Giving and receiving

A Sermon preached on October 23, 2022, at St. Augustine’s and St. Christoph

Sirach 35:12-17, Timothy 4:6-8,16-18, Luke 18:9-14

When I first looked at today’s reading from Sirach, or Ecclesiasticus as the book is sometime also called, I thought this is a perfect text for a stewardship sermon: “Give to the Most High as he has given to you, and as generously as you can afford.” (35:12) That could sum up the theology of stewardship. We are giving back to God from what we have received, and we do so as generously as we can. God is the origin of all life, the giver of everything that we have and are, and so our response must be to thank God in prayer and praise, by serving God and God's people, and by sharing our financial resources. Unfortunately, I can’t finish there, and you only have Jesus to blame!

The parable of the pharisee and the tax collector in our Gospel reading today seems to contradict Sirach. We don’t know much about this particular tax collector, but we know that they were not paid by the Romans and instead had to take extra money and keep some for themselves. The temptation was to abuse this system by taking far too much. Next Sunday we will encounter Zacchaeus, a chief tax collector, who at least acknowledges this possibility: “If I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much,” he will tell Jesus. (Luke 19:8) Not surprisingly therefore, tax collector were anything but popular. Yet it is the tax collector who is declared righteous, who is justified rather than the Pharisee, who is particularly strong in his religious devotions and who tithes, that is gives a tenth of his income. So generous giving is not such a good thing? No, it’s not a simple as that either. Jesus does not condemn the Pharisee for his behaviour and certainly not for him tithing! We often find Jesus recommending generosity or praising those who give even of the little they have.

The problem is not the Pharisee’s behaviour, but his attitude. He may well have kept the ritual and religious provisions of the Law, but here we see him ignoring that whole section of the Law that has to do with the love of the other. Remember Jesus’s summary of all the law and the prophets: Love God and love your neighbour as yourself. We do not love our neighbour by looking down on them, despising them, and especially not by thanking God that we are not like other people. Nor by the way would that part of the Great Commandment be fulfilled if we were to look down on the Pharisee and pray “God, I thank you that I am like this Pharisee!” (Luke 18:11)

Sirach also teaches that it is not just about behaviour, generous giving, but about attitude. He criticises those who try to bribe God, to buy God’s favour through generous donations and extravagant sacrifices. And he rejects what he calls “dishonest sacrifices,” those that are supposed to hide or heal bad behaviour. In Sirach’s case, in his society the problem was oppression – the powerful oppressing the poor and weak. There can be no true sacrifice, no genuine generosity without justice. Sirach calls on his people to give as the Most High has given. And God, the Most High is a merciful, just and loving God. If we give as God has given, we must do so with the same attitude and motivation!

That brings us back to the Pharisee and his problematic attitude. On the one hand, as I said, he ignores the commandment to love his neighbour by regarding them with contempt. On the other hand, he seems to trust entirely in himself. He may have thought he was praying, but the only person he was really praising, and exalting was himself, for not being like other people, and for his good deeds of fasting and tithing. He does not see that his situation, his relative wealth and privilege is a gift from God, and he also forgets that many of those he criticises may not have had a lot of choice: poverty and the need to feed their families may have pushed them into working with the Romans, or into crime. Instead, the Pharisee speaks as if his own accomplishments, his “lawful” behaviour are what have earned him God’s grace – as if he has effectively bribed God.

The tax collector on the other hand knows that he is entirely reliant on God’s mercy. He acknowledges his sinfulness, does not try to buy his way out of trouble with a generous donation, and simply prays “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” (Luke 18:13) He shows humility and for that he will be exalted and forgiven. It recalls Jesus’ saying that “The last will be first, and the first will be last” from the parable of the labourers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:16)

These two readings contrast those who give generously and selflessly, with those who seek to purchase divine favour. They compare those who are sure of their place in God’s kingdom on their own merit, “who trusted in themselves that they were righteous” (Luke 18:9) with those who rely on God’s mercy and in turn show mercy to others. They speak of a generous God and of a virtuous cycle of giving. And they declare that we are justified by our attitude to God and other people, rather than by our deeds alone.  

It's a pity that our reading from Sirach only begins at verse 12. Verse 11 says: “With every gift show a cheerful face, and dedicate your tithe with gladness,” which could well have been an inspiration for Paul’s teaching in 2 Corinthians 9:7 that “God loves a cheerful giver.”  Please smile therefore when you out your pledge forms in the plate or in the mail!

My initial instinct was not wrong. Today’s readings do lend themselves to a stewardship sermon, if we understand stewardship as being about both our attitude and our behaviour. Borrowing from a document that the National Conference of Catholic Bishops Roman once published[1], good stewards:

• receive God's gifts gratefully,
• nurture God's gifts responsibly,
• share God's gifts justly and charitably, and
• return those gifts to God abundantly.

Our right behaviour is to receive God’s gifts – and sometimes we are reluctant to receive them, if their use is challenging! To nurture and grow them – and one way of doing so, as we learn in the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30), is by putting them to good use. To share them with others, they were never meant just for us, and to return them to God and, yes, to God’s church. The appropriate attitude, as we have learned in today’s readings, is gratitude and humility, responsibility and solidarity, justice and love, and joy in their abundance.

Amen.

 

 

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[1] Stewardship: A Disciple's Response, National Conference of Catholic Bishops (Washington, D.C.: United States Catholic Conference, 1993).

Increase our faith!

A Sermon preached on October 2, 2022, at St. Augustine’s and St. Christoph

2 Timothy 1:1-14; Luke 17:5-10

The image of a mustard seed that Jesus uses in his first short parable seems quite appropriate for today’s Harvest Festival celebration! It is plant based and there is no better metaphor for growth than a mustard seed. It is very small after all (show) and as a plant can grow up to 5 ft/1,5m tall. Jesus clearly likes this image. He uses it twice in Luke’s Gospel and we find similar verses in Matthew and Mark as well. In Luke chapter 13:18-19 Jesus compares the kingdom of God to a mustard seed “that someone took and sowed in the garden; it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches.” There it stands for massive growth into a place that offers a home for many.

Here uses it to tell the disciples not to worry about the size of their faith, for if they had faith only the size of a mustard seed, they could still tell a mulberry tree, “Be uprooted and planted in the sea”, (Luke 17:6) and it would obey them; or in the perhaps more familiar version from Matthew (17:20) they could tell a mountain to move from here to there! In both cases it’s actually not just a mulberry bush or a mountain, but this bush or this mountain, so Jesus using something right next to him as an illustration. Perhaps he used the same metaphor on more than one occasion – the disciples could be pretty obtuse at times! In both cases it stands for something that sounds ridiculous or impossible, so his purpose is to emphasise the unlimited power and potential of faith.

In this morning’s Gospel, the disciples had asked Jesus to “increase our faith.” (17:5) Why? Well Jesus had just warned them not to be a cause for others to sin, to stumble, not to lead them astray and to be ready to forgive again and again, whether seven times a day or seventy times seven. They were worried that they might not be the good example that was called for. They thought great faith would be needed to be so forgiving. But if the disciples thought that Jesus would magically transform them, they would have been disappointed. Jesus is concerned not about faith's volume but simply about its presence. God can work with even a little faith, is his message. “You do not need great faith, but faith in a great God,” is how Tom Wright summarises this teaching. The disciple's and our main responsibility are to trust God, to apply what we have and watch it work in the world, growing and transforming.

The second parable also has an agricultural setting. The slave works on a farm, either ploughing or tending sheep. As it stands, as it is written it could simply be a reminder that we are the Lord’s servants: “Who among you would say to your slave . . . ‘Come here at once and take your place at the table’?” (17:7) It reminds us that we serve God not for reward, not to put God in our debt, but because God deserves our humble service as our Creator and Redeemer: “We are worthless (or “just”) slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!” (17:10) We find similar sayings in the Jewish Mishna, the written collection of the Jewish oral traditions that began when the gospels were being written, for example: “Be not like slaves that serve their master for the sake of a reward.” (Avot 3)

But it is always good to look below the surface. Again, and again Jesus invites those who do not deserve it to sit at the table, to join him for a meal. In John’s Gospel (John 13), he - their teacher and Lord – washes the disciples’ feet. “Very truly, I tell you, slaves are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them,” (13:16) Jesus says, but is still willing to act as a servant. “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many,” is what we hear in Matthew’s Gospel (20:28) By reminding us of the way of the world, this little parable helps us to see how outrageous is the service rendered by the servant king. And let us not forget that our Lord invites us to a meal each week, long before we finish our tasks, when we gather at the Lord’s Table to share in the bread and wine made holy.

And what about the work that we are called to do? If we turn back to the parable, we read that when the slave is finished with his work in the field, he gets given more work – cooking and serving food. So, when we come in from doing something for God, we should not expect a reward, but only more work? With a sales pitch like this, it is a wonder that anyone ever followed Jesus. But it is true. The work of God, the work of transformation of self and of the world, as we build the kingdom of God is never done. And we do not serve God and others for the thanks we get. We serve others, just as Jesus did, because that is the abundant life God calls us to, and we benefit more than the people we help. Through our service we will grow in faith and love. And there is no need for a reward because, as we heard in the Letter to Timothy, we rely on the “power of God who saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works but according to his own purpose and grace.” (2 Timothy 1:9)

Our two parables today are about contrasts. Our faith is small, as small as a mustard seed, but we are still capable of great works with God’s help. And we are nothing in comparison to God, sinful and “worthless slaves,” yet in God’s eyes we are of infinite worth and value and loved more than we can ever love back.

Amen.