A Fourth Church Sermon by J. Frederick Holper

August 8, 2004 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

God’s Good Pleasure

J. Frederick Holper
Professor of Preaching and Worship, McCormick Theological Seminary

Psalm 33
Isaiah 1:1, 10–20
Luke 12:32–48

“Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”

Luke 12:32 (NRSV)

An old rabbi once asked his students how one could recognize
the time when night ends and day begins.
“Is it when, from a great distance, you can tell a dog from a sheep?”
one student asked. “No,” said the rabbi.
“Is it when, from a great distance, you can tell a date palm from a fig tree?”
another student asked. “No,” said the rabbi.
“When is it?” the students asked.
“It is when you look into the face of any human creature
and see your brother or your sister there.
Until then, night is still with us.”

Once upon a time—long before the church got around to deciding which of the dozens and dozens of early church documents should be included in what we now know as the New Testament—many congregations had their own collection of favorite stories and letters about Jesus and the early church.

Even after Christianity became the state religion of the Empire, and the New Testament canon was closed, evidence suggests that some of those congregations clung tenaciously to their favorite Gospels. Churches in the western part of the Roman Empire seem to have preferred Matthew, while those in the east seem to have favored Mark and John. What no one has yet found is evidence of a similar fondness for Luke. (1)

Scholars don’t have an explanation for this. For all we know, someone will find an ancient manuscript tomorrow showing that Luke was the favorite Gospel of what became Europe.

But if I were a betting man, I’d guess that, for many of the congregations in imperial cities at least (and probably a fair number of Presbyterian congregations here in the United States), Luke’s Gospel cuts a little too close to the bone. As folks in the South are sometimes wont to say of their pastors, Luke’s Gospel always seems to go from preachin’ to meddlin’.

On the other hand, the church—through its schedule of readings for worship—invites us to spend every third year in conversation with Luke and the community for which he wrote his Gospel. And that’s a good thing, in part because Luke’s telling of the Gospel story pushes us to think outside our comfort zones more than any of the others.

Think back for a moment to the stories we’ve heard read the last few Sundays:

the parable of the Good Samaritan
he dispute between Martha and Mary
Luke’s plain-speaking version of the Lord’s Prayer
the parable of the Rich Fool

Along the way, Luke has pushed us to think about enemies as agents of God’s care, about the arbitrariness of cultural gender boundaries, about why we should pray only for what we need to get through the day, about the foolishness of expecting the world to revolve around our versions of the future.

In the coming weeks, we’ll confront the parable of the great feast where untouchables end up at the banquet and the “better classes” do not.

We’ll hear the parable of the Pharisee and the tax-collector, two men who go to pray with one set of expectations and leave with those expectations reversed.

And we’ll wrestle with the story of Zacchaeus, the tax-collecting little weasel who ends up cleaning out his bank account for the sake of the poor.

That is the context for our reading today: a collection of sketchily drawn parables about vigilance and service, framed by a promise and a challenge at the beginning and a warning at the end.

What ties this collection of sayings together is Luke’s vision of what might be—no, more than that: Luke’s vision of what will be in the kingdom of God. In Luke’s Gospel, what will be is not measured by the aspirations of the world’s movers and shakers but by God’s passion for the moved and shaken. It’s there from the very beginning of his Gospel, in the pregnant Mary’s protest song that we call the “Magnificat”:

The Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. The Mighty One has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. (Luke 1:49–53)

And then there’s Jesus’ first sermon, delivered from the bemah of his hometown synagogue in Nazareth:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18–19)

Throughout the Gospel of Luke (and extending into the Acts of the Apostles, which he also wrote), we find this vision over and over again. Luke’s understanding of God’s passion for the poor arises from a vision of community where those who have more share their wealth with those who
have less. (2)

It is not an overstatement to suggest that, in Luke’s telling of the Gospel, people with lots of possessions can never be faithful followers of Jesus. Having wealth is not necessarily bad in Luke’s writings, but holding on to possession—believing that the only, or even primary, purpose for that wealth is one’s own enjoyment—is bad. In Luke’s vision, the proper way to make use of one’s possessions is to give them away, to share them with others, or to sell them so that those who have very little will have enough to live. “Live simply,” Luke seems to be arguing, “so that others may simply live.”

This is also the vision at the heart of this morning’s Gospel reading. It begins with a promise: “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” God wants us to enjoy the life made possible by God’s reign on earth. Nothing, Jesus says, would give God greater pleasure. To all those who think they have to believe something incredible, do something impossible or perform something heroic in order to earn God’s favor, Jesus says: “God doesn’t want anything from you. God doesn’t need anything from you. God just wants you to receive gratefully what God wants to give you in the first place.”

On the other hand, before Jesus tells us about this wonderful gift, he tells us not to be afraid. It doesn’t come across very well in the English translation, but the tense of the Greek verb here suggests a continuing action. “Do not continue to be afraid,” Jesus says. “Do not keep on being afraid.” Receiving God’s gift of the kingdom is not a one-time decision or a one-time emotional experience. Receiving God’s gift of the kingdom is an everyday way of life, a day-in-day-out orienting of ourselves to God’s emerging vision for the world.

If, in Luke’s telling of the Gospel story, God neither wants nor needs any of the things we spend most of our time worrying about—doctrines and rules and “the ways we’ve always done it”—then what does God want to happen?

That’s simple, says Jesus. God just wants you to sell your possessions and give alms to the poor. It’s a jarring juxtaposition, when you think of it, linking fear and possessions the way Jesus does. If you’re afraid, he says, maybe it’s not because of what you don’t have, but because of what you do have.

Most of us, of course, tend to think about that juxtaposition the other way around. We’re afraid because we don’t have, or might not have, what we think we need for the good life. We’re afraid that our retirement may be held hostage to a global economy that only a few of us really understand. We’re afraid because we could be one messy divorce or one catastrophic illness away from losing our nest egg. At the same time, there’s a whole world of people out there who barely manage a subsistence living and yet raise and protect and love their children into adulthood all the time. There’s another whole world out there where people live from paycheck to paycheck and still manage to send their children to college and take pleasure in their grandkids. There are neighborhoods in this city, and subdivisions in towns large and small, where the houses and apartments are smaller than the ones in which most of our parents raised us but where there’s always room for the stranger.

The late Henri Nouwen begins his book With Open Hands by telling the story of a woman suffering from a nervous breakdown who is brought to a mental hospital for treatment. The intake process requires that she be relieved of everything she has brought with her: clothes, purse, jewelry, etc. The attendant takes everything from her and inventories it. But then he notices that the woman’s fists are clinched tightly, as though she is hiding something. The attendant asks her to open the hand, but the woman refuses. The attendant then tries to pry her fingers open, but she resists with every ounce of strength.

Finally, the attendant calls upon a team of orderlies to hold the woman still so that her hand can be pried open. And when he finally does so, all he finds in her palm is a single, thin dime. It isn’t much. In fact, it isn’t even the most expensive thing she had had taken from her. But to the woman, that dime represented the last vestige of her hope that she could control her own future on her own. So long as she had that dime, she believed, she could at least make a phone call to the outside world. Nouwen goes on to note that this incident was the key to her recovery. Once the dime had been taken from her, she no longer had any reason to keep her fists clenched. And once she opened up her hands, once she relinquished the notion that everything was up to her, she was able to receive the gifts of others. (3)

If I were to make a list of the things I would fear losing the most, material possessions would be far down the list. I grew up the oldest son in a blue collar family, and material possessions were never the center of our lives. We always had enough, but almost never more than that.

But that doesn’t mean there was no fear in our family. No one can battle against the encroachment of cystic fibrosis on your children’s lives without experiencing fear.

We all have treasures we fear losing: for some it’s our looks, for others our authority; for some, it’s our minds, for others our reputations; for some it’s our art, for others, our sense of humor.

What matters is not which treasure we have, but whether our treasures are shared. When treasures are shared, the master suddenly starts serving the workers. When treasures are shared, hungry people find their way to a feast. When treasures are shared, the suicidal find hope. When treasures are shared, people who couldn’t paint a fence become artists-in-training. When treasures are shared, the kingdom of God is at hand.

God wants to give us the kingdom. That’s the carrot. Here’s the stick: “from everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.”

To God be the glory for ever and ever. Amen.

Notes
1. See Thomas J. Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year (New York: Pueblo Publishing Co, 1986).
2. See John Sheila Galligan, “The Tension between Poverty and Possessions in the Gospel of Luke,” Spirituality Today, Spring 1985, vol. 37, pp. 3–12.
3. Henri Nouwen, With Open Hands (Ballantine Books, reissued edition: 1992).