The question is on
everyone’s lips in the old mainline churches such as the Episcopal and the
Church of the Ascension: “How can we
turn this around? What can we do to
thrive again?”
When I was here seven
weeks ago I talked to you about the folly of making plans, and the vital
importance of honing your values and practicing them ever better. And I extolled the central biblical value of
hospitality.
Jesus commends another
value to us this morning, but it may not be what we expected from him. He commends the value of “shrewdness.”
And his master commended the dishonest
manager because he acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd
in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light (v. 8).
The one thing that any commentator on Luke’s Gospel
who has ever lived has agreed upon is that this is the most difficult parable
to decipher. Why does Jesus set up as
the hero of the story someone he calls dishonest? And why does he commend that dishonesty to
his disciples as “shrewdness?”
What is this
“shrewdness?” It’s not a word you
usually connect with church or the Christian life. I imagine none of you have ever bragged to a
friend that the Vestry of your church is so shrewd. Or invited a friend to come to church with
you saying, “I think you’ll love people at Ascension. They are so shrewd!”
It actually can be spun
positively as “cunning,” but it began life as a synonym for malicious. There is even an obsolete English word,
“shreward,” meaning “scoundrel.” So is
Jesus suggested we should do well to have an annual “shrewardship drive?”
So what is this parable about? Let’s read it through.
A rich man has charges brought to him
that his steward was squandering his property.
We don’t know exactly what that means but it was clearly bad, probably
something like extortion. He demands an
accounting from the steward but also fires him.
The steward is in a quandary. What to
do now? I don’t particularly like to get
my hands dirty and I’m too proud to beg.
Then he has an idea, the point, apparently, where he is shrewd. He wants to see my books, does he? He thinks I’ve squandered his property does
he? He hasn’t seen anything yet! And
this should have the effect of giving me a good reputation with the people and
perhaps they will see that I am well taken care of.
So, instead of finding a way to
un-cook the books, he decides to cook them even more. He calls his master’s debtors in and gives
them amazing discounts. Why some of them
end up repaying less than they had borrowed in the first place.
And then comes the surprise. There’s usually
a surprise in Jesus’ parables, and it’s usually where you should look for the
meaning. Jesus says, “And his master commended the dishonest steward because
he had acted shrewdly.”
Now wait just a minute. The master should have been furious. He had just lost a great deal of wealth at
the hands of the steward, and he had acted to do so without consultation after
he had been fired! He should have had
him arrested.
How did the master, who began the
story as a pretty determined bean counter, end the story celebrating the
underhanded shrewdness of the manager?
Why?
Because this is a parable about the radical grace of God. It has
immediately followed, with no interruption, three other parables of the grace
of God: the shepherd with the lost sheep, the woman with the lost coin, and the
story we call the prodigal son, but is really the story of the forgiving
father. Those three parables had been
reactions by Jesus to criticism by the religious authorities that he associated
with tax collectors and sinners, the wrong kind of people.
By the time he is through with the
prodigal son, you can imagine some in his audience simply increasing their
grumbling. They sided with the elder
brother in that story who was furious that his younger brother had been
welcomed home to a party rather than a rightful punishment and significant period
of earning his way back into the family’s good graces.
So Jesus goes on to be even more
provocative by telling this fourth story, about the dishonest steward. God has indeed allowed the books to be
cooked, and Jesus himself is the cooker.
The announcement could not be clearer.
Salvation by bookkeeping is dead.
The divine bookkeeping department is closed.
The Church has struggled with that
message ever since. It is hard to
believe when you’re in the religion business that you are not also in the
bookkeeping business. And when a piece
of the church has acted like its bookkeeping days are over, it usually gets
accused of looking like the world, operating like the world. I have stood before meetings and Councils of
the church and been told that my declaration that the bookkeeping is over is a
total capitulation to the values of the world.
But I believe it is a total
capitulation to the values of Jesus. I
believe it is simply time for the children of light to be as shrewd in dealing
with our current generation as are those whom Jesus called “the children of
this age.”
Which is to say that our message is
homecoming not bookkeeping. If we are
going to invite people back into our tradition of Christianity, we need to be
clear about two things:
1. What is it that we are inviting people into?
2. What is their perception of what we are inviting them
into?
To
take the second question first, the perception of the vast number of people who
these days are frequently called the “nones” (because they check “none” on
surveys when it comes to religious preference—and they are the fastest growing
religious preference in this country), those folks perceive that what we do
inside here is try to keep the books clean for God. We are bookkeepers who worship the Divine CPA
in the sky. What we are best at is
counting sins, especially other peoples.
Their
perception is aided by a great deal of the Christian Church who steadfastly
believe that Jesus gave the church his ministry of keeping God’s judgment
books, even though they know perfectly well that the grumbling about him was
that he indiscriminately welcomed sinners and ate with them as if they were
not.
So what is our message?
One of the writers on the New Testament that shaped my thinking was an
Episcopal priest named Robert Farrar Capon.
It happens that he died just a couple weeks ago at the good age of
87. Capon would say, does say, about
this parable that the message is that when it comes to judgment, Jesus is a
scoundrel. Here’s what he has to say
This parable…says in story form what Jesus himself
said by his life. He was not
respectable. He broke the Sabbath. He
consorted with crooks. And he died as a
criminal….Jesus who winks at iniquity and makes friends of sinners—of us crooks,
that i—and of all the losers who could never in a million years go near a God
who knew what was expected of himself and insisted on what he expected of
others.
You don’t like that?
You think it lowers standards and threatens good order? You bet it does! And if you will cast your mind back, you will
recall that is exactly why the forces of righteousness got rid of Jesus. Unfortunately though, the church has never
been able for very long to leave Jesus looking like the attractively crummy
character he is: it can hardly resist
the temptation to gussy him up into a respectable citizen. Even more unfortunately, it can almost never
resist the temptation to gussy itself up into a bunch of supposedly perfect
peaches, too good for the riffraff to sink their teeth into….[But Jesus] is the
only mediator and advocate the likes of us will ever be able to trust, because
like the unjust steward, he is no less a loser than we are—and like the
steward, he is the only one who has even a chance of getting the Lord God to
give us a kind word….Thank God we do not have to deal with a just steward.[1]
Which means for us that our ministry is homecoming not
bookkeeping. Our ministry is hospitality
not judgment. Our ministry is welcoming
folks as they are to the table, not insisting that they clean themselves up
first.
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