19th Sunday after Pentecost (Year C) - October 20, 2019

Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Year C
October 20, 2019
Genesis 32:22-31

Our first reading from this morning contains, for me, one of the most powerful images in scripture. Jacob had been avoiding his brother Esau after stealing a blessing and the birthright from their father, a few chapters earlier in the narrative. Esau vows to kill Jacob, once their father dies, so their mother, Rebecca, urges Jacob to flee to a distant land so that he might live. Jacob and Esau are about to meet after something like twenty years apart, as Jacob is returning home. Jacob is “greatly afraid and distressed,” fearing that Esau was going to finally make good on that earlier vow. 

Then, we get this text from Genesis. It is a bizarre story: an unknown assailant and Jacob wrestle throughout the night. There was no warning. No description of the man. All the text tells us is that a man wrestled with Jacob until daybreak. In this wrestling match Jacob senses that this man is something more than a man – and demands a blessing, refusing to let the man go before he gets it. Jacob – whose name meant “heal-grabber” a permanent reminder of his deceitfulness and his desire to take what wasn’t his own – is renamed Israel – “God wrestler,” “for he had striven with God and humans and have prevailed.” He receives a blessing and the being goes away, but Jacob – now called Israel - is left with a permanent limp. As often happens with texts, there are a multitude of angles and interpretations to take with the text. The text is *just* open enough to yield a number of interpretive possibilities. Yet this text – and the image of wresting with God - has become so formational and foundational for me as I encounter faith, how I encounter Scripture, and how I encounter our God – to the point that my blog is called “Wrestling with the Word.”

Throughout my life in various ways and in various places, I’ve heard this myth. Faith is about certainty. A strong faith doesn’t ask questions. A strong faith is a passive life – one that just trusts in God and lets, as the saying and the country song go – Jesus take the wheel. My first encounter with biblical studies – as an academic pursuit – was in my second semester of undergrad. It was in a class with my soon-to-be academic advisor, Dr. Frank Eakin, around Jewish/ Christian dialogue. To talk about Jewish/ Christian dialogue, we had to talk about Scripture – and the ways it had been used and interpreted by Jews and by Christians. I don’t remember much of the content of the class anymore, but I certainly remember the struggles of the class. It was a first-year seminar, a class with students ranging from theologically conservative “Bible-believing” Christians to politically and socially liberal atheists – and everyone in between. 

Dr. Eakin encouraged wrestling with the material. We dug into texts; we asked questions of texts; we learned what we could about the contexts around texts. From some of the Christians in the class, there was frequently push-back. If the Bible says X, then it says x, no questions asked. Questions were an indication that faith was just not strong enough. I frequently found myself frustrated because I was confronted, in almost every class, with a God that I didn’t recognize. A God that was distant. A God that was all-demanding. A God that was easily offended by the easiest of questions. A God that was easily angered and threatened to turn one’s back with one wrong move. A God that couldn’t handle my questions. I saw a Christian interpretation of God that was so foreign to me. Throughout my life, I’ve always had a lot of questions. About everything. I was “that kid” in school that had just one more question, after everyone else was ready to move on. And questions are what drew me to the Bible and Biblical studies in the first place (and the questions still draw me there). Questions woo me into relationship with God. A God that couldn’t handle them was so foreign to me. Perhaps that interpretation of God isn’t foreign to you (and that’s okay); it is a common view on God – especially in American Christianity. American Christianity, in general, I think, is uncomfortable with the wrestling because wrestling has the potential to upend the status quo or to push us outside of our comfort zones. 

In our text today, as Jacob wrestles with this divine being, scripture provides a different framework and image for what faith looks like, for what engaging with God and Word looks like. Here, we meet a God that is close, that is not only willing to wrestle, but that wrestling brings that God closer. Next to God’s incarnation in Jesus, Jacob’s wrestling with the divine at the Jabbok is one of the clearest examples of God’s closeness to God’s beloved humanity. This is not a God that turns away – even from the seemingly most undeserving of people – but this is a God that chases down Jacob, confronts him, and brings him into this wrestling match, transforming him, leaving him with a blessing. God doesn’t just invite wrestling, but God sometimes demands it. Debie Thomas puts it this way, 

“Stories like Jacob's excite and inspire me now, because they point to a God who is infinitely more interesting than the one I feared in childhood. A God who wants to engage? A God I can come at with the whole weight of my thoughts, questions, ideas, and feelings? A God who invites my rigor, my persistence, my intensity? That's a God worth pursuing. That's a God I won't let go of. Wrestling, as it turns out, is not a bad or even a scary thing, because it's the opposite of apathy, the opposite of resignation. It's even the opposite of loneliness. To fight is to stay close, to keep my arms wrapped tight around my opponent. Fighting means I haven't walked away--I still have skin in the game.”[1] 

To take it one step further, a God that is willing to wrestle is a God that keeps God’s arms wrapped tight around us. A God that refuses to walk away. A God that has skin in the game. And that gives me intense comfort. In the best and in especially in the worst moments of life, before God, I am not “too much” to handle. I’m not “too intense.” I’m not “too persistent.” I’m not a burden. No, this is a God a God that refuses to remain distant and comes close. This is a God that has skin in the game and is committed to the wrestling match. This is a God that pursues us and is committed to doing whatever it takes to bring us into relationship with Godself – even if it means wrestling, even if it means going to the cross. This is a God that can hold whatever I bring before the divine, and this is a God that can hold me – fully and completely for who I am. This is a God that can hold whatever you bring before the divine, and this is a God that can hold you – fully and completely for who you are. If God, in Christ, is willing to even go to the cross, if God, in Christ can handle death, God can hold us and all we bring – our questions, our doubts, our wresting, our wounds. We are free to be ourselves before this God. And God frees us to have an active, persistent faith that refuses to let go. 

This week, I read an article, entitled “Bruised and Blessed by Scripture” in the Christian Century by the Rev. Emmy Kegler – an ELCA pastor in Minneapolis.[2]  In the article, she describes her way of encountering and wrestling with Scripture as reading “the hermeneutic of the hip.” I love that phrase. Hermeneutic is a fancy word that refers to the lens or the method for interpreting literature. Most Pastors and Biblical scholars are familiar with a “hermeneutic of suspicion” – approaching a text with the expectation that there’s more to it than what the text actually says. An obvious example: as the Israelites enter the land of Cana, God seems to actually endorse genocide – with the extermination of all the original inhabitants of the land. A hermeneutic of suspicion says: that doesn’t sound like God, so what’s going on here? So the lens that Pastor Kegler takes – the hermeneutic of the hip – goes further than that hermeneutic of suspicion. She is seeing the Scripture through the lens of the hip. The lens of the hip recognizes that – in wrestling with God and with Scripture – we bring with us the pains of life, the pains of the text being used in ways that harm us or the ones we love, the pains of being pushed to places of discomfort and growth, and the pains of the wrestling with Scripture or God in and of itself. It acknowledges the scars and the limps that we all carry. We come before God – as we are – with our wounds and our trauma. Yet the lens of the hip trusts that in the wrestling with Scripture, in the wrestling with God, in coming face to face with the Divine, God meets us in suffering and sends us away blessed. 

Encountering God face to face, we walk away changed. Jacob’s struggle with God results in a new, transformed identity. He’s no longer the trickster, the heel grabber. He’s one who strives with God. In our encounters with the divine, we find a new, transformed identity. While we experience encounters with God in our own ways and in our own places, God promises to encounter us in water and in bread and wine. In water, we are named and claimed as God’s beloved children. In bread and wine, we are called forgiven. In the Sacraments, we go from being called sinner to being called saint. And we are promised that nothing – not our wrestling, not our scars, not our limps – can separate us from the love of God we’ve found in Jesus; we have a God that won’t let go. We’re freed to wrestle, to be pushed outside of our comfort zones, to upend the status quo to demand God’s blessing, not just for us, but for all people – especially those on the margins – in this world here and now. 

Amen. 

[1] Debie Thomas, "Fighting God (Genesis 32:22-31)," in The Christian Century, https://www.christiancentury.org/blogs/archive/2016-10/fighting-god-genesis-3222-31

[2] Emmy Kegler, "Bruised and Blessed by Scripture," in The Christian Century, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/first-person/bruised-and-blessed-scripture

 

17th Sunday after Pentecost (Year C) - October 6, 2019

Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
Year C
October 6, 2019
Luke 17:5-10

Evangelist miniature of Luke; part of an eighth-century Irish pocket Gospelbook. [Public Domain]

“The apostles said to the Lord, ‘Increase our Faith!’” The apostles’ request is reasonable and understandable. For the last few weeks, we’ve been reading through the section of Gospel of Luke’s that recounts Jesus’ journey from Galilee to Jerusalem - from Galilee to the cross. This section of Luke’s gospel is filled with tough words from Jesus, from “hating” our parents and our own lives to warnings about the role reversals of the Kingdom of God. We’ve heard texts that challenge us on our use and relationship with wealth. Jesus has time and time again told us that following him is not easy. It requires forsaking those who are closest to us, vulnerability, identification with the lost and those who society makes invisible. It points to glory, not in power and riches, but in servanthood. It requires subverting the typical boundaries that separate us: money, race/ ethnicity, religion. It leads to the cross, which in the narrative is creeping closer and closer. After hearing these teachings and these parables, it is easy to understand why the apostles would request more faith because, quite frankly, it seems like an impossible task, particularly if we feel that our faith isn’t quite up to par. It is easy to see why the apostles would wonder if the faith that they have is sufficient for the road ahead.

We may not quite use the same words, but the sentiment is familiar to us. As we read this passage, I would guess that we can identify with the apostles. There are times in our lives when we desperately want Jesus to increase our faith, whether we are daunted by the callings of our faith or whether we are going through our own periods of doubt. We might say, “If only I had a little more faith, I could do what you ask of me,”  “If only I had a little more faith I could be a better Christian, a better disciple,” “my faith isn’t strong enough for that,” “if my faith was stronger I wouldn’t be in the valley of the shadow of doubt” or  “if my faith was stronger and I prayed more, I would not be suffering right now.” We go through times in our lives when we feel like our doubts are the size of a boulder. We may believe that with a greater amount of faith, we could somehow crush these doubts and avoid the troubles of the world and live a happy, fulfilled life, or we may believe that a greater faith leads to greater wisdom, or we may believe that a greater faith would better equip us to live out our Christian calling, or we may believe that our standing with God depends on how much faith we have, as if faith is something quantifiable that we can measure. Like the commodities of this world, more of it is good, less of it is bad.

Jesus’ response, at first, seems odd and a bit condescending. “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea’, and it would obey you.” It sounds like we’re being scolded for not having enough faith. It sounds like Jesus is saying something like “If only you had the faith the size of a mustard seed,” implying that we don’t have even that much faith and therefore we have failed. We hear Jesus’ response as condemnation, as punitive. This is the assumed tone of the passage. We place our own guilt or insecurities about the amount or strength of our faith onto Jesus and onto this message. We see other people who seem to have “great amounts of faith” (whatever that might look like - a person that we think of as having a “faith that can move mountains”), and we feel that we don’t quite live up to that example. Read this way, the passage is a call to more faith because we are certainly lacking. Is Jesus’ response to our desire to have our faith increased, really a condemning, “Yeah, you don’t have enough, and by now, you should have more”? If that’s his answer, how will we ever have enough? How will we ever be able to live out the Christian faith, in vulnerability, in servitude, in love for the neighbor?

If we read this text this way, I fear that we miss the point. This passage becomes about Law and not Gospel. It condemns us rather than frees us - sometimes texts do condemn rather than free, but is that how this text is intended to function? It makes faith a “work” rather than a gift given freely by God. It pushes us to try to climb a ladder up toward God, rather than trusting that God comes down to us, dwelling with us in our joys and in our sufferings. If we read the text this way, we also run the risk of the prosperity gospel or being Christians of glory, instead of Christians of the cross, servanthood, and vulnerability. In other words, if our faith is strong enough, God will provide happiness, health, and wealth. In this way of looking at the gospel, we earn good things in this life by the measure of our faith.

But that isn’t how it works, is it? That certainly isn’t my experience of God or of the Gospel. In reality, the life of a Christian contains both joy and sorrow, times of both sickness and health, both good and evil, both faith and doubt, one of being both saint and sinner. Our faith doesn’t eliminate those realities.

So I wonder… What if we read the text a different way? How does it change the text if we hear a different Jesus speaking with a different tone? Instead of hearing it as “if only you had the faith the size of a mustard seed,” we might hear, “if even you had the size the faith of a mustard seed.” Or to say it a bit clearer, “even the faith the size of a mustard seed is enough.” A little bit of faith, just the size of a mustard seed, can do extraordinary things. If the faith the size of a mustard seed is enough to force a mulberry tree to be uprooted and thrown into the sea - an extraordinary thing to be sure but not exactly useful - what can the faith that we already have do, even if it seems tiny? A small amount of faith - even smaller than a mustard seed - is enough to do the “ordinary” callings of our faith - the things that really matter - loving God and loving neighbor. Because faith is a gift from God, the faith we have already been given is enough.

If we read these words in this way, Jesus’ response becomes liberating, freeing. We no longer need to be concerned with the amount of or the strength our faith - because like the love of God, faith is immeasurable. And we have already been given enough. Therefore, we are freed to live with doubts and with questions. As Ann Lamott once said, “The opposite of faith isn't doubt. It's certainty."  That may sound odd, but her point is that if we are certain, what is the point of faith? Faith is trusting in the promises of God even amid uncertainty, doubt, questions, and sorrows. We trust that we are loved by God, forgiven by God, reconciled to God and that God, incarnate in Christ, dwells with us even and especially in the darkness and in the suffering of our lives and of our world.

 And we are freed to use, to live out the faith we have. It is not about working our way up a spiritual ladder to God, but rather about living in response to the God, incarnate in Christ, who comes down to us, giving us the gifts of forgiveness, reconciliation, and love freely, without us doing a thing to earn it. Living out that faith or trust is living our lives in response to the promises of God. We live out that faith not in extraordinary actions - like ordering a mulberry tree to throw itself into the ocean - but in the seemingly ordinary actions of forgiveness, reconciliation, and servanthood. And I would argue that those actions are truly the extraordinary actions of faith - it isn’t about miracles. Those actions are the actions that actually participate in the breaking in of the Kingdom of God, breaking down the barriers that divide us, building and restoring relationships, lifting up the poor, the neighbor, and the stranger, and working for peace and justice here and now.

As we look at our lives and at the world around us, we can see that this is a large task, as Jesus hasbeen saying over the last few weeks. However, Jesus gives us gifts to increase our faith, to ground our faith. We’re given the gift of faith in the waters of baptism, which joins us with Christ in his death and resurrection. We are fed and nourished in our faith each week, as we celebrate Communion. In the Body and Blood of Christ, yet again we receive these gifts of forgiveness, love, and reconciliation, and are strengthened for service in the world. And we are assured that we already have been given the faith necessary to live out our faith in response to the Gospel and to what Christ has already done for us.

Amen

16th Sunday after Pentecost (Year C) - September 29, 2019

Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Year C
September 29, 2019
Luke 16:19-31

This week Jesus hits us again with another hard parable. Unlike last week, this one isn’t a puzzle tofigure out. It is almost “too clear.” To give the broader context, Jesus tells this parable in the same sermon in which Jesus tells the story of the Lost Sheep and the Lost coin. In this gathering are “tax collectors, sinners, Pharisees, and scribes.” Jesus, in addressing this group, goes from talking about searching for the one lost sheep to this imagined scene, that is quite frankly disturbing. This is not a comfortable text. It is one thing to hear about the reversals of the Kingdom of God and the justice found in God’s kingdom – in general. I love hearing the Magnificat; “he has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1:51-53). As many of you all know, my favorite hymn, the Canticle of the Turning, is based on these verses. The Magnificat and (thus the Canticle of the Turning) are about Justice – not human justice, but God’s justice. And it is a beautiful vision of the justice that is coming into the world.

This justice in the Gospel of Luke is not “getting one’s ‘fair share’ or getting what one ‘deserves’” No, justice for the Gospel of Luke is the balancing of scales. The powerful are brought down and the lowly are lifted up. Both the Magnificat and the Canticle of the turning are… well… general enough that it doesn’t push me too far. There’s distance in the general. But here, today, we get a parable from Jesus in which this role reversal and in which God’s justice, which was present from the very beginning of this gospel comes close, in the particularities of two people – the rich man and Lazarus. When we get into the particularities and the specifics, when we imagine how God’s justice plays out for two characters, things get much more… uncomfortable. The distance allowed by keeping things general is erased, and suddenly we have these two people, these two characters in front of us. It is intentionally uncomfortable – from the detail in which Jesus’ describes Lazarus’ pain and affliction to the detail of the rich man’s torment after death. We’re not supposed to get to the end of the story, thinking that it was such a “nice” story. A powerful story. A provoking story. A clear story. But not a nice and comforting story, as it is directed at the Rich Men (those scribes, Pharisees, and tax collectors) not the Lazaruses.

As we continue to wrestle with some of Jesus’ toughest parables, I keep in the back of my head the purpose of Jesus’ parables. These stories are supposed to help shape us for living kingdom building lives – not in the next world – but in this one. In other words, the question of today’s text isn’t “what does this text say about what will happen to me?” Instead, the questions are “what does this story reveal about our current reality?” and “what does this story reveal to us about living out our faith and living out the Kingdom of God?”

On internship, we had a Tuesday afternoon pericope study, in which either Pastor Neal, my supervisor, or I would lead a bible study on whatever passage we were (at least at that point in the week) likely using as our focus for preaching. This week’s gospel happened to fall on my supervisor’s turn to preach. I don’t remember the angle that he eventually took in his sermon. But I hand wrote some notes in the margins of my bible from that pericope study. Intern Pastor Alex had enough sense to write some things down where I could find them once Pastor Alex had to preach this text. (I’m super thankful for my past wisdom this week). I have these notes above the passage: “To serve the vulnerable is to serve God.”

The story of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation
[Public domain]

In life, Lazarus was invisible to the rich man. The chasm between them wasn’t created in this imagined afterlife. It was created in life. Maybe the rich man saw him every day to the point where he became numb to Lazarus’ pain. Maybe the rich man blamed Lazarus for his situation – he didn’t work hard enough, he made his lot in life with the choices he made, he never pulled himself out, never changing his ways to make a better life for himself. Maybe the rich man just didn’t see him; his wealth and purple clothing may have blinded him to the real suffering just outside his own gate.  Whatever kept the Rich Man from seeing Lazarus, the rich man did not do something to help the person in front of him who needed compassion, who was hungry and needed food. At the end of the day, the “why” Lazarus ended up there isn’t the focus; he was just a person in front of him who was in need. The only ones in the parable to show Lazarus compassion in life were the dogs that would lick his sores. In life, Lazarus was a nobody. And the Rich Man never looked down from his place of wealth and privilege to see him, really see him and his suffering – and so he didn’t act.

The Rich Man, presumably speaking, was someone of the Jewish faith. He heard texts his whole life that called him to look down, to see the other, to serve the neighbor, to welcome the stranger. The last few weeks we’ve heard some of those texts in our worship from the Prophet Amos. This week, too, we hear it in our appointed Psalm text. “Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God, who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them; who keeps faith forever; who executes justice for the oppressed; who gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets the prisoners free; the Lord opens the eyes of the blind. The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down; the Lord loves the righteous. The Lord watches over the strangers; he upholds the orphan and the widow, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.” (Psalm 146:5-9). There are few things that the Hebrew Bible – especially the prophets – talk about more than care for the needy, food for the hungry, welcome for the foreigner/ migrant. The heart of God, or as our text says today, the bosom of Abraham belongs to these. He had the words of the prophets, the words of the Psalmists, the Word of God, yet he wasn’t convinced enough by them to act for God’s justice in this world.

The Good News is: We have a God who sees. The first person in the Bible to name God was Hagar – the mother of Ishmael and slave of Sarah and Abraham. She named God “El-roi” – the God who sees. The God who sees her suffering, her affliction. This is a God who sees the suffering of the Hebrew people and who acts to bring them out of slavery. This is a God who sees the people that God so loves mess up again and again, yet continues to reach out to God’s beloved humanity to offer grace, love, and forgiveness. This is a God who sees that acts to bring God’s people out of Exile and back to their home. He knows these stories. His brothers know these stories. His faith in the God who sees should affect how he interacts with the world around him. His faith in the God who sees should push him to work for God’s justice in the world. Yet he is so ensnared by the trappings of this world – his own wealth and purple clothes, that he misses that he can use what he has to seek justice for Lazarus in this life. To serve the vulnerable is to serve God. Martin Luther puts it this way, “You can’t feed every beggar in the world, but you can feed the beggar at your gate.”

This is a God who sees the pain of humanity and acts. And even more, in Jesus, we have a God who feels. We have a God that comes down, was born to an unwed mother. Our God was a child migrant, fleeing for his life. Our God makes Godself known in suffering and in dying on a cross. Suffering is real to our God, made known in Christ. Jesus – the one who was beaten, left with sores, the one who died the death of a dangerous political dissident – the one who rises from the dead – knows intimately the sufferings of Lazarus and those like him. We have a God made known in suffering. We have a God that shows us God’s own wounds. In Jesus, God sees our pain and the pain of those around us. We have a God that looks down, that notices, that sees, that experiences suffering, poverty, and has experienced the worst of what the world as it is can offer. 

By the Grace of God, we know that we have been saved. Through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, we know that nothing can separate us from the love of our God who sees and who knows us more than we can know ourselves. Not our mistakes, not our choices in life, not our pain, not our sin. Nothing can separate us from the love of God made known in Christ Jesus. In other words, we have a God that looks down into the best and worst of what it means to be human – and brings us to Godself. God doesn’t give us what we deserve. Despite our own failings, God gives us grace, love, and mercy. 

Here’s where we get to my last note. “Christ will look like Lazarus. If Lazarus is invisible, so will Christ.” How can we see and experience God’s presence – the presence of the God who sees and feels - if we cannot see the suffering of others? To see Christ is to see the vulnerable. We too have a call to look down, to see the Lazaruses in our midst. We find all sorts of excuses to look away, to not see. “He’s an alcoholic.” “She has made the same mistakes over and over.” “They should just find a job and pull themselves up. Why is it my responsibility?” “He made his choices and now he has to live with them.” We find ways to blame and shame people for their suffering – to allow ourselves not to see the brokenness all around us. But at the end of the day, we have the vulnerable in front of us, Lazarus at our gate. In the Gospel of Luke, however, we get this repeated call to live out our faith – our faith in the one who has already seen us and saved us – by seeing and serving those who God sees, those who are close to Abraham’s heart. How will our faith in the God who sees, who feels, who looks down, who comes down, shape how we interact with the world around us? How will this God push us to see those most vulnerable? Will we be convinced to act for justice for the vulnerable around us by the one who was raised from the dead?

Amen

15th Sunday after Pentecost (Year C) - September 22, 2019

15th Sunday after Pentecost
Year C
October 8, 2019
Luke 16:1-13

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus talks about money often. We don’t get many of those texts in our
lectionary. But we get this one today – a bizarre, and frankly confusing, parable, often called the parable of the dishonest manager. Matthew Skinner, a professor at Luther Seminary and commentator on the podcast Sermon Brainwave, says that he loves the parable, precisely because “no one understands it… That’s what makes it fun.” It is one of the most difficult parables to figure out, so it becomes a jigsaw puzzle in order to try to understand what Jesus is trying to tell us. To be clear, I like a good theological or scriptural puzzle. It is why I focused on Biblical studies in both undergrad and seminary. It is why I ask so many questions of texts. I’ve done a lot of that recently while wrestling with texts and in my preaching. I like taking apart texts and putting them back together. For me, that process is indeed fun. But this one, at least for me, is not as “fun.” Interpreting this text is hard. Really hard. Even among scholars there are dozens of theories and no clear answers. So if upon hearing the parable, you’re left scratching your head, know that you aren’t alone. It is a parable that, as a friend of mine has said, is a way of God reminding us to use our brains.

Part of the issue with interpreting this text is that, so often, we like to make parables into allegories. We want to assign different characters in the story to figures from our faith. A character in the story is “supposed” to represent God, another Jesus, and another us. It can work relatively well (and be a good and well-grounded interpretation) for some parables: the parable of the lost coin, for instance, allegorically speaking, the woman could represent God or Jesus and the lost coin could represent us. Last week, we imagined God as the woman who searches through dust bunnies and dress pockets to find what was lost. Great. A wonderful vision. In this text however, it isn’t that simple. Many interpretations, for instance, place Jesus as the dishonest manager; as Jesus is the one who forgives our debts and reconciles us to God (who in this case would be the master). But there are problems. Can you imagine Jesus, the one who went to the cross, saying that he isn’t “strong enough to dig”? And if Grace and reconciliation with God are free, why is the debt reduction only partial – just 20-50%? All of that to say, allegories are not the only (nor always the best) way of interpreting Jesus’ parables.

Jesus parables do however help us to enter in, to imagine the Kingdom of God that has broken into the world in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection – a kingdom that continues to break into this world. They help us reimagine this world as it is becoming this world that God intended for us. I wonder, if to help us get there, Jesus tells a story that helps us see the breaking in of the Kingdom of God – by saying something about this world as it is. I wonder if this parable points us to one example – an imperfect example – of the liberation that is breaking into the world through Jesus.

Louis Le Breton [Public domain]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mammon.jpg

I’m going to start at the end of the passage. We’ll start where it is actually clear, to hopefully clarify
other pieces of the parable. Here’s the punchline. “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 6:13, NRSV). The word used in today’s passage isn’t “wealth” it is Mammon. Usually, I’m a fan of the NRSV (which is the bible translation we use in worship). But those of you who know older translations of the Bible may remember this final verse differently, “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 Mammon” (Luke 16:13). Mammon is wealth or money personified. It is money as an idol, an object of our worship. It is money plus power – the power that money can hold over us.

Martin Luther, in the Large Catechism, has this to say about Mammon: “There are some who think that they have God and everything they need when they have money and property; they trust in them and boast in them so stubbornly and securely that they care for no one else. They, too, have a god — mammon by name, that is, money and property — on which they set their whole heart. This is the most common idol on earth. Those who have money and property feel secure, happy, and fearless, as if they were sitting in the midst of paradise.”  Then, there are some, Luther continues, “who have nothing [that] doubt and despair as if they knew of no god at all. We will find very few who are cheerful, who do not fret and complain, if they do not have mammon. This desire for wealth clings and sticks to our nature all the way to the grave.”  Mammon, Luther argues, is a god that holds power over us – a false god, but a god nonetheless. Wealth, Mammon, is something we – as human beings – put our trust in – often above putting trust in God. If we have enough money, we have security. Then, the tendency is to hoard that which creates security for ourselves; we like to feel safe. And we can convince ourselves that we do it on our own. We don’t need God. We don’t need others. We buy into the myth that we are “self-made” people. Therefore, we cannot serve God and mammon. Mammon turns us inward. God turns us outward.[1]

This year, as I’m wrestling with this passage, I’m wondering if the dishonest manager falls into the trap of trusting (or hoping in) mammon over other things. The manager is working in an unjust system. While charging interest is technically prohibited by Jewish law, the rich often found ways around that particular law by charging various fees or hidden interest charges. In other words, the rich got rich by cheating those who were beneath them - the poor and the less powerful. While technically their actions were legal, their wealth was built on the backs of those beneath them. They put so much trust or love in money that they care for no one else. They’re self-made people, after all. They rest secure in their wealth. The source of the unfaithfulness of both the manager and his master is their greed, their love of money. They cannot be faithful to God nor to neighbor as long as they put their love and trust in money. Their actions, while legal, cause great harm to those indebted to them. As with so much in our world, legal doesn’t make it right.

The manager, upon finding himself soon without a job, suddenly will be without the *things* that provide for his security – his wages and a roof over his head. So then, he frees some people from a significant portion of their debt in order to have some people on “his side.” He does a good thing for the wrong reasons. You might be thinking, “Good? He is hurting his master; he is chipping into his profits.” But we need to remember the good news that the Gospel of Luke proclaims. Luke frames the work of Jesus as liberation and the work of the Kingdom of God as turning the world upside down (pulling the lowly up and bringing the mighty down). Forgiving of debts is exactly the kind of work that Jesus would call “good” – even if it comes at the expense of the powerful. The manager does this for the wrong reasons: his own security. He’s desperate. On the verge of losing everything, he needs a plan B. So he turns outward to save himself. His love of money (and fear of losing his place, his privilege, his status) keeps him from genuine relationship with the neighbor – both in his job and as he is losing his job. I don’t think that we’re supposed to read this story and come out thinking that the manager is a “good guy.” Yet at the end of the day, while the manager isn’t interested in justice, the poor find *some* liberation through the actions of the manager. They are relieved (of at least some) of their debt.

Here’s where I think we hit on one (of many) possible points in this text: if a dishonest manager can do a good thing for the wrong reasons, how much more can a person of faith do of a good thing for the right reasons? Or even more, if a dishonest manager can do a good thing for the wrong reasons, how much more can our God, the one who is truly faithful, do good things for the right reasons?

We too live in an unjust economic system. Too often we, as a society, put trust in money to the point where we neglect to think about others. The master and the manager aren’t evil people; they’re part of a larger system built on the accumulation of wealth. It is a system that worships Mammon. Today, the richest 1% of the world owns half of the world’s wealth, and they are on target to own 2/3rds of the world’s wealth in the next ten years. Specifically, in the US, the top .1% of American households hold the same amount of wealth as the bottom 90%. 44 million Americans struggle under the weight of student debt under a system in which the cost of college education has risen 200% (even accounting for inflation) since 1980. About 40 million Americans live beneath the poverty line. Our faith calls us to examine not just our lives and our individual actions but to examine the society in which we live. If we’re proclaiming that Jesus is bringing about the Kingdom of God in this world, turning it upside down, we need to look at the world as it is, we need to see the injustice, we need to see what needs to be turned upside down. Our gospel text invites us into looking at the world as it is for what it is. If the Kingdom of God, as the Magnificat states, brings down the powerful and lifts up the lowly, we need to see what, in this world as it is, props up the powerful and holds down the lowly. Money and economics are a big part of that. What drives this world in which we live? Who is it built for? Who is it built on or at the expense of? Who thrives (and why)? Who struggles (and why)?

If a dishonest manager can do a good thing for the wrong reasons, what is the response of a God who is faithful? We have a liberating God that seeks to free people from that which holds them down. God takes our debts – whether financial, moral, or otherwise – and forgives them – not by 20% or 50% but in their entirety. How much more does a faithful God do than a dishonest manager? A God that is strong enough to die on the cross; A God that is willing to do anything – search through dust bunnies, wander the wilderness, even beg – to bring God’s people into relationship with Godself. If a dishonest manager can do a good thing for the wrong reason, what is the response of a person of faith – one who has already received that forgiveness from God – to the injustices of the world as it is? If our God is the God made known in Jesus, not Mammon, how much more can we do? Because our debts are forgiven, we get to free others from their debts. Putting our trust in the faithful God, serving that God, we get to practice forgiveness – moral, financial, and otherwise – and we get to work for the release of others from their debts. Liberation in this world is not just possible, but the call of those who have been entrusted with true riches – the love and grace of God through Christ. And in that, we get to see glimpses of the Kingdom of God in this world here and now.

Amen.

[1] Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert, eds., The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, Accordance electronic ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 387.