Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
How many of you are Chipotle fans? It is not uncommon for me to garb a quick bite there myself. Recent news, though, has made me boycott Chipotle. Nearly 10,000 workers are suing Chipotle. They claim that the company made them work extra hours "off the clock" without paying them. It is alleged that Chipotle routinely requires hourly-paid restaurant employees to punch out, and then continue working until they are given permission to leave. It's a practice known as wage theft.
Why begin a Sunday homily with a story of labor-related lawsuit? Because God, the Bible, and the Church have something important to say about these things. One time I preached about work, just wages, and the dignity of work, and someone came to said to me, “The Church should stick to religion and not get involved in economics and politics. I come to the church to worship God.” This person has a misconception. The Bible has much to say about economics, work, and just wages. It has much to say about creating a just society and a just church.
Today’s reading draw attention to a disciple’s pursuit of justice, especially through his or her relationship to wealth and material things. Here are the three things that I discern the scriptures are saying to us today:
1. “Praise the Lord who Lifts Up the Poor.” Let us begin with God’s relationship with the poor and those who create and unjust society by oppressing the poor. Today’s Psalm response says, “Praise the Lord who lifts up the poor.” This is scripture’s way of saying that God’s cares about the poor in a special way. The greatest event of the Old Testament is God freeing a slave nation from the grips of an unjust and oppressive Pharaoh. It is in this spirit that today’s gospel acclamation says, “Though our Lord Jesus Christ was rich, he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.” God responded to our poverty by coming to us. It is not God’s will that people suffer because of poverty. God did not create poverty. God created human beings to be content and happy. When this purpose is not fulfilled, God takes a stand. God says through Amos in today’s first reading, “Hear this, you who trample upon the needy and destroy the poor of the land! Never will I forget a thing they have done!” In other words, if in fact Chipotle wronged their workers, God is on the side of those who have been wronged. The Bible and the Church are on the side of the poor. “Praise the Lord, who lifts up the poor.”
2. We are Stewards. The New Testament particularly defines human relationship with the material world as “stewardship.” Stewardship is radically different than ownership. These approaches are radically different. Ownership gives us absolute right over that which we consider ours. Stewardship says that what we have is, in fact, a gift. A spirituality of stewardship invites us to “manage” our material resources and our relationships in a way that God intends for them to be managed. In this sense, the earth is a gift that we do not own but must manage as good stewards. The people in our lives, including our family, are gifts from God. The material things we own like our house, our automobiles, the credit cards, the savings… as stewards we are called to manage them not according to our whims and fancies but by God’s will. The problem is that, socially, people consider finances as a very private thing. Somehow, this spills to our relationship with God. We rarely think of our relationship with wealth as a spirituality. We rarely think of ourselves as stewards. To act as owners instead of stewards is to play God. The parable of the dishonest steward tells us that we are accountable for the way in which we manage God’s gifts to us.
3. Who is The Prudent Steward. The opposite of being “owners” of wealth and material things is to owned by them. Jesus says, “You cannot serve God and mammon.” Wealth is a very powerful force. Greed and addiction to wealth has perpetrated many a social evils in the world. Slavery, colonialism, human trafficking, the banking crisis, the drug epidemic, modern day sweatshops, loan-sharks - these are all results of human slavery to mammon. In the parable of the dishonest steward, the master commends the dishonest steward for his prudence. In other words, the steward was good at being dishonest. The moral of the story is simply this — just as the dishonest steward was good at his dishonesty, a Christian must be good at what is entrusted to him or her. We can do that by thinking about these questions: “How much say does God have in the way we manage wealth and material things? Do we have a spirituality for how we relate to material things? mHow concerned are we about creating a just society, promoting just wages, or about the needs of the poor? Do we control mammon or does mammon own us? Do we indeed consider the people and things in our life as gifts?
In the Eucharist, we offer bread and wine. But the bread and wine is itself the gift of God's creation. We can never offer God that which it totally our own. As we offer God bread and wine, may we also offer all our lives. Amen.
- Fr. Satish Joseph