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                                                                                 The Church of the Redeemer

                                                                                         September 23, 2007

                                                                                                Proper 20

                                                                                      The Rev. Mr. Marc Eames

A couple of weeks ago we read the difficult text about the apparent call to hate one’s family.  Dorsey was teasing me that those difficult texts are supposed to go to the curate on his preaching day.  Well, I don’t know if today’s text is any more difficult, but initially it was no less befuddling for me.  Jesus appears to be singing the praises of a crook.  Someone who squandered the wealth of his master, and when caught, slashes the debts of the common people in order to ingratiate himself into their circle seeing he was about to lose his job.  The literal meaning of the text seems to indicate that the Daily family, or perhaps Buddy Cenenci, would have a special place in heaven.  Is Jesus really accepting corruption?  The easy answer is, of course, no.  The correct answer I think might be yes, in a way.   

Some scholars have reformed this troubling parable.  They have written that in ancient Palestinian society, stewards often took hefty commissions from the common borrower.  This is certainly true.  They argue that given this practice, therefore, the shrewdness of the steward was the removal of his commission.  He was being generous.  It is argued that when Jesus calls the man dishonest, he is referring to a prior bad act, not the legitimate and generous slashing of bills.  Well that makes this passage easy enough to understand, but I don’t buy it.   

It is true that the stewards often charged usurious rates of interest, but by slashing the debts, who is he hurting?  He wasn’t going to collect those debts anyway because he was being fired.  There is also a sense that this is being done in a clandestine fashion.  He tells the debtor to “sit down quickly, and make it fifty.”  Jesus also doesn’t call him dishonest until after he slashes the bills.  I think the explanation that Jesus is praising honest generosity here is hard to believe given the passage.   

I think Jesus is praising generosity, but not just honest generosity.  Jesus concludes that we are to make friends for ourselves with dishonest mammon.  I don’t believe that Jesus is telling us to go around stealing from the companies we work for and then throw big parties for our friends, or even to give away the money.  I think Jesus is ok with a Robin Hood situation, however.  As you will recall the Sheriff of Nottingham collected burdensome taxes from the people of the town, which caused Robin of Loxley to rebel against a corrupt system, steal from the sheriff, and give the proceeds to the poor.  Robin Hood certainly broke the law when he stole from the sheriff, but the sheriff had established a corrupt system creating a situation where the right thing to do was to break the law.   

Now the shrewd steward from the gospel is no Robin Hood, but he did use ill-gotten gains from a corrupt system to help those who had been taken advantage of by that system.  Robin Hood did the same.  Are there any modern day Robin Hoods or shrewd stewards out there?  On one of my trips to the Holy Land I met a priest who may qualify.  He had a church in Israel and in the Palestinian territory of the West Bank.  During the second Intifada, there was a mandatory 24-hour a day curfew during the worst of the fighting.  By the second week of the curfew, the priest heard that his parishioners were running out of food and medicine.  He decided to take an ambulance, fill it with food, turn on the lights and sirens, and race through all the security checkpoints, in order to feed his parishioners.  He violated a curfew, stole an ambulance at taxpayer expense, he lied, he impersonated medical personnel, and violated the check point system.  He did this all to help some poor people.  He did not help them legally or honestly.  He broke laws, lied, and stole, yet, I think, he did the right thing.  He was a shrewd manager of resources that were not his own, in order to help relieve the suffering of others.   

So what does this mean for us?  I am no Robin Hood or priestly adventurer in the holy land.  What could this text mean for me or for you?  I think Jesus is talking about our fallen world here: the kingdom of God that is not yet fully realized.  The economic systems that humans have constructed for ourselves, be they free-market capitalism, communism, socialism, mercantilism, or whatever system we will create in the future, have flaws.  In every human system there are winners and losers, and there is injustice.  This injustice does not come from the evil of the system necessarily, but rather comes from human sin, that causes all systems to fail from time to time.  Humanity’s greed and yearning for power taints every economic system.  In some ways this tinges all of our gains.  We may not have done anything unjust or even unfair to earn a living, but the stain of human sin is still discernable, sometimes even physically.  As many as four out of five bills in the United States have trace amounts of cocaine on them.  There are lots of ways this can happen, but the figure is still astounding.   

I am not giving a money is bad sermon, in fact just the opposite.  While acknowledging that the money we have in our pockets does bare the stain of human sin somewhere along the way, God may have put it there for a reason.  Since our system is imperfect, we have the obligation to give generously and shrewdly.   

The last part of the passage that strikes me is the lack of judgment from Jesus.  Shouldn’t Jesus have condemned the method even if praising the result of the steward’s actions?  The steward’s actions were generous in a way, but weren’t they also self-serving?  Yes, they were generous and self-serving, and that was acceptable.  Seldom do we as human being do something that is totally selfless. Most of the time we have mixed motives.  Jesus accepts that.  Through Jesus’ actions on the cross we don’t have to be perfect because we have an advocate who is perfect.  We have some brokenness and some sin in our lives, and through the grace of God we might accomplish a righteous act, but often it is righteousness with some negative qualifier attached.  Thankfully, Jesus doesn’t need our explanation.  It is ok that we don’t sell all of our worldly possessions.  It’s ok that we are not heroic priests or robin hoods.  It’s ok that many of our best deeds have some tinge of an ulterior motive.  Jesus has called us, and Jesus accepts us as we are.  We are imperfect, ever striving for a deeper relationship with him who is perfect.  The love of God is stronger than the sin and corruption that can distance us from that love.  God does not love our sin, but loves us despite our sin.  God accepted the dishonest steward and God has accepted us with all of our baggage and with all of our imperfection.   

Let us pray:

God eternal, give us the grace of your holy and life giving spirit, that we may strive to have generous hearts, may we care for those in poverty, and for those suffering from any kind of injustice.  Guide us in victory, accept our poor attempts, and comfort us in our brokenness.  We ask this through the mediation of your triumphant and resurrected Son.  Amen.