Proper 20 - September 19, 2010

Why this blog? (Andy)

Most Sundays during my ten years as a United Methodist pastor, I preached and/or taught from the Revised Common Lectionary.  I loved spending time reflecting on the week’s Scriptures.  Now I am a layperson in the Episcopal Church.  I co-lead an adult Sunday School class on the week’s Lectionary texts, and I still love chewing on the texts.  Lately I’ve been getting the feeling maybe I should do something more with the excellent seminary education I received besides just teaching this class.  This blog seemed like a natural fit.  I’m writing this with our class at St. Andrews Episcopal Church in mind, as well as other friends.  This blog is not by any means intended to be a thorough exposition of the texts, but rather me thinking out loud about what I’m hearing and noticing, what strikes me in the week’s texts.  For that reason, I expect I’ll write at least a little something on most of the texts, but probably more on some than others from week to week.  Finally, a note on the format: since I won’t reproduce the readings here, you’ll need to look them up.  I’ll be using NRSV.

Jeremiah 8:18-9:1

This is a good example of why we need Jeremiah – because he gives voice to some of the really unpleasant stuff of our experience – deep grief, feeling utterly abandoned by God (hey, been there).  At this point in the story, Judah’s destruction by the Babylonians is imminent, and the feeling here is one of knowing something terrible is going to happen and that there’s apparently no way to avoid it.  And Jeremiah isn’t afraid to voice the people’s feeling of having been forsaken: “Is the Lord not in Zion?!”  And I think God’s response here sounds like that of an older sibling who has made the younger one cry and is being confronted about it:  “Well they’re the ones who…”  Verse 21 really gets me, though: “For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt.”  Jeremiah is the consummate prophet: standing between God and God’s people, able to pronounce God’s word of judgment but also experiencing the people’s pain as his own.  And then verse 9:1, he feels for God’s people so intensely that he just wishes he could let loose a river of tears to relieve them.

Bonus point: I love that the comforting hymn “There is a balm in Gilead” comes from this passage, which has such the opposite sense: “If there’s any balm in Gilead, then why are we still so sick?”

1 Timothy 2:1-7

            I find the first two verses interesting because they call us to pray especially for political leaders.  It interests me because so often political campaigns talk about the candidate “sharing our values.”  But the context of 1 Timothy was the Roman Empire!  And I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a sense that the emperor shared the values of the Christian community very much.  Rather, I imagine the early Christians found themselves subject to the vicissitudes of the Empire and the whims of the “kings and all who are in high positions.”  So the author of this letter says, Pray for them so that we may live a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity.  In other words, it’s about something bigger than those in high places “sharing our values” – it’s about God being active in the midst of whatever they’re doing, or in spite of whatever they’re doing!  (Cue the Matthew Sweet song, “We’re all counting on his/ Divine intervention”)  The text ends with this liturgical bit, with its image of Jesus as Mediator, and it strikes me that prayer is a “mediating” activity, an activity that seeks to mediate between humanity and God.  The image of Jesus as Mediator also reminds me again of Jeremiah standing between God and God’s people… hmm…

Luke 16:1-13

This text is so weird to me – even for a parable, it’s weird.  “Parable” comes from a Greek word that means “to throw alongside,” and if you imagine something being “thrown alongside,” you see it on the periphery, out of the corner of your eye.  Parables are like this – often the “point,” if there even is one, isn’t something you see straight on – instead, it kind of escapes you, you can’t quite put your finger on it.  With this text, I think there are two things that make it hard to deal with: the first is that the parable itself is weird, and the second is that it has like three different explanations tacked onto it.  I read Fred Craddock’s commentary on it, and he notes that it’s hard to tell which words are supposed to be Jesus’ and which are Luke’s. 

            So what about the parable?  First of all, when it says in the first verse that the boss is a “rich man,” my alarm bells go off – as “rich men” don’t tend to come off too well in Jesus’ parables, particularly in this part of the Gospel of Luke (see 16:19-31, for example).  So anyway, the boss hears that his manager has been “squandering” his property – not necessarily so good (see 15:13), but could go either way (see 15:22-24).  Anyway, the boss gives the manager his two weeks notice, just enough time for him to get an account together for his successor.  It’s also just enough time for him to put

together and carry out his own transition plan – which involves going to each of the boss’s loan customers and unilaterally writing down their debts.  The idea, he implies in verse 4, is that while he has the power to do so, he’ll make it so the customers owe him a favor – which will be a good thing once he’s out of a job.  The surprise comes in verse 8, where instead of getting mad, the boss “commends” the manager for his “shrewdness.”  I think it would help if, instead of a comma and some explanation, there was just a period there so we’d just think about the story for a minute.  Why did the boss commend the manager?  Apparently, one interpretation is that the manager took off his commission, so the boss was OK with what he’d done—which to me is one of those lame biblical explanations that tries to make everything smooth and nice.  Another interpretation is that, when the manager wrote down the loans, it made the boss look good and that made him happy – better, but my problem with it is that the manager made clear from the start that his motives were purely selfish; plus it says the boss commended the “dishonest” manager (literally the “manager of wickedness”) for his shrewdness.   It says the boss pats him on the back for his clever thinking, so I don’t think we need to read some other reason into the text.

So then the question becomes, why did the boss commend his shrewdness?  Well remember, the boss is a “rich man,” someone who knows about operating out of self-interest.  So I think the boss is proud of the manager because he finally “gets it” – before he was just an inept squanderer, but now he’s using his head.  The manager’s not only figured out the rules of the boss’s business, he’s figured out how to use them to his advantage – almost brings a tear to the old man’s eye.  That’s what I think, anyway. 
OK, I’ve already written way more on this than I planned, so I’ll get to Jesus’ commentary.  The first thing he says we disciples might learn from the manager is a little shrewdness – that when it comes to playing the world’s games, we don’t just have to accept the world’s rules – we can break them, using the world’s stuff for purposes other than just adding to the bottom line.  And as we work on that, we’re preparing ourselves for our next “gig” (the eternal one).  Jesus then drives the point home in verses 10-13, by saying that being faithful in a little, and in the “unrighteous mammon” - our life in the world – is training for being entrusted with the “true riches” of God’s kingdom.

Works Consulted

Fred Craddock's commentary on the Gospel text in Preaching Through the Christian Year, Year C;

Luke Timothy Johnson's Luke commentary in the Sacra Pagina series.