Saturday, September 17, 2016

Pentecost 18, Proper 20, September 18, 2016

Sermon for The Eighteenth Sunday After Pentecost
Year C, Proper 20  ~  September 18, 2016

Holy Trinity & St. Anskar

And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth
so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.

+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity

So, today we learn from Jesus that we should cheat our boss! This is one of my favorite passages, because it is obviously ironic, maybe even comic. I also like it because it is a great cudgel with which to punish literalists. Obviously, interpretation is necessary, and the Gospel itself even supplies its own – if you don’t handle unrighteous wealth properly, then you can’t expect anyone to entrust you with real wealth. What is dishonest wealth anyway? – or unrighteous mammon? Wealth just means well-being, usually material well-being, by convention. What makes wealth unrighteous is reserving well-being for the few and denying it to the many. Well-being turned into a measure of division among human beings is unjust, unrighteous. In fact, it is not really well­being, at all.
The question remains, what is the proper way to handle this unrighteous wealth? Give it away. That’s my take. In effect that is what the crafty steward was doing. We have to bear in mind that his master’s wealth was unjust. In fact, one can argue from this parable that distinctions of rich and poor are themselves unjust and sinful. So inequality in society is NOT the will of God, but rather the opposite, and wealth that is not held for the common good is unrighteous mammon, or unjust wealth, which has no rights at all.
This interpretation is suggested and supported by the lectionary’s pairing with the stirring prophetic passage from Amos.
[I always like to remember that Amos is the earliest full Book of the whole Bible. It is thought to have reached its present form in the middle of the 8th Century BC., which makes it a late contemporary of Homer, older than Buddha, the Bhagavad Gita, Confucius and Laotze. It is also entirely possible that the Book of Amos was actually written by the Prophet himself.]
It is forever significant that this oldest book in the Bible is all about social justice. Do you want to please God? Do you want to go to heaven when you die? Do you want to get into harmony with Divine Will? Do you want to live a life fitting for a human being? Do you want to use your time in this life profitably? Then devote yourself to the poor and combat social injustice. Well, that is – arguably – exactly what the dishonest steward was doing! Sure, he was doing it out of selfish motives, but the effect was to reduce social inequality.
Another interpretative hint is today’s Collect, which reminds us that we are placed among things that are passing away, and asks for the grace to hold tight to what will endure. Well, money and social inequality is passing away. The power of Empire is passing away. The illusion of our divisions is passing away, and the sinful systems that arise from that illusion are passing away. Amos called this ultimate passing the Day of the Lord. He coined the term to refer to God’s victory over human injustice – good news for widows and orphans, bad news – very bad news – for their oppressors. The Day of Doom.
At the ancient beginning of our written scripture – at the door, as it were, of our whole tradition – stands this denunciation of social injustice. Our Divine Savior confirms it and underlines it. He tells us, “If nothing else, dissociate yourself from this doomed, delusional way of life. Maybe it’s impossible to avoid all contact with unrighteous mammon - fair enough. But you don’t have to hold on to it. Instead, use it against itself.  Let go of it and invest it in the oppressed. Use it to further the common good.”
The funniest part of this parable is the detail about the congratulatory attitude of the Master, upon learning that the dishonest steward had cheated him! That is unimaginable on the literal level, and I take it as another hint that the story is not to be understood as literal advice about cheating the boss. What is true is that all this wealth is illusory and passing away. It’s doomed, and those who hold on tight to it and devote their lives to it are doomed, too.
    Unrighteous mammon will always let us down, as the boss let down the steward. Better to establish solidarity with the poor, the last who shall be first, the beneficiaries of the Kingdom of God.

AMEN
MARANATHA

COME, LORD JESUS!

Pentecopst 17, Proper 19, Septemeber 11, 2016

Sermon for The Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost
Year C, Proper 19  ~  September 11, 2016

Holy Trinity & St. Anskar

there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents
than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.

+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity

God/Prophet/People. That is the familiar pattern of revealed religion. God talks to us through messengers. They tell us about God, Who remains unseen. The symbolism of the story we heard today has God up at the top of the mountain, out of sight, where no one but the Prophet Moses can go. The people wait in the desert below. They see the clouds and lightning and hear the thunder, but that’s all. They wait. And wait. Eventually, they get tired of waiting and decide to make their own god. They do so by pooling their most valuable possessions and fashioning them into a visible symbol, which they can worship.
This behavior reminds me of the old joke about the man who comes to ask a favor. His friend replies: “Favors, favors, but what do you ever do for me?”
The petitioner replies, in great detail – “I stayed with you when you were sick last year, I lent you allot of money when you asked me five years ago, I helped your kids get into college ten years ago, I got you your job twenty years ago, and I saved your life on that camping trip thirty years ago.”
His friend responds: “Years ago, years ago. Yes. But what have you done for me lately?”
Likewise, God set the people free and brought them with a mighty arm out of the land of slavery, destroying the power of their overlords. But that was way in the past, a memory increasingly dim. Anyway, the meaning of all that was only Moses’ interpretation, and now Moses had disappeared. The people felt forsaken, this so-called “God” Moses talked about had not done anything for them lately. There was really no reason to think He would do anything ever again, or that He even existed. So they decided they would have to fend for themselves.
Our whole religion can be seen in similar terms. God is out of sight – far away, if He even exists at all. And all we know of Him we learn from messengers who come down the mountain from time to time – prophets, sages, and – later on – Apostles and Evangelists. But here we are in the spiritual desert, feeling alone. Here’s our choice: we can trust what those messengers say about the Unseen: that it is the only Reality; OR we can get together and craft our own – something we can see. A projection of ourselves that we turn into ultimate reality.
The story shows us that the latter choice – what we call idolatry – leads to death. The Israelites literally choke on their golden idol. (By the way, it is not an accident that the idol is made of gold, but that’s another sermon!) On the other hand, we can choose to trust the messenger – the Prophet – regarding Unseen Reality. There are no other alternatives. Either the Unseen, Unseeable, and Unknowable God is Real and wants us to know something about Him, or we might as well pool our resources, project a collective image of ourselves and worship it.
We live in a time when that’s what many of us do.  We believe only in what we can see, or in some imaginary projection of ourselves. The notion that what we can see is in some sense illusory and that genuine Reality is invisible is not widely accepted. Actually, our age is not so different from others in this sense. We naturally tend to believe our senses, and to think that if we can’t see it, it is just imaginary. The problem is that we can’t get along without God, so we make our own, which we can see, and it kills us.
There is another detail in the ancient story, which links it to the Gospel for today: the only repentance in this story is God’s. God repents of the destruction He had in mind for the wayward people. God changed His mind – an astounding thing! And this divine repentance came while the people were still whooping it up around the Golden Calf. In other words, God did not need to be appeased first, before He changed his mind. The punishments that followed were all Moses’ doing, not God’s. Likewise, One Greater than Moses, the Personal Fulfillment of All Prophecy, came to those who were most completely lost, while they were still lost. Here the mountain-separation is bridged not by a Prophet, but by God, Himself. The righteous, who are not apostate, but faithful to their end of the agreement with the Unseen One, do not need anything from the Godman. It is the sinners, the apostates, the wicked who do. God comes down the Mountain to eat with them.
Our Lord’s offer of salvation to the really lost is not a “last chance” to “believe or else.” It is the assurance that the door is always open, and there is nothing we can do to shut it. The worst criminal is precious, like the woman’s lost coin. And when there is the slightest glimmer of hope within the heart of the lost, there is rejoicing among the angels in heaven.
AMEN
MARANATHA

COME, LORD JESUS!

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