This Messy Story

Luke 16:1-13; 1 Timothy 2:1-7

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.

 

Counted Costs

Luke 14:25-33; Philemon 1-21

Which of you, intending to renovate your kitchen, or attend to a couple decades of deferred capital improvements at your church, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether you have enough resources to complete it?

 

So how many of us sat down, before being baptized, to estimate the cost of following Jesus in our lives, and tally up the resources we can commit, making sure they are enough and we won’t fail mid-project?

 

Many of us never really had that option if we were baptized as small children, with others making the decisions for us.

Even those baptized at a more mature age often find that it’s just not possible to see the potential costs of following Jesus, especially in a context like our current one, where Christian life is assumed to be part of the dominant culture.

 

For many of us, then, following Jesus is much more like the small, ordinary renovation project that uncovers a foundation that has to be completely re-built in order to go forward: a cost that comes to us to be estimated and paid after we’ve committed to the project. 

 

I think something like that happened for both Philemon and Onesimus, the object and subject of the unique little letter of Paul’s that we read this morning.

 

Paul writes to urge Philemon to welcome Onesimus back as a brother, as equal family, although when Onesimus left Philemon’s house, he was Philemon’s slave.  There’s something more between them, too. Onesimus has done something that caused “damages” to Philemon. 

 

He might have stolen something; might have escaped from enslavement; might have made an expensive error in his work. Or something else. We don’t know what it was.

But this relationship is tense, broken.  There’s law and custom – an expectation so deeply rooted it behaves as fact – that demand Onesimus should be punished, as a slave, not freed and celebrated.

 

And yet Paul says that, for the sake of love, he expects Philemon to receive Onesimus as beloved family: owing nothing, welcome to anything, a fellow worker for the gospel.

Because that’s what Onesimus is now. He’s been assisting Paul during Paul’s imprisonment, and has himself become a Christian, committing himself to the radical good news of resurrection, and to the way that requires us to live out of generous love here and now. 

And, as Paul has written more than once, there can be no distinction between Christians. 

All are siblings.

 

Philemon made his commitment to following Jesus, to the radical love of all God’s children, some time before Onesimus left, without any expectation of change in his household. And now he’s being asked to actively choose the economic loss of freeing a slave, the status loss of welcoming a slave into his home as a sibling. 

To sacrifice his existing sense of family and rebuild it. To sacrifice his sense of self, even, letting go of everything he might be owed, financially, morally, spiritually, experientially. 

It’s an ask that could completely up-end his life.

 

Just like Jesus tells the crowd following him in our gospel story today.  “Carry the cross; radically re-think family; give up all your possessions, or you can’t be my disciple.”

 

Onesimus was far from Philemon, temporarily free, when he made the decision to follow Jesus. Now he’s accepting the cost of returning as a slave, not knowing whether or how he’ll be punished for whatever wrong he has committed, if that’s what happens. He’s giving up whatever he possesses to join or re-join this particular community of the followers of Jesus.

 

As you and I observe this from our own place and time, it’s difficult to wrestle with the fact that while Paul makes radical demands of both Onesimus and Philemon, he isn’t actively critiquing the institution of slavery; an institution that has warped all of our lives in its long shadow.
But it’s also worth noticing that because this letter was preserved in scripture, this invitation to freely welcome one who you previously enslaved as your dear sibling, with all the difficult work of being reconciled that is implied, helped later Christians recognize that the institution of slavery – Roman, American or any other - is fundamentally incompatible with the gospel, impossible to sustain when we are committed to following Jesus, to loving and living as Jesus does.

 

The stakes are high, in whatever context we read this ancient letter. In the glimpse we get today, both Philemon and Onesimus are faced with the decision of whether and how to sacrifice and rebuild their sense of family, to accept the risk of their own life – to give up all they have, in different forms – to follow in Jesus’ teaching and footsteps, toward a world radically transformed by unlimited love.

And they could decide not to.

We do not know – will never know – what happens next.  

 

We all have a chance to decide not to pay the cost; to decide that the renovation of our world, our life, our faith, into the image of Jesus’ self-giving love is too expensive. 
When they are faced with the cross, Jesus’ most famous disciples – Peter, John and James, almost all the others named in the gospels – decide it’s too expensive. 
They get offered those decisions, opportunities, and costs again, though. 

Once isn’t the only chance.  Not for them; not for us.

And enough of them count the cost, and do invest their whole selves and lives, that the world you and I live in is transformed.

 

You and I, most likely, will never face a Roman empire and religious establishment trying to crucify us. But we might find ourselves asked to put our personal financial security and comfortable relationships on the balance sheet, and speak up against injustice, petty everyday evils, or widely-accepted selfishness in our workplaces, neighborhoods, or families. 

We might have to choose to put our physical lives as well as our financial comfort on the balance sheet when evil takes a form that can be resisted with military force. 

To put our sense of self, our independence, on the balance sheet when God’s love for the world, for the planet and the planet’s most vulnerable, “least valuable” people, requires us to give up small habits we’re comfortable with, or expectations we find essential, and spend ourselves and our resources to benefit others.

 

There are many ways you or I may find ourselves invited to give up what we possess; re-imagine our family and our identity; give our whole lives, literal or metaphorical, for the love of Jesus.
Today, Jesus reminds us that we will, soon or late, need to take all that into account, to assess how and if we can commit our whole selves to the extraordinary, holy, renovation of the world into the image of Jesus’ own love.

 

We don’t do it alone, though. 

Jesus doesn’t demand all this all-you-possess commitment from the disciples privately, one-on-one. He offers this invitation to an entire crowd of people, people who’ve come together from all different and diverse backgrounds and life situations because they’re attracted to Jesus’ love and life.

 

And when Paul asks Philemon to welcome Onesimus in love, he doesn’t write to Philemon alone. He includes the whole community of disciples, both in Philemon’s neighborhood and those with Paul far away, in the invitation.

 

You and I, too, come to these choices surrounded with witnesses, and with people God has given to us to share in the love, the hope, the trust that makes the sacrifices seem almost natural, when our faith brings us to them.
When we release all we possess, when we give ourselves away, we do it within a community of Jesus’ own love, broad and deep and wide and strong.

 

So when each of us has given all we possess to the renovation of the world, to following whereever God’s abundant, risky, extraordinary love will take us, there is always more.

And to count all those resources – that richness for giving all we have and are to Jesus’ love – will take a lifetime - and more.