that out.

Peace,

Bishop Mike

Thanks for reading!  Pray for those who help us invest wisely, and for those who give us the opportunity to share what we have with others.  

The Carpenter's Pencil

Luke 15:1-10

‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’  --Luke 15:9

Last week, during my vacation, I built a set of steps for my deck.  The old ones had rotted to the point of collapsing, and safety demanded their replacement.  I am a slow carpenter.  One of the reasons I’m slow is that I often set down my tools around the work area and then can’t find them.  During this particular building project, I managed to lose my only carpenter’s pencil.

With increasing frustration and irritation, I searched and searched for the pencil in the small area I had covered between where I had used it last and where I noticed it was missing. After searching for what seemed like forever, I was convinced it had been swallowed up by a black hole.  I was just about to give up when…  there it was… laying hidden in a tuft of green grass. I was convinced it had been spit up by the black hole.  I was sure I had searched that same spot at least ten times.   

I rejoiced.

Can you think of a time when you found something you lost?  Can you remember finding something you had given up on ever finding again, or were about to?

Think about how YOU felt. 

I think that’s what Jesus was trying to say about how God feels when God finds us!  OK, God never really loses us!  But, we humans do have a bad habit of falling out of life’s pockets and slipping into the gaps between the sofa cushions of the world.  Like pencils, we slip out of holes in shirt pockets and wind up hiding in the grass. 

No matter how lost we are, God always keeps looking for us.  Unlike me and my pencil, I don’t think God is ever ready to give up on us.  Like the woman and the coin, the scriptures teach us that the God of steadfast love persistently searches for God’s lost ones.   As Paul writes, there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.  I believe that!  I count on it!

Jesus didn’t give up on those around him either.  He welcomed tax collectors and sinners, along with prostitutes, lepers, and those discounted by the world.  He even ate with Pharisees and others who were his enemies!  He invites us to do the same.  Not because we’re so righteous or better than the lost ones of our worlds.  Not because we’re like the woman with the coin.  But, we join Jesus’ search because we know we’re lost coins too.  We are compelled to invite everyone to the table because even the likes of us have been invited by Jesus. 

My pencil could do nothing to make me find it.  It could not shout or cry out or confess its faith in me or do anything else to help me in my search.  When it comes to being lost from God, there is nothing we can do either. And yet, somehow, God still manages to find us, reclaim us, and rejoice over us.  That’s grace.  Grace worth sharing.  The cornerstone of our faith.

Peace,

Bishop Mike

Pray for those who feel lost and alone, and who wander and wait to know the God who loves them. Pray that God uses us to accompany them and help them discover the God who never loses track of any of us.  Not once.

Thanks for reading.

Behind the Scenes

Luke 14:1, 7-14

For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.  –Luke 14:11

I have always preferred working in the background. Behind the scenes.  When I was in High School, I participated in a few musicals (we only did one every-other year).  But, I was never interested in being on stage.  I was a part of the audio-visual crew.  Lights and sound.  My senior year, I was chosen to run the master light board.  I sat up in the projection booth at the back of the theater and, though I was out of sight, I felt powerful behind that huge board that controlled, well, everything.  That was, until a fuse blew on opening night plunging everything into darkness.  I won’t repeat the words the director said in my headphones. 

Jesus’ words about humility at the end of this week’s parable have always confused me.  Humility is a good thing.  I get that. To be humble is to be who you are, nothing more, nothing less.  The word comes from the same root as “humanity.” To be humble is to be human in the fullest sense of that word.  It appears that those who aspire to the place of honor in the parable are anything but humble.  They seek the limelight.  They want to be at center stage.  They want the attention focused on them.  But, Jesus warns, the limelight can go dark as quickly as it shines.  It can be embarrassing when you find out that you didn’t get the lead role.  Better to stay in the wings and wait to be called. Right?  But then he drops this line about the humble being exalted.  It’s almost as if he is suggesting that humility is the correct path to take to the limelight.  But, if your end goal is to be exalted…  is that really humility?  If you’re hiding in the projection booth reveling in the power of your humility, the lights could still go out and leave you embarrassed.  Trust me on this one.

That’s why we need to keep reading.

True humility is not about working the angles to get recognized, repaid or lauded by your admiring friends.  True humility – true humanity -- is found in the realization that life is not about you.  We were all created in the image of God, not to be gods, but to care for one another, to care for the creation, and to tend whatever little piece of the world God has placed in our hands.  In this parable and the next Jesus teaches us to care for the “poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind.”  In other places it is the stranger, the prisoner, the hungry and the naked. Jesus, through his own example, shows us that we are to welcome the prostitute, the tax collector, sinners, outcasts and even our enemies.  There are people all around us every day who need our care.  And there are people all around us every day who God will use to care for us…  if we let them.  And together, we are lifted up from the ashes to praise the One who was the most human of us all.  The One who rose from the dead to give us all life to share --whether we find ourselves on stage or working behind the scenes.  

Peace,

Bishop Mike

Thanks for reading.  Pray that God give you the vision the see those around you in need of God’s love, and the courage to care for them.

For the Bent and Broken

Luke 13:10-17

“Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water?”  --Luke 13:15

Why go to worship?  

Some, I suppose, go to be entertained.  Good music. A good speech that makes us feel good. Others, I suppose, go because of the people.  Friends.  Acquaintances. Maybe people we’ve known for years.  People who, basically, believe and think like we do, or at least that’s what we tell ourselves.  Some go out of a sense of duty.  (Though I think this reason is fading away fast.)  We gather around Word and Sacrament because we know that’s what God wants us to do.  It’s what God expects of God’s children.  

Why go to worship?

Have you ever gone to worship because you were bent?  Broken? Tied-up and yearning for a freedom that you haven’t been able to find anywhere else?  Release from whatever evils bind you?  Have you ever come to the church looking for a word of compassion, of healing, of hope from Jesus?  

That’s why the woman in this week’s Gospel lesson came to the synagogue on that Sabbath day so long ago. And, in Jesus, she finds what she was so desperately longing for.  She receives the healing she had been seeking for eighteen long years in spite of the leader of the synagogue who would have denied it to her.

The leader of the synagogue was so bound up in the rules and religious traditions (which, after all, had come from God) which he felt duty-bound to uphold that he almost got in the way of the very thing which God intended for this child of Abraham, this beloved child of God.  

But, before we judge him, we should probably look in the mirror.  The people of God have a long history of getting in the way of ourselves! Like the leader of the synagogue, we can get so wrapped up in “the way we’ve always done it” that we completely miss the new thing God is doing in our midst.  We can get so focused on doing it “right” that we resist and can even be found working against the miracles God is performing right before our very eyes. We forget what Jesus said during another of his many sabbath conflicts, “the sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath” (Mark 2:27).  And, in the process, more than one bent woman… or man… has walked away from the church still stooped over.  

For Jesus, compassion always supersedes the rules.  For Jesus, an opportunity for healing always outweighs upholding tradition.  For Jesus, mercy always transcends judgement.  (Good thing, or we’d all be lost.)  Holding to these values of grace and love got him nailed to a cross.  The power of these life-giving values were unambiguously demonstrated when he rose from the dead three days later.  

Why worship?

Because we who have been freed cannot keep ourselves from joining our voices with the woman in our text who praised God for her healing.  We come together as bent and broken people to pray for all those who haven’t experienced the healing power of Christ that we have come to know.

People are still coming bent, broken and tied up, yearning to be released from the evils that bind them. Will we who follow in the Way of Jesus respond to them with rules and traditions…  or with the compassion of the one who freed us from our bondage to sin, death and the devil?

Peace,

Bishop Mike  

  

Pray for all those who live bent over by the evils and oppression that binds so many in our world. Pray that we respond to them with Christ-like compassion.  Thanks for reading.

Uncomfortable Truths

Luke 12:49-56

“I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed.” 

Luke 12:50

More than ten years ago now, I received some sobering news from my family physician.  I had just finished my first physical in a number of years.  I was overweight.  My blood sugar was high.  My blood pressure well above normal.  My triglycerides off the charts.  The doctor sat me down and said, “If you don’t do something about your health right now, you are not going to live to see your grandchildren.”

He spoke an uncomfortable truth and it was not good news.  

Throughout Luke, chapter 12, Jesus is preparing his disciples for the coming judgement.  He is preparing them for the coming difficult days in Jerusalem that will lead to a cross and for the challenges of the mission they will be given following Pentecost.  He speaks an uncomfortable truth, and it doesn’t sound at all like good news.  For Jesus’ disciples, these words are prophetic.  For Luke’s community, they are descriptive.  Living in the Way of Jesus has never been easy.  Jesus’ inclusive vision of the Kingdom, and his welcome of those the world would reject – lepers, sinners, tax collectors, demon possessed, Gentiles, prostitutes, outcasts, the “unclean” and others – caused division and conflict.   Making a commitment to Jesus’ Way of love, grace, forgiveness, mercy and compassion will inevitably get us cross-ways with the ways of the world.  That does not sound like good news.

But, maybe we need to look again.

My doctor’s uncomfortable truth was a wake-up call for me.  Over the next six months, I started to lose weight, changed my diet, started a meager exercise program and began to get my health under control.  The good news is that, today, at 58, I’m probably healthier than I was at 40.  

The division caused by Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom got him nailed to a cross.  He was rejected for his supposed blasphemy.  Executed as a criminal.  Forsaken by everyone.  But, in order to prove that there truly is nothing that can separate us from the love of God, not even death itself, he rose again on the third day, crushing the world’s system of division, oppression and death under the rock of the broken tomb. And that is good news!

Today, we still live in a divided world.  We still live in a world where people are rejected and cast aside.  We still live in a world where it is difficult to interpret the times, or know how things will turn out.  But we do not face the terrors of our world with no hope.  We do so empowered by the vision of an empty tomb and the peace, the shalom, the wholeness, and the LIFE it represents.  

And so, we become good news in a divided world.  

When we live in the Way of the Risen Christ, we become the presence of God’s love, grace, forgiveness, mercy and compassion for the stranger, the poor, the powerless and the suffering. For the children and the vulnerable and all those the world would turn away.  

That can be uncomfortable. But at the same time it is also blessed work.  For when we care for the “least of these,” we know that we are, in fact, caring for Christ. 

Peace,

Bishop Mike

Thank-you for reading. Please pray for the immigrant, the refugee, the stranger, the homeless, the rejected and all those who desperately seek for a place to call home.   

When You Pray

Luke 11:1-13

When I was in my first call, a little over thirty years ago, I regularly visited a woman in the nursing home I’ll call Leila.  Lelia was in her late eighties and suffered from severe dementia.  She did not know who she was, or where she was, or who this strange young man who came to visit her was.  But, when we came to the Lord’s Prayer as we shared Holy Communion, her foggy eyes would clear and she would get every word right.  Every word.  Those familiar words woke something deep in her soul and drew her out.   That part of her which connected her to the God who claimed her in baptism was still attached.

The prayer that Jesus taught his disciples some two thousand years ago has reverberated through the life of the Church and continues to instruct our souls to this day.  It is more than just a rote prayer to be rambled off. If prayer is one of the primary ways we live out our relationship with God, the Lord’s Prayer helps define that relationship and how that relationship shapes our lives as God’s children.

Father, hallowed be your name.

Our Creator God IS holy. Transcendent.  Beyond human comprehension.  Unable to be captured fully in human language or art.  Wholly other.  And yet, the whole of scripture bears witness to the immanent, personal, compassionate and loving presence of God in the life of the world.  We hallow God’s name – that is, we worship God – because of this undeserved and gracious gift of presence.  We hallow God’s name out of a sense of awe, gratitude, wonder and humility that God would even recognize, let alone love, the little dust specks in the universe each of us are.  Worship is not about being entertained.  Worship is about pausing at least once a week to acknowledge and give thanks for this amazing truth.

Give us each day our daily bread.

Inhale.  Feel your breath fill your lungs.  Let it out slowly.  That breath and every one you have taken before it and will take after it is pure gift. Spend a few minutes reflecting on the space you currently occupy.  What do you see?  Look at the details.  What do you hear, feel, smell?  Everything within the reach of your senses and beyond is a gift.  Pure gift.  The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, “The whole world is charged with the grandeur of God.”  Every time we pray for our daily bread we acknowledge this fact.  We ask that God might help us see its truth.  We are reminded that, as Christians, we have a responsibility to share our daily bread (which isn’t ours at all) with those around us – from our breath to our wealth.

Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.

Because of Christ, we know our sins are already forgiven.  That’s what the cross and resurrection were about.  The Passion Story teaches us that God’s love is stronger than hate, that God’s life is stronger than death and that there is nothing, NOTHING, in heaven or on earth that can separate us from God’s love.  But that is more than a personal eternal insurance policy.  When we pray this prayer we are committing ourselves to work for reconciliation.  God’s forgiveness empowers our forgiveness. Our meager, sometimes successful and often failed attempts at forgiveness help us to understand the real depths of God’s forgiveness for us.  Knowing that God forgives us gives us the courage to try forgiving again.

And do not bring us to the time of trial.

Trials come.  Suffering comes.   Brokenness is part and parcel of human existence in a broken world.  Like Jesus prayed for the cup of suffering to be taken from him, we pray that we might be spared what we know is inevitable.  Like Jesus got up from prayer and went to the cross, so too we pray we might be given the strength we need to face what we must.  Jesus promises to be with us to the end of the age. God promises to go with us through the times of trial, yes, even through death itself.  

Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer acknowledges God’s steadfast love, inexhaustible grace, and how it can and does shape who we are and how we live even when, like Leila, it’s the only thing we have left.  

Peace,

Bishop Mike.

Thank-you for reading. Keep praying!

Gracepoint

Luke 10:38-42

Mary…  sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying.  –Luke 10:39

For a long time now, I have had a vision of creating a community of listening.  I have called this place, “Gracepoint.”  A point of grace.  Gracepoint would be a place apart from the frantic pace of life in today’s world.  A place that holds sacred space open.  A place of healing.  A place dedicated to prayer and reflection.  A place where people could stop for a bit to hear the still small voice of God, contemplate the Word, and sit at the Lord’s feet and just listen.  I realize there are already such places in the world.  Retreat centers.  Monasteries.  Bible camps.  But there are not nearly enough of them.   

There are plenty of places where Martha would be comfortable. Places where people are dedicated to building and binding and mission and ministry and witness and teaching and preaching and doing God’s work with our hands.  Places of action and advocacy.  Places of service and compassion.  Places where Samaritans care for people who have been cast into ditches.  People the world walks by unnoticed.  Places where people dive into the frantic brokenness of the world and work tirelessly to share the love of Christ.  This is important work!  Holy work!  Gospel work! But sometimes, I fear that we risk getting so busy with our ministry that we lose our moorings and our roots and Jesus winds up just getting honorable mention in what WE are doing to save the world.  

I live and work in Martha’s world.  But, I yearn for Mary’s.  Both are important and necessary in the life of the Body of Christ.  But I confess that, there are days, when I would step out of Martha’s world in a heartbeat if God opened the door to bring the Gracepoint I have imagined into being.  But, right now, there are still dishes to be done.  And, like the rest of us, I have to settle for finding those points of grace to reconnect to Christ wherever I can in the midst of the busy-ness of life.

Peace,

Bishop Mike

I pray that you can find times to sit at Jesus’ feet and just listen.  Thanks for reading.