In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Glory to Jesus Christ. Glory to God.

How awkward, we have these readings for the liturgy today, and they all have to do with money. Like, how are we supposed to handle this when we came here to try to be spiritual? And here we get dragged down and have to be—in both the epistle and the gospel—spending all this time basically from the beginning to the end having to think about money.

You know, we should be thinking about spiritual matters. Like, for example, how to get into heaven. What does the gospel have to say about that? Oh, I remember: Jesus tells us that if you would be perfect, sell all that you have, give to the poor, and come follow me. Hmm... uh, let's turn some pages. Maybe we'll find a better one.

How about this? "Lord, I give half of what I own to the poor, and if I have cheated anyone, I restore to them four-fold." That also doesn't sound too good. Let's find something a little more manageable. Oh, how about that time that Jesus tells us to use our wealth to buy friends for heaven? Hmm, still kind of on the same track here.

Well, what about something different? How about how to be faithful as Christians? Well, there's that famous parable about the talents—how we're supposed to use our talents well. And if we have a little bit, we'll use that faithfully and we'll be given more.

But wait a minute—we just heard about talents in the gospel today. And they're not talking about talents like a talent show. A talent is a huge sum of money. It's enough to pay for an entire year's worth of living expenses at a generous rate. So if we're talking about using our talents... wait, that's again my stuff, my bank accounts. What do I own? Jesus is expecting me to be investing that for the kingdom.

There's got to be something better to this. How about morality? Well, what do you know? The first murder was committed because of envy. You know, when we just look at the Bible, we just can't get away from it. Because the reality is that money is not something that's radically different from the rest of life. It is quite literally, as any economist will tell you, a store of value. It's a store of value—a convenient, handy way to say, "This is something that I value, and I'm going to give you what I value for something that I want from you."

Nothing magical there, nothing that's somehow entirely of some other order of the world. And you know, if we're going to get to heaven, if we're going to be in a position to meet God and not be destroyed by the experience, we need to give some thought to what it is that we value. And you know that saying: "Put your money where your mouth is." Or as Jesus says—there he goes again—"Where your heart is, there your treasure will be also."

This is how it works, brothers and sisters. Money is a store of value, and what we value reveals our hearts. And so naturally Jesus and all the scriptures use money to teach us—to teach us through it and about it—for our lives.

Today we have the Apostle Paul instructing the Corinthians on the proper way to support their ministry. He teaches them a passage from scripture: "You shall not muzzle the ox while he treads out the grain." And he uses this to explain that "if we sow spiritual things, may we not also reap your material things?" In other words, we need to provide for those who are caring for us spiritually so that they may with confidence and without distraction do the work that God has given them to do for our sake.

And then in the gospel, Jesus goes straight to the most difficult matter of all when it comes to money matters: debt. Debt—what we owe and what others owe us.

Now when we come into debt, that's a matter of misfortune. That's something that we know from the inside, the circumstance. It's not like we're deciding to get ourselves in a position that we can't get back out of easily, but a matter where we think we've got it handled, and then something comes along and throws us off balance. And so we find ourselves in a position where we've got a debt that we can't just pay off at the moment.

But then when it comes to other people, we see them behaving in ways that don't make sense to us. It's like, "Why are you doing that? If you just behaved a little more rationally, a little more reasonably, you wouldn't have gotten into this big trouble."

And basically, we don't care that much about why someone got into a debt. If the debt is something they owe me, just pay me what you owe already. Just pay me what you owe. Let's get this behind us.

But these debts that we are speaking of from the parable today—they're not the work of a moment. They're not a matter that came about in a day. We have on the one hand 100 dinarii. That's 100 days' wages—that's a pretty substantial sum for most of us. We don't just drop that in one place typically.

And 10,000 talents? Well, that's on another scale altogether. You know, do you have 10,000 years of your income saved up that you could just pay that debt back? I know I don't. And you don't get into a situation of having 10,000 years' worth of income that you're indebted just accidentally in a moment. That's something that takes some doing, some work to get to that point of accumulating that spectacular a debt.

With others, as we're going along, we tend to shrug our shoulders at the beginning stages of this. You know, just "okay, that's fine." But it's too much work to sort it out in a moment as it starts to accumulate, and we put it off and put it off. And you know, we feel like we're being a good person by not being difficult, by not getting to the bottom of the matter. "Okay, I'm being a good guy." And meanwhile, I'm getting more and more frustrated inside, more impatient, more angry, more resentful, until finally I've had it, and now it's time to grab you by the throat and say, "Pay me what you owe!" And I'm perfectly reasonable, perfectly justified in that moment. I've put up with all this time in the past, and now I just can't take it anymore. Perfectly reasonable, right?

And then for ourselves, meanwhile, we are often understanding in some part of ourselves that there's something not quite right, that this is not the way it should be. But we can't seem to quite figure out how to get it sorted, how to get back on the right track to a point where we're not going continuously further and further into the red, but can actually start to put things back together. Until we come to a point where we just can't handle it anymore. We wake up and it's not $100. It's not 100 days' pay. It's 10,000 talents, and we don't have one.

So these things—as I think you can begin to understand—we're talking as Jesus began with money. But I hope you can see that this goes way, way beyond actual material debts. And in fact, we can pretty much say that any uncontrolled material debt is a manifestation of other kinds of debt—of being foundationally out of balance in our lives. Things that are badly off-kilter, where we are not ordered correctly. We are not putting first things first and doing things in a healthy manner.

But we also should understand that this is above all about the very first thing: our relationship with our heavenly Father, and what that means for our relationship with one another. Because of course, we are all, every one of us, in the position of the man who owes the king 10,000 talents.

All of us, if we were held to account today, not one of us could stand in God's presence and be justified. We don't have it.

What the epistle and the gospel both are telling us is that what we have—our money, yes, that store of value—but then everything that is of value in our lives: what we own, what we use, our talents in the sense of our gifts, our abilities, our relationships, the time that we have, the attention and energy that we can give to anything, our life itself—every one of these things, and all of them and more, are not things that we gained all on our own. They are all, all of them, at the beginning and at the end and all the way, at every moment, a gift from our heavenly father, without whom we would be nothing. Nothing.

And of course we know the other part of the equation is that he asks us to use what we've been given well—to use it for a blessing, to use it in ways that are pleasing to God and that are life-giving, that bless us and others.

And instead, so very often we use them unwisely, unfruitfully, in ungodly ways, unloving ways, unrighteous ways. And so we begin with a substantial debt because there is no way we can pay God back for our very life. And then we add to it with all of our sins.

And above all, in how we treat other people, because we are expected to show mercy as our Father has shown us mercy—to not hold on to these accounts of debts that other people owe us, to not be constantly running through our memories a record of wrongs, of resentments, of the failures of others, but instead to realize that we have been shown such great grace that there is just simply no good—certainly nothing that is fitting for us as children of God—in keeping such accounts. And so we should tear them up and throw them in the fire, because that's what they're worth.

And instead, to realize this whole way of thinking—of imagining I'm being patient while I suffer with this person beside me who is doing wrong again the way that I told them they shouldn't, again—the whole way is completely beside us. It is a fantasy, a delusion, something that is harmful to you and me.

Because the truth is that God has given all things into our hands freely. He doesn't treat this all like a debt in that sense. He's not demanding that you somehow manage to measure up to this impossible gift—not in that way. He loves to give it to you. Whether you do anything good with it or not, he's always got more. He's not going to run out.

And what he is inviting you to see is that if he is continuously generous with you, then you won't run out either. You won't run out if you are acting generously like your generous heavenly Father.

That's in fact the way that we come into crisis, we come into that point of disaster: by hanging on so fiercely to what it is that we imagine is "mine."

And if we try it God's way, if we remember how immeasurably generous he is with his gifts, if we act with that kind of trust and confidence, if we pour out richly what has been given to us as a free gift, emptying ourselves out of love for others and thankfulness to the good gifts that come from heaven above, we will find that as we empty ourselves, now we are free to receive even greater gifts—ones that are ever more rich—so that we truly may draw near to our Father and find the place prepared for us in his heavenly kingdom.

Amen. Glory to Jesus Christ forever.