Right and faithful worship. Isaiah 1

This morning’s reading from Isaiah is a bit rough. In fact it denounces Israel’s religious practices as utterly unacceptable to God, and he wants nothing more to do with them. Thus says the Lord, what to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? I’ve had enough of your burnt offerings. Incense is an abomination to me. Trample my courts no more. I cannot endure it. I will hide my eyes from you and I will not even listen to your prayers.

What’s gone wrong? Isn’t Israel supposed to be God’s chosen people? Aren’t they performing all the rites, rituals and ceremonies according to law? Why then is God so scathing of them?

In ancient Canaanite religion, the gods were invoked and presumed upon through the practice of the religious cult. If you wanted the gods’ approval and something done for you, you would perform the appropriate ceremony, sacrifice or ritual, and in return the gods would be obliged to grant your request. Very convenient because it put you in the hot seat with the gods at your bidding.

From human thinking it made sense. For example, you were dependant for a livelihood on the produce of a fertile earth, and if you wanted children a fertile wife too. So if you weren’t getting those, you had to call on the fertility gods, and off you went to visit the temple prostitute.

By Isaiah’s time in the 8^th century BCE, Israel’s worship didn’t look much different to Canaanite worship. The conquest of the land wasn’t as decisive and clear cut as it was supposed to be. Settlement of it by the tribes of Israel took a long time, and over the centuries, Israel’s religion, which was supposed to be exclusive to Yahweh, became infused with Canaanite religion. And so the covenant between Yahweh and Israel was in serious danger of becoming extinct, which was the situation in Elijah’s time. Remember the confrontation on Mt Carmel between Elijah for Yahweh and everyone else for Baal. Elijah of course was proved right, but at great cost to himself.

I suppose it was a bit like Christianity in the 4^th century when Emperor Constantine made it the official religion of the Roman empire. The church was allowed to take its place in the rites and passages of Rome, and over time it came to look like an empire church. If you look around a Christian church service today, you can still see remnants of that. Clergy and other sanctuary officials wear white to indicate they have an official office and role. That’s descendant from the white togas of Roman officials and senators. Why does the bishop have a posh special chair set aside just for him or her? That’s a throwback to the district Roman governor’s chair set aside just for him.

Fortunately, the Christian church remained mostly faithful to its Lord and God, unlike ancient Israel whose fidelity to Yahweh was all but gone. And that’s why the prophets were sent to call Israel back to right and faithful worship.

So, back to our question of why Israel’s worship was so unacceptable. It’s because God cannot be manipulated or presumed upon in a mechanical manner, such as performing a ritual in a certain way, or relying on objects to be sacred to which one’s god is obliged to respond. The real god doesn’t work like that. He’s not a credit card and all you need is the right PIN for him to dispense a solution to a problem.

It is all too easy for us in our day to attend religious service as a kind of insurance policy. I’ve done my Sunday morning hour and now I can claim God’s favour. It’s all about me. Then when God doesn’t pay out the claim, I lift my eyes to heaven and say it’s not fair after all I’ve done for you. It’s all about me. We can be very religious and yet be living lives of complete self-centeredness, never giving God a hearing let alone our due worthship of him (ie, our due worship of his worth).

So how does it work? How does a relationship with God work, and is it religious? Is Christianity a religion or a relationship? It certainly looks like a religion and is often treated like one. But is it? I don’t recall learning about Jesus setting up a religion in the image of Roman officialdom. But I do recall learning about him teaching in terms of relationships – love God, love others; being children of a heavenly Father; sharing in a wedding feast. All these things are in the language of relationship, not religion.

What Isaiah and all the Old Testament prophets kept hammering home was the point that access to God is not gained through sacred objects and rituals in themselves. Rather, access to God is found in response to acceptance and obedience to his Word, confession of faith, and adherence to the ethical demands of his Kingdom.

What does God require of us? The prophet Moses said Hear O Israel; and in our churches today after each reading, we are exhorted to Hear the Word of the Lord. Through the psalmist God says sacrifice I desire not, but mercy and a contrite heart. And through the prophets Isaiah and Micah we are told that God requires us to do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with our God, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow – the ethical demands of the Kingdom. These are all responses to what God has done for us. It’s all about the acts of God in human history, not the acts of mankind in history.

So where does that leave the rites, sacraments and ceremonies that happen in our church today, and how are we to approach them?

Well the first thing I want to say about this is that everything that happens in our services of worship in this parish is designed with one thing in mind, and that is the right and faithful worship of our God in spirit and in truth. The sacraments are not celebrated as points of religious duty to be performed as ends in themselves, and we should not think of them that way. They are marks of covenant relationship, tangible ways by which God ministers to us through the forgiveness of our sins and our penitent and contrite hearts.

There is music chosen as praise of God in song; there is opportunity for prayerful intercession for others; there is due honour and worthship of God offered in the prayers for Holy Communion; there is absolution pronounced for the forgiveness of sins; the scriptures are read aloud so we can hear the word of the Lord. It’s all about our response to what God has done for us. It’s not about what God is obliged to do.

Now I know we have things like votive candles, a couple of icons, and occasionally the bells and incense. There was a time no so long ago when I would have stayed away from them because I saw them as meaningless points of religiosity. And I wouldn’t have darkened the doors of Benedictine abbey to waste time droning through psalms multiple times every day.

Then I remembered what God has done for me, and I am happy to spend time in the psalms and in silence at the abbey. I am excited to be still in the presence of the Lord and know that he is God. The bells, incense, candles and icons have all become meaningful ways through which can I respond to God. They are certainly not mechanical means of doing self-justified duty, and then expecting God to do his. I do not come into God’s house asking what’s in it for me. But rather as the psalmist wrote, by your great mercy I come into your house. (Ps 5:7)

That, ladies and gentlemen, is right and faithful worship that the Old Testament prophets called Israel back to, and it’s also what our Lord and Saviour set before us in his parable of the penitent tax collector. God have mercy on me a sinner. I tell you this man went home justified before God.

It’s all about giving God the glory, and our response to what he’s done for us.

Ascribe to the Lord the glory due to his name;

bring an offering and come into his courts.

Worship the Lord in the splendour of his holiness;

tremble before him, all the earth.

Philip Starks

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Shrewdness for the kingdom. Luke 16

During the Second World war the Vatican was neutral territory, and by and large the Germans respected that. However, they knew that British airman POWs were using the Vatican as an escape route out of Europe, and that there was monsignor who was organising these escaping POWs. It’s a true story told in the film The Scarlet and the Black, with Gregory Peck as Monsignor O’Flaherty and Christopher Plummer as Herbert Kappler the German security chief in Italy.

O’Flaherty started his work with very little, and gradually over the months people put their money, their time and their homes at his disposal. They were investing in the allied war effort against Nazi Germany in whatever small way they could. O’Flaherty was totally entrusted with it, and he enlisted his diplomatic connections and friends in and around the Vatican to ensure the allied airman would remain hidden from the Kappler and his forces. The film tells the story of O’Flaherty’s ingenuity and shrewdness in how he used what was entrusted to him. He would rent property as safe houses to hide the escapes; he would buy food on the black market to feed them. And at the end of the war he was honoured for his services to the allies. O’Flaherty was faithful with little, therefore he was honoured with much.

Kappler, on the other hand, served another master. His wealth was obtained through extortion, demanding the local Jews hand over 100 pounds of gold in return for protection, which of course never eventuated. Where did Kappler end up after the war? A life sentence in prison for war crimes.

Kappler was not faithful with worldly wealth, so how could he expect true riches?

It’s classic, and the parable of the dishonest manger is all about how we use worldly wealth for Kingdom outcomes, with a warning that we should not allow worldly wealth to become our master. That’s why Luke writes his Greek as “unrighteous money”, in that only God is righteous and therefore only he should be our master.

Now this parable has often left Christians scratching their heads, because on a superficial reading it comes across as Jesus commending a dishonest manager who squanders his master’s property. The man is going to lose his job, so he goes round discounting his master’s debts to serve his own interests because he knows he is very shortly going to be homeless. Plus, at the end of the story, Jesus says, I tell you make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth. How are we going to unravel this? Obviously Jesus isn’t going to commend dishonesty. But what he does commend is the manager’s shrewdness, the way he used his smarts when faced with a challenging situation.

Let’s have a look at it: the first thing to notice is that the manager is moving towards the day of accountability, and what he has done has reached the ears of his master. What is this I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management. And like the manager in the story, we all moving towards our own day of accountability for the stewardship of what we’ve been entrusted with, are we not? The manager goes out and calls in those who owe debts, and they are very large debts. It would take more than a lifetime for debts of those magnitudes to be repaid. Sons and daughters would have inherited the debts. Either that or they would have been sold into slavery for them.

Now it appears the manager is discounting his master’s debts, such that his master is losing up to fifty percent of loan earnings. But he isn’t, because those debts will have been in form of bonds stipulating a fixed amount of payment by a due date. So the real loan might have been 50 gallons of oil, plus some fee for the master’s return on his loan investment, plus the manager’s fee as the master’s agent. The bonds couldn’t stipulate a rate of interest because that would be usury, which was illegal under the Law of Moses. So lenders required borrowers to write IOUs or bonds. Hence the manager in the story got the debtors to write new IOUs without his own large fee as agent. And in the process the debtors would have seen both the manager and the master as very generous. New friends for life are made; a win, win situation.

Whether the manager proved himself at that point, or whether he still lost his job, Jesus doesn’t conclude the story either way. The story is meant to raise questions. It’s told to the disciples who are in training for going into the world with a message of good news that there is a god who wishes to redeem mankind from itself and its refusal of that god. In other words, the disciples are going to be charged with the responsibility of continuing Jesus’ ministry to the world after he has returned to the Father in heaven. And it carries a serious responsibility, one which they, and us as disciples today, are going to have to give an account of. What’s this I hear about you? Give me an account of yourself.

How have we as Christ’s followers used what he has given us in terms of worldly things? That’s the question the parable is asking. We in Australia are very wealthy. Most of us have jobs, leisure time, a house of some sort, the freedom to worship and proclaim the Christian message. It is not illegal to do that in this country.

Our own parish here in Lara has a lot entrusted to it. We have wonderful plant and facilities and an effective opportunity shop that provides a good and necessary income. Without it we wouldn’t have a full time parish priest who does an enormous amount of work for the good of the community at large, as well as for her own parishioners. We have generous donors to our food bank that feeds those who cannot always afford good food for themselves.

All of us have time. We are not without free time. All of us have something of ourselves to contribute to parish work and mission. The question is, how are you using those? How are you investing your time and availability for Kingdom outcomes? And are you using them well, being strategic and positive in thought about them? I tell you, use worldly wealth to make friends for yourselves, so that what it is gone you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.

It doesn’t matter how much or how little you have. What matters is how faithful you are in using it for Kingdom outcomes and your relationship with God. Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much.

Jesus isn’t condemning the possession of worldly wealth. It’s not a sin to be rich. The problem is what you do with it. Will it become your master, or will you be its master for Kingdom outcomes? This is the question Jesus raises at the end of parable, because he sees the Pharisees, who love money, listening in. They are double agents serving two masters. They keep the law of Moses, yet they also keep the law of worldly wealth. And you can’t serve two masters. Double agents in the world of espionage ended up getting shot on both sides. Poor miserable wretches they became.

To bring the point home, Jesus tells them another parable, the rich man and Lazarus. There’s a rich man who accumulates wealth for himself, and when he dies he finds himself outside eternal dwellings. Looking across the uncrossable chasm, he sees poor man Lazarus enjoying those eternal dwellings in the arms of Abraham. The fact that the rich man had wealth is the not the problem. Abraham was a very wealthy man, yet there he is in eternal dwellings. The reason Abraham is where he is, is because he was faithful with his wealth, put it at God’s disposal and did not allow it to master him. Not so the rich man across the chasm outside eternal dwellings. Message to lovers of money: this is where you will end up if worldly wealth becomes your master.

And there’s also the parable of the talents with the same message. You all know the story: three people are given a store of worldly wealth. Those who were given ten and five talents acted shrewdly and brought back a good return on what the master had entrusted them with. But the one who was given little just sat on it thinking it’s too little, too late, and I can’t do much with it anyhow, so I’ll just hand it back. At least it won’t be lost. But he was still called to account. What did he do with his worldly wealth? If he couldn’t be faithful with little, how then could he be faithful with much. And his talent was taken away and given to those who had acted smartly and invested for a good return.

For the past two years, this parish has participated in the parish renewal program called Pathways. It’s a program that trains parish teams in a method of appraising what they have, where they want to go (the focus group), and how to move along the path in the right direction. It’s all about strategic thinking for Kingdom outcomes. This parish has a focus group of people seeking connections. In other words, we are well aware of people in Lara who are disconnected, perhaps because of unemployment, recently retired struggling with transiting from an active working life, loss of a relationship, single parents, the aged, and any who are burdened by needs of many sorts such that they experience loneliness. Did not Jesus say, come to me all who are burdened and you will find rest for your souls. That’s why our parish renewal team in the program has chosen people seeking connections as our focus group. Many of them may well need to experience rest for their weary souls.

We are a parish entrusted with a ministry to the disconnected. So let us keep thinking shrewdly about how we use the resources we have. And the whole thing of course must be underscored with prayer. It is the Holy Spirit who brings people to us for help. Our job is to respond and to offer ourselves in his service.

So, the question for the week I want to leave you with this morning is: are we being shrewd and faithful stewards of this world for the next?

Philip Starks
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