“Stewardship Sunday”
Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, Decatur, GA
The Rev. Pamela Cooper-White, Ph.D.
Texts adapted for Stewardship Sunday from Proper 20C and Proper 22B: Gen. 1:26-31, Ps. 104: 24-30, Heb. 1:1-4, 2:5-8, and Luke 16:1-13
Today’s Gospel is about something more private than our love lives, our deepest regrets, or how we brush our teeth. It is even more private than our prayer life. Today’s Gospel touches on what may be, in our North American culture, the most private and carefully guarded dimension of our lives: money.
Nearly everyone in our culture is extremely private about at least some aspects of our finances. Nothing breaks up an office friendship faster than finding out about an inequity in pay. Being laid off from a job is tantamount to being de-valued as a person, even if the reasons have nothing to do with performance and everything to do with budgetary constraints. There are those of us who are afraid that if anybody, including close friends and relatives, knew what we earn, they would look down on us—it wouldn’t be prestigious enough. Or, on the other hand, there are those of us who are afraid that if anybody knew what we earned, they would try to take advantage of us because we had more money than they. When we think about the emotions that are tied to money, particularly our own money (or the lack of it), we tap into envy, fear, guilt, and even shame—that haunting, pervasive feeling that we are somehow bad or insufficient people. We can feel shame if we enjoy our money, and we can feel shame if we don’t have enough to enjoy.
Practicing Christians may be even more funny about money than the general population. We tend to think of money as “filthy lucre” (from the King James translation of I Timothy). “Money is the root of all evil,” we repeat to ourselves, usually guiltily. “Money isn’t spiritual.” So we get ourselves into a terrible double bind: We feel miserable when we have enough money, or more than enough just to live simply and well, because that doesn’t feel “spiritual” enough; and yet we also know that we feel miserable when we truly don’t have enough. We either experience lack ourselves, or we witness directly every day the misery of the poor who never chose to be poor, both in this city and around the world. We know that there is nothing intrinsically spiritual about being cold, sick, hungry, sleep-deprived because there is no safe place to sleep, and dirty because there is simply no place to get washed up. No one financial condition, then, rich or poor or in between, guarantees a greater sense of spiritual well-being, and our souls’ longing for God and for the deeper meanings of life continue to go unmet regardless of our economic situation.
But there is no evidence that Jesus himself felt that money itself was evil, or dirty, or even un-spiritual!
Now you will surely protest that right in today’s Gospel Jesus says “You cannot serve (both) God and wealth,” and didn’t Jesus also say that money is the root of all evil?” (Actually, no, that quote is from I Timothy, and the exact quote is that the love of money is the root of all evil.)
I read these statements of Jesus in Luke today not as diatribes against money per se. Rather, I see them as statements against idolatry. Whom, or what, do you worship? Whom do you serve? Literally, in the words of the gospel, even, to whom or to what are you enslaved (as the text literally translates)? Where is your preoccupation, your time, your energy really invested? Jesus did say, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” (Matt. 6:21). If money becomes our preoccupation, it may very well become our god. And Jesus was always very concerned with the false values of those who, like the Pharisees, seemed to worship their own wealth, or status, or power, or even their rules, rather than simply worshipping God—which would have been evidenced not by acts of ritual purity, but by acts of kindness, mercy, and justice.
As Christians, then, we tend to fall into a trap: the trap of spiritualization. Spiritualization means splitting off earth from heaven, body from mind, the visible from the invisible, and the material from the ethereal. We have inherited from Greek philosophy a system of thought called the “mind-body split,” in which the matters of mind and spirit are held to be separate from, and higher, better than, the matters of the body and the heart. We have been taught to prefer rationality over emotionality, logic over intuition, and an image of a Sky God “up there” somewhere, as opposed to an Earthy God, immediate, immanent, “down here,” close at hand. But we can’t spiritualize everything. For example, our bodies are earthy, fleshy things. We can’t become vapors just wafting around, no matter how ascetic our spiritual practices. Food and money and material things are all down-here kinds of things, down to earth.
What happens when we subscribe to a mind-body split way of thinking—and feeling—about the world, is that we end up having to devalue and belittle anything that belongs down here. So our bodies, our feelings, our material possessions, and yes, our money, all start feeling less-than, even dirty or shameful. Even evil. “Filthy lucre.”
Carry these ideas around inside long enough, and it’s easy to begin adopting a stance of scarcity about our material possessions. We learn from an early age that it is better to be skinny, to be stoic about our feelings and not show them, to hide away earthy functions—for example, to give birth and to die in sterile, impersonal hospital rooms rather than in warm, homey rooms surrounded by loved ones—and to be secretive about money because if there isn’t enough to go around, then we’d better hoard what we need. We are ashamed of the things that are not the “things of above,” and we impose on ourselves a spirituality of scarcity and guilt.
Jesus, on the other hand, taught a spirituality of abundance: “I came that they might have life, and have it more abundantly.” (John 10:10) So while Jesus never meant for us to worship money and material things, neither did he urge us to view the material as evil or dirty. When Mary of Bethany poured an extremely expensive perfumed ointment on his feet, the disciples asked him to rebuke her. In fact, according to John’s gospel, it was Judas himself who said, “Why was this perfume not sold for 300 denarii and the money given to the poor?”) (In a spoof called the “Politically Correct Bible,” Jesus replies, “Of course, what was I thinking? Here, maybe we can still scoop some of it up!”) But no, Jesus knew that money, and costly things, have many purposes, and at that moment, Mary’s purpose of the heart—and in all but Luke’s Gospel, her prophecy of his death—were more deeply right than any other purpose.
How could Jesus believe that? Because Jesus didn’t believe in a spirituality of scarcity. Jesus didn’t apparently believe that that was the only wealth that would ever be available, or the only opportunity to serve the poor, or even that the cost of the perfume was all that important in that moment. Jesus believed, it seems, that there was abundance enough for all holy purposes to be served.
Today is Stewardship Sunday here at Holy Trinity. Fall is the harvest time—an appropriate time for us to reflect on this abundant life, and how we give thanks for our time, talents, and treasures, and offer them to the church and the world.
Douglas John Hall, in a little book called The Steward: A Biblical Symbol Come of Age, also urges us to do away with this mind-body split in our thinking—both about talents and treasures. He writes:
The life of the world is where the theology of stewardship must seek its real foundation, and if this foundation is missing then no amount of beating the drum for God and money will make the least difference. If this world is not indeed the first object of Christian concern…then stewardship of this world is…just an addendum.
But if this world matters, and if the secret of its mattering is felt in the very depths and center of the gospel, then Christian stewardship of this beloved world is of the essence of our belief, and every attempt to shove it off to the side is a form of apostasy and blasphemy.
And so, back to that confusing, rather strange parable in today’s Gospel. Jesus almost seems to be commending the unjust steward or “manager” for his cleverness and his shrewdness, which may have a negative, crafty connotation. But let’s look at the word that gets translated as “shrewdness.” In the original Greek text, the word is phronimos – which simply means using practical wisdom, or even, based on related words in the New Testament, using care. Nothing pejorative about it. Isn’t it possible that when we read this text we identify too much, as Christians, as the [quote] “children of light,” spiritualized beings who can’t allow ourselves to think in savvy and bold ways about money or material things of this world, because we don’t allow ourselves to think about money at all? Yet Jesus is quoted as saying “Make friends for yourselves by means of this Mammon of unrighteousness—so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.” A confusing passage, to be sure, but I think what Jesus is really being quoted as saying here is, “Use money, don’t shrink from it, go ahead and use it to befriend holy purposes.”
In closing, I want to share a little oddity I came across in my readings on today’s texts. Do you know where the English word “stewardship” comes from? It’s related to the word for “sty,” or “pigsty.” The steward was the “sty-ward,” the warden--the guardian, or caretaker of the sty! Far from being some lofty, pious manager of resources who keeps money and the material world separate from the supposedly “spiritual” things that really matter, the steward is somebody who gets right down there in the mud and mucks around with the rest of the piggies! There couldn’t be a more earthy message than that! Maybe we need to supplement the beloved metaphorical command of Jesus to “tend my sheep,” which conjures up images of fluffy, clean, heavenly little postcard lambs with a different command, which conjures up a very different picture: “Tend my pigs!” And of course, we are all pigs in it together.
So get out your rake and your knee-high boots, and revel in the work that is to be done as stewards in God’s muddy, wallowy, oozy dark earth.
God is as much in the muddy earth as in the sky; in the body and the heart as in the mind; and God is just as much in how we use our material possessions, and yes, even our money, as God is in our meditation practices and our prayerbook and our hymnal.
And so I would exhort those of you who are on the Stewardship Commitee : Get down there, roll up your sleeves, get out your pitchfork if you need it, and practice boldly saying, “We need your heart, and your hands, and your time, and your talent—and we very much need your money. How much can we count on from you?” Get in front of the mirror if you need to, and say the word until it loses its charge of shame and fear: “MONEY. MONEY. MONEY!”
And to those of you who will receive these visitors:
Enjoy your money! Revel in a theology of abundance, not scarcity! Whether you have a lot or a little, you don’t need to live in fear, or shame, or envy, or embarrassment. Give freely of your time and talent—and give freely of what money you have. When we truly believe that we don’t need to fear, that there will be enough, and that loving God will lead us to the abundant life, then we will also give freely, and that abundance will overflow into justice and dignity for everyone—including ourselves—not just in the next world, but right here on God’s glorious, muddy earth!
Amen.
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