This past Wednesday, I hosted the first meeting of a bimonthly Bible study on the campus of Bryn Mawr College. We began with the second creation story from the book of Genesis, where God forms Adam from dust and Eve from one of Adam’s ribs. Then, the serpent beguiles them. Remember what God says to Eve after he learns that Adam and Eve have eaten of the forbidden fruit from the tree of life in the midst of the Garden of Eden. God says to her, “What is this that you have done?”
In Wednesday’s Bible study, I realized that I have always heard that question from God as one of angry accusation, which may say more about the image of God that has been instilled in my mind over the years. But, I asked the students on Wednesday, do we really know God’s tone when he asks this question? What if God was sorrowful that Adam and Eve had disobeyed him?[1] What if God was only objectively posing the question to get them to own up to what they had done?
Questions in the Bible, like God’s question to Eve, can be heard in different ways because, of course, we often don’t get any indication in Scripture of the tone of the speaker’s voice. Read on paper, a question could be either accusatory or genuinely curious.
So, then, what do you make of the dishonest steward’s question to himself in today’s parable from St. Luke’s Gospel? Recall what he says after his master has demanded an accounting of him and fired him. The dishonest steward asks himself, “What shall I do, since my master is taking the stewardship away from me?”
What emotions are behind this question? Once again, my initial reading of this parable probably sheds more light on my own tendency towards reactivity in times of crisis. I imagine the steward as being anxious. Yikes! My job has been taken away from me. What shall I do? After all, he is now out of a job, and as he later frankly admits, he isn’t strong enough to dig, and he’s too ashamed to beg. What in the world will he do? I wonder what tone you hear in the steward’s voice as he queries himself. Is it one of anxiety and fear? Is it a question posed with elevated blood pressure and a fight-or-flight response to a crisis?
If you imagine anxiety in this question, you’re not alone. The late Rabbi Edwin Friedman, who honed family systems thinking, suggested that we inhabit a culture of chronic anxiety. We demand quick fixes, which usually result in the desperate pawning of tricks and gimmicks that will serve as the panacea for all our problems. But until we recognize the emotions underlying all these reptilian initial responses, no source of data or advice from a consultant will enable us to operate as healthy, well-functioning human beings.[2]
So, is the dishonest steward operating from a chronically anxious mindset? Is he employing a crude mechanism to ensure the stability of his own future, even if it means being dishonest? Or can we read the steward’s self-posed question in another way?
What if the steward is not exhibiting extreme reactivity because of anxiety but is rather responding well and cleverly to his unfortunate circumstances? Perhaps he is merely being shrewd, the quality for which he is praised by his boss.
Scholars and commentators have spilled vast quantities of ink trying to figure out just why Jesus seems to commend someone who is acting dishonestly. Some have even employed astounding interpretive gymnastics so they could explain away the steward’s behavior as not dishonest but honest. This, I think, is missing the point. Jesus is not praising dishonesty or encouraging us to be Machiavellian. Jesus is using an earthy example of shrewdness and resourcefulness to show us the vast potential in God’s abundant gifts.
God’s abundance? you may ask. Nowhere is God’s abundance mentioned in this parable. And that is precisely the point. We’re always prone to miss the evidence of God’s abundance because we’re looking for something obvious. But God’s abundance is most often realized in situations of seeming scarcity. Maybe another parable will help us see this.
There once was a church that had been through many tumultuous and difficult years. Indeed, it was believed that this church wouldn’t survive. Some suggested that selling property would be a good idea. Others said certain budget line items should be slashed. People from outside this church pitied it and said under their breath that it would never survive, bless their hearts.
People came, and people left. They would occasionally drop into the church to pray or worship on a Sunday, but some were discouraged by the obvious decline and never returned. The church was experiencing a frustrating, catch-22 situation common in small parishes. There seemed to be insufficient financial resources to fund staffing to move forward. The church was the steward of a vast amount of property but not enough money to maintain it. At times, the difficult past haunted any prospect of a new future. There seemed to be little hope of a way out of this intractable situation.
And then, one day, a group of bold parishioners said to themselves, what shall we do? It seems like what we’ve been given might be taken away. We are not strong enough financially to fix our building problems, and we’re too ashamed to close. Then, they had an epiphany. We know what we’ll do, they said. We’ll change our vision. We see that while we might be financially challenged, we have great and wondrous gifts from God. We have beautiful buildings, and spacious ones, at that. Our worship and music stand out among other churches. We had a long, beautiful history before we ever had troubles. We know what we’ll do! We’ll invest our hearts, souls, and minds in this new vision. We’ll take risks in how to spend and use what God has given us, and we’ll invest ourselves in God’s abundance. We’ll be generous, not parsimonious. And from that moment on, things began to change.
Do you recognize this parable? Do you recognize this church? This is you, this is us. This is the Church of the Good Shepherd. You’ve been resourceful. You’ve been faithful in a little, and truly, you’ve been faithful in much. You’ve understood, perhaps without realizing it, the essence of Jesus’s parable today. You are such a parable.
But there’s more. This parable is not just about the wider Church or our own parish church. It’s about how we live our lives. It’s about whether we hold something of ourselves back before God for fear that we don’t have enough to give. It’s about whether we hoard our talents or money because we don’t think that God has provided us with enough.
But this parable is also about whether we can find the gleaming pearls of God’s abundant gifts to us even when we don’t seem to have enough. And when we’re in a pit of scarcity, we might just need to shift our vision so that we can see that we’ve always had enough and that we have enough right now, even though others will always tell us we don’t. Here’s the difficult part: we must ignore those jaded voices and trust that God has given us exactly what we need to be resourceful.
We’re entering that time of year when we intentionally and prayerfully discern how we can use what we’ve been given by God in his service. In an unstable economy, with soaring cost-of-living increases and an uncertain future, it may very well seem like we don’t have enough to give. We may be hunkering down even more into saving and stashing away all we can get. Considering a tithe or a sacrificial financial gift to support God’s ministry could seem like a pipedream for this particular year. And then next year, it will seem the same. And then the next.
Jesus’s parable hits us in an uncomfortable spot because it forces each and every one of us to be honest about how we respond to situations of seeming scarcity. What shall we do? It’s a difficult economy, and there are so many demands on our money and time. When we ask ourselves what to do, are we asking with deep anxiety and fear? Or can God help us shift the tone to one of trust? Can we be less anxious and more resourceful?
For the truth is that God has given us every gift and material resource that we need to serve him and his kingdom. Our hurting, chronically anxious world needs all our gifts. It needs our money to support beauty, wisdom, generosity, love, and peace. God has entrusted us with much, whether it seems like much or not. Let’s use it for his gospel and mission. And only then will our vision open to see the true riches that are yet to come. So, beloved in Christ, what shall we do?
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 18, 2022
[1] Thank you to Rabbi Nora Woods, Interfaith Chaplain at Bryn Mawr College, for this suggestion.
[2] Edwin Friedman, A Failure of Nerve (New York: Church Publishing: 2017)