Dylan's lectionary blog

Proper 20, Year C

Luke 16:1-13 - link to NRSV text

I'm tremendously excited, and don't tell me you're not excited too. It's a very special day coming this Sunday -- like a holiday that only that only comes once in every three years.

It's ... "Unjust Steward Sunday"!

OK, so maybe you're not that excited. But I am. I did my master's thesis on the parable, often called "The Parable of the Unjust Steward," in this coming Sunday's gospel. I spent the better part of a year or two thinking about these thirteen verses. And this Sunday will be the first time I've ever had a chance to preach on them (unless you count the children's chapel I did to audition for my current job, in which I did this parable in biblical storytelling, using a few of the kids gathered as human puppets -- a story I'll be happy to tell if you're interested. I really ought to get around to putting up some kind of 'About Me' page, for those who want to know who the heck I am).

So woo-hoo! Go Unjust Steward!

I said in a previous blog that I have a strange attraction to what are called the "hard sayings" of Jesus, and that's how I ended up pouring so much energy into the parable of Luke 16. I did it because I read in an article (I can't remember off-hand which one, and am too lazy at the moment to dig up my old thesis to look it up) that this parable posed problems that are "insoluble." With the considerable hubris that a nineteen-year-old can muster, I decided to tackle it. Here's what I came up with. It's summarizing about 60 pages of writing, so I hope you can take my word for it on a lot of things and overlook gaps.

The parable is not as obscure as it might seem; we just need to get over our resistance to the most obvious interpretation. The biggest questions that commentators seem to be ask about the parable is "who is 'the master' or 'the lord' (kurios in verse 8 could mean either): the steward's employer, or Jesus?" and "Why did this person commend the steward?"

First, a summary of the plot of the parable (told with some contemporary terms to make it more readily apprehended):

A very, very rich man lives in a big city (like Jerusalem), with a lifestyle of luxury made possible from the income of the estate he owns in the countryside. He's hired a manager (steward) to run it while he parties in Jerusalem, and all of the work of planting and harvesting is done by peasants whose grandparents might have owned the land but lost it in payment to a debt. Now the peasants work the land as tenant farmers, buying what they need from the company store (at prices far above what their grandparents paid for the same goods), with whatever is left over after the exorbitant rent is paid to the landowner. The harvest is never quite enough to pay the rent plus what the family needs, so the family is slipping further and further into debt, working harder and harder to pay what can't be paid. The immediate face of this system is that of the steward -- someone who might have come from the same families as the people who now suffer under his management, but who managed somehow to get the education needed to keep records and to lose the backbone needed to refuse to participate in something so clearly unjust.

The landowner fires the steward because of rumors that the steward was squandering the landowner's resources (and "squandering" isn't necessarily a bad word here -- the sower in another of Jesus' parables squanders seed by tossing it on roads and in bird-feeding zones, and the shepherd in last week's parable potentially squanders the ninety-nine by running after one lost sheep). So the steward is no longer authorized to do anything at all in the master's name. The farmers from whom he probably came aren't about to take him in either, given that up until now he's allied himself with the landowner by taking a job that involves collecting exorbitant rents, running the company store, and generally dealing unjustly with the farmers. That's why the steward is called "the steward of unrighteousness" in verse 8.

So what does the steward do? Something extraordinarily clever. He gathers all of the farmers who owe him money, and he declares that their debts have been reduced from the rough equivalent of "a million bazillion kajillion dollars" to something that maybe could be repaid, (maybe) freeing the family to make choices about next steps. With quirks of how records were kept, this involves a few subtle strokes of the (forger's) pen -- much like what students do in changing a handwritten 'D' to a 'B' on a report card.

The steward doesn't tell the farmers that he was fired any more than he tells them that the landowner didn't authorize any of this generosity. The result is that the farmers believe the landowner is more generous than just about anyone else in his position would be. The landowner is now a hero in the farmers' eyes -- and the steward is also, by extension.

The landowner comes for his customary visit to pick up the wealth the steward has collected for him, and he gets a surprise that is both exhilarating and challenging:

The streets for miles before he reaches the estate are lined by cheering farmers. They're shouting his name, telling him he's a hero.

He finds out (probably when he arrives at the estate house) what the steward has done in telling the farmers that the landowner forgave their debts. Now he has a choice to make.

The landowner can go outside to the assembled crowd -- the people shouting blessings upon him and all his family -- and tell them that it was all a terrible mistake, that the steward's generosity was an act of crookedness (or unrighteousness, depending on your perspective) and won't hold water legally. The cheering will turn to boos, and I wouldn't want to be the landowner then.

Alternatively, the landowner can go outside and take in the cheering of the crowd. He can take credit for the steward's actions, in which case he'll continue to take in the acclaim of the farmers (who are honoring him -- you know how much I talk about how important honor is in the first-century Mediterranean world!), but he'll have to take the steward back. Mistreat the steward, who brought such good news of the lord's generous forgiveness (pun intended) in the future, and the crowd might turn on him. I don't doubt what a sane person in the landowner's situation would do in such circumstances, but either way, the steward goes from scab and scumbag to hero. When he retires, the farmers will gladly take him in, if the landowner won't.

Here's the big problem, for most commentators:

What the steward does is clearly dishonest. From a capitalist perspective, he's guilty of all charges, taking the landlord's property and squandering it -- even after he was fired, and therefore not authorized to do anything in the landowner's name.

Most commentators I read who were looking for the point of the parable came up with something like this:

"The steward is confronted with a crisis, and he acts decisively. Jesus is saying that the inbreaking of the kingdom of God calls upon us all to act decisively."

No offense to commentators, but that rings hollow for me. What's the crisis or decision? And what about the direction of the decisive decision is commendable? After all, if the story had gone something like, "There was a rich man who had a steward and fired him, so the steward decisively concluded that he should form a boy band and inaugurate a tour of Galilee and Judea," we probably wouldn't get quite the same point.

So here's the big question that I haven't seen commentators in print ask:

Q: What, precisely, is it that the steward does, albeit without authorization and with deception?

A: The steward forgives debts.

The steward forgives. He forgives things that he had no right to forgive. He forgives for all the wrong reasons, for personal gain and to compensate for past misconduct. But that's the decisive action that he undertakes to redeem himself from a position from which it seem he couldn't be reconciled, to the landowner any more than to the farmers.

So what's the moral of this story, one of the stories unique to Luke?

It's a moral of great emphasis for Luke: FORGIVE. Forgive it all. Forgive it now. Forgive it for any reason you want, or for no reason at all.

Remember, this (Luke) is the guy whose version of the "Lord's Prayer" includes the helpful category confusion, "forgive us our sins as we forgive (the monetary debts of -- it's clear in the Greek) our debtors" (Luke 11:4). I could point to at least a dozen moments off the cuff at which Luke raises this point: the arrival of the kingdom of God is no occasion for score-keeping of any kind, whether monetary or moral.

Why forgive the debts of debtor nations? In America, we could forgive other nations their debts for the reason Bono cited in his appearance on the O'Reilly Factor: to raise or maintain the value of the American brand, letting the rest of the world associate "USA" with health and freedom. Or we could do it because of what Jesus said about forgiving debts. Or we could do it because we think the leprechauns will then lead us to the land of eternal youth. To paraphrase Nike in a manner more worthy of Adbusters, just do it.

Why forgive someone who's sinned against us, or against our sense of what is obviously right? We don't have to do it out of love for the other person, if we're not there yet. We could forgive the other person because of that whole business of what we pray in Jesus' name every Sunday morning, and because we know we'd like forgiveness ourselves. We could forgive because we've experienced what we're like as unforgiving people, and so we know that refusing to forgive because we don't want the other person to benefit is, as the saying goes, like eating rat poison hoping it will hurt the rat. We could forgive because we are, or we want to be, deeply in touch with a sense of Jesus' power to forgive and free sinners like us. Or we could forgive because we think it will improve our odds of winning the lottery.

It boils down to the same thing: deluded or sane, selfish and/or unselfish, there is no bad reason to forgive. Extending the kind of grace God shows us in every possible arena -- financial and moral -- can only put us more deeply in touch with God's grace.

I cannot escape the kind of awareness that an Anglican has while awaiting the report of the Lambeth Commission on Communion (AKA the Eames Commission), or an employee has while working in a congregation experiencing some serious conflict. What's a good reason to remain in fellowship (or "in communion," if you want a more technical term)? What's a good reason to be gracious toward those on the winning (or the losing) side of a political debate? What's a good reason to give up any and all scorekeeping?

Pick one of the above, or none, or all. It doesn't matter. If a guy who was a scab and a scalywag can forgive to save his job or give himself a safety net if his firing proves final, we have who experienced real grace -- we who believe that "the earth is the Lord's, and all that is in it" (Psalm 24:1), and therefore forgiving debts is simply telling someone else that scorekeeping is up to the only one to whom anything of value belongs -- have better reason to forgive. We've got more important things than scorekeeping to think about and act on: the work God has given us to do, to love and serve Him, with gladness and singleness of heart, through Christ our Lord.

Amen, and thanks be to God!

Proper 20, Year C

Luke 16:1-13 - link to NRSV text

I'm tremendously excited, and don't tell me you're not excited too. It's a very special day coming this Sunday -- like a holiday that only that only comes once in every three years.

It's ... "Unjust Steward Sunday"!

OK, so maybe you're not that excited. But I am. I did my master's thesis on the parable, often called "The Parable of the Unjust Steward," in this coming Sunday's gospel. I spent the better part of a year or two thinking about these thirteen verses. And this Sunday will be the first time I've ever had a chance to preach on them (unless you count the children's chapel I did to audition for my current job, in which I did this parable in biblical storytelling, using a few of the kids gathered as human puppets -- a story I'll be happy to tell if you're interested. I really ought to get around to putting up some kind of 'About Me' page, for those who want to know who the heck I am).

So woo-hoo! Go Unjust Steward!

I said in a previous blog that I have a strange attraction to what are called the "hard sayings" of Jesus, and that's how I ended up pouring so much energy into the parable of Luke 16. I did it because I read in an article (I can't remember off-hand which one, and am too lazy at the moment to dig up my old thesis to look it up) that this parable posed problems that are "insoluble." With the considerable hubris that a nineteen-year-old can muster, I decided to tackle it. Here's what I came up with. It's summarizing about 60 pages of writing, so I hope you can take my word for it on a lot of things and overlook gaps.

The parable is not as obscure as it might seem; we just need to get over our resistance to the most obvious interpretation. The biggest questions that commentators seem to be ask about the parable is "who is 'the master' or 'the lord' (kurios in verse 8 could mean either): the steward's employer, or Jesus?" and "Why did this person commend the steward?"

First, a summary of the plot of the parable (told with some contemporary terms to make it more readily apprehended):

A very, very rich man lives in a big city (like Jerusalem), with a lifestyle of luxury made possible from the income of the estate he owns in the countryside. He's hired a manager (steward) to run it while he parties in Jerusalem, and all of the work of planting and harvesting is done by peasants whose grandparents might have owned the land but lost it in payment to a debt. Now the peasants work the land as tenant farmers, buying what they need from the company store (at prices far above what their grandparents paid for the same goods), with whatever is left over after the exorbitant rent is paid to the landowner. The harvest is never quite enough to pay the rent plus what the family needs, so the family is slipping further and further into debt, working harder and harder to pay what can't be paid. The immediate face of this system is that of the steward -- someone who might have come from the same families as the people who now suffer under his management, but who managed somehow to get the education needed to keep records and to lose the backbone needed to refuse to participate in something so clearly unjust.

The landowner fires the steward because of rumors that the steward was squandering the landowner's resources (and "squandering" isn't necessarily a bad word here -- the sower in another of Jesus' parables squanders seed by tossing it on roads and in bird-feeding zones, and the shepherd in last week's parable potentially squanders the ninety-nine by running after one lost sheep). So the steward is no longer authorized to do anything at all in the master's name. The farmers from whom he probably came aren't about to take him in either, given that up until now he's allied himself with the landowner by taking a job that involves collecting exorbitant rents, running the company store, and generally dealing unjustly with the farmers. That's why the steward is called "the steward of unrighteousness" in verse 8.

So what does the steward do? Something extraordinarily clever. He gathers all of the farmers who owe him money, and he declares that their debts have been reduced from the rough equivalent of "a million bazillion kajillion dollars" to something that maybe could be repaid, (maybe) freeing the family to make choices about next steps. With quirks of how records were kept, this involves a few subtle strokes of the (forger's) pen -- much like what students do in changing a handwritten 'D' to a 'B' on a report card.

The steward doesn't tell the farmers that he was fired any more than he tells them that the landowner didn't authorize any of this generosity. The result is that the farmers believe the landowner is more generous than just about anyone else in his position would be. The landowner is now a hero in the farmers' eyes -- and the steward is also, by extension.

The landowner comes for his customary visit to pick up the wealth the steward has collected for him, and he gets a surprise that is both exhilarating and challenging:

The streets for miles before he reaches the estate are lined by cheering farmers. They're shouting his name, telling him he's a hero.

He finds out (probably when he arrives at the estate house) what the steward has done in telling the farmers that the landowner forgave their debts. Now he has a choice to make.

The landowner can go outside to the assembled crowd -- the people shouting blessings upon him and all his family -- and tell them that it was all a terrible mistake, that the steward's generosity was an act of crookedness (or unrighteousness, depending on your perspective) and won't hold water legally. The cheering will turn to boos, and I wouldn't want to be the landowner then.

Alternatively, the landowner can go outside and take in the cheering of the crowd. He can take credit for the steward's actions, in which case he'll continue to take in the acclaim of the farmers (who are honoring him -- you know how much I talk about how important honor is in the first-century Mediterranean world!), but he'll have to take the steward back. Mistreat the steward, who brought such good news of the lord's generous forgiveness (pun intended) in the future, and the crowd might turn on him. I don't doubt what a sane person in the landowner's situation would do in such circumstances, but either way, the steward goes from scab and scumbag to hero. When he retires, the farmers will gladly take him in, if the landowner won't.

Here's the big problem, for most commentators:

What the steward does is clearly dishonest. From a capitalist perspective, he's guilty of all charges, taking the landlord's property and squandering it -- even after he was fired, and therefore not authorized to do anything in the landowner's name.

Most commentators I read who were looking for the point of the parable came up with something like this:

"The steward is confronted with a crisis, and he acts decisively. Jesus is saying that the inbreaking of the kingdom of God calls upon us all to act decisively."

No offense to commentators, but that rings hollow for me. What's the crisis or decision? And what about the direction of the decisive decision is commendable? After all, if the story had gone something like, "There was a rich man who had a steward and fired him, so the steward decisively concluded that he should form a boy band and inaugurate a tour of Galilee and Judea," we probably wouldn't get quite the same point.

So here's the big question that I haven't seen commentators in print ask:

Q: What, precisely, is it that the steward does, albeit without authorization and with deception?

A: The steward forgives debts.

The steward forgives. He forgives things that he had no right to forgive. He forgives for all the wrong reasons, for personal gain and to compensate for past misconduct. But that's the decisive action that he undertakes to redeem himself from a position from which it seem he couldn't be reconciled, to the landowner any more than to the farmers.

So what's the moral of this story, one of the stories unique to Luke?

It's a moral of great emphasis for Luke: FORGIVE. Forgive it all. Forgive it now. Forgive it for any reason you want, or for no reason at all.

Remember, this (Luke) is the guy whose version of the "Lord's Prayer" includes the helpful category confusion, "forgive us our sins as we forgive (the monetary debts of -- it's clear in the Greek) our debtors" (Luke 11:4). I could point to at least a dozen moments off the cuff at which Luke raises this point: the arrival of the kingdom of God is no occasion for score-keeping of any kind, whether monetary or moral.

Why forgive the debts of debtor nations? In America, we could forgive other nations their debts for the reason Bono cited in his appearance on the O'Reilly Factor: to raise or maintain the value of the American brand, letting the rest of the world associate "USA" with health and freedom. Or we could do it because of what Jesus said about forgiving debts. Or we could do it because we think the leprechauns will then lead us to the land of eternal youth. To paraphrase Nike in a manner more worthy of Adbusters, just do it.

Why forgive someone who's sinned against us, or against our sense of what is obviously right? We don't have to do it out of love for the other person, if we're not there yet. We could forgive the other person because of that whole business of what we pray in Jesus' name every Sunday morning, and because we know we'd like forgiveness ourselves. We could forgive because we've experienced what we're like as unforgiving people, and so we know that refusing to forgive because we don't want the other person to benefit is, as the saying goes, like eating rat poison hoping it will hurt the rat. We could forgive because we are, or we want to be, deeply in touch with a sense of Jesus' power to forgive and free sinners like us. Or we could forgive because we think it will improve our odds of winning the lottery.

It boils down to the same thing: deluded or sane, selfish and/or unselfish, there is no bad reason to forgive. Extending the kind of grace God shows us in every possible arena -- financial and moral -- can only put us more deeply in touch with God's grace.

I cannot escape the kind of awareness that an Anglican has while awaiting the report of the Lambeth Commission on Communion (AKA the Eames Commission), or an employee has while working in a congregation experiencing some serious conflict. What's a good reason to remain in fellowship (or "in communion," if you want a more technical term)? What's a good reason to be gracious toward those on the winning (or the losing) side of a political debate? What's a good reason to give up any and all scorekeeping?

Pick one of the above, or none, or all. It doesn't matter. If a guy who was a scab and a scalywag can forgive to save his job or give himself a safety net if his firing proves final, we have who experienced real grace -- we who believe that "the earth is the Lord's, and all that is in it" (Psalm 24:1), and therefore forgiving debts is simply telling someone else that scorekeeping is up to the only one to whom anything of value belongs -- have better reason to forgive. We've got more important things than scorekeeping to think about and act on: the work God has given us to do, to love and serve Him, with gladness and singleness of heart, through Christ our Lord.

Amen, and thanks be to God!

Comments

Proper 20, Year C

Luke 16:1-13 - link to NRSV text

I'm tremendously excited, and don't tell me you're not excited too. It's a very special day coming this Sunday -- like a holiday that only that only comes once in every three years.

It's ... "Unjust Steward Sunday"!

OK, so maybe you're not that excited. But I am. I did my master's thesis on the parable, often called "The Parable of the Unjust Steward," in this coming Sunday's gospel. I spent the better part of a year or two thinking about these thirteen verses. And this Sunday will be the first time I've ever had a chance to preach on them (unless you count the children's chapel I did to audition for my current job, in which I did this parable in biblical storytelling, using a few of the kids gathered as human puppets -- a story I'll be happy to tell if you're interested. I really ought to get around to putting up some kind of 'About Me' page, for those who want to know who the heck I am).

So woo-hoo! Go Unjust Steward!

I said in a previous blog that I have a strange attraction to what are called the "hard sayings" of Jesus, and that's how I ended up pouring so much energy into the parable of Luke 16. I did it because I read in an article (I can't remember off-hand which one, and am too lazy at the moment to dig up my old thesis to look it up) that this parable posed problems that are "insoluble." With the considerable hubris that a nineteen-year-old can muster, I decided to tackle it. Here's what I came up with. It's summarizing about 60 pages of writing, so I hope you can take my word for it on a lot of things and overlook gaps.

The parable is not as obscure as it might seem; we just need to get over our resistance to the most obvious interpretation. The biggest questions that commentators seem to be ask about the parable is "who is 'the master' or 'the lord' (kurios in verse 8 could mean either): the steward's employer, or Jesus?" and "Why did this person commend the steward?"

First, a summary of the plot of the parable (told with some contemporary terms to make it more readily apprehended):

A very, very rich man lives in a big city (like Jerusalem), with a lifestyle of luxury made possible from the income of the estate he owns in the countryside. He's hired a manager (steward) to run it while he parties in Jerusalem, and all of the work of planting and harvesting is done by peasants whose grandparents might have owned the land but lost it in payment to a debt. Now the peasants work the land as tenant farmers, buying what they need from the company store (at prices far above what their grandparents paid for the same goods), with whatever is left over after the exorbitant rent is paid to the landowner. The harvest is never quite enough to pay the rent plus what the family needs, so the family is slipping further and further into debt, working harder and harder to pay what can't be paid. The immediate face of this system is that of the steward -- someone who might have come from the same families as the people who now suffer under his management, but who managed somehow to get the education needed to keep records and to lose the backbone needed to refuse to participate in something so clearly unjust.

The landowner fires the steward because of rumors that the steward was squandering the landowner's resources (and "squandering" isn't necessarily a bad word here -- the sower in another of Jesus' parables squanders seed by tossing it on roads and in bird-feeding zones, and the shepherd in last week's parable potentially squanders the ninety-nine by running after one lost sheep). So the steward is no longer authorized to do anything at all in the master's name. The farmers from whom he probably came aren't about to take him in either, given that up until now he's allied himself with the landowner by taking a job that involves collecting exorbitant rents, running the company store, and generally dealing unjustly with the farmers. That's why the steward is called "the steward of unrighteousness" in verse 8.

So what does the steward do? Something extraordinarily clever. He gathers all of the farmers who owe him money, and he declares that their debts have been reduced from the rough equivalent of "a million bazillion kajillion dollars" to something that maybe could be repaid, (maybe) freeing the family to make choices about next steps. With quirks of how records were kept, this involves a few subtle strokes of the (forger's) pen -- much like what students do in changing a handwritten 'D' to a 'B' on a report card.

The steward doesn't tell the farmers that he was fired any more than he tells them that the landowner didn't authorize any of this generosity. The result is that the farmers believe the landowner is more generous than just about anyone else in his position would be. The landowner is now a hero in the farmers' eyes -- and the steward is also, by extension.

The landowner comes for his customary visit to pick up the wealth the steward has collected for him, and he gets a surprise that is both exhilarating and challenging:

The streets for miles before he reaches the estate are lined by cheering farmers. They're shouting his name, telling him he's a hero.

He finds out (probably when he arrives at the estate house) what the steward has done in telling the farmers that the landowner forgave their debts. Now he has a choice to make.

The landowner can go outside to the assembled crowd -- the people shouting blessings upon him and all his family -- and tell them that it was all a terrible mistake, that the steward's generosity was an act of crookedness (or unrighteousness, depending on your perspective) and won't hold water legally. The cheering will turn to boos, and I wouldn't want to be the landowner then.

Alternatively, the landowner can go outside and take in the cheering of the crowd. He can take credit for the steward's actions, in which case he'll continue to take in the acclaim of the farmers (who are honoring him -- you know how much I talk about how important honor is in the first-century Mediterranean world!), but he'll have to take the steward back. Mistreat the steward, who brought such good news of the lord's generous forgiveness (pun intended) in the future, and the crowd might turn on him. I don't doubt what a sane person in the landowner's situation would do in such circumstances, but either way, the steward goes from scab and scumbag to hero. When he retires, the farmers will gladly take him in, if the landowner won't.

Here's the big problem, for most commentators:

What the steward does is clearly dishonest. From a capitalist perspective, he's guilty of all charges, taking the landlord's property and squandering it -- even after he was fired, and therefore not authorized to do anything in the landowner's name.

Most commentators I read who were looking for the point of the parable came up with something like this:

"The steward is confronted with a crisis, and he acts decisively. Jesus is saying that the inbreaking of the kingdom of God calls upon us all to act decisively."

No offense to commentators, but that rings hollow for me. What's the crisis or decision? And what about the direction of the decisive decision is commendable? After all, if the story had gone something like, "There was a rich man who had a steward and fired him, so the steward decisively concluded that he should form a boy band and inaugurate a tour of Galilee and Judea," we probably wouldn't get quite the same point.

So here's the big question that I haven't seen commentators in print ask:

Q: What, precisely, is it that the steward does, albeit without authorization and with deception?

A: The steward forgives debts.

The steward forgives. He forgives things that he had no right to forgive. He forgives for all the wrong reasons, for personal gain and to compensate for past misconduct. But that's the decisive action that he undertakes to redeem himself from a position from which it seem he couldn't be reconciled, to the landowner any more than to the farmers.

So what's the moral of this story, one of the stories unique to Luke?

It's a moral of great emphasis for Luke: FORGIVE. Forgive it all. Forgive it now. Forgive it for any reason you want, or for no reason at all.

Remember, this (Luke) is the guy whose version of the "Lord's Prayer" includes the helpful category confusion, "forgive us our sins as we forgive (the monetary debts of -- it's clear in the Greek) our debtors" (Luke 11:4). I could point to at least a dozen moments off the cuff at which Luke raises this point: the arrival of the kingdom of God is no occasion for score-keeping of any kind, whether monetary or moral.

Why forgive the debts of debtor nations? In America, we could forgive other nations their debts for the reason Bono cited in his appearance on the O'Reilly Factor: to raise or maintain the value of the American brand, letting the rest of the world associate "USA" with health and freedom. Or we could do it because of what Jesus said about forgiving debts. Or we could do it because we think the leprechauns will then lead us to the land of eternal youth. To paraphrase Nike in a manner more worthy of Adbusters, just do it.

Why forgive someone who's sinned against us, or against our sense of what is obviously right? We don't have to do it out of love for the other person, if we're not there yet. We could forgive the other person because of that whole business of what we pray in Jesus' name every Sunday morning, and because we know we'd like forgiveness ourselves. We could forgive because we've experienced what we're like as unforgiving people, and so we know that refusing to forgive because we don't want the other person to benefit is, as the saying goes, like eating rat poison hoping it will hurt the rat. We could forgive because we are, or we want to be, deeply in touch with a sense of Jesus' power to forgive and free sinners like us. Or we could forgive because we think it will improve our odds of winning the lottery.

It boils down to the same thing: deluded or sane, selfish and/or unselfish, there is no bad reason to forgive. Extending the kind of grace God shows us in every possible arena -- financial and moral -- can only put us more deeply in touch with God's grace.

I cannot escape the kind of awareness that an Anglican has while awaiting the report of the Lambeth Commission on Communion (AKA the Eames Commission), or an employee has while working in a congregation experiencing some serious conflict. What's a good reason to remain in fellowship (or "in communion," if you want a more technical term)? What's a good reason to be gracious toward those on the winning (or the losing) side of a political debate? What's a good reason to give up any and all scorekeeping?

Pick one of the above, or none, or all. It doesn't matter. If a guy who was a scab and a scalywag can forgive to save his job or give himself a safety net if his firing proves final, we have who experienced real grace -- we who believe that "the earth is the Lord's, and all that is in it" (Psalm 24:1), and therefore forgiving debts is simply telling someone else that scorekeeping is up to the only one to whom anything of value belongs -- have better reason to forgive. We've got more important things than scorekeeping to think about and act on: the work God has given us to do, to love and serve Him, with gladness and singleness of heart, through Christ our Lord.

Amen, and thanks be to God!