What is Righteousness?

Sermon Given Sept. 18, 2022

Texts Used: Luke 16:1-13, Amons 8:4-7

First of all, I just have to say, this Gospel lesson is weird. A lot of people don’t know exactly what to make of it, including commentators. What makes it so bizarre is that with parables oftentimes we see at least one of the characters embodying a characteristic of God. Last week we heard the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin. We saw the nature of God coming alive in the acts of the shepherd going out of his way to find the one sheep, and in the nature of the woman sweeping and searching to find that lost coin. But here, who plays God? Who shows us a characteristic of our Creator? 

I posit that the answer is really no one. The rich man is a fool, he leaves his books with the manager he just fired for squandering his property. The manager is a liar. The people who get some debt relief are just grateful and barely a part of the narrative. As Jesus says, he is talking about people who belong to the world, not children of the light. They have their own ways of dealing with things. So why tell a story about them? Why mention them at all?

I went back and forth this week about whether this is a commentary on wealth or a commentary on righteousness. The problem is that the two are so connected, and this certainly talks about both, so which did I want to talk about first? I switched the sermon to being about righteousness to being about wealth back to righteousness. But I settled on righteousness with the thinnest of margins between the two, because I think all our readings taken together share more about righteousness than wealth. 

So what is righteousness? It’s a fancy word for a moral standing of being right, just, and fair. Neither the rich man nor his manager display righteousness. The rich man might seem fair because he lets the manager off, he displays some semblance of grace, but he does so because the manager, in forgiving debts, makes him look good. Yeah, he’s lost some wealth, but he’s gained clout. He’s a really rich guy. He has a ton of stuff and money. In the big scheme of things, getting back 80 containers of wheat versus 100 is like getting back 80 cents versus a dollar when looking at his entire estate. It’s not a huge deal. But that person who has been sweating how to pay back that 100 feels a big relief that now they only have to pay 80. There’s a load off their shoulders and they are grateful. The person whose debt is relieved knows that it is the work of the manager, not the rich man, but the rich man looks good in the eyes of the community if he doesn’t try to get the full amount back after the debt has been reduced. He looks generous just like his manager. 

His manager of course is entering tit for tat relationships, essentially saying, “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine”. He wants to be supported by these people when he’s out of a job. So the people who owe debts benefit, but there are strings attached. They now have to help this guy out. It’s shrewd of him to set up this arrangement. That doesn’t mean it’s just or right. 

All these relationships are distorted relationships with others. Even as the manager is reducing debts, he’s not doing it out of love. He’s doing it for his own selfish gain so he doesn’t have to actually work when he’s fired. There are lots of ways we see this similar sentiment being played out across the United States today, this reduction of others to transactional players. Let me share one example.  

It’s no secret that meat packing plants employ a lot of immigrants and refugees. Some people they employ don’t have documents, but when I was interning at a church in Grand Island, NE, which has a huge packing plant in 2014, I learned that the industry was shifting towards employing more refugees, especially from war torn parts of Africa. There were a lot of refugees from Sudan and what would later become South Sudan coming into Nebraska and Iowa right alongside immigrants from South American countries, working in our factories and meat packing industries. 

But then the pandemic hit. Do you remember the meat shortages at the beginning of the pandemic? In several key pork rendering plants in Iowa and South Dakota, Covid quickly spread on the floors of the factories, where people were still working shoulder to shoulder without masks, without precautions, causing hundreds of employees to be sick at one time. The employees at the plant received bonuses for continuing to show up to work for three months, a nice gesture, but also a subtle encouragement that kept sick people working, spreading the virus. The plants were Covid hot spots and while they eventually got masks and some distance, they remained hot spots for a long time. At a Tyson plant in Waterloo, Iowa, seven managers were fired after making wagers and placing bets on how many workers would get sick. At the end of 2020, six of their employees had died. The devaluation of these lives at that moment is something that haunts me, especially since it happened in my home state. I, and many others, weren’t sure what to do as we stayed home to stay safe. The state didn’t do much to intervene, they pushed to keep production flowing. There was a backlash, people did rise up, writing the state, and not buying meat. Some actions were taken, but the whole situation really made me stop and ponder: Who are we as a people and who could we be?

That is the question of righteousness. That’s what it means to be righteous, to see what is happening, to be moved by it, and to ask what actions are available. It also involves a deep level of trust, trust that God cares, that God sees, that God is working through others as well to try and help. Not everyone was saved, but some action was taken. Hard truths were exposed. People like me, who have never stepped foot in a pork rendering plant, suddenly were deeply interested in how we could make these places better. Righteousness does that. I’m not sure how much my actions mattered, but even when I felt helpless to act while hunkered down in my home, I prayed for them. I still think about them. 

Basic human dignity is what God holds out in all our interactions, a care for each other as fellow humans. Because God wants us to do that, I don’t really think God enters tit for tat relationships with us. We owe God a lot of gratitude. God after all made all of us and gave us this planet. We are meant to live in harmony with God, each other, and creation. That’s the desire of God, but of course, as we talked about last week, sin is easy, and we do things that distort our relationship with God, each other, and creation regularly. But unlike the rich man or the manager, I really don’t think God has a ledger book, writing down all our debts. God desires us to praise and worship, God wants to be in relationship with us, to know us and share life with us.  I don’t think worship and following the commandments are like a mortgage payment. You can’t pray enough to eventually pay off your place in heaven. I don’t believe in purgatory. I really have a lot of issues with the kind of tit for tat relationship that some atonement theories imply, especially substitutionary atonement. Substitutionary atonement simply means that Jesus paid our debts, but the idea that we spread about it is that because we were so bad, God had to kill God’s own Son to pay our debts. God didn’t pay Jesus for our debts. The cross wasn’t the punishment we couldn’t bear. That paints a picture of a God who is physically abusive, one who punishes those trying to do the right thing. No, I think God knew our struggles for power and dominance, knew how Jesus would upset the apple cart and sent him anyway. Jesus knew he would die, not because God planned it, but because God knew the people in power and knew Jesus’ message would stoke their greatest fears. Still, God sent Jesus anyway. The message was that important. 

Instead of having ledger books and using Jesus as a shrewd manager, God did something better. God invited us into a relationship not of tit for tat, but just pure gift. That feeling of debt reduction  is amplified in God’s kingdom because Jesus didn’t hide from God and quickly scratch out amounts owed. Jesus instead gave us a new way of living that doesn’t require ledger books and financial tricks. Jesus offered a better way. 

The way of righteousness is the way of discipleship, so much of what I said two weeks ago applies. Righteousness is the worldview of discipleship. It is a criticism of the way the world is and a conscious effort to live in the way the world should be. When Jesus says you can’t serve God and wealth, Jesus is saying that you can either choose the righteous worldview or the worldview of the rich man and his manager. The tit for tat system does work. It does help provide some people with relief from suffering. It’s not entirely broken, but there is a better system available. We don’t have to settle. We can have more justice, more life that lives in harmony with God, neighbor, and all of creation. The world’s ways sometimes work for the benefit of the oppressed, but they aren’t designed that way. God’s ways are a much better bet. 

But God’s ways also cost us in a financial ecosystem. The system of debts and ledger books is part of daily life. I long for a better way, but this is reality. Still, I dream. I realized the other day part of the reason why, even though I have more Star Wars swag, I really enjoy Star Trek more. It’s because it is based in a cashless society. The replicator system made any desires available for free. That radically frees up people in that imaginative universe to live in different and better ways. Everything is at their fingertips. But in a society with debts and debtors, what does righteousness look like? 

I think Amos is helpful here. Amos of course is a prophet of righteousness, calling people back to right relationship with God, one of justice and truth telling. He calls people out for being impatient with the Sabbath and holy festivals. They want to get back out there and sell more. They put profit above God. The people he’s calling out specifically aren’t the poor who need to continually work in order to survive. That’s an important distinction to make. He’s not mad at people who barely have enough. He’s calling out those who have profits and savings. They can easily make it if the business is closed for a day. They also rig their booths to increase profits. They work to extract more money from the poor and oppressed, to increase the debts people owe to them. Amos calls out exploitation. Amos says God is angry at that. That it is not God’s way. They need to focus on the Sabbath and festivals, giving praise to God, but even more so, they need to focus on how their financial dealings are harming those around them. Where are their hearts? What are their values? 

Remember, this is a financial system where if you get too indebted, if you can’t pay what you owe, you could end up enslaved. Your rights could be taken away and you could have a master who tells you what to do. You could lose bodily autonomy and be trapped in a system that is designed to keep you down and in the place of bondage. When Jesus acted as a slave towards his disciples, he was taking on this kind of debt system. In that sense, he was paying the debts of all of us. This is where substitutionary atonement is actually not bad. Jesus was saying, “God will take on these debts that have literally enslaved you and make you free.” It’s a radical release from those things that hold us back, the societal sins that trap us in unjust systems. Jesus takes on those sins for us, empowering us to move forward, to help create a society that mirrors God’s reign on earth. 

Ultimately, righteousness, that justice seeking state of mind, comes out of a deep relationship with God. It seeks to live into the message of the Gospel, of liberation, redemption, and justice. Jesus rose to affirm that even when things looked their worst, there was still more to be done. We could break even the bonds of death with God by our side. We have the power to choose the dignity of others over profit. We don’t have to exist in tit for tat relationships that end up helping people in power more than the oppressed. God’s relationship with us is greater than that and better. God just gives in abundance. We can generously share with each other too. And maybe, when the hard moments hit, we can put people over profit, caring for our neighbor over all else. Amen.