A sermon on dishonest managers and cooking the books

Luke 16:1-13

Jesus also said to the disciples, “A certain rich man heard that his household manager was wasting his estate. ² He called the manager in and said to him, ‘What is this I hear about you? Give me a report of your administration because you can no longer serve as my manager.’³ “The household manager said to himself, Bah! What will I do now that my master is firing me as his manager? I’m not strong enough to dig [in the fields] and too proud to beg. ⁴  I know what I’ll do so that, when I am removed from my management position, people will welcome me into their houses: ⁵ “One by one, the manager sent for each person who owed his master money. He said to the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ ⁶ He said, ‘Nine hundred gallons of olive oil.’^[a^] The manager said to him, ‘Take your contract, sit down quickly, and write four hundred fifty gallons.’ ⁷ Then the manager said to another, ‘How much do you owe?’ He said, ‘One thousand bushels of wheat.’^[b^] He said, ‘Take your contract and write eight hundred.’⁸ “The master commended the dishonest manager because he acted cleverly. People who belong to this world are more clever in dealing with their peers than are people who belong to the light. ⁹ I tell you, use worldly wealth to make friends for yourselves so that when it’s gone, you will be welcomed into the eternal homes.

¹⁰ “Whoever is faithful with little is also faithful with much, and the one who is dishonest with little is also dishonest with much. ¹¹ If you haven’t been faithful with worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches? ¹² If you haven’t been faithful with someone else’s property, who will give you your own? ¹³ No household servant can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be loyal to the one and have contempt for the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”

Welcome to the Jesus’ famous parable of cooking the books for the kingdom!  If you’re hoping that I’m going to explain these words to you this morning, my friends, you have come to the wrong place!  I’m not sure what the in the world Jesus was going for when he commended the manager for acting cleverly or shrewdly.

Now, there’s a lot of ways to read this story and I have been puzzling over them for the last week.  But I keep coming back to the manager.  Fear not, I’m not pro-embezzlement as your pastor, you’ll be happy to know. But there is something about the character in this story that I kinda like.  

He’s kind of caught in the middle between the wealthy land owner and the people.  Think about it: we got the landowner boss who is ticked off because he has heard that his manager is acting dishonestly (mind you, the bible doesn’t clarify if this rumor is certain or not).  The executive, land-owner fires the middle manager.  But before the chips have a chance to fall where they may, the middle manager out is hustling.  He sees he’s not loved by his boss and he’ll be despised by his peasant neighbors for his role in the system.  And he dramatically decides that he is done. He is done with the Roman tenant farming system. He is done with being a cog in the wheel. He is done with playing ball in a game that eats peasants alive. He uses the tools that he has at his disposal.  Yeah, it’s true, they’re tools he used to exploit people, but he tries to do good with them.  He rushes to a few of the clients, forgives half of their debts and kinda like, rewrites the terms of their loans.  And when he rewrites those loans, I’m pretty sure that he doesn’t redline the contracts and run them past the landowner boss that just fired him first.  So do we applaud him for being a sort of biblical Robin Hood or critique him for not following the rules?  What do we do with this guy? 

Martin Thielman tells the story of a guru and his star disciple.  This particular disciple lived in a simple mud hut and wore only a loincloth.  The guru was so pleased with the disciple’s spiritual progress that he left him to live on his own.   The guy lived simply, begged for his food. Each week, he’d wash his loin cloth out and hang it out to dry.  One day, he came outside to find that it had had been shredded and eaten by rats.  He went out and begged the villagers and they gave him another loincloth.  But the rats ate that one too, so he got a cat.  The cat took care of the rats, but now when he begged for food, he had to beg for milk for his cat too. So he got a cow to feed his cat, but then he had to beg for grass to feed his cow. In order to feed his cow, the disciple decided to till and plant the ground around his hut.  But then with all the farming, he couldn’t find time for mindfulness and meditation so he hired servants to tend to the land so that he could maintain his life of contemplation.  Overseeing all these farm workers became a chore, so the disciple got married so that he would have a partner to help with the farm.  But his spouse wasn’t into the mud home and after some arguing, they decided to move into a fancier house.  But in order to maintain the house, the disciple had to grow more crops and hire more servants…and in time, this star disciple became the wealthiest man in town.

Years later, the disciple’s guru was traveling through and he decided to stop and visit his old student.  The guru was shocked at what he saw. You know, there’d  once been a simple mud home, there was now a palatial house and huge estate worked by all sorts of servants. “What is the meaning of this?” the guru asks the disciple.  “You won’t believe it, sir,” the disciple replied.  “But there was no other way I could keep my loincloth.”[1]

When Jesus says at the end of our parable that we can’t serve both God and wealth, he is naming the incredible power that money can wield in our lives.  And this is Regardless of if you have mountains of wealth or are mired in debt).  Jesus knew that money can become a god that we find security in, that we worship, that we trust in. (We even write the word “in God we trust” on our money.)

The call to Discipleship is all about clarifying: what is the god that rules your life?

I think one of the reasons that I like this middle-manager is that he takes a step back, looks at the system and says, “what happened!” and “what can I do?”   The good news, Jesus reminds his disciples and the motley crew of tax collecters, sinners and pharisees listening to this story, is that it is possible to do right by wealth and power that we have earned participating in a dishonest system.  If it’s is uncomfortable for you to hear about the manager’s questionable ethical practices in the bible this morning (I’m gonna admit, it is a little for me), remember that the point of a parable is to shock us into seeing things differently. 

So let it shock you this morning.

I’m not asking us to commit to living life with just a loincloth.  In the gospel of Luke, Jesus never says burn it all, give it all away and go live in the woods and eat nuts and berries forever. But Jesus does call us continually to evaluate the role that money plays in our lives.

While I don’t consider myself a wealthy person, I have lived enough years in Latin America to know that by the world’s standards, given the home I live in, the schools at my disposal, the healthcare I have, and so much more, I am a fabulously wealthy person.

In 1977, Ron Sider published the book “Rich Christians in an age of hunger.”  One of the main questions that he asks in the book is that when asking what we give (to charity, to the church, to wheverever) that we should not be asking “what do I give,” what do we give, but instead “what should we keep?” 

In my personal case, this means asking what do Omar and I need to live a decent life, follow through on our commitments to our children, follow through on some debt we have.

When we baptize little Soren into a life of Christian faith shortly, I will ask Jesse and Emily and Soren’s Godparents and you all a series of questions.  The questions have to do with promising to help nurture in Soren a life of faith that keep God and the neighbor at the center of how he lives:

Do you promise to nurture Soren so that he may learn to trust God, to share Jesus through words and actions, care for others and the world God made, and work for justice and peace.

I will not ask Soren’s parent’s, godparents and congregation, “do you promise to help Soren always have a life of financial security in his life in the world?”

Maybe what the manager does in the parable Jesus tells is a little nuts. Honestly, I’m still wrestling with it.  It’s crazy cook the books and hope that the boss doesn’t figure it out.  Isn’t it better to play the game, and have the palace and the estate and the servants instead of a loincloth and a mud hut?

But…let’s be honest: It’s crazy people in the most powerful nation on earth worship a God that was crucified as a poor peasant by the Roman state 2,000 years ago.  It is crazy to believe that we should forgive people just because we believe that the radical power of grace is transformative.  It is utterly crazy to commit to stand with powerless and vulnerable people in the world.  Why would we do that?!  It makes no sense. It is crazy not to put money and our financial security at the center of our lives. And moreover. It is crazy to support the church—who supports a church! Wouldn’t it make more sense to put our faith in our retirement accounts, not in an institution that teaches us that every single life has dignity and value in this global economy where it seems there’s never enough to go around?

Yes, the guy in our bible story today is subversive, but so loving your enemy.  So is admitting our failure and fault.  So is believing humanity is infused with the power of the Holy Spirit that works for change in the world.  It is ridiculous for 16 year old Greta Thunburg to stand up and address a UN Climate Action Summit. It is absurd for a group of First Nations people to speak out against Big Oil at standing rock. It is nuts for Shindler to make a list of Jews to save from the Holocaust. It is crazy to imagine that the power of Jesus Christ which is on the loose will transform the world.  It is crazy and subversive and we commit to it and believe in it.

It is crazy to believe that we can do right by wealth, that we can keep God and our neighbor at the center of all that we do, but we believe it. Because as disciples, that’s what we do.

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[1] Martin Thielen, Searching for Happiness: How Generosity, Faith, and Other Spiritual Habits Can Lead to a Full Live.