Sermons

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

We have, for the past few weeks been reading from the First Epistle of St. Paul to his young apprentice, Timothy. Reading this rather discursive letter as a whole, we find that Timothy’s church in Ephesus was beset by a myriad of false teachings and false teachers. Impious superstitions; speculation which both wasted time and drew people away from the Faith once received; consent to scandalous and illegal behavior; condemnation of perfectly proper, Christian activities, like getting married and even eating.

False teaching was legion in this little church, and so were those who propagated the heresies. Worst of all, these false teachers were making a killing. We learn in today’s reading that the besetting sin in this community seemed to be love of money. They put their faith in mammon, hoping that wealth would save them. This is what in theological terms is called a “false soteriology”, which is a fancy way of saying that one can find life, and truth and purpose and salvation where these things are not to found. It is something that we fallen people fall back into, time and time again. So did Blessed Paul, who counted himself the foremost of sinners.

We are not in a world much different from Paul’s, I’m afraid. I know that I am barraged every day with false objects of hope, and sinner that I am, sometimes I put my trust in those things, hoping to find salvation there: whether it’s money, or the positive regard of my fellows, or self-sufficiency, or any of a number of countless idols the world constructs for me or I for myself. I suspect few of us are saintly enough to avoid placing our trust in these things from time to time; but it is not at the altars set up by this sin-sick world where we find salvation.

Anyway, that is what it is to live life on the terms that the world has set for us, and that is what the apostle is warning us against. The good life, he says, is forged by virtues like righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness. These are what St. Paul tells us to pursue, but the pursuit of these virtues isn’t what leads to salvation, either. Rather they are the proper response to the gift of salvation already wrought upon the cross and given freely to those who would accept it. Salvation is not primarily about how we live our lives, as important as that may be, but who it is that gives us life.

Indeed, after he lists the virtues of the Christian life, Paul goes on to explain why we ought to cultivate them: Fight the good fight, keep the faith; take hold of the eternal life to which you were called and for which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses. Our Lord made the good confession before Pontius Pilate, Paul tells us, and we find that confession in St. John’s Gospel: My kingdom is not of this world. We are meant to live as a people set apart, because we really are. By virtue of our Baptism we are made citizens of a kingdom that is not of this world. We are a priestly people, brought by Baptism into the Mystical Body of Christ and continually fed and reconstituted by the Very Body of Christ.

In the Fourth Century A.D., St. Ambrose of Milan, that Doctor of the Church and champion of the Faith in one of Christianity’s darkest hours, wrote a hymn which remains popular on the feast days of Apostles. The hymn extols the virtue of those whom the church recognizes as saints, but much of it applies equally to the ordinary saints of the church, the regular saints, like you and I, who are saints not by virtue of wondrous deeds, but by a simple confession of our belief in our Lord and our Baptism into His Body. From the third verse of that hymn:

Theirs is the steadfast faith of saints,
and hope that never yields nor faints;
and love of Christ in perfect glow
that lays the prince of this world low.

These aren’t miraculous acts, but the simple acts of faith we are called to live out as baptized people. To pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance. It is in living by these uncomplicated, but sometimes impossibly difficult virtues that we show forth to the world that though we are in the world, we are not of it. We show the world the power of the God in whom we find salvation. We show that in the waters of Baptism we are truly changed and will never be the same. We show to the prince of this world that the Kingdom of God will prevail, and for this there is much rejoicing in Heaven.

+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.

This morning’s Gospel contains what may be the most baffling 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 recent 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. 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 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.

You will remember from last week that we sometimes misunderstand parables because we reckon their protagonists to be us rather than God. Keep that in mind. There is another truth about parables which also affects how we read them, and that is that 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. So, in last week’s Gospel we heard the parable of the lost coin, and determined that the woman was to be seen as God and the coin as the lost soul, but the woman’s penury is a plot device rather than a symbol suggesting that God is somehow poor. It is a powerful metaphor, not a perfect allegory.

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.

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 Old Testament rules. 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 trumped fairness; love has overcome the law.

As I said last week, this doesn’t mean that we don’t have any expectations. It doesn’t mean we should try to be kind and just and curageous 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. 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 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.

I recently read a book from our parish library written by John Krumm, who was chaplain at Columbia University when he wrote it, and later went on to be Bishop of Southern Ohio in the 1970s. Modern Heresies: A Guide to Straight Thinking About Religion was published in 1961, but sixty years later, it’s obvious to me that we are still dealing with many if not all of the same issues. Sometimes, though, these heresies are rebranded and take a form particular to our modern context. What was once called Pelagianism might just as well be called the heresy of American individualist spirituality.

The idea that it’s up to us to go on some sort of spiritual quest to effect our own salvation, is popular and deadly. Certainly, as Christians, we are expected to expend some sort of effort in order to live the Christian life aright. We’re expected to grow in love and virtue. Even so, when we take it to an extreme, we start to see our own efforts, our own seeking, as the primary action in salvation history, shifting the focus from God’s actions to ours. Unfortunately, our efforts will never be enough.

I know I’ve mentioned before from this pulpit that this heresy, so popular in Nineteenth Century liberal protestant theology, was widely recognized as being problematic after the experience of the First World War, when the human family was reminded again that despite all of our advances, our capacity to turn on each other–the reality of Original Sin–was still a strong force for evil in the world.

Despite all our attempts to be reconciled one to another, radical evil still succeeds, albeit (we hope) temporarily, in alienating us from God and each other and the whole created order.

I’d be remiss not to mention that twenty-one years ago today we were reminded of this sad state of affairs, and, not to put too fine a point on it, our own attempts to grow in love as a nation and as human family in response to this tragedy were short lived, and here we are just as divided as ever.

The parables Jesus tells in this morning’s Gospel remind us who the principal actor in salvation history is, who alone has the power to save and reconcile us one to another. But before we get there, let’s look a bit more closely at each of these parables.

The problem with parables is that they meant a lot to the people to whom Jesus first told them, but they may (at least initially) mean less to us. This is because our context is so different from that of a first century Jew in Palestine. We hear the parable of the lost sheep, and probably think the shepherd rather silly. He’s still got ninety-nine sheep safe at home, and the dangers inherent in searching for the one lost sheep are likely not worth the risk. The woman who’s lost one of her ten coins might seem a little more believable to us, at least from a mathematical point of view. She’s lost a tenth of her wealth to the shepherd’s one-hundredth. Even so, calling the neighbors over to celebrate finding one measly coin that was in one’s house the whole time seems a bit much, doesn’t it?

Yet, if we were to place ourselves in the shoes of those first century listeners, Jesus’ parables would have made perfect sense. A conscientious shepherd would have been sorely grieved by the loss of one sheep and would have put himself in harm’s way to seek it out. The modern language of “satisfactory percentage” and “acceptable loss” would have been foreign to the first century shepherd, because if he were a good shepherd, his sheep would not be considered a mere commodity, but rather an extension of himself. Thus, his grief upon losing the sheep and his great joy upon finding it would have been natural. It would have been as if he had lost and found a missing part of himself.

Likewise, the woman with the lost coin can be understood to have found something more than a minor boon. Objectively, one silver coin, or drachma wasn’t worth that much. It was one day’s wage for a laborer. We might in our present economy even start to see the loss of a tenth of one’s wealth (or, in our case, inflation getting close to that 10% mark) as terribly inconvenient, but for those of us not living a hand-to-mouth existence it is probably less than utterly catastrophic.

Well, we get a distorted view of the plight of the woman in the parable if we view he through that modern, middle class lens. For that matter, we get a distorted view of contemporary poverty if we do so. For folks living on the margins, in the ancient world and today, that one sheep or coin can be like that one piece in the block-and-tower game Jenga, whose removal leads to everything else crashing down around them.

But for most of us, both parables seem to be dealing with a relatively insignificant object, but we can start to appreciate the value of that which is lost by the grief of the one who loses it and his or her joy upon finding it.

But Jesus’ words make it rather explicit that we are not the shepherd or the woman; God is. We don’t need to worry so much about saving ourselves by pulling ourselves up by the spiritual bootstraps, because he’s the one who invariably finds us. When we like sheep have gone astray, Christ the Good Shepherd grieves the loss and then strikes out into the wilderness to take us back, his finding us restoring joy to the heart of God. When we like the coin fall through some crack in the floorboard of our existence, God, like the woman in the parable, will tear up the house in order to find us.

You see, God might not be as immovable and implacable as we think. God’s certainly got a Plan and a Will, He’s certainly perfect in strength and virtue, but thanks to the Incarnation, the fact that God has become human in Christ Jesus, we can understand God as being moved by our weakness and woundedness. God is love, and when love goes unrequited, the response is grief. When we are not in God’s presence, when we wander lost through the wilderness of self-willed depredation, which is the state of sin, we grieve Christ’s heart of love.

The Good News is that God does not then disown us, but seeks us out. God will and has searched for us as far as the depths of Hell itself; and in Christ he has found us and he is still finding us and he will find us at last. And our Lord’s grief, being once as sharp as a sword piercing His breast, will at last be transformed into greater joy than we can imagine. The whole host of heaven will rejoice in our having been found, and we shall join with them in praising the God whom we didn’t presume to seek out, whom we couldn’t reach by building a tower tall enough or find by lighting a torch bright enough, but who reached down found us when we were most in need.

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