September 21st ~ You cannot serve both God and Wealth

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Amos 8:4-7

Psalm 113

1 Timothy 2:1-7

Luke 16:1-13 

Sermon by Pastor Joel

As parables go, our gospel this morning is a tricky one. Usually when Jesus offers a story to the crowd, the characters are pretty clear. The landowner in the Prodigal Son is God, the forgiving parent, and the wayward child is us, always welcomed back to the fold. The farmer throwing their tiny yet sturdy mustard seed on the field is the gospel that perseveres from many small, humble beginnings to grow tall and influential. The Good Samaritan is quite literally for us, the good Samaritan.

But the parable of the dishonest manager is tricky. It opens with a rich man who has discovered his manager has been cheating him and calls him to return to be disciplined. Before the meeting, the manager goes around forgiving parts of debts to make sure he has a place to go when his rich boss casts him out. When he brings what he retrieved from the people, he is not arrested and tossed out. Instead the rich man celebrates his cunning.

Now if we were in the crowd hearing this, we might assume, out of practice, that the rich man is God, and the dishonest manager is us, and Jesus is saying, “Go out and be sneaky for the good of the gospel.” Or maybe Jesus is saying that when we’re in trouble, then we should go out and curry favour from the ones we have mistreated – which, to be honest, seems much worse.

But take a step back, slow down. Our scene has already been set for us, earlier in the gospel. Jesus has been speaking for a while to a crowd. The disciples are there, and new, curious followers. And also sitting among them are the Pharisees, waiting, as we know, to catch Jesus going too far with his teachings so they can hold their power over the people. Considering the audience, the parable begins to make more sense.

Let’s take another look at the rich man, who we can easily presume has been aware for a while that he is employing a dishonest manager. How would that manager have been able to cheat his boss – unless by also cheating the people he was collecting debts from, by charging them too much, or not paying them enough for their goods. We can then assume that as long as the rich man got his piece of the pie, he was willing to look the other way. Now that he has learned that the manager has been slicing off to his disadvantage, he is outraged. So when the manager returns with the money, the rich man is appeased – he has made back what he deserved.

The Pharisees might hear this parable and think, okay, Jesus is saying it is okay to be sneaky and dishonest if your intentions are good. After all, people tend to hear what they want. But the disciples are meant to hear it another way. This is a parable about a system that rewards cunning over good conscience, wealth over generosity, and self-serving efficiency over ethical action.

So when Jesus then says, those that are faithful in little are faithful in much, he is indirectly reminding us of the parable of the mustard seed, which is little and becomes much. And when he says whoever is dishonest in little is also dishonest in much, we should be indirectly thinking of the Good Samaritan parable, where the priest walked by as justified that he was too busy to help, and yet left a man to die. In the context of our parable today, if we accept an unethical system that exploits the vulnerable to the benefit of the powerful, can we be counted on to stand up for the gospel? Our honesty must be firm and clear in all situations, not only with what we fairly own, but also with what others own and need.

If we think of the most daunting issue currently facing humanity, this parable becomes a powerful message. For as much as we recycle and compost as individuals, if we still build oversized homes and fight densification for the sake of our own property values, are we not much like the dishonest manager, accepting environmental cost for the sake of our own interests? And if we make a show of being concerned about climate change, but are unwilling to make sacrifices as a nation, have we not contributed to a world - hot and on fire - that we will leave to the next generation? Our individual actions are important – from all of Jesus’s parables this has been made clear. In the parable of the dishonest manager, Jesus is reminding us that the society we live in and the system we support must also be challenged.

Take a moment, each of us here, and think ahead – 30 years, 50 years, to the world we want to leave to our children and their children and all the younger people we care about. I imagine a world where life in the ocean is protected, where we have supported the science to mitigate the damage done, where we have learned to be proactive against wildfires and reduced our ongoing harm to environment. Where living with a small footprint has become not a bold choice but the accepted way – just like all the other animals on the planet who are instinctively careful not to destroy their own habitats. I imagine that those with more resources have, collectively, supported those who have been, through no fault of their own, displaced from their homes because of climate change. I imagine a world where we have learned to value community over materialism, and connection over competition.

Perhaps this is what you imagine as well, or, I hope, at least a version of it. It is certainly the kind of world that Robel and his family of 5 strive to preserve by saving every drip of water out a leaky tap and producing half the garbage that I do currently living on my own. It’s the kind of world we saw at the Draw the Line demonstration yesterday where legions of people pushed for a just system for people, peace, and the planet.

Achieving this future world is not easy. It will take hard individual choices but also collective action. We need to ask ourselves how we are complicit in a system that allows us to be dishonest managers. Cunning is not justice if it allows us to slip through loopholes and hide behind justifications.

Perhaps, we can begin with this strategic exercise. Are our individual choices steps backwards or forwards toward our vision of the future? When our government, because of complications such as tariffs and war, must change tack, has it done so wisely, without closing the door to that future? What happens when the consequences are clear – as with climate change? Will we choose what is convenient and easy, or will we act with integrity?

In the final part of the gospel, Jesus says, “You cannot serve both God and wealth.” By ending this way, Jesus shows that he didn’t mean we could be sly and dishonest with money when it suits. Those are not the actions of a just person. Wealth facilitates justice and meaningful life; it is not the path that leads to it. These days it is especially important for us to consider what we strive for, the material goods we value, and how they change our footprint in the world. May we think of that world we want to leave to the next generation, and move strategically forward with God’s grace and guidance to achieve it. Amen