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God's economy and God's sense of justice cannot truly be
understood from an Old Nature perspective. This is what is difficult for us to
grapple with. To truly begin to grow into that prayerful wisdom the gospel is
needing, we must look spiritually through the New Nature's lens.... This past
Sunday we looked for a long time at the 15th anniversary of 9/11. What we
really looked at was truly about the fine line of being prey to evil or
following the good and Jesus as the Good Shepherd. In some senses, another
misused word in our vocabulary of wisdom is shrewdness or the act of being
shrewd.
This coming Sunday’s lessons are really complex. There
are many things that are being talked about here. Is it all about money being
greedy and indifferent? Or is it about the wisdom of being intentional for God’s
purposes, NOT ours. The ethics of what we choose and how intricate the
challenge becomes for us to be disciplined to the Gospel, is coming back to
being both an external worldly battle and an internal spiritual battle of the
will and our priorities...
Being disciplined to the Gospel or developing a “godly
shrewdness;” I believe is the closest connection you can glean from these texts.
We start with the wonderful Prophet Amos with his fabulous descriptions putting
people in their place in regards to what God’s economy truly is and what it
requires from us. Again, we have a word
we misunderstand spiritually—economy. Our sense of economy equates the term
purely in connection to money…. God’s
sense of guiding our New Nature is talking about a spiritual economy of
discerning on behalf of others, on behalf of the Kingdom of God and its goals,
priorities.
From 1st Timothy the first half of the lessons is pretty
cut-and-dry in regards to talking about how prayer helps to discipline and
shape our lives alongside everything else we do when we are following Christ. In
essence, he is teaching the culture of that time to develop a New-Natured
wisdom of ethics, justice and how how to harbor a “Godly economy.”
The latter half ironically speaks to what we are guilty
of towards much of God’s Word, we are guilty of cherry-picking and manipulating
scripture without understanding or caring to understand the complete context
and the consequences of our choice. I make this statement because these are
some of the famous patriarchal texts that Christian denominations have used
against women serving and have laid a foundation of prejudice that people have mal-aligned
and abused for power....
How I could even fall victim to preaching these texts
through a lens of misunderstanding; is if I allow myself to go off on a tangent
about this or go off on a tangent about the economic plight in America and so
on. How does that get to the Good News,
though? It doesn’t, it misses the mark. The Good News that we need to hear is
how our hearts need to avoid the sin of greed and indifference. In short, this
means that the world needs to stop revolving around ourselves. Both of these words,
greed and indifference make up a Pandora’s box of meanings onto themselves. Over
the centuries walking our Christian Journeys, we have added quite a few
definitions and judgments to what these terms truly mean. Why are the sins of
greed and indifference considered to be systemic?
If you recall last week we talked about spiritual warfare.
To a certain extent, we talked about those internal choices we make to spiritually
change for Christ. This is known as transformation and metanoia also known as
repentance... What the devil has worked on within our battle to be
disciplined and grow with the Gospel, is the self. Yes I'm coming from that $20
word understanding of it, existentialism. It does come down to that though, our
human nature, our Old Nature, our awareness of our physical selves
automatically lends itself to a consuming concern for the self. An aspect
of this, is something we can't avoid to use one of those famous Reformation
quotes, we cannot avoid that we are both Saint and sinner.
The texts this week in essence are aspiring towards our
hopes to be intentionally upright. To quote St. Paul in Timothy here as well,
we are to be prayerfully disciplined; which Jesus and his very complex Parable
for this Sunday in some senses is indirectly trying to teach the Pharisees. The
Pharisees shallow morality or ethics is skewed by their agenda which has been
built on indifference and to a lesser extent greed. For God does know our hearts, this is beyond
being a faith-filled observation, but it is a fact. And maybe we should be hurt or offended by
the last verse in today’s Gospel, but we must hear it from Jesus as a prayerful
warning to align to. What we may
treasure and justify may truly be an abomination through God’s eyes, His wisdom…
Where we are as an American culture currently perhaps
would initially look at the Gospel and blankly see it as a statement of Justice
against the Love of Money alone. There is more here than meets the eye and I
think this is the more important message to all of scripture, we cannot assume
there is one blanket concept or layer of understanding to the profound truth
The Living Word is trying to reveal to us. Unfortunately we have catered to
polarizing scripture with politics, consumerism and universalism that takes
away from Christ's victory as Our Savior, in many ways….
The law of love that is the heart of Jesus mission
through the Gospels is a complex road but not an impossible road for us to journey
down. This is important because we can feel as if there's only one thing we can
do or one thing that we understand. It has often been said that being a
disciple of Jesus is one having a faith seeking understanding. We are always
seeking, but do we really come to understand? Do our hearts’ questions
truthfully and truly get answered? We need to not toil on the anxiety of that
but look brightly into the future with a hope-filled innocence with promise and
joy in the heart.
The riches of God and the economy of God have completely
different meanings than to what we understand of the two words or I should
better say how we have transformed the understanding of those two words not
successfully battling the self to think beyond the self.
A prayerful spiritual formation economy is one where
we stay focused, we stay disciplined. So if you do take a look past the
biases of the patriarchal context that St. Paul lectures the early Christian
women with... you can hear it as perhaps a lecture to us all to how we should
be or respond in a civilized manner, how we conduct our lives living into that
lifestyle of Grace. The mere fact that
Paul even acknowledged women and faith together in this text… Was amazing for that cultural context of that
time. Hard to believe, but we must
remember as well, we’ve come a long, long way…
still not there in some issues but we have progressed!
What we see in the Gospel and even hear about with the
prophet Amos is when we have, through our own Human Nature, blurred the
boundaries of sin verses righteousness, to fit our needs. This adjustment comes
from greed. The consequence for us to bear is being and becoming indifferent.
What I like to call indifference is something that we are plagued with I
believe today, and that is what I would like to call graceless Behavior.
I actually penned the thought, “graceless behavior,” a
few years back when I was interviewing and looking into different schools in
order to stay in a particular degree. I was parking the car and the key broke
off in the ignition. I go in for the interview to be met with a very judgmental,
unfriendly attitude; which as we know can be or feel quite oppressive. I shared
honestly that I was upset that my key was broke off in the ignition the woman
acted fairly annoyed and basically dismissed me.
Regardless of why I was there and what she was doing as a
part of her “job,” when we get so wound up into our fixed agendas that we need
to accomplish and we can't see or care about our neighbor… What fruit does this
truly bear? This is what the Prophet
Amos said we do, we trample on our neighbor. How can we live into understanding
what God sees as our priorities, what our economy should be, what are mission
and purpose should be, if we serve our own agendas and pursuits?
Perhaps the best illustration to think about in regards
to coming in from a skewed perspective or a particular angle that is not in a
pure frame of mind.... is thinking about our crazy Healthcare System. Our
Healthcare System is all over the map but does it completely and
comprehensively see all sides of the picture, come from a place of maybe a Gospel-oriented
sense of justice?
Doctors and hospitals have to have a lot of insurance
coverage which makes everything and anything almost completely unaffordable.
Regardless to what has been invented to address these problems, think about the
image here of Care itself. Think about the shrewd money manager that
Jesus talks about in the Gospel. Then think about all the segments of things that
are charged for. It may be very hard to tell where there might be
some injustice or unethical decisions because now it has become very complex.
Just this past Labor Day there was a middle-aged man at Pastor
Debbie’s party who came with a friend and he began to choke unknowingly at the
time on a small piece of meat. There were an awful lot of bees buzzing around,
as well, and some of them were going into the cans of soda pop… Since he could
still talk and the Heimlich maneuver did not work, we called the ambulance. Less
than 15 minutes later, an ambulance came by, picked him up totaling something
like $1,400 and he waited in the waiting room for some five hours while they
did an x-ray, and an upper GI. They also insisted on having him wait for a upper
G.I. Specialist to come to basically look into his mouth or down his throat and
find this piece of meat that they just needed to help shove into his stomach.
In the meantime this has now ballooned into the $3,000 range of a simple visit for
this man who may have been stung in his throat by a bee, or as we would find
out, simply choking.
Did the hospital and the insurance companies really need $3,000
something dollars, is this really ethical? But then we have to be careful here
and think about the economy and the spiritual focus that Jesus is trying to
teach the Pharisees to realize. Everything that Jesus tried to teach us even
about ethics is around the spiritual. This is what we often forget when we are
coming from a perspective of the world, or should I say fighting that
perspective of the world, which is our Old Nature and our spiritual warfare
battle.
Discerning the spirit and growing spiritually is the most
complex aspect of growing as a Christian, but this is the cost of
discipleship. Jesus is always hoping that we consult that first church.
As you know I have preached many a sermon that talk about that first church
being the heart. The heart is the
Tabernacle of the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives for the purposes of the
Gospel. Jesus would like us to look deeply into adapting a disciplined heart
that would internalize that law of love to be lived in all that we do and say and
in our ethics and economy too.
Let us Pray,
Teach our hearts, O Lord, a true economy
This is one built by a prayerful wisdom
Only Your love and Grace reveal to our Old Natured ways
Help us to harbor a restorative New Natured justice
That we bear towards our neighbor
With a humbling hope and inspired intentionality
Amen
September 18th,
2016; Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost; Proper 20; Year C; SOLA Lectionary
Sermon by: Reverend
Nicole A.M. Collins
Psalm 113; Amos
8:4-7; 1 Timothy 2:1-15; Luke 16:1-15
https://youtu.be/o7nTll0UvIc
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