For much of the Gospel of Luke, the scribes and the Pharisees have been trying to cancel Jesus. For anyone who might need a quick refresher, the Pharisees were the reform movement in Judaism at that time. Their goal was to teach Israel to obey God’s word well enough that God would bless his people and make them an independent nation again with an heir of David on the throne in Jerusalem. As part of this, they created the institution of the synagogue, which is the model for church as we know it, to teach the word of God to the people of God. They were held in high esteem by most Jews for their knowledge of Scripture and their personal holiness, even though most Jews weren’t interested in matching the Pharisaic standard of personal holiness. The scribes, meanwhile, were the religious scholars of the day; modern translations often refer to them as “teachers of the Law” or “lawyers.” The reason they’re always mentioned in tandem with the Pharisees is that most of them, understandably enough, were Pharisees.
So, for maybe fifteen chapters now, the scribes and the Pharisees have been trying to trip Jesus up. You might say they’ve been playing a long-running game of “Jesus Jeopardy” . . . and they’re riding an unbroken losing streak. They are the anti-Ken Jennings. Here in Luke 20, their great rivals the Sadducees decide to try to take advantage of their ongoing failure.
Two weeks ago, I preached a sermon in which I spent a fair bit of time talking about all the connections between the gospel reading for that morning and the preceding two chapters. This is not that sermon. Luke gathered a fair number of sayings and brief scenes which he wanted to use that didn’t belong to any larger collection of stories and sayings; he dealt with them by inserting them between the main sections of his narrative. Luke 17:1-10 is one such insertion, comprised of four brief scenes of Jesus teaching his disciples; the compilers of the lectionary, for whatever reason, have given us two of the four.
I thought at first about just doing one of those two. It’s easy, if a biblical text seems to lack unity and coherence, to chop it up like a butcher into chunks of disconnected meat. Several major commentators on Matthew, for instance, take this approach to the Sermon on the Mount. One of the things Regent taught me was to resist that easy assumption and look for connections and structure; so I decided to see if I could find a common thread between the two parts of our passage this morning. Spoiler alert: I think I found one, as you’ll see in a little bit.
The great problem in preaching many Scripture passages is that we think we already know what they mean—usually an interpretation we find easy and comfortable—so we don’t need to listen to them. That is not the problem this morning. Luke 16:1-8 is a problem parable, and our problems begin with the way our Bibles present it to us. The chapter break at 15:32 leads us to separate this parable from the one immediately before it and connect it instead with the poem that follows. We fail to see the deep connections between it and chapter 15 because, hey, it’s a different chapter! We take 16:9-13 as an interpretive key to our parable this morning—see the lectionary, which actually assigns all thirteen verses for this Sunday—when it’s actually transition and introduction to the parable of Lazarus and the rich man. As a consequence, we read verses 1-8 as a parable about money, which completely jams us up, because on that basis it seems clear Jesus is praising the crook for being a good crook. That is not what’s going on.
Note: I have preached on this passage four times now; some things evolve, others do not. This message is a direct reworking of the message I preached at Warsaw EPC in October 2019.
The title of this message is Follow Me!; there are two reasons for that. One, that is everything in this passage. If you wanted to sum it up in one sentence, that would be it. Two, while it might seem to you that I’ve just said something boringly obvious, it actually means a lot more than you might realize on a surface reading. Indeed, it means everything, as I hope you will see. To that end, those of you who know me well will not be surprised—indeed, I’m sure many of you are confidently expecting—to hear me draw on the work of Dr. Kenneth Bailey more than once this morning. For those of you who don’t, feel free to ask me afterward.
The first thing we need to understand here is that this is the hinge of the gospel of Luke. To this point, Jesus has had a spectacular ministry career. He’s established himself as a teacher who speaks with authority, he’s done stunning miracles—everything is rolling along beautifully. And then, instead of capitalizing on his success as any smart preacher would, Jesus tossed it all aside and—as Rich Mullins put it—“set his face like a flint toward Jerusalem.” This begins the section of Luke commonly known as the Travel Narrative, which continues into chapter 19. In these chapters, every interaction and every incident happens on the way to the cross.
On Pentecost two years ago, I opened the sermon in a way that maybe no one else remembers, but that haunts me: with a brief overview of the mass-shooting events in the US to that point in the year. By the most widely-accepted definition, there had been 223 as of the previous Sunday, May 21. Pentecost falls eleven days later this year; as of last Sunday, by the same definition, the count stands at 173. Which is . . . better, sure; but saying “There have been fifty fewer mass shootings in eleven more days” doesn’t exactly seem like cause for wild celebration. What’s more, given human ingenuity, killing a lot of people doesn’t require a gun. You might remember that six weeks ago, I asked for prayer for the Filipino community in Vancouver, British Columbia, as someone had driven an SUV at high speed into a street festival in celebration of Lapu Lapu Day. Dozens of people were injured, and eleven people died; the driver turned out to be a thirty-year-old man, also of Asian descent, who was dealing with mental-health issues—though according to reports, his care team had seen no signs of possible violent behavior before that point.
I could go on ad nauseam, but nausea would serve us nothing. It all boils down to this, that we live in a world which generates such horrors. It makes me think of the opening stanza of William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming”:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Yeats wrote that in 1919, but as true a description as it may have been of Europe in the aftermath of World War I, I think it may ring even truer now. But then, like John Green in the clip Emily played last week, I feel the power and pull of the statement “Everything is the way it is because everything and everyone sucks.” Green is a favorite in our house, too, in part because of his response to the steady temptation to despair. He chooses neither avoidance nor positive thinking but active resistance: he steers into it, facing the maelstrom head-on, and seeks to find and enact hope there—which is, I believe, uncommonly wise.
We as followers of Jesus are soldiers of the Prince of Peace, an army called to wage peace against a world of war. To do that, we have to face the violent life-sucking whirlpool of human sin squarely, or else we will end up speaking peace everywhere except where that word is desperately needed. Ours is not a peace that denies war, for we have been given a hope which does not deny despair. The things which tempt us to despair are real and must be answered, and ultimately made right; our hope in the face of despair is the proclamation that they will be made right, for they already havebeen made right—we just haven’t reached the end of the story yet.
I told Emily after the service last Sunday that she’d teed things up nicely for me, in a couple ways; I should note I hope to do the same for next Sunday for her when she takes up one of my favorite parts of Scripture, the opening of Revelation 21. That’s for later, though. One way she set me up was bringing the concept of “heaven” into the conversation, because that’s one of those words that when you say it, people think they can stop listening because they already know what you’re going to say. When we die, our bodies aren’t us anymore, and our immortal souls go up to heaven where we watch over the people we’ve left behind. Add in the usual clouds and harps and pearly gates, with St. Peter standing outside them behind a lectern with a huge book—and what on earth did poor Peter do to get stuck with that, anyway?—and you have the basic picture that floats around in the back of most people’s minds; that’s what “heaven” means to us.
Among churchgoers—well, and Kirk Cameron fans of a certain age—you mix in a particular popular understanding of the book of Revelation. At some point, on this view, there will be the Rapture: all true Christians will disappear from the earth in the blink of an eye, leaving their clothes fluttering to the ground and their tennis shoes smoking in the streets. Then will follow the Great Tribulation, with all sorts of terrible CGI-type events; that will continue until Jesus comes back and ends it with the Last Judgment.
Now, I believe beyond even my capacity for doubt that Jesus is coming back to set all things right and make all things new. For the rest? I don’t believe a word of it. I don’t believe I have an immortal soul, and I don’t believe it’s going up to heaven when I die, and I most especially don’t believe any of us in this room will be playing harps. (If you want to tell me heaven would be a place where I’ll play bassoon well enough that it will still be heaven for everyone else, we can talk about that, but I’m no harpist.) Obviously, if by “heaven” you mean the place where God lives and is fully visibly present, yes, I believe in that, but I don’t believe in heaven as most people think about it; and the reason I don’t is because the Bible doesn’t either. The Bible, instead, promises us two very different and very much greater things: the resurrection of the dead, and the new heavens and the new earth.
Our passage from Isaiah 43 has been a favorite of mine for over 22 years, since my friend and colleague Gretchen Bretz preached on it at my installation service in Colorado, and I look forward to diving into it with you this morning; but before we do that, I want to make sure we all have the context clearly in view. This is part of a sixteen-chapter section of this book, chapters 40-55, which is commonly referred to as “Second Isaiah.” I could go into a lot of background, but I’ll just say this: there is an arc to these chapters into which our passage fits.
For one thing, the imagery here is part of a crescendo which has been building since chapter 40. The language of preparing a way and leading the people of God in a new way begins in 40:3-5, where the cry goes out among the host of heaven to prepare a way for the Lord. We see it again in 42:16—to use Phil Keaggy’s paraphrase from the song “Things I Will Do” on his 1976 album Love Broke Thru,
I will lead the blind
By the way they do not know;
In paths they do not know I will guide them.
I will make darkness into light before them
And rugged places into plains.
These are the things I will do . . .
And I will not leave them undone.
—and yet again in 43:2. Related to this is the language of bringing water, and thus life, in the wasteland; this first appears in 41:18-20, while 42:15 gives us the ironic inversion: “I will lay waste to the hills and dry out all that grows on them; I will turn the rivers to desert and dry up the lakes.” In 44:3, the Lord promises, “I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground.”
This imagery is woven through and supports an extended polemic against idolatry: in 40:18-20, 41:1-7 and 21-29, 42:16-20, and continuing to a long prose indictment of idols and idol-worshipers in 44:9-20. All of this builds to the announcement of Cyrus as God’s chosen deliverer—his anointed one, his meshiach—in 44:28-45:1. Now, as I say this, it might not be obvious to you; what do blind and deaf people have to do with idols? There’s a scriptural principle underlying Isaiah’s language which isn’t explicitly articulated here but is set forth in Psalms 115 and 135. Here’s 115:4-8:
Their idols are silver and gold,
the work of human hands.
They have mouths, but do not speak;
eyes, but do not see.
They have ears, but do not hear;
noses, but do not smell.
They have hands, but do not feel;
feet, but do not walk;
and they do not make a sound in their throat.
Recognize that language in Isaiah 43? And in verse 8, the psalmist drives the point home:
Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them.
Worshiping idols makes you as blind and deaf as they are.
This is building through these chapters of Isaiah. God hauls the gods of the nations into court again and again, pointing to all he has done and challenging them to match his record; he also declares he will do a new thing and dares them to equal him. And then in verse 18, we get an extraordinary command. The ESV reads, “Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old.” The NIV puts it this way: “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past.” Going back for chapters, the Lord and his prophet have been challenging the people to go back and remember all God has done, and compare that to the track record of the idols they keep worshiping instead. And now the prophet says, “Nah—forget that”? Are we supposed to remember all God has done for us, or not?
It’s not a trick question, or one with a right answer which you’re supposed to find. Tell truth, I’ve been at this whole following-Jesus business for decades, and I’m not sure I’ve ever had an answer for very long. Is prayer about asking for things, is it about God changing us, do we need to be specific and detailed, is it immature to make specific requests of God—do we know enough to even know what we really want to ask? At various points in my life, I’ve had answers to each of those questions, but they’ve never been the same answers from one point to another. What, really, are we on about when we pray?
To help us think about this, I want to draw in my favorite poem by one of my favorite poets, the 17th-century Anglican priest George Herbert. His principal poetic collection, published after his death, is The Temple; one of the odd things about it is that some of the titles, such as “Love,” “Affliction,” and “Employment,” were applied to multiple poems, and so we have poems with names like “Employment (II)” and “Love (III).” There are numerous great poems in the book—“Love (III)” is one of the greatest, in fact—but my favorite is “Prayer (I),” which offers an extraordinary response to the question “What is prayer?”
Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;
Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tow’r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.
Happy twelfth day of Christmas! Anyone here planning where to plant a grove of twelve pear trees—or how to get rid of all those lords a-leaping? No? Well, the old traditions aren’t what they used to be. Indeed, a lot of folks anymore don’t know the twelve days of Christmas begin with Christmas—they are the twelve days of the Christmas season, December 25 through January 5. For Shakespeare fans, yes, that means tonight is Twelfth Night, which in Elizabethan England was the last and greatest night of the party; it was a time for the sorts of humorous reversals and playing of the fool which characterize old Will’s greatest comedy.
So this is the last day of the Christmas season, and tomorrow is Epiphany. The feast of Epiphany most likely began as a celebration of Jesus’ baptism, as it still is in Eastern Orthodox churches. In the Western church, however, the focus of Epiphany shifted to the coming of the magi. Their visit marked the first revelation of the Messiah to the Gentiles; it wasn’t exactly the first revelation of the Messiah to the Jews, but the appearance of the magi before Herod was the first announcement of Messiah’s coming to the broader Jewish world beyond Bethlehem. Epiphany is the transition from the Christmas season to Ordinary Time, and it turns our attention from the birth of Jesus to his ministry. It’s the outward turn from celebrating his coming to focusing on why he came, and thus to considering our own work in the world.
Also, by this world’s calendar, this is the first week of the new year, and so for VSF it marks a turn in another way. Last year, we focused first on detachment—on living life with open hands—then turned to grapple with the concept of integrity. A life of full integrity would be living with undivided mind and heart, which is only possible to the degree that we are aligned with the character and will of God. That launched us into a season of teaching on discipleship, on following Jesus’ for Jesus sake, being all-in with him and for him. Only detachment makes discipleship possible, and only faithful discipleship can produce lives of true integrity.
The Apostle Paul was a wanderer. God had gifted him to plant churches, and that meant moving around a lot: start the church, build it up to where it could keep itself going, raise up leaders within the fellowship, and move on to the next city. Or at least, that was the general approach. Some places, he stayed longer—most notably Ephesus, where he spent three years; but there were more places like Thessalonica, where the authorities ran him out of town after just three weeks. None of them added up to long pastorates for Paul, only short ones and shorter ones. That was hard on him, because he cared deeply about the churches and people he had left behind; getting back to visit churches he had planted drove his travels just as much as planting new ones. When he couldn’t visit for whatever reason—perhaps because his travels went awry, perhaps because he was in prison—he wrote letters, like this one.
In reading Paul’s letters, we should always remember there’s no small talk here and no fluff. Right from the first word, he’s always on about his purpose, always doing something intentional. Philippians is one in which his opening comments serve as an overture to the letter, bringing up themes he intends to address at greater length, starting with the very first line. Normally, Paul opens his letters with “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus . . .” and goes on from there. His calling as an apostle is the source of his authority, and so that’s generally where he needs to start; but here, writing to a body of believers who honor and respect his authority, he leaves that out. Instead, he describes himself (and Timothy) as a servant of Christ Jesus. Or at least, that’s how the NIV renders it; to give the word its full force, he calls each of them a slave of Christ.
To be sure, this didn’t mean quite what it does to our ears. Roman society knew full well that slaves were human, and they weren’t doomed to perpetual slavery; if things broke their way, slaves could earn their freedom and even become Roman citizens. In fact, I’ve seen speculation that Paul’s parents might have been slaves who had earned citizenship. All the same, slaves had no legal rights, no freedoms, and no personal autonomy whatsoever. They were completely subject to their masters’ every whim and desire, whatever those might be.
In addition to the cultural context, there is an important biblical context for Paul’s description of himself as a slave of Christ, because nearly a third of the Old Testament uses of the word ebed, the principal Hebrew word for “slave,” are used to describe an individual or the nation as the slave of God. Among individuals, the word is used most frequently of David and Moses, 38 and 37 times respectively. Paul is putting himself and Timothy in the same biblical frame as those two, Elijah, Isaiah, and the prophets more generally.
For Paul to call himself a slave of Christ means he is bound over to Christ, totally at his service, with no independent rights of his own; Jesus is his Lord in every respect, in every aspect of his life. It therefore means he is Christ’s instrument: he does not speak and act on his own, but God speaks and acts through him. It also means he does not find his life in getting his way, but rather in submitting to Christ, for that submission defines his life; his identity is defined by serving others, for he serves his Lord by serving his people. And here’s the key: Paul isn’t claiming this title to assert his authority (he would do that by invoking his apostleship) or his superiority to the Philippians—and how ironic would that be, anyway? Rather, I believe, Paul is presenting himself and his status as a model for the Philippians. We might say the goal of discipleship in Jesus is to reach the point where we can honestly say we, too, are slaves of Christ.
