Dishonesty As The Way Of The Christ

Dishonesty As The Way of the Christ?

Luke 16:1-13
September 23, 2007

Then Jesus said to the disciples, “There was a rich man who had a manager, and
charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. So he
summoned him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Give me an
accounting of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.’
Then the manager said to himself, ‘What will I do, now that my master is taking the
position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. I
have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may
welcome me into their homes.’ So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he
asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of
olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’ Then he
asked another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘A hundred containers of
wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill and make it eighty.’ And his master commended
the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are
more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. 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. “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. If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to
you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who
will give you what is your own? No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either
hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You
cannot serve God and wealth.”

Now, last week, I mentioned that I often look back at old sermons to see how I preached
a particular text years ago, and this week was no different—I went a on a hunt to find
something, ANYTHING that might help me figure out how in the world to interpret this
difficult text. Well, I couldn’t find any record of me ever preaching on this text in the
past 10 years or so of preaching on a fairly consistent basis—but, after hearing the
reading itself, can you understand WHY I never chose to preach on this text?! This
parable told by Jesus is considered one of the most difficult to interpret for obvious
reasons—it seems to have Jesus commending, even approving of dishonest behavior
and pointing to it as a way of being for his disciples, both present and in the future. It’s
an odd moment, but mostly its confusing for interpreters of the text—what is Jesus
saying with this parable, this story meant to show us a deeper truth?

Before I get to what I think is a possible way of understanding this text, a way of
understanding that actually has its roots in the differences between our way of doing
business and the way people in the ancient world did their business, I want to actually
point out something similar between the people of Jesus’ day and our own. The reality
is that the desire to make a quick and easy buck in this world is nothing new, and this
dishonest manager is no different than many of the people we know or have seen in
this century, people who are willing to cheat in order to get ahead. More and more, we
find that people are willing to cheat others in order to make a buck, though most of the
cheating in our culture has to do with cheating government agencies—cheating on our
taxes, or playing fast and loose with our tax receipts, or often its large corporations
cheating its customers of a fair price, or lying to shareholders—as a recent resident of
Houston, Texas, the Enron Corporation comes to mind. Sometimes we even see our
young people cheat more often on their tests, on their school work because the
difference between this score or that score can be thousands of dollars in
scholarships. The competition to be number 1 is so fierce that people will do what they
think they have to do to get ahead quickly—lying and cheating to keep up with Jones’
or fudging on the facts in order to get a job they aren’t quite qualified for. We are a
culture that seems willing to do what it has to do so that we can get the short-term
profits in order to satisfy the needs of impatient shareholders like you or me—we want
what we want and we want it now, and nothing should get in our way, or so we seem to
think.
There is a wonderful, funny story about a Mafia Godfather who finds out that his
bookkeeper has stolen 10 million bucks from him. The bookkeeper is deaf. It was the
reason he got the job in the first place, since it was assumed that a deaf bookkeeper
wouldn’t be able to hear anything that he’d ever have to testify about in court. When
the Godfather goes to shakedown the bookkeeper about his missing 10 million bucks,
he brings along his attorney, who knows sign language. The Godfather asks the
bookkeeper, “Where is the 10 million bucks you embezzled from me?”   The attorney,
using sign language, asks the bookkeeper where the 10 million bucks is hidden. The
bookkeeper signs back, “I don’t know what you are talking about.”   The attorney tells
the Godfather: “He says he doesn’t know what you’re talking about.” That’s when the
Godfather pulls out a gun, puts it to the bookkeeper’s temple, cocks it, and says, “Ask
him again!” The attorney signs to the underling, “He’ll kill you for sure if you don’t tell
him!” The bookkeeper signs back, “Okay! You win! The money is in a brown briefcase,
buried behind the shed in my cousin Enzo’s backyard in Queens!” The Godfather asks
the attorney, “Well, what’d he say?” The attorney replies, “He says you don’t have the
guts to pull the trigger.”

It’s a funny story, and I do offer my apologies to deaf people, and those with Italian
roots, and attorneys, but you get the point of the joke: so many of us seem enamored
with easy money and doing whatever it takes to get what we want nowadays. But this is
nothing new—people in Jesus’ day are cheating up storm as well, anything to get a
quick and easy buck. The manager in our story has been accused of squandering the
property of the person he works for—perhaps even cheating his owner of some rightful
profits—and the solution the manager seems to come up with is to continue his
cheating ways by cutting the debts of the owner’s debtors. And what is so weird about
this passage is that the owner doesn’t end being angry—he actually ends up praising
the manager for his cleverness in securing his own future, of making sure that
someone will take him when he doesn’t have the means to afford a roof over his head,
or a good reputation to fall back on when he puts his employment applications out
there. And then Jesus says that one ought to be as shrewd as this dishonest manager,
that you ought to prepare for your future with the same kind of dishonest cleverness
that the people of his age practice. It’s just a baffling piece of advice from someone
whom you can’t imagine endorsing immoral means to get what one wants or needs to
survive. I mean, we are faith that believes that the means matter as much as the ends,
so this is an uncomfortable piece of advice that our Christ offers us.

But this is one of those moments when most of us don’t quite understand the way
things are done in the ancient world, where when we try to put on the frame of current
business practices on a world that doesn’t keep the books the same way we do
nowadays. More than likely what has happened is that the manager has cut out his
commission on those debts, and so when he cuts what is owed to the owner by half,
what he is cutting out his commission on the deal, his commonly understood piece of
the pie, his cut off the top of the deal. Now, charging a commission on top of the owner’
s price is probably something that the owner wouldn’t have thought twice about, though
maybe its exorbitant, maybe it was the manager’s greediness with the large percentage
of the commission he was charging people, maybe that it what was messing up or
squandering the owner’s business. We don’t know for sure, but we do know that a little
off the top is something most cultures in that day tolerated. My father used to work in
the oil business in Indonesia, which is one of the most corrupt cultures in the world and
he would tell me stories about having to grease the wheels with local officials in order to
make things happen—it was an expected part of doing business, even with large multi-
million dollar corporations. He would tell me about being across the room from
government officials he had to get permits from, and how these illegal transactions took
place. Usually, he would send over one of his Indonesian employees across the room
to actually hand the government official the bribe, because as an American you would
suffer a more harsh punishment than an native Indonesian if you were caught literally
handing a bribe to an Indonesian state employee—not that anyone was ever caught, of
course, and if you were, well, you could always bribe yourself out of that situation as
well! And I know my father, God rest his soul, is probably rolling over in his grave right
now, with me telling that story to a church congregation in a sermon!

The point: a little off the top was part of doing business, and so what this clever
manager does is to cut his commission, his piece of the pie, at that moment, in order to
secure some goodwill amongst people he was soon going to be visiting in order to
apply for a job. He was doing what so many of us are unwilling to do in this day and
age—and that was to think long-term, to think about tomorrow rather than just today.
So, when the owner praises him, it’s no longer so baffling! He gets what the manager is
doing—sacrificing his short-term profit from his commissions in order to secure
something long-term, something he will need tomorrow or a week or years from now.
Pretty clever, actually, and that seems to be what Jesus is praising—someone who was
willing to put off what he could get in the present in order to make sure he had
something long-term, something in the future. And remember what I said a few weeks
ago about the Gospel of Luke, and how the writer seems to be obsessed with having
Jesus go on and on about material things, about material wealth? Stuff, and the use of
stuff, money and wealth, it is a particular focus of this Gospel, of this telling of Jesus’
story and teachings, and of the particular chapters right before we get to this story in
chapter 16. And so the statement that the writer has Jesus saying here, that no one
can serve two masters, God and money, makes more sense. It is a continuation of a
theme, a theme where Jesus cautions his earliest listeners and us as well, to not get
caught up in a culture that only sees the present, that only sees what is at hand, the
stuff of the moment, rather than the possibilities of the future. It requires time and
commitment and integrity to not just go for the easy fix, the easy money, the easy
solution, instead of doing the right thing—life requires more of us, spiritually and
ethically, than just thinking about the next quarter’s numbers, and satisfying the
stockholders at the next date you have to disclose your earnings. I know most of us
don’t hold stocks for as long as we did a generation ago—we buy and sell to get the
quick profit, and we’re told to do that, but this Jesus asks us to think long-term about
how we invest our lives in this world, and whom we invest with. It requires commitment
to follow after the way of this Christ, and it may mean not always getting what we want,
or the emotional or spiritual profit we could have had if we had done things on the sly, if
we had gone for the easy solution, the quick fix. Its hard for us to think long-term, isn’t
it, nowadays—most of us don’t believe in sticking it out for the long haul, but that is
what Jesus seems to be saying here—give up the easy way for the way of the cross, for
the more difficult way, and know that something else more meaningful will meet us on
the other side of that cross, something called resurrection, something called peace.

But that is not the only thing we are gifted with if we choose a better way, to use Paul’s
phrasing in his first letter to the church of Corinth. What the manager discovers in his
slashing of the debts, in his attempt to make friends quickly, is that people and
community and connections really do matter in this life. I suspect he was like a lot of
people nowadays, including some of us, I am sure—we don’t pay as much attention to
our need for each other, we don’t get involved as much as our parents used to—we are
bowling alone, as a recent book said of us, as opposed to joining leagues and being a
part of a larger community. You know, this man discovers that he actually needs other
human beings, that it’s a good thing to be kind to people, to be generous with people,
because, more often than not, they return the generosity with us. He had probably
never thought much about it, especially when he was charging those exorbitant
commissions on his owner’s debts. But now, he gets it—he gets that stuff doesn’t
matter as much as people do, that he isn’t the loner, and the self-made man that the
thought he was. When he was on the brink of losing it all, he saw that he couldn’t make
it on his own, that he needed the very people he had once tried to extract every last
penny out of.   You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about our need for each other these
past few weeks, especially with what a few of us here are dealing with right now, health
issues and challenges. What I love about church and community is that we aren’t alone
in our struggles, that others stand with us and beside in our pain, our disappoint, and
they celebrate with us the good news as well. We are not alone, in the good times and
the bad times, because God is so often with us through each other. It took the
manager in this parable the possibility of losing everything to get this point, that it wasn’
t the stuff, the material goods that matter in this world—it’s the love and the grace and
presence you leave with others that really matters. I think Christ is right, though I am
slow on the uptake sometimes with truths like this—I still act as if I only had enough
stuff, it would be enough, but it never really is, is it? What you and I both need is more
of each other, and then we really will have enough in our lives, enough of the goodness
and peace that we’ve been searching for all of our lives. Amen and amen.