Luke 15 & 16

Read Luke 15 & 16 and meet in your Good Soil Group by Sun, Mar 4.

Remember: Formation, not information. Luke and Acts invite us to live differently than the world around us. Focus on the seeds of trust, hope, and compassion God is planting.

Reading

As you read, here are a few things to notice, in addition to everything you notice naturally.

When you figure out the parable of the shrewd manager, you let me know. Was he accused falsely, or was he really guilty? Was cheating his soon-to-be ex-boss the right thing to do? This parable reminds me of the story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38. With the ambiguity of the parable, is Jesus recognizing moral ambiguity in the world? Is the message: “even in far-less-than-perfect circumstances, there is a right path”? What does Jesus mean, “the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light”? Does my/our confusion only reveal how unshrewd I/we are? What does Jesus want us to take away from this?

On either side of this challenging parable are two of the most powerful and beloved parables of Jesus: the parable of the prodigal sons (yes, plural: sons) and the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. On March 4, I’ll be preaching on the prodigal sons, so I’ll leave that for later. For now, let’s focus on the other one.

A professor once asked a class full of heady seminary students a question. They had just finished reading the gospel of Luke, so he asked: “What would Luke say: can the rich be saved?” Now I’m asking you, and I’m adding another question: “Who gets to say whether I am rich or not—me or the Lazarus’s outside my gate?”

These uncomfortable questions are wrapped up in this parable. I’m not going to answer them here, but I will offer some food for thought. Take, for example, an article in last month’s Atlantic Magazine, called “Making it in America.” In its conclusion, the author writes:

It’s hard to imagine what set of circumstances would reverse recent trends and bring large numbers of jobs for unskilled laborers back to the U.S. Our efforts might be more fruitfully focused on getting Maddie the education she needs for a better shot at a decent living in the years to come. Subsidized job-training programs tend to be fairly popular among Democrats and Republicans, and certainly benefit some people. But these programs suffer from all the ills in our education system; opportunities go, disproportionately, to those who already have initiative, intelligence, and—not least—family support.

I never heard Maddie blame others for her situation; she talked, often, about the bad choices she made as a teenager and how those have limited her future. I came to realize, though, that Maddie represents a large population: people who, for whatever reason, are not going to be able to leave the workforce long enough to get the skills they need. Luke doesn’t have children, and his parents could afford to support him while he was in school. Those with the right ability and circumstances will, most likely, make the right adjustments, get the right skills, and eventually thrive. But I fear that those who are challenged now will only fall further behind. To solve all the problems that keep people from acquiring skills would require tackling the toughest issues our country faces: a broken educational system, teen pregnancy, drug use, racial discrimination, a fractured political culture.

What if helping modern-day people in Lazarus’ shoes involves our food pantry and the choices we make with our money and also “tackling the toughest issues our country faces”? What if our afterlife depended on it? What would we learn if someone rose from the dead?

I believe the Gospel Jesus Christ as told by Luke is good news for rich and poor alike. The good news for Lazarus is pretty obvious maybe. And for the rich man? My suspicion is God’s good news for him is the Resurrected One who gathers rich and poor alike into one community, to live their lives as humble and incomplete answers to impossibly difficult questions.

That’s why I’m excited for All Saints’ year-round stewardship education team begin its work. I don’t know about you, but I need help with this. It’s about money and what each of us do with our money, and it’s about more than money too. Jesus died and rose to become our only master. What might it look like to live unruled by money (or debt)? Thanks to Jesus, we get to figure that out together.

Meeting

Getting to Know Each Other (10 min): You might ask each other, “What are your first memories of discovering the difference between poor and not poor?” or, “Can the rich be saved?” or, “What do lives unruled by money or debt look like?”

Or you could tell each other stories about the most joyous celebrations you’ve ever participated in. What’s one thing, no matter how small, you and your group can celebrate today?

Talking about Luke (20 min): Here’s some good starting questions for any week, “What did God do in these chapters? What did people do?” You also might ask each other, “What in these chapters did I welcome? What did I resist? How was Jesus freeing me as I read?”

Praying (15 min): Start this time by asking, “Who or what do we have to pray about today?” Don’t censor yourself. Nothing is too big or too small to pray about. And no one is beyond God’s care. If nothing else, pray for each other and for all of the other Good Soil groups that God will open us to the seed of God’s Word.

After Reading & Meeting

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