Switching Sides on Mammon

Luke 16:1-14
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My uncle Carl in the course of his working life was a farm manager for a couple of big family farm operations in Augusta and Rockbridge Counties, VA.  As my grandfather on my mother’s side had rheumatoid arthritis and couldn’t work, Carl, for a time was the chief provider for my mother’s family.  He was and remains a generous man. 

Being the farm manager could mean a lot of things depending on the size of the farm.  Uncle Carl likely didn’t handle the money.  I’m sure the people who actually owned the farms looked after that.  Mostly, he was responsible to make sure all the work got done, which meant looking after the other workers and/or doing it all himself.  He was the farmer tied to the farm while the actual farm owner was free to do something else.

It was customary where I come from for farm managers to be compensated with a stipend and a place to live.  Back in the day, it was not unheard of that if a farm manager worked faithfully for a family for years and years and got too old to work anymore, the family would let him and his family either continue to live on the farm or make sure he had a nice place to live out his days.  If you were faithful in the day-to-day things of running someone else’s farm, that someone else in the end would be faithful to you; and faithful my uncle was.  Now in his 80’s, he and my aunt have a nice home just off the estate of the farm where he worked many years and retired from and they want for nothing. 

Uncle Carl demonstrated the flip side of the coin with respect to the rhetorical question Jesus put to his disciples.  Jesus asked, “And if you are unfaithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own?”  Uncle Carl was faithful with what belonged to another and so now he has his own.  That’s how it is supposed to be in the world of honest work.  My uncle was not “in it for the money” so to speak.  He wasn’t serving Mammon.  He wasn’t one of those bent on pinching a nickel off of whomever however he could just so he could have a bunch of nickels.  He just loved to work, and loved to farm.  He and my aunt raised an outstanding family and the only word I can think to describe them is blessed.

Looking at his parable of the dishonest manager, I can definitely say, “My uncle, he was not.”  This guy was dishonest, greedy, and only in it for himself.  He didn’t a worker.  He was the business manager for a wealthy landowner.  Agriculture was not fair business back then.  It mostly amounted to a rich landowner growing richer and richer, while the farmer like my uncle grew poorer.  Sound familiar?

Here’s how it worked back then.  Agricultural land existed as massive tracts owned by a handful of wealthy people who rented out small plots for people to farm.  The agreement was usually that the landowner would let a set amount of land for a sizeable percentage of the yield.  It was also likely that the sharecropper would have to borrow money from the landowner to live on until the harvest came using the harvest as collateral.  Let’s just say that it was a situation where the landowner wasn’t going to lose any money on you.  It amounted to the farmer simply getting a place to live and barely enough to eat and always being in debt.  Sound familiar?  Substitute “the bank” for “the landowner” and we can say it ain’t changed much for middle income earners on down no matter the profession…and it is worse for people in the Third World.  That’s the way Mammon works. The rich get richer while the poor get poorer unless someone intervenes.

This dishonest manager in our parable was the one who collected the rent and the yield percentages and settled the debts…and he was dishonest.  We don’t know exactly what he was doing, but for sure he was sweetening his own coffee at the expense of the sharecroppers and using the authority of the landowner to do it.  Accusations were brought against him and so the landowner called him in and told him to turn over the ledgers because he was fired.  Knowing he was about to lose everything, he rather ingeniously cooked up a scheme: he would get the tenant farmers to “owe him one” by reducing the amount of debt they owed the landowner, which he likely had inflated so that he could skim it. 

Well, something odd happens.  The landowner commends the dishonest manager for his creativity in this matter.  In the world of mammon where making money is all that matters, this dishonest manager had done a brilliant thing.  He secured his basic necessities of room and board by getting the people he had been cheating to feel obligated to him for doing them the favour of getting their debt reduced.  Incidentally, this was the same thing he would have received from the landowner if he had faithfully administered the business for years and years and retired.  It’s a messed up deal like when those credit rating companies tell you that keeping your credit card paid off each month hurts your credit rating.  It actually does.  They say that paying your credit card off each month does not demonstrate that you can responsibly pay off a debt.  The world of Mammon is a messed up place.

This parable gets all the more confusing when Jesus then says to his disciples, “For the people of the world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of light. I tell you, use worldly wealth (or unrighteous mammon) to gain friends for yourself, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.”  It seems Jesus is telling his disciples to play the game of mammon, but be like Robin Hood with the proceeds.  Admittedly this is probably the most difficult parable Jesus ever taught and it would be nice to have him here to explain himself because he’s either encouraging financial dishonesty from us or he’s just dripping with sarcasm because he knows the Pharisees, “who are lovers of money”, are standing in the wings eavesdropping and he’s trying to tell them that they have been dishonest managers of everything God had entrusted to them.  From their teaching of the Law right down to their love of money they were squandering what God had entrusted to them.  They themselves appeared faithful and blessedly wealthy but they gained their status by means of spiritually and economically abusing God’s people especially the poor.  They were in fact serving Mammon, the god of wealth and image, and using the authority of the one true God to do it.

In my humble opinion, this very troubling parable and its main point that we cannot serve both God and Mammon fits very nicely into Jesus’ broader teachings on how we, his disciples, should handle money.  If we look at this parable through the lens of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel the lesson is for us to not store up treasures of earth, but rather to be generous with the wealth of resources God has entrusted to us and by our generosity store up treasures for ourselves in heaven. 

We are to switch sides in the game of wealth; switch from serving Mammon to actually serving God.  The Pharisees were using the things of God as a means to grow in worldly status, wealth, and power.  They were in it for themselves even though they dishonestly said they served God.  Like the dishonest manager appeared to switch loyalties by reducing the debt of the poor in the land, so Jesus invites us, his disciples, to really switch our loyalties from simply growing our own financial security to actually helping others.

Though the dishonest manager was dishonest and self-serving in all his motives when it came to money (and if we’re honest so are we), a glimpse of Kingdom of God values and its powerful reality of justice remarkably shone through when he, like Zacchaeus, gave wealth back to those he had cheated.  So also, Jesus calls us to keep our service to Mammon in check by disciplining ourselves to honest work for an honest wage and practising generosity.  If we find ourselves in the game of trying to grow our wealth on earth rather than in heaven, it is likely we have left the Kingdom of God to serve Mammon.  Amen.

Grace Celebrates

Luke 15:1-10

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When I was in seminary I was given the opportunity to preach at a federal corrections facility.  It was the most incredible worship experience I have ever had.  Those men were a light to the world. They worshipped. They all knew they were beloved children of God in Christ.  They all had felt new life given to them by the Holy Spirit; forgiven, accepted.  And so they lifted up their hands, jumped for joy, sang with tears in their eyes.  They celebrated.  I had been to charismatic services before, but their worship was beyond that.  That worship service was their freedom. 

Preaching there was incredible.  They were awake, leaning forward in their seats, and listening carefully wanting to learn and grow in Christ, wanting to hear a Word from or even just about their Lord who had shown them so much love and not withheld his presence them.  The preaching experience was very much like it is in an African-American church.  When I spoke they responded.  I literally had to pause at the end of every sentence for someone to say “Amen”, “Preach it, brother.” or “That’s right”.  The sermon that I wrote to last for 12 minutes took over 30 and it never felt long.

These men were from all walks of life.  In a way, they looked very much like a first century church.  There were no lines of division. They were African-American, White, Hispanic, young, old, rich, poor, educated, dropouts; but no women.  It was a men’s prison.  These men all had two things in common: a conviction for a crime and Jesus.  They were drug dealers, domestic abusers, sex offenders, thieves, murderers; you name it, they done it.  They all had accepted responsibility for what they had done.  They also accepted that even though God loved and had forgiven them, there was still time to do.  Living in prison is hard.  There are both hardened criminals and hardened guards and they don’t care whether you’re a Christian or not.  Yet, these men still walked the walked.  They did unto others as they would have had done to themselves, forgave as they had been forgiven, and loved as they had been loved, prayed together, studied the Bible together, and on Sunday they rejoiced.

There was such joy there.  That worship service is my image of what Jesus meant when he said, “there is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance” and “there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents”.  Each one of those men knew what it was to be a “lost sheep” or “lost coin”.  And more so, they knew that Jesus—that God—was the type of god who left the fold behind to come and find them; who searched all night by lamp light and swept the house clean to find them.  Such joy!

What about us?  What about yourselves?  Have you ever been lost?  It is likely we have had panicky experiences as children of being separated from our parents that we can remember.  Or, that bewildered feeling of being geographically turned around in a city or out in the country when you think your heading north only to be going further south.  There’s also being emotionally and spiritually lost.  Stuff happens – a diagnosis, an accident, a job ends, an addiction befalls you or someone you love – and your life is no longer your life and you spiral out of control into a dark place.  People watch you.  People talk about you but rarely to you.  You feel utterly alone…lost.

We have a cultural default belief when it comes to God and how or why we got lost.  It goes something like, “If I’m lost, then I took a wrong turn (sinned) and God (the Judge) is holding me accountable for it.”  It’s pretty black and white if you’re in prison and convicted of a crime.  You took a wrong turn and the God who punishes wrong doers is punishing you.  But – and hear me on this – if you spend some time talking with prisoners and hear their stories, in time you discover they suffered emotional, physical, and sexual abuse in the course of their formative years and patterns repeat themselves over generations.  Compassion, unconditional love, is needed to break those cycles, not punishment.

But then there’s being lost and where your wrong turn was is not so black and white.  You desperately preoccupy yourself with the question – the very heartfelt prayer – “What have I done to deserve this?” and honestly the answer is “Well, not anything that deserves this”.  What if you’re lost-ness is due to the wrong turns of others or there really was no wrong turn at all?  When that is the case you have to then find some way to reconcile how it is that God, who is supposed to be all-loving and just, is treating you like you’ve been wicked.  How can God in his great love be so unfair?  Many people stop believing in God at this point.

I think Jesus here in these two parables presents us with a different way of understanding God.  Instead of God being the Judge and we being the Sinners, God is the one who in love finds the lost and restores them.  God is the one who brings order out of chaos.  Look at the parables, God doesn’t ask the sheep or the coin what its wrong turn was or punish them once he found them.  He puts everything at risk to go and find the sheep and when he does he puts it on his shoulders and rejoices and celebrates.  He sweeps by lamplight until he finds the coin and he rejoices and celebrates.

Consider the parable of the lost sheep.  I’ve had brief moments where in the midst of a crowd of people I’ve lost track of one of my children.  That is scary, particularly in this day and age when kids don’t just get lost in the department store but often get taken.  I don’t want to imagine what it is like to lose a child.  Could it be that God in his love is desperately and personally and really searching for us in the midst of our lost-ness.  Could it be that God isn’t a Judge who gets angry at us for getting lost?  Could it be that God doesn’t regard us as “sinners” who deserve punishment?  Could it be that God rather sees us as little lost sheep who are quite vulnerable in a world full of danger and wants us safe?

Consider this parable of the lost coin.  The coin didn’t lose itself.  If anything, it was lost because of the woman’s carelessness.  Yet, this lost coin has value.  It was silver and worth about ten days worth of work.  Even if you were just earning minimum wage in Ontario, that coin would be worth over $1,100.  If I lost a coin worth that much, I lost would turn my house inside out looking for it.  I think it is safe to say that sometimes we are lost not because we took the wrong turn but because God lost us.  In God’s great scheme of things, he loses us.  Still, God desperately and personally and really searches for us and what joy it is when he finds us.  Sometimes, the only way some people in their lost-ness can be found is that God profoundly gives them the sense that reason they are lost is his fault and not their own.  But he finds them and he celebrates.  Notice the invitation there: “Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.”

To repent is to have a change of mind.  The word in Greek literally means “to become with-minded”.  To repent is to become “with-minded” with God in his plans and purposes and in the way he regards people.  It is to see the world and the people there in with the same compassion and patience and kindness and seriousness as God does and to act accordingly.  

Sometimes, in order to become “with-minded” with God requires changing what we believe about God.  Sometimes the things we believe about people can keep us from seeing a person for who they really are.  Unfortunately, we have a hangover from Medieval Catholicism in our tradition that defines repentance as turning away from one’s moral baseness and becoming a faithful church participant.  That understanding of repentance requires an image of God as being primarily the Judge who punishes the wicked.  Unfortunately, that image of God as Judge creates believers who look at others and say, “I’m thankful I’m not like that tax-collector.”  It creates believers who sit and grumble in judgment of Jesus for his keeping company with “sinners”. 

We need to repent of that image of God.  In fact, it is quite likely that the current dispute we are having in the PCC over human sexual identity could be more healthily dealt with if we repented of our belief that God is primarily a moral Judge.  What if we truly became “with-minded” with the God who is like a shepherd who risks everything to desperately search for his sheep that has wondered off into a world of danger?  What if we truly became “with-minded” with the God who is like a woman who frantically searches for the dearly valued coin she lost?  What if we became “with-minded” with the God who rejoices and celebrates when he finds us in our lost-ness.  Grace celebrates.  It does not judge and grumble.  I suspect that if we become “with-minded” with the God we see in Jesus, the God who welcomes sinners and eats with them, that we will rejoice like prisoners set free and people we least expect will come out for the celebration.  Amen.

Leave It!

Luke 14:25-33

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At my house on Friday nights we frequently have pizza and watch a movie.  Everybody gets a couple slices and goes to the living room and takes a place on a couch.  And poor Nellie, she just goes this glassy-eyed, bury-my-face-in-your-plate stare and she starts to walk up to your plate only to be rudely awakened by “Nellie!  Leave it!”  She will snap to for a moment but you can see in her eyes that she’s about to return to the zone.  That’s when we say, “Nellie!  Go!”  She gives a look reflecting just how unfair it all is and so we say “Hurry up!”  That’s when she comes out of the zone and walks around the coffee table only to come back and do it again.  The pattern repeats itself until we finally get frustrated and put her special collar on her, the shock collar. She suddenly becomes the best puppy in the world and goes and lies down.  We don’t even have to turn it on.  When she wears the collar, she knows her place.

The thing is, if it were not for the commands and the collar she would not be able to stop herself from thieving some pizza.  She gets obsessed with what she wants and believe me, when Nellie’s nose kicks in, the very order of the cosmic universe of our home is utterly disrupted until she is redirected.  To get her to leave behind the things that her baser instincts draws her to and obsesses her with is like trying to get a Zombie off brains.  So, Nellie must learn that if she wants to live peacefully in the company of her family, she must “Leave it!”

Nellie’s inability to get control of herself in certain situations where her basic instincts are involved may seem a petty illustration for what’s involved in being a disciple of Jesus but maybe it rings true.  Jesus says that we cannot be his disciples unless we leave behind everything we have.  Other translations use the word “possessions” in place of “everything you have” so that it reads, “So therefore, none of you can become my disciples if you do not leave behind all your possessions”.  The word in Greek that we’re working with literally means “the ruled-over things”, the things that we think we have rule over and yet they rule over us.  I like the word possessions here because of the latent wordplays there such as “Our possessions will soon enough possess us” or “Our possessions become our obsessions”.

Thinking about Nellie, when there’s food around her instincts kick in telling her she’s entitled to it and she loses herself in the pursuit of them.  Let’s say there’s a steak on the counter.  Her scavenger instincts kick in telling her it would be such pleasure and joy to have that steak.  Everything about her is saying to that steak, “oh baby, you are mine”, but it’s not hers to have.  It belongs to her humans.  Nellie cannot possess the steak apart from it being a grave wrong, but it certainly possesses everything about her to want it.

So I ask, how is this any different from us when it comes to possessions?  As a species on this planet we have long sought to curb our baser instincts with religion, morality, civil law, the protection of human rights, education, science, and so on and guess what, contrary to what the evening news thinks is news, humanity’s efforts to curb its baser instincts have resulted thus far in a world that is better to live in than it has ever been.  Even with the looming threats of WMD’s and environmental crisis, as a species we are safer, healthier, better educated, and more prosperous than we were even just fifty years ago. 

As a species we’ve done well, but when it comes to the individual of the species—to me, myself, and I—there is a problem.  As individuals, we will too often put “me” before my family and yours.  We will put “my” family before yours.  We will put “people like me” before people different than me.  We will make “my” nation great to the detriment of others.  When it comes to us as individuals, we have a baser instinct towards being self-serving that is detrimental to the species.

This is why Jesus told the crowd of people following him that they could not become his disciples unless they leave behind their possessions, the way he said it was more like “All of y’all cannot become my disciples unless each one leaves behind his own possessions.”  Just as there is no peace at pizza time at our house until Nellie complies to the “Leave it” command and goes and lies down, so also there will not be true peace on earth until all are disciples of Jesus and that won’t happen unless we each are willing to leave behind the things we think we rule over but really rule over us…our possessions.

Jesus has difficult things here to say about what we must leave behind if we want to be his disciple.  He begins with our family loyalties.  He says unless we hate our fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, spouses, and children, we cannot be his disciples.  Hate is a much stronger word to our ears than what Jesus means here.  He was not saying we must loathe our families and seek their harm, which is what hate means to us.  Rather, he means we must not let family members prevent us from being faithful to him.  Commitment to him must come first.

Jesus also says we must hate even our own lives.  We must not let our egos or dreams of success or pride or any of that self-motivation stuff come before him.  We must leave our self-identities behind and instead find our identity in him as his disciples.

Jesus says we must take up our crosses and follow him.  The cross Jesus is talking about here is not those personal challenges that we all have to bear.  The cross was the Rome’s preferred form of execution for those they saw as enemies of the empire.  Being Jesus’ disciples will involve walking a different walk than simply being good people who are good citizens.  As Jesus stood prophetically against the corrupted political and religious institutions of his day, so also must those who wish to be his disciples.  We can’t just vote for the candidates that we think are best for me and my family and think we’re being good disciples.  Good disciples look after the needs of the “least of these”.

Jesus tells a couple of parables about counting the cost of following him.  The first one involves building a tower for protecting one’s assets.  No one builds a tower without making sure they have enough resources to finish it.  It is foolish to spend everything you have on trying to protect your possessions.  In the end, there’s nothing left.  But, how many people sell off their dignity and enslave themselves to have life the way our materialistic and consumeristic culture says it should be and in the end really have no life at all.

The next parable involves a king counting the cost of a war.  If your army is outnumbered two-to-one, then there is no point going to war.  You will lose everything and there will be a lot of needless loss of life.  It is best for everybody involved for the king to seek the terms of peace and avoid the war.  Interestingly, the terms of peace will most likely involve loosing all of one’s possessions anyway, but you will still have life. 

Hidden in this parable is the message that if we want to have peace, God’s peace which he has given to the world in Christ, then we cannot also have a lifestyle that is obsessed with and possessed by possessions.  If we want to be Jesus’ disciples, the terms for peace are to walk away from our glassy-eyed, zombetic, Nellie-esc pursuits of possessing the good life, which is at heart driven by greed and covetousness, and fall in behind Jesus and take up his simpler, prophetic, cross-shaped way of life based in denying our selfish sense of self.  Put simply, we must “Leave it!”  Can we?  Amen.