I love a good story.
Especially stories about being clever, or tricky or shrewd.
Often those kinds of stories are stories about survival, like Robinson Crusoe, or Swiss Family Robinson, or more recently the Tom Hanks movie Cast Away.
They are great stories because the characters survive because they choose to survive, rather than give up. I read stories like those and afterwards I feel like I can do anything if I just keep running into it long enough, life is worth living, life is worthy of effort and creativity and working all the angles.
Do you know that feeling? It is kind of like the opposite of being tired or bored, it’s a driving curiosity to learn and be actively involved.
I like those kinds of stories.
Stories about being clever, or tricky or shrewd aren’t only survival adventure stories, perhaps more often they are crime stories, or murder mysteries where the clever criminal and the clever sleuth try to out trick one another, those stories are survival stories of a different sort.
I finish those kinds of stories and I feel like I can get away with about anything, not so much breaking the rules as working around them or through them.
I have that same feeling of not being passive but rather being active and involved, looking for new ways to do things, and finding all sorts of clues everywhere pointing to a world and a God who are boundless and begging to be known and explored.
Scripture is full of shrewd and tricky characters. Sometimes we forget that just because they are sacred stories it doesn’t mean that they are still great stories with all kinds of wily and tricky characters.
Whether it is Miriam hiding the baby Moses right under Pharaoh’s nose, whether its Abraham bartering with God about not destroying his nephew Lot’s hometown, or even better Abraham’s Grandson Jacob. Jacob who not only deceived his father into giving his blessing and cheated his brother of his inheritance he also ran off with most of his father-in-law’s flock. The father in law thought he could out trick Jacob! Jacob of all people. Well he had another think coming!
Jacob was a truly tricky character, shrewd, always out for something, not laying back but always on the move with the upper hand, looking for leverage.
Jesus outwits the devil in the temptation in the wilderness and then steels the world back from the devil in the ultimate bait and switch job in history, the Resurrection.
I read those stories and I realize that God’s favorite people aren’t all bowed down and groveling they are rather gloriously alive, animated, making things happen, using everything they had, they couldn’t sit still, and deeply flawed, desperately in need of forgiveness, and salvation.
They weren’t so much pious or well behaved as they were using every breath God gave them to live and learn and strive. Alive! Not waiting for anything, at full throttle until they crashed into the grave.
The parable Jesus tells us today is about a manager, who was out for survival and shrewdly makes it happen, he didn’t give up, he did what he did best, he cheated.
What we are to glean from this colorful story is not that we are to cheat, but rather that we are to show that same constant alertness for opportunities for creative survival, for working out all the angles, being shrewd and wily, but here is the catch, not for personal gain but rather for God’s justice.
Just as the shrewd manager saw to his future well being we are to shrewdly see to our well being for eternity.
“Crooked wealth” is the contemporary translation for the Greek word mammon. It’s a great word. I prefer to just use the word mammon because it sounds almost like a vicious, wild animal that will eat us alive if we aren’t careful.
Ultimately the only way to faithfully use mammon rather than be used by mammon is to give it away, to forgive debts, to serve the poor generously.
Ultimately if we are not involved in the wily, tricky, shrewd redirecting of wealth away from the haves to the have-nots then that wild animal of mammon has us in its jaws.
Granted there are many ways of redirecting that wealth, all sorts of social, political and economic philosophies about how to do that, some of which are faithful and some are decidedly not.
But the point for us today is to be faithful in the subversive underground movement of God’s Kingdom where the poor, the forgotten, the sick, the prisoner are remembered and cared for, not as a second thought, but in an active and revolutionary way, a priority.
Mammon is dangerous, we either pursue it and get eaten alive, or we pursue how to share it.
It is the most dangerous game, we either play it, or it plays us.
It is a crisis that requires tricky characters to risk all for the hope of glory, eternity is at stake.
It will take all our wiles, all our wheeling and dealing, all our shrewd planning to put mammon to use without being eaten alive.
We have to be fully alive, awake, attentive, active, always reaching for new ways to grow, learn and be generous.
Who knows we may become one of those characters that people tell stories about for generations, like all those crazy people God loves so much.
For most of us, for most of the time, this revolution of God’s kingdom, this taming of the wild beast of mammon will be lived out in small ways, daily kindnesses, simple plans to help someone along, spontaneous giving when a need is clear, encouragement, comfort, a visit, a note, a gift.
Whatever it is we have, what ever time we have left on our clock, we have that to use, faithful in little ways, and we are to use it all up at full throttle, for God’s kingdom.
We have characters like Abraham, Jacob, Miriam, Mary, Jesus, the wily manager, the list goes on and on, all this vast crowd of tricksters, gloriously and vibrantly alive, to encourage and entertain us as we go about our father’s business.
I end with a quote from St. Iraneous, from the year 170 AD.
He said, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”
I look at all these tricky characters that God loves so much, and I see God’s glory, and I see God as the most wily and alive character of all.