Sermon on Luke 12:13-21

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

We can draw some pretty bleak conclusions from our readings today.

Maybe all is vanity. Maybe there’s no point in working for anything,

because someone else will benefit from it after we die.

Maybe our very life will be asked of us tonight, and we won’t get to

enjoy the fruits of our labor.

But I don’t think that’s what those readings are actually about. Our

reading from Colossians actually sums up the point of our readings well:

“Set your minds on the things that are above, not on the things that are

on earth.”

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t enjoy things here on earth. God

created this world and called it good. God made food taste good and

made us with eyes that can appreciate beautiful things. God gave us skin

that’s sensitive to the softness of a blanket. We can appreciate good

things in this life. The Bible often uses strong either/or language that can

cause us to draw the conclusion that everything earthly and physical is

bad and everything spiritual is good. But I like to imagine God enjoying

watching us appreciate the world God created. It seems ungrateful to

shun the pleasures God created for us.

We just get into trouble when we focus on physical comforts and

enjoyment at the cost of ignoring our relationships with God and each

other.

The Teacher in Ecclesiastes was throwing his hands up in the air, giving

up on everything he had worked for because he couldn’t be certain of his

legacy. He seems to have found no joy or meaning in his work and still

felt despair at the idea of not knowing whether those who came after him

would care about his work and make good decisions. He was focused

inward, obsessed both with the drudgery of his work and the uncertainty

of its future.

Then, the opening of our Gospel reading shows someone approaching

Jesus to settle a disagreement with his brother over their inheritance.

And then Jesus starts telling this story about a man who’s also focused

inward, obsessed with storing up.

Jesus doesn’t say he got his wealth by mistreating his workers. The

problem instead seems to be that he doesn’t mention them at all, nor any

family, nor any other person. His inner monologue is full of the words

“I” and “my.” He, unlike the Teacher in Ecclesiastes, doesn’t seem to be

worried about what will happen to his stuff later. He just wants to enjoy

himself but doesn’t seem to have any concern for relationships with

other people. By extension, the brother who approached Jesus seems to

be putting his concern for possessions over his relationship with his

family.

Now, I don’t know what the situation was, but I do know that

inheritance and arguments over money and heirlooms can rip families

apart. I’m not saying it’s never justified to disagree about these things,

but they’re often symptoms of deeper hurts. We can let stuff become

symbolic of our relationships and fight over that instead of having more

vulnerable conversations about what our family means to us.

Whether your family is biological, chosen, or a mixture of both,

relationships are worth far more than stuff. That’s what the Teacher and

the rich man were missing. They were focused on themselves and their

stuff instead of human connection.

That’s what our readings point us to: what’s most important in life.

People don’t get to the end of their lives and wish they had more stuff. If

their death was brought on by poverty, then yes, wishing they had

enough resources to prevent a life cut short is understandable, but that’s

not what Jesus is talking about here.

• He’s talking about priorities and pointing out how lonely even the

  enviable position of prosperity can be if one doesn’t share it with loved

  ones and neighbors and the community.

  In our individualistic culture, it’s easy to fall into that loneliness. We can

  pay for delivery services instead of asking a favor from a neighbor or

  even interacting with a cashier at a store. Algorithms curate the people

  and ideas we interact with online.

  There are deep-seated cultural scripts that tell us that it’s shameful for an

  individual to be poor instead of shameful for a society to let them be

  impoverished, which keeps us from asking for help. Add on biases

  against people of color, immigrants, gender non-conforming people,

  people in larger bodies, people with disabilities, and so on, and our self-

  worth gets capped by how closely or not we embody the “cultural ideal.”

  Anything else becomes shameful.

  And so, we isolate ourselves for fear of what’s different or for fear of

  being different. We build bigger barns, numb ourselves with eating,

  drinking, and being merry, gripe about the dreariness of our jobs, and

  worry about who will get hired to take our place someday. We stay in

  our safe silos and forget the richness of community just outside our

  doors.

  The 2004 movie Crash explores racial relations in LA through several

  intertwining storylines revolving around a car accident. One of the

  storylines involves a district attorney and his wife, Jean, played by

  Sandra Bullock.

  At one point, Jean falls down the stairs in her house. She can’t get any of

  her so-called friends to help her. A friend of ten years even refuses to

  end her massage early to come to her aid. It’s Maria, Jean’s cleaning

  person, who takes her to the emergency room. When they get back to the

  house, Jean pulls Maria in for a long hug. “Do you want to hear

  something funny?” Jean whispers to Maria. “You’re the best friend I’ve

  got.”

  Jean’s life had gotten turned inward. She hung out with people like her:

  upper-middle-class white people who called each other to complain

  about their gardeners but who would never actually lift a finger to help

  each other. She learned the value of relationships—genuine,

  compassionate ones—the hard way.

  The movie plays hard into the “poor little rich white lady” trope, but it

  doesn’t take much to become isolated like that. It’s a gradual thing. It’s

  harder to get to know our neighbors than it once was. We get updates on

  people’s lives through social media posts instead of picking up the

  phone or meeting for coffee. We can afford to run to the store instead of

  borrowing a cup of sugar and building mutuality. We easily become rich

  in dollars and poor in relationships.

  We face the same challenges as the characters in our readings.

  What do we want our legacies to be?

  What will happen to our possessions after we die?

  What work can we do that will live on after us?

  What really matters? Who really matters to us?

  How can we expand our circles and deepen our relationships so that

  instead of turning inward toward vanity and loneliness, we turn outward

  with a spirit of joy and generosity?

  Relationships are hard work and can be painful. They require

  vulnerability and difficult conversations. But they’re what’s worth

  having in this life. Relationships with each other and God are what

  Beloved Community is made of. Embrace God’s immense and

  unchanging love for you and use it to love those around you. Your life

  will be richer for it

Sermon on Luke 11:1-13

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

What is prayer for? Why should we continue to pray when we don’t receive what we’re praying for? Why bother? Many of us, including me, wrestle with these questions.

I used to find a lot of encouragement in the saying that God only has three answers to prayer: yes, not yet, or I have something better in mind.

But I don’t find that satisfying anymore in the face of tragedies. I don’t know why kids get cancer, and I can’t accept that it’s God’s will. I can’t accept that God has something better in mind when people are praying for their child’s life.

Prayer is a mystery and not always in a good way.

I do find some small comfort in the fact that questions about prayer are nothing new. Even Jesus’ disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray.The disciples had Jesus right in front of them day after day, and they still didn’t feel like they knew how to talk to God.

I don’t have much in the way of answers about prayer. It’s something we can spend our whole lives learning about and practicing and still not fully understand. It’s one of the many mysteries of our faith, which is beautiful and frustrating.

But there are a few things our readings today tell us about prayer.

In our first reading, we see Abraham having a conversation, even negotiating with God. That’s not uncommon. You’re probably familiar with the stage of grief called “bargaining.” We often try to bargain with God when we’re grieving or in danger or even “I promise I’ll never risk eating too-old food again if you get me through this food poisoning.”

But Abraham didn’t bargain for himself. He bargained for the lives of the people in Sodom and Gomorrah. He tried to talk God down from raining fire and brimstone on a city for the sake of any righteous people living there.

I have to take moment here to talk about Sodom and Gomorrah. Our reading today comes right before a passage that has become known as a “clobber passage” or a “text of terror”: a part of the Bible that has been used to discredit, dehumanize, and terrorize LGBTQ people.

I can’t do a thorough enough job in a ten-minute sermon of unpacking why this passage shouldn’t be understood or used that way. If you want to dig deeper, let’s do it. Talk to me later. I can’t fully talk through this passage, but when our readings come this close to a clobber passage, I also can’t pass over it without comment.

So here we go. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah has been interpreted since pretty early on in Church history as God raining down judgment because of “homosexual behavior.” That interpretation is so steeped in our culture that it’s really hard to read it any other way.

But Ezekiel 16identifies Sodom and Gomorrah’s sin differently. God, through the prophet Ezekiel, compares God’s people with Sodom and Gomorrah. It says, “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease but did not aid the poor and needy.”[1] God’s people, it says, had been behaving worse than Sodom and Gomorrah.

The three divine messengers that visited Abraham and Sarah in our reading last week were about to go to Sodom and Gomorrah to see if what God had heard about those cities was true. And indeed, the people of the city tried to commit sexual violence against the divine messengers. So, that is what has been interpreted as the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah, despite what Ezekiel says. And of course, sexual violence is a terrible way we humans harm each other and abuse the image of God in each of us. But sexual violence of any sort is very different from a loving relationship between people of the same gender or between anyone besides a cisgender man and cisgender woman. Those should not be conflated.

The sins of Sodom and Gomorrah were pride, not aiding the poor and needy, and sexual violence.This is a tragic story, and it should not be used to harm LGBTQ folks. Again, if you want to explore this more, talk to me later.

Apart from its proximity to a clobber passage, I find the story of Abraham negotiating with God disquieting.I believe in a God who knows that we’re all simultaneously saints and sinners, who saves us by grace, and who would not rain down fire on any city, regardless of the righteousness of anyone there, because none of us are righteous by our own power.I want to believe God would be merciful from the start and wouldn’t need talking down by a mere mortal.

But on the other hand, the way this conversation shows Abraham’s value of mercy is beautiful.

I don’t know how much our prayers change God’s mind. Maybe they do, just like in this story. Or maybe it’s an opportunity for us to embody what we want God to be like. We want God to be merciful, so we pray for mercy. We want there to be peace, so we pray for peace. And in that process, we become more merciful and peaceful ourselves, which impacts the world around us.

Maybe that’s what the Lord’s Prayer is for: Jesus was teaching us how to imagine the Beloved Community, where earth is as it is in heaven.Maybe prayer is about aligning ourselves with how God is creating the world to be.

And when we read the rest of our Gospel story and it sounds like God will give us what we ask, maybe it’s about learning to want what God wants for the world.God isn’t a vending machine, but doesn’t mean we can’t bring ourmost trifling, petty requests to God. God wants to hear that too—whatever’s on our heart. C.S. Lewis wrote this in favor of bringing our tiny requests to God:

“…those who have not learned to ask Him for childish things will have less readiness to ask Him for great ones. We must not be too high-minded. I fancy we may sometimes be deterred from small prayers by a sense of our own dignity rather than of God’s.”

It's okay to bring every desire of our hearts to God to practice asking for the things that make this world like it is in heaven. Prayer may not be about getting every single thing we ask for, and I don’t know why some prayers are answered and some aren’t.

But I do know that prayer is about relationship. God wants us to ask, wants us to talk to God. When Paul says to pray without ceasing, it doesn’t mean that we have to be on our knees day and night, but our inner monologue can instead be a dialogue with God. And over time, that will change us.

Prayer is still a mystery—one we can explore for the rest of our lives. Whether we change God’s mind or just our own, it’s an important part of our relationship with God who is with us always, loving us just as we are and wanting the best for us.

With that, let us pray, continuing this mysterious, frustrating, and beautiful conversation with God:

Loving God, prayer can be hard. We don’t always know what to pray for or how to pray, but You are always listening. Thank you for being a better friend than the one in our Gospel reading. You are never to busy, and our requests are never an inconvenience to You. Make us brave in bringing everything that’s on our hearts to You. Please make us more like You and help us show Your love to this world where there is so much need. Teach us to pray and help us feel Your love and presence always. In Your name we pray, Amen.

[1] Ezekiel 16:49

Sermon on Luke 10:38-42

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

I’ve seen the story of Jesus visiting Mary and Martha used like a personality test: are you a Mary or a Martha? This is usually in a women’s devotional.

I’ve seen the characters pitted against each other: silly Martha was too busy doing chores to pay attention to Jesus. She should have been a Godly woman like Mary.

I’m pretty tired of it.

Maybe if there were more stories about women in the Gospels, especially women whose names are actually used, we wouldn’t be so desperate to use these two characters to exemplify women specifically.

When there’s a story about Peter, James, and John, I see the traits that I resonate with in the characters, regardless of gender. So why are Mary and Martha used as a typology for women?

Christians of all genders are called to service and to learning.

So, let’s let these two followers of Jesus be what he treats them as: disciples.

I also sometimes hear this story framed as service versus learning, as if when Jesus told Martha that Mary chose the better part, he was saying that all of his disciples should choose learning over service. But that doesn’t line up with much of the content of the Gospel of Luke, the book of Acts, which is by the same author, or much of the content of the whole Bible.

The Gospel of Luke focuses a lot on service and working for justice. We discussed the Parable of the Good Samaritan last week, which Jesus toldright before this story. That parable uses an example of service to emphasize that everyone is our neighbor, even and especially those we kind of wish weren’t. Throughout the Gospel of Luke, we see themes of service and acting out our faith in the world and not just paying lip service to God.

In the book of Acts, the follow-up to the Gospel of Luke, the twelve apostles were getting overwhelmed by the needs of the growing number of Jesus followers. They decided to appoint seven folks who would serve the physical needs of the community so the apostles could focus on prayer and other spiritual matters. This is where we and many other denominations get the position of “deacon,” which comes from the Greek word for servant. Service is an important part of what it means to follow Jesus or the apostles wouldn’t have bothered dedicating people specifically for that form of ministry. Both Luke and Acts are particularly concerned with service and addressing people’s physical needs. Martha is an early example of faithful Christian service.

Jesus didn’t discourage Martha’s service in this story. He accepted her hospitality. There’s no Lazarus or any other man mentioned in this story, so we can assume Martha was the head of this household.

So, there would have been certain expectations of her as the host. Hospitality was a huge deal in the Middle East in the first century and before. Look at the lengths Abraham and his household went to in our first reading to show hospitality to the three divine messengers.

Abraham isn’t scolded for showing hospitality, and neither is Martha. Her hospitality is a good thing—how any of us would want to treat Jesus if he were to show up at our door.

If Martha was resentful of her sister for not helping her provide that hospitality, it’s understandable. Making Jesus referee their disagreement isn’t a good look, but it’s a very human reaction to feeling overwhelmed and overworked. Martha’s hospitality wasn’t the problem.Her attempted interference with Mary’s discipleship was the problem.

Mary sat at Jesus’ feet, where students sat to learn from their rabbis. Jesus didn’t make a fuss that she was a woman; she was a disciple. He even encouraged her discipleship by the end of the story.

Jesus accepted and encouraged both Mary and Martha’s discipleship. When he said Mary chose the better part, he wasn’t setting study above service. He was inviting Martha to let study fuel her service. Right then, she was overwhelmed by what she had to do, and Jesus was reminding her of why she served: it was a sign of her love for him.

Discipleship isn’t about choosing learning or service. Most followers of Jesus do both, and that’s good. Learning can help ground our service in love for God and service can ground our learning in love for our neighbor. It’s a cycle of action and reflection that helps us love God and our neighbor with our whole selves.

That cycle’s going to look different for each of us, and it’ll probably take a lifetime to find what works best for us.

Our cycle of action and reflection may look different depending on our season of life. If we’re students, we may not have time to serve. If we’re parents of young children or caregivers for other family members, we may be doing a lot of serving and not have a lot of time for quiet contemplation. That’s okay—it doesn’t have to be an even split. But long-term, it’s helpful to pay attention to what God is calling you to and what nourishes your soul.

The communities we’re a part of affect our action and reflection too. Being a part of a smaller faith community like this one has its benefits and challenges. You can pretty quickly get to know the majority of the people here, which is wonderful. You can easily get plugged into whatever ministry you’re interested in or start something new. If you have ideas or questions, talk to me.

On the other hand, there are things that need to happen to keep the ministries of the church going, and it can sometimes be hard to find people with the right gifts and interests in a smaller community. And conversely, it can be challenging to step away from something if it’s not a good fit or you’re interested in trying something different if there’s not an immediate candidate to fill your shoes.

God provides, and sometimes much to our chagrin, God provides us. It can be hard to keep our service to a manageable level and also have time to just enjoy each other’s company and have contemplative and study time with God. We need to discern what’s essential in this community and what needs to be released or reformed to make sure we’re choosing whatever the better part is for us and our neighbors.

We can get distracted by many things—here at church, at home, at work. Our world moves so fast. There’s always something more to do, to achieve, to innovate, to manage, to perfect.

I realize I’m assuming most of us tend toward the service side of the service and learning cycle. I’m defining service not just as volunteering at church (though that certainly counts), but service to your family, friends, community, work, and any other action-oriented ministry. I see a lot of busy people in this congregation who are generous with their time here and elsewhere.

But maybe you feel a yearning for meaningful service that you haven’t been able to figure out how to fulfill. In that case, let’s have a conversation. You’re probably doing more than you realize, but God may be calling you to something new, and that’s exciting.

But whether your yearning is for service or study, let’s keep imagining together how we can meet each other’s needs in this community.

What’s essential? What needs to be reimagined to make time and space for something different?

We talked about Sabbath throughout last year, remembering in this bustling world that God made us good and invites us to rest and commune with God. It’s in the Ten Commandments—rest is to be a regular part of the rhythm of our lives as individuals and as a community.

How do we foster rhythms both of service and of study and contemplation that nurture this faith community and make this a place of healing for everyone?

We are the church that feeds people body and soul. Let’s sit at Jesus’ feet to fuel us to love and serve our neighbor.