There Are Boring Christian Lives, and It's a Problem
25th Sunday of the Year
The origins of the word ‘boring’ are mysterious. Some etymologists say that the word ‘boring’ follows from the world of manual labor in the 18th century. Three hundred years ago, if you wanted to make a hole in a piece of wood you would need to use a hand-turned drill. To drill a hole into a piece of wood is also to bore a hole into a piece of wood; we use the same expression today. You can imagine a person spending hours with a hand-turned drill, rotating and rotating and rotating the drill by hand—maybe for most of a day—until the work was completed. That kind of labor must have numbed the mind. By 1852, Charles Dickens was using the word ‘boring’ as we use it today, to describe someone or some kind of experience as tiresome and dull.
I want to say more about the word ‘boring.’ But first I want to make a clarification about our Gospel for today: Christ is not praising the deception of the steward; rather, Christ is praising the cleverness by which the steward pursues his own welfare. The steward has squandered his master’s property and the master knows it. The steward is told to give an account of his property management and that he will soon no longer be employed. And the steward knows that once unemployed he has few options to provide for himself. A life of manual labor or begging is ahead of him, and the steward rejects either possibility. The steward determines to find two debtors; one who owes the master oil and another who owes the master wheat. And the steward gets to work with his deception. For each debtor, the official record of the debt is altered. One hundred measures of oil are changed to fifty; one hundred kors of wheat are changed to eighty. The debtors now owe less than the original debt. The steward has saved these two debtors a significant amount of money and hopes that once unemployed these debtors will hire him in gratitude for altering the record of their debt.
And how does the master respond when he discovers the deception? The steward is praised for his prudence. What Christ means with the parable is that the steward tenaciously and with much practical wisdom pursues his best interest. What Christ condones is not the deception—not lying for the sake of our own good. Christ praises the attitude behind the deception; the kind of interior desire and disposition that leads the steward to passionately pursue what he determines is best for him. And the problem is that Christians sometimes lack that same kind of passion. To believe in Christ is to claim that we know what is in our best interest. Without Christ there is no hope of salvation, there is no visceral, tangible connection to God in this world. And salvation—a life giving relationship with Christ both now and for eternity—is absolutely in our best interest. And yet many who profess faith are not possessed of the kind of passionate desire that we see motivating the steward in today’s Gospel. Christ teaches that the children of this world are more prudent in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. There is something of a crisis for Christianity when our desire for Christ lacks the intensity that defines the passions of those who sin and reject God and want nothing to do with Christ.
The whole parable of the steward is given to us to provoke a crisis for the Christian. And with the word ‘crisis’ I mean something much closer to the original Greek: a separation, a judgment, a decision, a choice between what is right and what is wrong. The Christian is called to determine what—or who—will be the foundation of their lives. That kind of determination requires a choice between a life in service to the world or a life in service to Christ. 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. The authentic Christian—the Christian who chooses to establish Christ as the foundation for their life—is then expected to passionately pursue union with Christ always and in all things and in all ways. Those who reject Christ and live by the standards of the world viciously pursue what is in their best interest. The sinner, the atheist, the hedonist, those unaffiliated with religion and those who simply do not care about any kind of faith or religious tradition: those who serve the world do everything possible to eliminate the obstacles that prevent them from obtaining whatever is determined to be in their best interest. The Christian is called to live that same kind of life, eliminating the obstacles in life that separate us from Christ.
The problem is that too many Christians lack the passion and the desire to live as Christ commands in the Gospel. Many Christians refuse to make a choice; many Christians reject the crisis that Christ provokes; many Christians choose instead to hedge their bets. We invest in the life of the world, and we invest in the life of Christ. We invest in God, and we invest in mammon. We either cannot decide about what matters most to us, or we make a decision about what matters most to us but lack the resolve to wholeheartedly bind ourselves to the choice that we have made. Incapable of determining which master we will serve or incapable of allowing the choice we have made to determine the course of our lives, we decide to play it safe. We serve God, and we serve mammon. We invest in the life of the world, and we invest in the life of Christ. We hedge our bets.
There is a word for that kind of Christian life: boring. A few years ago, I was speaking with two friends in seminary and told them that perhaps the greatest tragedy of our age is that Christianity is perceived as boring—dull, tiresome—by so many in the world. And the cause of the tragedy can only be that so many Christians hedge their bets; too many Christians refuse to make a choice or lack the resolve to live by the choice that they have made; the power of the Gospel does not resonate throughout the Christian life as it should. We live lives in the Church today that do not capture the attention of the world through the revelatory power that is given to us through relationship with Christ. St. Paul teaches us in our second reading today that an all-knowing, all-powerful God desires our salvation. In other places St. Paul teaches us that through baptism the Christian dies and rises with Christ; that through the celebration of the sacraments the boundary walls of time and space are broken down and the eternal sacrifice of Christ becomes manifest in our presence; that through the life of Christ the shattered design of the cosmos is restored to its original glory; that the Christian belongs to the body of Christ in such a way that his or her life—no matter its privilege or status or success or influence—becomes an expression of divinity in a world still marked by sin and death. The Christian life is the great equalizing force in history that fashions the raw material of human existence into an act of God’s self-revelation. There is nothing boring—tiresome, dull—about the Christian life. But there are boring Christian lives.
The steward of the parable we hear today lies and cheats and steals; he fails to manage the property of his master well. There is no cause to praise the viciousness of the steward. But the motivating force that animates the life of the steward—the zeal with which he pursues what is in his best interest—there is something deserving admiration. The steward has made his choice regarding how to live, and he wholeheartedly lives his life by the choice that he has made. The steward knows exactly which master he serves, and what that kind of service means for his life. We are called to make a choice for Christ, to serve a single master, and to live our lives wholeheartedly by the choice that we have made. Anything less than that kind of life is a reduction of the Christian mystery to a half-measure; to a way of life that cannot inspire others or capture their attention. There is nothing boring about the Christian life. But there are boring Christian lives.
Homily preached September 17th-18th at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.