Matthew 22:15-22, Genesis 12:1-9 The Journey of Faith: Us For the Common Good A sermon by Rev. Aaron Fulp-Eickstaedt Preached at Immanuel Presbyterian Church, McLean VA On October 19 th, 2014 The first scripture lesson for today is the assigned Gospel lectionary reading for the day, from the Gospel of Matthew. It follows immediately after the passage I read last week, Jesus parable of The Wedding Feast (by the way, for those who had questions about that parable, Tom Long will be at Immanuel next Saturday and I am certain he will be open for questions about that parable). In today s Gospel, the Pharisees, whom Jesus has angered with his story of the wedding banquet (because he portrays them as those who refused the invitation and killed the son), try to trap Jesus with a question about how to handle paying taxes to the emperor. Notice how he answers them and as you do, think about whose image the coin bears, but also think about whose image that you and I bear. Then the Pharisees went and plotted to entrap him in what he said. So they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality. Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not? But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the coin used for the tax. And they brought him a denarius. Then he said to them, Whose head is this, and whose title? They answered, The emperor s. Then he said to them, Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor s, and to God the things that are God s. When they heard this, they were amazed; and they left him and went away. Our second scripture passage is from the book of Genesis. It is the story of God s call to Abram and the promise God makes to bless Abram, So that he will be a blessing, so that in Abram all the families of the earth shall be blessed. As Brian McLaren points out, Abram and Sara s identity will be us for them, us with them, us for the benefit and blessing of all 1. In other words, us for the common good. Now the Lord said to Abram, Go from your country and your kindred and your father s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother s son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran; and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. When they had come to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. Then the Lord appeared to Abram, and said, To your offspring I will give this land. So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him. From there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; and there he built an altar to the Lord and invoked the name of the Lord. And Abram journeyed on by stages towards the Negeb. 1 McLaren, Brian. We Make The Road By Walking. ISBN 1455514004
There are certain words in our religious lexicon, our spiritual vocabulary, that we do well to use carefully. We tend employ them without thinking critically about their connotations or about the way others who are not in the know or hip to our religious jive might hear them. Sometimes we speak them without putting too much thought into what we are saying. Other times, when we do think about what the words we use mean (or might mean), we get nervous and perhaps we become a little too careful. Blessed and blessing are two of those words that we do well to use carefully. Both of them from the same verb to bless. Our passage from the book of Genesis says that Abram and Sarai were blessed by God in order to be a blessing to others. Brian McLaren takes that idea and, rightly I think, says that you and I have been blessed in order to be a blessing to others. This is a really good thought. It is central to our identity as this community of faith, where we make helping others a focus and priority hosting a forum on human trafficking today so that we can begin to figure out how to help address that, making sure our kids have the opportunity to go on Habitat and Youthworks mission trips, taking part in Rebuilding Together, making sandwiches for Bologna Bunch, working with Dreamers, encouraging people to volunteer, helping settle a refugee family, tithing our church budget to mission and outreach and going beyond that with the proceeds of our Auction, crafting prayer shawls, and being involved in probably fifty or sixty other things I haven t named. Okay. But before we get to what it means to bless others, what does it mean to be blessed? I went and looked it up in my hardbound copy of Webster s 9 th Collegiate Dictionary. To be blessed, according to that old standby, can be understood in several ways: First, to be blessed is to be hallowed, consecrated. To be blest is to be set apart as holy or sacred; isn t that what we are doing when we celebrate a baptism for a child or an adult? Second, to be blest is to have prosperity or happiness conferred upon you. To be blest is to have wealth and health and happiness not as something you have achieved, but as something you have been given. It has been conferred upon you. Those of us who have those things health and wealth and happiness, know that it could well be otherwise, right? Even if we don t have health, we are all of us in this room richly blest compared to the vast majority of the world when it comes to finances. When it comes to water, we are blest. Friday, the day of the rehearsal for the wedding we had yesterday, there was a water main break over on Basil Street. There was no water here all day long. I went to bed praying, Lord, please let them get that water main fixed. It was an inconvenience not to have water here at church. Later I thought to myself, How many people go day in and day out without running water across the globe? Third to be blest is to have divine care invoked on you a prayer said over you, the knowledge that God goes with you. Fourth, to be blest is to be spoken gratefully of Bless the Lord o my soul, and all that is within me bless God s holy name.
Turns out, when I went to look up the Hebrew word for blessing, barak or barakah, it is associated with the word berek which means to kneel, to express gratitude and dependence. And when I looked up the Greek word translated blessing, makarios, it is associated with the word happy. So that in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is literally saying, happy are you, not blessed are you. Blessing is associated with being set apart, with having gifts and talents conferred on you, with being cared for by God, and with gratitude. It is one thing to say we have been blessed. It s another to actually recognize it, to believe it, to know it in our guts. One way to recognize that we have is to count our blessings to make a gratitude list to do what some people are doing on social media right now, to take part in a gratitude challenge, listing three things every day that they are thankful for. Fran Rooney has shared with me that back when she sought stories to help compile this little book, Blessings and Other Faith Experiences there were people who said to her, Oh, I don t think I have any blessings. Now, on further examination, I d bet that anyone who said that then would change their mind now. Engage in a little comparison with the rest of the world and your sense of being blessed might increase a hundred fold. Then again, comparison is a little tricky, because when you do compare, it s easy to point to some people who are in better financial shape or physical shape than you are (even if you re Bill Gates well, maybe not Bill Gates). It s easy to point to people who have more money, more health, people whose relationships seem healthier, whose kids don t seem to have any problems, whose lives seem to be one big green light (in part, because you don t know the secrets they keep). Furthermore, to say that God has something to do with why I have more than somebody else, or why somebody else has more than me, raises issues of its own. (Like saying, I m so blessed that I didn t get born into a poor family in Liberia, where health care is in short supply, or into a refugee camp somewhere. That has its problems). Be that as it may, all of the health and wealth and community we enjoy is something for which we ought to be grateful, but if the blessing of God all hinges on our material circumstances, then we re in trouble. Nevertheless, the truth is that we do enjoy a lot of good things we do have gifts and talents and resources and we re called to use them to bless others. Us for them, us with them, us for the benefit and blessing of all, us for the common good, as Brian McLaren put it. If you ve been paying attention to the Ebola situation unfolding, you know how hysterical the media has become about the possibility of widespread outbreak here in the United States. There is wisdom in being careful with a virus like that. There is wisdom in following protocols, respecting the danger of a virus and how it could spread. But many of us wonder why it has only now started to become an issue that really concerns Westerners. Thousands and thousands of Africans die of the disease, and it is no big deal until Thomas Eric Duncan comes to the U.S., goes to a hospital in Dallas, and dies, infecting a couple of nurses along the way. We are blessed to be a blessing. And the reason why Thomas Eric Duncan got sick is because he lived his life thinking that way. His memorial service took place the other day, and people talked about how he always thought of others. It is thought that he contracted the disease because helped a pregnant woman who was suffering and dying of it. He couldn t look the other way. He had to help.
What about Dr. Kent Brantly, who went to Liberia with the aid organization Samaritan s Purse, and contracted Ebola there. He didn t die of Ebola, and now he is donating his blood plasma, blood which is resistant to Ebola, to help others combat it as well. He understands that he is blessed to be a blessing. Every Sunday at the morning service we say, Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me bless God s holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all God s benefits. What might it mean to bless God? I know this is anthropomorphic, but there s a long tradition of anthropomorphizing God. If you can believe in a God who weeps over human pain, over the human tendency to violence and evil, over the human inability to grasp the things that make for peace; if you can believe in a God who cares enough to suffer and be vulnerable; then maybe you can believe in a God who delights in people, who smiles at people, who see their lives and their gifts and talents, their energies and financial resources and talents and all, not as something to hold on and protect but as something to share. Perhaps you read the piece in the Washington Post this week about Dr. Christopher Fee, a professor at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania 2. Every year for the past twelve years, Dr. Fee has been bringing a freshman class to D.C. to experience a little something of what it is like to be homeless, to engage the homeless. On Saturday, a week ago, he was leading 15 students down Massachusetts Avenue NW in the District. Under a lightly falling rain, He spotted an older man who seemed homeless: grizzled hair, a flannel shirt, rolled-up pants. Good morning! Fee said. The man smiled. Good morning! the man responded. How are you?! Fee and his students were on their way to D.C. Central Kitchen to help staff members prepare some of the 5,000 meals for the needy. This visit marks the 12th consecutive year that Fee has brought students to Washington from his Pennsylvania school as part of the homeless class. Its aims go well beyond a student service trip. Students work next to homeless people, sleep next to them in shelters and get to know them. As the professor walked, he realized that his students had overlooked something important: Like so many people, they had been so busy getting from point A to point B, perhaps distracted by something like the weather, that they had missed a chance to extend a simple measure of dignity. He stopped his students. So how many of us said Hello to that nice gentleman back there? he asked. 2 Dan Morse, Freshmen from Gettysburg learn about D.C. homeless people by working with them, The Washington Post, October 11, 2014, (http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/freshmen- from-gettysburg-learn-about-dc-homeless-people-by-working-with-them/2014/10/11/0ecb64a6-5170-11e4-aa5e-7153e466a02d_story.html)
They said little, and looked at one another. Okay, let s work on that, he responded. We are blessed to be a blessing, as scary, and as wonderful, and as life changing as that is. In Jesus name. Amen.