Trinity 14
Sermon preached by the Reverend Anna Matthews.
Recently I’ve been listening to a podcast series called British Scandal. It tells the stories of events from Edward VIII’s abdication to phone hacking, from Nick Leeson and the bringing down of Barings Bank to the Teesside canoe man and the Profumo affair. What many of the protagonists have in common is an attempt to escape the consequences of their situation. Rather than come clean, they engage in ever more desperate or elaborate ploys in order to stave off the reckoning they can see coming and the future they fear, whether that’s gambling ever more of the bank’s money in the case of Nick Leeson, or faking your own death in the case of John Darwin, the Teesside canoe man. There’s a period when they know the game is up but before they’re found out when they can act. And what’s striking is just how often the one thing that doesn’t seem to occur to them is to face reality. The game’s up, but they insist on one last throw of the dice, convinced it can come good.
The protagonist of today’s Gospel reading is also in a situation where the game’s up. We don’t know the exact circumstances, other than that he’s accused of squandering his master’s property. From the amounts mentioned that are owed by the debtors we learn that the master is a man of substantial wealth: the steward has been entrusted with large sums. We don’t know if he’s embezzled money, or undersold goods, or wasted money on frivolous projects, but we do know that the master has found out that he has not been honest in his dealings and has asked to see the accounts. The day of reckoning is coming, and in it the steward faces destitution: the loss of income and accommodation, of status and reputation. With no social safety net in existence he will be reduced to begging, or to menial manual labour. It’s a precipitous fall.
So the steward acts to save himself, as much as he can. He calls in his master’s debtors, one by one, and slashes what they owe. The debtors are now in his debt: he effectively creates a system of IOUs, in which the debtors are now obliged to repay him in some way – in this case by offering him hospitality when his master kicks him out. It’s more squandering of his master’s wealth – the debts he slashes reduce his profit – to secure some sort of a future for himself.
And the master commends him for his shrewdness. This man has a good business head, if by good we mean that he knows how to work the system to his advantage. Jesus doesn’t call him shrewd, though. Jesus calls him dishonest. He’s not commending him for what he’s done. But he does tell the disciples to make friends for themselves by means of dishonest wealth.
If this makes us uncomfortable it’s because we rightly sense a dissonance between these words and the rest of Jesus’ teaching. Which should encourage us to dig a little deeper than the assumption that Jesus is condoning shady dealings and dishonesty.
What he says is ‘the children of this 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 (mammon) so that when it is gone, they may welcome you in the eternal homes.’
In other words, if the ‘children of this age’ understand how the world works and use it to their benefit, why don’t the ‘children of light’ understand the ways of the world to come, the kingdom of God? How should they, who live in this world, act in such a way that their true home in the kingdom of God is revealed?
So if you serve God, not wealth, what difference does that make to the way you live? And in particular, what difference does that make to what you do with your money? Jesus counsels his disciples to ‘make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.’
Just like the dishonest steward, concern for the future will shape present actions. He made friends for himself through his use of wealth in order to be welcomed into earthly homes. What Jesus is telling his disciples to do is to use their wealth in such a way that they make the sorts of friendships that anticipate their heavenly home.
And as we know from what’s led up to this parable in Luke’s Gospel, our heavenly home is one that is shared with tax collectors and sinners, with siblings in faith who head off with their inheritance in entirely the opposite direction, determined to make their own way in the world, and are then welcomed back home with a party. In God’s home the invited guests are the poor, the blind, the lame, the maimed, the ones whose table manners leave something to be desired and the ones who don’t normally get invited anywhere.
What would using our resources, our wealth, to foster these sorts of friendships look like? Not using our wealth to gain influence or reputation, or to create relationships based on IOUs, but simply to use it in a way that anticipates God’s kingdom? That creates solidarity and mutuality with all those God wants in his heavenly home?
When Jesus goes on to say we can’t serve God and mammon, he isn’t saying just give away all your money – though that is his call to some. He’s not saying you can’t be rich and follow him, though as Luke’s Gospel makes very clear, it’s hard to be rich and follow him, because riches are very seductive. What he is saying is that these two masters will pull us in different directions. If we serve mammon, we will make decisions based on storing up our wealth: gaining more of it, avoiding giving it away, or dodging taxes. If we get a particularly bad case of mammonitis, we may start to think we deserve our wealth, and that those who haven’t got it are less than us. If we serve God, though, wealth takes a lower place, because we put it to God’s purposes.
Mammon dominated the steward’s thinking: it got him into trouble in the first place; it was what he resorted to to get him out of it when he needed to secure his future. Because he served mammon he couldn’t imagine it any other way. But for someone who serves God a different future might have been imaginable. It might have included a community that welcomed him, accepted him, helped him get his life back on track, enabled him to believe and to hope that there was more to who he was than a disgraced, dishonest steward.
As my podcast listening has taught me, scandal often worsens when the truth is something that can’t be faced and the consequences of what’s been done can’t be borne. So the bad decisions and actions pile up in an attempt to wrest a different future from the one that will bring it all to light. The steward’s actions in trying to secure his future after being found out may well have worked in the short term: he creates a lot of IOUs. But then what happens? Onto the next scheme, the next money-making opportunity, with the added reputational damage he drags around with him? For those who accept the invitation to live in the light of the scandal of the cross, though, we are offered a future we don’t deserve, and welcomed with a hospitality we can’t reciprocate. That future comes to meet you in me, says Jesus. Invest in that.