SERMON FOR THE SEVENTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Proper 20 C ~ September 23, 2007

Holy Trinity & St. Anskar

The master commended the dishonest

manager, because he had acted shrewdly

+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity

    Well, I guess one way to interpret this parable would be to say with the Japanese tycoon that “business is war” and with General Sherman that “war is hell”, by which many mean that there are no rules. Just go at it and do whatever you have to do to win. But I hope to find some other economic advice in this parable of the dishonest manager, in the context of this summer’s theme of non-possession, or at least non-ATTACHMENT to possessions.

This probably wasn’t such a big problem for Christians before the rise of modern capitalism. The people of Cæsaræa could, without alarm, hear St. Basil tell them that the extra pair of shoes and the extra cloak they had in their closet were stolen from the beggar down the street who had none; and the people of Milan were not particularly shocked to hear St. Ambrose tell them that the very notion of possessing anything was original sin! I think their mentality was radically different from ours.

In the end, capitalism in incompatible with the Catholic faith. For us, human solidarity and the common good are more important than individual accumulation and private property. This does NOT mean that the person is secondary to the society. It means that personhood is not about possession. It is not that property and wealth are evil in themselves; but attachment to them is. They are not the purpose of human life. It is not money that our Lord calls “the root of all evil”, but the love of money. This is an important distinction, which leads me to think of detachment and dispossession in terms of spiritual development. As persons grows in the spiritual life, they become less and less interested in possession.

The very idea of spiritual development is Catholic. We are born as cute little Adams and Eves ~ reaching out and grabbing anything we can and putting it in our mouths. That’s what we have to do. That is our nature. We are self-centered as infants. But the process of growth and socialization leads us into more self-effacing attitudes. This is not automatic. Some people remain self-centered their whole lives. They are an unattractive spectacle ~ monstrous even ~ because in the Catholic view, human life is a process of spiritual transformation from the Old Adam into which we are born to the New Adam, into Whom we are baptized. This is not an instantaneous change, but the beginning of a process.

This is a major difference between Catholic tradition and the more extreme versions of the reformed tradition, which go hand-in-hand with capitalism, for whom there is no transformation, only gracious justification. We are given a garment of purity and righteousness, which covers the filth of our totally depraved and disfigured nature. There is no process ~ just an instantaneous fiat. We never, in ourselves, become the likekness pf God, but God doesn’t hold that against us. God chooses not to notice and treats us as though we did reflect God’s glory.

Since there is no real spiritual growth or transformation, since the Old Adam still lurks underneath the garment of grace, there is no hope of “outgrowing” one’s attachment to self and to property. All we can hope is that ~ at the last ~ God will not hold this against us. As far as I know, there are no Calvinist non-possessors. The best of them ~ like Andrew Carnegie ~ really believed that wealth was a sign of election, not of their own personal worthiness, and that there was nothing so shameful as dying rich: the elect had a duty to contribute to the common good.

Maybe Carnegie was thinking about today’s Gospel, when he said that. (A hard one for anybody, Catholic or Calvinist.) The crooked manager is held up as a hero ~ approved even by the guy he cheated, the Big Guy of the parable, who applauds him for his cunning, for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than the children of light. Clearly, the Master does not represent the Reign of God, as the Big Man in other parables does, (The Prodigal Son, the Laborers in the Vineyard, the Banquet of the King). In this one, the Big Man is Wealth itself, or maybe even the economic system that produces disparities of wealth. And it is called unrigihteous. Unjust. DISHONEST. The original word is mammon. And it is by nature unclean. You cannot serve both God and mammon.

In one reading, this could be taken as license to go out and do your worst! Accumulate as much as you can (you are totally depraved, after all), but just be sure that by the time you’re through you have put plenty of people in your debt, so they will plead your case before the Awful Judge. That would constitute being faithful with dishonest wealth.

Another reading might find in this Gospel a general condemnation of possession and acquisition as such ~ and of the economic system based on them. The term, Dishonest wealth (unrighteous mammon) is not understood as suggesting that there is another kind of mammon, which is not unrighteous. No. Anything you have that you don’t need is stolen from those who don’t have what they need. That is what solidarity means. My very idea that I own anything ~ that it is proper to me irrespective of my actual human need ~ is an illusion, or worse.

On the personal level, our whole spiritual life is a process of growing out of such illusions, like an infant grows out of trying to grab and devour everything. Like an infant, there is a time when I can’t help but labor under these illusions. It is appropriate to accumulate and build up for a time. The human race couldn’t continue without that. But there is also a time to put aside childish things, to shed the illusion of ownership. Not to love money ~ not to be attached to possession is to grow more like Jesus, to grow into the likeness of God.

The Gospel also, I think, gives us a picture of the right way to deal with unrighteous mammon as a society: make sure it is equitably distributed. Inordinate wealth is dirty money by definition. How is one to be faithful regarding it? Look at the dihonest manager: “One hundred? Sit down quickly and write fifty!” This is fraud. Enron accounting! But it seems to be saying that dishonesty with respect to that which is already dishonest is fidelity to the Reign of God. If Ambrose and Basil are right, the system that permits me to get more than I need while you lack what you need is unjust. Illegitimate.

I claim my surplus as my right, my property. And from that deluded perspective, it is wrong to tax me to benefit the poor. But ancient Catholic tradition doesn’t support that view. The manager who does what the unjust system considers dishonest is actually moving toward a higher spiritual plane! He has been found out, and soon he will have nothing, and he knows it. (Just as we do, in our more sober moments of recollection.) Better to stop selling the needy for a pair of sandals and instead to side with them now before it’s too late, and thereby have some hope for the future. Better not to pay attention to earthy things (wealth and possession) and to love things heavenly. Better, while placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those things that shall endure.

AMEN

MARANATHA

COME, LORD JESUS!