Timothy Sheridan
Wherever you live, you’ve seen them, lying on park benches, standing on the roadside, sitting on street corners, easily identified by disheveled hair, baggy clothes, and bad teeth: the homeless. Maybe you’ve also been one of those people who walk in the opposite direction, lock your car door or roll up your window, at the mere sight of someone holding a sign reading, “God bless,” as if the words written in Sharpie on the bent piece of cardboard were an imprecation rather than a benediction. I’ve seen someone reach for a concealed weapon at the mere approach of a homeless man.
“You always have the poor with you,” Jesus said (Matt. 26:11). Some Christians seem to have taken the Lord’s words as a challenge to prove Him wrong through various relief efforts; others have resigned them to their fate. For as much ardor as the Church seems to have for involvement in worldly politics, many of her number would just as soon leave the poor and the downtrodden to themselves, invoking other gods like self-determination, self-preservation, or the invisible hand of the market. But none of these have anything to do with the God who is the Father of the fatherless and the protector of widows (Psalm 68:5), whose Son became poor for our sakes (II Cor. 8:9).
That’s the God we confess, before whom we piously call ourselves poor miserable sinners, but what is it that we’re really confessing when we scramble for the locks on our car doors, our guns, our excuses for saving our own skins and our own goods at the expense of those who have nothing? We’re admitting that we know full well that what we have could just as easily and effortlessly be snatched from us as was the wealth of those now bereft of everything. We betray just how weak, helpless, scared, and impoverished we truly are. We’re afraid that God, who has promised to provide for all our needs, is actually a tyrant who cruelly and capriciously takes our rightful possessions from us. Perhaps we also fear the poor because in them we see our own poverty.
If that’s really the case, then we’re poor miserable sinners indeed. But because that is the reality of our plight, we are in good company. The Son of Man, who had nowhere to lay His head (Luke 9:58), became poor and miserable for us. In laying aside everything, including His very life, He became even less than the most destitute vagrant – He became nothing (Phil. 2:7).
By becoming the victim of every injustice and misfortune, by allowing Himself to be murdered by the affluent, falling among thieves and robbers, and making His grave with the wicked, Jesus became the neighbor we are to love according to the Great Commandment. In the suffering and bruised countenance of God in the flesh, executed like the greatest of criminals, we realize that where Jesus ends and the neediest of our neighbors begins is intentionally ambiguous: “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me” (Matt. 25:40).
The distinction between our Lord who has redeemed us and our neighbor whom we are bound to serve is blurred by the blood of Jesus. Encountering the poor is not an aberration in our otherwise comfortable middle-class lives, but is an encounter with Jesus Himself and with people who are not panhandlers, bums, or addicts — they’re our neighbors.
So when you come face-to-face with the poor, it won’t matter what you think of welfare, humanitarian aid, or vagrancy laws. You are free from your anxiety about the stuff to which you try to cling and your own poverty. None of God’s children will be left as orphans. “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not graciously give us all things?” (Rom. 8:32). Our heavenly Father can’t be out-given. As lord of all in Christ the conqueror, you are free to be the servant of all. Having lost our old lives of sin and death with Christ and having been raised with Him, we have nothing to lose.
Timothy Sheridan is a member of Our Savior Lutheran in Raleigh, NC.
The world loves a good hypocrite. Nothing makes the Twitterverse explode like a Christian who is revealed to be caught up in the very sin he preaches against. “Be true to yourself!” is the world’s sermon-and even better if your true self involves some sort of alternative sexual appetite. Even Christians get downright giddy when a Christian falls into public and shameful sin, and seem to delight in heaping up the shame. Hypocrite!
“So, you’re a pastor, eh? What do you do anyway?”
The story of Chicken Little is about a chicken who believes the world will soon come to an end. One day, when an acorn falls on his head, he mistakes it for the sky. In his panic he runs to tell the King that the sky is about to fall on all of them. Whenever he meets someone on his journey to warn the King he exclaims to them, “The sky is falling!” This phrase is often used as a common way to say someone is under the mistaken belief that disaster is imminent.
What are we celebrating when we commemorate this day of the presentation of the Augsburg Confession by the reformers to Emperor Charles V?
I didn’t grow up a Christian. I couldn’t have told you the difference between a Roman Catholic and a Baptist. None of the kids in Mr. Pelstring’s class who attended religion classes at their churches every Wednesday looked like Christians I’d seen portrayed on television or in movies. But growing up in Minnesota, our family knew more than a few Lutherans. Our neighbors, when we lived in Grove City, were Lutherans. One time, they invited us to Christmas Eve service. I didn’t understand why she’d accepted, but after supper my mother drove the two of us across town, past the gun club and snow-blanketed baseball fields, up the little hill to the church.
We Christians are well-meaning people, at least some of the time. Perhaps you’ve been in the situation in which your non-Christian neighbor (family member, friend, or coworker) asks you the question, “Why are you a Christian?” This is the moment that the Apostle Peter wrote about in his First Epistle: “In your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks for a reason for the hope that is in you” (3:15)! You’ve been through confirmation, and have diligently attended retreats, worship, and Sunday School. It’s as if you’ve been preparing for just these sort of interchanges for years now.
The importance of Pentecost is demonstrated profoundly in the original medieval tales of King Arthur: For on the Feast of Pentecost, the Round Table was begun. Also on this Feast, the Knights would tell stories to the court of their adventures and service, in the name of Christ, in order to edify and inspire. To be made a Knight was a sober duty, full of danger against great evils in service to their neighbors; this vocation required humility, vigilance, wisdom, regular attendance of the Divine Service, and penitent faith. Through Jesus, you have been elected before the creation of the world and given the quest of the cross: the Christian faith. At your Baptism, you received, by the Holy Spirit in the Word, the Name of the Triune God upon you, justification by faith, forgiveness of your sins, and the ability to discern Scripture and rely upon it alone: these are your holy Armor and Shield and blessed Sword for the perilous adventure to the Celestial City.
If you’ve grown up in church, you probably know that it’s hard to be surprised by the story of Jesus’ life and ministry. We have 2,000 years’ worth of teaching and reflection on the Gospel in addition to our own personal familiarity with it. But here’s what never fails to surprise me: after Jesus ascends into heaven to sit at God’s right hand, His disciples are…happy? St. Luke writes, “And they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple blessing God” (24:52-53).
Technology in its very nature is restless. It consists of many techniques, methods, and developments. Its services are always running and running, traveling from machine to the next in an array of impulses that never seem to end. All we have to do is flip a switch, push a button, or pull the handle down, and — BAM — technology reveals to us its splendor of incessant power and glory.
