George A. Mason 18 th Sunday after Pentecost Wilshire Baptist Church 18 September 2016 Dallas, Texas Enlightened Self-interest Luke 16:1-13

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1 George A. Mason 18 th Sunday after Pentecost Wilshire Baptist Church 18 September 2016 Dallas, Texas Enlightened Self-interest Luke 16:1-13 Preachers and scholars don t always agree a bit like pastors and parishioners, don t you know?! But we have long agreed that this story Jesus tells of the dishonest manager is the hardest parable. Now, it may be hard to apply to our lives, but many things Jesus tells us are hard in that way. Mark Twain once said: It ain t those parts of the Bible I don t understand that bother me, it s the parts I do understand. I think we can all agree with that. We re really good at modifying Jesus to take the edge off what he says like the part about selling all you have and giving it to the poor, or the part about loving your enemies and doing good to those who hate you, or the part about forgiving seventy times seven times. Yes, we understand what he s saying there, but we would rather not follow him all the way on those things. Tony Campolo, who teaches sociology at Eastern University in Philadelphia, spoke at the New Baptist Covenant summit in Atlanta this week. He recalled a day a father brought his collegegraduate son into his office and started blaming Campolo for his son s misuse of his college degree by working with the poor instead of making a decent living like any self-respecting middleclass kid should do with his American ambition. The father declared: Don t get me wrong, I m okay with Christianity up to a point. Yeah, we all have our point, don t we? The point beyond which we don t want to go with Jesus. That might also be true with this parable, but before we get there, just understanding the point is hard, period. For instance, if you treat it as an allegory and not a parable, where all its figures represent someone in the divine drama, it may seem that God is the rich man who will judge us for our bad stewardship and fire us off to hell for our sins, only to give us a break if we double down on our self-interested dishonesty. This seems like a bad example for the children. How are we going to teach good morals if we follow Jesus wisdom about selfish, conniving people getting

2 rewarded in the end? The first thing to say is that we should look for the forest in the trees, not the trees in the forest. That is, parables make one big point overall. And most commentators and preachers fall into two categories of interpretation on this parable: it s about forgiveness or money. If it s about forgiveness, the parable makes sense in that it follows the parable of the Prodigal Son. In both cases there came a time of reckoning for the sins of the central character. Both the prodigal son and the dishonest manager were trying to figure out a way to secure a welcome for themselves in some home after becoming aware that the jig was up on their profligate ways. In the Prodigal Son story, the forgiveness flows downward from the father to the son without any merit on the son s part, except his coming empty-handed and without excuse Just as I am without one plea, right? In the case of the dishonest steward, it flows upward, so to speak: his debts are forgiven only after he forgives the debts of his debtors. Sounds like the Lord s Prayer, doesn t it? Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. The point is that if we want to be welcomed by God into an eternal home in heaven someday, we d better get started now on earth by forgiving others, or we may not be forgiven ourselves. Okay, so there s something there, but also something troubling. Hold on and let s see what the second interpretation looks like. This view is all about the Benjamins, as they say. It s about money how we misuse it for evil and may reuse it for good. On the side of this view, Jesus does say something peculiar about using dishonest wealth to buy friends, whatever that means. And he does say at the end of the passage that we can t serve both God and mammon. What s more, the very next verse we didn t read has Luke telling us that the Pharisees were upset with Jesus teaching because they were lovers of money. On top of that, Jesus goes on to tell the parable of the rich fool a few verses later. (More on that next week.) So it could be that this parable should 2

3 be matched with that one instead of the Prodigal Son, which comes before it. If that s the case, we should read it as a warning against greed and lack of care about the poor and hungry. I remember that one of my preacher heroes, Cecil Sherman, used a passage like this to justify talking straight to people in the church about tithing. He said that how we handle our money is tied to our eternal salvation. Here s his line: I consider it my spiritual duty to deliver people from that which if held too tightly would send them straight to hell. Nice, huh? Maybe we could make up our budget deficit this morning if we just pass those plates again after the sermon. Ushers? But here s problem with that interpretation, and it s also one of the problems with the forgiveness angle: it turns salvation into something we do to earn God s acceptance. We may be scoundrels, but before it s too late, we ought to start making amends somehow whether by showing mercy to people or by giving away our money to good causes, so that God will be impressed with our sincerity and let us into heaven when we die. This isn t far off from the way the church functioned for centuries. In addition, for ages the Mafia has abused and terrified ordinary people, extorted small businesses and trafficked in criminal behavior of all kinds. Then they give dishonest wealth to the church in order to buy forgiveness. One writer said, For years many priests have been happy to allow the Mafia to dress themselves up as upstanding members of communities. 1 Even worse, it seems that the Vatican Bank has laundered money for the mob in order to enrich itself. No more. The unflappable Pope Francis has gone to Sicily, into the heart of Mafia influence, and made it clear that cheating the poor and mistreating the vulnerable would result in excommunication from the church. There will be no buying salvation through donation for those who practice extortion. We can say the same for payday lenders, who abuse the poor and 1 3

4 entrap them in debt. The same goes for politicians who take the money of these predators to buy legislative influence. It also applies to payday lenders who give ill-gotten gains to charity. Don t use Jesus to justify injustice. One payday lender, Phil Locke, who had started a small company named Cash Now, got out of the business a few years ago and became an informant, trying to reform the industry. He called his partners some of the greediest people he had ever known, so he sold most of his possessions and seemed to find religion. Most people didn t take his conversion seriously. They didn t believe he had really seen the light. And indeed he eventually went back into the business. He hadn t sold his stake in the business at all; he had transferred it to his mother. His wife missed the trappings of the life they had gotten accustomed to. And so had he. I gave it a shot just to see what I could do, Locke [said]. It didn t work out. I had to return home. 2 Here s the problem with that, according to Jesus: by returning home to a lifestyle built on mammon that always abuses others to enrich yourself, you will never enter into an eternal home. Judgment is coming. So if it s not about forgiveness or money per se, even if there are implications for both of those things, what is this parable about? Enlightened self-interest, I would say. I know when I use the word enlightened these days, it raises the cackles of some people because it s tied to a kind of arrogance of those who think they are more knowledgeable about things than those who cling to tradition. It s usually thought of as referring to so-called progressive educated elites who look down on conservatives they think are unthinking, prejudiced and backward. You can just about summarize one theme of our current presidential campaign that way. And it isn t hard for that sort of thinking to invade the church. I have been accused lately of 2 4

5 just such a spirit. And if I harbor it, I should be judged for it, because as the moral philosopher Immanuel Kant once said, Excess of light blinds, too. You can be blind because you won t come out of the darkness into the light, and you can be blind because you are looking straight into the sun. One side doesn t have a copyright on arrogance, though; and neither does one side have a purchase on humility. Progressives, even in the church, should embrace enduring things; and conservatives should remember that God is not finished shaping the world or the church into more equitable, just and merciful ways of living. Still, Jesus called on children of the light to be as shrewd in dealing with their own eternal interests as those of the world are in dealing with temporal interests. Self-interest doesn t have to be selfish. This is the key to understanding the parable. The phrase enlightened self-interest means that individuals or groups that act in the interest of others will turn out benefiting themselves by their generosity. Doing well can be rightly judged only by doing good. And that means doing good toward your neighbor. The problem with so much of our society these days is that we think we are in zero-sum culture wars. We think there s only so much freedom or prosperity to go around, so we have to get ours, regardless of what happens to our neighbors. Jesus parable teaches us to have a more enlightened, spiritual, communityoriented, neighbor-focused view of things. It s not for charitable reasons that you give to others whether forgiveness or money in order to impress God and secure your place in an eternal home. It s about living according to the rule of grace. That is the way God has designed the world in the first place, and it will be the only way the world to come will operate. The reason the rich man in the parable is pleased with the shrewd manager in the end is the same reason he is upset with him in the beginning: he doesn t value things the way everyone else in the 5

6 story does. The rich man wasn t concerned with how much was his; he was concerned with the injustice toward others that was being done in his name. He was angry that the manager didn t trust him to take good care of him, which led the man to cheat him by overcharging his customers. The customers paid only what they thought they owed, but they were being cheated, too. When the manager finally cuts their debts, he s realizing for the first time that he is a debtor along with them. Listen, my dear people: The church is secure only when we realize that the church doesn t belong to us; we are stewards of it only for a time. We all belong to God, and God wants us to count ourselves among the debtors who are saved by grace and grace alone. Kayla McClurg puts it this way: Instead of trying to prove how wronged we have been or how righteous we are, we can be like the manager and get busy using our talents in new ways. Jesus calls those who have benefited from the influence of the powerful to turn now to making friends among the least. Whatever we have, whether honorably or illicitly gained, we can use it to build up a new kind of community not achievers, but debtors all. Among the dismissed and the dispossessed, we will find our true home. 3 Only there, friends. Only there