{"id":1533,"date":"2013-09-24T19:05:13","date_gmt":"2013-09-24T23:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/?p=1533"},"modified":"2013-09-24T20:27:07","modified_gmt":"2013-09-25T00:27:07","slug":"kara-slade-this-sermon-is-not-only-about-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/?p=1533","title":{"rendered":"[Kara Slade] This sermon is not (only) about money"},"content":{"rendered":"
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ALH asked me to post this sermon, so here it is. \u00a0– Kara<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Proper 20 – Luke 16:1-13; 1 Timothy 2:1-7<\/p>\n

Goodson Chapel, Duke Divinity School,\u00a0September 25, 2013<\/p>\n

The Rev. Kara N. Slade<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 O, Thou far off and here, whole and broken,<\/em><\/address>\n
<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Who in necessity and in bounty wait,<\/em><\/address>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Whose truth is light and dark, mute though spoken,<\/em><\/address>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 By Thy wide Grace show me Thy narrow gate.\u00a0 Amen.[1]<\/a><\/b><\/em><\/address>\n
\u00a0<\/address>\n
\u00a0<\/address>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Let me be frank. \u00a0The parable we just heard from Luke\u2019s gospel offends my sense of propriety. \u00a0I suspect I\u2019m not alone in that assessment. \u00a0All the commentaries I consulted – and I consulted quite a few – contained the Biblical Studies equivalent of the warning on ancient maps: Here be dragons. This passage is hard to interpret.<\/em> \u00a0It\u2019s a parable that reminds us of the importance of rightly interpreting these stories, of resisting the urge to turn them into universal moral imperatives. \u00a0And, while a lot of people seem to think this morning\u2019s parable is about money, or about networking your way into heaven, I\u2019d like to suggest it\u2019s about something else entirely.<\/p>\n

This tale of a shifty middle manager and his overdramatic boss begins on a decidedly ominous note. \u00a0The manager is accused of squandering his boss\u2019 money, and he\u2019s summarily fired. \u00a0No chance of appeal, no severance pay, no nothing. \u00a0We can imagine him considering his future as he packs up his office, filling two battered boxes full of trade-show coffee mugs and desk accessories. \u00a0Quite understandably, he panics. \u00a0 His words reek of the sort of middle-class status anxiety that Barbara Ehrenreich called The Fear of Falling<\/i>: \u201cWhat 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.\u201d[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

But he comes up with a cunning plan, to fiddle the Accounts Receivable, ingratiate himself to the customers, and arrange a safety net for himself by means of creative bookkeeping. \u00a0And then, things get really weird. \u00a0The parable ends with a lucky escape – and with what sounds like Jesus\u2019 endorsement of all the shenanigans: \u201cI 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.\u201d[3]<\/a><\/p>\n

Remember, this is not a moral object lesson. \u00a0Our sketchy steward gets this much right: \u00a0Life as he knows it has come to an end. \u00a0 The economy of Mammon, of scarcity, self-sufficiency, and competition, will grind him under its heel like anyone else. \u00a0Just as it always has, just as we heard in the reading from Amos: \u201cHear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land.\u201d[4]<\/a> \u00a0But there\u2019s a different economy on the way: an economy of gratuity, friendship, and grace. \u00a0And the steward is freed by the death of his previous self to think possibilities he couldn\u2019t have thought before. \u00a0From the bottom of the heap, he becomes the unlikely agent of life for everyone else in the story.<\/p>\n

One way I think we can start to make sense of this parable is by reading it alongside the passage immediately before it. \u00a0At the end of Luke 15, Jesus tells the much more familiar story of the prodigal son. \u00a0Here, too, we hear about a man who squandered everything he had – the Greek verb is the same in both stories. \u00a0Here, too, the possibilities of a new way of thinking and living emerge only on the other side of a kind of death. \u00a0And here, too, we find ourselves in the middle of an offensive economy of extravagant love and abundant mercy.<\/p>\n

As several commentators have suggested, we can read Jesus figuratively as both the Prodigal Son and the Unjust Steward. \u00a0As the Prodigal Son, he enters into our greatest humiliation and reconciles humanity with the Father. \u00a0As the Unjust Steward, he enters into our all-too-ordinary sinfulness, and forgives our debt. \u00a0And from a place where con-men scheme and thieves gamble, on a hill outside the city walls, Jesus ushers in the age to come.<\/p>\n

He becomes, as Karl Barth writes, \u201cthe one great sinner, with all the consequences that this involves, the one who penitently declares that He is the lost sheep, [He is] the lost coin, [He is] the lost son, and therefore as the Judge he is judged. \u00a0His day – the day of the divine judgment – [is] the great day of atonement, the day of the dawn of a new heaven and a new earth, the birthday of a new man. . . . He is sinless not in spite of, but just because of his being the friend of publicans and sinners and His dying between the malefactors.\u201d[5]<\/a><\/p>\n

Now, I admit, this all seems very unseemly. \u00a0But I think I agree with Robert Capon when he says the unique contribution of this parable to our understanding of Jesus is just this<\/b>: \u201cgrace cannot come through respectability. \u00a0Respectability regards only life, success, and winning – \u00a0not the grace that works by death and losing. \u00a0Which is the only grace there is. \u00a0To save a world that respectability would only terrify and condemn, he became sin for us sinners, lost for us losers, weak for us weaklings, and dead for us dead.\u201d[6]<\/a><\/p>\n

This<\/b>\u00a0<\/i>is a grace that works only on those it finds dead enough to raise.<\/p>\n

Hear the good news today from the first letter of Paul to Timothy: \u201cFor there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself a ransom for all.\u201d[7]<\/a><\/p>\n

It really is that easy. \u00a0And it really is that hard.<\/p>\n

Because in the abundant economy of grace, this, our infinite debt to Jesus, is the starting balance of all our own accounting. \u00a0 This is the fixed point from which we begin, and begin again, in our grateful work as disciples. \u00a0And our goal can never be the perfection of our striving, but instead \u201cthe deep recognition of the imperfection of it, and precisely because of this a deeper and deeper consciousness of the need for grace, not grace for this or that, but the infinite need infinitely for grace.\u201d[8]<\/a><\/p>\n

And it\u2019s for this reason that I\u2019d like to suggest today\u2019s Gospel ultimately points us towards the mystery of the Incarnation. \u00a0The Word became flesh because of, in spite of, the utter failure of all our attempts to save ourselves, to secure our own future in the eternal homes. \u00a0The Anglican poet Denise Levertov puts it this way:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s when we face for a moment the worst our kind can do,\u00a0<\/i><\/address>\n
and shudder to know the taint in our own selves,\u00a0<\/i><\/address>\n
that awe cracks the mind\u2019s shell and enters the heart:\u00a0<\/i><\/address>\n
not to a flower, not to a dolphin,\u00a0<\/i><\/address>\n
to no innocent form but to this creature vainly sure it and no other is god-like,\u00a0<\/i><\/address>\n
God (out of compassion for our ugly failure to evolve)\u00a0<\/i><\/address>\n
entrusts, as guest,\u00a0<\/i><\/address>\n
as brother,\u00a0<\/i><\/address>\n
the Word.[9]<\/a><\/b><\/i>\u00a0<\/address>\n

Amen.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

\n
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[1]<\/a> Wendell Berry, \u201cTo the Holy Spirit,\u201d in The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry<\/i>, http:\/\/friartucksfleetingthoughts.blogspot.com\/2009\/02\/to-holy-spirit-poem-by-wendell-berry.html<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[2]<\/a> Luke 16:3, NRSV.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[3]<\/a> Luke 16:9, NRSV.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[4]<\/a> Amos 8:4, NRSV.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[5]<\/a> Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.1<\/i>, p. 259. and II.1, p 157.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[6]<\/a> Robert Farrar Capon, \u00a0\u201cThe Hardest Parable: The Unjust Steward,\u201d in Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus <\/i>(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), pp. 302-309.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[7]<\/a> 1 Timothy 2:5-6, NRSV.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[8]<\/a> S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard, J. Pap. X3<\/sup>\u00a0A 784\u00a0n.d., 1851.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[9]<\/a> Denise Levertov, \u201cOn the Mystery of the Incarnation,\u201d in The Stream and the Sapphire: Selected Poems on Religious Themes <\/i>(New York: New Directions, 1997), Kindle location 156\/672.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ALH asked me to post this sermon, so here it is. \u00a0– Kara Proper 20 – Luke 16:1-13; 1 Timothy 2:1-7 Goodson Chapel, Duke Divinity School,\u00a0September 25, 2013 The Rev. Kara N. Slade   \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 O, Thou far off and here, whole and broken, \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-church","category-guestposts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7EotM-oJ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1533"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1533\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1541,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1533\/revisions\/1541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}