The New Through the Eyes of the Old

Good morning!  I’m afraid I have to start off my sermon with an apology, today.  You see, normally when pastors write a sermon we do so with certain goals in mind.  Our hope, in the end, is to glean a relevant message from God out of the Scriptures and then do our level best to hit you square in the heart with it.  You see, to live in this broken and sometimes all too ugly world of ours is to have our hearts harden, to have them darken and grow cold.  It becomes all too easy to withdraw from the world, to ignore the needy, to turn our backs on the vulnerable and defenseless, to focus only on our own selfish wants.  It is for that reason, I think, that we as Christians know it is in our best interests to gather into community often and hear a message that tenderizes the heart.  A message that brings light to the soul even as it warms the cold places of our spirits.  It is for that reason that I need to apologize, however, because I have no intention of giving that kind of sermon.

                I have no intention of giving that kind of sermon not because I don’t feel it is important, that we as human beings don’t need to be deeply intentional about the state of our hearts, but because our text today requires something different.  Indeed, I feel if I preached such a sermon I would do a grievous injustice not only to you but to our lesson as well.  Ladies and Gentlemen, something absolutely remarkable happened with the institution of the New Covenant, and when Christ declared that he was giving us the keys to the kingdom it really was a groundbreaking and unheard of thing.  Coming from the religion of Judaism, a religion that told you what to wear, what to eat, and where to worship, a religion that regulated almost every area of human life; to have Jesus tell his disciples, both the apostles and us living today, that we have the keys, that we now are trusted as the highest officials in the kingdom, able to set policy, and make important decisions as to life, faith, and even worship all on our own.  We can choose what hymns we sing, what holidays we will follow, secular or otherwise.  We can create liturgy, and decide for ourselves what foods we ought to eat.  Yes we have Communion and Baptism, but even with these the particulars of when, where, and with what have been entirely left to the faithful.   But all this freedom comes at significant price, we have the freedom of choice, but we are also held responsible for what we do choose. 

To be responsible requires that we be very intentional with our choices, that we be thoughtful about what we do and why.  This means not only being aware of the advantages of what we have chosen, but also being very careful not to ignore the flaws that come with it either.  On point for our lesson today is our community’s choice to preach solely from the gospels.  I want you to know I agree with this decision wholeheartedly.  It makes us supremely Christ-centered, and deliberately keeps the gospel the focus of not only our worship but our lives as Christians.  I would not have it change for anything, but as a minister called by God under this system, I must tend to its flaws.  The flaw of preaching only from the gospels is that when you need the Old Testament to understand the gospel, the temptation is to do without.  By focusing only on a small portion of scripture it becomes really hard to show you what a passage means given the whole of the Scriptures.  And when really Big Picture things are happening in our gospels, Big Picture things that took several books in the Old Testament to articulate, we miss them, and we skew our reading of the gospel because we haven’t preached on anything else. Such is the case with our gospel lesson today.

                Now, as a pastor, I could have ignored all that.  I could have simply ignored the big picture, I could have stuck to our chosen method of simply writing an emotional sermon that only considers these few verses out of context from the much larger history of Salvation.  I could have hit you square in the heart, pounding the pulpit and shouting, “WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?  ARE YOU WILLING TO SACRIFICE FAMILY FOR CHRIST?  HOW DOES GOD KNOW IF HE’S FIRST IN YOUR LIFE IF YOU HAVEN’T SENT YOUR OWN MOTHER TO THE CURB FOR HIM?”  I could have done that, I could have written a sermon that punched your right in the solar plexus.  But that isn’t the point of this passage, and it would have been irresponsible and unfaithful of me to preach that sermon, though indeed at this point as Americans we all have heard it preached.  I could co opt the small picture presented in this gospel to my own selfish ends, but I am not going to do so.  Instead, what I am going to do is to help you see the part of the story in light of the whole, to the flower the mind in addition to stoking the embers of the heart.

                Often times when Jesus is doing something that seems out of character or just odd for him it is indeed because there are Big picture issues at work.  The Old Testament prophets held out a fervent hope that the new covenant would move away from a restricting religion to a relationship of conscience.  That instead of a thousand rules to enforce the externalities of faith there would instead be loving hearts that have no need of them.  The prophet Hosea proclaimed loudly that God desires mercy, not ritual sacrifice, and the acknowledgement of God rather than burnt offerings.  The prophet Micah shouted from the mountains, “The Lord has shown what he requires of you, he has shown you what the rules are…to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”  But of them all perhaps Jeremiah articulated the point best, when, in the wake of the destruction of Jerusalem, and as the last nail in the coffin of the old covenant was about to be struck, he offered this unrelenting vision.  “Israel will survive saith the Lord, and the covenant I will make with them will put my Torah in their minds, and it will be written on their hearts.  No longer will they teach their neighbor or say to one another, “Know the Lord,” for they will all know me.”   

                Now, when you reached the New Testament, when you read the words in the gospel that said, “I am giving you the keys to the kingdom of heaven, whatever you bind or loose on earth will be bound or loosed in heaven,” in that moment you may have heard much.  You may have heard 16^th century European theology, you even might have heard the voice of Mrs. McGullicutty, your old Sunday School teacher, but what you didn’t hear was the clamoring joy as the hopes and dreams of generations of Israelites were fulfilled.  It was here!  The time came!  The faithful no longer need to be broken under the law, no more is righteousness found in keeping such a cornucopia of rules.  With the coming of Messiah, the anointed one, humanity can at last enjoy the firstfruits of choice!  The saving work of God had not been in vain!

                But just as you would not have seen the Old Testament in that gospel lesson, just as you might well have read that verse and not realized all that those few words brought into being, so also might we miss the culmination of so many Old Testament hopes in the passage that lies before us.  Just as the prophets proclaimed the coming of a New Covenant of Freedom and Conscience, so also they too proclaimed the coming Kingdom of God.  Isaiah declared with boldness,

“A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit. The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him— the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of might, the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord— and he will delight in the fear of the Lord. He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, or decide by what he hears with his ears; but with righteousness he will judge the needy, with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth. He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth; with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked. Righteousness will be his belt and faithfulness the sash around his waist. The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. The infant will play near the cobra’s den, and the young child will put its hand into the viper’s nest. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

            Neither was the prophet Daniel silent, “And in (those days) the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all the kingdoms of mankind and bring them to an end, and it alone shall stand forever.  And, “There before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. 14He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.”

                So when we read our passage, when we see Jesus saying, “I have not come to bring peace but the sword,” we are confused, we scratch our heads, and we are tempted to move on, but what we are missing is the culmination of what generations of prophets foretold.  Jesus is saying “How can you not interpret the present time?  The promises of God are being fulfilled before your very eyes!  I am here!  I am the foretold One!  I am the branch of Jesse.  With Justice I decide for the poor, with righteousness I judge the needy.  I slay wickedness with my words and I am the One who establishes the kingdom where tears are no more.  But make no mistake, I am not here for peace at any cost!  The Father did not lead the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt to abandon them to the oppression of either Rome or Jerusalem.  My mission is not the elimination of a tyrant but the elimination of tyranny.  Every oppressive system, every government, every religion, that breaks my people’s backs will be hauled off in chains before me when all is said and done, and because of this, because there is so much at stake, expect the people who rely on those systems, who benefit from misery and despair, expect them to absolutely come out of the woodwork because of everything that I am doing. They will not be some far off Lord, they will not be strangers or aliens living in your midst, they will be your mother and your father.  They will be your brothers and sisters, they will be very people that you hold most dear.  They are the ones that will side with the enemy and they will do everything in their power to get you to do the same. 

                You see my friends, just as we in the New Covenant are enjoying the firstfruits of freedom promised to our ancestors so also do we see the Kingdom of God working diligently in our midst, but it means that we must be diligent.  We live in a very special time, a time when the promises of God our unfolding in ways never before seen, and because of that we must be wary.  Both require faithfulness and intentional obedience to Spirit of God among us.  Let us resolve to be careful in our actions, to be discerning in our words and in our relationships.  If we say we serve the Lord of Freedom, a Christ who teaches us how to act rather than telling us what to do, then let us be sure we act in such a way that all the forces of misery and oppression count us as implacable foes and let us do so knowing just who might turn on us in that fight.  Keep to what is good, steel your spirits for what is right, and do so knowing the battle has already been won.  No matter the evil or the ugliness, Good will overcome.  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.    

Out of Order!!

Out of Order!  Can you believe it?  But that’s what the sign said!  This isn’t how it was supposed to go, it’s not how my situation was supposed to resolve itself.  I was hungry.  I had money.  I needed food.  But the sign on that vending machine made it very clear to me that I wasn’t going to get food no matter how hard I tried.  It was nonsense!  It was uncalled for!  Why I’d even go so far as to say that it broke with inherent logic of the universe.  These things have a certain flow to them, you see, a particular chain of reason that goes all the way back to God Himself.  I had money, I went to a machine that was specifically designed to trade food items for money, and…it wouldn’t take my money.  The machine was out of order!  Not only was it out of order in the sense that it needed to be fixed but it was also out order in the sense that it was out of line.  I was hungry, and now I needed to spend 10 whole minutes to find some other place to get my food.  That’s 600 seconds!  4200 in dog seconds.  I swore that that when all was said and done somebody was going to pay for this travesty of injustice. 

We humans are such silly creatures, aren’t we? Dangerously ridiculous creatures, really.  Most people think that when we get this way because we hate having our expectations crossed.  That’s not quite true.  It goes deeper than that.  It’s not just about expectation and surprise, it is about clean and unclean.  Now when clean and unclean in this sense have very little to do with hygiene.  To the human psyche clean and unclean are much more about the perceived order of things, a deep and inherent belief in a universal order.  A gut feeling about what is proper and what is logical, and we can get rather unfriendly about the whole affair if we don’t get what we think ought to be coming.  Don’t believe me?  If somebody visited your homes and drew a single giant black circle on your living room wall, I don’t think any of us would like it very much.  I mean, it’s clean.  No one is going to get sick from it.  But it offends the sense of the proper, it violates how we believe things ought to be, and we react accordingly. 

We are a broken paradox.  We live in bodies that are the very incarnation of change, with a thousand cells moving and replacing themselves and doing those things that cells do, and yet we desire stability, we desire sameness, we love inertness rather than inertia, even though the only true stability is death.  Dead things don’t change.  Yes the rock might wear down, the rock might have change inflicted upon it, but ultimately the rock is incapable of change, incapable of life.  And yet it is the stone that we value, value to the point that we make even our own hearts out of it.

Now today didn’t go exactly according to script, did it?  I mean the script was still there, everything that we all normally get in a service is still here.  Nothing was missing.  We still communed, we still repented of our sins and received forgiveness, everything that we need to be filled and renewed for the week is here and yet I guarantee the only thing that you are currently happy about this morning is that you finally know who is to blame for all of it.  There is a part of us that is like, “Yes I got everything I needed, yes I got fed with the body of Christ, yes I was clothed in holy presence of God, but dagnabit Keven these things have a certain flow to them, and by mixing up the service you’ve broken the inherent logic of the universe.  As sinful broken human beings in need of God’s salvation, isn’t it our preferences that are really important? 

Now, why did I do this?  Why did mess things up so thoroughly?  I did so for two reasons.  First, everything that you’re feeling right now: the confusion, the anxiety, maybe even the irritation and the anger.  If you take all that frustration and multiply it by a thousand, if you pretend that everything you’ve felt here today is in fact what you’ve felt for every single Sunday of your life then you will begin to understand just how much the Jews hated the Samaritans. 

A Jew looked at a Samaritan and shouted “Out of Order!” You are out of line and need to be fixed!  Jews, after all, they said, are supposed to be pure-blooded Israelites.  Our lines are supposed to be untainted by Gentile Blood.  As a Jew, of course, you would have been there for every act of copulation your ancestors ever did, so clearly you could hold a Samaritan to that standard and not be a hypocrite.  The Samaritans were seen as half breeds, the descendents of the poorest Israelites who were not exiled to Babylon with the rest of their countrymen.  But the Jews also worshiped through the Torah, that was a box that had to be checked, and the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Samaritan Bible, was only 99.99% the same.  That wasn’t in the Script!  Clearly all the Samaritans were just going to have to die.

We read the text of our Scriptures, we read this very short line of words, and because it is so small we fail to be invited into the larger world that this gospel has in store for us.  We read it and pay it no heed, filing whatever wisdom we glean from it as we would an anecdote or a particularly witty fortune cookie.  But what would be evident to anybody at all familiar with that part of the world is the deep history of hate between these two peoples.  There was no love loss between Samaritan and Jew and they were well known for the antagonism they showed to the other.  It is not for no reason that James and John wanted them destroyed in the most fantastic fiery way possible.  They didn’t fit the bill, they weren’t following the Schedule, and when it came to getting all their boxes checked as Jews they didn’t even try.  The straw that broke the camel’s back, however, was that the Samaritans were denying them hospitality, and all because they were on their way to Jerusalem.

Now hospitality wasn’t like it is today.  Hospitality today we think of as fresh pillows at a hotel we had to pay for and all the below standard coffee that comes with it.  Hospitality back then was very different, it was a matter of deep personal identity.  Inns and hotels were in short supply in the ancient world, and indeed most people would have been too poor to afford one anyway.  If you were traveling at all, be you a merchant or a pilgrim, you relied on other people opening their homes and their pantries to you, otherwise you had to often poach for food and sleep out in the open where you would be vulnerable to robbers and raiders.  And as a home owner you wanted to invite strangers under your roof.  For one, it was a means of social status.  Whoever could provide lavishly for travelers caught the eye of your family and townsmen, earning their respect.  For two, it was the only real way to get news from far off lands.  There was no newspapers back then, no channel nine helicopters to report when the huns were invading again, so hospitality was often the only way to get the news of an invading army or a band of thieves that had moved into your area.  Lastly, if there was going to be an invading army the best thing you could do as an ancient home-owner to get them to spare you was to show them hospitality.  To be denied hospitality today is much like my story with the vending machine, irritating at worst, but to deny hospitality in the ancient world was a grievous and foolish insult.  It would be no wonder that James and John want them destroyed in the same manner as Sodom and Gomorra.

But Jesus will hear none of it.  The text says that Jesus “epitamao’s” his disciples, he rebukes, he strongly and sternly charges them in the same manner that he rebuked and sternly charged the devil and his demons.  God said in that moment of anger, in that high point of frustration and rage, “Don’t…you..dare.”  It is you that is out of order. 

Ladies and gentlemen, I asked to mix up the service today for two reasons.  One was to get you to understand and enter the emotional world of our gospel story, to see why the disciples did what they did and why God stopped them.  The other reason is so that you realize we are not any different.  We read this story as we often do, selfishly, and think, “Oh, this is just them.  THEY are doing something wrong.  THEY are the ones being rebuked.”  Ladies and gentlemen, we ARE them.  We are the people who insist on Order, who think righteousness amounts to checking boxes on a list, we are the ones who cannot stand certain people because they offend our sense of how the world should be.  We hope the other side presents us with an excuse for violence.  We cry “Out of Order” and we will demand blood on its account.  We have always been this way.

Jews not only did this to Samaritans, but Jew did this to Christian and Roman did this to both.  Saul stood by crying “Out of Order!” as Stephen was struck with stones. Around 70 A.D. Roman guards went into the temple treasury to take its wealth and when the Jews rebelled Rome struck.  Crosses arose around Jerusalem like a forest, and Rome cried “Out of order!  Out of order!”  When Nero made Christians into torches he cried “Out of order!”  Christian Orthodox Russians shouted it as they raided Jewish weddings to murder the bride.  Charlemagne shouted it as he went on to butcher the polytheists still living in his land.  Protestants exclaimed it as they drowned the Anabaptists and set fire to Catholic Priests.  American settlers yelled it in a rage, “Out of order!” as they took native American babies by the ankles and shattered their heads on rocks.   And on June 12, 2016 a native-born American Muslim cried “Out of order!” as he gleefully reloaded his assault rifle and killed or wounded over a hundred people at a Gay Latino nightclub in Orlando, Florida.  We think it is them, it is not.  It is us.  It is all of us.

As Pastor Don said last week, the first step in exorcizing any demon is extracting its name.  This demon’s name is self-righteousness.  Any time we think of another human being as less than human for acting improper, anytime we get enraged because life and people aren’t going according to the way we want them to we are engaging in that demon and that …has…consequences.  Take Jesus’ rebuke seriously, it is meant for every single one of us because we all desperately need it. 

The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, in the wake of Orlando, in the wake of all the death and the violence facing us this year, we all need to realize this problem is never going to resolve itself unless we do one and only one thing.  We stop insisting on our rights and we start talking about our Samaritans.  Amen and Amen.