Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

September 23, 2007

Sermon by Pastor John Marboe

The Holy Gospel according to Luke. (Luke 16:1-13)

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 made 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 his 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 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.”

The Gospel of the Lord.

Jesus was a storyteller; Jesus told stories. So do we.

The wealthy owner of a fairly large company in St. Paul received complaints about her chief operating officer. She has suspected for some time that he had been finding ways to channel some of the company money into his own pocket. Yet, she had no proof. Profits were down, and cash reserves were a bit low. It seemed to her the right time to make a change. Her gut told her that the chief manager was not fully honest. But, at any rate, she had grounds for dismissal on the basis of performance. The board would back her decision.

Monday morning, she called the manager into her office and invited him to sit down. He sensed something was up and couldn’t look into her eyes. “I have to let you go,” she said coolly. “I want a summary of your accounts on my desk at the end of the day. Turn in your key and your computer at that time, also.” He was stunned and speechless. He left the office feeling numb. His head was spinning. What was he going to do now? He just had his 57th birthday. Who would hire him? He was overqualified and over-aged for most positions. He had two children in college. The family health-care was through his work. He had never been a great saver. They had a bit of retirement and the house, and that was it. He wasn’t completely surprised. His boss had always been tough, but fair. And she didn’t get where she was without being a bit ruthless from time to time. She wasn’t cruel per se. But when it came to the business, the bottom line for her always came first.

But this had never been his orientation. He wanted success for the business, for sure, but not at any cost. He was closer to the employees. He knew what was going on in their lives. He knew their struggles, their problems, their hopes. He had looked the other way plenty of times. He knew there were times when it was his job to be tougher, but often there were sick children, a dissolving marriage, a drug problem, emotional problems. At the end of the day, he had to let some of them go; they just couldn’t do the job. But second chances, and even third and fourth chances, were not uncommon under his supervision. These were hard choices. His boss wouldn’t approve, he knew, but she didn’t have the whole story. For him, the bottom line could never simply be the bottom line.

He had moments of weakness himself, too. He had not been squeaky-clean all those years. His family enjoyed trips they couldn’t otherwise afford, using the frequent-flier miles he accumulated during business travel. These were supposed to be strictly used for business, but he had never really agreed with that policy. He knew the boss used hers for personal trips—so he took trips. And he didn’t require other employees under him to account for their frequent fliers either. When he traveled, he was pretty liberal with the company expense account. He could stay at more modest hotels, but he liked four- and five-star hotels. People smell better in those hotels. The pools aren’t over-chlorinated; the sheets, they’re so crisp and thick. The soap products are Aveda, not Suave. He justified the expense by telling himself that the luxury enhanced his performance as a businessman. The company probably came out ahead.

The one thing he really felt guilty about was the computer. His son needed a laptop for school. And it was a tough time for the family; everything happened at once. The furnace went out; the car transmission needed replacing; one of the kids needed orthodontics. But the worst of it was—one of the other kids joined hockey. They were strapped, and a laptop was out of the question. But the company had just ordered several laptops, new laptops, and he felt they had ordered more than they needed. His I.T. manager was one of those geeky-types who felt there was no business solution that didn’t require a new computer. The I.T. manager was a little fast and loose with his budget. But he was good, and new equipment kept him happy. So he made up a story about his own laptop being stolen from his car. And the I.T. manager bought it. The COO gave his old laptop to his son, thinking, “Hmm, maybe it was time to replace it—no big deal.” But it never felt right to him.

He wasn’t sure which of these things had gotten back to the owner’s ears, but he was sure something did. She couldn’t prove it, but she knew—she was smart. The company was like her own child, and she had those maternal eyes in the back of her head. Was he bad for business? Hmm – yes and no. He always felt there was more to life than profit, and who is to say that philosophy wasn’t good for business in the long run. He knew even better than the owner that the company was in a low patch. He knew the numbers. But he also knew the people; he knew the customers. Accounts receivable were too high for anyone’s comfort. There was a lot of uncollected debt out there. This, too, was part of his responsibilities. Their accounts were with smaller businesses and individuals, by and large, and over the years he had come to know the regular customers very well. He felt that trust was the most valuable commodity. If you gain someone’s trust, you have their business. These were not to him just accounts; they were people, struggling for their own survival as well. When they couldn’t pay on time, he cut them slack. The owner didn’t like it. “I’m not a cash cow,” she used to yell at him. “I’m not a bank.” Still her business depended on these very customers, and things were tough for everyone just now. There was no way they could pay everything that they owed. And these were the thoughts that swam in his brain as he sat in his own chair and stared, without looking out the window.

Suddenly a plan came to him. He had one day, only one, to try to improve the situation. It was likely something that would infuriate his boss, but he had nothing to lose. And it quite possibly would work in her best interests, too. He called each of the customers who owed them money, and he told them, “Look. I know you can’t pay everything, but how much can you pay right now?” And in each case it was more than half their debt. “Good,” he replied. “I’ll send over the revised bill right away. I need payment by the end of the day.” The customers, of course, were delighted with the deal. The COO knew that if he was going to make a living after today, he could use as many friends out there in the business world as possible. He wasn’t born yesterday. It wasn’t an entirely bad deal for the owner either. She had outstanding accounts. And what were her options? Well, she could turn them all over to collection for pennies on the dollar and then lose those accounts for the future. Or she could continue to carry the debt and be strapped for cash; and, in the long run, that could be more costly than the debt itself. But because of her shrewd chief operating officer, with nothing else to lose, she received well over half the debt she was owned, and all in one day. When she discovered what her manager had done, she was furious. But then she looked at him, and his eyes were calm and level with hers. He was no longer afraid; he had done what he thought was best, given the situation. And even she could see it wasn’t that bad for her. She would be fine; she had enough. And she, for a moment, envied him. She held out her hand and commended him for his shrewd final move as chief operating officer.

In our reading today, Jesus tells a story; he told this kind of story. Now, I have elaborated and amplified it. I added characters and gave backgrounds—that’s my own—and I recast it in a modern setting. But Jesus in this way was a storyteller. I like to imagine that he simply told the story and didn’t include all the commentary that follows the story, the commentary about making friends by unclean money so that you’ll be admitted into the eternal homes, whatever those are. Or about whoever is faithful in little is faithful in much, but whoever is dishonest in little is also dishonest in much—which, frankly, seems to contradict the very point of the story.

There are fully six separate comments on the story after it is over. Some of them have a point either unrelated to or counter to the story. And the six comments don’t even agree with each other. Some commend the dishonest manager and some condemn him. It’s as though Luke himself couldn’t quite figure out what to do with the story. So because it’s about business he, and likely further editors, tossed in collections of sayings about money attributed to Jesus.

Now, keep in mind, Luke, the Gospel writer, never met Jesus. And the version of Luke we have was compiled forty or more years after Jesus had died. This is not an eyewitness account. The commentary at the end of our Gospel reading may be worth pondering. But I think we need to assume that Jesus never connected them necessarily to this parable. More likely, I think, he stopped talking after telling the parable and left people to wonder what it was about.

The beautiful thing about Jesus, the storyteller, is that he is so very interesting. Great stories never grow stale. They strike us in new ways every time—that is, unless we reduce them to a point or a simple moral, like Luke seemed to try to do. But stories, and especially Jesus’ parables, defy that kind of simplistic interpretation. I think we sense that, even though the parable touches on love of money, there is so very much more going on in the parable. It creates an imaginal world for us to step into, to look around, to identify with, to be frightened by, to see something from a new angle.

I retold the story largely from the manager’s point of view. You might not have. You might be less sympathetic toward the manager than I was. You might be tougher on the owner. You might think the debtors were all deadbeats. Or maybe they were oppressed, an oppressed underclass being fleeced by rich people, like the owner.

But Jesus told stories, and at times they were puzzling, and surprising stories, like this one He didn’t explain them. But let’s just notice one thing today about the story Luke tells us that Jesus told—tomorrow we may notice something else, but today let’s just notice this—that in the context of entering this story, we’re reminded that there are things far, far, far more important than bottom lines, more important than running a tight ship; more important than legalities; more important, in short, than getting everything one can out of a transaction. Life is more than all of this. And this is true, at the end of the day, for the owner as well. No one takes their wealth with them. People, relationships, trust, these are much more important than money; not the other way around. Might this be God’s word for us today? Perhaps.

Parables tease us into thinking and wondering. They don’t answer all our questions. They teach us, rather, to live with our questions.

Thank God Jesus told stories.