Well happy Dishonest Manager Day everyone! This is a day that we celebrate only once every three years and I’m hoping by the end of today each one of you can find something unjust to do to mark the occasion! Did anyone hear the Gospel reading this morning and think, “huh?” Is it possible that Jesus was really telling a story celebrating dishonesty or injustice? Or is it cleverness or cunning that Jesus is celebrating? Is it cheating rich people that Jesus is applauding? Shall we all take an extended moral leave of absence? Does anyone feel a little embarrassed by the admonition to make friends for your selves by means of dishonest wealth?
Turns out that this parable is most embarrassing to people who think of themselves as basically good, as righteous: you know, people who think of themselves as Episcopalians, or maybe not Episcopalians, but as Christians. But before any of you atheists get too smug, I just have to remind you that atheism is never an effective protection – never a prophylactic -- against self-righteousness!

The situation described in Jesus’ parable can be described like this: A really rich guy lived in a big city on income that he made from the land he owned in the country. The land was managed by a well-paid steward who ran the operation, and all of the work of farming was done by tenant farmers, whose parents might have once owned the land but lost it because of debt. Now the tenant farmers could barely afford to pay rent and feed their families because of the high rent that the rich landlord charged. So they were going more and more into debt, too, and working harder and harder but they were not getting ahead. (Sound familiar to anyone here?)

The manager or steward was the one who collected the rents and sold goods to the workers and kept track of their debts. He was contributing to the demise of the tenants by working for the rich guy – but he needed to feed his family too. But then rumor got back to the rich guy in the big city that the steward had been mismanaging the property. He had been wasting resources – squandering or scattering them in a way that was reckless, and the rich guy fired the manager. Now the manager really had a problem – he would be out of work and none of the farmers were going to have any sympathy for him because he was the one who had been working for the Man. They were going to figure he got what was coming to him. He looked at his smooth hands and said, “I can’t do hard labor!” and He looked at his smooth pride and said, “I’m definitely not going to ask for handouts!” So what did he do? Something amazingly clever!

Without telling the tenants that he’d been fired, he gathered them all together and announced that their unpayable, whopping debts had been forgiven by the rich landowner! It was a lie of course, but they didn’t know that, and there was great rejoicing on the farm! They had thought the rich guy was terrible, uncaring, but now they think he’s the nicest guy in the world. So when he comes out to the country to try to find a new steward to replace the old one, the peasants are waving and celebrating, wild with thanksgiving that he has forgiven their debts!

The rich guy has two choices. He can tell the peasants that the steward had no authority to cancel those debts – that they’re not cancelled and still have to be paid in full. Problem is that he’s on the property, unprotected – and they’ll probably turn into an angry mob and kill him. His other choice is to smile and go along with it and become the hero that they think he is! That means he’ll also have to hire the steward back because if he mistreats the one who announced the good news, they’re also likely to turn on him.

Now the problem to our ears might be that what the steward did was dishonest. He forgave debts that were not his to forgive.  He did it in someone else’s name without any authorization at all. He had no right to forgive. He forgave for all the wrong reasons and he did it the wrong way. On the other hand, the dishonest manager, when faced with the termination of his livelihood, realized that he’d better work on making friends, on improving his relationships by whatever means possible.

So what's the moral of this story? Contemporary theologian, Sarah Dylan Breuer writes: “It's a moral of great emphasis for Luke: FORGIVE. Forgive it all. Forgive it now. Forgive it for any reason you want, or for no reason at all. Why forgive someone who's sinned against us, or against our sense of what is obviously right? We don't have to do it out of love for the other person, if we're not there yet. We could forgive the other person because of that whole business of what we pray in Jesus' name every Sunday morning, and because we know we'd like forgiveness ourselves. We could forgive because we've experienced what we're like as unforgiving people… We could forgive because we are, or we want to be, deeply in touch with a sense of Jesus' power to forgive and free sinners like us. It boils down to the same thing: deluded or sane, selfish and/or unselfish, there is no bad reason to forgive. Extending the kind of grace God shows us in every possible arena -- financial and moral -- can only put us more deeply in touch with God's grace.” 1

Aphiemi – the Greek word that we translate forgive means let it go, release, dismiss the charges, leave standing without further concern. In English, the “f-o-r” part of the word indicates away or apart. Give away. In English, “for” also indicates future – as in forth or forward. When I think of forgiving, I think of giving a future. It’s forgive, not “backgive” or “retrogive.” Forgiving is a way forward rather than being stuck in the very narrow place of one’s own victimhood. If we’re talking about giving a future, about moving forward, it seems that we don’t have to get bogged down with questions about whether you can forgive someone who doesn’t seek forgiveness – who will not ask or cannot consent to be forgiven, or who very likely will offend again. Nor is it about condoning the offense. If forgiveness is about a way forward instead of a way back, it does not matter about the desire or the ability of the offender. We also don’t have to argue about whether there are deeds that are unforgiveable. (Of course, the answer is, “yes,” but I think it’s more like an answer of “yes, so far.” So far there are deeds that are unforgiveable like so far there are places in space that we cannot explore or medical advances that we cannot yet make.)

So it might not be fair, it might not be pretty, it might be unjust, but forgiveness of debts is the bottom line today. It IS a little embarrassing. Truth be told, Jesus is something of an embarrassment – always has been. In fact, the whole Bible is rather embarrassing in the way that it depicts the Divine who, again and again seems to favor crooks. Mark Twain once wrote that “the Bible is a spectacular collection of the immoral – liars, cheats, adulterers, murderers, con artists, megalomaniacs, all of whom appear to be loved by God.” 2 I don’t think Archbishop Desmond Tutu had Mark Twain in mind when he said this, but he gives a fitting response when he says, “Yes, we have a horrible capacity for evil, but more wonderfully, we have a glorious capacity for good!” 3 He adds this advice for nations caught in a spiral of violence: “Consider forgiveness!” If you’ve ever seen him speak, you can just imagine the sparkle in his eyes when he says that. It’s sage advice for nations, for cities and communities, for families and for every single one of us.