9th Sunday after Pentecost 2025

Texts: Luke 12:32-40, Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16

Grace, Peace, and Mercy from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Christianity is full of fun and quirky lore. In the olden days, around the desert lands of Egypt, there existed a group of men and women who left everything to follow Christ. People of all social realms felt a call to run to the desert and escape the world to focus on God alone. These men and women would be the foundation of what is now called the monastic movement within Christianity. We have received from these desert father and mothers, plenty of stories of their own walk of faith, living bibles as some people called them. Their stories are beautiful in how they represent God’s grace, and others terrifying in how they evince the struggles of temptation and spiritual conflict; others are actually funny in how they show that following Christ can make you seem kind of crazy to those in the world.

Considering today’s reading, I’ll share three of these short stories from the desert that comes to mind. Once, there was a monk who lived in a cave in the desert, like many of them used to do. And as you can imagine, the possessions this man had were not much. Maybe some hand-woven basket, one set of over used and repaired robes, perhaps some pottery. All in all, this man was dirt poor. And so one night, a pair of robbers come

into the cave and they steal the little that he had. I can imagine how frustrating that could be, if there are moments to cry out about the unfairness of life, that would be it! The monk at some point encounters the thieves, and they have been imprisoned due to their crimes. And instead of gloating over them, he instead frees the thieves in the thick of night and tells them: “Thank you because you have shown me how to detach from my possessions and focus on God above all things! “ I can imagine the faces of confusion of the thieves at this scene.

Another story: it is said that “Abba Euprepius helped some thieves when they were stealing. When they had taken away what was inside his cell, Abba Euprepius saw that they had left his stick and he was sorry. So he ran after them to give it to them. But the thieves did not want to take it, fearing that something would happen to them if they did. So he asked someone he met who was going the same way to give the stick to them.” Truly to this monk, to live in Christ was in fact gain, the unstealable treasure, and worth more than losing the last of his material wealth.

And a third final one: “When Macarius was living in Egypt, one day he came across a man who had brought a donkey to his cell and was stealing his possessions. As though he was a passer-by who did not live there, he went up to the thief and helped him to load the beast, and sent him

peaceably on his way, saying to himself, ‘We brought nothing into this world (1 Tim. 6:7) but the Lord gave; as He willed, so it is done: blessed be the Lord in all things.’ This is an example of total abandonment to the will of God, to feel secure in the fact that it is well with my soul, no matter what may befall.

As we can see, these monks, in their own quirky way, are responding to Jesus’ call in the gospel text today. They are living, as the writer of the Hebrews states, “in faith”. They were living according to that foundation of things hoped for, that conviction of things not seen. The response of the monks only makes sense, as in the words of a commentator, when we see that they are participating in the “alternative economy” of God’s Kingdom. It is such a departure from how we have been taught to behave in today’s world. The world is always trying to draw our focus to the bigger number, to the larger building, to the greater wealth, to the most powerful or stronger, to the fastest. But God doesn’t seem to work that way. He says: “Sell your possessions and give alms”. In other words, make space in your life for the truly fulfilling element, the love of God. If our possessions clutter our vision of what life’s meaning is, then we can’t see God, and we can’t see the neighbor. We become enclosed in a world of unfeeling matter, echoing our own sins to us, preventing us from forming

relationships with the world and life that God wants us to meet. So if material wealth is your treasure in your life, Jesus says, then you have placed your heart, meaning your identity and worth on objects that thief can steal and moth destroy, things that naturally or eventually will waste away, and whose worth diminishes with time and circumstance. Jesus wants us to be aware, beware of putting your heart on these things, focus on what nobody can take away from you and which persists forever, the love of God that made you, the love of God that sustains you and builds bridges so you can meet others to love in the same way. It is not surprising that when many people are faced with death, they almost always regret all the times they had spent worrying about the wrong thing, and not focused on the nurturing relationships and qualities that never lose their worth. And for us Christians, this eternally valuable thing is the kingdom of God that reorients our lives from cluttering self-obsession into widening and expansive embrace of others in love and mercy. It is God’s pleasure to give the greatest gift, that strangely enough, as one of our desert monks said: “God sells righteousness at a very low price to those who wish to buy it: a little piece of bread, a cloak of no value, a cup of cold water, a mite.” Life’s ultimate gift is given so

accessibly, and yet we persist in the world by gatekeeping our possessions.

So in receiving the Kingdom, Jesus reminds, we must be alert. We must be attentive, “dressed for action and have your lamps lit…for the Son of Man will come at an unexpected hour”. We can’t put a rain check on the gospel life. We never know when God will require our action. If our hearts are distracted by the wrong thing, we might then misplace our action, when He will say “sell your possessions and give alms”. If our lamps are not lit, then when the Son of man comes we will stumble in the darkness. Like many things happening today, our daily lives can take their ordinary routes paying no mind to the shifting and important circumstances around us. Not being ready means being caught off guard and going with the current. But if we are alert, perhaps we can withstand the incoming struggle, perhaps we can act in such a way that reflects the “alternative economy” of God. Many Christians have fallen to the temptation of putting their hearts on those things that are not of God, they are grasping at the straws of worldly power. But Jesus calls us back to the radical essentials: life in God is not about what you own, it is not about where you go in the spheres of influence, it is about how much you serve, how much you love, how much do you forgive and have mercy on others just as

God has bestowed on you; how much can we see common suffering and humanity and act accordingly in response to the God-breathed image of every human person. We can miss out on all these possibilities of a beautiful world in our distraction from God. So as the monks in the desert, may we be inspired to act a little differently, may we rely on the abundant grace of God that allows us to see the world in new light, not as objects to accumulate, but as a world to embrace freely and openly in the bonds of love. May God empower us to be alert, for who knows when our hands, our words, our very lives will be needed to witness to God’s incoming Kingdom of justice. Better to be, like these quirky monks we heard from today, strangers and foreigners in the land for the sake of God’s Kingdom, than to be too comfortable with it’s injustice. God has made us to trust another way, hearts that put their trust in the merciful heart of Jesus. His heart can carry us to where our hearts truly yearn for, in His heart, we have the clarity and the daring to love and beautify the world outside the destructive logic of this world, with the grace of God. And so we pray: