Preached on September 18, 2022, at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on Amos 8:4-7, Luke 16:1-13.
There is a new term sweeping the internet and Twitter and such: quiet quitting. According to techtarget.com, “Quiet quitting doesn’t mean an employee has left their job, but rather has limited their tasks to those strictly within their job description to avoid working longer hours. They want to do the bare minimum to get the job done and set clear boundaries to improve work-life balance. These employees are still fulfilling their job duties but not subscribing to ‘work is life’ culture to guide their career and stand out to their superiors. They stick to what is in their job description and when they go home, they leave work behind them and focus on non-work duties and activities.” The term and the phenomenon are subjects of some controversy. On the one hand, employers want their employees to be engaged and committed to the success of the company. On the other hand, if they want employees to do more, they should pay them more, right? I mean, doing the work you get paid to do should not be considered a form of “quitting.” The Onion, a satire news site, had an article with a bunch of alleged quotes about quiet quitting, including, “Not me. I take pride in being the most exploitable laborer in my office.”
In other situations, this phenomenon has been used as a labor action, termed “working to rule.” Instead of going on strike, a union might decide to do things exactly the way the contract is written, with no flexibility. The flip side of quiet quitting is “quiet firing,” where an employee is given unglamorous work or management otherwise makes their job increasingly unpleasant and unrewarding so that the employee quits.
Maybe these terms are new, but the actions are not. For years—probably millennia—people have sometimes insisted on doing no more than what they are paid to do, and employers have responded by rewarding those who are willing to be exploited. There was a time, not too long ago, when employment was considered a lifelong relationship. For example, my father spent his entire engineering career working for Westinghouse. In the steel mills of western Pennsylvania, generations would spend their whole careers working in the same plant. That’s not the world we live in now. People change jobs regularly, either for different opportunities or because their employer makes a change. I mean, Westinghouse doesn’t really exist anymore, and most of those steel mills shut down decades ago. So instead of being a relationship, it is a contractual arrangement: employer pays $x for employee to do Y.
This is often called the “market economy.” In the market economy, every good or service has a value, usually a dollar value. People exchange money for goods and services, and get essentially what they pay for: no more, no less. Sure, we all like to get more than we pay for, or get paid more than something is worth, but in the long run, those marginal differences wash out.
The problem is, the only relationships people have in a market economy are those that can be monetized. I don’t have a real relationship with the people who work at, say, Walmart or Amazon. I have a financial relationship with Amazon because I subscribe to Prime, but if I discover that I’m not receiving sufficient value for my money, I’ll cancel it. No big deal.
But we are relational beings. When God created us in their image, they created us to love one another, to see God in each other. That requires us to have actual relationships, not just exchange money. The next level up is what’s sometimes called the “gift economy.” In a gift economy, I give you something with no expectation of financial compensation, but we end up with a tiny bit of a relationship because of a sense of obligation. Multiply that by a hundred or a thousand small gifts that we give each other, and we create a network of mutual obligation. There is no way to actually account for what anyone is “owed” by anyone else. There is just a sense that we have all contributed to the community and are all obligated to help each other.
This, I think, is the difference between a contract and a covenant. In a contractual arrangement, the two parties agree to exchange certain things of agreed-upon value, with clauses to account for uncertainties in the future. For example, when I worked for Motorola, we had a contract with Baldor to provide a custom component in exchange for some money and some other concessions. Then Motorola’s business changed, and they decided not to provide that custom component. No problem; the contract had a clause that governed what would happen in that situation. Unfortunately, Baldor did not find the terms to be sufficient. Baldor thought they were entering a relationship, a covenant, where both parties would gain and would be obligated to supporting each other. Motorola simply entered a business contract and honored its terms.
We do not have a contract with God. The nation of Israel did not have a contract with God. They had a covenant. The terms of the covenant were like the terms of a marriage. A covenant is not a 50/50 agreement, but 100/100. Both sides give their full selves to the relationship, which then creates something new that is bigger because of that mutual obligation. The essential narrative of the Old Testament is that first Israel and later Judah failed to live up to the expectations of the covenant. It wasn’t that they violated some contract term. It was that God expected to be in a relationship with Israel, and the Israelites kept turning away. God gave them chance after chance to turn back, to acknowledge that the relationship was important, to make an effort to live up to God’s expectations, but they failed again and again. As Amos said, they turned their backs to the poor and prioritized the market economy over their relationship with God. Finally, God sent Israel, and then Judah, into exile. The gifts of God to his people were not enough to bind them to him, so the relationship was broken.
That might have been the end, but God didn’t give up altogether. God kept trying. Throughout the centuries after the exile, the Israelites tried to rebuild their relationship with God, but in the end, it’s impossible for humans to ever heal what has been broken. But with God, all things are possible.
We live in a market economy because we are modern Americans. We live in a gift economy because we are members of a community, whether that community is Rolla or Missouri S&T or the Lions Club or whatever. We give ourselves to our chosen community and form a network of mutual obligations with them. But Jesus came to teach us about something better: the grace economy.
How do we earn God’s grace? Trick question. We cannot earn God’s grace. It is freely given to us by God through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. It is a gift of infinite value that God chose to give us, each one of us individually and all of us collectively. God’s grace cannot be bought and sold. It is both precious beyond words and abundant beyond our imagining.
The grace economy is like the gift economy, except that the source is from God. God has showered grace upon us, an overflowing love, and all he asks is that we share that grace with others who need it, which is everyone, and who God believes is worthy of it, which again is everyone. The grace showered upon us is not ours to keep but to give. We ask God to forgive our debts, as we forgive our debtors. We treat people who make mistakes the way we would want God to deal with us when we make mistakes. We are forgiven and in return we forgive others. We are loved and in return we love others.
What makes the grace economy so different is that grace is not a finite resource. In the market economy, if I give you a dollar in exchange for, say, a book that you give me, I will have less money, you will have more money, I will have one more book, you will have one fewer book. It’s a zero-sum situation. In the gift economy, our network of mutual obligations is limited by the time, energy, and other resources within the community. We see that sometimes in small organizations where there’s only so much the organization can accomplish because the people who give of themselves only have so much to give.
But in the grace economy, when we share God’s love with others, we receive more love in return. God’s love is an infinite resource, and God’s realm is an open-sum situation. There will always be more love to give, more forgiveness to give, more hope to give, because our source is God.
In the Gospel of John, in Jesus’s farewell discourse after instituting communion, Jesus said, “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. … Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.” What is this fruit that the branches bear? It is the grace of God, the faith, hope, and love of God that we share with others. If we rely only on our own resources and our own selves, we are living in the market economy or the gift economy and are governed by scarcity. If instead we rely on God, if we abide in Christ as He abides in us, we can live in the grace economy and can be governed by the abundance of God’s eternal realm.
Now, I am an engineer, and therefore, I’m a pragmatist. I recognize that we all have limited time, energy, and resources. I know that we all live in a market economy and rely on it for our food, shelter, transportation, and so much more. The shrewd, dishonest manager also lived in a market economy. He was about to be thrown out of his job, and decided to make use of someone else’s resources to provide for himself. He used his master’s wealth to build relationships with the master’s creditors. But how long do you think those relationships would last? Take the man whose debt was a hundred jugs of olive oil, but the manager made it fifty. Well, how much is fifty jugs of olive oil worth? I’m guessing the debtor would know exactly how much debt was forgiven, and would give the manager exactly that much support. And then what? Well, if he didn’t have a ready source of income, he would still end up a beggar.
We too need to have a source of income to live in this world, but we have an infinite supply of grace that will sustain us in the world to come. But the promise of the Gospel is that we can live in God’s realm now, not later. This world is being transformed through Christ. It’s an already-but-not-yet fulfilled promise. God’s realm hasn’t come into full fruition, but is already available to us. We have available to us an infinite source of grace, of love, of faith, and of hope. We can tap into that wellspring of love if we are willing to be conduits for it, sharing it with all of God’s people to bring them into God’s eternal realm now, growing the grace economy until it transforms this broken world, one person, one relationship, and one community at a time. Amen.
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