pentecost 19 year C

Lamentations 1: 1-6; 3: 19-26 NRSV text
Psalm 137 NRSV text
2 Timothy 1: 1-14 NRSV text
Luke 17: 5-10 NRSV text

Luke 17: 1-10 is a strange passage. It sounds disconnected – something that jars when compared to the narrative sweep and flow of the previous chapters. My NRSV heads the section, “Some Sayings of Jesus”, reinforcing the impression that what we have to do with here is a Lukan grouping of some odds and ends (as far as sayings are concerned). There is no grand narrative, teaching or story here

 

Staging Luke’s drama
However, there are connections – structural and thematic – with the foregoing material. Note Jesus’ audience: Jesus is again talking to his disciples. We have noted the ways in which Jesus’ audience alternates between the Pharisees and the disciples. It’s probably best to imagine this as a staged play. Think of it in terms of a very simple set: Jesus is sitting centre stage, fully lit. He is the central character. He remains constantly floodlit; constantly centre stage.

On his left is the group of Pharisees and on his right the disciples. They are the main audience groups – the main recipients of his teaching. When Jesus is addressing the Pharisees, the producer lights up Jesus and the Pharisees. The disciples are in darkness – dark shadows against a very low-lit backdrop. Then when Jesus shifts audience, the lights go down on the Pharisees and come up on Jesus. The point is that each group hears what Jesus says to the other – exactly as Luke intends it to be staged!

In today’s passage, Jesus turns from the Pharisees (against whom he has just told the parable of the rich man and Lazarus) and turns to the disciples. Remember: this is part of the travel narrative – the journey to Jerusalem. We ought to expect, therefore, that Jesus will tell us something about the life of the community of disciples in the light of all that they have just been witnessing. And that is what we find.

Resident Aliens
The parable of the dishonest manager, you remember, turned on the way in which the economy of the Kingdom worked, as opposed to the “ways of the world”. Jesus wants his disciples to be as shrewd in terms of the Kingdom as they are savvy in the ways of the world. That led to the saying about not being able to love both God and money (16:13).

The Pharisees are described as “lovers of money” – that is, they are the people who ought to know best the difference between “world” and Kingdom, but instead have lost their way. This leads to the parable of Dives and Lazarus. One of the implications about what Jesus is saying is just how easy it is to be seduced from a proper understanding – to replace the God of the Kingdom with an idol.

It is because of the Great Reversal that rich man realises the error of his ways. Tragically, in the story, he does so too late. Furthermore, says Jesus (via the exchange between Abraham and the rich man) it is hardly surprising: people’s foundations in the status quo run so deep that it is desperately difficult for them to hear any alternative truth about God.

Just how are people then to hear and believe? One of the ways is that the community of disciples – the Church – models the Kingdom. This is the astonishing truth that actually proves to be true on the ground: people are far more convinced by a community that models and lives out what it preaches than they are by something spectacular – even as spectacular as someone rising from the dead!

It is immersion in the “everyday” that shuts us off to the message and ways of the Kingdom. The very “natural-ness” of it – the “that’s the way it is” quality – exercises enormous paralysis on our moral and spiritual imagination. We just don’t realise how we are involved in a process – day by day – that is waging a war of attrition against the Kingdom simply by being the status quo. We are socialised into things and ways of living that are inimical to the Kingdom.

What is the answer to this? The answer is immersion in a community that is modelled on the Kingdom and that lives by different rules. This is what leads Stanley Hauerwas to describe the Church as a community of “Resident Aliens”. The Church is a community that is an outpost of the Kingdom, or a bridgehead. It lives in the world – in alien territory. Its rules and procedures work very differently from the world.

It is a fragile existence. It is living “against the grain”. This is not a vision of the Church that is accommodated to the prevailing culture: rather, it is a picture of the Church-as-counterculture. The emphasis is on what makes the Church different.

What I find so attractive about Hauerwas’ image is that it fits the contemporary Christian Church in postmodernity. It takes very seriously the reality of fragility. Luke’s was a community under huge pressure to compromise their faith and priorities. The contemporary Church is likewise under both pressure and scrutiny. As an institution, it attracts the hostility and suspicion that characterises people’s instinctive – default – reactions to former authorities. “Occasions for stumbling are bound to come”! There is a gritty realism to what Jesus tells his disciples here. The world is a bloody place for people trying to model the Kingdom. There are no shortcuts to success, no automatic shield from failure and compromise. In fact, the more radically Christ-like it is, the more its life will be peppered with failures and fallings.

The reference to “little ones” here recalls immediately the parable of Dives and Lazarus. The latter is one of the “little ones” whose circumstances were caused by the rich man. It also recalls the lost sheep and the lost son – in other words, the focus is on vulnerable people. Lazarus is “lost” – even while he is in full view! – because the one person who can do what is needed has shut him out and overlooked him.

Here is a realistic warning about just how easily vulnerable people in Church communities can slip through the nets. It’s the unintentional “not noticing” that pushes them further on to the margins, isolates them, and makes them angry and despairing. They appear as pastoral problems – typically by destructive sorts of attention-seeking – yet the compassionate and sensitised will see them for what they are: neglected and systematically excluded. “It’s all too easy to cause that sort of stumbling”, says Jesus. But God takes that sort of thing seriously – as seriously as the “little ones” take it! And because of the Great Reversal, we’d better be aware and beware!

The community of Resident Aliens mustn’t be unrealistic about their communal and individual lives. Holding on to an alternative lifestyle take vigilance and grace. People will fail; don’t be surprised! Don’t act shocked and disappointed – just deal with it! The aim is restoration. People need to be confronted with destructive patterns – not for some sense of superiority or satisfaction, but in terms of a reminder that we’re supposed to be living an alternative life, that it’s always hard, and that their behaviour is simply making it difficult for others (ie is being a stumbling block). When those who are picked up express remorse and want to sort things out, then the community is to forgive – freely.

In other words, what we have here is Jesus talking about the daily ebb and flow of community life. He tells people what to expect. Living differently will be difficult and takes effort. But what must characterise the community is a ready willingness to forgive and restore fellowship. That must become the pattern of life to the point where it is as natural as breathing. It needs to be developed carefully and vigilantly – but it will be the means whereby people experience the Church as a life-giving community, both inside and out.

“Lord, give us faith!” (Luke 17: 5-6)
We need to remember that when Luke uses the word “faith”, he does so in terms of faithful living – faithfulness – rather than as some sort of quality or commodity. Jesus has just been talking about faithful discipleship; the disciples, recognising the reality and the challenge, respond by saying “Give us faith!” – ie they ask Jesus to make them into people who won’t stumble or cause others to stumble.

We need to remember that because we usually use the word “faith” differently. “Faith” can often mean a set of beliefs (propositions), or an ability to hang on to difficult beliefs. But “faith” in gospel terms means primarily something to do with discipleship. It is means “faithful living”.

Marcus Borg identifies 4 meanings of faith very helpfully. The first is Assensus – “believing that…” This is the most common use of the word. It has been particularly characteristic since the 18^th century Enlightenment. It has the sense of “believing six impossible things before breakfast”. The difficulty with it is that it has been used far too narrowly and privileged inappropriately.

There are three other older, deeper meanings of faith. The first of these is Fiducia – faith as “trust”. Trust is committing one’s self to God in the same manner as we urge a child to trust themselves to water – to lie back and allow the water to hold them up. This is faith in the buoyancy of God – wholehearted commitment into God’s hands,

Then there is Fidelitas – “fidelity”. At its heart is a notion of covenant and promise. Fidelitas means being “faithful” to God – even under extreme pressure. It means resisting idols.

And lastly, there is faith as Visio – a “way of seeing”. This is about seeing the world through God’s eyes. When we pray that we might learn to see with God’s eyes and hear with God’s ears, we are echoing the petition of the disciples: “Lord, give us faith!” It is when we see the world through God’s eyes that we respond in fiducia and fidelitas.

Jesus says to them, in response, “You seem to think you need vast amounts of faith. I tell you this: if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, it will be more than enough to live as I have been telling you!”

Obedience (Luke 17: 7-10)
The problem, says Jesus, is that the apostles seem to think that this way of living is something extraordinary that requires huge amounts of faith, Spirit and supernatural strength! “Actually,” says Jesus, “it’s simple obedience – and you’ll discover that the more you live by it! It will become second nature!”

Jesus, you see, has been talking about faith being rewarded. “This isn’t anything to write home about!” he says. “It’s ordinary, everyday stuff! Why should you be rewarded for being forgiving, for looking out for one another (particularly the “little ones”) and for being quick to restore broken fellowship? That’s the basic weft and warp of daily living!”

To make his point, he employs the image of the household servant. This isn’t meant to be allegorised. What he’s saying to the disciples is this: “You are behaving as though you’re a servant who is asking to be rewarded and elevated just for doing his job!” He uses the picture of the small-holder who has a single servant/slave. The slave does all the tasks – the tilling, the pruning, the tending of the sheep – and then is expected to come home at the end of the day and get on with the household tasks – cooking and serving dinner.

Jesus says to them, “Would you consider yourselves in the slave’s debt because the slave has done what is expected?” To our ears, it sounds as though Jesus ought to be urging the householder to say, “Oh, you poor thing! You must be exhausted after all that work! Come in, take the weight off your feet and let me bring you some dinner! Thank you so much for all you’ve done!” In other words, we expect Jesus here to be using the inversion of masters and slaves as he does elsewhere.

What Jesus is doing, however, is to tell a parable within a debt/honour system. For the householder to do as Jesus describes would not be being kind or humble; it would be acknowledging that the householder regarded himself as being in the slave’s debt simply because the slave did what was expected. That would be absurd. Likewise, the disciples – unlike the Pharisees – ought not to be constantly on the lookout for ways of currying favour with God. We are obedient, not to curry favour or reward, but simply because that’s what being a disciple means.

Gritty realism (Lamentations 1: 1-6; 3: 19-26)
In a way, including chapter 3 of Lamentations is a cheat: it’s one of the very few passages that have any hope. Lamentations does exactly what it says on the box: it’s a series of laments amidst the ruins of Jerusalem. These are not the exiles mourning in Babylon; these are the laments of those who have been left behind, day by day to pick through the ruins and remember the former glories.

The hope of chapter 3 is all the more powerful for the fact that it comes looking fully in the face the awfulness of loss and destruction. One of the things the Church needs to learn is a more honest realism. Expressions of faith and hope are often a means of avoiding the awfulness of things. There’s a constant temptation to jump from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday without actually confronting and going through Good Friday and Easter Saturday.

What we learn from Jewish spirituality is a refusal to pretend – to ourselves or to God. It is when we have been nakedly distraught in God’s presence that words of hope and healing have real power. Just as Jesus does not expect community life to go smoothly, so God does not expect us to remain unaffected by disaster and tragedy.

The Exile shattered faith and belief in all that had gone before. It was the dawn of the unthinkable – and it meant re-appropriating all the old beliefs in a new way. That they could do it was made possible only because they confronted with brutal honesty the awfulness of destruction and Exile – and took it to God.

We find that difficult, because we tell ourselves that things are different and better than they really are. We love to delude ourselves – as if by having enough faith, or shouting out words of promise loudly enough, we can make life easier than it genuinely is. Or else we have this view that we must somehow always be polite and grateful to God.

The realism of the Old Testament and of Jesus himself cuts across this sort of destructive intuition. Yahweh is, after all, the God to whom “all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hidden”. What is the point of not being honest with God about pain and doubt? It is when we are honest about our doubts that there is room for the growth of genuine faith.

Rekindling gifts (2 Timothy 1: 1-14)
When I read these opening words of the second letter to Timothy, I get a strong impression of Paul writing to someone who has been through a very tough time and who has lost their way a bit. I get a strong impression of Timothy’s confidence having been shattered – or at least having taken a very serious knock – because of the opposition to him in the Church and because of Paul’s imprisonment and suffering. Why else would Paul talk about “rekindling the gift” and then go on immediately to say, “For we have not received a spirit of cowardice”?

Timothy seems to have had a very rough time for holding on to what Paul had taught him. It doesn’t help either, that Paul is in prison – and has lost a great deal of his street cred among the Church members for that reason! So Paul writes to encourage his son in the faith.

Again, I want simply to flag here something about the realities and difficulties of the life of faith. Church communities are not all they should be. They can be bloody, bruising, destructive places to be. They can destroy faith in the reality of God, just as they can be the sacramental presence of God!

And as Church life has its ups and downs, so do individual disciples. There are times when we lose our way; times when our early confidence and sense of God’s call, or our earlier enthusiasm and confidence in God’s presence is tested and blunted – or even broken. That is not the time for giving up, says Paul. It’s the time to rekindle our gifts. The gift doesn’t go away: it is “within you”, says Paul. It isn’t dead – it’s just that the flame’s gone out and the embers need coaxing back into life.

What about times of renewal in the Church? What about services where there’s space for people to come and be prayed for – for renewed faith and rekindled gifts? These are important – not because we’re praying for some sort of “faith package from heaven”, but because, like the disciples, we want to live more faithfully and consistently than we do – and life within and without the messianic community can make that difficult to do!

Amen.

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