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September 23, 2007 Rev. Steve Gehlert Have you ever been really desperate, ever had to really scramble? It was our second day of backpacking in Glacier National Park. We'd been the first group allowed into the area around Triple Divide Pass, after the winter snows had melted enough to allow people to cross it. The night before we'd been the only campers by a beautiful lake, where sounds of a large animal outside our tent and in the water kept us awake most of the night. That day we're to hike up over Triple Divide Pass, down into a mountain meadow, through a forest, across a major stream, and then on to another designated campsite by a lake. (Designated campsites are important in Glacier because of the Grizzly Bears. They have a special cooking ring, and a place to hoist your food up, to keep it away from the bears, but also away from where you sleep; Grizzlies had killed people in Glacier, but it had always been when they'd tried to sleep out on their own, away from the designated campsites; it had never happened at a designated site). So, it was important that we get there, but it was about 9 miles, and even with the climb over the pass that didn't seem so bad; the kids were older than on our first visit and we'd been able to do about 6 back then. As we cooked our breakfast that morning, we shared stories of how scared we'd been during the night, by the sound of that large animal, how the parent in each tent had put their arms over their kids and said a prayer, as they listened and waited, for whatever it was to go away. It had been a sobering night, but still we greeted the day with cheer. The weather was great and we expected the scenery to be fantastic. After breakfast we started up the slope to Triple Divide Pass. Everything was fine, except that Jake, was so, so slow, the rest of us had to sit and wait for him again and again. Yet, even though that leg took longer than we'd expected, we started down the other side of the pass feeling very optimistic. But then we were further delayed when we came to an icy slope, which took lots of care and time to cross, and where my daughter fell and slid hundreds of feet into the mud at the bottom. When you scramble for your life, comfort and appearance are of no concern. It doesn't matter whether you like to run, or if you are in good shape. It doesn't matter if you're usually quick witted or good with words. You find resources, expend the energy, you didn't know you had; because survival is so important. We see the same instincts at play in today's Gospel lesson. We don't usually associate the good news of Jesus with such cunning. But, in this parable, Jesus uses an embezzling servant as an example. The guy is a real scoundrel. Not only has he used his boss's money for himself, his boss suspects something. So, he's asked to account for what he's done with his money, he knows he's in trouble. Surely he was in a panic. All his crooked plans and arrangements were about to crumble. He was about to lose his job, or maybe get thrown in jail. Yet, as he quells his panic and begins to deal with the situation, he does two commendable things. He accepts some financial responsibility in reducing the debts, and at the same time he translates economic realities into relational realities. Whatever the outcome, whether he repays the amount by which he reduced the debts or is fired, he's created good relations with a variety of people. If his boss ends up firing him, he can trust that they'll take him in. Why would Jesus hold up such actions as an example? There's something here we need to grasp in order to understand faithful living. The key is in Jesus' comment, "the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of the light." In other words, those who live for the world are more focused in their values and priorities than those who live for God. That implies that the followers of Christ have a lot to learn from the secular world about things like commitment, resourceful-ness, doing whatever it takes. Those who live for themselves, with the world's values, will do anything to survive, to make a buck, to get ahead. God's people don't seem to have that kind of drive or passion. It's his resourcefulness and his realization that friends are more important than money that finally commends the steward to the consideration of the disciples. Oh, many of us get to church when we can, give what we can, do this or that, when we can. But the focus of our lives is elsewhere, on surviving, getting things done, getting ahead, or maybe just having fun. Yet, if that's all there is to our way of thinking and acting as Christians, then an important aspect of faith is missing, a sense of total commitment: to do anything God asks, to step out on a limb of faith, to rush forward to do something that needs to be done, to scramble to act in love in the face of danger. In another place, Jesus puts it in a more familiar way. He says "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." To do that requires total commitment. It means to "give yourself." And your "self" means everything. That leads to the second reason Jesus lifts up this unscrupulous steward as an example. In the end he's finally come to realize that it's not wealth or success that really matter, or can really save you. It's relationships. He wants us to see that if even a shifty steward realized that relationships are more important than money, how much more should his disciples realize that "true riches" have to do with relationships rather than wealth or possessions. In fact, he concludes, it's impossible to truly serve God if one is also trying to serve wealth and possessions. The parable and the sayings that follow it put us squarely into the middle of one of the oldest human dilemmas. We may think materialism and consumerism are North American, 21st-Century concerns —and perhaps nowhere and at no other time have they held such sway over human lives. Yet Luke's Gospel bears ample witness to a larger reality: they're ancient as well as contemporary problems. All this leaves us little room to rationalize our overabundance and our pursuit of even more. The dishonest steward, the farmer who built more barns, the rich man who ignored his neighbor Lazarus, the ruler who valued possessions more than abundant life—all point toward the better path, the path of radical trust in God alone, for the sake of serving God and others, that Jesus walked before us. Relationship with God and others is what life's really all about; yet how little of ourselves we give to those relationships, and how much to everything else? Jesus wants to know, "to what will you give yourself?" Today's Gospel teaches something new, unreasonable, and shocking. It's a lesson in total commitment. Like the embezzling manager who drops everything, even his love of money, and scrambles to save his skin, or a criminal who will say anything to get out of trouble; the church needs a passion that inspires creativity, energy, and action for God. It's also a lesson in transformed commitment. Our commitment, our passion, energy, and action need to be refocused, away from ourselves, our survival, and our getting ahead, to the relationship with God and others which really matters, which alone can save us, and which, in the end, alone can bring us joy. We need that passion in order to accept God's call, to follow where Jesus leads, to love without calculating the sacrifice. That's what it means to find a more mature faith. One aspect of that maturity is to grow in giving ourselves away. The unjust steward demonstrates no mere ten-percent effort. His is a scrambling, survival mentality that represents 100-percent commitment - commitment to his own survival. The parable suggests that we learn how to give of ourselves so completely to God and God's work in the world. What would it mean to "give yourself" so completely? It's not something we're likely to be able to do, if we think we're diminishing our lives by doing it. It's only possible when we come to see that we're enriching ourselves, saving ourselves, through our commitment, through our giving. What would it mean to look at a Retreat weekend and see not the usual schedule or work to be done, but an opportunity to share in strengthening the relationships that make our faith community a family? To look at Sunday morning class time, not as a time to catch up around the house, but to grow in faith, and in your acceptance and understanding of others in your faith family? To look at all you've been given, not as the dishonest manager first did, as yours to use for your own pleasure and advancement, but as God's to be used for God's work? What would it mean for you to look at all those kinds of choices, and see that you are not diminished but enriched by choosing to give yourself for God and others rather than for yourself and things of this world? What would it mean to really believe that? I believe it'd mean real joy. Look at the people who are most committed, most willing to give of themselves for God and others in our faith family. They don't go around with long faces, looking burdened, and put upon. I think what you're probably more likely to notice about those people is an amazing joy and energy. Sure, they're human, they get tired, they need to rest, to take sabbath, and sometimes they get discouraged, but what you'll see as essential to their character, to their being is joy. How can that be? How can that be if they're giving themselves all the time? Doesn't make sense in terms of the way the world calculates things, in terms of the self-focus on survival and getting ahead that it tells us to assume is the way to life. But they've internalized the gospel, they've found its truth. You find life and peace and joy when you "give yourself." So, instead of looking at such people as oddities, as somehow threatening because they are doing what we don't ever think we could do or could ever want to do, or as someone we think we have to divert from a passion that we think is in danger of draining them dry, why not look to them as witnesses, witnesses of what God intends for us all. What God intends not first because God wants something from us, our selves, our selves serving God's purpose in the world, but because God loves us and wants us to have joy and peace, and God, who knows us better than we know ourselves, knows that this way, the way of giving yourself is the way to find that, what Jesus called eternal life. To give of ourselves is to live. When we focus on things outside of us we become more alive. We learn to scramble not for our own existence, but for the life and wellbeing of all people. That is loving God with all our hearts and loving our neighbors as ourselves. |
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