Facing Crisis, Living Wisdom: Disruption

The steward, however wanting in fidelity and care, showed great prudence in the use which he made of present opportunities as a means of providing for the future.

The New Revised Standard Version The Parable of the Dishonest Manager

16 Then Jesus said to the disciples, “There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. 2 So he summoned him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.’ 3 Then the manager said to himself, ‘What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. 4 I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’ 5 So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ 6 He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’ 7 Then he asked another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘A hundred containers of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill and make it eighty.’ 8 And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. 9 And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.

10 “Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. 11 If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? 12 And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? 13 No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”

This month, we’ve been working through a series of Jesus’ parables from the Gospel of Luke. Parables are stories told to illustrate a teaching, object lessons or riddles of sorts that aren’t always about the story they tell, but a deeper truth or unveiling of an issue of faith and the nature of God.

A parable is a story that must be looked through - like a lens or through a looking glass. These are Jesus’ wisdom teachings, his way of talking about much more than what the story itself says.

I’ve been playing with these parables as an exercise in reading through them in order to see Jesus’ wisdom for us as we face rising seas, melting ice caps, and increasingly dire reports about the future of our world’s climate. As people who share this common home, earth, how do the parables of Jesus impact us, teach us, open us up to wrestle with these problems faithfully, with conviction and purpose and dare I say hope?

Some parables are downright difficult to stomach. They’re difficult to understand, because they swim upstream, sail against the prevailing winds. They…disrupt our way of life, at least how we would like it to be or how the world would have us believe it is, apart from God’s reign.

And some parables are downright difficult to stomach.

Today’s parable is just such a parable. Honestly, it’s one of the most difficult texts I’ve studied and preached. It’s confusing and feels like it doesn’t align with what I want it to say. It disrupts me.

And I expect it will disrupt you. For how we consider wealth, relationships, the use of our capital and resources, the role of truth and the role of smart (wise) commerce. With this in mind, let’s hear our second Scripture reading.

The New Revised Standard Version The Parable of the Dishonest Manager

The Parable of the Dishonest Manager

Pray

Rather than leave it to the end and deliver the punch line — I want to tell you right now what I think this parable is teaching us, with regards to our ethics and faithfulness to God’s way and in response to the crisis we face as a world.

This parable is teaching us to be willing to disrupt the systems of money and power for the benefit of relationship, community, participation, and belonging in the eternal Reign of God. It undermines wealth and power as the primary measure of success. Faithfulness — to the way of Jesus, to the bonds of Christian friendship, to the stewardship and care of the earth — faithfulness in even the smallest things matters and it reflects later on how we steward greater things. We cannot serve wealth and serve faithfully the way of Jesus, which requires us to give it up. Instead, wealth becomes the tool to leverage, to make deals, to shrewdly get ahead so that we might deepen and expand and strengthen the work of disrupting all that tells us to hoard, to divide off, to shelter what is ours at the expense of the poor, the displaced, the marginalized. The way of Jesus is disruptive.

To get where we’re going, we need to change our perspective on wealth from what we might commonly believe about it in our Western capitalist society. This parable needs to disrupt our relationship with wealth — we are not bad people for having wealth (there are countless places in the Scriptures where God’s people are rewarded with earthly possessions because of their faithfulness). But what we’re looking at here is how we prioritize and manage wealth.

Who is the rich man?

The rich man requests an accounting of the steward’s management. So…he doesn’t have the facts in front of him, but he’s heard the steward is squandering the property.

Who is the manager?

Who are the debtors to the master?

Connections to the Prodigal Son story — I can’t dig, I’m ashamed to beg (the opposites of the Prodigal’s thought-response)

We typically want to look at the accumulation of wealth as a good thing, because that’s what happens in Western capitalist society. But for the moment, let’s assume that we take the closing wisdom statement from this text (You cannot serve God and wealth) as a binding truth — it’s one or the other. God or wealth. So we serve God, which means we are no longer aligned with wealth — wealth is the bad guy. Or at least the accumulation of wealth at the expense of other things of value is the villain. Follow me here.

Key words: commended/praised, squandering, shrewdly

Master commended

because he acted shrewdly

Let’s put wealth in the position of the villain. We typically want to look at the accumulation of wealth as a good thing, because that’s what happens in Western capitalist society. But for the moment, let’s assume that we take the closing wisdom statement from this text (You cannot serve God and wealth) as a binding truth — it’s one or the other. God or wealth. So we serve God, which means we are no longer aligned with wealth — wealth is the bad guy. Or at least the accumulation of wealth at the expense of other things of value is the villain. Follow me here.

If wealth is the villain, then the rich man is praising the steward for operating with a different ethic, one that focuses on building a strong network and solving the problem through shrewd ways.

Why would the rich man do this?

We might balk at Jesus using a parable to praise dishonesty. We think the manners of the Christian must only be upright and righteous. But we have to question our reaction in the light of who the actions of the steward ultimately serve. Do they serve wealth and the furtherance of it for the rich man? It seems like the rich man ultimately doesn’t care or know enough about his wealth for it to matter that much to him — he didn’t have the accounts before him in the first place and his concern comes up because of some hearsay about the steward.

What if we are supposed to be surprised by the rich man’s response? Why does he allow this? Well, perhaps he is a rich man — and it doesn’t matter to him whether its 100 or 50 jugs of olive oil. For this man, he’s dealing in such large sums of a wealthy commodity that 50 or 100, it isn’t going to matter all that much.

Or maybe the rich man is foolish — and so, par for the course, he foolishly lets his steward get away with cooking the books.

Or maybe, just maybe, this rich man knows something more about what matters in the world and is praising the steward for his actions because they are disrupting the balance of power that wealth is supposed to have in their relationship and the relationships of their community.

The rich man talks about how the children of the age are shrewder than the children of light. “Children of Light” is a figure of speech that gets applied to Christians a few places in the New Testament. Some commentators argue that the rich man is encouraging the church to act shrewdly like the rest of the world — encouraging them to cook the books, play the game, and get ahead. That the people who act dishonestly and get ahead…maybe the know something…maybe there’s something for the church to learn…maybe not the act itself, but the underlying ethic of acting smartly, thoughtfully, wise as serpents…maybe there’s something here for the church to glean…maybe.

What? How can Jesus be encouraging this?

Well, again, if the villain is wealth, then the pursuit of wealth for wealth’s sake and the accumulation of goods and possessions is not what Jesus cares about at all. Rather, what if he’s encouraging us all to think wisely about what privilege, power, possession, riches we have been given and to leverage them for more important purposes — namely for the establishment of eternal worth, for connections that last among people of community, for the mission and call of the church to the world.

Are you confused enough yet?

Questions you might be asking yourself right now?

So…Jesus says it’s ok to be dishonest about how I make money?

Or…as long as the ends justify the means, lying about my accounting is permissible?

Or…doesn’t Jesus call us to righteous living…this sounds like the opposite, right?

And all of these questions are at some level holding a belief that living in the way of Jesus is compatible with the accumulation and preservation of wealth. So the other question we have to ask is: are the compatible?

I have come to believe that the rich man is wise to the ways things work and ALSO has a heart that is set on greater things, on Reign of God, eternal, holy things.

And a person who has that kind of mind and heart is also a person who knows that sometimes, you have to disrupt the system. Sometimes you have to help things break in order for a more excellent way to rise up, a way that lasts beyond what is immediate gain. To them who have ears, may they hear.

If you are uncomfortable at this point, then you must be paying attention. And we must not be surprised that Jesus is the one who makes us uncomfortable, especially in how he pushes us to be opposed to the ethics of the world and self-preservation.

Think again about the rich man, who perhaps knows something more about the good life. Because of his abundance, his richness, he is able to see something deeper in the manager’s actions. He sees that this man has secured entrance into the homes the ones who he’s cut deals with. The steward would be stuck, out of luck, on the curb, if he didn’t find a way to deal with the master’s call for accounting. And the rich man sees that the steward has a smart mind and has secured himself a safety net. Perhaps the rich man knows that wealth is fleeting, but the ones who will welcome you into their homes, the ones who you can rely on when you’re down and out, that’s a greater level of richness than even he can claim.

We are heading into what the City of Bellingham is calling Step Up For Climate Change week. Our city is hosting a number of events and initiatives to bring to light the need to care for creation through our civic life together.

I’m struck, as I think about this parable, by the disruption that we are called to if we are going to participate in helping rally around this charge to reduce our waste, to clean up our world, to temper our excessive use of fossil fuels and find alternative solutions that will not continue to harm our common ecosystem.

Remember that wealth is the villain in the parable — but what if wealth and privilege and access and ingenuity are also the tools that, when we apply them to the problems we see, become the means to a better end? Our call from this passage of Scripture is to clearly be wise and shrewd — so what does it mean to break the patterns of accumulation and excess and, instead, band together with our city, our families, our nation, our world to secure more generative, hopeful, perhaps more challenging in the short term, but long-term oriented tactics to combatting the wicked problems we face?

Here’s an example: Community Solar projects. There are projects around our city and country where you can buy into a solar production facility. You pay a premium which then is leveraged with others who pay a premium too to develop larger scale solar projects that, in turn, reduce the need for fossil fuel consumption and generate clean energy that powers our ongoing life together. We can use wealth to leverage change.

Hear that sentence again: We can use wealth to leverage change.

That doesn’t sound very Christian, does it? That sounds like buying votes or pushing an agenda with your money.

But that’s when we’re oriented toward wealth as the finally ends which all of these means are for. If, instead, our collective action is oriented toward, focused on finding solutions that are collectively better for every single person — why not use wealth and access to leverage change? Why not make deals with people who then become friends and who can work together for the common good?

We have trouble with this line of thinking because we expect:

a. that people are only interested in their own accumulation of power and wealth

b. the common good is debatable

But if we are people of Jesus, we are instead motivated

a. not by the accumulation of wealth and power for its own sake, but rather wealth used to participate in the flourishing of all humanity and creation. Wealth used to build homes, medical clinics, places of worship that call out the best in each of us. Wealth that drives us forward collectively, ensures stability and refuge for ALL people, not just the few.

b. we are motivated by a shared understanding of the common good, as it is seen in Scriptures and affirmed in the church as it is lived in healthy, generative, loving ways. It is the wolf lying down with the lamb, a place where there are no more tears, a community where this is no longer Jew nor Greek, Slave nor Free, Male nor Female — where we are one, belong to each other, love one another. We don’t call it the common good, though. We call it the Reign of God, we call it heaven, we call it Kingdom Come!

If you serve wealth, Mammon, these ethics will not make sense. And sadly, we are all so oriented toward serving accumulation and preservation of self.

But friends…we are a people of abundance. Not because each of us has so much as the rich man…but because we are people of God’s promise and care. We are a people who have access to all riches that we could ever need — in Christ Jesus.

And so, we share, we work together, we contribute as we are all able to the collective work of proclaiming this better way amidst a broken, consumption-addicted world. People of the abundant love of God are wise, smart in how they act, inviting others to disrupt patterns of self-preservation, all in great community oriented to the hope of God’s glorious way, breaking in among us.

Amen.

Vs. 9 — Luke’s offering of Jesus’ interpretation

how you handle money has eternal consequences (Interpretation Commentary)

A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel according to St. Luke 14:1–17:10. The Second Period of the Journey

The steward, however wanting in fidelity and care, showed great prudence in the use which he made of present opportunities as a means of providing for the future.

Do not waste your money. Be shrewd, thoughtful, purposeful with your possessions. Store up treasures in heaven ().

Being smart about our possessions is a kingdom activity.

The master praises dishonesty — can we hold this as a Christian ethic?

The steward is solving the problem - disrupting the status quo and making a solution out of his bind

A question before us is “are we using our wealth and status to open up the greater flourishing of God’s Reign among us, to promote the welfare and mission of the church, to encourage the growth and prosperity of the community in which we proclaim an alternative way of life? Or are we obeying the rules of society which seek our personal welfare and security at all costs, above all other needs, at the expense of the least of these and to the decline of resources for God’s people?”

When Jesus speaks, at the end of this passage, of the impossibility of serving both God and wealth — the way we can hear this today is plain: do our material resources get put to use to serve the ends of God’s mission, on earth as it is in heaven; or is our care for wealth self-serving, self-focused, self-preserving.

Facing Crisis, Living Wisdom: Disruption

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