Proper 20
September 22, 2013
Luke 16:1-13
The Shrewd Manager
Before we start talking about today’s tricky readings, I have a little test. There are three steps. I’ll go slow, and there are no winners or losers. Do this in your head, and don’t say anything out loud, lest you ruin the surprise.
First, think of a country that begins with the letter D.
Now, think of an animal that begins with the last letter of your country.
Finally, think of a color that begins with the last letter of your animal.
Now picture your animal, in your color, cheering at the Olympics for your county.
Got it? OK. Now realize how silly it is to think of an orange kangaroo cheering for Denmark. There are no orange kangaroos!
I must be magic, right? Nope, just trained on cultural bias and assumptions. We all have bias that results in us making choices. And so much of that bias is based on things we don’t even see, things we don’t actively decide. We get our bias in a pretty passive way – where we live, when we were born. And these things change the way we see the world. It changes what we assume about ourselves and about others, and determines our actions.
See, we northern hemisphere, first world folks most frequently pick Denmark as our country that begins with D. In another hemisphere and culture, we might have picked Djibouti, or Democratic Republic of Congo. Once most of us picked Denmark, there are other animals that begin with a K, but kangaroos are on all our ABC flash cards. Orange is in our crayon pack, but serious artists in the bunch may have picked ocher. And if we lived in Temple, Texas or Tacoma Washington, we may have jumped to the color olive, because of the significant amount we see at our community’s army bases.
The moral of this little exercise? We are absolutely creatures of our culture. So much so that we don’t even see our cultural bias, and yet the majority of us stood there envisioning an orange kangaroo from Denmark. This cultural bias ends up firmly attaching to our psyche, and helps develop something that’s gaining national attention, our implicit bias –which is so inherit or implicit, we fail to see it. It influences what we think about other people, other cultures, other countries, and even the colors, animals and countries you pick at a short little exercise at church.
There’s nothing to do about implicit bias, except understand it exists, and question it when you make judgments about others. Just be aware of it.
I mention all of this about cultural and implicit bias in light of today’s Gospel reading. This reading from Luke 16 is tough. What we hear, or at least what I heard is the following: The manager isn’t doing a good job and gets fired. Being conniving, he runs to the people who owed his employer and tells them to cut what they owe. This accomplishes a few things. It makes the debtors grateful, and ingratiates them to the manager. The rich owner then does the unthinkable. He commends the manager. What? That’s not fair.
From where we sit, in one of the most capitalistic and wealthy countries in the world, this cannot be right. The manager swindles his boss out of his hard earned income, and the owner thanks him? This goes against everything we entrepreneurial Americans to know to be true. You work hard and are honest, and the system repays you. If you are wronged, justice will be done.
But what if our understanding and our visceral reaction to this story is deeply affected by that implicit bias? For a second, let’s step away from that orange kangaroo and try to see things as if we weren't as implicitly biased as we really are.
What if the manager had worked his whole life, was a great manager and had done everything expected of him by his rich owner. Maybe the rich owner is a crook, and inappropriately fired the manager, leaving the manager to face pending doom without skills or resources. Some scholars argue that the words used would indicate that the manager was in the right and the rich owner was mean, and inappropriately fired the manager, trying to destroy him. That would make the story easier to swallow and understand.
Here’s another scenario that doesn't jump out at us because of our implicit bias. What if what the people originally borrowed was significantly less than what they were asked to pay back? There were laws on the books at the time prohibiting lending with any interest. What if the rich owner not only lent with interest, but with significant interest, conducting what is now known as “predatory lending practices”? What if they’d borrowed the equivalent of 2 jugs of oil, and now one year later, payment was being extracted for 100? This may seem absurd, but that’s exactly what the annual rate would be for the predatory payday loans that are rampant in our society. People borrow $100 for 2 weeks, and are required to pay $15 interest. Carried out for a year, that’s nearly 4,000 percent interest. People are crippled by exorbitant interest fees on these seemingly innocent short term loans. As a result, they borrow more to pay the last debt, resulting in increasing debt. This is a horrible problem in our country. While banks are heavily regulated, payday loan establishments are not, and the people who use them are stuck with unregulated horrible predatory lending practices that cripple them. If we were sitting in their shoes, maybe this story would sound different.
Maybe the wealthy owner was effectively a predatory lender, and he was jacking up the interest to the point that it was unbearable. Perhaps the manager was just performing his own form of debt forgiveness, in a corrupt and unfair system. Some scholars argue that the words used in this story would indicate that the manager was just making right on the original loan, and removing the excessive interest. This too would make the story more understandable.
I’m not sure whether these scholarly justifications are correct, but they don’t ring true with me. These explanations, predatory lender or mean boss, both help explain the story, but I think they let us off the hook, in thinking about the hard part of today’s Gospel reading.
At its core, today’s reading is about an authority figure, who has someone over which he has some authority. The underling is trusted, and then messes up. Badly. And in the end, the underling returns and instead of being mad, the authority figure commends the subordinate. Does that sound like any other stories familiar to us? What about one of the most beloved, heart warming stories, the story of the prodigal son?
Authority figure – father. Subordinate who messes up – son. Son returns and instead of being mad, like the older brother is, the father welcomes him and celebrates. Perhaps not coincidentally, the story of the prodigal son immediately precedes this story. In the oral tradition, these stories would likely have been heard together. So perhaps it’s not a coincidence. Maybe the stories are related somehow, even though one story we love, and the other – we don’t.
Why are these stories received so very differently by us? I think it’s because we live in a society where we implicitly value family. Forgiveness and love are what we assume family is; it’s what family is supposed to do. It’s justified. I’m not suggesting that it always is exactly like that, but that’s our assumption or norm about family. We want to be that forgiving father. Work, on the other hand, is not that. It is contractual, and we have no illusion of love or relationship. If we’re the employee, it’s how we make money. If we’re the boss, it’s how we make more money. The primary purpose is making money; it’s not primarily about the relationships.
Both stories involve power, bad decisions, relationships, and mercy, or at least, the lack of condemnation. Because of their contexts and our implicit biases, in one we hear family, love, forgiveness, good master and good loving resolution. In the other we hear money, cheat, bad master, and bad unfair resolution.
We can see how and why the father forgave and welcomed the son, why he chose love over justice. That’s what fathers do. It’s much more difficult to comprehend why the master commended the shrewd manager, why he welcomed him with a commendation, why he chose love over justice.
I believe that the three most frequently repeated words of mine as a child were, “that’s not fair”. I was all about justice, defined in the worldly dictionary as action that is morally right and fair. To a large degree, I still am. I believe it’s critical to try to be just and fair. But what I hear in today’s reading is that there is something more important than justice. Love.
What I hear from the Gospel today is that at the end of the day, love needs to rule, not justice. Love needs to rule when it’s an errant son returning, or a shrewd manager.
Love needs to rule when it’s my own kids, or my coworkers. Love needs to rule when the other person steals our heart, our inheritance, our money. Love needs to rule when there’s remorse, and when there isn’t.
In this story, the resolution was unjust. And we have a great model for seeing what that choice looks like in action. At the end of his life, as he was being tried and tortured, Christ did not choose fairness or justice. He could have. Everyone was goading him to save himself, to testify on his own behalf. But he chose love. He chose an incredibly unjust resolution to demonstrate what love looks like, to show what the choice of love over justice looks like.
The closing of today’s Gospel says you cannot serve God and wealth. We hear that and we know that it means we can’t love money more than we love God. But in light of today’s reading, I think it also is a warning about those implicit biases we don’t even know we have. The one that makes the unforgivable actions of a child against a parent more forgivable than the unforgivable actions of an employee against the money-making boss. For some reason we feel it’s more egregious to wrong someone when the relationship is primarily about money, rather than when it’s family That says something about the high value we place on that money making relationship. To me, it says that we do serve two masters, and that the second master, the money master, is so embedded in our culture and our bias, we don’t even see it. We hear the praise for the shrewd manager, and cannot fathom why, even though we all love the similar plot of the prodigal son. We need to understand that we do have bias, particularly about wealth and capitalism, and the American Dream. And knowing that, we need to struggle with today’s Gospel. And we need to fight against the invisible urge to root for the orange kangaroo, or to decide that in this story, this story that involves money, love is too extravagant.
When I feel that urge to respond with my battle cry, “that’s not fair”, I need to catch myself and try to figure out if my implicit biases are making me serve that other master, the master that cares about retribution, and my hard-earned money, or making sure things are fair. I believe that it’s our cultural capitalistic implicit bias that makes this story so much harder to hear, harder to understand.
After all, Jesus didn't strive to be fair. He didn't command everyone to be fair to one another, but rather to love one another. Love needs to rule when we know it’s the right thing to do, like the prodigal son. And Love needs to rule when it’s hard, and doesn't seem fair. Particularly, when it doesn't seem fair. When it’s hardest, it’s most important that we as Christians love. When we hold fast to love, when we serve love, not money and not justice, we are, as the collect says, holding fast to things that endure, and we can let those earthy things like money, like retribution pass away without anxiety. We cannot serve God and wealth. Our greatest challenge is to see and cease all of the ways our implicit bias about wealth and money and working hard and the American Dream result in actions that serve that other master. Instead, we need to serve love.
