October 7.

2007

The Rev. Joseph Winston

Your Worth

Sermon

Grace and peace are gifts for you from God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.1
For millennium, auctions of all types have been used to establish the “real
value” on a piece of property. According to the ancient Greek historian Herodotus,
the first markets that used bidding to determine the worth of an item occurred in
Babylon around 500 B.C. Once a year, all the young girls in the kingdom were
brought before potential suitors for marriage. If a man wanted to have a wedding
that year, he needed to purchase a bride. The auctioneer sorted the girls by beauty
and brought them out one by one. The bidding started high and continued down
until someone purchased the girl. This meant that some women were sold at a loss
and their families were forced to pay the bidder for their child.
Not only women were sold at auctions. The Romans used the open market to
1
Romans 1:7, 1 Corinthians 1:3, 2 Corinthians 1:2, Galatians 1:3, Ephesians 1:2, Philippians
1:2, 2 Thessalonians 1:2, Philemon 1:3

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help finance their war machine. In order to help offset the often minimum wages
given to them, soldiers of all stripes collected booty during their campaigns. If the
enlisted man needed some money in the field, he would take his spear and mark
off the goods that he would offer up for auction. The soldier could run the bidding
himself and get what he could from the others or he could take advantage of the
businessmen that followed the army and use their services. Any spoils of war not
sold in the foreign land were taken home and then disposed of, in what we today
would recognize as an auction.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, bidding disappeared from the world’s
landscape until King Henry VII of England re-instituted the practice. This monarch
wrote laws that described the legal process of selling items at an auction, which in-
cluded the licensing of auctioneers. About a century after Henry’s death, the 1595
Oxford English Dictionary noted that auctions were being held in Great Britain.
Once again, the world was using this manner of selling goods as a way of finding
an item’s real worth. Two great auction houses that exist to this day, Christie’s
and Sotheby’s were established in London near the end of the 1700s to sell col-
lectible items. Around the same time, the French were selling art in taverns and
coffeehouses. And in this country, the auctioneer’s gavel was heard in the selling
of items like furs, crops, and lumber.
With each of these examples, whether it be the girls in ancient Babylon, the
Roman soldiers with their booty, or even the pelts of a fur trader, it is difficult to
establish a fair price on these items. How much is beauty, grace, and charm really
worth? What does an item from a foreign land bring in terms that I can understand

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like gold or silver? How do I purchase coffee and other things that I need when I
only have hides? The answer to all of these questions is the same. Let the market
decide. A girl in Babylon is only worth what a man will pay. The value of booty
is determined when someone exchanges it for silver or gold coins. A fur’s price is
set when it is auctioned off to the highest bidder.
Today’s Gospel lesson presents us with the same sort of question. How much
are we worth to God?
The idea that we can determine our intrinsic value to God is nothing new. It is
a result of a long running process. When God took the Israelites at Mt. Sinai to be
His people, God promised to love them always. This gift of unconditional grace
for all of God’s people was also promised to their ancestors: Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob. All that God asked in return was to love only Him with their entire existence
and to show that same care for every other human.
Little by little, this relationship between God and His people changed. Make
no mistake it was not God that changed His mind about how much He loved all of
us. Instead, it was us.
The Israelites, just like you and me, could not believe that God would do
everything that He had promised without any strings attached. So, the Israelites
made up some ideas that attempted to explain their observation of why it seems
that God values more people than others. This transformation started off so simply
that it is even hard to see what was happening. People began to divide themselves
into groups. One division condemned by the prophets was the gap between the
rich and the poor. The rich told everyone that God loved them the most. For them

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this conclusion was obvious. They had all these extra blessings and since God is in
control of the universe, this extra wealth must be a result of God’s gift. It was not
a large leap of logic to move to their next incorrect assumptions. The poor must be
cursed by God and the reason for their suffering must be related to something that
they have done. By the time of Christ, entire elaborate rituals had been developed
that pointed out those few people who God loved. One example seen throughout
Luke comes to mind. There were groups of men who only associated with others
of the same stature. The reason of this behavior made lots of sense to these people.
In their mind, God was so far removed from the problems of this world as the east
is from the west. In their teachings, just coming near, much less trying to help,
the women, the poor, and the outcast would pollute them and then move them
out from God’s blessings. Just like with their forefathers, they could explain using
flawed reasoning why some people were female, less fortunate, or even Gentiles.
God made them that way and to try to change God’s will would be wrong.
This is the situation of the world that Jesus found Himself in. The upper class
Jews would have nothing to do with other less fortunate Jews much less with the
Romans. Jesus, recalling God’s original promise to love all of Israel, came pro-
claiming that God embraced everyone: the rich and the poor, the free and the slave,
the man and the woman, and most surprising of all the Jews and the Gentiles. This
message of acceptance spoken at the start of His ministry caused an irreparable
rift between His followers and those Jews who thought God loved only them. This
division became even wider when Jesus started to eat and drink with the outcasts.
In the section just before today’s Gospel lesson Jesus adds two stringent re-

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quirements that all of His disciples must keep. Not only must they follow God’s
law to the letter and take care of the less fortunate in society but they also are com-
manded to keep people from stumbling because of scandals and they also have to
forgive others daily. Today’s Gospel adds another demand to the life of a disciple.
Christ’s followers need to trust Him. Without this faith in God, they cannot ac-
complish anything. Next, come the four verses that condemn all of us who try to
set a price on our worth with God.
Jesus plays on these well-known division between the have and the have not,
the Jew and the Gentile, the owner and the slave, and the follower of Christ and
those who do not know Him. He says, “After a hard day’s work, you do not tell the
less fortunate in this world to come and eat with you (Luke 17:7)?” The fortunate
ones, the sons of Abraham, the slave owners, and the disciples of Christ all answer
in unison, “No!” “We do not invite them to dine with us because we know our
place in the world. God has placed us on the top of society because He knows our
true worth.” Just to make sure that He has heard correctly, Jesus continues with,
“You command them to make your meal, do you not (Luke 17:8)?” Everyone
answers, “Yes! It is their God given calling in life to serve me.” A third time,
Jesus questions our response, “You do not say ‘thanks’ to a slave, do you, for
doing what he was commanded? (Luke 17:9)?”2 “Of course not,” we all cry out,
“they are just doing their work.” Then, Jesus concludes, “Do not ask God to do
anything for you because you are just doing what was commanded.”
2
Luke Timothy Johnson; S.J. Daniel J. Harrington, editor, The Gospel of Luke, Volume 3, Sacra
Pagina, (The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1991), pp. 257, 259.

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 With this final sentence, Jesus breaks down all our self-constructed ideas of
our “real value.” In God’s eyes, our wealth is worthless, our position in life is
meaningless, our gender has no significance, and our race has no bearing on our
value. Because you see, for God there is no difference between those people with
all the blessings in the world and those individuals who have absolutely nothing.
It is the shared duty of the Jew and the Christian to eliminate each of these things
that divide us because equality is what God has commanded us to achieve.
With all of this talk of what we need to do here in this world in order to remove
all of the inequities found in it, it becomes very easy to loose focus on the Good
News found in today’s Gospel lesson. The Word of God for us in this text is simply
this. There is nothing that we can do to win God’s approval. Our salvation must
come from God. And it has. Jesus came to this world and once again showed us
the same message that God spoke to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all those at Mt.
Sinai. We are not judged by who we happen to be. God loves each of us.
Our true value does not come from being sold in the market at auction nor is
our worth something that can be calculated on a balance sheet. Rather our impor-
tance is measured in a completely different way. Jesus died for you and He died
for me. His priceless sacrifice has given us true life that will never end.
In our day and age, there still are people who calculate their worth based on
what the market will give them. This means that sometimes their net value moves
up and at other times it move down. No matter how much they increase their
standing in life, they will never meet the minimum requirement to get into heaven.
It also makes no difference how low their portfolio goes. They will not be able

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to enter heaven just because they are poor. We can either let them work at this
impossible task, which they will never succeed or we can tell them, by the power
of the Holy Spirit, that God loves them just as they are.
“The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, keep your hearts and
minds through Christ Jesus.”3

References

Johnson, Luke Timothy; Daniel J. Harrington, S.J., editor, The Gospel of Luke,
Volume 3, Sacra Pagina, (The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, MN: The
Liturgical Press, 1991).

3
Philippians 4:7.