sunday sonnet #5

The lectionary text today was one of Jesus' more difficult parables to understand. Here's what the text and Ginger's sermon took me.

We met today to worship, pray, and sing,
and heard the call to shrewdly help the pauper;
my mind played “Money Changes Everything” –
the lectionary led to Cyndi Lauper.

I looked up shrewd. It says: perceptive, artful, keen --
someone who sees the worst and and can discern
how to flip the tables rather than rage ‘gainst the machine,
and use new math to measure the return.

“You can’t serve God and riches,” was the parable’s punch line,
but the room gets hard when we talk of faith and stuff;
we look at class divisions as though by divine design:
they go without; we never have enough.

Jesus might not have packed quite the punch had he
grown up in a gated community.

Peace,
Milton