Getting our priorities right

 ‘…You cannot serve God and wealth...’ (Luke 16:13)

        Pic: Sea Point Methodist Church. ZA    

Luke 16:1-13 (Year C: Trinity+17)

Happier and wealthier?

Recently, in the Republic of Ireland, the value of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew by an estimated 26% in one year.  The calculation was correct according to a new set of international statistical rules.  However, nobody believes that we were all suddenly happier, richer and healthier by as much as 26% in the space of a 12 month period.  Likewise, as many earn more, grow a business or a career or move up the ranks in an organisation they are not necessarily happier or healthier as a result.  Improving economic wealth and distributing it more fairly is a noble calling directed to each of us.  Money – a store of ‘market value’ and unit of account is necessary and important. Nobody has figured out, yet, how to abolish it!  There is, however, a truth that all our working, striving, giving and receiving does not have meaning in the quantitative measure society, economists, statisticians or others put on such activity.  Turning thing around we need to see the value of our work and our command of financial resources as a good we help create around us and the way in which we help sustain this precious planet for ourselves and for the generations to come (and please God there will be).

Love people; use money

Money is something that we should use to provide life, joy and meaning. People are to be loved while money is to be used responsibly. In practice economies, businesses and politics are run the other way round: people are used and money along with power is loved. The experience of a sharp economic downturn in 2008-2009 took many of us by complete surprise. We had grown up in a relatively stable world where economic downturns were short-lived interludes between bursts of fast economic growth. Many of us had been lulled into a false sense of security that the depressions of the past could never happen again. That the global recession of 2008-2009 was not as traumatic and devastating as the great depression of 1929-1930 was more due to deliberative monetary and fiscal policy responses in 2009. However, the experience of losing jobs, enduring pay cuts or pay freezes and seeing an erosion in various public goods and services was shocking. Along with that, here in Ireland, we saw a resumption of emigration among the young robbing town and country of young blood.

Like the steward in today’s passage from Luke we had to juggle finances, debts and various relationships including business and personal.  Luke’s steward was, essentially, a first century debt collector in a suit acting on behalf of an oil snake vulture fund seeking to make more money out of other people’s money.  But, this is not the main point of Luke’s story. The steward’s business shrewdness was an example of how the ‘children of light’ should use tact and kindness in advancing the kingdom of God in complete contradistinction to the kingdom of darkness where grubby deals happen and money is a god and people don’t matter. About such realities W.B. Yeats wrote in his poem September 1913:

What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone….

Let’s say there was a cut for the steward, another slice for the master and then a slice for Rome. Sounds familiar?  The steward in Luke’s story wrote off some of the debts owed by others not for love of his debtors but in order to win friends in key places as he was in debt and under financial pressure from his creditors.  The steward was a shrewd and clever bondholder who burned himself to a significant extent in order to curry favour with those who might give him a dig-out if the steward’s bondholders burnt the steward.

Recent economic history

Financial markets and transactions have changed a lot in the course of 2,000 years since the gospel of Luke was written but not that much in so far as a lot of wheeling and dealing is done on the basis of mutual reciprocity, trust and networks. Some theorists call it ‘social capital’. In the days leading up to the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 as well as the Night of the Long Bailout in Ireland later that month there was much positioning, frantic calls, threats and assurances. It was surely a case of ‘the children of this age’ being more ‘shrewd in dealing with their own generation than … the children of light.’ (Luke 16:8). The subsequent and continuing devastation in terms of business closures and loss of income was widespread throughout the advanced economies. Though the seeds of the crisis were sown, in part, through a lack of effective and just regulation it was also in the presence of disordered appetites and reckless behaviour that played havoc with the lives of millions. Have lessons been learned and changes made so that ‘next time it will be different’?  Time will tell.

We still have a little time

In this life we have been given a precious but limited window of opportunity to work with others in this precious natural and human-made environment for the common good and the glory of God. In past times, most Christians along with other thought of the Earth as a place in which we subdue nature.  It was as if we had a divine freedom to thrash the earth and lash the animals – so to speak.  We understood ourselves as stewards of Grace but the duty of stewardship of the natural environment got little or no attention. Rather, it was there to be exploited. A growing awareness of environmental degradation and the role of human behaviour in this regard has propelled Christians to work with others to effect fundamental change in the way we live, consume, travel, work and farm.  There is still time, perhaps, to ‘save the planet’. This work of saving involves individual as well as collective action.  However, the first step to recovery is acknowledgment of the truth.  Today’s Gospel reading challenges us to put God first instead of ‘Mammon’. For ‘Mammon’ read GDP, my own income, possessions, material security and comfort. The point is that we have been gifted with many of these things and more besides but for a purpose. At the end of our busy and hectic lives we will be called to account – like the steward delegated with stewardship of his manager’s property.