Not Who You Think God Is

Jul 26th - Not Who You Think God Is, with Rev. Dr. Steven Koski. Series: More Than You Think: Discovering the Parables of Jesus A Spacious Christianity, First Presbyterian Church of Bend, Oregon. Scripture: Luke 16.19–26.

Ever felt like life is a constant test, and you’re never quite good enough to pass? This Sunday we’re talking about a different way to see God, ourselves, and the people right at our front gate. A God who meets us in our mess, not after we’ve cleaned it up. If you’re hungry for a faith that looks more like grace than pressure, you’re welcome to join us online or in person this Sunday.

Join us each Sunday, 10AM at bendfp.org, or 11AM KTVZ-CW Channel 612/12 in Bend.  Subscribe/Follow, and click the bell for alerts.

At First Presbyterian, you will meet people at many different places theologically and spiritually. And we love it that way. We want to be a place where our diversity brings us together and where conversation takes us all deeper in our understanding of God.

We call this kind of faith “Spacious Christianity.” We don’t ask anyone to sign creeds or statements of belief. The life of faith is about a way of being in the world and a faith that shows itself in love.

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Keywords:

Grace, unconditional love, parable, rich man, Lazarus, reward and punishment, God’s favor, ledger theology, heaven and hell, living hell, bringing heaven to earth, kingdom of God, fullness of love, seeing others, compassion., presbyterian, church, online worship, bend, oregon

Featuring:

Rev. Dr. Steven Koski, Rev. Sharon Edwards, Becca Ellis, Brave of Heart, Guests

Transcript

Unknown: 0:39

Welcome to worship at First Presbyterian Church in Bend, Oregon. My name is Becky, and we are so grateful that you've joined us. We are a community shaped by what we call spacious Christianity-a faith wide enough for difference, honest enough for questions, and kind enough for the full truth of our lives. Here, doubts are not disqualifiers, questions are not threats, but they're invitations into deeper faith and more authentic connection. Your story matters, and together we seek God with holy curiosity. So today, wherever you're coming

from, know this: 1:19

you are welcome, and your presence is a gift.

Steven: 1:26

Imagine a community where faith is about curiosity, not certainty; a journey, not a finish line; a practice, not a rigid set of rules; wonder, not fear; grace, not perfection; compassion, not exclusion-a seat at the table for all, where everyone belongs. That's exactly what you'll find at First Presbyterian. Join us. I was standing in an airport bookstore a while back, scanning the inspiration section, and counted four books, promising that that if you believed hard enough, prayed boldly enough, planted your seed of faith generously enough, God would multiply it back, bigger house, better health, business breakthrough. You know that's the only theology some people

ever get: 6:28

a carrot and a stick, and God holding both. If you're faithful enough, you get blessed. If life is a struggle, well, maybe your faith wasn't strong enough. Now it's tidy, it's simple, and it's this very theology that Jesus wants us to unlearn. Grace, grace is the name we use for the the gift of God's unconditional love, but grace that comes with conditions isn't grace anymore. It's actually a transaction, a ledger God keeps measuring what we've earned. That ledger theology, reward for the righteous and ruin for everyone else, is still the most common face of Christianity the world sees. It was just as prevalent in Jesus's day. In the parable I'm going to share today, Jesus is challenging people to reconsider everything they thought they knew about who God is. Now, parables were never meant to confirm what people already believed. I mean, the word itself, parabola, parable, parabola, it actually means something thrown alongside you, not handed to you gently. Jesus told these stories to to disrupt us, to to knock people off balance, to to heal a broken image of God, one uncomfortable story at a time, and this parable might be the most disruptive of all. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells the story of a rich man dressed in purple and fine linen, feasting, feasting every day. And at his gate lies a poor man named Lazarus, covered in in sores, longing for for whatever falls from the rich man's table. Now both men die, and everything the crowd listening to Jesus believed about who God favors gets turned upside down. The poor man, invisible in life, and the story is carried by angels into the arms of Abraham. Now the rich man, comfortable in life, he finds himself in torment, looking up across a great chasm at the very man he used to step over, without even seeing him, in the world Jesus was speaking into, wealth and health were seen as a blessing from God. Poverty and suffering, as judgment. I mean, if you were prosperous, I mean, God must be pleased with you. If you were poor and broken down at at someone's gate, you must have in in some way deserved it. That's the reward and punishment, God. The bookstore rack is still selling today, and Jesus spends this whole story quietly unraveling the certainty people carried about who God favors and who God doesn't. Doesn't now. It's interesting. Lazarus is the the only character in any parable Jesus tells who gets a name, who actually gets named. I mean, not the prodigal son, not not the good Samaritan, not the workers in the vineyard. Just this one beggar at the gate, invisible, invisible to everyone who, who just stepped over or stepped past him every single day. And his name, Lazarus, means God is my helper. Now, in a world that that had no use for him, God had already given him an identity that nothing could take away. Meanwhile, the rich man, even in torment, even having lost absolutely everything, still hasn't learned to see. In the story, the rich man asks Abraham to send Lazarus to bring him water, then send Lazarus to warn my brothers. So even from torment, the rich man imagines Lazarus as his servant. He still can't picture Lazarus as anything but beneath him, having less value and worth. That's that's the real chasm in this story. I mean, not a chasm between heaven and hell, but a way of seeing that was never wide enough to include the person at the gate. No, I don't think Jesus in this story is handing us a floor plan of the afterlife. I think Jesus is is trying to teach the crowd to to help the crowd unlearn everything they had ever assumed about heaven and hell. God isn't the one rewarding the comfortable and punishing the poor. God is the one who has already given a name and a home to the very person the rest of us walk past, which means that the question the story actually asks isn't, "Where do I go when I die? The question the story asks, "Who am I stepping over right now? Do I even see them? Years ago, I heard a story about the writer Gary Wills, whose young son woke up to sobbing from a nightmare his his Sunday school teacher had told the class that if they weren't good, they'd end up in hell, and the boy is scared, really, really, genuinely scared. Looked up at his father and asked, "Daddy, am I going to hell? Now his dad had no theological training for that moment. No, he had no clever answer at the ready. He just said the only thing a father could say. Son, if you're going to hell, I'm going with you. That's what this story is finally about. A God who does not stand across the chasm. Waiting for us to qualify, but a God who comes and sits down at the gate with the very one everyone else stepped over-a love, a love that says wherever you end up, I'm going with you. Not because you earned it, but because I love you. Grace was never the kind of currency that demands you earn it. And that kind of grace is true for you too. Before it's ever an ask of you, you don't have to spend your life proving that you belong on the right side of that chasm, like Lazarus, you already have a name. You were never, for one moment, waiting to be found acceptable. You know that's the kind of fear the carrot and stick God has been running on for centuries. That you don't measure up. That you have to keep performing. You have to keep proving yourself in order to stay on the right side of the ledger. Jesus didn't come to confirm that fear. He actually came to take that fear away from you. And here's what happens. Here's what happened once once that fear loosens its grip, you actually stop spending all of your energy trying to prove you're worthy of love, and you start having the energy to give your love away. As Pope Francis once said, life may be good when you're happy, but it's so much better, so much more meaningful when others are happy because of you. You know, it's worth noticing how little Jesus actually talks about heaven and hell in the Gospels. What he talks about again and again and again is what it looks like to bring heaven to earth. When his disciples asked him how to pray, Jesus didn't teach them to petition for, for an escape plan out of this world. Jesus taught them to pray, "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. Not some day, not somewhere else. Right here, right now, and maybe that's the the paradox tucked tucked inside this parable. We we experience a taste of heaven every time we bring a bit of heaven's love to those experiencing a living hell, so maybe the question this parable actually asks isn't about the afterlife at all. It's how will we know when heaven has arrived on earth? Not by checking a box of correct beliefs. We'll know because the hungry are fed, because the lonely are no longer lonely, because the person everyone stepped over gets seen. gets named, gets invited to the table, and we'll know it in ourselves as well. You know that strange fullness that shows up. I mean, not when we're accumulating more and more and more for our own table, but when we've given some part of ourselves away to somebody else's table, who is Lazarus at your gate? You know, not someone far away, not in a headline. Maybe someone close enough that you've actually learned to walk past them without even without even looking. The cashier who seems worn thin. The neighbor whose yard is unkept because something in their life has fallen apart. The family member you quietly wrote off. The chasm in this story doesn't open at death. The chasm opens the moment we decide that someone doesn't count. The good news isn't that the rich man finally gets what it's what's coming to him, it's smaller, smaller than that, and and harder. Lazarus was at the rich man's gate the whole time. All he had to do was look down. The reward isn't waiting on the far side of some ledger. The reward is the fullness, the fullness of God's love that is already yours, right here, right now, waiting to be lived. Someone is at your gate too. So is Grace. Go look. May it be so, friends. I offer us this prayer. God, who sees us, who sees us and loves us before we've earned a single thing, we confess that we spend so much of our lives keeping score. score, keeping score of ourselves, of of each other, measuring our worth by what we've accomplished, and measuring everyone else's the same careless way. Forgive us for the gates we've learned to walk past without, without even looking, for the people we've made invisible, because seeing them would have cost us something. For the times we assumed someone's hardship was somehow their own fault. We confess too how much of our lives we've spent trying to prove that that we belong, trying trying to earn a love that was never for sale. So free us, God. Free us from the exhausting work of qualifying for what you have already given us. Remind us that we, like Lazarus, were named and known and loved before we did a single thing to deserve it, and where we still see a chasm between us and someone we've written off, between comfort and need, soften. soften it. Give us the courage to close the distance we've been keeping. We don't ask you to open the door for us. You already have. We ask instead for the courage to walk through it, to live like people who know they are loved, and finally free to love others the same way. We pray this for the ones sitting at our own gates, wherever they are. Amen. I offer you this blessing. May the extravagant, unconditional love of God be the ground upon which you walk, the very air that you breathe. May the spacious, radical, generous love of Jesus inspire and transform you to love as Jesus loved, and may God's Holy Spirit lead you to those people sitting at the gate in need of your grace and your generosity. May it be so,

Unknown: 29:15

friends. This worship broadcast is only possible because of your generous support. We need your support in sharing this spacious Christianity, a faith that welcomes questions, embraces difference, and makes room for everyone. Please consider making a financial gift today. You can give online at bendfp.org or by using the QR code on your screen. Thank you for worshiping with us. It's a gift to have you here. Until next time, may God bless you.