One of the hosts on the preaching podcast I listen to said this week that a preacher should, and I quote, “by all means, preach on Habakkuk this weekend.” And then, as if David had listened to the same podcast, he picked a choir piece based on the Habakkuk reading, so here we go. First off, because you may not know anything about Habakkuk, or even that it was a book in the Bible, a bit of introduction. Habakkuk is one of the twelve minor prophets. Minor not because they’re unimportant, but because the books are short, compared to books like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Speaking of Jeremiah, Habakkuk was probably a contemporary of his time, speaking to the people of the southern kingdom of Judah during the time of King Jehoiakim around the turn of the sixth century BCE. Which is really nothing more than your fun fact for the day because what I love about prophets is the timelessness of their messages, and that is certainly true about Habakkuk. Because whoever he was speaking to, the message he was delivering is one that feels super pertinent to today, the challenge of believing in a just God in the midst of an unjust world.
Habakkuk opens with this plea—actually we cannot even call it a plea, so much as a complaint to God for justice, “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you, “Violence!” and you will not save?... Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise. So the law becomes slack and justice never prevails.” With Habakkuk, we hear a prophet who has waited long enough, and instead clamors, seriously, Lord, how long must we wait. You say you are a God of justice, so let’s see it.
I’ve mentioned before in recent sermons that I, like Habakkuk, am over it. I’m over thoughts and prayers that have no effect on the pandemic of gun violence. I’m over pretending that our climate is not changing, and that we humans are not the cause. I’m over the crisis at the border, I’m over the images of children in cages. I’m over the uncertainty, I’m over the failure to take action, I’m over living in a world where refugees are treated like a plague, people in poverty a problem, and those who cry for justice are labeled troublemakers, while dictators are eased and appeased, the powerful are given more power, and we are told not to trust what we see. I’m over it.
And with Habakkuk we get a prophet who’s not just over it, not just a prophet who demands God to do something, but a prophet who isn’t going anywhere until those demands are met. We skipped the section of chapter one where God answered, and Habakkuk challenged that answer, but we pick up again in chapter two with Habakkuk’s continued determination, “I will stand at my watchpost, and station myself on the rampart; I will keep watch to see what he will say to me.” Habakkuk is going to wait God out, going to wait for the answer he wants, the answer he needs, no matter how long that takes. And that, dear people of God, is what I think faith is. Faith is waiting, it’s waiting it out, it’s waiting for God, waiting on God.
Faith is waiting, but it’s also not passive. By waiting, I don’t mean that sort of “thoughts and prayers” sort of faith that we hear so much of these days, where we pray and then hope God will change the injustice of the world. Rather it is waiting in the way of Habakkuk, who is active in his declaration of injustice and his demand for action.
In the Gospel reading for this morning, the disciples asked Jesus, “increase our faith.” Which seems like a noble question, right? The thing that prompted the disciples request was Jesus’ command in verse four that if someone sinned against them and repented not just seven times, but seven times in one day, still the disciples were to forgive them. In verse five, we see the disciples’ response: well now Jesus, that sounds pretty hard so, if you want us to do that, you’re going to have to increase our faith. To which Jesus responded with this weird line about mustard seeds and mulberry trees. Which if you think it’s confusing in the translation, there’s all sorts of weird things packed into the Greek. My understanding of the nuances of grammar has never been all that good, so I’m going to just tell you the words I read in the commentary and maybe any of you English teachers in the room can explain it to the rest of us. Apparently the second clause in this sentence, the one about the mulberry tree, is what is known as a “second-class conditional phrase, a statement contrary to fact.” What that means is, that is the part of the sentence that proves the example. So basically, there’s an unspoken second part of this sentence that reads like this: “If you faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you, [but you cannot command a mulberry tree and have it obey you, so you do not have faith the size of a mustard seed].”
What I think Jesus was saying to the disciples here wasn’t that they didn’t need more faith, but that they didn’t even understand what faith is. Asking for more faith in order to do hard things is having faith in faith. It’s believing that faith will save you, that you can earn God’s grace through your faith. And yes, as Lutherans we believe and confess, as is written in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, that “by grace [we] have been saved through faith.” But the faith through which we have been saved is not our faith, it’s God’s. The line from Ephesians goes on, “by grace [we] have been saved through faith, and this is not of [our] own doing; it is the gift of God… so that no one may boast.” What the disciples needed to do the hard thing Jesus was asking wasn’t more faith, what they needed was God’s faith. And that is a thing we don’t have to ask for, that is a thing we are gifted by God, that is grace.
Then Jesus went on with this parable about slaves, and how slaves shouldn’t expect to be praised for doing their duties, should not be thanked for their work or served at the table. So too, should the disciples, when they live rightly, expect Jesus to give them special reward or treatment. But I was thinking about this, actually Eileen got me thinking about this in Bible study. Remember last week in the parable about the rich man and Lazarus, and I talked about how the parable ends with the chasm being uncrossable and people not believing even if someone rose from the dead. But the story itself doesn’t end that way, because we know that Jesus did rise from the dead, and in doing so Jesus didn’t just cross the chasm but in fact closed it. That same thing happens here. Because Jesus told the disciples, who among you would serve your slaves, and so you should say, “we are worthless slaves,” but think about what Jesus himself is going to do. We say it every Sunday, on the night he was betrayed, Jesus took bread, broke it, and gave it to his disciples. He took the cup, gave thanks, and gave it to his disciples. The disciples didn’t deserve this. They were all about to abandon him, one was about to deny him, and one was straight up going to betray him, so in no way are these guys doing “what they ought to have done” and yet, Jesus did to them exactly what he remarked that no one would do. Not because of their great faith did he do this, he did this, he does this, because of his great faith. We are saved by grace through the faith of God, when we have not even the faith of a mustard seed—because I don’t know about you, but I had a mulberry tree in my yard when I moved in, and all it did was make a mess. And even now that dad cut it down for me, it remains firmly rooted in place, so clearly my lack of a mustard seed of faith isn’t uprooting any trees—the faith that changes us is the faith of God in us, through us, that is the faith that changes the world.
The faith of Habakkuk is a faith in God, not in faith, but in God. A faith that waits on God, a faith that says, even though I have no faith that anything will change, still I will wait on you to answer, wait on you to move, wait on you to fulfill your justice. The faith of Habakkuk is a faith that perseveres despite all evidence to the contrary that our actions have meaning, because the faith is not in our actions, but in God who acts. I’ll share with you what that looks like for me. For me it looks like doing what I can do for climate action, for the refugee crisis, for gun violence reform. It means I call my congressperson, even though all I do is leave messages and we just about never vote the same way, I bring reusable bags to the store, I’ve gotten more conscientious about rinsing out things before I recycle them, I read the advocacy updates from Samaritas and the ELCA and I share them with you all, I crack jokes with the Co-op members, I listen to their stories, and I try to be a reminder of God’s presence in their lives. I do these things because as meaningless as those tiny actions may be, I refuse to give in in the face of hopelessness, I refuse to believe that my actions don’t matter, I refuse to believe that God is not still at work in the world and that these things are not having an impact.
The book of Habakkuk ends with this declaration of confidence, which the choir will sing as their offering piece today. The words from Habakkuk go like this:
Though the fig tree does not blossom,
and no fruit is on the vines;
though the produce of the olive fails,
and the fields yield no food;
though the flock is cut off from the fold,
and there is no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord;
I will exult in the God of my salvation.
God, the Lord, is my strength;
he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
and makes me tread upon the heights.
Faith doesn’t change the world around us, faith changes us to change the world. And it’s not our faith that does the changing, it is the faith of God, a faith that is slow, so much slower than our human time scale wants or can grasp, but that is real and relentless and permanent. So have faith, dear friends in Christ. Have faith not in faith, and have faith not in you. But have faith in God, who is faithful. Amen.
The extraordinary can look so ordinary
Monday, October 7, 2019
Thursday, October 3, 2019
Crossing the Chasm - A Sermon on Luke 16:19-31
Gloria’s teaching Sunday school this morning, and when we read this passage on Wednesday, she joked that on first read she thought her lesson for the kids should be, “well kids, you better be good and be nice to other people, or else you’re going to hell.” We laughed, and don’t worry Javana, it hopefully goes without saying that is NOT what Gloria is teaching the children in Sunday school, but it does get to the central question of this text, what are we to do with this parable?
Last week I mentioned that money and wealth is Jesus’ second most favorite topic to teach on, second only to the Kingdom of God, and here it is coming up again this morning. Theologian R. Alan Culpepper sees the parable of the rich man and Lazarus as the capstone moment in Jesus’ prophetic critique of wealth in Luke’s Gospel. In Mary’s song, the one we’re currently singing as the song of praise during the Eucharistic prayer, Mary declared that God “has brought the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly,” and at Jesus’ baptism, John the Baptist told the crowd that they should not take comfort in having Abraham as an ancestor, “for God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” In this passage we see that foretold reversal taking place, as the rich man is brought low to Hades while Lazarus is raised up to the side of Abraham. And actually the Greek is even more provocative. Lazarus is brought to Abraham’s “bosom,” which in Jewish tradition is the place of highest bliss, the place where martyrs were brought as a reward for their sacrifice. Lazarus in this parable is not just in heaven, he is an honored guest, seated at the place of prestige at the banquet feast of the Lord. Meanwhile, the rich man, who saw himself as a child of Abraham, who called Abraham father, and was even called “child” by Abraham, is in Hades, separated from the feast by an insurmountable chasm. Throughout Luke’s Gospel, we heard the message that the last shall be first and the first shall be last, in this parable, we are shown an image of that very declaration. “Child,” Abraham told Lazarus, “remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony.”
And since we’re at that part of the story, let’s talk a little bit about this chasm, where did it come from? One possibility is the man built it himself. He built it when he walked past Lazarus laying at his gate again, and again, and again throughout their lives, never seeing Lazarus, never acknowledging his need. How simple it would have been for the rich man to do something, anything, to ease Lazarus’ suffering, but instead he continuously walked by, digging that chasm deeper and deeper. So accustomed to the presence of the chasm was the rich man that even in death he continued to dig deeper and deeper into it. That, I think, is the rich man’s sin, not that he never helped Lazarus, he never even saw Lazarus. Not as a person at least, not as an equal. Even from Hades, the rich man begged Abraham to “send Lazarus,” first to cool his tongue, and then to speak to his brothers. Lazarus remained nothing more than a set-piece in the rich man’s mind, a tool to be used, a servant to be ordered around as he pleased. The chasm the rich man created in life was not only fixed in place at his death, but it continued to grow, as he continued to push Lazarus away. This is the danger of dishonest wealth, the “mammon of wickedness,” as the Greek phrases it, it separates us, isolates us, draws us from each other and ultimately from God.
So “then who can be saved,” to take a phrase from Matthew’s Gospel? We go to church, we read scripture, to find hope, and hope seems in short supply in this parable. Hang with me, there is hope, there is good news, I promise we’ll get there. But first, let’s ask the question that is often key to unlocking a parable, who are we to be in this story? Are we the rich man, condemned to an eternity of suffering for mistakes we did not even realized we were making? Or are we Lazarus, tortured through life so that we can reap a final reward after we die? I don’t know about you, but both seem like pretty terrible options to me. Both also seem hopeless, fatalistic, and not in line with the God I read about in scripture. Was Lazarus really forced to suffer such agony and torment so that he could be rewarded in heaven? And was the rich man really without redemption? Was there no hope for him in the end, no possibility of repentance, no opportunity to turn and be saved? Let me pose then a third option, rather that the rich man or Lazarus, what if we are the brothers? Like the brothers, after all, we have Moses and the prophets, and like the brothers, our story is not yet set. We still have the opportunity to repent, to be different, to live different.
And, I promised there would be good news, here’s the good news. The parable as Jesus told it, is not how the story actually lived out. Because the parable ended with despair, “neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.” There would be no point in sending Lazarus, the brothers would not be changed. But, dear friends in Christ, Lazarus was not the one who was raised from the dead, Jesus was. And Jesus didn’t rise from the dead to convince us to believe, Jesus rose from the dead to close the chasm itself. What that means is that on this side of the resurrection, there is no chasm. Lazarus couldn’t cross it to soothe the rich man or to warn his brothers, but Jesus didn’t just cross it, Jesus canceled it out entirely.
What the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ did, dear people of God, is it transforms this parable from a threat to an opportunity. What the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ does is it invites us, since the chasm between us and God is closed, to think about how we then can cross chasms between us and others.
Dear friends in Christ, because of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, this parable is not threat. It is challenge. Don’t get me wrong, this is hard stuff, this is hard work, but it is not threat. Rather it is opportunity, it is invitation, to be about the work of crossing chasms. As Lutherans we preach a cruciform, a cross-shaped faith. Since the chasm between us and God is bridged by Christ, we then get to be about the work of bridging the chasm between us and others. So in light of the resurrection, this parable is about challenging us to see others whom we may have ignored, whom we may not have noticed, and reach out to them. This parable is meant to shake us out of our comfort zones, to be alert to those around us, that their presence might change us.
The good news of this parable is acts of service are transformational not to those we serve, but to us. When we help our neighbor, when we reach out to others, what we will find is we are the ones being changed. You are seen by God, you are loved by God. Take that promise, see others, love others, and you will be transformed. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Last week I mentioned that money and wealth is Jesus’ second most favorite topic to teach on, second only to the Kingdom of God, and here it is coming up again this morning. Theologian R. Alan Culpepper sees the parable of the rich man and Lazarus as the capstone moment in Jesus’ prophetic critique of wealth in Luke’s Gospel. In Mary’s song, the one we’re currently singing as the song of praise during the Eucharistic prayer, Mary declared that God “has brought the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly,” and at Jesus’ baptism, John the Baptist told the crowd that they should not take comfort in having Abraham as an ancestor, “for God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” In this passage we see that foretold reversal taking place, as the rich man is brought low to Hades while Lazarus is raised up to the side of Abraham. And actually the Greek is even more provocative. Lazarus is brought to Abraham’s “bosom,” which in Jewish tradition is the place of highest bliss, the place where martyrs were brought as a reward for their sacrifice. Lazarus in this parable is not just in heaven, he is an honored guest, seated at the place of prestige at the banquet feast of the Lord. Meanwhile, the rich man, who saw himself as a child of Abraham, who called Abraham father, and was even called “child” by Abraham, is in Hades, separated from the feast by an insurmountable chasm. Throughout Luke’s Gospel, we heard the message that the last shall be first and the first shall be last, in this parable, we are shown an image of that very declaration. “Child,” Abraham told Lazarus, “remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony.”
And since we’re at that part of the story, let’s talk a little bit about this chasm, where did it come from? One possibility is the man built it himself. He built it when he walked past Lazarus laying at his gate again, and again, and again throughout their lives, never seeing Lazarus, never acknowledging his need. How simple it would have been for the rich man to do something, anything, to ease Lazarus’ suffering, but instead he continuously walked by, digging that chasm deeper and deeper. So accustomed to the presence of the chasm was the rich man that even in death he continued to dig deeper and deeper into it. That, I think, is the rich man’s sin, not that he never helped Lazarus, he never even saw Lazarus. Not as a person at least, not as an equal. Even from Hades, the rich man begged Abraham to “send Lazarus,” first to cool his tongue, and then to speak to his brothers. Lazarus remained nothing more than a set-piece in the rich man’s mind, a tool to be used, a servant to be ordered around as he pleased. The chasm the rich man created in life was not only fixed in place at his death, but it continued to grow, as he continued to push Lazarus away. This is the danger of dishonest wealth, the “mammon of wickedness,” as the Greek phrases it, it separates us, isolates us, draws us from each other and ultimately from God.
So “then who can be saved,” to take a phrase from Matthew’s Gospel? We go to church, we read scripture, to find hope, and hope seems in short supply in this parable. Hang with me, there is hope, there is good news, I promise we’ll get there. But first, let’s ask the question that is often key to unlocking a parable, who are we to be in this story? Are we the rich man, condemned to an eternity of suffering for mistakes we did not even realized we were making? Or are we Lazarus, tortured through life so that we can reap a final reward after we die? I don’t know about you, but both seem like pretty terrible options to me. Both also seem hopeless, fatalistic, and not in line with the God I read about in scripture. Was Lazarus really forced to suffer such agony and torment so that he could be rewarded in heaven? And was the rich man really without redemption? Was there no hope for him in the end, no possibility of repentance, no opportunity to turn and be saved? Let me pose then a third option, rather that the rich man or Lazarus, what if we are the brothers? Like the brothers, after all, we have Moses and the prophets, and like the brothers, our story is not yet set. We still have the opportunity to repent, to be different, to live different.
And, I promised there would be good news, here’s the good news. The parable as Jesus told it, is not how the story actually lived out. Because the parable ended with despair, “neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.” There would be no point in sending Lazarus, the brothers would not be changed. But, dear friends in Christ, Lazarus was not the one who was raised from the dead, Jesus was. And Jesus didn’t rise from the dead to convince us to believe, Jesus rose from the dead to close the chasm itself. What that means is that on this side of the resurrection, there is no chasm. Lazarus couldn’t cross it to soothe the rich man or to warn his brothers, but Jesus didn’t just cross it, Jesus canceled it out entirely.
What the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ did, dear people of God, is it transforms this parable from a threat to an opportunity. What the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ does is it invites us, since the chasm between us and God is closed, to think about how we then can cross chasms between us and others.
Dear friends in Christ, because of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, this parable is not threat. It is challenge. Don’t get me wrong, this is hard stuff, this is hard work, but it is not threat. Rather it is opportunity, it is invitation, to be about the work of crossing chasms. As Lutherans we preach a cruciform, a cross-shaped faith. Since the chasm between us and God is bridged by Christ, we then get to be about the work of bridging the chasm between us and others. So in light of the resurrection, this parable is about challenging us to see others whom we may have ignored, whom we may not have noticed, and reach out to them. This parable is meant to shake us out of our comfort zones, to be alert to those around us, that their presence might change us.
The good news of this parable is acts of service are transformational not to those we serve, but to us. When we help our neighbor, when we reach out to others, what we will find is we are the ones being changed. You are seen by God, you are loved by God. Take that promise, see others, love others, and you will be transformed. Thanks be to God. Amen.
How To Be Faithful: A Sermon on Luke 16:1-13
If you had to guess, what topic do you think Jesus talked about the most in the Gospels? Answer: the kingdom of God. What do you think is the second most popular topic Jesus taught on? Answer: money. Yep, a sermon about money, not just for stewardship season anymore. Nor should it have ever been confined to stewardship season, because clearly Jesus felt that money and wealth were important topics to speak of. Sixteen of the thirty-eight parables, and a whopping one in ten verse in the Gospels deal with the topic of money, how we use it, how we get it, and how it can use us. So buckle up, dear people of God. Because yes, it’s September 22nd, and the time for pledge cards is a month away, but it’s time to talk about money.
So we’ve got this parable this morning, which one of the commentaries I read described as, and I quote, “difficult to read and difficult to preach.” Awesome, these are always fun. And this parable of the absentee landlord and the dishonest manager does feel both difficult to read and to preach. Especially at the end, where the manager cuts the debts owed to the master, the master praises him for acting shrewdly—not normally an adjective we associate with uprightness and Godly living—and Jesus says, “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth.” Wait, what? “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” is not logic we generally think of as coming from Jesus, nor is “use wealth to get what you need,” so what is Jesus trying to get at here?
Before we get into the parable itself, it is important to notice the shift in audience here. Last week’s parables of the lost sheep, coin, and the skipped parable of the prodigal son were all addressed to the Pharisees. But today we read that Jesus said to his disciples, “There was a rich man…” This is an important distinction to notice, because it tells us that this is insider knowledge. This isn’t the sermon on the mount or the feeding of the five-thousand or the healing of some passerby. This is teaching for those whom were closest to him, who’d been traveling with him, who knew him. Which means this is going to be a hard teaching, a teaching meant to challenge, push, even test those who heard it. The message of the Gospel is described as one meant to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, and when Jesus spoke to his followers, he always seemed focused on making sure they didn’t get too comfortable.
So we’ve got this manager, whom the parable tells us had charges brought against him to his master, “that this man was squandering his property.” And like last’s week’s question about the definition of who is a sinner and who is righteous, the question here is, who is defining what it means to squander property? Is the manager defining it, is he legit bad at his job? Is the absentee landlord defining it, how does he know what property he has from a distance? Or is whoever reported on the manager defining it, and what motivations might this unnamed third party bring to the story? Whatever’s happening here with the so-called squandered property, the result was this: The manager was informed he needed to get the accounts in order, because he was out of a job. Oftentimes nowadays when someone finds themselves out of a job, especially a job in finance, rather than given time to organize the books, they are ceremoniously escorted out of the building. And this parable shows us the wisdom of that move, as with this additional time the manager came up with a scheme to provide for himself once he was no longer under the master’s employ. He called in several of the master’s debtor and dramatically cut the amount they owed. Now it’s a bit unclear here what exactly the manager was doing. Theologian R. Alan Culpepper offers three possibilities. The manager could have been a) cheating the master by reducing the size of the debt owed, b) deducting the interest, thus acting rightly in bringing the master in line with the Deuteronomic law against charging interest, or c) cutting the portion of the debt that was manager’s own commission. Whatever the motivation, the master praised the manager for his shrewdness, a move that seems strange and unlikely since in at least two of the options the master ended up with less money than he was supposed to have, and Jesus encouraged the disciples to use make friends for themselves by means of dishonest wealth. So, still the question, what is going on here? Is the manager the hero of the story? Who are we? Does Jesus want us to cheat the cheaters to advance the kingdom? Or make friends for ourselves with dishonest wealth so that we can obtain security? But verses ten to thirteen seem to contract that, with their disregard for dishonesty and the admonition that you cannot serve God and wealth. Is it faithful to be faithful with dishonest wealth? Was the manager serving God or himself in cutting the debts of the debtors? And, most importantly, what does this parable say to us in a world where finances are measured not in jugs of oil and containers of wheat, but in credit card debt, student loan payments, mortgages, stock-options, tax credits, and 401Ks. How are we to be shrewdly faithful?
Guess what friends, I cannot answer that question for you. And neither, sadly can scripture. I think a lot of times we want scripture to do that for us, or at least, I want it to do that for me. To give me a simple answer for exactly how I should act and what I should do in order to live rightly with God and my neighbor. The problem is Jesus almost never gave straight answers, and on the rare times he did, they were always to introductory problems. Remember a few weeks ago, Jesus turned to a large crowd and said, “none of you can be my disciples if you do not give up all of your possessions”? And we all thought, you can’t possibly mean that Jesus, that’s impossible! Well, this morning he told his disciples the parable of the dishonest manager, and suddenly getting rid of all our possessions, if not practically easier, seems at least conceptually easier. I know at least what it would look like to give away all my possessions, even though I cannot actually do it. But this, to faithfully and shrewdly manage dishonest wealth, that I am less confident in my ability to balance.
Friends, rather than answers, I think the gift this parable is offering us is questions. Because there is no one sized fits all answer for how we manage our personal finances. Leviticus chapter twenty-seven goes into great detail on how much is due to God, but the amounts are given in shekels, and they vary by the giver’s age and gender, and the priest’s assessment of the value, and whether the animal is a firstling, unless it is an unclean animal and then it needs to be assessed and given at one-fifth it’s value, and all of this changes if it’s a Jubilee year. So go ahead and try to figure out the conversion rate between a ritually clean firstling animal and 2019 US dollars, net or gross income, accumulated interest minus interest on debt, etc. We joke at stewardship time that your pledges are between you and God and Doug, because Doug is the financial secretary and does all the tallying, but the reality is even if we published the exact amount of everyone’s giving on a billboard somewhere, your pledge is between you and God, because only you and God know what that amount of money means to you. It is possible to make the largest financial contribution and still be the least generous, and conversely it is possible to give nothing but your time and be the most. Rather than give answers, what this parable does it invites us to wrestle with the questions money poses, and there are many, and it challenges us to ask ourselves who am I serving, am I serving God or money. Because it is possible to serve God with money, but it is also to easy to discover that our money is being served by us.
So consider this parable an opportunity, dear people of God, to think about your finances and whether you are using them, or if they may be using you. And this is complicated stuff, so I invite you to lean further in, to ask bigger questions, than can you up your pledge amount this year. Let this parable challenge you to think about where you spend your money, even on essential items. Does it go to people who are doing ethical work in the world, does it support things you care about? If you think, Pastor’s not talking to me, I’m broke, hang on. If you are a part of the US economic system, and you are, you’re a part of this conversation. You can shop at consignment stores that support good causes, you can share your resources, you can splurge on that kid’s girl scout cookies because you like cookies and supporting small children, these are all financial decisions that can be made by any of us at any income level. If you need to make a large purchase this year, a car or a lawn mower or a water heater, how do the choices you make reflect your values? Do you need a large car, that’s maybe less fuel efficient, because you spend your time helping senior get to appointments or hauling kids to soccer practice? Or is it just you most of the time, and something more environmentally friendly is a better fit? See how there are two right answers to that question. And of course, if you are lucky enough to have some resources, the questions get harder. Who are your investments with, and who are those investments benefiting? Are there corporations who don’t support your values who you need to divest from? Or is it more beneficial to stay invested, to have a say at the table, and to work for reform that way? Again, no one right answer, just a whole bunch of questions.
And here, at last, is the good news, dear people of God. Asking these questions, thinking about finances, wrestling with the ambiguity of these issues again and again and again, that in and of itself is an act of good stewardship, it is a way of being faithful. Yes it would be way easier if Jesus would just tell us how much we owe him every week, if Jesus would just send us a bill like the gas company, and we could pay it. But Jesus is not the gas company, and faith is not a transactional relationship. The fact is we don’t owe Jesus anything, because no amount of money could ever be enough for the gift we have received in Christ’s death and resurrection. Everything we do is a response to that gift which we already have. The opportunity and ability to manage our resources, however large or small they may be, is in itself a gift, it is a way for us to grow closer to God through the act of asking questions, learning, and challenging ourselves to lean in further. These hard and simple acts of faith are opportunities to strive for the kingdom. Theologian Fred Craddock reflected on this passage: “Most of us will not this week christen a ship, write a book, end a war, appoint a cabinet, dine with a queen, convert a nation, or be burned at the stake. Most likely this week will present no more than a chance to give a cup of water, write a note, visit a nursing home, vote for a county commissioner, teach a Sunday school class, share a meal, tell a child a story, go to choir practice, and feed the neighbor’s cat. Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much.” How will you be faithful this week? Thanks be to God. Amen.
So we’ve got this parable this morning, which one of the commentaries I read described as, and I quote, “difficult to read and difficult to preach.” Awesome, these are always fun. And this parable of the absentee landlord and the dishonest manager does feel both difficult to read and to preach. Especially at the end, where the manager cuts the debts owed to the master, the master praises him for acting shrewdly—not normally an adjective we associate with uprightness and Godly living—and Jesus says, “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth.” Wait, what? “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” is not logic we generally think of as coming from Jesus, nor is “use wealth to get what you need,” so what is Jesus trying to get at here?
Before we get into the parable itself, it is important to notice the shift in audience here. Last week’s parables of the lost sheep, coin, and the skipped parable of the prodigal son were all addressed to the Pharisees. But today we read that Jesus said to his disciples, “There was a rich man…” This is an important distinction to notice, because it tells us that this is insider knowledge. This isn’t the sermon on the mount or the feeding of the five-thousand or the healing of some passerby. This is teaching for those whom were closest to him, who’d been traveling with him, who knew him. Which means this is going to be a hard teaching, a teaching meant to challenge, push, even test those who heard it. The message of the Gospel is described as one meant to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, and when Jesus spoke to his followers, he always seemed focused on making sure they didn’t get too comfortable.
So we’ve got this manager, whom the parable tells us had charges brought against him to his master, “that this man was squandering his property.” And like last’s week’s question about the definition of who is a sinner and who is righteous, the question here is, who is defining what it means to squander property? Is the manager defining it, is he legit bad at his job? Is the absentee landlord defining it, how does he know what property he has from a distance? Or is whoever reported on the manager defining it, and what motivations might this unnamed third party bring to the story? Whatever’s happening here with the so-called squandered property, the result was this: The manager was informed he needed to get the accounts in order, because he was out of a job. Oftentimes nowadays when someone finds themselves out of a job, especially a job in finance, rather than given time to organize the books, they are ceremoniously escorted out of the building. And this parable shows us the wisdom of that move, as with this additional time the manager came up with a scheme to provide for himself once he was no longer under the master’s employ. He called in several of the master’s debtor and dramatically cut the amount they owed. Now it’s a bit unclear here what exactly the manager was doing. Theologian R. Alan Culpepper offers three possibilities. The manager could have been a) cheating the master by reducing the size of the debt owed, b) deducting the interest, thus acting rightly in bringing the master in line with the Deuteronomic law against charging interest, or c) cutting the portion of the debt that was manager’s own commission. Whatever the motivation, the master praised the manager for his shrewdness, a move that seems strange and unlikely since in at least two of the options the master ended up with less money than he was supposed to have, and Jesus encouraged the disciples to use make friends for themselves by means of dishonest wealth. So, still the question, what is going on here? Is the manager the hero of the story? Who are we? Does Jesus want us to cheat the cheaters to advance the kingdom? Or make friends for ourselves with dishonest wealth so that we can obtain security? But verses ten to thirteen seem to contract that, with their disregard for dishonesty and the admonition that you cannot serve God and wealth. Is it faithful to be faithful with dishonest wealth? Was the manager serving God or himself in cutting the debts of the debtors? And, most importantly, what does this parable say to us in a world where finances are measured not in jugs of oil and containers of wheat, but in credit card debt, student loan payments, mortgages, stock-options, tax credits, and 401Ks. How are we to be shrewdly faithful?
Guess what friends, I cannot answer that question for you. And neither, sadly can scripture. I think a lot of times we want scripture to do that for us, or at least, I want it to do that for me. To give me a simple answer for exactly how I should act and what I should do in order to live rightly with God and my neighbor. The problem is Jesus almost never gave straight answers, and on the rare times he did, they were always to introductory problems. Remember a few weeks ago, Jesus turned to a large crowd and said, “none of you can be my disciples if you do not give up all of your possessions”? And we all thought, you can’t possibly mean that Jesus, that’s impossible! Well, this morning he told his disciples the parable of the dishonest manager, and suddenly getting rid of all our possessions, if not practically easier, seems at least conceptually easier. I know at least what it would look like to give away all my possessions, even though I cannot actually do it. But this, to faithfully and shrewdly manage dishonest wealth, that I am less confident in my ability to balance.
Friends, rather than answers, I think the gift this parable is offering us is questions. Because there is no one sized fits all answer for how we manage our personal finances. Leviticus chapter twenty-seven goes into great detail on how much is due to God, but the amounts are given in shekels, and they vary by the giver’s age and gender, and the priest’s assessment of the value, and whether the animal is a firstling, unless it is an unclean animal and then it needs to be assessed and given at one-fifth it’s value, and all of this changes if it’s a Jubilee year. So go ahead and try to figure out the conversion rate between a ritually clean firstling animal and 2019 US dollars, net or gross income, accumulated interest minus interest on debt, etc. We joke at stewardship time that your pledges are between you and God and Doug, because Doug is the financial secretary and does all the tallying, but the reality is even if we published the exact amount of everyone’s giving on a billboard somewhere, your pledge is between you and God, because only you and God know what that amount of money means to you. It is possible to make the largest financial contribution and still be the least generous, and conversely it is possible to give nothing but your time and be the most. Rather than give answers, what this parable does it invites us to wrestle with the questions money poses, and there are many, and it challenges us to ask ourselves who am I serving, am I serving God or money. Because it is possible to serve God with money, but it is also to easy to discover that our money is being served by us.
So consider this parable an opportunity, dear people of God, to think about your finances and whether you are using them, or if they may be using you. And this is complicated stuff, so I invite you to lean further in, to ask bigger questions, than can you up your pledge amount this year. Let this parable challenge you to think about where you spend your money, even on essential items. Does it go to people who are doing ethical work in the world, does it support things you care about? If you think, Pastor’s not talking to me, I’m broke, hang on. If you are a part of the US economic system, and you are, you’re a part of this conversation. You can shop at consignment stores that support good causes, you can share your resources, you can splurge on that kid’s girl scout cookies because you like cookies and supporting small children, these are all financial decisions that can be made by any of us at any income level. If you need to make a large purchase this year, a car or a lawn mower or a water heater, how do the choices you make reflect your values? Do you need a large car, that’s maybe less fuel efficient, because you spend your time helping senior get to appointments or hauling kids to soccer practice? Or is it just you most of the time, and something more environmentally friendly is a better fit? See how there are two right answers to that question. And of course, if you are lucky enough to have some resources, the questions get harder. Who are your investments with, and who are those investments benefiting? Are there corporations who don’t support your values who you need to divest from? Or is it more beneficial to stay invested, to have a say at the table, and to work for reform that way? Again, no one right answer, just a whole bunch of questions.
And here, at last, is the good news, dear people of God. Asking these questions, thinking about finances, wrestling with the ambiguity of these issues again and again and again, that in and of itself is an act of good stewardship, it is a way of being faithful. Yes it would be way easier if Jesus would just tell us how much we owe him every week, if Jesus would just send us a bill like the gas company, and we could pay it. But Jesus is not the gas company, and faith is not a transactional relationship. The fact is we don’t owe Jesus anything, because no amount of money could ever be enough for the gift we have received in Christ’s death and resurrection. Everything we do is a response to that gift which we already have. The opportunity and ability to manage our resources, however large or small they may be, is in itself a gift, it is a way for us to grow closer to God through the act of asking questions, learning, and challenging ourselves to lean in further. These hard and simple acts of faith are opportunities to strive for the kingdom. Theologian Fred Craddock reflected on this passage: “Most of us will not this week christen a ship, write a book, end a war, appoint a cabinet, dine with a queen, convert a nation, or be burned at the stake. Most likely this week will present no more than a chance to give a cup of water, write a note, visit a nursing home, vote for a county commissioner, teach a Sunday school class, share a meal, tell a child a story, go to choir practice, and feed the neighbor’s cat. Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much.” How will you be faithful this week? Thanks be to God. Amen.
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