Jesus, shrewd stewards, and Farm Aid 40

Now is a good time to befriend your farmers

A few weeks ago, back in September, Farm Aid celebrated 40 years of standing with family farmers right here in Minnesota. Willie Nelson, Neil Young, John Mellencamp, Dave Matthews, Margo Price, and so many others gathered to sing, to testify, to remind us of the same truth that Jesus preached: farmers are worthy of our collective attention. They are, as every human being is, not expendable, not a means to and end. And farmers are essential to our common life as a species.

Jen and I didn’t go (no goatsitters available, alas) but loads of our coolest farmer friends were there. The selfies they sent were amazing. Our organic farmer friends from Glencoe, Matthew Fitzgerald and his dad, Joe Fitzgerald, were on the actual jumbotron behind Mellencamp as he played his set.

My absolute coolest friend, Jesus, was at Farm Aid 40, too, in solidarity. I’m sure of it, because of the story he shares in Luke’s gospel, the one known as “The Parable of the Shrewd Manager.” Jesus loves farmers and fishers, and isn’t shy about advocating for them.

But first, in case you weren’t tuned in to the Farm Aid scene, here are the basics: For four decades, Farm Aid has told the truth about how industrial agriculture and corporate consolidation crush small farmers. The stories shared at Farm Aid indict the empire of agribusiness, which demands profit at any cost. The aid that this massive benefit concert generates is not for conventional industrial farms (monocultures of commodities like corn and soy that deplete and poison the soil, factories where livestock are treated as “units” on a conveyor belt) but for small family farmers who are trying against all odds to feed their neighbors in the face of mounting debt and loss of farmland. While your grocery bill is going up, the amount farmers are paid is bottoming out. Who’s profiting? Is there a more sustainable way to feed our communities? What change do we need?

To hear the answer and to find hope, folks came to Minneapolis to listen to farmers and to musicians. In the words of the organization, Farm Aid 40 united food producers, artists, advocates and fans to reinvigorate support for America’s family farmers as low prices, high input costs, decreasing global markets, corporate consolidation and climate disruption threaten their survival. This year, the message at the “Homegrown Village” outside the stadium was clear: another way is possible—community-supported farms, regenerative practices, local food systems that give life instead of taking and taking and taking it.

At Farm Aid 40, so many voices rang out: Farmers need us, and we need farmers.

That’s exactly what Jesus is telling us in Luke 16, which is (to my farmer’s ears) anything but a parable. I think it’s straightforward, anti-imperial, divinely inspired instruction in one strategy for low-key holy sabotage of oppressive economics. I think it’s timeless encouragement in world-building with God’s help, calling not just rockstars but every disciple of Jesus to defy the empire of industrial ag and to support those who actually nurture the land. Not just as charity, but as an act of faith.

In Luke 16, Jesus is being completely, this-worldly on the level. He is perfectly serious – and not metaphorical – in saying to us, “Be like this guy, this shrewd steward.” You’re going to need farmers as friends, soon, and those farmers need friends right now.

The so-called parable of the dishonest (a.k.a. shrewd) manager in Luke 16 has always made people scratch their heads. Jesus seems to be praising someone who cooked the books—marking down what debtors owed to his master in order to make friends before he was fired. Preachers usually rush to explain that Jesus isn’t telling us to cheat. Then they go on to say how this is a parable about the debt owed to an angry God by sinners, all forgiven by Manager Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. What?? Spiritualized interpretations of this text do ridiculous gymnastics to try to make sense of this as a metaphor about individual salvation and Heaven as our home after we die. Those interpretations still leave people confused and reaching.

If you spiritualize this story, it makes absolutely no sense. At best, the most common otherworldly interpretations of this story insist that its moral is “wealth is spiritually risky but generally okay, and so long as you’re occasionally charitable with some of it, you can still go to Heaven when you die.”

But what if Jesus is saying something more radical than we’re led to think?
(I mean, he almost always is.)

It’s not a parable, friends. It’s an account of the collapse of an empire built on extraction and debt, and it’s a map toward the life God hopes we’ll choose next…hopes we’ll choose again.

You’re still reading. Cool.
OK. Here how I see the story of the shrewd steward…

If you take Jesus at his word – if you read it at face value –
everything about the story of the Dishonest Manager falls into place.

Here’s the scene: A guy works for a wealthy landowner —he’s a middle-management-level agent of empire, really. The kind of guy who pays attention to which side of the bread is buttered and takes jobs accordingly. He has power only because he enforces the system of debt extraction that keeps tenant farmers poor. But when his job is about to be taken away, he decides to turn the system on its head. Instead of squeezing peasants for all they owe, he slashes the debts. He uses his last moments of authority to redistribute wealth, relieve burden, and restore community.

What do you notice about this story? I notice that the debts are not measured in coins, but in food. The debtors are farmers. They produce wheat and olive oil. They know how to grow food, and they are strong enough to dig. I notice that the manager, whose life has been spent at a desk, is worried that his body just isn’t up to the work of feeding its own needs.

And a key noticing for me is the Greek phrase that’s usually translated as “eternal habitations”, and usually interpreted to mean “our future homes in Heaven, where we’ll go when we die” – those words, αἰωνίους σκηνάς, can be translated just as faithfully as “age-old tents”. Like so many of Jesus’ stories, it beomes a story about this world and all the half-baked spiritualized goofiness just falls away. We’re left with something that makes perfect sense and is consonant with the Reign of God as Jesus reveals it: This debt-based system will fail you. God alone feeds you through Creation’s goodness. Bread for bodily strength. Wine to warm the heart. Oil for gladness. Make friends with farmers so that when Rome collapses, you’ll be welcomed back into these families’ age-old tents, into your people’s traditional homes. Back into the covenant your ancestors had with this land before the bankers, soldiers, and tax-collectors showed up.

This is the way to think and act, Jesus says, as exploitative empires flail and fall apart around you. This manager guy wakes up and thinks outside of Rome’s temporary box. He remembers what really keeps us alive: food and community. Jesus’s calls us to imitate him! What’s worth imitating is the steward’s courage to use what little leverage he has to feed the village and starve the empire. What this character remembers is what we must remember: our ancestors (who may well have come from a continent other than the one we live on now, and been mid-level agents of empire, themselves…but that’s another post…) lived in covenantal relationship with the land and with one another.

Extractive economies break those relationships and insist that there is no other way to live. It’s simply not true. When the empire collapses—and it will—Jesus agrees that we’ll all need friends strong enough to dig, to tend olive groves, to keep life going after the system falls apart. And they’ll need us.

Ledgers are not real wealth. Farmers know this. People who organize farmers know this. The folks of Farm Aid, the folks who gather at Good Courage, the folks who followed Jesus around the Galilean countryside, we all notice that the capitalist math just won’t math for much longer. Only what God gives us through the goodness of Creation can possibly be considered “the true riches”.

It’s clear in Luke 16, and it’s clear in this century’s cries for justice and dignity for farmers. My father-in-law’s songbook held this chanted slogan of the Farmers’ Union from back in the Great Depression, calling on midwestern farmers to strike against foreclosures:

Let’s call a Farmers’ Holiday,
a Holiday we’ll hold!
We’ll eat our wheat and ham and eggs
…and let them eat their gold.

I think it would make a fine refrain for John Mellencamp’s next Farm Aid anthem.

I think it’s the song the shrewd steward was singing to himself as he walked out the door on his last day at work.

Make friends with farmers so that when the empire’s economy of debt and extraction collapses you’ll be welcomed back into right relationship with what was always yours - community, tradition, soil.

If Jesus had been the closing act at Farm Aid, rather than a presence among the crowd, he’d have ended with the same mic drop as in Luke 16:
“You cannot serve God and wealth.”

The choice is stark. We can align the way we feed ourselves with empire and its endless extraction, or align with God and the community of Creation.

Hear the invitation, friends, in the songs and stories.
Hear the urgent, revolutionary exhortation from the Redeemer of the world.
Now is a pretty good time to make friends with your farmer.