A sermon by the Rev. Kathleen S. Russell, Assistant Professor of Contextual Theology for Ministry, given on September 27, 2007, in Christ Chapel

Jeremiah 8:18-9:1; Psalm 113; Luke 16:1-13

Over the summer I came across a new series on one of the cable stations. It’s about the world of advertising in New York City, set in the late 1950s. Appropriately it’s called Mad Men, a term that the advertising executives coined for themselves. It’s a play on Madison Avenue, that piece of Manhattan real estate where the big ad agencies have their offices.

Of course it also says something about their world.

The firm in the series markets cigarettes and Richard M. Nixon, two of the more toxic commodities of that era. It’s a world of sexism, racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism and perhaps most of all, cynicism.

The landscape of the office space says a lot: Around the perimeter are the windowed offices with classy wood paneling and chic furniture. (By the way, that style of furniture is now called “mid-century”—I always thought it was just mom’s.) Here sit the Execs, the ad men, and I use the word men simply to be accurate. Their job is to find the ways to sell the goods to the people who can buy them.

These rather driven people inhabit a world of wheeling dealing, self-serving lies, manipulation, and cut-throat competition; a world where people are just another means to an end and the end always justifies the means, no matter how mean.

The offices of the execs surround a middle space — the office pool, an open area with no closed doors or even dividers. This is where the secretaries — who are women — and the men who are the lesser beings — the gophers and the wannabes — sit. The secretary’s job is to take shorthand, type and file, get coffee, look pretty and keep the right secrets from the right people — wives and competitors mostly.

The first time I saw the show I excitedly called my 20-something daughter and told her she just had to watch it. Not because it was exotic or captured a world that has passed away (more’s the pity that it hasn’t), but because it was a world that I myself had caught a glimpse of. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I don’t think I would have appreciated what it really means to live in a world like that.

Way back in 1973 I temped for several weeks at one of the 3 network television stations in Chicago. (Yes there were only three networks then.) I worked as a secretary for two sales reps — representatives in the local sales division. These guys were the second string: the national sales reps sold time to Chrysler and Cadillac; my guys sold time to used car dealers. The national reps sold time for Super Bowl ads while the locals sold time to boom box emporiums and late night spots for kung fu movie ads.

The angle on buying and selling was different from the world of Mad Men but the landscape was the same: private, windowed offices for the salesmen while our secretary desks formed a phalanx along the outside wall — easy access for “get me so and so.” If you‘ve seen The Devil Wears Prada you get the picture. The moral landscape was the same too: manipulation, wheeling-dealing and backstabbing. It was a world in which relationships were built on usefulness — Tit for tat, you scratch my back / I’ll scratch yours.

It was a very bleak landscape and I got out as soon as I could.

It’s a landscape that the manager in today’s gospel would fit into quite nicely.

Although at first it appears that he’s not quite clear on the concept — that he’s supposed to be making money for the boss! — he turns out to be the master of the art of the deal.

Here, he says to those who owe his master, “Take your bill and cut it in half.” The debtor cuts his payment schedule while the manager gets somebody who owes him a favor. SWEET! At first the master’s response feels a little odd — he commends the guy for being shrewd instead of being upset over the lost profit margin. I can only conclude that the owner is either thinking — “Well, something’s better than nothing” or “Finally, the guy’s taking some initiative.”

And Jesus (!), Jesus seems to second the approval. The children of light could learn something from this guy, he tells his disciples. “I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.” Huh? What ever happened to storing up treasures in heaven?

Frankly, Jesus confuses me here — he seems to be both praising and damning with faint praise. Is he being ironic? I don’t know but I don’t think that Jesus is opting for discipleship of the least common denominator.

 Ultimately Jesus gets to his point: you can’t serve two masters, God and wealth.

But getting there takes us into some funny territory — a territory in which we are asked to struggle with figuring out the relationship of the world we find ourselves in to the drama of salvation, that relationship of the sacred and profane that Diana Butler Bass talked about the other day. Implicit in Jesus’ discourse is — I believe — the demand of faith that we take the world we inhabit very seriously and that we take very seriously how we inhabit that world.

Jesus says if you are faithful in a little then you are faithful in much…

He is — to turn a phrase — talking about habitus — that disposition of the soul toward to God… and if to God, then to the world and life and all that is given into our care.

Tuesday we heard Dr. Bass talk about the interconnections of practice, wisdom and tradition. You can’t have one without the other because if we disconnect them, if we privilege one over the other — then we fall off into various heresies and kinds of spiritual stagnation. They cannot be separated she told us — and I agree. Taken together they form the soup for discipleship. Taken together they express and form the habitus of the life of being a Christian. But we can’t stop with the generality — we need to get specific.

And the specific I would like to lift up today as essential to living out this habitus is the practice of self-reflection and self-awareness which always, I think, begins and ends with humility. Humility understood as rightly seeing ourselves in the drama of salvation.

There’s an old twilight zone episode in which a young couple wakes up after a night of partying and discovers themselves in a strange town. The world looks familiar — even though the buildings seem to be made of cardboard and the food is plastic to the taste. Of course they want to figure it out and make their escape. But the train they think is their way out just goes in circles and they keep wandering around, like rats in a maze. At the end of the episode, as I remember it, the couple suddenly feels a chill and looking up to see what cloud has gotten in the way of the sun, realize that they are living in the shadow of a very large child.

The camera pulls back and you realize they’ve become the figurines in a child’s train set. Over night they have been kidnapped by a giant alien who has brought them home to be moveable parts in his daughter’s play world. And that odd, oversized child is just looking down on her train set, amused and entertained but strangely disconnected from those little people who are just stock characters in a drama designed for her amusement.

And if the train runs off the tracks, oh my, how sad — or — how exciting! And if those little people become more frantic as they try to escape, how silly!

There is no balm in this Gilead.

Jeremiah understood bleak landscapes and crazy drama!

War, displacement, power used to move people around, the loss of place and home and loved ones, the threat of being transported to a strange land and held prisoner, people used as pawns to serve another’s ends. Is there no balm in Gilead?

Lately, I feel more and more like that oversized child looking down on her train set, disconnected yet casting a shadow on the lives of others in ways I can barely name and don’t want to face.

I am convinced that being the “children of light” (the spiritually enlightened according the notes in the Oxford Bible) means something other than taking comfort in believing that God has put us in the sunniest spot in the meadow or that we are supposed to chase the sunbeams of whatever makes us feel good or righteous, all the while avoiding the edges of gloominess and pushing back the shadows.

To be the children of the light is as much — if not more — about knowing where and how we cast our shadow as it is with the necessary task of coming to terms with the shadows within which we live.

I am stuck with this image of casting shadows when I think about Mad Men.

Elizabeth Johnson a feminist theologian writes in She Who Is, turns a good phrase when she writes that women have always had to — and I quote — always had to “resist the official construction of their lives.” The characters in Mad Men certainly have officially constructed lives: The women are wives or secretaries — and any one who goes beyond those roles risks the “b” word. The African Americans hover at the edge, delivering donuts and working the mail room. There’s one fellow who — if I’m reading the clues right — is a closeted gay man who is working very hard to play the role of a heterosexual. And even the execs — the men in charge — are living out illusions of success and control. There’s a hollowness to their existence that on some deep level tells them that all is not the way it should be.

After all, the classical sense of being mad is not to be crazy or mentally ill exactly, It’s about things being out of order— and we being at once a part of it and yet somehow disconnected.

If women have had to resist the official construction of their lives, by religion, by culture, by the very incarnate contours of their bodies, then so too have all the people whose lives are shadowed by others with the power to define them. Think of Ken Burns forgetting to include Hispanic Americans in his massive documentary about World War II, defining them as marginal. Or how during that war, African Americans had to resist being defined as lacking the courage or the smarts to fight? Or the Japanese Americans resisting being told their loyalty couldn’t be trusted.

That was then — this is now:

Think of Iraqis being told their pain and suffering serves a greater purpose or people who are gay and lesbian being told they are “inherently disordered” or, from the other end of the spectrum, that they need to wait and be patient. The list goes on.

The temptation is to push these shadows away. Blame the Bush administration. Define myself as one of the good guys on the sexuality issue. That way I keep myself in the sunny spots and I don’t have to face being that odd girl looking at a drama playing out in ways that matter oh so deeply to the people caught up in it. And I can pretend that I cast no shadow, which is so much easier than facing my participation in sin. And so much easier that joining my voice with Jeremiah’s lament: “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved. For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me.”

To do this, seriously, — to join our lament with Jeremiah in solidarity (yes, an old fashioned word but a good one) with those who suffer is to arrive at the point of resistance. I don’t know what that resistance looks like.

But I do know that even if lamenting as Jeremiah laments is only a starting place, it is the place to which we are called.

May the God who takes up the weak out of the dust and lifts up the poor from the ashes give us grace and strength and steadfastness to face the shadows we cast and the light to know the way through. Amen.