Blog

March 10, 2013

Dear James,

I want to let you in on a little secret about me. Perhaps you’ve picked up on it already. I am overly fond of superlatives. I think they are the best. But I’m not exaggerating when I say: Today is the loveliest day of your life. Today is an eternal day. It is a great, great day – the day of your baptism!

A few months from now, in late July, your parents are going to sit you down in a highchair, in a room filled with family and friends. They might put a little hat on your head. They will sing a song as they bring out a piece of food that looks like it’s on fire. It’s called cake. It is delicious.

You will put it all over your face. Enjoy it. In that moment, surrounded by people who love you, high on sugar, you might think, “This is the greatest day of my life!” But don’t forget today. I hope this is the day you cherish above all other days of your life – the day of your baptism!

 The scripture we read this morning is from Deuteronomy 14. You are the Lord’s children. James, I want you to notice what this verse doesn’t say. It does not say, “You are the Lord’s child,” though you certainly are. It is addressed to a group of people. A family. This little detail might be the most important clue in learning to read the Bible faithfully. From the very beginning you are lumped in the story of God with other people – people not of your own choosing, but God’s.

This morning you are getting a new family we call church. We also call it the body of Christ. Being baptized means you belong to the body of Christ as much as you belong to your parents or grandparents or any brothers and sisters who come your way. When my cousin Cole was baptized the pastor asked his family to come to the baptismal font. When they all looked back out there wasn’t a single person left in the pews. I hope that’s the kind of love and belonging you always feel from Durham Church.

 You are the Lord’s children. There’s only one way to hear this: together. Of course there are some people the Lord calls by name, people who are singled out for special work for the family. They inevitably find it a horrifying experience. It changes them forever. The story you are now part of really got going when God called a man named Abram. God told him to leave his parents and his home and set off for a land God would show him. God promised Abram that all the families of the earth would be blessed through him and then God changed Abram’s name to Abraham.

God loved nothing more than making Abraham all sorts of crazy promises. Once God told Abraham that he would have more children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and greatgreat- grandchildren and great-great-great grandchildren than there are stars in the sky. Abraham could not know it at that moment, but God did – you are one of those children, James. You have always been part of this story that began so long ago. In fact, the promises Abraham received weren’t perfect without you! Abraham and all the others who’ve gone before you have been waiting for you – for this moment! How does that feel? To know you are absolutely essential to God’s design and aim for human history.

Another person God called by name was Paul. Paul is great at explaining how all this works. A long time ago he wrote a group of his friends and he said:

As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise. And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.

Did you hear that James? Those crazy promises God made Abraham are for you too! That’s what your baptism is really all about. Nothing magical happened when the water fell over your head. It’s a reminder of the promises. It’s one of the ways God says, “Remember James: I love you and I am not going anywhere. Remember Durham Church: You are the Lord’s children!” How does it feel? To know you are that precious. To know you were chosen so long ago.

Another one of Abraham’s children was a guy named Moses. Moses is also one of the people God called by name and aside for special work, all for the sake of God’s family. He’s the one telling us today: You are the Lord’s children! He put that in the middle of a long list of rules. Right now you are enjoying the precious few months of life where no one really asks much from you. But already your mom and dad are starting to put expectations around how you live. There’s a time for sleeping and a time for eating. There’s a time for playing. Your mom and dad know you’ll flourish when you live according to certain rules and rhythms.

That’s all God is trying to do with the rules he gave Moses. The rules are a precious gift. They help the Lord’s children know how to live. We are expected to behave in ways that please God because we belong to the Lord in the most intimate, personal way possible. As soon as you are old enough to start paying attention to these rules and rhythms of life you’ll learn that it’s not easy. It’s like learning to walk. No sooner do you stand up on your own two feet and take a few steps than you totter and fall. Sometimes the most faithful thing we can ever do is stand back up and try again.

Ok, enough about rules. Following them is important, but what’s special about your life is not that you become a certain kind of rule follower. The rules aren’t going anywhere, but what will make you life lovely is that you will be following a person. His name is Jesus. I know you’ve heard this name before. I’m sure you heard it plenty even before you were born, listening as the rest of us talked to Jesus and about Jesus. In fact, I bet from the time you came out of the womb you’ve been looking around and wondering, “Which one of you is Jesus?” We see Jesus in each other, in the family God calls together. We find Jesus when we gather together.

It’s only fair for me to warn you right now, James, that following Jesus will mark you as odd. You will grow up in a time when many or most of the people around you don’t share our beliefs. They will tell you that Jesus was nothing more than a teacher who lived and died a long time ago. But we believe something else – we believe Jesus is the way God fulfilled all those promises made to Abraham so long ago.

Following Jesus will set you apart. It won’t make you better than other people -you must never think that - but it will make you different. When your parents decided to have you baptized in a way they were saying,

“Our deepest prayer for you, James, is that you be strange. Our great hope is that you will believe crazy things this: an unspeakably good man was killed 2000 years ago but the God of Israel raised him from death…and he is alive now. We pray that before you hear our voices or the voices of friends you will hear the voice of the one who tells you to take up your own cross. And love your enemies. And never resist evil with violence. We don’t want you to be admirers of Jesus- we want you to be followers, whatever the cost. We want you to know that you can only live, really live, fully live, by dying.”

That’s not easy for parents to say, James. But you kind of scored in the parent department. Your parents know what it is to live because they’ve read all those words Paul wrote to his friends.

Here are some more:

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. If we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.

James, you might be thinking to yourself right about now, “This is some heavy stuff to lay on a little fella like me.” I get that, but it’s nothing to be afraid of. In fact the only way to know real joy and love and purpose is to learn that following Jesus is less a way of living and more a way of dying! A daily dying to ourselves and our fears and grudges and self-absorption in order to live for God and other people.

Baptism is a reminder that God’s love is costly. Our task and call is to assume Christ’s form of life. To live in the way Jesus did. Some churches have a funny way of baptizing. The person holding the baby will take a cross from his neck and before baptizing the baby he smacks him on the chest with the cross – hard enough to leave a mark! It’s a way of saying you are marked as Christ’s own forever. It’s also a reminder that the way of the cross can hurt.

There may be times when you say, “Hold on now. Jesus died…so I don’t have to!” But really it’s the opposite: being a follower of Jesus is as much about the death and resurrection of us as it is of Jesus! Jesus died so we could share in his life with God, not when our bodily lives end, but now! This is really good news, James! It means that in our baptism we are all drawn so deeply into the life of God that we can say we become the flesh and blood of God in the world!

This is how Jesus talked about it:

Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.

James, there’s no way to live without dying. Let’s help each other remember that. There will be time when we will want to understand ourselves as anything other than the Lord’s children. We will want to be free from the covenant that binds us to the Lord and a lifetime of giving ourselves away in love.

In those moments, let us both pray for each other, that we would return in our hearts to the waters of our baptism. And like a grain of wheat – small, buried deep in the darkness of the earth – die.

And in that darkness, trust that God brings life from death. And from that darkness, emerge again and remember who we are – those who are called into being by God’s choosing us. We are, all of us – the Lord’s children – by God’s love and nothing else.

No one knows what’s ahead for you, James. The uncertainty of life can be all but unbearable for those who love you and want to keep you safe. We don’t know what the future holds for any of us, but we know what we have promised to you today. We will walk with you and your parents as long as we are able. We will walk with you as we all learn to love each other the one whose image we bear. Most importantly, we know what God has promised today: nothing in life ofdeath will ever be able to separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

A few days ago I went to my computer to put this day on my calendar. I wanted to set it up so the computer would automatically put your baptism on my calendar every year. I love what it said:

Repeat: yearly. End: never.

This is an eternal moment.

May you remember March 10th every year of your life, and light your baptismal faith in the hearts of all who come to know you, James Andrew, child of the covenant, heir according to the promise, bearer of beauty and joy.

Much love always,

Franklin

We prayed this litany in worship on Sunday, December 16 as we mourned the losses at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

Father in Heaven, you made all that is.
You care for us as a parent cares for his children.

Lord Jesus, you are the Lamb of God.
You take away the sins of the world.

Giving Spirit, in you we live and move and have our being.
Thank you for giving us life.

Yet something is amiss.
How long, O Lord?

All is not right in the world.
Will you forget us forever?

Your people are suffering. Your children are dying.
Will you hide your face from us?

We cry out against it.
Have mercy on them. Have mercy on them.

Help us to wait in our suffering.
How long, O Lord?

Help us to see your face in our midst.
Grant us your hope.

Help us to hear your voice in our midst.
Grant us your peace.

For you said, “Blessed are those who mourn.”
For they will be comforted.

Even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus.
Amen.

Pilate went back into the palace. He summoned Jesus and asked, “Are you the king of the Jews?” Jesus answered, “Do you say this on your own or have others spoken to you about me?” Pilate responded, “I’m not a Jew, am I? Your nation and its chief priests handed you over to me. What have you done?” Jesus replied, “My kingdom doesn’t originate from this world. If it did, my guards would fight so that I wouldn’t have been arrested by the Jewish leaders. My kingdom isn’t from here.”

-          John 18:33-36

Politics is messy. A study of the 2012 presidential election showed that more than 90% of pastors did not publically endorse a candidate from the pulpit and more than half of pastors said they had not mentioned politics in a sermon at all.

From a random sampling of sermons and statements from pastors around the country, the gist of the message about the election was essentially the same – No matter who is president, Jesus is still King. John Ortberg of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in California expressed this sentiment well: “Remember, the office that matters most has already been permanently filled with a God of eternal omni-competence.”

Does this mean that Jesus’ kingship has nothing to do with the politics of this world? When Jesus says, “My kingdom isn’t from here,” does he mean that his kingdom doesn’t matter here?

In college, my husband Brian and I took a political science class on religion and politics. It was cross listed in the religion department, but we quickly found out that we were some of the only people in the class with an active faith. Our political science professor opened by explaining that he was not a religious man and wouldn’t be able to represent that view, so those of us who did belong to a religious community should speak up.  But in the second lecture, he presented the opinion of philosopher Richard Rorty that religion is the ultimate conversation stopper. In the public realm, when religious people invoke their beliefs, “it kills public discourse.” Our classroom of political science students eagerly nodded their heads in agreement.

So I was nervous when Stanley Hauerwas was slotted on the syllabus for a guest lecture. Stanley Hauerwas is a big deal in theological circles.  He’s also one of the few modern theologians that regular people can understand, as Time magazine named “America’s Best Theologian” in 2001.

Hauerwas is perhaps best known for never compromising his Christian beliefs when it comes to difficult political issues—as well as his high pitched southern accent and his tendency to use “four letter words” in lectures. Hauerwas crtitiques Christians for watering down their message in order to be a part of public conversations: “In the interest of being good citizens, Christians have lost the ability to say what they believe is true.”

When it was time for Hauerwas join our seminar, I wondered what would happen when this radical Christian thinker sat down with our very secular class that wanted all mention of faith to be wiped from the political sphere.

After the lecture, the students raved about Hauerwas.  He knows what he believes, and is truly trying to get people to live it out, they said.  Hauerwas got my secular classmates to stop talking about religion in general and forced them to look at Jesus in particular.  He showed them that following Jesus requires us to take particular political positions – for Hauerwas, nonviolence being at the center of Jesus’ political influence. While we’d spent a lot of the class looking at minor issues like whether the 10 commandments should be posted in elementary schools, Hauerwas shifted our attention to big issues like whether American politicians should wage wars in the name of God.

This is the problem with the message that “no matter who is president, Jesus is still King.” That message seems to say that the fact that that Jesus’ kingship doesn’t matter for the politics of our day. It seems to tell Christians that paying attention to politics and being invested in political outcomes is somehow in opposition to having Jesus as our King.

I completely understand why this message is both popular and needed.  There is also an all-too-common political message that to be a Christian means caring about one particular set of issues or voting with one party or another.  This message has declared that Christians succeed or fail based on who is in power and what a court decides. You find this message on both sides: “Vote with us or you are not really following Christ.”  In reaction to the over-identification of Christ with politics, many Christians have turned in the other direction. As long as you are a good Christian, you can leave politics to sort itself out.

But the problem with this view is that only days before his death, Jesus stood before Pilate in his examination chamber as Pilate asked, “Are you the king of the Jews?” If Jesus had been able to preach his message and meander through the countryside, perhaps we might be able to be good Christians and leave politics alone. But Jesus’ message, actions, and way of life land him a hearing with Pilate, who holds the power to choose life or death for Jesus.

When Jesus answered Pilate, it must have sounded like political evasion or mumbo jumbo: “My kingdom doesn’t originate from this world. If it did, my guards would fight so that I wouldn’t have been arrested by the Jewish leaders. My kingdom isn’t from here.”

All Jesus was doing was living according to the truth of his Kingdom where forgiveness rules the day and where revenge has no place.  But over and over, living in the way of his Kingdom meant disobeying the political rules.

Whether or not Jesus wanted to be political, his way of life challenged the political world around him.

Being a disciple means following Jesus.  And if we are following Jesus, then we have to go to the places where he went.  Since Jesus stood in the examination chamber with Pilate, we need to be there too.

Following Jesus also means stepping into the political conversation even if it is a “conversation stopper.” Pilate may have been confused and frustrated by Jesus, but Jesus tells him the truth even if Pilate has no idea what to make of it. Jesus claims the Kingdom of God as his primary allegiance, and the truth of the Kingdom is what he risks his life for. In effect, he says, “I would rather die belonging to the truth than live under any other rule than of my father in heaven.”

In the book of Daniel, when Daniel sees a vision of the heavenly throne, he glimpses something his mind can barely comprehend: “As I continued to watch this night vision of mine, I suddenly saw one like a human being coming with the heavenly clouds. He came to the ancient one and was presented before him. Rule, glory, and kingship were given to him; all peoples, nations, and languages will serve him. His rule is an everlasting one—it will never pass away!—his kingship is indestructible.”

Jesus our King is indestructible because he is not willing to compromise the truth nor is he willing to abandon the conversation. Jesus combines sacrificial love with intimacy and friendship, and in the end, even the Roman cross cannot destroy him.

This post is an adapted excerpt from Amanda Diekman’s sermon from “Christ the King” Sunday, 11/26/2012, entitled “Cross Politics.” Listen to the full version here:

On October 7, Durham Church and Iglesia Emanuel joined to celebrate “Día de la Raza” (Day of the Race), a celebration of the distinctive multi-ethnicity and multi-cultural communities of Latin America.  Pastor Julio preached on Jesus’ question “Who do you say that I am?” and called everyone to proclaim Jesus as Lord with a unified voice, rather than choosing to be defined by what separates us.  With boisterous excitement, we joined to feast after the service as members of both congregations brought dishes to share from their unique cultures and communities.

“I have no greater joy than this, to hear that my children are walking in the truth.”
- 3 John 1:4

“See that you also excel in the grace of giving.  I am not commanding you, but I want to test the sincerity of your love by comparing it with the earnestness of others.  For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.”

-          2 Corinthians 8:7b-9

Fundraising books and articles will tell you that the key to successful fundraising is connections and relationships. You don’t have to go to many fundraising conferences or read many blogs before you hear the common refrain: “Linkage, interest, and ability” – that’s what it takes to get a donation from a donor.

But what if all those professionals are missing something?  What if the key is joy?

Before I became a pastor, I worked for several years as a fundraiser for non-profits.  I spent my days writing grants and appeal letters and donor reports.  It sounds dreadfully boring, I know, and some days it was.  But the reason I continued to do fundraising work is joy.

I love talking about money with Christians because most of us are terrified to mention it.  For fear of pressure, judgment, jealousy, or embarrassment, we’d rather leave any talk of money out of our churches.

While the church remains silent, others step forward with remarkable honesty: “I’ve worked in an economy that rewards someone who saves the lives of others on a battlefield with a medal, rewards a great teacher with thank-you notes from parents, but rewards those who can detect the mispricing of securities with sums reaching into the billions,” wrote Warren Buffet.

Sadly, the silence among Christians is stifling to many of us who have real questions about how we use what finances we have.  When Bill Gates tries to “defeat poverty” with his billions, what can our $5 possibly accomplish?  How do we know if our money actually makes a difference?  Should we get want credit for our generosity or try to make it as anonymous as possible?  How do we show support and love without making others dependent on hand-outs?

The reason that it brings me joy to open up such conversations about money is that Jesus has a LOT to say about our money and how we live our economic lives.  At Durham Church, we are reading, preaching, and learning our way through the passages that are unique to the gospel of Luke, and it’s astonishing how many of them deal expressly with the question of how we use our money.

When we expose our pocketbooks and wallets to the light of Jesus Christ, God will transform our hearts and our lives.  And as we see in this passage from 2 Corinthians, we will then have the chance to experience “the grace of giving.”  Rather than appealing to our humanitarian hearts or our desire to do good, Paul points to Jesus.

Jesus tells us in Luke 14 to spend our money throwing parties for outcasts.  Don’t invite people who could pay you back; just invite the ones who don’t have a cent to their name, say our Lord.  In chapter 12, Jesus tells the story of a man who had so much that he had to build extra barns just to hold all his wealth.  God shows up with a message: “This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?”  In other words, money is not your life and will earn you nothing when you are face to face with the Lord.

But perhaps the best story that exemplifies the “grace of giving” is the prodigal son. In this story, the father extends radical grace to his two sons – one who has stayed close by his side day after day; one who has run as far as he could go but came crawling back.  The father, with both boys twinkling in his eyes, says to his older son, “My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’”

This father lives the radical truth that in the Father’s love, everything is always enough.  “Everything I have is yours,” he says to the one who is worried that he will not get his fair shake.  “But celebrate and be glad” he says to the one who is worried that he has squandered his chance.  The boys are not in competition.  There’s enough for both.

See that you also excel in the grace of giving. 

“Hear this word that the Lord has spoken against you, O people of Israel, against the whole family that I brought up out of Egypt: ‘You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your sins.’

‘They do not know how to do right,’ says the Lord, ‘those who store up violence and robbery in their fortresses.’ Therefore, thus says the Lord: ‘An enemy will overrun the land and strip you of your defenses and plunder your fortresses.’”

 - Amos 3:1-2 & 10-11

–

I have a friend who had a toothache recently.  At the dentist, they told her that one of her molars had rotted completely, but she had no way of knowing because the outside was still strong and white.  The fluoride in our water has made our enamel strong, so when our teeth start to rot, it’s hard to know how bad things have gotten.  The tooth looks pearly white on the outside, but on the inside, it’s just a shell of a tooth—which is alright until there is a crack in the exterior and everything caves in.

In the days of the prophet Amos, everything looked strong and pristine for Israel. With ivory clad vacation homes and with plenty of leisure time for drinking and parties, Israelites seemed prosperous and blessed.  But Amos came with a hard word for the people: God is not fooled by strong exteriors.  God saw right to the heart of Israel and saw the rot that lay beneath the polish and the shine.

For every vacation home, God saw orphans without a place to sleep.  For every socialite lounging and sipping cocktails, God saw a poor woman, forced to sell her body to survive.  When the world saw a prosperous economy, God saw robbery and violence.  God was not fooled.  God looked into the hearts of the people of Israel and saw that they were rotten.

A couple of years ago, I visited Greenwich CT, one of the wealthiest zip codes in America.  It has a quaint downtown, and the Whole Foods-to-person ratio was very high.  I was visiting a church with a local pastor from the area, and as we drove to the church, we passed scores of gorgeous, huge country estates.  With my face was pressed to the window, I began admiring the beautiful mansions that sailed by on either side.  My pastor friend, who’d been ministering in Greenwich for 20 years, sighed at my admiration and said, “Don’t be deceived the exteriors.  Houses like these are like one big prison cell.  They’ve locked everyone out and locked themselves in, and people are wasting away in there.”

When God sees the people in decay, will God sit idly by?

The answer is obvious, and the answer is no.  God will not give up God’s people to destruction, even by their own hand.  But how do you get to the rotten heart when it is surrounded by high, strong walls?  As any good dentist will tell you, you’ve got to drill the rot out.  The walls have got to come down and the rot needs to come out.

And so God tears down our defenses, our walls, our protection—There’s no place to hide, no place to escape.  There’s no protection in power, no safety in money.  In fact, since hoarding and stockpiling were the cause of the rotten condition in the first place, God forces the rich to see that they were created for dependence, trust, and vulnerability. The storehouses of food and wealth had to be smashed open because gifts are given in order to be shared. The poor needed to share in the abundance of God’s provision because otherwise they would waste away.

Though this passage feels scary and ominous to us the first time we read it, when we look closer, we see that it is a beautiful picture of our relentless Lord.  This passage shows what it means to be known by God, to be God’s chosen people.  God’s way of knowing leaves us no escape.  We cannot retreat from this relentless God.  God breaks through every boundary that would leave us to our own devices because God knows that we will destroy ourselves with things that don’t bring life.

We are known by God, and our lives can never be the same.  God is not content to know us and leave us as we are.  We are not left alone to decay.  We are not abandoned to a path toward destruction.

Because God knows us, God is relentlessly pursuing us. 

In Rio de Janeiro, a concrete figure stands 130 feet tall, perched on a high mountain top, looking down over the sprawling city and gorgeous coastline.  This is the 5^th largest Jesus in the world, and, according to the ever-wise Wikipedia, the statue known as “Christ the Redeemer” is “a symbol for Brazilian Christianity.”

I had a chance to look at this giant concrete Jesus with my own eyes when I was 22 years old – fresh out of college and yearning for an experience of global Christianity.

If there was a symbol for Brazilian Christianity, I was in search of it.

When I arrived in Rio for my experience with the mammoth Redeemer, I had already lived for 6 months in this country of contradictions.  I’d lived there long enough to witness the deep division between Catholics and Evangelicals (a term that applied to everyone who was not Catholic!) and the chasm between the rich and the poor.  Though Brazil was the birthplace of “liberation theology” – the belief in God’s preferential option for the poor – it was also a place where the poor were a routine and unremarkable part of most Christians’ daily lives.

While many Catholics believed in the value of social justice programs, they barely mentioned the witness of Jesus nor seemed motivated by Jesus’ life of self-offering and advocacy for the poor of his day.  Evangelicals, on the other hand, seemingly couldn’t complete a sentence without invoking the name of Jesus, but didn’t seem to think that their Lord had any claim on their way of life.  Many of my evangelical friends lived in a wealthy gated buildings with private gyms and pools on their rooftops, designer clothes in their closets, surrounded by European-style cafes.  Their attitude toward the poor was blasé.

In Rio, ten of thousands of international visitors flock every year to the mountain where the Christ the Redeemer statue stands.  They have come to Brazil for mixed reasons—the gorgeous beaches and beach-goers, the vibrant culture, the amazing wildlife, or for pure adventure.  As I stood in line with hundreds of other tourists to lay eyes on this giant symbol for the country I wanted to badly to understand, I realized what bothered me so much about the Christ the Redeemer statue.  It described Brazilian Christianity better than any Brazilian had been able to.

This Jesus was high and lifted up, so high that he was out of reach.  This Jesus was far beyond the mundane realities of squalor and pain.  Far above the messiness of worship and church.  Far more powerful than the difficult lives lived beneath his outstretched arms.  This Jesus had his eyes fixed on nothing.  Blank.

High and lifted up, this Jesus was the symbol of power and distance.

Perhaps I had found the symbol for Brazilian Christianity after all.

But the Jesus that I was falling in love with would never take his eyes off the poor.  The Jesus I was reading about in the bible was the one who said, “Blessed are you poor for yours is the Kingdom of God.”  The Jesus of the bible was determined to spend time with the poor—going to their homes, receiving their love, seeking them out, and telling us to do the same: “But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you.”

The Jesus-high-and-lifted-up is a false Jesus.  We can find Jesus immortalized in concrete and power, but this false redeemer takes our eyes off the poor, which is where the real Jesus promises to be.

Are you being a good steward?

I’ve never really understood what this question means.  I’ve struggled with the meaning of being a “steward” and how this whole idea fits with the upwardly mobile, wealthy, success-oriented culture in which I’ve always lived.  How does being a steward fit with the Jesus-idea of blessed poverty and voluntary simplicity?

Sometimes it’s helpful to let a wiser woman do your thinking for you, and in my case, I’ve been blessed by Kelly Johnson, a gifted Christian thinker who has written a book with the provocative title Fear of Beggars: Stewardship and Poverty in Christian Ethics to explore the idea of “stewardship” and the role of money in the church today.

At a basic level, I began to understand “stewardship” all over again.  The Christian ideas at the heart of stewardship are: 1) material wealth is primarily a gift from God, given for one’s own control and management, and 2) through prudent generosity, the poor can participate in this blessing.

Johnson’s titles her book “The Fear of Beggars,” especially focusing on voluntary beggars—people who follow Jesus’ command to sell everything to follow him and make themselves completely dependent on others.

First, beggars interrupt our neat-and-tidy economic world with their request for money.  Our modern economic world is endlessly complex.  Banks are international institutions; somehow Chinese currency is connected to our dollar; and people can buy tomorrow’s oil with my money from yesterday’s deposit.

Beggars mess up everything.  They create a new, simple economy.  One person’s need meets another person’s potential to share.  They make us nervous because there is no distance.  In a way, this is what the church once was (and was intended to be).  In the book of Acts, the church shares all economics in common with loving interdependence and sharing with the vulnerable at the core.  While “stewardship” means that we are in control of our money and in control of its use, a church of voluntary beggars (meaning a church where we share everything and are therefore dependent on one another) forces us to give up control.

Second, beggars confront us with the reality that we’ve divided the world into clear categories of “stranger” and “friend.”  Most of us would gladly give money to a friend in need, but when a stranger asks for money, we are confused and afraid of such an intimate request. Whether we admit it or not, we think, “Where are your friends??”

As Christians, though, the whole idea of a “stranger” is undone because Jesus says that we will discover him when we embrace and share with strangers.  Strangers are not really strange at all.  By looking into the eyes of a beggar and seeing a friend, Christians see with the eyes of Jesus Christ.

On the other hand, “stewardship” emphasizes independence and efficiency.  In stewardship campaigns, people rarely become intimately involved with the recipients of funds.  Stewardship is more about “altruism” – I am doing something nice for you. But this means that stewardship campaigns also leave divisions and “diving walls” in place. Conversion and transformation are not necessary to be a good steward.

Instead, the church is called to become a community of shared gifts, a community where gifts are given and received among friends.  The great blessing of being a Christian is that all gift giving doesn’t need to be equal in this lifetime because we live in light of the resurrection, the in-breaking of a new kingdom.  This means that we give gifts not only with trust but with mercy, which is “the power which calls for laying down one’s life for others.”  Since Christ has already offered the ultimate gift to humanity, all of our gifts are essentially gifts of response to God. In a Christian economy, friendship is the defining relationship between people, trust is the dominant truth about that relationship, and mercy is the character of love exchanged.  There are no strangers in the Christian economy, only friends.

Third, and lastly, beggars show us the face of a beggar-God, who suffers patiently, waiting for the return of God’s children in love.

Here, only Kelly Johnson’s beautiful writing and teaching will do:

“…the source and sustainer of all economic life is a beggar.  God has poured out and maintains the freedom of the world and now waits for a return gift.  The game of freedom then is not how to maximize use of the resources God has entrusted to us to prove ourselves good stewards, but how to give ourselves in love to the One who grasps at nothing.”

God is Creator of a good and free creation, and then God waits, “as a beggar” for humanity to use that gift of freedom to return in love to God.  Our Lord Jesus, who grasps at nothing, lived as a beggar, and we are called to follow him.  This is also the point at which Johnson answered a deep misgiving that I’ve always felt with stewardship teaching. The God of the steward is the divine owner of everything who then “charges his somewhat confused management team to tend his investments.”  This God is distant and leaves control of wealth in the hands of the human manager.  But unlike the steward, who gives of his finances and property, the neighbor and friend gives of himself in love to the beggar-God.

Finally, in the stewardship narrative, the rich invite the poor to participate in the blessing of their God-given wealth. But in a Christian worldview, it’s not the rich who are blessed – It’s the poor!  Which means that beggars are the ones who have the greatest gift to give.  By witnessing to Jesus’ poverty and extreme self-giving love, beggars give the rich the opportunity to follow Jesus, to turn from their hoarding of wealth, and to participate in the blessing of sharing gifts.

Beggar or steward?  We all get to choose.