University Christian Church

Over the past few months, I’ve been seeing these troubling stories about the ways debt is messing up our country and people’s lives.

We’ve heard about
- medical debt preventing some people from getting the treatment they need
- student loans weighing down young people trying to get their professional careers started
- and even lunch money debt preventing kids from having lunch at school

This week, for instance, I received an email from Prince George’s County Public Schools that said starting Monday, kids who owe money or have a $0 account balance can still have lunch in the cafeteria but it will be limited to some crackers, a cheese stick, and a vegetable. That sort of ticks me off. Of course, some of those parents need to deposit some money into their students account, but other parents may simply feel embarrassed or be unable to pay for all kinds of reasons. They may have swallowed the line that asking for or receiving help is not dignified.

Or they may truly not have the money, and student lunches becomes one more debt to have to pay in what can be an unforgiving economic time.

One of our elders, Jesse Brande, said to me in an email this week, “Debt of any kind can be a burden.”

I bet if we took an informal poll of everyone in this room who themselves has trouble with debt or hard months financially or know multiple people who do, we would learn so much more about our current economic reality and the burdens that so many people face. These burdens are not always visible. We are often embarrassed about them. Sure, there are good kinds of debt, but our society is great at marketing to us about bad kinds of debt, including credit card commercials who ask us, “What’s in your wallet?”, and invite us to trust that if we have their kind of card, life is manageable. We can get through those financial crisis. We can trust what’s in our wallet.

Here’s the thing about Jesus - Jesus was never afraid of money. He spent a lot of time talking about money in the gospels. In the Gospel of Luke in particular, 1 out of every 7 verses are related to money. Jesus wasn’t afraid to speak the truth and connect the way people treat money to their values. Jesus wasn’t afraid to call people out for trusting money over God.

In our parable today, we find a clear moment when Jesus addresses the power of money, where he uses images from his culture and his teaching to challenge his disciples to think about whether they use money or if it uses them.

Jesus says later on in this passage that the Pharisees and scribes, or at least some of the religious leaders, had problems with money. They loved money too much. Brian McLaren, an author and pastor, joked about this in a video this week when he said - “We modern readers may need to really think hard and imagine a society that loves money too much.” (Rewrite this)

But this parable of a dishonest manager is kind of confusing. It’s one of Jesus’ harder parables - unless we take a step back and look at what was going on in the culture of 1st century Israel.

So, here is Jesus - teaching his disciples and challenging the Pharisees about money with a peculiar story.

Behind the scenes, what hearers back then would have connected to and we modern readers sometimes miss, is the Roman occupation of Jewish land. When Rome would come in with their armies and power to seize control of territory, they would do so of course to take control of what the land produces - crops and resources to feed and expand their vast army. To do so, it meant taxes. It meant using farmers, especially poor farmers.

The taxes could be hard to pay for small Jewish farmers, especially if the year is a tough one, if the rain didn’t come… if life didn’t go the right way…

If the farmers couldn’t pay their taxes, the Roman authorities could take their land back.

Wealthier Jews would sometimes step in then and help pay for those taxes - with a cost, taking their land or taking their own cut on top of what was already owed to the Romans.

And as Brian McLaren points out - the rich people never went themselves to talk to these landers, but sent managers - middle men - to go cut the deals.

The whole system then could be about exploitation - where those at the top have more power and resources than those at the bottom. Even the guy in the middle would take his own cut from this unjust setup. And no matter what the poor farmers would do, their land and their livelihood was at risk, with either the Roman authorities or their wealthy Jewish landlords.

Enter this strange parable. A rich man, who obviously had land and power at his disposal, learned that his manager was dishonest. He was not doing the job he had been hired to do. We don’t know what he had done wrong, but it’s likely he was cheating his owner. He was an unscrupulous man. The rich man decides to fire this manager, to clean house, to get his operation back in order.

The manager then, aware that the end of his employment is coming, is in serious trouble. He doesn’t want to go and dig ditches for Romans. He doesn’t want to beg on the streets - but he will have nothing after losing this job, so he hightails it up to the north to these little farms that his boss either owns or has cut deals with. He goes from one to the other, settling accounts.

To one, he says, Oh you owe my master this 500 tons of oil? Cut it down to 250.

To another, he says, Oh you owe my master 100 bushels of wheat? Cut it down to 75.

As I’ve read different opinions this week, this dishonest manager’s actions either meant that, instead of taking his own cut on top of what the farmer owed, he forgave that specific amount. Alternately, he was wiping out what his boss would add on over and above what the Romans wanted. Think of it like interest - sometimes, the manager and the rich landlord would ask for that extra amount to pad their own pockets, even though it was against Old Testament law.

And because of this act of generosity to those struggling farmers, this dishonest manager made some friends. For some of those smalltime farmers, this was a huge break - it was the difference between selling their farm and going into debt or even starving. Suddenly, this dishonest manager had friends who might take him in when he is fired, friends who might offer him a meal, maybe friends who could use someone with his experience to work their plot of land.

The dishonest manager, when he learns that his life is about to take a turn for the worse, turns around. He does what we call repentance. He turns away from a pattern of behavior that has cost him a good job - and turns to a way of life that relies on others. He recognizes how he is not alone.

Theologian Brendan Byrne calls this “the great reversal.” It mirrors what Jesus speaks about in the Kingdom of God - when the poor and the outcast and the struggling will be invited in to God’s feast and those who have a lot and are comfortable and happy now will suffer.

The dishonest manager, by building relationships and using his position and power for others, sets himself up to survive what should have been a disaster. Instead, when that pink slip comes, even though his boss may think him clever, at the very least, the dishonest manager will have a couch to crash on until the next opportunity comes along.

Jesus follows up this parable by warning his disciples and all who could hear that money can mess us up and interfere with our relationship with God.

We cannot love God and love wealth. - Jesus says plainly.

So, the question of the parable and of his teachings - do we serve our money, or does our money serve us?

If we are spending too much serving our money, devoted to our money-making enterprises, or trying to find ways to skim off the top, then Jesus challenges us to abandon our idol worship and turn to a new way, a way that will not leave us alone when wealth and privilege dries up. Rabbi Samuel in his reflection on texts of prayer says it this way - “The gates of repentance are always open.” We always have an opportunity to start making small choices or different choices in some way to realign our lives and worth in light of who we are in God than what is in our wallet.

You may have seen images from the Climate Strikes and rallies across the world, often led by young people who are courageously challenging us to abandon our worship of the idol of consumption and domination of our planet’s resources. It’s a prophetic message - but beneath it echo the question of this parable. When we learn that our earth is straining under the weight of pollution and carbon and extinction, are we prepared to make a sudden shift in action?

Jesus through this parable also speaks clearly that in God’s economy, relationship is vastly more important than money. The dishonest manager saves his skin by being generous to others, realizing that he does not live on an island. He needs people. He needs community.

When I was a struggling college kid, sometimes with no cash in my wallet, I was often surprised by these moments at my church when someone would reach out to shake my hand and in their hand would be a $20 bill. I don’t forget those people. It wasn’t a lot, but even in that generosity, it took care of lunch or a gas tank or a grocery trip for a few items. Generosity sustains us in hard times.

We’ve had many stories here at University Christian Church - including one just last week - of former members or friends of our community who years ago we helped out during a hard time in their life… who then years later, when life has become a little better, cut a check and said thank you. Pay it forward to someone else. We received another one of these just last week. I don’t know the person. Maybe a few of you might remember them because they moved away, but the fact that our church’s generosity eased their burden never left their memory.

The good news is that Jesus came to ease our burdens - including our worship of money. It’s a scary thing to think about sometimes - but if we turn our lives around, we will find there is still time to live into God’s community that is unfolding now.