Sermon by Bishop Margaret G. Payne

2006 New England Synod Assembly
Festive Assembly Eucharist
Friday, June 9, 2006
Wesley United Methodist Church, downtown Worcester, Mass.

How many times have you heard your children complain, “It’s just not fair!”

It’s hard to know what to say because so often we agree with them – someone got a good grade on a test because she cheated; a bully beats up nice kids; sickness gets in the way of good times. It’s just not fair.

And we often make that same observation in our adult lives – bad things happen to good people; wonderful people die too soon and too sadly; powerful, dishonest people cheat simple, hard-working people. It’s just not fair.

The Scribes and the Pharisees were doing some grumbling along those lines in the Gospel lesson this evening – tax collectors and sinners were gathering around Jesus, smelly and sinful and unworthy, and Jesus was delighting in them – turning his back on holy feasts and organized worship in favor of unclean food in low-life places.

So Jesus told them a story: There was a man who had two sons ...

Now, before we get into the matter of how Jesus’ story relates to the matter of “fairness” or lack of it, have you ever thought about what the money autobiography of the three men in this story would look like?

For those of you here who don’t know that term, a money autobiography is the life story of you and money. Taking on the challenge to write one helps you to realize how feelings and experiences about money have affected you – often in ways that you had not realized, and ways that imprison you and rob you of the joy of God’s plan of a life of giving.

What made the younger son want to take his share of the wealth, leave town and then waste it all? How did the father feel when he did it? How did the younger son feel about money before and after this story takes place? How did the older son feel about money before and after this story takes place?

We know how the older brother felt by the end of the story. “I have worked like a slave for you”, he rages at his father, “and never asked for my share of the money of this family. I have been obedient, and uncomplaining, and you have been SO STINGY with me – and now you’re giving a party for that creepy son of yours who wasted your money, OUR money, and now he’s penniless and he’s back … and you’re giving him a party without even telling me about it??? It’s just not fair!”

So often, it’s money that causes anger or resentment in relationships. And I don’t know about you, but I have a lot of sympathy for the older brother – if that happened to me, and my father said that – I’d think it was REALLY LAME – and I’m not sure I’d go to the party. Even hearing the story is hard – I know I am supposed to appreciate the wonderfulness of the lost being found, the dead coming back to life, and that there HAS TO BE celebrating for those reasons, but that holy joy doesn’t take away the sting of feeling unappreciated.

For those of us who try so hard to play by the rules, who truly love God and give of ourselves for the kingdom, don’t we deserve just a little more appreciation?

And that brings us to thinking about the whole idea of: deserving – what do we deserve”?

America functions with an underlying theme that people get what they deserve – and so people who are poor somehow deserve that, and people who are rich somehow deserve that, and McDonald’s reminds us that we “deserve” a break today.

But Jesus is gently showing us a glimpse of a different way. He tells us, through this story of a loving father, that in God there is no notion of some people deserving more than others; there is only love that is blind to “deserving” and rejoices in every movement toward repentance and new life.

The younger brother deserved punishment and got a party; the older brother deserved a party and was left out in the excitement of his brother’s party, despite years of faithful service to his father; neither brother got what he “deserved.”

The Father was filled with a heart that ran to offer compassion, compassion in spite of the wastefulness of the younger son, and compassion in spite of the self-righteousness of the older one. Jesus is telling a story about compassion as a way of life, the way of God’s life, and the way that we are called to live as well.

But compassion seems so impossible when things just aren’t fair – how do we find our way into it? You can’t order someone to be compassionate – you can explain it amazingly well to a congregation of older brothers, and it might never take root.

Compassion plays hide and seek in the human heart. In one moment we are in tears seeing pictures of dying babies, but soon we are reluctant to give up money set aside for ourselves. But Jesus invites us to grow into compassion as part of our love for him – to walk with him beyond the world of deservedness, into the world of amazing grace – to feel it so much ourselves, that we cannot help but share it.

Compassion can be contagious – hearts catch it from other hearts, and it is those hearts that should take leadership in shaping the ministry of the church.

The life of the church is not most deeply about family feelings or preserving tradition or excellent worship – it’s a community fueled by bread and wine that longs to run toward the lost and surround them with compassion.

There is a true story that a pastor told that haunts me every time I think of the challenge to proclaim Christ in our culture – to move beyond our safe, fair, familiar congregations and ask what compassion is calling us to do.

The pastor tells how he was working as a chaplain in a campground, making the rounds each week of the friendly tents and RV’s, chatting with people, talking about things that mattered to them, and planning weekly Sunday morning worship. One Saturday night he went to bed, eager for the next morning’s worship. But during the night, a change took place in the campground – a group of wild and rough bikers moved in, loudly, rudely, and flopped on the ground, and in hasty lean-tos, with drinking and laughing, and though the pastor slept through this intrusion, most of the campers did not, and, one by one, left the campground.

In the morning, the pastor arose to a different sight and a different congregation, and he knew that singing Kum-By-Ya around a campfire was not going to cut it with this crowd. He was shaken, but determined to do the work of ministry, so he began walking around looking for someone to talk to.

He stopped at one ragged tent, just as a tall, bearded, tattooed, pierced man rose up out of it, and the pastor said, “Uum, Hi.” And they began to talk – awkwardly at first, and then less awkwardly, and the man told the pastor about a life of violence and pain and meaninglessness, and the pastor told the man about Jesus.

After listening to the pastor for a while, the man finally said, “Last night, I tried to commit suicide with drugs and alcohol, and, you can see, that I failed. What is it about this Jesus that would make me not want to try again tonight?”

Could any of us answer that question?

If our own safe congregation were suddenly infiltrated by tax collectors and sinners, or wild and rough bikers, or people who were homeless or ex-cons, could we eat with them and love them and find a way to tell them about Jesus?

We are surrounded in this culture by people who are lost – surrounded by people who are empty in ways they can’t describe, some of them are as publicly lost as the younger son, and some of them are driving BMW’s and living in great wealth, and will only realize how lost they are as years pass and the emptiness doesn’t.

Jesus’ story of a father and two sons is a story of God’s unimaginable grace, but it is also the story of one son who “came to himself,” realized how lost he was, and went home to repent and start a new life, and another son who was lost in a different way, and we don’t know for sure that he ever “came to himself.”

Which one was the most lost?

Our life together in the church is the place where we wrestle to answer these kinds of questions – we can’t answer them alone, and together in the church we help one another grow in compassion by making our home in the stories of scripture, and shaping our lives with water and bread and wine.

Tonight, we have the privilege of setting apart a new batch of story-tellers and sacrament-givers. Roldano, Sean, Jeff and Sarah: Tonight you will be set apart for ministry in this church, and although you have already have had years of people teaching you and telling you all that they think you need to know to do ministry, I want add two more things – two bits of advice that have come to mind as we have pondered this story of a father and his two sons.

First, take time to wrestle with what money means in your life, and pray for the courage to talk openly about its power. It is so tempting to avoid it, and think that if you just preach Christ compellingly, people will easily give their treasure for God’s work in the world. But it doesn’t happen that way, because Mammon’s power is always underestimated and the devil loves to plant indignation in hearts when pastors talk about it.

Jesus told us that no one can serve two masters, but everybody tries; we are so used to juggling competing demands in our lives that we think we can juggle masters as well, and your call is to remind people that we can’t. People will be saying: I want, I need, I have to have it now … And you will be preaching: give, surrender, wait … it is not a culturally popular message, and you will be accused of interfering with matters that preachers should avoid. But you are called to name the longing for God that is at the heart of the choking consumerism in our culture, to help people understand that the real cause for their restlessness and insatiable material desires is their need of God, and to challenge the seductive message of those who prosper mightily by purposely confusing spiritual longing with a desire for things.

In order to do this work, and all the other work that is expected of you, will be important to live in compassion – and I suspect that you are poised at the starting line of ministry ready to dish out compassion wherever it is needed, but for now, I am speaking of compassion for yourselves. The busyness of ministry is as fraught with danger as the busyness of the world. When we push ourselves beyond reasonable limits, and never take a break from the endless list of things that need to be done in ministry, we are not only denying ourselves compassionate care, we are also living in a way that looks suspiciously as though we must “deserve” God’s favor, and we are not truly living in God’s grace.

You can only preach the good news of grace effectively when you live in it yourselves.

One of my favorite night-time prayers includes these words:

     The night is for stillness. Let us be still in the presence of God.
     It is night after a long day,
     what has been done has been done,
     and what has not been done, has not been done;
     let it be.

One of the best bits of advice that I received when I was a new pastor was this: Just because something needs to be done doesn’t mean that you have to do it – let others help. That enabled me to relieve myself of the burden of feeding all the hungry in the world (now we have Bono to do that), achieving peace in the Middle East, and thinking that I had to be available 24/7 to the people who called me pastor, when my own family was too often last on the list of people to visit.

You need sleep and fun and learning and beauty and love and leisure and family time in order to be able to do the work of ministry in a healthy way ... and the church desperately needs healthy leaders.

All of us are called to a life-long journey toward compassion and wholeness: led by God to take risks, seek the lost, learn from tax collectors, find the courage to identify our idols, and claim a vision that sees beyond deserving into grace.

The way to be able to hear God’s word for us on this journey is to take time to listen – to rise up in the morning and cherish the new day, then to drop down into the life of prayer beneath all our busyness that is the fertile silence where answers grow.

May the amazing grace of God in Jesus Christ surround you who are being set apart this evening, and all of us, as we carry compassion into the world, and may the peace of God that is beyond all human understanding fill our spirits now and forever. Amen.