Sermons

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Occasionally a preacher who is too clever by half will get up and give a one sentence sermon and sit down. Rarely does this go well. I heard a story of a priest who got into the pulpit on Christ the King Sunday and bellowed “the church is not a democracy” and then sat down. While he may have technically been right, this seems like a poor tactical move, and I suspect he didn’t last too much longer in that parish. The only sermon of this sort I ever heard was when I was in seminary. We had a celebration of the Eucharist with sermon and everything every day in the chapel in addition to Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer every day; so we were expected to be in chapel three times daily unless prevented by some good cause, so the daily sermons tended to be brief. But only once did I hear a “one sentence sermon.” The celebrant that day was Fr. Kadel, the seminary’s librarian, and this is a man whom I love and respect, but his choice to give this particular sermon did puzzle me. All he said was “parables are not allegories.” That was it. As baffling as this preaching power move was, it stuck with me–and I assume every one else what was in the chapel that day–and in light of this morning’s Gospel, I’m actually now grateful for having heard and remembered it.

This morning’s Gospel contains what may be the strangest of Jesus’ parables. If you were paying attention it might have struck you as more than odd. It likely would have seemed like I misread something to horrible effect, because it seems to run counter to everything we know about Jesus: And I tell you, [Jesus says] make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous mammon. More contemporary translations make the point even more sharply: And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth.

So troubling are these words that, even from very early on, Christians have tried to argue that this is a mistake in how Luke recorded our Lord’s words, and critics of Christianity have used it as proof of the faith’s inconsistency. Julian the Apostate—the Roman Emperor who turned back to paganism after two Christian Emperors—claimed this passage as proof that Jesus was no more God than any other fallible human being. And if we look at the text, it appears that Luke himself didn’t know what to do with this saying. Surely, he included it because Jesus said it, but then he tacks a number of Jesus’ other, apparently contradictory sayings about the dangers of mammon, of wealth, on to the end. So, we go from “make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous mammon” to “you cannot serve [both] God and mammon” in the span of a few verses.

What in heaven’s name are we going to do with this? Well, I want to suggest an alternate reading as a possibility—a possibility, not the gospel truth, necessarily, though thinkers as wise as St. Augustine made the same argument, so I’m in good company.

Parables are not allegories. That is to say that they give us an insight into the nature of God or of the Christian life, but not every detail is meant to correspond neatly to something in reality. Another truth about parables is that we can sometimes misidentify whom their characters are meant to be. Who is God in the story? Who am I? Is it even that simple, given the preceding fact, that they’re not allegories to begin with.

So let us apply these two facts—that we often mistake whom the parable is about and that parables are not allegories—to this morning’s Gospel. Remember what happened? The steward is fired for defrauding his master, and he proceeds to collect less than what is owed from the master’s debtors in order to ingratiate himself to them. Ultimately, the master commends the steward for his shrewd rejection of justice. The just, or righteous, path would have been to collect all that was owed, but such justice often lacks mercy. The steward is less interested in what is fair than he is in what is effective in bringing about rapprochement.

So what if this parable is not about us and our business dealings? What if it’s actually about Jesus? Remember, parables aren’t allegories, so we don’t have to see the steward’s initial unfaithfulness as anything other than a plot device to get the story going. In other words, just by positing Jesus in the role of the steward, we don’t have to claim that Jesus has defrauded God the Father or something like that. The important part is what the steward does with the debtors. They owe something, and the steward cuts them a break so that he might be taken in by one them. This is called “unrighteous” in the parable, but we miss the point if we impose our own understanding of righteousness onto the text. In fact, a better word would be “unlawful”, because that’s what a first-century Jew would have understood the word “unrighteous” to mean. The law demanded full payment.

If the steward is supposed to be Jesus, the parable is not about money at all. Luke probably added the bits afterward about not serving God and mammon, because even he (or perhaps some later redactor) didn’t fully understand what the parable was about. It’s not about money, but rather about the human soul and sin. By all rights, we’ve got a debt we cannot pay. The fair thing, the lawful thing, the righteous thing, would be for each of us to suffer the consequences. But just like the steward, who desired to live with one of the debtors, Jesus desires to dwell with us and within us. And just like the steward, Christ knows that that can’t happen if he simply follows “the rules”.

That we can have a relationship with Jesus is not fair; justice would demand the opposite. If a friend were to constantly turn his back on any one of us, to break faith and defraud us, we would be just to end that friendship. So, too, would God have been within his rights to cut us off entirely, to call it quits with us.

This is an oversimplification of the Old Testament, but it’s more or less correct to say that the children of Israel had a conditional relationship with God. God promised to remain faithful if and only if they kept their end of the bargain, if they followed the Law. They didn’t. Neither would we have done. We were supposed to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and mind and our neighbors as ourselves. We still don’t. But then what God did was shocking, an affront to justice. He said “no more conditions. I will love you unconditionally.” That wasn’t the deal. He didn’t have to do it, but He loved us so much that He desired to stay in relationship with us whatever the costs to Himself, knowing that the cost would ultimately be His Son’s life. Mercy has triumphed over fairness; love has overcome the law.

This doesn’t mean that we don’t have any expectations. It doesn’t mean we should try to be kind and just and courageous and loving, to practice the virtues we learn in following the Lord. What it does mean, though, is that there isn’t anything we can do to make God stop loving us. He’s broken the rules for us already; He’s bailed us out when we should have been left in chains. The only things we can actually offer in return are our penitence and our thanks, which is why we keep showing up here week after week. We can try to love God back, even if we haven’t enough love in us to go very far in that regard. Most of all, we can permit Him to live in our hearts. This is not a one-time deal, no matter what the televangelists tell you when leading you through the sinner’s prayer. This is a daily choice. We can let God in or evict Him. But before we do the latter, let’s remember that that’s why he bent the rules in the first place. That’s why he showed mercy when justice demanded wrath. He who on earth had no home, wants only to live in us. Will we prepare for him a room?

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Tradition holds that on this day 1,699 years ago Saint Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine the Great, found the spot on which our Lord was crucified in Jerusalem and identified the relics of the True Cross, the very instrument of his saving death. I’ll leave it to the historians to debate the veracity of this account. There is good historical and archaeological evidence to back up the claim that the place she found, on which now stands the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, is the true location of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. But as for the True Cross itself, the jury is out and I have no idea.

Within a generation the cross was divided and fragments distributed to churches throughout the known world. Medieval forgeries make matters even more difficult. While Calvin claimed that enough purported fragments of the original were to be found that they could build a ship out of them, this is calumny. Forgery was never that bad, but provenance does remain something of an issue.

I’m not Puritan, so I’m not going to claim that these issues are neither here nor there. An object relating to Christ, his Blessed Mother, or the saints can be a powerful aid to devotion, so long as we avoid worshiping the object itself like an idol or engaging in some other superstition. Nor do I believe in some sort of post-modern way that an object of devotion gets its power from whatever we project onto it, like our good “juju” somehow makes something holy. The facts of the matter matter.

All that said, these concerns are secondary. Primary for Christians is not the object or the location, but the reality of Christ’s saving work, which today he accomplishes in a secret place–the soul of the believer. I am not going to defend the Crusades this morning, which seem an exception which proves the rule, except to say that they began as an attempt to secure safe passage for pilgrims to holy sites before sadly evolving into bloody conquest to the end of controlling sites and states. We should, as Christians, at least theoretically be less concerned than say Jews and Muslims fighting over whether a particular mountain should have a rebuilt Jewish temple or the Al-Aqsa mosque on top. I’m grateful that many years ago I was able to go to Jerusalem and Bethlehem and Galilee and visit the sites associated with Our Lord. But more important than Christ being born on a particular spot rather than another, is that he was born in my heart. More important than the fact that GPS can guide me to where loaves and fishes were distributed to the multitude is that Jesus still feeds me with his Word and with his very Body and Blood. I am grateful that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is still in Christian hands instead of it being a Temple of Venus, as it was before Constantine and Helena—don’t get me wrong—but the more important thing, indeed the infinitely important thing, is that he died for each and every one of us and he rose again that we might be justified and live forever with him and each other in the Resurrection.

Holy Cross Day is the good and proper counterpoint to Good Friday. On that day we appropriately mourn. We grieve what our sin made necessary in the perfect Will’s response of love over wrath. Today we glory in the majesty of that horrific implement of torture and death which has been transformed into a beautiful , life-giving token for the salvation of the world. For we, like St. Paul, bear the marks of our Lord, invisibly but indelibly inscribed at our baptisms. Christ has accomplished what he foretold, that when he was lifted up he would draw all sorts and conditions of people to himself. We still flee to that cross to find the life which radiates from its luminous arms.

I recently reread the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola for the first time since seminary. Some hardcore spiritual athletes might say that just reading the book isn’t as useful as practicing the exercises Ignatius described just as he described them isn’t terribly useful, but not currently having five hours available for daily meditation over thirty straight days, I had to pick up what I could reasonably apply considering present obligations.

Anyway, he suggests several dialectical practices where we imagine ourselves in the biblical scene and have a conversation with its subject, and he begins with the crucifixion. Such a conversation is appropriately uncomfortable, considering the pain and sorrow our Lord endured and our part in necessitating it, but perhaps we shouldn’t shrink so quickly from such a task. One may counter that Christ is no longer dying nor dead, that he is risen and the cross now stands empty; they have a point, but that argument strikes me a little bit as “being so right it’s wrong.” Yes, the crucifixion is an historical moment which has been accomplished, but along with the Resurrection, it’s a transhistorical or metahistorical event, which is just a perhaps pretentious way of saying that it stands above and beyond time and transforms it from beginning to end. It is, as I’ve heard it called, the hinge-point of history and so we have access to it in the here and now in a powerful, mystical way.

So my suggestion today, like that of St. Ignatius, is to consider taking a sort of spiritual pilgrimage to Golgotha. No airfare or passport is required. Do it in whatever physical space you find conducive to prayer and meditation. Approach the tree of life and see hanging from it the fruit which even the boughs of Eden could not bear. Speak to our Lord and listen for his response to your deepest questions, your most profound pains, the hopes you dare not even hope. And then see that cross transformed in your seeing to brightness beyond compare and comprehension. Behold your Lord reigning from that tree, sovereign of all creation and of your heart, and commit all that grieves your heart to him, knowing that he is accomplishing for us his perfect will and will finally welcome us into the kingdom which has no end.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

With a Gospel like the one we have this morning, it’s wise to address the elephant in the living room first. I hope you’ll take the following in the context of having heard me preach for nearly a decade here and knowing reasonably well that I’m not in the habit of smoothing out scripture to make it more palatable and will trust that I’m doing that this time …

When Jesus says that we cannot be his disciples without hating family and even our own lives, he uses the Greek word μισεῖ which is the closest equivalent to the Aramaic word he almost certainly used, identical to its biblical Hebrew equivalent, and which Luke translated: שנא. Ancient Hebrew and Aramaic lack alternatives for this word to indicate degree, and so what is translated here as “hate” could mean anything from “utterly detest” to “prioritize slightly less.” Matthew opts to translate this saying of Jesus differently—we mustn’t love God less than these others. Translation is always interpretation, but I suspect Matthew gets technically closer to the meaning, considering everything else Jesus said about loving others. That said, this teaching, however it was taken would have been uncomfortable, perhaps even shocking, to the crowd, so we shouldn’t spend inordinate time this morning interrogating precisely how strong Jesus’ tone might have been in the moment. It was strong enough.

It must be noted that how we love our friends and relations is a reflection of God’s love. If we love God less, we’ll be less capable of being loving to wife, husband, sister, brother, &c. And the less we love God, the harder we’ll find it to love this life, which is a gift he has given us. The great irony is that in loving God more than these, we come to love them better, to enjoy them more. The kind of love which is God, finds its visible expression in self-sacrifice–the other great irony of the Christian faith being that it is only in giving it all away that we truly receive grace upon grace.

The question Jesus asks us today is whether or not we’re willing to prioritize God and thus be enabled to have well-ordered affections.

Whatever else you might say about Jesus, you cannot accuse him of burying the lede. Signing up to be a disciple is not a bait-and-switch affair. You don’t have to give away all your money and your freedom first and then discover years down the line that it’s really about how you’ve got alien ghosties attached to your soul because Lord Xenu blew up the earth with hydrogen bombs (that’s what Scientologist believe, but they won’t tell you until after they’ve trapped you, like any good cult).

Not being a cult leader, Jesus tells us right up front what we need to know, namely that this isn’t an easy road to hoe. I wonder how many parents in pre-Baptismal preparation are warned that what they’re signing junior up for is a life which demands dying every day to self. I know there are other concerns (how quickly can the seamstress get the gown ready, what kind of petits fours to have at the reception), but perhaps a brief disclaimer woulnd’t go amiss.

I think that the two metaphors in this morning’s Gospel, those of the landowner and the king, are simply an honest disclosure about the life of the Christian demanding more of us than we might be willing to give. Before you choose this life, the life of a disciple, be fully informed. Know what you’ve got to lose. You may lose much, because the demands of the Gospel are great. Depending on the particular call God has placed on your life you may lose relationships. You may lose reputation. You may lose your life, at least your life as you know it.

And there are some things I believe that you are sure to lose. You’ll lose your self-obsession. You’ll lose your need to always be right. You’ll lose your need for radical self-reliance. You’ll lose your grasping desire for wealth and honor. You’ll lose the gnawing worm of conscience. You’ll lose your fear of losing all those things and you’ll lose your fear of death itself.

Now, I think that’s a pretty good deal.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.