Homily for the Eighteenth
Sunday after Pentecost 18 September 2016
The Rev’d John R. Clarke, Rector
The Rev’d John R. Clarke, Rector
Luke 16:1-13 (Jesus
goes soft on crime. Sort of.)
“Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth.” Luke 16:9a
Contradicting all the press releases, all the
punditry, all the caught-in-the-random-act-of-kindness paparazzi shots … contradicting
all we know must be true for two millennia now, does the heart of a criminal
after all beat in Jesus’ breast? Because who but a criminal would boast, “Make friends
for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth”?
And our role model, according to Jesus? An embezzling
manager ─ a chief
operating officer ─ who bilks
his boss out of megabucks. And then, to cover his tracks post-audit, generates instant
assets by cutting a cents-on-the-dollar payback deal with his boss’s debtors.
So, in commending the embezzler, is Jesus channeling
street-smart and jagged-headed Bart Simpson, who famously said, “Inside every hardened
criminal beats the heart of a ten-year-old boy”?
In other words, do we finally learn the truth: that
inside Jesus ─
inside this too-good-to-be-true, goody-two-shoes Galilean ─ “beats the heart of a ten-year-old boy”?
Or is Jesus (wink, wink) just pulling our leg?
It depends on how much you know about “tricksters.”
They’re in a class of con-artistry all their own. Factoid: Stories about
tricksters enliven folklore from the Bible to Uncle Remus’s Br’er Rabbit to Stewie
on Family Guy.
Let’s take a quintessential trickster Jesus’
audience would be familiar with: the Bible’s Jacob. His dirty tricks? First, he
dupes his older twin Esau out of his inheritance. He then tops that scheme off
by cheating Esau out of their blind father’s blessing (a financially-beneficial
“favored son” status). How? By doing an impersonation of his impossibly butch brother.
No one can deny it: Jacob commits blatant fraud. But do
people condemn his duplicity? No, they channel their inner Bart Simpson: “Don’t
have a cow, man!” … because one takeaway from trickster Jacob’s rap sheet is: “In
a pinch, we should all be so clever.”
It’s like an actual trickster story that was making
the rounds in Jesus’ day. I’d be surprised if Jesus wasn’t familiar with it:
Once upon a time, there was a petty thief who was
caught red-handed. He’s tried, found guilty, and sentenced to be hanged. He’s “dead
man walking.”
On the way to the gallows, he tells his jailer that
he knows a secret. “I can place a magical pomegranate seed in the ground,” he
claims, “and through a secret taught to me by my sainted father (may he rest in
peace!), I can make the magical pomegranate seed grow and bear ripe fruit … overnight!
What a shame it would be for the secret to die with me. Before you hang me,
perhaps I should share it with the king.”
And so, the jailer passes word along to the king.
And with much ceremony the king and all his court process to the gallows. The condemned
man is waiting for them.
In front of them all, he digs a hole in the ground.
Then he holds up an ordinary pomegranate seed. “For the magic to work,” the
thief says, “this seed must be planted by someone who has never stolen anything
in his life. I’ve been caught red-handed, so obviously I can’t do it. Do I have
any volunteers? Anyone? Don’t be shy.”
Crickets.
He turns to the king’s chief of staff, who stutters:
“W-w-w-ell, once I committed a ‘youthful indiscretion.’ I kept something that
didn’t belong to me … quite by accident, of course.”
The thief turns to the king’s treasurer. His reaction?
“Well, you have to realize that I deal with money all the time. It’s only fair
to assume that in a moment of distraction, I may have entered some incorrect
figures into the balance sheet that may have benefited me in the long run …
quite by accident, of course.”
At last, it’s the king’s turn: “Well, uh, once, if
I recall correctly,” he clears his throat, “I ‘borrowed’ a teensy-weensy diamond-studded
necklace of my father’s. And, gosh, come to think of it, I guess I forgot to
return it … quite by accident, of course.”
The thief then addresses the whole court. “You ―
every one of you ― have all the money and power in the world you could possibly
want. And yet you can’t plant the magical pomegranate seed … while I ― who have
stolen a little because I was starving ― am to be hanged!”
This impresses the king. He rewards the thief’s cleverness by pardoning him.
So, is the Parable of the Dishonest Manager a “trickster
story”? In this case, does it accentuate the positives of cleverness … while it
papers over the crime of embezzlement?
That’s my take, because, like the thief in the
Story of the Magical Pomegranate Seed, the dishonest manager in the parable ―
who’s also in a pinch ― is rewarded for being clever.
Meaning: He’s cooked the books of his boss’s
distribution business and lined his own pockets with embezzled cash. The boss
catches him red-handed and is just about to kick his kiester to the curb. With the fat in the fire, what does the
manager do? He’s a trickster! He snatches job
security from the jaws of insolvency!
And he does that by exercising what we would today call
seychel. It’s in the trickster
job description. It’s Yiddish for ‘wisdom.’ But it’s more than that. It’s ingenuity,
creativity.
So, the dishonest manager-trickster goes into seychel mode.
He calls into his office the vendors who owe the
boss big time. He pulls up the records of their debts. But with a double-click
of his mouse [click-click!], the manager offers instant pay-now-or-weep later
discounts. Result? Instant cash for the boss.
To the vendor who owes major stocks of olive oil,
the trickster-manager says, “Now you owe only 50 percent.” To the one owing wheat,
80 percent.
50 percent … 80 percent. The numbers: arbitrary? …
or shrewd?
Answer: shrewd. Olive oil is a less stable
commodity than wheat. Basically, the wheeler-dealer is saying to the first
debtor, “If I have to wait to move 100 percent of the olive oil you owe, it
might spoil. What have you got on hand? 50 percent? 50 percent it is.”
To the second debtor: “Wheat. Stable, stores
better. No need to glut the market. Ship it in 24 hours, and I’ll give you a 20
percent discount.”
As Jesus says, the manager may be dishonest … but
he acts shrewdly.
And because the manager restructures their loans at
bargain-basement rates, the debtors are now indebted … to him! In fact, they’re
all quite chummy, in the “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” economy of
first-century Palestine.
How will this help?
The manager gambles on one thing: that when he’s fired
and his backside hits the
pavement, his new-found “friends” will reciprocate on the deals he cut them. And
they will then support him in the style to which he would like to become accustomed.
Now, perhaps I speak just for myself, but deep down
— on some level — I think we envy brazen tricksters like the dishonest manager.
We may not like them, but I mean, Bart Simpson! They pull off stunts we would
never dare, but daydream about.
We envy them because even if they lack morals, they
do have chutzpah! Take the boss. When
he finds out about the deals the dishonest manager has negotiated, he has to
give him credit: “Fellah, whatever else of mine you’ve got, you’ve got chutzpah!”
So, by praising the dishonest manager, is Jesus
making a virtue of dishonesty? No.
Is he making a virtue of the dishonest manager’s seychel — his turn-on-a-dime creativity
— and the unabashed gall to pull it off? Absolutely!
That’s because Jesus ― our boss ― would
like good reasons to give us credit for being as shrewd, quick, clever,
creative, and brazen about the crises threatening God’s kingdom as the dishonest
manager was in responding to his
crisis.
In other words, we’re in a pinch — we, the people
of God, and all our neighbors. And given what we could be doing ― now, we’re
doing a lot! ― but given what we could
be doing ― through our taxes, our gifts to this parish … through our deanery
and diocese … through our votes, and what we spend our time on ― we’re barely
chipping away at the things God sees as critically important, like:
People hurting, losing more and more of the little
they have and suffering at the hands of those who live by the market, and not
by the heart.
In other words, people being treated as commodities
and statistics, and not as our neighbors.
In light of all this, Jesus says, “Be like the dishonest
manager. Not in cheating, but in urgency. Switch into crisis management mode! Triage!”
… because life ─ as Jesus lived it ─ isn’t a “let come what may”
enterprise. It is about seychel: being shrewd and gutsy … using
use whatever we’ve got on hand now to pull the fat out of the fire for legions
of our neighbors-in-harm’s way.
That means: as long as there is one crisis anywhere
that puts God’s kingdom of each-being-neighbor-to-the-other in jeopardy … just
like the dishonest manager, we may as well all be caught red-handed.
And the only way out of that mess is raw …
no-holds-barred … step-up-to-the-plate once and for all … creativity-packed chutzpah.
Or, as trickster Bart Simpson would never in a gazillion years say to Homer,
“Go ahead, man, make my day. Have a cow!”
Amen.
