Divine Comedy

Sermon for Sept. 22, 2019
Amos 8:4-7; Luke 16:1-13

We usually hear Jesus’ parables as nice little illustrations that teach us something about the kingdom of heaven.  Think of a famous one: “A sower went out to sow,” and he scatters seeds on different kinds of soil.  Different things happen in three different locations, and each situation clearly stands for something.  Then the ending wraps things up with a nice, tidy bow.  It’s great when storytelling works that way. 

But then, there’s today’s parable about the dishonest manager.  I’d like us to consider hearing this one very differently.  And it’s OK to do that because parables aren’t necessarily tidy little Sunday-school stories.  Like the human experience that Jesus came to inhabit, sometimes parables are messy.  And today’s is maybe the messiest one of all. 

So:  A dishonest manager either wastes or steals from his employer and gets caught.  The dishonest manager tries to cushion the blow of being fired by ingratiating himself with the customers, reducing their bills so they’ll help him out.  And Jesus apparently commends such behavior to the disciples, advising them to “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth” (Luke 16:9).

Hmmm.  Here’s a secret:  Given what we know about Jesus, that doesn’t make any sense.  I know it’s what the words of the reading say, but it doesn’t make any sense.  

Well, in a situation like this, you can find all sorts of interpretations trying to make it make sense.  Maybe the manager is nobly cutting those bills by the amount of his own commission, in which case the manager is sacrificing his earnings because he’s at fault.  OK.  Or maybe the lesson is broader, about making friends with the powerless, giving to them with no strings attached so that the poor may welcome you into the kingdom of heaven.  Well, OK.  But the truth is, there is no commonly recognized way of making sense of this parable. 

So, let’s look at it from a different angle.  I can’t promise you this is the “right” interpretation because, with parables, the point is that they spur a variety of interpretations.  That’s why biblical interpretation is fun!  No, really….

This is the first of two parables Jesus tells about the dangers of idolizing wealth.  And importantly, this one is an intimate tale, one told not to crowds of thousands but to the disciples, the people closest to Jesus.  So, imagine Jesus telling this story over pizza and beer rather than from a pulpit.  And imagine it’s more a comedic sketch than a lecture on proper behavior.

In this story, the rich man probably isn’t God but probably is just a rich man.  The story isn’t about him anyway; ethically, he’s a neutral character.  The story is about the rich man’s manager, an important servant in his household – sort of like Carson, the butler in Downton Abbey.  But I think the character of this manager is about as far from Carson in Downton Abbey as you can get. 

In fact, this manager is a scoundrel, a talented con man who at least is blessed with self-awareness.  He’s indolent – too weak to work hard and too proud to beg.  So, having been caught skimming money, his solution is to ingratiate himself with the people who owe debts to his boss.  He goes and invites them to join him in committing fraud – it’s in the customers’ interest to save the money, after all.  But he’s actually scamming them as much as he scammed the rich man:  They’ll have to “take care” of the manager once he’s fired because he’ll blackmail them into silence.  As a scam, it’s Hollywood-worthy. 

Well, the rich man finds out what’s going on.  And he’s impressed with the manager’s cunning and the shrewdness of his plot, probably wishing the manager had used those talents to help build his business instead of stealing from him.  

So, there’s the story.  And looking at his friends around the table, Jesus observes that the “children of light” – the good folks, his followers – they aren’t very shrewd in their dealings with the world, letting themselves be taken by folks with a dubious moral compass.  You know, just because you live to serve others doesn’t mean you want them duping you. 

So, I imagine the disciples looking up from their pizza and thinking, “Yeah, but a while back, you told us that if someone takes our shirt, we should give him our coat, too.  So, now you’re saying you want us to be more like the dishonest manager and look out for ourselves?”  As they sit there chewing their pizza, maybe one of the disciples – probably Peter; he was great at sticking his foot in his mouth – maybe one of the disciples asks that question out loud:  “Well, Jesus, is that how you want us to act?  Like the dishonest manager?”  And Jesus looks over his glasses at the poor sap and gets a little snarky, a little sarcastic.  He says, “Yeah, right.  Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth, so that when it’s gone, those folks will welcome you into the eternal homes.  That sounds like a great plan.” 

If Jesus’ response is holy sarcasm, then what he says next makes better sense as the point of this teaching.  “No, of course not,” Jesus tells his friends.  “Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much … and by the same token, whoever is dishonest is a very little is dishonest in much.  If you aren’t faithful with the wealth you have here, why would God trust you with the great treasure of eternal life?  Look, you can’t honor two masters.  You can’t serve God and wealth.”  

That last word is important.  In the Greek text, the word is mammon.  That word goes back to a root that has to do with confidence – where we place our trust.  So, mammon doesn’t just mean wealth; it means wealth in which we place our trust, wealth that functions as an idol for us.  Can you serve God with wealth?  Absolutely, in very holy ways.  Can you worship wealth as your god?  Only at your own risk. 

For us, it’s not very comfortable or comforting when Jesus talks to us this way, but he’s standing firmly in the tradition of the prophets, whom God sent not to comfort the people (at least not off the bat) but to confront them instead.  In our first reading, we hear from Amos, one of the earliest of the Old Testament prophets.  Like most prophets, Amos wasn’t exactly a popular guy.  God called him to bring the word to the leaders of the kingdom of Israel, the northern kingdom, at a time of peace and prosperity, at least for the folks at the top of the ladder.  The people with power, status, and influence were doing just fine, thank you very much – keeping the letter of the law by observing religious festivals and making the Temple offerings the law required.  But at the same time, they were shortchanging their poor customers, and selling worthless merchandise, and profiting from the slave labor that came from people who couldn’t pay their debts. 

Like the teaching Jesus brings us today, Amos’ word indicts the perspective that profit and wealth are themselves the ultimate good, more important than God and God’s command to love our neighbor.  If we demote the Lord and make money our god, Amos says, God will return the favor and bring the kingdom to somebody else.  In Amos’ day, that meant judgment in a very outward and visible way, destroying the kingdom of Israel and sending its leaders and people off into exile.  That’s what’s coming, Amos said.  And just a few decades later, he was proven right.

That’s pretty confrontational stuff, between what Amos and Jesus have to say.  But to the extent the story fits, we have to wear it.  Life offers us many idols, many not-Gods in which we might place our trust.  Mammon is certainly one of them, though it’s not the only one.  Our golden calves might be position and authority, or other people’s perception of us, or being the expert, or simply getting what we want.  But all of these, like money, can lure us into putting something else in the place of God and trusting it instead.  And when we do that, our actions tell the story of where our priority lies.  As the wealthy and powerful of Amos’ day might have put it, “Come on; when will all the God talk be over so we can get back to business?” – because it was their own efforts, their own projects, that they seemed to think would save them.  And that didn’t work out so well.

So, there we have our happy little readings for this Sunday morning.  They’re hard to hear, but maybe we need a little confrontation.  Sometimes we don’t recognize how lost we are until someone hits us upside the head with it. 

But remember that judgment isn’t God’s last word.  Remember what we heard last Sunday:  God goes to great lengths to find the sheep who are lost.  Think about the parable of the prodigal son, which comes immediately before Jesus’ teaching this morning, actually:  God waits very patiently for us children to recognize how we squander what God gives us and honor ourselves instead.  And once we look around at our lives, and shake our heads, and see how far we are from hitting the mark, God welcomes us back with open arms, rejoicing that we finally figured out just how lost we are.  And that very day, life begins again.

Changing God's Mind

Sermon for Sept. 15, 2019
Exodus 32:7-14; 1 Timothy 1:12-17; Luke 15:1-10

Don’t you wonder sometimes why God doesn’t just get fed up with people and walk away? 

I mean, think about human behavior.  For thousands of years, people have been judging each other based on meaningless differences, keeping others away from resources God has provided, and treating each other violently.  

And think about our own behavior.  When I offer Morning Prayer each day, and the time comes for the Confession of Sin, I find myself mostly confessing the same things I confessed the day and the week and the month before.  That may mean that I suffer from a failure of imagination, but I don’t think I’m alone.  Try this thought experiment:  How do you take your own path and turn away from what you know God would prefer?  Bring a few examples to mind.  Got some?  OK, now, if I’d asked you that question last week or last month or last year, would you have given very different answers?  I imagine hearing our confessions must be incredibly boring for God, because the story really doesn’t change much as time goes on.

For the first people of the covenant, the people of Israel, their collective category of sin seems to have been idolatry, in the sense of embracing gods other than Yahweh.  Sometimes those gods looked a lot like our own idols: possessions, privilege, power.  But sometimes those idols looked like, well, idols – as in today’s reading from Exodus. 

Moses goes up Mt. Sinai to receive God’s Law, and we know he’ll be gone 40 days.  But the folks back in the camp, at the foot of the mountain, don’t have any idea what’s happened to Moses.  Maybe they’re just looking for a chance to party, but maybe more than a month of silence has made them wonder whether this Yahweh really was the one who’d brought them out of slavery after all.  Maybe it was the local deity – which is how people understood divinity in that day, different gods reigning over particular geographies.  So, they create a representation of a local god, a golden calf.  Maybe it’s celestial fishing, trying to see whether that god would take the bait.  But for whatever reason, they do what people have been doing forever, which is to put the worries of the moment, and their own self-interest, first.

So, God sees this and goes into a rage.  “What, it’s not enough that I inflicted plagues on your enemies, and freed you from enslavement, and gave you water from a rock, and fed you in the wilderness with the bread of angels?  You want to worship something else instead of me?”  God tells Moses to get out of the way while the Lord brings the hammer down.  “Don’t worry,” God says to Moses, “I’ll just start the covenant over with you once I consume all of them.”  

But Moses says to God, “Wait; hold on a minute.”  And he talks the Almighty out of it.

OK, let’s hit the “pause” button on this story.  Here’s Moses – not exactly a guy with a perfect history, a murderer who turned down his call from God multiple times – here’s Moses interceding for these stiff-necked people who are dancing around the golden calf.  Now, put yourself into this scene.  Imagine that God was speaking as directly to you as to Moses.  And imagine that God was about to bring down judgment on everybody but you.  Would you decide to ally yourself with the people God was about to “consume” in righteous anger (Exodus 32:10).  What was Moses thinking? 

I don’t think Moses was on the side of the rebellious people per se; I think Moses was on the side of the relationship with God that they’d broken.  Once Moses got back down the mountain, he was just as angry with the people as God had been.  It’s not exactly a happy little story that follows today’s reading:  Moses and his supporters kill everybody who’d turned against his leadership, and God sends a plague against the ones who remain alive.  Clearly, there are consequences for turning away from a covenant you make with God.  Because keeping the covenant is job one.

So, back to the story.  Up on the mountain, Moses explains to God why the Almighty’s plan is wrong.  And then comes maybe the only thing more surprising than Moses’ response to God.  It’s God’s response to Moses:  God changes God’s mind. 

OK, hit the “pause” button one more time.  Isn’t God supposed to be omniscient?  At least some Christians would say that God wrote the whole script for existence before the Big Bang ever happened, that God knows all and has worked out everything yet to come.  But here, we see God changing God’s mind.  What’s going on? 

Maybe both for Moses and for God, the answer lies in the importance of honoring commitments.  Moses pledged to God that he would bring the people out of slavery – slavery to Pharaoh and, now, slavery to their own temptation to choose the gods they want.  And well before that, God pledged to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to bless them and their descendants with land and abundance.  God and Moses are both fully aware that the people have failed utterly by substituting their own solutions for God’s.  But in a covenant relationship, you’re not simply pledging to observe the stipulations of the deal.  That’s a contract.  In a covenant, you’re pledging yourself to the other party and committing yourself to walk along together. 

We know a little something about covenants.  Every time we celebrate Eucharist, we remember Jesus’ New Covenant with God’s people, eternal life for all who’ll trust and follow him.  Every time we celebrate baptism, we renew our Baptismal Covenant, pledging to trust in God who is Father, Son, and Spirit; and pledging to live our lives following Jesus, in loving commitment to God and the people around us.  When we get married, we stand before God and make a covenant with our beloved to invest ourselves in that relationship as long as we both shall live.  When we’re ordained, we make a covenant with God and God’s people to live out the trust and responsibility of a new order of ministry.  So, covenants seem to be our pattern of commitment, too.

I think it’s interesting that what God asks of us is not just our worship or our tithes or our following of the rules.  Apparently, what God values most is covenant living – investing ourselves in relationships, with God and one another, even when the other covenant partner doesn’t deserve it. 

Think about how crazy it is that the most influential follower of Jesus in all Christian history is the apostle Paul.  At the start, Paul even beats Moses as the most unlikely hero, not just telling God “no” but “Hell, no!”  In the second reading today, Paul describes himself as “formerly a persecutor, a blasphemer, and a man of violence” (1 Timothy 1:13), arresting and killing followers of Jesus because they were breaking the religious rules of the day.  For having co-opted God’s role as judge, Paul was the last person to give us a gospel of grace, of divine love freely given – but that’s precisely how God asked Paul to change his mind. 

Paul didn’t deserve a second chance any more than the people of Israel.  The truth is, neither do we – and our redundant confessions confirm it.  So, here’s the good news: that God chooses love over the highest holiness score.  Remember the Gospel reading today:  Where God works the hardest is with the one who’s lost.  Where God works the hardest is in the areas of our lives that are out of alignment with divine purposes.  Sure, God appreciates all the coins that are properly collected and kept neatly where they’re supposed to be.  And God appreciates the 99 sheep who don’t go off on their own paths.  But what makes God rejoice is when the lost one is found and brought back home.

So, in our own lives, what are the relationships that challenge us the most, the ones we might feel justified in letting go?  Where do we need to consider changing our minds?  Maybe it’s sticking with someone we’d sooner leave behind.  Maybe it’s entertaining the possibility that there might be some truth, maybe even some holiness, in the “other side’s” world view.  Maybe it’s remembering that being in relationship is what makes all people grow into the full stature of Christ – both “them” and “us.” 

When we ask ourselves those hard questions, and when we do the work to strengthen the covenants that challenge us most, we gain the last thing we’d expect – peace.  In the upside-down reality of the kingdom of Jesus Christ, we find that committing ourselves to hard relationships brings counterintuitive joy.  We are blessed with being stuck with people we find hard to love.  We are liberated from judgment when we bind ourselves to God’s grace. 

In those moments when we think we know best, when the world tells us we’re completely within our rights to walk away from the people we’re bound to, or even to punish them for their sins, that’s when God says, “Wait.  Grace beats judgment, even when judgment seems deserved, even when judgment seems righteous.  After all,” God says, “even I changed my mind.”