Lectionary Lab PREMIUM Edition for the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Year C
September 18, 2022
Comments by John Fairless
Jeremiah 8:18-9:1
Jeremiah is not called “The Weeping Prophet” for nothing!
His brokenness over the sin and rebellion of Israel is God’s brokenness, as well. How it pains God when we are willful and choose our own paths, come hell or high water!
The irony of the situation is that there IS plenty of balm in Gilead (known for its soothing ointments — probably a form of myrrh — in the ancient world.) But, a sick person must be willing to be healed.
Psalm 79:1-9
What recourse do we have in the aftermath of God’s judgment upon sin? It can be pretty tough to accept discipline in our lives (have any of you parents ever had the “I hate you!” moment from your kids when you were in the midst of a course correction?)
The closing verses make an excellent prayer of penitence — when we are genuinely in a place to understand that. Our hope — our only hope — is in the deliverance and forgiveness that comes from God, for God’s own name’s sake.
Amos 8:4-7
Are we ever impatient in accomplishing our assigned or expected “holy tasks” so that we can get on to real life? And why do you think God is so doggone interested in the poor and needy, anyhow?
Psalm 113
I’m loving so much about this psalm, but I am immediately captivated by v. 2. There is simply no better time to praise God for God’s goodness than right now — “from this time and forevermore.”
Again — with the needy!
1 Timothy 2:1-7
Fill in the blank: God would like to see ____________ be saved.
Luke 16:1-13
There’s a very interesting discussion of this passage — one of the more difficult in Luke’s gospel, and among Jesus’ more quizzical parables — on The Lectionary Lab Live podcast this week.
Perhaps we are called both to be like and unlike the “shrewd manager” in our handling of the gospel. We don’t really need any extra deceit, but there sure is an advantage to getting focused on our tasks when time is of the essence!
And just for fun…
Sermon by Delmer Chilton
When I was a child growing up in rural Appalachia, the word "smart" had a number of meanings, most of which had nothing to do with intelligence. One meaning had to do with how much something hurt. Bang your finger with a hammer? "Dang! That's gonna smart." Another, the one I heard the most from the many adults who bossed me around on the farm, meant something like "obey quickly with no questions." "You heard me now. Look smart and get on with it." Occasionally it was used to describe someone who dressed nicely. (This was never applied to me.) "That's a smart looking outfit you have on there." The one that came closest to being about intelligence had to do with being good at earning money. I had more than a few relatives with degrees from good colleges. Some of them worked in the Aerospace Industry or for the Tennessee Valley Authotiy's hydroelectric plants, most of them were public school teachers. None of them got rich and their well-meaning relatives often described them as having a bit of "book learning," but they would also say, "but if they're so smart, why ain't they rich?" There was a persistent association of true "smarts" with the accumulation of earthly goods.
Something along those lines lies in the background of this disconcerting story that we often label "the dishonest manager." The story itself makes perfect sense to us - the man had been caught padding his expense account or some such "squandering the rich man's property." He was fired, his future prospects were dismal, "too weak to dig, too proud to beg." So, he did what he did best - he manipulated other people's money to his own advantage. He would have had a brilliant career on Wall Street. He quickly made deals with people that owed the rich man money, thereby feathering his own nest for the future. It's the way of the world.
The hard part for us comes next. The master calls him in and compliments him on being "smart," for knowing how to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, for making lemonade out of a lemon, for outsmarting his boss and everybody else. Why is this hard for us? Well because this is church, and the story is coming out of Jesus' mouth, and we have a habit of making the powerful people in Jesus' parables into God-figures - it throws us when Jesus seems to praise the dishonest manager for being dishonest. We don't get it. It doesn't fit with our notion that the gospel is about morality, and being good, etc. What is going on here?
Two things are important to note. First - not all parables are allegories - indeed few of them are, yet we persist in hearing them that way. In an allegory, certain characters stand for people in the "real world." But very few of Jesus' parables work that way. The rich man isn't God, the manager isn't a model Christian, etc. This is not a "good example" story with a "go and do likewise" moral. Second - we need to remember to look at the larger context, where the story is in Luke's gospel. Chapter 14 of Luke has stories and instructions about the pursuit and use of possessions. Chapters 15 and 16 contain five separate parables, each of which has to do with the use or misuse of property: the lost sheep, the lost coin, the prodigal son, a rich man and the dishonest manager, and a rich man and Lazarus. Luke is working on a point about how followers of Jesus are to regard their money and their stuff. Underneath all these stories there lurks a counter-cultural rebuttal to the notion that being truly "smart" results in being rich.
In reading today's scripture lesson, it's easy to get hung up on parsing verses 8-12, which appear to praise monetary dishonesty, and miss the real point of the parable laid out for us in verse 13, "No slave can serve two masters. . . You cannot serve God and wealth." The core meaning of this story can be summarized this way :
We must deal with money and possessions to live in this world. There are two ways to do that. Option one is to treat your money and your things as an end in themselves. We are to accumulate and use them to make life better for ourselves and our families in this world and this world only. Or option two, money nad possessions are a means to an end, and that end is serving God and neighbor as a way of participating in the Kingdom of Heaven. If you choose option two, remember to be as "smart" with your life and things on behalf of God and others as you would have been on behalf of yourself alone.
True story. In the place where I grew up there was an old man, "Mr. Smith," who was "smart" by local standards - he had used every ounce of his brain and waking effort in the pursuit of things and he was good at it. Owned a large farm that had many employees, lived in a big house on a hill, drove a brand new big, expensive car. And, because it was a small, close-knit community, we all knew he was a miserable human being. He lived in that house alone, drinking himself to sleep every night, spending his days worried that somebody, somewhere, sometime, was going to outsmart him and cheat him the same way he had outsmarted and cheated others.
There was also an old woman, "Miss Jones," who lived alone in a two room building that had once been a little country store. She buried what little money she had in jars in the yard, she ate off both sides of a plate before she washed it, and she sat in the backyard in the shade playing her fiddle and dipping snuff. Her little house was filled with all the neighborhood children every afternoon after school and people from all walks of life frequently dropped in to see her. She spent all that she had and all that she was on caring for others. "Old man Smith" served one master, "Old lady Jones" another. I think I know which one died happy.
Amen and amen.