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Sermon – Luke 12.13-21, P13, YC, August 3, 2025

27 Wednesday Aug 2025

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One of the last things that happens when you graduate from seminary is the staff from the Church Pension Group comes to talk to you about money management.  They help you understand how retirement funds work for clergy, encourage you to make sure you are doing some additional savings and investment planning, and remind you that, like tithing, how you manage your finances is a witness to your congregation about being good stewards.  Each year, you are encouraged to be a smart investor through email reminders.  We even go to a wellness conference a few times over the course of our ministry to make sure we are tending to our financial wellness in addition to vocational, spiritual, and bodily wellness.  The repeated lesson to clergy is to be good stewards of our financial resources.

You can imagine how your clergy and anyone schooled in financial stewardship hears today’s parable from Jesus.  At first glance, this is a story about smart financial management.  A man has a bumper crop – the land produces so abundantly he cannot fit the excess crops into his current barns.  Knowing the land is fickle, maybe even having taken some notes from our ancestor Joseph who prevented a seven-year famine by stockpiling during a seven-year boon, the man decides he will just have to build a bigger barn to hold all the extra crops.  His actions do not sound that far off from what any investment counselor might tell us to do – store the excess away so that when a rainy day comes, or even when retirement comes, we can still “eat, drink, and be merry.” 

But, like any good parable, there is a plot twist:  the day the newly enlarged barn is finished is the same day the man will die.  All those plans, hopes, and dreams for a secure retirement are gone.  He never gets to enjoy the fruits of his labor.  He never gets to retire in comfort.  He never gets to eat, drink, and be merry.  Our immediate reaction to this tragedy might be to proclaim how life or God is not fair.  But into our protest, Jesus says, “So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

These last words from Jesus are ones that sting.  Jesus reminds us that being a good steward of our resources means lots of things:  being smart with our money, saving for times of famine, giving to the church, and caring for our neighbor.  But most importantly, being a good steward of our resources is not just about sound financial practices.  Being a good steward of our resources is also about managing our relationship with our money – and more specifically, managing our relationship with God in relation to our money.

Now some of you may be thinking, “Here she goes.  She’s going to tell me how I need to give more money to the church to right my relationship with God.”  The good news is I do not think Jesus is looking for a specific corrective – as if to say, “Do not be like the man with the barns:  give your full ten percent to the church and all will be well.”  No, what Jesus is trying to do is help us see that our relationship with money matters.  Unlike a polite Southerner, Jesus never shies away from talking about money.  He is constantly warning us about the potential of riches to corrupt our relationship with God.  The answer to what the rich man should do may not be specific, but we get some obvious clues about what Jesus means by being rich toward God.

Going back to the story is particularly helpful.  The most obvious thing we see happening in the parable is the wealthy man has become completely self-absorbed and ego-centric.  Listen again to the words of the parable, “And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods.  And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’”  The list is long:  What should I do?  My crops, my barns, my grain, my goods, my soul.  All the words of the wealthy man are self-referential.[i]  Nowhere does he talk to God.  Nowhere does he talk to his family or a trusted friend.  Nowhere does he consult his property manager, or the local priest – the whole conversation is with himself.  Further, he never praises God for the abundance.  He never acknowledges that the land has provided.  He never even considers sharing his abundance.  He is self-interested, self-protecting, and self-centered.  All that focus on the self comes from a relationship with money and with God that is simply out of whack.

So how do we avoid the slippery slope that leads to self-centeredness and greed, luring us to constantly redefine how much is “enough”?  What exactly is being rich toward God?  Jesus tells us the answer to our quandary throughout Luke’s gospel.  As one scholar explains, “Being rich toward God entails using one’s resources for the benefit of one’s neighbor in need, as the Samaritan did (10:25-37).  Being rich toward God includes intentionally listening to Jesus’ word, as Mary did (10:38-42).  Being rich toward God consists of prayerfully trusting that God will provide for the needs of life (11:1-13, 12:22-31).  Being rich toward God involves selling possessions and giving alms as a means of establishing a lasting treasure in heaven (12:32-34).”  In other words, “Life and possessions are a gift of God to be used to advance God’s agenda of care and compassion, precisely for those who lack resources to provide for themselves.”[ii]

I served on a church board many years ago that received a surprise bequest of about 1.3 million dollars.  The bequest came from a woman who had seemed to be of little consequence.  Each year she had probably given the charitable group about $25 a year.  We assumed that was about all she could do.  When the gift came in, we were stunned.  After some prayerful discernment, we elected to put one million into our endowment, to ensure that we could keep helping ministries in our diocese.  But we designated the remaining three hundred thousand for us to try new and innovative ministries – and luckily for us, there was already a proposal on the table that we thought we could not afford:  a food truck that would take food around to the homeless in one of our cities, and maybe even host a social worker and or nurse.  I do not know what sort of life this woman led or how she managed her money.  But even in death, her richness toward God was obvious to us all.

Though we may be tempted to finger-point at the self-centered man of means, Jesus knows that money has the power to corrupt all our relationships with God.  And unfortunately, the consequences are not limited to our relationships with God – our ability to live lives rich toward God impacts our neighbors too.  The good news is we have a community of faith sitting right next to us who can be our support system as we work to turn our hearts and our riches to God.  Now I know we all value being good Southerners, but this time, Jesus is pushing us out of our cultural norms and patterns.  In order to turn our hearts and riches toward God, we are going to need to start talking with our friends about the place of money in our lives and in our relationship with God.  We are going to need to talk about our struggles and failures.  And we are going to need to celebrate our victories and successes.  We are basically going to need to become a giant support group for becoming rich toward God.

Pastor and scholar David Lose tells a story of a “congregation who invited families to not buy any unnecessary new thing for six months in order to break the culturally-induced habit of trying to buy happiness.  But they didn’t just invite people to do this, they formed a culture in which they supported each other.  They read and talked about a common book on abundant life, they kept in touch via small groups and email, they shared where they were succeeding and struggling and what they were learning.  In short, they formed a community so that they could stand against the all-too-human and culturally supported belief that if we just had a little more we’d be happy.”[iii]

I do not know what model or what goals are going to work for each of you.  But I do know that just by our very citizenship in this country, in this time of scarcity thinking and fear mongering, we face more temptation toward greed than in probably any other country.  If we are going to follow Jesus, to avoid a life of self-centeredness, and claim a life of being rich toward God, we are going to need each other.  Whether you want to form a small group or just find a trusted friend, this is the important work Jesus invites us into today.  My guess is that building up a community of support that is rich toward God will create much more opportunities to eat, drink, and be merry, than any bigger barn could ever give us.  Amen.

[i] Audrey West, “Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Yr. C, Vol. 3 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 312.

[ii] Richard P. Carlson, “Exegetical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Yr. C, Vol. 3 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 315.

[iii] David Lose, “What Money Can and Can’t Do,” July 29, 2013, as found at http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=2668 on August 1, 2025.

Sermon – Mark 4.26-32, P6, YB, June 16, 2024

19 Wednesday Jun 2024

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Many of you know that I grew up in the United Methodist Church.  Growing up in the Methodist Church meant that I was steeped a particular set of hymns, many written by John and Charles Wesley themselves – John being attributed with the founding of the Methodist movement.  I can be at a retirement community or an ecumenical service and one of those songs will come up, and I am instantly transported back to the old country church where my dad was the pastor.  There is something about that music that almost feels like the music is a part of my DNA.  So, imagine my surprise when I found out in seminary that much of the music settings for those old timey hymns I love were actually pub songs – tunes that anyone who had spent time at the pub would know, just set to new words about Jesus.  Charles and John did that because they knew it would make the songs deeply familiar, while becoming teaching tools for the church.  No wonder those hymns are so catchy!

In some ways, parables from Jesus are similar.  Jesus uses story to teach truth.  Teaching through parables makes the teaching engaging, accessible, and memorable.  I bet that even today, two thousand years later, when we heard Mark’s gospel today, we probably thought, “Oh yeah!  The one about the mustard seed.  That’s about just having a little faith is all you need!”  And in part, you would be right.  But as catchy as pub songs are and parables seem, unfortunately, Jesus’ parables, while memorable, are not always simple in meaning. 

Our trouble starts with the fact that we have two parables together today – not just the one about the mustard seed.  In the first one, Jesus says the kingdom is like a guy who scatters some seed and then does literally almost nothing – he does not even know how the growing of seeds into plants works.  And then he just goes out to harvest.  So, that’s parable number one.  Parable number two compares the kingdom of God to a tiny little mustard seed that, when planted, grows into a huge bush big enough where birds can make nests.  So, this is not exactly a set of stories about just having a little bit of faith.  And quite frankly, if you take these two together, they seem to be saying that basically we do not really have much of a hand in the fruitfulness of the kingdom – that maybe we do not even understand the kingdom.  So, is that the message?  Just sit back because God does all the work to bring about the kingdom – oh, and the kingdom will be really big?

As much as I would like to send you all home today thinking you can just kick up your feet and sit back while God does the heavy lifting, especially as summer gets into full swing, unfortunately, we have summertime work to do.  You see, in both of these parables, while the miracle of growth happens through God, the planting in both stories has to be done by a person – by us, namely.  Scholar Amy-Jill Levine explains that in these parables, the seed still has to be planted.  She confesses that certainly some things need to be left alone – notice the man in the first parable.  And sometimes we need to get out of the way – notice the planter in the second parable.  But most importantly, Levine argues “The kingdom is present when humanity and nature work together, and we do what we were put here to do – to go out on a limb and provide for others, and ourselves as well.”[i]

That doing something, that lack of passivity in the bringing about of the kingdom, is what we are talking about when we talk about stewardship.  Often when we talk about stewardship, we think of that as the church’s codeword for our money.  But we were made stewards long before there was a church.  Even in the moment of creation way back in the book of Genesis, God created us to steward God’s creation – to tend to the blessings given to us.  Now that may feel daunting – as if not only are we to tend to this church but now we must tend to the whole world! 

But before you panic, let’s go back to that mustard seed parable.  I do not know how many of you have actually been around mustard plants, but mustard plants are a lot like kudzu – they tend to take over an area where they are germinated.  Jesus is telling us all we do is plant one of those teeny-tiny seeds, and suddenly we will have kudzu spreading everywhere.  In other words, our work of stewardship is like kudzu[ii] – we invest our time, our talent, and our treasure here in this place – and the results will spread like wildfire.  Suddenly, we have whole hillsides full the love of Christ, spilling over into the neighbor’s yard, draping everything in goodness.  We do not have to micromanage the growth – we do the planting, and God partners with us to bring the growth – even growth we sometimes do not understand.  Our job is simply to plant.

Our invitation today, then is to ponder what seeds we can plant here at Hickory Neck.  What gift of time can you place here that can spread to your fellow parishioner?  What gift of your unique talent can you plant here that can grow into powerful ministry?  What gift of your financial resources can you gift here that reach beyond these walls to share and spread God’s love?  Jesus’ familiar story reminds us that whatever we give, our giving allows us to participate with God in helping manifest the kingdom of God.[iii]  And God will spread our gifts like kudzu!  Amen.

[i] Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus:  The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi (New York:  Harper One, 2014), 182.

[ii] Ronald J. Allen, “Considering the Text: Week Two, Fourth Sunday After Pentecost, 16 June 2024,” Center for Faith and Giving, 11, as found at centerforfaithandgiving.org, 2.

[iii] Allen, 13.

On Living Generously…

12 Wednesday Oct 2016

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This past Sunday we kicked off our Fall Stewardship Season, “Living Generously.”  I talked about the campaign in my sermon, but we also have many invitations into this time of discernment for our parishioners.  We each received a packet of information about the ways we can support the life and ministry of Hickory Neck.  We have reflections written by national and parish-level leaders that invite us to consider their experiences around stewardship.  And we are having conversations with each other about how pledging works for each of us.

Just last night, the Vestry took on one of those conversations.  We looked at the gospel lesson for this coming Sunday (Luke 18.1-8) and talked about the challenge of persistence when it comes to stewardship.  We realized that no matter what financial situation or phase of life we are in, living generously does not come naturally or easily, but takes intentionality and persistent commitment.  In our small group, we had a person with young children – including some in childcare, a person with teens approaching college, a person who is thinking about retirement but has taken in an aging parent, and a person in retirement on a fixed income.  Despite those differences, we all have to be intentional with our commitment to stewardship because we all have commitments that can distract us from generosity and tempt us into scarcity.

There was something powerful about talking about hard keeping our commitment to stewardship is with other parishioners.  Too often we take those pledge cards home and embark on a discernment process that is very individualized.  Certainly, we all need time with our God on our own to fortify ourselves to being generous stewards.  But we also need companions on the journey – fellow parishioners who can say, “Yes, it is hard living generously!”  We need those fellow pilgrims because they also remind us of why we keep at it.  These are the same people who will remind you why you are grateful.  After the Vestry talked about the challenges of living generously, then we talked about the benefits.  Stories started pouring in about what we each get out of Church.  We talked about the ways that Hickory Neck feeds us and brings us joy.  We talked about the ways that, throughout life, God has been so faithful to us, and what an honor it is to be able to harness some of that generosity in our own lives.

On Sunday, I encouraged us to spend some time at home in discernment about our stewardship of God’s abundance.  This week, I also want to encourage us to spend some time in discernment with each other.  Share those challenges to being a steward; but also share those blessings of being a steward.  Those conversations may feed the conversation you have at home and will certainly renew your spirit.  Join us as we embark on this journey toward living generously together!

Sermon – Luke 16.1-13, P20, YC, September 18, 2016

21 Wednesday Sep 2016

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Often when we talk about Jesus, we marvel at his parables, and we encourage each other to follow his teachings.  We ask questions like, “What would Jesus do?” as if the answers are obvious.  We describe Jesus as illuminating God, helping us to understand God in an incarnate way.  We even say that all things necessary for salvation are found in Holy Scripture.  And for the most part, all of those things are true – until we get to today’s parable.  Most of us listen to the lesson for today and can only say, “Wait….what?”

Here’s the problem.  Unlike many of Jesus’ parables and sayings, most of us come away from this one completely confused.  Jesus starts off simply enough.  A rich man has a manger, or steward, and the manager is accused of squandering the master’s property.  The master threatens to fire the manager, and so the manager goes off and talks to all the debtors of his master.  Knowing he is about to be fired, the steward strikes deals with the debtors, decreasing their debts, in the hopes of making some friends who will feel indebted to him and may take him in once he is fired.  But what happens next is where the parable gets confusing.  When the master finds out what the steward has done, instead of being angry, he commends the manager for being shrewd.  And to top off this odd response, Jesus completes this whole parable with an instruction that all of us should be like the shrewd manager, making friends by means of dishonest wealth.  Jesus concludes the story by telling us that no one can serve God and wealth.

Confused yet?  You are in good company!  Even most scholars disagree about what the parable is trying to do.  Though we all might understand the part about our loyalties being torn between God and money, the parable hardly helps us get there.  The manager is a schemer – he is about to be fired because he has mismanaged things.  But instead of righting the situation with his master, he confesses that he is both lazy and proud.  He sneakily makes deals with the master’s debtors in the hopes that the debtors will see him as an ally and will help take care of him when he is fired.  But what is most confusing about the whole story is that Jesus says we should go and do likewise.

What might be helpful in getting our heads around Jesus’ strange parable is to understand the economics of “Roman-occupied Galilee in the first century.  Rich landlords and rulers were loan-sharks, using exorbitant interest rates to amass more land and to disinherit peasants of their family land, in direct violation of biblical covenantal law.  The rich man … along with his steward or debt collector, were both exploiting desperate peasants.”  Wealthy landlords of the day would hide interest charges in the money owed by the peasants.  According to scholars, someone like the wealthy steward could be charging the average peasant anywhere from 25-50% for the landlord, an additional cut for the himself, and then a Roman tax on top of all that.[i]

Now before we get too self-righteous about the injustice of the Roman economic system, we have to remember the economic system we operate under today.  Think about modern college students, who not only attend colleges with soaring tuitions, but also are being offered student loans with higher interest rates that ever before.  Add on top of that a weak economy and you see our young people being buried under unfair debt.  Or think about predatory payday loans.  Those scraping by to make ends meet start slipping behind.  Bills are due and they do not have enough to make ends meet, so they get lured in by the immediacy of a pay-day loan.  But by the time all is said and done, they lose more of their paychecks to the interest charged by loan sharks than if they had just kept their money.  And just in case we think we can get away with blaming student loan and payday lenders, we cannot forget our own country’s lending policies with impoverished countries.  Leaders of third world countries agree to harshly austere loans we make, but the poor of the country end up bearing the brunt of the burden.  In fact, “the Lutheran World Federation calls oppressive debt terms imposed on Honduras and other Latin American countries ‘illegitimate debt’ and likens such debt itself to ‘violence,’ because of its crushing effects on people’s futures.”[ii]  Though we may not have everyday contact with stewards or managers, their economic system is more familiar than we may realize.

What is unclear about the steward’s actions is how he is able to forgive some of the debtors’ debts.  In forgiving the debts of the debtors, the manager may have been forgiving his own cut of the interest being charged.  In that way, his actions seem a bit more noble.  Obviously, he is cutting out his own salary, but he is doing so in a way that seems to, at least outwardly, condemn the system.  Or, the steward could have been eliminating all the hidden and prohibited interest in the contracts.[iii]  This would have been a bolder move, as he would have been denying the master his typical amount due.  But because he is enforcing Jewish laws around interest, he would have ingratiated himself to the local Jewish peasants.   This is why the steward may receive commendations from the landlord and Jesus – not because he is noble per se, but because he manipulates the unjust system to curry favor with his neighbors – the very ones who might lend him a hand when he is fired for doing something supposedly just.[iv]  Whatever the self-interest of the steward is, what he is able to do, and perhaps why his master calls him shrewd, is use an unjust system against itself.  Just or not, the steward is able to see that the power of mutuality, of relationship, is the better bedfellow than the unjust economic system of the day.

One of my favorite classes in college was a class called “Social Dance.”  We spent the semester learning the Fox Trot, Waltz, Tango, Cha-Cha, and Swing.  My class happened to have more men than women, so I never had to sit out a dance.  I just switched from partner to partner, trying to adjust as each lead learned the steps.  There were many hard lessons in that class, not least of which was learning how to let the man lead.  But the hardest lesson was learning that no matter what dance we were doing, and no matter how intertwined our bodies were, my frame was a vital component to the dance.  Even in a dance like the Tango, where bodies seem to be intertwined, each partner is holding on to their frame, protecting their space.   I was fascinated to see how two bodies could function in such unison, looking like one unit, and yet, be two differentiated, separate units.

As I studied our gospel lesson this week, I wondered if Jesus’ lesson about wealth is not unlike a couple dancing the Tango.  Living in the world that we do, there is no way for us to escape the dancing partner of wealth.  Given that wealth has the power to corrupt, we will always need to keep our frame in place – keeping the dance going in unison, but never letting ourselves forget to be differentiated from dishonest wealth.  Though the steward seems unseemly and self-interested, he shows us an intricate tango with wealth – how to manipulate wealth so that wealth only hurts itself, not those most in need.

The way that we keep that firm frame is by being in relationship – by making friends as Jesus tells us.[v]  When we invest in friendships (not just friendships with people we like, but kingdom friendships[vi] – the kind of relationships that are unexpected, but feed us more than any wealth can), then wealth begins to lose its power to weaken our frame.  Kingdom friendships are those friendships with people at church or in the world with whom you thought you would never have anything in common.  Kingdom friendships are those relationships you develop with those who are different – either socioeconomically, racially, or ethnically.   Kingdom friendships are those relationships that develop when you realize that despite the fact that you are trying to help someone else, they are actually helping you.  The steward may have made kingdom friendships out self-interest, but the results are the same.  He realizes once he sees the humanity in those he is oppressing – once he makes kingdom friendships, the wealth he is pursuing no longer matters.  That is what Jesus invites us into today – that is how Jesus knows that we can hold onto our frame when dealing with the master of wealth.  Jesus invites us to nurture our kingdom friendships because when we nurture those friendships, we strengthen our sense of self, ensuring our frame never slips in our tango with wealth.  Amen.

[i] Barbara Rossing, “Commentary on Luke 16:1-13,” September 18, 2016, as found at http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=2982 on September 14, 2016.

[ii] Rossing.

[iii] Rossing.

[iv] G. Penny Nixon, “Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Yr. C, Vol. 4 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 95.

[v] David Lose, “Pentecost 18C:  Wealth and Relationships,” September 14, 2016, as found at http://www.davidlose.net/2016/09/pentecost-18-c-wealth-and-relationships/ on September 15, 2016.

[vi] Thomas Long, “Making Friends,” Journal for Preachers, vol. 30, no. 4, Pentecost 2007, 57.