sermonboy.com

Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Luke 16
Jesus told his disciples: “There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions. 2 So he called him in and asked him, ‘What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your management, because you cannot be manager any longer.’
3 “The manager said to himself, ‘What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job. I’m not strong enough to dig, and I’m ashamed to beg— 4 I know what I’ll do so that, when I lose my job here, people will welcome me into their houses.’
5 “So he called in each one of his master’s debtors. He asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’
6 “‘Nine hundred gallons[a] of olive oil,’ he replied.
“The manager told him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it four hundred and fifty.’
7 “Then he asked the second, ‘And how much do you owe?’
“‘A thousand bushels[b] of wheat,’ he replied.
“He told him, ‘Take your bill and make it eight hundred.’
8 “The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly.


Why is Jesus always talking about money?

Well, I suppose, it’s something we can all relate to: too much or too little, we all think about money. And Jesus tends to stick to topics that his audience can understand: farming, fishing, finance. And of course, money defines our relationship with many of the people around us, from the kid who shovels the drive to the bank that was foolish enough to give us a Visa card.

So here in the heart of Luke’s gospel, we find money. Last week it was the lost sheep (worth money), the lost coin (actual money) and the lost son who had a knack for squandering money. And here we are a chapter later, and we meet the “dishonest manager” in the parable of the same name. Who is this guy?

Before we answer that question, it might be the moment to recall how parables work, and what they do. Generally, parables happen in three movements: they create a world, which sours, and is then resolved in a surprizing way. Often the resolution is meant to make us uncomfortable, or at least disrupt our usual reaction, and in doing so illustrate some aspect of God’s realm.

So parables are about the Kingdom, and this surprizing God we worship, and the extent to which we can think in worldly ways when there are higher ways waiting to be revealed—in this case, through parables. And last week may have given us the very best example: listening to the older brother you think, ‘wow, this guy has a point,’ until we’re reminded that God has other ideas about forgiveness and reconciliation—and higher ways are revealed. So, who is this guy?

You might say this is the rare parable where the world is sour from the beginning: “There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions.” The man is confronted, asked for an accounting of his management, and given notice. But this is where it gets interesting. We get an glimpse into the interior thoughts of our manager:

‘What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job. I’m not strong enough to dig, and I’m ashamed to beg—I know what I’ll do so that, when I lose my job here, people will welcome me into their houses.’

So maybe this the world that sours: the manager that won’t go quietly, or won’t just provide an accounting and move on. The manager has a plan, one that might mean some sort of future in the town.

The cleverness that follows—900 becomes 450 and 1,000 becomes 800—actually belongs to a whole subset of finance, but the end result is a very strange blessing: “The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly.”

I’m going to let that awkward ending just hang there for a moment while I share everything Wikipedia taught me this morning about write-offs, charge-offs, bad debt, strategic default, and debt restructuring. Actually, we don’t have time, except to say that there is nothing unusual about what transpired between the manager and the debtors. If a debt is considered uncollectible it’s written-off, recorded as an expense, and (these days) allowable as a tax deduction. Everybody wins!

Now just before I go back to the strange blessing—the master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly—I want to point out the little “A” in your bulletin. Rather than read all of what is typically included in the Parable of the Dishonest Manager, I decided to simplify things by refining the ‘cut’ of the passage. Those reading in your pew Bibles will have noticed that Luke tries four ways to make sense of this parable, evidence enough that he should have quit while he was ahead. He suggests the meaning may be:

Worldly people are more shrew that we are.
Use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourself.
Whoever can be trusted with little can be trusted with larger amounts.
No one can serve two masters—you cannot serve God and mammon.

The last one is quite true. And it likely deserves it’s own parable, or it’s own chapter even. But it’s not really the point of the parable. I have no doubt that Jesus said it—likely over and over—but the dishonest manager is not a God and mammon story, since he gets a blessing for being shrewd with mammon. So we keep looking.

We keep looking and I think we find that the clues are in the telling, which makes sense, since parables are puzzles, and Jesus loves puzzles.

And while we’re looking, it might be time for little Greek. So a clue, hiding in the first verse: “There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions.” The verb for wasting (διασκορπίζων) is the same verb we had last week translated as ‘squandered.’ So the manager is doing the very same thing the lost son was doing last week, squandering his master’s money—maybe too many office parties or three-martini lunches. Whatever it was, it creates a link to that earlier squanderer.

So having made the link to that other squanderer, perhaps the first thing that comes to mind is ‘what kind of pass with this guy get?’ or ‘how will he be forgiven, since the last squanderer just got the fatted calf.’ Maybe the parable is meant to begin with the expectation of grace, and the souring is the realization that he just might get what he deserves.

In other words, this is really the parable of the lost son, part two. Even as Jesus begins, we think ‘wait, I know this guy.’ He’s the lost son, maybe a few years later, doing the very same things: squandering someone else’s fortune, plotting a way back, inviting our condemnation, and getting grace he doesn’t deserve.

This time it’s not a young man off in the world wasting his father’s money, it’s a more mature wastrel, managing a business this time, but clearly up to the same kind of tricks. And as the story unfolds, we are cast as the older brothers, watching these financial machinations take place and assuming it will come to no good.

We’re the one’s this time who scratch our heads at this guy’s moxie, seeing a situation that seems to be going from bad-to-worse, more money disappearing, more money squandered, and in the end we get this: “The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly.” God does it again, drawing us in, feeding us with a bit of righteous indignation, then forgiving the underserving just to make a point.

Just to bring us back to today, I want to share a modern parable, this time with John Oliver in the role of the dishonest manager. Oliver used to be on The Daily Show and now host his own show, cleverly called Last Week Tonight. Oliver is a Brit in America, and has the wonderful ability to point out what’s absurd about the US without getting deported—so far.

Earlier this year he highlighted the cost of healthcare in the US, particularly the medical debt that people carry after an illness—debt that can take years to pay off. So he created a fake company, and “bought” some bad debt from a large financial institution, the kind of institution that deals in debt to give other large corporations tax breaks. Typically the people who buy this bad debt will then do everything they can to collect, assuming the risk and then strong-arming the people in debt.

For $60,000, John Oliver’s fake company bought $15,000,000 worth of medical debt, and then forgave it. Just forgave it. He wanted to highlight the scandal of a healthcare system that lands countless people in debt, and did it in the shrewdest way possible. Through forgiveness. And maybe he wanted to confront the older brothers who say “a debt is a debt, it doesn’t matter how it came about. Either way, there is nothing quite as shocking as forgiveness, and it can change everything.

May God continue to shock with forgiveness, now and always, Amen.

posted by michael jacob kooiman @ 7:36 AM