Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
Pentecost 17
September 23, 2007
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
Luke 16:1-13
Jesus said to the disciples, "There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. So he summoned him and said to him, `What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.' Then the manager said to himself, `What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.' So, summoning his master's debtors one by one, he asked the first, `How much do you owe my master?' He answered, `A hundred jugs of olive oil.' He said to him, `Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.' Then he asked another, `And how much do you owe?' He replied, `A hundred containers of wheat.' He said to him, `Take your bill and make it eighty.' And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.
Many people find what some call “the parable of the unjust steward” the most perplexing parable in the Gospel of Luke. So let me start by retelling the parable, explaining in more detail what might have been going on. (I’ll be drawing on comments by Biblical commentator Dylan Brewer who wrote her Master’s thesis on this parable.)
First, the background: A very rich man lives in a big city…he lives the high life, all made possible by the income from an estate he owns in the country. He's hired a manager, a steward, to run it. Peasants, tenant farmers whose grandparents might have owned the land but who lost it on account of their debts, do the real work on the land. These tenant farmers can’t get ahead because of the high cost of farming and the rent they pay to the landowner. And so they fall deeper and deeper into debt, falling into a kind of indentured servitude with the landowners.
As the parable begins, the rich landowner has heard rumors that the steward he’s hired has been squandering his money. So the landowner fires the steward. The steward is stunned and afraid in that he knows that after being discharged, the tenant farmers won’t take him given that he’s been the landowner’s representative, an overseer in an oppressive and unjust system.
So what does the steward do? He does something extraordinarily clever. He gathers all of the tenant farmers who owe the landowner money and declares that their debts have been reduced from the rough equivalent of a million dollars to something that they could possibly repay. This means that they and their families have a chance of being freed from their life of indentured servitude. The tenant farmers, then, are grateful to the landowner who they now believe is a generous man and to his representative, the steward.
And so when the landowner comes for his customary visit to pick up the money the steward has collected for him, he gets a surprise. The tenant farmers are celebrating his generosity! When he finds out what the steward has done, he has a choice to make. He can go outside to the tenant farmers and tell them that it’s all been a terrible mistake, or he can go outside and take credit for the steward's actions. If he does the latter, he'll have to take the steward back. And that, in our parable, is what he does. He takes the steward back and praises him for what he has done.
So that’s a little more comprehensive picture of what’s going on in this odd little parable. But what does it mean? Why is Luke’s Jesus telling it?
The steward in this parable, of course, does not fit our idea of someone worthy of praise, and yet the parable seems to suggest that some of what the steward does is connected to kingdom living—that is, is connected to behavior that gives us and others a taste of God’s gracious favor toward us and toward all humanity. And because what we’re looking at here is a parable, these kingdom behaviors are meant to come to us as listeners in the form of a jolt, a surprise, something that’s counter to our expectations.
I believe our dishonest steward gets us connected to two important and related kingdom behaviors.
The first is the ability to act even in the face of a personal catastrophe we may have invited upon ourselves. Remember, in the parable the steward is a part of a corrupt system and is personally corrupt within that system. Regardless of this, in the parable he acts, assuming he deserves a future, assuming that he is entitled to a life.
This, of course, runs counter to the belief that on account of our mistakes we don’t deserve a future, counter to the belief that because we’ve squandered something good that God has given us, that we don’t deserve anything more.
Not so for our dishonest steward. He takes in his situation and sets a course that attempts to create a life, that assumes he deserves a life. This kind of shrewdness as the rich landowner comes to call it, is the kind of response to life that our parable is proposing we embrace as we live out our own lives as God’s own.
And so what would it look like for you to move from an unholy and unhelpful sense of what you think you merely deserve, into God’s future, a future in which what you deserve is not the defining question, a future that belongs to a gracious God who asks you simply to move forward and to await what will be given to you there?
But there’s more in this parable, of course, more than just moving forward in the face of a catastrophe. For the specific action that the steward takes as a way to move into his future is crucial. And so the second important point about the unjust steward is that he forgives debts, and whether he intends this to happen or not, in this act of forgiveness, those forgiven gain a new freedom and the one doing the forgiving ends up saving his own skin. This it seems is how forgiveness works even in the most difficult situations.
The PBS program Religion and Ethics some years back devoted an entire program to forgiveness. One of the sad stories the commentator told during that program was the story of Steve and Maurine Young, a couple who had lost their son, Andrew, to a gang-related killing. Gang member Mario Ramos shot Andrew by mistake, thinking he was a rival gang member.
After Andrew’s murder, Steve and Maurine came undone. “If I could just walk into the kid's cell right now, I would just snap his neck in half.” Steve said.
Maurine was initially in the same place. but then she went on: “But I looked at my Bible and it just kept saying forgive your enemies. And I said, you know what, God? I know enough about you when you tell us we have to do something you not only give the command, but you give us the power to do it at the same time. So here I am. I give you my hate, my revenge. In return, I want your ability to forgive.”
And so Maurine wrote Mario a letter. This is what it said: “I don't know whether you would ever feel up to asking for my forgiveness for killing my son. So I'll go first. I forgive you.”
Some of Maurine’s relatives and neighbors thought she was crazy. How could a mother forgive her son's killer? But for Maurine the impulse to forgive her son’s killer was as much for herself as it was for her son’s killer. Incidentally, this is what some behavioral scientists are learning—that the difficult and painstaking task of forgiveness has a liberating and health-giving effect on the person who is doing the forgiving.
And so even after Maurine wrote her letter, she felt she had more work to do. She anguished, read the Bible and decided to go to see her son’s killer. “I wrote that letter,” she said, “and I wanted to go see him. It was one thing to put it in letter form. It is another thing to deliver forgiveness in person.”
A year and a half after the letter, Maurine visited Mario in prison. “The first time I met him he was trembling -- you know, crying and [finding it] hard to face me…I forgave him in my heart and I felt relieved, like I had just gotten out of jail or something.
Where do you hear yourself in this story? As the one who needs to forgive or the one who needs forgiveness?
Yesterday was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the Jewish New Year: a time when Jewish people recall their sins against God in the last year, repent of those sins and seek to begin a new year freed from them. Our strange little parable this morning, filled with so many who are not free—ungenerous landowners, shrewd stewards and indentured tenant farmers, seems to be telling us something this morning about the kind of new year God is always in the process of creating for us and with us. It is a future forever gracious and surprising—where we get more than we deserve and we free more than the ones whom we forgive.
Works Cited or Consulted
Dylan Brewer’s comments on the parable at
www.sarahlaughed.net/lectionary/2004/09/proper_20_year_.html
The Religion and Ethics program on forgiveness at
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week438/cover.html
