Recorded Sermon

Being the parent of teenagers is one of life’s biggest challenges — I can tell you that I have earned every single one of my gray hairs. You all know the difficulties: High school parties where alcohol is served, driving on hazardous Northern Virginia roads, pressure to be sexually active.

Nancy and I know the dangers, and we take them very seriously. We don’t expect our children to be saints, but there is one thing we demand of them: Honesty.

When it comes to drinking and driving, for example, they know that they can get a safe ride home from us if they call us and ask for a ride. If they are honest, there is no penalty and no punishment. But if they drink, drive, and lie to us — goodbye driving privileges.

In our house, honesty is more important than perfect behavior. But I also know that we live in a society where honesty is not always the best policy.

On the one hand, we admire George Washington for saying, “I cannot tell a lie.” And we look up to Abraham Lincoln, calling him “Honest Abe.” But on the other hand, we tell our children that there are instances in which we should not be honest.

We say, “Tell your grandmother you like the gift — even if you don’t.”

Or we make the comment, “That doesn’t look like a toupee at all!”

Or we say to young parents, “What an adorable baby!”

These lies are designed to please others, says Robert Feldman, a social psychologist who studies lying in everyday life. Experiments have found that ordinary people tell about two lies every ten minutes. Some people get in as many as 12 lies in the same amount of time.

So, if I’m an average person, you’ll hear about three lies in the course of this sermon.

But here’s the interesting part, according to The Washington Post (February 19, 2007): Liars tend to be more popular than honest people. Knowing when to say something, and when not to be completely blunt, is, in fact, a social skill. People say they want the truth, but do they really want to hear a list of everything about them that is really annoying?

I don’t think so.

All of which brings us to today’s scripture lesson, the parable of the dishonest manager. Jesus tells us that there is a rich man who has a manager, and the manager is found to be squandering his master’s property. So the rich man fires the manager, and the manager panics, knowing that he is not strong enough to dig, and much too proud to beg (Luke 16:1-3).

So he comes up with a plan. He summons his master’s debtors, and gives them deep discounts on the amount they owe. A debt of a hundred jugs of olive oil becomes fifty, and a debt of one hundred containers of wheat becomes eighty.

The manager does this to please people, so that when he loses his job as manager he’ll have some friends that he can stay with (vv. 4-7). He would rather be popular than honest!

The story’s big surprise comes at the end, when the rich man commends the dishonest manager for his shrewdness (v. 8). This compliment strikes us as odd, because it seems strange that the master would be happy about losing money to his debtors.

But maybe the manager didn’t cheat his master very much at all. It could be that the manager was taking these discounts out of his own commissions, and was only giving the impression that he was stealing from his boss.

Scholars have discovered that it was a common practice of first-century lenders to write debt obligations in such a way that there was no differentiation between the principal and the interest. They may have done this to avoid revealing that they were charging high interest — there were no “truth in lending” regulations in those days. We all know that it can be a shock to see how much interest you are paying on a 30-year mortgage, or even a 4-year car loan.

If this is the case with the dishonest manager, then what he is removing from the bill is his own commission, plus some of the interest that would have accrued to the master.

So he is dishonest, yes — but not quite the cheat he first appears to be. The master gets his principal back, and the manager makes some friends that he can stay with when he is out of a job.

If this is the case, it suddenly makes sense that the master would commend his manager for acting shrewdly. As a businessman, the rich man would admire the manager for using the money under his control to make some friends for himself.

So is honesty the best policy? In this case, Jesus seems to be saying, “Not exactly.”

I want to be very careful here, because I don’t want to give the impression that Jesus endorses stealing. I would not want any of you who are executives or accountants or private entrepreneurs to cheat your companies or customers and then say, “Jesus told me to do it.” The Ten Commandments still say “You shall not steal” (Exodus 20:15), and nothing in the teachings of Jesus contradicts this.

What Jesus does seem to be saying is that shrewdness is good. “I tell you,” says Jesus, “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes” (v. 9).

I think what Jesus is saying here is that money is a means to an end — it is not an end in itself. Money should be used to make friends, to help people in need, to bring order out of chaos, to create products that are good, to advance the kingdom of God — money should always be used as a tool to accomplish a good goal of some kind. Jesus never wants us to become obsessed with money, or to focus on the accumulation of wealth as an end in itself. “No slave can serve two masters,” he warns us. “You cannot serve God and wealth” (v. 13).

Back when I was in high school, one of my pastors gave an excellent definition of sin, one that I have never forgotten. He said that we sin when we “love things and use people.” This made sense to me, and so did his definition of good behavior — the opposite of sin.. If it is wrong to “love things and use people,” then it must be right to “love people and use things.”

Think about that. It is wrong to “love things and use people.” And it is right to “love people and use things.”

This goes to the heart of what Jesus is teaching us about money. It is wrong to love dishonest wealth and focus on acquiring money for ourselves, especially if we use people along the way. But it is right, according to Jesus, to use dishonest wealth in our pursuit of the kingdom of God, especially if we love people along the way.

This means that we can spend money on a sound system for our Encounter service if it helps us to reach a younger generation for Jesus.

This means that we can use income from church investments in the stock market to provide care-giving services for our growing senior citizen population.

This means that we can use money made in a our Monday through Friday work to pay the salaries of church staff members, to buy medicine for the poor in Honduras, to purchase curriculum for our church school, and to support the work that the Lamb Center is doing with the homeless in Fairfax.

This means that each of us, in our personal lives, can make good use of the income we gain from a complex and often corrupt world economy. I believe that all of our money is tainted in some way — whether it passes through factories in China or textile plants in Honduras — but that does not mean that we cannot use it to put food on our tables, or to educate our children. Our money is very dirty, but we can use it for some clean and even noble ends.

What we end up with today is a parable without a clear moral. The manager fools around with his dishonest wealth, and is commended by his master for making friends and being a shrewd businessman. There’s something to be learned from this approach, but it’s not as neat and clean as the story of George Washington cutting down the cherry tree and saying, “I cannot tell a lie.”

What we’re left with is a question, one that I want each of you to answer. The question is this: Am I using all my resources to make friends, to help people in need, to bring order out of chaos, to create products that are good, and to advance the kingdom of God?

Answer the question honestly, because your destiny may depend on it.. And remember the words of Jesus, You cannot serve both God and wealth. Amen.


Sources:
Shankar Vedantam, “Almost Everyone Lies, Often Seeing It as a Kindness,” The Washington Post, February 19, 2007, A2.
Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J., The Gospel According to Luke [X-XXIV] Anchor Bible Library, v. 28a, 1098-99.