Yeah...I Got Nuthin'

Good Morning!  Before we go into our gospel lesson for today, I feel the need to ask for your assistance.   What I propose is very simple - I’m going to read to you gelled down versions of all the gospel texts we’ve had since the beginning of August followed by who preached on them.  I want you tell me if you notice a pattern.  To begin:

August 7^th : “It is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” – Pastor Don

Aug 14^th I have not come to bring you peace but the sword – Pastor Keven

 Aug 21^st The old woman healed on the Sabbath – Pastor Don

Aug 28^th Humble yourself so you may be exalted – Pastor Craig

Sep 4^th Hate your Father and Mother – Pastor Keven

 Sept 11^th Welcoming Sinners – Pastor Craig

…and now this week I get “How to make friends by stealing from your boss.” 

The question I have to ask here … is it just me?  I mean, I don’t want to name any names, Don and Craig, but if I didn’t know any better I’d say you were pranking the new guy.  Now, I know that would never happen in Chuck Prokosh’s church, and with such pillars of seriousness as Jeremy Webber and Raymond Staffa, I know that can’t possibly be the case.  But, guys, I’m seriously in danger of developing a reputation here!  “Oh, whose preaching today at Eastside?  Uh, oh.  Looks like old “hate thy mother and thy father” Glassel’s preaching from the pulpit again.”  A little variety, please!  I mean the holidays are coming up, I don’t want to preach on Herod’s slaughtering of the innocents over Christmas!

                Now, I’ll be the first to admit our text for this week is extremely difficult, it is by far one of the most confusing things Jesus has ever been recorded as saying.  Would you like to know how difficult this text is?  In preparation for this week, after pouring over the history and the language, after double checking the Greek and looking over Luke as a literary whole, after spending hours and hours letting it all gel …yeah, I got nothing.  This text was really frustrating, it’s oddly placed and the content is just strange.  Even the other gospels avoid this story!  Matthew, Mark, and John are all looking at Luke and saying, “THAT’s the story you put in?” I even looked in the commentaries, both modern and classic, and you know what I found out?  They don’t have a clue either.  I did find a translation that worked well.

                “Jesus told his disciples: “There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions. So he called him in and asked him, ‘What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your management, because you cannot be manager any longer.’ “The manager said to himself, ‘What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job. I’m not strong enough to dig, and I’m ashamed to beg— I know what I’ll do so that, when I lose my job here, people will welcome me into their houses.’ “So he called in each one of his master’s debtors…  “The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly. For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light. I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.”

                The translation is nice, much more preachable, but there’s just one problem.  It doesn’t actually say that!  I mean other than the fact you are deliberately misconstruing Scripture, I guess it’s ok.  So, here we have a gospel text that stumps the lawyer/preacher, confuses the commentators, and is so strange that even translators are embarassed by it to the point where they feel the need to cover it up.  That’s how tough this text is.  So, Don, you were busy this week, that’s why you wanted to switch?

                So the question is, what are we supposed to learn from this?  What’s the point of putting this story in the lectionary?  Why preach on it at all?  Well, as it turns out, I think it’s actually here for a very good reason.  Quite a few reasons, to be honest.  And perhaps I am exaggerating things a bit to say, “I’ve got nothing,” but the reality is this text is rather inscrutable.  I do have an interpretation to give but that interpretation is only my best guess.  It’s not going to be any better than yours or anybody else’s and I have no right to pretend otherwise.  I think, though, that is the first lesson our text provides: that when you come to Scripture, be prepared to be humbled.

                Luther himself said that if there be any disagreement between men, that the only godly recourse is to have them both come to the Scriptures as beggars looking for bread.  I find I cannot disagree with that sentiment, for beggars we are.  No matter what job we have, no matter how many protections we have built up, how many insurance policies we pay for, it can all fall apart in a matter of moments.  Though we have had many technological breakthroughs, though we cure diseases that once scourged the ancients, though we fulfilled that ancient human wish of flying with the birds and searching out the mysteries of the deep, we all still exist by God’s grace alone.  It is not by our intellect, not by our power, that knowledge gets revealed to us, and the meaning of every verse in our Scriptures will only become apparent when God wishes it so.  Not before.  So when we come across texts like this, when we read in Exodus that Moses’ wife Zipporah saved her husband from God’s wrath by circumcising him and touching his flesh with the skin, when we read in the book of Kings that God wanted an excuse to be mad at the Israelites so he made King David screw up so he could punish them, we know that the first lesson these texts teach is humility.  The reality is we don’t know their meaning.  Our Scriptures, ladies and gentlemen, are comprised of documents that are at least 2000 years old, all from long dead cultures, penned in three long dead languages, and all authored by very long dead people.  And when I think of that, when I really dwell there, I realize the miracle of the scriptures is that any of these texts should speak to us at all.  That after years of study that this pastor can only think of three difficult portions within a whopping 66 of these ancient books is an amazing testament to God’s providence.

                The second lesson I think this text teaches is the need to be uncomfortably honest with one another.  This is not something we Americans are good at.  Indeed, in our culture it’s assumed that we hide things, that we deliberately misinform people and we’ll get mad at you if you don’t play this particular game.  The answer to “how are you doing” is not about eliciting an honest response anymore than “how does this outfit make me look!”  And let me tell you, that it is assumed we hide important things from each other gets built even into seminarian education.  It was rammed home to me time and time again how I need to meet perceptions as a pastor, that I must always have an answer, that I must always seem like the expert.  And I thought to myself, “Oh, there’s a resume zinger if I ever heard one.”  “Keven Johnson-Glassel, appears knowledgeable and is really good at seeming like an expert.”  I don’t want to appear knowledgeable.  I don’t want to deceive people into thinking I’m an expert.  My position here behind this pulpit is not pretend to be an expert but to actually be an expert.  And as an expert I am here to tell you there are still lots of stuff in these books we’re trying to figure out.  So when reading your Bibles, it’s okay to be confused.  We get that way, too. 

                And I think that’s the third lesson this text teaches.  That it’s ok to fail.  We don’t need to get awe inspiring wisdom out of scripture every time.  We don’t need to get mystical fulfillment out of scripture every time.  We don’t even need to get a meaning out of scripture every time.  What we need to do is to show God we tried - that we are willing to struggle and wrestle with the words even though we might fail.  Valuing Him enough to put our egos aside and be confronted with our ancestor’s experiences of Him I think means more than any Bible commentary and is far more spiritually fulfilling than any sermon.

                And that’s what we try to model for you up here.  That it’s okay to struggle with this.  Often times, if you just keep at it, it is very rare that you’ll get nothing out of a particular verse or text.  Something profound almost always comes.  So, yes, this text was difficult for me, and it outwitted every single one of my resources: from language, history, culture, and scholarship.  But I asked God for help, the same option you all have, and while I wasn’t given anything like a definitive answer, I was given something helpful that I had never considered before. 

                Now, it’s pretty clear that Jesus doesn’t want you to steal so you can make friends, so you can just calm down right now, but given that there are two things that jump out at me.  First and foremost, the fate of the unrighteous manager is not stated.  While the rich man praises his shrewdness he does not say he can still be manager.  The second thing that jumps out at me, however, is, yes, this man is dishonest.  Yes, this manager is a thief, and when he helps people it is only in the most lazy, self-serving way possible.  So yes, the accusation laid at the manager in this parable is that he is a lazy, dishonest, self-serving sinner who helps people, but the reality is the accusation laid against me might very well be I am a lazy, dishonest, self-serving sinner who doesn’t.  In the upside-down world of the gospel, salvation is an active sought-after thing.  God wants us to be saved, he wants us to give him at least some excuse to come to our rescue.  Now I don’t mean this in a works-righteousness kind of way, we in no way earn God’s grace.  I will not insult the Father by trying to buy what God offers for free.  Rather I believe our actions evidence our intent, and if we want to be saved it means we have to act like it.  Have no illusions, ladies and gentlemen. When the time comes for us to meet our Maker don’t think for a minute that all we didn’t do will be some kind of defense.  I think to a great extent, the unrighteous manager is us.  That’s how God sees us.  We are all lying, thieving, self-serving and lazy.  We can’t help it.  Even when we do good, there is still a part of us that does it for evil reasons.  It’s what we are.  As St. Augustine himself said, I cannot not sin.  The question is not whether I will refrain from sin; that is out the question, but whether I will help others despite my own sinfulness, to give God even a pathetic excuse to come spare my sorry hide.  That, I think, is the point of this text.

                But once again, that is only one interpretation among many that are possible.  So, I invite you as your pastor, read this for yourself!  Go to God and ask him to reveal what you need out of the text, do not let these pages go unturned.  The books of our Bible have frustrated many.  Luther himself is said to have thrown a copy of Revelations into the river.  The words in our Scriptures can be inscrutable, but there is wisdom and purpose there, thousands of years worth of experiences, successes and failures.  You will not find such treasure in any other book on earth.  So go home this afternoon and open these pages anew.  The worst that will ever happen is that you’ll be forced to preach about it, but even then you will still find riches meant only for you.  Amen and Amen.  

The Very Real Human Cost of Greed

Good morning!  Grace and peace unto you from God our Judge and Jesus Christ the arbiter and enforcer of our faith…boy, that really doesn’t sound too nice does it?  I mean, in a sense it is true.  God does judge, and our experience of Jesus at the end of history will be quite a bit different than the way we encountered him at the first.  Wise Christians are slow to invoke this aspect of God, especially in worship, and I think they do so for a very good reason.  While it is easy to get caught up in the American trend of self-righteousness, to paint causes and people as all either all good or all evil, specifically our own causes as all good and everybody else’s as all evil, the fact is we as mature people of faith realize that to call up images of the divine courtroom demanding judgment often does little more than put ourselves at the very top of docket.  This is why “Judge not, lest ye be judged” has been a mantra of the Church since its very foundations, because as Christians we know that God will bring justice about, in fact he will get right on their case just as soon as He is done with ours.

          Our gospel lesson today begins with such a legal dispute.  A family has been split apart over a matter of inheritance and a random man in the crowd seeks Jesus’ aid.  He is not asking Jesus for help to be reconciled to his brother, however, nor is he not coming to Jesus out of a place of suffering and needing a grievous wrong to be righted; he merely sees an opportunity, he wants to use Jesus to get the outcome he wants, namely the outcome that nets himself more stuff.

          I must admit, I feel I know this situation all too well, and I know it for several reasons.  As someone with his law degree I could tell you horror stories of families that tore each other apart as they greedily sought to gain money through the law, I could tell you all the twists and weaves the courts have had to do specifically with wills and estates.  I could tell you how well developed Inheritance Law is because of all the people, Christian people, willing to sue their brothers and sisters in court instead of peaceably and justly negotiating at home.  I know this situation well not only because of my legal training, but I also know it well because as a human being with a family I have lived it every single day of my life.

          I’ll be honest, I’ve been a pastor of this congregation for almost a year now, and it absolutely has been one of the greatest honors and joys of my life.  But when I hear you speak warmly of family, of brothers and sisters who visit, of fond memories of cousins, uncles who helped to cover up misdeeds and aunts who for all the world are simultaneously best friends and wise women, I’m at something of a disconnect.  I don’t know what any of that is like.  My brother doesn’t talk to me.  My aunts prayed for my father’s death and they called me Satan’s spawn behind my back because I was raised Lutheran.  And my own parents, well, we are so estranged I doubt if I will even hear of their passing.  We are a family split apart, and it is because at the end of the day they have learned to value possessing things and currying influence more than they value their own children.

          Every event that happened in our family for as far back as I can remember was used as a kind of emotional debt, an opportunity to jockey for position from within the family and gain some financial benefit.  One daughter needed help one time and all the others made sure their parents never forgot it.  “You helped daughter x with their house payment, why can’t you cosign on my car loan?  You cosigned daughter y’s car loan, why won’t you help us buy land?”  And on, and on, and on for generations.  If you were to walk into my grandmother’s house today and if you would check under the vases, under the base of her magnificent doll collection, you would find stickers with her daughter’s names on them.  Her children went into their home and laid claim to their mother’s and father’s things while they were still living.  I wish I was joking.  That’s how far greed took them and that is exactly the place greed will take all of you if you give in to it.

          And this attitude of greed, this desiring of things over the relationships that we have is absolutely the focus of our gospel lesson.  This random man that earlier in the gospel Luke tells us was in a crowd of thousands, all of whom bustling to hear Jesus’ teaching.  This man is there before the promised King, his long awaited Messiah and Emmanuel, God with us, but he is not there for wisdom, he is not there to be healed of some infirmity or to be set free from that which binds him, spiritual or otherwise.  No, he follows this crowd because he sees dollar signs, an opportunity to get what he wants out of a current dispute, and that’s about it. 

          And what does Jesus do? Does he listen to the man’s circumstances, does he inquire what the dispute is about?  No, Jesus calls him out and makes his passion for things an example to the entire crowd.  Jesus says the forboding words, “Man, who appointed me judge and arbiter over you.” Now some have interpreted this passage to mean that Jesus does not believe himself an earthly judge over earthly matters, but the fact remains that theology is nowhere to be found in Luke or any other gospel.  The reality is, ladies and gentlemen, this far into Luke it would be blazingly obvious who appointed Jesus judge and arbiter over the man in question, and that Judge looks upon such attitudes most poorly. What could be read as Jesus saying, “I was not appointed your judge, why are you involving me,” is instead, “You know who appointed me Judge over you, and you know the Father looks grievously on people with such wicked thoughts as yours.”

          It is here that Jesus then cries out to the crowd, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.” And to drive the point home he tells them a parable:

“The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’

“Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.” ’

“But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’

“This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.”

          In a culture that considered the wealthy blessed by God, this parable is more than enough to give them pause as it should us.  After all, what is the American dream BUT to build bigger barns so we may eat drink and be merry?  That a rich man would be so judged would have been astonishing, and today we as Americans pay this parable little heed because otherwise we would realize just how much we have in common with this doomed man.  Now does God want us miserable?  Does God want us to suffer, to be perpetually on the verge of starvation, and derive only misery out of this life that we have been given?  Of course He doesn’t!  God’s problem is not that we enjoy the bounties this life, His problem is that we continuously need to enjoy it to other people’s detriment.  Nowhere, does the rich man of the parable consider those less fortunate than him, nowhere does he even consider the state of his own family, for the doomed man it is all about him and what he wants.

          Ladies and Gentlemen, I ask you, does 10,000 dollars seem like a lot of money?  A person earning $7.25 an hour will spend 80 times that in their working career.  Very likely, every single one of us in this hall has already spent that amount of money or close to it in bills and the year’s only barely half over.  Is it really that much, then?  If you were offered a mansion to live in, would you take it?  Could you afford to upkeep it?  Could you pay the property taxes and fix all the things that could go wrong on the property, or would it simply rot in your keeping?  Is greed worth it?  Is it worth sacrificing family over?  Is it worth severing your relationship with God? 

My friends, I am going to point out something to you that is extremely sobering.  You know my children.  My children love you.  You have spent time with them, you’ve talked with them, engaged them, and help them grow.  You’ve granted them opportunities to serve, to befriend you and to befriend your own children.  You as a congregation have more memories and know my children better than all the rest of my family combined, and you see them for about an hour once a week.  My family is missing out on one of the best parts of life - getting to know the next generation, and for what?  A bigger barn?   

 A life of greed has consequences, ladies and gentlemen, both in this life and the next; but don’t think for a moment that we are somehow guiltless because others are more obvious about it.  How many families go unclothed despite our own full closets?  How many children sleep on our streets tonight, guarded over by pimps and drug dealers, and if you are familiar at all with the twin cities, then you know that is no small number.  How many of our most vulnerable must endure this because we have found it cheaper simply not to look? 

Ladies and gentlemen, what was the last thing you prayed for?  Did you pray to talk to your Father, to cast your worries and your cares on Him, or was it to ask for things?  A job you wanted, perhaps?  A good deal on a car?  That’s if you prayed to God at all, of course.  And when it came to giving to charity or buying something stupid and selfish for the week, who among us would dare stand up in this house and lie, saying we chose charity even part of time?  

          I say this again, because it is important, God does not want us to be miserable.  God does not expect us to starve ourselves or live lives perpetually on the verge of despair.  But God does expect us to be responsible with what we are given, and to not exclude the people who need our help the most.  We don’t have to be the doomed man in the parable, we don’t have to be the fool in the crowd of thousands, wasting a chance to meet God in a futile attempt to get more things.  We can value people.  We can stand firm in faith, knowing that God will indeed provide our daily bread.  We can live a life apart from fear, apart from greed and a misbegotten sense of self, we can live the best sort of life.  But we cannot continue to value Convenience and Comfort, Ego and Estates, over the needs of the human family and still pretend that we are the Body of Christ.    

The difference between Loving and Legal

Good Morning!  As many of you know I have worn a number of hats in my short time on this earth.  I have been a construction worker, a law graduate, and now a pastor, but in this particular instance I was a security guard.  I was the night lead for that particular property and I was the first responder for my shift.  We worked in what was essentially a factory setting and as 1^st responder that meant I received special medical training above and beyond first aid in order to deal with the injuries that would happen on site.  My job was to lead my other officers in the case of an emergency and no matter what we were to keep the injured person alive long enough for the ambulance to arrive.  So you see as a man trained in law, theology, and emergency response you might just be the first congregation to hire a truly full service pastor.  I can bring you into this world, keep you in this world, see you off joyfully into the next and even help you with your estate after you’ve left.

                There was a lot we did at that job, we helped people with chemical burns, diabetic issues, nasty cuts and even strokes, but all that didn’t phase me.  The building could burn down, a tornado could come by, a can of experimental chemicals could spill and turn everybody into a flesh-eating mutant, I could handle it.  What I hated about that job was midnight.  I hated midnight because midnight was shift change and shift change meant that HE would show up.  Now I had nothing against this particular HE but from almost the very outset he had something against me.  I remember when he first came there; he didn’t talk much.  I made sure to be polite and tell a few jokes, but soon afterward, let’s call him Tom, Tom became very belligerent.  He didn’t exactly say nice things, things I wouldn’t dare repeat in a sermon, and he made it very evident he didn’t like me much.  One night when he came in I was sure he was in fact going to hit me.  He took an intimidating stance, was a foot taller than me and twice as wide, he stood inches away from me, and looked me in the eye with his fists clenched.  I looked him in the eye also, but gently, and kindly gave him plenty of room to put his stuff down on the security desk.

                Quite frankly the situation confounded me.  Literally having said only a handful of words to the man, words of such nefarious intent like, “Hello and how are you” his anger, no his hatred was simply inexplicable.  I decided to make the best of the situation, however, and so every day he came in I decided to shower him with kindness.  I gave him his space, told him what he needed to know from the previous shift, and made sure to wish him well every time I left.  His attitude didn’t change toward me, in fact it made it worse, but I made it out the door without any violence to my person either.

                Now, many of you might be wondering, Keven, why didn’t you tell your supervisor about it?  Oh, I did.  But we were inevitably the only guards when he did these things and he was always very sure to stay off camera, so whatever I said was always a he-said-he-said kind of a thing.  And while he was intimidating, belligerent, and abusive he also did so in ways that never technically broke the rules, at least in a way that anybody could prove.  This information would turn out to be very important.  You see, after months of this kind of abuse, little things could and would slip out.  Tom, you see, was an ex-cop, and not only was he an ex cop, he was a self-righteous ex cop who, as it turned out, had a passionate hatred for not only attorneys, but also for clergy.  How does the saying go, “If it weren’t for bad luck I’d have no luck at all,”?  To Tom, the Bible was written in Plain Language and the nonsense that someone would have to be trained to understand it so they could perform the duties of God’s religion was simply of the devil.  To him, I was the worst sort of shyster and a charlatan, more crooked than the mafia itself.  The fact that I had graduated law school, and was going to seminary, only cemented in his mind that I was the worst sort of person imaginable.

                Despite his actions and overall terrible attitude, that is not really what I remember him most for.  What I remember most about Tom are the stories he would proudly tell of his days on the force, stories of dragging and roughing up suspects who hadn’t even been found guilty, and his hopes and dreams of what he’d do to criminals if he were only allowed, things that, by the way, would have killed them or left them horribly, psychologically scarred. These were the stories of his own endless righteousness.  It was a world of light vs dark, good versus evil after all, and he knew that he was God’s shining sword.  I have never met a more compassionless man.  A man who knew every rule, followed everything to the letter and knew every loophole to get what he wanted.  A man who saw righteousness in rules, and despised anybody who had the authority, legal or spiritual, to contradict him.  He was a holy bully.

                Now, you may wonder, saying this all well and good Keven, but what does this have to do with our gospel text?  In reality, everything.  You see, we are a culture of rule lovers.  We read everything with an eye for some new law, some statute that we can gleefully pin others under – the reality is I’m afraid that people like Tom do not spring from a vacuum.  They learn our culture’s obsessions with laws and the power they grant very early on, and some learn its lessons very well indeed.  You see, we read this text hungry for new rules.  Look! We say, Jesus is going to hand down a new rule.  Moses gave one rule, but Jesus is giving us the REAL one.  The reality is, however, rules were never really the point; it was the people that really mattered.

                Our story begins with the Pharisees and they pose to Jesus a question of the law.  “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” they ask, a topic that for its day was a woman’s rights issue.  Jewish law, as it had been interpreted and enforced, said a man could divorce his wife for any and every reason, leaving his partner and the mother of his children on the side of the road to essentially all but starve.  A woman’s only means of survival in that day was the men in their life; a divorced woman would be very unlikely to remarry and her only hope would be if her father would retake her back into the family, which not every father did or even was alive to do. 

                Jesus, however, as he is apt to do, changes the tone of the entire conversation.  Rather than entering into a quagmire of laws and their interpretation he relates the entire issue down to a person.  He answers their question with a question of his own.  “Why are you asking this?  What did Moses command?”  Well now that we know what Moses commanded; did you think to ask why he commanded it?  Was it because Israelites are so righteous?  Is it because their hearts are in line with God?  No, Jesus tells them, Moses wrote this rule because your hearts were hard.  Instead of asking about rules, why not ask about God’s intentions for human relationships?  Was God’s intention to have people use each other and throw them away?  No!  God’s intention was for you to find your other half, to enjoy a life of partnership and intimacy.  Yes, you can call yourself law-abiding if you divorce your spouse, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re being faithful.

                Now, I think it important to say at this juncture that I don’t believe Jesus intends to be exhaustive here, either about marriage or about divorce.  I don’t think he intended to cover every possible coupling and uncoupling that would occur in human history.  Indeed, given that Paul feels free to recognize an exception in the case of a partner leaving their spouse, it tells me that Jesus was far less concerned about creating a rule to fit every situation than he was in raising up a compassionate people able to handle every situation faithfully.  I don’t think Jesus intended to be convenient for us, and so I think we must take Paul’s example when it comes to marriage and divorce, that we must realize exceptions to what we think is ideal exist and we must be compassionate and gracious in the very real brokenness of our relationships.

                But it is precisely this compassion the disciples do not get, this difference between what is loving, and what is legal.  They ask him again when they get a moment and again Jesus discusses the matter not in terms of rules and laws but in terms of the damage being done to another person.  A person who divorces their spouse for any and every reason, because that was the law of their day, they are not just committing adultery, Jesus says, they are committing adultery against a person, a real human being.  Listen to Jesus words, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her”. This is not some mere rule violation, a traipsing across arbitrary boundaries, it is taking your life-mate and dashing them against the rocks and trying to look holy and justified as you do it. 

                But the disciples still don’t get it, and when we see them again they are still enforcing society’s rules, keeping pesky children away from the rabbi.  “Our master has more important things to do then entertain your little brats,” they say and it is here at this juncture we see Jesus does something very rare.  He is indignant toward them and tells his disciples “Don’t you dare.”  Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, my disciples, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it."

                Children, you see, are wonderful little learners and take what they are taught on faith, but even more so have a very unique understanding of the rules.  Children are very concrete thinkers and do not understand rules as we do, they do not think in terms of breaking some abstract precept but rather they understand broken rules in terms of the people they will disappoint or the loved ones they might hurt. Amongst children, people are always the point and Jesus says that his disciples need to think that way, too.

                Friends, let us learn these lessons and learn them well.  Our society is already one that produces rule mongers and legalized tyrants, people who have a rule for every situation so they might prowl around as a roaring lion, looking for another to devour.  Let us not participate in a bankrupt world that sees no difference between immoral and illegal, but rather let us claim the freedom that Christ promises.  Let us joyfully enter the kingdom of the compassionate where the only law is Love.  Let us be citizens of heaven and have little regard for earthly rules and the hellish sorts of people who revel in them. Let us live as a people so good and so obedient that no crime could possibly be charged against us and let us not think in terms of rules but in terms of people.  Amen.