Getting Right with God

Pentecost 15 Sermon Year C 2019

September 22, 2019

St. Michael’s Episcopal Church

The Rev. Canon Michael J. Horvath

Gospel Luke 16:1-13

“Give me an accounting of your management.”

I think for a lot of us, school report cards were the first process of accountability that we had to endure. In high school my grades were, for the most part, really good. The one exception was mathematics. As much as I found it interesting, I just couldn't wrap my head around trigonometry and calculus. I was pretty studious, but looking back on it, I did the bare minimum for these classes. My parents were supportive and encouraged me to study hard and do the best I could. But it was always with a bit of trepidation that I would wait for report cards, because the correlation between the amount of effort I put into trigonometry or calculus was directly tied to the grade I received. I worked a lot for an A- or B+, but when I didn’t work that hard, it showed. The worst part was having to account to my parents for that less than stellar math grade.  

In my reflection this week on today’s Gospel (often called the Parable of the Dishonest Steward), this idea of accounting stood out for me. The story centers on a man who is about to be fired for wasting his master’s property. He is not suited to physical labor and he’s too proud to become a beggar, so he devises an ingenious scheme in order to provide for his retirement. He goes around to each of his master’s creditors and he revises their bills so that a portion of the outstanding debt is immediately recovered. We’re not told how long these debts had been outstanding, but I suspect that part of the steward’s dishonesty might have been about interest accumulating on the outstanding amount and violation of the usury laws of that time. So, the steward does all he can to get things right and accounts for himself in the best way he can. 

This accounting is not always easy, yet it is something we are all familiar with. In the course of life we’re called to account on so many fronts – tax returns, for example; getting called to the principal’s office; annual performance reviews; annual dentist visits where the most dreaded words for me are always “How is your flossing coming along?” How about our weekly accounting here on Sunday when we stand or kneel together and confess our sins against God and our neighbor? In the end, we are being asked to account for our actions. And that can be very difficult. In the Christian context it is especially difficult because accounting for our lives the way this parable encourages us to do takes us out of the comfort zone of simply saying “I’ve done that in the past, but I don’t do it now. Why dredge up the past?” Instead, we are being asked to look at the big picture and figure out how our salvation in Christ can transform us into something new, a person changed. 

Two events happened in the last week that kept making this idea of accountability and God’s grace come to the forefront of my thoughts. The first involved Virginia Theological Seminary, an Episcopal seminary in Alexandria, Virginia, founded in 1823. For many of its early years, VTS, along with most of the other institutions in Virginia at that time, was run on slave labor. Its buildings were erected by slave labor, and menial tasks were left to the hands of slaves who worked, unpaid, for the seminary. This week, VTS announced that it would be “creating a $1.7 million reparations fund, becoming one of the first American institutions to allocate money specifically for the descendants of the enslaved. The fund will also provide financial support for black seminarians and black worshipers who experienced discrimination on campus.” The fund was created, in the words of the seminary, “as part of our commitment to recognizing the racism in our past and working toward healing and reconciliation in the future.” 

The second event was the Climate Strike. On Friday, worried about their future and frustrated by their governments’ failure to address a crisis, millions of young people around the world marched during a day of global climate protests. Global climate change has already had observable effects on our environment. Glaciers have shrunk, ice on rivers and lakes is breaking up earlier, plant and animal ranges have shifted, and trees are flowering sooner. Effects that scientists had predicted are now occurring: loss of sea ice, accelerated sea level rise, and longer, more intense heat waves. Given our president's determination to roll back environmental protections, this issue takes on a greater sense of urgency in our time.

In both cases an accounting in our current lives is being requested. In both cases, the response could not be “Well, that happened in the past, and those wrongs were done by people long gone.” Like it or not, we are being asked to account for our actions because the effects of racism and the damage to our environment are being felt in greater and greater ways. I have preached on these issues in the past, and I’m sure that they will come up again in future sermons, but they are not the central point of today’s sermon.

Today is about accounting for our actions as a movement on our part towards wholeness and love. As Christians we are called to account for our lives because this is the first step in reconciliation and healing. We can’t make things right between ourselves and God if we can’t articulate and reflect upon what we have done or have failed to do as followers of Christ. In the accounting of my own life as a Christian, I can easily find instances of anger, lack of understanding or compassion, failure to be charitable towards others, and even selfish pride. They are not pleasant to look at and relive. I would rather forget about them and fool myself that God has forgiven me already, so I really don’t need to worry about my past misdeeds. But how wrong I would be! If I don’t come face to face with my failings, if I don’t understand where I have let down God in our relationship, then I can’t really focus on a new way of living. If we can’t make it right with God, we can’t make it right with each other, and if we can’t make it right with each other, we can’t do so with God. There is grace in accounting for our actions, because out of it can spring a new love so bold, so big that the errors of our individual and collective pasts can become doorways through which we and the world we live in are transformed into the image of Christ. 

I’m excited for Virginia Seminary because they have opened up a space for themselves to have difficult and challenging conversations about race and racism in our church and in our country. Their act of reparation will not heal every hurt that has been inflicted by racism, but it allows God and God’s grace to be the basis of transformative justice. This feels right and holy on so many levels.

Similarly, the Climate Strike marches won’t turn back the damage inflicted on our planet, but they give us the opportunity to account for what we’ve done and an understanding that we all stand at the same starting point in becoming better stewards of God’s creation.

You see, accounting for our lives to God isn’t about tit for tat, it isn’t about tallying up our wrongdoings, and it isn’t about mitigating circumstances or punishment. God’s grace is enough to hold the good and the bad of our lives. Like the landowner’s steward, it’s about doing what we can to put things right to the best of our ability and offering it up to God, who ultimately does the real healing. It’s about carving out a new way of living, unchained from our past and transformed by God’s love.

So when you hear God asking you to account for your life, come forward with everything. The joyous things that make you look and feel good, and the things that you would rather not see the light of day. God can hold all of it and unconditionally love us in the bold and big ways that only our God can. Amen.