Two
Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday September 21, 2025
Scripture Readings: Amos 8:4-7 and Luke 16:1-13
There are some funny quirks about bibles, and one of them is the chapter titles
that bible publishers put in there.
These chapter titles or story titles, or headings – they aren’t part of
the original manuscripts. They’re not a
translation of something that the original authors put in there. Jesus didn’t begin his teachings by saying,
“Now I’m going to tell you the story of the Prodigal Son.”
Instead, it is up to the editor or the publisher to decide 1) if they want to
include titles or headings to the different sections, and 2) what title or
heading they are going to use. And so
these titles can give us a hint or a clue about what the editor thinks that the
story is about; but we have to be careful with them, because they might not
always match what Jesus intended by the story.
With the parable from Luke’s gospel that we heard today, if you were to open up
a bible – either one of the pew bibles or your bible at home, you would
probably see a title given to it along the lines of, “The Parable of the
Dishonest Manager,” or “The Story of the Crooked Manager,” or “The Shrewd
Manager,” or “The Parable of the Dishonest Steward.”
And if you were to read the parable with one of these titles in the back of
your head, it becomes a very confusing parable indeed. Because why, at the end of the parable, is
the landowner praising the dishonest or crooked dealings of his employee? What are we supposed to take away from this
parable?
It is a very confusing story that Jesus tells.
Are we supposed to cheat the people we are supposed to be accountable
to? Are we supposed to “make friends
using stolen money” as either the master in the story or Jesus himself seems to
be praising the manager for doing? Like
I said, it is a very confusing story that Jesus tells.
But what if we were to take the title out of the picture. What if we begin with the assumption that the
manager isn’t dishonest or crooked, and is the hero of our story. He has been put on notice for his employment,
his days at this job are numbered, and he chooses to use his remaining time
there spreading wealth and abundance to people with less financial clout than
he has. He could have doubled down,
tightened the screws and tried to extort as many debts as possible, trying to
curry favour with his master. But instead he turned around and did good to the
people without wealth. He becomes almost
a Robin Hood type figure – steal from the rich to give to the poor.
With this interpretation of the story, the most surprising moment is when the
master, the owner of the money that the manager is giving away, laughs and
praises the manager for what he is doing.
Maybe the owner of the money is also a Robin Hood type figure, giving
away their wealth to anyone who needs it.
My turning point this week, in figuring out this reading of the parable, was
the poem that I asked Elaine to put on the back of the bulletin. It was written by Steve Garnaas-Holmes and it
reads:
And Jesus went around
to everyone who thought they owed God something,
and asked, “What do you think you owe?”
And they would count it up.
And he would say, “Erase it.”
And God said, “That’s my boy.”
What if we can see this parable as a parable of God’s abundance, a story of a
world where everyone who has more than enough shares with everyone who doesn’t
have enough, a story of the kingdom of God where there is more than enough for
everybody. What if we were to title this
story, The Parable of the Extravagantly Generous Master?
With this reading of the parable, it makes sense for both the owner of the
resources and the person responsible for managing them to seek out generosity,
and for the parable to teach us to do likewise.
Be generous with what God has entrusted to us – we don’t own these
things, but God wants us to share and be generous with abundance, just as God
is generous.
The parable ends with, “No 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.”
We can’t be enslaved to God and enslaved to wealth at the same time, but the
good news is that we can choose which master we want to serve. We can choose to focus all of our attention
and energy to wealth-creation, tracking the stock market hour by hour, making
every decision in our lives based on what will allow us to accumulate more
wealth.
The easy example to pick here would be the ultra-wealthy in the world, but I
think that money-worship or money-enslavement is much more extensive than that.
There are some people on YouTube who take frugality to the extreme – even
though they make a good salary, they sleep on an air mattress because they
don’t want to have to spend money to buy a bed, they only buy food that is
“reduced for quick sale,” they walk or bicycle not for the exercise but because
they don’t want to spend money on the bus fare, they wear clothes that are torn
and dirty, to avoid spending money on either new clothes or doing laundry. I believe that there was also a TV show a
decade or so ago called Extreme Cheapskates along the same principles. I think
that they are as enslaved to money as the ultra-wealthy of this world are. Money shapes every decision they make.
But when we are enslaved to God, we are able to adopt a lifestyle of generosity
and abundance. We don’t need to hoard
wealth because we know that with God there is more than enough to go around. We can become concerned with what God is
concerned about, which usually has to do with caring for the poor and needy of
this world.
The prophet Amos, in the other reading that we heard today, is pretty explicit
about this. God condemns anyone who
tramples the poor of this land, God condemns anyone who tries to cheat in their
business practices in order to make more money.
(Side note – I love the ancient description of the modern problem of
shrinkflation. God condemns anyone who
makes the ephah, or container size, smaller, along with anyone who rigs the
scales that measure it out.). God condemns anyone who devalues human life.
God is always, always, on the side of people who are poor, people who are
oppressed, people who have less in this world.
In this season of creation, I would also name the non-human parts of
creation that are voiceless and silenced in this world as belonging to God’s
special care.
And when we stand on the side of the manager in the parable, who is on the same
side as the master, then that is where our concern should be too. We are called to abundant generosity – the
sort of generosity that doesn’t make any sense to someone watching from the
outside. We are called to this
abundance, extending our care to every corner of the world that is under God’s
special care. When we serve God rather
than wealth, we are freed to live in this abundance.
And what steps to we want to take in that direction today?
And may God grant us the courage so to do.
Amen.
-large.jpg)
“Rich and Poor, or, War and Peace”
How can we correct this picture?
No comments:
Post a Comment