Luke 16.1-13 23 September 2007
“YOU REALLY PULLED THAT ONE OUT OF THE FIRE”
I need to make a disclaimer before I begin. If you are a person always noble and godly and holy in your dealings with others, then today’s sermon is not for you. I’m sorry, but I don’t have anything to say to you this morning. At the same time, if you, like me, have had moments when you were less than just and generous toward others, listen up. For in Jesus’ parable, God meets us right where we live.
Let’s review the bidding on the parable of the dishonest manager. This manager, the key employee charged with caring for his master’s property, squanders all of his boss’s goods. No, the word Jesus used for what the manager does to his masters accrued wealth is wasted. This point man charged with protecting his master wasted away everything the guy had worked dutifully all of his life to save.
The master calls him on the carpet, catching up with his gross mismanagement. This rich man wants to know just how bad things are. So he asks for an accounting of his work before handing that manager his pink slip. This starts the wheels whirring in that manager’s little head. All of a sudden, his dire straits begin to dawn on him, “I am losing my job and need to find myself a soft landing.”
This manager is not an edifying character. Not only has he failed to make good on his charge, his lips betray his own laziness: “I’m not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg.” So he hatches a plan. He announces a crazed fire sale on his boss’s debts. One by one, he speaks to his master’s debtors, “You owe him 100 million, right? I’ll tell you what, make it 50 million and we’ll call it even.” He goes through the debtors cutting and slashing in a way that would have made Enron executives proud in the latter day stages of their shell-game shenanigans. But here’s the real shocker, friends. Jesus says that the master commended his manager for his shrewdness, he resourcefulness, for cleverly extricating himself.
What was Jesus thinking here? We school our children to be honest, then Jesus commends dishonesty? We discipline our children to be thrifty and hard-working then Jesus celebrates waste and laziness? Or was Luke dithering in writing this?
New Testament scholar and peanut farmer Clarence Jordan claimed that Jesus’ parables are like Trojan horses. They look great and promising on the outside, but let them in, and then---bam!—they’ve got you cold. You can only surrender.
And here’s the direction of surrender in this parable. Have you ever known some-one who did something that, in and of itself, is probably bad. But in their belated ingenuity of making an outstanding recovery, you shook you head in admiration.
Let me give you a personal example. When I was in 8th grade, John Canzano was my friend. Of course, in middle school even friends mercilessly go after each other. It’s the law of the jungle, right? One day John and were lighting into each other. He insulted my Germanic ancestry and I disparaged his Italian descent. During the break between classes, this spiraled, much to the amusement of the other students. He belittled me and I offered a stunning riposte—I can’t recall it. But John became so enraged at me, he grabbed the eraser at the blackboard. And he hurled it at me, standing by the doorway to the hall, as hard as he could.
I ducked and it sailed over my head. As I ducked, our English teacher Mrs. Keen chose just that moment at break’s end to step into the doorway, closing the door. I will never forget the sight of her closed eyes with that rectangular chalk mark on her forehead above her glasses. A puff of dust formed a halo around her head. The class collectively gasped. I slithered unscathed back to my seat. John was marched to the principal’s office and his dad was called into school for a summit.
Ever the English teacher, Mrs. Keen required John to write an essay on why he found it necessary to fling an eraser that ended up hitting her between the eyes. Not only was his father to see this essay, Nick Canzano was required to sign it. John wrote a long piece rhapsodizing about the wondrous contributions of Italy. And how crucial it was to protect his proud identity in the face of ignorant threats. His father, Italian-born, read the essay. Then he enthusiastically clapped him on the back, saying, “That’s good Johnny, well-done. I’m proud of you.” As John re-lated this, I said, “Wow! Nice recovery. You really pulled that one out of the fire.”
Maybe we can understand the parable. John was that dishonest manager who comes up with the ingenious idea. His father, rather than taking John down several notches for having done wrong, commends his ingenuity, “Well-done!” The parable is like this. But now you ask, what am I supposed to do with that?
Here is where the parable takes us, friends. You and I, we live in a world where God calls us to care for his creation and to know our lives as belonging to God. But is that we live? With our lives first for God, ever lifting up God’s claim on us? No, we fawn after unsavory celebrities. We waste money on frivolities rather than attend to life’s essentials, to the poor, to enduring goodness. We eat and drink a lot more than our bodies need. We get even with those who have wronged us. We are ungrateful and always want more. We lust after the spouses of others. We excel at, as the old prayer of confession, has it, “leaving undone those things we ought to have done, and doing those things we ought not to have done.”
We hear a sermon on Sunday morning. We go home thinking, “I’m going to mend my ways once and for all. I am not going to read gossip columns anymore. I am not going to be materialistic anymore. I am not going to over-consume anymore.” But no sooner does the sermon fade than we are back to our usual human tricks. The reformer Martin Luther once claimed that he was going to stop resolving to do better, because he never could, and it made him feel even worse for trying. Paul the Apostle once said, I don’t do the thing I want, but the very thing I hate. Jesus’ parable, you see, is really an intrusion of grace in this formula for despair.
Jesus proclaims God as the rich master who understands. That despite our weak resolves to do God’s will, and our lame attempts to do better, God is merciful. God understands this gray light of striving and falling short where we do so much living. And rather than mete out harder and harder spankings for our failings, God applauds our clever, creative and imaginative attempts at the good as humans. God will answer our ingenious little scraps of goodness amid the brokenness of our living with the words, “Nice recovery. You truly pulled that one out of the fire.”
You and I are not going to become Mother Theresa or Desmond Tutu tomorrow. God knows this. God has made some provision for the likes of us. To honor the mercy God demonstrates toward us, the parable says, it’s important not to give up. Do something, for goodness sake. Use your cleverness, your ingenuity. Make some step toward God, however small, and he may be strangely pleased. God may even magnify the ittsy bittsy teeny weeny gesture for good on your part.
It puts me in mind of the story of Millard Fuller, founder of Habitat for Humanity. He was always the enterprising sort. While still in law school at the University of Alabama, Fuller made his first million selling seed catalogs and birthday cakes to guilty parents who couldn’t visit their children at college. Viewed from the outside, Millard was a raging success. They had the houses, the farms, the cattle, the cars, the boats, all of the toys we are taught to crave. Viewed from the inside, his marriage was a hollow shell and he never saw his children. So absorbed was he in compromising principles and making money, he was a stranger within his own home. Leaving him, Linda went to NYC to visit the pastor of Broadway UCC.
Millard followed Linda up to New York and found her in a hotel. She couldn’t take it anymore. She couldn’t live that way anymore. Together they came up with an inspired, clever, imaginative idea. If money was making them so unhappy, let’s give it all away. That got her attention, what with all the broken promises and resolutions to do better that she’d heard in the past. And they did, they gave it all away—the houses, the farms, the cattle, the cars, the boats, everything but the clothes on their backs. Even in the midst of raising their children, again, they gave everything away. Millard writes, “We had gone too far down the wrong road to be able to correct our direction with a slight detour. We simply had to go back and start over again, but this time we would let God choose the road for us.”
They moved into an interracial farming community in Georgia, Koinonia Farms. Not long after, they hatched the idea for Habitat for Humanity, a crazy scheme by which God’s people in need could come to own a simple, decent, strong home. What does God say to the money-hungry, materialistic Millard Fuller according to today’s parable? Nice recovery, Millard. You really pulled that one out of the fire. God has a soft place in his heart for the imperfect willing to try again to do better.
Remember the movie Schindler’s List? What makes that film so interesting is that Oskar Schindler is not some plaster saint sacrificing everything to save the suf-fering and threatened in concentration camps. No, he has been making money hand over fist off these persecuted slaves. He has been complicit with the Nazis. But then he is struck by a sudden paroxysm of I-need-to-do-something-to-redeem-myself. I need to make a difference. Then he does it. Oskar Schindler is the shady manager in the parable. We want to say with that master, who is our merciful God, “Nice recovery, Oskar. You really pulled that one out of the fire.”
Friends, we live in a world that shrewdly calculates at every point, “What’s in it for me?” Despite our best intentions, we get caught up in that world. For our loyalty to such a world instead of trusting God, the Lord has every right to toss us aside and walk away. But that’s not our God’s nature. What do you think? Perhaps we can make the best of a bad situation by being shrewd and calculating for good rather than for further feathering our own nests. Even if we are not saints, we can know ourselves as unfaithful, forgiven stewards with eleventh hour attempts to do the will of God. We can still pull lives out of the fire, not the least, our own lives. Amen.
Lord Jesus, Creator of all, judge of all, we don’t enjoy taking such an honest look at ourselves as we have taken today. We would prefer to avoid the truth about our lives. We deal with reality by flying headlong into the packaged fantasies that are sold to us. We say we want to be near you, but we shrink from how com-pletely you own us, you miss us, you seek us, and you covet us from other gods. Yet you have made us and named us and remain determined to have us become the creatures that you intended in creating us. Go ahead, Lord Jesus. Keep after us, keep at us, keep from abandoning us to our own devices, despite ourselves.
We pray for all whose souls are in anguish feeling like they have squandered life.
We pray today for Dick Howland after an especially difficult week. We pray for Carlene Brown as she returns home following surgery and length rehabilitation.
