By Keith E Gatling Sermon
for September 20, 1998
Lessons
Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 20) - Year C
Amos 8:4-7
Psalm 113
1 Timothy 2:1-7
Luke 16:1-13
If
you’re a regular here, you’re probably aware of a certain running gag between
Anita and myself whenever we have to preach when Pastor Paul’s away. However,
for the benefit of those of you who don’t know the gag, I’ll bring you up to
date.
Basically, when it’s time to pick a weekend to
preach, I look at the assigned lessons first, and pick my preaching assignments
based on what I think I can do with those lessons. Anita, on the other hand, is
a little braver than I, picking her preaching assignments solely by the date.
So far she claims to have been burned twice and is now considering using my
technique, and ironically the two she thought were hard would’ve been easy ones
for me.
Well, there’s a third technique for picking
preaching assignments that we haven’t mentioned. It’s the “you’re the head
deacon, everyone else has picked their weekends, and this is what’s left”
method. And that’s how it came to pass that I got to preach on a bunch of
lessons that many pastors have a hard time with. One tends to wonder if Pastor
Paul knew these lessons were coming up when he planned to be away this weekend.
Now,
to be fair, most people would have absolutely no problem preaching on the Old
Testament lesson from Amos, about the rich cheating the poor, and most
listeners would have no problem understanding it.
Similarly, most people would have no problem
preaching on the New Testament lesson from Timothy, and most listeners would
have no problem understanding it…especially since the bit about praying for
leaders in government seems to be a hot topic lately.
The toughie. The one that people have a hard
time preaching on and understanding…and, of course, the one I’m going to preach
on…is the Gospel lesson from Luke. The one commonly known as the parable of the
dishonest steward.
Did
you notice the emphasis I put on the words “commonly known as?” Sort of like
“the alleged offender,” or “the accused assailant.” Each of those phrases
implies that things may not be all they seem. Especially when you look at it
almost 2000 years later from the vantage point of a different language and culture.
The problem many people have with this lesson
is that they see this steward who’s being fired for mishandling the masters
finances, and then both the master in the story and Jesus, who is telling the
story go and praise this guy for the way he handles things when he realizes
he’s about to be out of a job. We can’t believe that Jesus is actually praising
this guy for “cooking the books” and using him as an example of how we should
be. There must be something terribly wrong here.
And there is. What’s wrong is the understanding
many of us have of this story and what it’s saying. Let’s look carefully at it
for a minute. First of all, most translations say something along the lines of
“the steward was accused of wasting his master’s goods.” Any lawyers in the
house? Any teenagers in the house? What’s the key word in this? Accused.
It doesn’t say that he was actually guilty of, it said that he was accused, and
perhaps unjustly, of not doing his job well. And when you look at it that way,
the picture changes a little bit. You might figure that if the guy’s being
fired unjustly, it makes sense for the him to create his own little severance
package with the boss’s goods. And yet there’s still the problem of the boss
and Jesus praising him for doing this.
Well, let’s add something else to the equation
here. Did the steward stick it to the boss when he started giving everyone deep
discounts, or was he taking it out of his own commission as steward? The
answer to this question could change everything. If we go with our common
understanding that he was sticking it to the boss, we still have a problem. But
if we say that he was taking it out of his own commission, we can say that our
friend here was acting wisely, sacrificing short term gain for long term security.
That would be nice. That would be neat. That would take away all the moral
problems that this story presents. And…there’s a 50% chance that this
interpretation is wrong. So as much as we’d like to deal with the nice, neat,
clean version, let’s take a look at the old seedy version that we’re familiar
with, to see what it has to tell us.
What exactly is it that both the master and
Jesus are praising? Are they praising what we might see as the steward’s
dishonesty? No. What they are praising is this guy’s ability
to think on his feet, his shrewdness, the fact that he knew how to make the
best of a bad situation.
One can see where these actions might be proof
to the master that the accusations were false and that this guy really was
someone he wanted to keep around as a steward. But why was Jesus praise this?
The answer comes from a conversation I had with
Cheryl a few weeks ago.
I
forget what brought it up. Maybe it was a letter in Christianity Today or The
Lutheran lamenting the old news that evil people flourish while the
righteous are cut down like grass. If it wasn’t a letter or article in one of
those magazines, it was something pretty similar…the old complaint that “the
system” doesn’t work the way we think it should. The good should be rewarded
while the evil suffer, and not what seems to be the other way around. We want a
nice simple equation we can understand and deal with, and right now the results
aren’t fitting our expectations.
And this is because we’re stubbornly using the
wrong equation to try to solve the problem. Last year Marilyn VosSavant ran a
problem in her column about the chances of two different families having
different distributions of boys and girls. When she showed the correct answer
and how it was worked out, the mail started coming in from both supporters and
detractors, and it went on for months. It got particularly ugly when a person
from risk management at a nuclear power plant wrote in to agree with Marilyn’s
answer and her method, and someone wrote back later on saying that they were
going to send that person’s name into the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as
someone who had no business determining risk at power plants, because their
obviously poor math skills posed a threat to the rest of us.
What was going on here was that the people who
disagreed with Marilyn and the power plant person were people with basic math
skills who weren’t getting the fact that this was a probability and statistics
problem, that these problems need a whole different set of equations than most
things we’re used to dealing with, and that while the answers may seem
intuitively wrong, when you check them out against real world examples, they’re
dead on. These were people who were stubbornly using the wrong equation to
solve the problem.
And
so it is with us and the way the world works. There is an equation that
explains who gets what in this world. It’s also a very simple equation. But it’s
one that a lot of us aren’t going to like. You see, it’s not based on whether
or not you’re good, but instead on whether or not you’re smart.
Look around and you’ll see that except for
those who have been particularly lucky, those who have met with success,
whether evil or good, have by and large also been smart. Similarly, once again
making exception for those who have been particularly unlucky, you’ll see that
for the most part those who have not met with success, whether good or evil,
have not been so smart.
It is the being smart which both Jesus and
steward’s master praise. It is being smart in knowing how the world works that
is the point here. And Jesus notes that it is this knowledge and understanding
of how the world works that many of the children of light are lacking.
And the sad fact is that there are way too many
naive Christians out there. There are too many of us who believe that faith in
God is a substitute for acting wisely. Too many of us who don’t think before we
act, and expect God to protect us from the results of not thinking things
through. Too many of us who have traded in using our God-given brains not for
the child-like faith that Jesus says we should have, but for a childish
faith that expects all to go well for us because we are God’s. Jesus praises
the steward in the parable not for acting dishonestly, but for the smarts that
those actions showed.
A
few years ago the big news here was about how The Rescue Mission, along with
many other Christian schools and organizations got taken in by a pyramid scam
from the New Era Foundation. As I read more and more about this scam, it became
apparent how much of its ability to succeed was based on the simple naiveté of
the Christian organizations that were taken in by it. When approached by New
Era’s people about investing in the fund, no one thought about doing a little
background check because there was a long list of other Christian organizations
that had already signed up and done well. Surely these organizations wouldn’t
have signed up if there was any sign of fraud. And in fact, when a financial
person at one of the schools involved suggested doing a little checking around,
he was told not to bother for those exact reasons. It was only after he, at
great risk to his own job, decided to check things out anyway, that he found
out enough to alert the Federal authorities that something seemed amiss…which indeed
it was.
I suspect that a dishonest person, being
familiar with the aroma, would’ve smelled a rat a lot sooner. Even a relatively
honest, but slightly more “worldly” person would’ve thought that this deal
sounded too good to be true, and done a little investigation into it. But the
pattern was that Christian institution after Christian institution, after
hearing about this plan to double their money in a short amount of time through
this “Christian” investment scheme, fell for it hook, line, and sinker because
of their naive faith and lack of street smarts…a combination which New Era’s
backers knew to look for because it is all too common among us.
Jesus
seems to be saying here that your faith in him doesn’t require having to check
your brain at the door. I know this is good news to me, because I’ve seen far
too many churches that seem to require just that. I like the brain God gave me,
and I want to be able to use it. And I’ll admit that I may be reading too much
into it by suggesting that it also means that faith in him is not a substitute
for using the brains God gave you in the first place. It is perhaps even
possible to misplace your faith in God if you use it as an excuse to not do the
hard work yourself.
One
of my favorite stories about misplaced faith and not using a little common
sense involves a man who was caught in a flood. And as he stood on his front
porch watching the waters rise, a woman came by in a boat and offered him a
ride to safety.
“Oh no,” our friend said. “I have faith in God.
He’ll save me.” And so the boat rowed away.
A little later, standing in his second floor
window, our friend saw another boat come by with another offer of a ride to
safety.
Again, our friend said, “Oh no. I have faith in
God. He’ll save me.”
And so a little later we find our friend
standing on his roof when a helicopter comes by and drops him a ladder. And
again our friend says, “Oh no. I have faith in God. He’ll save me.”
Well, shortly after that the waters rose beyond
our friend’s ability to stay above them and he drowned. As he stood at the
gates of Heaven, St Peter could see that the guy was quite upset, so he asked
what the problem was, and our friend said, “I had faith that God would save me,
and he let me drown anyway.”
To this, St Peter, exasperated, said, “Well
good grief man. He sent you two boats and a helicopter. What more did you
want?”
What
is it about our faith in God that makes some of us so stupid? What is it about
our faith in God that makes some of us think that it’s all up to him and we
don’t have to do anything ourselves anymore? And what kind of witness to the
rest of the world is this?
Jesus expects us to use our brains. He expects
us to ask questions. He expects us to check things out. He expects us to be
able to think on our feet and make the best of a bad situation like the steward
in the parable did.
Jesus says that you can be his follower and use
your brain. This is good news to me and should be to you too. It tells you that
you’re expected to question to make sure that you’re following him
and not charlatan preying on “standard Christian weaknesses.” Not only that,
but you are expected to use your brain to help yourself and others, and to be a
witness to him by doing so, because I’m telling you, the last thing we need is
more stupid Christians.
God
gave you brains. Use them to his glory. Amen.
