Sermon delivered Sunday, Sept. 22, 2013 (18th Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 20C), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN, on Luke 16:1-13.
Our passage from Luke’s Gospel today presents us with one of Jesus’s more difficult parables, in which Jesus seems to encourage cheating and dishonesty. The parable is a story about a manager who “cooks the books,” so to speak, adjusting the amounts due from his boss’s debtors so as to give them a break and ingratiate himself with them so they will owe him a favor once he’s lost his job as a result of his corrupt dealings. As we listen to the story, we’re expecting a traditional outcome: the bad guy gets told what-for by the boss and faces the consequences of his actions. We’re probably expecting to hear about some weeping and gnashing of teeth.
But instead, the boss praises the manager for this behavior! And then Jesus summarizes his message with a strange piece of advice: “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.”
What?? “Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth?”
That doesn’t sound like the Jesus we know, the Jesus who consistently warns us about the dangers of our riches becoming an idol, who says it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven and tells us we must give up all our possessions to become his disciple. And just a few verses after this strange bit of advice, he warns us that no slave can serve two masters, that we cannot serve both God and wealth.
So what does this saying mean? Why does Jesus tell us to “make friends for ourselves by means of dishonest wealth?”
Well, first of all, it bears saying that this parable has been confusing to the church since its earliest days. Everyone from the early church fathers like Augustine and Jerome through the 16th century Reformers like Luther and Calvin and on to modern-day scholars like John Dominic Crossan and Amy-Jill Levine has attempted to understand and explain it, and there are a variety of different interpretations.
Some say that the “master” in the parable represents God, while others say the “master” represents this world and wordly pursuits. Some say the “children of light” refers to the disciples of Jesus, while others say it is a reference to the Pharisees. One interpreter even suggested that the unjust manager represents Jesus himself, who goes against the typical rules of this world and turns things upside down, stepping in to cancel the debts owed to the master as Jesus cancelled the debts of our sin on the cross. [1]
Some try to make sense of why the manager was praised by suggesting that perhaps the master was really the one who was unjust, a rich tyrant who was oppressing all his tenants, and so the “dishonest” manager was actually the “good guy” by freeing the tenants from the debts they owed this unjust master. In this interpretation, the manager is a sort of “Robin Hood” figure, taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Some say that perhaps the master commended the manager because the manager actually had done the master a favor: he made the master look good and generous by cancelling a portion of the debts owed by his debtors, and perhaps the master would have been glad to collect anything, even a partial amount, on the debts that were owed him from people who had accumulated such large amounts of debt.
A fairly common interpretation across the centuries is that because the master commends the manager for acting “shrewdly,” what is praiseworthy about the manager is not his dishonest dealings, but his shrewdness, his cleverness, his creativity. Even though he has essentially stolen from his master, his master commends him out of a sense of resignation – like, “Well, this guy really took me to the cleaners, but hey – you’ve got to hand it to him for his ingenuity!” The lesson for us is that we should be as shrewd and clever in figuring out a way to assure a good eternal future for ourselves as this guy was in securing a good future for himself in this world.
Many interpreters have linked this passage with the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25, where Jesus tells us that at the final judgment we will be rewarded based on how we have treated “the least of these,” and with Jesus’s many sayings about the last being first and the first being last in the kingdom of heaven. So, when Jesus says to “make friends for ourselves by means of dishonest wealth, so that when it is gone, they may welcome us into the eternal homes,” the “they” he is referring to is the poor. Those who interpret the parable this way point out that even though Jesus says “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth,” he also acknowledges that such wealth will not last – various translations have “when it is gone” or “when you fail,” showing that the goal of Jesus’s statement is not for us to put our trust in riches, but to point out that what will last is what we have done with our riches. If we “make friends” with the poor – even through unjust dealings – then the poor will be in a place to advocate for us in heaven when we arrive, saying, yes, these people offered drink to the thirsty and food to the hungry. Those who had been “last” in this world having been made “first,” they will be in a place of power in the next world and will be able to welcome us in if we have done right by them in this world.
One issue with that interpretation is that it still does not explain why we should make friends with the poor by means of dishonest wealth – couldn’t we do the same thing with honest wealth, with “clean” money rather than “dirty” money? And it’s also not clear that the debtors that the manager assists in this parable really were “the poor.” Given the fact that they had such large amounts of debt, they were probably also fairly rich farmers, so that forgiving their debts would hardly be an example of Robin Hood taking from the rich and giving to the poor, but more like Robin Hood taking from the king and giving to the aristocrats. And it doesn’t deal with the fact that, however much the manager’s cooking of the books may have helped the master’s debtors, the manager was ultimately acting out of self-interest – a strange thing to hold up as an example, given how important right intentions are in other places in the scriptures.
At least one interpreter has suggested that the key to this puzzling parable is to read Jesus’s words sarcastically. [2] It is worth remembering that we do not have any indications of tone of voice in the scriptures, and we all know how much difference tone of voice can make in our understanding of any given statement! For instance, a few weeks ago when we read the Gospel passage where Jesus tells his followers they must hate father and mother, wife and children – basically everyone except Jesus himself – and then Father Bob got up during the announcements and told you all he hated you, everyone laughed because we could tell by his tone of voice and facial expression that he was joking. But imagine if you just read somewhere that the rector told the congregation he hated them! With no tone of voice or context, such a statement could be easily misunderstood! And that’s what some interpreters suggest has happened to this statement from Jesus. Most interpreters have tended to read this statement “straight” – that is, at face value, as genuinely expressing what Jesus meant to say. But what if he was being sarcastic?
“Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth, so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.” Sure, go ahead and try that. Use your dirty money to strike deals for yourselves. Look out for number one and make sure someone always owes you something. But what good will those friends be to you when that money is gone? Will they be there to welcome you into the eternal homes? In the words of Dr. Phil, “How’s that working for you?”
Of course, we really have no way to know for sure whether Jesus was being sarcastic or not. (Perhaps this is one area where the oral tradition would have been more helpful than the written Scriptures!) And all of these interpretations have some point or another that doesn’t quite “fit” or make sense.
I thought there might be something to this parable that we Christians were missing because of some cultural blinders, so I turned to the Jewish Annotated New Testament, a collection of commentary on the Christian scriptures from the perspective of Jewish scholars and rabbis, of which Amy-Jill Levine is a primary editor. After a few notes connecting some of the Greek words used in this parable to similar words elsewhere in the New Testament and a few brief comments about the differing opinions as to who the “lord” and “master” represent in the parable, that resource summed things up with this helpful piece of insight: “This parable defies any fully satisfactory explanation.” Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking that if A-J Levine can’t even figure this one out, it’s probably time for me to throw in the towel!
But then that got me to thinking. Perhaps there’s a lesson for us in the fact that this parable “defies any fully satisfactory explanation.” There is a tendency for us as human beings to want to be able to explain things – it’s the impulse that drives both scientific discovery and our religious pursuits. We want to know God and understand the universe, and we like anything that makes us feel like we’re succeeding in that regard. We like the parables that are easy to understand because they give us a sense that we have things figured out, that we can summarize the mind of God with a nice little story about the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son, where the message is, “we screw up, God forgives us, and we all live happily ever after.” Those stories make us feel good and safe, and rightly so. But parables like this one, that “defy any fully satisfactory explanation,” remind us that we cannot wrap God up in a nice little box and place him on a shelf next to the other subjects we’ve mastered, like arithmetic and spelling. In a sense, God himself “defies any fully satisfactory explanation.”
So these confusing parables remind us, then, that we do not fully understand God. They are reminders of our limitations, and an opportunity for us to admit that we don’t know, that we don’t understand. In the Zen Buddhist tradition, students are often given koans to work on by their teachers. A koan is a kind of parable, but often more like an unanswerable riddle. A famous one that you may have heard before is, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” They are meant to boggle the mind, to circumvent linear, rational thought, and to encourage the student to open her mind to a nonrational, intuitive response to the question – or simply to “be” in a state of unknowing, and to be comfortable with that.
I believe that Jesus often chose to answer people’s questions with parables rather than direct answers as a way to encourage a similar kind of response – stop trying to explain it all and figure it all out. See if you can get the sense of the point I’m trying to make from the gist of this story. Or maybe just take a step back and remember that God is God and you are not – and you don’t have to figure it all out.
So what did Jesus mean when he said we should make friends for ourselves by means of dishonest wealth? The collective wisdom of the church throughout the centuries is: we don’t know. And perhaps that’s a pretty healthy response for us to have sometimes when speaking about the mind of God.
[1] Robert Farrar Capon, Kingdom,
Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus,
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002. Summarized in outline form on
GoBibleStudy.com, “The Hardest Parable: The Unjust Steward” (9.22.10), http://www.gobiblestudy.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Parables_Grace_Capon_Unjust-Steward_Luke-16-1-131.pdf
[2] See Donald R. Fletcher, “The Riddle of the Unjust Steward: Is Irony the
Key?” Journal of Biblical Literature,
1963, p. 15-30 (esp. pages 27-29). And some comments in this thread at
Christianity Stack Exchange: http://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/2220/what-is-the-parable-of-the-shrewd-manager-about
Sunday, September 22, 2013
Sunday, September 1, 2013
Seeing with "kingdom eyes"
Sermon delivered Sunday, Sept. 1, 2013 (15 Pentecost, Year C, Proper 17), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN (Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16; Luke 14:1, 7-14).
Both our readings from the New Testament today focus on the themes of hospitality and solidarity with both neighbors and strangers.
The author of the letter to the Hebrews encourages us to “let mutual love continue,” and reminds us “not to neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” We are also encouraged to “remember those who are in prison, as though [we] were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though [we ourselves] were being tortured.” In the Gospel passage from Luke, Jesus encourages us to choose humility over arrogance, and to invite and include the most vulnerable and marginalized members of society in our community gatherings.
We should give to others and extend hospitality not only when we can expect to receive it in return, but even when we know the recipients cannot reciprocate. For in doing so, we mirror God’s love to us – God gives to us freely, despite the inability of human beings to “repay” God for the gift of our life.
And we also offer a foretaste of that kingdom to come where all people will stand equal as children of God, where we will treat one another with love and respect not out of a desire to receive anything in return, not out of an attempt to lift ourselves up, but out of a recognition that we are all brothers and sisters in the family of God. With our worldly eyes, we see inequalities, separateness, and divisions, but with kingdom eyes, we will be able to see the oneness of humanity and the equal value of every human being.
Our faith gives us the opportunity to see with kingdom eyes now; we don’t have to wait for the kingdom to come. In the Lord’s Prayer, we pray for God’s will to be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” As we strive to live out our faith and follow the teachings of Jesus, God will use us to bring a glimpse of that kingdom to the world here and now, on earth as it is in heaven.
Because our natural tendencies as human beings can be so contrary to kingdom values, in order to do this, we must be intentional about our behavior. We must choose to see with kingdom eyes. We must choose to offer hospitality to strangers and neighbors alike – to push against our natural inclinations to speak only to those people we already know, to invite only our friends to our parties, and instead, choose to see the stranger as a brother and a friend.
The letter to the Hebrews tells us that we should “remember those who are in prison, as though [we] were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though [we ourselves] were being tortured.” The kingdom reality is that all Christians are one body in Christ, and when one member suffers, the whole body suffers with it. The kingdom reality is that all people – Christians and non-Christians alike – are God’s children and thus part of the greater family of God. When one of us is hurting, we all hurt. But so often, we don’t even know that one of us is hurting, because we don’t know one another. We see each other with worldly eyes, as “other,” as “different,” as “stranger,” as a statistic rather than a human being, and our empathy fades. But if we take the time to get to know one another as fellow human beings, as brothers and sisters in the family of God, we begin to hurt when others hurt, to care when our brothers and sisters are in prison, or tortured, or murdered, or deported, or slandered. When we know one another, when we hear one another’s stories, we can begin to see with kingdom eyes – we can recognize one another as a brother or a sister.
Allow me to share an example of this with you from my own life. Shortly after 9/11, I heard that a Sikh man had been murdered at a gas station in Arizona. I had never heard of Sikhism, and when my religion professor explained that Sikh men wear turbans and beards as part of their religious faith and that this man had been mistaken for a “terrorist” because his shooter thought he looked like Osama bin Laden, I shook my head at what sounded like an awful situation, but it quickly faded to the back of my mind. Two years later, I happened to be at a conference where a young Sikh woman presented a collection of video footage of interviews with the relatives of this man, as well as interviews with other people who had experienced discrimination and hate crimes in the weeks and months after 9/11. As I listened to story after story of people who had been yelled at, beaten, shot, and killed simply because of the way they looked, I felt like the Apostle Paul when the scales fell from his eyes at his conversion experience (Acts 9:18). I had had no idea about what had been happening to the Sikh community, the Muslim community, the Hispanic community – really, anyone with brown skin – in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, because I didn’t know them. Our paths never crossed, and so I had never heard their stories. I had been seeing with worldly eyes rather than with kingdom eyes. I hadn’t known that my brothers and sisters were suffering.
After the screening, I introduced myself to the woman who had shown the footage, whose name was Valarie Kaur. Her goal was to take this footage, which she had collected for a project as a college student in the year after 9/11, and turn it into a feature-length documentary film. I offered to help in whatever way I could, and eventually became the film’s communications director through a second stage of production and its eventual national tour. It was my work with that film that made me so sensitive to the shootings that happened last August at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, that motivated me to buy those sympathy cards for you all to sign and to take a group of you to visit the gurdwara here in Nashville.
In the middle of the film, which we titled “Divided We Fall,” there is a scene where a college-aged Valarie and her 18-year-old turbaned cousin Sonny, who was her cameraman for the project, discuss what the turban means to them as Sikhs. When it is Valarie’s turn, she says, “I see somebody with a turban, and I say, ‘There’s a sadar, he’s a Sikh man. He’s like my uncle, he’s like my brother, he’s like my grandfather. I know him. We come from the same place. He probably speaks Punjabi. He says the same prayers that I do.” She looks down, with a pensive look on her face. Her cousin pauses, then asks, “Why are we making this documentary?” Valarie looks away thoughtfully, smiles, then looks directly into the camera and says, “So other people don’t look at the turban and see fear, hatred, something laughable, something less than human… so that other people don’t look at the turban and see an enemy where I see a brother.”
I wonder if that isn’t why Jesus asked us to invite “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind,” to our luncheons and dinners – so that we wouldn’t look at them and see something laughable, something less than human – so that we wouldn’t look at them and see fear where Jesus sees a brother. So that, as we ate together, we could hear their stories, stories that would make us human to one another, stories that would allow us to see each other with kingdom eyes, as brothers and sisters in the family of God.
This is what we’re about as a church whenever we go to Church in the Yard and listen to the stories of people who are experiencing homelessness, or when we sit down at Spring Street to share a meal with our African-American neighbors, or when we visit the mosque or gurdwara and share tea with Muslims and Sikhs. We are intentionally connecting and building relationships with people we might not otherwise get to know. We are pushing back against the default mode of society that keeps us apart in separate circles of community that never touch one another. We are choosing to see one another with kingdom eyes, so that we will know when one of our brothers and sisters is suffering and remember them as if we were suffering ourselves.
Jesus says that if we show hospitality to those whom society separates from us, we will be blessed, and will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous. But, as I’m sure anyone who has participated in any of the ministries I just mentioned could tell you, the blessings are also available here and now. Because as we extend hospitality to both neighbors and strangers, we discover that there are no strangers in the kingdom of God, and we are able to touch a glimpse of the kingdom, breaking in to our everyday lives, on earth as it is in heaven.
Both our readings from the New Testament today focus on the themes of hospitality and solidarity with both neighbors and strangers.
The author of the letter to the Hebrews encourages us to “let mutual love continue,” and reminds us “not to neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” We are also encouraged to “remember those who are in prison, as though [we] were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though [we ourselves] were being tortured.” In the Gospel passage from Luke, Jesus encourages us to choose humility over arrogance, and to invite and include the most vulnerable and marginalized members of society in our community gatherings.
We should give to others and extend hospitality not only when we can expect to receive it in return, but even when we know the recipients cannot reciprocate. For in doing so, we mirror God’s love to us – God gives to us freely, despite the inability of human beings to “repay” God for the gift of our life.
And we also offer a foretaste of that kingdom to come where all people will stand equal as children of God, where we will treat one another with love and respect not out of a desire to receive anything in return, not out of an attempt to lift ourselves up, but out of a recognition that we are all brothers and sisters in the family of God. With our worldly eyes, we see inequalities, separateness, and divisions, but with kingdom eyes, we will be able to see the oneness of humanity and the equal value of every human being.
Our faith gives us the opportunity to see with kingdom eyes now; we don’t have to wait for the kingdom to come. In the Lord’s Prayer, we pray for God’s will to be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” As we strive to live out our faith and follow the teachings of Jesus, God will use us to bring a glimpse of that kingdom to the world here and now, on earth as it is in heaven.
Because our natural tendencies as human beings can be so contrary to kingdom values, in order to do this, we must be intentional about our behavior. We must choose to see with kingdom eyes. We must choose to offer hospitality to strangers and neighbors alike – to push against our natural inclinations to speak only to those people we already know, to invite only our friends to our parties, and instead, choose to see the stranger as a brother and a friend.
The letter to the Hebrews tells us that we should “remember those who are in prison, as though [we] were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though [we ourselves] were being tortured.” The kingdom reality is that all Christians are one body in Christ, and when one member suffers, the whole body suffers with it. The kingdom reality is that all people – Christians and non-Christians alike – are God’s children and thus part of the greater family of God. When one of us is hurting, we all hurt. But so often, we don’t even know that one of us is hurting, because we don’t know one another. We see each other with worldly eyes, as “other,” as “different,” as “stranger,” as a statistic rather than a human being, and our empathy fades. But if we take the time to get to know one another as fellow human beings, as brothers and sisters in the family of God, we begin to hurt when others hurt, to care when our brothers and sisters are in prison, or tortured, or murdered, or deported, or slandered. When we know one another, when we hear one another’s stories, we can begin to see with kingdom eyes – we can recognize one another as a brother or a sister.
Allow me to share an example of this with you from my own life. Shortly after 9/11, I heard that a Sikh man had been murdered at a gas station in Arizona. I had never heard of Sikhism, and when my religion professor explained that Sikh men wear turbans and beards as part of their religious faith and that this man had been mistaken for a “terrorist” because his shooter thought he looked like Osama bin Laden, I shook my head at what sounded like an awful situation, but it quickly faded to the back of my mind. Two years later, I happened to be at a conference where a young Sikh woman presented a collection of video footage of interviews with the relatives of this man, as well as interviews with other people who had experienced discrimination and hate crimes in the weeks and months after 9/11. As I listened to story after story of people who had been yelled at, beaten, shot, and killed simply because of the way they looked, I felt like the Apostle Paul when the scales fell from his eyes at his conversion experience (Acts 9:18). I had had no idea about what had been happening to the Sikh community, the Muslim community, the Hispanic community – really, anyone with brown skin – in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, because I didn’t know them. Our paths never crossed, and so I had never heard their stories. I had been seeing with worldly eyes rather than with kingdom eyes. I hadn’t known that my brothers and sisters were suffering.
After the screening, I introduced myself to the woman who had shown the footage, whose name was Valarie Kaur. Her goal was to take this footage, which she had collected for a project as a college student in the year after 9/11, and turn it into a feature-length documentary film. I offered to help in whatever way I could, and eventually became the film’s communications director through a second stage of production and its eventual national tour. It was my work with that film that made me so sensitive to the shootings that happened last August at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, that motivated me to buy those sympathy cards for you all to sign and to take a group of you to visit the gurdwara here in Nashville.
In the middle of the film, which we titled “Divided We Fall,” there is a scene where a college-aged Valarie and her 18-year-old turbaned cousin Sonny, who was her cameraman for the project, discuss what the turban means to them as Sikhs. When it is Valarie’s turn, she says, “I see somebody with a turban, and I say, ‘There’s a sadar, he’s a Sikh man. He’s like my uncle, he’s like my brother, he’s like my grandfather. I know him. We come from the same place. He probably speaks Punjabi. He says the same prayers that I do.” She looks down, with a pensive look on her face. Her cousin pauses, then asks, “Why are we making this documentary?” Valarie looks away thoughtfully, smiles, then looks directly into the camera and says, “So other people don’t look at the turban and see fear, hatred, something laughable, something less than human… so that other people don’t look at the turban and see an enemy where I see a brother.”
I wonder if that isn’t why Jesus asked us to invite “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind,” to our luncheons and dinners – so that we wouldn’t look at them and see something laughable, something less than human – so that we wouldn’t look at them and see fear where Jesus sees a brother. So that, as we ate together, we could hear their stories, stories that would make us human to one another, stories that would allow us to see each other with kingdom eyes, as brothers and sisters in the family of God.
This is what we’re about as a church whenever we go to Church in the Yard and listen to the stories of people who are experiencing homelessness, or when we sit down at Spring Street to share a meal with our African-American neighbors, or when we visit the mosque or gurdwara and share tea with Muslims and Sikhs. We are intentionally connecting and building relationships with people we might not otherwise get to know. We are pushing back against the default mode of society that keeps us apart in separate circles of community that never touch one another. We are choosing to see one another with kingdom eyes, so that we will know when one of our brothers and sisters is suffering and remember them as if we were suffering ourselves.
Jesus says that if we show hospitality to those whom society separates from us, we will be blessed, and will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous. But, as I’m sure anyone who has participated in any of the ministries I just mentioned could tell you, the blessings are also available here and now. Because as we extend hospitality to both neighbors and strangers, we discover that there are no strangers in the kingdom of God, and we are able to touch a glimpse of the kingdom, breaking in to our everyday lives, on earth as it is in heaven.
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