Dishonest Wealth

Luke 16:1-13

Why??

Why would a business owner, a landowner, praise the employee who cheated them?

 

Is this guy in Jesus’ story crazy? Corrupt himself? Just…weird?

 

And then, because this is a Jesus story, a parable, you and I might be wondering whether, and how, we are supposed to imagine God praising a cheater, a thief.

 

Eww.

 

And “eew” is, apparently, the reaction that generation after generation of disciples and scripture scholars have had to this story. No one has an explanation that they are satisfied with.

In fact, it’s probable that Luke himself, writing this story down for us, was confused about what point Jesus is trying to make by telling this story. He piles on a bunch of other things he remembers Jesus saying about dishonesty and wealth and trustworthiness, maybe hoping that something in those quotes will make sense of a story that…just doesn’t make sense.

 

So, when we’re stuck with an uncomfortable story about praising a cheater, it’s probably worth noting that Jesus has been telling us all along that our assumptions about who is closest to God, and who is not, are often wrong.
For early hearers of Jesus’ stories, it might not be that much more shocking to hear a dishonest manager praised than to hear that the tax collectors – graft-ridden collaborators that they are – are going to be among the first in God’s kingdom. And Jesus himself, as we heard last week, tends to eat with and celebrate people who the religious establishment thinks of as uncorrected “sinners”.

 

In fact, if you look back at the whole history of God’s people, there are a bunch of times when God picks out a shady or weaselly character and turns them into a “hero”.
That might be comforting when we reflect on our own imperfections, and the limited qualifications for heroism that many of us have. Though it’s still itchy and uncomfortable to consider God praising and congratulating a cheater right in front of us, when many of us also know very well exactly how it feels to be cheated.

 

So it’s helpful to me to remember that one thing I have learned about parables, about these stories Jesus tells, is that however easy it might be to label one character in the story “God”, or “us”, there’s never actually a one-to-one correlation.
It’s not that the “rich man” – the landowner or business owner – in the story is God.
(In fact, more often than not “rich men” are the losers or bad guys in Jesus’ teachings.)
Nor is the manager, nor the people who got their debts reduced, a direct equivalent to God. Or to us.

 

So maybe our best clue in the story is Jesus’ comment about “dishonest wealth”, and that other comment about how you cannot serve both God and money (or really any other idol).

 

Maybe all the money in this story is dishonest already. Not just after the manager cheats the owner, or after he makes all those unauthorized discounts and debt reductions. Maybe all the wealth is “dishonest” even before the rich man gets it and starts trying to use money to make more money, creating debts and obligations.

 

Oof, that’s messy.

Because humans being what we are, we can’t be fully honest and innocent and pure when we’re fully immersed in a dishonest system.

Maybe that’s why the dishonest manager gets praised – because he uses the dishonest resources of the system he’s in to try to build something else: relationships that will matter when he doesn’t have those already messy resources to spend.

 

I’m speculating there, and I’m not entirely happy with it.

But this story came to us because other people, over the centuries, have trusted that there must be some useful wisdom in it, so we all keep trying to find it.

 

And I am curious whether Jesus is trying to tell us about what it means to follow Jesus while we live and work in a world of “dishonest wealth”.
Because the all money that you and I handle – however much or however little we have, hold, or distribute – is money that is the currency of an imperfect system that has been corrupted, broken, accommodated to injustice, and exploited for self-interest as long as humans have had currency.

 

It's not that dollars haven’t also served justice, bought healing, or been used for holy purposes, but any system in which wealth makes one person more powerful than another attracts self-interest and dishonesty.

 

So maybe Jesus is telling us something about how to live in the world we actually live in.

To “make friends” in the world of dishonest wealth. Build relationships. Spend, or “squander” money and wealth in ways that build for eternity.

 

I’m pretty sure Jesus is not trying to encourage us to dishonesty and cheating. But I suspect Jesus does want to stir up our discomfort about money. To provoke an awkward consciousness that the money you and I have or manage – cash, or credit, or digital bits in some banking software – is already tied up in all the dishonest and honest acts that brought it to us. The acts of our employers and clients; of our ancestors, our government, our families and friends and a lot of people we don’t actually know. That we live with money in a messy, sticky, system, and we have to reckon with that.

 

Jesus also might want us to notice that money doesn’t give us – or buy us – peace of heart. Or love, or eternity, or the wonder and glory of the presence of God. Or any of the things our souls long for. So we can – should – look to something other than money to place our trust in.

God, for example.

 

So that maybe instead of “serving wealth” – letting money steer us – we’ll have opportunities to serve God with “dishonest wealth”. Maybe “squander” money – ours, our employer’s, the government’s, our families’ and friends’ – on things that do help make love, and peace, and eternity, and the presence of God more real in the messy ordinary world.
To spend money we can’t trust to be honest on the things that God would spend love and resources and power on.

 

I don’t know if that’s what Jesus meant the first time he told this story, two long millennia ago. But I believe it’s one thing Jesus might want us to consider; to try.

 

And I think the same principle applies, in slightly different ways, to a lot more than money. To success, influence, rank in the office or school or any organization, political power – anything else that gives us power in the messy, often dishonest, world we live in today.
And perhaps to prayer – which gives us power in God’s care for us – and still has to work in the messy world we live in.

 

Pray for the king, we hear Paul advise Timothy today. Pray for the people in power, the government. (Which, by the way, we often do in the prayers of the Episcopal Church, including in our service today.)

 

For some of us, some of the time, praying for political officials, or for people with unchecked power, feels just as uncomfortable as watching a cheater get praised by someone we were hoping we could trust.

 

So – since we have to deal with the powers that be, just as we have to deal with money – we can “squander” our other resources on the things God would love, that God would do.

We can pray, should pray, lavishly for the “king”: for our own government officials, and the politicians we dislike or despise, and for our employers and for media monopolists and far distant corporate officials – all those powers that be.

Pray, so that we so that we are focused on the will of God for those in power – and for all who are subject to, affected by, that power – instead of being caught up in whether the government or boss or whatever is dishonest or honest or evil or righteous.
Pray that by God’s work in and around the powers of this world, more and more of God’s people are brought into the gifts of peace of heart, the wonder and glory of God; into love and eternity and wholeness.
Pray so that our souls and hearts are tuned to the mind and heart of God when we consider the powers of this world, instead of being steered by the will of those worldly powers.

 

And even as we pray and spend our resources as close to God’s heart as we can, we may still be asking, “Why?”

Why, God, do things go so wrong?
Why do the cheaters seem to have your favor?

 

And we may never get the answers that make sense, but at least we will have our hearts and actions immersed in the love of God, working in us and through us, always, to heal our selves, and all the world.

 

Rejoice With Me

Luke 15:1-10

Imagine, if you will, this scene:

Someone walks up to the door of a church, knocks, and says “Rejoice with me! I have found your lost friend!” and a crowd peering out from behind a door opened only a crack responds “oh no. they don’t belong here. We kicked them out.”

 

Can you imagine any of the dinner guests of Jesus, or the Pharisees and scribes around him in today’s story, responding like that when Jesus brings in someone new?

Can you imagine the possibility of yourself responding like that?

 

That’s certainly not how we want to think of ourselves here at Trinity. Many of us are here, after all, because we felt like we didn’t belong in some other community, and found a welcome here.

 

But it might be exactly what the Pharisees and the scribes are thinking, as they watch Jesus seek out and eat with the ritually unclean and the folks whose profession or “lifestyle” does not – cannot – fit into the traditions and requirements of the holy community. The pharisees and scribes were probably genuinely convinced that those folks were excluded from the holy community for good reason.

 

And I’ve known congregations and church communities that would respond just that way to the return of individuals that don’t fit their boundaries of the holy.

 

In fact, that scenario is so much a possibility, sometimes probability, in churches and communities in our own time and culture that cartoonist David Hayward has not one, but several often-quoted sketches of a crowd of sheep rejecting the sheep that Jesus has carried to them on his shoulders – the rainbow-colored queer sheep, the trans sheep, the non-binary sheep, the ordinary white sheep.

“That one wasn’t lost! We kicked that one out!”

 

That might even be how ninety-nine well-behaved, committed-to-community sheep could want to respond to a shepherd actually abandoning them – in the wilderness! – to chase down one trouble-making wandering sheep.

 

And I suspect that while Jesus is looking for the lost in our time and place, there are some “sheep” that one or another, or many, of us would prefer not to have to welcome in our own communities – people who feel dangerous to our community. People who advocate or celebrate what you or I experience as evil. People who make being church too much work. People who seem uncomfortably “political”.

 

And Jesus would not be surprised at resistance, or resentment, being a natural reaction to his lost-sheep story. In fact, he includes the resentment of the stay-at-home, the hardworking “good son”, in his very next story – right after the part we read today – of the “lost” misbehaving son and over the top welcoming father. He understands how hard it can be to see the problem child, the “squeaky wheel” get all the attention, get celebrated just for being “found”.

Hard even if, in fact, you or I have also, at another time in our lives, been the one who desperately needed to be found, to be rescued and brought “home”.

 

Jesus knows this isn’t a comfortable story. (He almost never tells comfortable stories, after all.)

But he wants us to know it’s a good story.

That it’s about joy.

 

The bottom line of this sheep story, and of the story of the woman searching for a lost coin, is “Rejoice with me!”

And that there is joy in heaven.

 

These are joyful stories, because the finding of the lost restores wholeness to the flock of sheep, the set of coins, the community of the righteous – or the community of restored sinners.

A joy that needs to be shared with others. A joy that Jesus tells us is bigger than we would first guess it is.

 

(I’ll admit that Jesus’ declaration that there’s more rejoicing over one repentant sinner than over ninety-nine righteous that need no repentance…itches at me. I’m pretty sure that’s there as a pointed nudge to Pharisees and scribes – people who work very hard at maintaining a strictly defined holy righteousness – that their way is not the only, or even the most joyful, way to God’s heart.

But I don’t think Jesus minds if it nudges or itches any later hearers convinced of their own righteousness. Or the part of those of us who know our own need for repentance which still feels that seeing someone who has been dangerous to us brought back into the fold and changing their ways is less satisfying than seeing that person get a well-deserved helping of consequences.

Then again, maybe it’s even meant to be a joke. Because, as someone pointed out when we read this story in a Vestry meeting, how often do you actually find ninety-nine people who genuinely need no repentance?)

 

But the fundamental point of these stories is not actually about those who “need no repentance” – or the ninety-nine sheep, or the never-lost coins.

These stories are not even, I suspect, about the one lost and found sheep, or coin, or sinner.

Not primarily about us in any of these roles.

These stories are about God’s joy, and the invitation to us to share that joy.

 

“Rejoice with me!” the finder says, in both of the stories we hear Jesus tell today.

They summon their whole community to share their joy, their delight in the finding and restoration.

 

And I suspect Jesus, telling these stories, is inviting the Pharisees and scribes to the radical act of forgetting the rules of righteousness, forgetting all measures of merit or fault, to join in God’s joy in the reconciliation of all humanity.
That Jesus is inviting us, down the centuries, to share in God’s joy in the restoration of the wholeness of all creation – not matter how much we have invested ourselves in God’s work, or withheld ourselves from God’s work.

 

What a compliment, to be the ones with whom God wants to, needs to, share God’s joy. To be so important to God that we are those God turns to to celebrate.

 

Think for a moment about who you turn to to share your joys.

 

Sometimes we want everyone to see the baby pictures that melt our hearts. Sometimes we need specific individuals to rejoice with us in a hard-won success, or an unexpected blessing.

But think for a moment about who you need to have share in your joy. The people without whose joy your own joy isn’t as complete, or as full, as you want it to be.

 

And imagine being the people whose sharing in joy is important, even essential to God.

 

In that case, can you really withhold your shared joy when even the most troublesome sheep is found?

 

It’s a spiritual discipline – a practice that strengthens our spirits and our hearts – to pay attention to God’s joy. To share in God’s joy, whether we never actually knew the person restored to community, or whether we, well, hated that person. Or felt any level of resentment or indifference in between.

 

To practice sharing God’s joy in restoring sinners, in finding the lost, in making God’s people whole, will strengthen the muscles of our hearts and spirits. Will make it easier to pray for people we don’t like, make it easier to see the holy in the midst of chaos or despair. Muscles we need, day by day, to meet the challenges in the world around us, and in our own personal lives.

 

And practice in sharing God’s joy at the restoration of others will open our spirits and hearts to God’s loving pursuit of each of us in our failings or self-righteousness. To God’s joy in finding us, God’s delight in making us – and all humanity, all creation – whole.

Counting the Costs

Luke 14:25-33

There are certainly days when I long to do what Jesus is talking about today. 

To drop everything, walk away from possessions, family, all the stuff I have and am; leave it all behind and go off and be a hermit with Jesus.

I don’t know if any of you have ever felt that way, but for me, well, there are definitely days….

And then I remember that if I do that, I’ll miss my cat. And my favorite pillow.
And you all. 

And my washer and dryer after a few days.

And my family, even when I’m frustrated with them.

And I remember that Jesus isn’t inviting us to chuck it all up to retreat to a nice calm mountain cave with no internet, but rather to join him in a very active lifestyle: healing, teaching, and arguing with authority.

And, well, I haven’t actually seized a cross and walked away from it all, yet.

Because this is in fact something very difficult that Jesus is proposing you and I and everyone else do. 

It’s very hard to actively cut ourselves off from possessions, identity, security, and control over our own destiny. 

Jesus is deliberately using strong language – maybe offensively strong language – about “hating” family and life itself, in order to make sure we don’t miss the point that he’s not asking for a temporary shift in our priorities, but a complete, powerful, shocking reorientation in our priorities and perspective. Demanding not that we be “good people”, but that we become completely God’s people. Jesus’ people, rather than our own person.

Jesus very definitely wants to save and heal all the people of God, regardless of who is lifting a heavy cross to greet him, and who is tightly connected with their whole family.

And today, he’s asking us not just to receive his healing care, but to join him in it. To be an active, completely committed, part of his work to bring the world and all people into the unprecedented peace and wholeness and justice and self-giving love of God.

And he doesn’t want us to jump on the wagon and then fall back off in shock and dismay, but to “count the cost” and know how profound a commitment this is going to be. So that we can join him in disrupting and rebuilding the world wholeheartedly, not tied up in half-forgotten obligations, self-preservation, and anxious fear.

Phew.

It’s a big ask.

But it might be that Jesus is asking us to do what many of us actually long to do. 

We might in fact long to become part of making extraordinary miracles, saving those already counted as lost, and transforming the world.

Or maybe you long to cut loose of anxious obligations, of the fear of loss, of the need to preserve the world as we know it because the flaws we know seem less terrifying than tearing things down and starting over. 

Or maybe we long to follow a leader who is truly right. Truly good, and who will keep us from accidentally collaborating with evil, who will put virtuous, generous, healing choices in front of us, instead of a messy mix of bad choices.

Anyone else felt some longing for one of those things?

Those things we long for are rarely easy to find and grasp in the world you and I live in, and so it is difficult – just as difficult as Jesus says – to commit ourselves to a whole life of doing what Jesus would do. To a whole life of putting ourselves, our social standing, our working relationships, our sense of security on the line in order to profoundly heal and save and transform the world, and the lives of the neighbors and family and friends we love.

But when all the costs are added up, the cost of discipleship, of choosing always, over and over again, to take the risk of healing and reconciling, of disrupting everyday evil and making new space for God’s transformative love, might not truly be as high as the cost of going along in the world as it is. 

And I’m convinced that Jesus is asking us, today, to count the costs of staying comfortable in the world as it is, as well as the costs of joining him in transformation.

Inviting us, challenging us, to consider what it costs us to “go along to get along” with a co-worker, or an in-law – or our own children or parents, sometimes – and compare it to the cost of calling out a casual support of injustice, or some malice in tasty gossip, or leaving someone else to suffer what won’t kill them.

Challenging us to count the costs of reading the news in horror, and feeling our own helplessness grow. And comparing that to the risks of publicly demanding change, the hard work of seeking out others who want to heal that particular horror, and the heavy lift of figuring out some new way to act when all the ordinary ways we’re used to trying don’t work.

Counting the costs to the healing of the earth and the health of our neighbors in the way we invest and use our possessions, along with counting the costs to our daily convenience and our future security of sharing our possessions, or divesting from things that might harm others.

Counting the costs of loving our neighbors, even our enemies, with compassion and hope and generosity, and comparing the costs of cutting ourselves off from our neighbors, or the costs of nurturing hatred in our hearts.

I’ve counted some of those costs myself. I imagine many of you have counted some of them, too. They’re all expensive. 

And none of them look good on the living room wall, or in my bank balance.

But wholehearted trust in God – committing to “take up the cross” and giving up anxious control of my own destiny to be led by the direction and example of the one most profoundly worthy of trust – is still appealing, expensive as it may become.

I’ve been finding, all along, that saving the world is far too expensive for me. Even saving just myself is beyond my budget. And finding, also, that declining to help Jesus heal the world, declining to try to help Jesus defeat the powerful and petty evils that try to cling to us, is even more expensive. 

I can’t afford to say “no” to Jesus’ call to live, and do, and be like him. I need that vision beyond my own vision, that strength and courage and love beyond my own. So, even though the accounting is complicated, day by day, I can only afford to say “yes”, to try to let Jesus choose my costs. Can only choose to try to let God spend all I have on healing, and hope, compassion and love, and - in the spending - discover the richness and joy of being part of God’s impossibly generous love. 

What about you?