Dishonest Wealth and the Children of Light

Text: Luke 16:1-13

The scripture passages we hear in the readings each week are chosen by a committee. A big committee, with representatives from the many denominations that use what is called the Revised Common Lectionary. The lectionary is a list of selections from the Old and New Testaments—the Hebrew and Greek portions of the Bible—and the psalms. The lectionary lists readings for three years, called imaginatively years A, B, and C. We are now in year C. In this book are all the readings for year C, and we have similar books for years A and B.

You might ask whether the lectionary readings cover the whole Bible. That would make sense in a way. After all, for Lutherans the Bible is the final source of authority. But if we did read the whole Bible in three years, we would have to allocate five times the amount of space in worship than we do, because (by my informal reckonings) the lectionary readings cover a little less than a fifth of the Bible. And it actually is smaller than that, because some readings are repeated.

There are two main reasons for a lectionary or list of readings. First, the list is supposed to contain a lot of the important readings, as judged by the committee. So we won’t miss them. And second, the list disciplines the preacher, who cannot just get up and say “Hi, here’s some interesting things that I was thinking about this week, and I’ve picked a few Bible verses to beef up my argument.” That is, we are supposed to start with the Bible.

The problem with a lectionary is that, if you don’t read the Bible on your own, you’ll miss 80% of the Bible even if you attend worship every week.

Often the lectionary readings simply reinforce things we already know. They are familiar passages, or they state the scriptural basis for some theological position, or they tell the central stories of Christianity that all Christians need to hear to keep in touch with Jesus. But some days I think the readings are chosen just to keep us honest, you and me, to keep us on our toes. And to remind us that there is some pretty weird stuff in the Bible. And that we should not discount it. Some days, and today is such a day.

The reading from the Gospel of Luke today is a parable. Parables are never straightforward. They come to things sort of sideways. They are designed to surprise you, to shake you up and get you thinking. The story of the Good Samaritan, for example, is surprising because a man in troubled is rescued by an unlikely helper. Or the parable of the Mustard Seed is surprising because Jesus says that the Kingdom of God is like this tiny seed.

Parables are not allegories. That is, things and people in them do not stand for other things. The father in the story of the Prodigal Son does not stand for God, though the way he welcomes his lost son might make us think of the relationship between God and sinners. Us.

The parable for today in Luke is certainly surprising. It is supposed to make you think. But maybe all it makes you think is: “Huh? What’s with this? What is going on here?” There are a lot of strange parts to it, and it raises a lot of questions. As one scholar said, a many “interpreters have struggled to make sense of this parable.” Parables like this one make pastors want to suggest a hymn sing in place of the sermon.

The parable tells a story of a steward—like the site manager or operations officer—who is accused of cheating his boss, who is rich. The boss fires him. But first, the steward cheats the boss some more in a clever scheme in order to gain favor with the boss’s debtors. The steward is called both dishonest (he’s a bad guy) and shrewd (he’s a good guy). But there is so much here we don’t know.

Like, for example, who calls the manager shrewd? In our translation it says “And the master commended the dishonest manager.” But the word for master and the word for lord (as in Lord Jesus) is the same in Greek. Could it be Jesus who is commending this guy? And if so, why? And if the master is, why is he praising the man who cheated him? And is the master telling the steward to make friends by dishonest wealth, or is Jesus telling the disciples to (which is how most scholars read it)? And why would he say that? Is this good advice for Christians?

Who are the children of light? Why aren’t they so shrewd? Is that good or bad? What are eternal homes (a phrase which appears nowhere else in the Bible)? Why should your handling of wicked wealth (and why are you messing with wicked wealth in the first place)—why should that affect your handling of true riches? What does Jesus mean by true riches anyway?

Many interpreters of this text try to answer all these questions in a sensible way. They try to make what looks like a broken puzzle fit together to make a nice picture. But I’m not sure it can be done. They have to trim the pieces to make it work. They have to add a little notion here and ignore a little word or two there. There is a lot we do not know in this parable.

But there are some things we do know.

We know that this parable sits with a bunch of others in this part of Luke, and that most of them have to do with the way things will be, are, or ought to be in God’s kingdom. We know that some of them have to do with money. We know that Luke thinks that possessions are a problem for those who profess to follow Jesus.

We know that there are some things this parable of the steward have in common with some of the others near it in Luke. This parable, and the parable of the man who has to build extra barns to hold his extra stuff, and a parable that we’ll hear next week about a poor man named Lazarus, all start out “there was a rich man.” The parable of the man with the barns, the parable of the Prodigal Son, and this parable all have a main character in trouble or crisis of some kind. And when they are in trouble, they all mutter, trying to figure out what to do. And they all talk to themselves and make a decision. “I will do this: I will build larger barns,” says one. “I will get up and go to my father,” says another. “I have decided what to do,” says the third. I, I, I. None of them turns to God.

You cannot serve God and wealth, Jesus says. Why all this attention to money? Because wealth is incredibly attractive. It is also incredibly distracting. The complications of wealth make it hard to manage, but they also make it interesting to manage. The problems that wealth presents are just hard enough to be intriguing but just easy enough so that very clever people—shrewd people, you might say—can solve them. Rich people like to solve them, and like people who like to solve them, l suppose like the steward who is commended, in my reading, by the boss he cheated.

The Bible is the story of God’s relationship with us. It is often complicated because our relationship with God is often complicated. The Bible has weird parts because we have weird parts.

You cannot serve two masters, Jesus says. But we in our lives feel like we have many masters, not just two. And we make not just one permanent decision about whom to serve, but many daily ones.

God draws us near. We long to be drawn near. But God is not the only thing pulling us. There are lots of distracting attractions. When we are in crisis, when we are not sure where to go, how to deal, what to do, to whom do we turn?

Forgetful God

Text: Luke 15:1-10 Other texts: Exodus 32:7-14, Psalm 51

Humans are designed to forget. Unlike in some models of the mind, our brains are not mechanical or electronic machines. We notice some things but not others. We remember some things for years, others for just moments. Mostly, though, all our memories fade.

Until recently, that is. Now we have a huge repository of information, the global web, that remembers pretty much perfectly pretty much forever. If you did something not so pleasant a decade ago, the net will remember. You cannot outlive your mistakes, and their impact does not fade with time. This development worries people, because forgetting is important to us, individually and collectively. Forgetting makes forgiveness possible. It is not the same as forgiveness, and you can and usually do forgive someone without forgetting what that person did to you. But unless there is some trauma, you don’t remember everything exactly. And as we pull away from events over time, it makes room for reflection, reconciliation, and redemption. We are built to be forgetful.

In our relationship with God, it is easy to get confused about who does what. We get especially confused about repentance. In normal life, repentance is something we have to do to have someone say “It’s all right.” (I’m sorry, I won’t do it again, I messed up. Well, OK, it’s all right.) And if people don’t repent, that’s grounds for refusing to forgive them. Why should I forgive you, you’re not even sorry.

So when we hear Jesus talk about the joy in heaven over the one sinner who repents, it makes us wonder. Is repentance a requirement with God as it seems to be with us? Do I need to say I’m sorry before God says “It’s all right”? Will we lose our blessings unless we agree to change our ways for the better? Is it something we have to do to be favored by God, as it is to be favored by people?

The Israelites deserve God’s anger. God, through Moses, has just told them all the things they should do as God’s people, and in particular just told them that they are not to pay a lot of attention to other gods. So the very first thing they do is build this calf out of gold and start worshipping it as their lord. So God—our God and theirs—is ticked off. I have had it with these people, he says. And he threatens to zap them. But Moses intercedes. He argues with God. The Egyptians will laugh at you. Why did you lead all those people out of slavery, just to kill them in the desert. Change your mind, says Moses. It is hard to know whether God was nervous about being embarrassed. But whatever the reason, God does change God’s mind. That is, God repents. God turns back—which is what the word repent means—God turns back to the original plan: Israel onward to the promised land.

It is God who repents in this story, not the Israelites. There is no “I’m sorry, I won’t do it again” in this story. The repenting here is something God does, not something people do in order to have God do something in return. There is no “in return.”

The Israelites certainly deserve what God threatens to do. People like to see people get what they deserve. That’s one of the reasons some people don’t like the story of the Prodigal Son—in the next chapter in Luke—where neither son gets what he deserves. And why should the lost sheep of today’s passage get rescued, when by wandering away he puts the whole flock in jeopardy. But it seems like the words “God” and “what you deserve” don’t fit in the same sentence. God doesn’t seem to care much about who deserves what. The wandering sheep gets saved, the wandering brother gets a party, the adulterous woman gets freed, the workers who come late get paid the same as the ones who have worked all day, the beggar gets twice what he asks for, the Good Friday executioners get forgiven.

God gives too much away. In the parables that Jesus tells, no one asks for forgiveness. But they are forgiven anyway. No one repents. But they are welcomed by God anyway. The parables are not about how great the repent-ers are. They are about how great God is.

Sometimes I think the Gospels should be called “101 Jokes by Jesus.” He says these things with a straight face that you know are absurd. So today, he tells his listeners that the heavens welcome the one repentant sinner more than the 99 righteous people. But where are you going to find a crowd of 99 sinless people, one of whom repents? You’d be lucky to find one totally good person in a hundred, much less 99. We are all sinners, which we know by theology and by experience. If you’ve never done what you shouldn’t have or left undone something you should have, cool for you. The scribes and Pharisees grumble that Jesus eats with sinners. Good thing for us, I’d say. If Jesus only ate with the sinless, he’d eat at a table for one most of the time. If he wants to eat with me—and I want him to—I’m glad he eats with sinners.

We speak a lot about what God hopes we’ll do, what God says we should do, what we think God wants us to do. But our relationship with God is not so much about what God demands. It’s about what God gives. Even if we feel like we don’t deserve it, or don’t even feel bad about what we’ve done. Jesus eats with sinners not because they promise not to sin any more, but because Jesus wants to eat with them. This kind of hanging around with not-the-best sort of people is probably the most obvious part of Jesus’ ministry and for his contemporaries, and even for some folks nowadays, the most troubling. It is a scandal.

The psalm for today, a version of which we sang, is thought to have been a lament by King David after he slept with Bathsheba and then had her husband killed to cover it up. In the psalm, David says essentially: I would really appreciate it, God, if you’d just forget the whole thing.

I don’t know if God is more like the Internet or more like our brains—most likely not at all like either. We have a hard time forgiving, much less forgetting. But God evidently finds it easy. We worship a God who rejoices in the act of forgiving. Joy in heaven, the verses say, joy among the angels, when the ones who are lost are found.

Though made in the image of God, we forgive imperfectly, all messed up with thoughts of people getting what they deserve and accountability, or needing to receive an apology first, or just being unable to drop it. But we worship a God who forgives perfectly, and whether it is actually so or not, seems to perfectly forget. Which is good for wandering sheep and stiff-necked people. Good for us.

Choose Life

Text: Deuteronomy 30:15-20 Other texts: Luke 14:26

I set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you may live.

The Israelites sit on the border of the land of Canaan. They sit like kids on a seawall, contemplating the ocean, side by side, imagining their future. They have been traveling forty years to get to this place and this time to take the land they have been promised by God. They have been led here by Moses. They have been given the law to follow. They have made an agreement with God. God is their God. They are God’s people. The land of God is ready for the people of God.

Now Moses, near death, preaches to them for the last time.

I have set before you life and death, Moses tells them, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you may live.

These words can guide us. They can be, as they have from time to time been for me, a touchstone against which we prove decisions. Is what I’m about to do a blessing or a curse? Will it add life to this world or diminish it? Will it help others, or harm them? Will what I do cause pain or peace?

But these wonderful words, wise and powerful, can turn to mock us. They make it sound so easy. Just turn away from death. Just turn toward life. As if choosing were so simple. As if we didn’t already know that blessings are better than curses. As if we didn’t already know that life is better than death. Who among us would on purpose choose death? Who among us wouldn’t choose life if we could?

I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you may live.

It’s not easy.

It’s not easy because it is not always clear what’s a blessing and what’s a curse. Things that look good on paper turn out to be disastrous in fact. Things started for good reasons turn out to cause suffering. We start in love and end in sorrow. We start in hope and end in frustration.

The morning glories twist and grow and delight us with their blossoms, but they twist the necks of the marigolds and choke them to death. Life or death, blessing or curse?

How can we know all things? How can we control all the variables? How can we see all the ways our actions will affect all other people and this earth?

We cannot.

Issues that we deal with as a society are difficult because we can’t figure out, much less agree about, what’s going to happen. Does stem cell research fall on the life side or the death side? How about military intervention to stop a genocidal war? How about abortion? How about locking someone up in prison for life? It’s not that some folks are on the side of death and the others on the side of life (even though our politics sometimes makes us think so). It’s that both sides are trying to figure it out. What is the blessing here? What is the curse? Where is life? Where is death?

It’s not just large world-wide issues, but personal ones. We ask ourselves: should I, middle aged parent, move across country to care for my ailing and frail mother or stay where I am, where my popular daughter is in junior high school and my shy and difficult son is in fifth grade. Should we, a young couple in our late teens, raise our unexpected child ourselves or put it up for adoption? Should I, recent law-school graduate with lots of student loans, go for the big-bucks big-firm job for a while, maybe forever, or go back to my small hometown as I had planned? Should I, successful entrepreneur, whose son hates school—should I push him to work harder because I believe that success in school leads to success in life? Which is blessing? Which is curse?

I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you may live.

It’s not easy.

It’s not easy because the consequences are often hard to take. Jesus’ harsh words about hating one’s family are shocking. They make no sense coming from someone who advises us to love all, including our enemies. To love our neighbors as ourselves. To obey the commandments, including the one about honoring one’s father and mother.

They make no sense unless we imagine that Jesus is describing what is, not proscribing what ought to be. To disagree with those we love and who love us is not a recipe for discipleship. But it can be a result. People get angry and hurt and frightened. To follow Christ—to be my disciple, Jesus says—to follow Christ into life means putting Jesus ahead of all else, even family, even if it causes hurt. It is a horrible decision. How did Zebedee feel when new disciples, his sons James and John, abandoned their father and the family business and took off after Jesus?

I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you may live.

It’s not easy.

It’s not easy because it doesn’t end with one decision.

It might seem that Moses is asking the Israelites to make one final choice. But no such luck. The Israelites will have to make that choice over and over again.

The decisions we make, make our lives. Too often it is not a menu of choices that face us, but a choice between two alteratives. One or the other, no chance to back up. We have to do as Yogi Berra said, “when you come to the fork, take it.” And there is not just one fork in the road, but one after another. The forks we choose define our path.

Moses asks the Israelites to choose a life, a way of living, that aligned with God’s hopes. The book of Deuteronomy is about Israel’s covenant—their agreement—with God. When Moses asks them to choose life, he is asking them to put that agreement first in their minds and in their hearts. He is asking them to make God and God’s law the focus of their lives. He is asking them to be foremost, before all other things, people of God. He is asking them to think of themselves that way before all other ways.

And in the same way Jesus asks his disciples to choose. Jesus asks the crowd to hate mothers and fathers, wife and children, brothers and sisters, even life itself. The word “hate” here does not mean “have bad feelings toward.” The words are like legal terms. Love means “be loyal to” as one country might be loyal to a treaty with another country. When Jesus tells his listeners to hate life and family, he is telling them not to cling to these things above all. Like Moses, Jesus is asking the crowd to put God first before all things. Their first loyalty is to God, not to even important things like their families.

The book of Deuteronomy is formed as a book of laws, but in it’s 600+ laws, is a book of the heart. It is guide to responding to the experience of God’s love for a people. It is a guide to a way of living with God first in mind.

The Israelites stood on the border, just one step away from Canaan, the promised land. They stood on the border, just one step away from a prosperous future. They stood on the border, one step to complete their freedom from Egyptian slavery.

I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you may live. Living with God, Moses adds importantly. Loving God, obeying God, and holding fast to God.

Yet in this passage, unlike others in the Torah, the Israelites do not choose. The book of Deuteronomy ends with the people still on the border, still ready, waiting. The story doesn’t end. The offer remains for all people. And all people, including us, may accept it or not.

Will we? We often stand at some border, waiting, wondering what to do, nervous and confused. Wanting to choose blessing, afraid we will choose curse. At the fork, what path will we take?

To choose life and blessing is, as Moses says, to choose to walk in God’s path. God’s path is the path on which God walks. It is the path that God enjoys. It is the place where God is, where God is likely to be found. It is where God roams. God roams there waiting for us.

I will be your God, and you will be my people. That is God’s promise. God asks us to take one hesitant step onto God’s path. And when we do, God comes to greet us. God comes to take our hand. And as we walk step by step, day by day, God comes to walk with us.

Don't Forget, My Love

Text: Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16

Why be good?

Why be good? And why do good? Why let that guy nose into your lane from his driveway? Maybe he’ll let someone else do the same some day, but probably not. He’s clearly a jerk. Why pick up trash that someone else dropped? Why listen to your crabby friend complain once again? Why risk your job to defend a colleague? Why help those who are sick and poor? Why support infrastructure projects in Honduras, as some New England Lutherans are doing right now? Why fight for peace and justice? Why do anything good? Why should Christians, who are saved by grace apart from works, bother to do any good work?

The book of Hebrews is a strange book. Titled a letter in most Bibles, it is more like a long sermon. The language of Hebrews is very highfalutin, difficult in Greek and difficult even when translated into English. Hebrews is a book of high Christology, a theologians’ phrase for emphasizing the divinity of Christ at the expense of his humanity. Hebrews is big on the sacrifice of Christ and his priestly nature.

So it is odd to come across the final thirteenth chapter of Hebrews. Odd because all of a sudden the author begins to give down-to-earth advice about how to live as a Christian here in this world, in everyday life. It is so odd that some scholars think the last chapter was written by someone else, or tacked on later. But the final chapter tells us how to be good, and the book as a whole tells us why.

The advice is clear, specific, and short. There are four rules of conduct: Show hospitality to strangers. Be mindful of those in prison and who are being tortured. Be faithful in relationships. And stay free of the love of money. On the face of it, four seemingly unrelated exhortations. But they are sewn together by a common thread.

First: Show hospitality to strangers. The rule is first in the list. And it is the most emphatic: do not neglect to do this, it says. Strangers here means “people not like us.” The word means more literally “aliens.” Foreigners, people who look weird, talk weird, do weird things that we don’t do. And by weird, I mean different. People who admire things we don’t admire. People who believe things we don’t believe. People who don’t know the people we know.

The reason for this rule, Hebrews says, is that we might entertain angels without knowing it. Even those who seem strange to us might be angels. Not knowing them, we don’t know. Or they might just be good people just like us and our friends. People who have aspirations and fears just like ours. People whose reasons for doing things are just as complicated as ours.

The word for hospitality here means more than “tolerate” strangers. It means love the strangers. Love the strangers as you would your brother or sister. Go out of your way to give them the same break you’d give a friend. Forgive them a little. Help them before they ask for help. Be mindful of them. Do not keep them out. Invite them in.

Second: Remember those in prison. Remember those being tortured. We turn our backs on prisons and prison camps. Prisons are designed that way, to make it hard for people outside to imagine fully the people inside. As in our dealings with strangers, we imagine prisoners to be something other than us. We call them prisoners, but in Hebrews, in the Greek, it says “those who are in prison.” There are not humans outside and prisoners inside. There are people, some outside and some inside.

Think of those inside, Hebrews says, as if you were in prison with them. Bound up with them, it says. Imagine yourself in prison. Imagine yourself there for, say, five years. A short sentence by today’s standards. Imagine just a minimum security prison. Where you share a small cell with another person, where you hardly ever see your family or parents or children or partner. Where whatever you do is observed. Where your time is not your own at all. When you are subject to arbitrary rules and decisions. Where you have no liberty—which is the purpose of prisons. Imagine, say, starting next week and living like that for five years. Be mindful of those in prison, Hebrews says.

Imagine even more, if you can—which I’m not sure I can— being in a place where you are tortured. The word means “a place where you are held while evil things happen.” Imagine that, and be mindful of those who are being tortured.

Third: Be faithful in relationships. Honor marriage is what it really says, and don’t mess around with sex. In a time when the Roman oppressors mocked the Christians because they abstained from adultery, and where sex was an avenue to power and honor, the advice defended faithfulness against an unsympathetic culture. But the general is as true as the specific. Honor relationships. Don’t be tempted to betray your friends, or your partner, for other, sweeter rewards. Don’t use relationships as means to some other end.

And fourth: Keep your lives free from the love of money. Be content with what you have. Don’t put your trust in riches. Money is untrustworthy. It is great, but it can’t be counted on. It is addictive. It seems like a indicator of admiration and esteem when it is not. It is the love of money that is the issue in this passage. Money becomes an idol. We are tempted to turn to money for healing and peace when we could be turning to God.

Aliens, people in prison, marriage and sex, and the love of money. A motley crew. What makes these four rules a matched set is what Hebrews calls “mutual love.” We are exhorted to love others for what they are. Not what they represent—immigrants and criminals. And not with expectation of reward—affection and riches. Relationships with people are not based on transactions. People—other people—are not tokens, or counts, or aggregates, or means to an end. Not illegals, nor insurgents, nor gays, nor troops, nor reactionaries, nor liberals, nor “the homeless,” nor fat cat CEOs, nor anything that, though perhaps true but incomplete, lets us think of some people as something different in kind, character, and nature from you and me.

Mutual love in us is planted by our love for God and nourished by our imaginations. Imagining being the other person. Imagine you were the foreigner, imagine you were the prisoner, imagine you were the spouse, imagine you were the one who suffered because someone loved money more than you. Act as if you were.

When we are scared of people, we do crazy things. When we are tempted by idols, we do crazy things. We don’t do good. What makes the admonitions in Hebrews possible to follow is that first, God is with us. “I will never leave you or forsake you,” God says. And second, that God will help and protect us. “The Lord is my helper,” quotes Hebrews, “I will not be afraid. What can anyone do to me?”

The book of Hebrews is a love story. It is the story of God’s love for us and our love for God. It is the same story that is the story of the whole Bible. The mutual love is shaped and shown by Christ, both priest and sacrifice in the language of Hebrews. Christ who is and always was divine (“the same yesterday and today and forever,” it says) was able to be something else, was able to be us.

“Do not neglect to do good,” Hebrews says, “and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.”

We do good not because we have to, or because it earns us points, with God or anyone else. Not to get into heaven or to avoid God’s anger. We do good not because we get paid off in some way, emotional or actual, but because we are in mutual love with God and it pleases us, therefore, to do so, as it would please us to please someone we loved.