Master Jesus

 

Text: Luke 16:1-13

Focus: wealth

Function: to help people focus on Jesus instead of wealth

16:¹Then 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. ²So 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.’ ³Then 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. ⁴I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’ ⁵So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ ⁶He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’ ⁷Then 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.’ ⁸And 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. ⁹And 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. ¹¹If, then, you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? ¹²And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? ¹³No 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.”

I confess, I have been pondering this sermon the entire week and I am not very sure what to do with the text.

Every other time I have considered preaching the parable, I have ignored it because it doesn’t fit with my theology of right and wrong. But then, my theology of right and wrong is based on our economic system, and not the one designed by Jesus in the early church or close to the one designed by Moses in the OT. Both are forms of heavily mixed capitalism. Almost socialism, or it would be called socialism by those who use the word pejoratively against social policies designed to life the poor out of poverty.

So, I avoided it. I am not going to get political, this is a safe space for people to find Jesus and He is open to all, both right and left. I remember that it takes a right and a left wing for a bird to fly.

So, It is obvious what Jesus says the meaning of the parable is, you cannot serve God and money at the same time. The word translated wealth in the NRSV is literally the word for money.

I believe that the question that Jesus wants His listeners to ask themselves, at this point, is who it is they serve.

Do you serve money or Jesus? There are many ways to answer that question.

We need money to survive. The more money we have, the easier it is for us to survive. We need enough money to survive and we need enough money to survive, as believers, in the US culture.

There is nothing inherently evil about money. It is the love of money that is the root of all kinds of sin.

Placing money over Jesus is the sin that Jesus wants us to root out from our lives.

If we make Jesus the Master of our lives then money is not the measure of success.

And we get all that understanding from the last two verses in our text where Jesus explains the parable.

And the reason why I have been pondering the parable all week is because the conclusion that Jesus makes us draw from the parable seems to be contrary to the lesson learned by either the master, or the incapable, and then corrupt, steward.

The story goes like this. The steward is an incapable manager and the master hears about it from other sources and wants to fire him.

When he informs him that he must prove his innocence or be fired, the steward, who so far has been inept turns to corruption to solve his problem.

He is too proud to beg and to weak to do physical labor to survive. And remember, everyone needs enough money to survive. It wasn’t wrong for him to want to care for his needs after he is fired.

I think it was wrong for him to cheat his master out of money in order to survive. But that is what he did. He went to his master’s debtors and greatly reduced their bills so that after he gets fired, one of them, or all of them in turn, will help him out and give him charity.

And this is the part of the parable that used to be hard for me to understand. Instead of condemning him for his cheating, Jesus -and the master- praise him for his shrewdness. It is almost like Jesus understands the plight of the poor and the compromises they have to make in order to survive.

I have to remember that when I see people begging on the street. We are commanded to ignore judgment of the reasons for their predicament and care for them.

I have to tell you that the Holy Spirit promises to help us understand scripture. I wish that I had not avoided that help in years past and tackled this passage in my sermons.

Then I would have come to that conclusion about the poor and would have been less judgmental.

Let me digress a second. It goes to a problem that we have with Biblical interpretation.

We approach scripture with a lens from our own experiences and past understandings.

We don’t often ask for a new and a fresh understanding even though the Bible says that our faith grows line upon line and precept upon precept. It grows gradually. And it shouldn’t stop growing until we die.

That is why we Brethren are called people of the Book. The book being the Bible, of course.

We recognize that we continually are led and fed by the Holy Spirit as we search the scripture. That is why we spend so much time during our worship service every week listening to an explanation of the Holy Christian Scriptures.

Anyway, I had avoided preaching this passage because I was uncomfortable with Jesus supporting the idea of cheating someone else.

Well, technically He doesn’t. He praises him, but then tells us the be faithful in little things and God will make us faithful in much. He does include the hard work ethic that is important to our economic success. But the parable makes room for misfortune, bad management and bad luck.

I define sin as anything that keeps us from loving our neighbor as ourselves, or loving God. And cheating someone else is certainly a form of harm.

Of course, the master wasn’t upset with the cheating, as a matter of fact, he praises the servant who cheated him for being shrewd. It is almost as if he wishes he hadn’t fired him.

And I was not okay with telling people that it is okay to cheat.

And yet, this man was about to be thrown into abject poverty. He had no recourse except the generosity of those with whom he collaborated.

I avoided the passage based on my understanding of the theology instead of letting the passage create my theology. I let my theology create the passage.

I learned a lesson in that for the way that I try to preach, keep it on the task of the scripture.

And again, the task of this scripture has to do with our relationship with money.

And all I can say is we need to take seriously the statement, you can’t serve both.