Sermon 9.21.25 Dishonest Wealth

Begins @ 21:22

“Steven, Steven… Everything is on sale!!!”

These were the words spoken by Helen Mouzakiotis everytime the stock market began to plunge downward. When things were at their worst, Helen knew that the opportunity was right to buy-in.

As dishonest and icky as it feels, that is what savvy investors try to do; sell high, buy low.

Helen was my wife, Melanie’s, Great Aunt on her father’s side.

Steven is my father-in-law, who took every call that Great Aunt Helen ever made no matter what time of day or night.

In her younger days, Great Aunt Helen had been a bit of a wild child.  She “allegedly” hung out with Chicago mafioso types (and if you see some of the pictures, it’s probably close to the truth).

But in her later years, she became somewhat of a hermit with her mild-mannered Greek husband Uncle Nick.

For over 40 years, as she watched the world happen from her television and avoided going out at almost all costs,

Steve would answer her calls, “Steven, I’m dying.”  “Aunt Helen, you’re 50.”

“Steven, I’m dying.”  “Aunt Helen, you’re 75.”

“Steven, you really should listen to this televangelist.” “What did he say?” “I don’t remember, but it was good.”

“Steven, I’m dying.” “Aunt Helen, you’re 85.”

“Steven, let me talk to Melanie and Chris… Melanie, do you know this televangelist? God bless your ministry, you’re going to do great things for the Lord. Did I ask if you know this televangelist? He’s great.”

“Steven, Steven, everything’s on sale.”

Melanie’s Great Aunt Helen was this peppy, excitable woman who thought she was dying for 50 years and lived to be 95 years old.

She was also savvy and shrewd as an investor. A tiny, woman who you might take for granted because of her eccentricities, but who made money hand over fist on the stock market, because she knew when everything was “on sale.”

Now here is an interesting thing about preaching and making choices about how to organize a sermon.

If I were to immediately move into talking about the gospel story of the unjust manager, I would implicitly be making a parallel between Great Aunt Helen and this dishonest manager.

Which may or may not sit well with my family.

(Digression: Another organizational strategy to avoid… telling story about yourself and something awesome you did and then following it up with a story about Jesus.

“I’m not saying that I’m Jesus… but…”)

Now that I’ve digressed, I feel like I can talk about the gospel.

I have rarely met someone, who loves this gospel reading.

On the one hand, it’s not that complicated of a story.

There is a house manager who has been embezzling funds and his master found out about it.

On the other hand, it’s very complicated and hard to understand.

Jesus said what? Be dishonest? Or as my wife Melanie wrote in her sermon prep notes in bold letters, “WTF, I don’t get this part.”

The crux of this gospel lesson is to understand the economics of what the dishonest manager is doing.

Jesus, here, is presumably still talking to the tax collectors to whom he was speaking in the parable of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the prodigal son from Luke 15.

We even see that what the manager is doing is paralleled to what the prodigal son did.

Luke says that both of them were “squandering” property.  One was squandering his inheritance, the other his master’s property.

Tax collectors were infamous for charging people too much and then skimming the profits off of the top.

This seems to be the strategy of the dishonest manager as well.

The reason he reduces the amount owed by the debtors is because he had artificially inflated the debts in the first place.  Most biblical scholars accept this as the proper context for the passage.

Therefore, what the debtors owe is set back to what they actually owe the master without the manager imposing his extra tarriff of 20 cors of wheat or 50 jugs of oil.

What we see is that rather than praising dishonesty, Jesus is actually praising the one honest moment that the manager has ever had.

He is praising the fact that the manager is resetting the balances.

The truth is that we are all debtors in God’s economy of Grace.

Meaning, none of us have earned the love that God has given us free of charge.

The reformation theologians like Thomas Cranmer (who wrote the original Book of Common Prayer), Martin Luther, John Calvin, and many others talked about our debt to Grace in terms of righteousness.

All of them confirmed that we are unable to righteous our way into heaven.

Would it surprise you to learn that when Jesus is talking about “dishonest wealth,” he doesn’t actually say “dishonest?”

What he actually says is “unrighteous” or maybe even better “a-righteous” meaning, it is wealth that has nothing to do with being righteous, it is pure gift, God-given, unearned.

Does that sound more like God’s type of economy?

We all start out with the wealth that God has given us.

We all have individual talents, we all have different amounts of privilege based on where we grew up, who our families were, what advantages were given to us.

We didn’t earn any of these things.

God continues to put wealth into our lives as we grow.

People who showed you the ropes, who believed in your potential, doors that opened, pathways that became clear, successes and failures that added value to your journey;

Experiences that helped you use your talents better.

You may have worked hard to hone them, but you didn’t create them.

You didn’t become an engineer, or a doctor, or a teacher, a successful business person solely on the basis of your own effort.

God gave you a certain portion of “wealth” with which to express and use your gifts so that you could take care of yourself, your family, and your community.

It would be dishonest to think otherwise.

You could never earn this kind of wealth, it is not based upon how righteous you are, in fact, it is established in you from your birth before you could ever do anything to earn it.

The love that established this unearned, a-righteous wealth is called Grace.

One of the things, I believe, that Jesus is trying to show us today is how to use Grace responsibly.

We are - right now - living in a world that is monetizing misery.

Actually, let me restate that a little more accurately.

We could be convinced by people who are amassing monumental amounts of dishonest wealth to believe that we are living in a world where misery is the worst it has ever been.

I can only speak for myself, but I have heard other people in my life echo a similar feeling.

I feel like I’m living in two alternate realities;

One, I see with my eyes.

People are mostly kind and generous, they are watching their children play sports, or getting a cart for someone at the grocery store, they are listening to music and dancing like nobody is watching.

People are trying to get by and do life.

But then there is also the hyper-negative track of bad news that sits at the bottom of my consciousness on a loop throughout the day, that makes me keep checking the internet to see, if the Charlie Kirk saga, or the suspiciously lynching-like death of Trey Reed in Mississippi, have any fresh details;

To see if I can get any relief by finding out that my worldview has been corroborated and that “those people” are still wrong and dumb, hypocritical and terrible.

And here is what I know.

Just about every economist and reputable news source will tell you that the state of our economy rewards bad news.

The internet rewards the extrapolation, commercialization, algorithmization of extreme content.

It doesn’t matter what reality 70 million people are living, if 5,000 people repeat something heinous on behalf of the 70 million, then the internet and those who profit from its dishonest wealth will believe and caricature half of the country based on the most extreme content.

Imagine if we read the passage from Jeremiah today, or the psalm

“my joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick.”

“they have devoured Jacob, and made his dwelling a ruin.”

And this was the only thing that we knew from the Bible;

A moment in time when Israel and Judah had been destroyed by the Assyrians and the Babylonians respectively, a time of great turmoil.

We would have a very skewed vision of the Bible.

My friends, there is a Balm in Gilead, but you have to know that you’re sick to seek it out.

The truth of Jesus’ message is that all of our wealth is “dishonestly” gained in the shadow of God’s Grace

Every single one of us has been – from time to time -  a dishonest manager of the things that God has given us.

Every single one of us has fallen short of the Glory of God, and failed to “love our crooked neighbor with our crooked heart” as the poet WH Auden once put it.

We have tried to withhold Grace from one another, when Grace is the only thing that will save us.

It’s time to live in better relationship with your dishonest wealth, it’s time to reduce what people owe you and put the scales back to what people owe to God without your cut off the top.

We can’t control other people, we can’t control the grand manipulated narratives, but we can stop giving our treasure; our money, our attention, our devotion to these idols.

There is Good News, when we stick together and pray.

The greatest news, for all of us who are dishonest managers is that no matter how we squander the Grace and wealth that God has given us, Jesus has stepped in between our sin and God’s judgement.

We have been forgiven our transgressions and given a new lease on life.

Go find friends with the wealth that God has given you, hold tight to those who will help you find your way to heaven.

In the worst of times, remember that people need the Good News the most.

I’m sure you need it.

I definitely need to hear it.

Things seem terrible right now, but that also means there is an opportunity to remind everyone around you that it’s time to buy back in.

Our world needs you, right now, to use your dishonest wealth to proclaim the Good News of Jesus, to be a physician with some Balm in Gilead, to squander and scatter Amazing Grace all around you.

We won’t change everything, but every little bit helps.

Remember what Great Aunt Helen used to say “Steven, Steven, Everything’s on sale.”

It’s time to be real evangelists, the opportunity is right, the downturn of our earthly kingdom is the time to remind people that there is a more perfect kingdom to come.

So, let’s buy back in and let that Kingdom come.

Amen.