Connections&  
September 23 -- 25th Sunday of the Year

• The parable of the unscrupulous manager:                        No servant can serve two masters.  He will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other.  You cannot serve both God and mammon."      Luke 16:1-13
  

Every Christmas we receive them - those holiday letters from family and friends with the latest news from their households since last Christmas.  While many of us detest these Christmas letters, Kay Bessler Northcutt, a Disciples of Christ minister, confesses that she actually like them - but, as she writes in The Disciple (April 2000), something important is missing in those letters:
     "Products of our own raising in this American culture of acquisitiveness and achievement, we encourage and praise our children for what they accomplish... But every year I hope that this will be the year I open up one of those letters and the opening line will be:  'Merry Christmas!  Great news!  Our child is consistently KIND to people at home, church, birthday parties - AND at school!'
     "Imagine what would happen in this world if we assigned the same value to gentleness, self-control and compassion in our children as we give to their winning a piano competition, bringing home A's, or landing that place in the show choir.  What if we bragged about their kindness and generosity the same way we brag about their soccer trophies and report cards?
     "Our kids spend 99 percent of their waking hours being shaped by a society that tells them their value is determined by how they look, what they buy, and what they achieve.  The other one percent of the time, they're in church, where we reassure them of a God who loves them unconditionally.  In church, we tell them that how they look is already perfect - without the right label clothes or latest hairdo - because they are made in God's image.  Maybe those are the messages we can learn to reinforce at home."

CONNECTION:  In today's Gospel, Jesus asks, in the parable of the shrewd manager, why we are not as industrious or as dedicated to pursuing the lasting things of God as we are to the impermanent and far less important things of the world.  Our faith should challenge us to be as eager and as ingenious for the sake of God's reign, to be ready and willing to use our time and money to accomplish great things in terms of the Gospel as we are to secure our own security and happiness.  Christ calls us to use the cleverness, skill and ingenuity of the manager to build the kingdom of God in our time and place. ¦