July 25, 2010
The Dishonest Manager - Luke 16:1-13
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadWhen I was a student pastor in Texas with the United Methodist Church, I heard a sermon once by a former pastor from Houston. I forget which congregation she had served there, but one of her parishioners was a man named Kenneth Lay. You might recognize Kenneth Lay as the former CEO of Enron, which went financially and morally bankrupt from questionable accounting practices. On July 7, 2004 Kenneth Lay was indicted by a grand jury on eleven counts of securities fraud and related charges. On May 25, 2006 he was found guilty of ten of those charges. And on July 5, 2006 he dropped dead of a heart-attack while vacationing in Colorado before his sentencing.
Kenneth Lay sounds eerily similar to the dishonest manager that Jesus actually praised in this passage. The funny thing about Ken Lay, according to his former pastor, is that he was an outstanding Church member. He showed up every week to worship. He was a faithful giver. He served on different committees and supported the church’s ministries. From all accounts, Kenneth Lay was very good man. But somehow, she said, he managed to convince himself that there were two different worlds with two different sets of principles: the Church world and the business world.
The dishonest manager was by no one’s account a good man. In fact, from what I can tell, he never intended to be. He was a very shrewd business man who got himself out of a real predicament, which came from misusing his manager’s money, very much like Ken Lay. His solution to that problem was to misuse those funds one more time in way that guaranteed his security when he got fired. He just told his manager’s debtors that they owed his manager about half of what they actually owed. So when the unjust steward got fired, as he knew that he would, those other debtors would owe him one. Now forgetting about the dishonesty of the whole thing, it was a pretty shrewd idea. Given that his primary concern was to secure his financial future, the dishonest manager acted shrewdly. So if children of money can act so shrewdly, Jesus went on to ask, then why can’t children of light act so shrewdly?
What would have happened, I wonder, if Ken Lay had taken all that money he had defrauded and done something good with it? What if he had provided clean water, for example, for the millions and millions of children who don’t have it, and who, in fact, will die soon because of that? What if he had developed a scholarship that would have sent poverty stricken children to college? James Byrnes was a US Senator and Secretary of State from South Carolina. After his political career, he did just that. He started a scholarship to send children in South Carolina without fathers (he didn’t have a father himself) to college. James Byrnes actually died a very poor man. What if Kenneth Lay had done something like that?
For the exception of James Byrnes, never does anybody act so shrewdly for righteousness. If you’re going to be shrewd, we think, then be shrewd for yourself, man. Go live in a mansion or something. I would honestly love to open the paper one morning and read about a man indicted on ten charges for feeding the hungry. At the very least, we seem to be very good at using our brains and money for unrighteous purposes. We human beings are masters at that. Now why can’t we Christians use our brains and money just as shrewdly for righteous purposes?
“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,” Jesus went on to say, “you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true wealth?” That’s our problem, isn’t it? We just don’t have all that wealth. Some of us have more money than others, but not one of us can afford, for example, to provide clean drinking water to the 1.8 million children who will die this year because they don’t have it. Our meager resources won’t touch that problem, or any other monumental problem like that.
Well Jesus says that they actually might. At the very least, when we are faithful with what little we do have, then maybe we can then be faithful with even more. Doc Hendley was a recent graduate of North Carolina State, who, like a number of recent college graduates, could not find a job. He did finally find a job as a bartender, a tattoo-covered bartender at the Hibernian Pub in Raleigh. His parents, I am sure, were not very impressed. His girlfriend’s parents were certainly not impressed. He got to know a lot of people at that bar, though, and he made the discovery that people really wanted to do more than go to a bar after work and drink. And he heard those enormous statistics of 1.8 million children who die every year because they lacked clean drinking water. So he came up with this idea called “Wine to Water.” He had a wine tasting event one night that raised $6,000 for clean drinking water. In 2003, he raised $40,000 in wine tastings.
But he needed some organization, you see, and that was never his strongest suit. So he got in touch with Samaritan’s Purse here in Charlotte and they took him over to Sudan to train him. He discovered while he was there that there were actually a number of wells in the Sudan that he could simply repair for something like $50, while other organizations were digging new wells for $10,000. So, he started simply repairing the old wells. And he also discovered that a lot of aid organizations would not go into war zones for safety reasons. Well he was young and invincible, so went anyway and got shot at a number of times, but he survived and built and repaired numerous wells in the process. In 2007, he quit his job with the Hibernian Pub to start the non-profit organization called “Wine to Water.” Now, this is a tattoo-covered bartender in Raleigh, who discovered that instead of beer, people needed God, and that 1.8 million children needed water or they would die. And he took what pitifully little he had and used his brains and gifts shrewdly.
Are we using our own brains and gifts shrewdly? That’s the question that this text poses today that really ought to keep us up at night. We had a basketball program here that met on Tuesday nights. Miles Shepard started that program about a year and a half ago. We would just open the doors to our gym on Tuesday nights to the community and let kids around here play basketball. It was very popular for a while. In fact, I think we even had eighty kids one night. It finally averaged out to probably thirty or so kids in their teens and early twenties, which just so happens to be an under-represented age group in our church that we’d like to attract. Miles was no longer able to be there, so Jeremy Singleton from the YMCA ran it. Then Jeremy got promoted to another branch. So now, nobody is there from our Church or the Y on Tuesday nights.
We just can’t have thirty to fifty unsupervised kids in our gym. So as of now, Tuesday night basketball is cancelled. But if that gym really is there for God’s Kingdom and not ours, and God has entrusted it to us for his purposes, well then that Tuesday night basketball has lots of potential. We can build relationships with those guys and get them involved in our church. There is no reason under heaven that we cannot do that. If nothing else, we can tell them that God loves them, and I’m not sure that anybody is telling them that now. We have 120 children –as many people as we had in worship last week – on our church campus every day for a YMCA camp. And they have parents. And they too need to know that God loves them. As of now, I don’t think anybody is telling them that. As far using God’s resources shrewdly for God’s purposes, those two things could really hit the jack-pot.
At the very least, it begs the urgent question of how shrewdly we’re using God’s resources. God has given everyone of us a brain. Presbyterians have always been known for using their brains. And God has given us some money and time and talents. Now it’s our job as baptized Christians to take those brains and figure out the best way put that money, time, and talent to work. Like the dishonest manager, there’s about to be a chance of scenery around here. The Kingdom is coming, maybe tonight. We are citizens of God’s Kingdom and we work for him. Our resources are actually God’s resources. So we need, with what little time we have left, to use God’s resources in a way that serves Him the best. I have no doubt that if we put our minds and hearts to it, we can get a lot of good stuff done, and when the Kingdom comes, as it surely will one day, we can look back and be proud. Or we will look back at missed opportunities. I’m not sure that all of the regret in the whole world could ever make up for that.
This is a confusing passage because Jesus praises a dishonest man. Yet, given what the man was trying to do, he acted shrewdly. And given what we are trying to do, to be good stewards of God’s resources, may we act wisely, too. It is easy to think that our money and time and talents belong to us, yet our faith tells us that they don’t. They belong, like everything else, to God. So may we use them shrewdly for God’s purposes and not our own.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
