Proper 13 (July 31-August 6)
Texts: Ephesians 4:1-16;
John 6:24-35; Ex 16
YouTube: https://youtu.be/qV08AnGS88Q
GOD’S POLITICS REVEALED, PART 2: ABUNDANCE
What concerns do you bring here with you this morning? Perhaps it is a health concern for you or a loved one. Or you have recently lost someone and carry a burden of grief. Maybe a loved one has made some poor decisions and is suffering the consequences. Or perhaps it’s just the grind of trying to maintain a family budget on not enough income, living paycheck to paycheck. Whatever those cares are that you bring with you this morning, you come here to worship and pray with a group of people you know love and support you.
I begin with these concerns this morning to acknowledge that you might also come looking for words of comfort and support and are sometimes confused by a message that focuses on things like Christian Nationalism. I want to acknowledge this because I believe that bringing these concerns to this community of love and support is itself form of politics that we are called to discern and to first live them together with each another, but then also offer them to the world. There’s all kinds of politics out there that lead to suffering and death. But we are called to discern God’s politics of love and caring that lead to abundant life.
In my journey of faith, I’ve come to a place where I not only don’t shy away from talking politics but have come to see it as the very heart of the matter. That when we come here to worship with our daily concerns, we need to expand our vision of the Good News that God is bringing to us in Jesus Christ. The whole Bible, I think, can be read as a clash between the typical human politics of death and God’s politics of life that culminate in sending Jesus the Messiah to save the world. We have sometimes heard that message as saving us only at the point of death for an afterlife in heaven. But I believe that that narrow focus ignores the main thrust of the Bible — which is that God made the world very good and wants to save it from our deadly human politics. God so loves the world that God sent Jesus the Messiah to save it.
I even use the Hebrew word Messiah a lot these days because its Greek counterpart Christ has seemingly become simply part of Jesus’ name. “Jesus Christ,” we say, as if “Jesus” is his first name and “Christ” is his family name. We’ve lost the fact that both Messiah from the Hebrew and Christ from the Greek are thoroughly and completely a highly charged political title. New Testament scholar N.T. Wright has offered a translation of the New Testament in which he most often translates Jesus Christ simply as King Jesus — because that’s basically what Christ means. God sent Jesus into the world to bring God’s reign, God’s politics, so that we human beings could finally become oriented towards life, not the death that our reliance on political violence brings. God sends Jesus into the world precisely to suffer on the cross our typical violent death in order to expose, to forgive it, and to begin to replace it with a politics based on love and caring and serving.
So each week we bring our cares and concerns to this community of Bethania and its politics based on love and caring and mutual service. We read these politics of love in our Sunday readings, like this morning’s incredible passage from Ephesians 4, which maps out a politics of church community based on the unity wrought from Christ’s love. It shows how we are all equal but diverse. We each bring different gifts that we combine together to enhance all of our lives. That’s the way it’s been since the beginning of the church . . . .
Though we did get detoured in the 4th century to hierarchical models of the church which sometimes looked and acted more like the politics of human empire than God’s loving politics of mutual care. As we talked about last week (“God’s Politics Revealed, Part 1: Equality“), one of the main principles of God’s politics are that all people are created equal. Not equal in the sense that we don’t have many and varying gifts to offer to one another in our common life, like we just talked about from Ephesians 4. But equal in the sense of how God loves us and has created us as children who each deserve an equal chance to not only survive but to thrive, to have life abundantly. The politics of empire are based on inequality, that some people are made superior and so deserve more. Empires are based on the so-called divine right of kings and emperors and a strict pyramid with them at the top and the poor people at the bottom, whose lives are somehow not as valuable as those at the top. Their lives are expendable. And empires are also built on always having enemies, people whose lives are not only expendable but from time to time we have the duty to take their lives away from them. The politics of empire are a politics based on inequality that issue forth in lots of political violence, lots of oppression, lots of suffering and death. We know our long human history, right?
The Good News of Jesus the Messiah is a revolutionary politics based on equality, which our founding fathers at least laid down as an aspirational principle, that all people are created equal. It’s a principle we have quite lived up to yet, but in recent decades we’ve moved closer. Until movements like Christian Nationalism have represented a backlash and seek to move us backwards into times when the inequality is once again more pronounced. So it has become much more important again to discern in our life here something that we can offer to our neighbors, that, no, the priniple which leads to life is that all people are created equal. How can we live into that?
Today I want to end with another important principle of God’s politics that we didn’t get to last week but which are very much a part of our readings as we move through John chapter 6. The first principle is equality. God loves each person on this earth and wants them to have a chance of thriving, a chance at living abundantly. Which leads us directly to the second principle, namely, that God has created an abundance, not a scarcity. Our human politics of inequality are based on seeing things as scarce. That there’s not enough for everyone. So we need to make sure that the folks God made superior to others get the first share of scarce resources.
But this represents the fall into sin recorded for us in Genesis 3. The serpent tricks Adam and Eve into believing in scarcity — that God is holding out on them, no less, and right in the middle of a Paradise where there’s clearly enough! And so one of the main pillars of our sinfulness is to continue to believe precisely in this lie about scarcity. The biblical story is truly one about God creating a diverse creation teeming with life and all that life needed to survive and thrive. Is survival sometimes challenging? Yes! But that generally comes about when we fail to parlay our diverse gifts and skills into ways of cooperating together to take advantage of the abundance which God created. And believing the lie of scarcity only makes matters worse. Instead of pooling our skills and gifts together in cooperation, we become rivals for what we assume to be scarce resources. And the rivalry eventually leads to violence and death.
So the principle of abundance not scarcity is a second main principle of God’s politics. How do we know? Well, the story of Jesus feeding a multitude of thousands with five loaves of bread and two fish is one of the basic stories of the Gospels. There are not many stories which are in all four Gospels. The story of the miraculous feeding is not only one of them, but Matthew and Mark even tell the story twice — that Jesus fed a multitude on two occasions, once with fellow Jews and once with Gentiles. I don’t think there are any other stories told in the four Gospels six times! And what is the point of this story? That Jesus came to help us believe once again in abundance, not scarcity.
I’ve even come to think of this miracle a bit differently, which I’d like to briefly share with you. It begins with my own trip to the Sea of Galilee which I was fortunate to make in the year 2000. The most striking thing about it was to realize that the Sea of Galilee is joined by the Jordan River to the Dead Sea, the lowest point on earth. So the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee are basically in an inland trench hundreds of feet below sea level. So when you are traveling inland in Israel from the Mediterranean Sea, the terrain gradually rises above sea level like most places on earth. But the you suddenly reach this ridge and look at the Sea of Galilee well over thousand feet below you. When our tour bus descended down to the Sea of Galilee, the temperature raised about ten degrees. Our tour guide began to repeatedly remind us that we should never leave the bus without some food and water because of the hot climate.
It occurred to me: Were those more than five thousand people that Jesus fed that day really without food and water? If me a tourist comes to know that you must always carry food and water with you in that climate, should a lot of the people there that day have had satchels with some food and water in it? Yet there was only a young boy who would offer up what he had. Was everyone else holding back because they had been taught to think in terms of scarcity and rivalry? They had been taught to be reluctant to share because there’s not enough for everyone? Then, Jesus gives thanks for those loaves and fish as if there really is enough. Did he use that wonderful verse from last week’s Psalm? “Lord, you open your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing.” Jesus give thanks assuming that God has created enough for everyone. And lo and behold, when the thousands on that hillside begin to think in terms of abundance, they are no longer so reluctant to share. They begin to open their satchels and share with those around them. And there is more than enough.
What do you think? Could the miracle have happened that way? I’ve come to think of the miracle in this way not out of doubt that Jesus can physically multiply loaves and fish into enough to feed thousands. No, I’ve come to think about the miracle in this way because I think it’s more important. A miracle of Jesus multiplying food keeps us dependent on Jesus’ miraculous power. It doesn’t help anyone when Jesus isn’t there to do it. But the miracle of converting our human hearts to think in terms of abundance rather than scarcity, now that has staying power! What if our politics today in this country assumed an abundance rather than a scarcity? Think abundance rather than scarcity, for example, when we think about immigration. Do you see what I mean?
Brothers and sisters in Christ, let us continue to bring our concerns and cares to this community and its politics of lovingly caring for one another. As your pastor, I’m proud of how well you do that! But let us also dream and conceive of the ways in which we can share this wonderful politics of caring outside these walls. We can invite our neighbors to believe more in the principle of equality, rather than inequality, and the principle of abundance, rather than scarcity. And in a democracy like ours, if we can keep it, can we find ways of shaping our nations politics more toward that same caring and mutual service? And if we find those ways of expanding the politics of caring and sharing into our nation, will it actually help reduce those concerns we bring to this place? Will there be fewer of us, for example, that struggle to live from paycheck to paycheck. That when we are sick, we can count on affordable health care? Because together as a nation we make sure that everyone has at least enough for basic survival? Can we not only pray but live into, “They kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as in heaven.” Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, August 4, 2024
YouTube: https://youtu.be/qV08AnGS88Q
