The Crooked Lord

This sermon on the parable of the dishonest steward was written to be preached to the members of St. Dysmas Lutheran Church, an ELCA congregation behind the walls of the South Dakota State Penitentiary.

Luke 16:1-13 (from The Message)

Jesus said to his disciples, “There was once a rich man who had a manager. He got reports that the manager had been taking advantage of his position by running up huge personal expenses. So he called him in and said, ‘What’s this I hear about you? You’re fired. And I want a complete audit of your books.’

"The manager said to himself, ‘What am I going to do? I’ve lost my job as manager. I’m not strong enough for a laboring job, and I’m too proud to beg. . . . Ah, I’ve got a plan. Here’s what I’ll do . . . then when I’m turned out into the street, people will take me into their houses.’

“Then he went at it. One after another, he called in the people who were in debt to his master. He said to the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’

“He replied, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil."

“The manager said, ‘Here, take your bill, sit down here—quick now—write fifty.’

“To the next he said, ‘And you, what do you owe?’

“He answered, ‘A hundred sacks of wheat.’

“He said, ‘Take your bill, write in eighty.’

“Now here’s a surprise: The master praised the crooked manager! And why? Because he knew how to look after himself. Streetwise people are smarter in this regard than law-abiding citizens. They are on constant alert, looking for angles, surviving by their wits. I want you to be smart in the same way—but for what is right—using every adversity to stimulate you to creative survival, to concentrate your attention on the bare essentials, so you’ll live, really live, and not complacently just get by on good behavior.”

Jesus went on to make these comments: “If you’re honest in small things, you’ll be honest in big things; if you’re a crook in small things, you’ll be a crook in big things. If you’re not honest in small jobs, who will put you in charge of the store? No worker can serve two bosses: He’ll either hate the first and love the second or adore the first and despise the second. You can’t serve both God and the Bank.”

The gospel of our Lord.

Today is my 26th wedding anniversary today. Mary and I met on January 1, 1990, in a Twin Cities suburb. Our pastors invited a bunch of people to their house to watch the Rose Bowl. When Mary rang the doorbell, our pastor Nancy opened it and said, “He’s here.” We spent the afternoon ogling each other, sitting side-by-side, discovering that this was someone interesting, and decided to go on an actual first date of some kind. Six weeks later we were engaged. That September we had a wedding. And the rest is history. We’ve had all these years of ups and downs, and we treasure our happy little life.

When I look back at meeting all of you here at St. Dysmas, it feels much the same way. It was a kind of pastoral love at first sight. You welcomed me in so heartily that I’ve been telling people for a year that St. Dysmas and my own congregation in Des Moines are the warmest churches I’ve ever known. But more than anything, I’ve treasured the time I’ve spent with you, because it feels like I found my people. Jesus talked about preaching to people who have ears to hear. I encounter college kids in my classroom every day who have that kind of hunger – mostly because, when they’ve had questions about faith in the past, what they’ve gotten in return is a load of bison flop. But you, my friends, my fellow sinners, my beloved miscreants and felons, you whose days are marked by the constant reminders of either the worst things you’ve ever done or the one thing you got caught for, your tan inmate scrubs won’t let you forget you’re literally penned in and forced to face the hardest truths. Now whether you’ll respond with any kind of faith or with more of the same-old, same-old that got you here is another matter entirely. And that’s what we’ve gotta pray for tonight: that God would give you ears for this gospel word and that God would use this Iowa sinner to deliver a promise that gives you freedom beyond what’s held you down.

If that’s what we’re after, though, tonight’s gospel reading is a doozy. And it’s probably not something any suits or whiteshirts in Pierre or on the hill would we regard as very edifying for a room full of inmates with hard histories, anger issues, and neck tattoos. That’s because Jesus told this story of a guy who’s an absolute crook and gets away with it. And then Jesus made matters worse by praising the fella’s moxie at writing off debts that other people owe his boss. There’s plenty of entertainment value in that. I like an anti-hero as much as anyone. But I suspect Jesus didn’t tell the story to give us a role model in a crook who cooks the books and gets off with not even a hand slap.

So often we have a problem when we come to God’s word. We think that this whole bundle of scripture and this business of being a Christian is all about God wanting us to be more upright, upstanding, and on the up-and-up. We think Christianity is about a moral system, ethics, and good behavior. God gives us the Bible to show us how to live. Jesus came to teach us to be better people. And God rewards those who meet the mark with an eternity in heaven with no bars on the windows, eternal internet access, and meals that include more than soy substitute as a stand-in for actual meat. But if that’s where we start, then that’s all we’ll get out of God’s word, out of Jesus, and out of any preacher. You’ll get lessons in successful Christian living. You’ll get three-point sermons that tell you how to be more spiritual. And you’ll hear Jesus’ preaching and teaching as something you need to decipher and find the golden nugget that will finally unlock your potential.

With that approach, this parable Jesus tells in tonight’s gospel will screw you up royally. It doesn’t promote good behavior. It doesn’t give you a solid bro you can model your life on. In fact, this section of Luke’s gospel is full of idiots who can’t figure out that a flock of sheep in the pen is better than one lost in the sage brush, a prodigal son who squandered everything and gets welcomed home, and guests at a fancy dinner banquet who turn out to be the winos, the homeless, the heroin shooters, the whores, and the disreputable. Jesus seems bent on upsetting all our preconceived notions of what God actually wants us to live like.

The religious leaders who heard Jesus tell these stories were none too happy about it. They also thought the project we call a human lifetime was about righteousness, purity, morality, and fulfilling the commandments. It’s no wonder that they started plotting to recruit Judas and to arrest and kill Jesus. Where’s the peace and security in a world where people like you, my friends, are held up as just the kind humans God has taken a shine to? Armed robbers, murderers, meth cookers, pedophiles, your house band, and your inside council members are the most unlikely bunch of reprobates for God to grab hold of. Thank God that’s what he does, though.

The story of the crooked manager contains more than meets the eye. Jesus is setting us up for a life of dishonesty, but he does put before us the prospect of using all the tricks and tools of the streetwise for the sake of faith. Jesus says they’re “smarter in this regard than law-abiding citizens. They’re on constant alert, looking for angles, surviving by their wits.” Jesus knows that the tactics of the crooked on their own lead to a hollow life and damage to others. But he understands how wily a person of faith has to be in this world. All kinds of temptations will crop to get you to believe and trust something other than Christ for your future. They’ll pop out at you when you least expect it. And they’ll often look pretty appealing. But even good things like being moral or religious or spiritual can also be a temptation to rely on something other than Jesus. And he’s not interested in us complacently basing our lives and our eternal future on good behavior. There’s more to the abundant life Jesus promises than keeping your head down in the chow line, keeping out of the SHU, and flying under the radar of your CO's. Even if it were, Jesus is pretty sure you don’t have it in you.

So Jesus does something else between the lines in this story tonight. He shows you why he like people like you so damn much. The manager in the story is about to get canned for embezzlement. He’s cooked the books, and he sees what’s coming down the pike. When it all falls apart, he won’t have a place to go for refuge. So he’ll create a group of people who’ll say, “That guy gave me a deal on my debt. I don’t care what his own crime was. He can stay with me.” So the guy goes around and writes off debt. It’s like a governor caught in a crime who decides to commute sentences and issue pardons because he knows he’s going to wind up on the hill and wants friends on the inside.

And that’s exactly what Jesus does for you. At the point in Luke’s gospel, Jesus knows that what’s waiting for him in Jerusalem is an execution on the cross that is the finally accounting by the religious leaders. So he sets his face to the task of forgiving people who owe a debt to society, who don’t meet what’s required by the law, and especially those that religion and religious people have beat up on with their demands for perfect obedience and moral purity. Jesus comes to you saying, “Your accounts are cleared. You don’t have to worry about that sin anymore.”

Our Lord is never going to find real friends, followers, or disciples among those who regard themselves as debt-free. They don’t need what Jesus is doling out. They’re sufficient unto themselves. But for people like you and me, Jesus is all we’ve got. We know that we don’t love God or our neighbors as we should and, worse, that we don’t want to. We know how far into the red our accounts with God are. So when Christ comes with this good news of the great divine debt-elimination program, we can only say, “I want what Jesus has to give.” What Jesus is doing is exactly what we pray for in the Lord’s Prayer when we say, “Thy will be done.” By being such an irresistible and attractive friend, he turns our will his way. He comes after us in such a way that we can’t help but be open to him. He grabs hold of us so that our old tricks now get turned around for his sake and the sake of the gospel.

After all, isn’t that what St. Dysmas is all about? You guys have survived by your wits forever. You’ve had to be on the alert to make sure you’re not caught. But now Jesus has caught you and calls you to use your substantial streetwise savvy to become his very presence behind the walls of the prison and out in the world when your sentence is up. And if there’s no pardon for you in this life, he’s going to make sure that you know exactly what awaits you in his home. There are no cells there. But he says that in his father’s house there are many mansions. And every single one of ‘em has an open door and the best kitchen ever, where there’s a divine chef cooking up the supper of the Lamb of God to fill you with eternal good things.

For my money, I’d rather have a Lord who’s crooked, who gives grace and mercy to those who don’t deserve it, than some demanding rule-giver whose relentless rule-giving leaves me in arrears. When you come to the altar for the sacrament tonight, know that you come to Christ who says, “What do you owe?” and who says in response, “Take your bill. Put zero on the bottom line. And scrawl 'debt paid in full.'” He’s done it for you. Amen.

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We're Dead. We Don't Need No Stinkin' Credentials!

This sermon, preached on June 4-5, 2016, continues a series based on Galatians at St. James Lutheran Church, Johnston, Iowa, while their pastor is on a spiritual pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago de Campostela in northern Spain. It's based on both Galatians and the gospel reading from Luke about the raising of the dead son of the widow in Nain.

This week I was talking to Ryan Cosgrove, a former student of mine who’s now serving as a pastor in Burlington. While I’m an old professor cut off from the ins and outs of weekly preaching, Ryan is a millennial connected to all kinds of social media preaching sites and participates in a pastors’ text study each week. We were talking about today’s reading from Galatians, and he said that he was surprise that the other pastors and posters on social media had declared this passage about Paul’s authority to be pretty thin gruel for preaching. They thought it was inconsequential and boring, with nothing much going on. “I went into the regions of Syria and Cilicia, blah, blah, blah. But this passage is deceptive in its mundaneness. It’s actually an incredibly big and important part of Paul’s argument in the letter. And it falls right in line with the rest of what Paul is talking about in Galatians.

Remember from last week that Paul had been a Jewish religious lawyer, a Pharisee, and he had persecuted Jesus’ followers – even to the point of helping out at the stoning of Stephen, the first Christian martyr. When Paul came to faith with his encounter with the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus, he also became the church’s greatest missionary and most important theologian. He’d gotten permission from the believers in Jerusalem to go tell non-Jews out in the Roman empire about Jesus. He’d already been to the region of Galatia, which would be central Turkey today. Now, as he’s moved on to preach Christ in other places, a group of Jewish Christians has arrived from Jerusalem to investigate, and they’re shocked that Paul hadn’t taught the Galatians to follow Jewish religious laws like Jesus, the disciples, and they themselves do. They demand that the Galatian men who had been pagans now submit to the ritual of circumcision and have what we’ll call “their former life” sliced away. Paul says what the Jewish Christians have been saying is a false gospel, that is, their demands don’t give Christ’s benefits freely. He says that to stake your salvation on something you do, even something as good as circumcision is for Jewish males, takes Christ out of the salvation equation.

Because Paul preached in the Galatian communities and the Spirit brought people to faith through his preaching, in order to undercut Paul’s work there the Jewish Christians called his authority into question. They wanted to know what exactly Paul’s credentials were. That seems like a reasonable request to us. When Grand View’s education majors want to become teachers, the Iowa Board of Educational Examiners establishes requirements for their curriculum. For instance, you don’t get to become a fifth grade teacher if you haven’t taken a class about educating a diverse set of learners. Our nursing majors have to pass a rigorous battery of tests called the NCLEX in order to be certified to serve. The Iowa Bar Association won’t accept you for membership, no matter how good your law school grades if you don’t pass the bar exam. Each profession has specific requirements, and the church’s pastors do, too: You have to have a Master of Divinity degree or its equivalent, and you have to meet the requirements of the ELCA’s “Visions and Expectations” document, which details sexual behavior guidelines, financial guidelines, lifestyle and other qualities of a faithful pastor.

Article XIV of the Augsburg Confession, the Lutheran church’s primary guiding document from the 16^th century, says no one may function as one of the church’s public proclaimers (that is, as a pastor) without a regular call. Even if you feel an internal call to ministry, in the Lutheran church you don’t get to take up a position in a congregation without the church setting you apart as a pastor. Our brothers and sisters in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod is going to take up the issue in its national convention in Milwaukee this summer. They’ll ask if it’s kosher for the church to license lay people to administer the Lord’s Supper or if only pastor should be allowed to do it. When it comes to Paul and Galatians, though, it’s a whole other matter. The Jewish Christians want Paul to have checked off all their required boxes: be Jewish, be circumcised, be a disciple of Jesus or authorized by one.

But for Paul, it’s not about adhering to a set of credentials. He was called by the risen Jesus himself. When Paul was still a bounty hunter tracking down the blasphemous followers of Jesus, he was riding a horse on the road to Damascus 138 miles away in order to make some arrests. Suddenly there was a blinding light, and Paul was knocked to the ground and struck blind. He heard the voice of the risen Jesus ask him why he was persecuting the Lord. And he was told to get himself to the home of one of the believers. In that moment, everything changed for Paul. He began to see Jesus’ appearance to him as the dividing line between his old life in sin and death and his new life taken up in faith in the Lord’s resurrection.

When the Jerusalem Christians who’ve shown up in Galatia demand Paul’s credentials as proof that he’s allowed to tell these converts that they don’t have to follow Jewish law, Paul’s response is, “Credentials? I don’t need no stinkin’ credentials!” That’s because for Paul saving faith is all about a relationship with Jesus. It’s what was established for Paul on the road to Damascus. Paul cares about other questions: Has Jesus made you his own? Has the word grabbed hold of you to give you faith? Has the water been poured over you and the promise proclaimed to you in baptism? Has Christ given himself to you with the promise of forgiveness in the Lord’s Supper? Has God announced forgiveness to you on account of Jesus’? In each of these ways, you’ve had the same experience as Paul: Christ established a relationship with you through no work of your own. So Paul basically says, “Credentials? Ain’t got none. I only have Jesus. And if you have a problem with the Spirit having moved a former persecutor of the church like me to preach to the gentiles, you’re going to have to take it up with Christ. You claim to have such good standing with God on account of your adherence to religious laws. Go ahead and trot that out before God as evidence of your worthiness. See how well that works out for you.”

In last Sunday’s gospel we heard the story of the centurion who asked Jesus to heal his servant and came to confess his own unworthiness and Christ’s great power and authority. Today we come up against another character who’s even less worthy: the dead son of the widow from Nain. By what worthiness or authority did the dead young man come to be raised? He was dead. He had nothing to bring before God’s judgment seat. What’s worse, anyone who came close to his dead body and funeral bier would have been regarded as unclean and unrighteous. People would have to stay away from them for a week lest they, too, become unclean.

But Jesus seems to care not at all about clean and unclean, righteous and unrighteous. Becoming unclean and being cast out of the community for a week seems to be a trifle for him. And it doesn’t matter to him that the dead young man can’t present credentials for worthiness. In fact, Jesus has the dead guy right where he wants him: lying there unable to move, unable to perform a good work, unable to defend himself, unable to take a breath and puff himself up in pride. The guy is dead, and that’s not just good enough for Jesus, it’s the only thing for him.

At that point, there’s no longer any hope for action, neither a little finger twitching to indicate the guy wanted to be raised or asking the Lord to come into his life or giving his heart to God. Dead fingers can’t twitch. Dead people can’t catch a breath in order to speak. And this guy’s heart just isn’t beating anymore. The only thing you can say the dead guy is able to do is rot. And even that is about as passive as you can get. The dead son of Nain is simply done with life. He has no more he can do. Now it’s Jesus’ own power and authority to raise him from the dead or nothing at all.

Paul pretty much tells the Galatians that his favorite t-shirt says, “Resurrection from the dead: been there, had that done to me.” That’s what happened to Paul on the road to Damascus. Jesus grabbed him, and Paul saw that the life he’d led was actually corrupted and rotting from the inside. Paul was as dead in sin as the son of Nain was lying on his bier. The presence of the risen Christ may have knocked him to the ground, but it also raised him to new life.

So once again, we have the same story we had last Sunday when we began to hear about the distinction between what is Christ and what is Not-Christ. Paul’s opponents want to point to his lack of credentials as a problem. But Paul knows that credentials are Not-Christ. When Jesus is the only game in town for Paul, to submit to legalistic credentialing is to deny Christ. And it’s a false gospel every bit as much as the demand that the men of Galatia unzip and be circumcised.

To turn to something that is not Christ seems like it’s just adding a small thing. It’s just a bit of foreskin. It’s just a diploma. It’s a mere exam. It’s simply a class to take. It’s just a decision for Christ. But what Paul’s opponents don’t see, and what he wants the Galatians to open their eyes to, is that adding even the smallest thing is to diminish what Christ has done on the cross and to make him less than Lord of all. Is it Christ who saves or not? If you submit to a demand to be more religious, a better Bible reader, less of a sinner, a more devoted Christian, a stronger fighter for peace and justice, then you have made yourself the hinge of salvation. And what we’re going to hear later in Galatians is that when you’ve allowed that camel’s nose under the tent, it will take over everything, and you will lose freedom and salvation.

When the demand for credentials and proof of authority comes, Paul says he’s unqualified. The only credential he has is the same the dead son in Nain bore: he was dead in sin, and the only life he has is the one Christ gives him. Can anything less be true for you? As Paul says in Romans, while we still were sinners Christ died for us. You who have been baptized into his death are now raised in his resurrection.

When Luther’s prince, Frederick the Wise, died in 1525 after having stood by his local professor and pastor even in the face of the power of the Holy Roman Empire and the condemnation of the church, the reformer preached at the prince’s funeral. He called Frederick’s death the little death. His body was done moving and breathing, and, yes, the people were right to grieve. But Luther said Frederick died the big death, the point when he was loosed from the world’s powers and freed in Christ, when the prince defending the gospel that Luther preached. Luther told the gathered mourners that it was Frederick’s confession of faith via his actions when he died and new life began for him.

It’s a strange thing when that happens to you. You never actually realize you were lying on your bier, traveling through the world dead as nails and unable to move. And yet now by the power of God’s word declared to you, your eyes are opened and, blinking, you think, “Wait! What just happened to me? How did I get here? Wow!” As long as you’re alive enough to hold a credential in your hand, you’re not dead enough for Jesus’ resurrection. Besides, he doesn’t want those papers cluttering up the divine ticket-to-heaven counter. His death was messy enough. He doesn’t need that from you. Keep your good works and use them for your neighbors.

And when your little death comes, and you, too are physically over and done with and of no more earthly good, save as worm fodder, then lie still, because Jesus has a word he’s going to speak to you. He will come to you with sweet somethings for your ears, saying, “Get up. Enjoy the new eternal life I’m giving you starting right now.” You’ll no doubt open your eyes and blink. But you shouldn’t be surprised. Paul has been telling you about it for two thousand years. And he’s announcing it to you again today. Jesus is the only credential you need and the best portable defibrillator around. There’s a new heartbeat, a new life, and a new calling as one of Christ’s own that have been place in you.

Next week get ready because we’re going to come face-to-face with a legal equation that declares your fight to maintain your current death in sin to be over. Of course, it’ll be more of the same, but Paul’s going to take us ever deeper into it. Amen.