25th Sunday, C 2007.

‘when can we buy up the poor for money, and the needy for a pair of sandals.’
We heard in the first reading.
This is the attitude of unscrupulous merchant or businessmen.
They were powerful in the time of the prophet Amos around 750 BC, and they are powerful today.
The poor have been exploited in every age, even in our own time.
Many of the goods we buy today have been grown or manufactured by very poor people who are being paid pennies for their labour.
They are being exploited because for most of them a little money is better than no money at all.
We the consumers help to uphold this unjust system.
In the Gospel story the dishonest steward used money to buy friends for the future.
Some rich people in the past, spent money on funding monasteries and convents in order to have religious pray for them.
Like the steward, they were buying friends for the future.
Jesus recommends that we give alms and thus use our money to buy friends for the future.
However, to do so is really settling for second best.
For the steward cheated his master and was fired.
He was not trustworthy. He was dishonest.

We are called to be honest and trustworthy in small things so that we may be trusted with ever greater things.
In a week’s time we have the feast of St. Therese of Lisieux.
She commended her ‘little way’, practicing charity, self-denial and alms-giving in the small way that is available to us but practicing it to a heroic degree.
I recommend her book to you: Story of a Soul.

St Paul recommends – in his letter to Timothy – that we always pray for our secular rulers ‘so that we may be able to live religious and reverent lives in peace and quiet.’
He talks about religious freedom.
We have religious freedom in this country and can be grateful for it. But in some parts of the world people suffer for their religion.
Many Christians in Iraq have been threatened, murdered or their homes have been destroyed.
Let us pray for peace in that country, for their leaders, that all the inhabitants may live in peace, tolerance and harmony.