Economy of God

Proper 13 B: The Economy of God

August 5, 2018 by Cam Miller

As I was mulling over the whole
Jesus and “bread” thing
the Pledge of Allegiance
kept creeping into my thoughts.
It was kind of like an earworm –
a tune you can’t get out of your head,
and I couldn’t figure out why it was hovering around
in my strange little brain.
Then it hit me like a ton of bricks:
“I am the bread of life.”

Surely you see the connection now?

Okay, this is how my brain works,
or doesn’t work as the case may be.

A lot of people think about ‘the pledge’
in very religious terms.
I grew up at a time when people were burning
the American flag on a daily basis,
so taking a knee during the anthem
seems downright respectful in comparison.
But if you are someone who literalizes the flag
as the object of allegiance,
any disrespect is going to feel outrageous.
If “I pledge allegiance to the flag…”
means literally, I dedicate myself to the actual flag,
then the flag itself
becomes a sacrament
instead of a symbol.
As we know, a sacrament is imbued
with a great deal more freight than most symbols.

In contrast to a sacrament,
a symbol has a kind of mental weight to it –
a poetic image verses flesh and blood.
A sacrament has flesh on it – it is the thing itself.
So thinking religiously about ‘the pledge’
turns the flag into something more than it is.
But holding the flag as a mere symbol
allows much more room to explore
the elements and implications
of the flag as a symbol.

The same contrast can be applied
to the idea that Jesus is bread –
as in “bread of life.”
And that brings me to the song,
“I am the bread of life.”

While that song has an inspirational
and uplifting tune,
I find its lyrics very difficult to sing sometimes.
The lyrics to “I am the bread of life” say:

“The bread that I will give
is my flesh for the life of the world,
and those who eat of this bread,
they shall live forever…

Unless you eatof the flesh of the Son of Man
and drink of his blood,
you shall not have life within you.”

Well, just like thinking religiously
about the pledge
can turn a piece of fabric
with stars and stripes on it
into more than it is,
the same kind of thinking
can turn flour, water, and yeast
into flesh and blood.

But my way of thinking
takes a much different turn
when it comes to Jesus and bread.
I’m not saying my way of thinking is best,
or truest, or anything else,
but it may help you to understand this guy
you listen to yammering week after week.

What my mind wants to do
is understand the relationship between
Jesus and manna.

The reason I feel compelled to go there
is that Jesus was a Jew
and he could not help but think of bread
and manna in relationship to one another.

And when he thought about manna,
it would surely cause Jesus to think
of God’s abundantlove
rather than an implied threat to those
who do not believe,
which is the turn that song seems to take.
And in all fairness to the song,
it reflects the turn the author of John’s Gospel
seems to take.

So let’s dig into manna a little.

The Gospel of John,
written seventy or eighty yearsafterJesus died,
says that Jesus is the “Bread of Life.”

That really meant something in those days.

Bread was often the difference
between life and starvation.
And in Israel’s communal memory,
bread was also more than basic calories
because it was totally
intertwined with manna.

Basic sustenance and deep memory
made bread something very different
for those ancients
than it is for us modern folk.
For people of modern affluence,
like most of us,
bread is a little morsel on the side we nibble
before the real appetizers arrive.
To Jesus, and those who shared the world with him,
bread was the main course.
Like rice throughout Asia,
bread kept people alive.

To most of us, today,
bread is something that keeps our hands clean
while we eat lunch meat, chicken salad,
or sauerkraut and pastrami.

To say Jesus is bread– for laborers,
subsistence farmers,
fishermen, and even soldiers
that lived in the first century with Jesus –
meant that Jesus was a primary staple of diet.

Jesus is bread,
declares he is the main source of calories.
Jesus is bread,
meant he is a sustainer
who fills the hole that hunger digs,
and staunches that daily dread of insecurity
in a world in which you never knew
if there was going to be enough to eat the next day.
Think of it: If you had a loaf of bread,
some of which you could save until tomorrow,
then you had security beyond sundown.
That would have been a very good day for most people.

Bread was often the only thing standing between you and hunger on a daily basis –
the thing between you and starvation,
between you and death.

Declaring Jesus is the bread of life
is a metaphor of such massive proportions
I am not sure we can even get
our imaginations around it today.
But as I said,
it all goes back to manna.

Here is a CliffsNotes reminder
of the story and circumstance of manna.

After Moses and the slave nation
escape Pharaoh’s army,
they end up in the desert wilderness.

According to the story,
there were thousands of them
and the only food they had
was what they were able to carry with them
the night they escaped.
It wasn’t long before that food ran out
and they were in the desert hungry
and full of panic.

Idealistic visions of hope
soon turned into the anger and resentment of the mob:
“The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness…’If only we had died at the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.’”

So, as the story goes, God intervenes.
In the morning dew, miraculously,
there rains down upon the earth a substance
called “manna” – from then on,
known as the bread of heaven.

Manna had special properties,
very special properties.

First, God alerts the people
that there will be enough for everyone.
That is the first property of manna:
there is always enough of it to sustain those who eat it.

The second property, God tells them,
is that manna can only be eaten in the moment,
never kept more than a day.

No hoarding, God says.
But of course, the first thing that hungry,
scared, and starving people do,
is try to stash some.
But when they do, they discover
that second property:
it only lasts one day
and then gets wormy, stinky,
and gross.

Now if we engage this story with a little theological reflection,
which is what my brain likes to do,
it will bring us to some startling conclusions.
One possible rendering of the manna story
suggests that manna,
with its intrinsic properties
told to us in the story,
is the primary currency in the economy of God.

That phrase right there,
the economy of God,
is a way of messing with an important
and traditional Christian symbol:
the kingdom of heaven.
To call the kingdom of heaven
the economy of God
is to more plainly reveal that it has to do
with real life stuff that is here and now,
not just pie in the sky when we die.
I honestly think that is what Jesus was getting at
when he spoke so often about the kingdom of heaven.

Thinking about that manna story,
if the property of manna is
that there is always enough to go around
and everybody gets enough,
then perhaps it is saying to us –
even today, so many millennia later –
that anything that really matters
cannot be collected, amassed, or hoarded.

Let’s think about that
with an open mind and a deep breath:
In the economy of God
there is enough to go around
and everybody gets enough,
so that anything that really matters
cannot be collected, amassed, or hoarded.If that is true,
if that is actually the way the kingdom of God works –
and we are supposed to pray that
thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven–
then think about what we are actually asking.

Symbols and sacraments aside,
our real work – the thing our spiritual practice
and community of faith is supposed to be up to –
is co-creating with God,
the kingdom on earth as in heaven.
In other words,
we are supposed to be creating, with God,
an economy in which there is enough to go around.

Whoa.

One thing we know right now
is that in our world today,
poverty is a problem of distribution
not an issue of scarcity.
We DO have enough to go around
if we were to distribute it differently
and hoard it much less of it.

So now we can see, that this manna story
as well as the Jesus is bread story,
has a point aimed at us and we can feel it poking.

To say Jesus is the Bread of Life –
the manna we need to survive –
is to say, thy kingdom come, thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.

What that means,
if we use our theological imaginations,
is that we are supposed to be co-creators with God.
In other words, we are supposed to bring about
the kingdom on earth as it is in heaven:
the economy that God intends for the world.
It is not something that any one of us can do
all by ourselves, or even
a few of us gathered in groups
and impassioned to change our ways.

It is a collaboration between God and us,
and somehow, we have to convince
enough other human beings
that we would all be better off
living on manna
than hording what we imagine is the good stuff.

The first challenge we have
is convincing ourselves and one another
that all those material creature comforts we adore
is not our manna.
We imply such twisted thinking
with some regularity, maybe
without meaning to, when
we say we are blessed or someone else is blessed,
because they have stuff or got some more stuff –
even though we know true manna cannot be hoarded.

So often we think that blessings
are something some people ‘get’
and others lack.
Because we are so used to thinking that way,
we have commoditized manna
by talking about health,
success,
wealth
or beauty
as blessings from above.

In this scheme of things,
there are those who are blessed
and those who are not –
as if the economy of God
operates on the principle of scarcity
instead of abundance.

But that is because we define blessing so completely
by the amount of stuff we have
or our security, power, and health.
That is how our economy operates.
In God’s economy, rather than ours,
there is only blessing.
The story of manna in the wilderness
is a little reminder of that.

We have all been blessed;
we areall blessed.
No one gets more manna than anyone else
and no one gets more blessing than anyone one else –
we have all been blessed.

We would see and understand that
if ever we established the economy of God
on earth
as it is in heaven.

But until then,
we suffer and inflict suffering on one another
by amassing and hoarding anything we can,
and then we blame those who didn’t get much
and say it’s their fault.
It is absolutely as crazy a way of thinking as it sounds,
which is why Jesus asked us to give it up
and instead, work with God
to create God’s economy
on earth
as it is in heaven.

So, Jesus is manna:
he is a reminder that there is always
enough to go around
and everyone gets enough,
and anything that really matters
cannot be collected, amassed, or hoarded

Proper 20A 2017: Mercy Resentment

September 24, 2017 by Cam Miller

For children, life is a justice issue.
For many adults that never changes.
“Did I get what I deserve?”
“Did I get my reward?
“Did I get my share?”

My mom was a bit obsessive
when it came to making sure each of her five children
had exactly, and I mean exactly,
the same number of Christmas and birthday presents.
But even on a daily basis she made sure
that at dinner everyone had exactly the same
proportion of each serving –
more than once I saw her counting the green beans
on every dinner plate.

The book of Jonah
is a hilarious one-page book of the Bible
about a bean-counter extraordinaire.

I won’t regurgitate the whole story,
pun intended,
but for those that do not know this story,
God knocks on Jonah’s door (so to speak)
and tells him to go to a distant country called Nineveh,
and then tell the Ninevehvites
they are bad boys and girls
and they need to repent OR ELSE!

The ‘or else’ is God will “smite” them.
No one wants to be smitted.
No one really knows exactly what it feels like
to be smitted, but it sounds really bad.

We should remind ourselves
that in 4^th century BCE Mesopotamia,
a peasant listening to the Jonah story
would have no doubt that any one of dozens of gods
had the power to do some wicked smiting.

Try this small act of imagination.
Conjure up the horrendous images
of Texas towns under water,
or Caribbean islands after this week’s hurricane,
or Mexico City crushed by another earthquake.
Now imagine all the victims
of all that suffering
believing it was the result of a punishing God.
God tells Jonah
to go warn Nineveh they will be smitted,
unless something changes fast.

A 4^th century B.C.E. peasant most likely
would have lived through one or more smiting events in his or her lifetime,
and such a threat
would surly have caused them to shudder.

“Yeah, sure thing, I’ll do that right away,”
Jonah tells God,
then runs the other way.

Now as 21^st century folk who don’t believe in smiting,
we imagine all Biblical heroes are like Abraham,
who said, “Yeah sure,”
and then went above and beyond what God asked.
But not Jonah; not in this story –
and not in a bunch of other stories as well.

Jonah hops a on the nearest ship and sails away
to get as far beyond the reach of God as possible.

That is just one of the funny
and surprising parts of the story
if we were hearing it in the 4^th century BCE.

In those days, everyone knew that any god
was a god of place – a local god.
So you might be able to out run a god if you had to.
If it was a god you didn’t like, it was also a god
of that place
or those people
or that country.

Escape that place
and you might find a god more to your liking.

So Jonah gives God a head fake
and then makes a mad dash for somewhere else.

To make this short story even shorter,
God follows Jonah.
God agitates the ocean
that incites the sailors
that fling him overboard
that causes a big fish to gulp him down in one piece.

Now imagine Jonah’s surprise,
and the laughter of those hearing this story,
when the big fish belches him out.
Where? On the shores of Nineveh!

So now we are caught up
with the part of the story we read today.

What we heard this morning
answers the question about why Jonah
ran away from God in the first place.

Because, Jonah whines,
I knew you were a god of mercy not justice!

Jonah just knew
that after haranguing the Ninevehvites
about dire consequences,
God would show them mercy. Bah!

Jonah was just like us,
resentful and angry when the beans get miscounted.

Jonah is deeply disturbed
because God is going to be merciful
toward people he told, in no uncertain terms,
to change or get smitted.
“I knew it,” Jonah spits.
“I knew you were a sissy-god!
I knew you were a bleeding-heart liberal god!
Mercy, bah humbug!”

Now we can pretend,
sitting here in our very polite
and earnest Sunday-go-to-meeting mindset,
that we would not be angry and resentful,
but please, tell it to somebody else.

All of us have that juvenile penchant for justice living inside us.
4^th century BCE or 21^st century CE,
the Jonah story is about you and me;
a story about how we prefer justice to mercy, unless WE are the ones in need of mercy.

The Matthew story is more of the same,
without the humor.
We can bet that when the good ol’ boys
that had been working all day
heard the Line Boss paying the last hired
a FULL DAY’S PAY,
they were salivating for the windfall headed their way.
Who wouldn’t?

But then the Line Boss
pays them exactly what was contracted for.
They were incensed.
They were furious.
They were resentful –
all because they got paid what was expected,
while someone else got mercy.

Mercy is perfectly fine if WE are the recipients,
but if someone else gets mercy
when we only get justice,
look out!

Mercy.
The last few weeks
we have been stuttering on mercy and forgiveness
because that is where the readings have pointed us.
It is a kind of worldview
rising up in the mist between the verses of the Bible
from the book of Genesis all the way to Matthew.

It is a worldview that claims
the Economy of God
is guided by the invisible hand of mercy.
That is different than our economy.

Anyone who took Econ. 101 knows
that our economic system is guided
by production and scarcity – not even justice.
That is radically different from God’s economy.

The Economy of God,
if the Bible is to be believed even a little,
is guided by the laws of
extravagant,
excessive,
profligate mercy.

If we stopped to think about it,
if we even believed it,
it would make us angry enough to spit.
It is almost humorous how infantile we can be
when it comes to justice and mercy.

Let’s take an esoteric and abstract example,
to give us a little emotional distance
from our penchant for justice,
so that we can see it in better focus.

When human beings have imagined
the other side of death,
invariably it is a scheme built on justice, not mercy.
Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity
all assert an intimate relationship between
how we live this life
and the quality of another life.
No matter which religion, or whether
it is an Afterlife or the Wheel of Life,
there is always a relationship between
here and now, and then and there.

Reincarnation,
Samsara,
Heaven and Hell,
whatever, are all based upon a connection
between our behavior (or consciousness) now,
in this life, and the next life or dimension.

But what if there is no connection?

What if God really is as radically gracious
as indicated in the parable of the Generous Employer?

What if God’s mercy bears no relationship to justice?

What if God embraces good guys and bad guys
with the same joy and tenderness?

If the Economy of God really does operate
by the invisible hand of mercy then…
well, then what?

Well then, we will have to find new reasons
to do what we think is right,
instead of trying to motivate ourselves
with fear, guilt, or shame.

So imagine no fear.
Imagine no fear of the law.
Imagine no fear of punishment.
Imagine no fear of being caught.
Imagine no fear of Hell.
Imagine no fear of judgment.

Suddenly, we would need to find another motivation.
Suddenly, we would need to find
additional drive and impulse
to live our lives by the core values we claim.

Imagine spirituality with no guilt and no shame:
no guilt that we did not live up to expectations,
and no shame that we have failed.

Imagine religion with no guilt that we did not do
whatever it was we were supposed to do,
and no shame that we are not what we had hoped.

We would need to find new motivations
for resisting the temptation to forsake our principles.
What would those motivations be?
What could possibly be more powerful
than fear, guilt, and shame?

Just this:

That the values we have chosen are the ones we love.
That the principles we acclaim,
we believe deep down in our bones,
are the best ones to live by;
That we are convinced of our core values because we have experienced their wisdom, rather than because someone else or some other authority told us they should be ours to hold.

No fear,
no guilt,
no shame; and instead,
because our values, principles, and beliefs
are the ones we love
and the faith we hold
and the principles we have discovered
are the right ones to live by.

Without fear, guilt or shame,
when we violate our principles, values, or faith –
which we will always do because we do not have a snowball’s chance in Hell of perfection –
we will fall into the arms of God’s mercy
and recover there.

And if we do that,
instead of dwell in the valley of fear, guilt, and shame,
we will be more merciful to others,
and let them off the hook
so they can keep trying too.

We could call a world like that, a Life-giving Cycle
in contrast to the current one,
which is a Vicious Cycle.

The Viscous Cycle is a downward spiral
of fear, guilt and shame
that actually makes it harder for us to recover
and live our core values and faith.
A Life-giving Cycle is an upward motion
healing us and empowering us
to live out our values and faith
even as we stumble over our failures.

A Life-giving Cycle
rests upon our embrace of mercy more than justice,
of loving-kindness more than reprisal,
of humility more than vindication.

And the good news is, the best news really,
it is our choice!

It really is our choice
whether we live by mercy or justice.
All of us have been raised in the justice-system,
and we have been infected with or wounded by,
fear, guilt, and shame.
But the great thing about growing up
and spiritual maturation,
is that we have choices to make.
We get to choose
whether to live in the kingdom of mercy
instead of chasing justice.
To be sure, it is a learning curve
and it takes a lifetime to learn and re-learn,
but it all begins with our choice.

We can be sitting here, even now,
like Jonah under the shade of resentment
and pouting about things we don’t like
or changes taking place,
and decide – actually, choose – to be different.

Lord, have mercy upon us.

Proper 13 B: The Economy of God

Proper 20A 2017: Mercy Resentment

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