We are living in complicated times. Difficult times. Unprecedented times. I hear it so often – I say it so often – that the words start to feel like ashes in my mouth. And yet: it’s true. These are bitterly, deeply, foundation-crackingly complicated times in which to live.
There are moments and places and circumstances where things feel crystal clear. Things like our desire to protect our trans and nonbinary friends, loved ones, selves; our determination to stand with immigrant neighbors; our outrage about threats to access to healthcare, huge cuts to lifesaving research, protections for the environment we all share.
AND there are also moments and places and circumstances when things feel incredibly murky – around and within us. Maybe you feel trapped in daily choices, compromises and constraints. Maybe it feels like your bedrock values, the ones that have led you to be who you are and do what you do, now have to be whispered – if not entirely silenced – instead of shouted from the rooftops. Maybe you struggle with knowing how to feel, let alone what to do or say.
I’m hearing hints of this murkiness from folks who work for the federal government. From folks who work in education and health care. From folks with any kind of public profile or platform. From people just struggling with how to read the news and then get up and go on with their day.
These kinds of conversations have reminded me of the idea of moral injury. Moral injury happens when life injures your sense of being able to trust your leaders and do what’s right. The concept arose out of studies of healthcare personnel prevented from providing care by institutional constraints, and military veterans who had experienced their leaders, friends, or selves doing things that felt wrong, in the moment or in retrospect. A PTSD diagnosis didn’t fully capture the moral anguish these folks expressed.
The International Centre for Moral Injury states that moral injury “involves a profound sense of broken trust in ourselves, our leaders, governments and institutions to act in just and morally ‘good’ ways,” and the experience of “sustained and enduring negative moral emotions – guilt, shame, contempt and anger – that results from the betrayal, violation or suppression of deeply held or shared moral values.” (All citations from Wikipedia, Moral Injury entry.)
Moral injury seems like a pretty good name for some of the internal murkiness – and associated distress! – that people are naming to me. Today’s Epistle from the first letter of Timothy urges Christians to pray for our political leaders, “so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life.” Pragmatic advice from a community at risk of political persecution – but I know that some of you struggle with how to respond to our liturgy’s invitation to pray for all those in authority, every Sunday.
I know, too, that many have grappled deeply with how to feel, let alone what to say, in the wake of the killing of Charlie Kirk – whom some folks knew of as a Christian motivational speaker, and others knew as an incendiary voice who built his movement on targeting marginalized groups and stoking fear to mobilize outrage. Activist Gwen Snyder commented on Bluesky, “I think it is corrosive on a spiritual level to live in a world where we are so unused to justice that a political assassination feels [to some people] like cause for celebration.” Disciples of Christ pastor and writer Derek Penwell captured some of this corrosive confusion, writing, “Jesus says love your enemies. The timeline says humiliate them. I’m not trying to referee the news; I’m just trying to shepherd my own heart while the barometer drops. I’m stuck between the Sermon on the Mount and the comments section.”
Into all this disorienting murkiness, the Gospel of Luke drops this incredibly murky parable.
Some of Jesus’ parables have really clear messages! Like the lost and found parables: God loves us and will always seek us out! Good news! Some parables are a lot more perplexing, and this one is close to the top of that list. Not just for me! Every commentary I’ve looked at says some version of, Whoo. This one’s a doozy.
Jesus tells different kinds of parables. They don’t all work the same way. For example, I often remind us not to assume that the king or the boss in every parable is a stand-in for God. Sometimes yes; sometimes no. Here, I think, no. This is a wisdom parable, not a kingdom parable – meaning it’s about the world as it is, not the world as God means it to be.
I suspect that the parable as Jesus told it ends somewhere before the word “Whoever.” It’s not clear whether that last little bouquet of sayings belongs with this parable, or not. Sometimes the Gospel writers added explanations to the parables, to make it clearer what they thought Jesus was talking about. Luke, here, is working with a source document consisting of a bunch of stories and sayings of Jesus. Sometimes he’s just trying to figure out how to string it together and fit it all into the Gospel narrative he gets from Mark. So these sayings may not match this parable at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if Jesus’ version ended with these words: “People who belong to this world are more clever in dealing with their peers than are people who belong to the light.” Or in the more poetic language of the NRSV translation: “The children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.”
Let’s make sure we understand the story. There’s a boss, a rich man, a master, and there’s his business manager, sometimes called his steward. And the boss gets word that the manager has been wasting his money.
Fun fact: the same word is used for the prodigal son’s wasting or squandering of his inheritance, in the story that comes just before this one! We don’t know what the manager has been up to, but apparently it’s nothing that has made him any lasting friends, or provided for his future – no secret account in Turks and Caicos.
The boss calls the manager in to see him. What’s this I’m hearing about you?!? Bring me the account books immediately, show me what you’ve been doing! And then turn in your keys; you’re out.
Jesus’ storytelling is so wonderful as he gives us the manager’s internal monologue: What am I going to do!? I’m not strong enough to dig, to earn my keep by manual labor, and I’m too proud to beg. I know what I’ll do – so that when I’ve turned in my keys here, some people will still welcome me into their houses.
And then he starts calling in the people who owe something to his master. Maybe tenant farmers who work on the master’s land, maybe just ordinary neighboring folks who have gotten into hardship and had to borrow from the local wealthy landlord.
The manager opens the account books, where the record of what is owed is kept, and he starts changing the numbers. Jesus gives us a couple of examples – a man who owes nine hundred gallons of olive oil has it reduced to four hundred and fifty; a man who owes a thousand bushels of wheat has it reduced to 800. But we’re to assume that this happens over and over, with ten, twenty, fifty different debtors.
Walk with me briefly into the weeds about these debts. It was and is against Jewish religious law to charge interest to other Jews. But we know from ancient records that people found ways to make a debt grow without calling it interest. The manager would likely also have taken a fee from every debt he handled.
So we don’t know whether the cuts to these debts are reducing the principal, what was originally borrowed, or just taking off all the extra. If the manager is changing the debts back to the original amount – as some Biblical scholars think – then that’s very clever, because it leaves the master in a bind. It would be hard to publicly demand back all that that interest, forbidden by religious law. There’s a wonderful irony in that from the master’s point of view, this is yet more “squandering” on the part of the manager.
The manager isn’t liberating the debtors entirely – he doesn’t just burn the files – but he is easing their burden somewhat. But he’s not doing it out of altruism. He’s doing it so that when he gets fired, in, like, ten minutes, he’s not public enemy number one. So that some people might give him a little food and let him sleep in their barn for a while.
Who are we supposed to side with, here? The verses tacked on at the end include this question: “If you haven’t been faithful with someone else’s property, who will give you your own?” It’s easy to read this as a condemnation of the manager’s squanderings. But by making lucrative, predatory loans, the master has ALSO arguably been unfaithful with other people’s property. I suspect that Jesus himself did not care very much about people paying back their debts to the penny, especially in a brutally exploitative economic system that ground down the poor and enriched the wealthy and corrupted the middle management. And Jesus’ original audience, mostly working-class folks, probably empathized with the debtors – and appreciated the manager’s cleverness, even if his motives were skewed.
What are we supposed to make of this parable?…
In the translation we read today, the master commends the manager for his cleverness. In other translations, the original Greek word there – phronimos – is translated as shrewd.
Shrewd is an interesting word. To call someone shrewd is a compliment, though sometimes a grudging one. It means someone’s good at understanding a situation and making things work out the way they want. But shrewdness is hardly a virtue – in fact it’s oddly amoral; we might equally note the shrewdness of allies or enemies. Likewise clever – it’s not necessarily praise.
Phronimos, that Greek word, is sometimes translated as wise or wisdom. But it’s a very different wisdom from the more often-used Greek word sophia – wisdom as deep insight with a quality of moral rootedness and righteousness. Sophia-wisdom is associated with the holy, with God, with seeing things as God sees them. Phronimos is a much more contextual and ambiguous kind of wisdom – the wisdom of knowing which way the wind blows, and which side one’s bread is buttered on.
What I’m hearing from friends, from family, from all of you who are both friends and family in this household of faith, is that the internal murkiness of this season is really hard. Living with moral injury, with ambiguity, with compromise and silence, with trying to make the best of a wide variety of bad situations – when it’s often really unclear what the best is, or what best is even possible.
It feels bad and weird and gross.
If, like me, you come from a middle-class white family, you may feel very deeply that standing up, being your authentic self, and speaking your truth – even if your voice shakes, as they say – is always the right and good thing to do. Your responsibility and your birthright. Holding back our words, keeping our opinions to ourselvses, can feel like fire shut up in our bones, in the words of our friend the prophet Jeremiah.
Many of us face hard questions about how to be able to keep doing the most good we can, under our general and particular circumstances. And our information is imperfect; we just have to make our best guess, and try – and sometimes, that trying means that tolerating or participating in things that are deeply uncomfortable to us. That violate our values and sense of self.
Back in May, I was invited to a gathering of clergy to talk about how to preach and pastor in these times. A number of Black church pastors were part of the group. Our Scripture theme was the turn from the Book of Genesis into the Book of Exodus. At the end of Genesis, Joseph has ingratiated himself with Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, and he and his people, the Hebrews, are doing great, treated as part of the elite in Egyptian society. But a few generations pass and there’s a new Pharaoh, who doesn’t know or care about Joseph. And now the Hebrews, Joseph’s people, are enslaved, bitterly oppressed.
At one point during our gathering, one of the Black clergy noted how surprised and distressed the white clergy seemed by our national circumstances. He leaned in and told us all – clearly, kindly – “We’ve always known we couldn’t trust Pharaoh.”
It’s not news to us – he said, without saying – that the powers that be do not have our interests at heart. That the status quo was not built for our people’s flourishing, whether the party in power starts with an R or a D.
One thing we can do – that white, middle-class “we” – in these frightening and murky times is to listen to those kinds of voices. To learn from people who have never assumed that they would be free to live as they please and speak their truth boldly. Who’ve had to be shrewd, clever, prudent, strategic – first to survive, then to build strength and move forward together.
The little group here that’s been reading the work of 20th century Black theologian Howard Thurman together has appreciated grappling with and learning from Thurman’s mapping of the inner murkiness of life and ethics and humanity for Black folks in Jim Crow’s America.
People who belong to this world are more shrewd in dealing with their peers than are people who belong to the light. We’re supposed to be people of the light, right? You are the light of the world; let your light shine, Jesus says elsewhere! But we also seem stuck being people of this world. And Jesus himself was, among other things, a man living in occupied territory. Shrewdness may not be a spiritual virtue – but if you read the Gospels with some understanding of the power relations of the time, you see Jesus being pretty shrewd. There’s a lot of strategic not-quite-saying things, a lot of ducking and dodging and plausible deniability – until the point when he’s ready for the final confrontation. Until he thinks his followers and his movement are ready to continue what he’s started without him. (If you’d like a fuller understanding of Jesus’ life and context, we’re planning a study on the Gospel of Matthew this winter; watch this space!)
At the end of the parable, the master commends the dishonest manager for his shrewdness. Remember: The master in this story isn’t secretly God. But I still think it’s pretty interesting that Jesus ends the story with the master saying, You’re still fired, but that was pretty clever.
And Jesus almost seems to echo the master’s grudging respect, as he observes – commends? – the shrewdness of the people of this world. He might be hinting that the people of light can be a little naive, a little idealistic, when it comes to doing what needs to be done in the murky reality in which we live.
In Matthew’s Gospel Jesus tells his disciples that they’ll need to be as wise as serpents and innocent as doves. The word wise there, in the Greek, isn’t sophia. It’s phronimos. Shrewd as serpents. A little sneaky, a little slippery.
What we have in this quirky, murky parable, I think, is – not an endorsement, but an acknowledgment of the necessity of shrewdness. Sometimes squeezing some tiny bit of strategic goodness, or at least less-badness, out of a lousy situation is the best we can do.
I want to be clear that I’m not telling people that I think you should be more quiet, more careful, more strategic. I’m speaking to the many of you who are already feeling like you have to be quiet, careful, and strategic – and are struggling with what that means for your conscience, your heart, and your soul.
It’s a murky season, beloveds.
But the people of light can be shrewd when we have to.
May God help us live in the tension of these times, and help us be both serpents and doves, shrewd and wise, light-bearers and world-dwellers. Amen.