Two Widows.

1 Kings 17:8-16.

I.

            The prophet Elijah is engaged in a protracted war with the King of Israel, Ahab.  Ahab was the worst of the many bad kings that Israel had.  His greatest sin was introducing into Israel the formal worship of the god, Baal, and its consequent falling into terrible injustice, as indicated by the story of how the king basically murdered a guy named Naboth in order to get his vineyard.  He did all this under the strong influence of his wife, Jezebel, a fervent Baal worshiper from Sidon, the kingdom just to the north. 

            The consequence of such injustice is always eventually some kind of disaster, and Elijah proclaims this disaster himself: the region would suffer a terrible drought.  And it doesn’t rain for like three years.

            This doesn’t improve the relationship between Elijah and Ahab; most people blame the king when the economy tanks.  And in this case the drought is an indirect result of Ahab’s policies.  The king tries to blame the prophet, and he puts out a warrant for Elijah’s arrest, forcing the prophet into hiding where God feeds him by means of birds.

            The God commands Elijah to go to Sidon, the kingdom of the evil queen Jezebel herself.  In those days, deities were often considered to have their own territory.  Gods had power when they were in their own land where the people worshiped them.  But they had less or no power in other places.  The Lord was the God of Israel; but it was the opinion of many that the Lord’s power would be reduced and relatively ineffective outside of Israel.

            Furthermore, Elijah would be seen as carrying the battle into Baal’s home turf, and Jezebel’s.  Here is God making the point that God is the God of the whole world, not just the little corner of it where the Israelites live and worship.  It is an in-your-face move, somewhat equivalent to wearing a Red Sox cap in the South Bronx.  Only way more so.

            God indicates that he has commanded a widow in a village called Zarephath to feed the prophet.  So he is told not just to go to the enemy country, but to make his home with some of the poor people of that country. 

            Whenever the gods of economic inequality take over a nation, the people who suffer the most are the poor.  In the Bible, the term “widow,” of course, means a woman whose husband has died.  But it is also almost a euphemism for poor people generally, so common was it for widows, having lost all income and rights, to be destitute.  “Widows and orphans” is a term often used in Scripture to refer to the poor in society generally.

II.

            So God sends Elijah, not just to the land of his enemy, he is sent to live with those most harmed by the queen’s religion and economic policies.  It is as if he is saying that the Lord is God, not only of this foreign country, but the Lord can also be the liberator of poor people here.  The monotheistic values of the God of the escaped slave nation of Israel – mainly equality and justice – can be activated even in a country where the Lord is not worshiped.  In other words, God does not want the poor of Sidon suffering under Jezebel’s predatory Baalism any more than God wants the Israelites to be oppressed.  Israel’s God is the liberator as well of the Sidonians, and everyone on earth.

            Elijah meets the widow as she is gathering kindling for her fireplace.  He tells her to get him some water.  And she goes to get him some, even though there is this drought and water is extremely precious.  While she is going, he calls after her, “Oh, and some bread too, while you’re at it.”

            Her service and generosity to Elijah are remarkable.  Elijah sees this.  He notices that she, in her extremity, is even willing to help this presumptuous stranger from a foreign land and a foreign religion.  But being asked to provide food is too much… she doesn’t have it.  And about this she is apologetic.

            Seeing that Elijah is an Israelite, she swears by the Lord his God, and says she has nothing baked.  In fact all she has left in this disaster is a handful of flour and a few ounces of oil.  Her intention is to make some flatbread with it, which will be the last meal of her and her son.  It is the last food she has any hope of having.  In other words, she doesn’t have enough for her to give him his last meal, too.

            We don’t know how politically aware she is.  Does she know she was speaking to the guy who declared the drought in the first place?  Maybe.  Maybe we can hear a little bit of bitterness, here, like “Excuse me, but my son and I are going to have a final scrap of bread and then starve to death, thanks to you.”  Did she know that the Lord was responsible for this disaster? 

            What she does know is that the god who has failed in his job here was Baal.  Rain was Baal’s thing.  Baal was a thunderstorm god.  Baal was the god the government said to pray to for rain.  But much heartfelt prayer to Baal had gone unanswered. 

            Elijah feels for her.  People at the bottom are the ones the Lord loves the most… but they are also the ones who suffer the most when the rulers’ injustice generates a natural disaster.

III.

            Elijah says gently to the woman: “Do not be afraid; go and do as you have said; but first make me a little cake of it and bring it to me, and afterwards make something for yourself and your son.  For thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the Lord sends rain upon the earth.”

            That is good enough for her.  She does it.  Her hospitality, her generosity, and her trust in the man’s words, are sufficient. 

            Here is a poor foreign woman feeding the Lord’s prophet, responding to his need, welcoming him into her home.  She is demonstrating a selflessness and a community spirit that embraces even this foreigner.  In so doing she is showing that, even though she is not an Israelite, she is one of the Lord’s people.  Her welcoming, generous, serving heart identifies her as one of God’s daughters, even if she never formally worshiped the Lord at all.

            And consequently, in response to this show of trust in the Lord, we see the Lord miraculously feeding a poor, foreign woman.  Here is the Lord’s prophet, finding a home in her house.  And the message is that if God’s Word finds a home in your home, and in your heart, you will be fed.  If you give shelter to and feed the truth, the truth will provide for you.  Feed your faith by trusting in God, and God will feed you.  Show your own hospitality and generosity, and you will discover the generosity and hospitality of God. 

            The Lord comes to us in our poverty; both our poverty of spirit, and our actual material poverty.  The Lord comes to us, or we are able to receive the Lord best, when we have no other means of support, when we are not distracted by other concerns and responsibilities, when we have nothing to lose or worry about losing.  That’s when we are most open to God’s saving presence.

            But we should not over-individualize this or make it something that only happens within the heart.  The widow and her son are fed real food.  God nourishes our bodies.  And, while we may not expect the canisters of flour in our kitchens to be miraculously refilled whenever we deplete them, we may expect that living in communion with God and God’s people will create a culture of sharing and generosity, and we will be fed.

            Jesus enacts a similar miracle with loaves of bread and pieces of fish.  He does not create bread from stones when Satan tempts him to do that; but when he is gathered with others on the mountainside, he does.  Neither Jesus nor Elijah materialize bread for their own individual use.  But for the sake of others, for a community, for hospitality, they do.  The Word of God is never empty and isolated; but it always appears in relation to others. 

IV.

            Both the prophet and the Messiah are vehicles through whom God’s grace and blessing pours into the world.  All it needs is a world that will receive it by passing it on.  Those who welcome others will be welcomed by God.  Those who feed others will be fed by God.  Those who give away what they have will receive more from God than they could imagine.  Those who lose their life will save it…. 

            Elijah travels deep into Baal and Jezebel’s territory and establishes a beachhead for the Lord there in a small community where the consequences of injustice are mitigated and people are fed.  In the middle of the kingdom of death, life is preserved.  We see this even more in the following story, where Elijah brings the widow’s son back to life after he had died.

            Even in the middle of this horrible, punishing drought, people’s faith and togetherness, their hospitality and generosity, enable them to be fed.

            In the gospel reading for today we see another poor widow.  She too gives the last of what she has to the Lord.  In her case it is the two tiny coins she drops into the receptacle in the Temple.  Jesus is there and he witnesses this.  And he also witnesses the well-dressed, self-important, pompous, wealthy leaders, who conspicuously make a show of giving large amounts of money to the Temple.

            Jesus knows this is not generosity, but the buying of access and influence, and power.  And it positively disgusts him.  “Beware of the scribes,” he says, “who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the market-places, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets!  They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers.  They will receive the greater condemnation.”

            By Jesus’ time, the Ahabs and the Jezebels had taken over again.  Only now they have a façade of faithfulness to the Lord.  In reality, they worship Baal without knowing it.  How do they devour widows’ houses?  Any number of ways: high interest rates; fixing high prices; maintaining low wages; refusing to hire at all.  And here: making them pay a fee for the upkeep of the Temple and the payment of Temple staff, consisting in part of these overpaid, ostentatious scribes.

            These people had reduced Judaism to a mere religion, a set of rites and beliefs, an institution.  Jesus knows that faith in the Lord is a way of life to be expressed in individual righteousness and social justice and equality.  There aren’t supposed to be rich and poor.  That kind of a society is Baalism.

V.

            This struggle between the Lord and Baal is a fault-line running through all the Scriptures and all Christian history.  The church, and every believer, is faced with a choice every generation and every day. 

            Will we follow the Lord who creates us and gathers us together in a holy community of love, characterized by sharing, generosity, blessing, hospitality, service, and equality?  Or will we follow Baal – and even call it Christianity – by our exclusion, judgment, inequalities, and violence, allowing poverty and disease and despair to spread among the people, and not particularly caring about it?  Will we be a welcoming community, or a place of rejection?  Will we be known for our forgiveness and healing?  Or for forcing others to live up to our “standards” and demands?  Will we be people of compassion after the model of Jesus?  Or will we haughtily look down our noses at those who don’t exercise “personal responsibility” to our satisfaction?  Will we be people who humbly and simply share what they have?  Or will we be takers, extractors, parasites who get fat off of others’ labor?

            Too often the church has capitulated to the powers that only want to use it to enforce social classes and conformity.  But, as with Elijah, the Lord is never without a witness to the truth.  There has always been a remnant, a community of those who are chosen to follow the Lord, Jesus Christ.  Even in the throes of an apocalyptic drought; even in the regime of violence and injustice; there has always been a witness showing us that it doesn’t have to be this way.

            If we open our hearts to what God is doing in the world, if we share what we have, welcoming the destitute and the stranger, the sick and the disabled, if we pass God’s saving grace and blessing along to each other and expand that circle… then I know that “the jar of meal” that sustains us will never be emptied, and neither will “the jug of oil” that binds us together ever fail. 

+++++++

              

           

The Owner.

Psalm 24.

I.

            “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world, and all those who dwell therein.”  I say these words almost every week prior to the offering.  I say them to serve as a constant, nagging, annoying reminder that the earth does not belong to us.  It is not ours to dispose of as we please.  Rather, it all belongs to the God who made it.  We are just caretakers, stewards, tenants, custodians, as in several of Jesus’ parables.  We are managing this property, this planet, for Someone else.  And this management has to be done according to the wishes of that Owner. 

            In terms of our stewardship we should not so much ask ourselves how much of “our” stuff we are going to give back to God, but how much of God’s stuff can we justify keeping for ourselves?  What is our fair share of the produce, based on the quality of our stewardship?  Have we managed the vineyard well?  Is God’s intention that the produce of this garden be shared among all people equally being met? 

            Or do we come before God with a deficit?  Have we mismanaged it in such a way that some very few people have far, far more than they need, and many, many people have much, much less than they need?  Have we tried to fix this inequity; or do we just make excuses, and even justify it? 

            Have we managed the garden responsibly, or have we threatened to ruin it?  Have we depleted resources, have we poisoned ecosystems, have we flooded the system with our waste so profoundly that it doesn’t quite work the way it is supposed to?  In the last 13 years we have now had 4 storms of the severity that we used to expect maybe once per century, 2 in the last 2 years.  When I was a kid we had hurricanes… but they didn’t bring flooding to Vermont and blizzards to West Virginia.  That’s new.  I’m just saying….

            How many species have been driven to extinction during the time of our stewardship?  How many marvelous, magical, and miraculous voices that God designed to praise him are now silenced?  How well have we served as agents of the Creator?    

            When it says, “He has founded it on the seas, and established it on the rivers,” the Psalm remembers that God created the earth by carving a space for it out of the waters of chaos at the beginning.  God continues to protect and uphold the world in safety. 

            Science gives us rather a different cosmology, of course.  But even there, the earth is such an amazing blue jewel in the vast hostile chaos of space.  The natural systems of gravity and the atmosphere protect us from radiation and vacuum.  Our world is indeed held together by God’s will and plan and design.  It is a marvelous and unique garden in the infinite expanse of space, and we should treat it as such.

II.   

            This primary confession about who created and owns the Earth is something the worshiper has to make as a prerequisite to going up to the Temple.  The Temple was designed as a small model of God’s creation.  Before entering this comparatively little house, you had to affirm that you know whose house it is, and by extension whose house the whole world is. 

            It is this fundamental truth one has to understand before coming before God.  If you don’t affirm that God made the earth, the world and all living things, and it all belongs to God, then don’t bother trying to come to the Temple that represents that earth.  There would be no point.  You’d just be a tourist or an observer, not a participant.

            The next part of the Psalm makes it even more clear who is eligible – or recommended – to come into God’s presence.  Only those with “clean hands and pure hearts,” who “do not lift up their souls to what is false,” and who “do not swear deceitfully.”  These are the moral requirements for entrance into the Temple.

            These requirements flesh out the previous confession about the earth belonging to God.  That confession is not empty or theoretical; it has specific content and consequences.  We express our conviction about who owns the earth by the way we live our lives.  Every minute of every day we are demonstrating by our actions our belief about to whom the earth belongs.

            To have “clean hands and a pure heart” means that our work expresses a single-minded intention to live in harmony with the will of the Creator who owns the world.  It means that we do good work relative to God’s creation, which is everything and everyone.  It means we do not defile ourselves with actions that express the view that the earth belongs to someone else… like us, for instance.

            Are we acting like people who know themselves to be guests in someone else’s house?  Or have we arrogantly trashed the place in search of something we can use or sell?  Have we treated the Owner’s property with respect and care?  Or have we made it our religion to consume as much as possible?  Have we made our hands clean by our work in the service of the Lord?  Or have we soiled them in the muck of our own self-interest and greed?

            Have we worked for the betterment of all God’s people, especially those at the bottom of the social system?  Have we worked to ensure that the benefits and produce, the resources and the gifts of creation, are shared equally among all?  Do we recognize that, given how the godless powers have skewed things, this means redistribution of wealth, from the top down, as the Law of God advocates?

III.   

            Jesus Christ shows us what is good.  He demonstrates the attitude and approach of a faithful and trustworthy guest and steward.  Jesus walked lightly on the earth; he exhibited nothing but respect and love for the world made by his Father.  He even said we can learn from sparrows and lilies.

            Jesus also exemplifies purity of heart, which is a single-minded devotion to the Owner and obedience to the Owner’s will.  For the Hebrews the “heart” refers to the whole person: body, soul, and spirit.  Purity of heart means we have surrendered our whole life in submission to God’s Word, Jesus Christ.  It is a life without distraction, a life of which there is no part where we are responding to other influences, powers, authorities, and words.  It is a life in which it is our deepest joy to please and glorify the Owner, the Maker, God.

            God calls on us to be single-minded in our discipleship.  We are not divided or distracted, we are not compromised or procrastinating.  We follow Jesus in everything we do, in every decision we make, in every opinion we have, in every relationship.  There is no aspect of our life in which we do not ask how what we are doing reflects and expresses our faith. 

            We don’t follow Jesus on Sunday, and Baal the rest of the week.  We aren’t holy disciples when we’re doing church stuff, and heartless, cut-throat, thugs when we’re at work or driving on the Parkway.  We can’t be Christians at home, while everywhere else we act like Ebenezer Scrooge or Gordon Gecko

or some other selfish, godless barracuda.

            The divided and conflicted heart is in a way an expression of idolatry because instead of following God in our lives, we are wandering off after other pied pipers, or we are attracted by other shiny objects, or tempting promises.  So we lift up our souls, or at least parts of our souls, to what is false, to what is not God, to what doesn’t participate in God’s truth.

            And not swearing deceitfully means not just doing the truth but speaking it as well.  How often has this been a silly division between Christians?  Some are good at speaking the truth in evangelism, but they fall short in actually doing it.  Others do the truth very well in terms of mission and service to others, but they are reticent to put in words why they are doing these things!

            Our faith is made whole when we live in service to others and say that it is because… “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein.”  Our doing of peace and justice is a matter of obedience of the One who made all things.  The doing and the articulation of why we are doing what we are doing are aspects of the same devotion to the One God.

IV.

            The last part of the Psalm is kind of a liturgy.  There are two parts that answer each other like a responsive or antiphonal recitation.  It imagines the Lord, the Owner, returning to the creation.  It looks ahead to the Day when God appears.  This is anticipated liturgically in Temple worship. 

            The return of the Owner is a joyful event… for those who have kept the moral life indicated in the affirmation that “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and all those who dwell therein.”  But Jesus and other parts of the Bible are very clear that for those who do not make this affirmation, for those who have made it their business to trash the creation and exploit people, this return of God is not good news.  The bad and destructive and selfish stewards receive not reward but destruction when the Lord comes.

            And the Lord always comes.  We can view this as something that happens only at the end of time, and therefore render it effectively irrelevant to us.  Most of us live our lives as if there will indeed be a tomorrow. 

            But God does also enter human life and society all the time.  God enters our life especially when our mindless fantasies, our idolatries that lead to injustices, hit the wall of reality.  When we live for too long the lie that the world belongs to us, we eventually discover that this is unsustainable.  The Owner returns and blows that falsehood away.

            Jesus talks about his teachings being true, real, solid and dependable like rock, so that anyone who follows them will not collapse when the rain and wind and floods, the challenges of life, come.  If you build your house on the sand… we know what can happen.  Unfortunately and tragically we have seen this literally this week.  And our hearts and hands go out to all our neighbors whose lives were ruined by the storm. 

            Jesus, of course, is not giving architectural advice.  He is using a well-known fact to illustrate the importance of keeping to his teachings.  His words tell us what is real, what is true, and works.  They tell us what is strong enough to base our life on, as opposed to the flimsy, shifting, immaterial, vapor that is everything else we have dreamed up that we would rather base our life on.

V.

            If we build our lives upon the confession that “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and all that dwell therein,” if we shape our lives according to what it means to have clean hands by doing good work with single-minded intensity, avoiding falsehood and lies, and telling that truth all the time, we will find ourselves able to welcome with joy the coming of the Lord.  We will be able to see the Lord’s coming as profoundly good news for the earth and all people. 

            The creation does not belong to us.  We are guests, tenants, stewards, caretakers, custodians.  We should act like it… and treat this house and all its inhabitants with care, respect, and love, as the Maker intended and instructs. 

+++++++

A Trashed Rep?

Psalm 126; Mark 10:46-52.

I.

            In today’s gospel reading we have the story of a blind man named Bartimaeus.  Bartimaeus lives in Jericho and spends his days sitting on the side of the street, begging.  He would presumably live off whatever coins he managed to get from people walking by.

            One day he hears a commotion up the street, and he asks someone what is going on.  He is told that Jesus of Nazareth is coming through town.  And immediately he begins to yell at the top of his voice: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”  Why does he do this?

            He obviously knows who Jesus is and he knows Jesus’ reputation as a healer.  This would have been how Jesus’ contemporaries would have known him.  Jesus is an itinerant healer from Nazareth.  He is also a teacher and a community organizer, but his main reputation among the common people is healer.  That’s what gets their attention.  That’s what attracts the crowds.  Jesus is known as a person who heals, saves, liberate, deliver, and restore people, mainly from diseases, maladies, afflictions, and infirmities.

            If you were lame, blind, a leper, possessed by evil demons, or had some internal bleeding disorder, had suffered a recent death in the family, Jesus was your hope.  Healing and restoring to sound health was his reputation.  That’s what he is known for.

            Our reputation is based on past performance.  People hear about what we have done, what kind of people we are, what we say, how we relate to others.  Our reputation precedes us.  We understand that past performance is a reliable indicator of what we will do in the future.  It doesn’t always work this way.  But we hope and expect a person’s work to be consistent with what they have done in the past.

            In Psalm 126, the first part is about God’s reputation.  The Psalm remembers what God has already done.  In this case, it is the spectacular miracle of release from exile in Babylon.  This is something no one, except a few eccentric prophets, thought could happen.  The return of the exiles proved God’s nature as a God of deliverance and liberation. 

            And this experience only ratified what had always been God’s reputation.  This God originally delivered the people from slavery in Egypt.  God is about liberation, salvation, healing, renewal, justice, and love.  So when this happened in history again, it only meant that God was faithful and true to God’s original identity.

            So the Psalm has the people sing: “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream. 
Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy.”


II.

            Unfortunately, we live in a time when God’s reputation with people isn’t as positive.  Not that God isn’t forever and always the God of blessing, liberation, deliverance and freedom, but some of those who claim to worship and follow God have managed to trash God’s rep.  It is so bad that many today, especially young people, think that our God is a God of judgment, condemnation, punishment, retribution, exclusion, inequality, nationalism, racism, vindictiveness, bigotry, fear, and hatred.  In other words, many people today have an opinion of God that is exactly the opposite of what is actually true about God.

            This is a tragedy.  God’s reputation with a lot of people is so bad right now because so many of God’s representatives have been misleading folks about God; and it’s been happening for centuries.  Instead of telling the truth that God is working in the world to liberate those in bondage, heal the sick, comfort the afflicted, feed the hungry, and welcome the stranger, God gets made into the mascot for the way things are and the people in charge.   Instead of telling the truth that God loves everyone, regardless of race, language, or culture, they say that their nation, ethnicity, class, economic system, political philosophy, and moral framework are God’s favorites!  Instead of lifting up Jesus Christ, the Palestinian Jew, the healer, the exorcist, the non-violent community organizer, the teacher who practiced reconciliation, equality, justice, and peace, and who gave his life for the life of the whole world, we get an unthreatening, domesticated, comforting caricature of Jesus who manages to tell us whatever we want to hear.

            Nothing discredits God like tying God to human agendas, especially the agendas of people recognized as leaders.  The main job of leaders seems to be protecting and projecting their own power.  Did you ever notice that Jesus calls no one to be a leader in his church, and he acknowledges no leaders in society?  Jesus is in tune with the whole direction of Scripture when he calls for us to be followers and servants.  Jesus is allergic to any kind of leadership; he even sees himself as a follower of the Father.

III.      

            So we have a difficult job.  We have to rehabilitate God’s reputation among people.  I suspect that were I to go into a crowded college cafeteria and announce an opportunity for people to know Jesus, it could very quickly clear the room.  If you got any takers at all it would probably be those few who were already believers.  The results would be similar in a homeless shelter, a detention center, or a jail.  An opportunity to hear about Jesus would likely be met with a lot of skepticism, reluctance, avoidance, disregard, or hostility.  And in my experience the most hostile are some of the ones with the most church experience… and have the scars to prove it. 

            When Bartimaeus hears that Jesus is coming, he immediately raises his voice to get Jesus’ attention, and when Jesus calls him he jumps up in eagerness to meet him.  What do we have to do today so that people will be that interested in knowing and meeting Jesus?  What is going to get people to want to hear more about Jesus?  What kind of presentation do we have to make so that people will hear about the coming of Jesus as good news they want to be a part of?

            How do people come to know that God is not condemning but forgiving?  Not rejecting but welcoming?  Not judgmental but redeeming?  Not excluding but including?  Not violent but peaceful?  How do they come to know God as healer and liberator, rather than afflicter and punisher?  How do they know that God is on the side of the poor, the sick, the outcast, the rejects, the alien, and the struggling?  How do we change God’s reputation from retribution to salvation?

            I think this Psalm would say that first it’s about what you choose to remember.   What we choose to remember shapes our whole identity and our relationships.  When one member of a couple chooses to remember only the difficult and challenging times, only the negative things about their partner, then it’s all over.  Marriages and families are sustained when we choose to remember the best times, when we were happy, strong, and loving.  

            The first line of this Psalm is a celebration of God’s miraculous liberation of the people from exile in Babylon.  That is what it chooses to remember.  It does not lift up the fact that they got themselves to Babylon in the first place by their own disobedience and injustice.  That is not what this Psalm leads with.  It leads with the great things God has done for them.

            In his ministry, Jesus doesn’t begin by threatening people with God’s judgment if they don’t shape up.  He starts by proclaiming the Kingdom of God and healing the sick.  His more apocalyptic warnings he mostly saves for the last days of his mortal life.  But first he wants to make it obviously and undeniably clear that he has come into the world to save, to deliver, to heal, and to liberate.  By the time he gets to Jericho, just before reaching Jerusalem, Jesus has a strong resumé as someone who makes people more free, more whole, and more connected to God and their community.

IV.

            In the Psalm, after reciting the memory of the return from exile and how that is the event that establishes God’s reputation for liberation upon which the people may rely, it then goes on to address people in trouble.  On the basis of the tremendous and wonderful things God has done before, we can now approach our own broken situation with confidence that God will act in those same saving ways again. 

            The Psalm mainly uses the image of a farmer.  “May those who sow in tears
reap with shouts of joy. 
Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing,
shall come home with shouts of joy,
carrying their sheaves.”  Because God is the God of miraculous abundance, we know that, as hard as it is to bury the last of the saved grain in the ground at planting time, God will bring a good harvest in the fall. 

            For farmers, planting time is very much about sacrifice, loss, grief, risk, liability, and poverty, as well as hope in the future and trust in God.  By early spring they may have been very hungry, but instead of eating the leftover grain they had to plant it… and stay hungry a while longer.     

            In other words, no matter how bad it is now, no matter how empty, lifeless, bereft, drained, and apparently hopeless life seems today, no matter how much we are left with nothing, having just buried the sum total of our worldly assets in the ground, we may depend on God’s track-record, which is salvation.

            But we have to take the risk.  We have to make the investment.  We have to give up all we have.  We have to pay the cost.  We have to make ourselves poor and face our losses – in other words, we have to plant the seed – before we can enjoy the harvest.  At the same time, we could never muster the courage to do the planting and endure the loss without the hope in the harvest.  We require the prior knowledge that God saves; that’s where we get the strength and confidence to make the investments in life we have to make.

            The Psalm is suggesting that the difficult times in our lives are the planting times, the times of investing.  It is framing our down-times as necessary times of preparation for God’s blessings.  But it is the coming blessing, not the present suffering, that is the point.

V.

            What if we made it very clear in every possible way that our God is a God of blessing?  God is about liberation, healing, deliverance, salvation, redemption, justice, and love.  God is about generosity and sharing, forgiveness and peace, goodness and joy, acceptance and inclusion, thanksgiving and delight.  What if the main theme of our ministry is that no matter how deeply and thoroughly people get themselves into trouble, disaster, grief, injustice, and disease, God always, always, always brings them home… and God is waiting and willing and able to bring you home, too?

            What if we made it equally clear that we know this because this is what Jesus Christ is about, as we see in the gospel accounts of his ministry?

            What if because of this we became a blessing as well to all, especially the underprivileged and suffering?  What if therefore people began to think of Christians, not as hypocritical, judgmental, paranoid, nasty, self-righteous prigs, but as people as filled with hope, joy, faith, and love, as the God we worship and serve?    

  

            What if we built such a reputation for healing, blessing, liberation, and joy that, when they hear we are coming, needy people like Bartimaeus leap up to be a part of God’s salvation?  What if it wasn’t just blind beggars on the street, but others, like AIDS sufferers, the undocumented, the homeless, drug addicts, the unemployed?  What if it was the young, the depressed, the elderly, the indebted, the lonely, the bullied, and the grieving, who heard good news from us?

            I suspect that in order for people to realize that God is a God of blessing and goodness, we who profess to be God’s followers have to be people of blessing and goodness.  We have to show that some of who God is has rubbed off on those who claim to be God’s disciples.  Let’s make sure that this is the case.  Let’s make sure that in all that we do and say, we are always witnessing to the good news of God’s saving, healing, liberating, reconciling love for the world in Jesus Christ.

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