Sharing and caring. Caring can be shown in a lot of ways. John the Baptist didn’t need to lecture faithful Jewish people on how to care for family, or for those who are lonely or vulnerable. That’s always been part of Jewish law and practice. Instead he called out those people whose jobs invited them to abuse people: tax collectors, who made their living by overcharging people, and soldiers, whose power and prosperity depended on terrorizing people. How could tax collectors and soldiers be honest, when their jobs only paid a living wage by extorting their victims, I mean clients? They could take a huge pay cut. Disobey their bosses. Be shamed by their coworkers. Or quit.
I wonder if we have any jobs like that today, that set workers up to cheat or abuse other people? Compliant employees are very handy for carrying out unethical practices. They need to make a living, right? Upton Sinclair, who championed workplace and economic reforms back in the 1930’s, said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Asking questions about how our workplaces and our economic system treat people, and the planet, that’s one thing. But opting out of the parts that exploit? That sounds radical. The word radical fits our reading today. “John said, “Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees.” John was a radical, in the dictionary sense of the word, and so is Jesus. The word radical means “going to the root.” Seeing through distractions to what’s really going on, what’s important. Being radical, going to the root doesn’t mean having a revolution. It means recognizing what is essential. Yet when we do that, everything that is not essential gets called into question.
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Brea Congregational United Church of Christ
December 16, 2018
What Should We Do?
Luke 3:7-18 John said to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? 8Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. 9Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”
10 And the crowds asked him, “What then should we do?” 11In reply he said to them, “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.” 12Even tax collectors came to be baptized, and they asked him, “Teacher, what should we do?” 13He said to them, “Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.” 14Soldiers also asked him, “And we, what should we do?” He said to them, “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages.”
15 As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, 16John answered all of them by saying, “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. 17His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
18 So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.
Advent is a season of expectation. We are expecting Jesus, and what do we get? John the Baptist, that wild man. Matthew’s gospel portrays a desert hermit: wearing hairy clothes, eating locusts and wild honey. Both Matthew and Luke quote John yelling about broods of vipers and axes to the root of the tree. If we saw John the Baptist walking down the street we might be tempted to cross to the other side. It’s remarkable that he got a following, out there in the wilderness at the Jordan River. I can only imagine that people were pretty desperate for change to be lining up to get baptized and yelled at by this guy.
Let me try a line-by-line translation of John into modern expressions. Verse seven: “You SOB’s. Running like rats off a sinking ship.” Verse 8: “If you’ve really been transformed, act like it! Your heritage doesn’t make you special.” Verse 9: “This house of cards is all coming down. Every rotten piece of it.” Ouch!
Those people listening to John had gotten baptized; they really want to make a clean start and so they ask John, “What then should we do?” John gives them a list. It’s Luke’s list, I suspect. It’s short, simple, and profound. First, and for everyone, if you have extra food or clothes, give them to people who have none. Second, for people in professions that are considered shady (tax collectors and soldiers at that time): be scrupulously honest; don’t skim, don’t bully. Do that. That’s all. How is this transformation?
It is not a top-down transformation. This is a bottom up transformation. We think we have no power, that power is elsewhere, and some of it it is. But nowhere in the gospels are we instructed to transform our world. Instead, we are invited to be transformed ourselves. And transformation is contagious.
John the Baptist’s simple practices are an invitation to daily personal transformation, from: “What’s in it for me?” to “How can I share? How can I care?” How much can we share and care? According to Luke, a lot. “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none.” Only the Greek word chiton doesn’t mean coat, it means tunic, the long shirt they wore that doubled as their underwear. Having two tunics meant you weren’t destitute: you had a clean one to wear when your other one was being washed, or when it was really cold. Giving that second tunic away was a big share, not a little share. This kind of sharing only makes sense when you are in a caring community where you can trust that somebody else will share with you when you share what you really couldn’t spare. That is the kind of Christian community Luke was trying to build. And it’s the opposite of capitalism. Don’t blame me. It’s in the Book.
Sharing and caring. Caring can be shown in a lot of ways. John didn’t need to lecture faithful Jewish people on how to care for family, or for those who are lonely or vulnerable. That’s always been part of Jewish law and practice. Instead he called out those people whose jobs invited them to abuse people: tax collectors, who made their living by overcharging people, and soldiers, whose power and prosperity depended on terrorizing people. How could tax collectors and soldiers be honest, when their jobs only paid a living wage by extorting their victims, I mean clients? They could take a huge pay cut. Disobey their bosses. Be shamed by their coworkers. Or quit.
I wonder if we have any jobs like that today, that set workers up to cheat or abuse other people? Compliant employees are very handy for carrying out unethical practices. They need to make a living, right? Upton Sinclair, who championed workplace and economic reforms back in the 1930’s, said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Asking questions about how our workplaces and our economic system treat people, and the planet, that’s one thing. But opting out of the parts that exploit? That sounds radical. The word radical fits our reading today. “John said, “Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees.” John was a radical, in the dictionary sense of the word, and so is Jesus. The word radical means “going to the root.” Seeing through distractions to what’s really going on, what’s important. Being radical, going to the root doesn’t mean having a revolution. It means recognizing what is essential. Yet when we do that, everything that is not essential gets called into question. This “going to the root” is not a comfortable process.
If we contemplate just how radical are these practices Luke gives us, we may get discouraged. Or we can conveniently ignore them. They’re for another time and place, not for us. I’ve never heard a biblical literalist say Christians shouldn’t own two coats, let alone two shirts or two pairs of underwear. Yet I’m certain Luke meant these practices for his community. In the sequel to his Gospel, the Acts of the Apostles, Luke talks about the first followers of Jesus holding all their property in common. And he is the only Gospel writer who has soldiers engaging Jesus or his followers in a positive way. That’s something Mark and Matthew can’t imagine.
We are not literalists. We are free to follow the Gospel as our hearts leads us, that is the UCC way. Still it’s worth asking the question, “What should we do?”
How did the church of your childhood answer that question? What rules did they have? Funny how few of them have to do with sharing and caring.
What should we do? I don’t have a clear answer for you. Let’s live in the discomfort of the question, and see how we might be transformed. What practice might transform you as you live it out, invite you to closer relationship with the sacred, and right relationship with other people and the planet? We can begin by asking questions. How can we better share what we have? How can we free ourselves from obedience to a system that glorifies money and uses people and the planet as tools to get money? These are not comfortable questions. These are essential questions.
I heard of a sharing practice that John the Baptist would approve, from Rev. Austin Shelley and her grandmother. (1)
My grandfather never questioned the grocery bill. All other expenditures fell subject to his review, but the grocery shopping belonged entirely within my grandmother’s domain. Papa had good reason to be frugal. Though we never went hungry, we lived on relatively little inside our 526-square-foot home in rural South Carolina. Under these circumstances, Papa kept a tight grip on the finances, even meting out our weekly contribution to the church—ten dollars for the offering plate, plus one dollar for each grandchild for Sunday school…
As far as I know, Papa never discovered the secret my grandmother and I shared. Every Saturday she and I whisked into town in her faded blue Ford Torino. As I pushed our cart up and down the aisles of the Red & White, she carefully selected food in duplicate—two boxes of cereal, two jars of peanut butter, two bags of flour—until our cart looked like an abstract rendering of Noah’s ark with its produce and nonperishable food items arranged two by two.
Then we’d check out (an achingly slow process involving a hefty stack of coupons), load the car with heavy paper grocery bags, and drive straight to the town’s food bank, where my grandmother would donate exactly half of everything she’d just purchased. She bought my silence each week with a small candy bar, which was not immune to her rule: one chocolate treat for me, one for the food bank.
On one of these grocery trips when I was eight or nine years old, I asked my grandmother for a name-brand cereal I’d seen on a television commercial. “We can’t afford that one,” she replied without looking up from her list. “We can if we don’t buy two of them,” I grumbled under my breath. My grandmother’s eyes met mine. She put her list down so as to place her hands firmly on my shoulders. She measured her words as carefully as my grandfather had measured the dollars for our Sunday offering: “If we can’t afford two, we can’t afford one.”
When the practice of caring collides with our paychecks, it gets harder. My father was a physicist. For a number of years when I was a child, he trekked back and forth from the Bay Area to Nevada and Utah, testing nuclear bombs underground. He got colorful printed certificates with strange names on them like “Project Fulcrum” and “Project Quicksilver.” He told us stories of schlepping lead bricks, and measuring temperatures in the millions of degrees. As a righteous teenager I finally confronted him: “How could you work on nuclear weapons?” And he replied, “I did it to feed my family.” That shut me up.
I do know people who have walked away from jobs that were asking them to be a part of something they would not do, people who stood up to bosses who directed them to cheat or harm (which will get you fired!) They felt devastated. In our culture we often get a huge part of our identity and worth from our job and our paycheck. Caring at the cost of those things feels like failure. But maybe it isn’t failure at all. Maybe we can talk about ethics at work, and begin to change that mindset. Our generous sharing with people who care at the cost of their job might help.
Sharing and caring. Consider creating a practice for yourself, to share or to care in a consistent way. Maybe one thing that calls to your heart. Maybe something simple. Maybe something radical. For the radical: negotiate it with your family; I don’t recommend hiding it like Austin’s family did.
Then be kind to yourself when you don’t do it as well as you’d like. Anything worth doing is worth doing badly, at least at first. It’s a practice, not a perfect.
We know we are in need of transformation. Our society, our world, is in need of transformation. What should we do? Share and care, Luke tells us. How? Your choice. Take your time deciding, and have fun with your practice. Let’s share and care together, in a community that makes sharing and caring easy, and supported, and celebrated. I hope this church is that community for you. I’m glad you’re here. Amen.
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