Sermons

Minister: Rev. Margaret A. Beckman | “Once people adopt a religion, they should practice it sincerely. Truly believing in God, Buddha, Allah or Shiva should inspire one to be an honest human being. Some people claim to have faith in their religion but act counter to its ethical injunctions. They pray for the success of their dishonest and corrupt actions, asking God or Buddha for help in covering up their wrongdoings. There is no point in such people describing themselves as religious.” ~ His Holiness the 14th Dalia Lama
 

READING Hebrew Scripture (Old Testament) Amos 8: 4-7

8:4 Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land,

8:5 saying, “When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and the sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances,

8:6 buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat.”

8:7 The LORD has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget any of their deeds.

 

READING Christian Scripture (New Testament) Luke 16:1-13

16:1 Then Jesus said to the disciples, “There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property.

16:2 So he summoned him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.’

16:3 Then the manager said to himself, ‘What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg.

16:4 I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’

16:5 So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’

16:6 He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’

16:7 Then he asked another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘A hundred containers of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill and make it eighty.’

16:8 And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.

16:9 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.

16:10 “Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much.

16:11 If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches?

16:12 And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own?

16:13 No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”

 

SERMON

The two readings for today come from very different periods of history, but they both speak to a common challenge for human beings then and now – – our relationship with money, wealth and power.

I’m going to begin at the end and then go back and discuss how I have arrived at my concluding admonition.

May we always be among those who choose the common good above and before our individual good.

Now, let me go back and illustrate the stories from Amos and Luke.

We see in both passages from scripture that there are two very different approaches to dealing with wealth and the power.

One is the way of greed and avarice and dishonesty and the art of making the best deal and beating the other person in any transaction. It is a relationship that favors the individual over the good of anyone or anything else.

And, one is the way of equity and justice; compassion and grace, where making the biggest best deal for oneself is not as important as the health and integrity of the community.

Amos was a shepherd. He lived in Judah in the 8th century B.C.E. When he received the call from God to go and proclaim the word to the Hebrew people, he went to the northern kingdom of Israel. This was sometime around 750 B.C.E. so almost three thousand years before now.

You may recall that the Prophets were sent to the people when things were not going well for them. Often, the message of a prophet was something like this … “You all are messing up. You have forgotten your covenant with God. You are acting like you know more and are better than God. You are being mean to each other. You are using rituals and temple gatherings and holy services as a cover for your unrighteousness. God sees you and God is not happy with you. I’ve come to point all this out to you and to encourage you to get back into right relationship with all the members of your community and with God.”   And sometimes, maybe even often, the prophet would finish up with, “or else!”

In our passage this morning, Amos is calling out the powerful wealthy people for complaining about and actively resenting the periods of rest and religious observance when business could not be conducted. It wasn’t just that business could not be conducted, but workers got a rest from their labor and the poor got a reprieve from the hardships of life.

The wealthy men (yes, they were all men back then) moan and cry about the mandatory breaks in business and commerce when they can’t make a buck and soak the poor for what little they have. At the new moon – a break. At the weekly Sabbath – a break. These religious rules were designed to protect and promote the well-being of every member of the community, not just the wealthy who already had so much privilege and power. Even with all they had, they continued to whine about not being granted the unregulated opportunity to get more – by whatever means they could. They delighted in cheating those who had no power to negotiate or resist unfair business practices. They used faulty weights to measure transactions. They took everything from a family and thrust them deeper into poverty or even debtor’s slavery without a second thought.

All for the love of money and the power it gave them.

Amos calls them out. He says that they cannot do these things in secret and that they are seen, and their deeds are recognized for what they are – evil, dishonest, unjust and a tear in the fabric of community.

Amos tells these dishonest and greedy business dealers that they have broken covenant with their God and their people and that God will remember all that they have done.

Not publicity for the rich merchants. This passage does not tell us whether there was any repentance among the accused or any change in their unjust financial deal-making. It ends with the statement that God – the community at large – sees what they do and will remember their betrayals of their covenant to love God and their neighbors.

Switch over to Luke’s account of Jesus speaking to the crowds of people who follow him around.

Jesus sometimes says things quite clearly. Other times he speaks through parable. You will remember that a parable is a story used to illustrate a moral or spiritual teaching.

This parable of the Dishonest Steward is sometimes referred to as the most difficult of Jesus’ parables. At first, it seems that Jesus is admiring the wealthy man who has many debts owed to him and the steward who has cheated his master and pocketed the money for himself.

I don’t think that’s the point of this parable at all.

I see here a story of one who has been corrupted by the allure of wealth and power. He longs to be among those who can do as they please – cheating the wealthy and the poor whenever and however they are able to get away with it. He has fallen victim to the false security of money in his pocket and he has placed his own tenuous future in the value of the greatest acquisition of wealth through whatever means he can manage. The dishonest steward works for a dishonest manager – both driven by personal greed. They see in each other the cleverness of their ability to gain through deception and honor that skill even when it is revealed and made plain for all to see.

In the parable we have

The rich man.
The steward – charged with managing the rich man’s financial affairs.
The debtors.

The rich man finds out that his steward is not doing a good job managing his money, probably skimming off more than his fair share from the master’s earnings. So he tells the guy, “You’re Fired.”

The steward is in crisis. He has no skills by which to earn a living and no resources of his own to live on. He will be poor and ruined.

So, before he cleans out his desk and closes the master’s financial books, he makes a few deals on the side that he hopes will benefit him in his unemployment by creating people in his personal debt for favors granted. He goes to the master’s debtors and changes the books to show a much smaller debt than what is actually owed to the rich guy.

The debtors are happy and pay their reduced accounts in full as quickly as possible.

The steward reminds all his neighbors that he has done them a very great service and that he has made a very good deal for them, a really beautiful wonderful great deal for them. A great deal.

So of course, the rich man finds out about this scheme of the steward’s to cheat him out of great sums of money while he is building up favor with the townspeople who will remember his deeds and take him in.

Instead of having the steward arrested or even executed, he just shakes his head and walks away. Why? Well, there isn’t really anything productive for him to do. He recognized the shrewdness and the conniving of his steward.

The steward had the legal authority to act on behalf of his master in all financial affairs and the master didn’t get rid of him fast enough to prevent this dishonest scheme from working.

The rich guy can’t get his money back and so he nods in a grudging appreciation of the dishonest steward who got the better of him in his deal-making and conniving. One who strives always to win can acknowledge the cleverness of being beaten in the game of deal-making.

The parable ends, however, with another admonition from Jesus. Jesus speaks about the way that both the master and the steward have served their love of money at the expense of the community. Jesus says that a person cannot serve two masters. He will love the one and despise the other. A person cannot be a slave to personal wealth and power and at the same time be a righteous member of the religious community to which he gives his name and membership.

Again, the scripture poses the choice we all have about our relationship with money. Money is neither good nor evil in itself. The good or evil manifests in our human relationship to money. Will we choose individualism at its most greedy and self-serving or will we choose the common good and beloved community?

This choice lives now for each of us each every day.

It is a spiritual practice to place the good of the many – the common good – the beloved community – above our own inclinations toward selfishness and greed for personal gain and false security.

I continue to meditate on the words I shared with you all last Sunday morning as the final desperate message of a man who knew he would not survive the 9/11 attack on his office in the NYC Trade Tower. “I love you. Take care of the children.”

When we consider our relationship with money, wealth and power, I pray that we may turn to these words as a guide to know how we shall live.

It is not having money, wealth and power that places us and all those around us in spiritual peril. It is our relationship with money and how we put it to use in the world.

Who do we love? How far and wide is our circle of care and concern?

How do we use our money to take care of the children?

Yes, certainly our own children, but perhaps the widest possible circle of children as well. All the children. Everywhere.

This week with the youth climate strike everywhere, we are reminded to take care of the children. They are who we love. They want a chance to live in a healthy and thriving world – not a world devastated by human greed and indifference to the future of our planet.

There is a practice attributed to Native American culture that requires every major decision being made to be first evaluated by its impact on the children – to the seventh generation. It is both a reminder and a mandate to place the common good above individual wealth and power.

That is the relationship with money, wealth and power that I see being promoted in the passages from the Prophet Amos nearly three thousand years ago and the Gospel of Luke in the first century of our common era. We cannot serve two masters – the one using our resources for personal gain and the other seeing our resources in service to the common good. Which master shall we serve? Let us be guided by these words:

I love you. Take care of the children.
Blessed Be.   I Love You.   Amen.