This week the eyes of our nation have been focused on the financial crisis threatening our economy. The dark pall of economic collapse has loomed over the news and coffee shop conversations this week, with economists, financiers, politicians, men and women on the street offering explanations of how we got into to this mess and what will get us out. I confess that I was never really understood economics when I took it in college—(I thought the Econ and Stat profs should come to class wearing pointy hats and carrying wands)-- but I have found some of the explanations of sub-prime mortgages, interest rates, and the like a little helpful. But the most accurate naming of the root of this mess came not from economists and politicians, but from The Rev. Jim Wallis, the Evangelical prophet and political activist and editor of Sojourners magazine. The cause of this, says Jim, is greed.

            Greed, of course, is one of the seven deadly sins. It is a sin that destroys the life of grace. Greed is a sin of excess, and excess expressed through the out of control desire to acquire more and more and more material wealth. Greed rejects eternal things (like truth, love, justice, God) in favor of material and earthly things (like money, gold, cars, power, penthouses). Its motto is “The one with the most toys when he dies wins.” Greed fears there’s never enough, that too much is still insufficient. Facets of greed include betrayal of trust, disloyalty, treason, outright theft, bribery, and hording as well as manipulations of authority. In Dante’s inferno those condemned by greed were placed in hell, bound and face down on the ground, in punishment for having lived their lives solely focused on earthly thoughts instead of things heavenly.

            Greed, along with its kissin’-cousins Lust and Gluttony, is actually the outward and visible expression of an interior and spiritual dis-ease, which Augustine called concupiscence. Concupiscence is a wonderful word, and means “an infinite desire for the finite”. It is as if we humans are born with a infinite space within our souls that only God can fill. One of our repeated tendencies as humans, no matter how many times, it seems, we are offered opportunities to learn the futility of the attempt, is that we try to fill the infinite space with finite things. Finite things can never fill infinity, and the attempt to do so always leads to failure, and in the end to sin. 

            We’ve heard a great deal of talk about the best way to get out of our economic slough of despond and we seem to be heading towards some sort of bailout. I don’t know if that’s a necessary step or not: I’ll have to leave it to persons who better understand finances and economics and all that. I’ve also heard from one financial writer that before anything happens we need to hear two words we haven’t heard: “We’re sorry”. Now that would be nice, but it wouldn’t be enough. Guilty feelings or contrition of the “Oooooops, you caught me, I’m sorry” sort won’t cut it. What will cut it when sin is involved is only one thing. There is only one way out, and it’s not a bailout. It’s repent!

In Hebrew repentance meant simply “coming to one’s senses”. In the New Testament the word repentance was “metanoia”--change of mind--but it meant much more than just a mental shift. Metanoia, repentance, meant reorientation, a change in direction for your whole life. What this meant was that repentance didn’t require sort of a groveling posture for the mistakes of one’s past, but a positive change in direction for one’s future.  Repentance involved setting out on a new course or pointing towards a new target, a new goal. In fact, one of the words for sin in the Bible comes from an archer’s term for missing the mark and the word “repentance” was a term meaning “taking better aim.” Past mistakes are significant only in that they show the degree to which the archer is off target and for showing the degree to which the archer needs to re-orient to hit the target.

In today’s very short parable Jesus uses the word metanoia—repent—to describe the action of a child who at first disobeys his father. The parable is quite clear and simple, really. A man goes to his son and says “Go work in the vineyard today”. The boy, who was probably a strong willed sophomore, says defiantly: “I will not.” The reason for his disobedience is unexplained. There are lots of possibilities: perhaps he was tired out from too much study (yeah, right) or too much partying. Perhaps he had a date, or was meeting friends, or was just plain lazy. Perhaps he was simply doing what young persons must do, and push away from a constricting authority in order to grow into their own person. We don’t know why he refused. All do know is that he said he wouldn’t go, but later changed his mind, repented, and dragged his body out into the vineyard and went to work.

The father goes to the second son and says “You go work, too”. This son says “Right Pop. I’m on my way!”, but then he doesn’t go. And, here again, we don’t know why. Perhaps he feared his father and couldn’t be honest with him. Perhaps he just wanted to avoid a confrontation. Perhaps he really didn’t care that the work needed to be done. Perhaps it was just simpler to say “sure” and then get on with his life and hope he didn’t get caught. Perhaps both boys weren't really so different. Perhaps both were simply caught in the human tendency to self-absorbed ego-centrism—the way that says "I am the center of my universe, the master of my own destiny, no onw matters but ME".

In the parable Jesus praises the first son and condemns the second. In doing so he seems to be telling us that it’s not so much what you say that is important but what you do is important. In saying that the first son repented, Jesus implies that this child set his sights on a new target. He came to his senses, reoriented himself and headed in a new direction, going to work as his father wished him to do. He put his “money where his mouth wasn’t”--but he did put his action, his life, where his father’s priorities were. Not where his own priorities had been, but where his father’s were. And for this he is held up as an example to be praised.

As I read this parable this year, in this context of financial quagmire and political elections, I hear the call to us as a nation to be who we claim to be. If we are One Nation Under God, then the call is to place God at the very heart of everything we do, to take those values that God holds most highly—which as I read the Gospel are things like justice, compassion, mercy, concern for the helpless, and all the others you could name—and put those with our wealth of resources and creativity and freedom and spirit, to transform the world for God’s sake. I hear a call to this nation, and to us, The Church, and to us as individuals, live as Christ’s body with deep integrity. I hear a call to an examination of consciousness, an honest appraisal of whether the way we act is consistent with what we proclaim, and if it isn’t, the call to repent.

A few years ago I heard Jim Wallis speak at the Seminary of the Southwest. At that time he said “religion should not be a wedge to divide us but a bridge to bring us together. Our faith is meant to change the big stuff, the things that no one thinks can be changed. Sometimes it takes a natural disaster to expose a social disaster,” he said (referring at that time to Hurricane Katrina, though it could be applied to today’s mess as well.) “Katrina washed away our denials of the interconnection of race and poverty and blindness to ideological dialogue. We no longer have excuses for not knowing or caring, and caring as God would have us care.”

I learned something from Jim Wallis that week. Did you know that the altar call was invented by an Evangelical preacher in the 19^th century as a means to sign people up for the abolitionist movement? He wanted people to come to his revivals, awaken to the problem, to have their hearts and minds transformed by a Godly vision, and then to put their names on the line pledging to make a difference. Over the years the character of the altar call has changed, and for the worse. It’s become a litmus test of personal salvation, the “correct”(?) answer to the questions: “Have you been saved?” “Have you accepted Jesus as your personal Lord and savior?” Now I’ve heard it said many times over the years (usually when the Billy Graham Crusade comes to town) that we Episcopalians don’t have to have an altar call like Billy Graham. That’s true, (thanks be to God,) because we have one every Sunday when we come to communion. Well, that’s true, provided we remember something important.

Our relation to God is personal but never private. Each time we come to this altar we come to be touched by the grace of God. But God wants the grace of God to touch us. God wants that we experience conversion, metanoia, the touchstone of all true spirituality. And God wants us to turn around, aim ourselves into God’s new creation, and go do the work he has given us to do in his vineyard, being faithful witnesses of Christ our Lord.