First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
19 September 2004
Between Justice and Mercy
Those of you who were here last week will remember that Mary and I taught you a bit of American Sign Language. Well, there is just one more sign I'd like to teach you before we dive into this Parable of the Dishonest Manager. I've been making it a lot this past week. It is the sign for utter confusion. The ASL version is this (palms flat, opposing each other, moving in opposite directions in front of chest). And to it we might add the universally recognized version(head scratching). Perhaps now, we'll all be better equipped to tackle this difficult passage from Luke's Gospel.
Did you hear what was going on in that 16th chapter? Jesus tells a parable. First, there is a boss who has heard charges that one of his managers may be squandering his assets. The manager is summoned and summarily dismissed from his duties. This much we can follow. Upon a little reflection, the manager decides to go around to his bosses clients and relieve them of a few substantial chunks of debt that are owed to his boss. An odd move, but not having any other bright ideas, the manager figured if he made nice with the boss's clients while he still could, they might be obliged to give him a place to stay when he could no longer pay the rent. Were this manager one of our own children, we might tell him, two wrongs don't make a right! But here's where the parable gets really weird. When the boss hears that the manager had, in essence, given away his money, he does not get all the more upset as we might expect. Instead, he commends the manager…for being shrewd. For all we know, the boss may have even given the manager his job back. To make matters even stranger, Jesus switches from storyteller to preacher, with that characteristic phrase "and I tell you". And we find Jesus telling his disciples, "make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes." Before we go any further, let us pause and take comfort in the fact that even St. Augustine was confused by this passage. He supposedly said of it, "I can't believe that this story came from the lips of our Lord."1 Believe it or not, it did, and we are left to make sense of what it means.
Unfortunately, the commentaries offer surprisingly little in the way of help. Most of what I read this past week start out with a comment about how preachers generally avoid the passage altogether. Now that would have been a helpful insight if only I had read it before I told the staff what the texts were for the bulletin. The commentaries also agree that this is one of, if not the, most difficult of Jesus' parables. Beyond that, they are all over the map, leaving far more questions than answers. With whom in the parable are we supposed to relate? With the boss? With the poor whose debts are forgiven? With the dishonest manager? We'd rather hope not. Is the point of the parable that we ought to learn something from the business world about how to be effective and shrewd when it comes to matters of our faith? If so, why choose a dishonest exemplar? Is the point that the ends, i.e. debts of the poor forgiven, justify the means, i.e. theft? Some choose not to be bothered by these questions and focus instead on the bottom line: you cannot serve God and wealth, creating an entire biblical ethic on the right use of money with very little reference to the parable itself. As is often the case with Jesus' parables, these supposedly bottom lines may have been tacked on by a later writer or editor. And as is often the case, the parable itself is open to interpretation. I'd like to share with you mine.
Though I'm sure there is a good social or economic justice sermon in this passage, I think there is more to it. After some serious head scratching, I found myself starting to like the dishonest manger. Granted, he has two strikes against him. The first is a clear 'whiff' if we can believe the charges that he has squandered his boss's wealth. The second is more of a foul. He gives away money that is not his own, albeit to the benefit of the poor. If we are too focused on counting his strikes though, we can miss the little conversation he has with himself after he gets canned. This soliloquy may just be the key to a deeper understanding of the passage. "What will I do now?" he says. "What will I do now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig. I am too ashamed to beg." If we give the dishonest manager the benefit of the doubt, we might say that he is at least being honest with himself, about his weakness and about his pride. When the truth, or alleged truth, came about his squandering, when he learns that he's lost his job, he finds himself in crisis. Not knowing what he will do to get by, he reaches out to his clients for help, forgiving their debts so they will be indebted to him and will show him hospitality when he can no longer pay the rent.
When the truth comes out about the manager's dishonesty, our hearts may at first cry "justice!" The story does not make sense with him being commended for his unjust actions, however just the consequences. Our instincts seem to dictate that the manager needs to be punished. Upon a closer look though, especially at his honest and in some ways heart wrenching soliloquy, it could be that Jesus is calling us to cry not "justice", but "mercy". It wouldn't be the first time that Jesus' sympathies lie more with the sinner than with the judge.
Twice this week, I have felt myself crying out both "justice" and "mercy" in virtually the same breath. In the first instance, I'm sure you can relate. When the truth came out on Wednesday morning that Mary's mother does not have cancer, after the doctors had explicitly told them she did, my heart cried out, together with you, Mary, "sweet mercy." We'll take that kind of good news in whatever form. And yet, mixed in with that joy was some anger and sadness that Mary and her family had to unnecessarily endure such a horribly traumatic week. In some small way, we want to cry out "justice" too. Someone should at least give those doctors in Concord a good talking to.
The truth also came out this week in a 26th floor downtown law office, where my mother and I met with two attorneys that were handling a lawsuit that had been filed against my 90-year-old grandmother. About a year and a half ago, my grandmother was involved in a serious car accident. The accident was her fault, but it was nonetheless an accident. My grandmother was okay. The person she hit was badly injured. After hearing from the lawyers in some detail what she'd been through, it's clear to me that she is owed something, and well more than my grandmother's small insurance policy will cover. Together with her I find myself crying "justice". Let's settle the case and give her whatever she needs even if it is my grandmother's last penny. Of course, with my grandmother who is facing the possibility of relying on not much more than Social Security as her only income, I cry "mercy".
All week, amidst my confusion about how to interpret this parable, there has been this giant tug of war in my heart with God pulling on both sides. The pull has been between justice on one side and mercy on the other. I came across a quote by Martin Luther King that affirmed the tug. King said, "God has two outstretched arms. One is strong enough to surround us with justice, and one is gentle enough to embrace us with grace." What I want to know is what are we supposed to do when we find God's arms not merely hugging, but tugging our hearts in seemingly opposite directions? Through all of the confusion I have felt this week, and here I will use the remarkably apt ASL version of the word (sign for confusion), I believe this is at least one of the questions our parable leaves us to ponder. How do we balance the requirement to show both justice and mercy in those moments in our lives when a mistake has been made or when an accident happens or when some hard truth comes out as it did that the dishonest manager would lose his job?
Not too many years ago, I would have told you that what attracted me most to Christianity was that it gave me a firm foundation on which to rest my social justice convictions and a model to follow in Christ who would challenge the status quo of my life and the world. God was present in right and mutual and just relationships. It was ours to strive against oppression and injustice. Religion and morality were two sides of the same coin. Then one day a few years back, I was driving in my car on a Sunday morning when a heard line by Peter Gomes, our friend from across the Common. My visceral reaction to it almost made me drive off the road. He said that in all his years one of the few things he felt he had really learned about God was that God's mercy is greater than God's justice! At the time, I was utterly appalled at the thought. How could anyone say such a thing? I don't expect that you theologically sophisticated First Church types would have shared in my surprised or disgust but I for one am still recovering from that line. Somewhere along the way, it slowly began to dawn on me that choosing mercy is more often than not the more challenging, the more compassionate, the more edifying and the more fundamentally Christian way to go. Shakespeare's line from The Merchant of Venice began to take on a new resonance for me:
Mercy is above this sceptred sway, It is enthroned in the hearts of kings, It is an attribute to God himself; And earthly power doth then show likest God's When mercy seasons justice.
When mercy seasons justice! Even Peter Gomes could not have put it so well. And yet for how many years did I firmly believe that the call to Christian Discipleship was no different from any person's call to live a life of moral accountability. Lucky or unlucky for you, it has come to mean more for me. Mercy is that higher peak to which religion calls us, above all peaks of moral reasoning. By God's grace, mercy wins the tug of war every time! Apparently, the writers of all those books of common prayers were way ahead of me on this count. Can you imagine if we followed our prayers of supplication and of confession with the tag "Lord, have justice" instead of "Lord, have mercy?" Talk about being careful what you wish for!
This parable about the dishonest manager calls us not only to a higher place but also to a deeper place of Christian Discipleship. Imagine God commending you for your mistakes, and even your accidents! This is when grace and mercy in my mind become utterly terrifying. Imagine all of those moments in your lives when you have felt backed up against a wall and you have not known what to do and you did whatever you could, feeling guilty that you could do not more, or that you could not do better? When we face those hard truths of our own weakness or pride or misjudgments, don't all we want the same thing? Don't we all want what the dishonest manager wanted, a place where we will be welcomed, in spite of it all? But how hard it is to be so vulnerable? How hard it is to remember how human we are? I've come to think that the true cost of Christian discipleship is learning how to fully accept God's grace, for ourselves and for others. The cost of discipleship is the acceptance of grace.
To give you a sense of the challenge, let's try bringing this parable home, shall we? If the quintessential dishonest manager of our time, Ken Lay, were to walk through these doors looking for a church home, would we welcome him? Would our way of hospitality apply? The good news is that, in this congregation, the decision would likely create a healthy tug of war in the heart of the congregation. Some would cry "justice" and would stand in defiance in solidarity with thousands of disenfranchised employees. Others might well cry mercy, acknowledging that the commandment does not say we have to like our neighbors. Granted, it would be a hard and confusing dilemma. We might ask, "Are you done serving Mammon, Ken?" Or "Have you learned your lesson yet?" We might ask him: "Ken, have you repented, for you know, the kingdom of God is at hand?" Or, we could share the cost of discipleship with him, and let mercy win the tug of war. We could say, "Join us, Ken, in our own repentance. Come and feel with us that terrifying grace of God. Join us and let God's healing and commendation mend our broken hearts together."
As I get to know this congregation, one of the things that I've been listening for in our conversations is those places where your hearts feel tugged a part, those real places in each of our lives where we find ourselves saying "What will I do now? I am too weak to dig. I am too ashamed to beg." What will I do now that I have lost my job? What will I do now that I have another mouth to feed? What will I do now that my health or car insurance won't cover it? What will I do now that I have worked so hard in my life, in some cases crying out "justice" in my work and ministry in the world only to come home to my family which cries out "have mercy on us"? Amidst all of our noble passion to do justice in the world, on behalf of the poor and the oppressed, I fear that we are not being honest enough with ourselves, and we are not willing to bear the deeper cost of our discipleship which is to let God's grace and mercy work in our lives too. We think, perhaps because many of us have money, that our problems are small in comparison. We may even get confused that our vision, our way of hospitality, is more for those folks out there who haven't found a church community. But where do we need to feel that rich sense of God's welcome in our own lives? Where do we feel that the stories of our private pain are welcomed, required even, in order to find common ground with the stories of other, and to build public relationships and to take public action.
Before I close, I have a small example of what I mean. The Mass Council of Churches has heard some of our stories recently. They have heard us saying "What will we do now?" when a part of what we need most is Sabbath time, that is, time for ourselves, time for our families, time to spend with our church communities, not in committees mind you, but in worship and prayer and in spiritual deepening. They have heard our stories and our cries and are building a movement of public relationship and public action called "Take Back Your Time" wherein they are trying to declare that four days this fall will be set aside for Sabbath time. They are actively calling out congregations and agencies and towns to cancel all business and committee meetings. I'd love to see First Church be involved in this in one way or another if only because that is one of the big pains and pressures I've been hearing a lot about in my conversations with you. This is just one small example and it is barely the tip of the iceberg of a deeper problem in our culture. But, it is a tip at which our cries of mercy and justice can meet, and where God's Kingdom is breaking into our lives.
Like the dishonest manager, we have a long ways to go when it comes to being honest with each other and with God as we share our weakness and our pride and our profound though often veiled yearning for that place where we are welcome to lay our heads and our burdens down. Amidst all of our confusion, when we feel our hearts being tugged apart by God, let us proclaim that God's grace is sure. God's grace is sure and it is only needful thing. If indeed the true cost of our Christian discipleship is the acceptance of God's grace and mercy in our lives, let us share this cost together. Let us share our "what will I do now" stories with one another. Let us seek to build public relationships. On the rock foundation of God's grace, let us be a church in mission to ourselves and to the world!
1St. Augustine, quoted by William Willimon, in "The Future And What To Do About It", http://www.chapel.duke.edu/chapel/worship/sunday/viewsermon.aspx?id=89.
© 2004, Daniel Smith