Readings, Exodus 17:8-13 and Isaiah 65:17-25
Image,  John Everett Millais, Victory, O Lord! (detail), 1871
 
The story we heard from Exodus follows shortly after the miraculous crossing of the Red Sea. The people, recently freed, are beginning what they hope will be a short pilgrimage through the wilderness on the way to the mountain of God and then the promised land. Cracks, though, are already showing. Despite having witnessed the plagues in Egypt, and the parting and crashing of the sea, the people have begun to grumble: Is the Lord among us or not?
 
Thankfully for them, the Lord is among them, and the Lord provides. Bread and quails have fallen from heaven, water has been struck from a rock. The people are being fed from the hand of God; their daily necessities provided by the one who has promised to be theirs.
 
Then Amalek came and fought with Israel. To ensure that beleaguered and belittled Israel might survive, Moses stands atop the hill with the staff of God in hand – the very staff by which he bested Pharaoh, the staff which touched the sea and made it part, touched the rock and drew water. The staff given to Moses as a sign that God is with him and the people, about to reach out with a mighty hand to free them. This Moses shall hold aloft, so that once again God will act to secure the fledgling nation.
 
But here the story takes a fascinating turn. Because essential to this story of God’s extraordinary power, is the very ordinariness of human weakness. Mixed in with the seemingly supernatural ability of this gesture is the question of human limit. We simply cannot keep our hands above our head all day. Moses’ aged body will not allow it… it doesn’t matter how profound the moment, the human body is a vulnerable one.
 
Moses’ hands grew weary; so they took a stone and put it under him, and he sat on it. Aaron and Hur held up his hands, one on one side, and the other on the other side; so his hands were steady until the sun set.
 
I love this image, the failing Moses, exhausted and aching, propped up by a rock, arms held in place by those in his trust. It’s one of those beautifully paradoxical Bible stories. One of those stories which defy the heroic, the epic, and instead casts a picture of vulnerability, limit, weakness, and care.
 
Because there’s a more glorious way to tell this story. Where Moses, the intrepid, singular hero, stands alone aloft the mountain, and, with steely grit and rippling muscles seals the fate of the war. Channelling the very strength of his God, he triumphs with maybe just a few dramatic beads of sweat crossing his handsome brow.
 
Instead, we have another addition to the strange and uncharacterizable picture of Moses, of biblical heroism, and of godly leadership. For Moses, we know already from Exodus is a paradoxical figure – the baby saved from death who grew up in a palace, but also the murderer who was forced into decades of hiding. The man called forth by the blazing bush, but also the one whose doubt in his own speaking abilities was so entrenched that God had to relent and let him take Aaron to do the talking. The one who stood arms aloft and parted the Red Sea to bring his people to freedom, is now here requiring his own arms to be held in place to secure their safety. In the very next chapter this will continue. Moses’ father-in-law comes to visit and watches how Moses is stuck all day solving every petty squabble and has to tell Moses to teach the people to solve their own problems, and appoint judges to share the burden: What you are doing is not good. You will surely wear yourself out, both you and these people with you. For the task is too heavy for you; you cannot do it alone.      
 
The Torah proclaims Moses as a prophet without rival: Never since, the closing words of Deuteronomy ring out, has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face. He was unequalled for all the signs and wonders that the Lord sent him to perform. But what today’s story teaches us, alongside all those nifty paradoxes, is that even a man such as Moses has limits, limits which require not only the goodness of God, but the care of community. Moses’ health, his thriving, his survival resembles our own in its contingency. Moses is great, and he is vulnerable and dependent.
 
This is a vital message on a day such as today where we are thinking about men’s health and care, and in the coming weeks as we enter the 16 Days Against Gender Based Violence. The crisis of gender-based violence, the so-called epidemic of male loneliness, the increasing and concerning radicalisation of young men, the lack of dialogue about men’s health physical and mental, so much of this stems from rigid gendered expectations and stereotypes. Stems, that is, from expectations of what it means to be a man, to be masculine. Expectations that are rigid, restrictive, and ultimately destructive (not only for the self, but for others). Sadly, these kind of rigid expectations and aspirations take root in the church as well; where a kind of godly masculinity is espoused, touting the supremacy of men as leaders who are strong and controlled (and perhaps controlling). And yet, as with Moses, time and again the Bible defies a kind of heroic masculinity that is self-sufficient, strong, and stoic, invulnerable and individualist. In its place is the valorisation of service, the requiring of humility, the glorifying of weakness, the celebration of compassion, the commending of vulnerability, and the recognition of our reliance not only on God, but others. To be human, and in particular to be human within the church is to be given to others in mutual dependence and care, to be both giver and receiver of grace and gifts, to be a helpmeet to one another and the earth.    
 
And we needn’t solely glean this lesson from the figure of Moses, or other human leaders in Scripture. Because we find the same example in Christ, the exemplar of the human. Limit and vulnerability mark the life of Jesus. Jesus is entrusted to the care of others. Jesus’ body grows weary, and others will come along (whether it be to anoint his head or carry his cross) to care for and sustain him. Indeed, one of the great, dismaying failures that Jesus experiences is when he is facing an approaching battle and asks his friends to stay awake and pray with him, but – unlike Aaron and Hur – they fail, and sleep through his agony.
 
Jesus’ heroics, such as they are, also fit more in the mode of Moses’. His wonders are hardly herculean, but are acts of healing, feeding, compassion, stillness and peace. For God’s vision of flourishing, of future shalom and abundance – as we heard in today’s reading from Isaiah – is communal. In the new creation, far from being enforced, the so-called natural divisions and boundaries fade away, as wolf and lamb feed together. The picture of heavenly glory and peaceful new creation is not one where we become more self-sufficient, but more harmoniously intertwined with one another, creation, and God.  
 
The reminder then, whenever we start to think about health and flourishing, is to remember that in the Christian picture of the world, we are never called to be self-sufficient, never asked for individual heroics, never taught to hide or shun vulnerability. We are never asked to go it alone. We are made a body with one another, called to fold one another to our hearts, and hold each other up – weep with those who weep, rejoice with those who rejoice. Even when Moses possessed the staff of God, this incredible symbol of divine power - this is shown to be too heavy to hold on his own. Here on the battle field, as with the broader governing of Israel, his task will only be accomplished if it is shared. His greatness is contingent on hearing the words of wisdom: you cannot do it alone. Like Moses, all of us have God, an ever-present help in times of trouble, but we need to also have each other, particularly if we are to live into the vision of God’s flourishing kingdom where we shall know full and fruitful lives in community before God.

Readings, Luke 16:1-13
Image, Marinus van Reymerswaele, Parable of the shrewd manager (1490)
 
One of the great things about this parable, before even get to anything specific it might be teaching, is that it reminds us that parables can be strange. That parables can trouble our attempts to smooth out their rough edges, and disrupt our desires to map them on to easy, consistent, and predictable lessons (or, we might say, disrupting our assumptions of who is who in the zoo of a parable). We are so familiar with Christ’s parables – or at least the greatest hits like the lost sheep and coin we heard last week, that we can sometimes lose the ability to be surprised by them. But this parable is surprising.
 
To recap it… As was common practice, large landowners didn’t tend to spend a lot of time on their property and would thus employ a manager to handle the logistics and finances. In this instance, the manager has been squandering the property and stands to be fired. The manager doesn’t dispute the charge, but knows there aren’t other jobs he’d be able or willing to do. So he devises a plan, he will not try and win back the esteem of the rich landowner, he will try to win the esteem of tenants in the landowner’s debt. He calls together those who own money and has them write down their debts, take the bill of 100 and make it 50, take the bill of 100 and make it 80. The plan being that in reducing the debt, the people will be grateful and offer him lodgings when he is fired. Now the practice of reducing the debt in order to get it paid was common then as it is now, it is better to have some money and keep the people around than evict, get nothing and lose future income as well. Which means the landowner commended the manager’s shrewd action (though, we notice, does not decide to keep him on).
 
Slowing it down only amplifies the feeling that this is a strange story for Jesus to tell. Who are we meant to identify with, whose actions exemplify the kingdom, who stands in for God?
 
All this gets more complicated when Jesus offers this commentary: the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes. Now we have more questions, why is it that the children of the light are less shrewd? Is this a bad thing? Using dishonest wealth to make friends seems strange – and what are we classifying as dishonest wealth? And then the reason we are told to make friends is odd: that they may welcome us into eternal homes… what are eternal homes, and how are these people able to offer such welcome?
 
Jesus continues: ‘Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. Ok, that’s not too bad, seems like a straightforward moral axiom – having lots or little doesn’t really change the character of our relation to money. If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? Does it not feel strange that faithfulness with dishonest wealth is the path to being trusted with true riches? It seems a peculiar barometer for our capacity to handle something eternal – could all earthly wealth be dishonest?  And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.’ We get to this last pronouncement and almost breathe a sigh of relief – not because this command isn’t difficult or terrifying, but at least it feels adamantly straightforward.
 
So what is going on? What are we to make of all of this?
 
We’re in a section of Luke’s gospel where Jesus is speaking a lot about money, wealth, and the strange inversions of the kingdom of God. He has already told his disciples they must give up all their possessions if they are to follow him. He has told parables of the wedding banquet, of lost sheep and coins, and a son who squandered the wealth of his father’s inheritance only to be thrown a lavish party. And Jesus will go on to tell the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, and the agony of flames awaiting those who refuse to use their wealth to ease the sufferings of the poor. This strange parable takes its place in this nexus of stories, and as such we might begin to try and parse some lessons for Christian living.
 
We might begin by comparing the manager to the rich man of another parable, who realising that his storehouses were simply too small to house all his wealth, tore them down and built larger ones only for his life to be demanded from him that night. Wealth cannot be taken with you – and like the rich man who ignores Lazarus at his gates – it can end up creating a chasm between us and our neighbour, between us and God. The manager, on the other hand, recognises that all that he has can (and will) be gone. So he uses what he has while he has time. He doesn’t not squirrel and store, but uses his authority to ease the debt of those around him and in so doing make friends and neighbours who will welcome him in his hour of need. The manager, unlike so many other figures in the surrounding parables, is commended for using what he has (in the knowledge that he will not always have it) to relieve burdens, build trust, make neighbours, and receive welcome. What might it mean for us, who wish to be trusted with eternal riches, to do the same?
 
Expanding this point, if we can demonstrate faithfulness in our shrewd use dishonest wealth to make friends and receive welcome, then we come show we can be trusted with more important things. For in using dishonest wealth to ease the burdens of the poor, to create community and neighbourliness, to receive the welcome of those around us, we demonstrate that we do not serve money. We demonstrate our understanding of the finiteness of money, which even the finest and largest storehouses cannot secure from the forces of death. We cannot, Jesus remarks, serve God and wealth, but we can use wealth to serve God by using it to serve others.
 
But using wealth to serve God requires us to recognise a few things. The first is that there is something of a dishonest character to wealth – that is to say the kind of exorbitant wealth acquired by the landowner in this parable cannot really come to be without systems of inequality, injustice, and exploitation. Little wonder then does Jesus say that to devote oneself to wealth, to love wealth, is to despise God, for God is a God of justice, liberation, and dignity. And so if we find ourselves with access to dishonest wealth, do not serve it, but shrewdly use it to make friends (now, importantly, from the parable, the kind of making friends we are talking about are the poor, who the manager seeks to release from debt – in so doing he keeps with the mission of Jesus himself; as announced in Luke 4). There is something of Jesus’ instruction to his disciples that we are to be innocent as doves and wise as serpents – we must not make ourselves ignorant to either the character of wealth, nor the way it can be used to serve and bless others. And finally, the manager makes an important connection – one which is all too rare in many an age – despite having a position of some authority and importance, he is much closer to the tenants working the land the owner of the land, much closer to those in debt than to the one they are in debt to. The manager recognises this, and in so doing recognises that his future wellbeing is found in friendships and trust with the debtors rather than the landowner, the many rather than the one. This is an important lesson for us both on a material reality (as our work of justice, equality, and mercy will be bolstered by a recognition that by and large we are closer to our unhoused neighbour, or our neighbour who is a climate refugee, than the increasingly small top % whose storehouses contain the vast majority of worldly wealth) and it is also important as a spiritual reality (as we are all those who are taught by Christ to pray for the forgiveness of our debts, as we pray to be those who forgive our debtors – we are all those who rely on the largess of Christ’s grace to welcome us into the eternal household of God).
 
But even as we glean these possibilities for Christian living, we come back to the beginning and let the parable stay strange. In its strangeness we are reminded again, that the story and movement into which we are called is something of a strange one. For we seek, against the wisdom of the world, to devote ourselves to God, revealed most dramatically in the folly of the cross of Christ, as the loving master of our lives.

Readings, Psalm 71 and Luke 13:10-17
Image,  Thomas Schaidhauf, Christ Heals the Crooked Woman (c. 1780-1800)
 
Some months ago, members of the congregation shared about songs or hymns which shape and sustain their faith, songs from which they draw comfort, meaning, and hope. I’m sure many of us have these kinds of songs, or if not songs then passages of scripture, which are part of the story, part of the pastiche which leads us here to worship. That is to say, that we have, deep in our heart, songs and stories which have taught us something about God, and having come to believe this thing about God, we come to this place where we worship and learn about God together. And this, I contend, is no different for the woman who comes to the Synagogue in today’s gospel reading, who I want to suggest, with no evidence other than to know it is possible, is led to the synagogue because of Psalm 71. We heard the psalm read, but it might be good to also hear it sung. (Hymn 40 The Lord is near to all who call)
 
Let us imagine this woman on her way to the Synagogue, likely not an easy task – neither physically, as she has been suffering from this crippling spirit for eighteen years, nor perhaps spiritually or emotionally. And yet she makes her way to the synagogue with these words of the psalm on her lips:
For you, O Lord, are my hope,
   my trust, O Lord, from my youth.
Upon you I have leaned from my birth      
We can believe she would know something about leaning on another to rest, to steady, to persist. It would perhaps serve as a fecund image for her relationship with God, her reliance on God’s grace and promise. In hope and trust she moves toward the household of God.
 
But as she does, she starts, perhaps to get some of the familiar pangs of anxiety, and gives them voice in these verses:
I have been like a portent to many,
   but you are my strong refuge.
We know that at times people suffering from prolonged maladies, ailments, or disabilities could be seen as portents; signs of sinfulness, wickedness, curses, or calamity. Perhaps this had been suggested to her in the past as a reason for her prolonged suffering. Perhaps she has been made to feel less than holy, less than welcome. It might not have always been this way, but perhaps, over time, she came to experience derision or disregard. And perhaps when the place became less of a refuge, the feeling of God as refuge took on all the more resonance. Or perhaps even if she experienced nothing but understanding and compassion from her community, she may nonetheless suffered under the lowering of expectations, of the quiet dismissal of her capacity that can afflict many in our communities who are seen, either because of disability or age, as unexpected to contribute. And in the face of the good - though patronising – will of others, she filled her heart and mouth with the plea:
Do not cast me off in the time of old age;
   do not forsake me when my strength is spent.
 
And at this point she appears in the synagogue and in our story, and at this moment, and the yearning of the psalm infuses once more with her own,
O God, do not be far from me;
   O my God, make haste to help me!
Little does she know just how near God is to her this day, little does she know that help is here. Emmanuel, God with us, Jesus, the Word made flesh, is teaching in this very synagogue this very day. And he sees her. Quite unable to stand up, but nonetheless here, and Jesus sees her and calls over to her. This whole time the words of God swim in her mind and cascade off her lips, and now the word of God calls back, Woman, you are set free from your ailment. The God of her refuge and hope, who she pleaded to be near to her, is here with her. Laying his hands upon her, she immediately stood up straight and began praising God, perhaps, drawing once more on the words of this psalm:
My lips will shout for joy
   when I sing praises to you;
   my soul also, which you have rescued.
All day long my tongue will talk of your righteous help
 
And yet, in the midst of this joy, in the wake of this wonder, in the afterglow of this glory, the leader of the synagogue, [was] indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath. Talk about letting the air out of the balloon. There’s an interesting little detail here, the leader of the synagogue is noted to have kept saying to the crowd his complaint. Kept saying, paints the picture of a kind of glum persistence, perpetually interrupting what is undoubtedly a moment of revelry. We might imagine him going from group to group trying out his little line, or looking for quieter moments to interject, getting louder and louder, incessant in his insistence that this blessing is a crisis.
 
I wonder what, in this moment of praise and joy, the woman feels as she hears this persistent complaint. Well (perhaps surprising no one at this point) there’s something in the psalm which might have come to her mind:
Let my accusers be put to shame and consumed;
   let those who seek to hurt me
   be covered with scorn and disgrace.
It turns out this is the very thing that happens. For following Jesus’ response to the leader of the Synagogue, Luke reports, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing. Rejoicing, perhaps following the prompting of the woman, with the words of the psalm:
My mouth will tell of your righteous acts,
   of your deeds of salvation all day long,
   though their number is past my knowledge.
I will come praising the mighty deeds of the Lord God,
   I will praise your righteousness, yours alone.
 
As I said at the beginning, I have no evidence for the significance of this psalm to this woman other than to know it is possible. But if not this psalm it could well be another, or perhaps some word of the prophets, or story from scripture where God delivered people from suffering. But the point, in the end, is not simply to infuse this story with backstory, not simply to connect petition with psychology. Rather it is to commend the sustaining strength that can come from weaving into our life the words of Scripture. The hope we can find in tucking our life into the passages of God’s word. The meaning we can make when we can bring to mind God’s promises or the prayers of God’s people, in our own moments of need. The Basis of Union, our movement’s founding document, “lays upon its members the serious duty of reading the Scriptures” because in the scriptures we, like the woman coming to the synagogue, find in its pages the songs, prayers, stories, and promises of God which can help lead us to this place, to this people, where we might once more hear the call of Christ which raises us up, and sparks great rejoicing for all the wonderful things Christ is doing.