Sermon 9/22/2019 “Shady managers”
Preacher: Jo J. Belser
Location: Church of the Resurrection at Immanuel Chapel, Virginia Theological Seminary
Text: Luke 16:1-13
Day: 15Pentecost, Proper 20, Year C
Our scripture lessons are arranged in a three-year cycle. This means that we have heard this gospel lesson six times in the past 18 years. This week I read the sermons from those six Sundays preached at Church of the Resurrection; all but one was on today’s gospel lesson. We preachers are drawn to this lesson because no one really knows what this lesson means.
Our challenge is that today’s lesson includes a rich owner commending an employee who had squandered his employer’s property. A harsh judge might call this theft, and yet the owner commended his agent for his actions!
After wrestling with this lesson, I decided to retell the parable in three different ways to suggest Jesus’ original meaning and what this lesson might mean for us today.
Ready?
Having just been severely criticized by scribes and Pharisees for partying with tax collectors and other notorious sinners, Jesus told his critics THIS story:
Version 1. There was a High Priest responsible for ensuring the people—especially rabbis, the teachers of God’s Law—all lived according to that Law. And the High Priest had heard of a rabbi who was breaking the Law by spending time with sinners instead of confining his teaching to those in Temple. So, the High Priest sent his agents to the rabbi. They fired the rabbi on the spot, prohibiting him from teaching God’s Law in the Temple.
The rabbi knew that, without a place in the Temple and having no other vocation, he would need a way to live. He decided to form relationships directly with sinners so they would let him still be their rabbi. He knew no one could ever live totally according to God’s Law. So, he met with each person and asked what portion of God’s Law they were not meeting. He got them to repent and amend their ways. What he discovered in the process was that some who administer God’s Law judge people too harshly and demand payments that can never be met. In short, God’s Law had become Man’s Interpretation of God’s Law. So, the rabbi showed the people how to be faithful to God.
At the accounting demanded by the High Priest, the rabbi thus saved his job by demonstrating he truly understood and lived God’s Law, which is a way for God’s people to be in right relationship with each other and with God. The High Priest was so impressed he commended the rabbi.
This version of Jesus’ parable focuses on what Jesus’ original intention might have been for telling the story: to teach his disciples about our need to bring God’s message outside the Temple—outside the Church—if we want outsiders to become insiders. We need another look at the story, though, to help us understand what this manager Jesus told about had “squandered.”
Version 2. A very rich man was owed so much by his debtors he hired an employee just to keep track of what people owed him. And, as was the custom of his time, the employee got paid by being allowed to add and keep an additional percentage of what was owed the rich man.
This manager was shrewd. He collected his fee multiple times before demanding payment of the debt. He knew his boss was very rich and banked on him not knowing if all the debts owed him weren’t repaid right away.
This was a great arrangement—for the manager—until the rich man learned what was going on. He fired his employee and demanded an accounting.
Being fired energized the man. He had two assets remaining, but only for a short time. The first asset was that no one yet knew he had been fired. The second was he still had the account books. So, he began to demand and collect payments of debts owed to his former boss by greatly reducing the amount they owed. Perhaps (although we do not know this), the fired manager reduced the payments by the amount of his fees).
In any case, when the former employee turned over the account books, he also gave the rich man the payments he had collected. This must have stunned the owner, as he probably had expected he would have to write all those debts off. So, he commended his former manager for being so proactive and shrewd, the very traits he had been hired for in the first place.
I’m finally starting to understand this parable, at least on the first two levels. Let’s try one more version to help figure out how else Jesus’ parable might apply to us today.
Version 3. The “Creator of All That Is” (the one RICHEST in LIFE) noticed that many to whom she had given life were squandering the life they had each been given. The people were acting as if they had neither a Creator nor a purpose for living, other than to defraud others to gain more possessions for themselves. They were acting as if their Creator wasn’t going to ask them for an accounting of their lives.
Late in life, when their biological systems began to remind them of their mortality, some began to think about their lives in new ways. Finding themselves rich in possessions and poor in relationships, they began to spend time together thanking the Creator for life and to form relationships focused on the Creator.
Soon, they began to use the possessions they had accumulated to tell people about the Creator and to help people who had been defrauded by those still intent on accumulating wealth. When the Creator saw this, he forgave them their earlier lives, warning them and us that we each must choose whether to squander our God-given life on ourselves—on accumulation of possessions—or to share what we have with others.
Jesus asks in his parable, “If you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own?” Since our very lives belong to our Creator, another way to ask Jesus’ question is this, “If we squander this life our Creator has given us, will we be given another life of our own?”
