"Now and Then"

Psalm 103

Luke 16:1-13

Introduction. The town council of a community in Alabama was approached a few years back by the Ku Klux Klan, volunteering to keep a certain stretch of highway near the town clean. The town council suddenly found themselves in a sticky situation. If they said "yes," they might look like they agreed with racism, and bring contempt upon their town. If they said "no," they would be preventing citizens from doing something good in the community, and might look bad for excluding this group. So, they came up with a very shrewd decision. They said "yes" to the Ku Klux Klan–"go ahead, claim that stretch of highway for your clean-up activities." Then, they renamed that particular stretch of road "The Rosa Parks Highway." (Lorain Giles, in Aha!, Jul/Aug/Sep 2004, p. 55)

Move 1. Shrewdness is commended in our gospel lesson today. Cleverness is given the "thumbs up."

Cleverness is a characteristic of the mid-level manager in the parable today. It is a characteristic he uses to get out of a tight jam. His shrewd decision, after he is fired by his master, is to quickly go and reduce the payments of the master’s debtors, before his master knows. Maybe this action will help him to "get in good" with the debtors. Maybe it will foster a sense of gratitude toward the manager by the debtors, so that as he begins to struggle without a job, he might receive kindness from them in return.

His shrewdness, one would think, would cause the master to be angrier than ever. It might cause the master even to sue the manager for taking unauthorized actions after his firing. Yet instead, his shrewdness is surprisingly praised by the master. It is as if the master is saying, "Hmmm. Well, I have to hand it to you, manager, you outfoxed me this time. Good show. Well done."

Of course, shrewdness is not always so well rewarded. One man tells the story of being five years old, and getting ready for a spanking. He gets the "obligatory parental routine" from his dad: "Now son, this is going to hurt me more than it’s going to hurt you." This clever young lad says to his dad, "Wait a minute! You’re going to spank me, but it’s going to hurt you more than it’s going to hurt me, and I’m the one who did something wrong?" His dad falls into his clever trap. "That’s right." The boy then says, "Why don’t you let me spank you, and then I would suffer properly." As an adult years later, he recalls, "My father didn’t rally to my way of thinking…I got a worse spanking." Shrewdness doesn’t always produce good results. (William Willimon, Pulpit Resource, July, August, September 2004, p. 50)

But shrewdness is commended by the master in the parable today, and it appears, by the teller of the parable, Jesus. Cleverness is complimented by Christ.

Move 2. But isn’t Jesus also complimenting dishonesty here? Isn’t he saying to do whatever you need to do to get ahead in life?

Jesus certainly seems not to care that the manager is ripping off his master for his own gain. Doesn’t he see that the manager is doing the wrong thing for the wrong reason? Jesus goes on to propose using dishonest wealth to do good things. Maybe Jesus thinks that the manager does a good thing by helping the debtors, people in poverty. But still, even if it is the right thing, should he really be recommending doing it for the wrong reason? Jesus definitely isn’t providing the stuff that children’s sermons are made of–"Yes, kids, that’s right, Jesus says it’s O.K. to be dishonest."

I have had a difficult time with this passage. It’s not an easy one to understand. But maybe Jesus, in telling this parable, is simple recognizing reality. Maybe he is trying to make a point, that many people in his day, and many people today, have wealth that is on some level dishonest wealth. Yes, Jesus knows about those obvious cases of theft. But he may also recognize those less obvious cases that are much more wide-spread. For example, almost all people in our nation save money by buying products made cheaply by child labor or in countries with poor human rights records. Maybe Jesus is trying to say something about money, and about its proper use, not by using a clear-cut but unrealistic morality tale, but by going straight to where most people find themselves financially–in the gray area.

Rabbis in the Jewish religious tradition have this story: A poor man once caught stealing was ordered by the king to be hanged. On the way to the gallows he said…that he knew a wonderful secret and it would be a pity to allow it to die with him. He was able to get word to the king that he would put a seed of a pomegranate in the ground and through the secret taught to him by his father, he would make it grow and bear fruit overnight. He got the king’s attention, and the king agreed to meet him before the execution. When the king arrived, with other high officers of state, the thief dug a hole and said, "This seed must only be put in the ground by a man who has never stolen or taken anything which did not belong to him. I, being a thief, cannot do it." So he turned to one officer who admitted that in his younger days he had retained something which did not belong to him. Then he looked at the treasurer, who said that dealing with such large sums, he might have entered too much or too little. Even the king owned up that he had taken a necklace of his father’s. The thief then said, "You are all mighty and powerful and want for nothing, and yet you cannot plant the seed, while I who have stolen a little because I was starving am to be hanged." Through this bit of cleverness, he found pleasure with the king, who then pardoned him.

Though this story is not told by Jesus, Jesus might very well tell such a story, because it conveys the honest truth about most peoples’ lives. No, Jesus doesn’t support dishonesty. But he does always seem to find a way to meet people where they are.

Move 3. We are encouraged, in this gospel lesson, to be shrewd stewards. We, like the mid-level manager in the parable, are encouraged to use some ingenuity to create solutions to problems, even if imperfectly.

Like the manager, we are stewards, put in charge, and charged to care. Some of us are in charge of groups of men and women in our places of employment. Some are in charge at this church. Some of us are in charge of a household. Some are in charge just of the small amount of money left over at the end of the month. In most cases, though we often earn that money and those positions, we recognize that we all have the potential of having these things taken from us, and so also recognize that in the end, they are not ours alone, but ultimately belong to God.

Unfortunately, we are often unfaithful stewards of our wealth. One person says it this way: "We spend thoughtlessly on grand vacations and on trinkets for the house. We pile up mountains of presents for each other at Christmas, and pile mountains of food into our already-filled mouths at Thanksgiving." "We have polluted rivers and spattered clear skies," all in the name of profits to feed our own greed. (Willimon, p. 51)

We hear the same person continue: "I will not likely sell all I have and give it to the poor, becoming a modern-day Francis of Assisi. But maybe I can do better. Maybe I can write down some debts, dole out some funds, spread what I have around, buy a child a new coat, give my used car away." And, this person goes on, "The Christian businessman cannot tear down his (polluting) factory, but (maybe) he settles for a little less profit and applies environmental standards that are actually superior to the government minimum." (Willimon, p. 51)

Yes, we can be good managers, probably not all the time, but at least now and then. With some creativity and ingenuity, we can be shrewd stewards.

Move 4. In this rather difficult and unclear gospel passage, one thing becomes clear at the end–a person cannot serve God and mammon. A person cannot serve the divine one and serve the almighty dollar simultaneously.

A man named Richard Paul Evans has come out with a new book called "The Five Lessons a Millionaire Taught Me." He recounts a bit about his life–his dad’s job-ending injury, his family’s descent into poverty, and then, as a young teen, his encounter with a millionaire, and lessons taught and learned, which change his life. Evans comes at the subject of wealth not from a glitz, glamour and greed perspective, but as a Christian who seeks to persuade his readers to not love money–indeed, all the royalties from his book go toward "The Christmas Box House International" to help abused and neglected children.

In the book, he tells the story of taking his oldest daughter Jenna "on a daddy-daughter date to the Amazon jungles of Peru on a humanitarian mission." He wants her "to not only realize how much (they) have to be grateful for, but to learn to serve others who are less fortunate." He tells in the book of an extraordinary journey, of running out of food and eating piranha, and ultimately of setting up a clinic in a small jungle town to help the people in poverty there.

At the end of the journey, Evans and his daughter are in the Lima, Peru airport, and he asks her what she has learned from their experience. He is told she needs time to think about it. Twelve hours later, he gets his response. Noticing Jenna crying, he asks her what is wrong, and she replies, "Dad, we have so much and they have so little….I know what I’ve learned. We love those whom we serve." (Richard Paul Evans, The Five Lessons a Millionaire Taught Me, 2004)

A person cannot love God and money at the same time. Each person on this earth has a master, someone or something that they serve. One person is governed by greed. Another is led by lust. And when a person does something good for the least of God’s creatures, he or she does it for God. That person sees God as Lord, and that, not money or anything else, is where he or she finds meaning, guidance, and direction.

Conclusion. Yet, even on the cloudiest of days, we see the sun peeking through now and then. And even during those times in our lives when we find ourselves in service to something other than God, we too, now and then, can shine through, break free, and do something that makes a difference. We are commended. And the more we do those things, the more we begin to properly place our love with the one to whom it belongs, the one who first loves us, the one who forgives us all things, the one who satisfies us fully.