Hello, let me introduce myself to you this morning.

My name is Reuben.

Your rector needed a little break this morning from preaching, so she asked if I would say a few words to you.

I was born in the first century by your calendar.

Probably around the same year your Jesus was born.

When I saw him preaching, teaching and healing, he certainly seemed to be the same age as me, though he always had more energy than I had.

Boy did that man have energy.

I’m here to tell you a little bit about what it was like to live back then so maybe you will understand your Jesus a little bit better.

2000 years is a long time.

Much is different today than then, although I would wager that a whole lot that matters is pretty much the same, especially for those who live at the bottom of the societal heap.

Anyway, back to me and my story.

I was a lowly Jewish peasant farmer who lived in the rural area of Galilee.

I wasn’t at the bottom of the societal heap, but pretty close—but it wasn’t always that way.

As a Jewish person,

I knew my people’s history.

We were chosen by God to be a blessing to the world.

We lived on land that belonged to God and was given to us.

We were to use this land to sustain our people that we might show our God to the world.

We had a covenant, an agreement, with this God, that we would live as God would have us live, we would care for the stranger, the widow, the orphan, all those on the margins, and in return God would be our God.

But like most people, we kept messing up.

First, we asked for a king when God wanted us to trust in God alone.

God gave us kings anyway, and of course over the generations they and their retainers became corrupt, more interested in hoarding their own wealth and power than being the people of God.

We divided into two kingdoms and eventually ended up in exile.

All of this was because we did not keep our end of the bargain.

But God did not abandon us.

God walked with us in defeat and exile and eventually we returned to the land of our God, the land we were to use to sustain us as the people of God.

My father and grandfather owned their own land.

They weren’t wealthy but they were able to provide for their own wives and children through the sweat of their own brows.

And together with their neighbors, they sustained their community and sought to be faithful to their ancestors’ agreement with God.

But others who had greater ambitions than they did, those who ruled Jerusalem, had other plans.

They saw their future with the Romans, and they sold our people out.

King Herod, the so-called Great, is probably the best known.

He and his family aligned with the Romans and gave our land over to them all for personal wealth and power.

Herod had delusions of grandeur.

He built himself beautiful palaces and a spectacular Temple not with his own money but with ours.

Who paid the taxes that built those monuments to Herod and his retainers?

Well, the peasants did.

The ones who could least afford to pay.

The ones who had previously been able to support themselves with their farming.

When we needed something, we bartered with our neighbors for it.

Now we had to come up with cash to pay our taxes.

Cash that would build the monuments, line the pockets, and fill the coffers of Herod and the Romans.

No wonder Jesus wept over Jerusalem; the city of God turned into the city of tyrants.

And his son Antipas was no better than his father.

He wanted to build up other cities for the sake of the elite that lived there.

He turned the screws even harder.

I was the last of my family to own any land, but I had to sell it off piece by piece to pay the tax collector.

I eventually had nothing, and I had to farm the land I used to own just to feed my family, with nothing extra ever left over.

And in really tough years, I had to buy back what I planted, tended, and harvested myself at inflated prices just to avoid starvation.

We were always on the edge of starvation.

Those in power certainly wanted to use our energy but they wanted our labor at the lowest cost possible, barely allowing us to live.

And it seemed that the land we lived on no longer belonged to God but to Rome.

It was a life with small joys and a lot of hopelessness and despair.

Different people handled their feelings of hopelessness in different ways.

One of my brothers decided to join the Zealots.

This was a group of bandits that hoped to lead an uprising to throw off the rule of the Herod family and the Romans and bring back the rule of the Jewish Kings.

I understand why it appealed to my brother.

It gave him a sense of pride.

He felt like it would make us the people God had chosen us to be again.

I wasn’t so sure living under Jewish kings would be any different for those of us at the bottom than living under Roman vassals.

The prophets we heard read in the Synagogue certainly made it seem like it would be no better for a regular guy like me.

After all, oppression is oppression no matter who is doing the oppressing.

The Pharisees had a different way.

Their idea was to try to live as faithfully as possible in our ordinary everyday lives.

They wanted to separate our way of life from that of the Roman way of life.

It was their belief that if we lived pure Jewish lives, we would receive reward in the next life and usher in the Messiah who would save our people.

I have to admit that I found their way very appealing.

In a world in which I had little control, it was comforting to think I might have some control over what I encountered in the next life.

It was comforting to believe that those who were making our lives so miserable would be punished in the life to come, even if they were living it up in the here and now.

But somehow, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the here and now matters too.

That God wouldn’t wish for a world in which people suffered terribly during their lives on earth.

It didn’t fit with the world I heard described in Torah.

Plus, I was usually too exhausted from simply trying to survive to try and follow all the religious practices they prescribed.

Who can worry about the next life when your current life is hanging by a thread.

Still others dealt with this difficult world by joining with the oppressors.

My uncle worked as a tax collector’s servant and became so adept at his job that he eventually was able to become a tax collector himself.

My nephew became one of Antipas’ soldiers.

They survived but at what cost?

They certainly lost their place in our community and their connection to God.

No, not the life for me.

So where did I get my hope, my desire to keep going for another day?

Well, let me tell you, it was from Jesus, the one who your religion is named after.

He offered a vision of something different, something new, something worth living and dying for.

When I heard him preach and teach, I saw the world as I believe God wants the world to be.

He showed his listeners what a flourishing community, a God-centered community would look like.

In this flourishing world there were no great distinctions between rich and poor.

People felt their lives mattered because everyone had an honored role in this community.

God’s abundant gifts were available to everyone and not hoarded by a few.

Now I am not naïve.

I never believed Jesus could turn the whole earth into such a world.

But he did manage to create a community that lived in a way that we caught a glimpse of this world.

We caught a glimpse of heaven.

It made us hungry and thirsty for the God who dreams of such a world for all of us.

And so, I followed this amazing man.

And then the elite got him, and they handed him over to the Romans and the fox ripped out the throat of the mother hen who had given us renewed hope, renewed reason to live.

And we were left like motherless chicks whose mother hen had been eaten by the fox.

At first, we scattered, and then we gathered together in terror and grief and we prayed. We forgot what he told us (or perhaps we never really understood) that he would return on the third day.

And then as we huddled together in that locked room, some who were not with us began to return with amazing stories.

Stories that they had seen Jesus alive.

And we all had similar experiences.

I know it seems impossible to you, you who know so much more about the world than we did, but I tell you it happened.

Jesus came back.

And we were never the same.

You can’t experience heaven and remain unchanged.

Were the Romans overthrown?

No.

Did I become a wealthy man?

Of course not.

But we began to live and move and have our being together in ways that reflected the justice of God, the kingdom of God.

We treated each other with respect.

We valued even the least among us.

We shared what we had with one another.

We were not perfect.

We had our differences.

We disagreed with each other.

But we began to understand that before Jesus we had settled for too little in our attempts to simply make do, get by and survive.

We began to understand that every human being, not just those at the top of the heap, have the right to have enough to flourish.

Every human being is a child of God.

We knew we weren’t in heaven, in full communion with God, that could only come in the next life, but we knew were on our way.

We knew that in this lifetime we could train for the kingdom of God by striving for justice, for a life of flourishing for all, right here and right now.

Through us God could make elements of heaven visible in our community and in the world.

And this is why so many were drawn to join us.

This is why our movement grew and grew.

And is your time really so different from mine?

I read some of your newspapers and watched some of your news.

I know that you all thought since your second world war that you could make the world a heaven on earth and many of you are feeling discouraged and depressed because it has become very clear in the past few years how far you are from heaven.

The rich are getting richer and richer and richer and the poor are getting poorer.

Programs that gave some protections to those at the bottom both at home and around the world are getting cut.

Some have become modern day Zealots seeking to “Make America Great Again” by shoring up the aspects of your world that favor patriarchy, but at what cost?

I can guarantee this will only benefit those at the top of the heap.

Because those at the top don’t really care about you, they only care about themselves.

Some will seek to fight fire with fire.

Others will withdraw in an effort to survive unnoticed.

But you who follow Jesus are called to a different way.

In Jesus’ life, death and resurrection we can see embodied the kingdom of God.

We see justice.

We see mercy.

We see love.

We see abundance.

Jesus was a blessing to all who encountered him.

He lived in solidarity with the rejected and the outcasts of the world.

In my day that was the peasants, the beggars, the widows, the lepers, the prostitutes, the prisoners, and anyone else who my society pushed to the edges of our community. Today’s list of outcasts is pretty much the same with a few categories added—the immigrant, people of color, and trans people for a start.

If you want to know who is being oppressed, just look at who those at the top are saying you should hate.

They want to give you someone to hate so you won’t notice that they are stealing everything you have.

Jesus demonstrated to all that in God’s world, God’s kingdom, abundance is the rule, there is enough for everyone, and no one needs to hoard in order to survive.

Difference and diversity are simply more signs of God’s abundance.

And though we are not Jesus, and do not have the power to create heaven on earth, you and I are to practice the politics of resurrection.

You and I, we, the church, are to be in solidarity with those at the bottom of the heap, work to open everyone’s eyes to the injustice all around us in this world, resist that injustice wherever we see it, and seek to use God’s abundant gifts in such a way that everyone has enough.

Like Jesus, we are to be ones in whom others find a blessing.

We are to strive to live out God’s story, God’s dream, God’s kingdom right here and right now.

Don’t make a deal with the world.

Don’t withdraw.

Don’t settle for less than God wants for you and for me and for everyone.

God has shown us, consistently shown us, that God is on our side.

God has a great passion for us, for creation.

God is with us no matter what.

Being with us is built into the very nature with God.

Will we have that same passion for God in return?

And I thank you for listening to my humble words.

I promise Suzannah will return next week to preach to you again. Amen.