As you were flipping
through your bulletin this morning looking to see what hymns are going to be
sung, looking to see what scripture was being read, and checking to see if
there was anything on the upcoming events; you may have glanced at the title of
the sermon and simply seen the word obfuscation. Obfuscation, what in the world
does that even mean? Well according to
Merriam-Webster dictionary Obfuscation menas, “ to make (something) more
difficult to understand, to make
obscure, to be evasive, unclear or confusing.
If ever a word matched its definition perfectly, it would have to be
this word. After all what word could sound more confusing or as difficult to
understand as obfuscation. It truly is a strange word, which again means to
intentionally make something more difficult to understand.
So why do I bring this up, and why do I harp on this
confusing word this morning? Well, it is
because after reading and rereading, studying many different commentaries about
this passage, thinking long and hard about this strange parable that we get
from Jesus here in Luke, I found that I continued to end up confused. This
parable is hard to understand; not necessarily hard to understand what is going
on, but rather it is hard to understand why Jesus told it. It is hard to
understand the intended message for the readers. There are bits and pieces that seem to make
sense, and I have debated about preaching about those parts this morning, but I
believe that that would be a disservice to all of you and to God. Maybe, just maybe, we are not always supposed
to have all of the answers. Maybe, just
maybe, God does things to obfuscate the
message. Before we explore those possibilities however, let us first look at
this parable and see why it is that it is so troubling, so hard to understand.
In our parable for today we have a rich man and a
steward, that is, someone who is charged to take care of the property of the
master. In the beginning of the parable we find out that the steward has been
squandering the master’s property. We also find out that rich man has found out
about and has confronted the steward about it. The steward then knows that he
is about to be fired from his position and so he must think of what he must do
to take care of himself in the future. First he thinks about manual labor, but
realizes that he is too weak for manual labor. Next he thinks about begging,
but the steward is far too prideful to beg. And so finally the steward comes up
with a plan. The steward, who is not yet
fired and who still technically works for the master, goes and finds some of
the people of the area who are in debt to the rich man. The first one he meets he asks, “How much do
you owe my master?” The man replies that he owes him 100 jugs of olive oil. The
steward, still working with the authority of the master, but without his
knowing, cancels half of that man’s debt. The steward goes to another man and
asks what he owes and the man replies, “One hundred containers of wheat.” The
steward then cut 20 containers off of that man’s debt. Scripture tells us the reason that the
steward was doing all of this was that so once he was fired he would have good
will with these people so that they would help him.
Finally we get to the end of the parable, where the
master confronts the steward, after listening to so many of Jesus’s other
parables this is where we expect the master to rail on the steward for being
greedy, for being manipulative, and after this parable we have Lazarus and the
rich man who is punished for not helping the poor. We expect this steward to be
reprimanded, but what do we get? “ And his master commended the dishonest manager
because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in
dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.” The steward is commended by the rich man for
being shrewd? I would say he was being manipulative. And if that’s not enough
then Jesus adds another confusing line saying, “And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of
dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal
homes.” Make friends for yourselves by means of
dishonest wealth? What that doesn’t sound like what we have heard from Jesus
prior to this. And to make matters more confusing is that Jesus continues, and
as he continues he says things that are more in line with what we are used to.
He says, “Whoever is faithful in a very little is
faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest
also in much. If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who
will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful with
what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? No slave can serve
two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be
devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth. “ Here
we have sayings that seem to fit more with what we are used to hearing from
Jesus. That if you can’t be faithful with a little, how can you be faithful
with a lot. If you misuse your treasures on Earth how can you be expected to be
faithful with your treasures in heaven. That we cannot serve both God and
wealth. These are the type of statements that we are used to hearing from
Jesus, and yet how does it all fit with what we read in the parable?
Some try to take a more positive
view of the steward in the parable. Some argue that after realizing that he is
going to be fired that the steward is not dishonest, just clever. They claim
that the steward probably has a commission that he collects when works for the
rich man, and that when he is cutting the debt that people owe, he is really only cutting out his own commission,
since he won’t be getting it anyways once he is fired, and so that he may build
up goodwill with the people. The idea is the that the steward didn’t do
anything wrong, but simply found a clever way to provide for himself, and that
is why he is commended by the rich man.
I must admit, I so badly wanted to believe in this scenario because it
would put everything into a nice and pretty box, but there are things in this
scenario that just don’t add up. For
starters the amount of debt that he cut between the two men are drastically
different, and it is very unlikely that his commission would have changed that
much between people. Secondly, this
scenario suggests that the steward was not dishonest, but just shrewd, and yet
scripture itself calls him “the dishonest servant.” As much as I want to believe
this scenario, it probably isn’t correct. What most likely happened, is exactly
what it sounds like. That the steward, knowing that he was going to get fired,
looks out for numero uno, backstabs the master by forgiving debt that is owed
to him, and then for some reason instead of reprimanding the steward, the rich
man commends him for being so shrewd.
This parable is so confusing, it is obfuscates the message.
And that gets me back to this word,
this idea, obfuscation; and I must admit that I did not just think of this word
on my own, it was not already part of my vocabulary, but rather I saw as I was
watching a short four minute film online by Barbara Brown Taylor, who is a
world renowned preacher, author, and scholar. The name of the film is “A Stance
of Unknowing”[1] and it is a poignant
dialogue about not knowing. Taylor points out that there are multiple places in
the Bible in which not only is the meaning not clear, but that it seems as
though God obfuscates, that God intentionally makes something muddier. She points
out that in the Exodus story that it was God who hardened Pharaoh’s heart
against the Israelites. She also recalls in the gospel when Jesus is asked
about why he speaks in parables and he replies,
“He said, "The knowledge of the secrets of
the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to others I speak in parables, so
that, "'though seeing, they may not see; though hearing, they may not
understand.” If we live under the
presumption that we are supposed to understand everything about God, or that
God is supposed to try to make everything understood for us, the we will be
very disappointed when we see instances like these when God seems to obfuscate
the meaning. Likewise with our parable for this morning, we can try our hardest
to make sense of the difficult nature of the parable, and there may be some who
can, but we also have to come to the realization that we will not always
understand everything about God, nor does it seem that we are always supposed
to.
For many of us this is challenging,
for many of us everything needs to make sense for us to believe. That is why so
many of us say that God has a plan for everything, but how do we say that when
there are senseless murders in the DC naval yard this week. How can we say that God’s plan is for adults
and children alike to die from chemical weapons being released on towns. How can we say we understand God’s
sovereignty and say that the reason a young person died in a tragic way is
because God needed another angel. These
are not truths about God but rather claims that we feel as though we need to
make so that things make sense for us.
Taylor in that short film makes the
claim that one of the leading causes for atheism is the fact that Christians so
often try to make these extravagant claims about the sovereignty of God. That we make claims that since God are good
God has to do this. Or that since God is all powerful that the hurricanes, and
floods, and wildfires where his choosing, and that they must have been done for
some reason. We hear claims from Pat
Robertson that hurricane Katrina was God’s response to homosexuality, that the
horrible earthquake several years ago in Haiti was God retaliating against
Haiti for neglecting God, and that the more recent hurricane Sandy was God
trying to stop a Mormon from becoming president, and we can see why many people
can become fed up and disillusioned with all of our claims of God’s
sovereignty. As Taylor points out it quickly becomes of list of things that God
has to do in order to fit our understanding of God’s sovereignty, when the
truth of the matter is that there is nothing that God has to do. God is God,
there is nothing that he has to do. When
we get upset about something that God didn’t do, we are really just getting
upset at the fact that God is not acting in the way in which we expect God to
act, that God is not acting in the way in which we want God to act. When God
acts in ways that don’t make sense to us, when we read things such as this
parable that don’t entirely make sense we tend to get disillusioned.
And maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe when we come to realize that God
doesn’t always work the way in which we picture things, we can begin to realize
that God does not work like us. Most of
all we may begin to realize that we are not God. If everything made sense to us why would we
need a God to save us, since we could simply save ourselves. And yet things
don’t always make sense, we cannot save ourselves. We need God, and maybe being
disillusioned is a way of placing even more trust in God. Trust that even if we haven’t got it all figured out, we
still rely on God. That even when God seems to be absent or silent, we still
rely on God because maybe that silence can speak. That when a parable that
Jesus spoke seems to confound us, confuse, go against what we expect Jesus to
say, that it may be a time realize that we do not have it all figured out. That
trying passages like this should cause us to continually reexamine our beliefs,
challenge our faith, reconsider previously held notions, and yet do it all with
an understanding that we simply don’t understand. That God is greater than
anything we ourselves can imagine, and maybe that’s why we need God so badly.
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