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Just a few moments ago we prayed that God would grant us the grace "not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly," so that "even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away," we might "cleave to those that shall endure." I think of a number of people in the Bible who were anxious about earthly things. One was Job. In the early chapters of Job Satan makes a bet with God. Satan says that he bets that Job wouldn't be the good, God-fearing man he is if God were to take away from Job all the good things God had given him in his life. God accepts the wager and allows Satan to take away from Job all the good things of his life, and just a few chapters later we find a disheartened Job grieving over all his misfortunes. Although he is a righteous and upright man, he has nonetheless lost every earthly thing, all his possessions, his health, his family, even his reputation among his friends and his good standing in society. "Nobody can come out unscathed when confronted with God," complains Job, "so how can a mortal stand before God? How can I dispute my case? How can I dispute with the Maker of heaven and earth? How can I find words to argue with him? Even if I am innocent, God's mouth pronounces me perverse, and I can only plead with him for mercy. And he probably wouldn't even give me a hearing anyway, because he is strong and would crush me." "The fact is," continues Job, "I am innocent. I have lived a righteous life. But it makes no difference, because it's all the same with God. He destroys both the blameless and the wicked. He mocks the despair of those like me, who are innocent and who do not deserve to suffer." "If it isn't God who does this, then who is it? If you look around, you can see that everywhere justice and righteousness count for nothing, so God's not going to listen to my piddling petition and complaint. He has already found me guilty, so why should I struggle?" "If only there were someone to mediate between us, someone to lay his hand upon both of us, someone to remove God's rod from me, so that his terror would frighten me no more. Then I would speak up without fear of him!" Another person in the Bible who was anxious about earthly things was the prodigal son. He had demanded his share of his father's inheritance in hopes that it would bring him all the good things of life, along with independence from dad. But it failed him. He squandered it on a life of pleasure and debauchery. Just as Job lost all his wealth and his family, even his health, the prodigal son lost everything. Like Job, he found himself far from home and anxious and in despair. "I'm reduced to feeding pigs," he cried, "and I would even be willing to eat what they feed the pigs, but no one will let me have any of it. What am I to do now?" A third person who was anxious about earthly things was the dishonest manager in this morning's parable. This parable immediately follows the parable of the prodigal son in Luke's Gospel, and the manager's situation is similar to that of the prodigal son. The dishonest manager has squandered his master's money, just as the prodigal son had squandered his father's money - the same word is used in both parables - and the master calls him to account for it. Says he's going to fire him. Now it's the manager's turn for anxiety and despair. "What am I going to do now?" he asks, echoing the dilemma of Job and the prodigal son. "The jig is up! I can't work at an honest job of labor, because I'm not strong enough. I won't beg, because I would be too ashamed. What am I to do now?" All three - Job, the prodigal son, and the dishonest manager - have relied on earthly things, on money, on family, on reputation, even, in Job's case, on his own righteousness and the justice of his cause. But everything has failed them, and now they are anxious, even desperate. What is there to do now? Argue with God? That's useless. Beg? I won't stoop to that. Get another job? I'm not strong enough to dig ditches, and who would give me another office job after this? "I know what I'll do!" says the dishonest manager. "l'll change the books!" So he calls in his master's debtors, and he asks the first one, "How much do you own my master?" "A thousand dollars," the man replies. "Well, change that to read five hundred," says the manager. And to the second he asks, "How much do you owe my master?" "Fifteen hundred dollars," the man says. "Well, change yours to read eight hundred," says the manager. "If I do this for enough people," he says, "then when I'm fired and cannot work, there will be grateful people who will take me into their homes." "And the master praised the dishonest manager for his shrewdness," says Jesus, "for the children of this world are more astute in dealing with their kind than are the children of light. So I tell you this: use money, tainted as it is, to win you friends, and thus make sure that when money fails you, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings." This is one of the most difficult of all Jesus' sayings. Here is Jesus praising the dishonest manager for the way he used his intelligence in cooking his master's books in order to get out of his own desperate situation. Preachers have had trouble with this one for centuries. There are those who say that in a relationship with God, only the heart counts. But Jesus is not one who says that. Instead, he tells a story that praises a man who uses his shrewdness to get what he needs, a man as shrewd as the Israeli soldier who got the weekend pass he wanted. The soldier had been in the Israeli army only one week, but already he was sick of the long hours and the regimentation. So he asked his commanding officer for a leave. The officer laughed and said that the soldier could have a weekend pass on one condition: he had to capture a Syrian tank. Undaunted, the soldier leaves, and an hour later he returns driving a brand new Syrian tank. "I don't believe it!" the shocked officer said, running his hand along the barrel of the gun. "Well, a deal is a deal; the leave is yours. But first, you have to tell me how you did it." The soldier climbed down from the hatch and jumped to the ground. "It was simple," he said. "I drove my tank to the border, saw a Syrian soldier standing by his tank, and I asked him if he wanted a weekend pass. He said 'Sure.' So we swapped tanks." "Use money and the things of this world, tainted as they are, to win you friends, and thus make sure that when they fail you, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings." Notice that Jesus did not say if money fails you, but when it fails you. Money, mammon - the things of the world we are all so anxious about, even the very best things of earth that we are so proud of, things like reputation and position and righteousness and justice - all of them pass away. So what is it that endures? The parable of the dishonest manager is not about mammon. It's not even about the dishonest manager. It's not about earthly and transient things at all; it's about something heavenly and enduring. It's about God; it's another of Jesus' parables of grace. It follows immediately on the heels of the prodigal son, and the truth we find in the parable of the dishonest manager is the same truth we find in the prodigal son - the truth of the endurance of divine love and forgiveness in the face of human hopeless and indebtedness, even in the face of all the injustice and cooked books and tampered-with scales the prophet Amos talks about. St. Paul talks about it in his letter to Timothy, about how God wants everyone to be saved and to reach full knowledge of the truth, and about how God wants us to know that there is one who does mediate between God and man, one who does lays his hand on both God and us - Jesus the Christ, himself a man, a man who offered himself as a ransom for all. In today's parable the dishonest manager, you see, is a stand-in for Jesus. I know that sounds scandalous. But isn't cooking the heavenly books what Jesus does? Jesus uses the transient things of the earth, tainted though they are, to win friends for himself, so that when the earthly things fail, he and they will be welcomed into eternal dwellings. How else are we to understand the Incarnation? What is the Incarnation if it's not the Holy One's going slumming? What is the Incarnation if it's not God's coming into this world, tainted though it is, to cook the books of justice for us so that we might experience a salvation we have no right to expect? What else could it mean that Jesus became sin for us, as St. Paul says, in order that we might know the righteousness of God? It's absolutely scandalous. Whoever heard of a God who would do something like that? As Robert Capon observes, a God with any regard at all for his own standing in the God Union would throw the book at the dishonest manager and tell the prodigal son and all the rest of us to take a hike. But that's not what the God of the Bible does. Instead of throwing the book at us or telling us to get lost, he comes into this tainted world to walk with us in our troubles, to walk with us even in our desperation, in order to tell us the truth about God, which is that God himself has got his own thumb on the scales so that his love for us always tips them in our favor. In a TV program several years ago entitled, "In Search of the Trojan War," the commentator said that "in the archaeological record, love leaves no trace." We find traces only of civilizations, traces of buildings and pottery, a stone tablet here and there, traces of business records, traces of death. But in the archaeological record, we find no trace of love, he said. That's Job's line as well - that life is hopeless, that everything is futile. Not only does he find no trace of love in the ruins of his life, he doesn't even find any trace of justice. In all his earthly life Job had been fair in all his dealings with everyone, and yet, what did it matter? Because, in taking away all the good things of Job's life, God had dealt with him as if he were no different from all those unrighteous people the prophet Amos talks about, as if he were no different from those who trample the needy and skimp on the measure and boost the price and tamper with the scales. The record of history is, in fact, full of traces of injustice and cheating and hatred and war. "Look," says Amos, "The butcher's got his thumb on the scale." "But look," answers Job, "what difference does it make? In the end God treats us all alike anyway. In the end he destroys us all, just as he has destroyed me. If only there were someone to mediate between me and God, someone to remove God's rod from me so that its terror would frighten me no more. Then I would speak to him without fear." But Job is wrong, as he discovers in the end. In the archaeological record, love does leave a trace now and then. In 79 AD, for instance - about the time the New Testament was being written - a Roman town named Herculaneum was destroyed, along with Pompeii, by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. And not too long ago a large number of skeletons were found huddled under the ruins of the stone arches of an ancient wall in that city. Among them, frozen in time, was the skeleton of a mother bent over the skeleton of a child she had tried to protect, while holding a baby in her other arm. Nearby were the skeletons of a man and a woman clinging together, who died trying to shield a child between their bodies. Even in the archaeological record, love does leave its traces. And in the Biblical record, love leaves its traces as well. There are, to be sure, the traces injustice and violence in the Bible, as Amos says, the traces of crooked scales and broken chariots and crooked bodies and broken promises, traces of wind and fire, traces of earthquake and war and of the desperation of men and women and children. But Paul writes to Timothy to remind him that the historical record also leaves the traces of love, to remind him that the Cross is the trace of heavenly things, the trace of God's enduring love for us. And if we are anxious about the transient things of earth, then shrewdness, if not wisdom, would point us to that trace of enduring love where, on the Cross, we find Jesus the crook, Jesus the criminal, Jesus the One who uses his wits to cook the heavenly books to balance the Master's scales for us, Jesus the Christ, the One who, though he himself was righteous like Job, even equal to God himself, humbled himself to join us in our grief and pain and desperation, humbled himself even to join us in our unrighteousness, so that we might know the enduring truth - the enduring truth that God loves us where we are and as we are, and that in the end, in our desperation, in our deaths as well as in our lives, whether we are the just and righteous Job, or the squandering prodigal son, or the dishonest manager, God himself is with us, calling us home to himself. Oh, I can hear your objections! They fairly scream out through the silence. That way, you say, the dishonest steward gets off Scot free! Just like the prodigal son. That's right. But I'm not saying, any more than Jesus or Amos or Job is saying, that dishonesty is as good as honesty, or that squandering our inheritance is as good as faithful stewardship, or that injustice is as good as justice. I'm just saying what I believe Jesus is saying - that God is a God of grace, that being as just and righteous as Job is not what saves you, and that God's love is a balanced scale: God's love for the dishonest and the prodigal and the unjust is as great as his love for the honest and the faithful and the just. And before we object too loudly to such indiscriminate love on God's part, we might want to audit the books of our own lives. I'll do mine. You do yours. Would either your audit or mine reveal a truly righteous person like Job who can seriously argue that he has a claim on God, or would it reveal someone closer to the prodigal son or the dishonest manager? Some of us can use a crook like the dishonest manager, someone astute and shrewd about heavenly things, someone like Jesus. Squared off against a room full of indignant scribes and pharisees who demanded that he toe the line in matters of the law, Jesus reminded them that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, and he made friends with prostitutes and with white-collar crooks like Matthew who would just as soon rob you with a fountain pen as with a six-gun. And finally Jesus himself died, in the end himself a crook, with other criminals on either side. Thank God for that. Because a respectable God could never have loved and saved a crowd like us. He became one of us, and one with us, in order to save us. He said he came to settle up accounts between us and God, so we got all cleaned up, put on a coat and tie, and scrambled to the front pew at church in hopes of doctoring up our books before it was too late. But in the end Jesus was soft on sinners and criminals and disrupted the respectable social order. In the end, he was soft on the rich young man who was anxious about his wealth, soft on the woman caught in adultery who was anxious about her plight, soft on the criminal hanging next to him, even soft on the priests and the pharisees who were anxious about their own righteousness. In the end, he looked upon all our wheeling and dealing which had so neatly nailed him to the Cross, he looked upon us who deserved to be clobbered high and low for our crookedness, and he clobbered us, instead, with grace. "Father, forgive them," he said, "for they don't know what they're doing." And with this windfall in the bank, our anxiety about earthly things is turned toward the assurance of those heavenly things that endure, so that, if we are wise about heavenly things, the energy of our lives can be turned away from the fearful question of anxious desperation - "My God! What am I to do now?" - and toward the enduring question of love - "How do I want to respond to a heavenly bookkeeper like Jesus?" In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |