September 18, 2022 – Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 20)

Bleeech! We’ve entered that time in the church year where I dislike preaching, because it seems like all we hear about in the Gospel reading is money, money, and more money. I guess it’s better than having to preach about divorce or circumcision… but still, I don’t like it. And since I don’t like it, it usually means that it’s a quicker sermon. So perhaps all of you do enjoy it.

The Gospel story – the parable of the dishonest steward – is a curious story at best. It probably should come with the warning, “Don’t try doing this at home, or at the office, or in any business or church.” In fact, the steward’s behavior would likely lead in our society to indictment and incarceration, or at least probation and a fine. But I think the question contained in it is if we can be crafty for Jesus. Can you and I use different strategies to promote the Gospel?

This is a somewhat rhetorical question, because I think our answer here at St. Michael and All Angels is a resounding yes. We’ve gone from being here in this building as the church to having an online presence through Facebook and YouTube and we have people who haven’t been in our church building in years who are watching what we’re doing and joining us to advance God’s kingdom from their own homes. We’ve built gardens into which we’ve invited the community, and we’ve held church services almost weekly in those gardens to share our beautiful grounds with others online, too. We need to use the wisdom and technologies of the world to promote the Good News of Christ’s transformational presence. We need to adapt our strategies to the twenty-first century, using what we know about our faith and our society, to affirm and celebrate our ever-emerging and constantly creating and re-creating God.

This part of today’s Gospel is challenging, but not insurmountable for our minds. And then the Gospel writer has to end with a challenge: “You cannot serve God and wealth.” Well, crap…

This parable presents us with serious challenges in terms of values, ethics, and priorities. Either God or wealth has to come first. One or the other has to be the lens through which we make our personal and our congregational decisions. 

Studies suggest that greater wealth doesn’t lead to greater happiness. In the reading from Amos, we hear of making the shekel great. Back then, the ephah was used to measure wheat, and the shekel was used to weigh coins. The seller would measure the wheat by the ephah and receive in exchange silver weighed by the shekel, so by making the ephah small and the shekel great, the merchant gives the buyer less wheat and receives in return a larger amount of silver. In other words, the poor folks, trying to buy bread, were being cheated. Amos is telling the people that wealth without justice and compassion leads to personal and corporate destruction. Wealth without consideration of God’s purposes beyond our self-interest leads to poverty and pain.

The Vestry here at St. Michael’s has chosen, I think, to make God our primary lens to make decisions. We had to choose to spend an awful lot more on buying chickens and ribs for the barbeque this year with the understanding that our intent was NOT to make money, but to be out in the community and to share God’s love with all who we touched. In the end, we blessed over 150 people with leftover chicken and rib dinners. We didn’t make money on those dinners, but I can tell you – and I’m sure that Larry, Carol, Jack, or any of the rest of the congregants who were working at that barbeque can tell you – that sharing that food sticks out more in our mind than the money made that day.

Here’s the real problem in today’s Gospel reading for me. We like to think of parables as being somehow related to morality and teaching us a lesson around that. In this parable, no characters are innocent. The manager gets even with the master by appropriating the master’s profit, which is morally suspect. When the master commends the manager for his shrewdness, he also reminds us that the manager is unjust or dishonest. Wrong has been done, lots of wrong on all sides.

So where do we fit in? There are no guarantees of our immediate success as a result of spiritual transformation. We aren’t guaranteed that more people will walk in the doors or that our financial concerns are suddenly solved. Today’s scriptures reflect on the social consequences of turning away from God and the possibility that prayer and God-centered values can be a source of health in our personal and corporate lives. A transformed mind may lead over the long haul to transformed social systems. My friends, the practice of prayer and self-examination in terms of our values create the framework for communities and governments characterized by shared purposes, unity despite diversity, and  greater social equity. So, let’s get to it.