Painting - 1540 - Marinus Van Reymerswaele
To Hold to What Endures...
A Sermon for Proper 20 C September 21, 2025 – St. Mark’s. Charleston - JTCO
I love
our collect for today ..it was the collect on the Sunday that followed
Hurricane Hugo’s visit to the Lowcountry thirty-six years ago today. … listen to it again…
Grant us,
Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and
even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast
to those that shall endure.
It was
hard to not be anxious about earthly things during Hugo and its aftermath. With
three pine trees down into the house, a newborn little boy, no electricity or
water, a house full of friends and family refugeeing from Charleston – we were
in Summerville. There was severe property
damage all over the Lowcountry, and yet, and yet, we still had many of things that endure. We had our lives, no one dear to us died and
we were all standing together as neighborhoods and community - all of us waiting for ice and water, people
pulling out their grills and cooking what had thawed in their freezers.. people
checking on their neighbors…It was great leveler. We were all in the same boat and
trying to figure out how to weather the storm after the storm.
Today, in
this difficult gospel story and the following sayings about wealth, our Lord is
giving us counsel about how to navigate a different kind of storm. So, we are going to dig in, try to make sense of
it, and to see what our God might be saying to each of us today through this Word.
Our
gospel reading from Luke is considered one of the most hard to understand
stories of Jesus…but one clue to its meaning is where it is placed in the Gospel
itself.
It falls
right after the three “lost” parables -
you remember from last week—the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the last one –
the parable of the prodigal or the lost son- we will hear in Lent. Immediately following our reading today, Jesus
takes the Pharisees to task about their love of money and their hypocrisy
around it and this is followed by the parable of the rich man, dressed in
purple who dined sumptuously every day while a poor man, Lazarus, died starving
at his gate.. So, you might call todays’ reading a lesson in the economics of
discipleship.
Now, before I go any further, I want to give a shout
out to the Rev. Dr. Andrew McGowan, author, seminary, and theologian – whose
scholarship focuses on early Christian communities and contemporary
Anglicanism. His work on this passage
deeply informs the sermon this morning.
A number of bible scholars have said that the
meaning of this story has been lost in translation and over time…and that it is basically unrecoverable…That may
be so but it does give us a coherent picture of the socio-economic realities of
Jesus’ day..
I want to give you some that background, look at the
passage and then draw out some observations and questions for us..
The setting is most likely agricultural and during
Jesus’ time, you will recall that Israel was under Roman occupation. Consequently, in most of the country, the
land had new owners. In some cases,
these were Roman citizens or other foreigners who were owed a favor by Rome. In other cases, the owners would have been
the wealthy elite and temple-connected fellow Israelites who were aligned with
the Romans.
Andrew McGowan says, “… many peasant farmers
had been bought out or displaced by wealthy supporters of the regime, but
unlike in modern cases of consolidation of farmland by large owners, labor was
still required even after the land was taken. We can think of other Gospel stories
and parables where landless peasants wait for day-labor jobs, or wonder where
their daily bread will come from; often they simply worked what had formerly
been theirs, and handed over much of the product.” The former owners had been forced into
becoming sharecroppers.
The
role of the steward was, in part, to
collect the rent which mostly would have been a portion of the crop or whatever
the tenant farmer produced. The steward
would have been expected to take a cut of produce as their salary..and, as you
can imagine, some of them exploited their position not unlike the tax collectors of same time who
were hated because of how they enriched themselves at the cost of their fellow
Jews.. Remember St. Matthew? He fell
into this category
And, Remember, too, that
Jesus is the master of the teachable moment, so I wonder if a story like this had
been in the news of the day… and Jesus took the opportunity to use it to teach his
disciples.
Now to
the passage… the rich man, the master, ( probably the absentee landlord) heard
that his steward was squandering his goods.. and so, he says to the steward –
the jig is up, turn in your records…
Then
we switch to the inner dialog of the disgraced steward – and there is an
important thing to note – all of the actions he describes – going to the
various tenants and writing down their debt – are in past tense. You can’t see
in English but you can in the Greek. I
think, and this is me, that he is talking with himself.. reviewing his
stewardship and describing what he has already done..before not after he got
fired… As we heard, if someone owed 100 measures of oil, he had told them to
write it down as 50 measure owed…in other words, he was working with the tenant farmers to outsmart, to stick it to
the absentee landlord.. and basically he was putting the interests of the
tenant farmers, and his relationship with them, above that of the absentee landlord. Perhaps this had been his ongoing practice
and that was the word that got back to the Landlord.. that his tenants, in
contrast to many others, seemed to be managing, perhaps were even able to step up out of the grinding poverty
that had become normative for everybody else. Somebody noticed and somebody
reported it to the Landlord.
Now,
to Jesus - the way the story sometimes
is read, it appears that Jesus is commending the steward for being dishonest
…and people have a hard time with that.. but what if Jesus is commending the
steward for coming up with a way to help people survive under a grossly exploitative
socio-economic system - one in which all the cards were stacked against them. Jesus comments that the sons and daughters of
the light need to be shrewd in dealing with the realities of life where
economic oppression is the rule of the day.
And, this reminds me of what Jesus said in Matthew as he sent out the
seventy on mission – ““Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves;
so be smart as a snake and innocent as a dove.” (Mt. 10.16).
There
is a particular danger when we are in a grossly unfair economic system, like
that of the tenant farmers in the Israel under Roman occupation. It’s this – that when we get a chance, we may
reproduce that same system in our relationships with others..that is, we become
just as exploitive as the powers that be.
The oppressed become the oppressors -We become servants of unrighteous mammon
in this.
Case
in point, did you hear what was happening in the reading of Amos? The powerful
were trampling on the needy and bringing ruin to the poor of the land. – the
poor were bought for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals.…There is
danger to our souls when greed takes over.
Or, can
we, listening to Jesus’ warning, come up with creative ways to sustain life even under an oppressive
system without falling into the trap of chasing after unrighteous mammon?..
The
followers of Jesus have dealt with this kind of challenge down through the ages
in many different ways.
They built their own networks of support, like
Blessed Absolom Jones and Richard Allen did when, in 1787, they founded the Free African Society - a
mutual aid society for African Americans in the city of Philadelphia. The followers of Jesus created systems (and continue to do so) for caring for the
poor, like the early church did as it built hospitals. Did you know that, while the Romans and Greeks
had places of healing, “ Public hospitals,
did not exist until … towards the end of the 4th century, when the first
Christian hospital was founded by Basil of Caesarea? During the middle ages,
almost every monastic community or religious foundation built hospitals.
At the
same time, the followers of Jesus become well versed in how to navigate
existing systems. And, the Church has
been the place where faith communities
of mutual love and care are built– forging relationships with brothers and
sisters with whom the ties of Holy Baptism are as strong if not stronger than
the ties of blood.
These
communities could withstand the turmoil and collapse of governments all around
them … And all with merciful justice at
their heart… They organized economically and, as in during our own civil rights
times, undertook boycotts. They embraced those standing on the outside –
drawing them in- and at the same time, going out to care for neighbors, those
in need around them. I know that many of
you know these things and have done them and continue to live by them..
So to
today, whether you are on the right or the left of politics- republican or
democrat, progressive or conservative , you will have to admit that things are
deeply unsettled in our country at present as everything around us becomes
monetized and even the most basic
requirements of life are seen as an opportunity to enrich a corporate entity.
I believe we can look at this particular
teaching of Jesus – and his warning – that in the storm of oppressive economic
times- we need to remember that we are
called to serve God and not Mammon.. and we can look at how the Church has
managed to move through similar storms .. all the while we can remember that
this too will pass away.. and it will…
In short, and circling back to the collect, we
are surrounded by that which will pass away – both materially and politically -
but we are called to hold fast to that which
shall endure – that is, the true wealth that is ours in Christ Jesus – our love for God and our faith in him… and to hold onto God’s
eternal love for us, the creation – every atom of which shimmers with life… to
hold onto our love and care for each other as a faith community, and the
priceless treasure to be found when we serve those beyond us. These are the
main things, these are what will endure.
So,
beloved… How can we keep the main thing, the main thing? How will you and I and St. Mark’s do this? Think about this question this week, think
about what will endure … May you be blessed in doing so. AMEN.
Sermon starts at 22.51 - apologies for the audio drop out at various points.
