Sunday's Sermon: A Study in Irony

Below is the sermon for Sunday. Here's the irony (which I also mentioned in a footnote at the end, a practice which helps me remember to whom I am indebted for various thoughts and quotes) - I owe the entire second half of a sermon on forgiveness to someone else (Sarah Dylan Breuer is my hero today), and hopefully she will forgive my use of her brilliant analysis.

The confession of ignorance in part one, however, is entirely my own.

Peace to all for Sunday.

Dear friends in Christ, grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

If you’re anything like me, your first reaction to today’s parable can be summed up in one word: What? It sounds like Jesus is praising a guy who lied about his master’s income and went behind his back to try and save his own skin, and then you get to the part where Jesus says, “I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth,” which really doesn’t sound like much of a Jesus thing to say, and frankly, this is about the strangest parable we’ve ever heard. Which it is. It’s such an odd story that I think we ought to hear it again, but in a slightly different version. This is how the parable appears in The Message, a modern paraphrase of the bible:

Jesus said to his disciples, “There was once a rich man who had a manager. He got reports that the manager had been taking advantage of his position by running up huge personal expenses on his business account. So he called him into his office and said, “What’s this I hear about you? I want a complete audit of your books. And, by the way – you’re fired.”

The manager said to himself, “now what will I do? I’ve lost my job. I’m not strong enough to work in manual labor, and I’m too proud to beg. Wait: I’ve got a plan. Here’s what I’ll do…I’ll make sure that the people who owe money to my boss owe me a favor instead. I’ll become their best friend. Then, when I’m finally discovered and turned out into the streets, those people will welcome me into their homes.”

So he went at it. One by one, he called in the people who were in debt to his master. He said to the first, “how much do you owe him?” And the man replied, “a hundred jugs of olive oil.” The manager said, “Here; take your bill, quickly now, and cross out 100 and write 50.”

When the next debtor came in, the manager asked the same thing: “What do you owe?” And the man answered, “A hundred sacks of wheat.” “Okay,” said the manager, “take your bill, cross out 100, and write 80.”

Now here’s the surprise: when the master heard about this, he praised the manager! Why? Because he knew how to look after himself. Streetwise people are smarter in this regard than law-abiding citizens, because they’re on constant alert, looking for a new angle, surviving by their wits. I want you to be smart in the same way, but for what is right – by using every adversity to stimulate you to creative survival, to concentrate your attention on the bare essentials, so that you’ll really live, and not just get by on your good behavior. (1)

That version is a little more straightforward, but frankly, it still doesn’t take the edge off the story. No matter how you translate the words or mix them around, what you get in the end is still Jesus praising a dishonest person who saved his own skin by lying and survived it only because the master took the shocking action of not throwing him into jail. There’s no getting around it: this is a weird parable.

Most of the time we would all consider it my job to get up here and explain to you what this means. This is, after all, at least part of what you pay me to do: to read and research and think and research again, and finally to come to you on Sunday with some sort of meaningful, sensible explanation.

But we all run into parts of scripture which baffle us utterly, and I confess freely to you that this passage stumps me. I did find one particular writer whose take on this parable opened it up for me in a new way, and I am going to share that with you in a moment, but there is still something very important about the fact that scripture can sometimes puzzle us beyond belief. You can go along verse after verse, chapter after chapter, doing just fine – you read hard things from Jesus, certainly, but the hard part of them is often doing as he says, not understanding what it means. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is not hard to grasp. It’s just hard to put into action.

Perhaps Jesus tells a few of these particularly troubling parables just to remind us that we can never really get our hands or our minds around the whole complexity of God. Just when you think you’ve got it figured out, whatever “it” is – life, marriage, faith, politics, even a parable – it can slip out of your hands like sand, and suddenly you have to start over again. Catherine LaCugna, a theologian, once wrote, “We find God because we have been found by God. Anything we could find on our own would not be God.” A difficult parable like this one reminds us that we cannot find God on our own: sometimes we cannot even figure out a parable on our own. We cannot hold onto God for long, and too often we end up worshipping our ideas about God instead of the living, complex, mighty, vulnerable, merciful and extraordinary God about whom the scriptures can only begin to teach us.

But somehow, ending a sermon with the phrase, “I have no idea what this means,” didn’t seem all that satisfactory to me. So I share with you a very insightful word from Sarah Dylan Breuer, who writes a regular commentary on the lectionary passages. (2)

Here’s the problem that all readers of this parable must face: what the manager does is clearly dishonest. From a basic capitalist perspective, he’s guilty of embezzlement: he takes the landlord’s property as if it were his own and forgives debts that aren’t his to forgive. Even after he is fired, he keeps doing this even though it is, in no way, his job any longer.

"Think about that for a moment. What, exactly, is it that the manager does, even without authorization and with a great deal of deception?

He forgives. He forgives debts."

Let’s go back to the word originally used in the gospel for this man: the steward. He is the steward, the caretaker, of another person’s property. And he takes care of it by forgiving debts that do not belong to him. “He forgives things that he had no right to forgive. He forgives for all the wrong reasons: for personal gain, to compensate for past misconduct, to get ahead, to save his own skin. His motivations are poor, to say the least.” But in spite of that, in spite of the fact that he forgives for all the wrong reasons, in spite of the fact that he should rightfully have been thrown into jail for losing money that wasn’t his in the first place, the landlord forgives him. There it is again: totally inappropriate, wildly bizarre, and utterly unexpected…forgiveness.

This story appears only in the gospel of Luke. And it may be no accident that, when Luke tells the story of Jesus teaching us how to pray, he uses a very specific word in that prayer: “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive those in debt to us.” The Greek word Luke uses for “debt” is a word only used in monetary circles, a word that accountants would write down in column A: so Luke isn’t just talking about forgiving sins, or forgiving general wrongs done to us, but very specifically about forgiving financial debts. What that forgiveness might look like is the very subject of this parable, the moral of which seems to be: “Forgive. Forgive it all. Forgive it now. Forgive it for any reason you want, or for no reason at all.”

“Why forgive someone who’s sinned against us, or against our sense of what is right? You don’t have to do it out of love for the other person, if you don’t have that love quite yet. You could forgive them because you pray to do that every Sunday, and because you’d like to be forgiven yourself when the time comes. Or you could forgive because it’s really no fun to hang onto a grudge anyway, and you’ve learned that refusing to forgive because you don’t want the other person to benefit is like eating rat poison hoping that it will hurt the rat. You could forgive because you want to be in touch with Jesus’ power to forgive sinners and we want to be more like him. Or you could forgive because you think it will improve your chances of winning the lottery.

It boils down to the same thing: deluded or sane, ridiculous or wise, selfish or unselfish, there is no bad reason to forgive.” Forgiving debts of every kind – sins and wrongs and money and grudges and even ourselves – only puts us more in touch with God’s grace, and over time, that forgiveness itself will change you, no matter why you started doing it in the first place. There is no bad reason to forgive. In this case, your motivation doesn’t matter: you could even be a dishonest steward trying desperately to hang onto a job you’ve already lost and escaping jail by the skin of your teeth. You could be a man hanging on a cross, dying slowly and painfully, forgiving your executors with your last breath. You could be a mighty nation who decides to free the poorest of the poor by letting go of all your IOU’s and throwing them into the ocean.

Or you could be us, with all our mixed motivations, in all our confusion, knowing barely anything except this: that God has found us, and forgiven us, so that we can laugh all way to the kingdom, forgiving like it’s going out of style. It’s the first step in a life of stewardship, of moving our whole selves and everything we have into God’s way of life. When you forgive, you do not change the past. But you absolutely, no question about it, change the future. (3)

Amen.

Notes:
(1) I'm paraphrasing The Message. Paraphrasing a paraphrase. I'm paraparaphrasing. And also inventing my own words, apparently.
(2) All quotes that follow, unless otherwise noted, and the general gist of this interpretation are entirely thanks to Sarah Dylan Breuer at this post. To whom, ironically, I am deeply indebted.
(3) The last two sentences are a quote on forgiveness from Quotes for the Journey, Wisdom for the Way, by Gordon Jackson. NAV Press, 2000.