A Reflection for Stewardship Sunday Breakfast All Saints Church, Southern Shores, NC October 6, 2013 Thomas E Wilson, Rector
Gospel lesson for Pentecost XX (proper 22 C): Luke 17:5-10
In the Gospel lesson for today the disciples ask for more faith? Jesus tells them it is not about how much faith you have and in further response he tells them about about relationship between servants and masters. This request in verse # 5 follows some instruction to the disciples from Jesus about forgiveness given in verse #4:
Be alert. If you see your friend going wrong, correct him. If he responds, forgive him. Even if it’s personal against you and repeated seven times through the day, and seven times he says, ‘I’m sorry, I won’t do it again,’ forgive him.
I think that the disciples hear this instruction and decide that they would have a hard time forgiving someone who has sinned against them seven times in one day and they thought “Gee whiz I don't have enough faith to forgive someone over and over again – I need more faith.”
We hear a lot about faith. Especially this week we are hearing about the “full faith and credit of the United States”. The implication is that if we had more money we would have more faith. That is the way the world operates.
This reduces faith to an object that you are able to have, one that which one can measure. In this viewpoint faith is reduced to kind of a spiritual capital that one amasses and spends according to to one's desires. To use the government analogy we would say; “Gee whiz if we had enough money we would be able to get all that you want and if we withhold the money, or make it impossible to get enough money, than things won't get done.”
Jesus tells us in this lesson that faith is not an object but a subject, a relationship, a relationship which God initiates with us who are God's stewards. Faith is when we are called to remember who and whose we are. We belong to God, fully and completely and the Divine asks us to live fully on the Divine path. Yet we grumble and want to be in charge of everything in our life, thinking we can do it better.
Jesus uses the metaphor of slaves and masters which the people of his time could understand as a fact of life. However, we no longer see that metaphor as helpful; indeed the metaphor is offensive. So lets translate that metaphor to something we know about.
Anyone here remember about your first job you got paid for? I remember working for minimum wage in school and as a second job after graduation in order to pay medical bills. We want to move off the factory floor where we are working for minimum wage and move into the role of CEO and only stockholder with all the perks of the penthouse board room. When we think of ourselves as the CEO of our own universe, then we see everything that happens to us is something we deserve and to do with as we will. However, if we see ourselves as working on the factory floor for minimum wage than anything above our subsistence is seen as a gift, a blessing.
Jesus then seems to be saying that forgiveness is not something that you whomp up all by yourself but it is a blessing given to us in order for us to give it away. That is our work; to live in a universe of blessings in order to give blessings away. That central truth is the reason we do stewardship every week, not just on Stewardship Sunday- it is not to raise money but to examine our blessings and celebrate with thanksgiving. As an institution All Saints can live with not having enough money but we cannot live without faith.
Let us examine our blessings and celebrate with thanksgiving.
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