Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Dishonest Wealth

St. Matthew’s
Proper 20

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 accounting 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." Luke 16:1-13
If you have been around church in the past few weeks and months, you might have noticed that money, or riches, or the difference between rich and poor, or giving away everything to the poor have been common themes in our gospel readings.  I think these themes have shown up about 5 times since June, here we are again today, and they will show up again at least two more times before November.  This is not because we are about to enter a time in which many churches talk about money or pledge drives.  The reason for this is because we are roughly reading our way through the Gospel of Luke based on a three-year cycle of readings, and Luke brings the subject up repeatedly.  Essentially, in the Gospel of Luke, one verse out of seven has to do with money, or richness, or poverty.  It is incredibly important.    

The net result of this is that I’ve spent some of this summer feeling quite guilty that I own more than two pair of shoes.  And yet I cannot escape it either.  If I’m to read the Bible, I’m going to run into this theme again and again.  This is especially true in Luke, which has the most piercing thrust of social justice of any of the gospels. And as one commentator I recently read rather grumpily wrote in the 1950s:  “We may have to make allowance for Luke’s frequently manifest prejudice in favor of the poor…but when all allowance is made, the language around wealth and money seem consonant with the mind of Jesus.”  I cannot do justice to every instance, but it may be helpful to look at the accounts of money and wealth that are in the Gospel of Luke.  And I want to look first at the promise in Luke that the world through Christ is in the process of being turned upside down.  And second, about the account money that Jesus gives:  what money is and what money does.   It might help us understand what’s going on in this passage from today, which commentators consider one of the hardest parables to interpret.  If you have a Bible with you, feel free to mark where we end up, I’ll be calling out verses because I’d like you to be able to refer to these later if you want to.

Again and again The Gospel of Luke makes reference to turning the world upside down.  And one of the first things to be smashed will be the power of money.  The theme shows up incredibly early in the Gospel of Luke (1:53), with Mary singing in joyful exuberance of what God is bringing about:  he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.

When Jesus shows up in his hometown synagogue as a guest preacher, he chooses a passage from Isaiah to declare fulfilled in him, saying (Lk 4:18): 
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free.”

In other words, Jesus is here for the lowly.

In Jesus’ sermon on the plain, one of his huge open air preaching gigs, he furthers this theme of turning the world upside down, preaching (Lk 6:20- 25):
‘Blessed are you who are poor,
    for yours is the kingdom of God.
‘Blessed are you who are hungry now,
    for you will be filled.
‘Blessed are you who weep now,
    for you will laugh…
‘But woe to you who are rich,
    for you have received your consolation.
‘Woe to you who are full now,
    for you will be hungry.
‘Woe to you who are laughing now,
    for you will mourn and weep.

Last example I’m going to mention about turning the world upside down (but there’s at least three more):  Next week will be the passage on Lazarus and the rich man (Lk 16:19ff).  The rich man and the sick beggar Lazarus find their fortunes reversed in the afterlife. And the rich man, finding this quite untenable, is told that he had his good things in his earthly life, when he showed no concern for Lazarus’s suffering.

Next, what is the account of money that Jesus gives?  How does it make people behave, and what is it?

Again and again Jesus confronts money as a concern.  “But wait,” some might say—“money isn’t the root of all evil. Love of money is!” 

Well, that’s what the letter to the Hebrews says; today we’re talking about Luke and what Jesus says.  The idea is that money is morally neutral—so long as people make their money honestly and don’t hurt anyone, what’s the harm? 

In the parable of the sower (Luke 8:11-15) the seed that fell among thorns represent those who hear; but as they go on their way, they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their spiritual fruit does not mature. In other words, money has the capacity to put a barrier between us and God. The problem, says Jesus throughout the Gospels, is that our hearts cannot be so easily extricated from our stuff.

It isn’t simply the use of money—or it’s hoarding—that presents a problem, it’s the possession  of something we are trained to value because of the opportunities money can open up to us—the social status it gives us.  Money and wealth is not necessarily value-neutral— possession of it moves one psychologically in nearly imperceptible ways.  Is money a tool? Sure, but we’ve made it a necessity to live.  Is money just paper and metal?  Sure, but we‘ve created powerful and complex systems of ranking and prestige based on who has more.

So what’s the harm, indeed?  “Jesus appears to agree with money’s basic corrupting potential, since he told us how difficult it would be for a person who is wealthy (note:  he did not say “a person who loves money”) to enter the kingdom.”[1]  He said this to the rich young ruler (Luke 18:18ff) who was otherwise very righteous, but could not give it all away to follow Jesus.

Contrast that rich young ruler to Zaccheus (Luke 19:1-10) a tax collector who vows to Jesus to not only give half of everything he has to the poor, but to pay four times the restitution to anyone he has cheated and extorted. 

That got Jesus’s attention.  Here was someone willing to part with wealth for the sake of the kingdom.  Here was someone willing to make restitution for participating in economic systems that left the poor especially vulnerable.

Rank acquisitiveness has no place in the reign of God. Jesus seems to know what we know deep down: we are not good spiritual multitaskers. We have a hard time focusing on two things at once: we cannot serve both God and wealth.  And simply acquiring wealth opens us up to numerous opportunities—both large and nearly imperceptible—to downplay and delude ourselves into thinking that our money does not change us or we deny that the way we allocate money as a society impacts others.

So Jesus, in Luke seems to think that money is tainted by its very nature.  Hence all the warnings to store up treasure in heaven instead (See Luke 11:41, 12:21, 12:33, and 18:22).  The acquisition of wealth leads one to lose sight of God and given how often the rules of a society will privilege the rich, the acquisition of wealth is often theft from the poor.  This is why when John the Baptist was asked what people had to do to be saved, he said not to extort or take more taxes than necessary (Luke 3:14).

Salvation and faith and belief in Christ and what God is bringing about through Christ is according to Luke will necessarily involve a change in orientation—a way of understanding that the economy of God is different from that of the world.

Are you still with me?

Okay, now let’s take a quick look at the Gospel passage from today.  There’s so much to say about this passage.  But I’m going to limit this to what it might mean when Jesus tells us to “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes (Luke16:9).”

Is Jesus telling us to be dishonest?  Does Jesus mean for us to do some religious money laundering when he asks us “if we have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to us the true riches (Lk 16:11)?”

Here’s what might be going on.  Throughout Luke, the point is that money is being made at the expense of the poor, and Jesus often says to give one’s wealth away to the poor as a way to get closer to God—to better understand what it means to trust God and to align one’s own concerns with God.  We also see the reversals of fortunes are a big part of Jesus’s preaching of the Kingdom of heaven and our eternal destinations.

Because of this, I think that when Jesus talks about dishonest wealth, he simply means worldly wealth.  He’s deeply suspicious of human claims to be unaffected by our wealth, and I think he asks us to be suspicious of our own rationalizations.

If we are being commended to do what the steward did by acting like the steward and lowering the debtor’s bills, it is possibly because the steward cancelled the interest or his own extorting cut from the overall debt. Loan sharks and exorbitant interest were common at this time in history, and a steward could get away with a 50% mark-up in some cases.  By making such adjustments, the steward hopes to make friends who will take him into their own homes in gratitude.  Even if the steward’s motives are suspect, the debtors experience some form of grace and reprieve, and that’s not nothing.

So, if Luke and Jesus both mean for this parable to be an image of the Kingdom of God, it could be that Jesus is meaning for us to use our worldly wealth, as tainted as it is from our journey in a sinful world, to make friends with the poor so that they make the wealthy welcome in eternal habitations.  Our willingness to do this is a sign of faith that we’ve aligned with God’s economy. 

This interpretation would be in keeping with the frequent commands to give everything away to the poor in exchange for treasure in Heaven, and the interpretation would be bolstered by the condemnation the rich man receives for ignoring the beggar Lazarus that we will read next week.  A story that, by the way, immediately follows our passage today.  Luke means for them to be read together.

Okay, so what?  What do we do with this?  Well, we cannot serve God and wealth. After an enigmatic difficult parable, Luke puts that straightforward morsel of Jesus’s teachings to clarify everything else.  It’s always worth asking where God might be calling us to put worldly, wealth toward that which enriches instead of impoverishes—toward that which fosters friendship and reconciliations than division. 

And maybe it is okay that I own more than two pairs of shoes, but the life of faith is one of constantly checking on my rationalizations and ways of using the resources I’ve been entrusted with.  

And as aware as we might be of own propensities for self-delusion and questionable motives, might we be brave enough to welcome the questions that Jesus confronts us with about how we manage dishonest worldly wealth?



[1] Luke 18:24.  "The Politics Of Scripture: Luke 12:32-40—Maryann Mckibben Dana | Political Theology Today". 2016.Politicaltheology.Com. Accessed August 31 2016. http://www.politicaltheology.com/blog/the-politics-of-scripture-luke-1232-40-maryann-mckibben-dana/.