Listen

S. Pentecost 20.26 Luke 18:9-17

‘God; be merciful to me, a sinner…’

The hedge fund CEO said, head in hands, slumped in the back pew of the Lutheran seminary chapel after the “Growing Churches 2025” conference (he’d underwritten) was breaking up. It was part of the 50 million dollars he’d just given to the seminary—a small sliver of his bonus for the year, and he was wondering if he’d done the right thing?

He’d thought giving money to a conservative Lutheran seminary would appease his conscience. He’d grown up LCMS Lutheran in the midwest, went to Lutheran grade schools, his dad a manager at a big agri-business company and devout Xn, mom a homemaker. But his dad had passed years before and he’d fallen away from the church and only recently started reading Luther and Kierkegaard again and attending the struggling LCMS church in Brooklyn because he was deep in despair and seriously thinking of killing himself.

He’d had a record breaking year, financially. His massive shorting of a big American automaker’s stock had put a few billion into his book and caused an already struggling corporation to plunge into bankruptcy, costing countless thousands of average Joe and Jane workers to lose the only decent paying jobs they’d ever have a hope of getting, plunged the struggling US economy further into recession, and triggered another government bailout that involved printing more money and causing inflation to spike even higher so that the purchasing power of ordinary people (who didn’t have millions to bet or burn) plummeted even further, making it harder for everyone to put food on the table and their kids through school.

So, yeah; a sinful man with much to feel sinful about!

But hardly anyone else saw him like that. All the media blamed the automaker’s managers for not chasing efficiency single-mindedly. But the hedge funder knew that without his massive shorting of the company, it would have been… fine. They actually made good cars and sold them at a fair price. He’d owned one himself, his first car out of college, and it brought back memories of a better time, back before he turned to derivatives trading and short-selling—a time when he used to actually try to do good for his clients and for the companies they invested in.

The short-bet was not so much greed on his part as pure pride (mingled with his ever growing despair) showing that he could make companies rise and fall just with a bet (that he always made with borrowed money, never his own!) so enormous was his fund’s reputation—too big to fail!

He thought the Lutheran seminary was different—that it was about forgiveness, mercy, worshiping Jesus as God and LORD, giving sinners some hope, making the world a little better place. But the conference had made him sick to his stomach, and sicker at heart. He thought he was a shark!? But this seminary president was a piece of work like he hardly ever saw on Wall Street. His fellow hedge funders were bad dudes who knew they were bad dudes—going to hell, and might as well enjoy the ride!, no illusions about themselves or what they were doing.

But this guy! Wow! All he cared about was money and building his quarter billion dollar endowment. He’d been a pastor once in Nebraska for like 5 minutes and couldn’t wait to get to the sem and into admin where he wheeled and dealt with no remorse and fewer scruples.

The whole conference was about badgering pastors and the laity to get out and hustle more people into the church by hook, crooks, and hard-sell marketing, to get more bodies in the pews and dollars in the church coffers. The hedge funder heard not a single word about Jesus, the whole time. Pope Leo X, Luther’s 16th century nemesis and scion of the Medici banking family, could’ve learned a thing or two about corruption from this guy, the hedge funder thought.

And when the sem prez called him out at the end, with his shark smile, as the hedge funder was sitting in the back, fulsomely praising his financial and management savvy and how spectacularly his business was doing and how generous he was to the church, his face flushed and he knew if he didn’t get out quick, he’d throw up all over the guy in front of him.

After losing his lunch in a wastebasket in the lobby, he staggered into the chapel and slumped in the pew.

The conference broke up. No one else came into the chapel, but the sem prez knew where he’d find the hedge funder. And there he was, slumped in the back pew still looking pretty pale and queasy. Seminary conferences have that effect on some people. The sem prez had seen it before.

“Thank God I’m not like you,” the sem prez said, standing over him, “bilking the American people, driving a Maserati. I pray morning and evening, Luther’s prayer. We do worship straight out of LSB in our chapel every day. And I make sure the good news that God loves and forgives everyone, everything gets out to all the world so everyone can feel good abut themselves! But cheer up, friend! Jesus loves you just the way you are, and your generosity to the seminary will not be forgotten…”

And the hedge funder, without looking up, slumped deeper into the kneeler, groaned, and muttered, “It’s a vintage Ferrari F40, pinhead. And that what I’ve done won’t be forgotten is exactly what’s making me sick, right now;” and then, shuddering, the hedge funder exclaims louder, anguished, “God!… be merciful to me, a sinner.”

Context; so important for getting these little stories of Jesus, dontcha know?

After saying: “I preach justification every week, because every week they forget,” Luther would add, “Every week I forget, because the weight of sin makes me sick, sick to death of myself, yet such despair is very close to grace…”

The good news is not that Jesus loves you just the way you are—so you should feel good about your lousy sinful self. NO! The good news is you can feel good about Jesus, the LORD who took on all your sins, damned and died of them on the cross, so that sharing his dying and rising, by faith alone in his Gospel and sacraments, you have the promise of rising free of your lousy old sinful self, one fine day…

The good news is that just like Jesus beat the crap out of Jacob at the Jabbok last week, so he beats us—up and down—sharing his dying with us daily, so this lousy old sinner we are so sick and tired of will get drowned, engulfed, and die everyday, flooded by Baptism’s cleansing waters, fed with Jesus’ body and blood, torn down and rebuilt daily into Christ’s Image.

Luther was happily resigned to be damned to hell if that’ll get rid of the sinner he is and hates so much! Such despair of oneself—the perfect and holy hatred David lauds in Ps. 139, always begins by… looking in the mirror.

The hedge funder, rather than the sem prez, went home… justified. Likewise despairing, believing, the Peace, surpassing all understanding, will guard your heart too, in Christ Jesus. Amen.