Proper 28 (November 13-19)
Texts: Luke 19:11-28;
Isaiah 52:1-6
YouTube: https://youtu.be/pRPfqoFc7PY
Sermon Take-Home Notes
INDIGENOUS WISDOM FOR SURVIVING APOCALYPTIC TIMES
I’d like to start out this morning with a bit of the proverbial ‘watching the sausage being made.’ Please open your Green Hymnal to page 30 in the front part — not to hymn #30, but to page 30 in the front part. You should be looking at the last two Sundays of the regular church-year calendar: “Twenty-seventh Sunday after Pentecost” and “Christ the King.” Today is that second-to-last Sunday of the Church Year. We’re in Year C, so if you look in column C, you’ll see the two readings we just read this morning, Isaiah 52:1-6 and Luke 19:11-28.1
But turn to page 29 at the bottom, and here’s a little secret: This hymnal was published in 1978, 47 years ago, and it used an earlier version of the lectionary. Since 1994, our Lutheran denomination has been using the Revised Common lectionary, which made some slight changes. One of the bigger changes, I think, involves the last two Sundays after Pentecost, before Christ the King Sunday. This week, our sister ELCA churches will be reading what’s at the bottom of page 29, column C: readings from Malachi 4, 2 Thess 3, and Luke 21:5-19, which is called the Little Apocalypse, because Jesus correctly prophesies about the destruction of the Temple and the rest of Jerusalem. This second-to-last Sunday in the Lectionary cycle is always about how bad things happen in the human world, making it even more urgent for disciples of Jesus to participate in God’s salvation from our very serious sinfulness. Notice in our Gospel Reading today that Luke explains that Jesus is telling the parable because his disciples “supposed that the kingdom of God was to appear immediately.” No, Jesus is realistic about God’s reign expecting a lengthy battle with human sin. There are still apocalyptic times ahead.
This year I went back to Luke 19:11-28 as the Gospel for this Sunday because I think it’s the perfect Little Apocalypse for the theme of the dangers of wealth. For three months now, we’ve been traveling through the middle part of Luke’s Gospel, where Luke has Jesus encounter six rich men.2 Five of these encounters are not in any of the other three Gospels, so Luke alone has this emphasis. In various ways through the first five encounters, Jesus has commented on the dangers of wealth, especially how it creates a great chasm between rich and poor which goes against God’s intentions for creation and for our mutual flourishing as God’s children. Against the hoarding of riches by the wealthy, Jesus uses indigenous wisdom to teach us God’s gift economy, based on sharing with others in gratitude rather than hoarding against others in greed.
Finally! Last week, with the sixth encounter we witnessed a rich man who does the right thing. Zacchaeus realizes the error of his ways and undergoes a conversion to not only generous sharing of his wealth but also a dismantling of his wealth in order to make reparations, to right the wrongs of how he unjustly accumulated his wealth in the first place. Nothing less than salvation has come to his house.
This week, however, we descend back down to earth with Jesus’ little parable about a ruthless nobleman turned king who shows us the real world of empire that’s still in play. Once again, remember that Luke has warned us about Jesus’s awareness that the kingdom of God is not going to come to completion immediately. So while Jesus is still sitting there at the table with Zacchaeus, he tells everyone this parable about the real world, which will not yet be toppled just because Zacchaeus, a wealthy chief tax collector, has finally done the right thing. It’s going to take a whole lot more Zacchaeuses to bring the God’s reign fully and completely into this world.
Two thousand years later, we still have quite a ways to go. Yet again we have rich and powerful men on the ascent in our world who operate too much like the nobleman-turned-king in today’s parable. It’s easy to see his brutality at the end of the parable, where he slaughters everyone who has acted against him. One of Herod’s sons, Archelaus, acted exactly like the king in this parable. I’ve put a summary of that history in your Sermon Notes.3 So the people at Zacchaeus’s house would have known exactly the kind of person Jesus was talking about. Archelaus and so many others. This sort of king was all to common in their world. Unfortunately, it’s still too common for us, too, right? How many of our wealthy authoritarian leaders of today are all about making sure they punish their enemies? Yes, the brutality of the king in Jesus’s parable is still too easy for us to see in our world, too.
Unfortunately, though, we’ve been somewhat blind to the cruelty of the earlier actions of the king in this parable. When the nobleman goes off to the emperor seeking to be made a local king, he leaves ten pounds with ten servants, one for each servant. When he returns and begins to make an accounting of what they’ve done with his money, the first servant proudly produces ten pounds, and the second five. They’ve used his money to make more money in a relatively short amount of time. The drama of the accounting stops with the third — Jesus doesn’t bother to tell us about the other seven — presumably because his audience already knows Jesus’ point: one of the worst things about wealthy people is that they make so much of their money by using it to make more money against the good will of other people. The third servant has sized up his master and refused to play that game. He knows the cruelty of how wealthy people take money by ‘reaping what others sow.’ The most likely way that the first and second servant made so much money so fast was through something like loan-sharking. They lent money to needy farmers at high interest, and when they couldn’t pay, they were able to seize their assets.
Here’s the thing: The poor people who followed Jesus, including his own disciples, knew this practice first hand. It’s what kept them poor. Zacchaeus also knew first-hand the cruelty of these practices, because he had used them against others. It’s the sort of thing for which he Zacchaeus needed to make reparations, to pay back fourfold of what he had defrauded from others. Jesus’ parable reminds them that, even though Zacchaeus’s conversion is great news, there’s still too many out there who play the game. (God’s reign will not come immediately.) The king in the parable doesn’t even deny it. He simply punishes the servant who refuses to play the game by taking his pound away from him and giving it to the guy with ten. He sums up the terrible cruelty of the imperial money game perfectly: those who already have a lot get more, and to those who have little, theirs gets taken away. Just a fancy way to say the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Now, I began to talk about this part of the king’s action by saying we’ve tended to be blind to the cruelty of making money from money. The people sitting at Zacchaeus’s table that day knew the cruelty first hand. But in our capitalist society, where we’ve become increasingly focused on how to make money off of other’s people money, this part of the parable has been applauded not booed. I have to confess that I’ve given sermons on this parable, especially Matthew’s less violent version of it, praising the ingenuity of the first two servants and lamenting the third. I’ve given those sermons, relatively blind to the fact that Jesus, from the viewpoint of the gift economy of God’s reign, saw things the opposite. He saw the first two servants as playing the game of a harmful, unjust system, and the third servant as rightly refusing to play that game.4
So here’s the thing: if we are to have our blindness healed, we have to also come to see that there are many basic principles of our capitalist economics which are unjust and harmful. That’s not to say capitalism is all bad — that it can’t be redeemed as Zacchaeus was redeemed — but it certainly has principles that lend itself to making money in harmful ways off of other people’s money. For example, has anyone here ever been squeezed with credit card debt?
One of the things that has helped me see things from a different perspective is to see Jesus and the story of his Jewish people from the perspective of indigenous people, as people oppressed in someone else’s empire. In our First Reading from Isaiah today, we see the oppression going all the way back to the Assyrian Empire, centuries before Jesus. So, in order to see the indigenous perspective in our modern context, a book that’s helped me is Choctaw elder Steve Charleston’s book We Survived the End of the World — insightful, too, on this Sunday of the Little Apocalypse. The Jews underwent the end of their world, as Jesus prophesied they would. They didn’t heed his prophecy to not get caught up in an attempt at violently overthrow of empire, so thirty years later they were crushed by the Romans and lost the Promised Land for nearly two thousand years. The indigenous peoples of America have undergone a similar loss of their Land.
In We Survived the End of the World, Charleston offers the wisdom of several Native American prophets that we might learn to survive the crises that currently face us. In his chapter on early 19th century Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa, he begins by recounting how Governor William Henry Harrison was carrying out Thomas Jefferson’s plan to divest the indigenous people in the Midwest of their land basically by loan-sharking them. Sound familiar? I have Jefferson’s actual letter detailing the plan to Harrison in your Sermon Notes.5
Tenskwatawa, on the other hand, was a Shawnee living in Ohio who had a vision of how their people could survive. They needed to double down on their basic moral principals, no matter what white people did to them. Here’s a quote from Charleston’s account:
Tenskwatawa’s visions went on to reveal the ethical and moral precepts that should shape a believer’s life. No more war or killing between Native nations. Truth telling in all negotiations. Respect for all women. Reverence for the earth and all her creatures. Above all, a deep communal sense of life and creation. Private ownership of land was to be repudiated. No more land was to be ceded or sold. Native people should hold all things in common and share whatever they had with one another. Generosity was to be a cornerstone of the new faith as it restored ancient values and traditions.6
Native Americans came from far and wide to visit the Peace House Tenskwatawa had established in his Ohio village. When white people threatened to destroy his Peace House, called Prophetstown, he simply moved it to what is now a State Park near West Lafayette, Indiana — memorializing Tenskwatawa and his peace house. When white people did destroy that Peace House and moved his Shawnee people to Kansas, he simply established another Peace House there, where he lived until he died in 1836. Charleston writes:
Even after the destruction of the two predecessor villages, even after the loss of the war against the Americans, and even after the death of his brother, Tenskwatawa was defiant to the end. He carried his belief in his heart, so what he saw was that belief coming alive wherever he went. Therefore, Prophetstown was wherever Tenskwatawa was. The city on the hill was within him.7
Siblings in Christ, Luke was the Gospel writer who also wrote the Acts of the Apostles. Even though he knew that the way of Rome and other empires would live on for quite a while, so would the new way of being human that Jesus brought into the world live on. His followers would bring it with them wherever they lived in church communities. Notice in your Sermon Notes how close Tenskwatawa’s moral principles of indigenous wisdom are to those that Luke describes in the Book of Acts. There’s a quote from Acts 4 that is similar to Tenskwatawa’s principles.
You and I continue to be the living embodiment of this wisdom based on gift and generosity. We repeat the basic actions of our founder every time we worship: Took bread, gave thanks, broke it, gave it to others. We live it through things like the Community Meal and Thread-by-Thread. In a democracy, while we still have one, we have the opportunity to share with our fellow citizens this new way of being human based on giving thanks and generous sharing. Let’s learn to share the wisdom of this Peace House with our neighbors, so that we might more than survive the next attempts at empire. Let us be part of bringing salvation to this American house we love. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, November 16, 2025
YouTube: https://youtu.be/pRPfqoFc7PY
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Notes
1. Lutheran Book of Worship (Augsburg Fortress, 1978), 29-30.
2. Our guide through this section, featuring the “Six Rich Men Sequences,” has been Ched Myers and his book Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke’s Jesus and Sabbath Economics (Fortress, 2025). See today’s Sermon Notes with a graphic giving an overview of the six sequences.
3. The Sermon Notes quotation about Archelaus is from Myers, Healing Affluenza, 194.
4. My reading of the parable here owes much(!) to Myers, Healing Affluenza, 194-99.
5. Thomas Jefferson’s letter to William Henry Harrison quoted in the Sermon Notes is from Steven Charleston, We Survived the End of the World: Lessons from Native America on Apocalypse and Hope (Broadleaf Books, 2023), 52-53.
6. Ibid., 61-62.
7. Ibid., 79.
