Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 20C, September 18, 2016; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of our struggle, 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.

In our readings for this morning, we heard Jeremiah tell us what we already know: the summer is ended and we are not saved. Poor people are not being properly cared for. Poor people are hurting and that hurts the heart of the Holy One. The epistle of Timothy is urging prayers for kings and others in high positions – presumably this instruction is directed to people who do not wish to pray for those in power – presumably because it is the powerful and the wealthy who benefit from economic systems that trample on people who are needy, people who are poor. And Jesus, in the Gospel of Luke, seems to be celebrating and encouraging dishonesty. What?

This reading surely is in the top ten most difficult lessons in all of Jesus’ teachings. Make friends for yourself by means of dishonest wealth, so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes. That line trips me up every time. I agree with what biblical scholar Amy-Jill Levine writes in the Jewish Annotated New Testament, that this parable “defies any fully satisfactory explanation.” [1] Does it help to know the context? Yes, I think it does. Does it help to know what the Greek says? Maybe a little.

The context is this: the writer of the Gospel of Luke and Acts of the Apostles is deeply concerned about the corrupting effect of wealth. We know right from the beginning of Luke that it’s not going to go well in the realm of God for rich people. The Magnificat (which is an updated Song of Hannah from the Hebrew Bible) proclaims that in God, the hungry are filled with good things, but the rich are sent away empty. The Lukan beatitudes (the blessings) declare the opposite of a blessing upon those who are rich, for they have already received their consolation. Luke’s parables tell again and again about the proper and improper use of material resources, about foolish and faithful people with regard to material resources, about unjust and just distribution of material resources. In Luke’s second volume, Acts of the Apostles, we hear examples of the ways that the early communities of Jesus followers contributed each according to her or his ability, and received each according to his or her need.

If you are rich by the world’s standards (and that includes most or all of us in this room), I encourage you to learn about Jesus from the writer of Luke, because the Gospel of John doesn’t address the dangers of wealth at all, and Mark and Matthew only have a few mentions about how the lure of wealth chokes the Word of God, or how it is ridiculously difficult for wealthy people to experience the reign or realm of God. Luke has some things to teach us that we need to hear. The good news is that none of us has to figure this out alone. We are all in this together.

So the Greek: once again I’m grateful for the work of Mark Davis’s Greek translation blog, “left behind and loving it,” for sharing his deep dive into the ancient words and the Gospel grammar. [2] The word translated as manager, in older English translations as steward, is very close to the English words, home economist. Do you remember the idea of “home economics?” We used to take classes in home economics. (At least the girls did.) For those of you too young to remember, it used to be the umbrella term for things like budgeting and food science and life/work balance and home furnishing. What this home economist is doing is squandering a living – the word that gets translated “property,” is a participle – ing ending – he is squandering his living. Squandering is bad – it’s what the prodigal son was doing in the story just before this one.

Here’s a translation detail that seems important to me. The manager’s decision to reduce the bills in Greek is in the past tense. The home economist says to himself: I knew what to do so that I would be welcomed in their homes. (It actually is not, “I have decided what to do,” as if it’s a future plan). Read this way, it’s more clear that the offense committed in this parable was the ingratiating dishonesty of the manager with regard to money that didn’t belong to him. Shrewd is what the snake was in the Garden of Eden. When the rich man or master commends the manager, he is commending “the manager of injustice” or dishonesty. That’s more clear than saying, “the dishonest manager.” The rich man commending the shrewdness in this context makes it clear to me that the rich man is not God (at least it’s clear to me this year). The rich man is not the one Jesus is embodying here. The eternal homes of the shrewd are not where any disciple of Jesus would want to dwell, and his early audience would have gotten the joke I think.

Notice here that the opposite of faithful here is not doubt-ridden. The opposite of faithful is unjust. The opposite of faithful is dishonest. Rather than being a model for religious leaders, the manager of injustice or dishonesty is a foil. [3] What Jesus is teaching is, be faithful, be just, be honest, with a little, whether it belongs to someone else or it belongs to you. Being faithful is not about what you believe, it’s about how you behave. Our English really trips us up at the end of this passage. It seems clear enough that no slave can serve two masters, and that one cannot serve God and wealth. But in Greek, it’s more like no home economist can slave for two masters. The verb that gets translated serve is from the noun for slave (doula), not servant (deacon). The “you” here is plural. It’s not a directive for individuals. Jesus is teaching a gathering, a community. Jesus knows that this teaching is too hard for anyone to learn alone.

A few Saturdays ago I was helping to lead a Diocesan stewardship training day for parish stewardship committees and clergy. As an exercise to get people moving and thinking about how we behave around money in church, I asked half of the participants to leave their seats at the round tables in the cathedral basement hall, and come to the end of the room with me. There I distributed a roll of dimes to about 25 people. I intentionally distributed them unevenly and randomly. Some people got one dime, some people got multiple dimes, and a few people got no dimes. When I skipped over one person, the person next to him said to me, you skipped him. I said, “yes, I know,” but I kept going. When the dimes had been distributed, I addressed the people still sitting at the tables. I said, “you’re the stewardship committee and these people have money – your task is to get the money. You have three minutes.” They stared, struggling to comprehend. I said, “you’re probably going to have to get up.”

They got up. For the next three minutes, there was a buzz of conversation and then I called time and invited everyone to return to their seats to talk about what they’d noticed. Some people noticed their discomfort with the uneven, even capricious distribution. One person shared that she’d only received one dime so she put it deep into her jeans pocket when she saw the stewardship committee coming and thought to herself, “they’re going to have to work to get this dime.” I asked, “do you still have the dime?” (she said, “yes.”) Another shared that when asked for the dimes, she started telling a story about how she had worked hard for those dimes. Then she stopped herself, realizing she was making up a lie – the dimes had just been put in her hands – she hadn’t worked for them at all. She gave them all away. Some people gave up their only dime. Some gave a portion and kept the rest. One of the people I’d skipped in the distribution reported that when he was asked for a dime, he replied that he didn’t have one. The woman who had asked him immediately responded that she thought she had a dime in her purse back at the table. She used precious time to go to her purse and pull out a dime to give him, making the point that the dime exercise didn’t need to be a zero-sum game! After the conversation, some people wanted to give me the dimes back. I said, “no thank you, I don’t want them back!” Some people were frustrated by my refusal – not knowing what to do with the dimes. I said, “when you walk out of the cathedral, someone is going to ask you for money. Give it to them!” Others lit up and said, I know who I’m going to give these to!

One of my rector colleagues told us a story about a parishioner of hers whose husband had a sudden and debilitating illness earlier in the year. The family has three young children. The parish has come together to provide meals, transportation, babysitting, you know – the things that people in parishes do when there is an emergency. A few weeks after the initial crisis, the parishioner called the rector to ask that the family’s stewardship pledge for the rest of the year be written off, because of the loss of the husband’s income combined with medical expenses. My colleague responded that, rather than writing off the pledge, would the parishioner permit the parish to fulfill the pledge on the family’s behalf? The parishioner agreed. The following Sunday (and it was a small summer Sunday), my colleague explained the situation to the congregation and asked if they could help pay the pledge by making an extra gift to the church (without saying how much the pledge was). When the offering was counted that day, the extra giving had more than paid off the balance of the year’s pledge for the family. That’s the economy of Love at work – that’s God’s economy.

In the economy of material wealth, eyes are squinting, unseeing. Hands are grasping, clutching. Heads are measuring, weighing. Hearts are calculating, judging. To slave for wealth is to take our orders from money. In the economy of God, our eyes, hands, heads and hearts open more and more, realizing surprising and unfathomable abundance. To slave for God is to take our orders from Love. In the economy of God, we cannot earn, spend, save, borrow, trade, or accrue interest on love. It can’t be bought or sold or captured or leveraged or mortgaged. In the economy of God, extravagant Love rules. Pray that God will open our eyes, incline our hearts, order our steps so that we desire to live more fully in an economy of Love.

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