Getting out of the mob and finding a new "family”
Wonderings…
I wonder what the heart of your week has been?
I wonder if you’ve ever made a big change in your life, and who helped you?
Reflection on those Wonderings + Texts for Year C, Proper 20
Amos 8:4-7; Psalm 113; Luke 16:1-13
Let us speak, and listen, held in the presence of our loving, liberating, and life-giving God. Amen.
You cannot serve God and wealth; in the King James Version; “you cannot serve God and Mammon.”
What is Jesus’ tone here? Maybe I’m just projecting my own anxiety about money here, but at first glance here, Jesus sounds…accusing. Judgmental. It sounds like Jesus is demanding a form of spiritual heroism from his listeners, and from us? And I'm failing…
I detect some thick irony here. For example, “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, your ‘friends’ will welcome you into the eternal homes.” Jesus might be mocking his audience a bit—maybe mocking us.
But I want to invite us all to hear that mockery as gentle, as the thought-provoking irony of a compassionate friend and not the stark verdict of a judge.
One reason is context. This passage is part of the same scene as the passage we reflected on last week: the parable of the shepherd who leaves behind the 99 sheep to go looking for the one that is lost, and rejoices when they find it. And then, sandwiched between that parable of the lost sheep and today’s passage, there is the parable of the prodigal son.
So right before this story about a dishonest manager, Jesus has told a story that a young man who has squandered his inheritance on wine and women and ended up in the gutter, and comes home to his father saying ready to say “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands”—but before he can say any of that, his father sees him and runs, runs toward him to embrace him, rejoicing, calling for a feast, because his son who was lost has been returned to him.
So in Luke’s telling, Jesus offers this story of a middle manager caught in an unjust system, looking for a way out—and he tells it to a group of people who are still wiping their eyes at the revolutionary idea of a God who has the compassion and mercy of a parent for their child. Who does not punish the child for disobedience, but rejoices that they have been reunited.
I want you to imagine in your mind a young man named Tony. Tony grew up in a large tight knit family: 2 sisters, 2 brothers, loving parents, and they’d all sit down together for dinner 5 nights a week. This is the late 1970s, early 80s. Every Sunday after church, dinner at grandma’s house; there would be 4 or 5 aunts and uncles, and their kids, Tony’s cousins, running around in the yard. Raucous and joyous. And of course every family has its rough edges and relational challenges—it was far from perfect, but as childhoods go, it was more than good enough. Tony felt loved, he felt protected; he knew that he had a place at the table, he knew he had a home he could always return to, he knew who he was and whose he was. He was a Gambino.
Now we can imagine our Tony as a dreamer, a bit head in the clouds. We can imagine him floating through his teenage years, dreaming of performing on Broadway, with a fall back plan of being a fighter pilot or a CIA agent, and he didn’t think about any of it too seriously because if none of it worked out he could always find a place in one of the family businesses: dry cleaning, or trash collection, or property management. One of his uncles could certainly give him a job and show him the ropes, help him find his feet.
And it’s easy to imagine that Tony doesn’t make it as a musical theatre star or CIA agent, and he ends up floating into the property management side of things. And after a few days following his uncle around, his uncle sends him out to collect “rent” from a “tenant,” on his own. And on his way out the door, his uncle hands him a paper bag. And inside the paper bag is a gun. And in that moment, dozens of disconnected memories and hints suddenly snap into place, and Tony realizes the full weight of what he has tried his whole life not to know—he finally has to confront the full weight of what it means to be a Gambino. He’s in the mob. He’s being sent to extort protection money, to collect on a debt that can never be paid off.
Does anybody here have a story of a moment like that? (Hopefully not exactly like that, with the gun.) I mean a moment when something you had known distantly, hazily—suddenly snapped into focus? And with that clarity maybe came a sense of conviction, or decision, or vocation—being called to act? Maybe God spoke to you. Maybe you realized you were queer. Maybe you learned something and you suddenly knew—I want to learn about this for the rest of my life. Or maybe you suddenly realized I’ve got to get out of this marriage. Or, I’ve got a problem with alcohol. Or maybe you realized that somewhere, somehow, you had forgiven someone who had hurt you. The hurt had healed; the anger was gone.
They don’t have to be so dramatic, but those are the kind of threshold moments that anchor our spiritual autobiographies. The kind of threshold moments where we really need a community to support us as we take a courageous step out of the world we’ve known, into the class identity we’ve been formed in, even the family we’ve been born into. And I believe that when our loving, liberating, and life-giving God calls us across a threshold like that, God gives us companions—if we will allow it.
In our gospel lesson today Jesus invites his listeners to imagine a property manager who, we might imagine, was a lot like Tony Gambino. Not at all cut out for the work that was demanded of him, which was to manage a family business that kept debt payments flowing from desperate people up to people with the power to punish them. He’s loyal to the family which is his source of his identity, his security and status, but he also feels sick to his stomach when he thinks about the terrible weight of the gun in that paper bag. And because he won’t threaten the full force of violence on the boss’s debtors, he’s bringing in less money than the boss expects, and he knows that the hammer is gonna come down soon enough.
So this property manager tries to get out. And it’s interesting—he instinctively looks for a community, for a network of support. And in the way he goes about it, he shows how deeply formed he is by this mob mentality. He tries to ingratiate himself with the people who owe the family money, to put them in his debt. I’m looking for an off-ramp, he says; I scratch your back, you scratch mine. But the boss gets wind of it, and he calls the manager in, and he chuckles a little bit and says, “I give you credit for trying.” Game recognizes game. But you all have seen these kinds of movies, you’ve seen what’s happening right now in the U.S. Department of Justice. What do you think happens next to this manager, to our Tony, who won’t do everything the boss demands, who is less than fully loyal? Bye-bye.
This story ought to agitate us: because Jesus insists that serving God and serving money are mutually exclusive. It ought to agitate us because it points to all the things we would rather not know, all the ways that our “flourishing” under racialized capitalism depends on the suffering of those further down the ladder than we are.
This story ought to agitate us because Jesus insists that we have to choose. We have to choose where we are going to seek our security. We can seek our security in the status quo, where dishonest wealth is sucked up the chain of power and privilege, and most people are stuck paying too much for not enough. Or we can seek our security in the Body of Christ, where every member looks out for the best interest of the others, gives of what they have because they know that their own individual freedom and flourishing is always already bound up in the flourishing of others, of the whole community.
Seeking our security in the Body of Christ means being on the side of change—even though the status quo may be working for us ok. Because what we hear in Scripture over and over is that the God whose being transcends and includes all things also always “stoops to behold the heavens and the earth…”
God takes up the weak out of the dust *
and lifts up the poor from the ashes,
To set them up on high, *
with the rulers of the people.
And this isn’t an abstraction for the people that Jesus is talking to here. As I said last week, Jesus has been practicing solidarity with people called “sinners”—people too poor to pay the temple taxes and for sacrifices; people struggling with chronic illnesses—and blamed for it; people who had been told they had the wrong kind of brain or body—and shamed for it. And tax-collectors—that is, people just like our “dishonest manager” whose job it is to “trample on the needy, and [bring] ruin to the poor of the land”—to extort poor people on behalf of empire. And their souls can’t stand it any longer.
These people are experiencing healing, they are experiencing liberation, they are experiencing the blessing of being witness to each other’s healing and liberation. They are experiencing the presence of God who is on the side of change in their lives—and they are experiencing God’s presence in this scandalous community with Jesus, and with one another.
The teachings of Jesus should challenge us; but I don’t think they call for the form of spiritual heroism that we’re most familiar with in a hyper-individualized society. Jesus calls us into new forms of community, where we honor what our souls know, what our souls can’t stand any longer. Where we give one another courage, and support‚—where there are people to hold our hands as we cross the threshold toward the life that really is life.
So what, in your life, needs to change? Are you, like the bad manager, like Tony Gambino, stuck in a bad situation? How can we, the Body of Christ, spring you out? How can we walk with you, toward healing and integrity? How can we show up for you as God has shown up throughout history?
And how can we as the Body of Christ be a part of the change that is so desperately needed in these times in our local and national, and global life? How can we testify to the work of God as healer and redeemer, justice-maker? How can we be a part of the life-giving pattern of salvation history, where God comes alongside the desperate and shares their burdens, pays down their debts? How can we live out the mission of this Episcopal Mission in Sunnyside, to “let the whole world see and know that things which have been cast down are being raised up, and things which have grown old are being made new”?
God, give us grace and courage to follow your way of life, and love, and change.
Amen.
