Possibilities for Grace

Every week, during our Schola formation class, children hear faith stories from a Montessori-based curriculum called Godly Play. Parables are quite popular in Godly Play, and each parable storytelling begins with the same introduction. Holding up a box that is painted gold, the storyteller gazes wonderingly at it and says to the listening children that the box has a lid on it, like a door that is shut. Parables often seem like they have closed lids on them when you try to understand them. Sometimes when you come to a parable, it won’t open for you. And other times it will. But don’t be discouraged by the closed lid; you just have to keep coming back again and again to the parable.

Well, let’s just admit that today’s parable of the dishonest manager not only seems to have a lid on it most of the time, but the lid appears to be padlocked on a par with Fort Knox and the key is nowhere in sight. If you are feeling confused after hearing this parable, you are in good company.

I admit that I went looking for a key as I soon as I began to prepare for this sermon, and I quickly discovered that there are dozens of keys that all claim to open the parable box, to some extent, and they look vastly different from one another. Some are a bit ostentatious and resemble our giant key to the Fiske doors. Others are simpler and tiny enough to fit on my key ring.

Commentators on this confounding parable, in their quest to solve its puzzle, have engaged in astounding hermeneutical gymnastics to make some sense of it. And in many cases, these interpretive ventures are earnestly trying to do one thing: to make unlikeable characters seem more likeable.

The really problematic character, in this case, is the dishonest manager, because Jesus singles him out as a model for resourcefulness. In that case, can he really be all that bad? And so some interpreters have sought to unlock the hidden heroic qualities of the dishonest manager. He is a hero, apparently, because in reducing the debts owed by his master’s debtors, the manager selflessly eliminates the commission he would ordinarily have collected on such debts. Did you follow that? Maybe that’s the case, maybe not. In any event, it requires reading a lot back into the text.

It’s also troubling for some people that Jesus himself enjoins his disciples to make friends by means of dishonest wealth, so that when the money is gone, the eternal homes will be open to them.

All kinds of questions arise. Is Jesus advocating a Robin Hood tactic in which one robs the rich and gives to the poor? Is shrewdness being labeled a virtue? And what’s with all this business of making friends through shady means so that they can return the hospitality? I mean, we also know that Jesus expects hospitality to be based on sincerity alone, not on the prospect of reciprocity.

On the surface, it certainly appears that the dishonest manager is lauded for his very dishonesty. He is shrewd because he’s a child of this age, and the parable seems to urge those of us who are concerned about being children of the light to learn something from the manager’s cunning behavior. Maybe that’s the real message of the parable, maybe not.

This parable is further complicated by the fact that money is at the root of it. Luke has conditioned us to have a negative view of wealth, and Jesus himself says that one cannot serve both God and wealth—or mammon, to use that colorful Biblical word. It all seems to be so either/or. We feel that the parable must have a right interpretation and a wrong interpretation. You must choose God or money. You’re either 100% trustworthy all the time or you’re completely dishonest and a bad egg. There’s no in-between, and God certainly isn’t found in such a liminal place. So much for the Anglican via media.

And yet such a view puts us in a very difficult position—those of us who desire to be children of the light and yet who live in many respects as children of this age. Living in this age as aspiring children of the light is a never-ending torment. We can’t live without money, and yet we seem to be told that we can’t live righteously with it. And we are back where we started, knocking on the lid of the parable, waiting for it to open for us.

I think the problem is when we try to tidy up this parable, or any parable for that matter. Don’t we all want to find the correct key that opens the byzantine padlock on an obtuse parable so that its true moral meaning will be discovered? But let’s be Godly Play children for just a minute. What if we are not intended to figure out the meaning, and what if there is not simply one meaning? Instead of trying to allegorize this parable or make the rich man personify God who commends a dishonest manager, could we simply take this parable on its own terms, nothing more, nothing less?

Like the world in which we live, the world of the parable is not a perfect world, and so we don’t need to try to make it one. And precisely because it’s not a perfect world, Jesus uses it to speak to us most profoundly in our human imperfection. When we walk on interpretative high wires and pull off fire-eating circus tricks to clean up parables, we risk imposing a previously-constructed moral universe onto Scripture. But what if we turned things around and let Christ speak to us, unfettered by our attempts to make the text fit our desires or our need to reform the complicated, unlikeable characters? So, let’s explore again that world of the parable of the dishonest manager.

In this real world, the manager is indeed dishonest, highly conniving, and has been shamelessly squandering the property of his manager. The manager is irresponsible and untrustworthy. The rich man is equally odious. He is actively trying to make a substantial profit off his debtors through usurious means. And he only commends his dishonest manager because he has no way out. If the rich man revoked his manager’s actions, which were intended to placate the debtors, the rich man would only appear more detestable. And so, he commends the manager’s actions in order to make himself look generous, but in reality, he has had no other legitimate option.

It’s all a rather unsavory situation, if you ask me, and the characters are oily and highly distasteful. But into this world of reprobates, Jesus enters with his wisdom and the potential for redemption. Even from this morally dubious scenario, there might be a lesson to learn. Even in a distorted world riddled with mammon, it might still be possible for grace to break in. Even dishonest wealth might be transfigured into something glorious. Perhaps an untrustworthy manager has one or two redeemable qualities. A stopped clock, after all, is right twice a day.

You see, while Jesus appears to present us with impossible choices between two diametrically opposed things, he actually helps us find grace in the moral haziness of an imperfect world. Perhaps serving God instead of mammon is not impractically eschewing money in a society that runs on it. Instead, maybe it means not worshipping money and knowing when it has become one’s god. Jesus is urging us to be faithful stewards of the mammon of this age—because after all we do live in this age. And by being responsible and resourceful with worldly wealth, and using it for the good of others, we anticipate that glorious age to come where we shall truly be children of light.

Or maybe, just maybe, a largely dishonest manager is capable of doing a noble thing once in a blue moon, like reducing debt for struggling debtors, even if his intentions are unclear and his motives are mixed. By ceasing our quest for that key that will perfectly open the parable, we can better see how each tiny moment of life, even in its apparent hopelessness and wretchedness, could bear fruit for the kingdom of God.

I don’t believe that our task is to figure out the moral character of the rich man or the dishonest manager. In some sense, that has already been done for us. And it should be clear that Jesus is not commending dishonesty. He is, instead, offering us a more nuanced moral compass, where even the mammon of this world can be transformed by God into true riches.

The options are now manifold. Is it then possible for a wicked corporation or a ruthless government to experience redemption, even if through the fleeting honesty of one person? Is it then possible that someone you deem morally bankrupt might be capable, through God’s wondrous providence, of some small act of kindness? And could that person, like the dishonest manager, have an internal reflective monologue in which he or she decides to do something morally commendable, at least once? And even if that action is not moral perfection itself, maybe God is still at work there. Because if God in Christ has indeed redeemed this creation and is still dragging it to himself in salvific love, God is doing so in the squalor and mess of this world, using all of it, just as he did on that trash heap of Golgotha.

Was the rich man unscrupulous? Maybe. Was the dishonest manager really a bad egg? Perhaps. But who’s to say that even such folks are never open to God’s grace? Isn’t unrighteous mammon capable of being harnessed to build up God’s kingdom?

So, I don’t know about you, but I’m going to keep coming back to the parable box with its obstinate lid, and instead of trying to force the right key into it, I’m going to let it speak in its own mysterious way. And then, just then, I might gain some inkling of God’s unfathomable but glorious redeeming love.

Preached by Father Kyle Babin
22 September 2019
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Costly Signaling

A young springbok stotting (or pronking, or pronging).*

You know that I love to share great words with you from the pulpit.  Here’s a new one: “stotting.”  Yes, “stotting,” from the verb, “to stot.”  If the word is unfamiliar to you, maybe you know one of its synonyms: “pronking” or “pronging”.  Stotting, or pronking, or pronging, is a behavior exhibited by quadrupeds, “particularly gazelles, in which they spring into the air, lifting all four feet off the ground simultaneously. Usually, the legs are held in a relatively stiff position and the back may be arched with the head pointing downward.”*  It’s that marvelous spring-loaded bounce that we’ve seen gazelles make on nature documentaries when they leap into action.

There are lots of theories about why gazelles may stot, or pronk, or prong.  I think they probably do it because they can.  (I would.). But one theory is that stotting (or pronking, or pronging) is a development of an evolutionary biological system of signaling that facilitates a certain type of communication within and across various species.  For a gazelle, stotting, or pronking, or pronging might be an honest signal of the state of the animal’s health and strength.  On the one hand it’s an honest signal to would-be predators that the pronking gazelle is fast and fit, and perhaps not worth the trouble of chasing.  On the other hand, a young male gazelle who pronks may be sending an honest signal to young female gazelles (or other male gazelles, for all I know) that he is fast and fit, and definitely worth the trouble of chasing.

The point is that in gazelles, if this behavior can rightly be seen as signaling behavior, it seems to be of value because the signal is honest.  You see a young gazelle stotting, or pronking, or pronging, and what you see is what you get.

The theory that suggests that such behavior is at its root a kind of signaling, also sees a similar kind of signaling at work in certain religious traditions.  To this way of thinking, the ancient custom of male circumcision, or the somewhat less ancient custom of snake handling are both examples of signaling within religious communities.  In these examples, it may be that the chief characteristic of the signal is that it is costly, in that it comes with either sacrifice, or risk, or both.  Such costly signals may demonstrate loyalty, and contribute to a sense of shared trust and solidarity within religious groups, the theory goes.  But if there is any insight at all in reading religious signals this way, it seems to me that the signals need to be honest, too.  If you are going to talk the talk, you need to pronk the pronk.

Jesus is adept at deploying costly signals.  In the single paragraph of Luke’s Gospel we just heard, Jesus deployed three costly signals as challenges to the large crowd that’s following him around.  It may be that Jesus suspected that many people in that crowd were only there for the music.  And so he turned to them, and threw down three gauntlets, in the form of three costly signals.

One.  “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers, and sisters, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.”

Two.  “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”

Three.  “None of you can be my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.”

As signals go, these three seem custom-made to help most would-be followers decide that Jesus is not worth chasing.  As for those who decide that Jesus is worth the chase... well, we can’t say that he didn’t warn us with his costly signals.

But first, we have to ask whether or not these signals are honest.  And I think we can affirm that his costly signals are also honest signals.

First.  When it comes to his family, we know that Jesus repeatedly gave them short shrift.  The only account we have of his childhood tells us that Mary and Joseph felt the sting of his independence from them when they found him in the temple, after he’d be missing three days.

Second.  The Cross speaks for itself, since it caused Jesus to fall three times under its weight, and it was the instrument of his execution.

Third.  As for possessions, well... the story of Jesus’ life and ministry make no mention whatsoever of things he might have owned.  He never had a house that we know of.  There’s no mention of him carrying so much as a bag with him (and he told his disciples not to, either).  It’s not clear that he even owned a blanket to sleep beneath or a pillow on which to lay his head.

So it seems fair to say that if these three challenges are signals, they are honest signals from Jesus.

Back when the church was strong and the marketplace was weak(er), the church, too, was adept at deploying costly signals.  Make your confession every week.  Don’t eat meat on Fridays.  Father knows best.  (These kinds of things.)  These signals became deeply problematic for the church because it turned out that although they were costly, they were not really honest signals.  Confession became a means of control, not real pardon.  Fish Fridays didn’t often deepen anyone’s faith.  And much of the time Father did not know best.

Nowadays, we live in a world that is increasingly defined by its signals, on all sides, particularly in the marketplace.  Our lives are constantly manipulated by advertisers who deal in signals all day long.  Our communications have been shaped more by short bursts of signals than by reasoned discourse, dialogue, or discussion.  The clothes we wear, the ways we travel, the places and things we eat, the ink we use to decorate our bodies are all signals - and designed to be such.  “Everyone is signaling all the time.”**

Strangely (and dangerously) we have become unusually accepting of dishonest signals:  Smoking is sexy.  Joining a gym will make you fit.  A “happy meal” can be purchased at a counter and eaten in the car.  Indeed, we are subject to a steady stream of dishonest signals that encourage us to believe that money can buy happiness; politics is about winning, not compromise; we can win all wars; and all the trash we are creating is no big deal.  And since it’s easier than ever to choose the signals we like, and tune out the signals we don’t like, well, it’s also easier than ever to convince ourselves that dishonest signals are really honest, since we seldom put them to the test.

Jesus, often forgotten about, comes pronking into our lives with his Cross.  Admittedly, the weight of it keeps the stotting to a minimum, and soon sees him on the ground, but still....

And we are confronted (on Homecoming Sunday, which, frankly, ought to offer a much easier Gospel to preach on ), with the costliness and honesty of the Cross, of the all-encompassing nature of the call to follow Jesus, and of the clear suggestion that we have ordered our lives around all the wrong things, because we have, indeed ordered our lives around things.

But, if this Gospel message speaks to you (and I hope it does), then maybe it’s because, costly as his signals are, Jesus’ signals are also deeply honest.  It’s as if he knows that we’ve been knocked down ourselves by crosses of different shapes and sizes.  It’s as if he knows that we are starting to get sick and tired of all the dishonest signals out there.  It’s as if he knows we want to be something more than consumers doing the bidding of a marketplace.  It’s as if he knows what we have always suspected - that we were made for love.

And Jesus refuses to send us dishonest signals.  Which is why the signals he sends look and sound so costly to us.  And of the three signals in this morning’s Gospel passage, one is far more important than the others.  Yes, the Cross is the costliest signal of them all.  But its reward is commensurate with its cost: that is to say everything.  The Cross costs everything.  And the Cross gains everything.  Everything that matters, that is.  Which is to say, love.

Look, there are a lot of signals out there to choose from.  Everyone is signaling all the time.  Including God, it would seem.  For an hour or so each week, why not come stotting in here with Jesus?

It turns out that the word “stot” is “a common Scots and Northern English verb meaning ‘bounce’ or ‘walk with a bounce.’”  And pronking “comes from the Afrikaans verb pronk-, which means ‘show off’ or ‘strut’, and is a cognate of the English verb ‘prance.’”***. Now, in a place like this, I have to be careful about encouraging anyone (myself included) to prance or strut.  Let’s leave that to the Mummers!

But something about the idea of a church that bounces, seems alright to me.  Especially since something that bounces always has the possibility of bouncing home, like a prodigal child, like one who was lost but now is found, like someone who’s been at the shore all summer!

If everyone is signaling all the time, why shouldn’t Jesus be signaling us too?  I believe his signals are both costly and honest, and they are meant to show us the truth in a world that would mostly rather convince us to buy something, using whatever signals it takes.  But Jesus’ signals always come with the living memory that when he was taken down from the Cross and laid in his grave, dead, as dead can be… Jesus came pronking up from death to bring light where there had only been darkness, hope where there had been only despair, and life where there had only been death…not because of his family ties and connections, not because of his wealth and possessions, not because death doesn’t happen.  But because his signals are both costly and honest.  And God’s power, made perfect in weakness, overcomes cross and grave, transcends all family ties, and depends on no wealth or possessions.

And God is signaling to us, that it’s not only gazelles who can go bouncing, or stotting, or pronging through the challenges of life.  By God’s grace, we can, too, if we’ll take up our Cross and follow him, pronking as we go.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
Sunday, 8 September 2019
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

*Wikipedia

**Jane Coaston in The NY Times, 8/8/17

*** Alas, this information is not provided in the Oxford English Dictionary, which includes an entry for “stot,” but not one for “pronk.”  It comes from Wikipedia.

Move Up Higher

It’s rather refreshing to encounter the practical side of Jesus. Let’s face it: the Jesus we encounter in Scripture may be the King of Peace, but he is not always the king of clarity. A number of his sayings are ambiguous, difficult to comprehend, and even somewhat cagey.

Not surprisingly, Jesus frequently admonishes his disciples for their perceived ignorance of who he truly he is and what he has come to do. “Do you still fail to understand?” is a persistent refrain from his lips. But we might very well scream in frustration as we hear his words, “I don’t understand what you’re saying! At least throw me a bone!”

Yes, it’s refreshing, then, to find Jesus being straightforward and pragmatic in today’s Gospel. He is here a teacher offering helpful wisdom. Passages like this one remind us of Jesus’s full humanity, lest we forget that he was, in fact, truly human as well as truly divine. Jesus’s earthy advice while dining in the home of a leader of the Pharisees is vivid evidence that Jesus was an astute observer of the human condition. The parable that Jesus tells about a dinner party is, on the surface, uncomplicated in terms of how parables usually go. In some respects, it’s less of a parable than an excerpt from an etiquette guide, common sense wisdom from Miss Manners or Emily Post rather than Biblical wisdom.

It’s simple advice with some direct takeaways: if you are a guest at a wedding banquet, don’t take the VIP seat if it doesn’t have your name on it. Don’t sit in the orchestra seats at the Kimmel Center when you’ve purchased considerably cheaper ones in the nosebleed section. And whatever you do, don’t sit in the boss’s chair at the business meeting.

And here’s the really wise part: wait until the host invites you to move up higher at the table, because otherwise, if you presume to take the most coveted seat without an invitation, and should your host decide to seat someone more important than you where you have planted yourself uninvited, well, it would be rather embarrassing wouldn’t it? No one wants to be asked to move back down the table, do they?

Now, there are several aspects of Jesus’s advice that I find curious. He is being practical and doling out wisdom that fully acknowledges human ambition, competition, and the quest for recognition. He knows all too well how we long to be in places of honor but probably detest social embarrassment even more than we covet social status.

But does it bother you even a little that Jesus is commending a social grace that appears to be humble but when poked a bit further is really more about avoiding humiliation than about avoiding pride? Either way you slice it, the end goal is ultimately still about having the place of honor, even if the means of getting there appears to be humbler.

And more than that, why is Jesus even talking about different degrees of status and seating by rank? What happened to the great leveling that his very life ushers in, where there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female? Jesus may be helpfully practical when he advocates tact in knowing your place in social settings, but is his advice too practical or too shrewd? Is the practice of cunning actually compatible with humility?

We shouldn’t be surprised to hear that “all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” This good news is not unexpected news if we’ve read our Bible. These words recur all over the place in Scripture, whether in that exact succession of words or in variations on the same tune. The proud will be scattered in the imagination of their hearts. The mighty will be cast down from their thrones. The rich will be sent away empty. And the lowly and meek will be exalted.

But practical Jesus knows the weakness of human nature. He knows those desires misshapen by the fall of Adam, that arrogant ambition evident in the building of the tower of Babel, and so time and again he offers his timely refrain, because people still don’t get it, they still don’t understand: those who exalt themselves will be humbled, those who humble themselves will be exalted.

But I fear that we still don’t get it, we still don’t understand what Jesus has been saying, do we? And Jesus, of course, knows this all too well, and it’s why he has offered such practical advice. He knows we need his help to understand what humility means in human terms, and so Jesus offers more wisdom after his parable about humility. He now addresses the person hosting a luncheon or dinner. Ever so perceptive, Jesus knows that it’s not only the guests who are prey to human pride and ambition; it’s also those hosting the dinner party, perhaps especially so. He lets no one off the hook. In this case, the one who is ostensibly serving through the hosting of a party is one who is at the same time all too vulnerable to pride and keeping up appearances. Hyacinth Bucket, Jesus is talking to you.

The Achilles’ heel of the dinner host or hostess is the act of service itself. The coveted gesture of reciprocity from the dinner guest is the motive for service and hospitality. The dinner host invites those who will be most likely to offer a dinner invitation in return. In all likelihood, the guests in this case are the rich and famous, the powerful, or the ones who offer the most splendid feasts and whose own guest lists are the most sought-after places in town. I imagine we’ve all been there at some point: talk to the persons who will give you something in return or can do something for you, and well, don’t worry about the others.

So Jesus presents an antidote for this temptation to curry favor: “when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.” To your feast, invite those who have no home in which they can host you in return. Invite those who are part of the anonymous fabric of the workplace and who can never help you get that promotion you’ve always wanted. At coffee hour, engage in conversation with that person who may never come back to this church or ever offer a large pledge. Because then, you will be doing it not to gain some earthly reward but because you can do nothing else. You are doing something simply because it’s the right thing to do, with no ulterior motives.

The problem is that when we’re doing the righteous thing—even when we’re compassionately inviting the poor, the crippled, and the lame to our parties, even when we are trying not to be Hyacinth Bucket in our own social circles—we are always vulnerable to that great temptation of pride. We are always susceptible to over-scrupulous questioning of our motives, because after all, we’re human. It may be that we invite the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame because that’s what we’re supposed to do, and then we are proud of ourselves for doing so. We volunteer at some charitable organization because it’s a good work, and it feeds us as well as those we serve. But before long, we’ve proclaimed our altruism on social media and become the victim of humble bragging. And we have fallen into pride once again. It’s a frustrating, vicious cycle. Secretly, no matter how hard we try, we are still desperately longing to hear that anonymous but seductive voice saying, “Friend, move up higher.”

And I think this is why Jesus is so shrewd in his advice. He knows better than you or I that our humility has the potential of being our downfall into hubris. He knows that when we “want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.”[1] He knows that the desire to get the upper hand on sin that is part and parcel of being human can, in and of itself, be a snare and stumbling block, and so he offers us a pragmatic way out of it. He approaches us on our own terms.

He urges us to get on with very practical tasks because the only way to be humble is to start practicing it and to learn it, even if our first efforts are distorted. No doubt, we’ll stumble at first. Our initial attempts to take the lower seat at the table will be full of secret yearning for some alluring worldly voice to say, “Friend, move up higher, and take your place next to me.” And Jesus knows that our early forays into hosting dinner parties will be characterized by carefully crafted guest lists of the least of these followed by contented pride in how generous we were in our invitations. But we have to start somewhere. Over time we may find that we are longing less for that voice to call us up the table, and we may feel a bit less satisfied and self-conscious about our supposedly selfless efforts.

Because Jesus understands what all along we have not truly understood, that while we can intentionally humble or exalt ourselves of our own free will, God has the final word. God’s grace is the only thing that can imbue us with true humility. And maybe one day, we’ll begin to see that we don’t need to curry God’s favor the way we would try to do so with our dinner hosts. Perhaps we’ll see that God doesn’t operate according to the wisdom of Miss Manners or Emily Post. Maybe we’ll see that we don’t have to engage in tit-for-tat reciprocity to earn God’s invitation to a higher place at the table.

God has already called us higher up the table. We are already precious and honored in God’s sight, even though we so frequently fail to perceive it. And all our jockeying for position and status is because we still just don’t understand.

If we could only get on with the work of trying to be humble, of practicing those slow, baby steps of humility in all its floundering messiness, with God’s grace, we’ll surely begin to discern God’s voice more clearly, not calling to us from way up the table, but right next to us, indeed in our very hearts, saying, “Friend, move up higher; move up even higher than that high place where I’ve already placed you. I’ll help you move up as high as you can go to that place where you will be with me forever and ever. And we’ll feast together, and there are plenty of seats to go around. Move up higher, my friend, and rest your head on my chest, and there you’ll rest eternally.” And at the end of the day, this is the only voice and the only place that ever matter.

Preached by Father Kyle Babin
1 September 2019
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

[1] Romans 7:21