Monthly Archives: July 2025

Discipleship in the Age of Vanity

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EIGHTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14; 2:18-23

Psalm 49:1-12

Colossians 3:1-11

Luke 12:13-21

Prayer of the Day: Benevolent God, you are the source, the guide, and the goal of our lives. Teach us to love what is worth loving, to reject what is offensive to you, and to treasure what is precious in your sight, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.

“What do mortals get from all the toil and strain with which they toil under the sun? For all their days are full of pain, and their work is a vexation; even at night their minds do not rest. This also is vanity.” Ecclesiastes 2:22-23.

The little book of Ecclesiastes is given scant attention in the common lectionary. It is usually not the text of choice for preachers either, particularly in the United States where it runs contrary to that dominant religion that is America. Ours is the land of opportunity where everything is possible for anyone with enough grit and determination. Strain and toil build wealth, create opportunities and secure a future of ease and comfort. At least, that is how it is supposed to work. But the American dream has turned out to be a cruel hoax for many of our neighbors who work two, sometimes three jobs, yet struggle to pay the rent, put food on the table and cover medical expenses. With the passage of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” many of us will find that the American dream has sailed even further out of sight as our toil, strain and sleepless nights prove to have been in vain.

But is life any better for those of us who manage to achieve the dream? A survey of college students in the United States in 2023-2024, a group one would expect to represent the most successful families in our society, found that around 38 percent had symptoms of depression. These included loss of interest/pleasure in things once found enjoyable, feelings of sadness and hopelessness, fatigue, changes in sleep and thoughts of death or suicide.[1] Psychiatrist Claudia M. Elsig, MD observes that wealth can cloud moral judgement and distort empathy and compassion. Evidence suggests that wealthy people are disproportionately affected by addiction.[2] Studies show that anxiety suffered by children in wealthy families is 20-30% higher than it is among the less affluent, and that affluent kids are more prone to substance and alcohol abuse. Many of us who have doggedly chased the American dream and finally caught it discover that it is really a nightmare, a dead end from which there is no escape.

The words of Ecclesiastes are attributed to King Solomon.[3] Solomon reigned over the united kingdom of Israel at the peak of its wealth, power and cultural influence. Solomon’s reputation for wisdom and learning brought visitors from as far away as northern Africa. International trade flourished as Israel’s territorial acquisitions reached levels never before achieved and that would never be matched again. Of course, the Temple in Jerusalem was completed by Solomon, a structure considered one of the most impressive architectural accomplishments of the century. According to the Chronicler, “silver was as common in Jerusalem as stone.” II Chronicles 10:27. If anyone had reason to expect the happiness, satisfaction and enjoyment promised by the American dream, it was King Solomon. Yet Solomon’s great wisdom, wealth and power seem only to have sharpened his conviction that his life was empty and pointless. He reached the top only to find out that there is nothing there.

Such is the fate of the “rich  fool” in our gospel lesson. Here we meet a man who has reached the nirvana of financial security for which all of us Americans are urged by our financial advisers to strive. Accordingly, he does what most of us would probably do. He takes an early retirement. And yet, there is something a little off about this character. You would think that after landing such a windfall an ordinary guy would be down at the local waterhole with his buddies announcing that tonight, the drinks are on him.  Or you might expect him to call the wife and tell her to start packing up the kids because “we’re heading for Disney World.” But the only one this rich fool ever talks to is himself.  “I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” Luke 12:18-19. “I, I, I, over and over again. Does this fellow have anyone he cares about? Anyone with whom to share his abundance? One gets the picture of this sad sack spending the rest of his life in opulent luxury, eating and drinking-alone every night for the rest of his life. Perhaps God was doing him a favor by ending his lonely, selfish and empty existence before it began.

Recall that this parable was sparked by a dispute between two brothers over their inheritance. I cannot help but wonder whether these two men were sons of the “rich fool” in the parable. Sad enough that this hollow man had nothing he cared about more than his stuff. How doubly sad for him to have fathered a couple of sons who immediately fall to quarreling over his wealth while his corpse is still warm. What a sorry and pathetic legacy! Wealthy as this man was in the conventional sense of the word, he was profoundly poverty stricken on a much deeper level. His sickness, I believe, is one that affects us all individually and corporately.

The Book of Ecclesiastes captures the emptiness and despair of a community on the verge of decline. It is the mood of an empire that no longer believes in its gods, no longer offers to its subjects a cause worth living or dying for and has no vision of the future. “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun.” Ecclesiastes 1:9. A people blind to the future and unable to see a way forward ultimately ends up looking back. They try to revive the old faith, repeat the practices of the past to which they attribute their success and turn away from the horror of their emptiness. They strive mightily to whitewash the signs of rot, spray with perfume the stink of decay and shout down every voice that dares suggest that everything is not all right. Let me say clearly that I believe what we are seeing with the MAGA movement is the last terrified gasp of an empire that can no longer believe the lies it has told itself about itself for all the years of its existence. The United States is in a terminal phase of decline. It has lost its faith in its constitution, its courts and its legislatures. Nothing remains of the confidence once placed in these quasi religious symbols, without which only raw power can hold a nation together. History more than suggests that power cannot do so for long. Whether I am right about the fate of the United States, history will be my judge. I am confident, though, that both Jesus and the preacher of Ecclesiastes have put their finger on a mortal sickness infecting our culture.

There is, of course, a gospel counterpoint to this malaise and despair, but we must be wary of drawing near too hastily. Much of what passes for gospel these days is little more than Pollyannaish optimism exhorting us to “Keep on the Sunny Side.”[4] The prophetic outlook is always one of hope, even for such as that old storm crow Jeremiah. But the promise of a new day always comes on the far side of judgment. For the prophets and for Jesus, the new creation cannot be born without the death of the old. There was no salvaging the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Their culture of oppression, enrichment of the royal household and its cronies at the expense of the poor and their twisting of the covenant faith into a propaganda arm of the state had gone too far. A new day for the people of God would come, but not through evolution. Nothing short of revolution could bring about a fresh start.

As I see it, the most significant divide within the Body of Christ today is not between modernists and fundamentalists, conservatives and liberals, high church and low church or on any point of doctrine. The most significant divide is between those of us who envision the reign of God implemented incrementally through reforms in the existing order and those of us who view the old order as an impediment to God’s reign that must be removed. Most of us reared in American Christianity fall among the former. Our clergy pray regularly for the nation at civic events, often blessing its wars and lionizing its warriors. Our ministries are embedded in the United States Armed Forces with chaplains owing a dual allegiance to the nation and to the God and Father of Jesus Christ confessed in our creeds. Whether we are Christian nationalists seeking to transform our government into an instrument for imposing some kind of religious moral culture on the United States, or whether we are progressives seeking justice through incremental reforms, the underlying assumption is the same: the future lies in a renewed America. We are all trying to save America because we cannot imagine a future without it or face the existential horror of its demise.

I am afraid that those of us American Christians prepared to look beyond the American dream for a new day will need to sit with the preacher in Ecclesiastes for a while. We will need to learn again to pray psalms of lament that see no reason for hope in the world around us. For the only good news to be had is the assurance that the God of the enslaved, the oppressed, the hungry and despondent-the God of the cross-hears our prayers. “The Lord works vindication for the oppressed.” Psalm 103:6. But we might have to wait four hundred years under the lash of the oppressor before it comes. We might need to spend a generation in Exile before the way into the land of promise opens up. We may cry out with the psalmist, “How long, O Lord?” but receive only silence in reply. In the meantime, we plant seeds we may never see take root. We plant trees from which we will never taste the fruit. We do as much justice as we can, practice as much kindness as opportunity affords, even when it is not enough to bring about the change we long for, even when it does not make a difference, even when it appears counterproductive. We do all of this because we believe in a future we cannot see and find nearly impossible to imagine based on the evidence.

This is not the sort of good news that fills auditorium sized megachurches with happy clappy worshipers. It is not the kind of good news that galvanizes activists with death defying enthusiasm. It is not the kind of good news that sends you away from worship with a spring in your step and a song in your heart. This is good news for those of us who cannot see any good news in the status quo, who have tasted the bitterness and betrayal of the American dream, who can no longer believe in the mythology of the American empire and its empty promises. This good news is the stubborn conviction that the engines of oppression enshrined in our society, the national creed of white supremacy systemically infecting our institutions and the hateful ideologies dominating our politics with violence do not get to have the last word. The way of Jesus is the way of eternal life. Our participation in that way of compassion, justice and peace in the midst of a cruel, oppressive and violent world takes hold of that abundant life. What little we can do that is true, beautiful and good outlasts everything else.

Here is a poem by Wendell Berry giving expression to the kind of hope required of disciples in these days.

Enriching the Earth

To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass
to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds
of winter grains and various legumes,
their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.
I have stirred into the ground the offal
and the decay of the growth of past seasons
and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.
All this serves the dark. Against the shadow
of veiled possibility my workdays stand
in a most asking light. I am slowly falling
into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,
not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness
and a delight to the air, and my days
do not wholly pass. It is the mind’s service,
for when the will fails so do the hands
and one lives at the expense of life.
After death, willing or not, the body serves,
entering the earth. And so what was heaviest
and most mute is at last raised up into song.

Source: The Peace of Wild Things, Wendell Berry (c. 1964 by Wendell Berry; pub. by Penguin Books). Wendell Berry (b. 1934) is a poet, novelist, farmer and environmental activist. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of The National Humanities Medal and the Jefferson Lecturer for 2012. He is also a 2013 Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Berry was named the recipient of the 2013 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. On January 28, 2015, he became the first living writer to be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame. You can read more about Wendell Berry and sample more of his works at the Poetry Foundation website.

[1] “Percentage of college students with symptoms of depression in the United States in 2023-2024,” Preeti Vankar

  Statista, April 7, 2025.

[2] “The Psychology of Wealth and How It Affects Mental Health,” Claudia M. Elsig, MD, Calda Clinic Blog.

[3] Most biblical scholars agree that this attribution is more literary than historical. That said, I am not ready to dismiss the potential contribution of Solomon to either of these two books. Wisdom literature reaches “back into the earliest stages of Israel’s existence.” Crenshaw, J.L., Wisdom in the Old Testament, Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, Supplementary Volume, (c.1976, Abingdon). It was during the reign of Solomon that the Israelite monarchy reached the height of its international prominence. Solomon formed treaties with Egypt and the Phoenician kingdoms transacting commerce and military compacts. Cultural exchanges would have followed naturally and thus exposure to wisdom literature from these sources. The authors/editors of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes may well have had access to collections of sayings from this ancient and illustrious period.

[4] See the Carter Family’s rendition of this jolly classic.

Praying Away Privilege

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SEVENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Genesis 18:20-32

Psalm 138

Colossians 2:6-19

Luke 11:1-13

Prayer of the Day: Almighty and ever-living God, you are always more ready to hear than we are to pray, and you gladly give more than we either desire or deserve. Pour upon us your abundant mercy. Forgive us those things that weigh on our conscience, and give us those good things that come only through your Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.

“Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” Luke 11:1.

Prayer does not come naturally. It is a practice that is learned through participation in a faith community. I learned to pray the way my mother learned to pray. One of my earliest memories is of my mother sitting with me beside my bed and praying, “Come dearest Jesus, take my heart and let me never from thee depart.” That is also the first prayer my own children learned to pray.  Of course, my prayer life (and that of my children) has deepened through regularly singing the liturgy, reciting the creeds and praying the psalms as they apply to ever new contexts within growing life experience. These practices have given me a rich prayer language with which to express what Saint Paul calls, groanings too deep for words.” Romans 8:26. I am still learning to pray and expect I will continue learning until the day I die. Prayer is a never ending discipline.  So it is not surprising that Jesus’ disciples should ask him to teach them this sacred discipline of prayer.

Prayer, according to Jesus, is less about us, our needs, our concerns and our aspirations as it is about the reign of God and the working out of God’s will on our planet. God’s reign is never defined in terms of political, social or economic theory. Instead, it finds expression in prophetic preaching and apocalyptic visions. What we know of God’s reign is that it comes when the powers that be are cast down from their thrones and the lowly exalted. Luke 1:52. Under that reign all have enough to live and thrive without fear of violence. “…they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid.” Micah 4:4. The reign of God erases all artificial barriers based on race, class, gender and dissolves all distinctions of nation, ethnicity, blood and soil. “…there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands.” Revelation 7:9.  Many who are now deemed first in the hierarchy of greatness will be last under the reign of God and those deemed “the least” will be first. Matthew 19:30.

While, as I said, the reign of God is not the deification or implementation of any particular political agenda, it cannot help but have profound political ramifications. All nations, of whatever age, ethnic makeup, political organization, social order or economic system will be judged by one and only one criterion, namely, by how well or poorly they treated the least and most vulnerable among them. Matthew 25:31-46. To be a disciple of Jesus, therefore, is to live today under the promised reign of God, the fulfilment of which lies in God’s future. It is to identify with “the least” and advocate, suffer, sacrifice and pray for their wellbeing. It is to speak the truth of God’s will for this planet to all who would exploit it, oppress its peoples and practice violence against its ecosystems.

Jesus instructs his disciples to pray for daily bread. It is the only physical item sought in his prayer. Enough for today and no more. Those of us who make up a fraction of the fraction of the world’s population, who have known only privilege and plenty, find it hard to relate to this request. Though I have lived through times when my financial resources were stretched, I have never been poor. I cannot say that I have ever been hungry. To be sure, I have had a ferocious appetite that I have wrongly described as “hunger,” even to the point of the all too common hyperbolic assertion, “Man, I’m starved.” That, of course, is an insulting trivialization of the suffering experienced by millions on our planet who truly are starving to death. So far from seeking daily bread, we strive, with the help of our financial advisors, to achieve that nirvana known as “financial security.” We celebrate our wealth as “blessings,” while remaining blind to the costs our financial security and the lifestyle it allows us to enjoy inflict upon the world’s poor, its non-human creatures and the ecosystems sustaining us all. “Give us this day or daily bread” has become little more than a pious nod to the deity we credit with bestowing so many blessings of wealth and abundance upon us and our country.

Mary the mother of our Lord sings of the day when the hungry are filled with good things while the rich are sent away empty. Luke 1:53. I do not believe this means the rich are condemned to starvation. I do believe that the rich (privileged folks like us) might find it hard to accept a world where we receive only what we need so that all might finally have what they need. What is just and merciful to the vast majority of the world’s people might at first leave us feeling a bit empty. Those of us who have confused privileges with rights will no doubt feel that we are being deprived. If there is an eternal hell, it might consist of those of us who cannot get over our feeling of resentment at the loss of privilege to which we have become accustomed. Hell might be our inability to adjust to a world in which our great accomplishments, the letters after our names and the honorary titles of which we are so proud no longer matter. Hell might be our inability to let go of our empty symbols of wealth, power and status in order that we might take hold of the truly abundant life offered to us under God’s reign. Until we learn to love the reign of God, heaven is going to be one hell of a place!

Jesus tells his disciples to pray for forgiveness. But there is an interesting twist here. Unlike Matthew’s gospel where Jesus appears to make God’s forgiveness contingent upon our forgiveness of others, in Luke’s account, Jesus takes forgiveness of others as a foregone conclusion. Forgiveness is humanly possible and the fact that it takes place among us, however incompletely, witnesses to the far greater capacity of God to forgive even the murder of the beloved Son. Forgiveness, it should be understood, is not contingent upon the wrongdoer’s repentance. Neither is it passivity in the face of abuse. To forgive is an act of resistance to evil. Forgiveness deprives the enemy of the power to occupy our minds. It robs our enemy’s barbs of their power to infect us with the venom of resentment and bitterness. Forgiveness is the refusal to be drawn into the vortex of retributive violence that transforms us into the image of what we hate. As such, it sets the community of disciples apart from a world consumed by blood feuds.

Jesus ends the prayer on a sobering note: “Do not bring us to the time of trial.” I believe this is a recognition that there are limits to human capacity for persevering in good against the power of evil. Recall the disciples’ broken vow to stand by Jesus to the end. Throughout most of my lifetime, protests, acts of civil disobedience and principled resistance to unjust laws have been treated with deference by the authorities in this country, given our time honored respect for the freedom of expression. To be sure, there have been instances of brutality and governmental violence, the Kent State shootings being one notable example. Yet, for the most part, arrests have been made using restraint and the defendants treated with a degree of respect. That is not the case anymore. No one, especially those of us who have lived in a culture where the church has always been an honored fixture, can predict how we will respond in the face of real persecution. In view of recent events in our nation’s body politic, we might soon be in a position to find out.

I would like to believe that I will faithfully proclaim Jesus and the reign of God for which he lived, died and continues to live-even when that proclamation puts me in the way of masked thugs seizing people off the street, MAGA gangs assaulting LGBTQ+ folks or whatever other consequences there might be. However, as I watch footage of civil rights leaders on Edmund Pettus Bridge facing the brutality of armed police, I must confess that I am not sure I am made of such stern stuff. Moreover, I have family members who depend on me and for whom I am responsible. How will they manage if I am jailed or otherwise out of the picture? Even if I could muster up the courage to put my own life at risk, could I justify risking their wellbeing? As I cannot answer these questions, I pray God to spare me from the time of trial or sustain me in it.

Most believers pray the Lord’s Prayer with some regularity. But, I wonder, do we really know what we are asking for when we pray that God’s kingdom will come? Do we really want a world where the privilege, wealth and comfort we enjoy must be surrendered so that all might have enough, and no more, to thrive? Are we prepared to let go of our loyalty to nation, race, blood and soil to live under an order where none of these distinctions matter? What are we willing to let go of in order to take hold of the just and gentle reign of God Jesus offers us? Do we possess in sufficient measure the love of God’s reign and the courage to live under it? Do we really want what we are praying for?

Here is a poem by Marjorie Allen Seiffert offering the kind of reflections we ought to be entertaining as we pray the Lord’s Prayer, which is an invitation to “accept the challenge” of love and brave all the consequences it may bring.  

All the Bright Courage

Not naked on the mountain were you reared

By wolf and weather, bramble-scratched and lean;

Privation has not made your senses keen

Since hunger is a thing you have always feared.

With fire, food and shelter you have cheered

A pampered body. What does courage mean

To one untried by danger? You have been

Safe and adventureless till love appeared.

Love is a ruthless bandit-may he shatter

The wall that bricks you sungly in content!

And though he would rob you, what shall it matter?

Accept his challenge. Who can circumvent

Death, collecting in person somewhat later

All the bright courage that you never spent!

Source: Poetry, Marjorie Allen Seiffert (1885 –1970) was an American poet and winner of the 1919 Levinson Prize for Poetry. Seiffert used several pseudonyms over the course of her career, including Angela Cypher and Elijah Hay. Seiffert began writing verse around 1915. Over the course of her career, she published dozens of poems in many publications, including The New Yorker, Others: A Magazine of the New Verse and Poetry. By the early 1930s, she began to have trouble getting her work published. It was around this time, she created the pseudonym, ‘Angela Cypher’, under which she wrote a form of light verse. These “Cypher poems” were a hit with the editors of The New Yorker, which published around a dozen of them in the 1930s. You can read more about Marjorie Allen Sieffert and sample more of her  poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.

A Hope Better than the American Dream

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SIXTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Genesis 18:1-10

Psalm 15

Colossians 1:15-28

Luke 10:38-42

Prayer of the Day: Eternal God, you draw near to us in Christ, and you make yourself our guest. Amid the cares of our lives, make us attentive to your presence, that we may treasure your word above all else, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.

“[Christ] himself is before all things, and in [Christ] all things hold together.” Colossians 1:17.

This claim sounds preposterous these days when it appears so much of our world is falling apart. International treaties and trade agreements that ensured a measure of peace and stability for eight decades are fast unraveling. Wildfires, hurricanes and tornados are becoming increasingly frequent and destructive as the earth’s temperature rises. Fragile ecosystems across the globe and the habitats that support them are at risk. As war ravages South Sudan, Gaza and Ukraine, millions are facing displacement, homelessness and starvation. Even to those of us who have lived our lives in the bubble of privilege cannot help but wonder whether the world order that has been so good to us is about to fall on our heads. In short, it does not appear that anyone is holding things together.

On the other hand, none of this is new to the people of God who have known enslavement, displacement, exile and the dissolution of “civilization as we know it” more than once. Our spiritual ancestors have witnessed the dissolution of the Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian, Macedonian and Roman Empires, along with the carnage following in their wake. Each empire, including the one called the United States of America, is, to quote Shakespeare, “but a walking shadow, a poor player,/ that struts and frets his hour upon the stage,/and then is heard no more.” Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5. Nevertheless, as the Prophet Isaiah reminds us, “[t]he grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever.” Isaiah 40:8. Christ, the Incarnate and eternal Word, suffers patiently and faithfully with God’s wounded creation, striving to heal its wounds, mend its fractures and bring it to its appointed end where all things are made new, all tears are wiped away, mourning and pain will end and even death will be no more. Revelation 21:1-8.

Saint Paul tells us that we are saved “in hope.” That is to say, we order our lives according to a future we do not see and almost certainly will not come to fruition in our lifetimes. To be clear, this hope is not synonymous with mere optimism, a glib belief that “everything will work out in the end.” It did not happen that way for Jesus and Jesus warns his disciples that they can expect nothing other than the cross he bore. Our hope is grounded in the conviction that God raised Jesus from death and, in so doing, delivered a decisive “yes” to the life he lived. To hope is to live in the way of Jesus, even when it does not seem practical, even when it seems not to make a difference, even when it appears to be counterproductive. To hope is to live in the way that is eternal, the way that life is lived is under God’s just and gentle reign yet to be revealed. The church is not the reign of God, but it witnesses to God’s reign by its communal life, its witness to Jesus’ obedient life, faithful death and glorious resurrection and its solidarity with those regarded as “the least” in the human community. To borrow a phrase from Professor Stanley Hauerwas, the church is the community whose life is incomprehensible apart form the belief that God raised Jesus from death.

This week I attended the annual gathering for the Ekklesia Project, the theme of which was “Hope Does Not Disappoint: Wrestling with God in a Groaning Creation.”? Together, we sought to listen carefully to voices and experiences that have too long been absent from the church’s construction of hope. To that end, we heard speakers from Latin American, Indigenous and African Christian traditions articulating the meaning of faith, hope and discipleship in their contexts. What became painfully clear to us is the fact that the Christianity imposed on these groups in the course of colonial domination has inflicted untold suffering. Miraculously, though, the good news of Jesus nevertheless broke through giving birth to new and vibrant expressions of faith grounded in the cultural wisdom and understanding of these very aggrieved communities. We were forced to consider what it might mean to receive the wisdom of these saints in confronting our difficult days of dissolution.

I was particularly struck with a remark made by Professor Michael Budde:1 “One thing I am not hoping for is a return to normal, because normal is how we got here.” Those who lament the decline in influence by the United Nations would do well to scrutinize its structure which allocates its real power to the Security Council made up of the richest and most powerful nations. The rest of the nations making up the General Assembly, by contrast, lack all power to effectuate whatever resolutions they might pass. At the lowest wrung of hell are refugees, those who have been forced to flee their homes, the people without a country and therefore without any rights other than toothless UN resolutions. The Jews learned the hard way that, when you are not a citizen of a nation state, the world will not lift a finger to prevent your extermination. It is one of history’s cruel ironies that Israel, the nation founded by a people subject to centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust, is carrying out what is currently the most sweeping act of war and ethnic cleansing against another nationless people. Normal, the current world order whose dissolution we lament, has not afforded justice, equality or even the ability to survive for millions of this planet’s people. It has instead maintained the systems and power arrangements that keep so much of the world in misery. Preserving and restoring that world order will only perpetuate the gross inequities that have plagued peoples all over the globe for centuries. Only those of us whose privilege has allowed us to benefit from it have reason to regret its demise.

For churches like my own that have evolved from state churches and taken root in the United States where, separation of church and state notwithstanding, the church has played a powerful role in our national politic, the demise of the United States as we know it is a bitter pill to swallow. American Christianity, whether under the guise of progressive social gospel or in the form of rightwing crusades to make America great again, has typically been focused on saving America. Right and left agree on the goal, they only differ with respect to the means and the shape of the end. Though nominally Christian, the dominant religion of America is still America. Our hope is shaped more by the American dream than the reign of God. It is because we are looking to America rather than Christ to hold all things together, we experience despair, inertia and loss of hope.

I believe that one of Jesus’ parables, soon to be our gospel lesson, can help us out. This is the difficult and, I believe, sadly misunderstood parable of the “Dishonest Steward” found in Luke 16:1-9. The title is a little deceptive. Truth be told, we don’t know whether the steward was dishonest. We only know that “charges were brought” to his boss that he was mismanaging the goods for which he was responsible. He might have been merely incompetent or the charges brought against him might have been false. His boss seems to have no interest in investigating the matter or hearing the steward’s side of the story. He summarily dismisses the steward who now finds himself without a job and few prospects of finding comparable employment. The steward learns the hard way that corporate doesn’t care. It is now clear to him that he was little more than a tool for his boss that could be disposed of when no longer useful. His colleagues, who he might have mistaken for friends, were ready to throw him under the bus to advance their own interests. The world of wealth, power and influence that once lifted him up over the people whose debts he was responsible for collecting has ruthlessly cast him away like a used tissue. There never was any loyalty, friendship or fairness in that world. The steward was a fool to think otherwise.   

But that is not the end of the story. The steward does not waste time lamenting his fall, wallowing in self pity or trying to beg and plead his way back into favor with his former employer. He recognizes that he is now among those his employer used his services to exploit. His fate is tied up with theirs. His hope lies in solidarity with them. So the steward uses the time he has left in his job to build bridges and form supportive relationships with the debtors he was commissioned to extract payment. He reduces their debt payments-possibly by foregoing the collection fee to which he was entitled, thereby easing their economic burden. This will ensure that they, in turn, will take him in and assist him with his needs. While that might sound a bit calculating, I believe we can recognize here a reorientation of hope. Hope lies in solidarity with the exploited, not the exploiter. Hope lies in aligning oneself with the lowly, the poor and the hungry rather than with the proud who are to be scattered in the imagination of their hearts or the mighty who are destined to be brought down from their thrones. See Luke 1:46-55.

The American church has seen decline and contraction for as long as I have been alive. Our power, influence and prestige in American society have decreased accordingly. It is becoming clear that America no longer needs the church and perhaps never did. What is less clear is whether the American church can free itself from its need for America. Can we recognize a better hope than the salvation of America? Can we imagine a better future than return to normalcy-whatever that might mean to us?  Can we see a future beyond the collapse of the world order we have looked to so long for safety, security and prosperity? Do we have the courage to defy our wealthy patrons, let go the vestiges of privilege remaining to us and risk whatever consequences might flow from standing with the victims if ICE violence, racial hate, homophobic persecution and sexist discrimination? Can we posture ourselves in such a way that we can pray Mary’s Magnificat with joy and conviction? Therein lies a better hope than the American dream. Therein lies the life that is eternal and holds all things together until the day when all things are made new.

Here is a poem by Pamala Sneed recognizing hope in the resilience of South African Blacks struggling against apartheid that points us toward the better hope I believe is represented in the promise of God’s gentle reign of justice and peace.

Robben Island

The only antidote I may have to Trump’s election

is in a small ferry to Robben Island

one that shuttles you to the former prison

where those who fought against apartheid were held

The only answers may be in one wool blanket

a basin

toilet

cell

and the tiny windows of  Robben Island

in the discarded artillery

the rock and the limestone yard

where many were blinded

driven mad

Now the survivors former prisoners

give tours

their faces carved like tree roots exposed

The only answers may be in the surrounding peaks of Table Mountain

its Twelve Apostles

all now standing as testament to what

through years of struggles

can be defeated

overcome

Source: Poetry (June 2025) Pamela Sneed is a New York City-based poet, performer, visual artist, and educator. She earned her BA from Eugene Lang College and MFA from Long Island University. She has taught solo performance and writing for solo performance at Sarah Lawrence College and was the 2017 visiting critic at Yale and at Columbia University. Sneed currently teaches online for the low-residency MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a visiting artist in the summer MFA program. Sneed is also an adjunct assistant professor at the Columbia University School of the Arts. She won a 2023 Creative Capital award in literature as well as a 2024 NYSCA grant in poetry. Her visual work has appeared in group shows at the Ford Foundation, Company Gallery, and more. You can read more about Pamala Sneed and sample more of her poetry at the Poetry Foundation and Cornell AAP websites.

1 Michael Budde is a co-founder and first coordinator of the Ekklesia Project; he is Professor of Catholic Studies and Political Science at DePaul University in Chicago, where he also serves as a Senior Research Professor in the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology (CWCIT).

Neighbors are to be Loved, not Defined

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FIFTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Deuteronomy 30:9-14

Psalm 25:1-10

Colossians 1:1-14

Luke 10:25-37

Prayer of the Day: O Lord God, your mercy delights us, and the world longs for your loving care. Hear the cries of everyone in need, and turn our hearts to love our neighbors with the love of your Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.

“And who is my neighbor?” Luke 10:29.

In this day and age, the parable hardly needs a sermon. If I were preaching this Sunday, I would be tempted to say following the gospel reading, “You know very well what our government has to say about who your neighbor is. It all depends on nationality, blood, soil and proper documentation. You have just heard Jesus tell you who your neighbor is. Neighborliness knows no limit. It extends to everyone in need of a neighbor. This is not rocket science. As Moses tells us in our lesson from Deuteronomy, “this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will go up to heaven for us and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?’ Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?’ No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.” Amen.

“But come on, Pastor! You know it isn’t that simple. Do you want open borders? Should anyone be allowed to come into our country? What about criminals? What about drug dealers? Sex traffickers? How many people can we take without burdening our own people? Where do you draw the line?”

This is precisely the sort of argument into which the lawyer was trying to lure Jesus. It is what lawyers do. As one who practiced law for eighteen years, I understand how lawyer’s minds work. Lawyers do not ask questions in order to learn anything. Good lawyers never ask a question unless they know (or think they know) the answer. The purpose of a lawyer’s question is to elicit an answer that pins down the one being interrogated. It is designed to box one’s opponent into a position that can be attacked and discredited. If only Jesus can be forced to concede that there is a line to be drawn between neighbor and non-neighbor, insider and outsider, then the argument boils down to a simple matter of where you draw that line. Your nation? Your home state? Your neighborhood? Your family? How far can Jesus be pushed?

Jesus, however, will not be drawn into such puerile sophistry. For the duty of neighborliness does not turn on any definition of the noun, “neighbor.” It is not as though I can determine the scope of my responsibility to love my neighbor by crafting a definition of the term conveniently excluding those I dislike. It is quite the other way around. I am called first to be a neighbor without any limits, conditions or qualifications. The scope of my duty is then defined by everyone who needs a neighbor, without exception. The proper question, therefore, is not “Who is my neighbor?” but “Am I a neighbor?” Hence, rather than engaging the lawyer on his own terms and assumptions, Jesus replies with a parable.

Unlike most of Jesus’ parables, this one includes some very specific details. We are told that the victim of the bandits was travelling on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. Why does that matter anymore than the country of the king in Jesus’ parable of the wedding feast and the ungrateful and unresponsive invitees? One possibility is that the parable was based on an actual event about which the lawyer and the rest of those listening were aware. If so, Jesus’ story would have landed with even greater force. Had Jesus’ parable been only a parable, the lawyer might have responded, “Nice story Jesus. But that would never happen. You don’t know those Samaritans like I do. Rapists, murderers, drug dealers…” But if the parable were based on an actual event, there could be no such off handed dismissal.

Though the robbery victim, presumably a Jew, would surely have qualified definitionally as a neighbor to the priest and the Levite, he would hardly be considered such to the Samaritan. So distasteful is the very idea that the lawyer cannot even bring himself to use the word “Samaritan” in answering Jesus’ query as to who was neighbor to the man who fell among robbers. He will only reply “the one who showed him mercy.” When it came to who actually was neighbor to the man in need, the lawyer could not deny that the Samaritan alone fit the bill.

The refugees seeking asylum in our country are neighbors for no other reason than that they are in need and we have the means to assist them. Martin Luther recognized as much in his commentary on the commandment against murder in the Large Catechism:

“In the second place, this commandment is violated not only when a person actually does evil, but also when he fails to do good to his neighbor, or, though he has the opportunity, fails to prevent, protect, and save him from suffering bodily harm or injury. If you send a person away naked when you could clothe him, you have let him freeze to death. If you see anyone suffer hunger and do not feed him, you have let him starve. Likewise, if you see anyone condemned to death or in similar peril and do not save him although you know ways and means to do so, you have killed him. It will do no good to plead that you did not contribute to his death by word or deed, for you have withheld your love from him and robbed him of the service by which his life might have been saved.” The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, Translated and edited by Theodore G. Tappert (c. 1959 by Fortress Press) pp. 390-391.

My Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and its ecumenical partners have always recognized refugees as siblings and neighbors. For over a century we have been working with, advocating for, sponsoring and resettling refugees from all over the world. We do it quite simply because it is what Jesus commands us to do. We cannot recognize the authority of any civil, religious or military power that would limit the limitless scope of our sacred duty to our neighbors.  

Here is a poem by Adreinna Rich about the boundaries we erect to divide ourselves into nations, tribes and clans, thereby diminishing our common humanity and eroding our capacity for neighborliness.

Boundary

What has happened here will do

To bite the living world in two,

Half for me and half for you.

Here at last I fix a line

Severing the world’s design

Too small to hold both yours and mine.

There’s enormity in a hair

Enough to lead men not to share

Narrow confines of a sphere

But put an ocean or a fence

Between two opposite intents.

A hair would span the difference.

Source: The Fact of a Doorframe, Adrienne Rich (c. 2002 by Adrienne Rich, pub. by W.W. Norton & Co.). Poet and essayist Adrienna Rich (1929-2012) was born in Baltimore, Maryland. Her father was a pathologist and professor at Johns Hopkins; her mother a former concert pianist. She graduated from Radcliffe University and married in 1953. She had three children with her husband, but the marriage ended with their separation in the 1960s. Rich’s prose collections are widely-acclaimed for their articulate treatment of politics, feminism, history, racism and many other topics. Her poetry likewise explores issues of identity, sexuality and politics.  Rich’s awards include the National Book Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the Bollingen Prize, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship and a MacArthur “Genius” Award. You can read more about Adrienna Rich and sample more of her poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.