9-22-19 Readings & Sermon

The first lesson today is from Jeremiah.

My joy is gone.

Grief is upon me.

My heart is sick.

Hark, the cry of my poor people from far and wide in the land.

Is the Lord not in Zion?

Is her king not in her?

Why have they provoked me to anger with their images, with their foreign idols?

The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not safe.

For the hurt of my poor people, I am hurt.

I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me.

Is there no bomb in Gilead?

Is there no physician there?

Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored?

Oh, that my head were a spring of water and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep day and night for the slain of my poor people.

The word of the Lord.

Jesus said to the disciples, There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property.

So he summoned him and said to him, What is this that I hear about you?

Give me an account of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.

Then the manager said to himself, What will I do now that I that my master is taking the position away from me?

I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg.

I have decided what to do, so that when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.

So summoning his master's debtors one by one, he asked the first, How much do you owe my master?

And he answered, A hundred jugs of olive oil.

He said to him, Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.

Then he asked another, And how much do you owe?

And he replied, A hundred containers of wheat.

He said to him, Take your bill and make it eighty.

And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly.

For the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.

And I tell you, make friends with yourself for yourself by means of dishonest wealth, so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.

Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much, and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much.

If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust you to the true riches?

And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own?

No slave can serve two masters, for a slave will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other.

You cannot serve God and wealth.

The gospel of the Lord.

So I have to ask you all.

Y'all, excuse me.

My northern genes are coming out today.

I have to ask y'all, do you ever feel like when you're reading scripture you need a decoder ring?

If I'm perfectly honest, I kept wishing my cereal box at home had one of those this week as I was preparing for this sermon.

This one's a doozy.

It would be helpful if this story or Jesus at the end gave some more clues, but about the only straightforward thing I see in this is when Jesus says you can't serve two masters.

The rest needs a lot more explanation.

It needs that magical decoder ring.

And well, since I don't have one of those with me, I'd like to try a different approach today.

It might help, it might not.

You might all leave here at the end of the day still scratching your head saying, What?

But let's give it a try.

I thought we could approach this by looking at the different characters in this parable and seeing if any of them resemble God in some way.

Now that's not to say that parables always have a God figure in them.

I think we would make a mistake if we always try to fit God into a parable.

Sometimes he's just not there.

Or he's there in other ways than a character.

But let's let's give this a try.

I figure we have not much to lose, hopefully, something to gain.

So first we have the landowner.

The landowner had these managers underneath him.

He had this whole system working for him, something not too dissimilar to feudalism.

It kept him in a position of power while many others owed him great debts.

Now, this is an extreme contrast to that vision laid out to us in the Old Testament, where land was something one inherited, not accumulated, where debts were not to acquire interest, and people were to experience some level of equality.

It might be helpful to compare this landowner to that of the landowner of the parable that comes right before this one in the Gospel of Luke.

The preceding parable is one I'm going to assume you all are rather familiar with.

It's that of the prodigal son.

In the first parable, we hear of a landowner who shows mercy, forgiveness, and love.

The landowner welcoming his son back in his arms before any explanations can be given.

But in today's parable, the landowner only seems to show mercy to the manager when the manager impresses the landowner with his street smarts, his cunning behaviors.

It's only then that the landowner thinks, this guy might be good to keep around.

His creative thinking might come in handy, especially now that he's earned those brownie points with those peasants.

The landowner operates from the economy of mammon.

Mammon meaning not just money, but that idle nature, that possessive power that money can often hold over humanity.

So does this character sound much like God?

I don't think so, so let's cross him off the list.

Next we have the manager.

The manager appears to primarily be concerned with himself.

He wants to save his own backside.

While his actions may benefit the peasants as their debts are reduced, and also his actions impressed the landowner with those business practices.

Really, the manager was only concerned about himself, wanting to make sure he had a future.

And then the debts.

The debts that he was reducing were most likely ill-gained in the first place.

Again, the interest on debts was something not good.

They weren't supposed to happen.

And then, in addition, managers would often, for their own livelihood, would add on interest to whatever the landowner had already established as interest.

So inappropriate interest on top of inappropriate interest.

No one can ever get out from under that.

And so the reductions that the manager offered weren't really generous gifts, but were what should have belonged to the peasants all along, not the landowner.

Managers were not the ones controlling the economic system of the day, but they certainly were benefiting from it.

The managers were the beneficiaries of this economics of mammon.

And then there's that accusation brought upon him: one that he was squandering the very thing he was supposed to be managing.

The behavior of squandering was also used in the parable of that last son, that prodigal son.

The son had squandered his inheritance until he was stuck eating scraps with the pigs.

So here we have two second in commands, neither who was good at managing the resources.

But there is a noticeable difference between these two characters.

The prodigal son goes back repentant and is even willing to take the position of hired hand, if only it means that he no longer has to eat with the pigs.

And on the other hand, the manager never seems to show any signs of repentance.

Instead, he does exactly what he was accused of doing all along, mismanaging the resources, doing whatever it took to save his own self even at the expense of others.

The manager does not seem to hold the characteristics of God.

So we can cross him off our list, too.

That leaves us with one more character.

That's a group of peasants.

These are the individuals who remain subjects to the economic system of mammon, the system where there are a few rich landowners and way too many poor peasants.

They do not benefit from the system but instead are oppressed by it, kept down by that ever-growing interest which is placed on them from by the landowners and their managers.

In this story, the peasants have two chances, two possible opportunities of hope where the oppressive system might begin to topple down.

One would be if those managers' actions in canceling the debt had actually caused the landowner to file bankruptcy, turning the system upside down.

This is pretty unlikely, but those peasants can hope, can't they?

Or second, the manager really does leave the landowner's business and is now dependent on the peasant's hospitality.

See, while the peasants have no power within the economy of mammon, they hold power in the economy of love, an exchange of practices that are more about serving the wider community than just oneself.

Now, this is not to romanticize poverty, for poverty is not God's desire.

But it seems to me that often when people are so caught up in the system of mammon, they struggle to truly work in the system of love.

Whereas those who aren't caught up in the system aren't caught trying to keep the system alive can be free to operate within a currency of love.

Maybe this is what Jesus means when he says we can't serve two masters.

When I was in India, I saw a true example of the economy of love in a rather simple way.

And forgive me, I'm sure I've told a few of this before, simply because it was a practice that continually challenges and inspires me.

See, in India, the meal is everything.

Indians love to eat, which is probably why I got along with them so well.

Every meal had to have the staples, dal and rice.

And if you're Bengali, it would also have to have potato because rice is not enough of a starch.

And then, of course, there's always some kind of veggie curry.

And then ideally, you would have at least one other curry dish that contained a protein, whether it was egg or fish, chicken or soy.

That's five dishes at a minimum every night of the week.

I don't know about you, but I hate to just make a casserole dish, let alone five dishes.

And now imagine this: most of these women are cooking on either a one or two burner stove.

Cooking takes half of the day for most of these women.

So after a while, the shrewd, street, smart women got with it and they started working together.

And each woman would decide what they're making for the day, and not only making enough for their family, but they would make extra to share.

And so at about seven o'clock every night, I would watch the kids run from door to door to door to door, asking the mothers, what are you cooking?

What are you cooking?

Do you want to trade?

And there would be this whole bartering system going on.

And that way, a family would make three, four dishes, but end up getting to enjoy six or seven dishes.

This was an economy of love that benefited the whole community, not just the individual.

Is God found in the poor?

I'm not sure, but I do believe God's face is reflected in the economy of love as shown in their hospitality, shown in the way the peasants would have cared for that manager if it had come to that.

Jesus is essentially asking us, his listeners, which system are we managers within?

And who is our master?

Which economy are we operating within?

The economy of mammon or the economy of love?

We know the landowner approves of the manager's shrewdness in the end, but the manager had a choice in that moment to resign or to stay.

He had that choice to take that red pill or that blue one, to keep things as status quo or to walk into a new world.

He could say, I'm done with this system that keeps people oppressed and just very few on the top.

I'm sick of that constant fear of being fired.

I'm sick of earning my keep by charging unfair interest to others.

I'm gonna go spend my life with those peasants and learn a new way of being in their economy of love.

Or the manager could have said, Thanks, boss.

Now that you really know what I can do, give me a promotion with a raise, of course, and I will be shrewd for you.

We will make bank.

All the while, the manager saying, Peasants?

What peasants?

It seems to me, like the manager in this parable, we have the chance every day to ask ourselves, which economy do we want to be subject to?

Which economy do we want to be shrewd for?

Part of the challenge is that we can never fully escape the role that money has in our lives.

But we can make choices and turn our hearts towards love so that money does not turn into mammon.

While we live in this space of the now and not yet, while we are waiting for Christ's restoration project to be completed, we must live with this tension, this struggle pulling us in two different directions.

But we can make choices every day, in big ways and in small ways, to have our hearts set on love, not money.

Imagine a world where those with the street smarts, those with the shrewd ways, the cunning behaviors, are actually the managers working for the kingdom and the economy of love.

This, my friends, is the world that Jesus is offering to us.