Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

The Rev. Rob Fisher

St. Dunstan’s, Carmel Valley

Readings: Jeremiah 8:18-9:1; Psalm 79:1-9; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

A wise person that I know, who is a priest in his eighties, recently told me that he has some advice that he has been offering to his friends.

He feels that it is really worthwhile advice, and he’s giving it to everybody he knows, including himself.

What advice is this?

It is just one word:

“Simplify!”

***

Most of us constantly set about finding ways of making our lives more complicated than they need to be.

And my friend advises that we all just give it a rest.  We ought to look for the path towards simplicity wherever we can.

It’s good advice.

And I wonder if this is an important part of what Jesus is saying in this morning’s parable.

Here we have a parable that spins us around.  Some scholars, including Rudolf Bultmann—claimed that this parable was “insoluble.”

Faithfulness and dishonesty become so closely intertwined we lose track of where the story is heading, of what is good and what is bad.  But then Jesus brings it all to a conclusion that is profoundly simple:

We cannot serve God and wealth.

***

We better unpack this a little bit.

The parable, first of all, is not necessarily “insoluble.”

The scholar Ken Bailey, who spent a great deal of time living and teaching in the Middle East, makes the observation that the dishonest manager was betting the farm on his plan, and he makes the case that it was not really a crazy plan, nor was it a completely dishonest use of his position.

According to Bailey, the manager’s dishonesty was faithful.

And here’s how:

The manager lightened the debt carried by his boss’s debtors.  This earned the rich man favor among those people, and hence was a great service.  Forgiving the debt was a loss in terms of what was owed to the rich man, but it was a gain in good will toward him.  It was risky and dishonest, but it apparently worked.

In the end, the master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly.

Jesus seems to be playing devil’s advocate here.

He says that we should be shrewd like this dishonest manager.  If we are, we will do well in the world.

To live in the world, we must be shrewd.  We have no choice but to complicate our lives to navigate the terrain.

But then he says that the children of light are not shrewd in this way.

Jesus is saying that there is more than this world.

***

The worldview of the dishonest manager, and his boss, and most of us, is a world starved for grace.

We live in fear of losing what little we hold in our grasp, rather than living in hope of the glories that cannot even be contained.

In this sense, the simpler route is the harder route for us, as we are children of this world.

Grace, by definition, is a free gift to us.  It is that which we have not bought, or traded for, or even earned.  It is freely given.  And the more we come to know the true and living God, the more we become aware that God is gracious.

Yes, we may not always get what we think we want, when we think we want it—but that should not blind us to the truth that we get gifts beyond what we could ever ask for or imagine.

The children of light, as Jesus says, are not shrewd.  The light which fills their eyes is a full and abiding awareness of God, and it follows that their lives are much more simple.  They are people of faith and trust.

***

I was struck by an interview I recently saw of the late William Sloane Coffin.  This was a man who had really lived an incredible life.  He was once a member of Skull and Bones at Yale, and then fought in World War II.  He served the CIA fighting Communism, and then returned to Yale to study theology at the Divinity School.  He became a pastor who spoke out for peace, and who worked closely with Martin Luther King.  After many years as the chaplain at Yale, he then became the senior pastor of Riverside Church in New York City.  In addition to these things, he was an expert on Russian literature and music, and a concert caliber master of classical piano.

So imagine old Bill Coffin, retired and living up in the country, in Vermont, spending time with his wife and his dog.

He had suffered a few strokes, which took from him the ability to walk or to play the piano at all.  His voice was still booming, but his words were severely slurred.

He was in the simple twilight of his life, and he accepted this.  (He said that he found it interesting, the more glorious nature becomes as you become closer to joining it.)

And here is one of the things he said about God:

“God is not too hard for us to believe.  God is too good for us to believe!  Especially as we are so far from such goodness.”

This is a simple truth, and it is what lies at the heart of Jesus’ parable.

God is not too hard for us to believe.  God is too good for us to believe.

***

If we cannot serve both God and wealth, then what will we serve?

We serve whatever builds up love.  We serve that which brings fairness.  We serve that which brings respect and dignity for all people.

And we discover, with amazement, that to give is to receive.

This is the cost of discipleship, to give and receive the grace which originates in God and is carried to us in Christ.  It frees us, but not without turning our world upside down.

It must have been a hard role for Jesus, as for all the prophets, to speak the truth that few were ready to accept.

A younger Coffin himself once said: “Every prophet has realized that nobody loves you for being the enemy of their illusions.”

Our illusion is that to receive is to get; to give is to lose.  But Jesus calls us into the world of grace, the Kingdom of God.

It is not a world dominated by shrewdness, but by the life-giving simplicity of love.

Amen.