Survival Economics, Gospel Economics

The Rev. Alissa Newton

The Eighteenth Sunday After Pentecost

text: Luke 16:1-13

Listen to this sermon here.

This past week my friend Sarah went to the shores of a river in Greys Harbor county and broadcast live on Facebook as one hundred people were kicked out of the only residence they had, an illegal campsite. Sarah is a priest who works with the rural poor and homeless in one of the most economically depressed areas of our state. Her ministry is called Chaplains on the Harbor. I followed along on Facebook, as Sarah posted throughout the drama of the displacement this week, and was struck by the desperation on the faces of the mostly young homeless people, and by the powerful sense of community that can be born out of the need to survive.

But, there are some real problems with communities that form out of a need to survive, and only a need to survive. I was talking to Sarah this week and she cautioned me about over idealizing the community she works with. “People certainly rely on each other and support each other, because they have to.” She said, “they also sometimes prey on each other to survive.” What Sarah is talking about is the trades that people have to make sometimes, to get shelter – trading use of their bodies for a place to stay, or petty theft in order to eat or have something to sell. Sometimes people with more resources exploit those without shelter. Sometimes they choose to exploit each other. And, sometimes they come together as community in ways that are brave, and beautiful, and strong.

I find all of this very relate-able, actually. We see these dynamics in really public and obvious ways with the very poor, who cannot afford privacy, among other things. But to some degree all of us, regardless of our state of wealth or shelter, are caught up in the same systems, and all of us use relationships to survive them. Sometimes this is a good thing, and sometimes we have to put up with people, or sacrifice values, in order to shrewdly manage our lives and livelihoods. It's not always fair, or ideal.

The reality of inequality, and the need to use relationships to survive isn’t something our culture invented. Jesus also lived in a world where there was great upheaval, a huge gap between the very rich and very poor, and where most social relationships were based in some way on survival – either protecting one’s own survival or exploiting someone else’s need to survive for personal gain. This is the dilemma at the heart of the parable we hear in our gospel today – how are we supposed to exist, to act and live and belong to God in a fundamentally unjust world? How do we know what to do, when our culture requires us to exploit others or ourselves in order to live?

In this parable Jesus is talking to his disciples, to his inner circle of friends. That’s all we’re told of the context, except that this parable is nested within a long string of parables in the Gospel of Luke, most of which have something to do with the relationship between people and money, and between money and relationships. And this parable is a tough nut to crack. Nothing goes the way we think it should. A manager is accused of mis-management. He realizes that he has to do something to survive. The manager chooses to basically steal from his employer in order to build goodwill with the many people who owe his employer money or goods. The rich employer discovers the manager's theft and counter intuitively is pleased, rewarding him for it. And then, just to top it all off, Jesus tells us to be like the manager – who broke all the rules of being a good employee not for altruistic reasons but to save his own skin. Somehow this story has to do with choosing God over wealth.

One thing we know for sure – this parable takes place in a world that is just as unjust and broken as our is. It is likely that what Jesus is describing in the parable was something that his disciples would have instantly recognized. Two thousand years ago in what we now call Israel it was common for individuals or individual families to own large pieces of land that poor individuals and families paid the landowner to farm. There was usually a middle man, a manager, whose job it was to get the people who worked the land to pay the landowner a percentage of whatever they produced. It was a common practice for the managers to overcharge the farmers to pad their own pockets. Landowners didn’t mind this as long as their wealth was preserved, and as long as the manager didn’t appear too wealthy. The managers provided a foil – they were the ones actually charging interest and cheating people, protecting the landowners from both the ire of the people they kept in poverty to work their land and the religious problems that came with charging interest for anything, which is against Torah, or religious law.

So the manager in our parable is stuck, caught in a system that was unjust to the poor, and ultimately also to him, and a system that was also pretty blatantly against Torah, the religious laws of God. And when he realizes that the system is now also against him, the manager has some choices to make. He could have pleaded his case to the employer. He could have given up. But he chooses to use his position to build goodwill, to relieve debt. His hope is that perhaps the many poor who benefit will lend him a place to stay, will give him food, when he is destitute. So basically, the manager chooses survival, and he chooses relationship with others. He has a bad situation, he is caught in a bad system that hurts people and threatens his own life. And he does what he can to alleviate pain and survive – both for himself and for others who are hurting.

So how is all of this about being faithful? What is "dishonest wealth?" What can we learn about this parable where a cheater gets rewarded on both ends – his employer finds him clever and the people whose debt he has forgiven also give him goodwill. Where is God, in this parable – because God certainly isn't the rich man, or the manager, or the debtors, right?

There are a couple of things that strike me in all of this. The first is that perhaps on some level all of our wealth is dishonest, because like the manager we are also caught in a fundamentally rigged system. And, in this system every one of us needs resources, wealth of some sort, in order to survive. The second is that even in the midst of unfair and unjust systems we have choices to make – we can choose life and survival, over giving up. We can choose relationship over isolation. We can choose to help those with less, in fact if we are like the manager, using whatever position we have in this world – good, bad, or ugly, to help others might be more than one options among many, it might be the thing that saves us. Maybe that is where God shows up in this parable, in the interactions between desperate people, the choices to prioritize relationship and life over legality and death.

In just a couple of weeks we will welcome the REACHout men's shelter into our hall for the first month of the winter season. Up to 25 men will sleep and eat here with us each night. Our job is to provide two people to "host" them every evening, as well as the other staff and volunteers bringing food that help make the shelter happen. Each year some of us struggle with this role, "just hosting." And each year we are reminded that for many of our neighbors without shelter, the main reason to interact with other people is to secure survival. So for one month we get to be different, for these men. The shelter provides social workers to help them get the things they need, and food, and a place to sleep and blankets and clothes. So we get to provide them with something else – a friendly face, a genuine interest in their well-being, the luxury of human contact where there is nothing to be gained, aside from care. Each year the grace of their presence with us transforms us, each year the opportunity to care for others in this way is an amazing gift to this household of faith.

God does not expect us to exist outside the systems and cultures we are born into. But today we are invited from right exactly where we are to choose life, to choose relationships and love, and to trust that it is in these places of care and desperation that we'll find the God whose love is bigger than our brokenness, a God who can use dishonest managers like us to change the world.