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A Sermon for the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
Amos 6:1-7
Barefoot, dressed in beggars clothes,
the preacher unrolls an old rug,
puts a clay bowl on the rug, sits crosslegged and says:
Allah!!! (shouted very loudly--and drawn out)
Greetings, strangers.
Welcome to the market place.
My name is Akhi, and I am a beggar.
All day long I sit here in the market place, and I beg.
People push and shove. They buy and sell.
But Akhi, he sits and begs.
Perhaps you wonder why Akhi is a beggar.
Akhi! Why don't you do honorable work, you might think.
Maybe you think that. It is a good wonder.
I will tell you why I am a beggar.
It is because I have a beggar's path.
Oh, yes. Each of us is called to a path.
And to follow one's path is holy--always.
Akhi is called to be a beggar.
For Akhi, not to beg would be a sacrilege.
So Akhi begs.
But he begs with pride.
I have studied for many years.
I have practiced and sat at the feet of the Masters.
You know, I went to the academy of beggars.
Yes. You must beg your way in and beg your way out.
It is like the universities in the United States, I understand.
Yes, I beg, and I learned from the great Master beggars--
from Raul who could beg life into a dead baby,
and Abraham who could beg rain upon the desert.
They were Master beggars.
Akhi, he is a beggar, but he is following a beggar's path.
That is the difference.
But why do we beg, you may wonder.
I will tell you, It is because of the dance.
That is why we beg.
Oh, yes, each of us is called to the dance.
Yes. We move our prayers as other people move their feet.
But there are people--there are people in the market place who are afraid of the dance. They cling to their life, to their possessions, or to their reputation.
Oh, yes. And they are weighed down with all of them.
They cannot move.
It's like human camels, like stones.
What a pity these people do not know how to dance.
But that is why we have beggars.
We sit in the market place, and when they come we say,
"Oh, give us a piece of bread, give us a coin in the name of Allah."
And if they do, if they reach into their pockets and give us a coin,
they are lighter--maybe they can dance.
You see. You see. Beggars try to make people lighter so they can dance.
And so begging is holy.
Oh, yes. But you smile.
You say, "Akhi, are you joking with me?"
What?? Cannot a beggar joke with you?
What do you think?
You probably wonder, "Oh, Akhi, you take our coins and spend them on yourself."
Ha !!
You think I want to be a human camel like you? No!
Ha. I will tell you a secret.
Your bread we feed to the birds.
Your coins--well, that is another matter.
I have friend, Amat, from Baghdad.
Oh, yes. Every holy day he takes the coins you give him.
He puts them in his purse, and he goes to the holy river, to the Euphrates,
and throws them in the water to listen to the splash.
It is his weakness--the splash.
It is also his prayer.
Akhi, he climbs the first level of the holy mountain every day at noon
and takes the silver and gold coins you give him
and throws them at the sun--and watches them glisten--
and listens to them sing as they dance down the mountain.
It is Akhi's weakness, Akhi's prayer.
And why should it not be so?
The coins you have come from the holy mountain, come from the holy river.
Should they not return there?
We beggars, we are middle men.
We help with the cash flow.
We know you will go back to the mountain and river searching for them again.
And so it is.
We are content.
It makes for the dance.
Ha! I will tell you something.
One day, one day--Allah may it be soon--one day everybody will be dancing.
Oh, what a day that will be.
If you go in the market place--you go looking--
you will see our rugs, our rags, our bowls.
But you will not see us.
The beggars will be gone, because our path will be over.
Yes. The dance will be here.
We will not be necessary.
Allah, bring this day closer.
So many camels. So many camels.
Ask yourself, "Am I too heavy?
Can I dance today?"
If you can't, you know what you must do.
And maybe, maybe you are not following your path yet.
What is your path?
What is your path, stranger?
Maybe one of you is called to be a beggar.
You could do worse, you know.
Yes. Yes, you could go to the academy and study with Abraham and with Raul.
Yes. And you could sit here with me in the market place.
And together we could beg.
How good it would be.
What is your path? What is your path?
Are you finding it?
I hope so.
May Allah guide you.
But now I must go back to my begging.
May Allah watch over you.
May you find your path.
And may you join me in the dance.
Praised be Allah!
Praised be his children!!
Praised be the universe!
Allah!!! (shouted very loudly--and drawn out)
(Ken Feit from a performance recorded in "Fools for Christ" [Cathedral Films] 3 June 1978)
The preacher exchanges beggar's clothing for preaching vestments and walks toward the pulpit, saying:
There is a great chasm between rich and poor, between beggars and camels.
A chasm as wide as the difference between life and death.
It is not that having money is wrong.
It is that too often our possessions become the center of our lives
so that we neglect God and God's people.
It is not that having money is wrong,
It is the dangerous illusion
that wealth gives us power over our lives and the lives of others.
We cling so tightly to power and possessions
that we are unable to receive anything.
We are burdened, weighed down like camels,
and unable to join in the dance of life.
There is a great chasm between rich and poor, between beggars and camels.
In today's gospel Father Abraham tells us that no one can cross the chasm.
But Jesus, when raised from dead, CAN reach across that chasm
between life and death.
Jesus did just that -- He ‘descended to the dead' and then lived.
Jesus' hand reaches across chasm to guide us,
to close the gap
between death & life,
between rich & poor,
between beggars & camels.
This is real outreach--
letting go of our "wealth" so our hands are free to reach out.
This is the way we reach out and give of ourselves to those in need.
Jesus stands with the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed,
and reaches out to free us from being possessed by our possessions
to free us from alienation and death,
Jesus, with the hands of God's poor,
is reaching out to give you Life.
Let go of the things that possess you and take his hand.
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A Sermon for the 16th Sunday after Pentecost
Amos 8:4-12
It's audit time.
The Boss is coming to check the books.
Got your accounts in order?
What how well have you managed your life?
The manager in today's gospel, we are told,
has squandered the possessions of the rich man.
In describing the behavior of the manager
Jesus uses the same word he used in the story he just told about the prodigal son who "squandered" his inheritance.
Son and manager both end up in big trouble for their reckless, scandalous living.
And then both end up being the focus of celebration.
The Wild Son gets a big party.
The Unjust Manager gets complimented.
As we read through this part of the Gospel according to Luke,
Jesus is telling a whole bunch of stories about things that go really wrong
that are then followed by a party.
Last week it was sheep and coins: lost and found and celebrated.
Now some shady business dealings are being praised:
First the manager is accused of squandering his master's possessions.
Then he doctors the books, recklessly canceling big portions of people's debts.
Oh sure, maybe the portion of the debt he cancels is his own unfair commission -- perhaps an outrageous interest charge his master doesn't know about.
But still, he's not making money on these deals, that's bad for business;
and along comes the boss and says,
"There you go, throwing away money again! Good job!" ???
What's going on here? Praising this disreputable scoundrel?
This is lousy business management across the board.
These guys need a good bookkeeper.
And then there's Jesus.
We want him to be a bookkeeper, to help us get our lives in order.
When we see the Boss coming at audit time,
we know that
there's no way we ourselves could ever balance our accounts or pay our debts.
And Jesus does balance the accounts . . .
but he cheats to do it.
He reconciles our messy records,
but not by adding up neat columns of credits of good deeds or debts and mistakes.
Instead he erases our mismanagement,
smashes the calculators,
and invites us to a party.
It's not fair. It's not just. It's lousy business. Jesus cheated.
He's not a bookkeeper but a squanderer....Thank God.
Just think how we'd fare if God had sent us a careful bookkeeper to manage our lives and we'd got what we really deserve.
The scandalous message here is that the way to care for the Boss's possessions
is to give them away,
to squander what we've been given.
That's what Jesus did.
Forget good business methods.
God's not asking us to make or save money,
or to accumulate possessions.
We're being asked to use our money and our possessions
-- that is God's money and possessions --
to make friends for the kingdom,
to be willing to sacrifice our material security for the love of God.
In other words:
Money is for making friends, not for earning interest.
Jesus is pretty hard on folks who hide their money away to keep it safe.
Relying on money in the bank and good bookkeeping for our security
can soon become idolatry:
Trusting money instead of God.
So the rich man commends the manager who squanders the money,
who recklessly gives it away, hoping to make friends.
Everything that Jesus had from his Father
he squandered on us sinners and fools.
He wasted his own life scandalously and recklessly on our account.
Jesus was a lousy business manager.
He squandered it all to make friends with a bunch of disreputable scoundrels like us.
Jesus cheated in the bookkeeping;
and now his crazy Father
is planning the ultimate party for anyone who accepts the invitation.
"You cannot serve God and wealth."
Make your choice.
You can't have it both ways.
Either we squander our money in service of God,
to make friends to join in the celebration.
Or we make money into a nice, safe, tame idol
and let the party pass us by.
Like the unjust manager,
Jesus is squandering his Father's gifts and canceling our debts.
Forget the bookkeeping and come to the party.
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A Sermon for the Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost
Exodus 32:1,7-14
Today's gospel reading is so familiar we could all probably recite it in our sleep--especially the first part, about the shepherd with the lost sheep. The church is very fond of the image of Jesus the good shepherd -- so much so that four times a year we get a "good shepherd" Sunday, with one or the other of the gospel readings that touch on that theme.
So today, rather than belabor the familiar image of the shepherd, I am going to focus on the part of the gospel reading that usually gets the least attention: the story of the woman who has lost a silver coin, a drachma. Ordinarily she is just the peanut butter in the sandwich between the all-too-familiar story of the lost sheep and the long, interesting story of the lost son. (That story comes next in Luke's gospel, but because we always read it during Lent it gets skipped in the Pentecost cycle.) Between the man
and his sheep and the man and his son, the woman and her coin gets -- if you'll pardon the expression -- swept under the rug. We say politely: isn't that nice, Luke likes to pair stories of men and women, and here is another of those pairs, and now let's talk about something interesting, like why the owner of the sheep would risk losing 99 to go looking for just one -- and so on. But today I am going to go sweeping and searching and looking for a paradigm of Christian living in what you may consider an unlikely place: in a story about a poor woman.
I used to have a problem with this second parable because it seemed so trivial. The man has a hundred sheep; the woman only has ten little coins. In one of the translations that was published in the sixties someone had gussied up the story in modern dress so that she had "ten dimes." Now, I ask you: who is going to sweep the whole house looking for a lost dime? And that was before the 1970s inflation! It seemed to be one more example of how women's lives are trivialized and demeaned in comparison to those of men. (The Living Bible has reversed field and made these "ten valuable silver coins," but in fact a drachma was about equal to a day's wages for a laborer.)
In 1985 women theologians of liberation from the whole South American continent and the Caribbean met in Buenos Aires at the "Latin American Conference on Liberation Theology from Women's Perspective," and they took this parable as the theme of their conference! They interpreted that conference as the coin that was lost and found. They said: "The coin symbolizes our coming together and the discovery of our selves in light of our experience of God and our daily theological work, which now are transformed into a festival. [In this celebration] we will share our different ways of seeking our coin, of doing our theology."
As these women knew, the parable reveals a number of things about the ways we do theology nowadays: our work is contextual and concrete; it sees the ordinary and the everyday as the place where God is revealed: It takes place "in the house." It is hard work; it is a struggle to find what we are seeking in the darkness that has covered it for so many centuries. But it is also characterized by joy and celebration, and by hope: a hope that assures us that God is with us. God has her skirts tucked up and is busy sweeping and searching, too.
Let me read the story again in this context:
This woman has ten silver coins or drachmas, and apparently that is all she has, because she is very distressed about losing even one of them. A drachma, as I said before, is about the same as a denarius: one day's wage for a laborer. We know, then that the woman is poor. We also know she is poor because she lives in a mean, dark house, with a low door that doesn't let in much light. In an age when houses were sometimes taxed according to the number of windows they had you could count your neighbors' wealth by how light and airy their houses were. This woman's house is dark. She has to light a lamp, which could cause her further anxiety because of the cost of lamp oil. Even then she can only find her coin by sweeping and listening for the rattle of the metal against the hard dirt floor. She is so happy to find that coin! In her joy she calls all her women friends and neighbors to share in her happiness, just as the owner of the sheep gets his buddies together to celebrate the recovery of that one sheep.
Both stories are the same: both use the same language. Both have the same sequence: having, losing, searching, finding, rejoicing. But more than that: both of these stories, and the one that comes after, the one about the lost son -- all of them end the same way: with a party! The rejoicing of the one who has found the thing lost is not complete unless it is shared, unless it results in the creation of a community of rejoicing. The having, losing, searching, and finding are all for only one purpose: so that, in the end, there can be a community gathered together. It appears that the sheep-owner has sheep for only one reason: so that there can be banquets. And the woman knows what money is for: it exists so that you can invite your friends to a celebration. It seems to me that by the time the feasting is over more than one sheep and more than one drachma's worth of goodies will have been consumed. But that is what they are for.
That is what we are learning about doing theology in the churches today: that its purpose is to create community, and to re-create it again and again. (When I talk about "doing theology" I am not just talking about what scholars and professors do; I mean what all of us do when we read the Bible together, when we gather in EFM classes or study groups to ask questions about God and seek for answers together, and when we gather in worship and break the bread of the word and the bread of the Eucharist together.) When we go searching for the lost coin of memory we re-discover and form new bonds with the lost fore-sisters who have gone before us (and that includes the fore-brothers, too). We forge new connections with our lost saints, and in doing so we find ourselves. We sweep, and listen, and sweep again, and listen again -- until there is a tiny sound that gives us the energy to go on searching until at last we have something; something so minuscule, so insignificant compared to the hundred sheep our neighbor has (just compare, for example, the number of pages in the Bible that are spent talking about men with the ones that tell us about women, or the number of pages in the Bible or in any history book that tell us about kings and queens and generals compared to those that tell us about ordinary people). But that tiny drachma is just what we were looking for; it is just what we need to make it possible for us to call our friends and neighbors, our fivlai and geivtonai, together and say: "rejoice with me, because I have found the drachma I had lost." (Incidentally, this little story is so nicely constructed that the woman, her friends, her neighbors, and the drachma she seeks and finds are all feminine in Greek!)
There are some stories in the Bible that tell us how we should be like God: in the way we love each other, in the way we forgive each other, in the way we care for God's creation. Then there are other stories, like these, that tell us how God is like us (only more so): how if we care for what is ours, and search carefully and exhaustingly until we find what we have lost, we can know that God cares and searches and rejoices even more when God has lost something -- or someone. And I think we can justly say, too, that God cares -- cares more than we do, if the parable is true -- when the stories of some of us are lost, when the memory of half the world dies. We are used to the idea of Jesus the good shepherd, and some of the earliest Christian art has that theme. But we are not so used to the idea of God the anxious woman, the poor woman laboriously seeking in the dark for the tiny, precious thing she has lost. This story says that God is like that woman, just as God is like that shepherd. And if God is the one searching, then we are like the sheep, either the lost one or the ones at home, and we are like the coins, either the errant one or the ones in the purse. Like them, we exist for only one reason: so that there can be an us, a community gathered together. When we are alone, we are lost; we are out of place.
In the end every story is about the communion of saints -- the community that rejoices together, with God and all the angels, because God refuses to have any gaps at the banquet table. If any of us is missing, we can't celebrate. If anyone is lost and cold and miserable and frightened, the rest of us are, too. Because our God can't rejoice without us. We have to be together, all of us, with our men friends and our women friends, with the saints and the angels: one people of God celebrating, because none of us can stay lost forever. "If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's." Nobody is superfluous, and nobody is left out.
"There will be joy in heaven," says the first story. "There is joy in the presence of the angels," says the second story. Our sisters and brothers, the saints who have gone before us, are already rejoicing -- not just because they are gathered together with God and the angels -- but because we are gathered here with them, and we are pledged never to forget them, as they will not forget us. Amen.
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Return or go somewhere new! 
A Sermon for The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
"Dancing Camels?"
A Sermon for The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
"Jesus Cheated?"
A Sermon for The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
"Partying with The Angels" by Linda M. Maloney
Psalm 146
1 Timothy 6:11-19
Luke 16:19-31
Outreach:
Coins glittering in the sunshine.
Coins splashing in the water.
Outreach:
Hungry people being fed and clothed.
Burdens lifted and camels dancing.
Outreach:
It is in giving that we receive.
Rich & poor, beggars & camels, reach across the chasm to touch one another.
1 Timothy 2:1-8
Psalm 138
Luke 16:1-13
by Linda M. Maloney
Psalm 51:1-11
Timothy 1:12-17
Luke 15:1-10
What woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, "Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost."