Proper 20C, September 22, 2013; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of love, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

Welcome to this grand sanctuary, this haven of beauty. Welcome to this magnificent community, whose mission is to welcome you, no matter how long you’ve been here, and wherever you are on your spiritual journey, even and especially if you are not in such a good place on your spiritual journey! Welcome to a gathering of people that will love you just the way you are and will love you too much to let you stay that way! Welcome to church in the Back Bay, which often turns out to be very hard to get to, in bad weather and in good weather! Welcome to a worship service in which the readings are usually challenging and sometimes confounding, the prayers of the people are often disturbing, and the music is reliably sublime! Welcome to a church long on questions and short on answers, and yet, a church where one beggar can always show another beggar where to get some bread.

So – about those confounding readings. As Jeremiah tells us, the summer is ended and we are not saved. Poor people are not being properly cared for. The epistle of Timothy is urging prayers for kings and others in high positions – presumably directed to people who do not wish to pray for those in power – presumably because they are trampling on those who are needy, those who are poor. And the today Gospel of Luke is celebrating dishonesty. What?
Yes. Happy Unjust Steward Day everyone! I am so glad that you are here to help us celebrate! I’m hoping by the end of today each one of you can find something unjust to do to mark the occasion! Is it possible that Jesus was really telling a story celebrating dishonesty and injustice? Did anyone hear the Gospel reading this morning and think, “huh?” Or are any of us who have more than we need to live on thinking, “uh-oh”? Are any of you hoping that I will pull a translation trick out of this pulpit?

I’ll tell you that Amy-Jill Levine, in the Jewish Annotated New Testament warns that this “parable defies any fully satisfactory explanation.”¹ And I do not have one for you, but here’s an approach worth seriously considering. Here’s the situation in the parable as laid out by one of my colleagues in ministry, biblical commentator Dylan Breuer. A rich guy lived in a big city on income that he made from his investments – namely the land he owned out in the country. The land was stewarded by a manager who ran the operation, and all of the work of farming was done by tenant farmers, whose parents probably had once owned the land, or land like it, 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. Of course the rent was considered the fair market rate (by other wealthy people). But the tenants were going more and more into debt, too, and working harder and harder and not getting ahead. (Have you ever heard of anything like this?)

The manager 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 – and yet he needed to feed his family too. But when rumor got back to the rich guy in the big city that the manager had been squandering the rich guy’s property, the rich guy fired the manager. Now the manager really had a problem – he was going to be out of work and none of the farmers were going to have any sympathy for him because he was the one who’d been working for the Man. They were going to figure he got what was coming to him.

Knowing that he was not strong enough to dig and he was too ashamed to beg, the manager had an idea. Without telling the tenants that he’d been fired, he gathered them all together and announced the good news that a portion of their whopping debts had been forgiven by the rich landowner! It was a lie of course, but they didn’t know that, and so there was great rejoicing in the land! They had thought that the rich guy was terrible and uncaring, but now they thought he’s not so bad! So when the rich guy came out to the country to try to find a new manager to replace the old one, the farmers were waving and celebrating, wild with thanksgiving that he had reduced the burden of their debts!

Now imagine with me that the rich guy had two choices. He could tell the farmers that the manager had no authority to cancel those debts – that no portion of the debt had been cancelled. He could tell the farmers that the debts still had to be paid in full. The problem with that was that he was on the property, unprotected – and they could turn into an angry mob and kill him. His other choice was to smile and go along with it and become the hero that thought he was! That meant he’d also have to hire the manager back because if he mistreated the one who announced the good news, they were also likely to turn on him.

Now the problem to our ears might be that what the manager did was dishonest. He’d forgiven debts that were not his to forgive. He’d done it in someone else’s name when he wasn’t authorized to do it at all. He had no right to forgive. He forgave for all the wrong reasons and he did it the wrong way. It’s one of many many stories in the Gospel of Luke about forgiveness. I have no translation tricks to pull out of the pulpit today, but I will remind you that biblical forgiveness has to do with letting something go, with canceling debt, with pardoning sin, with loosing the binding, with dissolving and disbanding and forgetting. Debts and sins and trespasses are all the same thing in Biblical literature and we are regularly reminded to turn from them ourselves and to set one another free from the burden of debts and sins and trespasses in relationships.

Our language of debts and sins and trespasses in English is all intertwined in the language of relationships: have you ever said to a family member, “You owe me”, and you don’t mean money. Or “I’m not buying that” or “What’s the bottom line here?”

I think that the moral of this story is: forgive. Forgive now. As Dylan Breuer writes, “Forgive for any reason you want, or for no reason at all. Why forgive someone who owes us or who has hurt us or offended our sense of what is obviously right? [According to Luke, it doesn’t have to be] out of love for the other person.” We could forgive because we are not strong enough to dig and we are too ashamed to beg. We could forgive because we want to save face. We could forgive the other person because of those pesky words in the Lord’s prayer that we say– you know, where we ask God on a regular basis to forgive our sins as we forgive the debts of others. (Those are the words from Luke.) We could forgive because we’ve been with ourselves when we were unwilling to forgive and we know how stuck and narrow and uncomfortable that place is. We could forgive because we are, or we want to be, more deeply in touch with a sense of Jesus’ power to free people like us (sinners like us).

It all comes down to the same thing: delusional or shrewd, selfish or unselfish, there is no bad reason to forgive, according to Luke. Extending the kind of forgiveness that God extends to us can only put us more deeply in touch with God’s astonishing love.² So it might not be fair; it might not be pretty; it might be naïve; it might be unjust, but forgiveness of debts is the bottom line today, both debts of wealth and debts of love. The authority to forgive comes from the God of Love and not from the god of wealth. Indeed, while it is possible to squander wealth, it is impossible to squander Love. If someone owes you a lot, forgive a lot. If someone owes you a little, forgive a little. Experience the freedom that comes with serving the God of Love, Whose name is too Holy to Pronounce, rather than serving the god of wealth, whose name is Mammon.³ Experience the thrill of it. Don’t let the sun go down today without doing it!

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