Betting on Love
Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 20 Year C RCL)
18 September 2016--8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 20 Year C RCL)
18 September 2016--8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland
(Oregon)
The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP,
Ph.D.
Readings: Amos 8:4-7 and Psalm 113; 1 Timothy
2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13
God, give us hearts to feel and love,
take away our hearts of stone
and give us hearts of flesh.
Amen.
You
know the phrase we hear in hierarchies: “Just make it so, I don’t care
how.” “You take care of it, I don’t
personally want to get too far down in the weeds on this.” “Just do it. I
really don’t want to know the details.” The underling is expected to meet
certain goals by whatever means necessary, however messy, and at the same time
maintain an appearance of tidiness, order, and calm. The boss’s unstated assumption is: “If there
is ever an investigation, I want to be able to say honestly I didn’t know.”
Today’s
Gospel is a parable often called “the Dishonest Manager.” I think it
should be called, “the Crooked Accountant,” or, “Street Smarts.”
It
almost certainly comes from the historical Jesus—no church leader in his right
mind would have made this up and put on Jesus’ lips what appears to be praise
for dishonesty. Preachers have been
trying to explain it away ever since, including Luke in today’s Gospel. Those three sayings (vv. 9-12) he tacks on
the end of the parable read, in the words of C.H. Dodd, like notes for three
separate sermons to preach the parable.
For
the original audience, the parable was probably less shocking than the parable
of the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son’s Loving Father. Both of these
stories went against social norms and expectations: Samaritans were not
expected to be “good,” and fathers were expected to be stricter disciplinarians
of wayward children. But the scene in “the Crooked Accountant” would have
been familiar to Jesus’ listeners.
The
economic system of the day clashed with stated Jewish religious
values. Torah said, do not oppress
the poor, do not charge interest, do not practice usury. Torah said, let land remain in families, re-establishing
original ownership at least once a generation, in the Jubilee Year.
But
in Palestine under the Romans, the vast majority of small landowners were
dispossessed without hope of restoration. Many became tenant farmers:
they had to pay for the right to remain on the land by signing notes promising
hefty amounts of the anticipated produce.
Farmers failing to pay for whatever reason were forced off the land and
fell into the anonymous and miserable mass of day laborers, whose hard manual
work did not pay enough to feed a single person, let alone a family. The large estates grew as more and more small
farms defaulted on loans and were sold.
The
rich landowner here has a manager running his operations. It’s his job to ensure that the landowner
gets richer. He puts a hefty interest
charge on the principal of the loan and imbeds it in the sum to be paid. He works on a kind of commission and must
pad the bills and rates he charges to include a “service fee” for
himself. The rich man doesn’t want to know the details—that would
implicate him in breaking Torah—he just wants to see a positive balance in the
books at the end of the year.
Like
most hatchet men, the manager is the one who attracts the wrath of those who
suffer from the system he enforces; the landowner is left free and unstained
above the fray, honored by all.
Then,
as now, the weak had few weapons to defend themselves against the powerful:
passive non-compliance, subtle sabotage, evasion, and
deception. It is probably some disgruntled debtors, angry at
the manager’s lack of pity, who float the rumors of corruption against him.
The
landowner could try and punish the manager as a thief. But that might expose his
own role in the extortion. Better not
let the sordid details be known. So he
decides to quietly sack the
manager. He asks for a final accounting
so he can pass on this dirty job to some other hatchet man who can be more
discreet.
The
manager is clever. He admits to
himself his own abilities and limitations. He does not want to fall
immediately into the hopeless mass of day laborers: “I am too weak to dig, and
I am too proud to beg.” So he himself uses a weapon of the weak to defend
himself.
In
order to feather his own retirement bed, he curries favor with the very tenant
farmers he has been gouging. He rewrites
the promissory notes, and gives the debtors all huge reductions, removing his
own service charge and the usurious interest charges.
The
strategy is so successful that when the landowner finds out how about it, he
can only shake his head in admiration and say, “I wish we could all be that shrewd!”
Jesus
was no prude, and was not bothered religious scruples. He was a craftsman
from Galilee, a backward and religiously dubious province. He lived closely with dispossessed peasants
and day laborers. He addressed his ministry primarily to them. His
parable here is an inside joke for such people—the great and the mighty are so
rich that they can afford on occasion
to forgo the rapacious squeeze their underlings apply to the poor.
The
difference between honest and dishonest is no simple matter: in a corrupt system of oppression, the ‘honorable’
may actually be dishonorable. The dishonest steward has to honestly assess himself and how he has
gouged people before he can find a way out of his dilemma. He becomes honest only when he realizes the lie at the heart of how he has
earned his livelihood and the wealth of his master. When he cuts the rates and
stops gouging, even though this may be crooked
by the standards of the system, he is actually recognizing the true way of the
Reign of God. And when the Reign of God
breaks in, grace happens. If only we could all be that shrewd!
Luke clearly believes the parable is about how we use
wealth, and how we need to be smart in using our current resources to insure a
better future in God’s kingdom. But I think
that the Historical Jesus had something else in mind.
Jesus
elsewhere says “Even bad parents know to give their children good things: bread
and not a stone, an egg, and not a snake.
God is a lot better than that, so just imagine what he has in store for
us!” “If a guy who wants to stay in
bed at midnight will get up and help a noisy friend at the door simply to get
some peace and quiet, God will surely give you us things when we make some
noise in prayer!” Jesus likes using edgy images to get at truths
about God.
Just before this story in Luke, Jesus gives several parables
about God: a shepherd who leaves 99 sheep out in the wilderness to seek
out one who has gotten itself lost, a
crazy woman who throws a big
expensive party in joy when she finds some
lost petty change, a somewhat ineffectual
father of a dysfunctional family who won’t adequately discipline a wayward
son, shamelessly runs out to meet him when he returns from his debauches, throws a big party for him, and then has
to deal with the sullen wrath of the older son who feels slighted in the whole
affair. All of these stories stress the
fact that God’s love is crazy
love. Jesus is saying God is wild about
you! God loves you without shame or
reason. Loving you is in the nature of God.
The
parable of Crooked Accountant tells us to be smart and lay our bets on God’s
crazy love, because that’s God’s nature. If a crook
can be smart and play his cards right because he understands his own failings
and his boss’s quirks, maybe we need to fess up and be honest about ourselves,
and really let ourselves wake up to the truth of God’s love. Be
street-smart like that crooked accountant!
God is crazy about you. Put your
bets on that.
There
are many ways we don’t place our bets on God’s love. We feel guilt and shame even though we have
been assured of forgiveness. We doubt
that maybe God’s love will one day overcome everything and win, and that all will come into its embrace. We are slow to forgive others, and to show
them love. We think that people cannot change.
Trusting
God’s love is a liberating thing. It is
what lies behind Martin Luther’s famous line, “Sin boldly!” He is not telling us to sin, but to lose our
silly scruples, and our fear of offending God.
Jesus
is not telling us here to be dishonest.
He wants us to be truly
honest, and to let the disreputable and unrespectable side of the Reign of God
win us over, work in us.
Truly
betting on the reality of God’s love means we do not need to have fear. It means we do not need to have regrets. It
means we can love, and give, and sacrifice, and enjoy life and friends and
family without shame.
Thanks
be to God.
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