“A Lost Family” based on Joshua 5:9-12 and Luke…

March 27, 2022
by Sara Baron

I spend a lot of my time learning about trauma, and
considering ways that the church might be part of trauma healing. If
I had a guess as to why this catches my attention so deeply, it would
be this: as I grew up and realized how broken things are, I started
wondering “why!?” Until I heard about the Adverse Childhood
Experiences study, and started reading about trauma, very little
seemed to adequately answer my question.

So it may not be surprising that when I read Joshua, and
hear “today I have rolled away from you the disgrace of Egypt, “
I find myself wondering about trauma healing. The story says that
the people had been enslaved for hundreds of years, and then spent 40
years wandering in the desert, as a means of leaving behind that
trauma and preparing for the new life they were going to live. This
passage, today, is the moment of transition.

In life, there isn’t an end to healing as a gradual
lessening of the grasp trauma holds on a life. But, also, 40 years
sounds like a good time frame. It is not instantaneous, by any
stretch, and it represented multiple generational changes. It takes
seriously the long tail of healing, and the impact on generations.

I don’t really think the story means that the trauma of
slavery is over for the ancient people of God. But, I think this is
another step in that process. To be told, “your disgrace is rolled
away” is a really important piece, and I rather respect it taking
40 years for the people to be ready to hear it.

I also love that there is this intersection of healing
and relationship. So for those 40 years, the people were said to be
fed directly by God. The manna on the floor of the desert provided
for them, along with occasional quail. Or, perhaps we might say,
they were hunter-gatherers and aware in that process of their
dependence on God. This passage represents a shift to being farmers,
who are still rather dependent on God, but take more of the
responsibility for active food production (especially in a desert).

While healing, the people needed to be cared for. They
also needed to be able to move freely. They needed space. They
needed time. They needed a dependable caregiver to keep on teaching
them that they could trust.

When they had healed enough, and when they were ready to
hear “your disgrace has been rolled away” which I think means
“you are no longer defined by what others did to you,” they were
ready to bring that time of healing to an end, and begin caring for
themselves and each other.

Have I mentioned how much I appreciate that this
timeline isn’t more aggressive? I love, also that this happened at
Passover. The first Passover was when the journey began, and it came
full circle, to the remembrance of that journey and to eating the
food in a new land as a new people, before the journey ended.

I don’t know where exactly the family trauma in the
parable starts, but I can see its fingerprints. This is, sadly, not
a healthy family. On the upside, it looks familiar enough to enough
of us that we can at least know that the Bible knows how REAL
families work. We can see that God sees and knows families as they
are, and still works within them. This family may or may not have
MAJOR trauma, but it is definitely struggling with at least a pile of
minor ones.

Before I delve into the parable, it seems worth taking
the time for a little reminder of what a parable is and is not,
because truthfully a lot of preachers get this wrong, and you may
have been misled along the way. Dr. Amy-Jill Levine, New Testament
professor at Vanderbilt Divinity School, has done amazing work with
her book “Short Stories by Jesus” and my reflections are guided
by her.

Parables are stories, sometimes quite short, that resist
easy interpretation, and understandings. Dr. Levine says, “What
makes the parables mysterious, or difficult, is that they challenge
us to look into the hidden aspects of our own values, our own
lives.”¹
Or, to be more direct: a parable is not an allegory. Each character
doesn’t “stand in” for someone else, where it appears to be one
thing but is actually about God. Or to be EVEN MORE DIRECT: please
don’t take the father in this story as God. It won’t go well for
God, and it will deny us the chance to hear the story as it actually
is.

Luke is the only gospel writer to tell this story, and
it puts it after two other stories about things getting lost. First
there are 100 sheep, and one gets lost. The shepherd finds it and
rejoices. Then there are 10 coins, and one gets lost. The woman
finds it and rejoices. So we’re well set up here. A man has two
sons, one gets lost.

Hmmm, “There was a man who had two sons…” That
should actually get our brains lighting up with memories. Or, at
least, it would have for the first listeners. “Two sons? Oh yeah?
I’ve heard that one. Cain and Able – older one was more than a
little bit of a problem, and God preferred the gift of younger.
Ishmael and Issac, older one had to be sent away entirely, younger
one got the blessings. Esau and Jacob – yeah, OK, there is a
pattern here, I get it. So, tell me about how the younger son is
better than the older and how God inverses my expectations, I’m
ready.”

Which means, of course, that Jesus inverses THAT
expectation. This younger son isn’t a pillar of anything. I believe
you know this part. The younger son asks for his inheritance,
receives it, and an unexpectedly generous portion at that, sells it,
leaves, wastes it, there is a famine, and he gets hungry. He then
realizes that he doesn’t have to live like that – he can go home.

Dr. Levine doesn’t entirely believe his contrition, and
she makes some good points about that. While he claims to be going
home to just be a laborer, the word “father” keeps being
repeated, which actually keeps him in his position as son. Also, the
line, “I have sinned against heaven and before you” is the exact
phrase Pharaoh mouths in order to stop the plague, which isn’t a
flattering repetition. It has been said that his words could be
summarized as “I’ll go to Daddy and sound religious.”²
He has a rather good idea that this may be sufficient, this is a
father who already gave him his inheritance, already have him a
larger portion than he should have, and may well have offered him a
safe place to land if ever he needed it. The father is a bit
indulgent.

The father is, of course, thrilled his son has come
home. The son has been gone for quite some time, and has been
functionally dead to him, and possibly dead. (I know you don’t need
this reminder, but they weren’t’ face-timing while he was away.) The
father’s rejoicing mirrors the shepherd who found the sheep, and the
woman who found the coin. YAY!

This also fits human nature, right? Most parents would
welcome home the wanderer, no matter where they’d been or what they’d
done. That said, Dr. Levine concludes “I still have a picture of a
manipulative, pampered, and perhaps relieved kid at the fatted calf
buffet.”

Which is important. Because at this point the younger
son disappears from the story, and it becomes clear that this is the
SET UP for the real story. The father thought he’d lost his younger
son, but in truth it looks like he’d lost them both. The younger
came back, but the elder is still lost.

No one told the elder brother about his brother’s return
nor the party.

What the hey?

They didn’t notice he wasn’t there? They didn’t think
to tell him? This sounds – sadly- like a story I’ve heard from
lots of people. The pain of being forgotten in their own family.
The so called “little” slights that add up over time to people
feeling like they don’t matter to the ones they love. Furthermore,
based on all the other stories in the Bible with 2 sons, it is
reasonable to guess there were some issues between the brothers, and
the father’s rather extreme generosity to the younger one likely
didn’t help the relationship between them.

Now, the father does seem to suddenly get that there is
a larger family dynamic issue, and he does rush out to greet his
elder son. Good! However, as Dr. Levine says:

Years of resentment have finally boiled over and found
expression. The son’s fidelity has been overlooked. Once again the
problem child receives more attention, or more love, than the prudent
and faithful one. By announcing that ‘there is more joy in heaven’
for the one who repents than for the ninety-nine who need no
repentance, Luke reinforces this preference. We might think of the
older son as speaking for those ninety-nine who have no need of
repentance but who appear to bring less joy.³

Right, so this sounds like families I know. It sounds
like my own family at times. It sounds really familiar. And I think
that’s part of the genius of the parable. This as come around to
dealing with responsibility and irresponsibility, enabling,
resentment, and the huge question: how to respond to it all? This
sounds like life. It is difficult and imperfect, and requires a lot
from us just to get through things – even the things that are
supposed to be good. His brother is alive! He came home! And it is
COMPLICATED.

The father does well here. The first word of his
response is best translated as an endearment “Child.” Perhaps we
might hear it as “child of mine.” The father acknowledges this
older son who has also been lost. And the father acknowledges a
literal truth: having given his property to his sons, all that he
had is now the property of his older son. AND, he needs to
rejoice. He is a father who has had his son restored.

Now, this is where I think the parable is most
brilliant. After the father’s speech it just… ends. Does the
elder brother go into the party? Would you?

This family has all been lost to each other. What will
it take to bring it back together? Do they have the ability? Do
they have the commitment and desire to fix things? Will they?

Would you? Amen

1Amy-Jill
Levine, Short Stories by Jesus (USA:
HarperOne, 2014), page 3.

2Ibid,
Dr. Levine however is quoting David Buttrick ,54.

3Ibid,
64.

Sermons

“Utterly Ridiculous Actions” based on Luke 15:1-10

September 11, 2016February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

I’m
going to start by answering Jesus’ presumptive questions, because I
know the answers. It is really exciting to know the answers to
questions Jesus asks, because they are usually trick questions, but I
have these. “Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one
of them. Does he not leave the 99 in the open country and go after
the lost sheep until he finds it?”

NO.
– What are you crazy? Have you met sheep? They are seriously the
dumbest creatures God ever created (ok, fine, they are tied with
deer). If you leave 99 sheep behind while you go look for one that
got lost, when you come back, you’ll have 70, if you are lucky. I
mean, I was a camp counselor, and we went over the “lost camper
plan” and step one as a counselor is that you STAY WITH THE CAMPERS
YOU STILL HAVE. (The support staff looks for the lost camper, you
work on not losing another.)

NO,
you don’t go after that sheep. Not unless you have a really good
team backing you up, and it doesn’t sound like you do.

Next
question? “Or what woman, having ten silver coins, if she loses
one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search
carefully until she finds it? When she has found it she calls
together her (female) friends and neighbors …” Um. No one.
Because a silver coin is a days wage for a laborer and it is
basically enough to buy half a loaf of bread, and no one can afford
to throw a party for their neighborhood because they just found a
coin that would cover 1/20^th of that cost. I’ll agree
that she’d search for the coin, it is after all 1/10^th of
her life savings, but NO she wouldn’t throw a party. Are you nuts?

These
two parables feel like Jesus is doing a really bad Childrens’ Time
with all of us, waiting for us to object with the most basic of
reasoning, and then laughing at his presumed stupidity.

The
problem is that I’ve been preaching regularly for 10 years now, and I
know not to trust it when Jesus appears to be an idiot. I’ve learned
that he only plays dumb to get our attention. So, what is really
going on here? It seems that the key to understanding Luke 15 is in
paying attention to the opening paragraph. “Now
all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him.
And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This
fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’“ (Luke 15:1-2,
NRSV)

Curious.
The New Testament seems to assume that some people are sinners and
others aren’t. Modern Christianity seems to assume that all people
are sinners (although if we look at actions and not just words, there
is an assumption that some people are WORSE sinners than others, but
no one cops to that). What did it mean to call some people sinners
in those days? R. Alan Culpepper, who wrote the commentary on Luke
for the New Interpreter’s Bible says “Those designated as ‘sinners’
by the Pharisees would have included not only persons who broke moral
laws but also those who did not maintain ritual purity practiced by
the Pharisees.”¹
I’m mesmerized by the idea of sin being finite enough that many
people wouldn’t qualify as sinners. It might take some of the guilt
off of life if, at least once in a while, we “weren’t sinners.”

The
so -called sinners are set up in contrast to the Pharisees and
scribes, people who were religious insiders. (To be precise,
Pharisees weren’t religious insiders at the time of Jesus, but they
were when Luke was writing his gospel, so we’re going to live with it
for today.) The religious insiders were concerned about the access
the religious OUTSIDERS were getting.

I
chose to use this text this week because I didn’t understand it at
all, and I took a leap of faith that some commentators would be able
to help me with it. Sometimes life works out exactly as planned, and
I discovered AMAZING work in the commentary series Feasting on the
Word by Charles Cousar (Professor Emeritus of New Testament at
Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia.) and Penny Nixon
(Senior Minister at Congregational Church of San Mateo, United Church
of Christ). The rest of this sermon is indebted to their genius, and
largely to their words 😉

“Often
this parable unfolds in a way that emphasizes the redemption of the
‘lost,’ but it is the ‘already found’ that the parable is meant to
bring to repentance.”²
Issues arise because in verse one the tax collectors and sinners are
coming near, and the ones who think they have an exclusive right to
be there are getting antsy. Jesus seems to respond that the ones who
are “lost” are already a part of the flock. They are lost out of
the flock, or in the house. They already count.

The
two parables are the same idea, they repeat for the sake of getting a
point across, or maybe because it is fun to have God as both a
shepherd (hated by Luke’s time) and a woman – and make most people
anxious at once. The Pharisees and scribes are said to be mad
because Jesus ate with sinners, which according to Luke he’s done all
of once by this point. They’re annoyed, “especially because the
sinners are ‘hearing’ Jesus. ‘Hearing’ for Luke is a sign of
repentance and conversion. Like the prophet Jonah in the Hebrew
Scriptures, the Pharisees and scribes do not take kindly to
the possible repentance of those who lie outside their definition of
the redeemable.”³

I
fear they’re not the only ones who feel that way. Have you
heard about the Wesleyan Covenant Association? They’re an emerging
group within the United Methodist Church who are trying to take
Luke’s “Pharisees and scribes” as their models for behavior.
Emerging as in their initial meeting is in October in Chicago. Their
stated goals start with “Connect
evangelical, orthodox United Methodists with one another in a common
ministry of the gospel,” and culminate with “To uphold and
promote biblical teaching on marriage and human sexuality.” (You
might be shocked to learn that they don’t actually mean “biblical
teaching on marriage and human sexuality” as I understand it.
They mean excluding the LGBTQ community from the Body of Christ.) The
Wesleyan Covenant Association is designated to be an alternative
structure that can become a new denomination, based on the litmus
test of believing that excluding God’s children from the church is
the best way forward. That is, they
do not take kindly to the welcome of people who lie outside of their
definition of worthy of God’s love, and they are willing to break a
denomination over it and define themselves by it.

⁴

Unfortunately,
the Wesleyan Covenant Association is NOT the only group of people who
immediately come to mind as trying to mold themselves after the
scribes and Pharisees rather than after Jesus. On this 15^th
anniversary of the attacks of September 11^th,
2001, we live in a country where many people are calling for the
exclusion of Muslims, the registration of Muslims, and closed doors
to the refugees of the world. We have a repeat of the ideology that
existed before World War II and kept many Jewish families from
receiving the welcome they needed to stay alive, except this time
with Muslims. Instead of learning the lesson that violence begets
violence and the world needs food, peace, and hope from the attacks
of September 11^th,
we have people calling for greater violence, less humanity, and
thereby the creation of more and more desperate people willing to
join extremist groups. Our sisters and brothers in faith who know
God through the teachings of Mohammad are particularly vulnerable
today, as they grieve with the rest of America.

Getting
back to the deceptively complicated parables, both the sheep and the
coin are passive. As one commentator explains, “A
lost sheep that is able to bleat out in distress often will not do
so, out of fear. Instead it will curl up and lie down in the wild
brush, hiding from predators. It is so fearful in its seclusion that
it cannot help its own rescue. The sheep is immobilized, so the
shepherd must bear its full weight to bring it home.”⁵
Furthermore according to Cousar, “Neither a sheep nor a coin can
repent. The issue of the
two parables, therefore, is not to call sinners to repentance, but to
invite the righteous to join the celebration.”

Let
me say that again. “The issue of the two parables, therefore, is
not to call sinners to repentance, but to invite the righteous to
join the celebration.” He goes on to quote Alan Culpper who said,
“’Whether one will join the celebration is all-important, because
it reveals whether one’s relationships are based on merit or mercy.
Those who find God’s mercy offensive cannot celebrate with the
angels when a sinner repents. They exclude themselves from God’s
grace.’ The Pharisees and the scribes put themselves outside of the
circle of divine grace by the way in which they grumble at Jesus’
fellowship with tax collectors and sinners. There is no joy or
celebration, no partying or delight, among Pharisees and scribes.
Even though invited to the reception given in behalf of the joyous
shepherd/woman, they cannot bring themselves to come; thereby, like
the elder brother (15:25-32), they are exposed.”⁶
Indeed, when Amy Jill Levine was in Schenectady speaking on the
Parable of the Prodigal (which immediately follows these parables),
she said that the point of the parable is the question of if the
older brother will accept grace or reject it after all. It therefore
raises the question about ourselves as well.

*Cough*
Wesleyan Covenant Association *Cough* (Seriously, this is so easy I
feel guilty about it.)

I
have one more gem to share with you from these wise commentators.
Nixon asks about the sheep and the coin, “Is it a search to save or
to welcome? It is one thing to ‘save’ and another to ‘welcome.’
Religious insiders are more comfortable with saving the lost than
welcoming those whom they perceive to be lost. Saving is
about power, whereas welcoming is about intimacy.
Saving is primarily focused on the individual, whereas welcoming is
focused on the community.”⁷
*SNAP*

These
texts present God as the hound-dog of heaven, searching out anyone
who would for any reason believe they are not welcome or not worthy
and proving that person wrong! All we are asked to do is
celebrate with God when goodness transforms the lives of those
who desperately need it! All we have to do is rejoice with God! And
apparently, sometimes, that’s too hard. It is easier to think of
people as needing to be saved (and assimilated into our way of doing
things), and harder to make space to truly welcome all of God’s
children and allow them to impact our lives in deep ways.

But
that’s the call: to be welcoming and open to intimate friendship and
relationship with all God’s children, and to rejoice when the welcome
is received. May God’s grace guide us to be the ones who are able to
rejoice! Amen

1R.
Alan Culpepper, “Luke” in Leadner Keck, ed. , The New
Interpreter’s Bible (Nashville:
Abingdon Press: 1995), 9: 295.

2G.
Penny Nixon, “Homiletical Perspective on Luke 15:1-10” in
Feasting on the Word, Year C Volume 4,
edited by David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (Westminster
John Knox Press: Louisville, Kentucky, 2010) p. 69.

3Charles
B. Cousar, “Exegetical Perspective on Luke 15:1-10” in Feasting
on the Word, Year C Volume 4,
edited by David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (Westminster
John Knox Press: Louisville, Kentucky, 2010) p. 69.

4 http://www.wesleyancovenant.org/purposebeliefs
accessed on 9/10/16. The access date is especially important as the
wording has already been known to change without notice 😉

5Helen
Montgomery Debevoise “Pastoral Perspective on Luke 15:1-10” in
Feasting on the Word, Year C Volume 4,
edited by David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (Westminster
John Knox Press: Louisville, Kentucky, 2010) p. 70

6Cousar
(quoting Alan Culpepper in “Luke” in the New Interpreter’s
Bible, 1995).

7Nixon,
71.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

September 11, 2016

Sermons

“Rejoice!?”based on Luke 3:7-18

December 13, 2015February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

In
the book Debt:
The First 5,000 Years,
David Graeber writes,

“If
one is on sociable terms with someone, it’s hard to completely ignore
their situation. Merchants often reduce prices for the needy. This
is one of the main reasons why shopkeepers in poor neighborhoods are
almost never of the same ethnic group as their customers; it would be
almost impossible for a merchant who grew up in the neighborhood to
make money, as they would be under constant pressure to give
financial breaks, or at least easy credit terms, to their
impoverished relatives and school chums.”¹

What
intrigues me about the “good news” of the John the Baptist is
that he completely ignores this universal reality. He speaks with
the same expectations and demand to everyone, regardless of their
relationships to each other. He is calling people back into
community, and they aren’t even community!

He
starts out being sort of nasty, I tried to wiggle out of preaching
this text because I rather dislike the brood of vipers language, but
upon examination he is saying radically loving things. (I have come,
rather despite myself, to really like John the Baptism. It turns out
most of my assumptions about him have proven entirely untrue.) John
calls on all the people to change their lives, he doesn’t just ask it
of the leaders or of the wealthy. He makes the same demands on
everyone who comes.

To
the crowds who have gathered, he demands a morality of sharing. No
one should have two coats while anyone has none. This is a standard
that makes a lot of sense, right? It isn’t trivial though. The
person who has two coats may feel as if they’ve²
earned them, or they really like them, or they are aware of the
differing fashion needs they respond to!! They may feel that they
aren’t their brother’s keeper, or that there are too many people
without coats to have the coatless be their responsibility.

That
is, they may not experience the other person as an extension of
themselves. In functional families, it would not go that way. If
there were 4 people and 4 coats, the distribution would not be such
that 2 people and 2 coats and 2 people had no coats. In a functional
family, 4 coats for 4 people would be distributed 1 coat per person.
Calling on people to give away extra coats, and extra food, is
calling on them to take each other’s well-being as extensions of
their own. That is something we naturally do for people we love and
are in relationship to. John calls for the extension of that
community. (This is the problem I have with trying to dislike John.
He sounds like Jesus.) He calls for it to extend without limit.

To
the tax collectors, John also extended a challenge. His words are
deceptively simple.

“Collect
no more than the amount prescribed for you.” That would, again,
be something we might expect to happen in a family. If the tax
collector came to the house of their cousin, they wouldn’t ask for
more than they were required to ask! This is an extension of
fairness to the whole community. It is treating each person as
someone you’d care about.³

The
final group that John is said to speak to is the soldiers. They are
probably the most interesting group. This is not because of what
John tells them, it is an extension of what he suggest to the tax
collectors: don’t take money you aren’t entitled to. What is
interesting is that they were there at all. The soldiers were Roman
soldiers. Why were they coming out to a radical Jewish prophet in
the wilderness? What was it about being part of the power structure
of the empire, or maybe even more simply about being human, that led
them to banks of the Jordan River and the preachings of the Wild One
seeking a better life? What were they expecting? Did they find it?
Did any of them follow it? Did they have a better life afterward?

The
challenge to the soldiers, while equivalent, may be even harder than
the rest of what John said because he calls on them to treat people
like family and they aren’t from the same group AT ALL. They are
different ethnically, and linguistically, and religiously. The
soldiers were the threat of force maintaining the empire and its
power to take wealth from the poor and transfer it to the wealthy.
John doesn’t call on them to stop being soldiers, he just calls on
them to be GOOD soldiers, and to let go of their greed, and to see
the humanity of the people they were (theoretically not) occupying.

Then
John goes back into a statement that I find cringe worthy. He speaks
of Jesus and says, “His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his
threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the
chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.“ This is called good
news! And it is. Christianity has done some terrible things. One
of them is assuming that there are good people and bad people and God
loves and forgives the good people while sending the bad people to
hell. Unfortunately, that’s the first thing I hear in this passage.
But I don’t think it is an appropriate reading of the passage.
Instead, I think it is consistent with the rest of the passage. As
Rev. Dr. Barbara Thorington Green says, the line between the wheat
and the chaff is not between people, it is within each of us.

This
is a passage of hope. God’s work includes taking away the greedy,
lifeless, selfish parts of ourselves so that we can be freed for
connection, love, and wholeness. The burning of the chaff is the
permanent removal of the things that hold us back from love, and the
making of space for love. This is a process of sanctification.

The
paradigm of the wheat and chaff is easily translatable into an
extension of Isaiah’s beautiful vision. In that vision, God offers
well-springs of joy for us to draw from; strength and might of the
Divine to trust in; and freedom from fear. It is a vision of joy and
beauty.

All
week I’ve been thinking about what it means to rejoice in the midst
of the quiet waiting of Advent. I’ve also been thinking about what
it means to call for joy when there is so much pain around us. I’m
not just talking about mass shootings and Islamophobia in our
society. I’m also profoundly aware of the many in our midst who are
grieving. For some among us the wounds are fresh or unhealed. For
others the holiday season itself is a source of pain. And we live in
a broken world. Many of us, me included, have too many coats. And
far too many people have none. The relationships that lead us to
sharing and wholeness are often not present in our lives.

To
go back to David Gaeber, he proposes that
“sharing is not simply about morality, but also about pleasure.
Solitary pleasures will always exist, but for most human beings, the
most pleasurable activities almost always involve sharing something:
music, food, liquor, drugs, gossip, drama, beds. There is a certain
amount of communism of the senses at the root of most things we
consider fun.”⁴
He says that we tend to share best with those we consider equals.
I’m not sure that John was proposing charity at all – in the sense
that charity is a gift of undeserved love to a stranger. Instead, I
think John was proposing making people family. When that happens,
the sharing follows naturally. (This is why anyone who has ever
researched it has said that socio-economically diverse neighborhoods
are best for everyone in a society.)

Joy
comes, at least in large part, by sharing the goodness of life with
each other. Isn’t that interesting? So much of what society tells
us is simply wrong. It isn’t about acquisition or outdoing each
other. It is about the wonder of experience together. There is
plenty of sorrow and sadness to go around these days, but there are
ways to pick ourselves up to. Thanks be to God! Amen

1David
Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years
(Brooklyn and London: Melville House, 2011), p. 102.

2As
of this week the Washington Post style guide has approved of using
“they/them” in the singular. This is helpful both for the
transgender community and for speaking without having to name a
gender for a person. On that basis, despite some old teaching that
rankles, I’m going to follow their lead.

3
I will note, however, that this is historically complicated. The
system in Rome as I understand it did not involve having a pay scale
for tax collectors. Instead, they were permitted to acquire both
the taxes they’d pass on and their own income as they determined
necessary. Therefore I’m not quite sure how this would work in
practice, but let’s leave it be and hope I’m just missing something.

4Graeber,
99.

December 13, 2015