The Biggest Neighborhood in the Whole Wide World (updated version)

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A sermon shared at the Suttons Bay Congregational Church

December 30, 2018

(updated)

Scripture: Luke 10:25-37

(the parable of the Good Samaritan)

         The end of the year serves for many of us as an occasion to look backward at how we’ve done so we can move forward with the goal of doing better. This often takes the form of regrets about past years and resolutions for the new one. Alas, the latter may fail to usher us down the storied paths of righteousness. As Mark Twain observed, “Now is the accepted time to make your annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.”

         Although the odds may not favor me, I cling to Jesus’s assurance that “with God, all things are possible” and so hold out hope. In that spirit, I have recently dedicated some time to looking backward—even way backward—to get a glimpse into the darker corners of my past. This has led me to an appalling, shocking, and dreadful realization that I will confess to you this morning.

Here it comes: when I was young, I did not like Fred Rogers or his television show, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

         My text says: pause here for gasps and to allow people time to leave in a huff or throw chunks of leftover fruitcake.

         My defense, to the extent I have one, rests in my age when his show achieved its popularity.  Mister Rogers hit his stride in the 1970s, when I was approaching and entering my teenage years. I certainly had nothing against him; even through the skeptical and all-knowing eyes of adolescence I could tell that Fred Rogers exuded kindness.

But that was precisely the problem: in those years, kindness did not stand out to me as an quality or activity of the highest order. I associated kindness with softness and at that age I wanted nothing to do with that dreaded “s” word. No, I was fully focused on what I saw as the three most important rituals of fully realized manhood: driving, shaving, and figuring out how to get that girl in my homeroom class to talk to me.

         As I grew older, I came to associate two other “s” words with kindness. One is spontaneity. I think I acquired this idea by living in Ann Arbor and finding myself more or less constantly behind a car with a bumper sticker instructing me to engage in random acts of kindness. I took these to be small and spontaneous things, like holding the elevator door for someone, or giving money to a homeless person, or smiling at a parent who is trying to quiet a screaming child in a restaurant while everyone else glares at them.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with any of these small acts of kindness—but it also seems fair to ask if we should strive for more. Thomas Jefferson wanted his gravestone to note that he had authored the Declaration of Independence. Who among us hopes that ours will proudly declare: “Always tipped twenty percent.”

Then there’s that third “s” word that we associate with kindness. Actually, I can give you a few “s” choices here, all getting at the same thing: Sensitive. Sweet. Saccharine. Take your pick. Here we equate kindness with niceness or even with some sort of slavish warm fuzziness. A kind person, we think, does nothing to trouble us—except possibly make our teeth ache from the sugar.

Let’s be clear: all of these things contribute to the common good and deserve our praise. The woman with her arms full who has a door held open for her, the homeless man who gets a few dollars from a smiling stranger, the exasperated mother who receives a sympathetic glance from an adjoining table, the beleaguered waiter who discovers twenty percent added to the bill—these acts make their lives better. They matter. We need every last act of kindness we can get these days, regardless of its size.

But this morning I want to suggest that we sell kindness short—and may even inadvertently give it a bad reputation—if we think of it only in the limited ways captured by these characteristics of softness, spontaneity, and sweetness. Jesus had important things to say about this. I have come to realize that Fred Rogers did, too. And maybe, just maybe, we can find in what they have to tell us some useful instruction for how to go about making the coming year a better and more meaningful one.

Let’s start here. Its reputation for softness notwithstanding, kindness sometimes requires courage and can even come at a significant cost. Take the Good Samaritan. We meet him traveling in notoriously dangerous territory—the road to Jericho, famous for its robberies and assaults. He knew violent bandits were in the area because he discovered one of their victims. Rushing to the aid of that stranger put him at substantial personal risk: indeed, this explains why the priest and the Levite crossed to the other side of the road and hustled out of there.

But not our Good Samaritan. He did not flee. He stopped to help. He rescued the man. He cared for him. He paid for his room and promised to cover any excess expenses.

“Good” Samaritan? Talk about understatement! How about the “Gutsy” Samaritan or even the “Gritty” Samaritan? This guy stops in the worst part of town, field dresses a man’s wounds, lifts him up and puts him on a donkey, delivers him to safety, and foots the bill. To use the vernacular, the “Good” Samaritan must have been one “bad” dude.

I never thought of Fred Rogers in those terms—but then I saw a recent documentary about him called “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” and it completely changed my perspective. Let me tell you: that Rogers guy, in his fussy little sweaters and colorful sneakers, he had courage.

At the time Fred Rogers entered the field, children’s television programming followed a well-established formula for success: a splashy and colorful set, lots of noise and action, and as little talking and thinking as humanly possible. A Punch and Judy show, without the subtlety.

Mister Rogers stood every single part of that formula on its head.

Do you remember the set? It looked like something your eccentric uncle had cobbled together out of cardboard, spit, and glue. You worried that if he sneezed it might topple over.

No loud displays here. Mister Rogers spoke in a quiet and thoughtful voice. And no one could accuse the show of being action-packed.

Most, importantly, though, Mister Rogers completely changed the substance of children’s programming. Rather than offer kids more of the nonsense and slapstick violence that routinely washed over them from their television sets, he took on countless tough subjects: Death. Divorce. Prejudice. Segregation. Sickness. The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. The Challenger disaster. 9/11.

Over and over again, Fred Rogers proved himself to be the Good Samaritan of children’s television. He never fled to the easier side of the road. He met kids where he found them. And he picked them up and took them someplace better, where they could heal from the world’s wounds.

The lessons of his program remain hauntingly relevant. Consider this: in a five-episode series in 1968, controversy erupts in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe when King Friday XIII—one of the puppets on the show—wants to build a border wall to keep people out who frighten him. Sound familiar? And that was fifty years ago.

All this kindness took a lot of planning on Fred Rogers’ part. And, indeed, while the kindness shown by the Good Samaritan probably qualifies as spontaneous—our second “s” word—we often have to do some advance work as we go about the business of God’s love. We may find we even need to be a bit calculating in the process.

We might bristle at the idea of associating kindness with calculation, but we shouldn’t. If we “love it when a plan comes together,” then we should love it even more when the plan is one of love. And remember that God’s greatest expression of compassion is reflected in a plan that took a few millennia to implement: the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy that brought a savior into the world.

Jesus understood that sometimes we will need to be calculated, canny, and crafty in our kindness. I think this explains why he said to his disciples: “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves, so be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves.” Translations vary here, rendering the word “wise” as “shrewd” or even “cunning,” but they all get at the same point.

Spontaneous outbursts of love have their place. But we live in a hard world—one with disquieting resemblances to the Jericho Road. So we need to have our wits about us and to strategize kindness—not just respond warmly when an opportunity taps us on the shoulder and says “Hey you! Over here!”

        

This brings us to our third “s” word—sweetness. Fred Rogers certainly embodied this characteristic and, over the years, I’ve heard a few sermons on the Good Samaritan that cast him in this light as well. And, please, don’t get me started on all the songs and paintings that portray Jesus as this sweet, amiable chap who’d never offend anyone. As a minister friend of mine was fond of observing, “angry crowds do not call for the crucifixion of nice guys.”

Alas, this strong association of kindness with sweetness may trap us into thinking that compassion routinely comes to us coated in layers of gooey frosting. This ignores the role that candor—and even confrontation—can play in kindness. And we find that reality embodied in the person of Jesus Christ.

Think, for example, of the rich young man who comes to Jesus and asks what he needs to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus responds bluntly and offers no spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. He says: “Sell everything you have, give your money to the poor, and follow me.” The young man does not take this well, the scriptures tell us, because he has lots of cool stuff—again, translations vary.

This passage includes an important nuance that we might read past if we don’t slow down and notice it. The rich young man may not have welcomed these words, but Jesus clearly spoke them out of care and kindness. The Gospel of Mark expressly declares that Jesus looked warmly at the young man, felt love for him—and then delivered the hard news.

We sometimes call this “tough love” and, as the author Julian Barnes observed, it is “hard on the lover,” too. If you have ever loved someone who you had to confront about their drug addiction, their alcoholism, their gambling problem, their eating disorder, their unhealthy relationship, or their abusive spouse then you can attest to this. Kindness can demand that we say uncomfortable words to people who have become too comfortable in the wrong places and on the wrong paths. It can even require that we intervene in their lives to try to interrupt the unfolding tragedy.

I have had to do this a number of times in my life—perhaps you have as well. It is not for the faint of heart. In all honesty, sometimes it did not work. And this much is clear: there is absolutely nothing “sweet” about it.

So kindness may come to us as soft, spontaneous, and sweet. Or it may require courage, calculation, and candor. But here’s the thing: I don’t believe that the gospels view any of these as being the most important characteristic of kindness. In order to get at that, we need to return to the two geographic territories that have occupied our attention this morning: the Jericho Road and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

Think back on the parable of the Good Samaritan for a moment. Jesus tells this parable in response to a question posed by a lawyer. This lawyer asked the same question raised by the rich fellow whom Jesus advised to go sell everything. Both asked: what do I need to do to inherit eternal life?

Now, I want you to notice something about this question: in both cases, these men are asking Jesus about themselves. They might as well have been asking about driving or shaving or getting the attention of the girl in homeroom—it’s all about them. They want to know what they need to do in order to get themselves a front row seat in the deluxe car on that great Amtrak to immortality.

In both cases, though, Jesus turns the question on its head: he moves the focus of the conversation away from the inquirer and toward others. Indeed, the rich young man experiences so much despair over the idea of selling his cool stuff that he misses the fact that Jesus isn’t talking about him or his beloved possessions—he’s talking about the poor.

An identical dynamic sets up the parable of the Good Samaritan. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” the lawyer asks. And Jesus answers: “Love the Lord with everything you’ve got and love your neighbor as yourself.” Again, Jesus tries to reorient the inquirer away from himself and toward others. The lawyer persists: “But who is my neighbor?”

Now, when we read this passage, we tend to emphasize the words “who” and “neighbor”: “But WHO is my NEIGHBOR?”

I think, though, that this misunderstands what’s going on here—and why Jesus answers the question by telling the parable of the Good Samaritan. In my view, properly understood the question sounds like this: “But who is MY neighbor?” That seems to me much more consistent with the self-directed nature of the whole line of questioning.

So Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan and the answer becomes clear: 

Everyone is YOUR neighbor. All people. No exclusions. No exceptions. Do you want to follow Jesus Christ? Then YOUR neighborhood has to be the biggest neighborhood in the whole wide world.

Do you remember how Mister Rogers started every show? He came in through his rickety front door and sang: “Would you be my? Could you be my? Won’t you be MY neighbor?” Now, think about that for a minute: he sang those words into a television camera, not even knowing who was watching and listening. He did not sing it to anyone in particular. He sang it to everyone in particular.

Notice how this message completely inverts the way we normally think about the concept of a “neighbor.” Here, YOUR neighbor is not the person with whom you share a street, or a property line, or a barbeque in the summer, or a cup of eggnog in the winter, or a church pew on Sundays. No, YOUR neighbor encompasses every last child of the living God. This concept stands the world on its head—and, as usual, Jesus says that is exactly the right way to think about things: upside down.

The great preacher Frederick Buechner wrote a wonderful sermon he called “The Clown the Belfry” that gets at this theme. In it, he tells the story of an old New England church that had suffered some damage and so, in 1831, repaired the structure and topped it with a handsome new steeple. A written history of the church observed that “When the steeple was added, one agile Lyman Woodard [celebrated by standing] on his head in the belfry with his feet toward heaven.” Buechner writes:

“That's the one and only thing I've been able to find out about Lyman Woodard, whoever he was, but it is enough. I love him for doing what he did. It was a crazy thing to do. It was a risky thing to do. It ran counter to all standards of New England practicality and prudence. It stood the whole idea that you're supposed to be nothing but solemn in church on its head just like Lyman himself standing upside down on his. And it was also a magical and magnificent and Mozartian thing to do. If the Lord is indeed our shepherd, then everything goes topsy-turvy. Losing becomes finding and crying becomes laughing. The last become first and the weak become strong. Instead of life being done in by death in the end as we always supposed, death is done in finally by life in the end.”

A savior—in a stable.

A tomb—empty.

A messiah—from the backwater town of Nazareth.

A respected priest—cowardly.

An obscure Samaritan—heroic.

The world turned upside down.

Of course, turning everything on its head and seeing our neighborhood as the biggest one in the whole wide world has consequences. It’s not exclusive real estate. It’s not a pretty, tidy, orderly gated community. We will find ourselves rubbing shoulders with people we don’t know, with whom we have little in common, and who we do not particularly like. And it’s not the safest or most welcoming place, either: as Jesus, and the Good Samaritan, and Fred Rogers all understood, the Jericho Road runs right through it. But that’s precisely the point—that’s why we are needed there.

         Fred Rogers liked to refer to the Jewish concept of “tikkun olam”—the idea that through our acts of kindness we can be “repairers of the world.” But there is no fixing it from the outside. When it comes to healing the world, we have to be in it to begin it.

         In the next week or so, many of us will ask ourselves the question: “What resolutions shall I make to give myself a better trip around this sun this time?” There’s certainly nothing wrong with doing that: I’m confident that God has no objections if we hope to get in better shape or to eat healthier food or to engage in that vast archeological dig that we call the cleaning of closets.

         But the stories of the rich young man and the Good Samaritan tell us that we will not really change our lives until we change our questions, re-focusing them away from ourselves and toward others. So, as we ponder our new year’s resolutions, I think Jesus invites us to ask ourselves these questions as well:

How can I be sure that I don’t miss any of the chances at soft, spontaneous, and sweet kindness that come my way?

What do I need to do so that this year includes some courageous, calculated, candid, and even crazy kindness as well?

How can I put myself on the roads that will lead me to those who need to be carried and cared for?

         What can I do for my neighborhood—the biggest neighborhood in the whole wide world?

         How can I make sure everyone feels welcome there?

         How can I help fix it?

         How can I help it heal?

         And the people said: Amen. 

Properties of Light

Properties of Light

A Sermon Shared at the Suttons Bay Congregational Church

October 20, 2019

Scripture: Matthew 5:14-16

         When I was a boy, my grandfather and I often watched a show called “big time wrestling” together on his tiny plastic black-and-white television set. To help retrieve the weak signal that floated elusively around our neighborhood, he had wrapped balls of aluminum foil around the ends of the rabbit-ear antennas—but, alas, this had absolutely no perceptible effect. My grandfather was an enthusiastic and committed viewer of the program: although he was a devout church-goer who sang the old hymns in the shower, he resorted to somewhat saltier forms of expression when the static grew so loud that you could no longer hear the announcer or when it looked like some villainous wrestler might get away with a dirty move.

The stark symbolism of these battles made an early impression on me: the good guys were very good and wore the light-colored shorts and masks; the bad guys were very bad and wore the dark-colored shorts and masks. A decade or two would pass before I came to three realizations: first, clothing is an unreliable indicator of moral integrity; second, these men were not actually fighting; and, third, the snow on the screen was the result of dreadful reception and not because the match was taking place during a blizzard.  

You have no doubt noticed that our faith makes a lot of use of those same two symbols of darkness and light. The Bible strongly and consistently associates darkness with evil, or at least with the absence of God. And it strongly and consistently associates light with God’s presence, guidance, and grace.

This imagery recurs throughout the Old Testament—right from the start. The book of Genesis tells us that in the beginning “darkness was over the face of the deep.” In Exodus, the Lord tells Moses to stretch out his hand so that darkness will fall over the land of Egypt—a “darkness to be felt,” he adds ominously. Adjectives multiply, with the book of Isaiah saying that the lost will be “thrust into thick darkness” and the book of Proverbs declaring that “[t]he way of the wicked is like deep darkness.” The book of Psalms uses a common metaphor when it says that those of us without understanding will “walk about in darkness.”

We find identical imagery throughout the New Testament. The Gospel of John tells us that people were evil and “loved the darkness.” In three of the gospels, the sky becomes suddenly and mysteriously dark during the crucifixion of Jesus. The First Epistle of John tells us that in God there is “no darkness at all.” Colossians says that Jesus delivered us from “the domain of darkness” and First Peter says we have been “called out of darkness.”

On the other hand, the Hebrew Bible repeatedly employs the image of light as a metaphor for goodness. The book of Genesis tells us that the first words God spoke were “let there be light.” The twenty-seventh psalm begins with the famous invocation “The Lord is my light and my salvation.” Isaiah is rich with such language, including the prophetic statement: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.” The book of Daniel declares that “those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above.”

The New Testament uses the same imagery—indeed, we might even say that it turns the lights up a bit. Such symbolism abounds. To give you some idea of how densely the New Testaments packs its references to light, just take the Gospel of John alone.

In that gospel, Jesus says (more than once) that he is “the light of the world”—hold on to that point, I’ll return to it. He warns his disciples that the light “will be among them” for only a little longer, and he tells them: “While you have the light, believe in the light.” John begins his gospel by saying of Jesus: “In him was life, and the life was the light of men.” And he reassuringly adds words often translated this way: the “light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

We find the same sort of language throughout the New Testament. Paul’s writings contain numerous examples. A familiar one comes in his letter to the Romans, when Paul urges us to “put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light”—the “armor of light”: a gloriously mixed metaphor.

This imagery has crept out of the Bible and into our everyday religious language, our traditions, and our literature. We refer to Jesus as “the Lord of Light” and Satan as the “Prince of Darkness.” We put lights up at Christmas and light candles at Christmas Eve services. If we plunge into John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, we discover that he describes the pit into which God cast Lucifer and the other fallen angels as having “no light, but rather darkness visible.” It was a concept that Milton—blind and impoverished when he wrote those words—could fully understand.

Now, here’s the thing. All of this imagery could leave us with a simple message etched in our mind: darkness bad, light good. But, of course, things are more complicated than that. This morning, I want to suggest to you that—if we pay attention to those complications—we might learn something not just about darkness and light …. but about God, about ourselves, and about what God asks of us.

Let’s start here. One risk in thinking in these simple “darkness bad, light good” terms is that we may come to view all existence as ruled by two conflicting, opposed, and equal forces. There is a religion that holds such a belief—but it isn’t ours. Manichaeism, which flourished between the third and seventh centuries, endorsed a dualistic model along precisely these lines. Indeed, religious historians tell us that Manichaeism actually gave us the phrase “Prince of Darkness.”

 The early church leaders did not just question Manichaeism—they declared it a heresy. I’m not big on calling people heretics, but the critics of Manichaeism had a point. After all, one of the fundamental tenets of our faith is that we believe in one God; we are happy monotheists; and dualistic belief systems see things very differently.

Of course, we understand that God gets a lot of opposition here on earth. As C. S. Lewis observed, we live in “occupied territory.” But make no mistake about it, our faith believes in one God and, to quote Luther’s great hymn, “on earth is not his equal”—or anyplace else, for that matter. I think that, in this sense, many translations of John’s gospel don’t get the sense of things exactly right: it’s not just that the darkness has not overcome the light; it’s that in the end the darkness cannot and so will not overcome the light.

There’s another problem with this simplistic “darkness bad / light good” dichotomy: darkness has a natural place in the very order of things. God may have brought forth the light and declared it good—but notice that God did not obliterate the darkness. To the contrary, God gave the night a proportional role and preserved it. Indeed, we cannot have days without having nights.

This means that darkness gets its seasons and we will inescapably spend some part of our life there,  like it or not. “There is a time for everything,” Ecclesiastes tells us, and that includes the dark periods and places of existence. If something bad happens to us, or to someone we love, or to an individual or group for whom we care, it makes no sense to say we shouldn’t go into the darkness—we will and, if we are compassionate human beings, we probably even should.

Whether we should stay there is, of course, a different question entirely. That’s where the redeeming forces of hope and grace and salvation come in. Sure, the Bible candidly recognizes that the valley of the shadows exists and that we will walk there. But it also promises that we will not walk alone and that, with God’s help, we will pass through it.

Still, darkness is more than just an unavoidable lapse in our otherwise well-lit lives. Sometimes darkness has important lessons for us. A spell in the darkness can help us recalibrate our thoughts, our behaviors, and our priorities. Being the weak creatures we are, sometimes we need the darkness in order to appreciate the light and to take a fresh new pleasure in it. The Prodigal Son had to wallow in the dim and filthy corners of a pig sty before he could return to his father’s warmly lit home—and to himself.

We can even have a little fun with this idea. Before we buy into the “darkness bad / light good” cliché, think of all the physical places in your life that you do not want to be bathed in light. Your bedroom at 2:00 AM. A restaurant on Valentine’s Day. A movie theatre once the film has started. The other night I was driving down a pitch-black road and accidentally hit the button for the dome light inside my truck. I immediately started scrambling to restore the darkness—since I thought it might be a good idea if I could see where I was going. I needed the darkness inside to see the light guiding me outside.

So: darkness bad? It’s a useful shorthand symbol. But there’s more to it than that.

Now, with respect to light, I want to make a somewhat different point. And I want to get at it by starting with a foundational question: what is it about light that makes it such a powerful, compelling, useful symbol of goodness? After all, life has many other good things in it as well—cheeseburgers, for example. And yet Jesus does not caution us against putting our cheeseburgers under a basket. What are the properties of light that give it such awesome theological utility?

Before getting to that question, it may be worth noting that thousands of years ago something was true about light that is no longer the case: it was precious and almost entirely outside of the control of human beings. Today, with the flick of a switch or push of a button we can light up a house, a backyard, a highway, a football stadium—we can even connect a lamp to Alexa and call out “Let there be light!” and play god in extreme miniature.

For the vast majority of human history, however, this did not hold true. We urgently needed the light—to grow crops, to work by, to find our way, to travel safely, and so on. But it was hard to make and hard to come by. Whenever the power goes out we get a tiny taste of the helplessness with which the authors of all these biblical texts lived on an hour-by-hour day-by-day basis.

So, today, we tend to take the magic of light for granted. Rather than thinking of it as a wonderful and important thing we may scarcely think of it at all. Perhaps we can regain some of our appreciation for light—and why it meant so much to the authors of the Bible—by remembering how precious it once was and by looking closely at its properties.

A fairly obvious property of light is that it affects other things. It warms them. It pulls them out of the shadows. It illuminates them. Numerous biblical texts make this last point—that light can show the way for us and keep us from getting lost, or worse.

We’ve all had these sorts of experiences. I recall a few years ago staying out a bit too late on our boat on Lake Leelanau. It was an extraordinarily starless night and as we approached the shore I could barely make out our dock. Fortunately, we had a good strong flashlight on board, and in short order I could see where we needed to go. That same light led us down the dock, along the path through our woods, across the road, and safely up the farmhouse steps. Right in my hand I held a nascent sermon, complete with rechargeable batteries.

 

And, of course, light does not just affect things—it affects people. Like plants, we naturally bend toward the light. In the introduction to his brilliant translation of the gospels, the poet Stephen Mitchell refers to this as the “irresistible phototropism of the human soul.” I suspect it explains why a ragtag collection of hardboiled fishermen would leave their nets and immediately follow Jesus; they saw the light in him and rushed toward it.

Think about that first fall day when the sunlight makes the leaves glow orange and red and yellow. Think about that first winter day when the sunlight dances across the crystalline snow. Think about that first spring day when the sunlight teases the crocuses out of the ground. Think about that first summer day when the sunlight flashes over the waves on the water. “It’s beautiful outside; I’m going to go sit in my closet,” said no one, ever. We are hardwired to move toward the light. As Mitchell says: like plants, we are phototropic.

But light has other instructive properties as well. It can be dispersed—meaning that it can be broken down into its constituent colors. We see this when we put light through a prism or when the sunlight gives us a rainbow after a storm. In other words, it is through a diversity of colors working together that light is achieved. There’s a powerful lesson embedded in there, although we human being seem to have a lot of trouble getting it.

But the properties of light have still more to tell us. Light can be diffused—meaning that it can be spread out and scattered—and it can be diffracted—meaning that it can be bent. Unleashed and directed, light finds its way into the darkest and most remote corners. In the example of his life, Jesus shows us exactly how that works—and how it changes everything.

As some of you know, my wife Lisa is an avid photographer. A few years ago, she was watching an excellent instructional video by Joel Sartori, who has had a long and storied career taking pictures for National Geographic. At one point, he said something like this: “Everyone takes photographs of sunsets. Next time, turn around and look behind you and see where the light from that sunset has gone. Often, it is a better and more interesting shot.”

Throughout the gospels, Jesus tells us the same thing: “Turn around. Look at the neglected places. Watch how the light can go there, too. See how it makes things beautiful.”

  

Light has an additional property as well: it can be reflected. Light can make contact with something and return to its source. Light comes back.

Jesus understood this, a basic principle of the physics of divine light. If we send ours out into the world, we will get the benefits of it as well. As we give, so shall we receive. The brighter, the better, for the other, for us.

We need to pause and notice here that our understanding of the source of the light has shifted. In much of our religious language, the light comes from outside—from God, from Jesus, from the Holy Spirit ... like the headlights on my pickup. But Jesus plainly declares that the light comes from within us as well. As I noted earlier, in the Gospel of John Jesus declares “I am the light of the world.” But in our scripture reading for today, he also says “You are the light of the world.” This makes perfect sense coming from the one who said: “The Kingdom of God is within you.”

Permit me a brief detour on that phrase. The biblical scholar C. H. Roberts points out that the words usually translated as “within you” here literally mean “in your hands” or “within your power.” Theologian Charles Dodd explained the implications of that meaning: “That is, the Kingdom of God is not something for which you have to wait anxiously … but is an available possibility here and now, for those who are willing to receive it as a little child.”

This idea gets at such a universal truth that devout followers of other faiths have embraced it. Mahatma Gandhi wrote: “My experience tells me that the Kingdom of God is within us, and that we can realize it not by saying ‘Lord, Lord,’ but by doing His will and His work. If we wait for the Kingdom to come from outside, we shall be sadly mistaken.”

Think about it. You are the light of the world. The Kingdom of God is within you. That is what Jesus says to us, in as clear, unmistakable, and well-lit a way as he knows how. What good news. And what a daunting responsibility.

Because this, then, is what Jesus asks of us: What will you do? Where will you shine your light? How will you spread it, disperse it, bend it, diffuse it, refract it, direct it, share it? Who is the person, now sitting in darkness, who will lean into your light if you offer it? When will you toss away your bowl and give your internal dimmer switch a good, hard twist to the right?

         In 2010, a mine in northern Chile collapsed, trapping thirty-three men inside. It took sixty-nine days to rescue them. During that period, helpers were able to send food down to the miners and the miners were able to send videos up to the surface so they could communicate with their families. Perhaps some of you recall watching this drama unfold on television.

         Once supply lines were established, the miners asked for something else, too. Most of them were deeply religious men, so they requested Bibles, crucifixes, rosaries, small statutes of the Virgin Mary—whatever could be provided. The rescuers found a way to get these things to the miners, who built a shrine in the blackened space where they were huddled. There, 2,300 feet underground, three miles from the entrance, in the very heart of utmost darkness, the light went on … and those miners assembled a remote outpost of the Kingdom of God.

         There are no limits to where the light can go. There are no limits to where we can send it. There are no limits to where we can bring it. There are no limits to the places, the lives, the circumstances that the light can reach.

         And this is so because, through God, all things are possible. Even the most impossible things imaginable. Even that the Kingdom of God would be within us. Even that we would be the light of the world.

         Praise God that it is so.

         Amen.

Great Expectations

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

Scripture: Luke 12:48

“From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required;

And from the one to whom much has been entrusted,

even more will be demanded.”

         At age seventeen, I had five great passions.

Four of them included: tinkering with the big blue 1955 Buick that I’d bought for three-hundred-and-fifty dollars; fishing for bass on the small and weedy lake where I grew up; writing for my high school newspaper; and trying to get a member of our high school’s cheerleading squad named Heidi to go on a date with me.

I quickly discovered that I was mildly competent at the first three and wildly clumsy and incompetent at the last. This is not modesty on my part. In my early efforts to woo Heidi I pointed out that she had the same name as our dog. You can imagine how that played.

         My fifth great passion—which I believe to be common among teenagers—was sleeping in late on Saturday morning. At this I excelled—I might even have been a prodigy of sorts. Left to my own devices, I would have blinked myself awake at around 1:00 in the afternoon, poking around in the refrigerator for breakfast just as my parents were finishing lunch.

         Alas, as things turned out I had precious few opportunities to exercise my special genius for slumber. My first-generation German-American father, the very embodiment of the storied Protestant work ethic of which sociologist Max Weber wrote, had other plans for me. God made Sunday for rest—but Saturday for labor—and my weekends always began with a long list of chores.

         I therefore did not hasten from bed. My father would call “Time to wake up!” and I would yell “I’ll be right down!” and go back to sleep. He’d call again “Let’s get at it!” and I would shout “I’m on my way!” and roll over. “We’ve got lots to do!” he would persist and I would call “Coming!” and adjust my pillow. The fourth call finally bestirred me with its inescapable logic: “Nobody else is going to do it for us!” “Okay,” I’d think to myself, “I give up. Fortunately, I left my clothes here in this convenient pile on my floor.”

         And work we did. Docks had to go in. Docks had to come out. The anchor on the raft needed re-setting. The pump needed priming. We had a shed to build. We had brush to clear. The grill wanted cleaning. The garage wanted sweeping.

“Somebody” needed to fix the fence. “Somebody” needed to haul two-hundred pounds of salt to the water softener. “Somebody” had to go to the nearest gas station—a forty-five minute round trip—to get fuel for the boat. I feel for those people whose fathers viewed them as nobody—but, at the time, I found being “somebody” no great honor.

         Cutting the lawn undoubtedly qualified as the worst chore. To save money, my father had cagily invested in a used Sears lawnmower that might have once belonged to Julius Caesar. It started reliably, somewhere between the two-hundredth and three-hundredth pull.

         Our lawn, which sat just a foot or two above lake level, routinely had snakes in it. And not just a few. Garters, racers, black water, Eastern hognose snakes—if it slithered its way around Michigan, we got them. So, while I mowed, I had to maintain a vigilant serpent patrol—because if I ran over one, I knew “somebody” would have to clean that mess up.

As a result, I developed a little ritual. If I saw a snake, I’d stop cutting, walk around the mower (this was before the days of the automatic shut-off safety feature that we now find on these machines), grab the snake behind the head, and throw it over the fence into the neighbor’s yard. Sometimes, later in the day, I’d see our neighbor’s son mowing their yard and tossing the snakes back.

         I carried all of these responsibilities heavily. My father expected so much of me. Why wouldn’t he just let me sleep? Was that so much to ask? Who was I hurting?

         Responsibilities tend to land in our lives with a thud. Sigmund Freud wrote that most people are frightened of responsibility, and we can understand why. Responsibility sounds hard. It sounds wearisome. And, perhaps most importantly, it sounds like it includes the possibility of failure and embarrassment and judgment and shame. Who wants any of that?

         We may feel these anxieties amplified when big responsibilities get joined with great expectations. In our good intentions, we sometimes say things like: “I know you can do it!” “I believe in you!” “You’ve got this!” And, I suppose, these sorts of statements sit much better than something like: “You, my friend, are destined for failure.” But I suspect that, at some point in our lives, each of us has felt a little uneasy when someone expressed much stronger confidence in us than we had in ourselves.

         We can imagine, then, how the followers of Jesus might have felt when he said to them the words we read in Luke chapter 12: “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.” That doesn’t sound very comforting, consoling, or carefree. That sounds like whopping big responsibilities and whopping great expectations—coming from no less an authority than the Son of the Living God.

         “I expect a lot of you” unsettles us when it comes from a parent or a teacher or a coach. Imagine it coming from the Savior of All Humankind.

What happened, his followers may have wondered, to the Jesus of Matthew chapter 11, who declared: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Now that sounds like someone who would let you sleep in!

It turns out, though, that on closer analysis we can reconcile these two themes of Jesus (“I expect much of you” and “my burden is light”)—and that doing so conveys an important lesson. To get at this, we will need to look at today’s scripture from Luke in its context. As is often the case, context provides our best tool to achieve clarity and our most effective weapon against confusion.

 The twelfth chapter of Luke has a distinctive structure. It begins by telling us that a massive crowd—thousands of people—had assembled to hear from Jesus. In the ensuing verses, Jesus then has two conversations in this setting—one with the whole crowd, and another one with just his disciples. Let me repeat that because it really matters here: in Luke chapter 12, Jesus has two different conversations with two different audiences—sometimes he’s talking to everyone who has gathered, sometimes just to his closest followers.

The chapter moves back and forth between these two dialogues: so verse one says “he began to speak first to his disciples”; but then in verse thirteen someone from the crowd makes a comment and Jesus addresses everyone; verse twenty-two suggests that he then turns his attention back toward his disciples; and so on and so on.

These conversations culminate in verses thirty-five through forty, where Jesus offers up a series of closely-related parables on the theme of readiness. The parables teach that those who follow Jesus must stand in a constant state of preparedness for his instruction and return—like the servants waiting for the master to return from the wedding banquet, and like the owner of a house watching for the unexpected thief.

In the course of delivering these parables, Jesus utters one of my favorite lines in the entirety of the gospels: “Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit.” Let me give you that again: “Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit.” Or, if you will, watch out for the snakes in your path, and be prepared to toss them out of your way.

 

By verse forty-one, all of this back-and-forth between audiences has left Peter confused. So Peter—who has the endearing quality of pretty much always saying whatever is on his mind at the moment—asks Jesus a pointed question. “Lord,” he inquires, “are you telling this parable for us or for everyone.” He wants to know: “Are you talking to them, or are you talking to me?”

As we would expect, and in the best rabbinic tradition, Jesus answers this question with another parable. Now, let me be completely honest: to our twenty-first-century ears, this parable makes for tough sledding. Many parables serve as the centerpieces for lots of sermons; this one, not so much.

In the parable, Jesus contrasts two different slaves. In both cases, the master has given the slave authority over the other slaves during his absence. In the first case, the master returns unexpectedly and finds the slave hard at work doing what he was told. Jesus calls this slave “blessed” and says that the master will reward him by putting him in charge of all his possessions.

Things don’t go so well for the second slave. Here, the master returns unexpectedly to find the slave he left in charge beating the other slaves, getting drunk, and otherwise generally disobeying instructions. Jesus says that the master thrashed this renegade slave “severely” and then—he rather graphically adds—“cut him into pieces.” As easy yokes and light burdens go, this doesn’t sound like one.

But we can’t let the imagery of the parable—which, I grant you, may make us squirm, perhaps by design—overwhelm the message of the parable. Remember: Jesus shares the parable to answer a specific question. And the specific question he’s asking is: are you talking to them, or are you talking to me?

As happens so often in the gospels, Jesus resists the binary choice. In essence, he says: “I am talking to anyone who will take up my word and my work and who will tend them in the world. Those who do so will be blessed—they will be given more and more of the care of my kingdom.”

Now, notice that we can easily reconcile this message with the message from chapter 11 of Matthew. We can almost hear Jesus adding: “Oh, and by the way. Those good people who will care for my kingdom? Well, their burden will be light, because the most powerful and loving force in the universe will be laboring beside them. When they need it, I will give them rest. Much will be expected of them. But that’s okay. Because they will never, ever toil alone. They will never do their work without me.”

In my view, our text for this morning has much less to do with responsibility as a burden than it does with responsibility as a blessing. As psychologist and concentration-camp-survivor Viktor Frankl recognized, responsibility is the blessing that gives our lives meaning. In fact, Frankl believed so strongly in the idea that he once said we should complement our Statue of Liberty on the East Coast with a Statue of Responsibility on the West.

It can sensibly be argued that responsibility is the blessing that gives our lives its greatest potential—even heroic potential. As that great philosopher, Bob Dylan, once observed: “I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.” We might say that the heroes of our faith—including the everyday heroes—are those who understand the degree of responsibility that comes with God’s love for us. And they do not just understand it—they delight in it. That responsibility becomes a source of perpetual joy.

*

Let me conclude by returning to my own little parable—the one with which I began—if I may. For some reason no doubt associated with the mysteries of adolescence, at age seventeen I had lost much of the sense of blessedness I had known at sixteen. At seventeen, I became somewhat jaundiced.

But, at sixteen, I didn’t mind driving into town for gasoline because I was still intoxicated by the thrill of steering that formidable old Buick around our crazy dirt roads. At sixteen, I didn’t mind loading salt into the softener because I was still impressed that I was strong enough to drape a bag over each shoulder and walk down our rickety basement stairs with them. At sixteen, I didn’t mind fixing the fence or working on the shed because I was still astonished that my father trusted me to swing a hammer and that I knew how to do it.

My father expected a lot of me. That was a great blessing. And, with the passage of time, it has become within my memories a great source of happiness. I was smarter at sixteen than seventeen—life works that way—and it can take a while to regain the wisdom of the child.

Oh, and there’s one other piece to this parable. All those chores I’ve described? I almost never did any of them alone. My dad usually worked beside me.

He even rode with me into town for gas. I didn’t understand why at the time—I did the driving and the pumping and he barely said a word. But now, at this age, I understand why. His simple act of being there made my burden easy and my yoke light—and he knew that. To paraphrase Jacob in the Hebrew Bible: “Surely, God was in that place, and I did not even know it.”

Sisters and brothers in Christ, everyone in this sanctuary this morning has their challenges, some very serious and daunting. That’s true. But it’s also true that everyone in this sanctuary is in their own way “dressed for action” and has their lamp lit. Much has been given to us. Jesus says: much is expected of us as a result. Importantly: he brings this to us not in the voice of tiresome duty but in the voice of blessing and of good news.

And so:

This morning, and every morning, may your blessings be an occasion for joy and delight.

But may they also be an inspiration to get out and get to work in God’s many fields with God’s many hands.

May we, every day, be “dressed for action”—because this tired old world needs our help.

And may we, every day, “keep our lamps lit”—because this dark old world needs all the light we can bring to it.

Or, as my plainspoken father used to put it:

“Time to wake up.

“Let’s get at it.

“We’ve got a lot to do.

“And nobody else is going to do it for us.”

And the people said: Amen.