How much do you owe?

Amos 8:4-7

Listen to this, you who devour the needy, annihilating the poor of the land, saying, “If only the new moon were over, so that we could sell grain; the sabbath, so that we could offer wheat for sale, using an ephor that is too small, and a shekel that is too big, tilling a dishonest scale, and selling grain refuse as brain! We will buy the poor for silver, the needy for a pair of sandals.” The LORD swears by the Pride of Jacob: “I will never forget any of their doings.”

Psalm 113

Refrain: The LORD lifts up the poor from the ashes.

Hallelujah. O servants of the LORD, give praise; 

praise the name of the LORD.

Let the name of the LORD be blessed

now and forever.

From east to west

the name of the LORD is praised.

The LORD is exalted above all nations;

His glory is above the heavens. R

Who is like the LORD our God,

who, enthroned on high,

sees what is below,

in heaven and on earth?

He raises the poor from the dust,

lifts up the needy from the refuse heap

to set them with the great,

with the great men of his people.

He sets the childless woman among her household

as a happy mother of children. Hallelujah! R

1 Timothy 2:1-7

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity. This is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself a ransom for all - this was attested at the right time. For this I was appointed a herald and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.

Luke 16:1-13

Then 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 bull and make it  eighty.’ And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of his 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. Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”

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Now, it’s easy to say this story really is all about money. And this time of year is typically when churches have their stewardship drives, taking account of the summer’s harvest and preparing for winter, looking forward to budgeting for ministry, considering which ministries are vital to the mission and which can faithfully be let go of. But I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. We tend to find ourselves in parables, and I have to say I found myself in that dishonest manager this week. I doubt many of us would want to be compared to such a character, but one way I tend to default to listening to a parable is to make the most powerful character into the stand-in for God. Usually somewhere along the way I end up discovering that, really, it’s the lowest character on the food chain who is the stand-in for Christ, but for starters, let’s look at this as though God is the rich man, the one with the power to fire and hire, the one with the authority to decide who owes how much and collect as such. Yet the manager who works for this rich one is deemed less than desirable, and has a sort of last minute, death-bed conversion, if you will. He uses the last week of his tenure to make fast friends, to lessen their loads, to use his employee benefits for the benefit of others in order that he has somebody to fall back on when he’s let go.

How does this feel like me? Well, I feel it in my office as pastor. It’s a position that carries more authority in some places than I am entirely comfortable with, and some historical abuses of that authority that I carry each time I wear the uniform, so to speak. Granted, that authority comes not from my Ordination, but from my baptism, so it’s not particular to a pastor, but still I see and hear many church leaders struggle with this sort of weight. It’s the weight of the law of the Lord. The righteousness of God. The grace and the judgment which come with assumptions about what it means to be Christian. So many, in particular many public televangelists and corner preachers, consider it our duty to overburden the world with demands of a certain kind of purity, a peculiar pressure to be separate from and somehow better than the world. I know you’ve heard it, those who claim that suffering happens because we deserve it somehow and our lives will be comfortable once we are “good enough” to earn God’s favor. And how often we assume these things about one another based on the labels we give one another: liberal, conservative, evangelical, atheist… 

This is what I mean about connecting with the dishonest manager. If the rich man is God, the dishonest manager seems to have the power to release people from their debts but only chooses to when it serves him. Forgiveness and acceptance of diversity is not something we Christians have a history of being very good with. In fact, in many ways our history is of hoarding that forgiveness until welcoming others who are different suits our needs to grow. It’s hard to consider how many times churches sit content to ignore their neighbors until it’s imperative that they do outreach so the doors can stay open. Our struggles are not with money, my friends. We know how to use money, how to spend and save and invest and plan. The way we budget our money is the way we live our values. But we have a far easier time putting our money where our mouths are than we do with actually sharing the forgiveness and grace that have been given to us.

See, even if we identify with the dishonest manager, even then we may be missing the point. Loving God more than we love money is not difficult because we are so wrapped up in paychecks and bills and the stress of maintaining or achieving a certain class level. Loving God more than we love money is difficult because we cannot see God, we cannot measure the effects of God, we cannot control the love and grace of God.

And that’s the point. Money is earned and given and spent and lost. Love is not. Money is fought over, and so are our ideas of the moment about who God loves, but who God loves is not up to us to decide. Love is not for sale. Grace is not budgeted out based on who has earned and who has borrowed how much. There is no interest rate on repayment for God’s creative and redeeming love for all the world.

Maybe what the dishonest manager failed to see was how rich his master was, how giving, how forgiving, how abundant. Maybe what he missed was the relationship with the rich man, and the relationship with his debtors. If the rich man is a stand-in for God, then it is all of our rules and expectations that get in the way, it is our middle-man work which stunts the growth of relationship between the rich man and the debtors. If we understand enough of how this world works to know that forgiving people their debts builds relationship, then why don’t we do more of it? Why wait until we are at the end of our rope to use forgiveness of others as a way to save ourselves?

Then again… then again, maybe we aren’t the manager. Maybe we are the debtors, who don’t really get much to say in this parable except to name what they owe to the manager. And if it’s that easy for the manager to reduce our debts, why didn’t he do so sooner? It’s enough to make anybody angry, despite the temporary relief of some debt. Even getting rid of half of my student loans would be enough to let me breathe easier, but if my interest rate can be cut to that which the banks pay, why hasn’t it been, and who decided to pay for their luxuries on the back of my education? Relief and grief and anger have to fit into the story if we are going to be honest about forgiveness coming that easily and being granted that stingily.

Money is easier to handle than forgiveness, when it comes down to it. And if we can’t handle a little thing like our money with trust and hope, how can we handle forgiveness and acceptance freely? How can we live in communities of economic injustice if we can not see the ways injustice harms the soul even more than the wallet? Love is costly, but we’re not talking about money. Money is only a small part of the picture. Love is deeper, more complicated, more lasting, more steady than any market investment, and it can’t be stashed away under the mattress for safekeeping. It shows up like pennies on the sidewalk, like nickels out of a jackpot at the slot machine, like those school fundraisers that will be going door to door soon selling candles or cookies or magazines. Money is so very temporary, so transient, so fleeting. Love, however, love that really matters, that kind of love sticks with you like a bad penny, it’s more difficult to run away from than the IRS.

This love is freely given to us. It’s what we are created for. This love will never let us go, it will never claim we aren’t good enough, it will never require us to earn it, and it will never leave us for a better deal somewhere else. The love of God is abundant, it is gigantic, it is eternal, it is priceless. It is love big enough for this world and every other conceivable world, many times over. It will never run out. The love of God does not depend on us, but it can move us. It can move us to speak up for the earth, as is happening with the Native American tribes protesting the North Dakota pipeline. It can move us to speak up for those who are presumed guilty before they have a chance to prove otherwise, as is happening with Black Lives Matter. It can move us to feed the hungry, as we do with the local food banks and weekly winter dinners. It is a love that moves through the world freely and without restrictions. May that love catch us up in freedom as we greet the days ahead.