It is NOT easy.... (Reflecting on God, on scripture, on money...)
Today’s parable from Luke is hard.
In fact, most biblical scholars concur – it is probably
impossible for us to interpret.
You heard me correctly.
Remember that scripture began as stories and accounts shared
person to person, stories told around dinner tables, in worship settings, in
the marketplace. Voice to voice.
Eventually they were written down…and we believe scripture
is inspired – so the person that wrote them down was leaning into a call to
write them down.
And they were written down in the language of the time and place. In this case, Luke’s gospel was recorded in very refined Greek.
Over time it was translated – first to Latin. Then probably to German. And then into a
range of other languages. Each
translator picking and choosing nuanced words to drive a point home.
It’s possible that the way this particular text was
recorded, there has been a fragment added from the original oral
tradition. It’s possible that some of
the words do not translate to an understandable concept in our current culture.
And there are probably some cultural context clues that
don’t fully translate.
It is likely impossible for us to fully understand this
story of the shrewd manager, or the dishonest servant.
But we don’t throw scripture out for that reason. We read it asking for the Holy Spirit’s
wisdom to illuminate the text for us.
We use our tradition, our reason, our experience…and prayer
to hear how the Spirit speaks to us. And
we do this together as a community …because imagine the chaos of faith if we
each just held our individual belief and didn’t work together to seek meaning.
Today, we’re going to wade through this text and reflect…to
see if we can’t gain meaning for us in this time and this place. Today I’m going to do most of the talking, but
I hope you’ll reflect and reread and share your insights with one another over
dinner, at choir practice, as you gather for various parts of life.
In this parable, we have a rich man who has a manager for
his business affairs. It comes to the
rich man’s attention that the manager has somehow been wasting funds that have
been entrusted to him. The rich man asks
for an accounting of the work that the manager has done.
The manager thinks about his options. He recognizes that if he loses this job, he is not cut out for hard manual labor, and he realizes that the people he has worked with on the rich man’s behalf will probably not want to help him – we are left to assume that this is because he’s not treated them well up to this point.
He hatches a plan. He
goes to master’s debtors and one-by-one reduces what is owed by each
debtor.
And this is where it gets difficult for us to fully
understand.
The rich man surveys what the manager has done, and declares
it shrewd.
The rich man sees the actions to befriend the debtors as a
wise one for the manager. Now these
debtors are indebted to the manager somehow.
They owe him some allegiance.
Is there something we don’t fully understand about the debts
that the manager forgave? Perhaps he
gave up his own commission. Perhaps he reduced their debt by the amount of
interest they owed – because historically interest rates would have been
astronomical and charging interest was not in keeping with Jewish law.
There is no consensus about these details. In fact, scholars collectively scratch their
heads and leave a lot of question marks…not a bad thing.
But what comes next in the text helps us a bit. Jesus closes this text with some key
teachings. Imagine him saying…
In light of this…remember:
Whoever is faithful in little is also faithful in much.
If you can’t be trusted with what you have been given, why
would you be given more?
You cannot serve two masters- you cannot serve both God and
wealth.
Ah. These are nice
clean statements. They don’t require so
much interpretation about which character is a stand in for whom. They don’t require us understanding an
ancient cultural system. They don’t
require us to know all the ins and outs of a social structure that ceased to
exist over a thousand of years ago.
These are guideposts that feel timeless.
I was reminded this week, pondering this parable, of what it
is like to be caught between a rock and a hard place.
To find ourselves in a no win situation.
To be at the street corner approached by a panhandler.
We worry that giving the person money might enable a poor
choice.
We also see a child of God who clearly has basic needs that
are going unmet.
It’s a no win situation.
To be stuck in a job that is soul-sucking – literally life
damaging, but we have a mortgage, a car payment, and a family to feed.
To have two bad candidate choices in front of us in any
given election.
The manager has found himself in a no win situation. Perhaps
what is shrewd is his ability to protect himself from risk and exposure.
But then, what about Jesus’ warning about being trusted in
little, about serving God?
What about that side-eye comment about making friends for
yourself of dishonest wealth so you have a back up plan.
As the story is told and then summarized, there is a
suggestion from Jesus that the shifty folks are shrewd, making such alliances;
where children of light (the disciples) don’t have such alliances.
Now wait a minute…is Jesus suggesting we should all go hedge
our bets with shifty deals? Just in case being good people that follow good
rules doesn’t work out for us?
Perhaps this parable and some of Jesus’ commentary has an
element of sarcasm to it.
I mean…I don’t see any emoji that would cue that for me (cue
slide at 10 a.m.). I’ve gotten pretty
used to people dropping faces into their emails or texts so that I catch the
emotional intent behind their written words…
I don’t know about you, but I’m not really fond of thinking
of Jesus using sarcasm as a rhetorical device, but there is evidence that he
does if we read and ponder well. I am guessing those sitting around him would
have occasionally recognized this.
So…we have a story about being shrewd. And we have some clear cut statements from
Jesus about what is important. And we might have some Jesus throwing shade.
What then, do we take from this text, prayerfully?
How is it that these timeless teachings of Jesus might be
guideposts in those no win situations – that we have to be trustworthy with
little to be trustworthy with much. That we cannot serve both God and wealth…
I have some thoughts. (Of course I do.)
This parable comes immediately after the story of the
prodigal son – a story in which a son, flesh and blood, squanders his father’s
wealth and is welcomed back into the fold.
And it precedes Jesus telling a story about a rich man and the beggar
Lazarus who waits sick and starving just outside his gates – a situation he
regrets only when he lands in Hades.
These stories are all about our relationship to material
possessions – to things and specifically to the resources of wealth that set us
apart. These are stories about how
material positions take us away from the thing that matters most – God.
The verse that immediately follows our text for today reads:
The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all this and
they ridiculed him. So he said to them,
“You are those who justify yourselves in the sight of others; but God knows
your hearts; for what is prized by human beings is an abomination in the sight
of God.”
I don’t know about you…but I get a little uncomfortable
swimming around in these texts. Because
I like my house and my car and my cool shoes and a nice vacation here and
there.
Over coming weeks as we enter into a season of considering
how we share our gifts with the community of Faith and the world beyond, we’ll
have to talk some about money and our relationship to it.
I feel like Jesus is laying a ground work…and giving us a
range of stories to consider how we might understand our relationship to God
and our relationship to money. And none of it is super plain and simple. And none of it is immediately
comfortable.
Because if we are honest with ourselves, we find comfort and
strength in things that aren’t God.
And scripture is rich enough to remind us of the complexity
of loving God and neighbor when we take time to soak in it, to wrestle with it,
to walk alongside one another through it.
When we can, with one another, recognize that we’re all broken. We’re all trying to figure this out. Because none of us is perfect. None of us
know for sure how all of this work.
Because God is so big that we cannot know.
(That’s where that faith we’ve talked about comes in handy…God’s
got this.)
When someone says, “the Bible says quite clearly…” I will
always pause. Because the bible says
very little “quite clearly.”
And that is the invitation.
To dive in. Together.
To look for the timeless guideposts.
To put God first, and to remind one another that is what we
are doing.
May it be so.
Amen.
Sources: Sermon Brainwave podcast, episode 681, from Working Preacher, a resource of Luther Seminary; Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, Proper 20, Donald McKim and Lynn Japinga; also Working Preacher: Preach this Week, commentary by Mitzi Smith (2019) and Lois Malcolm (2013).
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