Christian Century Lectionary Reflections
*I do these pretty often, whether it’s for Christian Century or Patheos. For the uninitiated, a “lectionary” is a set of texts that apply to a certain week. There’s a history to it and there are several different lectionaries*
ORDINARY 25C (PROPER 20C)
Required: Luke 16:1-13
Secondary: Amos 8:4-7
COLUMN
There’s a Chris Rock interview where he compares the career of standup comedians to musicians. The similarities are profound, and in many ways expected – after all, they are both performers. The role of practice in both vocations – public practice, in front of people – is paramount to growth in both fields. The major difference? Most comedians don’t “make it” until around age 35, which is when most musicians (especially rappers) are considered old.
The similarities between ministry and comedy are even more stark. You can be considered “too young” for ministry; you only become a better preacher by, well, preaching; both standup comedians and public theologians have to make persuasive arguments with confidence (i.e. “sell their material”). The last thing Chris Rock said made me think about Jesus. I’ll paraphrase: “The best (comics) can work multiple audiences in the same room. Sometimes you tell a joke and half the crowd won’t get it, but you didn’t do it for them. But everybody’s laughing.”
This may be the best way to approach the parable/sermon in the first part of Luke 16. It is, on the surface, a wildly ambiguous text, for a lot of reasons. There’s the parable itself (v. 1-8), where an already-dishonest manager performs more acts of questionable moral substance, and is praised by his boss who he just cheated. Here’s the moment where you expect Jesus to say, “Don’t do that.” (Because all parables are either “do this” or “don’t do this”, right?) But Jesus’ commentary (v. 8b) is basically, “Look how much smarter this guy is than you all.” Huh?
And then his ethical exhortation (v. 9) is to…use dishonest wealth? Make friends with dishonest people? Become like the dishonest manager? What’s going on here?
And then v. 10-13 seems to be Jesus quoting older Jewish sayings, one of which says (NRSV) to be faithful with dishonest wealth. This can’t be right!
These parables about money are tricky, and less careful readings of them have been used to support anti-Semitic values. But it’s not that money-hating socialist Jesus is encouraging his disciples to defeat the system (in Malcolm X’s words) “by any means necessary”, even if it includes dishonesty. Despite the common pairing of this text with Matthew 10’s “wise as serpents, innocent as doves”, Jesus saying, “do what you gotta do” here would be inconsistent with almost every other part of the Gospel.
Might I make another suggestion, then? He’s talking to two different audiences.
For the parable, he is talking to the disciples, but the crowd is full of (in Luke 15’s words) tax collectors, sinners, and Pharisees. This was a “sermon series” of sorts about money, and doing right with it, and getting a second chance to do right when you haven’t. Read this, or imagine hearing it right after the Prodigal Son parable, and it makes a lot more sense. He talks to the Pharisees, pauses, talks to his disciples, and in v. 9 talks back to the Pharisees. Now hear the words again, considering a different audience:
“Make friends for yourselves of dishonest wealth.” In other words: If you’ve been dishonest thus far, use what you’ve gained to finally do some good. He’s not telling disciples to be dishonest; this is a sermon for the dishonest already amongst them. The dishonest manager isn’t praised because he becomes dishonest; he is praised because he finally figures out how to do some good for his boss. It is his decision to change that is of note here – the same as it was in the Prodigal Son parable mere moments before. In our times this might sound like, “Do some good, you dishonest people, even if it means you have to take a loss to finally get on the right track.” We know who Jesus was speaking to then – the wealthy powerbrokers of his day, who also happened to be pretty closely connected with, if not directly members of, temple leadership. Who might he be speaking to today? Can the folks who foisted the housing bubble and ensuing crash hear this with contrite hearts? Is what Jesus is asking of them really that difficult? If anything, this moment is an incredible coda of care and concern for souls and bodies that have actively exploited people. As believers, can we offer that same compassion?
It’s clear the audience of Amos 8 would have appreciated a little tenderness from their prophet. But for all of their exploitation of the poor – going as far to calculate for their best return, strategic exploitation! – Amos is having none of it. “Hear this” is less “hear ye, hear ye!” and more like a sage matriarch sitting you down to tell you what a knucklehead you’ve been. “I won’t forget any of their deeds”, and transposing YHWH’s voice in first person? That’s some scary you-know-what. And whereas Jesus takes a more subversive and poetic route, Amos leaves nothing to the imagination.
Both approaches have merit and necessity as we endure a version of Capitalism that operates with declining moral vision. We need the type of prophetic leadership that Jesus and Amos offer here, to speak directly to systems and people that deny and subjugate others, to remind them of their power, privilege, and responsibility to God and God’s people. All money is not dishonest, and all dishonest money can be made honest again. This is the truth of God carried across thousands of years.
No joking.
WEB ARTICLE
What if I told you that, during my first year as pastor, a drug dealer approached me and said he had a $40,000 gift for the church, and that this gift was his way of making amends for his past deeds? Take a second, and simply ask, “What would I do in this situation?”
Ready?
Would you be mad at me for telling him that I’d accept his gift, and that during the conversation I was already making plans for the good we could do with this “dishonest” money? Would it be egregious if, after he was settled in his decision, I told him that giving the church this money wouldn’t solve his problems (after all he was still selling drugs!)? I should have kept quiet. After he realized that the problem was how he earned the money and not what he did with it but rather what he was doing to people…well, he decided to keep the money and work on his heart.
Don’t say it. I know you’re thinking it. And don’t worry: I said it. You know, you could do BOTH!!!
Money has been used to fix evil, and it has been the cause of much of humanity’s woes. The love of money - and not money itself, to be clear – has perpetuated many great evils. Jesus digs deep into that in Luke 16:1-13, speaking directly to the possessors of money – the lenders, the collectors, the temple agents – with a zeal against their dishonest practice and willingness to turn wealth into their idol. It’s not about drug dealers tithing regularly, though they should (and every faith community has a few “drug dealers” – wealthy folk doing questionable work), or making friends with dishonest people to do good work. Not on purpose anyway. This is about Jesus saying that the most important thing about money is what we do with it in our hearts.
Do we use money to love God’s people as an act of worship, or do we use money to serve our own interests? Do our riches come at the expense of others, or do continue to abide in a moral vision that protects our neighbors as God’s children? When we finally get all this money (you know how much “all this” means for you. For me it’s like $45), do you now consider yourself God? Who is serving who here?
These are the questions of Luke 16:1-13, “The Parable of the Dishonest Manager.” And believers with comfortable means and adequate access to power need to have these questions set before them. The challenge for us all is: what’s the price/pledge amount that makes these questions too inconvenient to ask?
ORDINARY 26C (PROPER 21C)
Required: Luke 16:19-31
Optional: Amos 6:1a, 4-7
COLUMN
I love a good transformation story. Saul on the road to Damascus. Augustine curiously stumbling upon Paul’s letter to the Romans. Martin Luther in a thunderstorm. John Wesley after his abject failure in Georgia. All stories about saints of the faith, and egregiously, mostly men.
One of my favorites is Elizabeth Ann Seton. She became the first American “saint” through a compelling if-not-circuitous route. Her husband, William, took ill and they sold everything to move to Italy. While in Italy, William died, and Lizzie (Betsy? Let’s go with “Elizabeth”) went to a mass, where she found purpose and euphoria in the Catholic faith. She came back to the States and, (skipping a lot), sacrificed her most important relationships to become a nun, started the Sisters of Charity, and went on to start several schools, orphanages, hospitals…truly a remarkable woman.
The question all of these conversion narratives raise is: why does it take so much? Maybe even your own journey to faith speaks to this. Why did it take THAT to happen? I surely can remember being in a dark place without much to lose before turning my life ov…see, even that language…turning one’s life over, carries an extreme attitude, as if the life that the One Who Created The Universe asks of us is only really plausible after exhausting all other possibilities. Only recently have we heard from extremely rich people deciding to donate most or all of their wealth – another kind of “conversion” from consumption to generosity (and even in those cases the general sentiment is, “I have more than I can possibly spend.”)
However we end up at “using our possessions to benefit others”, the point is to make whatever change necessary to end up there - as Jesus encourages in the parable right before this telling of “The Rich Man and Lazarus.” And while it’s not as important to decide whether this is a true story or another parable (probably the latter), it is important to note how Jesus tells this story – what he includes, the way characters are framed – and the many opportunities laid before us in a fairly simple story.
First is the awesome presumption that the rich man went to hell; it is taken for granted that Lazarus is the righteous one, the rich man is the evil one, and Lazarus’ hunger while alive is a product of evil (v. 25), which the rich man was benefitting from. His “feasting sumptuously” in fine linens is juxtaposed with the sore-ridden Lazarus, and this is no coincidence. By narrative construction, the rich man is viewed alongside Lazarus - the position of each made even more absurd by considering the other. Is it possible to discuss the circumstances of the poor without also discussing the deep disparity – that everyone does not share this fate – and that the size of this gap may be proportional to the amount of evil complicit in creating it? It is known that “blessed are the poor”, but there is more to say about poverty and its relationship to others that do not experience it.
That Lazarus is named here is also commendable. The visceral description of this poor man – his sores, his lack of capacity to even stop dogs from licking him – invites us to behold this man as more than another one of the “huddled masses” that Emma Lazarus penned about in her poem “The New Colossus.” He even gets a name, while the rich man remains “the rich man.” We are accountable to seeing Lazarus – one could argue we become as accountable to seeing him as the rich man himself. This is a clarion signal to those among us – regardless of politics – who think of issues but not individuals, who consider people but not persons.
Think of the jarring photograph released in June 2019 of the father and daughter drowned in the Rio Grande River while trying to cross the border into the United States. Regardless of your stance on immigration, the image puts in stark relief that this is indeed an issue that affects real lives. And now give them names: Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez. 23 month-old Valeria. These are not hypothetical deaths, and whatever our response is as believers should not be purely philosophical.
Jesus does this often – “Whenever you saw…you saw me” – and it is our duty to see Jesus and to see people. Think about ministries that want to end homelessness but not be in relationship with the homeless people in their neighborhood. Think about the last homeless person you saw, and whether you thought about their name or their story. Jesus is, with this simple story, pushing us into the vulnerability and risk of relationship. What the rich man missed was not merely a chance to redistribute his wealth, but a chance to encounter the living God!
Thankfully, the chasm is not too great for us to overcome, nor has it been “fixed”, as it has been for this rich man. Even in Hades he wants a dead man to visit his father and five brothers: he knows they won’t convert without being taken to the extreme! But to this request we hear perhaps the mightiest nugget of this Gospel: it shouldn’t take a miracle to repent. What we need to do better is right in front of us – no earthquakes, no cancers required – and we should take advantage while we are still in the land of the living.
Amos 6 further illustrates our opportunity – no, responsibility – to use whatever we have to take care of one another. And in typical Amos fashion, he pulls no punches. The folks that don’t live into the mandate to love with our possessions (instead of loving our possessions) will be the first to have their party rudely interrupted. Amos and Jesus are both calling for conversion-without-extremes: to do the right thing with our possessions simply because it is the right thing to do.
WEB ARTICLE
As a sociologist-cum-theologian, I take seriously the opportunity to understand the thinking of groups, deploying whatever statistical method is most suitable to analyzing the critical questions of our life, times, and social strata. One of the most pressing questions on the Southside of Chicago, where I live, is:
What is wrong with Kanye West?
I don’t like the framing of this question, for a lot of reasons, but it is my job as your tour guide to give you the facts without coloring them.
To be clear, people mean this question in one of two ways. The first is to ask simply, “What’s going on with somebody who I love and admire but is now acting erratically?” The answer there has been answered by Kanye himself: he is living with mental illness and working his way to health. (As is the case with all of us, this project is proceeding at full speed, with mixed results). We should use his vulnerability to have frank discussions about mental illness, and these discussions should move us toward loving action with those most affected. Easy, right?
The second version of “What’s wrong?” is the way people began asking it after hearing his outbursts at various concerts, where he was telling not only his but his close friends’ personal business. By far, most people sympathize with his illness fully and have no tolerance for his airing of other people’s dirty laundry. (That he has an actual song called “Family Business” is also ironic). “That’s the problem I have,” is what I can faithfully report back from most city blocks, although I’m not sure you can separate the illness from what the illness creates. I’m not an expert; I just love the guy and want him to be whole.
“Family business” is exactly what Amos 6 is all about. There are moments in the life of a family or community when one person simply needs to talk to another person, nobody else needs to know, and everybody moves on. There are other times – times we dread – when it is clear that we all need to talk because what is happening, even if between a couple of people, involves all of us. So when you read “Zion” (northern Israel) and “Samaria” (southern Israel), know that Amos is gathering them the entire family together to discuss some serious business. What is such a business so serious that the North and South must be addressed together? “The ruin of Joseph” aka the poor people struggling in the North AND South of Israel. To paraphrase Amos in terms you may have heard in your own family: “You out here relaxing and proclaiming the goodness of God, but refuse to take care of your own people.” It’s a big problem, and it’s set up by Amos using language we should either consider “massaging” or “world class sarcasm.” (“Alas for those who lie on beds of ivory…”) Knowing Amos, I’d guess the latter.
I wonder if Amos’ tone encourages MLK’s opening words of Letter From a Birmingham Jail (“My dear fellow clergymen,”) knowing that he considers them in that moment neither his people nor dear nor fellows nor clergy of any moral integrity. Just a thought.
The plight of Israel’s poor is not a matter of foreign policy; it is the business of the comfortable rulers to address it! Or before addressing it – to even grieve the ruination of their own people! They are condemned not only for their lack of action but also for their emotional distance from the problem itself. These folks have found a way to isolate themselves in every way imaginable!
I’ll let you make the contextual translations. Suffice it to say, Amos 6 speaks to families, nations, and individuals across space and time, and the prophet spends most of his time asking a simple and familiar question: “What is wrong with y’all?”
In the same vein, he responds to his critics with Kanye-esque bravura: We need to discuss this out in the open, because it affects all of us. When it comes to poverty, Amos is certainly right.