Readings (click here for full text of the readings):
   Amos 8:4-7(8-12), Psalm 138, 1 Timothy 2:1-8, Luke 16:1-13
 

I.       There’s a reason that Jesus spoke in parables

A.  He spoke to groups in settings just like this one

1.    Outside

2.    Wind howling

3.    People tending to their kids and making sure the ants didn’t get into the potato salad

B.  In that kind of situation, people wouldn’t necessarily hear every detail

1.    They wouldn’t take notes

2.    They listened for a basic message

a)    The sought understanding

b)    They loved stories

C.  And a parable is a simple story that conveys a deeper message

1.    Allegory: everything represents something else

2.    Parable: just a basic message

D.  Stories are memorable

1.    We re-tell them over and over

2.    We remember them – if not all the details, then the moral

II.    So it might well have been a day much like this one about 2000 years ago when Jesus told today’s parable

A.  Except instead of Lake Champlain it was the Sea of Galilee

B.  And the people probably thought they knew what was coming

1.    Jesus tells the story of a rich man

a)    Hired a manager to run his farm operation

b)    This was a big farm

(1)  Huge fields of wheat and olives and who knows what else

c)     The people on the farm were indebted to the owner

(1)  They got paid a salary, but had to pay most or all of it back in order to buy food and have a place to live

(2)  As time went on, they got more and more into debt

(3)  They had no way to free themselves from it

2.    The rich man gets ready to fire the manager for squandering the property

a)    The manager is weak, so can’t dig

b)    He’s proud, so he won’t beg

3.    So he thinks to himself: how do I get in good with other people who might help me out later?

a)    So while he still has a job he reduces the payments people owe the rich man

(1)  100 jugs of olive oil -> 50

(2)  100 containers of wheat -> 80

b)    He reduces everybody’s debt to something they have a shot of paying off

4.    You can imagine how the workers respond

a)    They’re thrilled!

b)    They love the manager for what he’s done

c)     They love the owner, because they assume he told the manager to do it

(1)  Obviously the manager didn’t tell them he was doing it on his own

(2)  And he didn’t tell the owner what he was doing

5.    So you can tell what’s coming

a)    The manager is going to be condemned for his lying ways

b)    He’s going to be punished for being dishonest

(1)  For trying to save his own skin

(2)  For writing off the debts people rightfully owe the rich guy

c)     After all, how can you not condemn the manager?

(1)  He’s about as shifty and sneaky as they come

6.    But what do you think happens when the owner returns?

a)    The workers who he’s treated so badly all these years greet him with love and adoration

(1)  They cheer his return!

(2)  He doesn’t know why, but he’s obviously happy about it

b)    Then he realizes what the manager has done, and he’s faced with a choice

(1)  He can confront the manager

(a)    The people would turn against him

(b)   They’d hate him more than ever

(c)    He’d never get those debts repaid, but the people would still be enslaved to him

(2)  Or he could praise the manager

(a)    The people would love him

(b)   He’d get repaid some of his loans

(c)    But the people would be free to move on, to buy their own land, to not be enslaved anymore

7.    And that’s exactly what Jesus does

a)    In the parable the master commends the dishonest manager because he acted shrewdly

And 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.

III.  Following that

A.  There are a few verses that seem to contradict that message

1.    If you’re dishonest in little, then you’ll be dishonest in much

2.    If you haven’t been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own?

3.    You cannot serve God and wealth

B.  You know what that sounds like to me?

1.    It sounds like Luke didn’t know what Jesus meant by the parable, but He couldn’t have meant that it was OK to be dishonest, so Luke tried to rein things back in

2.    Granted, the saying about not serving God and wealth is found in other gospels, but way earlier in Jesus’s ministry

a)    Matthew: Sermon on the Mount

b)    Luke: later, on the road to Jerusalem

3.    Luke’s been on a roll recently with parables of grace

a)    Like the Prodigal Son and the Lost Sheep

b)    It’d be strange to jump back to the idea of God keeping track of all our debts to make sure we repaid each and every one

4.    But no matter how hard Luke tries to reassure people that Jesus couldn’t have said what he just said, Jesus did say that

a)    Handy rule of Biblical interpretation: the harder the saying, the more likely it is to be authentic

b)    Because nobody would have added such a startling and confusing parable later on

(1)  Later on people add things that clarify and simplify and explain away

c)     The only way it’s in the Bible is if Jesus really said it

(1)  And it makes sense that Luke would try to make it a little less radical than it really is

IV.What are we supposed to do with this parable?

A.  Are we supposed to go out and be dishonest and shrewd and try to save our skins and shirk our responsibilities, and trust that God will reward us?

B.  No

1.    Because Jesus wasn’t praising dishonesty by itself

2.    He was praising dishonesty that benefited a certain group of people

a)    Remember how the parable starts: “There was a rich man who had a manager”

b)    Since we hear about the rich man first, we’re tempted to identify with him

c)     He’s successful, he must have worked hard, he loaned people stuff and he has every right to be repaid in full

d)    But remember what the Bible says about wealth

(1)  Wealth is an impediment to serving God

(2)  Easier for a camel to go through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven

(3)  And this picture of a penny-pinching, bean-counting, I-deserve-what’s-mine kind of guy doesn’t fit very well with the God of infinite grace

3.    E ffcgfb bg bgggggggggb ven though we might be tempted to identify with the rich man at the start of the parable, we shouldn’t

a)    We should identify with the workers who owed the money

(1)  Now the independent, American streak in us might say that the workers should repay their debts

(2)  The owner has a right to get his money back

(3)  That’s only fair

4.    But we have to remember that God isn’t fair – He favors certain people over certain others

a)    And He doesn’t even favor the people He should favor

(1)  The Old Testament

(a)    The Jews, just because He chose them

(b)   Abel over Cain, just because Abel raised sheep and Cain was a farmer

(c)    The younger sons over the older sons

(i)     Jacob/Esau

(a)   Joseph over all his older brothers

b)    Jesus – in His parables and His ministry – wasn’t fair

(1)  He favored the poor over the rich

(2)  The sick over the healthy

(3)  The needy over the self-sufficient

(4)  The weak over the proud

c)     Theological term: preferential option for the poor

(1)  Jesus didn’t come to save the rich, the healthy, the free, the well-fed

(2)  He came to save the poor, the sick, the slaves, the hungry

C.  Most of all, Jesus came to Earth so that we might be forgiven

1.    And that’s the bottom line of this parable

a)    Not that the manager broke the rules

b)    But that debts were forgiven

(1)  People were set free

2.    Forgiveness is the unifying message in nearly all of Jesus’s parables

a)    This one is called The Unjust Steward

b)    It might have reminded you of another parable: The Unforgiving Servant

(1)  In that one a rich man forgives the debts of one of his servants, but then that servant refuses to forgive the debts of others

(2)  And the rich man finds out, and orders the Unforgiving Servant to be tortured until he can repay his entire debt

c)     These two parables get at the same basic point, from different directions

(1)  In the parable of the Unforgiving Servant, it’s the master who forgives, and the servant who gets punished

(2)  In today’s parable, it’s the servant who forgives and the master who jumps on the forgiveness bandwagon

3.    The bottom line – the take-home message – is that God seeks forgiveness of sins, however He can get it

a)    Through proper channels

(1)  Like the master in the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant

b)    Through dishonesty and shrewdness

(1)  Like the manager in the Parable of the Unjust Steward

c)     And that’s how Jesus lived, and taught

(1)  He spoke in public in the appropriate places, like the synagogue

(a)    But He also dined with sinners

(2)  He confronted the political and religious authorities with their sins and minunderstandings

(a)    And He died a criminal’s death on the Cross

(3)  He embraced the Law of Moses

(a)    And He broke it time and again, by working on the Sabbath, by touching people who were unclean, by claiming to be God

V.   One of my favorite Biblical commentators – who wrote several books on the parables as well as the only theological cookbook I know of – calls today’s parables “the hardest parable”

A.  Because it seems to say that what’s good is bad, and bad is good

1.    That hard work isn’t what life’s all about

2.    That rules don’t matter somehow

B.  And most of all, because it seems to say that fairness is overrated

1.    And it does say that

2.    Because fairness is really just another way of saying deservedness

a)    And deservedness has nothing to do with Jesus

b)    Because if we all got what we deserved, it wouldn’t be a pretty picture

c)     And thank God we don’t have to get what we deserve

(1)  Thank God that Jesus came into the world to offer grace and forgiveness, by any means

C.  So the real take-home message of today’s parable?

1.    Stop focusing so much on what you deserve

2.    Stop focusing so much on getting a fair shake

a)    Because God plays favorites

b)    God isn’t fair

c)     And God is obsessed with forgiveness

d)    And thank God He’s all of those

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