Sermon preached at St. Alban's, Spirit Lake, on May 25, 2008
(Second Sunday after Pentecost, Year A, BCP Lectionary)
by the Rev. Carl D. Mann

Texts:   Isaiah 49:8-18
Psalm 62:6-14
1 Corinthians 4:1-5 (6-7) 8-13
Matthew 6:24-34

There once was an English Bard from the Rollingstone district (pronounced “Rawlingston”) who wisely summed up stewardship by saying:

“You can’t always get what you want
but if you try sometime
you just might find
that you always get what you need.”

That very well may be the theme of today’s lessons. Now as I have said before, stewardship is about relationships. Specifically how we relate to various things within our lives; material goods, people, the world, and even God. And I don’t mean to put God in last place either because how we relate to God will influence our relationship with all other things.

I was taught and believe in total stewardship which means that everything we have in our lives, including our lives, is a gift from God, and therefore everything is interrelated. If I were a concert virtuoso, my talents came from God. If I were a brilliant surgeon, my skill with a scalpel came from God. If I were the champion at the annual DOT Truck Rodeo, my driving abilities came from God. Yes, I would have had to endure rigorous training and schooling to accomplish any of these things but even the ability to think or the willingness to persevere or the discipline to practice would have been given to me from God in order to obtain the final goal. And it doesn’t have to be glamorous either. If I were the best bus boy, or floor sweeper or grease monkey I would only have God to thank for the opportunity to do my best.

No matter how hard we try to rationalize that we are in control of our destiny or that we picked ourselves up by the bootstraps or that it was by the sweat of our brow, if we don’t acknowledge that God was before us, behind us, or in us then it’s all hot air on our part. We can do nothing without God’s help.

It’s like the scientist who came to see God one day and said, “The scientific community has decided that we no longer need you. We’re to the point where we can clone people and cure diseases, and do many miraculous things so you’re really not necessary anymore.” God just smiled and said, “I’ll tell you what. Let’s have a man-making contest. Whoever creates the best man from scratch wins the argument to see if I am necessary or not. The scientist said, “Sure, why not! That’s easy! First I’ll just take a little of this dirt…” And God interrupted, “Wait a minute, that’s my dirt!” Everything belongs to God.

As Paul said to the Corinthians today, “What do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?” No matter where we are on the socio-economic ladder, as Christians we are servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries, and how we relate to these gifts or mysteries is important. Paul is instructing us not to use these God-given gifts as a means to divide ourselves from one another. Using irony almost to the point of sarcasm, he is marveling that the very gift which he and Apollos has received and subsequently given to the Corinthians has suddenly made them so much better than the rest of the community. How can this be? With the very same gift, we are fools but you are wise, we are weak but you are strong. You are held in great honor and we are held in disrepute. And yet look at how we respond. Do we lord our gift over others? Do we retaliate in kind? No, we speak kindly, we endure, and we bless. We take what God has given us and do the best with what we have received in all humility.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus takes it one step further. In order to remember that all things come from God we should always serve God first. The translation that we read says, “No one can serve two masters.” But a more accurate translation would be that no man can be a slave to two owners. A slave is completely and totally dependent upon their owner for everything that they have. Therefore we can’t be dependent upon the giver of all gifts and the gift itself. Whatever benefit that we derive from the gift is really rooted in the Benefactor.

Jesus goes on to say that we cannot serve both God and wealth. Here the word “wealth” is used for the word “mammon” from the old King James Version. Mamon is a generic Hebrew word for material possessions; a family heirloom, a piece of artwork, something or things that we treasured. But the word mamon is derived from the root word which means to entrust. So mamon could be whatever it was that one valued that could be entrusted into the safe keeping of another person; very similar to that of our putting our valuables in a safe deposit box and entrusting it to the safekeeping of the banker. But over time the word mamon evolved and became less of what we entrusted to others and became more of that in which we put our trust. It became so valuable in our minds that we could no longer think of parting with it. It became the focus of our very being. Our relationship with it came at the expense of all other relationships.

So let’s say I had a special rock that had been handed down for generations and I wanted to keep it safe while I was away on business. So I would entrust my rock into the hands of my friendly banker knowing that he or she would take care of it in my absence. But then I found out that the rock was the world’s largest precious gem and was worth millions of dollars which changed my life significantly. Now the rock became the focus of my life to where I could never entrust it to another person not even my son or daughter. Its very existence defined who I was. I could no longer leave the house on business, or even take care of my business. In that moment the rock has become mamon in the negative sense. I have forgotten that I received the rock from my parents who had received it from theirs who had found the rock while tilling the land with a horse and plow after migrating westward by mule and wagon. I have forgotten that it was God’s gift to them and to me. I have forgotten that God gave me my life in which to use it wisely. I have forgotten that God had entrusted it to me in the first place.

Jesus says to not let this happen. He says don’t worry about any material thing in life especially the basics; what you will eat or drink or wear. If God in His mercy has given all of these things to the birds of the earth or to the earth itself that don’t even have to work for it, surely He will give us what we need to survive.

Now what’s interesting about this sentence is that the word translated for worry does not necessarily mean anxiety although it can if taken to the extreme. It means don’t become preoccupied or obsessed with something.

Now this reminds me of our old coonhound Sophie, who was the most loving dog a person could ever hope for. She was gentle with children, and was content to just sit at your feet and look at you with those big brown eyes knowing that you loved her and she you. But that all changed whenever a raccoon ventured into her optical or nasal radar. She would catch a raccoon in the open field by running it down and breaking its hind leg to keep it from running. But raccoons don’t give up very easily and are equally vicious when cornered. So Sophie would literally run circles around it, darting in and out, worrying it until it became so tired and disoriented, finally giving her the opportunity to go in for the kill, grabbing it by the neck behind the head and shaking it like an old dust mop. Now until that raccoon was dead, there was nothing we could do to get her away from it. We could call to her by name; we could yell at her, it didn’t matter. She was completely obsessed by the raccoon; it became the entire focus of her being. There was nothing else going on in her doggie world until that raccoon ceased to be. We were no longer her masters but rather the raccoon or the instinct to kill the raccoon became her master.

Now here is the one exception to the rule. We have all been given the most precious gift in the world. God came into this world incarnated in the flesh of Jesus Christ in order that he should atone for our sins by his blood, dying on the cross and raising to life again conquering death once and for all, ascending back to heaven so that we have the opportunity to spend eternity with Him. He has given this opportunity to us and as Christians we have received it by entering into a covenant with Him. In this gift we can put our trust. It is why our founding fathers had the genius to inscribe on every coin and every note of legal tender, “In God we trust.” But lest this gift become mamon in our lives, which may not be the worst of things, we need to, no, we are commanded by God Himself, to entrust this gift to others, in fact with as many others as we possibly can. This is called evangelism and evangelism is total stewardship in a nutshell! Everything that we have in our lives including our eternal life itself is a gift from God!

So the take home for today is this. Let’s utilize this long green season of Pentecost in order to take an inventory of our lives and identify those things with which we are in relationship that are controlling the way we live our life at the cost of all other relationships, and set them aside. Know that we have only one Master; one Lord who is in control our lives and upon whom we are totally dependent. And He will never forget us as Isaiah said this morning. He is our strong rock and refuge. He will always provide what we need. Not everything that we want but everything that we need, and in ways that are beyond our imagination or comprehension. In this we can always trust. Then it is up to us how we relate to all of these gifts that He provides, not puffing ourselves up in favor of one against another but using them wisely; enduring, blessing, and speaking kindly to others, entrusting to them the bounty that we have been given. Gloria Patri