Mary Oliver’s poem, entitled Moments, makes me think of this week’s gospel text. Let me read it for us, and we’ll see what we can see:
There are moments that cry out to be fulfilled.
Like, telling someone you love them.
Or giving your money away, all of it.
Your heart is beating, isn’t it?
You’re not in chains, are you?
There is nothing more pathetic than caution
when headlong might save a life,
even, possibly, your own.
Yes, there are moments like these, crying out to be fulfilled, pressing us, pulling us toward an opening into something new, an inbreaking of freedom.
When I think about this poem together with our gospel, what I want it to say, what my mind fills in on its own, is this: there is a kingdom that cries out to be fulfilled.
There is a kingdom that cries out to be fulfilled – like, telling someone you love them. Or giving your money away, all of it.
And what, I ask, could be more “headlong” than the cruciform call of discipleship?
But, I’ve gotten ahead of myself.
Let’s turn to the gospel.
Our story begins with a household manager, brought up on charges of mis-management.
Like the prodigal son in the parable just prior to this one, he has been about the business of squandering wealth.
His master – his “Lord,” as it says in the Greek – asks for an account of the manager’s work, in preparation to fire him.
Our manager may not be able-bodied enough to dig, but he is quick on his feet, so to speak, a clever and fast thinker.
Faced with the impending loss of everything, he hatches a plan to save himself from hard labor and begging. Financial security stripped away, he will need people to meet his needs.
So he begins to cut deals on his master’s debts. For one debtor, he reduces the bill by half, and for another, by twenty percent.
In an act of brilliance, shady as the whole thing is, he creates a situation in which he himself is owed a debt, which later his master’s clients will repay, he hopes, with hospitality and provision.
In the face of losing everything, he shifts from an economy of self-sufficiency and exploitative wealth, to an economy of neighborliness, mutuality, and interdependence.
In shifting his economy, he in effect creates the conditions for a new politics for himself – a politics of, perhaps, a certain kind of friendship in which debt binds him to another in acts of gratitude and mutual dependence – life-giving debt, if there is such a thing.
We’re supposed to think the master will be angry, of course. After all, he’s losing out financially. Forgiveness of debt isn’t the way smart economics works – folks get cheated this way, the ones who are supposed to profit and have a right to financial gains are taken advantage of, so it seems.
But in a twist – because this is a parable, after all, and there is always a twist – the master commends the manager for being shrewd, wise – clever.
And that hardly makes sense.
It hardly makes sense unless the master in question isn’t loyal to the system of economics most easily taken as just “the way the world is.”
It hardly makes sense unless the master embodies a different sort of economics, privileges neighborliness and the well-being of his debtors over financial rights and financial gain.
Perhaps it hardly makes sense unless the master is the Lord, the God of abundance, King of everything – perhaps we’re not merely talking about the management of a household, but instead the stewardship of the inbreaking kingdom itself.
– a kingdom which our manager perhaps stumbles into mostly by backwards and accidental means – but still stumbles into, nonetheless.
That’s the story.
What Jesus does, in beginning to explain this parable, is set up a contrast between the shrewd manager, and Jesus’s own disciples.
In verse 8, he says, “for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.”
In other words, the manager is street-smart, and the disciples – the children of light – lack a certain kind of wisdom about the world. Perhaps they are too loyal to “the way things are”
– too loyal to an economic system where, as Amos says, the needy can be trampled, bought for a pair of sandals, and the poor can be brought to ruin, bought for silver.
Even the children of this age, Jesus seems to say, know that the systems are corrupt, and are willing to give the middle finger to the system, if that’s what it takes to survive. We see the manager embody this.
What Jesus is asking, I think, is for the disciples to bring their economics into line with the politics of the new and coming kingdom – to flip their loyalties, so to speak, from how things are, to how they can be.
There is a kingdom that cries out to be fulfilled.
And while his disciples perhaps have the sense that with Jesus on the scene, the politics are shifting, they haven’t imagined yet what the embodied implications might be.
Politics and economics go hand in hand, like two sides of the same coin. The ordering of people implies an ordering of economic relations, and vice versa. It’s a chicken or egg proposition – which comes first, right politics? Or right economics?
And it is into this invitation to kingdom imagination that Jesus says what, to us, probably seems startling:
“I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.”
Let’s take it bit by bit.
Whatever it is that this new kingdom and new economics will be, it is grounded first and foremost in a politics of friendship – and with it, an economy based in friendship.
In Aristotle’s ethics, book eight, he argues that at its best and in its most complete form, friendship is a relationship based in the giving and receiving of gifts, its nature being such that the lines between who is giving and who is receiving at any moment, are blurred.
The receiver is just as much a giver, giving to the giver the gift of being received.
And the giver, in giving, receives from the receiver the gift of being received.
(one more time?)
If that’s confusing, it’s because it should be.
After all, what we’re talking about is a reality that makes little straightforward sense; love rarely does.
Instead, in the mystery of friendship, we are always and simultaneously giving and receiving, accruing debts and paying them off, forgiving debts and asking the other to be indebted to us, that we may stay bound to one another.
Every politics contains some ranking of power dynamics, but within friendship, the power is harnessed by gift for the sake of the flourishing of the other.
And debts are allowed to stand for a time, as a bonding agent between two people who know intimately that they need one another.
In the manager’s cutting his master’s debtors a deal, it’s hard not to hear echoes of the Lord’s Prayer, the line that says, “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”
This kingdom politics of friendship shifts from a system of rights and gains, to a system of gifts and graces.
Jesus tells his disciples, “Make friends for yourselves.”
There are moments that cry out to be fulfilled, like, telling someone you love them.
Jesus goes on: “Make friends for yourselves – by means of dishonest wealth.”
Dishonest wealth here is perhaps a redundancy in translation. As one commentator noted, the literal translation from the Greek is something like “the mammon of wickedness” – which has sort of an epic and foreboding feel to it: the mammon of wickedness.
The point I take is that worldly systems of economics tend, by nature, toward being characterized by dishonest wealth.
In other words, anytime we play the economic game we’ve taken to be “just the way things are,” we run a risk of embodying a corrupt politics.
Arguably, we’re dealing with a system which is already bent toward injustice and founded on the necessity that some folks will win, and some folks will lose.
It is into this economic climate that Jesus seems to say, “Exploit the system. It’s already dishonest wealth.”
In fact, in verse 11, he suggests an expectation that a disciple will be faithful with the dishonest wealth – in other words, that using the system for the sake of making friends is in actuality an act of faithful stewardship, even if to the financially trained eye, it appears as foolishness.
Perhaps Jesus’s words here are an invitation to lavishness – to the fatted calf, the best robes, and the anticipating father of the prodigal son story. It’s wastefulness for the sake of love.
He flips squandering on its head.
In a sense, we will squander something – either we will squander the dishonest wealth in service to our relationships, or, we will squander the relationships in service to the dishonest wealth.
Which will we do?
There are moments that cry out to be fulfilled, like, telling someone you love them, or giving away your money, all of it.
Because after all, what comes next in Jesus’s command is the confession that the systems of wealth, and our world’s economies, are passing away – that money itself is fleeting.
“Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone –“
…so that when it is gone.
Here, perhaps we are to think of Jesus’s sayings elsewhere – don’t store up treasure on earth where moth and rust destroy, and thieves break in and steal, but store up treasure in heaven – for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Or perhaps we’re to think about the man who tears down his barns to build bigger barns to hoard away his harvest, and Jesus says his life was demanded of him that night.
Wealth is fleeting, and frankly not worth the value we ascribe to it; we know this, even as we forget it. It’s a means to an end, and not an end in itself.
Truly faithful stewardship makes it a means to the end of friendship and love.
“Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.”
In other words, embody a politics of friendship grounded in an economics of mutuality, interdependence, the forgiveness of debts, and hospitality – the things that bear fruit which last, which become storehouses of treasure in heaven.
There are moments that cry out to be fulfilled, like, telling someone you love them, or giving away your money, all of it.
Your heart is beating, isn’t it?
You’re not in chains, are you?
Well, are you?
Am I?
I think it’s such an important detail in the text that the manager doesn’t cross into this new politics and new economy until he’s lost everything.
Epiphany of 2011, it was clear that my marriage was going belly up, and Luke and I moved out on our own, to begin a new life.
I had relatively no idea what we were getting into.
I moved with hand-me-down dishes, a coffee table, a bookshelf, and a kitchen table and chairs. I spent the last bit of money I had on an air mattress for Luke to sleep on.
To every outside eye, we were bound to become a statistic.
I was a full-time student, a day’s drive from my family. I didn’t know yet that I would have the support I needed. We lived on the edge of economic ruin for about three years until I was able to hold us together a bit better on my own.
If you look back at my tax returns from those three years, you’d have to shake your head. It’s a mystery, at least by the financial books, as to how in the world we survived. The first year, I paid more in rent than what I actually brought in.
Mercifully, before we came to the end of what I alone could do, we were embraced into a politics of friendship which came with an economy of love, instead of anxiety and credits and debits.
A friend realized we had no furniture to speak of, and bought us a couch so we would feel comfortable inviting friends to come by and visit.
Another friend upon finding out we didn’t have beds, made a phone call and suddenly we did. We were given a mountain cottage to live in rent-free for as long as we needed. It came with shelves stocked with home-canned food grown in the garden the summer before, and the utilities paid for.
We were given a car by the same friend, who also paid my insurance until I could. This summer, four years later, I gave that same car to someone else.
Anonymous gift cards to grocery stores came in the mail. On more than one occasion, someone quietly bunched a wad of cash into my hand after church, kissing my forehead as they exited the sanctuary.
During six months of crippling depression near the end of my divorce, during which I was hospitalized twice and unable to work, a dear friend came by every day, made me laugh, then made us two meals and left them in the fridge for us. Sometimes she brought me flowers.
We often came home from worship with the left-over Eucharist bread, because it was insisted that we must.
And the stories go on and on, our provision intimately entwined with communion – both the bread, and the body of Christ it represented.
It was a season that on one hand was so hard, marked consistently by the fear of how we were going to make it.
But it was also a season of mystery and miracle, marked consistently by overwhelming gratitude for friends I had no idea would love us so well – and insist that by letting them love me, I was loving them in return.
It wasn’t until I was on the brink of such deep loss, that I even discovered that another economy could exist – one not based in my fear, my self-sufficiency and achievement, my slavishness to a system hell-bent on breaking me,
but one instead founded in the utter depths of friendship.
Your heart is beating, isn’t it?
You’re not in chains, are you?
Well, are you?
Am I? That season of my life is mostly over – we’re making it.
But I have learned something in beginning to make it on our own – namely, how lonely self-sufficiency can be, and how isolating the world’s economics, understood as “merely the way things are,” can be.
There are days I long for the season of mystery and miracles again, hard though it was.
But I think what Jesus, in explaining this parable, says is that we don’t have to wait for disaster to ensue in order to find our way into this politics and this economics –
– for the system is corrupt, the needy are trampled and bought for a pair of sandals. The wealth already travels along dishonest lines, the poor brought to ruin and bought for silver.
Someone’s disaster is now – and sometimes we are the needy and poor, but sometimes we are the tramplers, and maybe both are disaster.
And as disciples, the children of light, we can pre-emptively create the conditions within which we are able to embody this politics of friendship and economics where we relentlessly pursue the good of another.
We can throw off the chains of “the way things are,” and make friends by means of dishonest wealth for the sake of the inbreaking kingdom. We can profess love and disavow ourselves of misguided loyalties.
And not only can we, but we must.
For as the last words of our gospel reading warn us, “No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”
No, we can only serve one, and there is a kingdom that cries out to be fulfilled.
And as the poem says,
there is nothing more pathetic than caution when headlong might save a life,
even, possibly, your own.
Amen.