Stingy Generosity (Proper 19A)

Stingy Generosity

(Proper 19A)

8:00 a.m. Said; 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass with Holy Baptism

14 September 2014

Parish Church of Trinity Ashland (Oregon)
Genesis 50:15-21; Psalm 103:(1-7), 8-13; Romans 14:1-12; Matthew 18:21-35

God, give us hearts to feel and love,
take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

There are moments in our lives when a change in perspectives makes things very clear, and not always comfortably so.  This happened to me once when I was working hard on a budget submission to Congress.  I had spent a couple of weeks within the State Department bureaucracy arguing hard and long with various offices and bureaus over a budget line of $800,000, or .8 million as it appeared in the submission.  It was hard to get consensus over what my office and I felt was an essential, obvious, and prudent use of the taxpayers funds to enhance U.S. security and wellbeing in a long term program of building general good will in the East Asian Area.  It was a zero sum, and whatever went for my program had to be taken out of other programs, programs that their administrators thought were more worthy than mine.  Just after a successful submission, I was in an interagency discussion with colleagues from the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency.  The subject came up and to my horror, they all said in unison, “You had to fight to get that level of funding?  $.8 million is a rounding error in our process and can be covered for a worthy project without much fuss!  It is budget dust!” 

 

Budget Dust!  This underscored for me not only the perverse priorities of our society and government, where war, deceit, and coercion are funded multiple decimal points ahead of programs for peace, understanding, reconciliation, and goodwill.   As LBJ famously said, you put together 500 million here and 3 billion there, and pretty soon you are talking real money. 

Budget Dust!  This also underscored for me the perverse truth that the less you have, the more you seem to forced to be stingy with it.    The old saw among scholars in academia describing infighting about funding of university departments and research describes it:  the level of acrimony in discussing academic finances is inversely proportional to the size of the stakes: The smaller the sums and the more limited the resources under discussion, the nastier and more cut-throat the infighting for them. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his short story “The Rich Boy,” wrote, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are …”  In his novel, The Great Gatsby, he describes the practical effect of this: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . . .” 

This fact of life is the source of some great witticisms.  Oscar Wilde once described the traditional amusement of the British aristocracy, that caricature of hereditary wealth and privilege.  He said the fox hunt was “the inedible being pursued by the unspeakable.” 

Such wit and clear vision about the distorted ways of the world are what lie behind today’s Gospel reading, the Parable of the Merciless Servant.    You mustn’t be misled by the context in which the story finds itself in Saint Matthew’s Gospel.  Nearly all scholars agree that the parable itself goes back to the Historical Jesus, but few think that this applies to Saint Matthew’s understanding of the parable as a simple illustration of our need to forgive others and what might happen to us if we don’t forgive. 

Matthew’s reading has a basic problem of logic to it:  his Jesus here is saying forgive.    Not just the seven times you’ve heard in tradition that I’ve said, but 77 times, that is, forever.  Keep on forgiving.  But then he tells a story where God does not forgive.  Even though the king lets the servant and his family off first time around because of their pitiful cries, in the end he’s so outraged with this servant that he hands him over to be tortured to death.  Not a good example of forgiveness by any stretch of the imagination. 

Jesus originally told the parable as a stand-alone story.   The king was not intended as a symbol for God.   This is a story to make you think about what’s going on in the world around us.    It supposed to make us see the world with new eyes, and with these new eyes, perceive what the world would be like if God were in fact in charge of things, perceive the Reign of God. 

The king is a petty local client king of the Roman Empire.  The servants or slaves are his court retainers, bureaucrats and enforcers of his revenue collection.  The first servant is a high ranking retainer in charge of big revenue collection.  He deals with Pentagon-sized budgets.  Though completely dependent on the King, though in reality the king’s slave, and poor in comparison with the king, this bureaucrat is high in the pecking order, and so himself is fabulously rich by the standard of ordinary people.  The second servant is one in charge of budget dust level revenues. 

The system was that retainers kept for themselves a modest percentage of what they raised for their bosses.   And so, like Tom and Daisy, the high level bureaucrat is rich, not like the rest of us.   The huge amount he owes the king, literally 10,000 talents, is worth about 100 million of our dollars in purchasing power. The problem is that he has gotten too greedy, and the extortionate squeeze he applies for his King and himself has started to have negative blowback for the King.  People are starting to talk about rebellion, or ratting the King out to the Romans.  So the King decides to make an example of the servant, and blame the harshness on him.  He throws him under the bus to save the appearance of legitimacy for his own rule.   He throws him and his family into prison with no hope of release—there is no way anyone in prison can raise this sum. 

But they beg for mercy, and the King decides on another strategy.  He will show what a big heart he has.  He is going to prove those naysayers and whiners wrong.  By a magnificent show of mercy—forgive a debt of 100 million dollars!—this ancient Bill Gates or Warren Buffet hopes to recover some public relations ground.  He releases the servant to show his generosity. 

And then what does that fool of a bureaucrat do?  Run out and immediately put the squeeze on a lesser bureaucrat.  This little bureaucrat owes the big one a much smaller amount that the big one had owed the King, literally a 100 denarii, less that 1/1,000 of the sum forgiven him by the king.  But this relative budget dust is still a huge sum for the peasants and artisans listening to Jesus: about 30,000 dollars by our standards.  

By average standards, both the king and the high servant can afford to be “generous.”  But the king’s generosity, as astoundingly huge as it is, is still a stingy generosity.  It’s all about manipulating people to keep the flow of money coming.  And the high servant’s lack of generosity stems from the logic of the system.  He doesn’t think he can afford it.  This blinds him to his boss’s motives for generosity.  And so for the boss, this guy “just doesn’t get it.”   So his stinginess forces the King to go back on his strategy, and even make it harsher.  He turns him over to the torturers as an example to all other retainers.  They must keep their greed and squeeze under control, and maintain a façade of benevolent generosity.    The Chinese have a proverb, “You must kill the chicken to scare the monkeys.”  This guy has to be the chicken.

This parable is asking Jesus’ listeners and us to ponder on what sick societies we live in.  The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.  The rich are not like the rest of us.  They can afford to be generous, after a fashion, while the rest of us keep on struggling.  Most sociological studies of the ancient Greco-Roman world say that local client kings like the King in the parable were in the top 1% of the population, a group that controlled 95% of the resources.  Does that sound familiar?  Jesus is not saying wealth is bad, or that the rich are by definition evil.  But he is saying that, given the realities of how our world works, it is harder for a rich person to come under God’s Reign than it is to thread a rope through the eye of a needle. 

The fact is, generosity is a good thing.  Forgiveness is a good thing.  Even the super rich recognize that.   It just gets played out in different modalities, different motivations, and in vastly different scales of the size of the sums involved.  As we look out from this parable with new eyes on the world, we see that there is something seriously the matter here:  such good things as generosity and forgiveness have been distorted and corrupted by our societal structures.  If the Reign of God means anything, if God being truly being in charge, right here, right now, means anything at all, it means that our generosity and forgiveness must be redeemed and healed by genuine compassion.   It means that our priorities, where we place budget dust and where we place the real money must be reordered and fixed by concern for the welfare of others.    

Jesus elsewhere says be as smart as snakes and harmless as doves.  Be at least as street savvy as the local crook.  Be as tricky in building the Kingdom as an unscrupulous business manager can be when his retirement is threatened. At the very least, this parable of the Unforgiving Servant is telling us that we need to be as truly generous, as genuinely compassionate in our lives as the careless rich have the appearance of being when trying to show off or soothe their consciences. 

In the name of Christ, Amen