Proper 17 (Aug. 28-Sept. 3)
Texts: Luke 14:1, 7-24;
Heb 13:1-8, 15-16; Prov 25:6-7a
YouTube: https://youtu.be/OlBpCN4mcrM
SENT OUT FROM THE SUNDAY JUBILEE PARTY TO WORK FOR
THE EQUALITY OF GOD’S REIGN — AND OUR NATION’S IDEAL
I begin with a peek at the ending of the sermon. I have a good story to bring everything home with. First, on this holiday weekend, I want to set the stage with some reflections on the state of our nation, too, and our role as citizens to be part of making it better, of helping it to achieve its ideal of all people being created equal. From the founding of our nation, we set forth an ideal of achieving equal opportunity for everyone, and we’ve made a lot of progress, more than most nations on earth.
I wanted, to be honest, to say more than any nation on earth, for the United States has surely been the pioneer in moving humankind towards greater equality. But I’ve shared in the past some of the measures used to gauge nations for equality, and by those numbers other democratic nations have passed us up, nations like Denmark.1 Among the industrialized nations of the world, all the data shows that we have now slipped to being one of the most unequal nations. Among the other nations committed to democracy, the gap between rich and poor has increased dramatically in the United States over the past forty years, while it has shrunk in nations like Denmark.
How has this happened? It should be crystal clear by now, with forty years of hard data, that it’s because we’ve made different economic choices. We’ve gone the way of so-called Reaganomics, a supply-side approach to capitalism that features lowering taxes and deregulation.2 Who has this benefitted? Again, the data makes the answer clear. It has benefitted the wealthy. We of the middle class know that it surely hasn’t benefitted us. Our income has remained flat, losing ground to inflation.
Yet we keep voting for this economic choice. The recent Big Morally Repugnant Bill, as I call it, should be yet another red flag. It achieved the height of inequality, passing into law the largest transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich in our nation’s history. It’s the extreme climax to the economic choices over the past forty years. We keep voting for it, so they keep upping the ante, growing the gap between the rich and everyone else to historic levels. Why shouldn’t they? We keep voting for it.
So how can we wake up and stop voting for this? By realizing — along with the indigenous Savior, Jesus the Messiah — the dangers of wealth to human equality. Ever since humankind reached the stage of nations and empires, inequality has been the natural state of things. Nationalism and imperialism both have featured authoritarian power at the top that protects the wealth of the richest minority. It’s been this way for millennia now.
When a new nation, the United States of America, 250 years ago sought to found itself on the ideal of equality — that all people are created equal with inalienable rights to pursue happiness — who had the most to lose with this proposition? Isn’t it the wealthy who always have the most to lose when there’s the prospect of a march from inequality to equality? Yet our nation was founded exactly under this tension.3 Some of the most wealthy among the colonists designed a nation with the freedom to pursue equality. But we got off to a rocky start. The structure of our self-governance allows for a movement toward equality, but the rich men were given a head-start from the very beginning. Women were given second-class citizenship — not receiving the vote until 1920! Until then, their ceiling of achievement was tied mostly to the men in their lives. And those who suffered the worst were the indigenous peoples. Native Americans were not given citizenship at all, literally referred to as “savages” — in the Constitution! — to live as resident aliens in their own land. And enslaved Africans were afforded a very reduced citizenship, literally defined as 3/5 of a person — again, in the Constitution.
Siblings in Christ, if you and I are to play a role in helping this nation that we love to get back on track with its march to equality — as I have argued in my 20 months or so as your pastor, that it is part of our calling when following the one who launched God’s reign in this world on Easter. If we play our role in seeking God’s reign as it comes into world, then we need to begin with the fact that Jesus was an indigenous man in the Roman Empire, who met the fate of an insurrectionist when they crucified him. Yes, we worship Christ as the enthroned king of God’s reign, but we need to more fully understand how subversive that claim is, given the fact that he was an indigenous crucified man on this earth. I believe that the so-called Christian Nationalist movement is very big on the first fact, the rulership of Jesus the Messiah. But it tries to forget or even actively covers-up the second fact, that his rulership comes up from below as an indigenous person. Christian Nationalists want to erase all history in our country of mistreatment related indigenous people and African-American. So we need to not forget that Jesus was born dirt-poor on the fringes of the Empire. And he grew up teaching indigenous wisdom that centers life as a gift and seeks equality for all of God’s creation.
This message will generally be resisted by the wealthy since they perceive that they have the most to lose in a march toward equality. Let me be clear. I say this not to blame the rich, or to make them the enemy. That never gets us anywhere in achieving equality. It usually only results in us trying to turn the tables on them, to reverse places with them.
But here’s the more gracious way of looking at the so-called reversal, bringing us to one of the central themes in Luke’s Gospel. Luke is the most clear of all the Gospels about Jesus’ status as indigenous. He tells the birth of Jesus against the backdrop of the Roman Empire forcing all the indigenous people to travel to their homelands in order to be counted in the census. So in Bethlehem Jesus is born in a stable among the farm animals, laid in their feeding trough. Leading up to the birth, Luke also makes clear the poverty of Mary his mother. In the song she sings to her cousin Elizabeth, she praises God for choosing someone so “lowly.” And she anticipates the slow march toward equality that her son represents: the mighty will be brought down from their thrones, and the lowly will be lifted up.
This is the same theme which Jesus announces in today’s Gospel, when he declares that the “all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” This is sometimes referred to as a theme of reversal in Luke’s Gospel, but I think that’s wrong. It’s not a theme of reversal, in which the current inequality is simply reversed. [Setting hands at an unequal level and then reversing their position.] No! This is Good News for the rich, too, if they’re able to hear it. What this is about is a theme of leveling, of making things equal. The exalted are humbled and the lowly exalted not to switch places but to meet in the middle. [Setting hands once again at an unequal level but this time leveling them.] Jesus’ Good News is about the Jewish hope for Jubilee, the great Sabbath Year when the status of all people will be reset to an equal level. Jesus begins his ministry in Luke’s Gospel by reading from the prophet Isaiah about the Jubilee year, when: All debts will be forgiven, the blind will see, the lame will walk, and the prisoners will be released. So in telling the parable today of a wealthy man, whose initial invitations are lamely turned down by his peers, he sends his servants out to bring in everyone. His plan had been to maintain the status quo by throwing a party for his peers, but he ends up with a Jubilee party where everyone is invited.
Which now brings me to my story of a Jubilee sort of story in a contemporary setting:
Author and teacher Tony Campolo tells a true story about a time when he was traveling. He was in another time zone and couldn’t sleep, so well after midnight he wandered down to a doughnut shop where, it turned out, local hookers also came at the end of a night of turning tricks. There, he overheard a conversation between two of them. One, named Agnes, said, “You know what? Tomorrow’s my birthday. I’m gonna be thirty-nine.” Her friend snapped back, “So what d’ya want from me? A birthday party? Huh? You want me to get a cake and sing happy birthday to you?” The first woman replied, “Aw, come on, why do you have to be so mean? Why do you have to put me down? I’m just sayin’ it’s my birthday. I don’t want anything from you. I mean, why should I have a birthday party? I’ve never had a birthday party in my whole life. Why should I have one now?”
When they left, Tony got an idea. He asked the shop owner if Agnes came in every night, and when he replied yes, Tony invited him into a surprise party conspiracy. The shop owner’s wife even got involved. Together they arranged for a cake, candles, and typical party decorations for Agnes, who was, to Tony, a complete stranger. The next night when she came in, they shouted, “Surprise — and Agnes couldn’t believe her eyes. The doughnut shop patrons sang, and she began to cry so hard she could barely blow out the candles. When the time came to cut the cake, she asked if they’d mind if she didn’t cut it, if she could bring it home — just to keep it for a while and savor the moment. So she left, carrying her cake like a treasure.
Tony led the guests in a prayer for Agnes, after which the shop owner told Tony he didn’t realize Tony was a preacher. He asked what kind of church Tony came from, and Tony replied, “I belong to a church that throws birthday parties for prostitutes at 3:30 in the morning.” The shop owner couldn’t believe him. “No you don’t. There ain’t no church like that. If there was, I’d join it. Yep, I’d join a church like that.”4
Siblings in Christ, we are invited to such a Jubilee party every Sunday! We partake of the body broken for us and the blood poured out for us to celebrate the long, slow march toward human equality. That Jubilee reset. Every time we come to this table our status is reset to being children of God who are equally and unconditionally loved. We try to live this out — currently, by examining our welcoming state to make sure we are welcoming to everyone. And also through ministries like Thread-by-Thread and the Meal Site. But now, as we are sent out, as we are every week: how will we live that Jubilee in the world again this week? How can you and I be part of the long, slow march toward living into our nation’s ideal of all people being created equal? Of having an equal opportunity to see their lives flourish? Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, August 31, 2025
YouTube: https://youtu.be/OlBpCN4mcrM
Notes
1. See the sermon on Jesus’ Inaugural Sermon proclaiming the Jubilee at Epiphany 3C; the Sermon Notes, too, explain the measuring of national equality with the GINI Coefficient. At that time, I compiled this list of “GINI Coefficient of 50 Major Countries.”
2. This assessment is informed by wide reading in macro-economics. I’ve read Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek, two leaders of the Chicago School of Economics behind Reaganomics. (Reagan is said to have carried Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom as his “Bible.”) Outside the Chicago School and the Republican Party, contemporary economists of any repute are in agreement on assessing supply-side Reaganomics of driving huge increases in inequality, exponentially expanding the wealth of the top percent while leaving everyone else either stagnant or going backwards. These economists include Paul Krugman, Thomas Piketty, and Robert Reich, but the one I’ve found most helpful is Nobel Prize winning Joseph Stiglitz (The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do about Them [W.W. Norton, 2015], The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future [W.W. Norton, 2012], and most recently The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society [W.W. Norton, 2024].)
3. The historian who most poignantly lays out U.S. history through the lens of this tension between the ideal of equality and the reality of inequality is Heather Cox Richardson. See How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America (Oxford, 2020) and Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America (Viking, 2023). PBS videographer Ken Burns is another historian who sees America through this tension. See his recent podcast with Nicole Wallace: https://youtu.be/f_nC3p0Yyvk
4. This version of Tony Campolo’s story is as told by Brian McLaren in The Secret Message of Jesus: Uncovering the Truth that Could Change Everything (Thomas Nelson, 2006), pages 145-46.
