Last Monday, as I usually do, I
dropped my daughter off at school and then went surfing. I have a standing arrangement with Susan
Stewart that I can park on the street in front of her house, from which place I
can put on my wetsuit and carry my surfboard down the hill to Dillon
Beach. It’s a little extra work,
especially on the way back up after a couple hours of hard paddling, but it’s
well worth it, because it saves me the nine dollar parking fee every time I
go. Or almost every time. Last week I arrived at the road junction at
the entrance to the village at Dillon Beach and met with a flag stop and a road
crew with some heavy equipment getting ready to work.
They waved me by, and I turned onto
Susan’s street only to find it lined with orange-and-white-striped sawhorses
and placards that said “No Parking: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. September 16.” My heart started sinking as I saw those
sawhorses marching away up the hill and along all the side streets and in front
of Susan’s house. I kept going around
the block and the story was the same. I
turned back out onto the main road and tried the last street before the
beach—more sawhorses. I finally resigned
myself to paying for parking, and then I remembered that my wallet was empty of
cash. Now the surf wasn’t exactly epic
that day, but that doesn’t really matter much to me. I go out there mainly just to exercise my
body and let the ocean wash the stress and strain of my life on land off of
me—if I happen to catch a few waves that’s the frosting on the cake. So the prospect of having to turn around and head
back to Petaluma completely dry didn’t exactly fill me with joy.
So I decided to drive down to the parking
lot and see what would happen. I pulled
up to the little kiosk and rolled down my window. The attendant was a young woman, perhaps eighteen
or nineteen years old. I told her the
whole story about how I usually parked up on the hill but that the road work
had blocked everything off so I needed to use the lot, and didn’t have any
cash. She told me I could pay with a
debit card. I started to pull out my
wallet and she said, “No, not here—up at the store.”
I paused for a second before saying—“Ok,
I guess I’m off to the store. See you in
a minute.” And I put my wallet back and was
reaching for the keys, when she spoke again—“Do you live up in the village?”
So I repeated my story-- “No, my
friend does. She lets me park in front
of her house, but everything’s blocked off today because of the road work.”
“Road work,” she said to
herself. There was another moment’s
pause while she considered. Then she wrote
something on an orange slip of paper and handed it through the window of the
kiosk--a parking pass with 9/16/13 written on it, to put on the dashboard on
the driver’s side.
Our everyday exchange of society’s goods
and services is facilitated by a wonderful thing called money. And one of the reasons that money is so
useful is that it’s not personal. If you
have something that I want, I have something I can give you in exchange for it
that everyone has already agreed has value.
It doesn’t matter if I don’t have anything that you want in return, and
we don’t have to have a long argument about how much my plumbing services are
worth compared to your sweet corn. You
name your price, I pay it, and that’s that.
And it doesn’t matter whether you know me or I trust you, as long as
we’re dealing in cold, hard cash. Thanks
to money, I can be in a mutually-beneficial economic relationship with people
in China that I’ve never met and never will.
But there’s something about this
impersonal quality of money that’s seductive.
The way that it works seems so simple and clear and impartial, that it can
make the value of other things seem kind of vague and uncertain in comparison. That’s particularly true for the kinds of
things that are prized for their moral or spiritual value. We can all agree that things like wisdom and
wilderness and community spirit are important, but just how much value they
have, relative to other things, is difficult to say. But because the rules that govern the
exchange and accumulation of money appear so rational and predictable and
precisely proportioned, we can start to imagine that they are transcendent,
like some kind of natural, or even divine, law.
We can start to believe that the challenging and perplexing questions
about how to be a good person and a responsible member of society can really
just be boiled down to charging a fair price and paying one’s debts on time.
But then there are those moments when we find
ourselves, like that young parking attendant at Dillon Beach, in a position
where the clear and simple rules about money are at odds with what we feel in
our hearts is the right thing to do.
There are times when the kind thing, the generous thing, the courageous
and admirable thing to do, is to reinforce the shared moral values and personal
bonds that keep society healthy, by breaking the rules about money.
The manager of the estate in Jesus’
parable that we hear today finds himself in such a position. There must be some truth to the charge that
he has mismanaged his master’s affairs, because he has no doubt that he is
about to lose his job. And he also knows
that, left to follow the pitiless rules of the labor market, he’s not going to
make it. If he’s going to survive, it
will be because people behave towards him in a way that defies their supposed
rational self-interest. So he takes a
risk that might just make a bad situation worse. He acts irrationally, and unpredictably, and
violates the clear-cut rules of wealth. Instead
he banks on relationships, and on the value of kindness, generosity, and mercy.
The manager cooks the books, to the
cost of his boss and the benefit of his debtors, so it’s hard to understand why
the Master would approve of him, or why Jesus would hold him up as a model to
follow. I don’t think this story literally
means that we should be dishonest in our business dealings. But the master appreciates what his manager has
done because it exhibits a kind of shrewdness that is more admirable than
frugality or even integrity. It’s the shrewdness of knowing that that in
the last analysis, the human economy is personal, and that love, friendship,
hospitality, generosity, and compassion are its real currency.
In the coming weeks our national political
representatives will be facing many grave responsibilities of national and
world affairs. They will even address
some of them. So we should pray for
them—they, as much as anyone, are in need of Christ’s grace and truth. But watch out when you see them parading
across the airwaves talking the nation’s wealth as if it were governed by some
self-evident and inflexible law. When
they start talking about the federal budget and the national debt as if there
are no real alternatives, as if it is a foregone conclusion that the elderly, children,
the hungry, the unemployed, and the working poor must sacrifice on the altar of
economic necessity, and the debate is only about how much, Christians need to
remember that this is what idolatry looks like.
When Jesus tells his disciples to
make friends for themselves by means of dishonest wealth he isn’t just teaching
the conventional wisdom that worldly goods are fleeting and you can’t take them
with you. He’s also suggesting that the
rules that govern the exchange of those goods, which seem so impartial and
rational and pure, are actually unjust.
The manager might be cheating his master by changing the amounts of oil
and wheat that the debtors owe. But the
game of landowner and sharecropper is one that was already rigged in the
master’s favor. And on the other hand,
Jesus remind us that the laws of relationship—those indeterminate, always
voluntary, ever-being improvised and negotiated rules of hospitality and
generosity and forgiveness and love—those are the laws that govern the eternal
economy of the Kingdom of God.
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