Rivetti's Blog

The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

Proper 20 Year C Revised Common Lectionary

September 19, 2010

St. James’ Episcopal Church, Pullman WA

The Rev. Mary Beth Rivetti, Rector

Luke 16:1-13

Last April the Episcopal Preaching Foundation sponsored a preaching conference that I would have loved to have been at if I hadn’t been running around the country on a train. Second best was the set of CDs from the conference that my friend Carol Westpfahl shared with me while I was staying with her in Connecticut a month later. One of the featured speakers was Dr. Thomas Long, who is Bandy Professor of Preaching at Candler School of Theology, Emory University in Atlanta. Long’s presentation was about preaching from the parables of Matthew, Mark and Luke – at two hours, he hadn’t scratched the surface, and it was clear the people couldn’t get enough of him. He is a profoundly thoughtful scholar, and a marvelous story teller.

When he begins his talks about parables, he quotes John Dominic Crossan as saying that “Jesus was not crucified because he told parables; he was crucified because he believed the parables…When we are dealing with the parables of Jesus,… we are dealing with the essential structure of the faith of Jesus.” So it is worthwhile to look at what a parable is. Perhaps an “earthly story with a heavenly meaning.” But, taking the Greek word “parabole” – Long suggests that it is something that is put (bole) alongside (para) something else. Kingdom of God / alongside mustard seed, or a dinner party, or a woman looking for a lost coin. The story is a riddle, Long’s preferred translation of the word parable, a riddle that “teases out of the person who listens to it some creative jumping of the gap between the two things that are placed along side of each other.”

And then he offers a more formal definition of parable given by the New Testament scholar, C. H. Dodd who defines a parable as “a metaphor or simile drawn from everyday life, the meaning of which is sufficiently in doubt to tease the mind into active thought.” When he repeats the definition, I’m not sure he realizes that he changes it, but he says, “a metaphor or simile drawn from everyday life, the meaning of which is sufficiently in doubt to tease the imagination into faithful thought.”

The parable that we hear from Jesus today is a messy riddle, one that has teased us for thousands of years. There was a rich man who had a manager. We’ve been hearing stories about rich men. There was a rich man who had a dinner party. There was a rich man whose son asked him to divide his wealth and give him his inheritance. Next week we’ll hear a story about a rich man who dies and can’t get a drink of water in the fires of Hades. But this week, the story shifts to the manager – who has been caught skimming, and is going to be fired, and who concocts a radical, desperate scheme of deep discounts with all his master’s creditors. A hundred jugs of olive oil? Make that 50. A hundred containers of wheat. Make that 80. And then Jesus wraps up the story by saying, “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.”

Ok, a little grammar here. The Greek is ambiguous, as is the English. When Jesus says that the master commended the dishonest manager, is it Jesus or the manager who says “because he had acted shrewdly.” Did the master recognize a fellow con-artist and welcome him back into his good graces? Or did Jesus think that the manager was shrewd. And who thinks that the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light? The master? Or Jesus? And who is it who suggests we should make friends by means of dishonest wealth?

Some teasing here. Some perplexity. Some challenge and invitation for the mind to engage in. A riddle, as Long says, that presents “something for you to tease out – some mystery to be plumbed, some issue for you to ferret out in your own imagination.”

It looks like the people who heard Jesus tell this parable had to struggle with this story. And we’re far removed from its impact, as far removed, Long might suggest, as ripples at the edge of a pool where a stone has once made an impact. But even Luke — or the early members of the church who heard these stories, but we’ll say it’s Luke — has doubts about this, and starts heaping on some other wealth-related proverbs – the sort of thing that would probably get no one crucified. “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, [there's that dishonest wealth again] 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.” Whew. Bury the story with pithy sayings. No one will every pay attention.

But what about that shrewd manager? What faithful imagination pulls us towards the heart of Jesus’ preaching? To the kingdom he proclaims in his first public teaching when he says: “I have come to bring good news to the poor; release to the captive”. The kingdom his mother inaugurates before he is born when she sings “he has lifted up the lowly.” What is that shrewd manager telling us about the essential faith of the Jesus movement? What’s he saying there that could get him, get us, in real trouble?

I have some guesses, that perhaps it has to do with wealth. Jesus talks more about money than he ever talks about anything else. Here’s a more modern parable. This is from the late Carl Knirk, who was the Canon for Planned Giving/Stewardship and Evangelism in the Diocese of Olympia, and over there they call this Carl’s Rules for Giving:

1. Everything you have is a gift from God.
2. No one has everything; no one has nothing.
3. All you have you will lose.
4. While you are in possession of it, you, and only you, decide how to use it.
5. How you use everything that passes through your hands will determine the kind of person you are and will become.

The more traditional translation of the word “manager” is “steward” – the one who manages, or stewards, the property that he has in trust from the master. That makes us, in some way – and I warn against reading through any parable with a one-to-one assignment of characters – in the position of that manager. Have we been skimming off the top? Are we about to lose everything we have? While we are in possession of the master’s goods, we’re the only ones who get to decide how to use the goods we’ve been entrusted with. Will the master say, “good work?” when we’re done? How will we know?

And what about making friends by means of dishonest wealth – the Greek says, “the mammon of unrighteousness.” A group of us spent the day yesterday in conversation with Alice Woldt, the executive director of the Washington Association of Churches, talking about negotiating that path between what our faith tells us is good and right, and what is possible in the world of politics if we are to use our resources to enhance the wellbeing of others. Accepting less than desirable legislation, and piecemeal solutions; working with politicians who regularly vote against our perceived interests to find common ground with them, to see them as attempting to live out their own principles, so that when we need allies for the big fight, we have developed those relationships and have greater hope for success. Maybe they won’t welcome us into the eternal habitations, but maybe they’ll help to move things along towards our baptismal vision of justice and dignity for every human being.

I have another take on that riddle of the shrewd manager – one I like to think of when I read this story. You have to start out with thinking that maybe, in the earlier story that Jesus just told, the one about the son who goes out into the world and comes back home to great rejoicing, the son who was dead and now is alive, you have to think maybe that scapegrace ne’er do well might be Jesus, being welcomed home by the unseemly patriarch who can’t help but host that marvelous heavenly banquet. And maybe the conniving manager is Jesus, too. Deeply discounting debt everywhere he goes – forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. Seven times seven forgiving our debts. Wiping our debts completely clean. And at the end of the day the master looks at all that forgiveness and says, “That’s right. Good job. Now, let’s go to the feast.”