We Can't Serve Two Masters

 Luke 16: 1-13    September 18, 2022

 

Oh my! This parable. This has got to be one of the most confusing parables. 

Most scholars don’t agree on what Jesus could mean.

I mean it’s easy figure out what’s going on,

but the message seems contradictory to things that we assume 

about Jesus and our place in the world as Christians.

So much so that we doubt our understanding of it.

 

As I said, the story itself is simple to understand:

A manager has been put in charge of his bosses  accounts

he’s been accused of being dishonest

and his boss tells him to clean out his desk

because his pink slip is on its way.

 

The manager knows he isn’t good at manual labor,

and he doesn’t want to be homeless, so he has a plan.

Make all the customers happy and they’ll be nice to him later

 and maybe they’ll let him sleep on their couch.

 

So he calls up Henry and says, “Henry,

how much do you owe my boss?”

and Henry says, 100 bucks.

So the manager says,

“why don’t you just give me 50 and we’ll call it even?”

and Henry jumps on the chance and is very happy.

Then he calls up Sally and says how much do you owe?

She owes a hundred bucks too.

He goes, how about 80, can you do that?

She’s like, “Yeah, I can do that right now.”

So, let’s do it and we’ll call it even.

 

Now, you think that the boss would be pretty angry

because there the manager goes again being dishonest.

But no, the owner of the business applauds the manager

He actually approves.

He says, “that was pretty clever.”

 

And the first confusing thing is that act is commended by Jesus,

he says, “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”

 

And the second confusing thing is that Jesus seems to discredit that

statement immediately in the warning in the next two verses.

 

“Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much;

and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much.

¹¹If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth,

who will entrust to you the true riches?

¹²And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own?

 

So we have the story and then the confusing statement,

“make friends by dishonest wealth” and the warning, 

“whoever is faithful in very little is faithful also in much”

 

Now some scholars have said that the

Warning doesn’t belong because it seems to contradict

the story and the statement.

And some reasonable people say that the

statement doesn’t belong because

Jesus couldn’t be praising a guy who breaks the rules.

And some people say that Jesus never said the parable at all

and they choose to just ignore the whole thing.

 

Our discomfort with this parable

and why it causes so many interpretive gymnastics

is that we can’t wrap our heads

around the fact that Jesus is praising dishonesty.

Maybe as Christians, we’ve spent so much of our

history teaching each other that to be good Christians

means to follow all the rules, no matter how bad the rules are.

 

So this parable is so consternating because it doesn’t

go along with what we’ve been brought up with as Christians.

 

But I think we have to take Jesus at face value

And believe that he said both things and he meant them.

We just have to change our presumptions about a lot of things.

 

So I’m not exactly sure what’s going on here.

And I might change my mind next week, but here goes:

 

In the story, Jesus gives an example

of a manager being “dishonest”. Now he doesn’t rob people,

he doesn’t keep the money for himself.

He’s not that kind of dishonest.

What he actually does is he made up his own rules.

He changed the system.

 

And the system is this:

There’s a boss who has a lot of wealth and people borrow,

then they owe.  They actually owe a lot.

Most likely a lot more than they borrowed.

They are in debt. And debt becomes their status in life.

It’s very hard to get out of debt. Debts are an age-old way 

of keeping people subjugated to the debtors. 

That’s why the Hebrew scriptures actually tell people not to loan at interest. 

The people in debt have to keep struggling, they have to keep working, and they can never get ahead.

It works the same way today, people are swallowed up in

student loan debt, medical debt, credit card debt, payday loans -

Just in order to survive. Everyone’s following the rules, 

but the rules that are there make a few people really rich and make lots of others indebted to them.

 

But when the manager came in and forgives debts,

he just went and changed the rules.

 

This is not the way it was supposed to work.

You’re not just supposed to go forgiving debts.

If you just forgave debts how do we control people?

How would we know who is worthy and who is not?

People get upset when debts are forgiven.

There’s something about it, the little bean counter in all

of us goes crazy, we go, “that’s not fair. I had to pay,

why don’t they have to pay. What’s going on?”

The whole system of ordering and judging people is falling apart here.

 

But if you really look at it, everyone actually comes out okay:

The people who owed obviously benefit they are no longer in debt.

The manager benefits because he will be welcome into

the homes of the people who owed.

And even the boss benefitted because now he has $130

that he wouldn’t have had, and everyone in town

thinks he’s the greatest guy in the world. It’s win, win, win.

The only thing that isn’t happy is our sense of what’s right and fair.

And as I said last week, God stinks at math.

And as I said several times before, God isn’t fair.

 

And when Jesus says, whoever is faithful in little is faithful in much.

Maybe Jesus is saying that the “faithful” thing to do is to

change the rules. Even if this looks dishonest in the eyes of the world.

Remember, this is all in response to the fact that

the Pharisees and scribes have been grumbling.

“Why is Jesus eating with tax collectors and sinners?”

In other words, “Why is Jesus rewarding people who have so much

repenting and changing to do?”

Don’t they owe debts? Shouldn’t he be telling them about

all the repentance they should be doing?

Shouldn’t Jesus be showing them tough love?

Shouldn’t Jesus be telling them all about their sins

and telling them that he won’t love them until they change their ways? If he just goes and eats with them and welcomes them,

then there’s no difference between those people and us.

If God loves them just the same, then we couldn’t judge them like we’re used to judging them. That wouldn’t be fair.

 

Maybe Jesus is saying the “faithful” way is actually

to not follow the rules. To change the rules.

Maybe Jesus is saying “honest wealth” is the one where

everyone gets the benefits that God gives and not just the few 

privileged ones who have been raised on the ladder of success.

 

Maybe Jesus is telling us that maintaining

the system is not the honorable way

and treating people with love and kindness is.

Maybe Jesus is telling us that the system is actually “dishonest”

and the “faithful” way is to go around it or change it.

Like I said, maybe I’ll change my mind later,

but this is what I’m thinking now.

 

So there was this Lutheran Church in Washington DC called

Luther Memorial place. It’s in the middle of DC in a depressed

neighborhood and like a lot of churches, it was struggling during the 

1970’s when members started to move to the suburbs.

The pastor at the time was John Steinbruck and when I was

in seminary he was a guest professor and I was in one of his

classes, so I heard a lot of his tales.

In the 1970’s, the church was severely declining and it was

struggling to survive. It was likely to close soon.

Then in 1976 there was a particularly cold winter and a couple of homeless people died of exposure. 

There wasn’t enough room in the shelter and a crisis was about to brew.

So one night, the pastor just decided to open the doors of the church and let people sleep inside the church. And he did it the next night and again. Soon there were hundreds of people sleeping all over the building. This was not how things were supposed to work.
Churches weren’t supposed to do this . You were supposed to get permission, you needed certain things in place, there was processes.

But Steinbruck said that “people were dying that night. To heck with the rules.” But he used more colorful language than that.

 

A friend of Bob’s was actually a member of that church at the time,

and I asked him, did it cause any trouble?

He goes, “oh my gosh yes, there was tons of trouble.”

Lots of members of the church were complaining about it,

council meetings were really tough for a while,

the city was causing trouble with codes and ordinance,

things went missing in the church, There was no place to have a meeting. It was real trouble. But the leadership saw something happening and they didn’t pull the plug on the operation.

 

Steinbruck told us in our class that even the Lutheran Church was not pleased with him. The synod asked for the parochial report.

They were getting mission funds and they needed to show that their worship membership was up to snuff to get the funds.

So he just counted every person that had slept on their floors for the past year –  675 that’s our membership. He said, (again not as gently as this) “If those people in Chicago didn’t like it, they could lump it”

 

People were very annoyed with him and the church on all fronts.

He didn’t follow the rules, he didn’t care for the process, the constitution, the laws of the city. He didn’t use polite language.

Homeless people aren’t members.

But that was a turning point in that congregation.

The church suddenly had a mission, a point.

The giant building that seemed too large for the congregation

served a purpose, the neighborhood fell in love with the church in a way it hadn’t before. Everything changed. They started N Street Village, which serves the homeless population in many ways in DC. They started the Lutheran Volunteer Corps in 1979.

 

The Congregation has been a wonderful and thriving place

for the last 50 years, a beacon to their community involving

many people in spiritual growth, service, and justice.

Now they are seen as a model congregation of the ELCA.

 

Did they follow the rules? No.

Did they the go with the system as written?

No. Especially in the Lutheran Church in the 1970’s.

 But was it a faithful use of what had been entrusted to the church? Yes. 

Was it in service to God? Yes.

Did everyone win in this situation?

- The homeless who were previously freezing? Check.

- The city didn’t look so heartless letting people die. Check.

- The congregation that was lacking a clear direction? Check.

- The national church that would come to see Luther place

 as a model of what a church should be? Check.

 

Maybe the most honest way of dealing with things 

is the way that looks the craziest and most unorthodox to the rest of the world.

 

Are we as Christians so bogged down with doing

the right and proper thing by the rule book that we

sometimes forget about taking chances for God?

 

What if the message of this parable is that Jesus wanted his church to stop clinging to rules and to actually be faithful?

To use the worldly wealth that we have - not to keep order,

but to throw things into chaos?

What rules and systems are we clinging to?

What faithful things are we saying, we can’t do

because maybe it breaks the rules as they are?

 

What if Jesus is asking us to throw our rule book away?

What if Jesus is telling us to stop being responsible

and start being faithful?

 

What if Jesus is telling us to break our own rules

that we’ve established? Could we get into trouble?

 

Sure. Jesus got into plenty of trouble for us.

 

Jesus said, “you cannot serve two masters.”

You cannot serve money, rules, or security

and God at the same time. Sometimes you have to choose.

 

Jesus is the unjust steward. He is the shrewd manager.

He knows that the world is not saved by rules, or doctrine.

Not through counting debts and repayments

and figuring out who was better than who.

 

Salvation came through Jesus, not through rules.

The world was saved by breaking rules and by putting love, grace, friendships, and relationships first.

Jesus saved all of us by releasing our debts. By just giving it all away.

 

Jesus is a crook, robbing the system of its power.

Giving life to those who don’t deserve it.

 

We were saved by a scoundrel, a rule-breaker a man who hung

to death between two thieves on a cross for his trouble.

 

Jesus was faithful with what was given to him

and in return he gave us true riches.

He knew he could not serve two masters.

And for our sake, he chose to serve God.