God's "Fuzzy Math"

9-24-17

Grace to you and peace from God our creator and from our savior Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, amen.

Jesus is clearly terrible at math. But more on that in a minute.

Martin Luther is also terrible at math. One of the revolutionary thoughts that came out of his reformation writing is the idea that we are at the same time both sinner and saint. The fancy Latin way to say this is simil iustus et peccator.  It means at the same time saint AND sinner. Not transforming from one into the other like Jeckle and Hyde or the Incredible Hulk. We are both at the same time- one hundred percent sinner in desperate need of God’s grace. And one hundred percent saint saved by that grace in our baptisms. One hundred percent and one hundred percent.  

Once I was trying to explain this idea to a Catholic acquaintance of mine, who also happened to have a background in engineering. He looked at me like I had three heads and said dismissively, that’s FUZZY MATH!

It IS fuzzy math, my friends, but it is also God’s math. Its math that doesn’t make sense to us and the world that we live in. Here are some more examples of God’s fuzzy math, adapted from a post a friend of mine shared on Facebook:

1 + 1 + 1 = 1 (that’s the trinity, by the way – Father, Son, Holy Spirit, three in one and one in three at the same time)

God's love (minus) love that you give away = MORE of God’s love than what we had to start with. (Which we saw a moment ago with the invisible purple blob).

Your grief (plus) my grief, shared = less grief!

Jesus equals One whole human nature + one whole divine nature

This one is from two weeks ago:  where 2 or more are gathered (or “n”) always equals another guy is there or “n” + 1.

One sheep (greater than sign, or more important than) ninety-nine sheep. Also, one coin is greater than 9 coins.

And then from this week we get a couple of whopping examples of “Fuzzy Math.” Twelve hours of work equals one day's wages… but then one hour of work ALSO equals one day's wages! One twelfth equals to twelve-twelfths!  The last will be first, and the first will be last! This is certainly some “fuzzy math”!

Perhaps then it is not so surprising that Jesus used stories and not math as a teaching tool over the course of his ministry. These stories he told are called “parables,” which comes from a word that means “to cast alongside,” something thing to more easily learn about another. These parables of Jesus are often hard to swallow, because they resist easy comparisons. They are not really analogies or allegories, where one thing clearly stands in – or equals, if you will – another thing. It’s not a one-to-one relationship. They are vignettes and snippets of sorts combining elements of real life, more like the little cartoons and picture graphics that you might find shared all over Facebook. For better or worse, we are in for quite a few parables in the next few weeks.

Every so often this story will make the Facebook rounds that goes something like this, a social media parable if you will: “An anthropologist proposed a game to the kids in an African tribe. He put together a basket filled with fruit, placed the basket under a tree, and said, “Whoever gets there first will win the fruit.” When he told them to run, they all took each other’s hands and ran together to the tree. Then they sat in a circle enjoying their treats. He asked why they would all go together when one of them could have won all the fruits for themselves? A young girl looked up at him and said, “UBUNTU, How can one of us be happy if all the other ones are sad?”’

Who really knows if this story really happened or not. The idea of UBUNTU, however, is very real. Ubuntu, very roughly translated, is “I am because we are.” I first learned about Ubuntu when it was the theme of the an amazing week I spent at the 2003 ELCA youth gathering in Atlanta, where Archbishop Desmond Tutu was a keynote speaker.  Desmond Tutu is of course well known for his reconciliation work in post-Apartheid South Africa.

He says this about Ubuntu: "Africans believe in something that is difficult to render in English. We call it ubuntu, botho. It means the essence of being human…. It speaks about humaneness, gentleness, hospitality, putting yourself out on behalf of others, being vulnerable…. It recognizes that my humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together." (From the book The Words of Desmond Tutu)

“Ubuntu” is fuzzy math. “I” equals you, and me plus you equals more than we started with.  I can only, truly live a life full of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” only if MY NEIGHBOR can also do the same.

Unfortunately, though, we live in a culture that convinces us that scarcity is the name of the game. If you have more, that means that I have less. We are constantly looking at what our neighbor has and we lack. If another group gets something that we thought only belonged to us, we feel like something is being taken away. If we see our neighbor being blessed in some way, we are tempted to feel resentful and left out. Much like the workers who labored all day, as they complained against the others who worked fewer hours than they did, but got the same about of pay. Instead of being satisfied that the vineyard owner gave them a fair daily wage, they peeked over the shoulder of the other workers, and felt cheated.

There is even an acronym for this that is floating around social media: FOMO. Fear Of Missing Out – the anxiety that comes with missed opportunities that often happens when we are too occupied with what other people are doing. My favorite “example sentence” from Urban Dictionary that illustrates this is “the brothers had last-slice-FOMO as they stared at what was left of the pizza.”

The workers hired at dawn are like the brothers staring at the pizza - full and sated with their fair share, yet resenting missing out on the figurative “last slice” and envious when the “less-deserving” late comers get it.

God’s love cannot be divided up like pizza. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and “Mattering” to one another is not pizza either. This should not be a zero-sum game. Saying one person matters does not mean that other people matter less. It just means that some people are being treated as mattering less and we are bringing it to everyone’s attention, so that we can take corrective action together and right the injustices in our world.

Right now many people are treating some lives as less important, so until we live in a world where all lives are treated the same, we who have privilege and voice must speak up. Until we all ACT like ALL lives really DO matter, we HAVE to say, on behalf of our African American brothers and sisters, that Black Lives Matter.

We could say the same thing about the lives of trans youth who live in a safe house in Ewing New Jersey because they are not welcome in their own homes. Their lives matter. * at the writing of this I did not know about the Rainbow Room program right here in Doylestown.  

Or the lives of people who live in poverty and are homeless right here in Bucks County. Their lives matter.

Or the lives of those who are addicted and in recovery, working to get sober. Their lives matter.

Or the lives of those who have to choose between paying the bills and feeding their children. Or the lives of any vulnerable population that has been given less power in our society and world. Their lives matter.

These people are invisible in our society, but they matter to God, and they should matter to us too. At the end of the day, we all need to eat, whether we worked one hour or twelve. And we all get the same amount of God’s love – all of it – not that we have done anything to deserve it. We each get an infinite amount of God’s love, and there is still an infinite amount left over. T.W. Manson says, “There is no such thing as 1/12 of God’s love.” That’s God’s fuzzy math in a nutshell. And a different spin on UBUNTU too – I matter because WE ALL MATTER.

The world doesn’t want us to live by God’s math. And the sinner-ness in all of us doesn’t want to live by this math either. And yet, God has the saint part of us has this congregation neck-deep in hunger ministries – in a massive effort for Feed My Starving Children in October, in addition to the weekly and monthly things we do around here – Aid for Friends, Soup and Sandwich, the shopping cart in the narthex, the monthly Dine & Donate, which we do WHILE EATING and having fellowship with one another. Not to mention the ways we support Code Blue homelessness ministries and the ways we support Silver Springs, Hurricane relieve, and so much more. With our actions, we are saying “these people matter too.”

And our synod, the South East Synod of the ELCA, just send a thousand dollar check to eleven synods - around the ELCA that are facing natural disasters like hurricanes and wildfires - for a total amount of eleven thousand dollars - with the promise of more to come in the future, with the help of generous congregations like Family of God.

Take a look around. The world’s math would have us believe that we are small in number, and so not worth much and can have no way to change our world for the better. But GOD’S math says otherwise. Amen.