Sermon
9-18-16
Grace and peace to you from God our father and from our
Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ, Amen.
Have you ever played “The Game of Life”? You start out
with a car, a pink or blue peg, and ten thousand dollars in the bank - just
like real life, right? As your little car travels along the game board, you
experience life events. Some you get to choose, like whether to start college
or a career. Others you don’t get to choose, like whether or not you get
married, or how many children you have, or what kind of house you buy. The goal
is to drive your little car with your little family and live your little life
until you retire, the winner being the one who retires with the most money.
Once you understand all the rules, playing “The Game of
Life” is pretty easy and straightforward. Roll the dice, move your car, take
the rewards or misfortunes as they come. Living the game of “Real Life,” however, is not quite so easy or straightforward. Real life is much more complicated. The choices we make in real life are
not exactly based on dice rolls or the luck of the draw. Real life is messy and
confusing and complicated… and very much like the parable that Jesus tells to
his disciples that we heard just a few moments ago!
Now, when it comes to what Bible readings we hear in
church every Sunday, there is a pre-set order of game play. They are not chosen
willy-nilly, based on what Pastor Egan or I feel like saying on a Sunday. Certain
texts come up during certain parts of the church year, following a three year
cycle –always a reading from the Old Testament, the New Testament, a Psalm, and
one of the Gospels. Many years ago some very learned scholars – Catholics,
Anglicans, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Methodists, and more – helped organize and
plan these readings in an attempt to draw from many different parts of the
Bible.
But similarly to landing on a space telling us to “go
back three spaces” or a “skip a turn,” every so often we roll a doosey. And
today is one of the doosiest – this particular parable has the reputation among
pastors for being one of the toughest texts to preach on. And so it makes me
feel a little better than even two thousand years later, most Biblical scholars
and most seminary preaching professors still
don’t exactly agree on how we should be understanding what Jesus is trying to get
at here. Awesome.
This story Jesus tells his disciples sounds much more
like the plot of an episode of that Netflix political dystopia House of Cards, or perhaps an episode of
the reality TV show Undercover Bosses.
Much like in Undercover Bosses, the
boss finds out that his trusted steward is cooking the books, and as a result
is give him a pink slip. Hasta La Vista, cheater!
Though, there is something sort of refreshing about the
honesty and creativity of this steward that I can’t help but kind of like like,
and despite myself, I sort of want to root for him and see him succeed. Much
like the conniving and manipulating politician Frank Underwood on House of Cards, who also breaks the
fourth wall and lets us know what he's thinking, the steward lets us in on
how he intends to scheme himself out of this jam, his brilliant plan being to us
his access to swindle his boss out of EVEN MORE MONEY.
And, amazingly, it WORKS! Though perhaps not in the way
the steward intends. The rich guy was actually impressed, perhaps because this is the same way that made the rich
man likely his wealth- sneakily and
dishonestly.
And perhaps even more amazing of all – JESUS applauds the
steward too!
Really, Jesus? Should we really have as our model a man
who scams his boss, then tampers with the evidence to save his own skin? We all
know that THIS KIND of cheater is a dime a dozen. We see on the news daily
about people who come out on top for finding loopholes or exploiting people who
have no other options.
And this steward fits right in - he certainly knew how to play by the rules to his own advantage – the
rules of money, that is. As it was then, it still is now –in this world, money
talks, it is money who is king, demands our devotion, and makes the rules that
govern our daily lives.
Rules like: Whoever holds the money holds the power. That
your worth is based on what and how much you can buy, how big your house is or
what school you can afford to send your children too. To spend before even thinking of saving or
giving. That money is something we can never truly have enough of, and must be hoarded
at all costs. Money dictates our time, consumes our thoughts, and demands our
loyalty. One book about faith and money puts it this way: “we’ve followed a
script written by someone else … We’ve slipped unconsciously into lives of
bondage to bosses, debts, lifestyles, and expectations.” Another line goes, “Life is a game. Money is how we keep score.”
And so, when we slip into this kind of bondage, and
follow this script money lays out for us, what is our reward? How do we know if
we’ve “won” at the game? Like in the game of life, the one with the most money
at the end wins. But the thing is,
as Jesus also points out, when life is over and it’s time to enter into our
eternal, rather than retirement, homes, and
where is the money? Well, it’s
gone, because “you can’t take it with you”!
So, are we doomed to follow these rules that will, in the
end, cheat us out of life and in fact give us nothing? Is there another king to
follow, another set of rules for us to live by? The answer of course is yes,
there is another ruler to follow, and his name is Jesus. This Jesus came to
say, yes, yes there is. God’s Kingdom rules are the
alternative. And we as children of light are called to follow by these rules
instead.
Be faithful even in the little things. Be good stewards
of and take care of what has been given to you by God. Which by the way, is our
very life. Be a slave to God and serve one another, rather than serving the
demand of money.
Both God and money demand
your life. But which master would you rather serve? The small “G” god
who’s bottom line is power, manipulation, and fear? Or the Big “G” God of love,
grace, and mercy? The truth is, we can’t
play the game by both sets of rules.
We cannot serve both.
We are citizens of the Kingdom of God who are living in
the Kingdom of Money at the moment. Which makes life confusing and complicated.
All the playing pieces look the same. But we are called to play by different
rules and to have a different strategy, because our goal is not the same. Our
goal is not to win. Our goal is to follow Jesus. Which will probably lead us into
all kinds of trouble.
My personal theory is that Jesus liked the rascally
steward because he was the type of guy that Jesus tended to hang out with.
Jesus was often accused of eating with sinners, scandalous women, and shady
characters with glaring flaws – and this steward fits right in. He knew how to cleverly and creatively
play by the rules of his world. According to The Message translation, verse 8
and 9 of Luke 16 reads “streetwise people… are on constant alert, looking for
angles… using adversity to stimulate… creative survival.”
And so, that’s why I think that Jesus wants us to take a
page out of the steward’s playbook of creative survival: when things get tough,
DON’T give up. See what’s happening around you, and make a plan. Find those
angles and exploit them for the good of the kingdom. Be alert to new opportunities.
And WHEN – not IF – we fail, we can get right back up,
dust ourselves off, remind ourselves that we are baptized and beloved children
of God, and every day is a new day. This is how we live, because we know that
life is not really a game we manipulate, that there are actually no winners and
losers, and we cannot simply strategize our way into the kingdom of God.
Jesus won a place for us in the kingdom already, by not
playing by the world’s rules. In fact, you could say he cheated. He “won” the
game by losing – losing any opportunity to gain worldly possessions, power, or
status… even losing his very life, and ultimately, cheating death. All
to prove that we cannot win our way
to God. The game has already been won,
because there is no game. And so we
have been freed – we no longer have to play by money’s rules.
Though we no longer have to play by money’s rules, we
what we do with our money still very
much matters. And so too, along the way, we ask ourselves, how can we as people
of God flip the scrip, “cheat” at the game, and make our money SERVE US as WE
continue to be called to SERVE GOD?
How we answer this question matters, because here we are,
still on the game board, far from the finish line. The game of life has already
been won for us, true, but in the meantime we still make choices and roll the
dice. So along the way, Jesus challenges us to turn to the Dishonest Steward’s
playbook, finding angles, keeping alert, keeping our wits about us, creatively
surviving, until we reach the finish, in order challenge the game. Well, look
out world, challenge accepted. Game on. Amen.
