Faithful with Little, Faithful with Much – Sermon on Sept 19, 2010
September 19, 2010
Scriptures: Luke 16: 1-13
Then 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 accounting of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.’ Then the manager said to himself, ‘What will I do, now 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?’ 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?’ 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 for yourselves 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 to you 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 the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”
Sermon: Faithful with Little, Faithful with Much by Rev. Doreen Oughton
I hope you are all wide awake this morning, with the wheels of your minds greased and ready to roll. Because we are in school today, advanced bible study, maybe even graduate school with this gospel reading. First we have the parable of the squandering steward. It comes right after the parable of the prodigal son, and is told only to the disciples. There is some surface similarity between the two, with someone who squanders and ends up in trouble because of it, and a surprising and generous response on the person who’d been taken, so to speak. But then, Jesus goes on not to lift up such a generous response, but seemingly to commend the actions of the steward himself! He says, “the children of this age (or worldly people) are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.” He’s comparing this wheeler-dealer steward with the disciples and seems to find the disciples lacking. He seems to think they need to take a page from the steward’s book and make friends for themselves by means of dishonest wealth. Then he talks about faithfulness and dishonesty, and says something about faithful dishonesty! And finally he makes a statement that makes sense: you cannot serve two masters, you cannot serve God and wealth.
Now virtually every single source I searched regarding this passage says that it is a very difficult one, and there is little consensus on what the message is that Jesus is trying to convey to his disciples, or what Luke is trying to convey to his readers. There is general agreement that, because the message is so unclear, it is most likely a parable that Jesus really did tell. Luke or the oral storytellers of the time would have had no reason to purposely confuse or obscure the message. So we are left to grapple with it. My dear husband says this is very much in line with his notion of what a parable is, something mysterious, unclear, open to different interpretations. I’m used to the table-turning messages of Jesus that we’ve heard the past few weeks – seek a humble place, invite people in who have nothing to offer you, leave the 99 to seek out the lost one. But this one seems to be promoting devious means and commending self-interested action.
Others hear this parable and disagree with this interpretation. They say that though the rich man commends the dishonesty, Jesus is telling his disciples not to be like that. They are children of the light, not children of this world, and need to be faithful and trustworthy. Yet others say that Jesus is advising his disciples, the children of the light, to be as wily and shrewd about securing friends in heaven for their future as the steward was in securing a worldly future for himself. I really tried this one on. In some ways, this focus could be in keeping with the other lectionary readings for today, like the acknowledgment of the suffering of the world in psalm 73, which was the call to worship, or the reading from Jeremiah about the people who aren’t being saved. It is a rough, rough world to survive, and maybe we have to scramble and fight as well for a better life in heaven. So I kept trying to think of an example of shrewdness on behalf of the kin-dom. I thought how sometimes dishonesty and deceit are used for a greater good, like with substance abuse interventions, where a family might lie to the addict to trick him or her into the room where the intervention takes place. But this is not really about faithfulness, or spreading the Good News. I really couldn’t think of any worthwhile trickery to get people to believe in God or come to church or follow Christ. I had such strong internal resistance to this as a commendable thing. Maybe that resistance is a sign of my own short-sightedness, or attachment to my own view, but it just doesn’t connect for me.
I found some resonance, some interpretive insight from a blog by a woman named Sarah Dylan Breuer, who refers to herself as a public theologian and has great credentials for such a description. In her blog she expresses excitement about today’s text because she spent two years studying and writing about this very passage for a dissertation! She learned about the culture of the time, what it meant to be a rich man and to have a steward, what it would have been like for the people whose debts were reduced. It doesn’t make everything perfectly clear, and even with her compelling insights, I’m not completely convinced of the conclusion she reaches about the message Jesus is giving. But let’s see what you think.
One thing she helped me with is understanding that while some parables are allegories, with each character standing in for someone else, not all of them are. And this is one best understood as NOT allegorical. I kept trying to figure out if the rich man was God or a Pharisee, and who the steward was supposed to be. Dylan advises us to let that go, and just hear the story for what it says. Here is her summary of the plot.
A very, very rich man lives in a big city (like Jerusalem), with a lifestyle of luxury made possible from the income of the estate he owns in the countryside. He’s hired a manager (steward) to run it while he parties in Jerusalem, and all of the work of planting and harvesting is done by peasants whose grandparents might have owned the land but lost it in payment to a debt. Now the peasants work the land as tenant farmers, buying what they need from the company store (at prices far above what their grandparents paid for the same goods), with whatever is left over after the exorbitant rent is paid to the landowner. The harvest is never quite enough to pay the rent plus what the family needs, so the family is slipping further and further into debt, working harder and harder to pay what can’t be paid. The immediate face of this system is that of the steward – someone who might have come from the same families as the people who now suffer under his management, but who managed somehow to get the education needed to keep records and to lose the backbone needed to refuse to participate in something so clearly unjust.
The landowner fires the steward because of rumors that the steward was squandering the landowner’s resources. Now “squandering” isn’t necessarily a bad word here – the sower in another of Jesus’ parables squanders seed by tossing it on roads and in bird-feeding zones. So the steward is no longer authorized to do anything at all in the master’s name. The farmers from whom he probably came aren’t about to take him in either, given that up until now he’s allied himself with the landowner by taking a job that involves collecting exorbitant rents, running the company store, and generally dealing unjustly with the farmers. That’s why the steward is called “the steward of unrighteousness” in verse 8.
So what does the steward do? Something extraordinarily clever. He gathers all of the farmers who owe him money, and he declares that their debts have been reduced from the rough equivalent of “a million bazillion kajillion dollars” to something that maybe could be repaid, (maybe) freeing the family to make choices about next steps. With quirks of how records were kept, this involves a few subtle strokes of the (forger’s) pen — much like what students do in changing a handwritten ‘D’ to a ‘B’ on a report card.
The steward doesn’t tell the farmers that he was fired any more than he tells them that the landowner didn’t authorize any of this generosity. The result is that the farmers believe the landowner is more generous than just about anyone else in his position would be. The landowner is now a hero in the farmers’ eyes — and the steward is also, by extension. The landowner comes for his customary visit to pick up the wealth the steward has collected for him, and he gets a surprise that is both exhilarating and challenging: The streets for miles before he reaches the estate are lined by cheering farmers. They’re shouting his name, telling him he’s a hero. He soon enough finds out what the steward has done in telling the farmers that the landowner forgave their debts. Now he has a choice to make.
The landowner can go outside to the assembled crowd – the people shouting blessings upon him and all his family – and tell them that it was all a terrible mistake, that the steward’s generosity was an act of crookedness (or unrighteousness, depending on your perspective) and won’t hold water legally. The cheering will turn to boos, and I wouldn’t want to be the landowner then.
Alternatively, the landowner can go outside and take in the cheering of the crowd. He can take credit for the steward’s actions, in which case he’ll continue to take in the acclaim of the farmers who are honoring him, but he’ll have to take the steward back. Mistreat the steward, who brought such good news of the lord’s generous forgiveness (pun intended) in the future, and the crowd might turn on him. I don’t doubt what a sane person in the landowner’s situation would do in such circumstances, but either way, the steward goes from scab and scumbag to hero. When he retires, the farmers will gladly take him in, if the landowner won’t.
Though the parable doesn’t say that the landowner kept the steward on, just like the other one didn’t tell us whether the brother of the prodigal son went and joined the party. Whether he did or not, he had to give a nod commending the cleverness of the steward. But what was Jesus pointing out to his disciples?
Dylan asks, “what is it that the steward does, even though it was without authorization and with deception?” What is it that Jesus is commending? Dylan says, “He forgives. The steward forgives. He forgives things that he had no right to forgive. He forgives for all the wrong reasons, for personal gain and to compensate for past misconduct. But that’s the decisive action that he undertakes to redeem himself from a position from which it seemed he couldn’t be reconciled, to the landowner any more than to the farmers.”
She notes that forgiveness is a major theme throughout the Gospel of Luke and in her blog she expounds on the message to forgive, saying “Forgive it all. Forgive it now. Forgive it for any reason you want, or for no reason at all.” Perhaps that is the message of the parable, but I still have trouble with how that message relates to verses on shrewdness and dishonest wealth. Perhaps it is in forgiving that one makes friends in the eternal home, and that is the shrewd thing to do. Perhaps being faithful with a little means forgiving a little, being faithful with much is forgiving much. Like-wise perhaps being dishonest equates to holding debts no matter how impossible it is for people to pay them.
This idea of forgiving a debt owed to another is rich food for thought. I love that the choir sang their new anthem, Who by Fire, today, the day after Yom Kippur, a Jewish holy day, the last of the 10 Days of Awe during which the people atone for and seek forgiveness for wrongs done over the past year. Hopefully you saw the note that the song is about forgiveness, and considers the different ways people will be forgiven. I’m thinking about this because I was reminded of the different perspectives of forgiveness in different faiths. In Christian tradition, repentance and forgiveness, or absolution, are between a person and God, sometimes with a clergy person mediating. In the Jewish tradition, repentance and forgiveness include God, but also the person or people who were wronged. There would not be religious or spiritual integrity in seeking absolution only from God, or certainly not in forgiving debts owed to another, whether financial debts or absolution. Simon Weisenthal, while a prisoner in a concentration camp, was taken to the medical station for the Germans at the camp. A German soldier was dying and was wracked with guilt over the crimes he committed against the Jews. He wanted a Jew to forgive him before he died, to absolve him of his crime. Simon Weisenthal would not do so, but pondered for many years on the limits of forgiveness. His book, Sunflowers, explores the theme.
These questions about forgiving another’s debt also reminds me of one of the theories of how Jesus’ death on the cross saved us. The subsitutionary atonement theory is not one I am very comfortable with, because of the character of God that it implies. But this theory asserts that because of humankind’s fall, their destruction of one another, of God’s gifts to us, because they veered so far off the path that God laid out for the, God wanted an accounting. God insisted that such sin could not just be wiped clean, but that there had to be an act of atonement made. Since there was nothing that any human could do to atone for such sin, people were like the tenant farmers described by Dylan, hopelessly in debt with no way to climb out and move forward with God’s plan. So God sent Jesus who, in his divine perfection, could adequately balance the scales by giving his life. So Jesus isn’t like the steward, just forgiving our debts to God, but actually pays the debts.
Now I don’t like this theory because the God that I hitched my wagon to would not require a blood sacrifice as an atonement, would certainly not be satisfied with the killing of an innocent for payment, but would be willing by his own authority to forgive our debts. The danger for God, and for us, of that willingness is we can too easily lose sight of the magnitude of this gift. Instead of lining the roads, cheering and giving honor to this Master, instead of moving on enthusiastically to help building God’s beloved community, we squander this forgiveness. We waste it and take it for granted, we hoard it for ourselves. We fail to be trustworthy with a little forgiveness, and with a lot. But we are always offered the chance to do it differently, to take all the gifts given by God, the forgiveness, the means of living faithfully, the love; as well as all the worldly resources that come to us whether dishonestly or honestly; and use them to honor God, to move forward, to invest it all in working with God to create the Kindom within and among us. May it be so.
