Pentecost 16, Proper 20, 2004:

One of the stories I heard while on sabbatical, told by David Cannon of our companion parish, was the one about the devout American woman who had saved up for years for a trip to London and wanted more than anything to see St. Paul’s Cathedral. She arrived in London and went to church at St. Paul’s on Sunday. She had never seen or heard anything so beautiful. The majestic organ filled the magnificent place, the choir sang like what angels must sound like, and the whole experience was wonderful. At the end of a well-thought-out sermon the woman got so excited she jumped to her feet and shouted, "Glory hallelujah!"

An usher in a cutaway coat came quickly down the aisle and said, "Madam, we don’t allow outbursts here!"

"I can’t help it," she said. "I’ve got religion."

The usher drew himself up and said stiffly, "Well, you certainly didn’t get it here!"

What is it we expect to get when we come here? An hour of refreshment? A time away from the demands and stresses of life? An experience that feeds us? A chance to visit with friends? A place to be inspired? A time to acknowledge the author and creator of it all? Perhaps all of the above?

There is nothing wrong with whatever happens to be our motivation for being here. Only God knows each of our hearts and the one thing we can count on is that God knows how to keep a confidence. We do know that the church, when its members gather out of various motivations is the household of God. We are the family of God with vast privileges and we are the servants of God with great responsibilities. It is our privilege to use the material things of the world and to be good stewards of those riches. It is our responsibility to resist the temptation to make idols of any of those material things that surround us. Striving to live faithfully in this consumer-oriented society is most difficult.

The Gospel for this Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost is the Parable of the Dishonest Steward. When you first read or hear this parable it seems that Jesus is praising a dishonest manager for engaging in unethical business practices. This seems like a first-century World Com/Enron deal that made a few people rich. But, of course, the deeper meaning is that those who use worldly standards as the measure of success in life are much shrewder and ingenious than those who strive to follow the teachings of scripture are. Another way of saying that is if people would give as much attention to the things that concern the soul as they do to the things that concern their accumulating wealth and material things they would be better people. What Jesus is pointing out is that discipleship will be real and effective when we spend as much time and energy on it as we do our worldly activities.

I begin our worship services each week with a prayer out in the hallway with the acolytes, choir members, lay readers, deacons, and chalicist before we process. I always use the same one; "Grant, Almighty God, as we enter your house the thoughts of our hearts may be drawn close to you and that we may worship you in spirit and in truth." True worship is partly our offering ourselves to be used as God would use us and partly giving back to God a standard portion of that over which God has allowed us to exercise stewardship. That portion has always been and remains 10%. We always say at the 8:00 AM service, "All things are thine, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee." The question of course is do we mean that or are we guilty of committing mass perjury?

Giving is our response to God’s amazing grace and goodness shown to us. It is a response to God’s absolute holiness and a reminder that God is the creator of all things and they are therefore potentially holy and sacred. We profane them when they are used for wrong purposes. We are called by God to give our time and skills and prayer and worship and thought to the work of the church in this community and beyond. That involves budgeting our time and energy and attention so that we may be of service to God in this world. Jesus said that he could be found and be served outside the church as well as inside. Jesus said he would be anyone who is thirsty, or hungry, or a stranger, or without shelter, or sick, or homebound, or in prison. Jesus is served when we join the search party attempting to find the lost one.

There are contributions that only we can make. When Jesus called Peter to be a disciple, he got Peter’s fishing boat. It probably wasn’t a new one, wasn’t much to look at from a worldly point of view, and may have been battered by wind and wave. Yet, once that boat was a pulpit from which Jesus delivered one of his most important early sermons, one that produced four additional followers. That fishing boat was the also the means of his escape from Herod the Tetrarch. If that boat had not come with Peter, the Gospels might have told a different story.

Whenever you or I withhold something you or I should have given to the purposes of God, then church history will some day tell a different story.

In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky tells the story of an old woman and a very wicked woman she was. And she died and did not leave behind a single good deed. The devils caught her and plunged her into the lake of fire. So her guardian angel stood wandering what good deed of hers he might remember to tell God. He thought and thought and finally said, "She once pulled up an onion in her garden and gave it to a beggar woman." Her guardian angel told God about this act of generosity and God said to the angel, "You take that onion, hold it out to her in the lake of fire and let her take hold of it and be pulled out. If you can pull her out, let her come to paradise. But, if the onion breaks, then the woman must stay where she is."

So the angel ran to the woman and held out the onion to her. "Come," he said, "Catch hold and I’ll pull you out." And he cautiously began to pull her out. He had her almost all the way out, when the others in the lake, seeing how she was being drawn out, began catching hold of her, so as to be pulled out with her. But she was still a wicked woman and she began kicking them. "I’m to be pulled out, not you! It was my onion, not yours," she said. As soon as she said that, the onion broke. And the woman fell back into the lake. And the angel wept and went away.

"It’s my onion, not yours." That was her epitaph, both her life and her death.

In a very real sense, everything we hold onto means death. Wherever life is based on possessing things, there it destroys itself. By clutching fiercely and selfishly the very thing we seek perishes. Wherever life is sought by selfishness, behind the backs of other people, and where it is sought without the painful detour through the world for which Jesus died, it destroys itself. The onion breaks.

An angry, confused, and suffering world is saying today to this struggling church, to this blessed nation, and to each one of us, "Take care how you handle that onion. It can be the difference between life and death." And so it is!"

Taking care how we handle our onion can be the only thing that gives us true religion. Amen.