Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23 James 2:1-17 Mark 7:24-37
“Can… anybody… find me… somebody to… love.” I may not be Freddy Mercury, but those words remind me of why we are here. We are part of the blessed community formed by the love of God. We have found each other, so that we may have somebody to love.
As the blessed community of God, we are founded by and formed in our gratitude to God’s grace – the freely given love that knows no bounds nor limits. Over the last month, we have been talking about the transformative power of our gratitude to God’s grace.
Today we are on part four of four-part series on gratitude which is based on reflections on the lectionary in conversation with the book, Gratitude – The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks, by Diana Butler Bass.
So far we have talked about gratitude as an emotional response – the feeling of gratitude – to the gift of God’s grace. We’ve talked about putting that feeling into action – not so much as a quid pro quo but more of a pay it forward kind of thing – so that everything we do and say becomes a response to God’s grace.
We’ve also talked about the connectedness we experience through gratitude. When everything is a response to grace we tend to see God’s active presence in others. When we see it in people we might not have expected, it creates somewhat of a ruckus. A few Sunday’s ago I talked about the joyful noise of faith that connects us one to one and all together. After church, I got a text from one of our Session members comparing my “ruckus” to the children’s book Where the Wild Things Are, and the command of the child to the beasts to “let the wild rumpus start!”
That’s where we are today, for we are the blessed community of the wild rumpus of Jesus! Wouldn’t that be a great name for a church? Now, before we go any further, I’d like to hear from you about what that could mean. What does it mean to you to be the “blessed community of the wild rumpus of Jesus?”
Wow! That was fun. Those are some great answers! One of the things that I cherish about this blessed community is our ability to love one another in spite of our differences because we are grounded in the love of Christ. That’s a good thing because the readings that we have today are forcing us to do the one thing that most people agree is a bad idea – mix religion and politics. Yet the scriptures are born from God’s presence in political realities, and the passages we are given today are all about poverty, justice, ethnicity, and social class.
You can dismiss this and say that these problems have always been here and always will, but to that, I will quote from Yoda and Luke in Episode 5. Yoda tells Luke to lift his X-wing fighter out of the swamp by his awareness of the force. Luke tells him it’s impossible. Then when Yoda does it for him, Luke says, “I don’t believe it.” Then Yoda responds, “That is why you fail.”
I tell you that because this whole last month we’ve been sharing readings from John’s gospel that reminds us of the importance of belief – belief in Jesus and what he has done and is doing. So, today when we approach these readings that challenge our notion of justice and mercy and responsibility, we have to frame it all in an expectation that God is yet active and present and moving us toward something better.
So, with that in mind, I believe these scriptures have three questions for us to consider:
- What does it mean to be a blessed community?
- If we are one, then what is our relationship with the poor?
- If we are in a positive relationship with the poor, do we need to talk about oppression?
Each of these could be an all-day affair, so I’ll just try to give you something that you can keep chewing on as you read these passages again and again throughout your days.
To be “blessed” is to be favored. It is to be set aside for a special purpose, much like the bowls in the temple. In Proverbs, we are told that the generous are favored by sharing, but it’s not a transaction. It’s an extension of who they are, and by the way, it is their own bread that they share. The generous are those who say, “If I have bread and you have none, then we have bread.” To have bread for your family is a blessing from God. To share that same bread is to be a blessing from God.
Likewise, in her book, Diana Butler Bass reminds us that the whole idea of blessings coming from people with power down to people without power is turned on its head by Jesus. In the beatitudes, he says that the poor are the ones that are blessed. They are blessed because they are the ones set aside to teach the wealthy what faith is all about. Faith is about reliance on God’s unfailing love, and through our gratitude to that love, we see the world differently. Blessing, favor, and gratitude all lead toward a recognition of inequality and a desire to seek equilibrium.
So it was for the woman who came to trouble Jesus. He was trying to hide. He had gone about as far from his blessed community as he would ever go. Jesus was in an area where he was a cultural minority, so much that this woman felt emboldened to interrupt a conversation about God’s kingdom to see if it might include her and her daughter.
It is a hard pill to swallow that Jesus called her a dog. It is a hard pill to swallow that she accepted the status as a lesser being. Yet the crumbs she begs for are the very crumbs that feed me and you, and her ability to name the injustice of it all is the key to her daughter’s healing. Naming injustice is the key to our children’s healing!
Likewise, the spit of Jesus for a man who was deaf and dumb restored that man to life and community, and he could not help but tell others about it. He did not ask for it, but others brought him to Jesus. They brought him because the “wild rumpus” of people of faith is one that moves us with compassion. To be the blessed community means that we are favored by God’s choice and we are moved by God’s love toward justice – not by judgement but by the restoration of brokenness.
Those are some pretty fancy words, and they feel pretty good most of the time. Most of the time they are true. You know, with the obvious stuff – individual suffering and such. When it gets hard is when it gets personal. That’s the thing about faith. It’s very personal, but it’s not private. Faith always drives us into one another’s lives.
I think that is why these readings confront us, as a community, about poverty. Proverbs and James were certainly written from different economic realities, but the issue remains the same – wealth requires poverty, and that is an injustice.
If there are members of a given society that have more stuff, that means there are others that have less stuff. We can debate the merits of either, but that’s not the invitation of scripture. The invitation of scripture is to recognize inequality and do something about it. The invitation of scripture is to recognize that those with less stuff are also less disconnected from God and from one another. The invitation of scripture is to share our bread equally, and it starts with the bread of the Passover of Christ.
So, if we are blessed then we are naturally concerned about justice – not about punishment, but about restoration. if we are concerned about restorative justice then we are going to care about poverty, but we’re also going to look to the poor to help us become more reliant on God. If we are more reliant on God, then we are going to rely less on the powers that be, and that is why we need to talk about oppression.
We need to talk about it because most of us only know what it means conceptually. I would wager that the majority of us in this room have never experienced true oppression. Some of you may even disagree that there are oppressed people in our nation today, or that we have any relationship or responsibility to those outside of our nation. What matters is not our agreement. What matters is our willingness to see that even the laws of our nation cannot keep some people groups from asserting power over others. What matters is our willingness to hear those that others would silence. What matters is whether or not we are willing to speak for them or even to stand aside for their voices to be heard.
You see, I do believe in a blessed community that can and does demonstrate love in a way that challenges power. I do believe in a blessed community that works to alleviate poverty while listening to the stories of faith the impoverished offer. I even believe in a blessed community that is willing to examine their own role in the oppression of others and their own ability to restore the humanity that others have lost.
Dianna Buttler Bass describes such communities as being more like circles of faith than pyramids of power. It was one such circle around a table such as this that brought me to deeper faith. It is one such community as ours is that I believe can bring still others into reconciliation with God.
It is true that we have found one another to love, here in this place. The “wild rumpus” is about to start around this very table. What happens next? What will our legacy be? Well, that’s entirely up to you.
Will we be open to being transformed by our gratitude to God? Will we be moved by the injustice of the world around us? Will they – whosoever that might be – know that we are Christians by our love?
I sure hope so. We’ve certainly done it before. Surely, with God’s help, we can do it again, and all to God’s glory. Amen.
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