Sermons

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For The Love Of Money
July 10, 2005
Sermon Series on the Gospel of Luke
Associate Pastor Steve Lympus
Luke 16:1-15

Luke, more than any of the other Gospel writers, emphasizes Jesus’ teaching on wealth and money. Songs/poems, conversations, sermons about money, prophecy, blessings/curses, as well as parables (like the one today) – all telling us that God’s ideas about riches and poverty are not the same as ours.

But still, the message is not always the same: sometimes the rich are told to give up all their wealth, sometimes they’re not. Sometimes the rich are judged, sometimes they’re just saved. Sometimes the rich are seen in the grip of worrying about wealth, sometimes it’s the poor, but both seem freed from money’s grip when they give it away.

Throughout Luke, God’s concern for the poor is clear. But the issues of wealth in Scripture are complex issues, not easily solved (just like they’re not easily solved for most of us)…

Luke 16:1-15

Holy Spirit, come now and fall upon us. Enlighten today what you would have us see from your Word, and help us rest in that which remains a mystery. May we hear your voice, Lord Jesus, as you lead us…Amen.

This is a difficult parable. Some commentators say it’s the hardest parable! Usually when Jesus interprets a parable after he tells it, his words shed light onto the mysteries of the parable. Here, if Jesus is interpreting the parable, it just seems to me to make the meaning even more confusing.

Possible meanings: This week, I decided that before I really studied the passage, I would list out the possible meanings. Here are a few from the list I made:

Be clever when you’re hard-pressed facing difficulty…do what you can to make the best of the situation.

(More specifically) Take advantage of financial situations, and make friends so that you’ll have them when you need help.

Be faithful in the little things, and God will trust you with greater things…twist: if you are faithful in financial matters, then God will trust you with greater riches.

When another entrusts you with their wealth, this is an opportunity to prove your faithfulness, so that God will entrust you with your own wealth.

Money is just plain dangerous – it competes with God for our love.

I don’t think that any of these possible meanings hold all the truth of this passage – maybe they begin to get at it. And I don’t think that this sermon will hold all the truth of this parable.

But I hope to bring you along on some of the journey God has taken me on with this passage. Because this parable tells us something important about God’s Kingdom, and the message is both for the insiders and the outsiders…for the disciples Jesus is talking to, and the Pharisees who are listening nearby.

The manager (a steward in charge of his master’s estate) is facing a crisis – his lord/master has learned of his dishonest sins (he’s been accused of “squandering” the lord’s property), his lord fires him and tells him to turn in the bookkeeping. The manager is losing his job, his security, and facing judgment.

But a hint of mercy: his lord is only going to fire him, not sue him or put him in jail. Early on…this lord is a lord of judgment and also of mercy.

The manager, when his master confronts him about his dishonesty at the beginning of the parable, doesn’t try to make excuse, doesn’t try to justify his actions. Instead, the manager comes up with a plan, a risky plan to secure his future that banks everything on his master’s mercy:

Before anyone finds out that he has been fired, he calls his lord’s debtors into his office and he very quickly has them re-write their own debts so that they will owe less.

These debtors were probably tenants who rented farmland from the master and owed a portion of their crops at harvest time… but it’s not harvest yet, the debts aren’t being paid yet. He’s only refinancing with the debtors so that they will owe less.

He must finish this before anyone finds out what he is doing – he’s already been fired and has no authority to do this refinancing! If he can get away with is, he will gain favor with his master’s debtors so that when it becomes public that he has been fired, he will still have good connections.

Smart guy!

When his lord realizes all this – perhaps he hears the debtors in town celebrating, toasting the master’s great generosity – the master has to make a difficult choice:

Should he scold/punish his servant for this unapproved debt reduction (thus making all those celebrating angry/disappointed)

or

Should he approve of what the manager has done and keep good graces with all his debtors?

The master decides to take the more merciful route: he congratulates the manager, who was previously dishonest, for coming up with a clever and risky plan that relied so heavily on his master’s mercy.

It’s a little offensive – this dishonest manager being praised for his shrewdness (wisdom). But it’s not his earlier dishonesty being praised, it’s his risk-taking trust in his master’s mercy.

Maybe we all have something to learn from such a clever scoundrel:

When a crisis is coming...

take a big risk

and

trust in God’s mercy.

It might just pay off.

This manager risks everything on the mercy of the master! This is his only hope. And the risk pays off – the master is merciful, and the master pays the bill for the manager’s salvation.

How did the manager know that he could take this risk? Because he experienced a taste of his lord’s mercy at the beginning of the parable, when he was only fired, and not jailed. This taste of his lord’s mercy is enough to make him now risk everything.

Here’s what we’ve seen of the master’s character so far: he demands obedience; and there is judgment for disobedience when he learns in the beginning about his manager’s dishonesty (but mercy in the judgment, the punishment could have been much worse). And in the end, the master shows even greater mercy and generosity.

Now I bet some of you are thinking:

Are you saying this master is like God? God wouldn’t be merciful only because he was tricked into something.

True – I don’t think that we trick God into showing us mercy.

But parables themselves are tricky things…not a one-for-one correlation with every element in the parable.

The point is this: if this dishonest manager, facing a crisis, was able to risk everything on the mercy of his master, how much more can we throw ourselves completely on God’s mercy when we are in crisis! We don’t even have to trick God into it…God’s making us the offer: God is saying, “trust me.”

God’s Kingdom is coming, in Jesus – for many this Kingdom coming is a crisis: our sin and dishonesty is exposed on every level. What will we do?

Will we decide to enter the Kingdom?

Will we decide it’s not for us and depend on other things, like money/success/possessions?

Will we want to be in the Kingdom, but shy away because of our sinful past?

Like the dishonest manager, we only have one hope when Kingdom comes: throwing ourselves upon the mercy of the master.

Last week Jeff preached on the parable right before this one, the parable of the Prodigal Son. Today’s parable is not so different: both the younger son and the manager betray their father figure, “squander” their wealth, and end up facing a crisis.

With no future security left, both men devise a plan to throw themselves on the mercy of the one they betrayed. And both men experience unbelievable mercy.

This parable is another snapshot of God’s grace – but from a strange angle. In fact, the angle of the shot is so strange in this parable (because of all that is said about money), we’re likely not to see the grace unless we look closely.

So what about all this that Jesus says after the parable about money? Well even though the parable is focusing on grace, you might read this and totally get confused about what Jesus is saying about money (I sure get confused!).

I think that what Jesus says after the parable is almost a “corrective” so that we don’t read this and get the wrong idea about money in God’s eyes, ending up thinking that it’s OK to be dishonest in our financial transactions.

Jesus calls wealth “dishonest” as a bit of a warning: money can take the place of God in our lives, competing for our devotion, making us worried sick. But money can also be used in exchange for something that will last:

The manager used wealth in a way that had his future in mind.

Jesus seems to be saying that God’s people should do this, too: not by hoarding wealth/being dishonest, but by being generous with all we have, using our resources (time/money/possessions) to invest in relationships that truly last.

Instead of worshipping what we own, and separating ourselves from God, we can experience the true, lasting riches of God when we are open-handed with all that he’s given us. Giving to others is an investment that will last into eternity.

So if the 1st point is about grace, then the 2nd point is: make your financial decisions with God’s Kingdom and the future in mind. The wealth of this world is not ours anyway – God gives it to us as his stewards, his managers, to make the best decisions we can with it.

So many times, these decisions are the small ones:

• What would it look like for us to lose a little on our business deals, and gain the relationship involved? I think of folks I know who have not sold their homes to the highest bidder, but to a family who badly needed a house.

• What would it look like for us to spend a little time in conversation with someone who is lonely? I think of the Wednesday Night Dinner.

• What would it look like to offer what you have for the sake of relationships? I think of the life of this church, which exists so often in homes where small groups meet, where people are prayed for, where short-term housing is offered, where hospitality is shown.

These are little things. But

“Whoever is faithful in a very little thing is faithful also in much.”

We don’t really grab hold of grace until we die to all the other things we hold onto: our money, our plans, our possessions. Most of us don’t grab onto grace until we “give up our life and let God raise us to a new life” (Robert Farrar Capon).

In his time of crisis, the manager was freed up to consider options he never would have considered when life was so secure, going so well. It took a crisis to see that grace comes so many times in unconventional, out-of-the-box ways...ways that have more to do with giving up and taking risks than hanging onto success and security.

I hope that I come back to this passage in a few years and it makes more sense to me. God’s Word is like that…full of mystery, and yet the Spirit shows us more and more.

Though it’s difficult to fit together all that Jesus says here, maybe the main truth from this parable is simply this:

The loser ends up winning, because he banked everything on the Lord’s grace.

Like Jesus, who risked everything upon his Father’s good promise and went to die on a cross…like Jesus, who hanging on that cross looks like he will lose…and he does lose his life, only to gain it back again, and gain all of us back to life with him.

What is the crisis that will shake you and me? What will come and unravel us, and all our many plans, and all that we hold onto so tightly? What will bring us to the place where nothing is left but one plan, one crazy hair-brained plan, to let go of everything and bet all we have on the mercy and goodness of the Father? What will it take…?

For each one of us, letting go and trusting in God’s grace takes dying to ourselves. Nothing makes this more clear than the Sacrament of Baptism…

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