Sermon, 8/21/22: How much do you think you are worth?

11 Pentecost

Psalm 71:1 – 6; Jeremiah 1:4 – 10; Hebrews 12:18 – 29; Luke 13:10 – 17

I have been sustained by you ever since I was born; from my mother’s womb you have been my strength; my praise shall be always of you.  Psalm 71:6

It is not uncommon, when the news media give us information about a particular person, that one of the most enticing, intriguing, titillating bits of information given is: ‘His/her net worth is x-millions, or y-billions, dollars.’  A national periodical, to which I subscribe, produced recently a story about oligarchs and the superrich of nations whose attention has now turned from owning expensive properties in NYC, Miami, Tokyo, Hong Kong, London, to owning yachts which require crews of 100 plus individuals.   Before you conclude that my reflection this morning is “to attack” the wealth of these individuals, let me assure you that that is not the case.  I understand, from the introductory course in economics, which I took as an undergraduate, the word “net” to connote what remains after all debts and obligations have been met.  However, as a former pre-med student, I have a different sense of the net worth of an individual human being.

As a person of faith, I have an even different understanding of the net worth of an individual.  I direct your attention to an even more fundamental method of determining the net worth of every human being, including you and me.  I begin with the first reading in our lectionary of the day, Jeremiah 1:4 – 10.  Jeremiah is someone with whom we are most familiar from his challenging rhetoric in his adult ministry:

In those days they shall no longer say: The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge. But every one shall die for his own sin; each man who eats sour grapes, his teeth shall be set on edge.  (Jeremiah 31:29)

The Jeremiah, whom we encounter today, is not yet the great prophet, whose words are to be feared and followed.  Rather, that Jeremiah, whom we today encounter, is one who says to God, “Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a youth.” (Jeremiah 1:6) Whether Jeremiah is indeed a young boy, when God calls him to ministry, or whether this is a literary means to stress his lack of training and experience is important for our understanding of how God assigns net value.   In so describing himself, Jeremiah aligns himself with David who was destined to lead the people of Israel.  In so describing himself, Jeremiah acknowledges his dependence on God, if he is to lead as a religious leader.  Jeremiah’s net value lay most assuredly not in the number of shekels or sheep or cattle which he possessed.  Rather, his net value lay in his willingness to listen to and to proclaim the message of God.  Jeremiah’s intrinsic value, a value with which we are all endowed and which signifies our net worth, is exhibited in his Moses-like response to God’s calling to build community.

Two things, which even to this day I recall from the years of biology and chemistry that I enjoyed as an undergraduate, remain fixed in my mind.  The first is, gender aside for a moment, that we of woman-born, to use a Shakespearean turn of phrase, have more in common, biologically, than we are different.  Hence, those women and men who have devoted themselves to scientific investigation, have been able to discover medicines that can treat illnesses which affect us, medicines which can be given to a general population because we share so many things in common.  The second is equally profound, namely for all our commonalities, we are, each of us, uniquely made.

Luke, also called the physician, describes that uniqueness, as Jesus expresses:
Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies?  And not one of them is forgotten before God.  Why, even the hairs of your head are all numbers.  Fear not; you are of more value than many sparrows. (Luke 12:6 – 7)

Luke records further the words of Jesus regarding the net value of human life:
Do not be anxious about your life…For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing.  Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them.  Of how much more value are you than the birds!  And which of you by being anxious can add a cubit to his span of life?  (Luke 12:22f.)

There is, in Luke’s record of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, a this-worldly, practical, pragmatic understanding of the message of Jesus.  And perhaps no clearer picture of how the kingdom of God is to be achieved and lived than as Luke records in the response which Jesus gives his detractors and opponents, as they attack him for healing a woman who had been crippled for eighteen years.  Was her deformity that of scoliosis, kyphosis, or lordosis which would today be given medical attention, thanks to advancements made in medical science?  However, giving her ailment a name was not the issue before those assembled then, and nor it is the issue before us today.  Rather, as people of faith, we are called again and again to evaluate the net worth of every individual, whom me may encounter, and how we may be of service to them.  And over and over, the teachings of God’s Messiah call our evaluation into question, and Luke’s recording of the words of Jesus are on point. 

Jesus’ critics, the then religious establishment, were called out:
“You hypocrites!  Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water?  And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham…be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?”  (Luke 13:16)

In my era in theological training, a term most frequently heard on campus and in the media was “social gospel.”  And it was the Bishop of Rome, Pope John 23, who carried the banner of a fresh approach in applying the gospel of Christ.  He chided the churches, his own, as well as other Christian churches and bodies, for their neglect of the tenets of the gospel: Love of God and love of neighbor.  Or restated in biblical terminology, “how can you say that you love God, whom you cannot see, and hate your brother whom you do see?”  The Gospel of Luke calls us to account.

God cares for the least and the greatest, who net value is the same.  Nowhere is that more in evidence than in the Magnificat, of the Song of Mary.  On Monday of the week past, we celebrated the Assumption of the Virgin Mary.  I was the celebrant at mass on that day.  However, because of the significant role which Mary, mother of Jesus, occupies in God’s plan of reconciliation of the creation to the Godhead, that celebration was observed as a major feast day on the day prior, the 10^th Sunday after the Pentecost.  There is no mention in our Book of Records, the Bible, of Mary after the Crucifixion or Resurrection.  There is in that book no mention of the bodily assumption of Mary into heaven.  In the homily which I heard on that Sunday, the debate between the Roman and the Anglican Churches on this issue was duly presented.  And, thus, I forego a further dissertation here.

However, on one thing the two churches do agree, and for which we have scriptural documentation:  Mary, while visiting her cousin Elizabeth, who was herself carrying a central figure in the reconciliation of the creation to God, John the Baptist, declared unequivocally that which we heard today in the first lesson from the book of the prophet Jeremiah.  Jeremiah records God’s words to him:
Now I have put my words in you mouth.  See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.  (Jeremiah 1:10)

Even in his darkest, most severe prophesies, Jeremiah proclaims the positive message of God: God has not given up on the creation.  However, a different approach must be installed.  A different value system has to be restored and implemented, if God is to build and to plant.  And that is what Mary proclaims.  And what Mary proclaims is none other than a social gospel.  The old way of assigning value and measuring net worth must be discarded.  Hear again that wonderful word of promise.

My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden. 
For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed;
for he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name.
And his mercy is on those who fear him from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm,
he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts,
he has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree;
he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away.
He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy,
as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his posterity for ever.  (Luke 1:46 – 55)

We share with Mary, the Bearer of the Incarnate Word, and with the unnamed woman who had been bent over for eighteen years a belief in a God who tells us that we have a net worth far greater than social or political institutions may wish to recognize or bestow upon us.  Our task is to claim and to guard that value for ourselves and all those whom we encounter, as we go about our daily lives living out the social gospel of God’s Messiah, to whom be all honor and glory.  Amen