Faithful to One God

Luke 16:1-13; I Timothy 2:1-7; Jeremiah 8:19-22

Jeremiah 8:19-22

{19} Hark, the cry of my poor people from far and wide in the land: “Is the LORD not in Zion? Is her King not in her?” (“Why have they provoked me to anger with their images, with their foreign idols?”) {20} “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.” {21} For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me. {22} Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored?

Luke 16:1-13

¹Then Jesus said to the disciples, “There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. ²So he summoned him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.’ ³Then the manager said to himself, ‘What 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. ⁴I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’ ⁵So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ ⁶He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’ ⁷Then he asked another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘A hundred containers of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill and make it eighty.’ ⁸And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. ⁹And I 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.

¹⁰ “Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. ¹¹If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? ¹²And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? ¹³No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”

I Timothy 2:1-7

{1} First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, {2} for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity. {3} This is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, {4} who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. {5} For there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, {6} who gave himself a ransom for all—this was attested at the right time. {7} For this I was appointed a herald and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.

The Sermon

Having been given life and the freedom to choose how we will live our lives, there comes a time for each of us, and maybe this happens every day, that we hear the voice of Joshua, calling to the people of God, “ If you are unwilling to serve the Lord , c hoose this day whom you will serve. But as for me and my family, we will serve the Lord.”

So Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are all sitting around the card table. And Luke takes a long look at each one.

He looks directly across the card table and sees Matthew, and he thinks to himself, I like Matthew; I like him a lot. I disagree with him a lot but on most things I agree with him. But it always sounds like in Matthew’s world, everything has a neat, spiritual answer. Everything that takes place fulfills some Old Testament prophecy. But, Luke thinks to himself, life looks a lot messier than that to me.

And he looks at Mark, and he thinks, I like Mark, but in Mark’s world, everything seems to get solved by Jesus doing some amazing thing. And people see it and say, “We have never seen anything so amazing.” But, thinks Luke, when I look at the miracles happening around us all the time, I don’t see everybody being amazed anymore.

And he looks over at John, and he thinks, I like John. But sometimes I get kind of a suspicion that somehow, John is more interested in explaining what the church is trying to do than in meeting and knowing the man Jesus on his own terms.

Of course, Luke knows, none of those characterizations is fair, or even entirely accurate. But they aren’t entirely wrong, either.

Luke, the physician, has his own point of view. He’s the physician who’s seen what happens to a human body that has been denied adequate food, water, shelter, or medical attention.

He’s the doctor who has seen what war does to human flesh. He’s seen what demonic possession or any other kind of possession leads to. He’s seen the inexplicable gunshot wounds, the pointless fatalities, the inconsolable losses caused by drunk drivers, the bruised and broken faces of women saying, “I fell down the stairs…it was the dumbest thing, I hit my head right on the doorknob…it was my fault, I made him mad.”

And seeing what happens to people in this vulnerable world of mortal, human flesh, sometimes he thinks, how much longer, O God?

And he remembers the words of Jeremiah, who stood up in Judah with tears in his eyes and said, “ For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn… Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored? ”

We live in a world where there is some good and some bad and a very great deal in between, where it’s hard sometimes to tell a clear difference. Those who profess to see it in clearer terms than the rest of us usually turn out to be the ones who violate their own principles most egregiously.

Luke sees the gray because he sees what it means to be flesh and blood, what it takes to live in a world where there are a hundred daily little compromises that have to be made, where every certainty seems to lead to two more uncertainties. This is the mortal life that God has given us.

And so to this story about a rich man and his apparently untrustworthy manager. The manager knew he was going to get fired, so he adjusted down the debts that people owed to the rich man so that those people would all like him enough to take care of him after he got fired.

There are not too many parables in the Bible whose moral is more opaque than this one.

My question in reading it was: is the manager honest, or dishonest? But it turned out that wasn’t what it was about and I wasn’t even asking the right question. The right question was: is the manager faithful, or unfaithful?

Would you never tell a lie? Absolutely, that’s my goal: complete honesty. Would you always be honest? Of course I would; we all would. Until, that is, we are faced with such devastating philosophical, metaphysical questions as: Does this skirt make me look fat?

When the old man is on his deathbed, and all you would have to say so that he could go in peace is a response to the request, “Promise me you’ll never sell the land,” whichever way that conversation ends—with honesty or dishonesty; a promise or a false promise—it’s going to lead to a lot of long, sleepless nights.

But sometimes honesty or dishonesty is not the moral dilemma at all. The people of the village of Chambon in Southern France hid Jews in their basements, knowing absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that if they were caught doing that by the collaborators with the Nazis, they would be executed, and their farms and homes lost to their families forever. That would be the best case scenario if they were caught. But according to the historical record, they never saw what they did as the enormous humanitarian sacrifice that it was. To a person, they said things like, “Things had to be done and we happened to be there to do them. It was the most natural thing in the world to help these people.”

And the Nazis would come around and ask if they knew where any Jews were and they’d say, “Nope, no…. I don’t know anything about it.” Whether that was honest or dishonest is not the question. The question is: was it faithful, or unfaithful?

This is not an invitation to dishonesty. Maybe it’s more an acknowledgement that life will present us with many challenges, and we are neither too weak nor too ill-informed to make faithful, moral choices, even in a context where we may not always be presented with one bright, shining, crystal clear and perfectly clean option.

Luke knows this is a complicated world. To survive it, we need a compass that always points in the right direction, because a lot of the time, the landscape will be hidden, the goal in the distance will be a blur, and the straight and narrow path will be obscured by weeds and crumbling pavement.

And Jesus knows what it is to be human. He was able to do it without sin; you and I are not. Well, we’re able, but it’s like standing in front of the DMZ between the Koreas and being told, there are 750,000 land mines out there; now walk to the other side and make it in one piece.

There are so many pitfalls, so many complications in life. But that compass we carry, that points to the cross, will navigate us through even the most dangerous places.

Vernon Tyson, a white, Methodist minister who’s been immortalized in that book Blood Done Sign My Name, preached for our Martin Luther King service in Wilmington a couple years ago. He told us about a time when his city was going through terrible racial tension, and he had invited Samuel Proctor, the black president of North Carolina A & T, to come in and speak at his white church. This was 1963.

When word got around that they were going to have a black preacher come in, things got kind of scary. They said they didn’t want him to come. A protest was going to be held. And this was not a mild conversation: there was violence and danger in the air, that’s how bad things were—violence threatened by a lot of people who could not imagine the disgrace of having a black person stand up in their pulpit and address a white congregation, especially if he was going to say anything about civil rights. (I hope this is very hard for younger people to understand. I hope there are people in this room to whom this makes no sense at all.)

So they called a meeting of their governing body the night before, and a lot of people came to that meeting ready to vote against having that man come the next morning.

And people stood up and said, “If we allow this to happen, it’s going to tear this church apart.”

Finally, an older lady who no one knew what she really thought about anything stood up and walked up to the front with a limp. And she said, I’ve been following this story from Chapel Hill, where a young teenage boy was driving too fast, and went around a curve and his car rolled down into a ditch. It was pretty clear to people who could see the car that it was just a matter of whether the ambulance or the hearse got there first.

And an airman from Pope Air Force base happened to be coming by, and he saw what had happened, and stopped and went down to the wreck. And he opened the young man’s jaws and saw that his tongue was curled back in his throat, and he ran his finger behind it and pulled it out, and he gave the young man mouth to mouth resuscitation, and the boy sat up, and by the time the ambulance came, he was walking around. He made it.

And, the old lady said, the thing I haven’t mentioned is: that boy that was supposed to be killed was a white boy; that airman was black.

And she said, I want to ask you fathers in this house, which of you would have said, “Don’t you stick your black finger down in my white boy’s mouth”? Which one of you is going to say, “Don’t you put your black mouth on my white boy’s lips”?

And later that night, Vernon Tyson had people coming to his house, men who never in a million years would have wanted that black preacher setting foot in their town, and now they were coming to him in tears and saying, “Something changed in me tonight.”

Every once in a while, a voice comes along that speaks with such clarity that it allows us to find something to hold onto, an anchor in the storm, a compass in the wilderness.

So when Jesus said that the master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly, I thought, “So are you saying it’s best to be clever in business?” No, not exactly.

And when Jesus said, “Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes,” I thought, “So, are you saying it’s best to make friends no matter how you do it?” No.

And when he said “Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much,” I thought, “So this is about always being honest.” But I still wasn’t there.

And Jesus said, “If you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own?” And I said, “Now I am completely lost. I have no idea what you are trying to tell me.”

And he said, “No slave can serve two masters. You cannot serve God and wealth.” And I said, I think I’m starting to get it.

We cannot ultimately serve our God and some other god equally—wealth, security, power. We cannot ultimately serve our God and some other god equally.

We will not always have the best of circumstances in which to make our decisions. But we know whom we serve; and regardless of our circumstances, we know what it means to be faithful to the God who gave us life and demanded that we live it justly, with righteousness, and with love for our neighbor, our world, even our enemy.

The world in which we live will from time to time disappoint us with its lack of painless choices and confound us with its complications. But as Max Ehrmann said in that great poem, Desiderata: “With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.”

For there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself a ransom for all.

“Choose this day whom you will serve. But as for me and my family, we will serve the Lord.”

Keith Grogg

Carolina Beach Presbyterian Church

Carolina Beach, NC

September 23, 2007