William Yagel
Grace Radford
September 18, 2022
Proper 20, Year C
Eternal One,
Silence
from whom my words come;
Questioner
from whom my questions arise;
Lover
of whom all my loves are hints;
Disturber
in whom alone I find my rest;
Mystery
in whose depths I find healing
and myself;
enfold me now in your presence;
restore to me you peace;
renew me through your power;
and ground me in your Grace.
Amen
-Ted Loder, Guerillas of Grace
As most of you know, I spent the first half of my adult career working in construction. I began my work as a carpenter for several years, then moved to supervision and did a lot of work in Hampton Roads working on a variety of jobs at the military installations in the area, which is where Eve and I met. We moved to Charlottesville, and I managed the construction of Apartment complexes around central Virginia. Then, I was the Operations Manager for a Structural concrete firm out of Charlottesville. No, I’m not looking for another job…:)
I tell you that to say I that I did that work for a long time, and that I always enjoyed the work, but even more, I think I mostly enjoyed the people. My days were always filled with the strongest cast of characters you could ever want to meet. I would consistently come across personalities that were larger than life. I would come across men, and less often women (there just weren’t that many in the field), who had their own very particular rules for how they interacted with the world. Jay would always provide moral and relationship advice, whether solicited or not, and it was not possible to disagree with him unless you were yelling! Smitty was one of the funnier guys I ever met, and he would show up each day on site with a new joke. Charlie refused to eat in the presence of someone who didn’t have lunch-I bet I saw him tear his sandwich in half about fifty times. Thomas would not start his day until he finished his biscuit, and the hour that work began had absolutely no bearing on this ritual.
Stephen was one of those characters. I should begin by telling you that Stephen had not had the easiest life, and though he was in his twenties when I worked with him, the mileage on that body was much higher. The Latina crew called him “Mamorta”, which is Spanish for “groundhog”, a nickname he garnered because he loved to dig. The best gift you could give Stephen was a day with a shovel, really. I think the heavy physical activity and repetitive work allowed him to exist in a bit of a contemplative trance, probably calmed his ADHD and allowed him to focus and would let him sleep well at night? As you might suspect, this is something of a valuable trait when a crew is digging footings, so he found place and purpose quickly in the concrete world.
Stephen would, however, find himself in trouble periodically and would miss and day or two here or there, but given his skill set he would usually be welcomed back. But on one occasion I didn’t see Stephen for about a week, and nobody seemed to “know where he was”. This actually means that everyone knew they just weren’t going to say, but in that I knew he hadn’t been hurt, so he wouldn’t be in the hospital. I went by his home to check on him with no luck. I called the jails to make sure he hadn’t been arrested, at least not locally, so I just let it go. I was more than a little surprised when he walked in after two weeks of being off the radar, looking for his job back.
This, I thought, would need to be a pretty good excuse. Well, you could have bought me for a nickel when he looked at me and said: “Mr. William, I have used just about every drug that you could name, and I am no stranger to using, I’ve been around it all my life. But the crystal meth that I started using about two weeks ago was nearly impossible to put down. I have had a hard time with that stuff. It almost got me.” It seems a friend of his had been murdered and instead of acknowledging the anger, sadness, and loss, he medicated himself, heavily.
Have you ever been in a moment where you thought, you know, you could have just lied to me. I sat and listened and thought of the number of excuses for missed work I had heard in my career. I was so surprised by the truth in the words coming out of Stephen’s mouth that I almost wept right there in front of him. I have many reflections on that conversation, and I have considered A LOT of reasons why Stephen told the full truth, when discretion would have been much safer, and “I was sick” would have also been true? I think in the end, it was what he had to offer. He may have been a lot of things, but not a liar.
Now that moment was almost as confusing as our Gospel today! This passage, taken as a whole, is terribly confusing and seems absolutely contrary to the Good News of Love that we know to be the Gospel message. I want to assure you that if you heard the parable of the dishonest manager with confusion and surprise, you are in good company. The standard intro in most every commentary I read was some version of “this is a tough one, and it surely doesn’t mean what it sounds like it means.” Not a single theologian I found offered that we should behave like this manager, but all of them sat with this confounding information and listened for the good news.
Joseph Fitzmeyer followed historical critical research and offered that the parable from today really ends somewhere between verses 8 and 9, when the master praises the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly. The verses that follow in this passage are a series of sayings of Jesus that are kind of collected here. Meaning that although we read them as a unit, the verses in the second half weren’t really intended to speak directly to the parable in the first half. That does help a little as it separates these discordant messages from one another. There is plenty of discussion about which word it the parable actually stops on, but in broad strokes I think you can kind of see the change in tone.
The other suggestion that theologians offer is that we must remember the historical reality of the Jewish culture. Leviticus 25:35-36 forbids the taking of interest from the poor or from fellow Israelites. It is possible that the manager had been charging the debtors interest on top of their bills, lining his own pockets in these transactions. It would make sense, then, that the manager is removing the interest charge from the debtor’s bills in keeping with Jewish law. This would be shrewd because the rich man wouldn’t argue since it was in keeping with the law. If this is the case, we see that the manager is securing a place for himself by finally dealing honestly and in accordance with the law with the debtors.
He is worried about his future, he knows he can’t dig and he knows he can’t beg, so in this reading of the passage, he resorts to the only thing he has left - honesty. And in the end, that served him better that the underhanded dealings that got him in trouble in the first place.
We are reminded this morning that this is exactly how God knows each of us. God doesn’t know us as the polished and curated version of ourselves that we offer the world on facebook. God knows us as the complicated and nuanced beings that we truly are. Because it is those beings that God has created, God has redeemed, and God has sustained.
Amen