Sermon: "Making Friends Through Dishonest Wealth," September 22, 2019

The Rev. Ryan Slifka
Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Today we continue our sermon series, “Jesus Uncensored,” on the Topsy-Turvy Teachings of Jesus According to Luke. It’s this whole string of passages in Luke’s story of Jesus that seem to challenge what we think Jesus is all about. He’s not just about love and peace. He’s also about challenge. And disruption.

Today’s text certainly fits the bill. It’s what is traditionally called the Parable of the Unjust Steward. I’m going to call it the parable of the Dishonest Manager, which is a more contemporary translation. It’s often called Jesus “hardest parable.” And, as we’ll see, it’s about as topsy-turvy, about as challenging and disruptive as it gets.

The manager of a wealthy man’s estate is about to get fired. We don’t know why. The manager could be lazy, corrupt, or incompetent. Regardless, he’s about to get fired based on bad job performance. So his boss, the wealthy man, calls him in, tells him to prepare one final report for his exit interview. And after that, he can clear out his desk.

The manager panics. He’s only white collar material—too weak to work construction, terrified at the thought of having to beg on the street. So out of sheer terror for his future, he concocts a little scheme. Since his boss wants one last report, the manager decides to cook the books to make sure he isn’t left out in the cold.

One by one he calls in some of their biggest accounts. He asks each how much they owe, then he starts tossing out discounts left and right. “100 jugs of olive oil?” he says. “Let’s go half off—make it fifty.” “Hundred containers of wheat?” to another. “Today I’m giving you twenty-percent off. Call it eighty and we’re square.” Discount after discount. And since he’s the authorized corporate representative, his boss’ll have to legally honour the contracts.

I mean, that’s one way to get back at the boss for firing you. Reminds me of that country song, “take this job and shove it.” But it’s even more devious than simple payback. The manager’s buying himself some friends. Friends who can help him out when he gets his pink slip. Maybe one client’ll remember him and have a couch to surf on while he’s out of a job. Maybe one’ll be able to give him a loan to keep him from rock bottom. Or maybe one of them might have a job for him in the front office to keep him afloat. Essentially, he’s using his master’s wealth to win friends and influence people. Buying some allies to pad his landing when he’s tossed off the job.

Theft, lying. Self-interest. What this dude does is pretty bad. Just to save his hide.

It’s bad. The only thing worse than this deceit, though, is his boss’s reaction! [slide]

When the boss finds all this out, he doesn’t call security to have him escorted out of the building. He doesn’t call the company lawyer to see if they can untangle this mess and sue this guy for everything he’s got. No. The boss slaps the manager on the back. The owner, it says, doesn’t condemn him, he commends him for his shrewdness, his wisdom, his cunning. Great job! He says. High five. Maybe I should keep you around after all.

So not only did the manager lie cheat and steal, the guy he cheated, lied to, and stole from, thought the whole scam was brilliant. And just like that he keeps him on staff. Which not only rewards him for dishonesty. It’s also a breach of trust with his clients, who expect when they’re dealing with him they’re not gonna get swindled. I mean, what kind of people are these people? No matter how you look at it. It’s bad ethics, it’s bad character. And it’s bad business. Bad bad bad bad.

But wait… there’s more. Believe it or not, it gets worse. It gets worse when Jesus finishes the parable. When he offers us his interpretation.

I mean, you expect Jesus, of all people, to you know condemn this stuff. To have these guys thrown into the outer darkness. But that’s not what happens. Instead, Jesus tells this little seedy story of corruption, takes a breath, and then says to the disciples, “You see! This guy’s onto something. Folks like this are far shrewder at dealing with this world than you children of light are!” “Take a cue from the dishonest manager,” he says. “And get out there making friends through dishonest wealth!”

Here we expected Jesus to give us a little public service announcement on the importance of honesty and fair dealing. But instead of condemning the lying, cheating, and stealing, Jesus commends the manager in exactly the same way his boss did in the parable.

It doesn’t make sense. According to what we know about Jesus, and what we understand about the world. Giving away something that doesn’t belong to you to win friends and influence people is morally dubious. And safe to say, not on the list of good business practices. It doesn’t make sense.

It doesn’t make sense. At least not according to the way we see the world. Here we see a dishonest giveaway. But maybe that’s the point. Parables like this one are told to jar us. One friend of mine once said that Jesus’ parables are like tiny little verbal explosives. Jesus tosses them like a little stick of TNT to blow away our preconceived notions of who God is. Of who God is and how the world works.

We expect the world to operate by certain rules. Rules that mirror the rules of commerce. There’s the world of literal debts. Where everyone who’s deep in them must pay up, even if it will ruin their lives. Even if life circumstances, bad dealings, or a corrupt system led to it. But there are also other kinds of debts. Debts in the forms of trespasses against us. People who have done us wrong and hurt us, hurt the people we love, or society itself. An eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. I mean, there’s a reason why Jesus says in Matthew’s version the Lord’s prayer “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors”—because that’s how we operate both spiritually and physically. In either case, life is seen as a ledger. Either someone owes us something. Or we’re in the spiritual hole.

What this parable shows, though, is that God doesn’t operate by the same rules as us. With God it ain’t business as usual. One of my favorite writers, Father Robert Capon, says that the dishonest steward is “nothing less than the Christ-figure in this parable.” Not only does he die and rise again in the sense of losing his job and regaining it again. He also brings others—client-debtors—to new life with him. But most importantly, Capon says, the dishonest manager “is the Christ-figure because he is a crook.”[i] Of course Jesus is a literal crook, dying a criminal’s death on a cross at the hands of church and state. But in another sense, Jesus is a crook like the dishonest manager, because he refuses to play by the world’s rules. Rather than collecting on debts, Jesus proclaims a jubilee, the erasure of accounts—spiritual and otherwise. Rather than stockpiling grudges and exacting punishments, he subsidizes the forgiveness of sins. And rather than exacting vengeance, he loves his enemies—pronouncing that same word of forgiveness even to those who murdered him on the cross. In doing so, he cashes out on the ancient cycle of revenge and retribution altogether. And in the end, God, the great owner and giver to whom all creation belongs says—you done good. This is my beloved Son with whom I am well-pleased.

Where we expect the world to operate through debt and payment, both literal in figurative. This parable shows us that God operates by gift. By the erasure of debts, by mercy, and forgiveness. Making friends, like the clients in the parable, out of us, out of the very people who already owe her everything. I mean, think about your own experience. Many of us grew up in the church. But a lot of us didn’t. And for most,  what has drawn us to church, and drawn us to God, are acts of self-giving. Of extravagant generosity. Where people have surprised us by helping us out when we were out of money or on the street. Where someone took the time to actually give a damn about us when no one else would. Where someone came to pray with us when we or someone we loved were in the hospital. Or someone showed us the healing power of forgiveness to unload heavy burdens. Or we saw a soup kitchen just giving food away for nothing to people who never did anything to deserve it in the first place.

In each and every case somebody, like the dishonest manager, like Jesus, went against the grain of a world of give and take. Surprising us, blowing us away with such extravangence. Somebody broke the rules, broke the bank, and said good bye to an eye for an eye, And lo and behold we ended up friends of God. Because that’s God’s business. And how God works God operates by grace, taking our notions of fairness and turning them right on their head. It doesn’t make sense by the way the world operates. But according to scripture it’s the only way our lives will ever be healed. It’s the only way the world’s gonna be set right.

And so with all of that in mind, Jesus is inviting us to join in and do the same. To take on the family business. But it’s not like any other family business we’ve ever known. The great writer C.S. Lewis, author of the Narnia books, once put it like this. “Enemy-occupied territory---that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.”[ii] He might as well been talking about this parable. Because here we’re invited by this king in the guise of a thief, into this crooked family business, one whose mission statement is the sabotage the cosmic status quo. The turning over of tables, the redemption and renewal of humanity and all creation. Jesus says that just like the rich and powerful use their wealth and prestige to make friends, we are to use our own “dishonest wealth” to recruit more and more dishonest managers.

So take what you’ve been given, Jesus says. Take your money. Take your time, take your God-given talents. Take even those things that others have done to hurt you and cause you pain, take it all. And just start giving it away. Give yourselves away to make friends of God. In the same way that God has made friends out of you. Take the grace you’ve been given. And, like the dishonest manager… spread it around. Cuz now, that’s the business that you’re in. Cuz it’s the business God’s in, and it’s the business of God’s people—the church.

I realize that this all sounds very foolish. Give away everything you’ve got sounds like the worst possible business plan ever. Discount all debts. Forgive all trespasses against you. Keep handing credit to a world going deeper and deeper in hock. It’ll never fly in any Board room anywhere. But this, says Jesus, is the way that God does business. God’s business is the reconciliation of all things, and this is the way it’s gonna get done. As Paul says in his first letter to the Corinthians:

“For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

And thank God for that.

AMEN

[i] Robert Farrar Capon, Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 307-308.

[ii] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, rev. ed. (London: William Collins, 2016), 46.