Why "rewire" the church? Church has been at the centre of my identity. It’s formed me, frustrated me, deeply angered and hurt me, guided me, and protected me. Some of the most challenging ideas I have ever met, far more radical than the lawn meetings of my student days, have come from the theologians of the church. There has been a sense of connection to the tradition and wisdom of millennia. And, inevitably, the frustration of tradition hide-bound. I remember singing the words of a hymn one Sunday morning, “nothing changes here...” and one of the youth group muttered sotto voce to his girlfriend, “God, you can say that again!” What worked for our parent’s church doesn’t necessarily work for us. I notice it often doesn’t work for them anymore, although older people are sometimes more gracious about their frustrations! Life changes, we change, and constantly need to reassess where we are going.
This little church on the web is modelled around the metaphor of an old and treasured house. It's the house our parents lived in and inherited from someone we never knew. The house is strong and robust, but needs rewiring. Our ways of thinking and being need to change to make the house liveable and practical. Otherwise it will be a burden, not a base camp for life.
The Money Manager
Week of Sunday 19 September: Pentecost 17
Gospel: Luke 16:1-13
Then 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. 2So he summoned him and said to him, “What is this that I hear about you? Give me an account of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.”
3Then 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. 4I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.”
5So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, “How much do you owe my master?” 6He answered, “A hundred jugs of olive oil.” He said to him, “Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.”7Then 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.”
8And 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. 9And 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.
10 ‘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. 11If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? 12And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? 13No 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.’
The parable in this week’s gospel is difficult for a rich Australian to understand, but it all comes down to this: 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.
This parable highlights the absolute divide between two worlds. There is the world governed by the Gods of wealth and privilege, and the world of God the truly Divine. We are challenged, “Which one will you serve?”
And we are warned, if you cannot serve God the truly Divine, the real God, in the little ways of this life, how can you think you will be found worthy of the life of God? It says, “if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own?” It is very easy to hear Luke saying “how can you think you will be found worthy of the life to come,” but the life of God, the receiving of what Jesus called “your own”, the life in the Kingdom, starts now. If we make the wrong choice about serving God or mammon, the consequences for our life experience are immediate.
Let’s look at the background of the parable, because on the surface, read with our eyes, it seems like Jesus is praising, as we would say, “a very dodgy operator, who sails pretty close to the wind.” And that’s being nice about the manager. Why would Jesus praise him? In fact, the manager does the praising, and Jesus is talking about something else. Let's look again:
We have this thing called the Australian Dream, which has got something to do with owning your own house, everyone getting a fair go, and having plenty of meat for the barbecue, and beer, if you want it. In Israel, the dream was much more clearly laid down than ours. It was even enshrined in the law.
They understood how God intended the world to work, and wrote it down. It was called the law of Jubilee. Basically this meant,
1. Let the land periodically lie fallow in order to restore itself,
2. Forgive all debts every seven years,
3. release all slaves every seven years,
4. and redistribute the land so that all extended families received an equitable amount of the land every 49 years.
I’ve taken this neat summary from Dr Robert Linthicum, but you can also find it in the bible. Read Leviticus Chapter 25. There’s some strange stuff in Leviticus, from our perspective. But this chapter will blow you away.
Jubilee was a social strategy designed to stop people from getting too poor, and to stop other people getting too rich and powerful. It was a strategy to make the Promised Land something like what we would call Heaven on Earth; life as God means it to be.
Dr Linthicum says, and he is right,
The Jesus in Luke was about the restoration of the entirety of Jubilee and thus the leveling of Jewish society so that there were no powerful and wealthy forces exercising domination over the rest. To Jesus, this was not simply an economic and political task, but a religious task as well – for only by eliminating poverty and powerlessness would the nation ever discover the spirituality and relationship with God that God had always intended Israel to experience. This was the world as God intended it to be.
This means that for Luke, being rich is a problem. It’s only by the grace of God, if we take Jesus’ words, that a rich person can enter the kingdom of heaven.
Another way to understand this is to look at how we treat the poor. We often treat them with suspicion. It’s probably their fault. All too often, they have to prove themselves to be worthy of help. In one CentreLink office we had to visit when we received child allowance it was clear: We were guilty until proven innocent. Luke reverses this: essentially, the rich are “guilty until proven innocent .”
There was a reason for this. Scholars are unanimous that life in Jesus’ time was nothing like it should have been. Linthicum says that in Jesus’ time
there was both a significant and growing [gap] between the peasants and the powerful. Between 60% and 70% of the wealth of Israel at any given time was owned and managed by 2% of the population -- Israel’s religious/political leaders, the Herodian nobility and the land owners … along with their bureaucrats or managers…
These are the people in our parable, the rich man and his manager. They got there by being merciless. As my colleague John Petty says, “If you couldn't pay your debts, so much the better. They'd just take your land. If you didn't have any land left, they might take your daughter.” The rich lived in total contradiction of the laws of Jubilee, and thus the wishes of God.
The peasants, on the other hand, made up between 83% and 93% of the population … the peasants… perennially lived on the edge of economic disaster. Farmers, for example, didn’t own the land they farmed but rented it from the land owners mentioned above.
Typically, 50% of their harvest would be paid as rent to the land owner, 25% would go in taxes to Rome and the Herodian nobility, 10% went to the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem, and 3% would go to the village. Thus, each farmer realized only about 12% of his harvest, which had to be spent both on the family’s annual income and next year’s seed.
This is the life for which the manger knew he was not strong enough. Begging would mean being poorer again.
The way the system worked was that the manager ran the day to day business for the rich man. Periodically he was asked to “give an account of his management.” It meant he had to show how he had run things to make money for the boss; an audit. From day to day, the boss was not much interested in how things ran, except this rich man had heard on the grapevine that the manager was living high on the hog.
Everyone knew that managers took a cut. Everyone knew that when the bill was for 50 barrels of oil, the manager would charge for 60, or 70, or more, and keep the difference. As long as the rich men got plenty they didn’t worry. It was an incentive for the managers to work hard. But this manager had been a little too free and easy with the boss’s business. And when the boss said “Bring in the books for audit,” he knew he was in trouble. He would be sacked.
He pulled off an incredibly smart move. Basically, he "wrote off" his own cut. He let people rewrite their bills. (You wrote out your own invoice in those times; the proof that a bill was real and legitimate was that it was written in your own handwriting!) So all the people in debt to the rich man suddenly got a huge discount. The rich man got all his invoices paid early, and didn’t acutally lose anything, because the manager just discounted his own cut.
So, the rich man is in front financially. He also looks good in everyone’s eyes, because he has (apparently) been pious, godly and generous, and given huge discounts. He is also caught. If he sacks the manager now, he’ll look bad, not pious. After all, what kind of person would sack such a godly manger? He’ll also look like a fool, because he will be publically admitting he let himself be cheated. And he has no proof anyway, because you can bet the manager has burned all the original bills. So it will be very easy for the rich man to tell himself that the manager has done him a real service, and that the business will benefit! Although, we can bet future audits will be more frequent, and less cursory!
The manager is way in front. He gets to keep his job, he looks like a very pious, godly man because he has been merciful to the debtors, and they all love him, and are not only obliged, but will be happy to look out for him in future. In fact, he is probably better off than he was before he was caught! This is one very clever operator.
He is totally committed to looking after number one. He will do whatever it takes. And we can bet that audits or not, he will be finding some other way to keep his nest well lined. And this time he'll stay below the boss's radar. He knows the ways of the world. He is, to use Jesus’ word, shrewd.
Jesus listeners all understood this. They didn’t need my complicated explanation. They lived in this world. They knew how business worked, and how the rich ripped them off.
Jesus said 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.
Jesus’ listeners knew that “the people who …“get ahead” in this world are those who know how to manipulate and exploit the … system for their own benefit.”
There’s a broad hint here that those of us who , as Dr Linthicum says, “are working for 'the world as God intends'” need to understand the system just as well as the movers and shakers. We need to understand what is going on.
It’s not just a matter of understanding the system of “this world,” which is important. We do need to see how the powerful and rich try and rule the roost. But we need to understand both systems. We need to understand how the spiritual economy works, if you like.
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 here, 2000 words in, I realise my sermon draft is getting too long. But there is more background I want to get into the mind of my listeners…
Money, you see, is not quite real. It’s nothing on its own; just paper. It is a symbol of obligation and good will, and a promise to repay in kind. It’s a tool to translate your skill as an IT technician into food for my table (as your minister).
Money is, in the end, only what it provides. It can provide justice, love, sustenance, faithfulness: all the things of Jubilee. It is then a currency to secure your living and my living, so our physical needs are met, and we can be at peace to listen to God.
Or, money provides a currency for me to oppress you, and exploit you, and get my own way, and provide more than I ever need, regardless of what it costs you. This is what Luke’s Jesus calls, “dishonest wealth.” “True riches” require I have very little money. What excess I have, goes on to benefit others so that they too may experience the Grace I have found (and been given.)]
So being “faithful with dishonest wealth” means… what?
I think it might mean using the money of mammon, the exploitative dishonest system, to work for the “honest” system, using it to enabe Jubilee, life as God meant it to be. Jubilee life is not just money. It is a life and a world where land is let lie fallow, where ecological collapse is not imminent, because we have been just toward the land. It is where relationships, and justice, and fairness, and honesty are the real things of value, because they make being human a pleasure, and exciting and a blessing.
True riches are about relating to the Divine, and being in receipt of the gifts of God… what we call grace. Jesus said, “…if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own?”This thing called “your own” is life with God, life experiencing God, life that has more depth, life that is being saved; all the things our pressured, stressed and painful lives are so often not.
It is wrong to say God’s love is dependent on us doing the right thing. God gives… always. But it is true to say that when we live according to the world, according to mammon, and are not honest and fair and just, we are actively rejecting God’s grace, God’s gift to us.
Linthicum says, “What matters is which perspective of the world you are going to embrace, and which will you seek to practice…”
Luke makes it clear that being an economic success, and being rich, is to serve mammon. It is perilously close to being the opposite of serving God.
Linthicum goes on…
Will your life and your engagement of the world be centered on greed, accumulation and power…
Or will your life be centered on “ the world as God intended it to be”, not only believing in but actively and even shrewdly working for a world of justice, equitable distribution of wealth, elimination of poverty, and authentic relationships with God and each other?
What Luke suggests to me is that if we are rich and comfortable, and getting richer, then almost by definition, our “life and … engagement of the world is centered on greed, accumulation and power.” We can only be monetarily rich if we are part of the world system, or unless that “dishonest” wealth is being used against the system for the sake of Jubilee and the way God meant life to be. Even then, we are always perilously close to joining the world, with money constantly tempting us to forgo Jubilee.
We must make a choice. “No one 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” (13).
Which will we choose? The answer will not have effects on some future Judgement Day. It will begin to change us now.
Andrew Prior Sept 2010
Direct Biblical quotations in this page are taken from The New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
I think this is a profoundly important question. This is my reply. You'll see some of it reflects what is being said on the list, but I think it is worth reading.
I am reminded of two stories.
One is of the janitor at the big seminary, who is sitting waiting for the student basketball game to finish. A couple of seminarians, I reckon they were in second year, see that he is reading the book of Revelation, and ask him in that slightly educated tone, if he really thinks he understands what he is reading? Yup, he says. It means God wins. In that spirit, I think we can say about this week’s lectionary reading, along with Fred and Bob Dylan, “You’re gonna have to serve somebody.” (An old Bob Dylan Song)
The other story begins with a colleague who was our synod social justice consultant. He one day launched into an impromptu sermon- I was the sole, slightly overwhelmed congregant- about how we have no right to think we can interpret the book of Revelation. We have no idea, really, of the social situation in which that genre was generated. I remembered this the last time I had to preach the little apocalypse from Mark (Chapter 13). I said to our congregation that I found myself uncomfortable preaching this text. I said I thought we Aussies really had no real idea what life under real persecution was like, only a fairly dim imagining of what it might be like. And I suspected, I said, that there was a huge gap between our imagining and the reality. I said that I thought the Sudanese members of our congregation might be reading Mark 13 very differently from the rest of us.
And ***, whose family was almost the only one from his entire village to survive, gave me a wry, sad smile: You have no idea how right you are.
So, this week I went round and round in circles trying to understand the parable. Bill Loader says in his commentary that the interpretations of this parable “number in the hundreds!” Linthicum’s outline made some intellectual sense to me. I outlined it in my First Impressions. And in response, Janet with her wonderful ability to cut to the chase said, “to be honest, I end up scratching my head and wondering what you just said.” Well, also to be honest, :-) that could have a lot to do with my grammar! But I think it also reflects the cultural gap. We can come, perhaps, to a sort of intellectual understanding / hypothesis of what was going on in the story. (Whether we can communicate that in the space allotted to a sermon is questionable.) Even if we think we understand the mechanics of the story, there are few of us who have any imagining of the economic structures of the time that comes close to the reality.
I consider myself: I sympathise fully with what someone mentioned in another current thread about clergy incomes. Cobbling together incomes from 3 separate part time parishes, and one of those is not permanent, Wendy and I feel financially stressed. But we are a vast distance from student days, when we sometimes were close to begging for food. Yet even then, we were immeasurably better off than folk in one congregation who, I suspect, were going very hungry, and couldn’t pay for medication. And even they had us to support them, in the end. So really, I have no idea of what Jesus’ listeners felt and heard when he told that story, just an intellectual guess. (We might say that about lots of our texts, so I am happy to say that this week is an even more tentative guess than most!)
Back to Janet’s question, Can we actually make sense out of this parable or should we just leave it alone? I think there are areas of Scripture, and this is one, where we have only the slightest emotional connection with the story, and a very tentative intellectual understanding. I also think my Indian friends who are suffering enormously under the injustice of Australia’s treatment of overseas students, which is immoral, and where the whole system is stacked against them, and exploits them, might read Linthicum’s explanation, or my summary of him, and feel rather differently. Maybe all we rich and comfortable folk can do is take the Janitorial position: God’s gonna win. You gotta serve somebody. Maybe I should just leave the parable alone.
On the other hand, I discovered that I have apparently avoided this reading for the last twenty years, because it is so hard! I conclude this because it was news to me that probably the manager did not get sacked after all. I’m not sure ignoring the hard bits is a good approach to the text.
(We're guessing here about the story, but it's a fair guess)
I’m also realizing that all the rumination I did on the parable yesterday, and again now, and in reflecting on the situation for the refugee members of my congregation, and the really poor people in my congregation, has been an enormous blessing to me. I’m glad of it. So yes, I suspect Janet is right. There is a sense that I need to leave it alone for the sermon. It’s a bit deep. But I can also see that reflection around what it means to serve somebody, and what God and mammon is, is at the centre of our faith.
As a parable to explore, rather than explain…
As a parable by which to be provoked, rather than a story to understand…
As a vehicle to spark compassion for those who are poor… this could be an invaluable story.
As the basis of a sermon though? Well, I’m maybe coming down on Janet’s side. Maybe on Sunday I should just play Bob Dylan’s song… you gotta serve somebody.
I can’t help putting this all alongside the other discussion on this group at the moment. In the discussion called “What difference does it make?” Janet said
What I fear will happen as we allow more and more lay ministers into ministry is that the scholarship required to become a "theologian" will go by the wayside. What I mean by that is this: we will teach pastoral care; Christian education; conflict resolution; OT and NT; liturgy (hopefully) maybe even ethics. What we will not teach is hermeneutics and Biblical scholarship..... So my "however" relates to the fact that I think fewer and fewer pastors learn or worry much about theology--about how we think and image God. And more and more I am becoming convinced that that single factor is critical to how people live their lives. As someone wrote to me yesterday, after the turmoil of the 60's, the churches returned to "traditional" teachings so as not to disturb their members....
I fully agree with Janet at this point.
I imagine the Janitor in my opening story was not a hardline conservative. He just living with what resources he had. The problem with that is that it very easily ends up, if you’re like me, being hardline and argumentative and, essentially, closed minded. Some people seem somehow congenitally secure and tolerant. But I need the multiple voices of seminary/college to give me the experience that Larry spoke about...that experience of being opened up.
And whatever our disposition, we all need to be taught to be more than technicians who deal with, and retell, a received interpretation of the tradition. We need to be able to think theologically.
I think that dragging “teaching to think theologically” back into the congregation from theological college would be a really good thing. It is the thinking theologically that lets us challenge the received interpretation of the tradition. And here is where I can’t leave the parable alone this week. Struggling with the parable, in some way, brings the work of theological college back to my congregation. It shares with them the privilege of thinking theologically which was denied me by so much of my conservative background. Struggling with the parable, and even deciding I don’t really understand it, is still freeing.
Andrew
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