The Currency of Compassion

This sermon was given by The Rev. Michael Spencer at Trinity Cathedral in Portland on Sept. 21, 2025. To listen to a recording of this sermon, click here.

Prayer:
Lord, take our eyes and see through them,
Take our lips and speak through them,
Take our hands and work through them,
Take our hearts and set them on fire.

When I was younger, I loved the stories about Robin Hood. The legendary hero of Sherwood Forest who, together with his band of merry men, spent time stealing from the rich, giving to the poor, and turning unjust systems upside down. His story appeals to our longing for fairness, for justice, for a world made right.

Today’s gospel gives us a story that echoes Robin Hood. Jesus tells us about a dishonest steward who, after squandering the wealth of his boss, and getting caught, decides to shrewdly endear himself to others. He slashes debts, cuts what they owe, and redistributes wealth: not out of genuine kindness, but to indebt them to him, so that when he loses his job, he’ll have friends who owe him. By all accounts, this man is dishonest, manipulative, and self-serving. And yet, to our shock, his boss praises him. And then, even more shocking, Jesus commends his example. What is going on here?

Jesus is not telling us to engage in corruption. Rather, he is lifting up the steward’s willingness to step outside the normal order of things, to disrupt the corrupt system, and in doing so, to loosen the chains of exploitation. Like Robin Hood, the steward undermines an unjust order. That is the heart of the gospel message we have heard all summer as we have been moving through passages from Luke: in the realm of God, the tools of oppression are stripped of their power. In God’s Kingdom, debts are forgiven. The poor are lifted up. The oppressed are set free. In God’s Kingdom, the world is turned upside down, and mercy, not money, becomes the true currency.

So, when Jesus praises the steward’s shrewdness, he is not endorsing dishonesty. He is calling us to a holy cleverness. He is inviting us to resist the forces that enslave, inviting us to become dangerous mystics and spiritual rebels, inviting us to imagine what life might look like when love takes the place of greed. He is calling us, in the words of the late Representative John Lewis, to get into “good trouble.”

The sociologist Émile Durkheim described the human person as homo duplex: living life on two levels. On the first level, the profane, we dwell in the ordinary: securing comfort, feeding ego, protecting ourselves. But on the second level, the sacred, we transcend our self-interest. We live for something greater. We join with others to build justice, to extend compassion, to serve God’s larger purposes.

Most of us, if we’re honest, spend much of our lives on the ordinary level: consumed with earthly things, weighed down by worry. The collect for today speaks to that: “O God, let us not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure.”

There is no shortage of earthly things about which to be anxious. We see it on the world stage: economic instability, war in Ukraine, unrest in the Middle East, the growing impact of climate change, deep polarization, denials of truth, widening inequality, ongoing racial reckoning. There are also the personal anxieties we each carry: illness, strained relationships, aging parents, worries for our children, concern for the future. The list gets long, the burdens are real, and they weigh heavily. But the gospel calls us not to live chained to these anxieties, but to look higher, to lift up and fix our eyes on what endures.

When you look through the lens of the gospel, what does endure? Not wealth. Not power. Not the bright shiny things that easily distract us. Those belong to the realm of the profane, the ordinary. However, this parable is not about demonizing wealth, that reading is too simplistic and easy and feeds into polarized thinking. Rather, when wealth is placed in God’s service, when it is used as a tool of compassion – to lift burdens, to heal wounds, to bless others – then it becomes a holy instrument, not an idol. The bottom line of the gospel is not the accumulation of wealth. The bottom line of the gospel is the spreading of compassion. Compassion over currency. Our currency is compassion.

Compassion is what endures. Compassion builds the Kingdom. Compassion is the currency of the gospel. And in his own flaws, even the dishonest steward glimpsed that truth in a Robin-Hood sort of way. By loosening debts, he spread a measure of mercy. Shocking to us perhaps, but in reality, God uses the imperfect and the broken, God uses the slightly tweaked and the wonderfully odd stumbling our way through the ordinariness of life, and maybe sometimes touching the sacred. God uses the unlikely heroes who become unexpected saints. And here’s where one of my favorite lines from the singer Leonard Cohen, sums it all up: 

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forger your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

If we are honest with ourselves, we are all a little cracked. Our world is a little cracked. And if we look at the gospel, that’s how God’s light gets in. Just like it got in across the cracks of history: through the cracks of the people’s slavery in Egypt, through the cracks of persecution, through the cracks of genocide and war, through the cracks of oppression in this country and the long fight for civil rights, through the cracks that appear now. Jesus’ own life is cracked open on the cross, and then, then, through the fractured prism of that cross, shines the resurrection rainbow light illuminating everyone as children of God across the multi-colored spectrum of our humanity. The sacred is found in the ordinary, redeeming it from within. In the gospel, grace comes through even in the shrewd self-serving actions of a cracked dishonest steward. And if God can use such a compromised figure to reveal a glimpse of divine mercy, how much more can God work through all of us?

“Help us, O God, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure.” St. Paul reminds us of the enduring things: Faith. Hope. Love. And the greatest of these is Love.

As we go back into a world full of earthly anxieties, global and personal, ordinary and overwhelming, we can remember what endures. Get into good trouble. Hold fast to love. Love that lifts our eyes, steadies our steps, and helps us to move forward toward the horizon of our hopes – one day at a time, cracked as we are, letting the light get in. Amen