Go Home Jesus, You're Drunk

Luke 16:1-15

 Dear Jesus - 

When I signed up for this vocation of being a pastor, I have to admit, I did not read the fine print. Or, I mean, I did, but I didn’t ever think I’d actually have to preach on it. I mean, I guess that’s my bad, I should have known what I was signing up for. But, honestly, Jesus, this passage is bonkers. So I feel like maybe an apology from you would be appropriate, even if I did sign at the dotted line before reading all the riders and clauses. This passage makes no sense to me. It’s right up there with Elisha sicking a she-bear on a bunch of boys just because they pointed out his bald head, or that one time God decided that the whole world should be destroyed so God sends a flood and even the innocent animals all die, or that time when God decided to torture Job so that he could win a bet with Satan. This passage may even be worse than that time God told Abraham to commit filicide, or when Lot offers his daughters to a sodomite mob. I mean, maybe not in the particularity of the act, but in the way that it just makes no logical sense whatsoever. In the sense that this isn’t just a one-off oddball situation between a neurotic patriarch, but you’re actually instructing all of us to be like this so called “shrewd” manager. 

I have to be honest, Jesus, this isn’t your best work. It doesn’t hold a candle to the lilies of the field or the lost sheep or the prodigal son. Now those parables, they get it done. This one, if you brought it in to my creative writing workshop in grad school, would get ripped to shreds by all the writers in the room. Someone would say, “this text abuses the reader.” Another would roll their eyes. Another would rewrite the whole thing using their own words, and then praise it for how amazing it suddenly became. Someone else would try to couch the criticism in a constructive way. They’d say, “It’s really interesting that you’ve inserted so many contradictions in your narrative, but I wonder if the impact is lost on the reader because you haven’t taken its absurdity far enough?” The guy with the handlebar mustache slouching in the back of the room would speak up and say, “You’ve created a world in which the reader should occupy, but you haven’t been completely faithful to that world. You’re not following the rules you’ve set up for yourself.” It’d be worse than that one time I didn’t have a title for my poem, so I turned it in with the title of “untitled,” and somebody used a bright red pen to mark a huge x through the whole thing, and then handed it back to me. 

Or maybe, Jesus, you’re going to pass the buck to Luke. Maybe it’s his fault that this is such a confusing and maddening parable. Maybe, when he was writing, he had all these notecards with all your sayings and stories strewn out on the kitchen table, and as he organized them one by one, these were the random notecards left over, so he just piled them on top of each other and inserted them somewhere there was a page break. 

I mean, have you heard this story, Jesus?

Let me refresh your memory. 

So. Right before this, you’ve just told this amazing story about the prodigal son. He wasted his whole inheritance, he rejects his family, his tradition and his faith on fine wine and cheese and women, and when he runs out of cash and gets hungry for the pigs’ leftovers, he comes to his senses, and walks back to his house. On his way, his dad finds out that he’s coming back, and so he lifts his robes, runs through the muddy fields, and doesn’t even let the kid get a word in edgewise before he’s embraced him and forgiven him and brought him back home in an embarrassment of sentimentality and emotion. Now that one was a good one. Why didn’t you follow that one up with another just like it, you know, to really bring the point home, to really communicate to us in neon lights what God is like — all gracious and forgiving and valuing human life above the almighty dollar. But no. Instead. You follow that pulitzer prize winning parable with this one - where a corrupt manager races to save his butt once his boss finds out that he’s been wasting the landowner’s cash. “Oh crap!” He says, once the rich man calls him out on his shady bookkeeping. “What am I going to do? I have no real skills, I’m worse at manual labor than I am at managing, and there’s no way I’m going to demean myself so low as to go out and beg, how will I survive this?” And being the hustler that he is, he decides that since he’s already burned the bridge with his boss, he might as well go all the way, and you know, really stick it to the man. So, in the hopes that he wins some favor with some folks who might have pity on him - or, at least feel indebted to him - he does some fancy accounting to reduce their debt to the rich man. And just like that, with the stroke of his quill, one guy who owes a hundred jugs of oil now only owes fifty. And another guy who owes a hundred containers of wheat gets his bill slashed down to eighty. 

This reminds me, Jesus, of the whole student debt controversy we’re having in the United States, where, with the stroke of a pen, the president has just lopped off thousands of dollars from folks still paying back their college loans, and the rest of us are having an absolute fit about it. Except the rich master doesn’t throw a fit at all. In fact, he commends the manager for his shady dealings. Suddenly, instead of squandering, the manager is now “shrewd.” Ok. Ok. So, in your story, now we’re waiting for some kind of criticism of the master, at least, right? Something about how the master is just as corrupt as the manager, or something about how we’re in late stage capitalism and we need to forgive our debtors just as our debts are forgiven us? 

But Jesus. It’s a total rhetorical fail. It makes absolutely no sense. It doesn’t jive at all with anything you’ve been saying in Luke’s first fifteen chapters. Jesus, you do realize, don’t you that you take the side of “the man” in this story? You take the side of all of those who make decisions just like this manager. You praise the children of this age, and then throw some major shade at the children of the light. And then you double down. You tell us all to be like this manager, like those children of this age, like the rich man in the story. You remember, right? You command us to “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.” I mean, have you even seen It’s a Wonderful Life? That’s not the moral of the story at all. Or, if you’ve missed that one, maybe you’ve read A Christmas Carol, where Ebenezer Scrooge learns that it’s not about the accumulation of wealth at all, but the relationships we make along the way? Ok. Maybe those are too post turn of the millennium for you. Have you heard the one about the prophet who walks into the temple and shocks everyone by reading from the scroll of Isaiah and says that he has come to bring good news to the poor, or the time he stood on a mountain and proclaimed that the poor were blessed and said, “Woe to the rich”? Or did you hear the one about the guy who had a huge harvest and didn’t know what to do with his abundance and so he decided to build a bigger barn to store all his stuff, and then God ends his life that night? Or the one about the flowers and the birds who don’t worry about stuff or money or how they’ll be taken care of; they just trust? Or the one where we’re reminded to sell our possessions, give to the poor, and store real, godly treasures in heaven, where they can’t be destroyed? Surely you’ve heard the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, right? Because, spoiler alert, all of these are things you’ve said. These, among others, are stories you’ve told, commandments you’ve given, warnings you’ve made. So, uh, what gives?

You even seem to contradict yourself within our single lectionary reading today. Remember when you said, immediately after this story, — I have it written down right here, — you said, “And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own?” You said to us, “You cannot serve God and wealth.” You can hear how that’s very different from the moral of the parable you give us, praising this “shrewd manager,” right? 

So what the heck are we supposed to do with the contradictory and confounding parable/commandment/criticism sandwich from our lectionary today? How are we supposed to swallow that one when we’ve been chewing on all this righteousness and sacrifice and life-is-more-than-riches-burn-the-whole-system-to-the-ground casserole that you’ve been serving up this whole time? 

This passage gives me whiplash. This passage confuses and confounds and makes me want to challenge all those theologians who insist that there is always a “plain reading of the text.” ‘Cause the plain reading of this text seems to contradict everything you’ve taught us, everything you’ve come to unravel, everything you got nailed to the cross and died for. Seriously, go home, Jesus. You’re drunk. 

Unless, well, unless you knew those Pharisees were eavesdropping on your conversation. Unless you knew that they were going to take your words and twist them around and make them into something they’re not anyway, so you might as well leave their heads spinning. I know the lectionary cuts off before this detail, but it feels important. It feels significant, somehow. These particular pharisees are guys who are trying to keep one foot in two boats. They’re trying to love God and love wealth. They’re trying to do both, to serve both God and wealth. Is what you’re saying, Jesus, are you saying that we need to just pick one? Are you saying that maybe the rich man and the shrewd manager are actually more righteous than those of us who want to find a way to straddle both sides of the wealth and righteousness divide? Are you criticizing these pharisees because they’re so torn, all the time, between pleasing the system and pleasing God? Because if you are, then that gets real hard for me. It forces me to think about how wealthy I am, about how I am in the top ten percent of the world’s population when it comes to what I’ve got. If that’s what you’re doing here, then it gets even harder. Because then my attempt to give my kids a “good life” and new Nikes and drum lessons and Frappuccinos and money for college, and my anxiety about needing to save for retirement and have health insurance and get a new car suddenly becomes…not so righteous. Suddenly, the shrewd manager and his wealthy boss get to get in line before me, because, if nothing else, they were focused, they were one-minded, they didn’t put on a pretense about giving their lives to you and serving the poor and standing up for justice and then turn around and do the other thing. Are you trying to tell us that we can’t be of two minds, and if we are, then at least the shrewd manager is being honest about his corruption? ‘Cause if you are, then I really don’t know what to do. If you are, then I’ve got more worries on my mind besides a confusing and confounding lectionary passage. If you are, then I’ve got to reevaluate my whole perspective on how I live my life. And, frankly, I’m just not sure I’m ready for that right now, Jesus. 

I think I’d rather be confused. 

I think I’d rather blame you for your contradictions than wrestle with my own. 

But, you know, thanks anyway, Jesus.

Sincerely,

Your lukewarm, often distracted and confused follower,

Jenn 

Thanks be to God. 

Forest Bathing.

 

John 16:12-15

During the heart of the plague year, that is, those months of quarantine due to Covid, our family did pretty well there, for awhile. Dan and I both have flexible jobs, for which we are immensely grateful, so we were able to tuck in and out of parent-teacher-pastor-professor duties with graceful ninja-like skill. I was Zoom-meeting and drilling times tables, studying the letter to the Romans and explaining the difference between coordinating and subordinating conjunctions. Dan was parsing Greek verbs and making another pot of Mac and cheese, and grading exegesis papers while explaining factor trees and how to find the volume of a graduated cylinder. And then, we just hit a wall. We’d reached capacity. We just couldn’t function any more. The boys were testing limits and our patience, bickering, leaving wet towels on the floor and dirty underwear in the bathroom. Dan and I worried about reading delays and social transitions and job security before crashing to sleep at night, only to do it all over again the next morning. We were doing our best to do our part to keep a deadly virus from becoming even more deadly, but that left us isolated, stuck inside, and perpetually fussy. I’m sure most of you can relate. 

So one Saturday, after another fight over who was barging in to whose room, which then turned in to a fight over who hit whom first, which then turned in to an argument about who never gets in trouble and who always gets blamed for everything, I said, “That’s it we’re going to the woods.” 

We have this joke in our family. We are always encouraging the boys to get outside. But, alas, we rarely make them. They almost always choose Netflix and Fortnite. But whenever the kids are having a rough day, and we go out for a walk together, usually over to our nearby Dormont park, and the kids have this transformation -- their moods just lift — they start laughing, they start running around, their imaginations light up, they get along, they tell funny stories and ask great questions -- and we take a moment to remind them of what’s just happened. “Isn’t it interesting,” we say, “now that you’re outside, breathing fresh air, running around, playing and being imaginative, you feel so much better.” Every time. We tell them that they’ll feel better if they go outside, they resist and protest, they give excuses and arguments, but when they finally do get out there, they’re shocked by how much better they feel. And every time, we remind them, with a tone of loving sarcasm I am convinced is appropriate for parents of a middle schooler, we say, “Huh. Funny how that works. You get outside and life just seems much better.”

But really, it’s actually science. The Japanese coined the term, “Shinrin-yoku” - translated “forest bathing.” And they’ve done tons of studies about the physiological benefits of just wandering in the forest, with no goal, no intention, no accomplishment in mind. Just wandering through the woods. Studies have shown that this “forest bathing” lowers cortisol and adrenaline, lowers blood pressure, reduces anxiety, depression, anger, confusion and fatigue. It improves focus, reduces ADHD symptoms, and craziest of all, they’ve found that plants give off this chemical called phytoncides. This chemical has antibacterial and anti fungal properties, and increases a type of white blood cell in our bodies that supports our immune system and is linked to a lower risk of certain cancers. In fact, patients in hospitals with “green views” have shorter post-operative stays, take fewer pain killers, and have fewer post-surgical complications compared to those who have no windows in their rooms. So if you need to just stare out of the window for the next ten minutes, go for it. It’s the best sermon around.

Sometimes, we’ve just got to get out to the woods.

So as we wander through the forest on Trinity Sunday, I first want to remind you how very good it is for us, just to wander. Because we might start wandering around today, and maybe start feeling a little lost. That’s certainly the case whenever I try to think about or somehow “comprehend” the Trinity. 

I used to hate thinking about the Trinity. I’d end up in the philosophical and theological weeds where the theologians would drawl on and on with all the Greek and the pages of words and the footnotes. They’ll talk about the three in one and the one in three. They’ll use big words like perichoresis and hypostasis. One God in three persons, consubstantial in person, nature, essence and will. But also separate and distinct in and of themselves. Co-equal. Co-powerful. These authors insist on their rightness, and on their willingness to burn anyone else who might have a different perspective. There is one God in whom there are three persons who share one substance, and these persons, though one God, go by different names to denote those persons. They wax poetic about the heresies of modalism and Sabellianism and Arianism.  And then we wet-behind-the-ears seminarians would act like we understood what the heck they were talking about and we’d write papers about our own perfect orthodoxy that would get graded according to how smart we sounded, when really all we were doing was stringing words we didn’t understand together into incomprehensible theses and feeling really proud of ourselves. 

We’d use analogies like water and ice and steam, or the head, body and feet of a river, or a god “powerpack” that descends from the heavens, entirely God, but somehow suffused into a human body. We’d argue about the co-existence of the Son or the adoptionist theory that Jesus was made by God and then adopted in to God’s self. We’d argue about whether hypostasis means “essence” or “person.” And when we’d reach a dead end, when we’d start talking in circles and hiding our logical fallacies. After all the pages and the Greek and the footnotes and the Fathers we’d read, we’d shrug our shoulders, get to our required word count and say, “it’s a mystery.” “You must have faith.” The copout helicopter that will fly in to rescue us when we’re lost in the wilderness.

Somehow, being lost in the woods was just not ok. We like to have things figured out. We like to know and understand and comprehend and then tell others they’re wrong. 

But it’s ok. We really don’t have to have it all figured out. We’re just forest bathing.

We don’t have to understand any aspect or element of the forest in order to receive its benefits. Take a deep breath; we’re fighting cancer.

But I do want to tell you something cool about the forest, something that I think shows us a little bit of what the Trinity is like. And if you get lost, it’s no big deal, just come back to the surface, and forest-bathe. 

So often we think that we’ve got to get it all figured out, all by ourselves, we’ve got to come to this “personal” understanding of who Jesus is and what he has done for us, so that then we can go out and convince others to individually do the same. We look at nature like that, too. We don’t realize that everything is connected, that the elk need the wolves and the wolves need the prairies and the prairies need the elk in order for any of them to survive. We look at a tree and we think it’s this single thing, this one entity, this one “person,” “entire of itself.” But really, one tree is in unique relationships with all the other organisms all around it. In a sense, the tree is still a tree, but it is also the whole forest.

They call it the “wood-wide-web.” It’s a mycorrhizal network that creates a language through which the entire forest speaks to itself. So this network is made up of densely packed fungal threads that connect even plants of other species to each other. This fungus forms mycorrhiza with plant roots, and in this complicated system of tunnels and tubes, much in the same vein as our own internet, plants are able to pass chemicals between themselves in a sort of give-and-take relationship. It’s a “straight up exchange between plants and fungi. Plants provide carbon rich sugars made by photosynthesis, and in return, they get nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen that the fungi scavenge from the soil.” And then “other plants use this fungal network to communicate to each other, and through these fungal networks, the plants themselves exchange sugars, nutrients, and water between themselves,” even if they aren’t members of the same species. Mother trees have been known to send extra carbon to their seedlings. When a birch needs more carbon and the fir has too much, the fir sends some over. Dying trees will donate their nutrients to specific neighbors. They’ll even send warnings to other neighboring plants. If one species is being attacked by a certain kind of aphid, they’ll tell all their neighbors to increase a certain chemical that will attract a specific wasp that just so happens to feed on aphids, even if their neighbors haven’t been infested with the aphids yet. 

As we wander the forest. As we breathe deeply the phytoncides and focus our brains and fight off potential cancers. Just think about all that’s going on underneath our feet. Scientists still don’t have a full grasp on what’s happening. Although they can detect signals going from one plant to the next, although they can prove that there’s some kind of communication going on here that suggests unity among the diversity, although they know that each species is unique in and of itself and yet still a part of some great organism, there is still so much we don’t know about what’s going on in and through those mycorrhizal tunnels. We know now that forests aren’t just made up of single organisms in a survival of the fittest, fighting for resources battle, but they’re also this bigger, greater, more connected thing, united by this network of fungus that enables them to relate and speak and help each other.  There’s a web beneath us, orchestrating and coordinating everything all around us.

And that’s the Trinity.

At least, that’s how my puny little brain is understanding and relating to this trinitarian idea, for now. 

It’s this web of interconnectedness. The means through which we relate to one another. The tunnels through which information and needs and desires and gifts are exchanged. The system of relationships that unites us all. 

It’s this mechanism of interconnectedness that reminds us that none of us are alone, none of us can survive without each other, and none of us is separate from this great web of being. 

When we make connections with one another, when we offer someone a cup of water or a pair of shoes or the space in front of us in line, when we weep tears of mourning fifteen miles away from the most recent school massacre, when we cringe in frustration at our helplessness in a war happening an ocean away, when we are at our wit’s end with bickering families all stuck in the house during a global pandemic, we are participating in the movement of the Trinity. We are traveling through those mycorrhizal networks to reach out to one another, plant to tree to fern to fungus. We are participating in that web of interconnectedness that, at least for now, I like to think of as the Trinity - this great web of relationship. The great web of being.

And we don’t have to understand it, or “believe in it,” or learn complicated apologetics and theological backflips in order for us to participate in it, in order for us to feel the benefits of it. We can just bathe in it. Take a deep breath. Wander around. There is God beneath our feet.

Thanks be to God.