Jeremiah 8:18 - 9:1; Luke 16:1-13

I’d like to draw rather a long bow between the Jeremiah reading and the Gospel text (The parable of the Shrewd Manager). The one is about grief – the grief of Jeremiah for his erring Israelite people, who have turned their hearts from God and worshipped idols.  This passage might echo the very heart of God’s grief too, when we stray into unholy territory. The other is about a very shrewd business man.

We might feel like Jeremiah sometimes because many of our own people here in Australia have also fallen off the faith wagon;  they have turned their backs on the Christian faith which nurtured our nation in its infancy. And like Jeremiah, we long for our nation to turn back to belief and embrace the grace, mercy and peace of Christ.

But the first, unlikely thing I thought about both these passages when I read them was that grief and redemption can go hand in hand. We can’t ask for God’s forgiveness, until we can see our error.  We first must grieve over our fallen state, before we can seek God’s pardon. But people these days have no desire for all that confession and admitting to a fallen nature. They don’t want the clarity to see themselves as they really are, before God. They have no need of Him;  they do not grieve over their hedonistic lifestyle or their embracing of the very worst of depravity, gambling, pornography and so on.  They see no need for repentance. They have no need for forgiveness.  Perhaps a little shrewd spirituality on our part is called for.

That’s where the dodgy business manager comes in.  In the Luke reading, we have this off-putting story about the Manager who appears to conduct some very dishonest business deals on behalf of his Master, yet still comes out smelling of roses. He manages to keep onside with the boss and his clients, and keep his job at the same time – all with some clever manoeuvring and deals made with the debtors. He was very shrewd and he was definitely thinking outside the box. 

This parable has many layers about our attitude to money, to the poor, to redemption, but in essence one of its main themes is Jesus saying to his followers “If only you lot were as crafty and concerned and as focussed about MY business, as this wily fox was about saving his own interests and reputation. If only you would think outside the box now and then;  if only you would take every opportunity to showcase my Business, as well as this Manager looked out for his.  Take a lesson. Be as frank with yourselves and as clear headed about My Kingdom as these astute operators in the secular world.

I say again.  Grief can be redemptive.  This is out of the box thinking.  When I first heard this notion, I found it very confronting. I’ve proved it to be true though.  With God, any grief can have a redemptive quality; not just our grief when people stray from faith, but personal grief, even communal grief.   Grief and suffering have a spiritual shrewdness about them;  grief can lead to insightfulness;  it can sharpen and refine faith.  The grief someone feels over a failed marriage can lead them to understand why it failed;  it can redeem them from making the same mistake twice.   When God and grief are spliced together, the result is often redemption – redemption of many different kinds – not just eternal salvation.

You will have heard in the media that last month was the 50^th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech.  It’s a well-known speech. Just two weeks after that speech, in September 1963, the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was bombed and 4 little black girls were killed.  Birmingham Alabama was no stranger to violence, especially this church, because it was a gathering place for black Christians who campaigned for civil rights.  But the violence was mainly perpetrated on black people by white supremists – this was the case in the church bombing. Eventually, in 1964, Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights bill and this ensured that black people were equal in law, and it banned segregation.  But they still couldn’t vote. And there was another significant piece of oratory, before laws were passed to secure this right.

In 1964, Fanny Lou Hamer, a negress, addressed the all-white, anti-civil-rights Democratic National Convention.  This is part of her description of the violence perpetrated on her and her race..  Fanny Lou told how she had been carried to the county gaol, because she had encouraged black people to be registered to vote.  Play sound clip.   She told how she was put in a cell next to a young black woman, Miss Ivester Simpson.  She described how she could hear this woman being beaten.  Her attackers were shouting at her, calling her nigger and other awful names, and making her say “Yes Sir”.  Fanny Lou told how her screams reverberated through the cell.  She said that after a while Ivester Simpson began to pray, and she prayed for her attackers.  She asked the Lord to have mercy on them, and forgive them for what they were doing.  She was, through her suffering, asking for redemption, not for herself, but for those beating her. Her prayers for them became, eventually, redemptive for the nation of America – redemptive in the sense that it was freed from its evil racism and inequality.

The whole equal rights movement in America began with black Christian people.  It was based, in its purest form, in non-violence and redemptive suffering – Dr King’s Movement had as it’s motto “To redeem the soul of America”. The black people were suffering but redemption would come to America because of how they behaved in that suffering as Ebester’s prayer so powerfully exampled.  I am convinced that this is God’s best, most effective work;  that of turning bad into good, turning grief into joy;  turning wretched ungodliness into redemption. It has power beyond our reckoning or imagination. This is the work of the Kingdom, about which we must be so shrewd.

It is perhaps to draw a long bow to call this spiritual shrewdness, but the parable introduces us to the astute man who became righteous – not by begging for mercy and praying on his knees – but by forgiving the debts of others in the Master’s name. A key component of God’s Kingdom is all about forgiveness, mercy and grace to the undeserving.  And sometimes, as we walk across the bridge of our own grief, or someone else’s, we cross into that most shrewd and unlikely of God’s gifts – that of redemption and grace to help in time of need.  We cross the bridge of suffering, into God’s grace.

Just as the Shrewd Manager was retained, and benefitted from his prudence, Jesus uses this example to assure us that as we are shrewd managers with his forgiveness and grace, He will entrust us with the riches of heaven. As we forgive the debts of others, we ourselves are forgiven;  as we struggle with our own suffering, we become perhaps, the catalyst for another’s redemption, or even our own.

The dodgy manager could have followed the convention and been given his marching orders or dragged through the courts;  instead he made some succinct decisions and thought “what can I do to bring good out of bad;  what can I do for a positive outcome? 

What can we do for a positive outcome in the face of either our nations backsliding or grief?  We can decide to be astute and prudent with our emotional energy and spend it praying for others. We can be the vehicle of redemption through God’s amazing ability to bring good out of bad. Packaged up with grief is opportunity for the Kingdom of God to be passed on to people who may not receive it from a person who is powerful and with well-established social prominence.

It’s not that we want to experience grief or disempowerment.  We don’t want others to have it either, but let’s remember that God is never defeated by grief;   God’s Kingdom was started with grief and suffering on the cross.  God, who is the convener of life and death, the author of redemption, used grief very shrewdly – outside the box of what we think should happen, to bring redemption to us, to others, and especially to those who hurt us.

Forgiveness looms large in this because it’s not the norm – the norm is to hate those who hurt abuse and use us, but like the woman in the cell in Birmingham, we can pray for those who hurt us – God can take that attitude, those prayers, that resolve, to release and grow his Kingdom in very powerful ways.  Oh that we can strive to be this shrewd with his Kingdom to his glory and for the redemption of others.