Give and forgive
Thumbnail Photo by: Senior Airman Savannah L. Waters
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church
September 22, 2019—Proper 20A
Luke 16:1-9
Jesus has been spinning parable after parable, image after image, trying to teach us something about the kingdom of God, the household of God, the economy of God. Trying to shake us up about our money, about our social and financial transactions, about our mutual indebtedness and our inter-relatedness.
That’s a priority for Jesus: how we act with our money. How that affects our relationships with each other. He emphasizes it more than perhaps any other topic.
Apparently, what he has to say is unexpected, because the stories get weird. This one, for instance, has challenged scholars and believers for millennia now, because it resists straightforward interpretation. I think that’s the point: to get us puzzled. To stimulate our imaginations. Because we will need them. Need them, to enter into the question of how God’s economy, so precisely or radically presented in the Bible, can translate into our world.
How do those explicit commands to care for widow and orphan and alien translate? What about requirements for propertied individuals to leave the edges of their fields for the poor to glean? What about demands that the central political and religious authorities also care for the poor? What about the jubilee laws of periodic debt forgiveness, there to ensure that individuals not be ruined for a lifetime? What about Jesus telling us that every person in need is the second coming, is Jesus himself coming to us?
What does any of that look like, in our modern age? What does God’s economy have to tell us about how we are related to each other? How can we more meaningfully enact the generosity, sharing, and connectedness that the Bible expresses as the dream of God? How can we begin to imagine it into being?
Tom Brackett suggests we begin by looking at today’s gospel as a story told by Jesus in response to accusations that he’s too free with God’s blessings (Tom Brackett, http://day1.org/2196-jesus_the_rogue_rabbi). In which he makes it clear that the kingdom of God is scandalous by design! It will give things, it will forgive things, even when that horrifies people. Even when it seems WRONG.
In this, God (or Jesus) is not the master, but the unrighteous steward himself: giving away things that people think he has NO RIGHT to give away. But he’s doing it to build things up in heaven. Perhaps, to build the kingdom of heaven on earth.
Scandalous to the Pharisees, and therefore, scandalous to many of us. A challenge, as Brackett says, a challenge to ALL of us to accept the idea of Grace, of God’s scandalous generosity, of giving and forgiving that aren’t contingent upon deserving or fairness. That don’t look first and foremost to “who’s doing it right?” and “who’s doing it wrong?”
According to Jesus, THIS is what the kingdom looks like! This is what religious values really are!
But the only way to get this message about God out there is for us to do it too. We have to reflect this scandalous face of God into the world. We have to become what Brackett calls “rogue agents of God's radical and outrageous generosity” (ibid)
He lived that way … and he asked his disciples to live that way too! And those early Christians did it; or tried to anyway. Luke tells us (in Acts) they “held all things in common … and no-one considered what they had to be their own possession.”
It’s about money, yes. As I noted before, Jesus insisted that our relationship with money was key to the spiritual life. But part of why that’s true is that generosity and sharing in financial realms is so deeply connected to generosity and sharing in everything else. They reinforce each other, nurturing or strangling God’s household (God’s economy) as it seeks to take root within us.
So Jesus invites us into this roguish generosity in all that we do. To live like him. To live WITH him. “And” as my friend Susan Bock muses, “if we, his disciples today, dared to live it now, [perhaps] the Church would still be on fire, burning up the world with the power of its gospel instead of limping along, trying to survive.
“Jesus said, if you would follow me, you have to choose. It’s God or wealth. You have to choose. It’s treasure on earth or treasure in heaven. You have to choose. It’s love or fear. You have to choose. It’s faith and trust for today, or anxiety for some other day. You have to choose.
It’s open-hearted forgiveness, or small-hearted grudging resentment. You have to choose. It’s long-suffering with imperfect brothers and sisters, or a perpetual search for perfect humans in some other church. You have to choose. It’s the conviction that you are called to ministry, or the mistaken belief that someone else is called, someone else has the gifts. You have to choose.
It’s the true riches or the counterfeits. The abundant life only he can give, or the life of quiet desperation that most are willing to settle for.
You have to choose: Jesus? Or something else?
“And if you choose Jesus, if we choose him, truly choose him, it will change everything. It will change absolutely everything” (Susan Bock, “Unrighteous wealth and the Shrewd Manager,” sermon given for Proper 20C, 2004)
I think Susan is right when she says that this parable reminds us that we can’t live apart from the world and its currency of wealth and power. We have to live IN this world, but live in it differently. As though our hearts are fixed on a whole other reality.
To be a Christian is to live differently in every possible way: to live differently with your love. To live differently with your time. To live differently with your money.
Starting today, what can you do differently? What can you do here in the community, so differently that, small as it is, it changes us and we are entirely new? Forgive someone? Speak some truth? Take part in a ministry you’d never thought to join? Sit at a new table in coffee hour? Offer more of your money? Invite someone to dinner? Give yourself more fervently in prayer for the sick?
One small thing. Open your heart to one small thing, done so differently that, small as it is, it tilts the world toward God (ibid). A God whose very nature is giving and forgiving … lavishly … even rogueishly!
We have to choose. Jesus? Or something else? Heart on earth or heart in heaven? We have to choose. We get to choose. For the sake of the world, for the sake of his love, and for the sake of all his hope in us, may we today, and ever and always, choose him. Amen.