By the Rev’d Hilary Willett
Season: The 19th Sunday of Ordinary Time
Readings: Isaiah 1:1; 10-20 | Heb 11:1-3, 8-16 | Luke 12:32-40
So, some weeks when you are writing a sermon, it’s just not working. You can’t think of a good starting point. The readings are hard to get into. Everything just feels a bit… flat. Writing is a bit like squeezing blood from a stone.
For me, that was this week. I’m not totally sure why. Perhaps it’s just, you know, the tail end of the cold that I’ve had for the last week.
I now have some strategies for when these weeks happen. Sermon writing is a creative work, and there are some ways to just start. Sometimes I exercise. Sometimes I pray. Sometimes I listen to cinematic orchestral music by Hans Zimmer. There’s epic music that helps with inspiration. But this week, my usual strategies were failing me, and I was starting to feel a bit anxious. I have so many things I could be doing with my time: writing reports, working on the website, and finally getting through my emails. But I had decided, this week, to really engage in the discipline of setting aside time to write the sermon early. So often it becomes a late-night Saturday exercise. But this week, I’d set aside the time, and nothing was happening! I was left staring at a blank page.
Eventually, I decided to start listening to some other preachers. So I found some videos of other sermons on this passage and started listening. Many were preachers, and a few were theological writers and academics.[1]
As I listened, I started to notice some things. The first was that Anglicans have the right idea about keeping sermons short. Some sermons are decidedly not a tight ten to fifteen minutes, some will keep going for half an hour.
The second thing that I noticed was that I was still feeling anxious. So many of the preachers interpreted our gospel passage through what I can only describe as a highly panicky lens.
“Keep alert,” many of the preachers emphasised, “because you don’t know the hour that God will return and you don’t want to be found unprepared.”
This nervousness is not a new sensation. I have felt it before while listening to sermons. Maybe I’m not trying hard enough. Maybe I’m not growing enough. Maybe I’m not enough. Not enough. Not enough. Keep alert!
Interestingly, I noticed that the preachers I listened to did little to alleviate that anxiety. In fact, they kind of leaned into it. They said, “be ever ready, because God is coming back at some point. You don’t know what time. You don’t know whether it’s going to be the middle of the night. You don’t want to be shame-faced. You don’t want to be in a bad position, right? You might be living sinfully and not know about it. You might be doomed for hell and not know it!”
You might think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. One preacher I listened to said: “…An unfaithful steward is an unbeliever. You cannot have saving faith and live like this. You can pretend to have saving faith. You can profess to have saving faith. But you are, altogether, unconverted and on your way to hell.”[2]
Did you know that there are now mental health disorders that are explicitly connected to religion? There’s one called “religious scrupulosity.”[3] It’s a form of OCD. People with this condition are constantly afraid they haven’t repented enough to be right with God. So they are constantly in confession. Unable to rest. Always alert. I wonder why.
The reason why many pastors have interpreted this passage is because of what comes after our gospel reading finishes. So I’ll read that now.
“‘…Who then is the faithful and prudent manager whom his master will put in charge of his slaves, to give them their allowance of food at the proper time? Blessed is that slave whom his master will find at work when he arrives. Truly I tell you, he will put that one in charge of all his possessions.
But if that slave says to himself, “My master is delayed in coming”, and if he begins to beat the other slaves, men and women, and to eat and drink and get drunk, the master of that slave will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour that he does not know, and will cut him in pieces, and put him with the unfaithful” (Luke 12:41-46).
I will acknowledge that the consequences for the unfaithful steward are quite extreme. Getting killed due to unfaithfulness seems to add some weight to the interpretation that we should just be anxious all the time. Either you are ready and waiting for God, or there will be very bad consequences.
But there’s something missing here. Can anyone see an issue with this interpretation? Take a minute to reflect or talk to your neighbour.
(Pause)
The steward wasn’t just sleeping. The steward was drunk and abusing the people under him. The steward, in other words, was harming the people around him. Why wasn’t this noticed?
Bizarrely, instead of noticing the very obvious call to “do no harm,” most preachers emphasised obedience, donations to the church as signs of remaining alert.
It’s quite a top-down, authoritarian, controlling narrative. And, as much as I don’t want to just kind of blast all of the preachers I heard, because some of them had really nice points, I am conscious of how intensely many of them came across. I am also conscious of how many of them missed the fact that the steward was abusing people.
God didn’t just punish a person for resting. That’s not what happened. God punished a person in authority who was actively harming the people under him.
The other thing that I think a few preachers failed to acknowledge is some basic stuff about hermeneutics – essentially, our own subjectivity when we read scripture. We need to have some rules about how we read, so that we don’t just fall into damaging interpretations. One of my preferred lenses is a Christocentric lens. It’s a little more nuanced than that, but it’s generally the idea that we read scripture through Jesus. So, for example, we understand God through Jesus (both because Jesus is God and because Jesus describes God). And literally, a passage before this message about “being alert”, Jesus is saying “don’t be afraid – God wants to give you the kingdom” (v. 32), and before that “, don’t worry, God will clothe you and feed you” (vv. 22-31).
I don’t want to ignore the fact that God clearly feels strongly about those who abuse their power, like the steward did, but I don’t see in these passages a domineering God that wants us to be anxious. Constantly working. Constantly on edge. In fact, I would argue that this is much more a capitalist ethic than a Christian one. A reminder that I needed when writing this sermon, I think.
But clearly, there is an encouragement to be alert. So how might we interpret this with a Christocentric lens? I would like to suggest two things.
One, maybe don’t actively harm people.
Two, what if being attentive is good for us? What if we removed our capitalistic understanding of work as constant, intense, and unrestful activity, and thought about attentiveness as looking for the activity of God? Looking for where God is moving. And being curious.
Perhaps ironically, in my experience, curiosity provides some antidote to anxiety. Instead of alarm, interest. Instead of nervousness, purpose. Instead of restlessness, focus and attention. We are still awake, just not in a fearful way. We are alert in a way that recognises who Jesus says God is: a loving parent, who cares for us and inspires us. We are awake because we are interested in knowing what God is doing.
We don’t know the hour, we don’t know the minute, when we are going to encounter God in some new and unexpected way. But let us be awake to that possibility. Let us avoid harming each other, of course. But let us also be awake to where the wind of God will blow next. Not as a source of constant anxiety, but as a source of freshness, rejuvenation, conviction, joy, and life. Let us be awake to catching glimmers of God with us.
Keeping alert does not need to be an anxious task, where the consequences are dire if we get it wrong. We can keep alert to life around us, to God with us, to the wind of Holy Spirit who calls us into conviction and joy. We can keep alert by noticing what God cares about and responding as the church. So keep alert, church, to glimmers of God in our midst.
Bibliography
Beacon Church. “Daily Devotion Week 12: Luke 12:35-48.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oQi2WG_-XE.
Ligonier Ministries. “The Faithful Steward (Luke 12:35-48) — A Sermon by R.C. Sproul.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKXyBfGMeWU.
Newmills Presbyterian Church. “Sunday 17 January 2021 | Luke 12:35-48.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOjcJi7gwFo.
Peters, Tim. “Luke 12:32-48: The 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Gospel Reflection, Year C, Fr. Tim Peters.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ub1S7RppZF0.
Pollard, C. Alec. “What Is OCD & Scrupulosity?” With Jedidiah Siev. International OCD Foundation. https://iocdf.org/faith-ocd/what-is-ocd-scrupulosity/.
Zion Hill Methodist Church. “Great Un-Expectations | Luke 12:35-48 | Doug Overmyer | 3/14/25.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9VOND34BhE.
[1] Ligonier Ministries, “The Faithful Steward (Luke 12:35-48) — A Sermon by R.C. Sproul,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKXyBfGMeWU; Tim Peters, “Luke 12:32-48: The 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Gospel Reflection, Year C, Fr. Tim Peters,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ub1S7RppZF0; Beacon Church, “Daily Devotion Week 12: Luke 12:35-48,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oQi2WG_-XE; Zion Hill Methodist Church, “Great Un-Expectations | Luke 12:35-48 | Doug Overmyer | 3/14/25,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9VOND34BhE; Newmills Presbyterian Church, “Sunday 17 January 2021 | Luke 12:35-48,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOjcJi7gwFo.
[2] Ligonier Ministries, “The Faithful Steward (Luke 12:35-48) — A Sermon by R.C. Sproul.”
[3] C. Alec Pollard, “What Is OCD & Scrupulosity?,” with Jedidiah Siev, International OCD Foundation, https://iocdf.org/faith-ocd/what-is-ocd-scrupulosity/.