Sermon for Sunday, Proper 20, Year C

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If you are of a certain age, you may remember a movie from a few years ago called Taken. It stars Liam Neeson as a retired CIA operative whose daughter is kidnapped. When the kidnappers contact him on the phone, he replies in his gravelly Irish voice, “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. If you’re looking for ransom, I can tell you that I don’t have money. What I do have is a very particular set of skills.”

The rest of the movie involves Liam Neeson tracking down his daughter’s kidnappers in an attempt to rescue her. If you want to know how it ends, you’ll have to watch it for yourself. I don’t give out spoilers, and this sermon isn’t about Liam Neeson anyway. It’s about Jesus. But I want you to keep Liam Neeson’s line in your head — the one about having “a very particular set of skills” — since we’re going to circle back to it and see how it relates to the parable that Jesus told in today’s gospel.

This parable is notorious as one of the most difficult to understand among Jesus’s parables. Even PhD-level biblical scholars are left scratching their heads about it. What makes this parable so difficult to understand is the fact that there is no moral to the story, nor are there any clear-cut heroes and villains in the story for us to either imitate or avoid. And that’s actually part of the point that Jesus was trying to make in telling it.

It might help us to unpack the meaning of this parable if we were to look at it again and add some of the cultural context that would have been obvious to Jesus and his listeners but may not be so obvious to us who are reading it 2,000 years later.

To begin with, Jesus is telling this parable on the same night and at the same dinner party where he told the two parables that we heard last week: the lost sheep and the lost coin. This is also the same dinner party where he told the parable of the prodigal son, which we read back in Lent. So the scene around this dinner party is Jesus sitting at table and eating with tax collectors and sinners — the most outcast and despised members of his society. Meanwhile, the scribes and Pharisees — the most well-respected, well-educated, and religiously observant members of society — were looking on in disgust at the company that Jesus chose to keep.

The act of eating with someone in that culture was a powerful symbolic statement that you accepted this person or these people as members of your family and thereby approved of their conduct and lifestyle. So it makes sense, then, that the most respectable members of society would be offended at Jesus’ decision to eat at table with the most unsavory and despised members of society. They would be understandably suspicious of the example that Jesus was setting by associating with such people. Nevertheless, Jesus welcomed them and accepted them anyway.

He told the parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the prodigal son for God’s radically inclusive love that extends to everyone — even the last, the lost, and the least. So that’s the immediate setting for this parable. It’s part of the same scene in the movie, if you will, as the parables we heard last week. So it makes sense to look for a thematic connection between this parable and those parables.

Let’s keep going. Jesus begins by saying, “There was a rich man.” This is a significant detail. Regular people had a somewhat complicated relationship with rich people in Jesus’ day. On the one hand, people saw peace and prosperity as signs of God’s blessing upon the righteous. On the other hand, the everyday experience of lower-class people, like many of Jesus’s followers, was that rich people had become rich by exploiting the misfortune of their neighbors.

In the years when the harvest was bad, farmers would stay afloat by borrowing money from their neighbors. If the harvests continued to be bad and they couldn’t pay off the debt, the creditors would eventually seize the farmers’ property and lease it back to them for a price. This then created a kind of economic feedback loop in which the farmers would get poorer and poorer, and the landlords would get richer and richer by absorbing more and more properties of the farmers around them.

This, as you might imagine, did not exactly ingratiate the wealthy landowners to the farmers who had probably worked that land for generations. That’s the first detail to notice about this parable.

As we keep reading, we learn that our concerns about this particular rich man are well-founded. He is indeed a wealthy moneylender. He’s been so successful at it, in fact, that he has had to hire a manager to help him sort through the mountains of debt that his neighbors owed him.

Just how much debt is quite interesting. Let’s take a look. A hundred jugs of olive oil, as Jesus describes in the parable, was worth about three years’ wages for a day laborer. One hundred containers of wheat was worth up to ten years’ wages for a day laborer. So if you were to think of your current annual income — whatever that is — and multiply it by three, that’s how much the first debtor owed to the rich creditor. And if you take your annual income and multiply it by ten, that’s how much the second debtor owed to the rich creditor in this parable.

It doesn’t take much, then, to imagine just how heavy this burden of debt was for the characters in this parable. By forgiving such a large share of these debts, the dishonest manager was literally giving them years of their life back. It was huge, and the people would have certainly been most grateful to the manager for what he had done.

The thing is, however, that this manager wasn’t just acting out of altruistic motives. He was desperately trying to save his own skin. This guy had just learned that he was about to be fired for mismanaging the creditor’s accounts. So he went ahead and cooked the books in order to garner favor with the people he had been exploiting, who would now be above him on the social ladder when he finally faced the consequences of his own actions.

So, yeah, this guy isn’t exactly a Robin Hood kind of character — stealing from the rich in order to give to the poor. He’s more of a conniving opportunist looking for an advantage in an unfavorable situation, which also happens to be a situation of his own making.

The part that sounds funny to us is when the creditor actually praises the manager for his shrewdness. What the manager has done by illegally forgiving debts in his master’s name is to create a win-win situation for everyone involved in the story.

The debtors win because their debts have been dramatically reduced. The manager wins by ensuring goodwill for himself among his former debtors. The landowner wins by improving his social standing in the eyes of the community, which now sees him as a generous lender. This kind of social capital was worth even more than money in the ancient world.

So, the manager is not exactly a “good guy” in the moral sense, but he is a “wise guy” in the strategic sense.

This, according to most scholars, is the reason why Jesus told this parable. It’s not about being good. It’s about being smart and creative and forward-thinking.

Now, let me be clear before we move on: Jesus is not advocating for fiscal misconduct or any other kind of immorality. But he is talking about the kind of thinking that helps us to make the best of a bad situation. Our neighbors who practice in the Buddhist tradition might refer to this as the use of skillful means.

The shrewd manager in Jesus’s story is not a particularly moral person, but he’s smart. He has a very particular set of skills, as Liam Neeson said, and he used that to make the best of a bad situation.

I look around at the world we live in today, and I worry sometimes that we, too, are in the midst of a bad situation. Like the shrewd manager, our situation, too, is of our own making. Also, like the shrewd manager, our situation is no longer sustainable. Things seem to be coming apart at the seams, on the societal and global levels.

Our lust for money, sex, and power, and our faith in violence and greed to give us the world we want, are proving to be false idols that cannot deliver on what they promise. As things continue to unravel, Jesus calls us once again to be shrewd, like the manager in today’s parable: to be smart, creative, and forward-thinking. But this time, it’s not just to save our own skins, but to work together to build the kind of world that God intended.

Here’s a real-life modern-day example:

I read recently about an Episcopal church in Mountain Brook, Alabama. Several years ago, the members of this parish became very concerned about their neighbors who were being overwhelmed by medical debt. People were losing their jobs and their homes for no other reason than that they got sick.

Here in 21st-century America, the members of this church decided that’s not okay anymore. So they did a little research, and what they found out was that collection companies, after trying and failing to collect on the debt that was owed them, would often sell that debt for pennies on the dollar in order to recoup at least part of the sum. And this church decided to take them up on that offer.

They raised $78,000 and purchased $8.1 million of outstanding medical debt, and then, rather than collecting on it, they forgave it all. Now, that’s the kind of thinking that Jesus was talking about in today’s parable. It’s smart, it’s creative, it’s forward-thinking. And, unlike the shrewd manager in the parable, its purpose is to bless others, not just to save our own skins.

Kindred in Christ, I put it to you today that we, too, are called to be smart, creative, and forward-thinking — not in order to save our own skins, but to bless the world around us. There can be no doubt that things are falling apart. As the rock band REM said, “It’s the end of the world as we know it,” but the gospel tells us that it’s also the beginning of a new world, so we have a choice to make:

We can either shake our fists at the sky, point our fingers at one another, hang our heads in despair — or, alternatively, we can be smart, creative, and forward-thinking, like Jesus invited us to be in today’s parable.

When you look at your life, what is the very particular set of skills that you can use to bless those around you? How can you use your time, talent, and treasure to help build the kind of world that God intends for us?

You might not be able to forgive six-figure debts, but perhaps you can take it easy on someone who has offended you in some way. You might not be able to heal the sick with the Laying on of Hands, but perhaps you can give someone a ride to a medical appointment. You might not be able to end world hunger, but perhaps you can volunteer your time at a local soup kitchen.

Each and every one of us has a gift to give, so let us work together and offer those gifts in the hope that God will be able to use them to replace this failing world with the kind of world God intends for us to live in.