“Stewards and Rebels” // At Your Service: Sharing Our Resources // Part 3 of 3 Wildwood Mennonite Church // 2020-02-02 // Joe Heikman

The Parable of Weights and Balances: Tensions were high on Bay Street that afternoon. The investment firm of Benjamin, Loonie and Banks was on edge, because the boss had called a rare all-staff meeting. The boardroom was crowded with Armani blazers and bespoke Italian wool suits. “I’m going away for a while,” he said. That was the CEO of Benjamin, Loonie and Banks, Mr. Banks himself. He wasn’t much for pleasantries, styling himself as no-nonsense, bottom-line leader. His reputation was cold and harsh, profit-driven. “I’m going away for a while,” he said. “I expect the firm to carry on as usual in my absence. You all know your assignments. My personal portfolio has been divided up into three accounts. The largest will be managed by Marian Jaymes.”

Of course. Marian was the firm’s senior investing partner. She was the mirror image of Mr Banks--efficient, responsible, productive. She had been managing the firm’s mortgage and real estate portfolio for over two decades.

“The secondary account will go to Byron Chau.” Also not a surprise. Byron was the firm’s rising star, ever since he hit that hot streak in the commodities market last year. He was smart and polished, and he knew how the game was played. This opportunity would make or break his career.

“The third account will be given to…” Mr Banks paused to check his notes. “...Mallory Williams.” There was uncomfortable silence in the room, and someone actually let out an audible gasp. Mallory Williams? She was… boring at best. A junior marketing manager without major career aspirations, as far as anyone could tell. Not that anyone was paying attention.

“That ad campaign you ran last year,” said Mr. Banks, “the one with the trees and waterfalls and solar panels. That’s the kind of ‘sustainable community financing’ stuff people are talking about these days. Not that we actually care, but it’s helpful if it looks like we do. I’m giving you a couple million to play around with. I’m looking forward to seeing what you can do.”

Mr Banks left the next day. Nobody knew how long he would be gone. Marian Jaymes got right to work. Power lunches, golf with the old boys club, late night martinis with the reporters on the parliament beat. Then she heard from the friend of a friend in the government’s urban development department. Rumour had it that the feds were working on a major expansion of their low-income housing program. A few phone calls later, the firm of Benjamin, Loonie and Banks was the proud owner of a rather large share of low-income housing units. The value of which just happened to double the following week when the new government housing program was announced. Another win for Marian Jaymes. Byron Chau also got right to work. He knew the commodities market was tapped out, so if he wanted to make a big splash he’d have to go with something riskier. Junk bonds were all the rage these days. Byron Chau wasn’t that stupid, but he knew some other folks that might be. The details are hazy, but the gist is that Byron talked up a couple of promising high-yield bonds with the managers of a major pension fund, then undercut their deal and walked away with the windfall when the bonds collapsed. The pension fund tanked, but they’d never know why, and Byron’s returns were amazing! Mallory Williams was not nearly so sure of herself. She knew how high the expectations were, and what it would take to meet them. She knew that Marian technically didn’t break any rules with her government deal, but Mallory didn’t love profiting at the taxpayers’ expense. And she knew that deals like Byron’s happened all the time, but she couldn’t ignore the pensioners who lost all their savings. Besides, Mr Banks had chosen her because of her community marketing campaign. Maybe this was an opportunity to demonstrate the values that she actually believed in? Mallory had a friend from university who was on the board of a local housing cooperative called “Common Ground.” She called her up and together they made plans

for a major investment in mixed income housing units, and agreed to a loan with a fair interest rate. Several months went by, and then Marian, Byron and Mallory got an email from Mr Banks. He was returning at the end of the week, eager to hear their presentations on his investments. Marian’s presentation highlighted the numbers of her real estate deal and the ensuing government contract. Her investment had already doubled! Mr. Banks gave her a knowing smile. “It certainly pays to be in the right place at the right time! Well done, the board of directors will be very pleased. Keep managing this portfolio, and I’m also going to put you in charge of all of our government contracts.” Next came Byron’s presentation, with a lot of details on the high-yield bonds market and the mechanics of how he had maneuvered to turn a profit against the grain. Again, the value of his account had doubled! No mention of the bankrupted pension fund, of course, and Mr Banks didn’t ask questions. “Well done, sir. Our shareholders will be very impressed with their dividends this quarter! I’m going to make you our senior partner in charge of the whole bond market division.” And then it was Mallory’s turn. She introduced her friend at the Common Ground co-op and explained her vision for mixed-income housing. She showed pictures of the project and the plans for future developments. She went through the financials, which were tight. “I know there isn’t much profit in this project right now, but this is a bottom line we can be proud of,” Mallory said. Mr. Banks was not impressed. “This is not a charity, this is an investment firm! I gave you good money and I expected a return on that investment! The bottom line IS the bottom line! We have a fiduciary responsibility to make money! I would have gotten a better interest rate from a savings account at any bank on the street!” His rage building, Mr Banks turned to Marian. “Take over this account immediately and get us out of this worthless co-op deal. I’m sure they have nothing worth investing in, but see if there are any assets we can grab on the way out. That’s the way the world works: we use what we have to get more.” “Mallory, you’re fired. Obviously. You disgust me.” “Byron, have security escort this worthless bleeding heart out of our building. Maybe she can find a place to live in the dark with those outcasts at the housing coop.”

………………………………………………………………...

What would you say is the moral of that story? Clearly, the winners are Marian Jaymes and Byron Chau--they’re the ones that claimed the profits and got the promotions. But I hope that you’ll agree that the hero of the story is Mallory Williams, who took on Goliath and lost, but had the courage to stand by her convictions and ethical practices. I don’t know if it’s obvious or not, but that was Jesus’ “Parable of the Talents.” I modernized the setting, of course, and added some details to flesh it out, but the story is mostly the same. A master plans a trip, and puts his treasure in the hands of his servants. One servant gets five talents--a talent is roughly a million dollars. A second gets two talents, and a third gets one talent. The master leaves, and the first two servants get to work and double their money. But the third servant digs a hole in the ground and buries his money.

When the master returns, he is obviously pleased with the servants who had doubled his investments, and he gives them even more responsibility. But the master is outraged with the third servant for not doing anything at all with his money. He takes away that servant’s talent and gives it to the one with ten talents. And he has the third

servant thrown out of his house, “into outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” You know that story, hey? And the moral is well known: work hard to use the gifts you’ve been given. Don’t be lazy and feeble like the third servant, for God sakes. Work hard, or go to hell! That story is quite effective at getting kids to do their chores, eh?

But I hope you’ve noticed that that moral doesn’t quite line up with the first version of the story that I told. In case you missed it, in the first version, the “good steward” is actually the third servant, and the moral of the story isn’t about hard work but about ethics.

Two stories, very much the same and yet with completely different lessons. Ooh, it’s a Sunday Morning Mystery! I’ll explain, but first let me back up a bit. The question we’re talking about today is “how do we serve God with our money?” Or in the words of the text we read from 1 Peter, “What does it mean to be a good steward?”

“Manifold” here just means many and diverse - the broad and rich grace of God.

Usually, stewardship means responsibility - take care of what you have. Be cautious and conscientious about spending money. Work hard, play fair, don’t take stupid risks, don’t be flashy, take care of your neighbours. Good, old-fashioned Saskatchewan values. In the days when the Greek New Testament was written, a steward was a literal position of authority over a household. A house manager, someone who makes decisions and oversees the day-to-day domestic operations in the name of the owner. Oikonomoi. Oiko - house. Nemo - to allocate, assign, distribute. [you word nerds are correct, this is the root word of “economics” - the distribution of (household) goods and services.] The Inclusive Bible translates this as “distributor.” I’d say manager or minister would also be good translations. A modern parallel to a steward would be an office administrator, like what Sarah does for our church. She keeps track of the calendar and who’s in charge of what, she maintains connections with our partner organizations, she makes sure the bills are paid and the books are kept in order. Sarah knows all of the things. It’s not a formal position of power. Sarah doesn’t make the high level decisions on her own, but in a lot of ways she’s in charge as she represents the church and carries out the day-to-day functions and communications. And she does all of this very well, obviously! That’s the kind of work a steward did in Greco-Roman culture. So when Peter calls his readers to be “good stewards of God’s manifold grace,” he has that kind of role in mind. You are administrators of God’s organization: the broad and wide gifts of God, these things are yours to manage on God’s behalf. The whole spectrum of God’s creation is your responsibility: what will you do with it? And Peter’s answer: “Serve one another with whatever gift each of you has received.” This is a holistic vision, broad and comprehensive. Stewardship is not only about money, but about financial gifts as part of the whole of life, the whole house. And this is not just a call to “good stewardship” for individuals, this is about each person taking part in the whole community and taking responsibility for the greater good. So there’s this broad image behind biblical stewardship.

But somehow in some Western Christian thinking there’s a tendency to reduce the idea of being good stewards to what I described earlier, that set of values of individual hard work and personal fiscal responsibility. And that takes us back to the Parable of the Talents. What is a talent? As I said, a talent was an amount of money worth roughly a million dollars in today’s money, it was 15-20 years worth of wages for a common laborer back then. But that word has been brought from Greek into modern English, referring to the natural skills and innate abilities of an individual: “Oh, she’s so talented.” My talents are unearned, they were inherited genetically or perhaps somehow just appear. Talents are gifts, and it’s up to the individual to apply them. That’s how we think about talents, and so right from the title of the parable, we’re moved into this mode of individuals and the choice to work hard and do my best with what I’ve been given. But when Jesus told the story, an actual talent was a physical weight used in business transactions. Coins weren’t standardized and often varied greatly from place to place, so a scale was used to determine the amount and value of gold or silver coins. So you’d use a talent weight to measure out an exact amount of gold, to ensure a fair deal. So when Jesus talks about talents, the reference is about justice, fair trade, the ethics that governed communities. Is this talent standard and fair? Or do some folks have their thumbs on the scales? With that theme in mind, the parable takes on a rather different perspective. (I’ll give credit here to theologian Ched Myers, as he was the first teacher I heard explain this reading of this parable.) Justice mattered a great deal to the common folks of Israel in those days, because their lives were dominated by the elite ruling class.

Jesus is speaking to his disciples here. These are fishermen, workers, the commoners. They weren’t stewards, they didn’t know anything about investing millions of dollars, any more than I would. Jesus’ followers would not have seen themselves in this story,

they would have seen the upper class, the Jewish nobility and their Roman overlords, the 1%. This was a story about the man, and Jesus’ followers saw themselves as the resistance. That’s even more clear when it comes to the return on the investments the first two servants make. What’s more unimaginable than 5 million dollars? 10 million dollars. The story doesn’t say for how long the master was gone, but even if it was a couple of years, it takes an incredibly high rate of return to double an investment. Those are high interest credit card levels, payday advance loan levels, loan shark and gambling levels. This isn’t a story about two shrewd, hard-working administrators, this is fraud. Or at least exploitation. To be sure, even charging interest at all was outlawed by the Hebrew Bible. To Jesus’ disciples these stewards would not have been role models. Actually, they sound more like Zaccheus, the hated tax collector who built his wealth by exploiting his neighbours. Whose story, by the way, just happens to come, in Luke’s gospel, right before Jesus told this parable. Further, Jesus never says that the master character is meant to represent God. In fact, he goes out of his way to describe the master’s contemptible reputation-- reaping where he did not sow and gathering where he did not scatter seed. That’s unfair even for the stern father-figure God many of us were raised with. it’s awfully problematic to compare the master’s attitude and behavior to the God of Justice. It certainly doesn’t jive with how Jesus treated people. And then there’s that line at the end of the story:

Is that what Jesus was all about, feeding the abundance of the wealthy at the expense of those who had nothing? I don’t think this parable is meant to endorse that motto, but rather to expose it.

In Luke’s gospel, this parable comes right before the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem and the cleansing of the Temple. In Matthew, it’s told several days after the Triumphal Entry, in the middle of Holy Week. In both timelines, the tension is rising and the cross is looming--Jesus is going head-to-head with the religious and political leaders, and the disciples are looking for reassurance that he knows what he’s doing. They want to know when they’re going to win, when they’ll be rewarded for their faithfulness. But instead, Jesus tells them this story where the cheaters win, where the exploiters are rewarded for their exploitation. If you want the authorities to praise you, “well done, good servants,” well, do what they tell you to do and play the game by their rules. But if you stand up to them, if you expose their exploitation and refuse to play their game, like that third servant, they’re going to try to destroy you. Because that’s the way the world works, by domination: For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. Well, it was clear to the disciples where they stood in that game. It was rigged against them, and they were the have-nots. Some of them were hoping that Jesus was going to flip the game on its head, to give the power to the people, to turn the tables so that the masters were cast out and punished. Wouldn’t it be better if they became the stewards at the top? But no, Jesus is on his way to the cross. He is going to take on the fate of the third servant for himself. He is calling out the masters for their exploitation. And he fully expects the consequences, that he will be rejected and outcast and killed. And so in Luke’s narrative, Jesus tells this story and then gets on his colt for the ‘Triumphal?’ entry. In Matthew’s version, Jesus and the disciples are already in the middle of the storm of Holy Week.

And so when Jesus finishes the story, you can almost hear them asking: if you’re not going to overthrow the oppressors, if you’re going to just take the punishment, well then the game is going to stay rigged against us. If that’s not the way, then what is? What do you expect us to do?

And so Jesus told them another parable: At the end of the day, in the true justice of my realm, there are two kinds of people. It’s as clear as the difference between sheep and goats. On the one hand you have the sheep. The sheep see me everywhere, and they take care of me--when they see that I am hungry, they feed me. When I am thirsty, they give me something to drink. When I am a stranger, they welcome me. When I am naked, they give me clothing. When I am sick, they take care of me and when I am in prison, they visit me. They may not know it at the time, but just as you treat these most vulnerable people in my family, that’s just like doing it to me. That’s the blessing, that’s the realm of God, to find me and serve me in all people, all the time. Likewise, on the other hand are the goats. They see me hungry and thirsty but don’t give me food or drink. They don’t welcome me in the stranger, they don’t give me clothing when I am naked. They don’t take care of me in the sick, they don’t offer me comfort in the prisoner. When they ignore the most vulnerable, they ignore me. And they will have their reward as well. You can’t have it both ways, Jesus said. You have to choose between trying to please the master and his abundance, or serving the One who lives among the outcasts, the one who chooses solidarity with the “least of these.”

Not an easy choice. And not all of those who listened to Jesus that day found the courage to follow through.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------- So then, with the disciples, I wonder--what do we do? What does it mean to live as “good stewards” with the gifts that God has given to us? How do we serve God with our resources? I’m tempted to say that it’s complicated, that there’s a lot of grey areas when it comes to finances and economics. But Jesus gives a fairly straightforward, specific list: Are we feeding the hungry? Providing clean water for the thirsty? Treating the stranger with respect and hospitality? Clothing the naked? Caring for the sick? Remembering those in prison? What would happen if you made that your list of budgeting priorities and financial goals, large and small? What if you put those items at the top of your wishlist wherever you do you online shopping? What if you added that to your next conversation with a young person dreaming about what they want to be when they grow up? What if you made that the list of skills on your next resume or read that story out at the opening of your next corporate strategy session? What if you took that into the voting booth with you, or made that it the list of topics to bring up the next time a political candidate knocks at your door?

I don’t have the answers, I just tell the stories.

May we have ears to hear, may we have hearts to respond, and may we have strength to follow through, in the way of Jesus. Amen.

As I said back at the start of this series, I know you to be people of service, hospitality, and generosity, so I expect that these values very much inform your choices in these Well, “yes” to the lessons about hard work and responsibility, for sure. And also, we need to take care that those things alone do not define us. Because, as the Parable reveals, it’s easy to get caught up in the game of financial achievements, because that kind of success comes with all kinds of rewards and status. The parable invites us to take a long look at what we’re chasing, and the costs of our prosperity. Further, the parable points out that stewardship is not just about individual faithfulness but about systems of justice. Jesus was highly engaged in the pursuit of political and economic justice in his day. His faith compelled him to study, critique, protest and organize politically. As followers of Jesus, our faith should inspire us to engage with this as well, to consider our place in these systems and to work to make them better. You may or may not arrive at different political positions than mine, and that’s okay. As long as your faith is in constant conversation with your economics and politics, and as long as whatever positions you espouse are focused on the well-being of the whole community, especially those most vulnerable among us. That’s the standard of good stewardship, ultimately. Are we feeding the hungry? Providing clean water for the thirsty? Treating the stranger with respect and hospitality? Clothing the naked? Caring for the sick? Remembering those in prison? How would our lives be different if we brought thos That is service. That is where we meet God.