October 17, 1982

Let me summarize Matthew 18:23-35. Once, there was this king, says Jesus. One of the king's servants owes him 10 thousand talents, something like 10 million dollars in today's currency. The servant begs the king to let him off. Amazingly, the king forgives the debt. That debt forgiven servant is not long off his begging knees before he grabs his buddy around the neck. With a growl through gritted teeth, "Pay me the $20 (that's the value of 100 denarii) you owe me, or else.” The king got wind of what his servant had done. Angry, he called the servant in and had him thrown into debtor's prison after all. The guy blew it because he could not connect what had been done for him with what he did to the other guy. 

What a yukky story! Jesus used it to drive a deep point. Somehow the servant and the king represent a person and God. We want God to be real to us, to love us, forgive us, give us second chances, and give us strength beyond our own to cope with the copious problems of life. 

It's like a guy wanting the astronomical debt of 10 million dollars cancelled. There was no way he could have paid the debt or deserved the forgiving of it. grace. It was a gift, grace. All he could do was pass it on in his relations with others. And so he botched up his life.

For me, this story of Jesus gets at one of THE dilemmas of life. How do we get what goes on between us and God into what goes on between us and others in the world. How do we get this Sunday stuff we do at church into the stuff we have to do and put up with in our Monday world? Hence, the big question today is how do we bridge the gap between the religious doings of Sunday and the non-religious doings of our lives on Monday and all the other days of the week? Important question, because unless we get that mystery we call God into the rest of our relationships, then we will botch our lives for sure.

All of us know the ultra-religious guy who is super saint on Sunday but a you-better-look- out-cut-throat-business-man on Monday. Telling our favorite hypocrite story always gets our juices flowing. And to that kind of person, and I guess there is a touch of that in all of us, I am speaking somewhat. Yet the intention of this sermon is not to be judgmental or to stick people with guilt horns. The dilemma is that we just are not sure how to get our Christianity into our lives at times. And the church has not always helped very much. Church does a pretty good job of telling us how to be religious on Sunday, but not so hot on how to be Christian on Monday. 

Think of the dilemmas: 

• How do you get all the forgiveness, love, grace, and mercy business into the competitive- profit oriented world of business. A banker who forgave all his customers' debts would hurt a lot more people than he would help. 

• I have heard physicians and lawyers lament their dilemmas over their fees. If you decide the fee is excessive what do you do when it is the going rate? When people hear you charge less, they may think you are worth less or not as good.

• How about the woman who stays at home all day cleaning her family's house, washing their clothes, cooking their food, doing their transportation? When is there time she with good conscience can call her own? Society confuses you with its praise of the little woman at home but considers you ONLY a housewife. 

• There is the need to cut corners in business to make it sometimes it seems. What happens when your boss or client's demands the ones who pay your salary cut across your right and wrong values?

• In school, the name of the game is grades. So what if you cheat in a pinch? On and on the list can go.

What can the church, what can the Gospel – the good news of Jesus, what can the mystery of God, what can the Bible do to help us live in the Monday world of grays, compromises, and pressures?

When Ernest Campbell was the minister of the famous Riverside Church in New York City, he was questioned about his never having a layperson as guest preacher on Laity Sunday. He responded, "I have decided that I will not ask a layperson to be the guest preacher in my pulpit until I am invited over to Mt. Sinai Hospital to be guest surgeon of the day.”

He went on to say that his irritation about this went deeper than his feeling that preaching is not something just anyone can do. He said that it is an insult to laypeople to imply that to really be religious and Christian you pretend to be a preacher. That's not it. We are in business in the church not to make folks little preachers but to make them big Christians. Let me state my first point this way: The aim of Christian life is not to make you LITTLE SUNDAY PREACHERS but to help you become MONDAY MINISTERS where you are at home. work, school, or in the community. And do not be confused by the word "minister." It does not mean a religious professional but comes from the New Testament word which means a "server," one who serves the needs of others.

William Diehl, a former executive with Bethlehem Steel Co. and a Lutheran layperson, has written a book entitled Thank God, It's Monday. He deals with the issue of getting our faith and action translated from our Sunday religious doings into the non-religious doings of our Monday lives, where Christian faith either makes a difference for us and the world or does not. 

Diehl writes: "The local congregation...is not supposed to exist as an end in itself, but as a means to an end. The local congregation is the place where the people of God gather around Word and Sacrament, for praise and prayer, for education and fellowship, and for stimulation and support SO THAT they can scatter into the world on Monday as priests, being the channel for God's interaction with the world.”

What does all this business about becoming "Monday Ministers" or priests in the world mean? 

Does that mean we go around quoting Bible verses to people, intoning in sugary voices, "Smile, God loves you," and just generally being obnoxious as the super pious are good at doing? I think most of you know me well enough to know I don't mean that. My second point is this, and I am going to expand on it: In whatever you do during the week, as a Christian you are to be one of God's Life Builders.

In Genesis 1, the creation story, the first humans are told to be fruitful and multiply. On one level that means quantitatively birthing more people. More deeply, it is a qualitative challenge. Grow as persons in your creativity and your capacity to care. That passage speaks of God giving to humans 'dominion" over the earth. We have misunderstood dominion to mean dominate the resources of the earth: consider the pollution of our environment, the depletion of natural resources, and nuclear weapons. Yet dominion here means simply: "take care" of the earth. God is a lifegiver. Therefore his people are called to build up life on earth: LIFE BUILDERS. 

Jesus did more talking about the kingdom of God breaking into the life of the world than anything. In God's kingdom, people take care of each other, build one another up, and move beyond using each other. In his own way, Jesus calls us to be kingdom people, people of God's way on earth, LIFE BUILDERS.

Maybe one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves is this: With what I do day in and night out, am I building up my life and the life of others or tearing down?

Another book that has helped me is Ethics for the Professions: A Christian Perspective by Darrell Reeck. Reeck says it boils down for people in their professions, jobs, and lives to an either/or proposition: Am I an ENABLER or an EXPLOITER? Does my profession and my dealings with others ENABLE them to have their needs met and lives improved? Does what I do really meet my authentic right to exist, to feel worthwhile, and be needed? Or, do I simply exploit people: use them for unfair profit, to build up my ego, to have power, just to simply promote what I want when I want it? 

Hear Diehl again: "If we affirm that God is concerned with all of his creation, then there is no area of society where the priestly role is not needed. If God cares about justice, then there is need for Christians to carry out their priestly roles in political, economic, and social structures of our society. If God cares about the sick...then there is need for Christians working in the field of healthcare. God's concern for prisoners is expressed through Christians working in the criminal justice system.”

Being God's Monday minister does not mean being a holy Joe. It means being a LIFE BUILDER, an enabler of people not an exploiter of them in what we do.

Finally, God helps us with three big zappers of Monday living: guilt, burnout, and joblessness. 

GUILT AND FORGIVENESS - I am a "'Hill Street Blues" fan. I relate to the "not-neat, something going haywire" world of that show. In a recent episode Capt. Furillo has a man in custody who he knows committed a murder. Yet the evidence he has points only to a petty theft. Not quite breaking the law and not quite keeping the law, Furillo threatens to let the guy go while an angry mob waits outside. The guy under a sort of unfair pressure confesses to a murder he had in fact committed. Furillo did something wrong to achieve something right. The episode ends with Furillo in the confessional booth of a Catholic church saying through the screen to the unseen priest: "Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned."

We know what forgiveness means when we have done an out and out "no-no". We did wrong, even though we knew better. Even if bad consequences come, we know we deserve it. Forgiveness from God helps here. But the real forgiveness that breaks our hearts, changes our lives, and keeps us going is when we do the best we can in impossible life situations and still know that someone gets hurt. That's the forgiveness God offers us: his love even when we have blown our attempts in a particular situation to be his life builder. That gives us the guts to hang in there with our life situations in the Monday world. 

BURNOUT - Some of you may have read my remarks about burnout in this week's newsletter. Many of us get to bottomed out, used up situations with our jobs and daily predicaments. And oh how the world loves folks who just use themselves up sacrificing self and family. God did not give you life to burn yourself out. You can't be a life builder when you do not take care of the emotional, relational, and spiritual dimensions of your own life. People who work without rest and relaxation set themselves up for personal and family problems galore, not to mention health problems. We worship a God of the Sabbath who worked six days and then rested. Work and rest are deeply ingrained in structures of the life God has given us. Ignore the work or rest part, and you will be a mess.

We live in a state with one of the highest, if not the highest, joblessness rates in our country. If you are out of work or ever have been or have ever been close to someone who has, you know the pain, the despair, and scariness of being without work. Being without money to live on is bad enough. But the damage goes further than that. We live in a culture which bases persons’ value on what they do. We curse those who will not work. And those who lose their work often feel from without and within a stripping away of their value and identity.

Certainly, we as persons, churches, and communities need to do what we can to develop jobs and get jobs for people. We Christians have a crucial role. We are God's people in the world to proclaim a God who counts the hairs of heads and charts the fall of sparrows and who gives us infinite value simply because he made us and loves us.

You are God's people. You are called to be his Monday ministers. You are called to build up the life of yourself and others, to be an enabler not an exploiter. God gives you forgiveness galore for the gray areas galore of life. He bids you to rest and recreate yourself. He gives you assurance of your value and worth not tied to your paycheck. You have a bridge. Use it. For God's sake, your sake, the world's sake, USE IT. Amen. 

PASTORAL PRAYER 

God, our lives are like puzzles. 

Each of us, in our own way, is trying to put our life together, make sense of things, keep it together.

Sometimes for a while at least the pieces fit, it's good and we thank you. 

For some of us, the pieces of our lives seem jumbled: people make demands upon us, we have hopes and dreams all our own, yet we have just one self to live with, and we struggle to make it all hold together. 

God, help us. 

It thrills us and scares us that our lives are not quite complete without others. 

Other people hold pieces and parts of our lives and happiness in their hands and we feel so vulnerable. 

We hold portions of the needs and happiness of others in our hands, too. 

God, make us careful with the pieces of each other's lives we hold in our hands. 

God, it is almost understatement to say we live in a jigsaw puzzle world. Sometimes it seems there is just too much hate, mistrust, and selfishness for it to even hold together. Yet this is where we are pushed to you...you who has been putting worlds together, lives together, lives back together for aeons. 

God, help us. 

We thank you for this delicate-durable, joyful-frightening puzzle of life. Amen.