En el nombre de Dios, creador, redentor, y santificador… In the name of God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. Amen.
Mother Theresa’s prayer pleads for the will and wisdom to be faithful stewards of all of the gifts given by God, and to answer God’s call for justice. It’s a call for an inward change - meekness of heart and a true realization of our privilege - that has an outward effect - strength to act to relieve the burden suffered by others.
Privilege is a special advantage granted to a specific group. That by itself is neutral. Believing we have the right to be privileged…and the right to have immunity from guilt for being privileged, is sin because it distorts our relationships with God and one another.
The sin of privilege creates a blindness in us. Over time, we can become focused primarily on ourselves and those who can help us maintain our privilege because we have come to believe that we deserve all of the good things we have.
The sin of privilege, and the disruption it wreaks, is all over our current news in quantities I haven’t seen before. The most surprising part for me is how acceptable and normalized this kind of selfishness and its concomitant cruelty have become.
Jesus speaks directly to this in today’s gospel. Known as the parable of the dishonest manager, this is considered a particularly tough teaching, and it is, but not because the parable is hard to understand. I think what’s hard about this parable is the fundamental truth it communicates.
A little background: In those days, managers earned their salary by adding fees to the debt they were collecting – a practice called usury, which was strictly prohibited by Jewish law (Deut 23:19-20). FYI… it’s exactly what banks and lenders do today.
The manager in the parable would have been hated because his wealth resulted from how successfully he could squeeze these fees out of the debtors from whom he was collecting. The rich man, the manager’s boss, says that some folks have told him the manager is being reckless and wasteful with his property, so the rich man demands an accounting, then fires him.
The manager begins to panic. I’m not strong enough to work, and I’m too proud to beg. So, he cooks up a plan to save himself. He visits each of the debtors and does a surprising thing – he reduces their debt.
Scholars say the actions of the manager can be interpreted a few ways. First, the manager is cheating the rich man in order to ingratiate himself to the debtors. He is, after all, dishonest. Establishing a good relationship with the debtors he’s been fleecing will create a community of people who trust and will support him when he needs it.
Second, maybe the manager is simply cutting out his own commission. While this would have a short-term financial impact on him, there would have been no impact on the rich man who wouldn’t even know about it unless the manager told him.
The third possibility is that the dishonest manager was actually repenting. Given his other actions and statements, that’s doubtful.
Jesus presses on with some very surprising and challenging statements such as, the “… master (supposedly God) commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly.” Wait - what?
Hang on - it gets worse. Jesus also says: “… 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.” Again, seriously?
By now, the disciples’ brains – and ours - are nearly exploding, but Jesus isn’t finished. “If then you have not been faithful with dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you true riches?”
Then comes the big finale - the difficult truth being communicated by Jesus: “No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”
This parable teaches us that the wealth offered by the world is dishonest. It lies to us. It makes us believe that we have control of our lives and the right to decide how things should work for others. It fools us into thinking that we deserve what we have. It also makes us think it will last forever… but it won’t.
Wealth comes and goes, and as the saying goes, you can’t take it with you. As disciples, however, we know that the gifts we’ve been given were meant to be shared with others as generously as God has shared them with us.
Jesus says we cannot serve God and wealth. We will either be disloyal (which is how the word "hate" translates from the Greek) to God and loyal to money; or we will devote ourselves to God and find that obsessive devotion to money is incompatible with that.
Please let me be clear – having money or power or influence is not the problem. Devoting ourselves completely to having more and more money, so much that we can’t spend it in our lifetime, while others are dying from famine, poverty, unemployment, or as casualties of war meant to feed even more power to the power hungry – that is a problem. In fact, it’s sin.
Threatening someone’s safety or solvency, denigrating persons or groups, and telling outright lies that twist and pervert the truth, and even worse connecting God’s name to that, in order to garner more influence, more money, or more power is sin because it a) violates about 8 of the 10 commandments and, b) distorts our relationships with God, others, and even ourselves.
This is what brought the prophet Jeremiah to joyless grief. His heart broke as the people of Judah looked away from God and toward promises made by earthly powers for their safety and sustenance. He watched as those earthly powers turned God into a tool they could use to coerce the people into cooperating with their dishonest schemes.
To be honest, I’ve shared Jeremiah’s exasperation and sadness a lot lately as I watch the news. This is clearly not a new problem.
That’s why Jesus offered this teaching and it’s why, I think, this parable is so tough. Jesus offers us a rare “either-or” choice: God or wealth. It can’t be both. This is hard for Episcopalians who much prefer “both-and” options.
We must choose: will we be devoted to God or wealth?
Like the people of Judah in the OT story, we live in a world where greed is good, and empathy is bad. We witness continual acquiescence to the ‘me-first,’ mob-boss style ethics of this world.
But we are called to co-create a new world where the mercy, community, and the interconnectedness of Jesus reigns. We act faithfully with the dishonest wealth of the world by building relationships here on earth that lead us all into the eternal presence of God, because, in the end, it isn’t us vs. them. It’s just us.
As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson once said, “We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically.” [As for] “…me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.”
Maybe we wouldn’t be surprised. We are, after all, Episcopal Christians, part of the world-wide Anglican communion, and that is our tradition. Those of you who are or have been in our Episcopal 101 class will recognize this, my favorite quote from Episcopal theologian Terry Holmes: “[Episcopalians] see ourselves as interconnected …To love God is to relieve the burden of all who suffer. The rest is a question of tactics.” (Holmes, What is Anglicanism?, 95)
Jesus confronted the dishonest systems of his time. He modeled how to welcome the stranger and how to treat those society labeled as sinners, outcasts, or in today’s parlance: vermin.
We do the same now through the ministries of the church, which will be on display in the parish hall after the 9:30 service. Ministry leadership will be available to explain the ministries and you can sign up on the spot if you like.
We will share a meal – one of Jesus’ favorite activities, then get to work… together, doing our part to relieve the burden of all who suffer. Amen.
