Take a seat - any seat

August 31, 2025, Saint Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, Queens, N.Y.

My parents were the children of hardscrabble farmers in the Catskills. Both my mother and father were the first in their families to attend college, and Dad was a poorly paid schoolteacher in a tiny district in Central New York State.

Maybe these unassuming agrarian roots have unduly influenced me but few passages of scripture pop into my head more often than today’s Gospel reading.  

When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by the host; and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,’ and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. (Luke 14:8-10).

Throughout my career as a lay bureaucrat in denominational and ecumenical work, this issue came up – at least in my head – every time I attended a reception or fund-raising dinner. Sometimes I was invited as a mere reporter with the expectation I would write about the event later. Other times I was invited to offer a brief greeting on behalf of the board I represented. And on a few occasions I was invited to be the main speaker. At all times I would dawdle uneasily around the head table, waiting for someone to tell me where to sit.

Seating protocols were never clear in ecumenical circles that included cardinals, bishops, pastors, and lay factotums

The first time I attended an Associated Church Press meeting at the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America on East 79th Street, I was escorted to a dark room in which there was a polished oaken table surrounded by a dozen wooden chairs. One of the chairs at the table was much taller than the rest, its wooden frame ornately carved with religious symbols and a thick purple pillow in its seat. 

Perhaps, I thought to in my Protestant naiveté, the chair was symbolic of the presence of Christ, or maybe Elijah.  

“No,” the editor of the Orthodox Observer magazine told me. “The chair is for the archbishop.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised. The American Baptist version of that was providing first class airline seats for the church’s head while everyone else flew coach. That simplified matters for the rest of us because we never had to wonder where to sit.

As we read the passage from Luke 14 this morning, we find Jesus attending an apparently crowded Sabbath meal “when he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor.” (14:7a)

There are several interesting things about this passage that, as a non-scholar, I never noticed before.

For one thing, Jesus seems to be no stranger at Pharisee banquets. This is one of three recorded instances that he joined the Pharisees for food and fellowship.

It strikes us odd because most of us assume Jesus and the Pharisees were bitter adversaries.  Yet Jesus seems to be quite comfortable not only hanging around Pharisees but joining in their social gatherings.

This leads some scholars, in fact, wonder if Jesus was himself a Pharisee.

Mitzi J. Smith, professor of New Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, writes:

“Although Pharisees dispute with Jesus and sometimes express hostility toward him, Jesus continues to engage and dine with them. This kind of collegiality and friendship can be difficult to understand, especially in a rigid religio-political partisan atmosphere where, as in Jesus’ day, life is (de)valued differently and ignorance, tempers, and stereotypes often prevail. Readers must be careful not to stereotype and demonize the Pharisees as Luke sometimes does.”

According to the Jewish Virtual Library, the Pharisees were “blue collar Jews” who believed in an after-life and adhered to the tenets of the law, including individual prayer and assembly in synagogues. They were – unlike the elitist Sadducees – working class Jews who took their religion seriously. They had a lot in common with Jesus the carpenter from Nazareth. Whether he was a Pharisee or not, he was obviously not averse to hanging around with Pharisees and happily engaging them – as rabbis do – in arguments about Mosaic law.

Perhaps this was because he knew them well enough to know they would be open-minded about his teaching. Their Pharisaical hearts would already be open to the travails of the poor, the disabled, the lame, and the blind. As specialists in Mosaic law, they would immediately see the logic of expanding their gatherings to include everyone whether or not they had the means of repaying their hospitality. They just needed someone they trusted to point it out to them.

Jesus began his discourse by chiding those in the gathering who assumed they outranked the others and deserved higher seats at the table.

But Jesus goes even further than that, relying on his audience’s working-class sensibilities to see the justice in what he was saying.

He said also to the one who had invited him, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.” Luke 14:12-14.

This declaration is so consistent with the laws of the Torah that I don’t think Jesus expected anyone to disagree with him.

These words of Jesus are, however, a little harder for us to take in our class-sensitive society. Too many of us have become comfortable with those around us who separate humanity into tiers of relative worth: the one-percenters at the top who control most of the wealth and insist they earned their fortunes through personal merit and honest work; the management class who work for the one-percenters and share in the bonuses; the great middle class who work for the companies owned by the one-percenters and struggle each day to pay their mortgages and put food on the table; the blue collar farm labor class who work 12 to 18 hours a day, often more than one job, often at minimum wage, just to survive; and the desperately poor class living constantly at the edge of poverty and wondering if they will be able to feed their children every day.

So many of the people in these tiers are either invisible to us or far from our daily consciousness. None of us agree with these tiers of relative worth or see that that they are unjust. We are just too distracted by our own daily challenges to give it much thought.

Jesus knew the Pharisees understood that God created all God’s creatures equal, and that God expected all God’s creatures to reach out and help those who were poor, those who were sick, those who were disabled, those who were blind, and those who could not afford to take part in weekly Pharisaical banquets.

Jesus knew the Pharisees could have no argument with any of that, and he knew they could listen with contrite hearts.

Jesus asks no less of us.

When I began preparing my homily this week, it has escaped me that this is Labor Day weekend.

I asked Martha, “Do you think Jesus would be a Union man?”

She said, “Of course.” I should point out that both Martha and I saw our lives improved by the unions our parents were in.

Whether or not Jesus would have been active in the Samuel Gompers labor movement calls for more speculation than is sensible.

But as we see him sitting among the Pharisees ad arguing on behalf of those of lesser rank who need more in order to survive and contribute to their communities, one thing seems sure.

He speaks like a shop steward.

And he knows how to make management listen to him.

Stand and be seen

 

August 24, 2025, First Lutheran Church of Throggs Neck, Bronx, N.Y.

The woman in today’s scripture cannot stand erect. She is painfully bent over as if she had a millstone on her back. Her eyes are permanently cast down. She spends her days staring at litter and rubbish on the street. She cannot look into the eyes of the people who pass by her. The people who pass by glance at her and quickly turn away. She is invisible.

But she is a flesh and blood human being who cannot be seen because people refuse to see her.

Ralph Ellison, in his novel Invisible Man, depicts a flesh and blood human being who is invisible because he is black.

“I am an invisible man,” he writes. “No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination -- indeed, everything and anything except me.”

Have you ever felt invisible?

I suspect we have all experienced invisibility at times. As a kid, I had little athletic ability and I felt invisible waiting to be chosen for games. In Little League I was a permanent fixture on the bench, convinced the coach could not see me. Watching A League of Their Own in 1992, I knew Tom Hanks was wrong when he declared, “There’s no crying in baseball.”

Sometimes invisibility is a plague of adolescence. Some are never asked to dance at the prom. Some can never get a date because everyone they ask will be “washing their hair” that night. Some never get “likes” on their Facebook posts. Some are “ghosted” on the internet and wither into cyber oblivion.

Of course invisibility requires people who choose not to see unpleasant things. We render people invisible when we divert our eyes from beggars on the street, when we pass by homeless people sleeping on heating grates, when we turn away from persons who do not look like us.

Invisibility can be ironically contradictory. Sometimes fate conspires to make a person so visible that the real human being inside cannot be seen.

So it was with Joseph Merrick, an ordinary English chap whose severe physical deformities caused people to call him the elephant man. Millions gawked at him in side shows and novelty exhibitions where he was billed as half man, half elephant. No one saw Joseph Merrick. He was invisible.

When I was a teenager I loved to attend the Madison County fair in Central New York. That was back when side shows were still a cultural phenomenon and barkers would stand outside the tent urging you to spend a quarter so you could go inside and see astounding sights.

My buddy John and I could never resist that kind of temptation and we’d drop two bits into the basket so we could see exotic marvels like a five-legged calf or Lydia the Tattooed Lady.

One of the exotic exhibits was a middle-aged man named Billy* who was born with a cleft palate so severe that he had a deep gash in his head from his upper lip to his hairline. A human eye had been crudely painted in the hollow of his forehead so it looked like he had three eyes. Billy was billed – paradoxically – as “Cyclops Man.”

As the crowd gathered around him, Billy began to speak with a deep southern accent.

“Thank you for coming,” he drawled. “I give thanks to my Lord Jesus Christ for my many blessings. If Jesus loves ugly me, he loves you, too. Believe on the Lord and you shall be saved.”

The crowd shuffled out of the tent in silence. We Central New Yorkers weren’t accustomed to public Christian witness but I never forgot Billy. He overcame his invisibility and became visible. 

The woman in Luke’s story today has been invisible for eighteen years. God knows how many hundreds of people passed by her but did not see her. How many people told themselves her affliction was God’s judgment for an unknown sin? How many patriarchal men turned away from her because women were of little worth and the woman’s suffering was of little consequence?

As Jesus was teaching in the synagogue that day, it seems likely the woman was hanging back, cloaked in her invisibility. It would have been unthinkable for a woman to enter the sanctuary of the synagogue, and inconceivable that a woman would approach a man for any purpose. So she stood apart, unseen and discounted by the people around her.

But Jesus saw her.

Jesus called her over, laid his hands on her, and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.”

“Immediately she stood up straight and began praising God.” (Lk 13:13)

“Jesus sees this woman when no one else does,” writes Jared Alcántara, professor of preaching at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

“Throughout his ministry, Jesus had his eyes trained to see those who were forgotten, left out, and unnoticed by others.”

But Jesus does more than see her, Alcántara notes. 

“He acts to bring about the transformation she seeks. According to verse 12, he also ‘called her over.’ The God who sees us is the God who calls us. She had been outside the synagogue, and he invited her in; on the periphery, and he brought her to the center; invisible at one moment, and he called her the next.”

We are all challenged to see others as Jesus sees them. I was once in a small gathering of Baptist leaders who were reminiscing about Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter, two luminaries who actually made Baptists look good. (I might add that if all Baptists were like Jimmy and Rosalyn, I might still be one.)

One of the Baptist leaders told the story of Rosalyn’s visit to New York City to investigate homelessness in order to recommend ways the federal government might help.

“This was in the late seventies when New York was, well, the pitts,” the leader said.

“Rosalyn found herself literally stepping over sleeping homeless men. She began weeping and couldn’t stop. New York was a traumatic experience for her. She didn’t see things like that it Plains.”

His implication, I think, was that New Yorkers were used to dodging homeless people and didn’t get emotionally involved.

But my observation would be that Rosalyn was not reacting out of Southern naivete but because she was seeing these human beings through the eyes of Jesus. Any time we are able to do that, it’s a gift from God.

And we know, too, that both Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter found ways to act on this insight through their years of active service to Habitat for Humanity where they worked on many projects to build houses for people who needed roofs over their heads.

Jesus saw the needs of the woman who was so painfully bent over and he acted.

It was a time for rejoicing and gratitude to God. Unless, of course, you were the leader of the synagogue.

“But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the Sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, ‘There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured and not on the Sabbath day.’”

Jesus lets him have it with both barrels. 

“You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger and lead it to water? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath day?” (Lk 13:10-16)

“Jesus does not spare him or mince words,” writes Jared Alcántara “He unleashes a classical rabbinical argument: If one is willing to unbind an ox on a Sabbath day to give it water, how much more should you be willing to unbind a woman who was bound for 18 years? An animal, yes, but a person, no? One day? What about 18 years?”

Jesus is forcing the Synagogue leader to remember that the law of the Sabbath Day was given to the children of Israel at the very time God was liberating the people from Egyptian bondage.” In addition to being ironic, it is hypocritical to use the law to prevent liberating another child of Israel, a “daughter of Abraham,” from 18 years of bondage.

“For those who are religious or who like being religious about their religiosity,” Alcántara writes, “remember: When you do not see others, Jesus confronts you. The church is not meant to be a country club, a health spa, or a gated community but, rather, a place where those who are seen and freed by God are empowered to see others with eyes of faith.

Billy the Cyclops, exploited, disfigured, mocked gawked at, knew a great truth. God loved him categorically. And it was not his face that God loved but his beautiful, loving soul, created in the image of God.

For those who know what it is like to feel invisible or unnoticed in a world that struggles to pay attention, remember: When others do not see you, Jesus sees you. Those whom Jesus sees, Jesus frees. Like the woman in Luke 13, like Billy, you too can stand up straight and be seen.

Casting Fire

 

August 17, Saint Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, Queens, N.Y.

In the scripture we read last week, Jesus offered us words of comfort.

“Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” (Lk 12:32)

This week the clouds move in and an ominous smell of smoke is in the air.

 “I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already ablaze! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what constraint I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!  From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three;  they will be divided:

father against son
and son against father,
mother against daughter,
and daughter against mother;
mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law
and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.” (Lk 12:49-56)

 Whoa. What happened between last Sunday and today? I searched for commentaries that would explain what Jesus means by fire and division. There are many other passages we like better because they present a gentler Jesus who calls on us to love God and each other. It’s tempting close our ears to fire and division while humming the tender strains of “Beautiful Savior.”

But this is not the first time Luke has warned us that paths to discipleship will not always be comforting or smooth. Early in his gospel, the old man Simeon offers a clear-eyed summary of messiahship.

Then Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul, too.” (Lk 2:34-35)

From the very beginning it was obvious that Jesus would be a cause for division and conflict among those who could not accept who he is and what he came to do. Some expected him to be a military messiah who would use God’s might to vanquish the repressive Romans. Those in power feared him as agitator calling the people to rebellion. Pharisees saw him as a subversive who was disrupting ancient practices of Abrahamic law. Nearly everybody thought he was trying to become king of the Jews. When Jesus said he came to bring division, he knew it was already happening.

It shouldn’t be a surprise to us that Jesus is divisive because we see this happening all around us. There are many different sects of Christianity, including Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, mainline Protestant, evangelical, Pentecostal, as well as millions of independent congregations – many of which are hostile to each other. In the long history of Christianity, Catholics burned Protestants, Protestants burned Catholics, and Lutherans burned Mennonites. And I dare say none of them ever stopped to appreciate the irony of Jesus’ words: “I have come to bring division.”

In our current turbulent era, the divisions have become political. Perhaps you follow the cryptic theologian Rainn Wilson, better known as Dwight in the TV comedy “The Office.” Rainn, who was raised in the Bahái faith, has noted the ebbtides of U.S. Christianity with remarkable clarity:

He writes: “The metamorphosis of Jesus Christ from a humble servant of the abject poor to a symbol that stands for gun rights, prosperity theology, anti-science, limited government (that neglects the destitute), and fierce nationalism is truly the strangest transformation in human history.”

I suspect this Christian Nationalist view of Jesus is not the majority. In the years I worked for the National and World Councils of Churches, the church leaders I knew would have been appalled by this view. For most of them, Jesus made it abundantly clear that the way to repentance was to love God and neighbor, to put away our swords, to shed the worldly riches that distract us from God, to recognize that God’s kingdom is not an earthly nation state, and to share any wealth we may have with the poor.

For millions of Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christians, serving the poor and victims of disaster means opening church doors to free lunch programs, creating international relief organizations like Church World Service or Lutheran World Relief. And serving persons who are struggling below the poverty line also means lobbying state and national government to provide a safety net for the working poor by guaranteeing a realistic minimum wage, and by maintaining the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), Medicaid, health care, and, of course, Social Security.

On the other hand, there are Christians who want the church to steer away from politics and focus on winning poor people to faith where they can see God wants them to prosper by pulling themselves up by their own boot straps. Indeed, God will reward the faithful with riches beyond imagining.

Can there be any doubt that Jesus has – as he promised – brought division to his church? Many households experience this division during family Thanksgiving dinners that become microcosms of the discords of our society.

Can there be any doubt that on which side of the divide one stands is based on the Jesus we profess: the Jesus of love and giving and peace, or the Jesus of nationalism and the prosperity gospel.

Jared E. Alcántara, professor of preaching at Truett Theological Seminary in Waco, writes, “Division in families makes more sense when we consider who Jesus was and what he came into the world to do. Consider the most obvious source of contention. In a nuclear family, whether then or now, some conclude that Jesus is the Messiah, and others draw the opposite conclusion. Because these opposing views cannot be reconciled, division comes to a family—sometimes painful division.”

Reflecting on that, we may ask ourselves: where is the Gospel, where is the Good News, in this passage from Luke? Jesus sounds a little like the producer of a modern catastrophe film that threatens the end of the world: “I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already ablaze.” (Lk 12:49)

That gets our attention. I have a friend, a Pentecostal professor named Tom, who admitted he was an unruly child. Bored by the preacher’s warnings about fire upon the earth, he once hid behind the back pew and light kitchen matches. The acrid smell of phosphorous unnerved some members of the congregation who began dancing and speaking in tongues.

“It was my early effort at evangelism,” Tom said with a smirk.

What does Jesus mean when he says he wishes the earth was already ablaze? 

Matt Skinner, professor of New Testament at Luther seminary, warns us to be careful how we interpret that.

He writes: “Bad popular theology has done so much to train congregations to hear Luke 12:49 as a description of a God with an itchy trigger finger who just can’t wait to smoke some sinners. As a result, people duck their heads and wait until Jesus calms down and a nicer passage comes along. Isn’t the Parable of the Prodigal Son coming soon?”

Instead, Skinner writes, “The fire Jesus wants to kindle is a fire of change, the fire of God’s active presence in the world. No wonder he is so eager to strike the match.”

Professor Alcántara points out that Jesus’ reference to fire “would not have surprised Luke’s audience. In Luke’s account, John the Baptist declares that the one coming after him will baptize with the Spirit and fire; indeed, he will come with a winnowing fork in his hand to gather the wheat and burn the chaff.” (Lk 3:16–18).

Jesus’ promise of division and fire is difficult to hear, just as it is difficult to hear a doctor’s unpleasant diagnosis following test results that portend a long period of radiation or chemotherapy. 

But Jesus, like a conscientious doctor, is being honest with us. This must be endured before things will get better.

“Here is what might surprise us and perhaps undo us if we slow down long enough to let Jesus’ words reach us in a deeper place,” Alcántara continues. “The fire that Jesus wishes ‘were already kindled’ is a fire he will endure on our behalf. He refers this way to his imminent passion that will culminate on a cross: “’I have a baptism with which to be baptized and what stress I am under until it is completed!’” 

In this passage in Luke, Jesus is reminding us of his real role as God’s messenger of love and God’s emissary on behalf of the poor. Jesus reminds us that following him requires sacrifice and, indeed, suffering. It will not be easy for us to pick up the cross and follow him.

But it is Jesus who is passing through the winnowing flames that makes our salvation possible. Jesus, through his death and resurrection, enables us to endure the cleansing flames of repentance. And it is the Holy Spirit that brings us to faith and salvation.

We pray for the wisdom to understand who Jesus is: not the fair haired champion of the flag and guns and the prosperity gospel but the humble servant of the poor, the outcast, the unseen, and the lost.

Jesus foresaw this division, and churches, denominations, and family members are divided by which Jesus we choose.

Mixed Metaphors

 

August 10, 2025, Saint Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, Queens, N.Y.

In the wildly hilarious and often offensive musical Book of Mormon, a group of missionaries are sent to Uganda to preach their faith and win converts. 

One of the missionaries, Elder Cunningham, is at a disadvantage because he has never read the Bible or the Book of Mormon. But he has read Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring and he has considerable expertise in Star Wars and Star Trek. 

While other missionaries are preaching about Jesus and Joseph Smith, Elder Cunningham regales his listeners with stories about Mordor and Middle Earth and Darth Vader and the attack of the Sith. The people love the stories and begin to call Elder Cunningham a prophet. But when he has Boba Fett turn people into frogs, the other missionaries have had enough. They accuse him of lying.

Not so, a Ugandan woman replies scathingly. “It’s a met-a-phor.”

It turns out the Ugandans are not so naive as to believe Elder Cunningham’s stories. They understand them as allegorical promises that their life of misery will not last forever and there is hope on the horizon. And that is a prophetic message indeed.

Metaphors can be very powerful and very confusing. Christians who believe Bible stories are literally true may be perplexed by claims that Adam and Eve were not real people, or that Eve is not merely a morphing of Adam’s rib. For many, the Song of Songs seems like poetic eroticism between a man and a woman and is not immediately understandable as a metaphor of God’s love for creation.

Jesus’ use of parables to teach higher truths may also be confusing. Even the disciples had occasion to ask him what he meant. And sometimes the fictitious characters Jesus made up – the Prodigal Son, the foolish virgins, the rich fool, the woman searching for a lost coin – seem very real. I was once in a bible study class when a student exclaimed, “Wait. The Good Samaritan wasn’t real?”

Not real? Of course he becomes real every time people reach out to one another in love, every time we come to each other’s aid, every time we have each other’s backs. But a real person? 

Sorry. It’s a metaphor.

E. Trey Clark, assistant professor of Preaching and Spiritual Formation at Fuller Theological Seminary, calls attention to today’s Gospel reading as a means of introducing us “to images or metaphors for God in Scripture that we tend to overlook or underemphasize. Of course, metaphorical language for God in Scripture and elsewhere must not be absolutized, since it tends to both highlight and hide aspects of the mystery of the triune God. Still, in today’s lectionary passage from the Gospel of Luke, we find at least three different ways God or Jesus is described that call the people of God to …be attentive and alert to the priority of God’s reign.”

The first metaphor Clark points out is “God as a generous parent.”

In one of my favorite lines in Luke, Jesus presents God as a parent – a father – who loves us and wants the best for us.

“Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” (Lk 12:32)

This is such a reassuring promise. 

I don’t know how I got the idea, when I was a kid, that if I was bad, God would judge me vengefully. If I wasn’t good, I wouldn’t get into heaven. God was always looking down on me in judgment, a cosmic elf on a shelf, keeping a list and checking it twice.

I certainly didn’t get these heretical ideas from my parents, a functional Methodist/Presbyterian concordat who surely told me God is love. But it was so easy to get swept up in the flawed belief that God was keeping a stern eye on whether I was naughty or nice.

I was a young adult before I was able to think of God embracing me with unconditional parental love, a reassuring presence at my side, not “up there” somewhere.

In my Baptist days, however, I still thought of God as withholding the gift of salvation until I decided to accept Jesus as a personal savior. My old sociology professor, the late Tony Campolo, used to talk about the evangelical rallies he attended as a boy.

“Accept Jesus into your heart now,” Tony would quote the preachers. “You could walk out of this meeting tonight and get hit by a bus and your soul would be lost.”

“But,” Tony said, “it didn’t make me afraid of losing my soul. It made me afraid of buses.”

Most Christian denominations preach that your salvation is entirely up to you. Jesus died for your sins and all you have to do is reach out and accept it. If you wait too long, you may find yourself blocked from getting into heaven by a savior who tells you, “I never knew you.” (Mt 7:23)

Martin Luther preached that it is not up to us to get ourselves saved because God has already taken care of it. 

It is the Holy Spirit that gives us the power to have faith, not we ourselves. When evangelicals ask Lutherans if we have found Jesus, our response  should be, Jesus has found me. By grace we are saved and Jesus welcomes us into God’s kingdom. We no longer have to be afraid of buses.

For me, this confirms the concept of God as a generous parent, a father who brings God’s little flock together and expresses his good pleasure in bringing us into God’s kingdom.

Metaphor two: God as Servant Master

“Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down and eat, and he will come and serve them.” (Lk 12:37)

Okay, there’s a slight ick factor in this verse as we look at “master” and “slave” from our historical perspective. We think of masters and enslaved persons from our bleak understanding of America’s “peculiar institution” of cruelty and oppression. There are no masters on record who were kind to the human beings they owned and certainly no masters would deign to serve their human property. Enslaved persons who hear of masters who “will come to serve them” might regard it as a spiteful metaphor.

It helps to remember that masters and slaves had a different relationship in Roman households. Many slaves were artisans, chefs, domestic staff, entertainers, librarians, accountants, and physicians. Many Roman slaves worked to buy their freedom.

Be that as it may, slaves served their masters and not the other way around. Luke’s gospel turns the master-slave relationship inside-out and upside. 

This is a scandalous affront to societal norms. Luke reminds us that Jesus comes to us seditiously as a servant master who waits on his disciples.

This is a powerful metaphor about the relationship God has chosen to have with the universe, and about the Messiah who comes to us not as a mighty warrior but as a suffering servant. The metaphor reminds us that we Christians, at the very least, should be effecting a sweeping upheaval of society in which the first shall be last, the last first, the weak strong, the strong week, the poor rich, the rich poor.

Metaphor Three: God the Thief in the Night

“But know this: if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You also must be ready, for the son of man is coming at an hour you do not expect.” (Lk 12:39-40)

My mother, a Presbyterian elder, was determined to be prepared for that unexpected hour when the Lord returns. She kept the beds made, the dishes washed, and floors swept so the Lord would not suddenly appear and catch her with a messy house.

Of course my mother also sought to be spiritually prepared and she made sure her five children said their prayers at night and were scrubbed clean for Sunday worship at the United Church of Morrisville, N.Y.

But my mother’s strenuous preparedness made me wonder if she was fretful about the Lord’s return. Would he enter houses with white gloves to check for dust and untidiness? Would he suddenly appear when my brothers and I were pummeling each other on the living room floor and shout, “GOTCHA!”? What, indeed, were we to expect about the Lord’s return?

Clearly adults are not the only ones struggling with this question I first heard the joke in 1960 as my fellow adolescents were sitting around a campfire at Pathfinder Lodge, a Baptist camp near Cooperstown, N.Y.

“The good news is that Jesus is back.”

“What’s the bad news?”

“He’s pissed.”

This sounded dangerously impious to seventh graders and the counselor’s silent disapproval was accentuated by the snapping firewood and the gyres of sparks in the humid darkness. The censorious face of a counselor looks satanic in the red glow so we’d cautiously tongue our smores until the evening ended with choruses of kum-bah-yah and we could escape to our tents. There, we’d repeat the hazardous joke and squeal with laughter.

Actually, this is more a hermeneutic than a joke. It’s a brief, two-part sermon with yawning theological depth.

It forces us to ask ourselves: what is there in our world to gladden the heart of a returning savior?

Certainly if Jesus came back this morning and beheld the divisions and strife in our country – the proliferation of guns, the political lies, the wholesale rounding up and deportation of our neighbors, the racial and ethnic hatred - he would be enraged by our rigid inability to put his greatest commandment into practice: love God and love your neighbor. If we are to be prepared for Jesus’ sudden and unexpected arrival, we have work to do.

As it turned out, my mother passed into the kingdom without experiencing the sudden arrival of the celestial thief in the night.

Luke, in his metaphors, reminds those of us who are still here of these divine truths:

God is a generous parent who delights in giving us the kingdom.

God’s kingdom is an upside down realm in which masters serve their servants.

And we should be prepared for the final fulfillment of God’s loving kingdom that will burst before our eyes when we least expect it.

Fear not, Little Flock. This is most certainly true.