Making the Best of a Good Thing!

Making the best of a good thing

25th Sunday in Ordinary Time "C"

Amos 8:4-7

1st Timothy 2:1-8

Luke 16:1-13

Deacon Kevin Reid

My sisters and brothers, surely at one time or another we have all heard the popular saying about someone making the best of a bad thing, but perhaps maybe today we might after hearing the Good news in our Gospel might want to prayerfully consider making the best of a good thing.

The good thing that WE might just want to consider making the best of is in the life that we are ourselves are living, do we find ourselves consciously making the best of it or are we struggling, maybe we are just getting by, scraping along sadly from one day to the next.

OR are we using the many GIFTS and the life giving GRACES that we have been Blessed with to contribute to the GREATER GOOD of the rest of the world.

I don't mean that perhaps you personally have to build an irrigation system in sub-Saharan Africa, but have we in some small or major way made a difference for someone else anywhere ?

It could be in the life of a stranger or a neighbor that we have befriended, or the child living with out a Father, or the Widow that can't get a ride to the store or even to Mass.

Jesus in today's Gospel is not praising the so called dishonest steward, but rather he is preparing each of US for the time when we one day will stand before him and we will be asked to explain our own "STEWARDSHIP" .

My friends have we in our time, as the stewards of the Graces and the opportunities that we have been Blessed with used them for the Greater good, or have we ourselves perhaps squandered them.

To squander them might be to hold on to our things like they are more then things, if we share what we have been given then it multiplies.

The so called dishonest Steward had the sense in today's Parable to reevaluate his present day circumstances, he had been given an extraordinary opportunity to get his "house in Order" to prepare for an Audit that would possibly put him into a life of servitude and hard labor.

Friends the Lord today is offering us all that same opportunity this is the "GOOD NEWS" in today's Gospel that you have heard proclaimed here.

This story can have a good ending for bus just has it did for the Steward in the Parable.

All we have to do is to decide that enough is enough and that we want to make a difference in this world.

My friends the Kingdom of God is at hand.

Scripture reminds us to think of the boy with the five fish who gave all that he had, so that ALL could eat, the five fish that according to Luke fed the five thousand. His act of goodness multiplied one thousand fold by Jesus blessing his offering.

He could have easily taken the five fish home and handily fed his family, Lord knows they probably were counting on him to do just that.

One could be Blessed with a voice like an Angel but if no one ever gets to hear us sing, of what use is that talent, sadly it will eventually die and fade away with you if you don't share it.

You see that is why we are called to make joyful noise when we are singing. To let our voices rise up to Heaven and to stir in our Hearts the joy that the Good News brings to our Lives.

Just be glad that when I am singing that I'm not that close to any microphone so that you can in the Congregation can see my effort but not suffer with my flat off key and out of tune voice.

Rest assured good people if you do use your talents the way God intended you to, they will live on in our collective memories long after you have left us.

How many of us sitting here can remember that special recipe that our long since departed Grandmother made for us when we visited her house.

We can still smell and almost taste that memory.

Years may have definitely passed, its been forty five years now but I can still see that kitchen and taste in my mind my Nana's wonderful cooking.

She was the inspiration for my becoming a Chef, and helping me to discover the talent that I was blessed with. She brought out the good in me by her example of loving service to her family. No one was more important for her to cook for then her family.

When we stand before the Lord on that fateful day, maybe we could let our cooking story be the one where we faithfully made a few pans of meatloaf for Our Daily Bread, each month for all of those many years and the taste memories will then be something that the Lord himself will recall.

He will say to us when we stand before him in judgement "When I was Hungry you fed me", and when we say "when did we feed you Lord" he will say to us "I was the boy standing in line at Our Daily Bread on that cold November day, and your Meatloaf was the only warmth I felt that day".

We never know the time or the hour when we will stand before the Master in this life or in death.

The Lord has has sworn by the pride of Jacob:

"Never will I forget a thing they have done".

So today's readings have a collective theme, that the Lord in his Wisdom has chosen us to be his faithful Stewards and he has described to us all of the benefits of joyful stewardship and also the dangers of not being good, and honest stewards.

The prophetic voice of Amos today speaking across the ages to us today, think back not that long ago to the decision by the folks on that Oil Platform owned by BP to keep going on with the drilling even though the warnings of possible problems were plainly there, the decision was simply based on Greed to make more money and not on any other factor.

Surely the full impact of that decision to press on would not have been made if the blinders of Greed were not so securely in place, but that is the difference between living in a world of MAMMON, and not of God. The world of Mammon is fueled by our desire for more and more, me,me, ME.

Let every one fend for himself no one ever helped me.

We can not choose to be "Children of the Light" if we are living in that kind of darkness.

Our choices according to Jesus have to be radical ones that may just go against the grain of so called economic sense, we all know that economic sense and moral sense are sometimes further apart then men being from Mars and women being from Venus.

Yet even in our present day world we are reminded of the COST of our neglect as Stewards of our planet.

This past week I heard an interview with a Coal Miner in West Virginia who was describing how his father and father in law both Miners had died from Black Lung Disease, how they literally in the end of their lives were coughing up parts of their lungs before they passed, and that NOW he too had the same illness. But ironically he was lamenting the loss of the Mining jobs in his community and not the loss of his lungs. You can not serve both God and Mammon.

The odds are just not with you when you try to do both, it's like betting against the Casino, my friends the Casino never loses.

We can have a difficult road ahead of us, if we choose to serve God the rewards are not always apparent. To many the work that the sisters in Calcutta chose to do with Mother Teresa did with the untouchables was unthinkable most folks could not even bear to look at these poor unfortunates, and yet Mother Teresa said she could not bear to do otherwise.

She now has a crown to wear and is reunited with those poor unfortunates in Heaven. No more suffering or pain only joy and beauty.

In the popular movie "To Kill a Mockingbird" based on the novel of the same name, the main character is a widower Lawyer named Atticus Finch, who lived in the 1930's in a small Alabama town with his two school aged children.

Atticus has been assigned by the County Judge the job of defending Tom Robinson a black man falsely accused of crimes against a white women.

The townsfolk can not understand why Atticus did not turn down this demand, after all he was one of THEM, and why would he go against his own people. he and his children suffered greatly for his decision to represent this MAN who had been falsely accused.

They were taunted and they were threatened, you can not serve both GOD and Mammon. The children of the light must be there as a symbol of God's love for his people.

The reason that Atticus gives for making his decision is pretty concise and actually pretty simple he says in the end of the book "I just can't live one way in Town and another way in my home".

That's what it means to have an undivided heart, that was the secret of his Integrity, his strength of soul and his peace of mind. Can we there for live one way in our homes, in our Churches and live in another way when we are in our TOWN.

In a few minutes we will be beginning our preparations to receive the body of the one whose heart was never divided, who had the love of his friends above the love of his own life.

As you extend your hand today in peace, let us pray that the Peace we extend to our neighbor will be the genuine lasting peace of having an undivided heart.

Our stewardship here is a relatively short one if we compare it with the rewards of eternity, on the other hand we can always choose the low road but remember that the low road only leads us to one place. The high road on the other hand takes us to a place of unsurpassed beauty and unending joy.

Life is a series of choices that together make up the story of our existence, it is up to each of us to write and to live out the conclusion to that particular novel.

By the Grace of free will we are the Authors of our own stories, we can allow ourselves to serve either God or Mammon that choice good people will determine the ultimate outcome of our story, the one that people one day will remember us for.