Faith and Wealth – sermon on September 18, 2016
Luke 16: 1-15 Jesus told this story to his disciples: “There was a certain rich man who had a manager handling his affairs. One day a report came that the manager was wasting his employer’s money. So the employer called him in and said, ‘What’s this I hear about you? Get your report in order, because you are going to be fired.’
“The manager thought to himself, ‘Now what? My boss has fired me. I don’t have the strength to dig ditches, and I’m too proud to beg. Ah, I know how to ensure that I’ll have plenty of friends who will give me a home when I am fired.’
“So he invited each person who owed money to his employer to come and discuss the situation. He asked the first one, ‘How much do you owe him?’ The man replied, ‘I owe him 800 gallons of olive oil.’ So the manager told him, ‘Take the bill and quickly change it to 400 gallons.’ ‘And how much do you owe my employer?’ he asked the next man. ‘I owe him 1,000 bushels of wheat,’ was the reply. ‘Here,’ the manager said, ‘take the bill and change it to 800 bushels.’
“The rich man had to admire the dishonest rascal for being so shrewd. And it is true that the children of this world are more shrewd in dealing with the world around them than are the children of the light. Here’s the lesson: Use your worldly resources to benefit others and make friends. Then, when your possessions are gone, they will welcome you to an eternal home.
“If you are faithful in little things, you will be faithful in large ones. But if you are dishonest in little things, you won’t be honest with greater responsibilities. And if you are untrustworthy about worldly wealth, who will trust you with the true riches of heaven? And if you are not faithful with other people’s things, why should you be trusted with things of your own?
“No one can serve two masters. For you will hate one and love the other; you will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and be enslaved to money.”
The Pharisees, who dearly loved their money, heard all this and scoffed at him. Then he said to them, “You like to appear righteous in public, but God knows your hearts. What this world honors is detestable in the sight of God.
Sermon: Faith and Wealth by Rev. Doreen Oughton
I am so excited about this morning’s scripture passage. It is truly challenging. The parable Jesus tells is confusing, as are the comments he makes after the parable. Among biblical scholars, there is very little agreement about what it all means. Now I know many of you are tired after a long few days of working the Harvest Fair, but I am going to ask you to stay alert and enter into the mystery of this passage with me, let yourself wonder what it means, let it speak to you. I invite you to turn to the page the passage is on, as we might want to compare translations, p. 909. I thought it might be helpful to give some context for the parable. The reading this morning tells us that Jesus was speaking to his disciples, but the Pharisees overhear. My guess is that Jesus intended for them to hear, knowing they were within earshot. Just prior to this passage Luke has Jesus telling stories in response to the grumbling of the Pharisees and religious scholars about the company Jesus keeps – with tax collectors and big-time sinners. Jesus tells parables about the lost – lamb and coin and son, and the rejoicing that happens in heaven when the lost are found and reconciled. And then Jesus tells this story to his disciples. I’m going to go through it bit by bit, and share some of my own questions and musings. I might pause here and there, and if you would like to say something, ask a question, feel free.
The rich man has a manager, and gets a report that this manager is wasting the rich man’s money. I wonder who made the report, and I wonder in what way the manager was “wasting” money. Was he overpaying merchants and workers? Was he buying things at full price instead of haggling? Was he replacing perfectly good things? Whatever it is, the rich man doesn’t like it, and tells the manager he will be fired. Now whenever I’ve left jobs there has always been lots of paperwork to do- work to be finished and files to be closed out. But I have never been fired for mismanagement or misbehavior. When that has happened, someone else has to pick up the unfinished work and close the files. The untrustworthy person is not given the opportunity to do what the manager in Jesus’ story does… cook the books. So I wonder why the rich man gives him the chance to do just that. I would guess that the manager has the only accounting of debts and so forth, that exists. I would also guess that the rich man is an absentee owner of the estate that is being managed. He probably has a nice house out in the country, and that is where he got his report. So now he has to head into the city to take back the books and find a new manager. He probably shouldn’t have tipped his hand to the manager, but maybe he didn’t intend to. You know how news travels.
So this manager knows his boss is coming and he is angry and intends to fire him. He starts thinking about what he will do and comes up with a plan. He doesn’t start taking things for himself – demanding payment of the debtors, stealing it and heading for the hills. No, he cuts their debt so that they will think well of him and maybe help him out when he gets fired. Jesus calls this shrewd, and even says the rich man had to admire the manager, referred to in this translation as that “dishonest rascal.” And then Jesus talks about how much more shrewd the worldly people are as opposed to the children of the light. And he seems to think this shrewdness is a good thing – that the children of the light would be better off if they could do likewise. I think the next line is meant to make a point about the value of shrewdness, but well.. there are so many questions about what he is saying. The translation read by the deacon says. “use your worldly resources to benefit others and make friends. Then, when your possessions are gone, they will welcome you to an eternal home.” But the parable has the manager using someone else’s resources to benefit others and make friends! Another translation says “use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.” That’s a little different. It doesn’t assign ownership to the worldly wealth – doesn’t say use your wealth. I think the translation that spoke to me most was the translation from the pew bible (read)... unrighteous mammon, unrighteous wealth) so that when it fails. When that unrighteous wealth fails, then you will be taken into the eternal home.
So I wonder, is Jesus saying that all worldly wealth is unrighteous? Will it all fail? Or is there something about the way wealth is acquired and used that determines whether it is righteous or unrighteous? … I noticed Luke’s pointed comment about the Pharisees who are listening, how they love their money. And I started to wonder if the dishonest person in the parable was not the manager but the rich man. How had he acquired his wealth? Were the things he considered wasteful things that made life a little better for others not so well off? Was it a living wage, or paying prices for goods that allowed the seller to make a reasonable profit? Would the rich man have preferred to keep more money for himself by cheating others? When you consider the responsive reading from Amos that is paired with this text, perhaps there is something there.
So what do you think? Does that make it better to know that the manager was cheating a dishonest man, a man who perhaps earned his wealth dishonorably, on the backs of others? Is there a Robin Hood thing going on here of robbing the rich to give to the poor? Is stealing or cheating any less dishonest or dishonorable depending on who you cheat? I don’t know. I’m uncomfortable saying so. The ways we can justify our own bad behavior because of what someone else is doing.. well, I don’t think that’s making the world a better place or anyone a better person.
Then Jesus gets into his teaching about being honest and faithful and trustworthy with a little or a lot, with worldly wealth and the riches of heaven, with other people’s things and with your own. In find this confusing because in the story he told the manager was not honest or faithful or trustworthy, at least not in the ways we understand those words. He did not do the job his boss wanted him to do, and cheated him so that he could make friends for himself. At least the way Jesus tells it here, the manager was not so much concerned with benefiting these debtors as he is with finding some security for himself. I also thought maybe the rich man was also untrustworthy with things that didn’t belong to him. Did he forget that we are all mere stewards of these resources – that everything is actually God’s? Did he think he was entitled to his wealth and could do with it whatever he wanted? Would Jesus say otherwise?
Isn’t this great! There are so many layers to this passage, so many things to think about when it comes to what it means to us. Also in there is the teaching that you cannot serve two masters – you cannot serve God and be enslaved to money. What does that mean, to be enslaved to money? How would we recognize if someone is enslaved to money? Workaholism? Pinching every penny? Always trying to get ahead? Doing anything for a buck – no matter how base or dishonest? Or is it as simple as always worrying about it – whether we have enough or will have enough? I can see how such worry would interfere with serving God and following Jesus.
I also thought about unrighteous mammon, and what would be considered unrighteous wealth today. Drug lords, slum lords, con artists. But again, I suspect Jesus meant for the Pharisees to overhear him – seemingly respectable people, righteous, even, in their own eyes and in the eyes of many Jewish people. Jesus even calls them out, saying they like to appear righteous, but God knows their hearts. So perhaps we need to think of similar people today – people who may be admired for their business savvy, their shrewdness, yet are enslaved to worldly wealth and unrighteous mammon. Maybe it’s those savvy corporations who move their operations to third world countries where they can pay slave wages to workers who work in deplorable conditions. Or perhaps it is the public companies who do layoffs and wage cuts and benefit cuts and ask more and more of their workers so that the stockholders receive bigger dividends. I thought of the scathing report out of Ferguson, Missouri of how police and court officials focused on generating revenue from municipal fines, especially targeting people of color. Ferguson issued expensive fines for minor offenses: for example, $531 for high grass and weeds in a yard, $777 for resisting arrest and $792 for failure to comply with a police officer. The fine amounts were above regional averages for many offenses, the report said. Unrighteous mammon, I would say.
But what is the message for us here today? We are not corporations setting up shop oversees. We are not fining people who are already oppressed. What did Jesus want the Pharisees to do about their love of money? What does he want us to do? I can’t say for sure, but I can tell you what resonates for me. I think it is hard to be faithful and wealthy. And I think Jesus was trying to tell us that worldly wealth will fail, will fail to shape us into the people we are meant to be, will fail to reconcile us with God and one another. We can’t count on it. We can’t take it with us, so to speak. We have to realize that relationships are more important. Love is more important. Caring for others and making sure they have enough is more important than securing worldly wealth for ourselves. This is where we find the keys to the kindom. This is more important than following the rules. Perhaps the shrewdness of the manager that Jesus lifts up is that he knew his security came from relationships, not from making off with the money himself. Perhaps he learned this lesson late as he’d had to take such drastic action. But he learned it, and so can we.
