Discipleship of Defection Under Climate Catastrophe
15th Sunday after Pentecost (9/21/25): (Lk 16:1-14)
First things first. Bill Johnson, Baptist servant leader, friend, and loving spouse of our board member Carter Echols (right), passed away on Sept 13. His short time of hospice brought a gracious end to their brave decade-long struggle with Bill’s cancer. Please hold their family in God’s Light (you can see the journey on Bill’s Caring Bridge page. Carter writes:
Thank you on behalf of all of Bill’s family for the continued outpourings of love. We will hold a celebration of Bill’s life tomorrow, Friday, September 19 at 11 am at Memorial Baptist Church 3455 N. Glebe Road, Arlington, VA 22207. The service will be live streamed here, as well as recorded for future viewing. Donations in Bill’s name may be made to the Center for Common Ground; cards can be sent to 1010 S. Rolfe St, Arlington, VA 22204.
May brother Bill rest in the arms of the Everlasting. Please keep Carter in your prayers.
The two parables of Luke 16 represent the heart of the Third Gospel’s overall Sabbath Economics argument. I point you to HARP chapters 10 and 11 respectively. For this week’s story of the “Defect-ive Manager,” see also my detailed treatment here. For today’s blog, I’m lining out some brief thoughts for a sermon I’m giving at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church Ojai this Sunday, in which I draw an analogy between the gospel character and our own modest but meaningful efforts to defect from the Carbon Economy in light of the ultimatum of climate catastrophe.
I offer two framing lenses that undergird this exercise:
i) The first is from late 19th century German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies, who like others of his era (e.g. Weber and Marx) was trying to understand the profound cultural shifts underway due to the relentless spread of the “brave new world” of industrial capitalism.
Tonnies saw that the modern market economy, and the state apparatii that were developing to facilitate it, was steadily unraveling the fabric of older, more traditional ways of economic exchange that were fundamentally relational. In 1887 he articulated a basic distinction between what he called the integrating forces of traditional kinship, ethnicity, religion, and locality—which he called Gemeinschaft (Community)—and the disintegrating forces of Gesellschaft (Capitalist Society). He defined Gemeinschaft as everything that holds human relationships together despite all that would pull them apart. Gesellschaft, in turn, represents everything that would pull human relationships apart despite all that holds them together. This struggle between the two economic cosmologies and cultures of Capital and Community and serves as a concise, contemporary analogy for Jesus’ distinction between the economies of God and Mammon narrated in Luke 16:1-13.
ii) The second framing lies in a correlation between two “champagne glass” graphs showing disparity between rich and poor today. The first (at right) is the well-known Oxfam graphic showing how the more affluent 20% of us control and consume more
than 80% of the world’s wealth. By any moral measure, this exposes our unjust and unsustainable system of economic apartheid. But more recently this same cruel “curve” has been used to depict a parallel disparity in responsibility for carbon emissions (right).
It shows that the most affluent 10% of us generate half of global emissions; conversely, the poorest half are responsible for only 10%. From an environmental perspective, then, poverty isn’t the problem, affluenza is.
These intersecting disparities inspire me to read Jesus’ story of the “defect-ive” manager through the lens of efforts today by relatively privileged people to break with the Carbon Economy as part of the wider struggle against the Mammon system.
Luke 16:1-13 is both parable and real world object lesson about how to survive the cruel world of inequality. It takes place at the heart of human struggle between the economies of God and Mammon, as Jesus makes clear in his unequivocal concluding pronouncement (Lk 16:11-13). The story is about a middle-manager (Gk oikonomon) who is ensconced, however precariously, in the Mammon oikonomia under the severe rule of a plutocratic master.
It speaks directly to contradictions and challenges faced by educated and employed middle class folk like me, as we endeavor to change an economic system that materially benefits us even as it alienates us and perpetuates inhumane disparities.
At the outset of this realistic parable, this bureaucrat is accused of “mismanaging” the baron’s resources (16:1). Yet only here (and in Lk 15:13, the Prodigal Son parable) in the N.T. is the verb diaskorpizō translated moralistically as “squandering”; everywhere else it is rendered “scattering,”as in the sower’s freecasting of seed (Mt 25:26)—or the Magnificat’s vision of a God who would scatter the concentrations power controlled by the rich (Lk 1:51)!
The rest of the tale is about the manager’s determination to defect from the Master’s system by intensifying his strategy of wealth redistribution, through an unauthorized, wildcat discount on debt to those beholden to the rich man in hopes that they will welcome him back into the older economy of generalized reciprocity (16:3-7). The plutocrat acknowledges that this defector has acted in his self-interest; it
is, after all, the ethos of the rich. But Jesus immediately re-frames this as the art of building Community through monkeywrenching “unjust Mammon” (16:8-9). The rich man’s economy will ultimately fail, he insists, and those who resisted it will be “received into eternal tents”—an allusion to the older economic ways of wilderness Israel.
The moral of the story for “children of light” is that redistributing wealth is always in most people’s self interest. Here hard-pressed peasants get a measure of relief, and the defector animates communal solidarity so he’ll have a place to land when he’s kicked out of the Great Household. His jubilary gesture thus helps rebuild the very social relations that the Master routinely plunders.Though these actions make but a dent in the overall toxic system, they are not meaningless. And short of radical system transformation, that’s the most that can be said of any of our practices.
Even after all this time
The Sun never says to the Earth,
“You owe me.”
Look what happens
With a love like that,
It lights the whole sky.” ― Hafiz
(Above image found here.)
The great 14th-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic Hafiz left us perhaps the most succinct and poignant characterization of the economy of grace reflected in Creation. It could not contrast more starkly with our Carbon Economy of extraction and profiteering. The sun offers its nurturing energy indiscriminately—as Jesus put it, the Creator allows “the sun to rise on the evil and the good” (Mt 5:45)—and we who receive it incur no debt. Under capitalism, however, we have abandoned this economic cosmology of gift and equity, and are now deeply captive to a toxic cosmology that continues to intensify:
- indebtedness (economic and ecological);
- depletion (of resources on the extractive side and ozone on the consumptive side);
- and the resulting parallel disparities noted above.
Still, like the improvisational manager, there are meaningful ways that we who are, like him, simultaneously privileged in and captive to the Carbon system, can resist it even as we reimagine economics. And under climate catastrophe, it is imperative that we take such steps, even when they are costly.
This 15th Sunday after Pentecost comes halfway through the ecumenical Season of Creation, and on the Fall Equinox to boot. But it is also “Sun Day,” a recently curated global day of action promoting the power of clean energy. Thousands of events throughout the globe will showcase solar installations, electric homes and vehicles running on clean power, to help strengthen and accelerate the ongoing clean energy revolution. Solar power embraces the divine economy articulated by Hafiz, and by Jesus. To become synergistic again with what Creation provides is not utopian, but common sense “self-interest,” while also disentangling in a small but meaningful way from the Carbon Mammon system.
This Sunday at St. Andrew’s we’ll be celebrating its installation of solar panels, a project that was birthed during last year’s Season of Creation discernment sessions. With a significant capital outlay that will in the long term be more economical, this parish is rebuilding Community with Creation’s economy of grace. But it will do the same with local neighbors as well as a “community energy hub,” where they will be able to access
power at the church during power outages and crises. (Image right found here.)
This experiment in a “discipleship of defection” will lead to other steps and commitments. As Jesus put it in this Sunday’s gospel, “those who are faithful in little things can become faithful in greater matters” (Lk 16:10). Paraphrasing the struggle between Capital or Community, Wendell Berry reminds us that our choices matter: “If we do not serve what coheres and endures, we serve what disintegrates and destroys.”
Note: These blogs try to popularize and summarize my more detailed study of Luke’s texts in HARP. Let me know if this is helpful to you (chedmyers@bcm-net.org). We hope you will buy and engage the book—and we need your partnership in getting word about it into “seminaries, sanctuaries and streets.” In the publishing industry now, corporate profits take precedence over promoting books. So it is up to authors and their readers to spread the word about volumes that matter. None of us are professional vendors, but together we can build capacity to heal Affluenza and resist Plutocracy. Thanks, Ched
