Sermons

The Masters We Serve

John Wilkinson                            Third Presbyterian Church
September 23, 2007                    Luke 16:1-13

Beverly Gaventa writes that this parable “has baffled interpreters since the beginning of time.”1 Thanks, Professor Gaventa! That’s not the most helpful thing I’ve ever read, but it is true.

Here is what seems to be happening in the story that Jesus tells: a rich man has it reported to him that his business manager is squandering his property – it is not clear whether it is embezzlement, mismanagement, incompetence, laziness or what. They have a meeting, and not a very pleasant meeting I would imagine, whereby the rich owner calls the manager to account and asks for a report.

The writing is on the wall, and so after the meeting, the manager realizes he needs a fallback strategy. He is about to be fired and yet he has no other marketable skills. He hatches a plan to throw himself on the mercy of his customers. He cuts their debts in half so that later, when he needs food and shelter, they will take him into their home. Pretty clever, you might think, with the cleverness outmatched only by a sense of desperation.

At this point, we are not sure precisely where Jesus is going with all this, but we certainly don’t think he is going where he ends up. Rather than condemning the manager for shady client dealings, he commends him, praises him, for his shrewdness. What looks like dishonesty to us is viewed as creative problem solving by Jesus.

So many questions: is this parable about the rich master or the shaky manager? When the customer debt is cut in half, does that eat into the owner’s profits or the salesperson’s commission? Is the owner extremely generous for praising the manager for his desperate attempt to make things right, or is he just not a very competent business owner?

Either way, the manager is engaged in some very intense efforts at self-preservation. He has no manual labor skills and he does not want to beg on the streets. And still we are not so clear.

“Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth” may be one of the most puzzling things Jesus ever said. Because what follows is may be the plainest and most direct thing he ever said: "Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth."

Fred Craddock cuts through some of this interpretation confusion with a simple declaration, one that may serve as our starting point, despite our own lack of clarity or discomfort with what Jesus says. Craddock writes that “How one handles property has eternal consequences.” “How one handles property has eternal consequences.2

Last week, we resonated with the parable of the lost sheep so deeply because it spoke so deeply to our life situation. All of us, at one point in our lives or another, have been lost. And all of us seek to live in the assurance that we will be found and brought home. And though today’s resonance is different, it is no less true.

Jesus told stories to his followers that would grab them. So we cannot imagine the audience saying “Jesus, you had us with the sheep story, but we can’t relate at all to the story of a rich boss and a dishonest manager. That one doesn’t quite work for us.”

On the contrary, which one of us has not been in a situation where the dynamics Jesus shares haven’t held true? As people of faith, we have been programmed to think of religious matters as either fully above the cares of the world or fully beyond them? Not so fast, Jesus says. The cares of the world are precisely where we are called to be. Remember: “how one handles property has eternal consequences.”

I have become a fan of the TV program called “The Office.” It may not be your cup of tea, and it is not for everyone all the time, particularly younger viewers. But whether the original British version, or the American one, “The Office” serves as a kind of secular parable about money and meaning. My favorite character is Jim, though I love them all. Even Dwight.

“The Office” reflects deep, poignant, comic truths about the way that work, and all that work suggests, creates opportunities for human confusion as well as human transformation. And Jesus, by telling us a story that connects with our experience, draws us in more deeply, rather than above, or away or beyond.

It has always mattered to us, and in the ways that theological traditions articulate themselves, it has mattered to we Presbyterians in unique and important ways. The story of Presbyterianism, beginning with the story of John Calvin, is the story of how theology lives in the real world. Calvin, more than any other Protestant reformer, drew us into the world and not away from it. “It is not our duty,” he wrote, “to flee to the desert and the wilderness.”

In Calvin’s Geneva, Ronald Wallace reminds us, a healthy commerce meant a healthy city. It is no different now. Taxes were necessary; over-taxation was a sin. The accumulation of financial resources was an acceptable reality, but Calvin again and again reminded the captains of industry of their obligation to those with lesser resources and particularly the poor. Wallace writes that for Calvin, “nothing in the commercial world could be lawful which was hurtful to other people… and he condemned all bargains in which the one party unrighteously strives to make gain by the loss of the other party.”3

But more to the point of the parable. “Honor, wealth and rank,” Calvin observed, are almost always accompanied by pride, so that it is difficult to subdue with a voluntary humility those who are filled with arrogance and scarcely acknowledge that they are (human).” While embracing all that a fair and regulated capitalism could do for ordering a chaotic society, Calvin understood clearly that when capitalism went off its rails, which would happen most easily when the pursuit of wealth became the end in itself, then a well-ordered society was in deep trouble.

He wrote a great deal about frugality and modesty, as values both for those with financial means and those without. One wonders what Calvin would say, for example, about the current controversy about excessive CEO compensation, sometimes several thousand times greater than the worker on the floor.

But mostly, in all of his theological considerations, and particularly in those around commerce, politics, money and work, writes William Bouwsma, Calvin was concerned about community. We are to use our power, including our economic power, for the common good, and primarily for those with great need.4 That means, for example, that issues that we deem to be primarily economic ones, or political ones, are at heart religious ones, and theological ones, and matters of faith.

And we must think that way, here, now. For us, when Bausch and Lomb is sold, when Kodak announces another round of layoffs, when Rochester leaders debate how to attract and retain businesses in the community, when we fret about how to keep young people in our communities, we need to understand that those are matters of faith as well as matters of business and politics. And we must bring our voices of faith to the table as conversations are happening.

How do we do that? Where do we begin? How do we make a difference? I do not want to sound overly Presbyterian at this point, but I believe that for us it must begin with study. Part of the study would be to remind us that we should be thinking about these things more than we are. Part of the study must have to do with our understanding the issues, their breadth and depth, that though we are not economic experts nor, many of us, business people, that we can understand enough to sit at the table. Part of the study must include how we respond communally, as a church. And part must consider each of our responses, as individual people of faith, personal but never private.

That is where the parable starts, speaking to each of us, though it presumes a communal hearing and a springboard beyond individual action into practice that impacts society, the lives of all of us. In this, as Reinhold Niebuhr suggests, we need to be as wise as we can. But we can be wise.

The philosopher Richard De George writes that we must explore a whole range of questions if we are to frame a faithful response. Business ethics, De George calls us. We might think business ethics to be a contradiction in terms, but it is not. Business ethics, and business ethics that have a distinctly theological flavor to them, or rather, the bringing to bear of what we believe to the practices that make the world go ‘round. De George insists that we ask questions about morality, about the common good, about the communal implications of wealth accumulation, about how theology makes a difference as we think about the business world.5

I am no economist, and I am certainly no business person. But I, like you, have faith commitments. And I, like you, am a consumer, am a citizen, am a participant, by what I do and don’t do, by what I buy and don’t buy, by what I choose and don’t choose. I am a lost sheep who wants to be found and brought home. And I am one who overhears Jesus’ next parable and realizes that the financial elements of the living of my life has religious consequences.

As followers of Christ and as heirs of people like John Calvin and Reinhold Niebuhr, we live in the in-between places. We live between the promise of grace and the reality of a fallen world. We live between the belief that our actions can make a difference but never so much of a difference that human shortcomings can be fully overcome. We do not live in a utopia, but we do live in a world where love matters, which glimpses of justice and mercy do have an impact in the halls and around the tables of power.

In a fine book called Beleaguered Rulers, William May writes of the changing world of the professional. Whether you are a lawyer, engineer, physician, corporate executive, your world is changing. Roles are changing. Rules are changing. You sit on a “wobbly throne,” May writes, and as much as I know some of your experiences, I know that to be true. The religious question for you, and therefore for us as members of this community, is how do you negotiate this new world with ethical integrity and a sense of commitment to the common good? How do you use the power you still have?

And how do we, as members of this community, support you in that quest? And how do we who are not business people, but who are very good friends with those who are – good enough friends that we would be friends in Christ – negotiate this new world as well?

We may not be rich owners or business managers, but Jesus speaks to us when he tells his stories. He speaks to us because we, all of us, in ways big and small, participate in the world God created. We are not called away. We are not called above. We are not called beyond. We are called, called in, deeper and deeper, into a world where money is a reality, and how we live with money has deep spiritual implications.

Words like “stewardship” and “vocation” are not theoretical. They are avenues through which we reflect what we believe. Every nickel, every dollar we spend, has theological implications and is an act of faith. Every time we go to work – work in our home, work as a volunteer, work in an office, has theological implications and is an act of faith.

We cannot serve more than one master. We know that. What we do with that knowledge is the stuff of which great stories are made. Great stories that make a difference. Amen.