A Sermon by Jim Roberts
April 27, 2008
Sixth Sunday of Easter
INTRODUCTION TO THE GOSPEL LESSON
This lesson from Luke’s gospel contains one of the more difficult parables to understand. The text itself attests to that in that it provides at least four interpretations beginning with verse 9 and concluding with verse 13. That doesn’t include the interpretation in the second half of verse 8, which is the most likely original interpretation rendered by Jesus himself.
See if you can identify those interpretations and, most importantly, listen for God’s Word as we read Luke 16: 1-13.
16 Then Jesus said to the disciples, “There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. 2 So he summoned him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.’
3 Then the manager said to himself, ‘What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. 4 I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’ 5 So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ 6 He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’ 7 Then he asked another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘A hundred containers of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill and make it eighty.’ 8 And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. 9 And 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.
10“Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. 11 If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? 12 And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? 13 No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray:
Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Three contractors are touring the White House the same day, one from New York, another from Missouri, and a third from Florida. At the end of the tour, the guide asked them if they would like to bid on a project at the White House.
“Of course,” they replied in unison.
“We need one of the rear fences redone. Why don’t the three of you each look at it and give me a bid?”
The contactor from Florida got out his tape measure and pencil and, after examining the project, said he could do it for $900. “That’s $400 for materials, $400 for my crew, and $100 profit for me.”
The contractor from Missouri took the tape measure, pulled out a pad and pencil and came up with a $700 bid. “That’s $300 in materials, $300 for my crew, and $100 profit for me.”
Without hesitation, the New York contractor said, “I’ll do the job for $2,700.”
“$2,700!” exclaimed the guide. “You hardly even looked at the fence. How did you come up with that figure?”
“It’s easy. $1,000 for me, $1,000 for you, and we hire the guy from Missouri to do the work.”
Jesus said, “I wish the children of light were as shrewd as the children of this age.”
The New York contractor isn’t that different from the dishonest manager described by Jesus in this parable, except the dishonest manager has been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He’s in trouble and now he’s in the survival mode.
Survival is big on television nowadays. Whether fictionally lost on some remote island, or placed there to compete for a million dollars against other ordinary people—people scrambling for survival draws attention.
We also see it in the highly publicized trials that have taken place in recent years. People will say anything, do anything, tell any lie necessary to get out of trouble or avoid going to jail. No matter what you might have thought about the Martha Stewart trial, or the Robert Blake murder trial, or the Michael Jackson child abuse trial, what we’ve witnessed is an example of people struggling for survival with total commitment.
We see that same human instinct in today’s Gospel lesson. The rich man in the story has a scoundrel for a manager. When the crook is asked for an accounting of his mismanagement, he does some really fast thinking. He falls back on his primary skill of deception and decides the best thing to do is to swindle his boss one last time. He uses the only resource available to him—the wealth owed his boss by his debtors. With it he makes a series of special deals with those who owe his boss large sums. They aren’t his deals to make, and each one reduces the boss’s wealth even further. Yet, by cutting the deals, the scoundrel secures his own future. He bilks his employer, but in the process endears himself to the debtors and makes certain that they’ll take him in when the boss throws him out.
The real surprise is when the master, his ripped-off employer, commends the dishonest manager for his shrewd action. I’m sure he wasn’t pleased to have been further swindled out of his profits, but he was impressed, no, he was fascinated with how shrewd, how clever and committed, this desperate man was to survival.
Jesus said, “I wish the children of light were as shrewd as the children of this age.”
Is Jesus holding up this type of behavior as a model for Christians to emulate? Well, of course not. What he’s saying is that the followers of Christ have a lot to learn from the secular world about things like commitment, doing whatever it takes. Dishonest people will do anything to survive, to make a buck, to improve their lot in life. We honest folks are restrained in our behavior by law, by decency, by honor and integrity. Not so for con artists.
They’re totally committed to taking somebody for all they have, to save their own lives, especially at the expense of some poor sap who has integrity.
If you’ve seen the movie Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, you recall the hero of the film is a dapper, smooth-talking con man named Ulysses Everett McGill, played by George Clooney. Everett escapes from a chain gang and brings along two fellow prisoners who are chained to him, Pete Hogwallop and Delmar O’Donnell, with the promise of sharing a buried treasure from a previous heist if they come along with him. In truth, this is
just a lie he tells them to get them to come along so he can escape prison to get back to his wife and their seven daughters before she marries another man.
The movie is loosely based on Homer’s Odyssey, but Everett is no Ulysses. He’s a con artist from start to finish,
but he endears himself to us with his fast-talking and fast-thinking when survival is his only option. Now, most of us wouldn’t dare take up his habits, but doesn’t Everett have something to teach us about single-minded commitment to what we believe in.
That’s what Jesus wants us to see in this cheating manager—not his dishonesty and lack of concern for the other person, but his sense of urgency, his radical commitment to what he values most. Jesus’ criticism of the ones he calls “the children of light,” his disciples, is that we tend to play it safe, to act prudently. We like to stay within the church budget. We don’t like to spend what we don’t have, or commit ourselves unless we know we have the resources to succeed.
His criticism is that the children of light—and don’t be looking at your saintly neighbor over there, he’s talking about you and me—we don’t tend to be shrewd and cunning. We tend to be careful, cautious, deliberate, and conscientious.
You’re probably thinking, “Well, ye-ah!” These are all good traits, aren’t they? They’re the kinds of things the scriptures teach us. What did Jesus tell would-be disciples? “Count the cost.”
Yet, if this is all there is to our way of thinking and acting as Christians, then an important aspect of faith is missing—a sense of total commitment:
As much as the dishonest manager loved himself, Jesus tells us earlier in Luke: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself” (10: 27). That’s loving God and the other person with everything you have. To do that requires total commitment.
This parable teaches the church something new, something unreasonable. Like the embezzling manager who drops everything, even his love of money, and scrambles to save his skin; like a criminal who will say anything to get out of trouble; sometimes the church needs to have a sense of abandonment.
It’s a paradox that we should have such an attitude of abandonment and at the same time, be godly, honest, and prudent people. But that’s the nature of the Gospel. God loves us all, though we don’t deserve God’s grace. We lose our lives when we cling to them; we gain our lives when we learn to give them away. To be honest and cautious and prudent on the one hand; to be shrewd and cunning and quick-thinking and risk-taking on the other—these don’t seem to go together, and that’s the paradox of the Gospel.
In the constitutional ordination questions of the Presbyterian Church—the questions elders, deacons, and ministers affirm when they’re ordained and take office—there’s one question that sets forth this commitment succinctly: “Will you seek to serve the people with energy, intelligence, imagination, and love?” That’s one loaded question, if you take it seriously. Perhaps we should ask it of everyone who professes their faith in Christ: “Will you seek to serve Christ and his church with energy, intelligence, imagination, and love?” What it’s getting at is this:
“Look, Jack Welch got up every morning of his career focusing all of his energy, imagination, intelligence, and passion for the bottom line of General Electric; Donald Trump gets up every morning focusing his energy, imagination, intelligence, and passion on building his financial empire. How dare the people of God do any less for the things of God?
Sometimes I don’t think we even believe in God—not like we believe in everything else. At best we don’t take God seriously. Yet, we expect God to take us seriously!
Will you, as a Christian, a disciple of Jesus Christ, get up every morning focusing all of your energy, imagination, intelligence, and passion on the ways of peace, the paths of justice, acts of compassion, the building up of the body of Christ and the hope of the gospel? Is that any less important than whatever it is you focus your energy, imagination, intelligence, and passion on?
The problem is that we don’t hold anyone accountable for being a Christian. We’re not expecting anything of each other? We come to church when we feel like it. We give what’s left over from our budget to God, instead of the first-fruits God expects of us.
In order for us to be who God created us to be, we must have the same sense of urgency and commitment to living out our Christian faith in every facet of our lives—that’s what God expects of us, and that’s what we should expect of one another. That’s what we should do!
Candler School of Theology homiletics professor Tom Long tells of preaching in a church where each Sunday a member of the congregation would speak for a few minutes about the experience of God in his or her life. That Sunday a young woman spoke.
She told the congregation that she had grown up and been baptized in this church. Then she looked around and pointed her finger in the direction of the baptismal font and said, “In fact, I was baptized right over there. I don’t remember it; I was just a baby, but my father used to love to tell me about the day I was baptized. He would tell me with delight about the baptismal dress I wore, about all the relatives who came to the service, about the hymns sung, about the sermon, and he would always end this story by exclaiming, ‘Oh honey, the Holy Spirit was in the church that day!’”
“But as a child restless in worship, I would wonder, ‘Where is the Holy Spirit in this church?’” Now she moved her finger away from the font and began to point to various places in the sanctuary. “Is the Holy Spirit in the rafters? In the organ pipes? In the stained glass windows?”
Then her voice softened. “As many of you know, I lost both of my parents in the same week last winter. In the midst of that terrible week, I was driving home from the hospital, having visited my parents, knowing that I may never see them alive again, and I stopped by the church, just to think and to pray. Sarah Graham was in the church kitchen, getting ready for a family night supper, and she saw me sitting all by myself in one of the back pews. She knew what was happening in my life, knew about my parents, and she took off her apron and came and sat beside me, holding my hand and praying with me. It was then that I knew where the Holy Spirit is in this church.”
Now, Sarah Graham could have kept her apron on and kept on cooking, and she would still, no doubt, have been a church woman of faithfulness and obedience. But she had the discernment to sense the urgency of the moment, to know that the meal being prepared in the kitchen paled in importance before the needs of a grieving young woman sobbing in the sanctuary. When Sarah Graham took off her apron, she showed herself not just to be a Christian, but a shrewd Christian, a Christian of “energy, imagination, intelligence, and love.
Jesus said, “I wish the children of light were as shrewd as the children of this age.”
May it be so for me and for you.