Love Instead of Conflict, Faith Instead of Fear
Many of you know I commute from Little Rock to Conway. All that time in the car lets me indulge one of my favorite pastimes: listening to FM 89.1, NPR. After all, as an Episcopalian, being fluent in “NPRese” and ready with a witty reference to the interviews and stories of the day is not unlike a Baptist’s familiarity with the Bible. So I like to think of my commute as time well spent. Listening to NPR is professional development.
One of my favorite NPR shows was taken off the air several years ago. Recently—partly out of nostalgia and partly because I couldn’t find a good book on Audible—I started listening again in podcast form.
Now, despite its NPR pedigree, the show probably kills more brain cells than it cultivates wisdom. At least that’s how the self-deprecating hosts of Car Talk describe themselves. For the uninitiated, it’s a call-in show about cars, car repair, and just about anything else connected to life on four wheels. Click and Clack, the “Tappet Brothers,” are MIT grads with thick Boston accents and a gift for making people laugh until they cry. They sound like grease monkeys at first, but soon you hear brilliance, quick wit, and even a dash of philosophy.
Typical callers are folks like Bob from Boise or Sally from San Francisco, describing a mysterious squeak under the driver’s seat that appears only when turning left downhill. After every local mechanic has failed, Click and Clack diagnose it in seconds, usually with an off-the-wall solution. And when callers occasionally stray into questions about life and relationships, their advice is just as sharp.
Most of us assume the system works only one way—that the rules are fixed and options limited. We’ve been trained to think of cars as mysterious machines we can’t possibly understand. When something goes wrong, we take the car to a mechanic. The mechanic either offers to fix it—for a hefty sum—or says it’s beyond repair and sends us off to the showroom. Surrounded by professionals with secret car knowledge, it’s easy to believe those are our only choices.
But that’s a false dichotomy. More often than not, there’s a third option—or even a fourth or fifth. Maybe it’s getting a second opinion, asking a car-savvy neighbor, or watching a few DIY videos on YouTube.
The recurring lesson of Car Talk is this: if the usual system isn’t working for you, step outside it—or at least come at it from another angle. Refuse to play by the expected rules. And that’s exactly the theme we hear in today’s gospel from Luke.
We just heard a strange story about a property manager who, upon learning he’s about to be fired, quickly strikes deals with his boss’s debtors, telling them to reduce what they owe. His aim is simple: secure friends who will welcome him when he’s out of a job. In an unexpected twist, his boss praises him—not for his honesty, but for his shrewdness. The manager both protects himself and, in the process, makes his employer look generous.
By the rules of the world he lived in, the disgraced employee should end up humiliated and on the street. This one refused that script. Questionable though his character may be, he got creative and found another way.
Scholars have tried to clean him up, suggesting perhaps he was simply waiving his own commission rather than defrauding his master. But whether he was dishonest or not isn’t the point. The point is that God values creativity and resourcefulness. God calls us to look past the rigid categories of a world that only knows winners and losers, rich and poor, clean and unclean, virtuous and disgraced, running and broken.
And that point is made very clearly in the story of Jesus’ life and death. His message was always about walking a different path than the one the world prescribes. He refused to play by society’s rules—dining with sinners, keeping company with the sick, befriending the poor, and challenging the authority of worldly powers. For such defiance, the system allowed only one outcome: death. And everyone knew it.
His followers expected him to raise an army, to overthrow Rome, to win freedom by force—because that was the only script they could imagine. But like the property manager in today’s gospel, Jesus refused that script. In rising from the dead—a possibility no one imagined—he revealed a different kind of freedom: love instead of conflict, faith instead of fear.
Believe it or not, you and I are part of a powerful system right now called “the Church.” Those of you in my Anglican Way class know what I mean. Last week we looked at the rift between Protestants and Catholics during the English Reformation of the sixteenth century—a conflict in which much blood was spilled. One side insisted on loyalty to Rome; the other demanded revolution against its abuses. For both, the only solution was the eradication of the other—or so everyone believed.
Then Elizabeth I introduced a different vision: the *via media*, a middle way. There would be a Book of Common Prayer that carried both Protestant and Catholic sensibilities. And regardless of your private leanings, you would come to the altar and kneel side by side with your countrymen.
It was a shrewd political move, but one with deep theological grounding. Elizabeth found a third way—one that placed the altar at the center. If people disagreed, they would do so with Jesus between them, trusting transformation could take place. The Episcopal Church we know today is the fruit of Elizabeth’s third way.
Wouldn’t it be something if there were a show on NPR called Church Talk? Listeners could call in with the “funny noises” their congregations are making. Maybe Lucy from Little Rock or Fred from Fort Smith would say, “We’ve come through a hard season, but things don’t feel the same—attendance is sluggish, old programs lack traction, tempers run a little hot. What do we do?”
Click and Clack, the famed church strategists, might chuckle and recall a caller from their other show, Car Talk. A man, frustrated with his broken air conditioner, explained all he had done—recharged the freon, replaced the compressor—and still nothing worked. Exasperated, he asked, “What would you do?” And the brothers replied, “Roll down the windows.”
There is always another option, one beyond the dictates of the system. Sometimes the answer isn’t to restore what once was but to open the windows. Breathe in fresh air. Trust God’s Spirit to refresh us. Be creative. Be resourceful. Show compassion. Live by faith.
As followers of Christ—the one who broke the world’s rules and opened a new way—we are called to be that community. To show the world a third option. Love instead of conflict. Faith instead of fear. That is still the message the world longs to hear. That is the gospel. That is good news, indeed.