Proper 14, Year C | Luke 12:32-38 | Hebrews 11:1, 8-16
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
August 10, 2025
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
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“…it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” – Luke 12:32[1]
Recently I’ve been rereading a four-volume translation of The Journey to the West, a Medieval-era Chinese novel which recounts the legend of the Monkey King and his companions on their perilous quest to seek Buddhist scripture from Thunderclap Mountain. In the course of the story’s extensive prelude, Monkey—basically the Superman of his day—recognizes the Dao, becomes immortal, and then selfishly causes havoc in the celestial palace, leaving Heaven to confine him immobile beneath a five-peaked mountain for hundreds of years.
Shortly after Monkey’s imprisonment, the author turns our attention to a Chinese emperor who inadvertently allowed one of his ministers to execute a dragon he had promised to protect. The emperor soon finds himself snatched away to the Underworld, where the dragon’s ghost is suing him for breach of contract.
The Ten Judges of the Underworld decide the case has no merit and hurry to send the emperor back to the Earthly Realm before his body decays. But to make his final escape from the City of the Dead, the emperor, who has no treasure in the Underworld, ends up having to borrow a room full of gold from one of his citizen’s afterlife accounts in order to distract the other hungry spirits long enough for him to slip out.
When the revived emperor’s servants later go to repay his unwitting benefactor, they find themselves outside the Xiang family residence, a tiny hut. Inside they discover an uneducated elderly couple living in stark simplicity. Over the course of their lifetime filled with kindness, love, and generosity, their celestial savings, of which they were completely unaware, had dwarfed those of the most powerful, wealthy, and influential people who had ever lived. When the couple refuses to accept the emperor’s gold, he uses it to build the Daxiangguo Temple[2] in their honor, ensuring that both they and their community would continue to receive the benefits the couple’s simple selflessness and humility had unintentionally earned them.
Fully recognizing the gaps between our cosmological and religious worldviews, I couldn’t help but think of this story when reading what Jesus had to say in the opening of today’s Gospel:
“Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”[3]
Last Sunday we heard about brothers wanting Jesus to arbitrate their inheritance followed up with his parable of the hoarding farmer. Between that passage and this, Jesus had expanded upon his lesson, using the famous example of God feeding ravens and clothing lilies. Today’s text is an immediate continuation of his previous statement, “your Father knows that you need [food and clothing]. Instead, seek his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well. Do not be afraid little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” [4]
We humans tend to approach our lives in terms of scarcity, trying to control our fates by manipulating odds in our favor. This isn’t entirely a bad thing. The Bible tells us to “Go to the ant, you lazybones; consider its ways,”—how it stores food—“and be wise.”[5] Planning ahead can be normal and healthy. Thinking of the couple from our story, Mr. and Mrs. Xiang had survived to an old age (no small feat in ancient China), so clearly they had experience gathering and preserving food and maintaining enough savings to pay for common necessities. Where they differ from many of us is in their generosity.
Their metaphysical wealth built up as they shared what they did have—offering food and shelter to travelers, supporting neighbors in times of need, honoring the dead, and so on. Despite having limited means, by truly considering and caring for the people they had encountered, they had bettered countless lives around them, resulting in a treasury of gratitude preparing itself for them in life’s coming adventure.
Their story connects with our Hebrews passage, as well. We often think of the people the author includes in the so-called “Hall of Faith” as earning their place by continuing to believe in God despite continually adverse circumstances. However, we need to take into account what “faith”—and its sister term, “belief”—actually meant to the Bible’s authors.
We hit on this a few times a year at St. Andrew’s, but when we talk about faith and belief, we need to recognize that our modern definitions are more than lacking; they’re functionally misleading. When he first translated the Bible into English roughly 700 years ago, John Wycliffe used these then-accurate terms for the noun and verb forms of the Greek word pistis. For well over half a millennium, however, we’ve chosen to keep using these words while completely altering their meanings.
Our modern conception of “faith” and “belief” essentially amounts to trusting really hard in the reality of something that can’t be proved or may not even exist. For the past few centuries, then, we of the English-speaking Church have basically promoted a gnostic commitment to magical thinking as the secret way to “get to heaven when we die.” It isn’t hard to see how this foolishness has overflowed throughout broader American society, demonstrated in both the current denigration and distrust of scientific experimentation and frequent public denial of objective reality—of trusting the whims of influencers, pundits, and political figures rather than listening to people who actually commit their lives to test and understand evidence regarding what they’re talking about.
In Wycliffe’s time, though, “faith” and “belief” weren’t connected with imagination. Nor did they have much to do with the mental realm alone. The only related activity of the mind was to make a choice: whether or not to be faithful, which is what the term New Testament authors used actually means. Back when Middle English was the language of the day, to “have faith in” was to be loyal or faithful to someone. To “belief in” was to swear one’s fealty to a greater power. A knight would publicly “be-lief in” his liege (aka lord). That same lord would then “be-lief in” their king, pledging to “keep faith:” to remain loyal and practice fidelity, to observe and maintain the laws and customs of the realm, and, if necessary, to die in defense or for the honor of their liege.
What we read in Hebrews isn’t a record of people who remained committed to their own isolated interpretations of reality despite mounting evidence against them. We see people who pledged themselves to God, who, despite repeated faults and failures, ultimately remained faithful to God’s character and desires.
“Faith”—the way the Bible uses the term—is proof of “being lief.” So faithfulness isn’t measured by an isolated thought or single decision; it doesn’t really exist within a moment of time. Much like the Xiangs’ afterlife riches, faithfulness is slowly exhibited over the course of a lifetime. In the story of the emperor, the elderly couple’s kindness and generosity went almost entirely unnoticed by the world around them, yet their family’s commitment to love and care for others became a mountain—in their case, a nearly 90 acre temple complex—of proof to their faithfulness. And while I hope none of us are expecting our present actions to build up deposits of supernatural gold or jewels, our own faithfulness is just as important as theirs or any other saint.
Last time I was here, we talked about refashioning our understanding of God, turning from our typical expectations of the Great Self , the center of existence to whom all tribute rightly flows, to embrace instead what seems to be Jesus’ presentation of God as the Great Source. Rather than emulating God as the Ultimate Consumer, feeding on human praise and adoration while meting vengeance on those who rebel, we need to learn to see God in their initial Biblical role: the Ultimate Giver and Creator, constantly renewing, providing for, and delighting in all that is.
With that reversal as our model, what does being God’s Image—of being honorable descendants and accurate reflections of God—what might that look like? How might we be faithful to that God, one that’s genuinely—and faithfully—generous, merciful, and loving; one that honors and provides for the other, no matter their prominence or status; one who includes and enfolds and welcomes even the worst of failures as cherished family? What does it look like to amass that kind of treasure?
For one thing, it wouldn’t hurt to follow the Xiang’s example, living with compassion and generosity. For another, we can, as Jesus says, dispense of our excess while offering others mercy.[6] We can support and stand with those society rejects. We can act with kindness toward those we’ve been taught to fear and hate. We can respond to those who would oppose us with dignity and respect. We can walk as true disciples of Christ, living proof of the ongoing presence of God’s kingdom even in our own corrupt and confusing day. We can listen. We can trust. And we can commit, returning to faithfulness again and again, continually working to manifest the realities toward which Jesus continues to point us.
“Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also”
[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSVue unless otherwise noted.
[2] 大相国寺 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daxiangguo_Temple
[3] Luke 12:32-34
[4] Luke 12:30-32
[5] Proverbs 6:6
[6] An alternate paraphrase of Luke 12:33a