The fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost

 The fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Part I) 

The evening before, Uncle Albert calls. He apologizes: he needs a ride to church. There’s something in it for me if I will take him, and I don’t have to come forward for the Eucharist - he can get there without my help. The lessons are, he tells me, as follows: Amos 8:4-7 and Psalm 113; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; and Luke 16:1-13 - in case I want to read ahead.

I don’t want to read ahead, but I do anyway - in my battered Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha that “Sam” Samuelson left behind brand new when he dropped out of school halfway through freshman year. It has his bookplate in it: a candle with a steady flame, Ex Libris above, his name below: Lemuel R. Samuelson.

     In Sam’s Bible, the Psalmist is praising God from the rising of the sun to its setting because He “raises the poor from the dust, and lifts the needy from the ash heap.” The Prophet is yelling at the rich because they’re keeping the Lord from doing that. The Apostle is urging prayers for kings. And in the Gospel, Jesus tells a parable that in itself makes a certain amount of sense; then he elaborates in a way that makes no sense at all.

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Picking up Uncle Albert is no simple matter these days. But that’s not to say that it’s onerous. It’s only a matter of getting him down the steps from his rooming house, steadying him as he gets into the car, pulling him out of the car, and getting him up the stairs into the church. And listening to him on the ride! He’s excited about the sermon he is certain our rector, the former Miss Virginia,* will preach on the Gospel lesson. 

     Particularly, what’s she going to say about Jesus’ saying that God could hardly entrust “true riches” to those that can’t manage their money? What does he mean by that, “managing their money,” if they’re supposed to despise it? For, he quotes, “You cannot serve both God and mammon.”

     “Mammon,” he starts in as I am trying to decide whether or not to run the light at the corner of Division and Crowder, so that I lose track of what he’s saying, but as we’re sliding through the intersection between yellow and red, there’s something about Milton, “the least elected Spirit that fell,” or something like that, “bent down,” something, something.**

     I nod, “Uh-huh. Uh-huh.”

Then, Susan chooses not to preach from the Gospel but from Timothy because (she says anyway) “kings and those in high places” need our prayers if we are going to live quietly and peaceably, able to search for the truth, which we shall surely find if we give ourselves to the mediator that gave himself as a ransom for us all.

     “What a bunch of pious nonsense!” Uncle Albert says. “I thought better of her.”

     I ask him if that means that he no longer does.

     “We can get to your place in time for the kick-off of the West Ham - Man United match,” he says, “if you don’t dawdle.”

     “Then,” he says, “I have a surprise for you.”

     And I say, “Yes. You said. I remember.”

09.24.19

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 * Our rector, Susan, the former Miss Virginia appears in these posts.

** The illustration by Louis Le Breton from Colin de Plancy’s Dictonnaire Infernal. (Click on the image to see the page.) The image is in the public domain.