The Rev Josephine Robertson
All Saints Bellevue,
Sept 19th, 2022, Proper 20C
Amos 8:4-7, Luke 16:1-13
The more things change, as they say, the more they stay the same.
Amos is on fire today, calling out the way our society tramples on the vulnerable. How we will do anything to make a little more money, to get ahead, to do what we want to do. After all here we are, in the middle of a global pandemic and you wouldn’t know it from looking outside these doors. Since May, in the US an average of 3,000 people have died every week from COVID-19, in August alone 15,284 Americans died of COVID-19.
But you wouldn’t know it from the back to work push. From requirements that people work sick and contagious. From schools pretending it is still 2019. From a complete removal of mitigation strategies in our public places which have effectively turned our immunocompromised, elderly, and disabled neighbors into prisoners in their own homes. When I went to get my booster at the local pharmacy I found an elderly woman waiting who cried with relief when she saw my mask. Who was terrified as the only other masked person that she would die because she got boosted. Who hasn’t even been able to grocery shop since mandates went away. Because in our rush to normal we forgot about people like her, or honestly we never really cared. Disabled Americans have been forgotten and pushed out of view from long before COVID.
Climate change is reaching a critical tipping point. The latest data tells us to keep Earth habitable for us we need to peak our global carbon emissions by the end of this year. But even the most aggressive climate goals don’t peak those emissions until at least a decade from now. Meanwhile how many of us suffered from smoke this last week as a fire burned on the once wet Western slopes of the Cascades?
I feel Amos. We need his voice in our world, we need a lot of Amoses calling us out for our complacency, our greed, our lust for comfort.
And then we have 1st Timothy. Which tells us to pray for the powerful because really who doesn’t want a quiet and peaceable life? And whew. Jesus isn’t here for it folks. There’s a reason our lectionary committee put these lessons next to each other.
Just before Jesus’ strange teaching today in Luke (in Chapter 15) Jesus told a parable of another fellow who squandered what wasn’t entirely his: the prodigal son. That is a story with a satisfying beginning, middle, and end. Characters grow and develop and getting a nice Aesop’s fable meaning out of it is easy. Which makes is really different than this one.
In both there is a rich man.
In both there is someone who has been given charge of part (or all) of his wealth. The son has been given his inheritance (before his father dies, so it is still his fathers’ sort of) and the manager is in charge of the master’s estate. Both frankly, screw up.
The son realizes his mistake, and comes home ready to take his lumps. He is willing to accept the position of a servant in his father’s household. His father meets him with forgiveness and reconciliation.
The manager however does no such thing. He is confronted with his actions and he doubles down on his duplicity. He got in trouble for wasting his master’s resources. So now he wastes them even more, changing the debts of his wealthy neighbors and shorting the master who is firing him. And he doesn’t do it because of generosity, or as an act of repentance, he does it to get something out of it, he wants to lay a sort of honor debt on them that he can call in later. He wants to worm his way into their homes. (Greek: oikous)
And then Jesus has this inscrutable and weird saying about the children of this age and the children of light. And tells us to make friends by dishonest wealth so we can be welcomed into the eternal homes, but the word used there is not oikous. Nearly every translation out there renders the word here “homes.” The same as the parable just before. But it isn’t the same word. Jesus says “so you can be welcomed into the eternal tents.” (Greek: skenas)
And that is quite a difference.
A tent isn’t stable. It rather implies that you will be moving around, changing, traveling. The steward sought the stable home of one who has possessions, security, and place. He wanted normal. Jesus doesn’t promise that, his choice of words might even imply that to have that sort of stability/normality goes against the Kingdom his followers are meant to seek.
Jesus’ promise is the home of a refuge, a nomad, a wandering Aramean. He promises a life of change.
The steward got buddy buddy with the rich and powerful by doing them a sneaky favor on the side, in hopes of getting something out of them down the line. (Those debts he was making smaller were large, not something you’d lend to a person without means.)
What if the issue was what the manager wanted for himself (stability, certainty, and safety (sound like 1st Timothy))? What if instead he had scattered around that generosity without any thought of being repaid? What if it he called all the poor people who owed small amounts that were crushing them and canceled their debts (knowing they couldn’t pay him back)?
In the wilderness Israel ate the bread of angels, but when they tried to hoard that treasure for comfort it became moldy and rotten. Again and again throughout scripture we are shown that God’s gifts are meant to be held gently, given freely with no thought of return. Like Jesus’ instructions in Luke to invite the poor and the sick when throwing a party. Like his instructions to take for ourselves the lowest place, instead of the highest.
We live in a world of money and power, so did Jesus’ followers, and the churches for whom Luke wrote. There’s no way around that.
But Jesus wanted to be sure they understood what mattered.
Jesus wanted to be sure it was clear that we tend to have our priorities backward: seeking comfort for ourselves at the expense of others. In the end Jesus states it plainly: we cannot serve God and make the “normal” of our world our highest goal. The two are incompatible.
So much of the values of the Kingdom seem upside down to the modern Western world, even I’m afraid, to the church.
We are called to build a “normal” that protects the poor, the sick, the widow and orphan. To throw in our lot with those who have been forgotten and pushed aside, to confront the powerful, the wealthy, the corrupt in every way that they harm God’s children.
Our lectionary committee today did a wise thing, wedging our desire for comfort and ease, between two radical calls for anything but. So that we might see that impulse in our own hearts And hear the call to God’s way. Lest in hoarding and grasping the things we most desire turn to rot.