Church of Our Saviour

Ole Boudreaux was dieing. A stingy man, the old Cajun had worked on oilrigs, sold crawfish and was - near as anyone in the small town of Thibodaux could tell – about the most miserly man on the bayou. Not a soul could ever remember seeing him spend a dime. On his death bed, he called to his wife Jolie and told her to go to the crab shack and find that old bait bucket of his. It was probably under a piece of canvass. Sure enough when she found it there was almost all of Boudreaux’s fortune

Hoping to finally put plumbing in the house, she asked Boudreaux what he wanted done with all that money. He told her – when he was breathing his last - she was to take that bucket and put it up on the rafter next to the smoked catfish and hog joints. He’d figured out a way to take it with him.

The time came and Boudreaux took his last breath. Jumping up quick, Jolie stepped over the priest, tripped the snack tray into Ti Ray’s lap, grabbed the bucket and hauled it as fast as she could up to the rafters. By the time she climbed down, Boudreaux was dead. Now death in Louisiana is no different than anywhere else. Jolie was busy the next several days with the funeral, the food coming in and the free drinks flowing out. Once she had time to catch her breath she remembered the bucket. At first she thought she’d just forget about it but curiosity had the best of her. Slowly she climbed up the ladder and there it was – the bucket. Taking hold of it and slowly climbing down she began shaking her head and thought quietly to herself, “Ahh, Boudreaux, I’m sorry. I just new I should’ve put that bucket under the house.”

Personally, if I’m honest with myself, I kind of hoped Boudreaux had found away to take it with him. It probably wouldn’t do him much good, but in a sense he would have been cheating death. He’d have accomplished some kind of dishonest victory. If you and I are both honest, we like this kind of victory, this illicit kind of pleasure. Many of us secretly admire the person who has found a way to skim a few dollars off their taxes, managed to wrangle a few personal items from the company supplies, or discovered that others won’t argue with a person’s level of financial offering because they have spent more time in Church or on committee meetings. As a culture we kind of enjoy small little white-collar crimes where the average person gets away with cheating and even possibly stealing from the multi-millionaire boss or the billion dollar bureaucracy. We celebrate it in plays and television sitcoms. If we’re honest there is a private joy in hearing someone has out witted another and profited by it.

How about the manager in today’s Gospel text? Here’s a person about to be sacked because he’s dishonest in the way he has managed the household accounts. Knowing he’s about to be let loose he goes to each of this masters debtors and reduces the bill. It doesn’t seem like a good business practice. Household managers earned their living off the debts of their masters. As a manager of a person’s estate, it was expected that they would raise the cost of items and then skim a little of the profit for themselves. On the surface it looks like by reducing the bill, the manager has cut his earnings and the master will lose the value of what he’s owed. Yet, after all this back room conniving, we read the master commends, actually complements the manager for being so shrewd! He’s not sore about the loss. He’s not upset or angry with the manager. Nor does he blame him for losing income and capital – he’s happy. The managers’ dishonesty has paid off. Without understanding the socio-economic customs of the day, we look at this dishonest manager and could almost admire his savvy.

The very fact Jesus is telling this parable has confused people for centuries. What’s not understood is that even Jesus is capable of irony. The story of the dishonest manager is not told in any of the other Gospels. Only the latter part of our reading, “no slave can serve two masters” is found almost word for word in the Gospel of Matthew. Many point to the Matthew verse because the parable in Luke doesn’t seem to fit with its conclusion

In order to understand this parable we must first remember that we are dealing with an honor/shame society. The closest we come today in understanding this concept is in the Asian term “saving face”. Honor and shame in the first century controlled the society in its dealings socially, personally and economically. If a favor or act of kindness was done on one’s behalf the person was obligated to return the favor in equal measure. If the kindness was not returned, not only the person but the person’s family and business were discredited. One gave a gift for a gift and if this was not done a person’s entire means of support and the families standing in the community could come crashing down. This was how the society in the first century acted. There are still remnants of this left over in today’s world; particularly in the Semitic and Judeo-Christian traditions and more specifically when it comes to understanding the place of Scripture in these traditions.

Both the Pharisees and the Sadducees considered the Law of Moses a gift from God. Honor demanded an equal gift. That gift could only be equaled in the way one was obedient to it. If one followed the Law, the Torah, to its minutest detail then honor would be achieved in a heavenly reward. Today many of our Christian sisters and brothers still view Scripture this way. Follow everything – or in some cases those things one thinks is most important – and the reward will be heaven.

This is how the first century person in Israel acted and it’s how many well intentioned religious people act today. In the case of the dishonest manager, he was operating under this same rule. By reducing the bill of the debtors, he was giving them a gift, a gift on behalf of the master. The debtors now owed the master an equally important gift. In other words, not only did they owe the bill, even though it was reduced – they are now obligated to owe more. The manager has shrewdly increased the amount of money the master will collect. The manager’s solution to the problem is clever – it’s brilliant!

That little sense of victory we feel for the manager, right now, is the very point of today’s lessons. How can we be so perceptive and clever about material gain but not so clever in spiritual matters? When our master calls us to the final reckoning, will we have been shown to be clever with material wealth or proven shrewd and understanding in spiritual matters?

Too often preachers and scholars have pointed to this parable as a way to divide the material world from the spiritual. It’s not a question of material versus spiritual. In the King James Version of the Bible the manager is called the “unjust” steward. In the New Revised Version we read this morning, he is called the unrighteous. Both words share a single root word that means relationship in Greek. Jesus is calling into question our relationship that is material and spiritual. The author of Luke writes, “And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own?” We are unable to be faithful to the Gospel if we limit our values to just one or the other . Both the material world and the spiritual world have been given to us as gifts.

What makes relationship so hard for the post-modern world, especially a relationship such as the Church practices, is the fact we have so broadened our idea of community that the very notion we are a particular, intentional group of people is almost anachronistic. We have almost over-generalized our lives to look as if we are as common to every other person’s life.

We’ve done this so much that we have nearly secularized even our spiritual uniqueness. In effect we seem to have very little to offer because we seem to be like everybody else. We do this with our lives and we do this with our buildings. Church buildings like Church of Our Saviour are becoming rare in being separate unique places of worship. If you have the opportunity, thumb through the TV selections until you find one of the religious channels. With the exception of the Roman Catholic channel and a few mainstream Christian traditions, many of these worship places have developed into auditoriums and phone-a-thon TV studios. There are church buildings across this country that are beginning to adopt this style of architecture.

The message of the Gospel, however, is that we are not like everybody else. The material church, you and I, this building, the campus we are on, stand before the world spiritually as the Body of Christ. As the Church, we are called to spread the Good News which God has accomplished in Jesus the Christ. We are unique in that the Church is a divine institution made up of human – material beings. We are called to manage both our material and spiritual life in such a way that God’s saving grace is made known.

The author of Timothy reminds us that through our liturgical worship and in our daily life as Christians we are to offer prayers for all persons. For victims, the poor, our enemies, and those who cannot pray for themselves. Amos, however, is also a reminder for those who use their wealth only for their own gain. We are called to use what material we have, not just for our time on Sunday’s but our gifts and talents given to us and used by the Holy Spirit Monday through Saturday.

As managers of both the spiritual and material world, this means we have a unique and particular view of how we are to manage these things. It means coming to this place to pray, seek forgiveness and renew our relationship as a way of managing our spiritual lives so that we may offer ourselves, our souls and bodies as a witness of God’s love. We are more than a mouthpiece for God, we are the walking incarnate testimony of the Gospel. It means supporting this building, funding its committees and the salaries that go into a Church budget not as a material tribute to some divine emperor or a tax to some heavenly institution, but as managers of tangible materials that are also a testimony and physical view of God’s love, will and purpose.

In C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce, the story is told of a fantastic bus ride from hell to heaven where the passengers are made to decide if they will stay in the foothills of heaven and make the difficult journey up to the high country or get back on the bus and return to their commitments in hell. In the introduction, he writes the choice, in the end, is an “either-or” proposition. ”If we insist on keeping Hell we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.”

God’s love is for all of creation and we are accountable both to God and creation to see that love is grown and shared. We must strike a balance between the material and the spiritual not only in our daily living but also as a committed community of Christ so we may continue to be instruments of that love. If we insist on keeping earth we shall not see God: if we accept God we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of earth. Let us remember the words of this morning’s Collect. Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure .