Note: This is a slightly altered and expanded version of my Sermoneutics column on the same passage, adapted for preaching in the Logsdon Seminary Colloquium at the South Texas School of Christian Studies.
Collect
Great God who owns the cattle on a
thousand hills, with prophetic urgency your Son calls us to radical inclusion
over righteous exclusion. Grant us grace to discount the debts that others owe
us, that we might find both from you and from them forgiveness of the debts we
owe.
Sermon
When
Adriana Baer took over as artistic director of Portland's Profile Theater, she
wasted no time: She boosted the troop's income so as to create a margin instead
of barely covering expenses; she produced a critically-acclaimed run of Athol
Fugard's "Road to Mecca;" she even had the chutzpah to ask the company's
founding director, whom she replaced, not to sit on the board of directors so
that she could have a free hand.
Then
word came down: Profile had lost the lease on its venue after fourteen years
and would soon have no place to perform. A thirty year-old woman in a racket
where donors and peers tend to be elderly males, an East Coast arriviste with
no ties to the local high society cliques, Baer found herself in need of a
miracle - or a friend.
She
found the latter (and perhaps the former) quickly enough. Baer had already initiated
weekly coffee klatches with Damaso Rodriguez, who ran the cross-town outfit,
Artists Repertory Theater. He agreed at once to rent her company space in his building
at the same price she'd been paying before. Rodriguez knew the riff: His former
troupe, Furious Theater, had once found themselves bounced from their own Los
Angeles digs in a similar scenario. The two producers agreed that in a day when
corporate cutbacks and a sinking economy make a pig's breakfast of charitable
giving, those who work in the arts cannot afford rivals, only allies.
That's
a little bit like what Jesus is getting at in the text we have read today,
which I like to call the Parable of the Crooked Bookkeeper.
The
probable situation here is that the boss had developed a work-around for Torah
prohibitions against charging interest. Instead, he lent in commodities rather
than cash, then Shylocked his debtors on the payback. The steward figures he can
slash the notes down to the principal and get away with it. His boss won't
complain: after all, if you cheat Bernie Madoff, he's not going to rat you out
to the SEC. His creditors, on the other hand, know better than to look this
particular gift horse in its highly suspicious mouth, and may figure that it's
cheaper for them to take him in instead of turn him in.
Now
note two things about the context of this parable: First, Jesus delivers it to
first-century Jews, all of whom, upon hearing about a "steward,"
would think immediately of the Sadducees and the Pharisees who, between them,
had cornered the market on God's blessings to Israel. Second, Luke locates this
story in the long section, peculiar to his Gospel, called the Journeyings to
Jerusalem (Lk 9.51-19.44), which will end with the Master's ritual destruction
of the temple (Lk 19.45-47) and his explanatory sermon describing the same
event. (Lk 21.10-38)
The
meaning of the parable now comes clear: Setting ethical niceties aside, Jesus
warns the local holiness brokers that God has just about had it with them. They've
jacked up the demands of the law with nosebleed interest charges that nobody
can meet and Moses never dreamed of. Soon, their Master will return and
eighty-six the lot of them from their base of operations in the temple. They
are about to join the ranks of the homeless! Their best bet would be to hold a
fire sale - slash the soaring inflation rates on righteousness and concentrate
instead on relationships. Judgment day draws near and none of them has the cash
reserves to pay off his sins. They can't afford the luxury of competition; they
must embrace the wisdom of collaboration.
And
the application fits all too well with a congregation of pastors and seminary
professors. Too often we view our privileged position as an invitation to audit
the accounts of our fellow-Christians. Done correctly, this kind of Bible
brokering empowers preachers to deliver righteous judgments against the
spiritual red ink in other peoples' account books. And any delusions I may
entertain that I have risen above my self-appointed position as a CPA -
Certified Pharisaic Accountant - disappears when I inevitably find myself
counting to make sure that the person ahead of me in the express lane at HEB
does, in fact, have ten items or fewer!
The
problem with this is that any surplus sanctification I possess comes from
creative accounting which embezzles a holiness that belongs to God alone. As
the English poet laureate John Betjemen as expressed it,
Not my
vegetarian dinner
Nor my
lime juice minus gin
Quite
can drown a faint conviction
That we may be born in sin.
Read
this way, the parable reaches its logical conclusion in verse nine: Adriana
Baer found shelter with Damaso Rodriguez because she befriended him before her
company became homeless. Rodriguez, in turn, lowered her rent because he saw
himself in her plight. The religious leaders of his own day, Jesus warns, will
find open doors in other people's homes only if they take the bold step of
throwing wide the doors of what should be a house of prayer for all nations.
And we, Luke perhaps hints by including the parable in his Gospel, will find a
place to flop in the Kingdom only if we open ourselves to some wildly inclusive
pew-surfing here and now.
"In
my Father's house," Jesus says, "are many rooms," (Jo 14.2 NIV)
but it may turn out that every room is a guest room and you can only stay if
someone else invites you. Thus forgiveness, showing grace to others, is not an
act of superhero holiness but simply the wisest way for believers to do
business.
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