Do not be anxious

If you're familiar with rap music at all, you should know this:  I've got my mind on my money and my money on my mind.

And why wouldn't you?   That's the thing about money that I learned from Garfield's ME book, back in the eighties.  It was a great book, and it styled itself as a guide to superiority, how to know it, get it, and keep it.  And in that book, it detailed a list of superiorities.  Intellectual superiority, royal superiority, physical superiority, etc.  But the last in the list was financial superiority, and that was listed as the best superiority you could have.  Why?  Because it let you purchase any of the other sub-superiorities.

That's the deal with cash, is that it's nothing on its own.  Yes, it's useful, but only if you want to buy things.  The crushing thing about not having much money is that it limits your ability to do absolutely anything else.  And although you may not be thinking or dreaming about Scrooge McDuck levels of excessive wealth, there's a good chance that you're dreaming about something you might like to purchase.  And that's, ultimately, thinking about money.

Here's the deal.  Becasue money is the mechanism through which everything operates, then you need it to do basically anything.  And that by itself, is fine.  But the problem, as I have mentioned before, is not that you buy things.  Check out the gulf between where you are now, and where the people of Jesus' time were when Christ was speaking to them.  Look at what's asked of the good people from Jesus' time, that they not worry about what they eat or drink or wear.

Do Not Worry

22 Then Jesus said to his disciples: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear. 23 For life is more than food, and the body more than clothes. 24 Consider the ravens: They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds! 25 Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life[a]? 26 Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest?

27 “Consider how the wild flowers grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 28 If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today, and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more will he clothe you—you of little faith! 29 And do not set your heart on what you will eat or drink; do not worry about it. 30 For the pagan world runs after all such things, and your Father knows that you need them. 31 But seek his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well.

32 “Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom. 33 Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will never fail, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. 34 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Luke 12-22-34

Are any of you out there seriously so hard up on your luck that you are obsessing over where your next meal is going to come from?  No, you're not.  Everyone who is reading this likely has it together enough to pay for food and clothing.  No problem there.  So if all your necesseties are met, if there is nothing that you need to get by, then what is it possibly that you're obsessing over?

Well, from the moment you're born, you're presented with a vast wealth of things you can buy.  And things that you might want to buy.  And if you've been paying attention to the advertising industry, you should have noticed something very important - very few advertisments talk about the product in question.  All they're designed to do is to make you dissatisfied with who you are and your station in life.  The models will be holding the beers, to be sure, but nobody's drinking them.  They're selling you the party, but all you'll get is the beer.  Party not included.

But that lifestyle, that precious lifestyle, that's what's presented for you as the carrot dangled before your eyes.  It's what you want and what you crave, and as discussed last week, it's always out of range.


And you know that.  You should, at least, know that by now.  And then comes Jesus Christ, and he tells you something big.  Something really big.  Something of such monumental size that you couldn't possibly imagine the ramifications.  He advocates communism.  Really.

Now, this isn't to say that he advocates modern communism with all the bells and whistles of the Soviet system.  I think that we can all agree that that experiment failed, and is never going to work.  But what he does advocate, if you're listening, is redistribution of wealth.  That is, if you have an excess, which we all do, you are requested by Jesus to sell what you have, and give to the poor.

Now, how do I propose that this is to work without turning our great nation into the new Soviet Union?  Simple.  What the United States was based on, and to a less extent, Canada too, is the separation of church and state.  Put simply, we are to be living in Canada, under Canadian laws, but acting as little tiny individual communists.  Even in a capitalist system.

How on earth am I advocating communism?  Well, I'm advocating a system in which we, as individual

Christians, as the body of Christ, take seriously the directives given to us by our Lord, and decide to do the right thing with them.  As Tony Campolo once said, 'whatever your branch of Christianity, can we at least agree that the teachings of Jesus are normative.' We are saved by grace through faith, indeed, but then the inevitable question is 'now what?'  What are we to do then?  Just recede into the background, just disappear, just sit on our laurels as saved people, or are we to do something?

The best parts of the Bible are typically going to be the parts you don't like.  The best bits are the bits in which Jesus shows up, and tells you what you don't want to hear.  And guess what:  It's a lot like contemporary vs traditional music.  If half the hymns are in the style you don't like, then odds are you'll only remember the ones you hated.  You won't remember the half you liked.  It's the same way with the scriptures.  If the Bible seems to be talking a lot about sex, it's probably because you're doing something sexual that you shouldn't be.  If all the Bible seems to do is to bang on about social justice, it's probably because you're not very just.  And if the Bible seems to drone on and on about giving to the poor, so that it overshadows everything else, well, that probably means that you should be doing more of that now, doesn't it.

Again, to be abundantly clear, this has nothing whatsoever to do with salvation.  Don't get confused.  You are not granted admission to heaven based on the number of poor people you fed, but by grace,

the grace of God.  Having said that, the Bible does talk at great length about a lot of issues, and if you yourself are not real up on the social issues that the Bible talks about, odds are that's all you'll hear.

And these days, well, this last couple of weeks, it seems like Jesus Christ is all about the social justice, the feeding of the poor, and all that.  And if you end up thinking to yourself that that's all he seems to talk about anymore, well, then 'let he who has ears, let him hear.'  And this is something that we need to hear.  Badly.

The trouble with the Lutheran church, or the Christian church in general, is that we tend to get a little, well, lazy with the way we approach the words of Christ.  That is, we tend to feel as though he promises us grace (which he does), and that saves us (which it does), so we're all good.  But salvation, it's not a dead end.  It's not enough as Christians, and it never has been, for us to say 'got mine, forget the rest of you.'  That's why there's evangelism, and weirdly enough, charity.

Abraham prayed and was given a promise by God.  Noah, likewise.  They did what they did by faith.  And now, it's time for you and I.  Not to ask about our salvation, that's the one thing that our faith is

good at, but time for us to look at the monumental problems before us in the world and say 'we need to have faith to tackle this.'  I have faith in God to enact powerful miracles, but do I have faith sufficient to listen to his word?  That's a big question.  It's a big question with a big answer.  The Gospel reading tells us that we need to be more than faithful based on what we should eat or drink or wear, but that we should be the means through which that is done for others.   The poor of this world are expected to have faith that God will provide for them, and then in the same breath, God has said that he is going to use us to do that.  He told us to sell what we have, give it to the poor so that his words may be realized.

Once again, we need to remember that, though this is not a matter of salvation, it's incredibly important.  We are God's workmanship, made for good works, which he has prepared in advance for us to do.  If you don't want to feed the poor, and clothe the naked, and through that realize Luke 12:22-31, then what do you actually believe in?  A God who will reach through time and space and create clothing out of nothing for the naked of the world?  Or a God who will take clothing away from someone who has far too much, and use that to clothe the naked.  Every hill will be made low, and every valley raised up.

The choice is yours; not in terms of will you or will you not be saved, but will you listen to Jesus?  The calls that went to Abraham and Noah, as mentioned in the epistle reading, they were notable becasue the men who heard them had faith, and listened.  You were already called to faith through the Gospel, and to salvation by the Holy Spirit.  Now, friends, prepare yourselves to listen to what Jesus says:

Sell your possessions, and give to the needy.

That's what he says.  Do you have faith enough to listen?

PJ.