blip : Basic Living Instruction Protocol :

This past week we celebrated the 5th anniversary of our church. Many folks who were here at the beginning, and now have moved elsewhere, came back for our reunion. That’s an important bit of information that helps make sense of the end of the sermon.

Oh. And I changed the name of the guy at the beginning of the sermon.
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Title: Dirty Money
Date: September 23, 2007
Text: Luke 16:1-13

We knew Michael wasn’t exactly like the rest of us at our church in Tucson. He had lots of money, and we didn’t. But he wasn’t obvious or audacious about it. He dressed like the rest of us, and had a house in the same part of town as most people at church. But we all knew.

I started to sense for what kind of money he had when my dad and I went with a bunch of other men to the Promise Keepers convention in San Diego. Mike rented the van we drove from Tucson to San Diego. He also paid for all the gas. And he paid everyone’s hotel, and our registration, and for our dinners, and he even rented a boat one afternoon and we cruised around the harbor.

One Saturday afternoon my dad got back from lunch with Mike and told me that Mike was in trouble. Something bad was going to happen soon. My dad didn’t exactly know what it was, but Mike told him that he was involved in some activities that he now regrets and can’t really get out of and things might get really bad fast.

Sure enough, the following week, Mike showed up on the front page of the Tucson Citizen. Apparently he was part of an extensive drug ring. He’s the guy who made sure drugs got through Nogales, on the Mexico-Arizona border, and got to the regional suppliers. And now he would spend much of the rest of his life in prison.

Our small church was part of how he was working through his guilt and regret about this way of life he chose. Now, as a middle-aged man, he realized he was in so deep that he couldn’t really get out without getting killed, or putting his family at risk. But our small church benefited from his dirty money.

(pause)

Luke tells us a story about dirty money. The manager has a terrible job. He’s the representative of the richest guy in town to the money-hungry merchants and traders. The manager must combine the slippery skills of a politician, with the money-smarts of an investor who trades in commodity futures. If he pours too much of his master’s money in olive oil, and it’s a bad year, then he’ll be out of a job. And back then there really isn’t anything like picking yourself up by the bootstraps—you mess up, and that’s it, you’re done, you spend the rest of your life among the expendable class, the beggars and day laborers. There isn’t really another firm or investment group to work for in town.

But apparently, our friend the manager offends some of the town traders enough for them to send some nasty rumors to the big guy, the benefactor, his boss. They want the manager canned; or maybe it’s just the merchants showing their strong arm to the manager—letting him know who’s really in charge.

I think we misunderstand this story if we conceive of the manager as dishonest, a thief—stealing from his boss. That’s not what this story is about. This story is about a guy stuck right smack in the middle of an unjust, dog eat dog, system. And the translators lead us astray when they call the manager “dishonest” (v8). That’s not it at all. The word is adikia—and it means unjust, or unrighteousness. And he is not an unjust or unrighteous manager—he is the manager of unrighteousness.

But what does that mean—to be a manager of unrighteousness? It means that he’s caught in the middle of an unjust economic world, a world that operates in unrighteousness, a system that charges interest and creates debtors in violation of Torah, of God’s law. And what does the manager do? How does he manage all this unrighteousness?

This is our question as well. We go about our business in sinful economic system. That’s right. I said sinful. It’s too easy, and maybe a bit delusional, for us to preach against war and stand up against violence, and somehow think that because we do these things that we are innocent of a world at war—that we can wash our hands of the spilled blood in Iraq and elsewhere.

But here’s the thing about it. Our currency means nothing without our army. Our economic system needs wars, it needs violence, it needs oil, it needs to maintain our borders, it needs to maintain our expanding global markets—without this land, and without the armed forces that protect it, our cash means next to nothing.

Our money, the way it circulates, the way it means anything in the global market, in foreign trade, would come to nothing if we didn’t have sophisticated weapons and well-trained soldiers. Our dollars wouldn’t mean a thing if those 17th and 18th century entrepreneurs didn’t set up shop here in the new world, and later annex some large chunks of land through genocide, and maintain it with bloodshed.

The economy is sinful; it feeds off of violence, a history of bloodshed. And the harsh truth is that we participate in those violences; we benefit from those violences, when we earn money and spend it and invest it and use it.

Our hands our dirty, they are filthy, dirty from our money. We should be honest about it. We don’t live at peace with the world; we can’t; because people shed blood to protect our livelihood, our money. As one author put it, “All money gets dirty at some stage in its history.”

(pause)

I told you about Mike, about how he got himself stuck in the middle of a drug ring and went to prison because he couldn’t escape from it. Prison was the only way he could escape without losing his life. And his money was dirty—it’s pretty easy for us to see that. It’s drug money. I went to Promise Keepers on drug money.

Of course our money isn’t as obviously and directly dirty as my friend Mike’s. We don’t sell drugs or traffic drugs—or if you do, I haven’t heard about it… yet. But just because we didn’t choose this economic system in which we participate, just because we didn’t make Mike’s bad decisions, doesn’t mean we are innocent of its sinfulness. We are guilty by birth, by happenstance, by chance—and that’s original sin, something we’re thrown into through no fault of our own, simply by birth, the luck of the draw, the toss of the dice.

(pause)

So now what do we do? There’s no alternative, there’s no way to escape the system, and so we have to go straight through the thick of it, straight as an arrow. Wise as serpents, innocent as doves. And we learn how to handle our dirty money from our friend the shrewd manager. He is the manager of unrighteousness, someone in our position, that the Lord recommends to us.

And what does he do? What does he do as the manager of injustice, of unrighteousness? He forgives debts, or at least reduces them substantially. And in forgiving debts, he helps us imagine the possibility of that prayer we prayed with Jen earlier in our service—the Lord’s Prayer, to forgive debts, our call to forgive debts.

The wise manager helps us begin to imagine what it means for Leviticus 25 to come true, the year of jubilee, the Sabbath year, the year of our Lord—where debts are forgiven, slaves are set free, property is scattered—not squandered—among the people. The faithful manager helps us imagine what it means for the Pentecostal church of Acts to treat possessions like they belonged to everyone else: “All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as she had need” (2:44-45). And this is the vision that captured the imagination of the early Anabaptists, our ancestors of the faith: “Omnia sunt communia,” was they rallying cry, “All things in common.”

(pause)

Now if you’re like me, then all this sounds a bit too crazy for our modern, responsible sensibilities about our money. But even if we can’t do all that—all that sharing—it’s important to notice the ways we do share, and how that sharing is exactly what it means to live faithfully with our dirty money, and hope that God redeems it, sanctifies it, makes it holy, through our sharing. As Jesus says in verse 9 of our passage from Luke, “I tell you, make friends for yourself by means of unrighteous mammon”—unjust wealth, your dirty money (v9).

And we become good managers of unrighteous mammon, our money, when we use it to sustain our friendships. That’s why it makes sense for all you wonderful people who came from Pennsylvania, Virginia, Chicago, Maryland, and Ohio to make the sacrifice to travel, to spend that money, to join us in very ordinary things—these shared meals, fellowship, and worship. It’s about using our dirty money to sustain friendships, to be present with one another—because this reunion, what we are doing here, is all about the friendships that make up the body of Christ. This is about the friendships that redeem our lives, that set us free from the bondage of money, of mammon.

And that’s why a lot of us get together every other week and share a meal. Sure, we do it because it’s fun. But it’s also a way we share things in common, even if for only an evening. The time and effort and money we use to make food for one another is nothing other than the redemption of our dirty money, the sanctification of our unrighteous wealth. It’s how we make and sustain friendships; it’s how we weave our lives together; it creates the space to share our ordinary and messy lives; it’s how we come to depend on one another.

And in that dependence, as our lives get wrapped up with each other, we come to see our lives bound together in the Holy Spirit, woven together in the body of Christ. We are welcomed into the eternal home Jesus talks about in our passage, as we share what we have and provide time and space for the messiness of our lives to flow into the one seated next to you, and behind you, and in front of you, and the ones you will sit with when you eat in a few minutes.

This is where we come to find those friendships that beckon us into eternity, friendships that lead us along the narrow path, friendships that last forever. Sitting at these tables, and eating and talking about silly things, is the appetizer for the eternal banquet, the wedding feast, where we will abide forever in the loving embrace of our God and savior.

(pause)

With all this talk of feasts and food, you all are probably wondering when I’m going to stop all this talking so we can get to the real business of the kingdom—sharing and eating. But before I stop, I must leave us with the line that sums up what I’m trying to say. It’s this line that many of the regulars at Chapel Hill Mennonite Fellowship will find far too repetitive. But I thought I could say it again since I haven’t said it in a while, and since there are people here who haven’t heard it before. And because I really like it, and find every excuse to repeat it.

It comes from a dead Dominican priest, Herbert McCabe. And he says, “Christ is present to us insofar as we are present to each other.” Let me say it again, “Christ is present to us in so far as we are present to each other.” That’s the gospel, the good news. Christ is present. And it also names our calling—to be truly present, available, to each other, because that’s where we get caught up in the flow of God’s love poured out for the world.

And our money, even if it’s part of this passing system of injustice, makes sense as long as we remember that it’s supposed to be used for sustaining our friendships, and inviting others to join us in the friendships that make up the kingdom of God. Use it to make friends for the kingdom.

When you eat together, and when you return home, remember that the way you made yourself available for friendship this afternoon, is the very presence of Christ. And what Christ weaves together, what God joins together, nothing can separate, because it is the loving and permeating embrace of God that holds us through our friendships, for eternity.