Episode 8
· 18:20
Well, good morning, church. I do wanna start with a confession of failure. I spent yesterday at, the thrift stores in, Downtown Ventura looking for a pair of red or green Converse shoes that would fit both Rose and I because we literally wanna walk in the footsteps of father Bill, I failed. I think he bought them all out. Well, today's gospel is what I call the story of the defective manager.
Ched Meyers:And as Bill alluded to, this has been the terrain of confusing and confused interpretations in our churches, which I've tried to untangle in, my recent book, Healing Affluenza, Resisting Plutocracy, Luke's Jesus and Sabbath economics. This is one of the featured texts in there and by the way, we'll be having a book party and sale next week during coffee hour in Fisher Hall where today's co preacher Rose will also be selling her amazing pottery with proceeds from both going to the eight zero five UndocuFund. We hope that you'll join us. Most of you missed an amazing conversation today in the third session of the creation season of creation series in which Renee and Randy and Rose and Andrew and Cody surveyed the amazing steps that this parish has taken since the last season of creation. It was a great conversation.
Ched Meyers:Thank you all for contributing to that. Anyway, back to the gospel. This story is both parable and real world object lesson about how to stay human and to do the right thing despite the fact that we are all caught in an unjust economic system. We're deeply conflicted between what Jesus calls in the concluding pronouncement of this parable, the economies of god and mammon. Mammon being an ancient Aramaic word meaning that in which we trust.
Ched Meyers:In a concise paraphrase of Jesus' unequivocal challenge, farmer theologian Wendell Berry writes, if we do not serve what coheres and endures, we serve what disintegrates and destroys. So Jesus spends a story about a middle manager who is ensconced, however precariously, in a plutocrats mammon oriented oikonomia. Right? The Greek word from which we get our economy. And I invite you to follow the the gospel narrative in your as it's printed in your bulletin.
Ched Meyers:Don't don't don't send him to e to voice mail. So the man is accused of spreading the rich man's resources around, and he's about to get sacked. The rest of the tale therefore focuses on this underling's strategy to rather than backing away as so many people are under the current administration, he decides to intensify his unauthorized wealth redistribution, which he does through offering a wildcat discount on debt to poor farmers beholden to his boss. In the hopes that in turn they will then welcome him into their homes as part of the older traditional economy of mutual aid. In a clarifying epilogue, the plutocrat begrudgingly acknowledges that this defector has acted in his self interest, which he recognizes because that is his ethos as a rich person, only do what's good for me.
Ched Meyers:But Jesus immediately reframes the man's actions, which he characterizes as the art of building community by monkey wrenching unjust mammon. Verse eight. Jesus goes on to insist that the rich man's economy will ultimately fail while those who resisted it will be received inter into eternal tents. An allusion to the older economic ways of his ancestors' wilderness Israel. The moral of the story for children of light is that acts of redistributing unjust mammon are demonstrations of faithfulness to God's oikonomia, verses 10 to 12.
Ched Meyers:In the case of this object lesson, hard pressed peasants get a measure of relief, and the defector animates communal solidarity so he'll have a place to land when he gets kicked out of the master's economy. His jubilary gesture thus helps rebuild the very social relations that the master routinely plunders in his thirst for profit. Admittedly, the defectors initiative only makes a tiny dent in this overall toxic system, but it matters, says Jesus. So, this parable, I think, speaks very poignantly to the many contradictions and challenges faced by educated and employed middle class people like all of us. As we struggle today with a mammon system that materially benefits and privileges us even as it also alienates us, perpetuates inhumane disparities, and ruins the environment.
Ched Meyers:So this morning, Rose and I want to suggest an analogy between this improvisational manager and our own modest but meaningful efforts to defect from a carbon economy that frankly is backing our history into a dead end. After all, the richest 10% of the world's population, right, all of us, generates half of all global carbon emissions. Economic disparity thus breeds ecological disparity the double sin of taking way more of creation's gifts than our share. So we are halfway through our ecumenical season of creation, and it's the fall equinox. Mhmm.
Rose Berger:A time to regain our balance. And it's Sunday. No. I mean, it's Sunday. Sunday is a recently curated global day of action to help strengthen and accelerate the ongoing clean energy revolution.
Ched Meyers:Today, thousands of events around the globe are showcasing solar installations, electric homes, vehicles running on clean power, and that includes your own beloved Saint A's by the banks of the mighty Arbolada because we just blessed our solar panels.
Ched Meyers:The great fourteenth
Ched Meyers:century person poet and Sufi mystic Hafiz left us perhaps the most succinct and poignant characterization of God's economy of grace as reflected in creation. Even after all this time, he wrote, the sun never says to the earth, you owe me. Look what happens with a love like that. It lights up the whole sky. What a gorgeous recognition.
Ched Meyers:Indeed, the sun offers its nurturing energy indiscriminately. As Jesus reminded us, it rises on the evil and the good alike. And we who receive it incur no debt. And yet, we have abandoned that cosmology of equity and gift and are now deeply captive to a carbon economy of extraction and profiteering. This economy continues to intensify indebtedness, both economic and ecological, depletion of resources on the extractive side and ozone on the consumptive side, and disparities, both social and environmental.
Ched Meyers:Nevertheless, like the improvisational manager, there are meaningful ways that we who are like him simultaneously privileged in and captive to the carbon system can resist it. And that we can reimagine economics embracing the divine economy articulated by Hafiz and Jesus. Under climate ultimatum friends, it is imperative that we take such small steps. Let's think of them as local experiments in a discipleship of defection. And to say more about that discipleship and what this parish has done to disentangle ourselves a little bit from the carbon mammon system is your own beloved Rose Marie Berger.
Rose Berger:Thank you, Ched. So I wanna talk a little bit about us here. Sometime in the early part of the 2020, we humans, not just humans here at Saint Andrews, but we humans around the world crossed that invisible line where the cost of producing energy from the sun dropped below the cost of fossil fuels. That's a big step. It's a big step.
Rose Berger:Beginning in the middle of 2023, we entered the really steep part of this growth curve that could redefine our future, crossing that other invisible line. This one marking the installation of a gigawatt's worth of solar panels on the planet every day. Every day, we are removing the equivalent of one coal fired plant or one nuclear reactor. These are not your your own or your parents' solar panels. We are moving as a as a human community and as a community here into a new era.
Rose Berger:In April 2025, the fossil fuel fossil fuel was producing less than half of of the electricity in The United States for the first time ever.
Rose Berger:Also in April, California was using 44 less natural gas to make less electricity than it had the two years prior. And on more day days than not, California is now running on a 100% renewable energy. You all have been part of that. You all have invested either personally, if you could, or us together as a community through your long perseverance in helping Saint Andrews become part of that renewable process. So our panels went up and into operation about in January.
Rose Berger:And we know that as Christians, we have lived for too long as the beneficiaries of dishonest wealth because our carbon produced economic system is dishonest. In this case, we might call it dishonest energy. And our captivity to a fossil fuel century that many of us grew up on as the air that we breathe, we now recognize has trampled on the needy, as Amos said, and brought ruin to both the poor and the land. So this is a day for celebration. When we celebrate our new solar energy system here at Saint Andrews, we are experiencing that sense of liberation of having taken one small step out of Faroe's carbon economy.
Rose Berger:We celebrate our solar panels. We celebrate the batteries. We celebrate the energy resilience hub that as as farmer theologian Clarence Jordan used to say, we are making Saint Andrews a demonstration plot for the kingdom.
Rose Berger:And we celebrate this step no matter how small because we are taking a step away from fossil fuel dependence. We remember Wayne and Deb Pendry, our solar installers, for their long commitment to using renewable energy and helping others learn. We celebrate that our panels were made in The USA under good labor practices and continue to build toward a just economy with living wages. We celebrate the federal policies, however tenuous they may be at this point, that have made it increasingly affordable for all of us to literally point a sheet of glass at the sun and watch God's miracle of the conversion of photons into electricity and the work for democratic polities that allows us to meet the needs of our planet and our watershed as well as our own needs. Solar panels are part of the great rest of the earth, part of a multigenerational cycle of Sabbath, where we give the earth a chance to take a breath.
Rose Berger:Every time we come into this sanctuary, we recall that this small step with our solar panels is rooted in a much, much longer story. So here are a couple of our reminders. Over here on the what I learned is the Old Testament side of the church. New Testament side of church over there. Old Testament side of the church is over here.
Rose Berger:So this first window behind where Eric and others are sitting, that's the Genesis window. It's a faceted glass piece of art. The glass came from Portland. The art and the installation was done by Judson Studios in Highland Park. It's made of glass that fused earth as well as sand, locally purchased, locally mined from here in Southern California.
Rose Berger:And I just wanna read you what the artist, Walter Judson, wrote about his conception for this window. And this is the letter that he sent to the Vestry in 1975. The first window depicts creation in the book of Genesis, he said. The hand of God forms the round earth. A galaxy spins beside the hand.
Rose Berger:The sun behind the galaxy bursts out with life energy. The crescent moon and Saturn complete the picture. The rainbow coming from the sun above the galaxy in hand represents the Lord's covenant with Noah. The streams of stars represent the covenant God made with Abraham and Sarah when he said, your seeds will be greater in number than the stars of heaven. End of the quote.
Rose Berger:So we know that energy cannot be trans be destroyed. It can only be transferred. The Congregation of Saint Andrews is moving deeper into a relationship with the watershed that holds us. A relationship that's tied like an umbilical cord to the sun. So we can learn that solar power is not to be hoarded, but transferred.
Rose Berger:We have a few batteries. They hold a little bit for a day or two, but primarily, our solar power is like manna in the wilderness. We use what we need for a day or two, and we share the rest. And we try to make that our daily practice in life, not just in our solar system. This community's long commitment to deepening kinship with creation is evident around us and within us.
Rose Berger:The solar panels and the batteries are just one small seed of God's life giving energy in the world. One more concrete way we try to live out our discipleship to Jesus. If we were to put a plaque up for the solar panels, maybe we would even draw from today's song. From the rising of the sun to its going down, let the name of the Lord be praised. So when you see our panels, praise the Lord.
Rose Berger:Can the church say amen? Amen. Amen.
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