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| Our Greatest Gift Hosea 11:1-11
All those ingredients that served me so well at the time were no longer of the same value. Now my sandcastles had stems sticking out where they shouldn’t, my tea party cakes were marred, and worst of all my bare feet kept coming across things that made me uncomfortable. But how was I to return the sandbox back to its original form, to an image of unrealized and limitless potential. Enter one of my favorite summertime tools – the sifter, a bowl like container with holes just big enough for grains of sand to fit through and little else. I recall the almost hypnotic effect of the sifter as I would run shovel-full after shovel-full of sand through, shaking with a controlled gentility, until all that was remaining was the debris that I could cast aside, back into the indistinguishable earth from where it came. With the sand having returned to its true essence, I was free to once again imagine, create, and transform my sandbox world without the interference or limitations defined by prior successes - worthy of remembrance, but now past. Today’s Gospel passage from Luke about the rich man begs the question: If, as they say, you can’t take it with you, what is left? When we hear this story, we are challenged to consider the core of our essence. When we are sifted down, what remains? In Luke it is stated simply enough - we are cautioned that our lives do not consist in the abundance of our possessions. Our true selves are something other these our processions. But what are our possessions and what does our true self look like without them? When we can name that true self, that original form stripped of its earthly trappings, we can glimpse ourselves as God desires us most: we will be able to see ourselves as the Greatest Gift. Sometimes it just makes sense to start at the beginning, in Genesis, which in Divine irony also speaks to the end, which as it turns out are one and the same. In Genesis 3:19, the voice of God reduces this seemingly complex question to an almost embarrassing simplicity. We are told, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” And although this verse from Genesis has traditionally been experienced as a rather morbid reference to our mortality, which it most certainly is in its context, there is an opportunity here to see it also for its grander beauty as it simultaneously references our unique status among Creation. We are dust, we are a glorious dust – formed by the hands of our Creator and imbued with the Breath of Life. As some have said, we are Star Dust, a substance traced back to the very birth of the universe, the most basic building blocks of existence, elevated to the highest honor by being poetically gathered from the far reaches of the universe and formed in the Image of God himself. In the beginning, we just are. We just are God’s own unique creation. And in the end we just are. We just are God’s own unique creation. What words could possibly give justice to the awesome reality of such an honor. This is our first and greatest gift from God – our opportunity to participate in the glory of being. This is our true essence. But we know that that is not how we experience our earthly life. From whatever that Divine moment is when we come into being, God starts throwing things into the mix. Firstly, we are nested within a creation in which things grow, devolve, change. We are partners in a world in which change must be confronted, embraced, managed. So firstly, we are gifted with time. Secondly, we are nested within a creation in which our security and the security of others are not guaranteed. We are partners in a world in which forces conflict to shift the availability of resources in favor of one agenda over another. And as participants in this world of economy, we are gifted with treasure. Finally, we are nested within a creation in which we work, in other words, we create. In the image of our Creator, we too create, and in order to create, we are gifted with talents and abilities. In God’s abundance, we are each entrusted with varying degrees and diversities of time, treasures, and talents. In fact, we often pray that God would throw a little bit more of each of these our way. These are our possessions. They are that which we have been gifted with after receiving our first greatest gift of simply being. Yes, they are gifts from God, but as gifts they are also that which we have and hold. They can be measured, given, received, etc. Indeed, the traditional mantra of giving in the church setting during the stewardship season is to assess our giving in terms of “Time, Talent, and Treasure:” which together form the tripod upon which the work in the church relies. Our time and our treasures are intensely personal because they spring forth from our circumstances, our choices of the now and of the long since past. And like it or not, our allocation of these gifts show the world our priorities – as individuals and a communities. Yet however personal the gifts of time and treasure are, we are accustomed to being challenged to think of them as somehow separate from the essence of who we are. Our time is framed in popular discussions as something we can control. Time management and priority management are hot industries. And certainly within the faith community we have a conscious dialogue about treasure and a mounting materialism that is threatening our ecosystems and the integrity of our world economy. When it comes to time and treasure, we are accustomed objectifying them…. But when we turn to our talents and abilities, we are not as clear. Our talents and abilities are also incredibly personal, but differently so. Biblically our talents and abilities can be spoken of as charismata, they are the gifts from the Holy Spirit, and we tend to think of these gifts as innate – those which were specifically born in us, and even if not perfected yet were at least in origin meant specifically and uniquely for ourselves. Logically, we conclude that since they were uniquely gifted to us from God, they are inseparable from who we are. But the flip side of that perspective is that our talents, gifted to us by God, become something that actually set limits on our usefulness to God. First we assume that we are given the gift of talents for a reason and then presume to conclude that they define our purpose. And in doing so we opt out of responsibility for the realms that call for talents that don’t make us shine. In essence, we make an idol of our predispositions, our charismas, our gifts, living as if those possession, residing within ourselves, have the power to limit God. Returning to our reading from Luke, Jesus cautions us to be rich toward God. And I would not want to be accused of skipping over the obvious, because the first layer of truth in the text is that we are to be generous with our time, treasure and talent, as they are gifts entrusted to us out of God’s abundant love and not to be hoarded to feed our own vanity, comfort, and egocentricities. To use a trite phrase, we can’t take it with us. But in reality the text doesn’t really give an example of being rich toward God. It only gives an example of being rich toward self. It is our reading from Hosea that challenges us to consider in a new way what it means to be rich toward God, and it does so by transporting us into the heart of God when that richness is denied. In Hosea 11 we witness the miraculous and also painful birthing of Divine mercy. We watch with our minds eye as God Almighty, creator and Lord of all, stands at first confounded by unrequited love. Then as a spurned parent God retreats into sentimentality, recalling the days when Ephraim, a personification of Israel, was as dependent as a child, in need of and worthy of the Lord’s most tender blessings of love and affection. Then in agony from the loss of this neglectful child who has turn his back on the Lord, God descends into a rage, proclaiming the horrors that will come to his people, only to find that when standing on the precipice and looking into the metaphorical face of his beloved child, God’s love is stronger than his anger. God will not destroy Ephraim, because God is God and not man. What we witness in this passage is the agony of God denied his greatest desire, his beloved. God doesn’t lament the items that are sacrificed to other God’s; he laments that Israel, or Ephraim, has denied God himself. What is it God wants most? US!!! God desires us! God asks that we turn our lives over to him. Good discipleship and stewardship are the next step, yes. But first comes the surrender – our Greatest Gift. Our challenge, is to find that place within ourselves where we can approach the Lord as a new creation – one reborn with nothing but potential - not bound and limited by our successes, experiences, training, treasures, time. A saying that I find to be of great value is this: God doesn’t call the qualified, God qualifies the called. We should not assume that because we have the means to do something – the money, the time, the skill, the experience, even the desire – that it is what God wants us to do. In fact, God just may be calling us to do the thing that makes us feel the least confident, the most insecure, or worst of all, is the least interesting to us. Here is another way that I have heard this preached in the past. If God only calls us to do things we know we can do and we have already done before, what do we need him for? We can drive that car on our own. But when God calls us to step outside our comfort zone, then we really have no choice but to surrender the wheel. We need to be prepared to encounter the unexpected, to hear the ridiculous, and have those moments when we wonder if God dialed the wrong number. We need to be willing to listen to and discern our calling, and to say, “I have no idea how to do that, I don’t even think that I can do it, but since you are calling me I know that I will succeed, because you always succeed.” And taking a few steps backward in Luke, we find that Jesus provides us with instruction on how to surrender ourselves so completely. First a little context. Jesus has just finished blasting the Pharisees and the lawyers, crying out a series of “Woe to yous,” and hanging out their hypocrisy like so much dirty laundry for everyone to see. The sting has been deep and we are told the Pharisees and the scribes pursue him with a fury, trying desperately to catch him in a heresy or error, knowing full well the consequences they can rain down on him if they succeed. Jesus’ disciples are understandably nervous about the position
they are now in as having allied with an enemy of the Temple authority.
So when we then launch into Chapter 12 it is not really so surprising
that we find Jesus first addressing his disciples with words designed
for ease and confidence. And then we come to the troubling part,
which of course is the part that helps us with our lesson about
complete surrender of self. Maybe that is why it makes us so uncomfortable.
It is where we find the proclamation of the unforgivable sin – blasphemy
against the Holy Spirit. Beginning with Luke 12:10, the scripture
reads, How do we surrender our true selves over to God without allowing our time, talents, and treasures to define how God will use us? Well, it isn’t easy, and we have and will continue to make mistakes. But at least according to the scripture it is as simple as it is terrifying. To be true to the Holy Spirit is to trust that the Spirit will fill you with what you need when you need it. It is to open yourself up to real vulnerability, to pray with all your might that God’s will be done through you, whatever it is and whatever the consequences, stepping out in faith and being recreated into a new being. Isn’t that what Jesus did? Isn’t Jesus’ surrender to the will of God the supreme example of gifting back to God Our Greatest Gift? As today’s parable from Luke reaches its climax, God cries out, “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you.” Certainly, the basic assumption is that the rich man is to die that night a fool because he can’t take his abundance with him. But for us, the listener, there is a greater urgency than the fact that one day our “number will be up.” Biblically, the fact is that our time is ALWAYS up! Every moment we breath “our lives are demanded of us.” God Almighty is ALWAYS demanding our sacrifice – the sacrifice of ourselves over to his will. If we listen to that call, we just may be frightened but ultimately delighted by the diversity of ingredients that are introduced, sifted out, and reintroduced in a new way as we journey through our lives. But in the end, those things are NOT what
we are. In the end, we are glorious dust, and with the help of
God, like the sand cleansed
by the sifter, to dust we shall return, maybe even repeatedly,
long before we die. With the help of God, we will be liberated
from the golden handcuffs that are our time, our treasures, and
our talents – liberated into service as a new creation ready
to answer the call in faith that the Holy Spirit will equip us
with what we will need. That would certainly be our greatest gift.
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Is Still Speaking www.stillspeaking.com |
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