15th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 20C

15th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 20C September 22, 2019 I’ll never forget the time, years ago, when a member of my church showed up in my office and actually volunteered to be the stewardship chair for that year. (I can count on one finger the number of times I have seen that happen!) When I asked him why he wanted to volunteer to be the stewardship chair that year, he told me a story. He said that one Sunday, during the annual giving campaign the year before, I gave a sermon that was talking about the scripture passage from Luke 12:34: when Jesus says “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” In this sermon, I had invited the congregation to go home that week and to look at their checkbooks or online checking accounts. I invited them to investigate what their use of money had to say about where their hearts were. Well, he did that, he said; and he discovered something that really disturbed him. He said to me, “I realized I was paying more to my two golf club memberships that I don’t even really use than I was giving to the church in any given month. That upset me. So I have cancelled one of the golf club memberships and have increased my pledge to the church. He finished by saying, “I have been transformed in how I look at money and how I see what it says about my relationship with God and other people. And I want to help other people be transformed in this way.” Our reading for today from Luke’s gospel is one of the most difficult parables; it is known as “the parable of the unjust manager.” And one helpful thing that I have learned from our study of Amy-Jill Levine’s book Short Stories by Jesus and the study we are doing the corresponds with it, is that it is important, when looking at parables, to look at the actual parable itself and then to look at what Jesus or the writer of Luke has to say about the parable. Interpreters over the years have lumped these two together, and in order to see these old parables with new eyes, we need to separate the story from the interpretation. So, first, the story. Jesus tells his disciples that a rich man has a manager and charges are brought to the rich man that the manager is squandering his property. (We don’t know if this is true or not or what evidence is offered. We assume the charges are true and that informs how we read the parable, but what if they aren’t? Does that change how we read the parable?) The rich man calls the manager before him, ask for an accounting and says he can no longer be his manager. So the manager goes out (to get the accounting) and realizes that if he is about to be out of a job, then he needs to do something to preserve his future because he is cut out for neither manual labor or begging. So he looks to the relationships with his master’s debtors, and he reduces the master’s debt with each of them, so that they would think more kindly on him in the future and welcome him in their homes. When all is said and done, the rich man commends the “dishonest manager” (and can we assume, does not fire him?) “because he acted shrewdly…” Then the passage picks up with Jesus’s commentary on the parable, which shows us some of Luke’s agenda and also adds to the difficulty and complication of this parable. Another commentator points out that Jesus’s commentary via Luke offers at least 4 different interpretations to the parable: 1. The children of the light need to act more shrewdly. 2. Christians should make friends by “dishonest wealth.” 3. If you’re not faithful with dishonest wealth, who will trust you with the true riches? 4. You cannot serve two masters.i In the midst of those confusing interpretations, the commentator writes, it is important for us to remember “that one of the prominent themes in Luke is the proper use of wealth. Except it’s not just the use of wealth; it’s more like Luke is concerned with our relationship to wealth and how that affects our relationships with others.”ii So, what is our relationship to wealth and how does that affect our relationship with others? The only way I know to invite you to examine this question this week is to invite you to dive into how you spend your money. Look at your checking account statements-whether it is online or in your checkbook register; look at your credit card statement. Make a list of what relationships or priorities are most represented in those numbers and then sit with those before God and ask if how you spend money reflects what you would hope about your relationships. If not, why not, and how might you change that to be more reflective of who you want to be and who God is calling you to be? i. David Lose from http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?m=4377&rp=blog53&post=2746 ii. Ibid.