Grace-St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Mercerville, New Jersey

"The master commended the dishonest steward for his shrewdness."

Let’s speak about what the question of being "saved" might mean to those of us "ordinary people" who are often vaguely unconscious about where real sinfulness hangs out in our lives. If the ideas behind "bad person" run from terrorism to chocolate; perhaps we "ordinary" folks may be forgiven for not knowing exactly how "badly" --- or how "well"----- we have been behaving. What struck me was the word "ordinary." And of course, we here at GraSP are just that. We're fairly representative of the range of people who live in America at this moment - allowing for our serious lack of Hispanics. We mostly have average amounts of education, money, friends and possessions. We're older, younger, & middle-aged; married, partnered, & single; with and without children in pretty standard proportions. We have the usual range of problems, interests, and accomplishments among us.

But the most ordinary thing about us is probably that We're all pretty sure that when things go "normally", the world behaves the way "it should;" then good folks get rewarded and the bad folk get punished.

The devious steward's story warns us that such is not always the case in the kingdom of God. As we gather here around Jesus to learn, among other things, what God has in mind for human communities like ours, this story, and many other parables of Jesus - bring us up short -- They even reverse our ideas of how God sees us, and the world.

In God's world, The "prodigal son" is welcomed home - not with a lecture but with a party. All the workers in the vineyard earn the same wage. Those who willingly loose their lives for the kingdom save them. The most important are the last, and the least important are the first. The sinful tax collector's prayer is accepted, The virtuous Pharisee's (priest's prayer) is not. The poor and unwashed come to the banquet The rich relatives are left out in the cold.

What is at work in all these stories is the unpredictability and overflowing bounty of God's grace.

What is also at work in them is the radical distance between God's ideas of "good" and ours. These "parables of the kingdom" - these tales of how God treats people, [and expects us to treat each other] celebrate the Joy God has in each one of us, and God's power to re-orient our lives if we are willing to live according to the kingdom's ways.

Consider the steward. He has been mismanaging funds, probably by adding an extra percentage of money for himself to the client's loans. Now the village gossip chain has just caught up with him. His absentee landlord master turns up, fires him, and demands an accounting.

The steward is ruthlessly honest with and about himself - He's knows that he's weak, lazy and unwilling to work hard. But he knows how the world works. So . . . . He promptly and completely removes his percentage from the client's bills, which considerably lowers their debt, [and, by the by, leaves them enormously grateful to him.]

The Landlord commends him for his prompt re-assessment of the situation and for his understanding of how to win friends and influence people.

Jesus is not recommending "Enronian" methods of accounting, But he is please with the steward's immediate reaction to the breaking in of a new situation. Jesus also admires someone who moves from cheating others to giving them money - or at least making partial restitution of what was probably theirs.

We don't know what happened after that. The rest of the added words Cornelia read are, to put it crudely, sermon notes from various persons/scribes/ disciples who were retelling this, Jesus' parable, to their own audiences as they tried to figure out what the story conveyed.

I suspect however, that the steward never made it to jail. He probably lived peacefully in the town for the rest of his natural life. Whether he actually repented and changed his life, I have no idea. What I do notice here, as elsewhere is that the "bad" guy is not punished for his actions. Instead, the steward leaves the situation with at least a moderately approving word from Jesus the parable teller. We might even speculate that he was able to Live a different sort of life from then on (but maybe he didn't - just repeated the same thing over and over again.) The parable's open-endedness gives us the freedom to toy with the story To imagine various outcomes, and than to toy with its relation to with our own lives.

So how do we take this story into our own time? Cole Porter's "Anything Goes" is a great song, but not a very good method of living out the gospel. I seriously doubt that Jesus meant to suggest that honesty is not desirable. This story does not say that all kinds of cleverness are equally acceptable to God. I do think Jesus wants us to pay particular attention to the immediate situations in which we find ourselves. I'm pretty sure he wants us to be ready to "turn on a dime" and re-orient our lives when we realize that the way we're living is leading to a dead end.

More than that, we need to be aware that while the "normal," and the "ordinary," frequently revel God, God is NEVER confined to the normal and the ordinary. Human Decency, Wisdom and Prudence - and the rules they author - are utterly essential to a Christian life. But they can never be the last word - Never become an end in themselves - because they themselves will never be adequate responses to the Advent of God into our lives. God's reign is an inside out, upside down sort of place. Bumping into God is a totally re-orienting kind of experience. God's forgiving love shatters our human wisdom and prudence as it calls us to live only from our relationship to God - NOT primarily from the "rules" our human understanding has formed.

Richard Norris, one of the Episcopal church's finest theological teachers, reminds us that to believe in God includes having certain opinions or ideas about God, and trusting that God is eternally dependable and cares deeply about us, but that far more than either of those things; to believe in God is to make a performative decision (like getting married, or adopting a child) to live in relationship to another being.

Trying to understand how we relate to God, trying to discern what God's Spirit is up to in our world, trying to see where God is at work in our own lives: these are big reasons why we come here each week to sit around Jesus and listen to the stories he tells us.

And one thing Jesus has to say is that a holy life is far greater than human wisdom, decency and prudence. That a faithful life is far more than merely playing by the rules - or "being good-" or working on being "ready" for God's poking her head up here and there in unexpected times and places.

We can, Jesus warns, never really be ready for God's outlandish behavior. But we can recognize a new situation breaking through when we see it, and we can turn ourselves around, and live faithfully into any new ways to which God calls us. We can look around in both our normal, and unusual times, watching for the coming of God in the ordinary, and in the totally unexpected.

When God seems to be turning up in a new and "unauthorized" place, we can be open to the promise of a new creation, and, holding on tightly to our friendship with God, allow the Holy Spirit to lead us toward the life of the Kingdom.

A less fancy way to say that is that we should listen, look, consider and pray very carefully, So that when God's kingdom is breaks into our lives, We will actually NOTICE it, And, noticing it, welcome the Kingdom with hopefulness, faithfulness, trust and joy.