Sermon for the Ninth Sunday after Trinity: August 1, 2021 jj
Rev’d Mark B. Stirdivant, Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Yucaipa, California
✝ sdg ✝
God has a knack for teaching you something perfectly, even while using an imperfect example. The only thing you have around you is an imperfect world, a world riddled with sin, suffering, hardship and death. So for God to explain anything good and true and perfect to you, chances are He’ll sometimes have to use something imperfect, something tainted by sin’s disease and given to false pretenses and abuse, at least the way you normally see it.
We find this in today’s Gospel, a parable of Jesus, an earthly story that has a heavenly meaning. When you read His parables, normally there is only one or two main points that Jesus intends you to draw from them, and the surrounding details remain in the background. That is especially true with this story, because if you give equal emphasis to all the details, you actually contradict the main point. The parable is about a steward, or business manager, that a rich man put in charge of his possessions. Evidently, one of the items for which this manager was responsible was what today’s business world may call “accounts receivable.” He was to collect payments for bills that other people owed to the rich man. As the story goes, the manager wastes his boss’s possessions and it was announced to him Apprentice style: You’re fired. Prior to his last day on the job, this terminated manager thinks ahead a little bit and wins the favor of a few of the master’s debtors. How does he do it? He dishonestly tells them to pay his master less than they owe! That’s what will make his future unemployment a little brighter.
Most people don’t have a problem with the story up to this point. It’s the very next thing that happens that causes a real stir. It makes you scratch your head and wonder, What is Jesus thinking with this story? Because the rich man, the master, commends his fired manager! And since Jesus is providing this story in a positive way, you could even say Jesus Himself is commending this manager as an example for you! But here on out you must be careful: this is an imperfect example that He uses, and I must point out that He does not necessarily commend the actual dishonest thing he did, but the key to this whole parable is the manager’s shrewdness. Actually that word shrewdness in verse 8 is worth highlighting or circling in your Bible, if it belongs to you, that is. In the NIV it says he acted shrewdly. You might even see the word “cunning” in some other English Bibles. That sort of worldly wisdom that just like a good chess player it thinks a few steps ahead—that is what Jesus says the world can teach the Church.
Listen to your Lord’s own words: “The sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the sons of light.” Guess what? This is not a compliment. For you who are born of water and the Holy Spirit and ushered into the loving embrace of God your heavenly Father, you’ve got a big lesson to learn from the people of this world, people who wouldn’t ever give one thought to their eternal salvation! Jesus is telling you that you are not diligently wise in doing what you do best as a Christian, and the business sense of this fallen world is really showing you up.
The best way to illustrate this worldly diligence is how it makes you wonder—how do all those scam artists keep coming up with more and more elaborate plans to separate you from your money by fraud? It was bad enough that they concocted a scheme to steal your carbons back in the days when there were credit card carbons. Now they can be so bold as to impersonate you to a bank or to your own friends and take out a loan in your name or even trick you to be generous to them because they are in an emergency and Grandma Robbie or Uncle Tim, surely you can help out with just a few bucks to get them out of their bind? That kind of diligence would pay off really well in a real, legitimate job, right? But the world apparently can’t see that difference, and it still rewards shrewdness, whatever form it takes.
Jesus makes the point clear: “Make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings.” The word for wealth or money in the older versions of the Bible is Mammon, perhaps you heard of it. It means everything you have as God’s gift to you, and that means time, personal influence, strengths and abilities as well as money, anything you have that is extra beyond what you need to keep alive and satisfied. Jesus called it unrighteous wealth or Mammon because people like you and me use that extra surplus normally just for selfish things. That’s what the sinful world does best, but that’s still not the lesson Jesus wants you to learn. You already know that. You and I are by nature selfish because of sin.
Making friends by means of unrighteous wealth means to use the time, money, and energy that your heavenly Father has lavished on you to help someone who needs it. Another parable Jesus tells in the Gospel of Matthew reveals that when you feed the hungry, clothe the unclothed and visit those in prison, you are actually serving God. Now Jesus is not saying that all of a sudden you are saved and going to heaven just because you did good things, as if faith and trust in Him were now thrown out. No, believing in Jesus is still the only hope you have for salvation. You cannot do enough to please God, but Jesus has done it all, and your heavenly Father counts what Jesus did for you in your favor. That is the true faith, that is still the only way you’re going to heaven.
But it is also true that the true faith changes you in the process. It renders the lies and the deceptions of this world absolutely foreign and empty to you, and at the same time makes you do something that your sinful human nature could never do: and that is, look out for the benefit of someone else, doing good works for someone who needs it. Ephesians 2 sums it up: you are saved by God’s grace that you have received in your heart through faith and not by doing anything for it. Yet you are still the Lord’s new creation and He has preprogrammed you to help others and do good works, not to improve your situation, but to improve their situation. Since you were grafted in Baptism to Jesus Christ the Vine, you as His branches produce fruit, doing good things, but really it is God doing it all through you. Whether it is praying for your friends and loved ones, wielding a paintbrush on a Saturday, saving a friendly hello for someone new, changing a baby’s diaper, taking out the trash for your wife, giving to the Lord’s Work here at church as well as in some other area of missions, doing your homework, driving kids to millions of places, (as you know, the list just goes on and on)—whatever it is, God is placing the desire in your heart to do it, and you do it automatically. No matter what the service is that you do, or how unnoticed and unappreciated it might be, it is a good work that pleases the Father only because He is pleased with Jesus. In fact, the more unnoticed and unappreciated the better, the way He sees it. It’s what you do best as a renewed, forgiven Christian: thinking not about how to help yourself, but how to help other people.
And so, now to put it together, Jesus is telling you to learn from the shrewdness of the dishonest manager and apply it to the good, helpful things that you do best as a child of light. Look diligently, even creatively for ways to use the God given gifts you have beyond what you need to help other people. Jesus says in another place, Let your light shine before men, that they may see what you do for them and praise your Father in heaven. Remember, the dishonest manager didn’t have any means of his own to give to these people to make them his friends. He only had the generosity of his master the rich man to rely on. He had to know that the boss would honor the discount in the first place or else his plan wouldn’t work. It’s the same for you: the generosity you share with others isn’t really yours but God’s, yet He has given it to you to hand out to others.
But I should remind you that you will fail in this task as long as you are on this earth. You will constantly have your sinful human nature putting yourself first rather than your neighbor. Every day you will still need the Lord’s free gift of forgiveness that is yours in Jesus Christ and His death and resurrection. And He will come through for you every time because it is His responsibility as the head of the household of faith to serve you. For He didn’t think anything of laying down His own life for you, His bride, the Church. He just did it, and did it perfectly. And you have His Body and Blood here on this altar and placed into your mouth to bring His sacrificial love to you.
Jesus was truly diligent in completing His task when He went to the cross for your sake. Any one of us who thinks we can stand needs to take heed every moment so that we would not fall. We’re in this world, remember, and we’re not perfect. And yet temptation to sin, even at those times when we think we are being shrewd with our unrighteous wealth, that temptation will not be too great for us; we have God’s guarantee of that written down by the Apostle Paul. We have that guarantee of forgiveness sealed with the Body and Blood of Christ in the Lord’s Supper, which also through God’s own strength enables you to think ahead like that manager, imperfect though he was, but you’ll be that much more encouraged, eager and diligent when you leave this building and share His love with others.
In the Name of the Father and of the ✝ Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Readings:
2 Sam. 22:26–34 With the pure you will show Yourself pure
Psalm 51:1–12 in sin my mother conceived me
1 Cor. 10:6–13 …to them as examples, and they were written for our admonition
Luke 16:1–13 No servant can serve two masters