25 LECTIONARY GLORIA DEI, ANCHORAGE
SEPTEMBER 23, 2007 PASTOR SCOTT FULLER
AMOS 8:4-7; PSALM 113; I TIM 2:1-7; LUKE 16:1-13
The Whiskey Priest
Prepare our hearts, Lord, to receive your Word. Silence in us any voice but your own that in hearing we may believe and in believing we may obey your will revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Amen.
Dear friends in Christ: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
The parable of the Dishonest Steward is widely regarded as the most challenging of Jesus’ stories to understand. It’s confusing ending leaves us concerned and…consternated! It should end with the crooked accountant geting what he deserves. We could even live with the news that his boss gets angry with, or is hurt by the man’s treachery. We would be…happy if the thief has a change of heart, takes responsibility for his crime, confesses his sin, and is given a second chance…but none of that happens.
Such a negative story, with its perplexingly positive perspective, is… strange. It’s especially difficult for us here in Alaska to find anything affirmative in this affair. Daily we seem to be assaulted with headlines about shady financial deals, closets full of money and cash payments for questionable work – it makes us wary of such disregard for the law.
If we were to judge the man’s fate, I think we’d be tempted to say, Throw the thief in jail! Yet the master sends him off without even a slap on the wrist – in fact, he gives him a slap on the back, a hearty laugh, and a You got me good on that one!
What does this mean for us…? And nothing is made any clearer by Jesus’ statement about the children of the world being more shrewd than the children of the light…that seems to go without saying. And to make murky waters even muddier, we slip into that crowning point of confusion in v. 9:
Says Jesus, Make friends for yourselves by the means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes…???
Does anyone know what he means?...because I certainly don’t!
Now I’m pretty sure that Jesus is not encouraging us to lie, cheat and steal as long as it’s done in the name of God or for the sake of the Church. Would everyone agree with me?…because, if I’m wrong, we could have some very interesting fund raising programs for our ministry!!
So once again we have to ask that old catechism question: what does this mean? And here’s my answer: I couldn’t find any that I liked from the sources I checked…except for one…and that’s even a little odd, but then these verses of Scripture are odd.
Now, remember: this whole section of parables in Luke’s Gospel starts in chapter 15 with those famous words Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to (Jesus). And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them” (15:1-2). What follows is a laundry list of parables about God’s passion for grace – leaving 99 sheep in danger to go out and find the missing one; welcoming home a wasteful son as if he’s a returning hero…
So…I wonder if the same theme is at work here…the strange notion that while God commands us to live a life of love and service to the Gospel, God’s Spirit is out in the world throwing open heaven’s doors and welcoming in anyone and everyone who shows the slightest interest.
If that’s the case, says my favorite theologian Robert Capon, then the unjust steward in today’s strange story is…Jesus! On the heels of those other parables, here is one more example of the wasteful, indiscriminate attitude that is so frequently tied to God’s loving grace for people, especially those who are the lost, the last, the little and the least (Capon).
Here’s what Capon says: The unjust steward is the Christ-figure…because he is a crook, like Jesus…(Jesus) was not respectable. He broke the Sabbath. He consorted with crooks. And he died as a criminal. Now…we (can) see why he refused to be respectable: he did it to catch a world that respectability could only terrify and condemn. He became sin for us sinners, weak for us weaklings, lost for us losers, and dead for us dead (Capon, Kingdom, Grace and Judgment, pp. 307-308: emphasis mine).
In his novel entitled The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene tells a similar sort of dark parable about a broken sinner who is, nevertheless, the bringer of grace and hope in a time of suffering and pain. The story is set in Mexico, during a time when the Church was being persecuted. Priests throughout the region had been captured and executed. The “hero” of the story is a man known only as the Whiskey Priest which, kind of says it all.
He has compromised his vows, he has no spirit to be a martyr, he is plagued by the sins of his past and his predicament of the present, so he moves through the countryside, from village to village, looking for people who will hide him from the authorities.
Yet a strange thing happens whenever he enters a town. The faithful, who have been denied the opportunity to hear God’s Word and receive communion, are blessed by the mere presence of this painfully imperfect priest. Like the thief in our parable for today, this Whiskey Priest knows that the end is near – and knows that he cannot survive on his own.
So…he hears the confessions of the villagers, he pronounces God’s forgiveness, he shares with them God’s holy presence in the wine and the bread, then he moves on to the next village where he knows that with what he has to offer to the people, namely, that which belongs to God, he will be welcomed into their homes.
The Apostle Paul, in his famous quote from I Corinthians, seems to have the Parable of the Dishonest Steward, the Whiskey Priest, and you and me in mind when he says:
God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong (I Corinthians 1:27).
So, what I take away from this text is a warmed-heart at the affirmation of Jesus’ unwavering commitment to grace; a shake of my head at the mysterious ways of God; and a smile at the promise that the Holy Spirit is among us, working in and through us, at both our best and our worst, to seek out the lost, to bless the weak, to comfort the sad, to empower the frail: to bring about the kingdom of God one person at a time. Amen.