Gen 12:1-9, Heb 11:1-3, 8-16,

   Abraham is remembered for his faith.   It’s faith that motivates both him and Sarah to undertake a journey to  a new land where they will be a blessing to all humankind.

   Faith is central to our being here today.  Jesus talks about faith often, and praises people who have it.  Faith he claims is central to discovering the fullness of life he offers.  Often it seems that faith opens the door for the power of God to move as we see in the healing stories of Jesus.  Paul proclaims it is faith that will save us, and he is talking about the healing or salvation of the world.  Faith is vital stuff, faith is utterly central to the Christian life, but what do we mean by faith? 

   When I hear people talking it seems to me that the most common way of looking at faith in our time is believing that certain things are true.  Faith is believing that God is real, or that Jesus was God’s son, or maybe that Jesus was born of a virgin and walked on water.  Faith is about believing the resurrection.  People who believe these sorts of things happened usually some time in the past are called people of faith.  It is usually about believing that certain things are true which in the normal run of things might be considered odd or even impossible.  Equating faith with believing that certain things to be true was given prominence when Protestant traditions like ours were birthed in the Reformation.  The reformers were involved in all sorts of arguments about what was true and surprise, surprise, these arguments gave birth to a whole raft of churches that believed different things.  New creeds or statements about beliefs sprang up like the Westminster Confession which shaped our Presbyterian tradition.  I’ve seen the original confession now held at Westminster College Cambridge and seen the wonderful line in the confession that proclaims the Pope is the anti-Christ which I might add was a popular and common belief at the time among Protestants.  In those days people were burned at the stake because they refused to profess a belief in what the others in power believed.  Some believed that bishops and priests should run the church while others appointed elders who ruled as a group called the session.   Some believed the bread and wine in communion actually changed into the body and blood of Jesus while others said they were powerful symbols.   

To help maintain faith as believing certain things in the Presbyterian tradition catechisms became important.  The Shorter Catechism set out by the Westminster Assembly in 1647 is a series of 107 questions and answers with scriptural proofs which made the learning of faith easier.

Q. 1. What is the chief end of man?
A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.

Q. 2. What rule hath God given to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy him?
A. The word of God, which is contained in the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, is the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy him.

  If you learned and assented to the Shorter Catechism you had faith, and if you failed to assent you were a doubter and did not have faith.  Faith and doubt were hand in hand as opposites.

   I simply want to point out that Jesus never went around asking people about their beliefs.  Jesus to my knowledge never formulated a creed to express his faith.  He never really had arguments about what people he came across believed.  Now before you think I might be saying let’s tip all our beliefs down the plug hole I want to affirm beliefs are important, but when we use them to define what we see as faith we risk losing the heart and power of our religion.     

    When the writer of Hebrews holds up Abraham as a man of great faith, and I think the writer should have included Sarah as well, they weren’t talking about what Abraham and Sarah believed or didn’t believe.  Faith for them had a different meaning.  The ancient meanings of faith revolve around not what we believe in our heads but faith is about relationship.  Specifically there are two key parts of relationship – faithfulness and trust.  I invite you to think of what faithfulness means.  Commonly today we will think of faithfulness in terms of sexual behaviour.  Actually faithfulness has a much deeper and richer meaning.  It is about commitment,  allegiance, and attentiveness – working to uphold and build up the relationship.  Think of what commitment, allegiance, and attentiveness might mean in your journey of faith.  Commitment, allegiance, attentiveness.  It’s why you are here this morning committing time to maintaining and deepening relationship.  It’s what most spiritual disciplines in your life are about, like prayer and contemplation, or spiritual reading or discussion.  Upholding and building up the relationship.  Of course most of us, myself included, too easily slip into patterns that are lazy in the area of building up and growing our relationship with God. 

   The second meaning of faith is linked.  Faith is about putting our trust in God.  I sometimes talk of faith in terms of learning to swim.  You’ve heard me talk of this before, but swimming doesn’t come naturally to us humans.  We have to learn to trust the water and more specifically we have to learn to trust the buoyancy of the water.  I recall learning to swim in Dunedin.  We first learned to hold onto the side and let our legs float and then even putting our heads under the water and just holding onto the side.   But then we were asked to let go… I learned that as soon as I became afraid and tensed up and started thrashing around that I sank, but if I relaxed and simply lay there on the water I could float.  The secret was relaxing and trusting.  Faith is trusting in the buoyancy of God.   There are other biblical metaphors that may make more sense to you like trusting in God as our rock and fortress.  God is our solid ground, our safe place.  Interestingly the opposite of this way of looking at faith is not doubt or disbelief, but fear, worry, and anxiety.  Ever wondered why one of the most common statements of Jesus is, “do not be afraid”?  I know I get anxious and fearful.  I sometimes worry about what others might think, or I worry about failing in some way.  Sometimes I even think the world rest on my shoulders.  I know I have to keep learning to relax and trust God.  I know I need to let go, to be still and know that God holds me and yes things may be tough or messy, but I am not alone and I am not abandoned to sink into the depths.  I need to remind myself often that it doesn’t all depend on me but I’m walking with God.  I know one day I will have to let go of the gift of life.  Learning to trust the buoyancy of God is at the heart of faith.

But the writer of Hebrews takes us a step further in our thinking about faith.  Stage two of my learning to swim in that dismal Dunedin pool was to hear the instructor say, “now it’s time to learn to swim across the pool to the other side.”  Learning to trust the buoyancy of the water wasn’t enough, I had to learn to strike out across the unknown depths for the destination of the other side.  By an act of faith Abraham said yes to God’s call to travel to an unknown place that would become his home.   Faith opens the door to another place.  Faith tells us that this is not as good as it gets, but tells us there is another destination.  Faith unlocks the holy discontent of God and says there is a deeper life, a healthier life, a more just life for all.  Paul called this other side the new creation. Jesus called this new life the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God and asked us to pray that we would find this new life amongst us now, not in some distant place but here on earth.  As Abraham and Sarah looked for a new land where all life existed in a state of shalom or harmonious peace, we are called to seek a new earth.  A place where creation is nurtured instead of abused for gain, a place of respect for all people, where huge gaps between the haves and have nots are no more, where our God of justice and love reigns. 

   I know you have faith.  That is why you are here.  My prayer today is that we all may go from this time with our faith enlivened and your lamp relit. Ready to work at nurturing our relationship with God, ready to trust the buoyancy of God, ready to seek the life God is calling us to in the new creation… where heaven and earth are one.

Dugald Wilson 11 August 2019

Luke 12:13-21 (Contemplate Rembrandt’s painting the Rich Fool….)

Today I want to take a little time to dig into the parable Jesus confronts us with…. The story of the Rich Fool. 

The parable begins with a question in just the same way as the Good Samaritan parable.  The question is posed by a fellow whose father has died.  The family farm has been left to the two sons, and a dispute has arisen again because the two boys don’t see eye to eye.  The older son has no desire to break up the farm, but the younger one want’s his inheritance now.  It’s not an uncommon issue and one way to solve it was to get a rabbi on your side to push your case.  The younger son wants justice.  Jewish law was clear that if there was division over an inheritance then it should be split with both parties getting an equal share, but for whatever reason the older son is holding out.  Jesus however isn’t playing ball either.  He can sense there is a broken relationship here and responds that he hasn’t come to bring division between people but to be a reconciler.  “Man, who made me a judge or divider over you!”

Jesus then shares a word of wisdom.   “Take heed, and beware of every kind of insatiable desire, for life for a person does not consist in the surpluses of his possessions.”    It’s a bit of confrontational truth telling that most of us would shy away from.  Jesus is saying basically that the presenting inheritance stuff is just the pimple on the surface.  There’s something deeper going on.  Jesus is addressing the issue of the questioners heart and not the issue of his bank account.    The word ‘life’ is an important one.  Jesus often talks about finding life.    People are often filled with insatiable desires  and one of those is the desire to acquire more possessions.  They may think more possessions will give them a better quality of life but actually once you have a certain minimum more possessions just clog up your life.  If Jesus were addressing us today he might add with the natural resources of the earth being depleted we need to get a hold on our consumptive lifestyles because it’s literally screwing up the life of the earth.  If everyone on this earth lived the sort of lifestyle you and I live the earth is doomed.

He follows up with a parable.  “There was a certain rich man whose land brought forth plenty.”  The man was obviously wealthy, and the crop is a bumper one.  He has plenty, but he now has a whole lot more.  He doesn’t need it but life and good fortune has been good to him, so what to do with it is the obvious question?

The parable continues.  “And he discussed with himself, saying what should  do for I have no place to store my crops.”  I wonder what you notice?  He discussed with himself …. In communal middle eastern culture which is a very communal culture where everything is discussed with family and friends that is a particularly telling statement.  Where is his family and where are his friends?   We’ve all seen it many times….wealth especially excess wealth isolates.  The more wealth we have the more distance there is between us and our neighbours.   It seems he is a lonely isolated man whose big issue in life is finding somewhere to store ‘my’ crops.  There is no sense that these crops are a gift from God.

“And he said I will do this:  I will pull down my barns and build larger ones.  And I will store all my grain and my goods”.  My barns, my grain, my goods….the word my is a telling one.  The Christian ideal that everything we have is a gift, and we are trustees of everything we ‘own’,  is simply absent. 

What follows is rather sad.  “And I will say to my soul, Soul! You have ample goods laid up for many years.  Relax, eat, drink, sit back and enjoy yourself.”   He is isolated.  Where are the family and friends?  It’s such a sad speech.  The use of the word soul is interesting.  Some English translations simply have him saying to himself, but there is a deeper conversation going on here.    This man thinks that good food, a fine house and other trappings of wealth will give him peace.   He is mistaken for into this little internal conversation thunders God.

“But God said to him, Fool.  This night your life is required of you, and what you have prepared, whose will these things be?”   Your life is required of you uses words that are commonly used for the return of a loan.   It’s as if our lives are a loan from God and at some point the loan will be called in and some account expected of how we have put the gifts to use.  But there is no accusation.  There is no why have you not helped your community more, or what have you done for others.  There is simply the confronting truth that this man faces a sad reality.  He plans alone, he builds alone, he indulges alone, and he dies alone, and we are all left pondering how things could have been different if he had seen his wealth as a gift to be used to serve God and bring life to his community.

And that’s hammered home in the final words of wisdom.  “So is he who stores up treasures for himself, and is not gathering riches for God.”   I wonder if you have ever thought of your life as gathering riches for God.  It’s an odd way of putting things.  Other translations talk of storing up treasures for self but not being rich towards God.  I don’t think God has a bank account that we are supposed to put wealth into, but doesn’t this mean we are supposed to commit our wealth to doing the things that honour God.  When the Bill and Melinda gates Foundation commits to the education of women and girls to help overcome poverty and help third world communities take responsibility for themselves God is honoured.  When you and I make a decision to use our wealth to help promote a better future for the earth God is enriched.   Just putting it in the bank to guard against a rainy day, or storing it up so the kids have a good inheritance….I’m not so sure that is enriching God. 

Jesus refuses to lay it out black and white, and so must I.  What he is saying is that we have to look beyond self and selfish need and security.   Eugene Peterson translates this last verse of wisdom and advice which sum up the rich fool’s predicament as “That’s what happens when you fill your barn with Self and not with God.”  This word self appears often in our scriptures.  If you want to be a flowerer of mine you need to leave self behind.   What Jesus is talking about is the outer self.   We have an outer self the self that wants the biggest bit of cake, the self that wants a bigger bank balance, the self that likes to impress others, the self that feeds on the adulation of others.  It’s the ego self that is grasping, greedy, and shallow.  It’s the me and mine self.  But deeper within us is another self.  The true self, the God infused self.   This true self is found in each of us, because each of us is God infused.  The story invites us to resist the ‘me and my’ self the ego self,  and instead nurture the growth of the true self speaking into and directing our lives.  That true self will tell us that life is a gift.  We are simply trustees of all we have including our wealth and our very lives. 

We live in a ‘me and mine’ world, and it’s not easy to resist this world.  The good news is that I see amongst you signs of resistance.  Selfless acts, consideration of others, concern for the common good.  But we all need to adopt religious practices that continue to re-orientate ourselves.   Listening to the stories of Jesus is a good place to start.  Chewing them over like we’ve been doing today.  Coming to communion where we break bread together and reinforce the truth that life is not about me but we.  It speaks of the death of the outer ego self and the nurturing of a the true self that is treasured by God.  Simple practices that nurture thankfulness as we sit down to eat reminding us that food is a gift or  spending time at the end of the day to be thankful for all that has been in the day.  Practices like meditation and prayer that take our focus away from self and allow allows the true deeper self to whisper into our lives.  Practices like acts of generosity and kindness that offer things to others without seeking anything in return.   These things help re-orientate our hearts in the way Jesus was seeking.

How are you/I, we gathering riches for God.  That’s a good question Jesus asks. 

A little history…Once we lived without it, now we can’t escape it.  In the last 100 years it has revolutionised life and now it is everywhere.  Plastic bottles, plastic bags, plastic everywhere we look.  Carpets used to be wool now they are mainly plastic.  Packaging used to be a brown paper bag but now there are all sorts of plastic packages.  We are all wearing plastic in our clothes. Synthetic materials took over our economy, our lifestyles, and our imaginations because they did their jobs so well.

Bakelite, the first plastic produced entirely from synthetic materials, was invented in 1907. By the beginning of the second world war, plastic was in use for industrial parts like automobile distributor caps and colorful costume jewelry. Initially plastic was valued because it was unbreakable and long lasting.  A plastic mug wouldn’t break if dropped.  Perspex didn’t shatter like glass.  And plastic could be shaped and moulded. 

A new idea came with plastic.  People used to spend considerable time and effort taking care of things – oiling and waxing, mending and altering, working to prolong the useful lives of the things they owned.  The new idea was disposability.  Because you could mass produce plastic cheaply and easily we got all sorts of new products:  disposable razors, bottle caps, and plastic containers and bottles of all sorts.  The war had taught us how to use plastic to make parachutes and now this material was used to make nylon stockings.   

By the 1960s, long-lasting plastics had been joined by single use plastic.   Shampoo used to come in glass bottles with the possibility of broken glass in the shower, but now plastic bottles offered a cheap alternative to bloodied feet.  In the 1980’s paper bags were replaced by cheaper and stronger plastic bags.  The transition to a throwaway consumer culture was complex and gradual, but we all got hooked and now we wonder how we could survive without plastic.  Our cars are full of plastic.  [P1] We go shopping at the supermarket and come home with a heap of plastic.  Plastic wrap, plastic trays, plastic bottles, and yes even with a plastic bag ban in place we still have plastic bags.  The clothes we buy are full of plastic, the carpets we stand on are invariably plastic, the computer or phone we use is plastic, the paper we read is delivered in plastic, even the pacemaker that keeps us going is plastic.    

When plastic bags transformed shopping and packaging in the 1980’s no one gave a thought to what might happen to all those bags.  Rubbish was invariably just buried and dear mother earth would take care of them.  Slowly a new way of living emerged.   We can just throw it away when it’s job is done.  Even the old rubbish tin was replaced with a plastic bag for rubbish.  It made everyone’s job easier and tidier, although it wasn’t much chop for hot ashes.  But another problem was emerging.  The small rubbish trucks were replaced with bigger rubbish trucks because there was so many plastic bags full of …. plastic. 

So the idea of recycling was born and little triangular arrows with a number inside told us that this plastic could be recycled.  Aware that dear old mother earth wasn’t coping well with the amount of rubbish being gifted to her many of us got on board with yellow, green, and red bins.  Problems solved.  Well no…

 In recent years there has been a tsunami of single use plastics. About half the plastic ever produced has been made since the year 2000. Research tells us that the average plastic bag produced does it’s job for about 12 minutes.  It could take 450 years to decompose. If Jesus had used a plastic bottle of hair shampoo we could possibly dig it up today. A million plastic bottles are purchased around the world every minute and the number is increasing rapidly thanks to the growth of western consumer culture in China and Asia.

So much plastic it is getting everywhere. Some does get recycled but actually not that much.  Lots of people still live in the chuck it in the rubbish and all will be well, or even chuck it out the car window.  Sorting plastic or even recycling some say is for greenies. 

[P2] Plastic is ending up in all sorts of places, polluting our eco systems.  Our oceans are full of plastic.  I doubt whether any of you have been to the Cocos Islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean.  They are touted as ‘Australia’s last unspoilt paradise.’  Marine scientists visited these islands to do a plastic count along the beaches thinking these remote largely unpopulated island could function a bit like the canary in the coal mine.  They found a very sick canary in the form of 238 tonnes of plastic.  Most was single use plastic: bottles, plastic cutlery, bags, straws.  There was 373,000 toothbrushes.   In total 414 million pieces of plastic were retrieved and they reported there was many more times that amount buried in the sand.  

   [P3] And plastic is making its way into all the creatures in those oceans.  We read of literally kilograms of plastic being found in the stomachs of whales who can’t tell the difference between food and plastic.  They and other sea creatures think a plastic bag looks like a nice jellyfish.  Their digestive systems can and the plastics clog them up and kill them.  I think the record currently stands at about 40 kg of plastic found in a young curvier beaked whale near the Philippines.  Just under 10% of its body weight was plastic!  Can you imagine 10% of your bodyweight inside and a collection of plastic?  We see pictures of other creatures being entangled in plastic waste. 

   [P4]  This picture is a close up of salt crystals but see something else… plastic..  its in salt increasingly its in the water you drink.  Microplastics, tiny plastic fragments, from all sorts of places including the plastic from the clothes we wear and wash getting literally everywhere including our own bodies.  The very latest research tells us we ingest about 50,000 particles of microplastic a year or about the equivalent of a credit card a week, and we have no real idea what it might be doing to us.  But every time we wash clothing with plastic in it, and that’s just about everything we wear, we are flushing more micro plastic into our rivers and oceans.  The  plastic dream has become a plastic nightmare

[P6] Plastic has  become the defining material of our time and despite some limited success in recycling it turns out that much of our plastic is used once and literally dumped.  Remember those little triangles on plastic containers.  The 1&2’s are easier to recycle but 3,5,6,7 are usually not worth it.  It’s even worse if people put plastic in for recycling that hasn’t been washed.  Ideally we would incinerate the difficult to recycle plastic, carefully filter emissions,  and derive energy from it but this costs large amounts of money.  What actually happens is that the developed countries like New Zealand is that we simple put it into landfill.  About 20% of our landfill in NZ is plastic.  WE love burying stuff and forgetting.  You simply cant do it in most western countries because it costs way more than here to bury. In reality we lag way behind most developed countries in waste management.  We also ship  plastic we can’t recycle off to poorer countries for them to deal with.  It used to be China, but China stopped taking plastic from the world for recycling back in 2017.  Like Australia we started sending plastic to countries like the Philippines and Malaysia.  You need very cheap labour to sort the stuff to make money from recycling.  But what was happening was that while we paid someone to take our plastic with the idea it would be recycled, unscrupulous operators were simply burning it with horrible effects on local populations not to mention the atmosphere.  But now these countries are waking up to what’s going on and soft plastics which are difficult to recycle are currently are going who knows where. 

.  .  And what will save us…I believe we have a fundamental problem.  While human beings think they can do what they like and while profit is the key driver of our existance we are doomed.  We need to find a new religious way of looking at our world, a way that values the  sacredness of life.  We need to hear the pain of a whale with 40 kg of plastic in its gut.  We need to feel the agony of the littered beach on the Cocos Islands. We need to acknowledge the pain of God that our consumptive way of life is screwing up the world for all future generations. 

Polluting the earth, the sea, and every living thing with bits of plastic tells God we want to do it our way.  This is sin in its simplest definition.  Protecting my comfort and my way of life becomes paramount.   A religious outlook says we are accountable to the creator and the sustainer of life.  A religious outlook says we are people who long for heaven and earth to become one.  We look to transform how things are to how things should be.  We look for an earth that exists in harmony and peace with all its abundance and diversity. 

There are some Biblical verses that are worth remembering. [P7]

The Earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it (Psalm 24:1).  The Lord, however you want to see the Lord, is bigger than us and all life belongs to this Lord.

Let us make humankind in our image and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, and over the cattle and over all the wild animals and all every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.  (Gen 1:26)  Dominion does not mean domination but has the meaning of working with God to nurture and care – to be caretakers and stewards.

So how do we live out these verses?

[P7a] Live wondrously…. Before we start laying down laws I think we have to connect with creation more closely. Step outside, take a walk by our local river.  Explore, ponder, slow.  Listen to the song of a bird. Stop and pause in front of the sight of a spring bulb pushing through the earth.  Notice the bees busy on the warmer days.  Look for the first flowering of kowhai.  We often get so tied up in our little worlds that we fail to notice the handiwork of God all round us.  This noticing re-orientates us in our rightful place within creation.  It is actually prayer and a reawakening of this prayer is needed.

[P7b]  Live with an enquiring mind.  Ask questions and educate ourselves. What is actually happening to the plastic we put in the rubbish or the recycling bin?  Is there an alternative to buying something in a plastic bottle?  Is it possible to purchase meat without buying plastic trays and plastic wrapping?  Which plastics are recyclable here in New Zealand?   Which plastic products do we want to keep because let’s be clear….plastic can be a wonderful life giving material.

[P7c]  Live in community.  Talk with others about this issue.  Encourage each other with small steps that will help us live a God’s caretakers and guardians. We need to talk about plastic and what we do with it and how we have discovered ways of minimizing our use.   That’s why on the pledge I suggest we tell others about our commitment.  It’s not to show how good we are but to nurture a build a movement of people who call themselves caretakers and trustees of God’s creation. 

[P7d] Dream that as God’s people we may show the world how to be good caretakers.