“Lessons from a Scoundrel”

Luke 16:1-13

September 19, 2004

St. Paul United Methodist Church

John A. Fleming

I do not mind telling you that I wasn’t the best student in my junior high and high school days and for a semester or so of my college days. My older brother and sister always came home with perfect grades, straight A’s and did so without ever cracking a book. Me, I studied all of the time. I got up an hour before everyone else in our house and stayed up a couple of hours after everyone else was sound asleep, just to study. Well, maybe that is a bit of an exaggeration. I had to study to keep up. I don’t know if you had older brothers and sisters who were good students, but it bothered me when one of my teachers would say, “Fleming. Fleming. Ah, yes. You must be David Fleming’s brother. I’ll be expecting great things from you.” When they said that, I would slump in my chair knowing that it was going to be another one of those years.

No, I was not a great student back in those days and the subjects that gave me the most trouble were science and math courses. I can remember being in Mrs. Freeman’s tenth grade geometry class. Mrs. Freeman was a good Methodist, thank the Lord. She was a member of a church near our house. She knew my parents and took pity on their youngest. When the reports came out each six weeks, Mrs. Freeman marked a “D” on my report card. Mrs. Freeman gave me a “D.” Now, when I say that she gave me a “D” I mean that she gave me a “D.” I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t deserve a better grade. I deserved a worse one. So, every six weeks she gracefully put a “D” where my grade was to go. When the school year was over, I drove to Mrs. Freeman’s house, knocked on her door, went into her house, sat in her living room, and gave her a cross-stitched present from my mother as a thank you present for passing her baby. I did not do well in the class, but it is not because I did not try. My parents hired Christie Smith, a student from the college where my dad taught, as my tutor. But I was beyond help. Give me an English essay to write and I would not let you down. Give me a history exam and I would pass with flying colors. But give me a geometry problem to figure out and I would disappoint you. Sometime that year, I discovered something about my geometry book. Tucked away safe and sound near the back of our book were the answers to the odd numbered problems. I used to pray that Mrs. Freeman would assign those problems. For a while, my grades improved. I was hovering near a “C” when Mrs. Freeman called me to her desk after one of our classes and asked me to show me how I had gotten the answers to my problems. I was busted and I confessed my sins.

Are you like me? Do you like to have all of the answers at your finger tips? Are you like me, would you rather not have to work hard to figure things out? I am not just talking about geometry equations now. When things get hard and your brain has to kick it into overdrive, wouldn’t you like to turn to the back of the book and discover the answers to all of the problems of life? If you are like me, then you might not like our scripture lesson for this morning. Jesus tells a parable that is, quite honestly, hard to figure out. If you were here last Sunday, then you heard another one of Jesus’ parables, this one recorded in Luke’s eighteenth chapter. Luke tips his hat and tells us what the point of the parable is when he writes, “Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.” If Luke was going to give away the point of a parable, I wish that it could have been this one, from his sixteenth chapter. He does not do that and I think that I know why. I think that Luke has no idea what to do with this story of Jesus, let alone what it means. The great theologian Frederick Buechner said this of Jesus’ parables, “If you have to explain them, then you have missed the point.” Missing the point of this one, or at least not understanding it, is easy to do. The story that Jesus tells is a disturbing one. If you want to see a preacher squirm and fidget, tell him that he has to preach from this lesson. Jesus’ story seems to be saying that dishonesty is all right. But if you will listen carefully, you will discover that that is not at all what Jesus is doing.

Well, let’s take a closer look at this story. Jesus begins by telling us that there was a rich man who had a manager who squandered and wasted his property. Jesus has just told a story about a son who squandered his share of his father’s estate and his father who offered him grace when it was time for him to come home. So maybe we can take a clue from that story. But back to the story. I like the way that the New American Standard Bible puts our opening verses. It reads, “There was a certain man who had a steward, and this steward was reported to him as squandering his possessions.” In the days of Jesus, landowners were often absent and hired managers or stewards to take care of things while they were away. In this rich man’s case, word had gotten back to him that the one that he had hired was wasting his property. So he quickly made a trip home, called him in, and fired him on the spot, giving him just two weeks to get the accounts in order. He says this, “What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your stewardship...” So now he is in a bind and what is worse, his being in one is entirely his fault. He has no one to blame but himself. My guess is that he knows no business but the stewardship and managing business. I think that because he says, “What shall I do, since my master is taking the stewardship away from me? I am not strong enough to dig. I am too ashamed to beg.” I think that I know how he feels. I have never been fired from a job, but if I was fired from this one, I would have to go back to the only other job I have had, mowing yards. I began working for the church when I was sixteen. Come to think of it, the yards I mowed were church members’ yards. So if something happened here, I would be in trouble. Back to the steward’s plan. It was a I’ll scratch your back if you will scratch my back kind of plan. In those two weeks, he goes to the creditors of the landowners, pulls their promissory notes, and reduces them quickly. In one case, his deep discount was fifty percent. He hoped that by doing that, when he was without work and went and knocked on their doors, they would gladly let him stay with them until he was back on his feet.

Here is the twist. There seems to always be a twist in the parables of Jesus. The rich landowner doesn’t get mad when he hears what his steward has done. He doesn’t call the police or call a lawyer to make sure that these people give him every cent that should have been coming to him. He does not even reprimand the steward. No. Jesus has the manger saying this, “And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly.” A lot of people have trouble with this passage. Some pastors never preach it in their ministries. The ones who are troubled by it usually say, “How could Jesus tell such a story? How could he applaud such dishonesty?” I don’t think that Jesus does that. My Bible does not have the landowner applauding the dishonesty. No, my Bible has the man commending the steward for thinking ahead, for planning for his future, and for doing it in a shrewd way. I think that Jesus is commending the man’s resourcefulness.

Here is what I think. I think that Luke doesn’t tell us what the point of the parable is because he, like a lot of us, isn’t comfortable with it. One of the commentaries that I read in getting ready for this morning said that it is quite possible that the words of Jesus and this particular setting stopped in the middle of the eighth verse, where Jesus commends shrewdness. I think that that is possible. I also think that it is possible that Luke could not let it end like that, so he gathered other sayings of Jesus about possessions and money and threw them up in the air, at the end of this passage, hoping that one of them might redeem the story. That makes sense to me. Listen to some of the things that Luke includes: “Children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own...Make friends of yourselves by means of dishonest wealth... Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful in much...If you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust you with the true riches? If you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own.”

I think that I will stop there. Listen again to the last verse, “If you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own?” According to the Bible, we do not own anything. Everything that we think that we own belongs to God. We might own payment books, our names might be on loans, but the money and everything else really belongs to God and it is our job to take care of it. Oh, we keep some of it for ourselves and we trust God when we give scatter it around. The old fashioned word for taking care of God’s things is stewardship. “There was a certain man who had a steward, and this steward was reported to him...”

I wish that I had been a better pastor this year. I wish that I had talked to you more, I wished that I had preached to you more about stewardship. I do not know how it was for you, but for me, growing up in my home United Methodist Church in Jackson, Tennessee, I hated the four or so Sundays before the day when we turned in pledge cards. When I was old enough to see the cycle, I begged my mother, “I get it. I get it. It takes money to run the church. Please, mom, let me stay home from church. I’ve heard that sermon three times already!” Is that what stewardship really means? Is stewardship just about money, particularly the money to pay the bills at the church? Stewardship, friends, is not a four lettered word. Listen carefully to this. Stewardship is not just about money. Stewardship is taking care of the things that God has entrusted you with. It has to do with your time, your abilities, and the relationships in your life, too. One of the greatest things that God has entrusted me with is one of his little girls, my daughter, Annie Grace. He’s also entrusted me with this church. One of the sayings that Luke threw in among the others was that if we can be trusted with small things, bigger things would come our way. I don’t know how it is for you, but for now, I am happy with taking care of the little things. The chances are pretty great that none of us will be asked to stop a war, dine with world leaders, or come up with a cure for cancer. The way that life is set up is that God sends small opportunities our way, things that we can do, ones that we can be good at. Just this week, in his spare time, one of our uniformed police church members came in and changed thirty light bulbs. Could we be better at doing the little things, like writing notes, visiting nursing homes, teaching Sunday School lessons, sharing meals, reading to first graders, going to choir practice, feeding our neighbor’s dog while they are away, listening to someone when they need to talk. We must do something with the little things that God has entrusted us with.

God has given us so many things, so many gifts. One of the greatest of them is the gift of grace, the chance to begin again. And you know what, we have squandered that, too. We have fallen back into old patterns, and broken promises that we said that we wouldn’t. Some days we have thrown grace completely away. Like all of the gifts of God, we have squandered. I wonder what would happen if Jesus caught wind of our squandering these gifts of his. I wonder what would happen if he called us in, asked to see us, and taken away the things that he has entrusted us with. I wonder what would happen if God gave us two weeks to get the books in order. What would you do? I will tell you what I would do. I would go out first to everyone that I knew, who owed me something, and I would say to them, “Forget all about your debt, live debt free.” I would go to the ones who I owed forgiveness to and I would say to them, “I know that there has been trouble with us in the past. Let’s mend the fence. Let’s live the way that we are supposed to live. I forgive you.” You see the best thing to do, according to this parable of Jesus, is to come up with a plan, a plan of grace. Do you know what I think? I think that Jesus would like that, perhaps even commend me, praise me for planning for my future with him. It’s something to think about this week. Let us pray.