"Dishonest Wealth"

The texts for this week's sermon are Jeremiah 8:18-9:1; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13.

Dishonest Wealth

There’s a dirty word that flies around during the month of April with regularity - of course, I’m talking about taxes.  Every January, we get those wonderful forms that remind us how much we made this year, then we go about the grueling process of figuring out just how much of a cut of that money we need to give to Uncle Sam.  So we call up our accountants, we log onto the tax preparation websites, we pull out the calculators, the big ziplock bag of receipts we’ve saved all year, the letters from the churches and charities telling us what our donations have been this year, everything we can to help figure out what we need to pay, and we crunch those numbers down to the last penny.  We make that extra pot of coffee, pull out the antacids, and we don’t quit until it’s done and we know whether we’re getting something back, or whether we just have to pay.

And then we turn on the news and hear about some big, huge company who was obviously owed some huge favor from a bigshot Washington politician and are now the center of some new controversy over yet another big tax break.  You know they’re corrupt to the gills.  I know they are, too.  We’ve heard the stories about how they’re already being investigated for sending most of their income into offshore accounts and messing with all their books so they don’t pay taxes.  We know how much they charge us to use their stuff and we complain about it all the time, especially since we know that it’s all made in sweatshops by exploited children for pennies a product.  We’ve gotten the emails and the announcements from the General Assembly that the church is boycotting this company until they fix things.  And we wonder: what kind of favors do these politicians owe that we can’t get breaks like that on our taxes - especially when we barely have the money to pay what we already owe from our labors, fair and square?

But what if we turned on the news and heard instead about this same company being audited?  The other dirty word around April...  Now the big story is how all the things we already knew were coming to light.  The company is finally having to come clean about all the things they’ve done, all the workers they’ve exploited in unsafe conditions, the profits they’ve been making and hiding away in Switzerland, the palms they had to grease on Capitol Hill to keep things the way they were... everything.  What if the whole truth came out?  For many of us, it’d be a time for celebration - we’d do a little jig in the living room, excited to finally see the CEO’s being made to account for what they’d been doing with the money.

And then... in the midst of the audit, while everything is being scrutinized and gone over with fine toothed combs, the company launches a charity outreach center right here in Vandalia.  They give each house money toward their utilities bills, effectively cutting them in half each month.  They match all of the funding toward the new YMCA and begin the construction, hiring local contractors to start breaking ground.  They put together a scholarship fund at Van-Far to help every graduating senior have something to help them start into adulthood. And all the money they were using to do that comes from the CEO bonus checks they’d been giving themselves and from the offshore accounts where they’d squirreled away their profits.

Suddenly, our community is a better place, and the only people we can thank for it are the ones we’ve only ever seen as crooks.  And just as suddenly, the IRS changes their minds - they don’t bring the hammer down on this company, but applaud it for its “philanthropy” and “charity,” for using its money so shrewdly to help out a small community.

Maybe we’d be thankful to the company - in fact, we’d probably be very thankful to the company.  We’d see through what they were doing and know it for what it was, but we’d be thankful nonetheless.  We’d maybe even be willing to cut them a little slack when it comes to the prices of their stuff - after all, we can afford it a little better now.  But at the same time, we’d know... it still doesn’t seem quite right.  This company was supposed to get what was coming to them... but now they’re not.  We don’t know whether they’ll keep up this charity work now, or whether they’ll go back to cheating everybody again.  It just feels like a story that’s left decidedly unfinished...

And this is the story that Jesus tells about this “shrewd manager.”  This guy was a cheat.  He mis-managed his master’s property, squandering it in ways we can only imagine.  It’s probable that he even charged the tenants on his master’s property more than what they were due in the first place, allowing himself to skim off the top or to make some form of “commission” through his position.  Regardless of what the manager did or how the manager did what he did, the rich owner finds out about it and immediately calls the manager to task.  “Get your books and accounts together - you’re being audited and then fired because you’re not doing your job.”

The manager is put in a terrifying position - and the worst part is: he knows he’s brought it on himself, that he deserves everything he’s gotten.  So he takes stock of his situation and thinks about his options - he knows he’s not built to go out and dig ditches for a living, and he’s ashamed to beg.  So what’s a dishonest crook to do when the deck is stacked against him and he can’t dig ditches?  Why, do what he’s been doing in the first place: he spends his master’s money for his own benefit.  But this time, he does it to ingratiate himself to the people who owe his master.  “So... you owe a hundred jugs of olive oil?  Go ahead and make it fifty.  Owe a hundred containers of wheat?  Now it’s eighty.”  If he can’t beg, if he can’t do manual labor, he knows he’ll at least have some people willing to bring him home for dinner every now and again because they know he’s the one who helped them out with their bills.

It’s a horrible thing for him to have done - it was underhanded and just further cheated his master.  We see it clearly in front of us; Jesus’ audience saw it plain as day.  And as we listen to the story, we’re waiting for the hammer to fall.  It’s time for the master to see what his manager has done now and to go nuclear.  As Jesus is telling this parable, we can see his audience lean forward, eager for the chewing out they know this manager is about to get.  And then the utter shock that follows when the master commends his steward... well, it’s been the subject of a lot of commentaries and a lot of seminary students’ term papers.

Is Jesus really using this crooked manager as a moral example?  Is he seriously condoning such immoral and irresponsible behavior?  How is it good to use money fraudulently with the sole purpose being to curry favors from other people?  That’s just abusive - and the manager is commended for it.  What kind of master commends someone who has so blatantly misused that kind of wealth?

Jesus tells us that it is our master who does this kind of thing.  And he tells us to make use of our own “dishonest wealth” so that when the time comes, we may be brought into eternal homes.  It’s a confusing parable until we remember that everything we have is “dishonest wealth” in God’s eyes.  We often talk about how everything we have belongs to God, but how often do we really stop to think about what that means for us?  Every tomato we pick, every gallon of gas that goes into our cars, the land we till, every quarter that goes into the noisy can, even every breath we take - all belong to God.  And God entrusts these things to us, asking us to be caretakers of them, to use them wisely.  How much of that trust do we take advantage of each day?  In what ways have we squandered the very things which God has placed in our care to manage?  And in what ways will we be called to account for that misuse?  Jesus tells the people to use their dishonest wealth to make friends and to do good for other people - but that doesn’t mean Jesus is telling us to do immoral things.  Jesus instead takes the lesson of a dishonest manager, reflects it back upon us, and reminds us of our own status as benefactors of things that are not ours.  And so we should always strive to make the best use of these blessings and temporary possessions of ours so that when the true riches of the kingdom are given to us, we may use them wisely, and all to the glory of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.