“Imagining, if Even Just for a Moment, You Were God”
A Sermon for the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
July 22, 2007
Colossians 1:15-28, Luke 10:38-42
Rev. Larry Lange
Grace Evangelical Lutheran Congregation
Green Bay, Wisconsin
It’s not every day you get to have Jesus over to dinner. It would be almost as exciting as getting to have someone powerful and famous like President Bush or say, Chad Fradette, over for dinner.
And, of course, if such a thing ever did happen, if, say, the pastor called you up and asked if you might be able to throw a little something together for dinner for Jesus and put him up for the night, because his flight to Cleveland was cancelled, you’d slam the phone down and get right to work. You’d begin by clearing all the bills and the Press Gazettes and the Country Home magazines and church newsletters and all the rest of the unopened mail off the kitchen table and try to cram them into a fifty gallon garbage can.
Then you’d probably want to get everyone’s shoes out of the hallway and coats up off the floor and in doing so you’d probably pass by the guest bathroom and notice someone’s handprints all over the mirror and wonder why in the world someone put their handprints on the mirror, and you’d notice too, that someone hadn’t replaced the empty toilet paper roll (not that Jesus would even know what toilet paper was), and so you’d want to spiff up the bathroom a bit, and you do, and then you zip over to the sink and wash up all the breakfast dishes and lunch dishes and snack dishes and put away all the dishes that are in the cupboards that are so high you have to get the ladder to reach them, and while you’re doing dishes, you notice that the kitchen windows haven’t been washed for a while, and you’d want to wash them and the living room windows and any other windows Jesus might see, and as you’re washing the windows, you’re reminded you can’t just clean one side of the window to make it look nice, oh no, you have to clean both sides of the windows, so pretty soon you’re outside on the ladder cleaning the outside of the windows, too, and then, of course, you notice the grass needs cutting, and the weeds need whacking, and the bird bath is full of floating feathers, and the bird feeders are empty, and the bicycles and the croquet set need putting away, and you scamper madly around to do that, because that’s what Jesus would see first, and you know first impressions last.
But when you try to get all that stuff in the garage, you notice it’s full of maple leaf seeds and cottonwood tree cotton and bird doo doo from when the robin was trapped in there last week, and you immediately want to clean all that up, too, but you know you can’t, because there’s no time, so you push the garage door opener button, but the battery is dead.
Now although you do have batteries lying around, you can’t figure out how to get the garage door opener open without breaking the stupid thing, and you remember that the garage door opener that looks like a doorbell is already broken, and so you have to figure out how to pull the garage door down without power and you can’t figure it out, and so you go to find the instructions for the garage door opener, and you know they’re in the house somewhere, and after twenty precious minutes go by, you find them, and you remember what that stupid rope is for that’s hanging down from the garage door opener and you yank the garage door down to hide the mess in there.
Then you vacuum the living room, dust the furniture, and look for a bible to stick on the cocktail table which you can’t find, so you decide a Lutheran magazine will do (even if the Pope doesn’t think so), and you remember you don’t get the Lutheran magazine at Grace Lutheran Church any more, so you finally put out the Watchtower magazine the Jehovah’s Witnesses dropped off three weeks ago.
It’s only then you remember that Jesus is staying for the night, too, so you tear upstairs or down the hall to whatever room you use when overnight guests come, and you have another bathroom to clean, and the sheets you’re stripping off the bed, are flying through the air, and the rest of the bedroom doors you just slam shut knowing there’s no hope for them at all.
Well, you’re just about exhausted, and you feel like you just ran the Bellin Run, when the doorbell rings and you realize that you look like you just ran the Bellin Run, and you let out an enormous anguished cry, because you also smell like you just ran the Bellin Run, forgetting all the time that Jesus is a homeless fellow, and there aren’t a lot of opportunities for homeless folks to maintain a proper hygenical regimen, and there’ll be even fewer if the City Council votes for a moratorium on homeless shelters that would shut down the homeless shelter down the street.
So you send the kids or the husband down to answer the door, and you take a quick shower and put on some nice clothes—not too nice, because you know you still have to throw something together for dinner—but somewhat nice, because it is Jesus who’s coming by after all —not the Culligan man.
This decision takes a while, because, well, you have a lot of clothes to think about and all the rest of your essential hygenical routine—the flossing, the brushing, the hair drying, the eyebrow plucking, those pesky nose hairs—these things take time. Finally, you stagger downstairs, and there’s Jesus sitting on the floor, because he didn’t want to get your new couch dirty. He’s sitting there with the kids or the husband and the pastor and the dog and the white rat and the turtle and the canaries, and he’s teaching all of them his radical interpretation of the ten commandments, which is fascinating to them, even though Martin Luther had done a pretty good job with them in the Small Catechism, but it was like none of them had ever heard any of it in Confirmation class which, of course, is partly true.
And to your absolute disgust, you see that no one has offered Jesus a glass of lemonade or even a beer would have been okay since Jesus hung out with tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners, but the dolts sitting at Jesus’ feet haven’t offered him anything, not even a cup of cool water and the stale box of Wheat Thins, and so you blow a gasket: all the ugly thoughts you have about how relatively useless men are when it comes to proper hospitality and about how lazy the younger generation is all come boiling up out right out of your gall bladder and come out your mouth in words pretty much the same as Martha’s in today’s Gospel lesson, except not translated in such a lame and wooden manner as the New Revised Translation of the Bible.
You say something like: “"Lord, do you not care that my husband and/or children have left me to do all the work by myself? Tell them, then, to help me."
You say something like that, but with a little bit more acid reflux in it. You say: “Jesus! Don’t you give a expletive deleted about me? Look at how my husband and/or children have left me with all the work! Why don’t you tell them to get their posteriors in gear and help me!”
Now, notice that Jesus does not do as Martha commands. Jesus, and not Martha after all, is
“the very image of the invisible God, in whom all things in heaven and on earth were created.”
Jesus is not about to be ordered around by anyone much less you or Martha.
But Jesus doesn’t zap you with a bolt of lightening. Jesus stays cool. Jesus enters the gestalt of the moment. He is truly aware and truly present in the moment. “Martha, Martha,” he says, wry smile, shaking his head, “you are worried and distracted by many things. There is need of only one thing. Those sitting at my feet to learn from me have chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from them."
It’s at this point that you suddenly stop and realize what you’ve been doing ever since the pastor called and asked if you could help out.
You suddenly realize that number one: you have just accused Jesus of not caring about you, and number two: you have just commanded Jesus to yell at your husband and/or kids as if you were God, as if it were your priorities that were supposed to be carried out by God and not God’s priorities that were supposed to be carried out by you. You realize that in your zeal to do many, many good and excellent things, you have pretended—if even just for a moment—that you were God and that you lost sight of the one good thing: Jesus and his teachings.
How did this happen to a nice person like yourself?
Well, you are exhausted from being worried and distracted by many things, and so you sit down with the rest of them at Jesus feet to try to figure him out. You sit down and listen to Jesus teach. You listen to Jesus tell his stories. You start thinking about his story: his story about how Jesus was out there in this ugly, violent world feeding and healing the homeless, the mentally ill, the lost, the tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners until one day the religious and governmental authorities decide Jesus and all his loser friends are too much of a public nuisance, and they decide that his priorities for economic development downtown are not their priorities, and they pretend—if even just for a moment—that it is judgment day and they are God and they work together to try to get rid of Jesus.
The more you listen to Jesus’ story, the more you realize you are—if even just for a moment—just like them.
After a while, the kids get hungry and get the idea to go outside, start a campfire and roast hot dogs and marshmallows on sticks. And Jesus likes that extremely un-nutritious idea, and Jesus is very happy to join you for a meal, just like he joins us for a meal we here every week.
Amen.