WEEK OF PENTECOST 17, 2010


A Stewardship Homily: Returning to God When (Before) Returns Decline

Jeremiah’s spirit in this past Sunday’s Old Testament reading is crushed. “My joy is gone” laments Jeremiah, “grief is upon me, my heart is sick.” Why this personal anguish? Because, as the Sunday Readings commentator on our parish website says, “(Jeremiah) proclaimed God’s way of life to a community on its way to death. They were unwilling to listen and had no desire to hear and heed God’s word.” The people of Jeremiah’s time didn’t get the truth that living a spiritual life is more than being good and getting goodies. The spiritual life is about being blessed and sharing those blessing, especially with those who have become disconnected from their people and lost their way, the homeless, the addicted, the grieving, the poor and the marginalized.

“The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved,” God's people complained, as if the material good times they had always enjoyed and were now gone (sound familiar?), were their entitlement, right and privilege for simply showing up in the flesh. “Hey, God, I’m here, lay it on me!” And God did but not as they presumed. They were oblivious to the spiritual judgment that was coming down upon them. They knew that something profound had gone wrong yet thought the cause was elsewhere than in themselves, their materialistic attitudes and behaviors, and in their systems of organizational behavior. Kind of like the economy and society today. Do you think?

The predicament of the people and nation of ancient Israel in the time of Jeremiah was that they thought backwardly. They thought they had material issues with spiritual consequences, if they thought about spirituality at all. What they had, as Jeremiah told them prophetically for forty years, were spiritual issues with material consequences tied on. The real order of the world in every generation is that we all have spiritual issues that have to be dealt with up front or be faced with material consequences down the road. This is an important indeed foundation biblical truth.

Said in the Bible language of the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew, chapter 6 - every generation has to “Strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness” and only then “all these (good) things will be given to you as well.” In other words, if you don’t get your spiritual house in order first, regardless of whether you get or don’t get material satisfactions, you’re on your way to death without hope. The good news is, if you’ve got God and your spiritual house is in order, you’re still on your way to death but with hope for what’s to come and “hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”

We are a new creation in the Holy Spirit. Without the Holy Spirit we are a dusty lakebed, gone dry for lack of the sustaining wellspring of every blessing. With the Holy Spirit, all of life’s experiences, every good or bad turn of events, every joyous or calamitous happening, bears within a transcendent glow that will lead us through every day and night. Rock songs or drinks on the rocks can’t get close to this Spirit! No wonder the crowd on Pentecost thought the disciples were drunk early in the morning. Who’s ever that joyful and cheerful in the morning? The Holy Spirit is, thanks be to God!

How upsetting it must be then in the Lord to see us, literally his namesake Christians unhappy or complaining all the time, having issues unworthy of our true identity, calling and destiny. How can we shine our light that others may see our good works and glorify our Father who is in heaven, if we ourselves are dispirited? This we are told is how Jeremiah felt after forty years of fighting the good fight in a depressing era in the life and history of God’s people. Given the circumstances of our time, it would be easy to throw up our hands and fall into the despair and anguish of Jeremiah, although who among us would dare arrogate to ourselves his dark night of the soul?

And what about Jesus? God knows Jesus did not have an easy time of it on the way to the cross, his death and resurrection. We see something of the stress weighing upon him in the Sunday morning Lucan parable of the shrewd manager, another story told in the face of constant opposition to the Good News by Pharisees and the scribes. How annoying they must have been to Jesus!

Jesus offers what amounts to sarcastic admiration (if we were making this point) for the villain in the parable precisely because of the man’s attentiveness to his own best interests. The manager certainly had this for a talent, looking after himself. He shrewdly lines up debtors who will owe him favors when he loses his position. Jesus then turns to his disciples and drives home the message of the day, asking, “Who among the children of God are as wise in the ways of the kingdom; lining up favors with God in acts of justice and mercy for when they lose their lives!”

Christ commands us to be every bit as clever in doing good works for God and others as the shrewd manager was in doing good works for himself. No one can serve God and wealth. You can have both - and I have many friends who are both rich in God and rich in wealth - but you can’t do both. You can’t serve God and serve wealth. It’s a matter of basic stewardship orientation. It all begins, continues and ends with God: God’s love, God’s grace, God’s justice, God's annoyance and outbursts, God’s mercy and forgiveness, God’s joy and fellowship, God’s gratitude and generosity. This was Jeremiah’s message. This is our message.


Let’s stay on message whether or not others are hearing what the Spirit is saying to his people. Recite with me again, and this time with conviction, the Collect of the Day - “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, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”