Promises of Time

Promises of Time

Isaiah 55:1-13; Luke 13:1-9

March 24, 2018

You probably saw the news this week about the death of Alan Krueger, the Princeton economics professor who served as chair of President Obama’s council of economic advisors. Professor Krueger died from suicide at his home in Princeton last weekend. He made his mark in economics by focusing on people, and studying the economic aspects of such basic questions as what makes human beings happy.

As John noted in our prayers of the people last Sunday when he lifted up a young relative who survived a suicide attempt, most of us will never know or fully understand the pain – whether it’s physical or emotional – and utter despair that lead people to take their own lives. Professor Krueger’s family and friends no doubt long for some understanding just now.

Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell, who was an undergraduate student of Krueger’s and credits her former professor and long-time friend for launching her journalism career, captured the sadness and deep irony of her mentor’s death, writing “So why, all those years ago, was Alan studying happiness, a topic that usually falls under the fiefdom of psychology, not the dismal science? I don’t know whether Alan felt he had a personal stake in the subject; right now, it’s hard not to wonder, though he never said anything to me indicating this was the case.”

Another friend of Krueger’s, New York Times op-ed page editor David Leonhardt, wrote about two distinct economic lessons about happiness that he learned from his friend:

“The first lesson that Alan gave me comes from a finding that sounds a bit like a letdown: People waste a lot of money on gifts. In particular, surveys show that gift recipients don’t have much use for many objects that they receive. They usually appreciate the thought behind the gift, but the actual item isn’t of much value to them. In economic terms, they place a lower value on the gift that it cost.

“But experiences are different. When someone receives an experience – say, a nice meal out – they often both appreciate the thought and enjoy the actual gift.

“The second lesson involves spending time with friends. It’s one of the best ways to increase happiness, according to the survey data.

“Alan said this finding has stayed with him. At the end of a long day or long week, he said his instinct was sometimes to skip a social gathering. In the moment, he felt too tired. But the data had persuaded him to push though his fatigue more often.”

In other words, what we have to give and to receive from one another is time. It’s ironic to focus on time during a Lenten season when we’re also focusing on “generative church.” After all, time is the one thing we cannot generate, we cannot make more of it.

We say, in English, that we’re going to “make more time for family,” or “make more time for exercise,” or “make more time for” some other thing that is, typically, on the list of things that are not getting enough of our time. But the truth is, we cannot make more time.

All we can do is choose how we are going to spend the time that we are given. There are, obviously, all kinds of restraints on that, and every hour over which one has real choice is, itself, a huge mark of privilege.

My friend David LaMotte often opens concerts with a song called “Deadline.” Its refrain is simple: “there’s no time like the present; there’s no present like time.” One verse mentions a teenage child who “hangs the tassel from the mirror of the present parked outside.”

Whenever I hear the song I think of the prep school where I taught driving when I was fresh out of college. In the parking lot of the school sat a brand new Porsche 944 that had replaced another brand new Porsche 944 that had been a 16^th birthday present to a high school boy who wrecked the first one so his parents naturally bought him another.

I didn’t teach that kid – if I had maybe he wouldn’t have wrecked the first one. Who knows? But I have often wondered about him. He was a boarding school student whose parents lived at the other end of a very long state, and I’ve wondered if he would rather have had time with his parents than a new car from them. Did he know they loved him? Only the gift of time can answer that question for any one of us.

Last week I was running along 4 Mile Run and saw a little boy – toddler age – digging for worms as a man I took to be his dad stood close by with a fishing pole. I caught the man’s eyes as I ran past and we shared a smile. I’m confident in the judgment I made based solely on dress that that little boy is highly unlikely to get a new Porsche when he turns 16, but I bet he knows already that he is loved.

Why do we spend our money for that which is not bread? Why do we spend our money of that which does not feed us?

I imagine Jesus had Isaiah in mind when he said, “I am the bread of life; come to me and never be hungry.”

“Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live,” Isaiah put it. “I came that you might have life and have it abundantly,” Jesus says.

In the life of Jesus we see God’s great gift of time and of self. It’s almost as if Alan Krueger’s economic model is trying to measure that. In economic terms, he found that giving time creates value – creates abundance.

In theological terms, in God gift of time and self made flesh in the life of Jesus, God creates abundant life.

In terms of discipleship, that is to say, in terms of Christian living, in terms of living in the manner of Jesus, we find that when we give of our time and of ourselves we create abundance in the lives that we touch.

But the stark truth remains: we have only so much time. The fig tree has another year to produce or it’s getting cut down and used for fire wood. As the Ash Wednesday refrain reminds us, we are dust and to dust we shall return.

We cannot create more time. So, as Mary Oliver so pointedly asked, “what are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?”

To what will we give our time? To what will we give ourselves? To what will we give our lives?

I trust the great promise of Isaiah, that when we seek the Lord, when we aim to follow in the ways of justice and of peace, then we shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills shall break forth in song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

Let us join our voices to their song as we live faithfully following the way of the Rabbi Jesus. Amen.

Make Love

Make Love

Luke 13:31-35

March 17, 2019

My all-time favorite preacher story was told by a colleague in Pittsburgh recalling the time he’d preached a stem-winding sermon calling on the congregation to join the fight for economic justice. At the conclusion of the sermon, they closed worship singing Onward Christians Soldiers. Then the preacher stepped up to deliver his powerful charge and benediction. He said, “I know we haven’t sung that last hymn for many, many years because of its militaristic overtones and images of war, but today I want you to go out and make war on poverty, make war on racism, make war on injustice, and make love in the name of Jesus Christ!”

Can I get an amen?

At least that one Sunday he sent lots of folks home wanting to make what he’d told ‘em to make.

So often we’re just confused about that central question: what do we make? What do we make of our lives? Of our time? Of the gifts we’ve been given?

Sometimes the question gets skewed into political diatribe. Remember the dust-up back in the 2012 campaign when President Obama said “if you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that” in the middle of a long riff on how all of us contribute to making the American economy including teachers and construction workers and sales people? His opponents accused him of, well, who cares at this point?

The point is, the question of what we build, what we make, is central to understanding ourselves. Essentially related, of course, is the question of who gets the credit for what gets made.

Ronald Reagan had a plaque on his desk in the Oval Office that read, “There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he does not mind who gets the credit.”

Luke’s gospel is all about who deserves the credit. From beginning to end, the gospel of Luke narrates the confrontation of the corrupt power of Herod’s family by the good news of the gospel of Jesus, the Christ. Throughout Luke’s gospel, the good news is generating a new world, a future otherwise for the victims of corrupt and abusive power.

At the same time, Herod and his family are intent, throughout, at claiming power and taking all the spoils that come with it, including credit for controlling a community roiling in discontent.

The whole story is about what Jesus is making and how the powers and principalities are threatened by Jesus’ creative actions. If Jesus casts out the demons, then what of the demonic power that keeps the people in their place?

The demonic power, throughout the gospels, is represented by the cross and the crucifixion. That’s a powerful image, to be sure, and in the minds of Jesus’ contemporaries it was way more than symbolic. The crosses that lined hillsides outside of Jerusalem were a constant reminder of the brutal power of the occupying empire that ruled Jewish lives.

To cross the empire was to risk winding up on one of their crosses.

Herod’s family was thoroughly enmeshed in the violence of the empire, and would think nothing of condemning you to hang on a Roman cross. Remember the grizzly story of the beheading of John the Baptist? That played out in Herod’s courts, and resulted from his fear that John was stirring up resistance to Herod’s rule.

At the end of Jesus’ life, Herod will say, in essence, “I’ve been wanting to see you, Jesus, to see if you can do some amazing sign for me.”

But, as Princeton New Testament professor Eric D. Barreto puts it, casting out demons and healing the sick “are not a show for the empire but an embodied rebuke of its arrogations.”[1]

The empire has claimed for itself power that it does not have – power over every aspect of people’s lives and deaths. The cross is one sign of its power. The coins of the realm – on which Caesar’s image appears along with the inscription Caesar Kurios, or, Caesar is lord – are another.

If Caesar can claim power over all of your life – and in a system that allowed Herod’s family to steal your land and your livelihood in the name of the emperor it surely must have felt that way – if Caesar can make that claim, then  Caesar can label you “an invader” if your family happens to have moved across some arbitrary line in the sand, then Caesar can label you “an outsider and a threat” if you don’t look like everybody else on your block, then Caesar can call you “a heathen, and a terrorist” if you don’t pray like the majority of your neighbors, and if you can upset about any of this, then Caesar can also label your anger “demon possession” and threaten to remove you from your family and community – to have you chained in a cave in a field overrun with pigs if we are to take seriously the story of Garasene demoniac just a few chapters prior to our text this morning.

Recall in that story Jesus casts the demons out of the man and into the nearby swine who then run off a cliff into the sea and drown.

In that single story, Jesus claims the authority to restore a demon-possessed man to his family and community, and he destroys a herd of pigs – food for the soldiers of Rome because they would clearly not be food for the Kosher-keeping Jewish inhabitants of the countryside.

Do we begin to see what’s at stake here?

Jesus is making something completely different than Herod and his ilk make and maintain.

Jesus is making a commonwealth in which the people can aspire to wholeness, to healing, to justice. Jesus is casting a vision of a future otherwise, and, through his actions, is inaugurating the beloved community, the commonwealth of love, the kindom of God.

One might say he is realizing love in the world, or, simply, Jesus is making love.

He’s also calling us to do the same. Go out, then, and make love in Jesus’ name.

I could just leave at that and send you home happy, but that wouldn’t actually be faithful to the story, or the Jesus’ call and claim on our lives. Because that call is really about confronting everything that stands against love in our own time.

In other words, that call is about justice.

So what are the powers that threaten justice in our time and our community? We don’t have to look very far to see that economic injustice – massive inequality – is a hallmark of our time, and if things like Amazon coming to town are not yet demonstrably a cause of further economic inequality in Northern Virginia, they are certainly a symptom of massive political inequality that undermines fundamental notions of democracy across the country these days.

Unchecked corporate power, concentrated economic power – these are among the demons of our day. The call of Christ in our time compels us to ask how we cast them out.

In other words, how can we reclaim the power to build communities that shape and nurture lives capable of making love the most important value of them all? Following the way of Jesus in the world is ultimately about making love matter most. So, go out into the world and, well, make love in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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