Seventeenth Pentecost

             September 23, 2007

     They had not gotten along very well for all of their sixty years of marriage, but the wife felt obligated to be in court when her husband appeared on shoplifting charges.  When he went before the judge, he was asked, “What did you steal?”

     He replied, “A can of peaches, your honor.”

     The judge asked why he had stolen them and he said his wife never bothered to cook anything and he was hungry.

     The judge then asked, “How many peaches were in the can?”

     “Six, your honor,” he said.

     The judge then said, “I sentence you to six days in jail.”  But, before he brought down the gavel to close the proceedings, the wife interrupted and said, “Your honor, he also took a can of peas!”  I suspect they needed a break from each other. 

     We are the household of God.  That means we are the family of God, with vast privileges.  That also means we are the servants of God, with great responsibilities.  It is a special blessing from God to be allowed to use the material things of the world and to be good stewards of them.  It is our challenge not to make idols of any of the things in the created order.  Keeping the faith with our natural environment, exercising good stewardship while we are in this world, and leaving things in better condition than we inherited them is a constant challenge.  The first order of business is to refuse to allow forces from the left or right to make a political football out of something as crucial to life as God’s creation.  It really is arrogant on our part to think we can destroy what was here long before we came along.  Not keeping the faith with our natural environment ensures that, in order to protect itself, the natural environment will destroy us.

     Holy Scripture calls us to be faithful stewards and Jesus used stories to teach about faithful stewardship.  In today’s Gospel Jesus uses a story that on first reading seems to be praising a dishonest steward for unethical business practices.  I would suggest that what he is saying is that the children of the world are wiser in their generation than the children of light.  One could say that if only the Christian person was as eager and ingenious in their attempt to attain goodness, righteousness, and mercy as the child of the world is in their attempt to attain money, prestige, and creature comforts, they would be a much better role model.  If only people would give as much attention to the things that concern the soul as they do to the things that concern their business, they would be better people. 

     Over and over again people will expend an obscene amount of time, money, and effort on their pleasure, their hobbies, and their entertainment as they do on their church and its work.  Our evangelism will begin to be real and effective only when we spend as much time, effort, and money on sharing the redemptive Word as we do on our worldly activities.

     Genuine worship is partly our offering ourselves and it is partly offering back to God that over which we have been exercising stewardship.  It was never ours.  We say “all things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee.”  The question is whether we truly mean that or are guilty of committing mass perjury? 

     Giving is our response to God’s challenging goodness to us.  It is our response to God’s absolute holiness.  Striving to be faithful stewards includes the acceptance of God’s ownership of all things and our relationship to God.  It involves giving our time, skills, prayer, worship, creativity, and resources to the work of the church in this community and beyond.  It involves budgeting our time, energy, attention, and resources so that we may be of service to God in this world.  Jesus very often reminded his followers that he could be found outside the community of faith as well as inside.  He is anyone who is thirsty, hungry, a stranger, without shelter, sick, homebound, or in prison.  Jesus is served most clearly by joining the search party attempting to find the lost one.

     I want to repeat the story from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, in which he tells about the old peasant woman and a very wicked woman she was.  And she died and did not leave a single good deed behind.  The devils caught her and plunged her into the lake of fire.  So her guardian angel stood and wondered what good deed of hers he could remember to tell to God.  “She once pulled up an onion in her garden,” said he, “and gave it to a beggar woman.”  And God answered, “You take that onion then, hold it out to her in the lake, and let her take hold and be pulled out.  And if you can pull her out of the lake, let her come to Paradise, but if the onion breaks, then the woman must stay where she is.”

     The angel ran to the woman and held out the onion to her.  “Come,” said he, “catch hold and I’ll pull you out.”  He began cautiously pulling her out.  He had just pulled her right out, when the other sinners 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 a very wicked woman and she began kicking them.  “I’m to be pulled out, not you.  It’s my onion, not yours.”  As soon as she said that, the onion broke.  And the woman fell into the lake and she is burning there to this day.  So the angel wept and went away.

     “I’m to be pulled out, not you.  It’s my onion, not yours.”  That was her epitaph; both her life and her death.

     In a very real sense, everything we hold on to means death.  Wherever life is based on possessing things, there it destroys itself.  By clutching fiercely and selfishly, it 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.  What should be private becomes public.  What should be public becomes private.  The onion breaks.

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

                                                          ~The Rev. G. Thomas Mustard