2 short talks this week as well as a short sermon on the gospel.
Gods blessings a few words on psalm 113
I wonder
what you think when we say ‘Praise
the Lord!’ or
‘Blessed be the name of the Lord’
This psalm
is a psalm of praise, a psalm that acknowledges the mystery and power of God,
the enormity of God, the care God shows to the lowly, the poor and needy.
Part of the psalm
reminds me of the Magnificat – where the powerful are brought down and the
lowly are raised up, the hungry are filled with good things and the rich go
away empty.
Do we praise
God when we are hungry? Or only when things are going well?
What does it
mean to praise the Lord, to bless the name of the Lord?
A few words
on Amos
“I will never
forget their evil deeds.”
I think this
passage from the prophet Amos is fairly clear. God is not happy with the way
that people were treating each other, especially those who ripped off the poor.
This and the reading from Luke both talk about being in debt, yet the Jewish
system did not allow charging interest. The
system of jubilee meant that land was to be returned to its stewards, so that the
rich could not keep on getting more and more and the number of poor did not
keep increasing.
“ .. it said that St. Augustine asserted that God
gave us people to love and things to use, and original sin manifests itself in
our penchant to confuse those two, loving things and using people.” [i]
What is the
evil you see in our country?
[i]
David Lose, In the Meantime
Luke 16: 1-13
This is one of those readings I have
struggled with. There are a variety of opinions amongst scholars as to the meaning
or moral of this parable.
At the beginning of chapter 15, the religious
leaders were grumbling because Jesus ate with the wrong people, sinners and tax
collectors, and then we have 3 parables – the lost sheep, the lost coin and the
prodigal son. The first two we looked at
last Sunday. In both the lost is looked for, searched for, and when found and
returned, there is much celebrating. In the third of the lost stories, the ‘lost’
son returns home hoping his father will employ him, but the father celebrates, though
not all the family celebrates.
Then “Jesus said to his disciples,
“There was once a rich man who had a servant who managed his property. …”
The servant is the manager of the rich
man’s property. From the list of amounts
owed, property included olive oil and wheat.
Here is a crash course in economics
from 1st century Galilee.
While the Jewish religion prohibited
the charging of interest, many rich landlords charged high interest rates. People
who were desperate would borrow to buy what they needed. In this case the manager may have added his
own cut on top of the landlord’s fees or interest.[i]
One way to look at this story is that
the manager reduced the amount owed by his cut. He reduced his earnings, but he
wasn’t going to see that money once he lost his job. Or maybe he reduced the
debt by his cut and the boss’s interest as well. The boss can’t really complain
because by Jewish teaching he should not have been charging interest in the first
place. But he has made friends who will look after him, because he forgave part
of their debt. [ii]
While the boss commends the manager
for being shrewd, Jesus doesn’t end this parable with ‘go and do likewise’.
He does say be clever, not in ripping
people off, but in living as my disciples. Be shrewd, not at the expense of
others. Don’t be naïve about the ways of
the world.
While I have been told that you shouldn’t
discuss politics or religion in polite society, it seems to me that in the church
we don’t talk about money.
The Gospels don’t say anything about wealth
being a problem. What is a problem, and a sin, is becoming wealthy at the
expense of others, particularly the poor. Wealth also comes with responsibility, as we
will see in next week’s reading. One of the problems of money, is that once
people have some, we want to keep it for ourselves.
And the last part of the passage:
“No servant can be the slave of two masters;
such a slave will hate one and love the other or will be loyal to one and
despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”
Life can be complicated. As Christians
we try and follow Jesus, yet we live in a world that at times seems incompatible
with following Jesus.
Do we serve God or money?
Money is a tool, yet so often it seems
like an idol. The more wealth we have, cars, house, investments, the more time
and energy is needed to look after these things. Yet life is not about money, life
is about relationships. The religious leaders grumbled because of the people
Jesus associated with. When we are in healthy relationship with people around
us, we won’t be exploiting them, or allowing some people to be hungry or
homeless.
The manager was clever, he had messed
up and had to find a way out of the mess. We need to be clever with our money,
our resources, our time – not so we can make more and more money for ourselves.
We need to be wise to recognise the true nature of life.
Remember the quote from Augustine:
I can remember many years ago making a
mobile, with people and things on opposite sides of one piece of paper, and
love and use on the other piece of paper, just like this.
Do we use our position in life, our resources
to feather our own nests, or do use what we have to show and share the love and
grace of God?
