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.

Well, Happy Unjust Steward Day everyone! I am so glad that you are here to help us celebrate! Is it possible that Jesus was really telling a story encouraging dishonesty and injustice? Did anyone hear the Gospel reading this morning and think, “wait a minute, what?” Or are any of us who could be considered wealthy thinking, “uh-oh”? Are any of you hoping that I will pull a Greek translation trick out of this boxy pulpit? Alas, not today. As Jeremiah tells us, the summer is ended and we are not saved. Vulnerable people are not being properly cared for. As our planet continues to heat up, it’s the people who are the poorest who suffer the most. Is there no balm in Gilead? This anguished question in Jeremiah is the voice of God. God knows there is balm and God does not have enough tears for the disaster that is looming because the people with resources are spreading dis-ease instead of balm.

And yet. And yet, 16-year-old Greta Thunberg. A year ago, Greta Thunberg went on strike from school in front of the Swedish parliament to protest inadequate governmental response to our global climate crisis. Maybe you’ve seen the picture of her sitting on the sidewalk all alone with her handmade poster and her pink backpack. Thirteen months later, this past Friday, she inspired teenagers and their allies around the world to demonstrate in order to hold politicians and corporations accountable for changing their death-dealing profiteering ways. Millions of people on seven continents, in more than 150 countries rose up to demonstrate with her, with thousands of companies and hundreds of civil society organizations offering support. The teenaged leaders’ message is “we vote next.” So maybe we will be saved. There is a balm in Gilead, and teenaged leaders know it.

But what about the parable of the dishonest Chief Financial Officer? Does Jesus really mean for us to make friends by dishonest wealth? This passage follows immediately after the Gospel of Luke reports that Jesus’ colleagues were grumbling that Jesus was spending time and food and forgiveness on cheaters and criminals. They were accusing him of “a giant squandah” (as local baseball announcer Joe Castiglioni calls a bases-loaded no-score situation). Jesus responded to their grumbling with three stories of losing and finding and rejoicing – a sheep, a coin, a son. Jesus then turned to his disciples, which surely included both tax-collectors (cheaters) and Pharisees (who were known for their decent and modest living), and told them this confusing story. According to Luke, it just made his colleagues madder. Then he launched into the story of the rich man and Lazarus. (We’ll hear that next week.) Even if you didn’t know this sequence, you probably know that Luke’s stories that begin with “there was a rich man who…” do not usually end well for the rich man unless the wealth is being used in service to the larger community — think public banquet, not private party. 

As an audience, we, too, are disinclined to identify with “a rich man,” even if we are morbidly rich by the world’s standards. As an audience we are more inclined to identify with the steward who has been anonymously accused of squandering, has been fired, and is not strong enough for hard labor and too ashamed to beg. But then we find ourselves in a pickle (to use another baseball term) because we don’t want to be congratulated for dishonesty or encouraging dishonesty in others. I bet you’ve never seen a stained glass window depicting the shrewd manager standing over a peasant who is marking down a bill! And you probably never learned this story in Sunday School.

I’ll tell you that Amy-Jill Levine, in the Jewish Annotated New Testament warns that this “parable defies any fully satisfactory explanation.” And I do not have one for you, but here’s an approach worth considering, laid out by one of my colleagues in ministry, 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 an oppressive economic system that impoverished the vast majority of the people. 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 amounts were ridiculously high for the tenants. One-hundred jugs of olive oil would have been worth three years’ wages for a day laborer (think $75,000 of debt). One-hundred containers of wheat would have been worth eight years’ wages (think $200,000 of debt) for someone making about $25,000/year. This is impossible and punishing debt for people who had nowhere else to go. 

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 a cunning 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 and 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. His other choice was to smile and go along with it and become the hero that they 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. 

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. The late William Herzog concludes that, faced with an impossible situation, the manager devised impossible acts that shifted from a tale of woe to a scene of rejoicing, and that, while this may not be a parable of the reign of God, it does suggest how the resistance and determination of the weak can produce results in a world dominated by the strong.

This may not be a description of the reign of God, but it is one of many stories in the Gospel of Luke about how to get there – namely — forgiveness. Biblical forgiveness has to do with letting something go, with canceling debt, with pardoning sin, with loosening the binding, with dissolving and disbanding and forgetting, all forms of balm. 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 in English is intertwined in the language of relationships: have you ever said to a family member “you owe me” or “I’m not buying it” or “what’s the bottom line?” and you don’t mean money.

 I think that the moral of this story is: forgive. Forgive now. Forgive for any reason or no reason. 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. 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 ancient God of Love Whose name is too Holy to Pronounce, rather than serving the ancient god of wealth, whose name was Mammon. Experience the thrill of forgiving. We have been given plenty of balm to spread around for pain relief and healing. Please squander it.