Readings, Luke 16:1-13
Image, Marinus van Reymerswaele, Parable of the shrewd manager (1490)
 
One of the great things about this parable, before even get to anything specific it might be teaching, is that it reminds us that parables can be strange. That parables can trouble our attempts to smooth out their rough edges, and disrupt our desires to map them on to easy, consistent, and predictable lessons (or, we might say, disrupting our assumptions of who is who in the zoo of a parable). We are so familiar with Christ’s parables – or at least the greatest hits like the lost sheep and coin we heard last week, that we can sometimes lose the ability to be surprised by them. But this parable is surprising.
 
To recap it… As was common practice, large landowners didn’t tend to spend a lot of time on their property and would thus employ a manager to handle the logistics and finances. In this instance, the manager has been squandering the property and stands to be fired. The manager doesn’t dispute the charge, but knows there aren’t other jobs he’d be able or willing to do. So he devises a plan, he will not try and win back the esteem of the rich landowner, he will try to win the esteem of tenants in the landowner’s debt. He calls together those who own money and has them write down their debts, take the bill of 100 and make it 50, take the bill of 100 and make it 80. The plan being that in reducing the debt, the people will be grateful and offer him lodgings when he is fired. Now the practice of reducing the debt in order to get it paid was common then as it is now, it is better to have some money and keep the people around than evict, get nothing and lose future income as well. Which means the landowner commended the manager’s shrewd action (though, we notice, does not decide to keep him on).
 
Slowing it down only amplifies the feeling that this is a strange story for Jesus to tell. Who are we meant to identify with, whose actions exemplify the kingdom, who stands in for God?
 
All this gets more complicated when Jesus offers this commentary: the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. And 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. Now we have more questions, why is it that the children of the light are less shrewd? Is this a bad thing? Using dishonest wealth to make friends seems strange – and what are we classifying as dishonest wealth? And then the reason we are told to make friends is odd: that they may welcome us into eternal homes… what are eternal homes, and how are these people able to offer such welcome?
 
Jesus continues: ‘Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. Ok, that’s not too bad, seems like a straightforward moral axiom – having lots or little doesn’t really change the character of our relation to money. If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? Does it not feel strange that faithfulness with dishonest wealth is the path to being trusted with true riches? It seems a peculiar barometer for our capacity to handle something eternal – could all earthly wealth be dishonest?  And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? 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.’ We get to this last pronouncement and almost breathe a sigh of relief – not because this command isn’t difficult or terrifying, but at least it feels adamantly straightforward.
 
So what is going on? What are we to make of all of this?
 
We’re in a section of Luke’s gospel where Jesus is speaking a lot about money, wealth, and the strange inversions of the kingdom of God. He has already told his disciples they must give up all their possessions if they are to follow him. He has told parables of the wedding banquet, of lost sheep and coins, and a son who squandered the wealth of his father’s inheritance only to be thrown a lavish party. And Jesus will go on to tell the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, and the agony of flames awaiting those who refuse to use their wealth to ease the sufferings of the poor. This strange parable takes its place in this nexus of stories, and as such we might begin to try and parse some lessons for Christian living.
 
We might begin by comparing the manager to the rich man of another parable, who realising that his storehouses were simply too small to house all his wealth, tore them down and built larger ones only for his life to be demanded from him that night. Wealth cannot be taken with you – and like the rich man who ignores Lazarus at his gates – it can end up creating a chasm between us and our neighbour, between us and God. The manager, on the other hand, recognises that all that he has can (and will) be gone. So he uses what he has while he has time. He doesn’t not squirrel and store, but uses his authority to ease the debt of those around him and in so doing make friends and neighbours who will welcome him in his hour of need. The manager, unlike so many other figures in the surrounding parables, is commended for using what he has (in the knowledge that he will not always have it) to relieve burdens, build trust, make neighbours, and receive welcome. What might it mean for us, who wish to be trusted with eternal riches, to do the same?
 
Expanding this point, if we can demonstrate faithfulness in our shrewd use dishonest wealth to make friends and receive welcome, then we come show we can be trusted with more important things. For in using dishonest wealth to ease the burdens of the poor, to create community and neighbourliness, to receive the welcome of those around us, we demonstrate that we do not serve money. We demonstrate our understanding of the finiteness of money, which even the finest and largest storehouses cannot secure from the forces of death. We cannot, Jesus remarks, serve God and wealth, but we can use wealth to serve God by using it to serve others.
 
But using wealth to serve God requires us to recognise a few things. The first is that there is something of a dishonest character to wealth – that is to say the kind of exorbitant wealth acquired by the landowner in this parable cannot really come to be without systems of inequality, injustice, and exploitation. Little wonder then does Jesus say that to devote oneself to wealth, to love wealth, is to despise God, for God is a God of justice, liberation, and dignity. And so if we find ourselves with access to dishonest wealth, do not serve it, but shrewdly use it to make friends (now, importantly, from the parable, the kind of making friends we are talking about are the poor, who the manager seeks to release from debt – in so doing he keeps with the mission of Jesus himself; as announced in Luke 4). There is something of Jesus’ instruction to his disciples that we are to be innocent as doves and wise as serpents – we must not make ourselves ignorant to either the character of wealth, nor the way it can be used to serve and bless others. And finally, the manager makes an important connection – one which is all too rare in many an age – despite having a position of some authority and importance, he is much closer to the tenants working the land the owner of the land, much closer to those in debt than to the one they are in debt to. The manager recognises this, and in so doing recognises that his future wellbeing is found in friendships and trust with the debtors rather than the landowner, the many rather than the one. This is an important lesson for us both on a material reality (as our work of justice, equality, and mercy will be bolstered by a recognition that by and large we are closer to our unhoused neighbour, or our neighbour who is a climate refugee, than the increasingly small top % whose storehouses contain the vast majority of worldly wealth) and it is also important as a spiritual reality (as we are all those who are taught by Christ to pray for the forgiveness of our debts, as we pray to be those who forgive our debtors – we are all those who rely on the largess of Christ’s grace to welcome us into the eternal household of God).
 
But even as we glean these possibilities for Christian living, we come back to the beginning and let the parable stay strange. In its strangeness we are reminded again, that the story and movement into which we are called is something of a strange one. For we seek, against the wisdom of the world, to devote ourselves to God, revealed most dramatically in the folly of the cross of Christ, as the loving master of our lives.

Reading, Luke 15:1-10
Image, The Parable of the Lost Coin, Domenico Fetti (1589–1624)

​During our kid’s talk about baptism, we explored various imagery which helps communicate the reality of baptism. Our becoming part of the body of Christ, our being buried in Christ so that we can rise with him also, our light secured and enlivened in the fire of Christ’s light, our name being added to the great cloud of witnesses. The reading today carries two similar, potent images. The lost sheep and the lost coin, found and returned, the cause of much celebration.
 
Much comfort and hope has been gleaned from these most famous of stories. For in them, we see the attention, tenderness and determination of our God. This is a God not of averages but individuals. This is a God not content with rounding errors but who counts, knows, and delights in every hair on our head. The God who numbered the stars in the sky is as attentive to the human as the shepherd charged with the care of 100 sheep, as attentive to us in our billions as a woman to her 10 coins. These stories display the attention, tenderness, and determination of our God who knows when there is one who needs to be gathered, who knows where the lost will be found, and who celebrates their homecoming.
 
In theological speak, there is a term called the economy of salvation. The economy of salvation is used to describe the way in which God manages, or stewards, the salvation of the world. As an example, you might say, the economy of salvation is revealed in God’s decision to send the Son in love, or that the Spirit’s role in the economy of salvation is to awaken faith and understanding in the individual to the completed work of Christ. Baptism, even, can be part of the economy of salvation – not because it changes our status before God, but because as sacrament it points to the saving work of Christ and its effect in our common life. What we see, in parables such as those read today, is how different the economics of the economy of salvation are, from the economics of the world.  
 
By welcoming outsiders, the estranged and marginalised, Jesus risked not only his reputation, but the possible reception of his message. It was this welcome that brought about the grumbling that led to today’s parables. And the parables themselves attest to the deliberate attention paid to the few, the lost, the one amidst the many. None of these choices map onto the secure and prudent practices of worldly economics, all-to-ready to account for the odd lost coin or sheep, knowing that it is rarely worth the effort to retrieve.
 
And yet, time and again, Jesus teaches us that the kingdom of God is made known through an inversion of worldly values and expectations. Consider, for instance, the parable of the landowner who hires workers for his field at various points across the day. At the end of the day, the he gathers all the workers and pays each a day’s wage. Those who were there at the beginning grumbled at this wage parity. To which the landowner responds, Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?” So the last will be first, and the first will be last.’ 
 
Or consider, for instance, the parable of the banquet, when those who received the first invitation to dine do not come, and so the host sends servants to the streets to gather all they can find, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests.
 
The point is never order or longevity, deserving or protocol. For the joy is in the gathering up – is the bringing in of those outside, forgotten, and lost. It is in the inversion of the old order of things and replacing it with something sublime – the celebration over one found, the last being first, the hall filled with the good and bad. And the risk, as it was in for those grumbling at the beginning of today’s reading, as it will be for the older brother in the parable that follows the two we heard, as it is for those who went first to the fields, or turned down the invitation to feast, is to miss out on the celebration. Is to miss out on what is been made new in God’s attention, tenderness, and determination. To allow the economics and values of the world to rob us of the joy at something so strange and sublime as the attention, tenderness, and determination of God to fill God’s household with merriment, meaning, and fellowship. 
 
Because if we miss this celebration, if we grumble through what God is doing because it does not look like the logical or the prudent, if we scoff at the welcome of those so seldom welcomed, then we will miss what it is we are called to do. For as those who have received the grace of God and called to bear the fruit of the Spirit, we are called to live in response to God’s attention, tenderness and determination – to model it in our own life, to seek it in our community. For as the church we are called by God to organise ourselves after the economics of the economy of salvation.
 
This week you may have seen the story of Carlo Acutis, in the news for becoming the first millennial saint. Often what is first highlighted about Carlos’ life was his use of the internet to catalogue miracles and witness to the good news of the gospel (work he began at 11 years old). But what is also highlighted was that, between 11 and 15, Carlos was also known to go about Milan, giving out sleeping bags to the homeless, giving money from his allowance to the poor. When Carlos died, tragically from a rare cancer at age 15, his funeral was unexpectantly packed with a crowd of the poor and homeless from across Milan. His Priest remarked, “It became apparent that Carlo had befriended so many of these people.” What a witness to a life modelled on the attention, tenderness, and determination of God. One devoting gifts, passions, and time to the kind of upside-down economics of the kingdom of God which celebrates in the great gathering of the unexpected a testament to the nature of our God, who refuses to allow a one to be lost or forgotten. May our own days, our own community, be marked by such attention, tenderness, and determination.

Reading, Luke 11:1-13
Image, Mario Sironi, Untitled (Man opening door), 1932
 
I wonder if you can recall a prayer you were taught? Perhaps in church, or as a child, or elsewhere? I can recall the start of the bedtime time prayer I was taught by my parents as a child. Dear God, please surround this house, my dreams, and my thoughts – an understandable beginning for a child nervous of bad dreams or the dark, then it continued, and please help the people in Third World countries and the poor to get the things that they need. An appropriate move, from ourselves to the world… but over time, I can remember adding my own bit that came after this… and please help me to get the things that I want. Child Liam had aspirations of his own alright. He had prayed for the poor to get the things they needed, but then didn’t have many material needs himself… but there were things I wanted – a new cricket bat, for instance – and why shouldn’t God help me get that. You can see the need to be taught to pray, left to our own devices, it can take some squirrely twists.  
 
We spoke a couple of weeks ago, in reference to the parable of the Good Samaritan, that the characters we relate to in stories of the Bible can shift with time. As our own experiences accumulate, we come to have new things in common with the experiences of others in the story. This week, in coming to this very familiar passage, I had my own experience of new found identification.
 
Jesus, in order to illustrate his point on the willingness of God to hear and respond to our prayers, tells this little parable.
Let’s say one of you has a friend and comes to him in the middle of the night and says to him, ‘My friend, lend me three loaves, since a friend of mine has dropped in on me after a journey, and I don’t have anything to put on the table for him.’ So the other answers from inside by saying, ‘Don’t bother me! My door is locked already, and my children are in bed with me. I can’t get up and give you anything.'*
In past readings, I thought of the man in bed lacked hospitality; being either too lazy or committed to his cosiness to respond to the need of a neighbour. Reading it this time I have newfound sympathy for the man in bed. I very much now identify with the freezing terror that strikes a parent when any loud noise risks waking children only recently gone to sleep, I know viscerally the tension that comes over in the body when any wrong move could wake those dozing next to you. I can feel the stress of seeing sleeping bodies between you and the edge of the bed and know that the list of things able to motivate me to crawl delicately over a sleeping kid is infinitesimal.
 
And yet, to the chagrin of the man in the bed, Jesus details how, the sheer shamelessness of the one knocking overcomes all fear and bargaining and forces the man inside to climb over children and out of bed, to give his neighbour everything he needs. And this, Jesus explains is the point. That if the motivation we assign to a new parent scared to wake their child is not enough to refuse a persistent request, how much more likely and gladly would God give the Holy Spirit to those who ask.
 
I used the phrase sheer shamelessness before. This comes from Sarah Rudden’s translation of the passage, and I like it because “persistence” feels a little too neutral to describe the actions of the knocking neighbour. Because there is a kind of brazenness, a distinct lack of good sense or respectability in hearing someone say, I can’t help you as I am in bed with my children and then deciding, you know that this situation calls for, louder knocking!
 
But sheer shamelessness is appropriate not only in discussing the behaviour but also in emphasising what Jesus is teaching us about prayer. That is to say that Jesus is instructing those in his care to pray to God with shamelessness. Jesus has just taught his followers to pray Our Father, that is to say, to pray for God with the boldness, intimacy, and directness of children speaking to a parent, to pray as those who are not only Christ’s followers, but as his siblings (co-heirs as Paul will later write). And having taught this posture of prayer, Jesus encourages us to pray not with timidity, not with respectability, not with the genteel politeness properly befitting a neighbour knocking on a door at night, but with the sheer shamelessness of one who needs not even consider the possibility of being turned away. Pray, Jesus says, in the spirit of a child who barges into their parent’s room at any hour of the night and hops up on the bed. Be shameless in your boldness and call out to the God of the universe as you would a loving parent.
 
Now readers of this passage have often got caught up on the line, For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. It’s a passage that can cause particular trouble and pain for anyone who carries the burden of unanswered prayer (no less cause havoc to a child thinking God should give him everything he wants). Does it not seem, that if the man would get out of bed to share some bread, God should not respond to our cries for healing, restoration, peace, and change? But the end of the passage makes clear what it is Jesus is referring to as the proper object of our asking, seeking, and knocking. If you are willing to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.
 
In teaching his followers to pray, Jesus instructs us to take up the boldness of beloved children of a trusted and generous parent and ask for the Holy Spirit to be poured out upon us. With the Spirit we receive the Spirit’s gifts, with the Spirit’s gifts we can bear the Spirit’s fruit, with the Spirit’s fruit we are prepared to hallow the name of God and seek first the kingdom of God, we are able to forgive sins and experience the forgiveness of God, we are able to persevere through trial and serve our neighbours in their own.
 
So friends, embrace the sheer shamelessness of those unconcerned with waking children, and pray with the boldness of beloved children of the Father and siblings of Christ, pray as those to whom the Spirit and her gifts shall never be withheld. In this posture we pray, and in this power we walk. Thanks be to God.   

--
* The Gospels, a new translation by Sarah Rudden (Modern Library, 2021). 

Reading, Luke 15:1-32
Image, Samuel Songo (Rhodesian, 1929–ca. 1977), The Prodigal Son, 1954. Soapstone, h. 26 cm.

It is a long-known truth of storytelling that there is something very satisfying to establishing a pattern and delivering on expectation. And it is equally well known that it is delightful to subvert the expectation in surprising ways, this perhaps, is the foundation of comedy (exhibit A).
 
This, most famous and favoured of parables is part of a set of three. The first two establish a pattern: a small part of a larger whole is lost (in the first instance one sheep out of 99, in the second one coin out of ten), then someone searches for the lost thing (in the first, the one who has lost the sheep leaves 99 in the wilderness to pursue and retrieve the lost one, in the second parable the woman upturns her house to find the missing coin), and finally, they invite their friends over to rejoice with them, for what was lost has been found.
 
With this pattern established, Jesus tells a third, longer parable, and it is interesting to observe where the story departs from our expectations established by the pattern.
 
The most commonly observed departure is the ending. The first two parables end with neighbours being invited to rejoice for what was lost has now being found, and it appears at first, this is how the third parable is going to end. The younger son has returned, has been embraced by his father, and they began to celebrate. If you’ve been listening to the first two tales you are primed for Jesus to offer the words already established: Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.
 
Instead, Jesus introduces a new character and a problem. For thus far we have not had to concern ourselves with the feelings of the 99 sheep left in the wilderness, nor the nine coins which had the good sense not to get lost. But here, we find lurking in the background of the story since the beginning, a second brother. And he does not join the rejoicing, instead he became angry and refused to go in. The brother and father have a conversation, and the story builds back to the familiar refrain that what was lost has been found. And hearing that, the audience is primed again for the patterned ending… ah, we think, it took a detour, there were some hurdles, but now, of course, there shall be rejoicing in the story as there will be in heaven. And yet, the story does not resolve, it hangs there with no indication of how this older son will respond to his father’s reasoning.
 
Much has been made of the entitlement and ingratitude of the older son. He has served as an analogy for those relying on outward observance of the commandments without an inner awakening of grace, or for those who withhold forgiveness and restoration from who they deem sinners in the church, or for those who think their longevity in the church affords them greater privilege than those whose came later to the faith.
 
And yet, there are efforts to understand the older son, an understanding that is propelled when we consider a second departure from the pattern. For sheep, let alone coins, can hardly be blamed for getting lost. Indeed, a coin has no agency, and sheep are famous absconders, so if anyone is to blame for the situation in the first two parables it is the shepherd and the woman. And yet, the third parable makes clear that the younger son bears pretty well full responsibility for everything that happens to him. He’s the one who demands his share of the property (which is gauche to say the least), only to find himself alone and penniless in the far country. That’s a fairly important detail, not one to be overlooked when adjudicating the actions of the older brother.
 
The older brother might be further understood by virtue of perhaps the largest and most perplexing of the discrepancies and departures of this third parable: that the father did not go looking for the lost son. The father does not leave the sheep, nor turn over house and home, he stays put. We celebrate his grace-filled acceptance, his knee-jerk forgiveness, his compassion-fuelled running to the son while he was still far off… and yet, when the son was really far off, out in the far country, he did not go out to find him. The older son was perhaps justified in thinking that he and his father’s attitude was in concert: the son who betrayed them was not to be sought, nor welcomed home.
 
One of the most engaging and sometimes elusive questions to ask of a parable is who represents God/Jesus. We are often fairly quick and confident to assign their part, but there are many that defy easy assignation. Indeed, there are many parables where God or Jesus is in a rather surprising or unexpected place. And while God is often quickly identified with the father ready to offer grace, forgiveness, and acceptance to the younger son, ready to host a celebration with the angels for the one sinner who repents, the fact that the father does not pursue the son into the far country to find him and bring him back raises a question to this one-to-one identification of the father of the parable and the Father of Jesus Christ.
 
In Romans 5 Paul goes to extremes to emphasise that while we were still weak… Christ died for the ungodly… while we were still sinners Christ died for us… while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God. In Ephesians the language is even more apt for today’s parable: You who were once far off have been brought near. The gospel message is that in Christ, God goes into the far country. The Eternal Son emptied himself and taking the form of a slave went out to seek and save the lost. In this way Christ resembles the one who goes and finds the sheep and the woman who goes and finds the coin, and yet, does not resemble the father who stays and waits for the younger son to repent and return.
 
Which leads us to this, that perhaps the greatest discrepancy, the most poignant departure of this third parable is that it teaches us that the story of the gospel is even better, more wondrous, more out of the ordinary than this most favoured and famous of stories. That the love of God is even greater, than the father who went running when he saw his son, the grace of Christ abounds more still than the father who adorned his son with the robe and the ring, that the kindness of the Spirit surpasses the father who killed the fattened calf.
 
For as another passage in Ephesians goes, God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be whole and blameless before him in love. God destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will. In absolute freedom, in beginningless time, God elected not stay in the heavenly home, but to venture into the far country to adopt us. God did not wait until we turned and walked back, until we were close enough to be seen from the front gate. No, before we left the house, before we squandered the wealth, before we even looked longingly at the pods fed to pigs, God destined us for adoption, God elected us in Jesus Christ. God – according to the good pleasure of divine will (which is to say not because of any catastrophe but simply because of who God is) – chose to be our God, to be the One who sent the Son in love to shower us with new life. Before the foundation of the world God determined to be for us. While we were weak, while we were far off, God went out like the shepherd to seek and save, to adopt and rejoice, to be for us and for our freedom. This is the story that makes us who we are, and it really is good news. So much good news in fact, that even the story Jesus is telling us to explain it is not enough to capture it all. And that discrepancy, that departure, is no joke, but does prove rather satisfying.