the hardest parable

preached on October 8, 2017, Valley Presbyterian Church

This is a difficult messy time in history. Our world seems to be in constant crisis and the news each week is devastating. Here's a question: Who do you want to be in this time? When you look back at this season of history, how will you have wanted to show up?

Our text this morning enters our messy difficult moment in history with its own messy and confusing message. I have been asked a few times this week why I picked it. And honestly, I didn’t. It was in the line of Luke’s parable that we’re going through. But I didn’t want to skip it because if we just stick with the passages that are easy and inspirational, we get a faith that doesn’t know how to navigate hard and dark times. And we are in hard and dark times.

I invite you to listen and allow yourself to be baffled and mystified.

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.  2 So he summoned him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.’  3 Then the manager said to himself, ‘What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg.  4 I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’  5 So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’  6 He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’  7 Then he asked another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘A hundred containers of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill and make it eighty.’  8 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.  9 And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes. Luke 16:1-9

I grew up with what I like to call a white glove faith. The Word of God was contained in this book and it was perfect, glossy even. And so when you read it, you entered a different world – the world of perfection, the world of orderly arguments and a worldview that was coherent and clear and comforting in a world of chaos. I was taught to read the Bible as a lawyer, crafting arguments based on the bumper sticker logic of “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”

And then I went to seminary.

And I learned that the Bible was formed over thousands of years through political power struggles. Different factions added their layers into the text to suit their interpretive lens.

This was a crisis of faith for me who had been taught the Bible was always right and could guide us into right thinking.

Driving home from seminary one day, I can remember the spot, in Larkspur, along the harbor, I had a revelation. What if the sacredness of this text does not come from its perfection? What if the sacredness comes from its messiness?

I had a vision of walking out into the streets of some major developing world city like Cairo or Bangalore or Shanghai – there are people arguing in the markets, there is rampant poverty, the traffic is insane and the pollution heavy. This is the world of the Bible, not the squeaky clean library where you had to handle books with white gloves.

The Bible is a messy book and we live in a messy world, in case you were asleep this past week, and the weeks before that.

It would seem to be comforting if we could at least come to the Bible and find order and perfection, but that’s not how it works. Instead we find words that have been used as wars in political battles and stories told from a foreign perspective that we can’t understand. And I have come to find that as incredibly comforting.

Because out of these words and out of the political power struggles, we have Jesus, we have grace, we have a conversation that takes us beyond easy answers and platitudes. We have a messy book that guides us in a messy world.

So today we’re reading the parable that commentators have been avoiding for centuries and others have called “insoluble.” It is, indeed, messy.

Here is this guy who squanders his boss’s money. His boss fires him but before he lets go of the books, he goes around to his boss’s debtors and reduces their debt so that they’ll like him and they will possibly give him a job. The boss ends up admiring this guy’s street smarts. And so does Jesus.

This parable is so crazy and twisted. When the Roman Empire turned against Christians, this text was used as proof that Christians couldn’t be trusted – they would cheat you – after all, Jesus had told them to.

In our Bible studies this week, we struggled with this one because it goes against everything that we are told our faith and our basic ethical nature is about. This steward is dishonest and sneaky. He shortchanges his boss and tries to engender himself to others at the expense of another. He’s out for himself. And Jesus praises his wily ways.

Even the biblical writers couldn’t make sense of this text. They added a few verses to the end of it to try to wrap it up in a nice package with some words that warn against the love of money but they really don’t seem to fit. This guy did love money and it actually earned him praise. There’s no moralizing with this one.

We have to be honest – our Western idealism likes a squeaky clean hero. But remember the Bible doesn’t offer us squeaky clean. Jacob gained favor by tricking his father. David killed one of his best military officers to cover up the fact he had been sleeping with his wife. Peter, the pillar of the church’s foundation, denied Jesus at his darkest hour. And this dishonest manager is held up as an example of how to deal with our own generation.

I think the heart of this parable is in the admiration Jesus expresses for the “shrewdness” or wisdom of the manager. How he did it is not the point. Jesus is asking us to go beyond a white glove faith to one that can engage and thrive in a messy world. It goes along with his admonition to his disciples when he sent them out to be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves” in Matthew 10 or the multiple times we are told in the gospels to “Be Alert.” Don’t go to sleep.

We think our greatest danger is that we won’t be good enough when actually it may be that we will go to sleep. We will allow the values around us to become our values. We will allow the onslaught of violence and bad news to make us immune. We will anesthetize ourselves with privilege and quick fixes.

This parable truly lives up to the meaning of the word “parable”.  Para means alongside and balo means to throw. This parable is thrown alongside our assumptions about what is right and what is wrong and we have to move to catch it. We have to skew our gaze to see things a little differently. We have to let go of what we are so sure of to see the kingdom at work.

Being willing to see things differently and being a little wily is critical these days. Our 24 hour news cycle and our social media feeds want us to see things in black and white and want us to narrow our vision. Jesus is praising flexibility, street smarts, deep thinking.

Is this hard to understand? Yes! Does it keep you scratching your head and looking deeper? I hope so. The kind of faith Jesus invites us into is not one that rests with easy answers and platitudes. It looks at the murder and pain in Las Vegas and it grieves and aches for a different world and seeks the ways of peace. It stays with the loss in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean even when there’s no clear way forward. It faces the polarities in our politics with a determination to not make enemies but to stay with compassion and complexity.

The economics of grace do not make sense to us but they invite us to go deeper – deeper into our vulnerability, deeper into our spiritual practice, deeper into the messiness. Because it is there that grace meets us. God is in the mess with us. And when we can stay in that place, we move closer to the heart of God, we move closer to grace, we become that foolish wisdom that is our only hope in this messiness.

So let us stay in the mess with this questions: Who do you want to be in this time?

This messy text can offer us a way forward. A way of grace, a way of wisdom, a way of compassion. The way of Jesus.