In the Spring of my seventh grade year, I came down with a resilient but otherwise unremarkable case of bronchitis. One night I was having trouble breathing, and my mother took me into her bathroom and turned on the shower as hot as it would go. Standing in that foggy bathroom, inhaling big lungfuls of steam, I got a crazy idea: I would stop breathing.

After a moment I waved my arms in a distress signal. My mother remained
calm at first. She swatted my back a few times, the way mothers do. When her face grew worried. I took a breath.

“ What happened?” Mom asked. “Are you all right? Were you choking?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “My lungs just sort of locked up.” I waited a few beats for
dramatic effect and then stopped breathing again. This time I added a hitching
movement in my chest. No sound; just hitching.

Keeping her displays of terror to a minimum, my mother drove me to the emer-
gency room, where I practiced my form in the waiting area. I decided to make the
attacks a manageable forty-five to sixty seconds in length (although on occasion
I went for as long as a minute and a half) and the hitching became more of a spasmodic jerking. The entire room was captivated by my performance.

Once in a hospital bed, I displayed my shocking symptoms for an assortment of
doctors and nurses: First my chest would hitch once, like a hiccup, and my breathing would cease, when I would widen my eyes and roll them back and forth, as if alarmed. I’d randomly contract my chest muscles and cause my limbs to twitch and shake.

Within a couple of hours, I’d been subjected to blood draws, vital-sign monitors, and a metal probe that was shoved down my mildly anesthetized throat. One
doctor finally suggested that I might be making the whole thing up.

Outraged, my mother transferred me to another, better, hospital across town.
To my chagrin, I was placed on the pediatric ward. I would have preferred
to be in with the dying patients. But I had faith that if I continued to display
my symptoms in a convincing and consistent manner, the doctors would have
no choice but to bump my status to “critical.” I really was quite sick. In addition
to my bronchitis, I’d developed a high fever and a propensity for vomiting that
I used to my advantage.

I was king of my own small kingdom.
When a clown came into my room, under the misconception that balloon ani-
mals would cheer a twelve-year-old, I simply conjured an attack, and he was
out the door in an instant. If I wanted my mother to stay by my side, I main-
tained a worrying regimen of five or six attacks an hour. If I wanted her to leave
me alone, I scaled back the spasms and said, “I’m feeling sleepy.” It worked every time.

One day a doctor came in to prepare me for an MRI. I’d never had one before,
and I asked what they would be looking for. “Mostly brain tumors,” he casually
informed me.

I was positively delighted. I told every visitor that the doctors suspected brain
cancer. Several days later, with the doctors still befuddled, my mother decided to do some research of her own. She concluded with near certainty that I was having an allergic reaction to the cough medicine I’d taken. When she told me this, I affected fascination and relief, though I secretly wished for a more dramatic cause than cough syrup.

After about a week in the hospital, my fever and bronchitis had cleared up, and
I gradually reduced my attacks until they “vanished” altogether. The doctors were
apprehensive about letting me go, but my mother insisted, and I was allowed to return home. To this day, my mother warns me to stay away from Robitussin.

A shister boy and his gullible mother. As is the case with today’s parable, and as it is so often in life, the swindler and the swindlee often have a very complicated relationship.

In this morning’s controversial parable Jesus praises a swindler for his cleverness and then draws for us no moral lessons about graft. Some in the 2nd Century simply found the story to be too disturbing to take seriously and denied that it was from Jesus. “There must have been some mistake.” Others, like Emperor Julian, said, “It's Jesus' all right, and it shows that far from being a God, Jesus is merely a man, and not a very worthy man at that.”

A goal of my preaching over the past 27 years has been to present Jesus for what he really was. He was many things but he was never a Puritanical moralist.

“Once upon a time . . .” Jesus said, there was a rich man who had a steward, a kind of business manager, and charges were brought to the man that his steward was wasting his goods. The problem here sounds like a simple personnel issue: malfeasance in the workplace. The steward will need to be reprimanded and let go. It seems that simple.

Complications set in when the steward is allowed a few extra days to audit the books and submit a financial statement. Between Friday and Monday, when the books were due, the steward goes around to all the rich man’s debtors and cooks the books. Sounds just like Enron. He marks down a percentage of all the debt owed by each, and thereby ingratiates himself with all the people to whom he would be looking for help in his impending unemployment.

“How much do you owe my master?” he asks one.
“ A hundred measures of oil.”
“ Take your bill and quickly write down fifty.”
“ And how much do you owe?” he asks another.
“ A hundred measures of wheat,” comes the answer.
“ Hurry, take your bill and write eighty.”

It’s hard to tell whether the steward was cutting out his markup, eliminating the usury charges, or just stealing from his master by lowering the debt. But I think it’s reasonable, in the light of the economy of this parable, to view the steward in the most pejorative way.

By the end of the day he has lined his pockets and the pockets of his master’s debtors at the rich man’s expense. And his master congratulated him on being so resourceful ????

The charming rascal is a favorite literary type. There is something in all of us that wants to see a gifted swindler get away with mayhem once in a while. Hollywood has made a mint on such characters – think of Paul Newman and Robert Redford in THE STING, or more recently, Leonardo DeCaprio in CATCH ME IF YOU CAN.

You remember DeCaprio playing the real life crook, Frank W. Abegnale, who "flew" for Pan Am, practiced law for five years in Louisiana as an assistant state attorney, masqueraded as a pediatrician in Georgia, was a very popular sociology professor at BYU, and did not graduate from high school. He was perhaps the most successful con man in history, and ended up spending five years in federal penitentiary. He was released when he agreed to advise the government on other frauds and forgers.

Abegnale begins his 1981 autobiography with the following story from his short career as a Pan Am pilot.

“Good morning Captain,” the cashier said. The markings on my uniform identified me as a first officer, a co-pilot, but the French are like that. They tend to overestimate everything . . . I signed the hotel bill she slid across the counter, started to turn away and then wheeled back, taking a payroll check from the inside pocket of my jacket.
“ Oh, can you cash this for me? Your Paris nightlife nearly wiped me out and it’ll be another week before I’m home.” I smiled ruefully. She picked up the [forged] Pan American World Airways check and looked at the amount.
“ I’m sure we can, Captain, but I must get the manager to approve an amount this large. She stepped into an officer behind her and was back in a moment displaying a pleased smile. She handed me the check to endorse.
“ I assume you want American dollars,” and without waiting for a reply she counted out $786.73. I pushed back two $50 bills.
“ I would appreciate it if you would take care of the necessary people, since I was so careless,” I said, smiling.
She beamed. “Of course Captain, you are so kind. . . please come back.”

It just goes to show that no con man, in or out of the Bible, can work all alone.

Now, in Jesus’ parable, when the landowner discovers what has happened he finds himself in a terrific bind. He can jail the dishonest steward and reverse the damage done to himself – but the problem is there is already a celebration going on down on the Plaza. His tenant farmers are all down at Louis’ drinking pints of ale and hoisting them all to him to toast his generosity, and the steward’s kindness. He can tell them it’s a mistake and pay for it big time with their everlasting resentment, or he can act as if it was his idea in the first place.

This is just what he decides to do. He shows unusual mercy, amazing grace and then. . . commends the steward for his cleverness. Unbelievable, or perhaps not.

Perhaps the steward knew all along what would happen if his master were backed into such a corner. Perhaps he knew that his master, when push came to shove, would be gracious, was gracious down to his toes. Perhaps that is one of the main points of the parable.

And then Luke reports an intriguing saying of our Lord he picked up somewhere, probably in a list of collected sayings of Jesus that we know were making the rounds in his day: “No servant can serve two masters, you cannot serve God and mammon.”

Mammon – what a great biblical word. It’s money, but it’s more than money. It’s the mystique of money, the essence of wealth. It’s Las Vegas – it’s Club Med. It’s a month of golf at Myrtle Beach. It’s the hubris of a company that names an automobile, Infinity. It’s Halliburton getting all the contracts in Iraq without having to bid on them, and nobody complaining until this month. It’s the smell of a magazine like Vanity Fair and the fact that you can’t tell the articles from the ads, which is the whole point.

It’s what Osama bin Laden hates so much because having come from a rich Saudi family, he’s had it, and now, deep in his cave he doesn’t have it anymore, so he both wants it and despises it at the same time.

Mammon is whatever shapes your dreams. It’s whatever you expect to save you.

A favorite English professor of mine in college – Phil, was brought up dripping with it. In college he grew a beard and discovered the writing of Henry David Thoreau and became a convert to the anti-mammon movement going around in the 1960s.

In 1840 Henry David Thoreau had gone to live in a tiny cabin overlooking Walden Pond in Concord, MA. He gave up comfortable digs and took up a poor man's life confounding his friends and family who could not understand; his defense was a book he simply called, Walden

In it he says, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately; to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Living deliberately is, of course, all about choosing God and not mammon (which is always busy choosing us).

My friend went on, of course, to do a graduate degree in English, writing his doctor’s thesis on Walden. After college I’d talk to him once in a while. I remember speaking with him in 1980. He’d been a full professor by then for 10 years and his father was still asking him when he was going to get “a real job.”

In fact, that year his dad asked him if he could put him up in the newest sure fire money-making enterprise. “What is that?” my friend asked his dad. “Storage units,” he said. “Acres and acres of storage units.” Phil heard that and realized immediately it was the complete antithesis of all he had chosen for himself.

See, the thing about mammon isn’t just the “stuff “that it comprises. It’s having to store it. Mammon isn’t just having a dozen vintage Ford Mustangs – it’s also where you put them. It’s endless shelving, and gymnasium-sized walk in closets, and 12 car garages, and storing the video tapes that photograph and itemize all those things for insurance purposes.

My mammon amounts to books. I didn’t realize the extent of the weight of them until this week when I was packing them up. I’ve decided to part with about half. They’re killing me.

Listen again to how Jesus puts this – “you cannot serve two masters, God and mammon.” It’s not that mammon is bad. Jesus has been consistently misunderstood on this point. He did not condemn wealth in itself, or ambition. He told one wealthy young man to sell all he had and give it to the poor, but that was a particular prescription, not a universal model.

What he is saying is that wealth, or any form of mammon, doesn’t work if we are looking to it for our ultimate fulfillment. It won’t work in that case and people who have tried to make it work know that best.

Frank Abegnale himself said that all the stuff he collected with the millions he gathered in his elaborate frauds just led to elaborate worrying. Says he’s happy to be free of it all.

Whatever you’re banking on as the fulfillment of all your dreams -- be it an antique automobile, your reputation, even your children – it’s still the same. If it’s not God it will collapse on itself.

One of the basic insights in the wisdom of Jesus is that if you try to squeeze something infinite out of something finite you will not only be unsuccessful and frustrated, you will very likely squeeze the life out of that thing you love, as well.

The final truth of the whole mammon business is that you and I only deeply enjoy what we don’t ultimately need.

The first lesson of parenthood is that if children are expected to provide us with peace, happiness and contentment the load will be too heavy for that relationship to bear.

Conversely, if your parents wagered all their happiness on your success in life, then you yourself have been carrying way too big a burden all these years.

Maybe that’s why some people are so much better at being grandparents than they ever were at being parents. By the time their grandkids come along they have given up on those ego needs they had once thrust on their poor children.

The radical word of the Christian faith that is as true today as it was 2000 years ago is that in order to experience “salvation” we must say “no” to all the other gods that clamor for our love and say “yes” to the God who continues to love us into being.

Anne Dilenschneider once put it this way for me as I prepare to leave this exceptional church and beautiful Ashland:

In an interview after her daughter died, novelist Isabel Allende said, ‘I finally understood what life is about: it is about losing everything. Losing the baby who becomes a child. The child who becomes an adult, like the trees lose their leaves. So every morning we must celebrate what we have.’

Yet we are continually reminded of what we do not have. That’s the genius of advertising and the mentality of consumerism. It keeps us wanting. It feeds on discontent. It attracts and distracts us and keeps us off-balance. It says that we can ground ourselves with things.

Celebration, on the other hand, makes us stop and pay attention. Celebration reminds us of what we have – life and love. And when we see what we really have, when we see how we have been blessed over and over again, we begin to trust the Giver’s intentions. Only then can we allow our lives to become grounded and rooted in God’s promises.

God appeared to Abraham and Sarah and told them to leave everything behind and travel to a place that God would show them. In much the same way, the book of Ezra recounts how God ‘stirs up the spirit’ of some of those living in exile. They say farewell to the only land and the only life they have known to return to Judah and rebuild the temple. Once again, God says, ‘Go forth! I will bless you and you in turn, shall be a blessing.’

Because Sarah and Abraham trusted the blessing, they were able to do the unthinkable: they let go and stepped into the future. The same was true of many who were living in exile.

Once we see that God’s promises are trustworthy, we, too, can take the next step into more abundant life. We don’t have to cling to the things that formerly defined us – house, furnishings, job. We know these are not the things that satisfy our deepest hunger; these are not the things that have sustained us over the long haul. In fact, we know that often these are the very things that have kept us from the great love that calls us and pushes us beyond ourselves into life.”

And who is this God who calls for ultimate allegiance? Simply that purposeful deity from which we came at our birth and to whom we go at the moment of our death.

Which puts me in mind of just one more element in the parable that often gets passed over. The element of time. “Quickly,” says the steward. “Hurry,” write the new amount.

This may merely be a way of underscoring the steward’s malfeasance. But it may also be Jesus’ way of reminding us that our lives, like his own, are incredibly short. We have a way of putting off our rendezvous with real happiness. So, once again, hear Jesus’ story –

Once upon a time a rich man had a steward, and word came to him that the steward was wasting his goods. So, the word went out that there would be an accounting. The question is, fellow steward, what by your wit, considering the hour, will you do?

Amen.

I owe a debt to preacher, Barbara Brown Taylor for the approach I take with the text. Her words and tone eclipse mine repeatedly.