Proper 20C
Amos 8:4-7
Luke 15:1-2, 16:1-13
Episcopal Student Center, Austin, Tex.

I love a good story. When I was a boy I read everything I could get my hands on, starting with Green Eggs and Ham and the big books of fairy tales on the shelves at home. I was given a set of The Chronicles of Narnia for Christmas when I was nine and the wide world of fantasy opened up, followed later by The Lord of the Rings and any Star Wars Expanded Universe novel I could find. I don’t read quite at the same breakneck pace that I used to, but even now I love a good video game or TV series that helps me get lost in a world and tells me a good story, especially one that gives me something to hold onto when I come back into the real world. So it is probably not a huge surprise that, as I was forming my adult concept of God and what my relationship to Christianity would look like, one of the things I have come to love about Jesus is that he loves to tell stories. Most of the stories Jesus tells are short and to the point, but I find that the more I sit with them, the more immersive they become. Because they are short, there is so much left for you and me to fill in, so much room for us to get lost, to play and imagine, to move around and ask questions and see what we can find. And, of course, the stories that Jesus tells are explicitly designed to tell us something about the world we live in and what God has to do with it. The stories that Jesus tells invite us to imagine with him what a better world can look like whenever he asks us to consider what he calls “the kingdom of God.” 

The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, which though it is the smallest of all seeds, grows into a shrub that provides shade and shelter for God’s creatures.

The kingdom of God is like a farmer who scatters seeds with reckless abandon and waits to see what new life takes root.

The kingdom of God is like someone who makes sure that the oldest treasures and the newest inventions are all being used for the good of the household.

Just last week: the kingdom of God is like a shepherd who rejoices over finding a lost sheep, or the woman who finds a precious coin that had gone missing.

In all of these stories, the point is easily found: that God is like this or like that, full of love and quick to rejoice, clever and gracious, welcoming any and all to the feast but especially the poor, the lonely, the weak, and the forgotten. Jesus loves to tell stories, and what good, beautiful, helpful stories they are.

Today Jesus tells us another story: the kingdom of God is like a man who stole from his employer, and who was applauded for just how clever he was for doing it. Got it? Go and do likewise. Of all the stories Jesus tells, this is perhaps the most perplexing. It’s confusing. It upsets me. It would be one thing if Jesus simply let the story lie without passing judgment one way or the other on the man who defrauds his employer, or maybe better still if he tells us the man is in the wrong. But no! Jesus explicitly tells us to follow his example: “Use worldly wealth to make friends for yourselves, ​​so that when it’s gone, you will be welcomed into the eternal homes.” What is the good Christian to do?

At this point it is perhaps helpful to step back and take a look at what is going on around this story. Saint Luke has given us this story as part of a set: last week we heard the stories of the lost sheep and the lost coin; then Jesus tells the story of the prodigal son, who essentially steals an enormous portion of his father’s fortune and spends it all, and then is welcomed back home with rejoicing while his brother sulks. Jesus then immediately launches into this story, and all as a response to the same event: “All the tax collectors and sinners were gathering around Jesus to listen to him,” and the people who knew how to follow God according to the rules “were grumbling, saying, ‘This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.’” Perhaps this is a clue.

In each of the preceding stories, something unexpected happens. A shepherd risks everything for one sheep who could have just been written off as a loss. A woman throws a party for finding a single, tiny, seemingly unimportant object. A young, foolish man who has ruined his own life and hurt his family is welcomed back without question. Over the centuries these stories have entered the mainstream and are perhaps not that remarkable to those of us who grew up hearing them. We see the goodness of God in them. But in all of them–as in this confusing, upsetting story of a man who gains friends through fraud–Jesus is trying to tell us that God does not play by the rules of our expectations.

God does not play by the rules of our expectations.

To the people who heard this story first, it would have been taken for granted that anyone who had enough wealth to put other people in debt to him was already not a good person, which is what we hear in our reading from Amos today. All wealth and all of creation belongs to God, and is entrusted to each of us for the common good. The wisdom of scripture looks at example after example throughout history and reminds us that hoarding more than we need will rot our souls and damage our relationships with one another. But the main character in this story is simply the accountant, who up to this point has probably not put much thought into the ethics of his employer. It would be reasonable, since he knows his job is on the line, for him to grovel and show that he really has been doing a good job, or perhaps to find someone else to blame and save his own skin. It would not be that surprising if that’s how the story went. But instead the accountant does something unexpected: he starts using his influence for the benefit of the poor, the lonely, the weak, and the forgotten. The man’s response to this moment of reckoning is to start forgiving debts, which to Jesus’s audience would have been an unmistakable sign of the kingdom of God. It doesn’t even matter that the man’s motivations are mixed at best, and just plain selfish if we’re being honest. God can and does work with that, and Jesus tells us in so many words that by befriending the poor we will have a place in God’s kingdom.

This story challenges what I think I know about responsibility and honesty and playing by the rules, and much like the story of the prodigal son, it invades my reality with an example of love and grace that is reckless, overflowing, unplanned, and above all irresponsible. Bit by bit it washes away the rotten status quo that keeps people down. It reminds us that our responsibility to one another comes before our responsibility to the status quo, and that we should look for chances to offer freedom and forgiveness everywhere we go. Jesus finishes by telling us that we cannot serve God and money, that if we are to follow him we will need to practice breaking out of the mindset of endless productivity and endless profit that is destroying lives and killing the planet. In this strange story Jesus is trying to show us something about the scandal of mercy and the righteousness of irresponsibility (as the world would have us understand it). 

The kingdom of God is like someone who decides to break the rules and change lives for the better. The kingdom of God is like someone who wakes up one morning and finds that their debts are forgiven. And that, to me, seems like a pretty good story to get lost inside.