Being Shrewd

Luke 16:1-13

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. So he summoned him and said to him, 'What is this that I hear about you? Give me an account of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.' 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. I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.' So, summoning his master's debtors one by one, he asked the first, 'How much do you owe my master?' He answered, 'A hundred jugs of olive oil.' He said to him, 'Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.' 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.' 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. 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.

"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. If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? 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."

What a parable we’ve just heard.  It’s one of those difficult sayings of Jesus that we end up scratching our heads over and hoping that next week’s lectionary reading is easier to understand; at least I do. But we ignore this parable at our own peril, so let’s look at it and spend some time trying to comprehend what Jesus may have been talking about.

To recap:  There’s a rich man who has a manager or steward.  The rich man discovers that the manager hasn’t been dealing with his accounts in his best interests.  The manager, upon learning that he’s been found out, hatches a plan to ensure that his good fortune continues.

He realizes that he’s too old or feeble to dig ditches and I can empathize with him there.  He’s also too proud to beg so there has to be another solution.  His solution is to create a circle of friends by reducing the debt they owe to the rich man.  Then comes the twist to the story; when the rich man learns of this plan, he commends his manager.  He doesn’t condemn him but rather calls him shrewd, as truly he is.

You’ve got to imagine that Jesus is telling this story with a glimmer in his eye.  He knows that the twists don’t make sense and that’s the joke of it all.  He’s telling this story to the man on the street; those who catch the early bus to get to grinding jobs.  This is a story for the run of the mill guy or gal who knows about rich men and how unlike they are from the rest of us.

And you have to remember that Luke, the author of our gospel, is particularly interested in proclaiming God’s preference for the poor.  Luke is concerned with what we would call economics; especially the economics of the poor versus the rich. 

So the rich man is not the hero here, well, at least not at the start.  Our protagonist is the manager, who shows how shrewd he is.  The translation we heard talks about him “squandering” his master’s riches.  In actuality, the Greek word is closer to “scattering:”  the manager was strewing about the rich man’s money. 

To where was he scattering it?  Well, very likely those hearers of the parable originally, those men and women of the street, would have assumed that it was going to the poor.  The manager was being an early Robin Hood, more or less.  Then he continues this use of his boss’ riches by shrewdly reducing the amount of what some of the rich man’s debtors owe.  And who are these debtors?  Well, once again they’re people who owe to rich people, in other words, poor people.

The manager is reducing the debts of these folks, in one case by 50%, so that they would feel an obligation to him.  Jesus is clear that the manager is doing this so he’ll be welcomed into the homes of these debtors once he’s out of a job.

Then comes the twist of the story.  The rich man learns of this turn of his affairs and commends the manager.  As Tom Boomershine, who taught me in my Digital Culture Certificate program, writes:  “This is a sign that the story is about God.  God is the one who commends a shrewd steward for acting in a way that was not in the benefit of a rich man.”  Jesus’ explanation about this is that the children of this age are shrewder than the children of light in their own generation.  That is to say, they know how to act; they know how to work the system and to have it work for them.  Children of light, Jesus is saying, are often naïve, pious, nice and don’t know how to use stuff such as money in their own interest.

Jesus knew what everyone else knew:  poor people welcome those who have treated them well into their homes.  That’s the shrewdness of this parable.  In Luke’s version of the beatitudes, the very first thing that Jesus says is that the poor shall inherit the kingdom of God; not the poor in spirit...that’s Matthew’s take on it.  And in the story about Lazarus and the rich man, it’s clear that the poor are going to be the gatekeepers for God’s realm. 

Jesus, according to Luke, is here for the poor.  And this parable only drives that point home.  We may look at it with alarm but that’s because in our materialistic culture, where money is a reward from God, the rich man is the hero.  We have to turn the tables and recognize this parable as a first century story and Jesus was telling it to the poor and those run of the mill, early bus catching guys and gals.  Jesus was, as he often does, turning things upside down; turning the story head over heels with a glint in his eye as he did it.

So where does all this leave us?  Likely none of us are in a position to scatter the riches of anyone in the upper income brackets and even if we did, we’d likely get a very different reaction when we were caught and let’s face it, we’d get caught.  Any scattering of someone else’s riches would likely land us in jail rather than commended.

And the answer to that question of where this leaves us is found in the paragraph that follows the parable, the very last line that we heard:  “You cannot serve God and wealth.”  If you’re serving wealth, you’re not going to scatter the riches around to those who need it, ignoring God’s call to serve them.  This is a parable of the end times, when things are turned as topsy turvy as the parable itself does; when God’s realm enters in fully and we don’t value people based on their bank account or garage contents.

Indeed we dismiss this parable at our own risk.  It must be viewed through the lens of God’s preference for the poor.  Only then can we begin to understand the lesson that this parable provides.

Lost & Found

Luke 15:1-10

There was a popular tv show that aired for several seasons though I myself never caught it.  It’s title came to me after reading today’s gospel lesson though.  The show was called Lost, and dealt, if I remember correctly, with a plane that went down in the middle of the ocean and the survivors who were lost to civilization on a deserted island.  From what I gathered, it was a more suspense-filled, less funny Gilligan’s Island, so to speak.

We all fear being lost.  It’s built into us from our earliest days.  I remember as a very young boy getting separated from my father in a store for just a few moments.  I still recall the fear that was brought up in that brief time for me when I thought I was lost.  Fortunately, Dad was closer than I thought and found me quickly, before there were any tears or panic.

Jesus was getting a lot of flak from the religious authorities at the start of today’s lesson.  This fact sometimes gets lost when we think about the two parables he told.  Jesus was responding to the Pharisees when he told about the lost sheep and the lost coin.  This was a pointed response to quiet them down because he was hanging out, so they thought, with the wrong people.  He was actually eating with tax collectors and prostitutes. 

We don’t need to go into the feasibility of leaving ninety-nine sheep behind while you go to search for one.  And I always wondered about the practicality of throwing a party and spending the money that you had just found.  Those details really don’t apply in this situation because we’re talking about parables; stories meant to make a point and the point was made in spite of picky details.

Too often we identify ourselves in these parables with the lost items.  We’re lost and God will come searching for us.  It’s a comforting thought.  No matter how lost we are, God will seek us out.  That is true enough.

But that’s not the only way we can fit ourselves into these stories.  We very well could be among the 99 sheep who are left behind and in many ways we are.  These, along with the coins that weren’t lost, are those religious authorities to whom Jesus is directing the parables.  We don’t like to think of ourselves in the same light as the Pharisees and scribes but in many ways we are more like them than we’d like to admit.  We, like they, think we’ve got our religious ducks in a row, if you’ll allow me to mix farmland metaphors between ducks and sheep.  We may be uncomfortable with such an identification, but we can’t avoid it.  In many ways we are similar to those 1st century religious authorities as we wonder why Jesus has left us to go out after the homeless, drug-crazed junkie.

But I’d like to challenge us today to think of ourselves as the other actor in the story:  as the one who goes seeking the lost; that caring shepherd off to bring back the 1% of his flock or the persistent woman who cleans until she finds that one important coin, a tenth of her entire savings.  We are called, I believe, to seek out the lost, to put ourselves in situations that will put us closer to the lost souls in our world.

I read an article in the New York Times this week about a woman who lives in the Bronx in New York City.  [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/nyregion/10muslim.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&nl&emc=aua1] She’s a single mother of three and an immigrant from the Ivory Coast.  Every 11th of September she gathers her children and they go down to Ground Zero in lower Manhattan where the World Trade Centers once stood.  There they pray because it was there, nine years ago that Mrs. Traoré lost her husband who worked in the Windows on the World restaurant atop one of the towers.

Mrs. Traoré and her children, in their prayers, invoke the name of Allah, because they are devout Muslims.  Her husband and their father is among the lost, those 60 or so Muslims who were killed that day by the terrorists along with the thousands of others who died in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania.  Of course, the Times printed this article about Mrs. Traoré as the flap about a building that would contain a mosque two blocks from Ground Zero reaches a fevered pitch, including the ridiculous and blasphemous burning of Korans that was supposed to happen yesterday in Florida.

There is quite a bit of religious posturing these days by so-called religious authorities, including that minister in Gainesville who initiated the Koran burnings.  If they’re paying any attention at all, they might be wondering why God would be off, seeking the lost ones such as Mrs. Traoré to comfort and console rather than joining in their bonfires.

We live in a world where it seems that the figures are much higher than 1 in 100 or even 1 in 10 who are lost.  All too often the self-proclaimed “religious authorities” are too busy keeping those ducks in their proper rows to notice that their Jesus is off gathering up the lost that they’re ignoring or, worse, reviling.

If we can find it in ourselves to extricate ourselves from the position of a religious authority to walking beside Jesus as he seeks out the lost, we are then truly living into our calling.  The lost are all around us if we only open our eyes.  They are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, and of no faith.  They are of all colors and ages.  They speak all the languages of our world.  They are everywhere and we only have to seek them out to find them.

They aren’t going to find us.  We, like Jesus, have to be the actors on this occasion.  Lost items aren’t going to naturally get themselves found, nor are lost people.  It’s our effort to make and our initiative to take.  We have to break out of the crowd and find the lost to care for them and to help them back.

As I prepared for this sermon, I read another preacher’s sermon on this same passage from Luke.  In her sermon, Rev. Huey talked about a segment of a television news show that she saw.  She wrote:

This week, I watched a segment of Primetime Live in which Diane Sawyer was revisiting – eight years later – several young people she had interviewed on the streets of a city in Oregon. These kids were definitely lost children. At least two of them were gay, and one can only imagine the terrible rejection that drove them from their homes and families. One young boy was asked to describe his dream home. He answered quickly, as if he had dreamed of it often: his dream home would have a marble staircase and a big entrance hall (doesn't that sound like someone who feels the need to be welcomed?). Asked to describe his dream parents, he said "They would have their mouths taped shut so they couldn't yell at me and their hands tied so they couldn't hit me." Years later, this same young man looked back on the years he spent as a runaway; when Diane Sawyer asked him, "Is that what you wanted – for someone to come and find you?" His response: "Yes, that's what I wanted – I wanted someone to care enough to come looking for me."   [by Kathryn Matthews Huey, from sample sermon at http://www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/september-12-2010.html]

You know, there are times when I feel very lost myself and at those times, I want to be found.   I imagine you each have felt the same.  But I think more often we are called to be the finders in the world.  We are called to care enough to go looking for the lost.  And then when we find them, we can rejoice just like the woman with the coin in the parable.

Onesimus & Philemon

[Note:  This sermon is based on the book of Philemon.  The entire book is quoted in the sermon and is reprinted here in italics throughout.]

 

Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus, and Timothy our brother,
To Philemon our dear friend and co-worker, to Apphia our sister, to Archippus our fellow soldier, and to the church in your house: 

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. When I remember you in my prayers, I always thank my God because I hear of your love for all the saints and your faith toward the Lord Jesus.

Thus begins one of Paul’s most personal letters.  Throughout this sermon, I’m going to be breaking up the letter, which is only one chapter long and one entire book in the New Testament.  This will give us a chance to really look at what Paul was saying and how he goes about it.  Much of this sermon has come from a book I have been reading by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan entitled, “The First Paul.” 

Some background first.  Paul is purported to have written several books of the New Testament.  Most are letters to churches, either that Paul had had some hand in founding or, in one case, a church he was planning to visit.  The letters can be divided into three groups:  those seven books that are undisputed by scholars to be by Paul; then there are three letters that scholars agree were not written by Paul; and finally there is a group of three letters which are disputed with scholars disagreeing on whether they were written by Paul or not.  Our letter this morning falls into the first category: it was clearly written by Paul and there’s agreement about that.  Most of Paul’s undisputed letters were written sometime around the year 50 c.e., a couple of decades at least before the earliest gospels were written.  Thus Paul’s letters are the oldest of the New Testament books.

In this letter to Philemon, Paul begins in a standard way of starting a letter during that time.  What’s different is that he calls himself a “prisoner of Christ Jesus” which is unusual for him.  Normally, in his other letters, he names himself as an “apostle of Christ Jesus” but in this case he defines himself as a prisoner.  In fact, in the letter, as we’ll hear, he uses the word “prisoner” twice and the phrase “during my imprisonment” twice also.  It’s important to Paul that Philemon knows he is in prison as he writes this.

You might well be wondering who this Philemon is that he should be the recipient of a personal letter from Paul.  We know little of Philemon, only that he was a Christian and probably fairly well off, and that Paul knew him from visits to his home.  Though Paul addresses this letter to others, it is Philemon who is really the intended reader.

Paul’s letter continues:

I pray that the sharing of your faith may become effective when you perceive all the good that we may do for Christ. I have indeed received much joy and encouragement from your love, because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you, my brother.
For this reason, though I am bold enough in Christ to command you to do your duty, yet I would rather appeal to you on the basis of love—and I, Paul, do this as an old man, and now also as a prisoner of Christ Jesus. I am appealing to you for my child, Onesimus, whose father I have become during my imprisonment. Formerly he was useless to you, but now he is indeed useful both to you and to me. I am sending him, that is, my own heart, back to you. I wanted to keep him with me, so that he might be of service to me in your place during my imprisonment for the gospel; but I preferred to do nothing without your consent, in order that your good deed might be voluntary and not something forced.

After the niceties of the start of the letter, Paul gets right to the heart of the matter quickly.  It appears that Onesimus, a slave belonging to Philemon, has found his way to Paul and is seeking his aid.  It was not uncommon during this era for slaves, if they find a way to do so, to appeal for mercy at the feet of those who were above their masters.  Thus Onesimus, likely in some trouble with Philemon, having fled from Philemon, appeals to his master’s superior, namely Paul.  It’s interesting to note that Paul is considered Philemon’s superior.  It seems that it’s an agreed upon situation.

It’s in this passage that Paul makes a little pun that we miss because we don’t know the original Greek.  Onesimus means “useful,” and was a common name for slaves of this era.  By saying that Onesimus was useless but is now useful, Paul is emphasizing how the formerly pagan slave has become a brother in Christ.

In fact Paul goes on to say that directly:

Perhaps this is the reason he was separated from you for a while, so that you might have him back forever, no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother—especially to me but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord.

Onesimus, once only a pagan slave, is now a brother; a beloved brother at that.  And not just a brother to me, Paul writes, but also to you, Philemon.  Paul is being sly here and backing Philemon into a corner.  Previously he wrote how Philemon’s good deed regarding Onesimus might be voluntary and here he declares Onesimus his brother, both in the flesh and in the Lord.  What can Philemon do?

Paul begins to conclude his letter:

So if you consider me your partner, welcome him as you would welcome me. If he has wronged you in any way, or owes you anything, charge that to my account. I, Paul, am writing this with my own hand: I will repay it. I say nothing about your owing me even your own self. Yes, brother, let me have this benefit from you in the Lord! Refresh my heart in Christ. Confident of your obedience, I am writing to you, knowing that you will do even more than I say.  One thing more—prepare a guest room for me, for I am hoping through your prayers to be restored to you.

Poor Philemon doesn’t know what hit him.  As if Paul had an account with Philemon.  As if Paul, the itinerant preacher, could repay the cost of a freed slave.  And, oh, by the way, Paul adds, once I’m freed from this prison, I’m going to be stopping by, using your guest room, and checking up on you. 

Paul uses the word “obedience” in this passage, indicating that this isn’t a request at all, but actually a command.  One is not obedient to requests; one complies with requests.  One is obedient to a command.  Paul is pulling no punches here. 

The conclusion of the letter seems fairly formulaic:

Epaphras, my fellow-prisoner in Christ Jesus, sends greetings to you, and so do Mark, Aristarchus, Demas, and Luke, my fellow-workers.
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.

Think about this though: if this is a personal letter about a private concern between Paul and Philemon (and of course Onesimus), how private does it sound?  At least five other people know about this letter and its contents.  It may be personal but it’s not private.  Those five people will know about the plight of their Christian brother, Onesimus, and likely they, too, will be checking in on Philemon to see how all this ended.

Paul ends the letter with a blessing of grace.  Indeed, Philemon may be feeling like he needs it.  But Paul knows freedom in Christ is for everyone.  And that includes living freely.  In the third chapter of Galatians, Paul writes those famous words that  “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal 3:28)  Christ is the great equalizer in society, including a society run by imperial forces, including a society in which the gap between the rich and the poor grows increasingly.  Paul, truly believing that we are all one in Christ, sets forth to live that by bringing Onesimus to freedom.

© Gerry Brague, September 2010, San Francisco