Fiftheenth Sunday after Pentecost
“God & Wealth” — Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Amos 8:4-7/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (Luke 16:1-13/NRSVUE)
Back in the fall of 2003, I, like the rest of New England, was still trying to process the fact that the Boston Red Sox had lost another yet pennant to their arch-rivals, the New York Yankees. The best of seven game series had gone to a seventh game, which the Red Sox were winning — until they lost. This was devastating, but not surprising, because the Red Sox had a long history of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
The Yankees went on to lose the World Series that year to the Florida Marlins (thanks be God), but it was a far greater comfort to know that this heartbreaking season was finally over and that us Red Sox fans could now turn our focus to the possibility that things might be different next year.
I had fallen asleep on the couch pretty early one Friday night in early November and woke up just as the eleven o’clock news was coming on. I stared at the screen in disbelief, thinking that I must have been dreaming, because standing there, holding a Red Sox jersey bearing the number thirty-eight that he had worn for his entire career, was Curt Schilling, one of the greatest pitchers of that era.
As it turned out, I wasn’t dreaming — the Arizona Diamondbacks had just traded Schilling to Boston; in reality, though, the deal was more complicated than that. The Diamondbacks were looking to slash their payroll and put together a transaction that enabled them to do that and to get four young players in return. Schilling waived his no-trade clause and agreed to being sent to Boston, and also got himself a big fat contract extension that netted him about thirteen million dollars per year over three years.
Was Schilling a hero, a villain, or a pawn? Was he none of the above or some combination of the above? Was he an opportunist finagling a lucrative deal or was he simply playing by rules of the cutthroat business of major league baseball (as the saying goes: don’t hate the player, hate the game)? It’s tough to say — and, of course, the very same questions could be asked about the Diamondbacks and the Red Sox. And while Curt Schilling could throw a baseball with the best of them, he’s also said things that a lot of folks have found pretty problematic.
Let’s face it: real-life situations are often not simple and motives are rarely pure (because people aren’t either). And whether the Schilling trade was the best or the worst thing that ever happened pretty much depends on which team you’re rooting for.
Today’s reading from the sixteenth chapter of Luke’s Gospel contains a story that is commonly known as the “Parable of the Dishonest Manager and it is one of the most difficult texts in the entire Bible (I’ll be honest with you: I’m kind of wishing I had chosen to talk about the one from Amos instead).
At a basic level, this too is a story about switching teams — a steward who is accused of squandering his master’s property and loses his job decides to reduce the obligations of his master’s debtors so they will, in turn, help him out now that he’s unemployed.
The first seven and a half lines of our passage consist of the parable itself (which we’ll come back to in a few minutes). The remaining verses are a series of loosely-connected statements by Jesus that seem to seek to provide a moral (or morals) for the preceding story, culminating in the well-known declaration: “You cannot serve God and wealth” — or, if you happen to prefer the more traditional version, “You cannot serve God and mammon.”
There has been much debate about this strange passage over the years, and the argument has mostly been about two essential questions: First, how are all the sayings of Jesus connected to the parable they follow? And second, what the heck is Luke trying to say?
While most Bible scholars agree that Jesus probably said the things Luke says he said here, there isn’t a whole lot of consensus as to whether he said all of them at the same time. Many interpreters believe that it was Luke who joined this story and these statements together here for posterity. In their way of seeing it, Luke is trying to make sense of this parable that Jesus tells about wealth by using a bunch of other things that Jesus said about wealth in order to put the parable in some kind of context. And even if you don’t happen to believe that this is true, it’s hard to argue that Luke’s choices about what is included in — and excluded from — his version of the gospel don’t guide our understanding of the gospel.
Each of the four gospel writers seeks to give us an account of Jesus’s life and death and resurrection, and while their accounts overlap to a large degree, they each tell Jesus’s story in unique ways and focus on different themes; for Luke, one of the key themes is wealth. From the very beginning of the third gospel — when Mary sings so joyfully of the God who has scattered the proud, brought down the powerful from their thrones, sent the rich away empty and lifted up the lowly — Luke has continually focused upon the leveling of the world’s playing field and Jesus’s role in that process.
As Jesus and his disciples make their way ever closer to Jerusalem, this refrain becomes more abundant and intense. “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions,” warns Jesus four chapters earlier, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Love of money simply has no place in God’s kingdom, and Luke wants us to know exactly where Jesus stands on that issue — which is why he keeps coming back to it over and over and over again.
“There was a rich man,” is how today’s parable starts. We’ll hear this refrain again next week at the beginning of Luke’s story about Lazarus. Because the rich man is not exactly the hero of either tale, it’s not all that hard to see which team Luke is rooting for — and the same could be said for Jesus.
The plot of today’s story basically goes as follows. A rich man hears through the grapevine that the manager in charge of his holdings is “squandering his property,” and so the rich man lets the manager know that his time on the job is quickly coming to an end. The soon-to-be-unemployed manager panics because he has no idea what else he could possibly do for work and he’s way too proud to beg. So he heads out to speak with all of the farmers with outstanding debts — owed not to him, but rather to his boss; the manager decides to reduce their bills dramatically — in one case, by half. The manager returns to meet the rich man and, as Jesus tells us, “his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted so shrewdly.”
Jesus himself uses the word “dishonest” to refer to the story’s main character, and this is the reason it has come to be known throughout the ages as the “Parable of the Dishonest Manager.” But it is not entirely clear that the manager has acted dishonestly; it all depends on how you choose to look at it.
The rich man doesn’t discover any wrongdoing by combing through the books to discover he’s actually being cheated; he acts merely on the basis of an accusation of possible squandering that he hears from someone else. And even if the manager were a squanderer, squandering doesn’t necessarily imply dishonesty; the manager certainly could be dishonest, but he also could just be bad at his job.
The whole meaning of the story seems to hinge upon how we view the manager’s action with respect to the farmers’ debts. Did he intentionally cheat his master by slashing the bills? Did he simply reduce the amounts that were owed by giving up his own commission? Or did he take the religious high road by forgiving the interest on the farmers’ debt — interest that would have been prohibited under Jewish law? It’s really hard to say.
The first option is clearly dishonest and probably illegal. The second option is neither of those things. The third option is a bit more murky. On the one hand, the manager would be denying the rich man interest that is due to him as a matter of contract; on the other hand, this would a contract that violates the covenant between God and the Israelites. In a conflict between two agreements, which one governs? Which one is right? That all depends upon which team you happen to align yourself with.
Any way you choose to look at the manager’s actions, the big issue that Jesus and Luke want us to consider in this really complicated story seems to be this: Where do your allegiances lie and why — and just how far are you willing to go in order to support them?
The manager is suddenly kicked to the curb by the rich man whose bidding he’d been doing for some time and this results in his whole worldview being shattered. Realizing that he is dispensable to the wealthy landowner whose interests he had previously served (even if not very well), the manager responds by switching teams and aligning himself with the tenant farmers who owe his master money.
Perhaps the manager is a vindictive crook who decides to exact his revenge on his soon-to-be-former boss by stealing from him. And the bonus seems to be that the rich man, who actually credits the manager’s cleverness, is too dumb to notice that he’s been robbed. The manager’s allegiance with the farmers is incidental.
Or perhaps the manager is trying to cultivate some goodwill among the farmers, thinking that they might help support him now that the rich man has cut him loose. The manager’s allegiance with the farmers would be one of convenience, driven by self-interest.
Or perhaps the manager has chosen to go full-on Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to give to the poor. His allegiance with the farmers, though implemented through dubious means, is one of mutual interest that is kind of grounded in moral principle.
Or perhaps the manager realizes the part he’s played in this system of exploitation and decides to give up his own commission in order to atone for his wrongdoing. The poor are helped, the rich man is no worse off and the manager’s conscience is clear. Everyone wins.
Or perhaps the manager now understands that charging the farmers interest violates the law as given to Moses, and so he literally chooses God over wealth — over mammon. The manager’s allegiance with the farmers would be the result of his decision to honor a different, more virtuous, set of obligations.
But it’s also entirely possible that the farmers are using the manager, who is clearly in a precarious position, in order to weasel their way out of paying his master the money they agreed to pay.
Or maybe the rich man is is trying intimidate the manager to force him to milk every last penny out of the poor farmers.
So, was this manager who changed teams a hero, a villain, an opportunist or a pawn? Which possibility rings true for you — any, all, some or none of the above?
As you think about how you’d respond to that question, you ought to consider this: the answer you give might just let folks know which team you’re rooting for.