Jeremiah 8:18–9:1, Psalm 79:1-9, 1 Timothy 2:1-7, Luke 16:1-13
I never wanted to be wealthy. I just wanted enough money to be comfortable, and to afford some pleasures and concerts and some eating-out and travel. When I was the pastor of a small church in Hoboken, my salary was low but so were our expenses. We lived for free in a big old parsonage, we got financial aid to send our kids to a progressive Christian school, and we rarely used our car. I had free time to do extra activities, like a housing ministry, ecumenical work, political activism, and the board of that school, for none of which did I get paid. But we always had just enough money.
One day I got a phone call from the HR director of our denomination (Al Poppen), and he said, “Daniel, I was reviewing your pension account, and at your current rate you will retire into poverty. My conscience tells me that you need to find a new church that can pay you a decent salary and build up your pension fund.” Oh! Suddenly we had to think about our long-term financial security, which means we had to think about gathering some wealth.
That’s the kind of wealth that the Lord Jesus has in mind in our gospel lesson. The word that he uses for wealth, mammon, doesn’t mean the riches of the rich but the moderate means of the ordinary middle class. Your savings, your equity, your pension plan, your security. Not your mansion but your coop apartment. And is the Lord Jesus saying that this is a problem? Yes, because of its grip on us.
Our gospel lesson is in two parts, in a literary structure that is typical to Luke. The first part is the parable, which Jesus probably used more often in his preaching, and the second part is a list of spin-off lines, that are the various “take-homes” that Jesus tailored to whatever audience he was addressing. The spin-off lines are punchy, sharp, and even alarming, while the parable is playful. It’s like an Aesop’s Fable, with a wily fox, or like Uncle Remus, with Bre’r Rabbit, who outwits his enemies, or even Bugs Bunny, who gets away with everything.
The rich man owns an estate, with sharecroppers on it, tenant farmers who pay their rent in kind. The master employs a manager to run things. He hears complaints that his manager is corrupt, so he calls him in. “What’s this about you? Hand over your records. You’re done.” The master is severe but more than fair—he gives the manager a break by not throwing him right in jail and giving time to gather his accounts.
The manager doesn’t deny the accusation or try to justify himself—he doesn’t waste his breath. The parable gets comic. “Now what am I gonna do? I could dig. Nah. I could beg. Nah.” Light bulb comes on. “I’ve got it. He wants the accounts, and the tenants don’t know yet that I’m fired. If I work fast they will owe me and be on my side.”
He goes to the tenants. “How much do you owe the master? 800 gallons of olive oil?” (That’s a preposterous amount of oil, but this is comic.) “Here, rewrite your contract and reduce it by half.” No problem, you’re the best!
“And you, how much?” 1000 bushels of wheat?” (An impossible amount of wheat.) “Quick, take off 200 bushels and keep them.” Hey thanks, I owe you one!
What’s the gambit here? The manager knows that his master is more than fair, and he’s betting that when the master finds out, he will not force the tenants to pay up for the manager’s misdeed. The manager calculates on the decency of the master, no matter how crooked he was himself. Calculating on his master’s character rather than justifying himself was the shrewdness commendable.
I can justify my middle-class wealth in terms of sound financial security. The Reformed Church pension plan is notoriously weak, and our health insurance plan is no better. I need to be prepared. The old assumption was that the pastor dedicated his life to the church, and then the church would take care of him and his wife.
My parents assumed that, and they retired with nothing, and they had to depend on the generosity of others for their housing (Al Poppen again), my dad had to work part-time into his 80's, and now my mom has her bills paid by Medicaid, which essentially is Welfare.
The assumption is over—retired ministers are on their own, so Melody and I thank you for the housing allowance from which we could buy an apartment and build up our equity, which no one begrudges us. But shall I try to justify our wealth? The increase in the equity in our apartment makes me complicit with the increased cost of housing that makes for homelessness in New York. My increase in equity is why we have to run our homeless shelter. I am complicit.
All of us are complicit. We enjoy the benefits of a global economy that increases both the wealth of the wealthy and the poverty of the poor, and is endangering the planet for our children. Do we waste our breath denying it, or defending it, or trying to justify our innocent share in it, or be more shrewd, like the manager?
Accept the judgment of Jesus that all of our wealth is ultimately unjust and unfair. Unequal. That’s a better translation than “dishonest” here. To say “dishonest” misses it. My moderate wealth is honest, but it’s also effectively unequal and unfair. The sober truth is that our moderate wealth is more unjust than anyone of us thinks it is. And because it isn’t right we do not have the right to it.
Accept the judgment and be shrewd. The trick is Our Lord’s strange advice that is the bridge from the parable to the spin-off lines: “Make friends for yourselves with your unfair wealth.” You have some wealth? Okay. You can still be the manager. Manage it but don’t kid yourself that you have the right to it, or that you’re not in bondage to it. You’re always more in bondage to it than you think, so be more generous with it than makes sense, which generosity loosens your bondage.
Shall we justify the endowment fund of this congregation? It’s tripled in the last fifteen years, thanks to honest, thrifty management by some of you, but also because of the stock market, which makes us complicit in our unfair economic system. Some of our endowment is old money, which means white privilege, a privilege denied to our sister congregations in Bedford-Stuyvesant and East New York. And yet I believe that our endowment helps to secure the future of our church, and it literally secures the loan for our renovation.
Our endowment is a blessing, but it’s also a temptation. It’s a temptation when we assume the right to it while there’s so much not right about it. We are tempted to put our security first and preserve our wealth which is to serve our wealth. But we can’t serve both God and our wealth. This temptation is faced by our Consistory every time we review our financial statements. Are we making friends for ourselves with our unfair wealth?
Here’s the take-home: Since we are always more in bondage to our wealth than we think, then always be more generous with it than makes sense. If we aren’t risking our security, then we are not yet generous enough.
You had to face that yourself when you made pledges for the renovation. You could have saved that money for your future. Why did you risk your own financial security? You were practicing the shrewdness of the manager. You went for welcome over security. You counted on God to be true to God’s own character, that God is more than fair, and faithful, and merciful, and the quality of God’s mercy is not strained, no matter how much you need God’s mercy.
Now let me turn this parable one more time for deeper down. If every parable that the Lord Jesus tells is ultimately about himself, then he’s both the master and the manager. He’s the master who expects you to be ethical, and to give an account of your life. He’s your Lord who holds you accountable for your accounting of your life. At the same time he is the crafty manager who comes to you and cancels for you your ethical debts to God. He is the wily fox in the fable, Bre’r Rabbit, Bugs Bunny, who beats the system and the penalty. He is that one mediator between God and humankind, himself human, who gave himself as a ransom to pay for you, and set you free.
And he welcomes you into his eternal homes. A better translation is “pavilions of the age,” the age to come. Pavilions of celebration, pavilions of feasting and joy. There’s all this extra olive oil, there’s all this extra bread.
So yes, the character of God that you count on is excess fairness, and mercy, and faithfulness, but if the goal is welcome and celebration, then the deepest character of God is more than generosity, it is abounding love, the love that says, “Come and share my joy with me.”
Copyright © 2019, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.
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