Sermons

+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.

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

The readings appointed for this morning offer several challenging themes, from the Moses’ ultimatum to the children of Israel to Jesus’ discomfiting words regarding the sacrifices inherent in following the Gospel. There is much unpacking and explanation that should be done for both of these readings, but perhaps another time. I want, instead, to focus on the Epistle, Paul’s letter to Philemon. I feel compelled to focus on the Epistle, if for no other reason than because this is the only Sunday in the entire three year lectionary that we read from this little, relatively obscure book in the New Testament. The book is only twenty-five verses long, and we read twenty of them this morning, and we won’t hear them in church again until 2025. So, here’s our one shot at Philemon.

All of Paul’s Epistles can be called “occasional” in the sense that each of his letters is written to address a particular concern of a local church or of an individual. We’re fortunate that much of the situation which gives rise to the letter to Philemon can be inferred from the text.

Paul opens the letter with a little bit of what one biblical scholar called “holy flattery” in which Paul praises Philemon’s faithfulness. In other words, Paul butters Philemon up. He knows that his request will be unpopular, and yet he is confident enough in its appropriateness to claim his Apostolic authority, should Philemon refuse to take the recommendation. “Accordingly,” he writes, “though I am bold enough in Christ to command you to do what is required, yet for love’s sake I prefer to appeal to you.” Like a parent, Paul wants Philemon to do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do, but he’ll force the issue if it’s necessary.

Finally, Paul gets to his request. He has run into Onesimus, or rather Onesimus sought Paul out, the Apostle being imprisoned at the time and not likely to come upon someone by chance. This Onesimus was Philemon’s slave and had run away. The precise events surrounding Onesimus’ escape are unclear, but what is clear is that the runaway slave is frightened of his master’s response should he return.

Indeed, Onesimus had reason to be frightened. According to Roman Law, a master could do just about anything he wished to a slave, and typically, a runaway slave, upon being returned would be branded and would sometimes be forced to fight with beasts to the death. Slave and master would be brought back together, reconciled in a sense, but without any sense of equality.

But Paul pushes reconciliation on Christian terms, which is to say that real reconciliation is effected between people whom God has already made equal, and the terms of Christian relationship is fraternal rather than hierarchical. Hierarchies exist (between employer and employee, between parent and child, and so forth), and those hierarchies exist for the common good; but getting beyond the practical, often necessary distinctions which serve to make society function, on the deepest level the relationship between Christians as Christians (indeed, between human beings as human beings created in the image of God) is that of brotherhood and sisterhood.

Philemon should have known this, because he had surely heard it before. He had surely heard Paul’s radical reënvisioning of Christian relationships, because our equality under Christ was so central to Paul’s message and because Paul and Philemon were apparently so close. In all events, Philemon was about to hear that message again, not just in this private letter, but read out in the local church, which met in his own home.

We know that Philemon and his household lived in Colossae, because so many of the people whom Paul mentions in his Epistle to the Colossians are also mentioned in the Epistle to Philemon, including Onesimus himself, who is called “one of yourselves” in Colossians. In fact, the original copy of the Epistle to the Colossians, as we learn in the text of that letter, was delivered by Onesimus, probably also carrying the Epistle to Philemon. Whereas today’s reading was a private letter encouraging Philemon to do the right thing, the Epistle to the Colossians would have been read publicly in the church. And what does that letter say?:

Here there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scyth’ian, slave, free man, but Christ is all, and in all.

What is Paul doing here? I think he’s hedging his bets. If the private letter doesn’t convince Philemon to have mercy on Onesimus, perhaps the same message read out to the whole Christian community will force his charity in the matter.

Tragically, considering the sad history of slavery over the following two millennia, Paul never explicitly demands manumission of Onesimus or abolition of slavery more generally. Nineteenth century Anglican biblical scholar J.B. Lightfoot wrote, “the word emancipation seems to be trembling on his lips, and yet he does not once utter it.” Paul does, however, hint at it in the last verse of this morning’s lesson:

Confident of your obedience, I write to you, knowing that you will do even more than I say.

What more could Philemon do than what Paul had demanded in the letter? Well, set Onesimus free from slavery, no strings attached.

In all events, either because of the private letter to Philemon or the public letter to the Colossians, we know that Onesimus was made free. Ignatius of Antioch informs us that Onesimus went on the be Bishop of Ephesus, and the Apostolic Constitutions tell us that Onesimus and Philemon died together as friends, free men, and martyrs during Nero’s persecution of the Christians.

At its heart, the Epistle to Philemon is a challenge to all of us still. Certainly, the days of slavery are happily over, but we still build walls between us for the sake of power or propriety. We still have a hard time creating relationships of genuine love as brothers and sisters, because we still see divisions which do not exist in the mind of God: divisions of race or class or power. We still permit our authority to distance us from those in our charge, or lack of power to scare us from building relationships with those we see as being “above us.” But if a slave and master in first century Greece can be reconciled, can become equals, can die together for the sake of their Lord, then our divisions can cease, too. May God do it, and may we be ready.

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