Message 02-11-07
Series: Lectionary [Traditional]
Scripture: Luke 6:17-28
Title: Is This Seat Taken?
Wow!
These are words that just smack you in the face don’t they?
How do we hear these words? I think the answer to that question comes from the answer to the question how much authority does Jesus have in your life?
If Jesus is just some guy who lived 2000 years ago and he’s interesting in a distant sort of way, then you can pick and choose which words you find important and which you don’t. If Jesus is a great teacher who’s words contribute to your understanding of life and they make you examine yourself then these may be words that are challenging, thought provoking. But if Jesus is Lord and Savior of your life then these words that you need to really take to heart. You need to know what Jesus is saying here. What is your Lord and Savior telling you about how to live?
When you hear them, maybe they make you a bit uncomfortable. When he’s talking about the rich, I mean, I live in South Tampa. I have a nice house. We have more than one car at our place. We’re on a cell-phone plan that means multiple cell phones scattered between members of our family. As far as I can tell I’m rich. If nothing else I live in America. There was a time when I worked with the poor in Philadelphia and I know that even the poor can be rich in America when they’re compared to the rest of the world. I’ve been to inner-city Chester, PA and I’ve been to Haiti. I’ve seen poor people who have toaster ovens and hot plates and live on food stamps in the inner-city and I’ve seen the poor in Haiti and I can only compare their lives to my own imagination of what medieval times were like. There has been more than one time that I’ve described Haiti and the area around the clinic where we send workers as medieval existence.
Near the clinic, people lay out cloth in an open air market in the middle of the village square – just a large area of dirt – and they place the items or products they have to sell on the cloth and call for buyers. It might eggs or it might be sandals they’ve woven together with natural materials around them, but they are simple things. And people don’t really buy anything. They barter.
When Jesus talks about rich people of his time, these are people who never used an ice cube. They never felt air conditioning. They would never have handled a DVD or a CD. They never flicked a light switch and had light fill a room. They never scanned a J Crew catalogue.
The truth is we are rich people and there’s no fudging on it.
I look at the words of Jesus here and I want to flip the page. This is the passage for the day from the lectionary, but it is only one of the passages. Pastors all over the world in different denominations will look at these words and some of them, I know, will decide to maybe preach on the Psalm suggestion. The lectionary includes 4 different passages for each week and in some church all four passages are read. There’s an Old Testament passage – that’s our Jeremiah passage that was read earlier. There’s a New Testament passage – usually from the letters of Paul. There’s a Gospel passage – the one we have before us. And there’s a passage from the Psalms usually. The preacher for the day gets to pick where he or she wants to focus.
Psalm 1 is today’s passage. “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers.
But his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night.
He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers.”
Yeah… how many preachers do you think are saying, “That’s the passage to use for today.”
But not at Palma Ceia Presbyterian Church. The Presbyterians are right in the thick of it. John is upstairs right now [was upstairs this morning], speaking on this passage to our members who attend the Connection services. We’re bold here. Or dumb. Kind of grabbing the bull by the horns this time. These are words of Jesus that it would be great to avoid, but you can only avoid them if Jesus doesn’t really have authority in your life right? As Presbyterians people join the church by answering the question – who is your Lord and Savior? And their response is – Jesus is my Lord and Savior.
And we take that seriously. So what does it look like for rich Americans in South Tampa to take these words seriously?
One answer it seems to me is how uncomfortable do you want to make yourself? This past weekend our elders held their annual retreat. It’s a program that happens on Friday evening and Saturday morning and we get to know each other and discuss how the business of the church works. The best part of the event for me is when we take the time to hear how people came to this church and what caused them to stay. We get to hear from our individual leaders why they feel called to be part of the leadership of this community. That’s just a great thing. There are usually tears as people share personal testimony about God’s work in their lives here in this community.
It’s during this time that John DeBevoise, our head of staff, lifts up an image of the church. He does this in several ways, but one of the things he shared this past weekend was that we did not feel called as a church to “grow”. We aren’t trying to pile up numbers of people coming here. But what we feel called to is being faithful. We’re called to being faithful. And then he posed a question that he wanted our elders to use as a guide as they thought about their work this coming year.
What does it look like to be faithful?
I think that’s where we need to focus… in our context, in our world, in our neighborhood, what does it look like to be faithful? This is how we begin to take the words of Jesus seriously. We think about what does it look like to be faithful when you live in this community.
And it’s important to take these words seriously. We don’t want to pretend that we don’t hear them or can avoid them. There’s a big evangelical church in the area where I used to live and it’s in an upscale neighborhood with an upscale congregation. The Philadelphia Inquirer did a big article on them in their Sunday magazine section. One of things they noted in the article was the kind of cars that filled the parking lot. They suggested to people they were interviewing that it was a pretty rich place.
In response to the reporter, one woman from that congregation lifted up the story about the rich ruler who came to Jesus. This is the man whom Jesus told to sell all your possessions, give the proceeds to the poor and then follow him. She went on to explain to the reporter that Jesus wasn’t really saying that you had to divest yourself of all your possessions. He just wanted you to be willing to give them up. I thought, “Well, that’s a relief.”
I had friends on the pastoral staff of that church and I used to ask them, is that true? Does Jesus only want us to be willing to give up everything? I mean that’s great. I don’t actually have to give it up. I just have to be willing to give it up. It’s kind of like that old joke about the pastor who throws the offering up in the air each week while he tells God to keep whatever he wants.
We can avoid these words. These are the words of Jesus and if Jesus has authority in your life, what do you do with these words?
Blessed are the poor. Woe to you rich. You poor will receive. You rich, you’ve already gotten everything. There’s no more left.
How do we respond? What does it look like to be faithful?
I think it looks like giving up your seat for one thing. For whom are you willing to give up your seat?
You know how you get comfortable in church. You pick out “your pew” and that’s where you sit each week. Nancy Little sits right over there at 11 o’clock. Sam Gibbons sits there. The Jordans are there. Carol McCammon sits back over there. We find our seats and we enjoy knowing that it’s where we sit each week.
Some of you know that I used to pastor a church that was housed in a shopping center. When I started out it was only me and 18 folding chairs. Because there were no people for a while I used to start each day – just as a thing to do to get into my work day – by rearranging the chairs and praying for the people who would sit in them someday. I put the chairs into little trios or little circles or one big circle. Because it was a shopping center I had a big storefront window and so I set the chairs up one day like they were an audience – like people would have sat in them to watch other people walk by.
After a couple of months people started coming in the door saying something like, “What goes on here? I know you have a lot of meetings or something because every time I come by the chairs are always in a different arrangement.
And then people started coming to church but they started sitting in the same place. But then, because we only had one space our space was used for youth group and Bible studies and church dinners and the chairs kept being re-arranged. Pretty soon people were asking why the chairs kept being moved and that was because they were a little uncomfortable. They kept looking to sit in the same place but the place kept moving.
I found out another interesting thing. That little bit of tension, that little physical change of point of view, made people pay attention. They listened a little better.
So, I’m lifting this up for you. One way you get on Jesus’ side in this is you make yourself uncomfortable. You give up what you own and you give it to God. You give up your seat so that someone else can get into the kingdom of heaven. You make room, you slide over, so that someone else can get in on meeting Jesus.
Do you see it that way? Do you remind yourself that the people who are coming to our church that you’ve never met before – the people who aren’t important to you yet – that they are Jesus?
It’s not just a matter of being willing, is it. Who would you give up your seat in church for? Would you give it up for your next door neighbor? If your neighbor came to church would you slide over? Would you give up your seat for your mom or your son or your daughter? I know some of you are thinking of a specific person right now that you wish would come to church and I know you’re thinking that you’d be willing for them to take your seat… just to know they’re here.
Would you be willing to give it up for someone of a different race? Would they find a welcome here, an open seat, someone who welcomed them? Would you give up your seat for the homeless man and regardless of how he smelled would you remind yourself that this is Jesus?
As you make yourself uncomfortable, as you give up what you have, Jesus said when you do it for the least of these, you do it for me.
And that’s why we give up our seat in church, we’re willing to have someone else sit in “our” pew because what we have learned from our teacher, from our Lord and Savior is that this person who joins us is actually Jesus.
It’s Jesus who is coming and he needs a seat. That’s
That’s what you’re doing in Haiti. You send people from here to do work that would not get done if you didn’t send them. You give up your money so other people can get what they need. You give up your money so children can go to school in Uganda. They don’t only get to go to school. They get to go back to a real house and not a mud hut. They get to have fresh water and they don’t have to walk 2 miles to a river.
