How to opt out

During the month of September faith traditions around the world consider the environment. The Season of Creation aims to:

1.   Renew our prophetic voices to action for creation.

2.   Gather all religious and non-religious communities to share a common voice for our creation and act.

3.   To reflect on the importance of ecological conservation and its integrity by remembering that the voices of creation are the reflection of the voice of its creator.

4.   To call out the damaging impact of our earthly development on God’s creation and voice our cry for change as humans living together under one home.

 

Our 2022 theme in the Season of Creation is listening to the voice of creation. What is the voice of creation saying to you in the parable?

 

To decode what is a perplexing parable I offer the following two bookmarks:

 

Bookmark 1: Parables are earthy stories with heavy meanings

In Sunday School we may have been taught that parables are earthly stories with heavenly meanings. We must outgrow this “pie in the sky” approach to studying scripture. Instead, I agree with William Herzog III who says that …the parables were not earthly stories with heavenly meanings but earthy stories with heavy meanings, weighted down by an awareness of the workings of exploitations in the world of their hearers. The focus of the parables was not on a vision of the glory of the reign of God, but on the gory details of how oppression served the interests of a ruling class. Instead of reiterating the promise of God’s intervention in human affairs, they explored how human beings could respond to break the spiral of violence and cycle of poverty created by exploitation and oppression. The parable was a form of social analysis every bit as much as it was a form of theological reflection.

 

Bookmark 2: Death and Resurrection

To decode the parable, we must appreciate that death and resurrection (aka the paschal mystery) are a constant theme in the gospels and the many parables. Jesus constantly preaches death and resurrection.

1.  For example, Jesus says a seed must die to bear fruit (John 12).

2.  Jesus also says that those who gain their lives will lose it. For example, in Luke 17.33 Jesus says: “Whoever tries to keep their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life will preserve it”. In Luke 9.24 Jesus also says that: “If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow Me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will save it. What does it profit a person to gain the whole world, yet lose or forfeit their very self?”

3.  The parables often comment that the last shall be first and the first shall be last, this continues the theme of death and resurrection.

 

Parables are earthy stories with heavy meanings and are undergirded by the theme of death and resurrection. With these two bookmarks I offer the following suggestions as you develop your own interpretations, listening to the voice of creation in Luke 16.

·In uke 16, a rich ruler, an absentee landlord, owns so much wealth he requires managers to look after it for him. How did he become so wealthy? In Luke 20.47 Jesus condemns those who devour widows’ houses, who, in the words of Isaiah 5.8 “add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land.” In other words, the rich ruler has become wealthy in a predatory way. Although God created an abundant world with enough for everyone (provided that human communities constrain their appetites and live within limits), disparities in wealth resulted because of human sin in structuring society such that the rich benefit. At this period of the Roman Empire, a growing concentration of land and wealth is in fewer hands resulting in landlessness peasant classes. According to Jesus sermon in Luke 4, the disparity between rich and poor is not “natural” and must be mitigated through the regular practice of wealth redistribution or jubilee politics. Jesus’ prophetic message calls people to the practice of the redistribution of wealth and in Luke’s Gospel this is “good news” to the poor.

 

·Without proof, a charge is laid against the manager that he is squandering his master’s wealth; a phrase that is exactly the same as the prodigal son who squandered his father’s inheritance in loose living.

 

·The manager is about to be fired. The manager is now in a crisis: he has no skills for hard work and no desire to beg. This is a crisis moment for the steward and decisive action is a must. In this crises moment the manager “dies” to money. Money often takes on divine status in the lives of people. The manager is now dead to the importance of money. Money is no longer the goal and purpose of his life. Money can no longer offer our manager security.

 

The manager must improvise. He builds connections with debtors to ensure his survival in the future, it is a case of I scratch your back please scratch my back in future. Set free from slavery to money, money is now used as a resource for relationship. The landlord should have been angry yet praises the steward for his shrewdness.

 

Luke 16 offers a highly relevant parable for the many who argue that our dominant economic system is failing. Like the manager in the parable, we too are in a crisis, an ecological crisis that is a result of our consumer capitalist industrial military complex. Capitalism does not know the word enough. In order to survive capitalism requires continual growth. Without an ever-increasing profit, capitalism collapses. Capitalism is not a stable system. The ecological crisis is because of cancerous economic growth. The parable encourages us to sabotage our dominant system in an attempt to restore justice, to “build a new world within the shell of the old,” as Dorothy Day did. As Wendell Berry say: “If we do not serve what coheres and endures, we serve what disintegrates and destroys.” The parable also helps us face the truth that like the manager we are enmeshed in a capitalist culture – we are stuck in a system that is death. Yet we still have to act. Like the manager we improvise. By being creative we can change the system that is killing us. There are positive examples of people who offer an alternative capitalism; that sabotage the system from within.

A contemporary example of Luke 16 is Yvon Chouinard, the owner of Patagonia, a company that makes outdoor clothes, who has given the company away. Like the manager in Luke 16, Yvon is caught in a death dealing system. Like the manager Yvon sabotages the systems from within. Patagonia has not been sold or made public but instead transferred to a trust; all of its $100 million a year profits are used to combat climate change and protect undeveloped land around the globe.

“Hopefully this will influence a new form of capitalism that doesn’t end up with a few rich people and a bunch of poor people,” Chouinard, 83, said. “We are going to give away the maximum amount of money to people who are actively working on saving this planet.”

Picture sourced from: https://uk.anygator.com/article/who-is-yvon-chouinard-patagonia-founder-giving-up-company-to-fight-climate-change__16801371

 

Where to from here for us? How can we listen to the voice of creation and participate in an alternative economy? We need to work that out together. As we work out our alternative economy, the sacred spiritual disciplines of simplicity, solidarity, silence and study will continue to inspire, transform and sustain us in our vision and work for a new heaven and new earth.

 

1)        Simplicity – get rid of your excess. The excess is a trap, and it takes away your freedom. Simplicity does not mean simplistic as in the opposite of complex. It means having things based on need and not want. It means breaking free from a consumer culture. 

2)        Solidarity with the poor moves you from “aid” to understanding and from sympathy to compassion

3)        Silence: the furnace of transformation where we can finally die to the tyranny of money and what it symbolises. Silence is God’s first language.

4)        Study Scripture: the Scriptures deserve study as they offer a healthy alternative to communism and capitalism. 

        

Desiree Snyman