The Unjust Steward: Wealth, Poverty, and the Church Today

"For what is the profit, when His table indeed is full of golden cups, but He perishes with hunger?”  I have heard it said that many priests have just one sermon in them, an image or message that they can’t help but return to over and over again throughout their preaching ministry. This was almost certainly the case for one of the greatest preachers of the late fourth century, the “Golden-Mouthed” John Chrysostom (c.347-407). In the many homilies that he delivered during his priestly ministry in Antioch and then as Patriarch in Constantinople, John repeatedly returned to the image of God judging the nations based on their care for the most vulnerable found in Matthew 25:31-46.  John Chrysostom frequently invoked this passage even when his homilies began elsewhere. In Matthew 25:31-46, God judges the nations as decisively as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, with the crucial determining factor being whether people cared for God in the most vulnerable. Both the righteou

 “At last when the dragon could not even thus overthrow Antony, but saw himself thrust out of his heart, gnashing his teeth as it is written, and as it were beside himself, he appeared to Antony like a black boy, taking a visible shape in accordance with the color of his mind.” - Life of Antony Let me begin with a parable made famous by the author David Foster Wallace: two young fish are swimming along when they suddenly meet an older fish swimming the other way. The older fish nods and says, “Hi there boys. How’s the water?” The two young fish continue swimming and never reply. After a long pause, one of them turns to the other and says, “What the hell is water?”[1]  This post is about trying to see the waters of anti-blackness that Christians have been swimming in for a very long time. Here I will look at what is considered to be the earliest instance of the devil being depicted as a black boy in Christian literature.[2] This occurs in Athanasius’ Life of Antony , a text from the mid