If you found it a little difficult to figure out just what Jesus wants us to do from the teaching in the gospel story we just heard, you’re not alone.
It sounds relatively familiar to me, maybe to you, to hear Jesus say we can’t serve both God and wealth. But it’s harder to make sense of that when we hear it right on top of this story that’s apparently about how we should use “dishonest wealth” to make friends. To insure ourselves against getting fired for cheating?
That doesn’t sound… well, Jesus-y?
The story is pretty messy – the moral is ambiguous; the bad guy sort of wins. In fact, nobody in it is a “good guy”: the “rich man” is a stock character of the “not getting into God’s kingdom” type in Jesus’ stories; the manager is definitely not acting in his employer’s best interest; and even the “debtors” – who might translate into our world as business suppliers – are perfectly happy to collaborate in cheating the rich man. Everyone in this parable “serves wealth”, which (according to what Jesus just said) puts them in opposition to God.
It’s normal to be disturbed by this parable. It’s not something I think we’re actually asked to aspire to, or imitate. When Jesus wants us to know that he’s telling a story about the kingdom of God – the way the world works when it’s aligned with God’s will and God’s love – he usually says so. And you might have noticed that this story did not start with “The kingdom of God is like…”
In fact, I think this might be a story explicitly about what the kingdom of God is not like. Not like a situation where everyone’s busy pursuing their own best interest, cheating or otherwise.
We’re not supposed to be like this.
But perhaps Jesus is telling us this story because this is the world we live in.
It would be a lot easier to be a follower of Jesus in a world that serves God. But you and I, like the first disciples who heard this story from Jesus, live in a world which “serves wealth”. Where gaining and keeping wealth and influence are promoted by our laws, by our entertainment, by everyday politics, entwined in all of our decisions about employment, voting, health care, parenting, caring for loved ones, even participating in our church.
Not necessarily because we set out to serve wealth, but because it’s so entrenched in the world we live in. We’re taught to trust wealth for our security, contentment, future planning – even to some extent, our identity and relationships.
And here is Jesus, describing that world to us – describing the world of a man who can only trust wealth to keep him from embarrassment or weakness or maybe even death – and telling us to participate in that world. To make friends, using the messy, compromised tools of that world in order to have eternal relationships.
In order to build the relationships of the kingdom of God.
I heard a news story this week about a group of nuns in Pennsylvania who have been suing to prevent – and then seek damages from – a natural gas pipeline running through their property, declaring in federal court that the pipeline violates their religious commitment to care for the earth. They’re using the compromised, messy tools of the world that serves wealth to try to build and protect the eternal relationships, eternal habitation, to which they hear God calling them.
The week before, I heard a story about corporations using the exact same tools to shield themselves against having to provide insurance for preventive medication against illness or pregnancy to their employees, declaring in court that to do so would violate their religious commitments about righteous sexual behavior.
I may be tickled by one of those news stories, and dismayed by the other, but I recognize in both those cases the shrewdness in engaging with the compromised, political, wealth-seeking world that is commended in the story Jesus tells today.
And – just like the story itself – that recognition leaves me feeling…icky. Compromised.
I’d much prefer to escape the morally hazardous, messy world for a clean one where the holy choices are obvious and the tools for doing God’s work are clean and easy to use.
And yet Jesus is telling me, telling us, we can’t drop out of the unholy world around us, but should seize opportunities to use the tools of that unholy world to build eternal relationships, gospel lives.
And perhaps the advice I need then – the advice you also might need, faced with Jesus’ messy stories and confusing instructions about what we do with money and influence when we have it – is to pray about it.
Not in a generic way, but in the way Paul (or someone writing in Paul’s name) urges Timothy.
To make supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings for everyone. Even for kings and politicians and billionaire business leaders and those with dangerously high levels of power and authority.
Because God desires everyone – even everyone at the heart of the web of the compromised, wealth-serving world of economics and politics – to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth: to true, wholehearted, unconditional love of God.
You and I, just like Timothy, are invited to engage with the very not-following-Jesus parts of our world (like the emperor was a very not-following-Jesus part of Timothy’s world) as part of God’s profound and overpowering desire that everyone become part of the truth: the whole, loving, transformative experience of God.
I wonder how it would change my reading of the news of the religious freedom arguments in our messy judicial system if I could hear the plaintiffs sincerely praying not for a win, not that everyone agrees with their specific case, but that all of us, all of us, become more aligned with the love and will of God, even in our various positions of entanglement with the messy politics and economics of the wealth-serving world.
And I wonder how it would change your reading of the news, to be praying that all of us – all the crusaders, all the compromisers, all the mis-led leaders, all the folks entangled in the political economy, the influence-serving world that flows across our news screens – all of us be freed to experience the fullness of God’s excruciating, generous love that turns our hearts inside out, heals the hidden wounds and evil desires of our minds and spirits.
It's worth noting that I don’t think Timothy’s mentor or Jesus have any intention of telling us to sweep evil under the rug. No intention of suggesting that in engaging the world or praying for everyone, we should overlook malice, ignore trauma, or actually compromise with evil or serve wealth and influence ourselves. But rather to pray with a power beyond that of our individual minds and hearts – a power that can actually defeat evil.
Timothy’s mentor implies that he – and we – are enabled, empowered to pray that way by our experience of Jesus himself, the heart of God walking among us in daily life, in death, and in resurrection. We pray with the power of Jesus’ own life. Because that’s part of God saving us, too – helping us find ourselves fully connected with the love and compassion and vision of God for healing the whole world, every person and every bit.
Praying that way – praying for everyone, because God loves and wants to save them (yes, all of them) helps us engage the messy world we have to live in every day as a place where holiness can – will – be found.
Helps us use the messy tools that are the only ones we can get our hands on just the way Jesus himself does – with our hearts firmly fixed in the “eternal homes”.
And if the world won’t change to make it easy to follow Jesus, those supplications, prayers, intercessions and thanksgivings for everyone can change me – or you, or us – so that our everyday engagement in the compromised, messy world can still connect us – heart and soul and ordinary messy body – connect even everything we have of wealth and influence – more and more with God’s will, God’s love, for every human and every atom of creation, until we are already in the eternal homes, right in the midst of it all.
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