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Sunday, September 22, 2019 | 8:00 a.m.

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 113:1–8
Luke 16:1–13

The parable of the dishonest manager certainly undoes the common notion that the parables are nice stories about commendable people whom we ought to imitate.

Justo Gonzalez

On the morning when I woke up without you for the first time
I felt free and I felt lonely and I felt scared
And I began to talk to myself almost immediately
Not being used to being the only person there

The first time I made coffee for just myself I made too much of it
But I drank it all just ’cause you hate it when I let things go to waste
And I wandered through the house like a little boy, lost at the mall
And an astronaut could’ve seen the hunger in my eyes from space

And I sang, oh, what do I do?
What do I do?
What do I do?
What do I do without you?

Those are lyrics from a song called “Woke Up New” by one of my favorite bands, The Mountain Goats. Their singer and songwriter, John Darnielle, is a master of first-person narrative who never gives you all the information you need to know exactly what’s going on in the story. Like who is the “you” who hates it when he lets things go to waste, and why are they gone on that first morning?

We don’t actually need to know all the details. All we really need to hear is that plaintive four-word refrain: What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?

I think the manager from our parable would be a Mountain Goats fan. Or at least he would identify with the persona behind “Woke Up New.”

“Then the manager said to himself, ‘What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me?’”

What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?

He’s really in trouble. He squandered his employer’s estate, mismanaged it so badly that now there’s no choice but to fire him. Actually, “firing” is putting it kindly; the manager is actually an oikonomos in Greek, which is a household steward, which is a slave. He won’t be fired and free to look for another job. He will be demoted to manual labor, or he will be put out of his household entirely. His mismanagement has caused an urgent existential crisis.

What do I do?

He’s not unlike a couple other parable characters Jesus introduces us to in Luke’s Gospel. There is the rich man whose land produces abundantly but who has managed things so poorly that he doesn’t have any place to store his crops. So he thinks to himself, “What do I do?”

More poignantly is the parable of the prodigal. He cashed out his inheritance prematurely and then, in the NRSV’s memorable phrase, “squandered his property in dissolute living,” so that when a famine hits he’s utterly destitute. He has to hire himself out to a pig farmer, and he has even less to eat than the pigs!

What do I do?

It’s something of a fixture in Jesus’ teaching: a person out of options, staring down calamity as the result of poor money management.

The first time I overdrafted my checking account was just a few weeks after I’d opened it. I tried to use the ATM in the grocery store to get some cash for a date I had that night, and I got this strange error message that I didn’t understand. “Insufficient funds? What does that even mean?” I thought.

I asked one of the staff there at the store for help. “There’s something wrong with the ATM,” I complained. The young clerk gave me a look of sympathy mixed with irritation as she explained the score.

What do I do?

The first time I bought groceries all for myself, the checker looked at me the same way. “I’m sorry,” she explained. “Your card’s been declined.” I felt my face get all hot with humiliation. I took the card back and left all my bagged groceries behind in order to get out of that store as quickly as possible.

What do I do?

We know these what-do-I-do moments, don’t we, and we probably know them with money. But it isn’t always to do with money. A what-do-I-do moment can reach us even when we have our financial house in order. It’s a moment when your life feels like it is dramatically changing—for the worse. The rug coming out from under you, water coming in under the door, the walls closing in: pick your metaphor.

Your what-do-I-do moment might have come in the form of a pink slip. Or it might have come in the form of a diagnosis. It might have been a middle-of-the night phone call. Or maybe your what-do-I-do moment wasn’t sudden at all but a slow-breaking wave of trouble that covered many moments.

We have our what-do-we-do moments too. What do we do about gun violence? What do we do about political polarization? What do we do about resurgent nationalism? What do we do about climate change?

What do we do about declining attendance? What do we do about the ending of an era in American life when church participation was widespread? What do we do about a loss of influence in the culture? You see, the church has its what-do-we-do moments too.

So what does the manager from our parable do in his what-do-I-do moment? Several things. First, he decides that there is something he can do. The option of accepting consequence imposed on him by his employer—digging or begging—is not even considered. No, he decides first that there is something he can do. That feels important to note.

Because what’s the alternative to that? A shrug of the shoulders and a “what’re you gonna do?” Cynical detachment? Burn-it-all-down despair? Victimization? We have options. We have agency.

The manager also reckons with reality. Notice that there is nothing in his strategy aimed at hanging on to his position. His employer has said clearly, “You cannot be my manager any longer,” and he’s heard it. He’s not in denial.

Instead, his plan is to provide for himself in a future that’s different than the one he had been imagining. He says to himself (I love the way these parable characters talk to themselves), “I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.” His purpose is to equip himself for a new reality, not to try to revive an old one.

A what-do-we-do moment forecloses the possibility of going back. The life we knew, the world as it was, the church we were comfortable with—they’re all changed in ways that can’t be undone in a what-do-we-do moment. We can grieve them (and we should). But we can also pivot and learn how to thrive in a new life and a changed world and an emerging church.

That pivot won’t be easy. It’ll be uncomfortable. It may even feel wrong.

I mean, what does the manager actually do? He slashes the debts of his employer’s debtors. One by one, he calls them into his office, asks them what they owe, and then reduces it.

This is not righteous behavior. It’s falsifying finances. Reducing these debts without his employer’s sanction is something that everybody hearing this parable for the first time would have regarded as shady, without a doubt.

It’s shady, and it’s shrewd. It puts these debtors now into the manager’s debt for the favor he’s done them and the money he’s saved them. It also implicates these debtors in the manager’s deceit. You notice that the manager doesn’t actually change the amounts owed; he has the debtors modify their own bills. So if their gratitude is not sufficient motivation for them to take care of the manager after he’s dismissed, perhaps their culpability in his crime will be.

Shrewd, shady, shifty—holy?

Jesus seems to think so. Jesus commends the manager’s action! That’s surprising, to say the least. Imagine the disciples hearing this parable and Jesus’ commentary on it. They’re observant, upstanding Jews, “Children of the Light” as they have been taught to think of themselves and their ancestors, not “Children of this age,” those whose god is the belly and whose glory is in their shame. But Jesus sounds uncomfortably impressed by the children of this age.

“The children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light,” he tells them. That’s gotta make their stomach lurch a little bit. Ours too.

The manager’s shrewdness is not merely ethical transgression. Jesus is more impressed by the manager’s right perception of the urgency of his situation.

Jesus is an occasion for urgency. From the beginning of the Gospels all the way to the end people respond with urgency to Jesus. Herod urgently wants to know the place where the Christ child is born, sensing a threat. The fishermen he calls to follow him, drop their nets and follow him immediately. People in need of a miracle run to him, grab his clothes, drop friends through roofs—whatever they have to do. Scribes and Pharisees plot in hurried whispers. His arrest, his trials, his crucifixion: there is an urgent drumbeat at the heart of the passion. And that third day, that first day of the week, feels like the most urgent of all, with the disciples racing to the tomb to chase a rumor that he’s alive.

A sense of urgency is a mark of faithful discipleship. Not panic, but urgency. And this parable is an example for the faithful of how urgency can work in the world.

Millions of people worldwide, thousands of them here in Chicago, took part in a youth climate strike on Friday. Lots and lots of them skipped school to take part, taking up for one day a small act of transgression that a sixteen-year-old from Sweden has been repeating every week for over a year now. Playing hooky isn’t the point. The urgent need for meaningful action to fight climate change is the point.

Jesus is urgency incarnate. His invitation is urgent—his invitation to follow him, to experience a love that is bigger than us and that wants us more than we want ourselves, his training in the Spirit for sharing that love with everyone we can, especially those this world loves least, and his invitation to this table. It’s all so urgent.

It is urgent that we hear how much Jesus wants us to come to this table together, to partake of this one bread and so experience being one body. It’s urgent we do that. It’s urgent that we share this one cup and know ourselves welcomed and accepted. That is urgent.

Friends, here at this table is where we begin to find our answer. What do we do? Start here. Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church