Luke 16.

1-9

I was somewhat amused this week by a reported utterance from a politician. It came in his suggestion that the cost of the proposed high speed railway line could be better spent on improved roads, transport systems and wait for it schools. I was shocked. Surely the relevant spin-doctor had told the speaker that schools and hospitals was the last decades clich. Since, at that time, no parliamentarian worth their salt would forget to utter schools and hospitals as the only spending worth making. Now of course the phrase is hard working families. Yet in all honesty this is but one waffle-ette amongst many in the economic sphere. After all, the news is awash at the moment with the bedroom tax and undeserving poor; quantitative easing and national deficit, interest rates and the euro bail outs. So we may daily be exposed to politics but we are also informed, challenged and conflicted by economics. And whist Christ could have had other issues in mind when he gave his parable; its complicated even perplexing nature has much to say in these economically difficult times. Indeed, it asks questions. Questions not so much about how we deal with our own resources rather how we deal with our communitys wealth. Specifically, it queries how we deploy our nations abundances with intelligence and compassion, shrewdness and insight, wisdom and empathy.

More to the point, as we puzzle out what Jesus genuinely meant we reject the sound bite, the quick fix and the scapegoats. Indeed, through his challenge we are reminded of deeper, more penetrating if inconvenient economic truths. Now it has to be said that politicians regularly speak about complex problems with mistaken belief that we can only grasp the simplest of solutions. In this they are usually aided and abetted by the media and if truth be told by our own prejudices. Yet we as Christians cannot be as unsophisticated in our approach to the wealth of our nation and its usage. For as the Spill the Beans material that we use to prepare for our services suggests: How quick society is today to moralise on the actions of those who work the system gaining the most out of the benefits that are available from the State, casting those actions in a wholly bad light. One cannot help wonder whether Jesus would smile at the ingenuity and shrewdness of their actions and would chuckle at the moaning and groaning of tax payers who fund those benefits but who do not show nearly the same nous in their approach to their own lives and dealings. So how do we show some common dog coupled with Christian ethics in the decisions we should be seeking from our political masters? Well we could do no better than reading Eugene Peterson. Since he translates verse 9 of our lesson this way I want you to be smart in the same waybut for what is rightusing every adversity to stimulate you to

creative survival, to concentrate your attention on the bare essentials, so youll live, really live, and not complacently getting by on good behaviour. Now in that quote we heard a very important word and it is creative. For, if we are genuinely to reflect the ability of Christ to see the hub of a problem; if we are ever to display his nice balancing of the issues and if we are truly to demand his inspired answers to even the most intractable difficulties facing our globe, nation and individual then we need to be creative. Creative to use limited resources wisely, creative to be compassionate to those really in need and creative to making our society rise above blanket cuts and remunerations. Now that all sounds like a hard mental struggle. And it is. Yet be encouraged by this story of the sheer creative effort of a master If you have ever been to an Ihzak Perlman concert, you know that getting on stage is no small achievement for him. He was stricken with polio as a child, and so he has braces on both legs and walks with the aid of two crutches. He walks painfully until he reaches his chair. Then he sits down, slowly, puts his crutches on the floor, undoes the clasps on his legs, tucks one foot back and extends the other foot forward. Then he bends down and picks up the violin, nods to the conductor and proceeds to play. By now, the audience is used to this ritual. They wait until he is ready to play. But this time, something went wrong. Just as he finished the first few bars, one of the strings on his violin broke. You could hear it snap it went off like

gunfire across the room. There was no mistaking what he had to do. A member of the audience takes up the tale. We figured that he would have to get up, limp his way off stage to either find another violin or else find another string for this one. But he didnt. Instead, he waited a moment, closed his eyes and then signalled the conductor to begin again. The orchestra began, and he played from where he had left off. And he played with such passion and such power and such purity as they had never heard before. Of course, anyone knows that it is impossible to play a symphonic work with just three strings. I know that, and you know that, but that night Yitzhak Perlman refused to know that. You could see him modulating, changing, re-composing the piece in his head. At one point, it sounded like he was de-tuning the strings to get new sounds from them that they had never made before. When he finished, there was an awesome silence in the room. Then there was an extraordinary outburst of applause from every corner of the auditorium. We were all on our feet, screaming and cheering, doing everything we could to show how much we appreciated what he had done. He smiled, wiped the sweat from this brow, raised his bow to quiet us, and then he said not boastfully, but in a reverent tone You know, sometimes it is the artists task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left. Let us then reject the easy rhetoric and the simple broad-brush and the enticing all encompassing. Instead let us through Christ be artists with all that we have

together. For then we will learn that what we have left even in these straitened times will suffice suffice for genuine justice and compassion suffice to show a life retrieving wisdom and suffice to make our commonwealth no less than a thing of beauty.

Amen

Offering

HYMN.