Jeremiah 31:27-34

Psalm 119:97-104

2 Timothy 3:14-4:5

Luke 18:1-8

“When the Son of humanity comes will he find faith on earth” (Lk. 18)? These words from two thousand years ago are the defining question of our time. This week the House Committee on the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol concluded its hearings. We have seen indisputable evidence that politicians continue to use false claims of electoral fraud to secure their own power.[i]

Last month the governors of Florida and Texas falsely promised jobs and resettlement help to asylum seekers who they sent to Washington, D.C. and Martha’s Vineyard. They used immigrants, including children, as part of a political stunt.[ii] This action echoes the way that black southerners were bused out of the south by segregationist White Citizens’ Councils to cities with prominent integrationist leaders in 1962.

This week in Ukraine and Iran ordinary people were slaughtered because of a distant political agenda, because of an ideology. Here at home we see terrible poverty and neglect on our own streets. “When the Son of humanity comes, will he find faith on earth?”

In the face of the heartbreaking cruelty and dishonesty of his own time Jesus tells his friends, “a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart” (Lk. 18). Jesus tells this story near the end of his own journey to Jerusalem, as he talks about the end of time when God’s realm of justice, peace and love will come.

The Hebrew Bible frequently demands that the powerful have a special responsibility to widows, strangers and orphans. These groups are vulnerable because they have no male relatives to defend them. Although widows in the Bible (like in the stories of Ruth or Elijah and the widow of Zarephath) often model tenacity, resourcefulness and initiative, they represent vulnerability just as the judge symbolizes power.

In several sections of Luke’s Gospel he uses a “how much more” argument. “If you then, who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him” (Lk. 11:13). This parable uses this same logic.

A widow comes to a judge seeking justice. He does not believe in God. Nor does he respect people. He refuses to help her until he reasons that, “because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out” (Lk. 18). Let me point out two ways in which the Greek version differs from the English translation. When the judge says that he does not want the widow to “wear him out” the Greek word for this is hupopiazē. It is an expression from boxing. It means to literally give someone a black eye. The judge doesn’t want the widow to embarrass him or injure his reputation.

Second, the Greek more strongly conveys urgency, impatience and conviction. Greek uses double negatives to add emphasis. It’s almost as if Jesus raises his voice to underline what he means. A more literal version might be, “And will not God give vengeance to his chosen ones who are crying day and night? And be impatient to help them!”

The point is not that God resembles the unjust judge. In almost every respect Jesus describes God as the opposite. The judge is self-centered. He only uses people. But God is full of love, impatient for his children to thrive. Jesus is unafraid to be humiliated for our sake. The purpose of this “how much more” story is for us to trust God and to persist in prayer.

Today I want to give you one picture of a faithless world and then to consider how faith humanizes us.

1. In college I knew a woman whose favorite story was Ernest Hemmingway’s “The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” This always worried me about her partly because of the story’s misogyny but mostly because of its position with regard to faith.

We meet Francis Macomber as a thirty-five year old American business tycoon on safari in East Africa. As the story unfolds we gradually come to realize that he has committed the cardinal sin in the universe of Hemingway fiction. The day before he betrayed his manliness and ran in fear from a wounded lion who had been concealed in the tall grass.

Margot, his wife, does not try to comfort him in his humiliation. Instead, she despises this act of cowardice and as a consequence she sleeps with the safari leader that night. Hemmingway also seems to hate his own fictitious character, because he wouldn’t leave his wife, because “he would take anything” from her.

The next day the group goes in pursuit of a dangerous buffalo. Then, suddenly, in an almost religious conversion, Macomber changes. Hemmingway writes, that “[f]or the first time in his life he felt wholly without fear. Instead of fear he had a feeling of definite elation.” The safari leader admires this new courage. His wife fears it because she no longer has the power to make him ashamed of being afraid.

Why is it called a “Short Happy Life”? Only moments later as Macomber tries to flush the buffalo out of the long grass, “he [feels] a sudden white-hot, blinding flash explode inside his head and that was all he ever felt.” Although his wife claimed she was aiming at the buffalo, she shot him in the back of the head.

When the son of man comes will he find faith on earth? In Hemmingway’s universe there is no faith. Men can never depend on women, or on other men. Every person is either a conquest or an adversary. The individual can only rely on an elusive courage that comes miraculously from within, an irrational bravery which completely isolates each soul from all else.

2. The theologian H. Richard Niebuhr emphasizes that faith means more than merely faith in God. Faith concerns all the ways that we are connected to and support and depend on each other. “We see this possibility – that human history will come to its end… in the gangrenous corruption of a social life in which every promise, contract, treaty and “word of honor” is given and received in deception and distrust. If [human beings] can no longer have faith in each other, can they exist as [human beings]?”

What shall we do in this time before the second coming of Christ? We need to pray and not lose hope. We also need to strive to be people of honesty and integrity, to listen and care for others. To use the language of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) we need to treat people as ends rather than as means to our own goals. The heartbreaking sin of this judge was his inability to see the widow as a person.

I have a friend named Sue Everson who is a world authority on hopelessness. As a medical researcher she studies the effect that hopelessness has on our health. One of her more startling statistics is that people who feel hopeless are twenty percent more likely to die in the next four years from a stroke. Hopelessness increases your chance of a stroke to the same degree that smoking a pack of cigarettes a day does.  Sue scientifically studies how religion seems to make people less hopeless.

Today with churches around the world we celebrate the Children’s Sabbath. A central part of what we do together involves our care for children and families. We teach children how to listen spiritually, how to pray and not lose heart. Professor Lisa Miller has been our guest on the forum twice. She argues that denying our spirituality is not just untrue but unhealthy for us and especially for children.

Using new techniques ranging from twin studies to neuroimaging, scientists are coming to a new appreciation for just how important spirituality is for human flourishing. Miller claims that all children possess a kind of “natural spirituality.” This interest in the Holy, this, “direct sense of… the heartbeat of the living universe… precedes and transcends language, culture and religion.”This spirituality protects us, but not completely, from depression, anxiety and the tendency to misuse alcohol and drugs.

So what is the most important thing that we can do as adults for children? We can support their Sunday School teachers and the families who gather here. We can take their questions seriously. We can listen to them.

And so the conversation continues every week here. In life we are forever asking and being asked a simple question, “do you believe me?” Do you? Seeing what is happening in the world, it is easy to struggle with a crisis of trust right now. I trust God but I don’t know if the Son will find faith on earth. And yet at the same time I feel remarkably supported by the life I find at Grace Cathedral.

C.S. Lewis writes that, “Faith… is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of changing moods….” Because of this he says we need to pray and hold some of the Christian ideals in our mind for a period of time every day. We need to worship because, “We have to be continually reminded of what we believe… Belief has to be fed…” People do not cease to be Christian because of a good argument but because they simply drift away.

Kathleen Norris writes, “prayer is not asking for what you think you want but asking to be changed in ways you can’t imagine. To be made more grateful, more able to see the good in what you have been given instead of always grieving for what might have been.”

My friends pray always and do not lose heart. Be trustworthy and care for the children. When the Son of humanity comes may he find faith on earth.

Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15

Psalm 91:1-6, 14-16

1 Timothy 6:6-19

Luke 16:19-31

What will you do with this wonderful, mysterious life that you have been given?

Imagine that you were born in Africa 300,000 years ago and you experienced the whole life of the very first human being ever born. Then immediately afterwards you were to live the full life of the second human being.[i] And then every human being since then, all the way to the baby being born as I complete this sentence. Your life would consist of all these “lifetimes, lived consecutively.”[ii]

Your experience would be very different from the history books. Famous people like the Buddha, Confucius, Mary (the mother of Jesus), Isaac Newton and Jane Austen would account for only an infinitesimal part of your experience. Most of your life would consist of ordinary social interactions. It would include a lot of worrying, working and social conflict over status and inclusion. You would feel a great deal of awe and wonder too.

This life would last for four trillion years. A tenth of that time you would be a hunter-gatherer. For 60% you would be in a farming family. You would spend 20% of your time raising children, 20% growing food. 2% of your time would be dedicated to religious ritual like this. For 1% of your life you would have malaria or small pox. You would spend 1.5 billion years engaged in sex and 250 million years giving birth. You would experience terrible suffering, war and brutality. For 10% of the time you would own other human beings and another 10% you would be enslaved yourself.

This brings us to our very unique circumstances as modern people. Substantial population growth means that a third of your life would have occurred after the year 1200 AD and a quarter of it after 1750. As a result during many of your years you would experience massive social changes around the industrial revolution, modern colonialism, the emergence of democracy, capitalism, contemporary science, civil rights movements, etc.

You would spend 150 years in outer space. For one week you would walk on the moon. Fifteen percent of your experience would be of people who are alive today. William MacAskill uses this thought experiment to give us an insight into human nature and a broader perspective of our place in the world. But he also does it to alert us to a pressing but often overlooked issue, our responsibility for the people of the future.

He points out that if human beings last as long as the average mammalian species (which is 1 million years) and even at a population of a tenth of our current size then 99.5 percent of human life would be ahead of us. It seems likely that the vast, vast, vast majority of all the people who will ever live have not even been born yet. And we have a responsibility to them. We are the ancient ones. We are the forebears choosing a course that will bring suffering or joy to the trillions of people who follow us.

Jesus presents us with another thought experiment that he hopes will change our vision and how we live. The religious leaders, who Luke notes are “lovers of money,” hear Jesus’ parable from last week about the unrighteous manager and “ridicule him” (Lk. 16:14). Jesus responds saying, “God knows your hearts, for what is prized by human beings is an abomination to God.”Then he tells a story that we hardly ever hear at Grace Cathedral and that I have not preached about for twenty-one years. Luke the author of this Gospel cares intensely about poverty and generosity. In his story Jesus is born poor in a barn, Mary in the Magnificat announces that God fills the hungry with good things, there are scores of examples of Jesus bringing good news to the poor, the earliest church shares all things in common.

This morning Jesus does not give us a philosophical dissertation on the afterlife. Like the image of a 4 trillion year lifetime, the point of this picture is to wake us up, so that we can see the world as it really is. A rich man in purple delights in his sensuality and his feasts.[iii] At his gate, Lazarus longs for leftovers, as the dogs lick his sores. His name el-Azar means “God has helped.” We wonder if the rich man even knows his name.

The two die and the rich man sees Lazarus in the bosom of Abraham. He calls out “Father Abraham” eleēson, “have mercy on me.” Send Lazarus to cool my tongue. Abraham points out the great chasm separating the two realms. Then the rich man tells Abraham to send Lazarus to warn his five siblings. Abraham concludes the story saying that if the rich man’s siblings do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead” (Lk. 16).

1. One thing I love about this story is that for Jesus, the poor man has a name – Lazarus. And what strikes me with such force is that over his life this rich man has created such an absolute barrier between Lazarus and himself that even after death, when everything should be clear, he cannot see his humanity. He looks at Lazarus in the bosom of Abraham, and he cannot recognize him as anything other than his inferior, as someone who exists to serve him.

Sharing what we have may be very difficult. But really seeing the humanity and dignity of the people we encounter, that might be even harder. Every time I walk through the Tenderloin wearing my clerical collar and saying hi to the people I encounter, I am surprised by the openness and respect of the people in this city who have the least. In that setting people regard the collar as a sign that because of Jesus I might be more ready to see their dignity. In their eyes I see the hope that they might be meeting someone who understands them.

2. Earlier in the Book of Luke, John the Baptist warns the people who come out to the desert, “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’” (Lk. 3). For Luke, what matters is not who your people are, or what tribe you belong to, it is about what you do.

In the third century Augustine understood this. The thirty year old Augustine was experiencing every form of success. He was wildly popular and successful. He had a beautiful concubine, a wonderful son, a prestigious professorship, a bright political career and the prospects of great wealth through a strategic marriage. But Augustine felt miserable. He writes, “I panted for honors, for money, for marriage.”[iv] And yet despite getting everything he wanted he felt profoundly empty.

One day Augustine was feeling career pressure (he had to lie about the virtues of the emperor in a public speech). He noticed a very poor man who was drunk and laughing. Augustine envied his light heartedness. If someone asked if he would rather be under great stress or happy like this man, he would rather be like this man. But if someone asked if he would rather be the beggar or himself he would choose himself. He could not let go of the honors that were making him miserable.

Eventually Augustine began to see that faith not as a mental state of believing but a changed life based on trusting God. Something in him opened and he became capable of receiving great joy.

3. The last thing I want to point out about this story is that according to Luke, Moses and the prophets are enough. Jesus has not come to add something to the Jewish faith or to replace it with something new. He has called our attention to the truths we already know about loving God and each other. We see these in Moses and the Prophets and in other religions, other forms of piety.

This week at Joan Silva’s funeral I mentioned that in this church we teach our children that prophets are people who are so close to God and God is so close to them that they know what to do. For me, the Persian mystical poet Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273) is a prophet. He writes, “Let the beauty we love be what we do / There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”[v]

Elsewhere Rumi writes, “Whatever you can think is perishable. / That which enters no thought, that’s God!”[vi] I see in Rumi the deep love of God that I also experience in Jesus. Rumi longs for God and writes,

“When I seek peace, he is / the kindly intercessor, / And when I go to war, / the dagger, that is he; / And when I come to meetings, / he is the wine and the sweetmeat. / And when I come to gardens, / the fragrance, that is he. / When I go to the mines, deep / he is the ruby there, / When I delve in the ocean, / the precious pearl is he. / When I come to the desert, / he is a garden there. / When I go to the heaven, / the brilliant star is he… / And when I write a letter / to my beloved friends, / The paper and the inkwell, / the ink, the pen is he. / And when I write a poem / and seek a rhyming word – / The one who spreads the rhymes out / within my thought, is he!”[vii]

We are the ancient ones. We are the forebears choosing a course that will bring suffering or joy to the trillions of people who follow us. Faith is the gift which sees every person’s dignity. Faith is the way we act, how we respond to God’s love. Faith is the question: What will you do with this wonderful, mysterious life that you have been given?

[i] https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/first-humans-on-earth/

[ii] William MacAskill, What We Owe the Future (NY: Basic Books, 2022) 3.

[iii] eujfraino/menoß This word means to rejoice, cheer and is used for the rich fool in Luke 12:19. “And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’”

[iv] 17 Pent (9-30-01) 21C. Augustine, Confessions.  Tr. Rex Warner (NY: Mentor-Omega, 1963) 119f.

[v] Jalaluddin Rumi tr. Coleman Barks, Rumi: The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003) 123.

[vi] Annemarie Schimmel, I Am Wind You Are Fire: The Life and Work of Rumi (Boston: Shambhala, 1992) 73.

[vii] Ibid., 44-5.