Honour is No Little Thing

Luke 16:1-13

Sometimes Jesus doesn’t make it easy for us. Today’s parable is often described as one of the more difficult of Jesus’ little stories. It is obtuse and confusing, asking us to accept Jesus as endorsing fraudulent and deceitful practice. If we interpret the master as God then we have a major issue, does God endorse such behaviour and how do we make sense of such. If we interpret this story from the worldview of capitalism we will be sympathetic to punishing the crooked manager?

Over the years we have witnessed many situations where people have acted in appropriately with other peoples money. The Global Financial Crisis is one alongside the collapse of a number of investment and banking institutions where one or more of the staff have acted to deceive others and to benefit from their actions. If you have had money as when you suffer great losses due to the actions of another.

So we may have sympathy with the Master and little for the manager. He deserves to be fired and get what is coming to him for his laziness, ineptitude and his decision to discount people’s debts just so he could gain favour when he finally loses his job. We have sympathy with a person who has been shamed by the actions of one he trusted for, as John Pettypoints out, “In the first century world, a person's wealth was connected to 'honour.' In fact, wealth was not necessarily an end in itself, but rather a means to get honour. Money could buy respect, or so it was thought. A person could be 'dishonoured' for any number of things, but two of them included having an unscrupulous servant, and taking back a gift."

Yet what was the manager to do? To lose his job meant facing the indignation of two dishonourable options - becoming a slave and digging roads or sitting on the side of the road and begging. His life was at an end. He had no more options, and unless he acted quickly and decisively he would be left homeless, penniless and without friends and family. So he gets creative, he demonstrates his business and strategic acumen by calling in his master’s debtors and giving them a gift – a discount on their debts.

Now as Petty points out, this was a very shrewd move by a very shrewd business man. He had won himself some very powerful friends, had placed his Master in the situation where he either accepted his manager’s decision or took back the gift given in his name. The latter would result in him losing face, customers, suppliers and more. He would become a man who could not be trusted and, possibly, join his manager on the scrap heap. So doing the only thing he can, he accepts his mangers decision.

Yet there is more to this story. Bernard Scott suggests that word “diaballein in 16:2 has the sense "accuse" in the sense of "falsely accuse, slander, lie about." So the manager has been innocent all along, but sees no way to prove his innocence other than by demonstrating what a shrewd operator he really is (and always has been).” (Jenks)

Gregory Jenks writes, “The master had originally dismissed the manager because he had [allegedly] squandered the master's property. Now he commends him for acting shrewdly -- the way a manager is supposed to act. If the master cannot repudiate the reductions in debt instituted by the manager without loss of face, do we have to imagine that the master let his dismissal stand or could he have taken the manager back?

In the social world of Palestine, where debt burdens reduced people to poverty and consigned many to slavery as a consequence, the master would not have been the object of public sympathy as Jesus' listeners first heard this tale.

In this parable the manager gets even with the master by appropriating the master's profit, which itself is morally suspect - for as we have seen no characters in this parable are innocent. Wrong has been done, lots of wrong on all sides.”

False accusations impact on the lives of all involved. How we speak about others, our initial reactions to a situation, our capacity to believe gossip and car park chatter have consequences. Speaking without knowing the full story can result in statements, which stain a persons life forever. In this case they not only threaten the future of the manager, but lead him into acting wrongly and inappropriately just to save his job and his lifestyle. They also have a habit of ensnaring those who believe such accusations. The Master finds himself trapped by the subsequent behaviour of a man who was at least initially, innocent.

State and church politics, run the risk of dredging up accusations which become a millstone around the neck of all involved. Self-interest drives such accusations yet we often find the people who start the process having to defend themselves from the same accusations. Our present debate about political campaign donations is a case in point.

Jesus makes the point, there is no such thing as a little dishonesty. You cannot be just a little pregnant, a white lie is a lie, dishonesty no matter how well intentioned is still dishonest and will have consequences.

It is also true that being trustworthy in small things translate into trustworthiness with bigger things, being trustworthy with others possessions means you may also be able to be trusted with things of your own.

How do we make sense of this parable in a time when the ego self dominates all decision making processes; where if it is right for me then it is right with out question; in a time where transparency in business, relationships and politics is in question. How do we survive spiritually and morally when we are asked to accept, participate in and turn a blind eye to false accusations, false practices and false premises at the foundations of our community life?

Jesus drops the bombshell - you can not serve money and God. If money was, in Jesus time, more than simply what it could buy and was the symbol of honour and respectability, the basis on which one built ones value and worth as a person then there is no room for the value and worth that comes from a covenantal relationship with God. Why? Because God seeks a compassion that includes not excludes, a compassion that is inclusive of all, a generosity using what one has to change the present and the future for others.

We are asked to give up our selves as the centre of the world and place our selves in the midst of others as an equal, living in harmony with God and others. As we found in last weeks Gospel honour in God’s economy is found in the opposite corner to where it is found in the economy of a shamed based society and in a self centred consumerist society such as ours.

We are called to be faithful to our experience of a compassionate God, a God who deals honestly and respectfully with us and whom we do not have to manipulate to retain our freedom. We are to live so others to can be free to become whom they already are with out manipulating God and man We are enough, there is enough and will find honour in enough. Amen

Who Feeds Us?

We live in a society built on the ideology of scarcity. What, you might think, is he talking about? Never has there been so much available to us, never has there been so many choices for us to consume. According to Choices Magazine there are more than 80 different brands and types of milk, some 23+ washing powders and over 14 coffee brands on your supermarket shelf.

In terms of banks, mortgage providers and finance brokers the choice is now much more than the big 4. Buying a car is a mire of maker choice and then, if you happen to find the make you want, there are up to a dozen or more choices of model and style. And I haven’t even thought of nail polish and hair colour!

Yet we live wedded to the ideology of scarcity. Enough is never enough to satisfy us. The issue, according to theologian Walter Brueggemann, is whether there is enough to go around - enough food, water, shelter, space. An ideology of scarcity says no, there’s not enough, so hold on to what you have.

An ideology of abundance is just the opposite and is often the ideology of those deemed the poorest in our society. Appearances notwithstanding, there is enough to go around, so long as each of us only takes what we need.

It has always interested me that when I spend time with families who are indeed poor, the willingness to share what little they have, to turn what seems to be a meager supply of food into a banquet of exquisite quality and quantity is overwhelming. There is always enough.

And food and table play a great part in the abundant life. Having grown up in an extensive extended family with 21 aunts and uncles and their partners and their children meant that family get togethers were massive in terms of numbers and catering. In my childhood none of these families were wealthy but the women involved knew how to make a little go along way and how to produce monumental feasting tables. We would all grab a chair and sit around a long series of trestle tables and eat until we could eat no more.

Conversation and laughter filled the air and where there had been conflict or difficulties they seemed to disappear in the convivial atmosphere. Family remained family despite what may have happened. The covenant was repaired and life moved on.

Isaiah 55 takes the prominent place of food and meals in the Bible as a tool for bonding and belonging, of remembering who you are and whom you belong to:
“Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. 2Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. 3Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David.”

The prophet invited the Israelites, living in exile in Babylon, to come to a lavish meal and receive renewal of covenantal blessings. Isaiah is warning against the very real danger that they would become obligated to or assimilated into the culture of their captors and present benefactors, and adapt to the bread of Babylon. Being assimilated into a foreign way of life and forgetting their roots. Brueggemman again, “Whoever feeds, owns.” Food, he says, comes with a price. “Eat royal bread and think royal thoughts. Eat royal bread and embrace royal thoughts.”

Isaiah reminded the Israelites that who fed them and what they ate were no small matter. Why should they continue with food that did not nourish? The Israelites were a people of different bread, another way, a bread that came as a gift.

In our modern world there are many who offer to feed us; the people we associate with, the ideologies we are exposed to, the pervading culture of consumerism, the idea that God is dead and there are now no rules, that we are special and the centre of our world and more. It is almost inevitable, say the realists, for us to abandon the Greek, Roman and Christian heritage on which western civilization was founded and simply run with the ‘I am god’ pack.

Charles Taylor suggest we have moved from a time and a society in which “belief in God is unchallenged and,…unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.”

Stanley Hauerwas agrees, ‘the situation we find ourselves in as Christians is at once a threat and an opportunity.’ He continues, and I agree, “For if you believe as I do that there is an inevitable tension between the church and world,then a world in which belief in God is unchallenged may be one in which Christians too readily assume that they can be at home in the world. So the world in which we find ourselves (today) may be one in which we recover the difference a Christian should make.”

The lack of concern for others, the lack of boundaries and moral assumptions in our children’s (and their parent) lives, the inappropriate behaviours of adults and children, the bullying which is rife across all ages and classes, and the simple mantra of ‘if I say it’s ok for me, it’s ok’, the personalism which rules thinking abroad; all challenge those who hold to the Christian ethos.

Thomas Merton, writing in the early-‘60’s, referred to that age as the post-christian age. I suspect we have moved deeper into this age for we are insatiate consumers of Babylon’s bread, even within those bodies and disciplines such as the church, education institutions, the body politic and the arts, previously critical commentators on Babylon and its ways.

In each Eucharistic service the invitation is given to come to a lavish meal, the well set table of Jesus’ body and blood where we renew the new covenant of love set in place by Jesus death and resurrection. We are reminded in this meal of our heritage, for it looks back to the Old Testament covenant God had with Israel, it takes us into the act of love which Jesus gave us in the New Testament covenant, and leads us forward into the eternal relationship we will share with all the saints who have gone before, in heaven.

At this table, just for a few moments we stand in the eternal space, touching the past present and future, and are reminded who feeds us. It is an ideology of abundance, not scarcity, there is sufficient for all our needs no matter how the circumstances and the voices of this world may suggest otherwise.

It is a theology of difference, for the body and blood of Jesus welcomes us into a new way of seeing the world and puts us firmly in the place of tension, the space-in-between this world and its appetites and the kingdom of God – there but not yet.

We are not fed by this world and we are called to remain true to the One who feeds us. That is the meaning of our dismissal from the table at the end of our service. We are reminded to ‘Go in peace to love and serve the Lord’, not Babylon.

Isaiah challenges the Israelites to return to the covenant table and be fed. We are challenged to do the same.