September 18, 2022 – Pentecost +15C, Luke 16:1 – 13

“Then Jesus said to the disciples, “There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. So he summoned him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management because you cannot be my manager any longer.’ Then the manager said to himself, ‘What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’ So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’ Then he asked another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘A hundred containers of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill and make it eighty.’ And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly, for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealthso that when it is gone they may welcome you into the eternal homes.“Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much, and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much.If, then, you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? No slave can serve two masters, for a slave will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”

One of the downfalls of following the three-year lectionary is the fact that sometimes we skip texts. For example, last week we read Luke 15:1 – 10. You would think that this week we would have completed the 15^th chapter of Luke which includes the story of the Prodigal Son or as I like to call it, the Forgiving Father. But, in the wisdom of the people who put together the lectionary, we skip it and save that text for another Sunday. Yet, the main purpose of that story is prodigal forgiveness – the prodigal or wastefully extravagant forgiveness offered by the father who is so anxious to forgive his son that he acts in absurd ways. And then immediately after telling the parable of the forgiving father, Jesus turns to his disciples and tells them this story of the unjust steward. Without the benefit of the parable of the “Prodigal Son” or “Forgiving Father” text, we have to wonder even more the question: “Where is Jesus going with this text.”

So let’s pretend that we did hear the parable of the Prodigal Son and then see what comparisons can be made between the Forgiving Father Parable and the Unjust Steward? Well, let’s see, each story has a scoundrel, so to speak – in the Forgiving Father story, the scoundrel initially is the younger son, but ends with us cheering against the older son. In our text today, we have the manager who is the scoundrel. He has squandered the wealth of the rich man, acts shrewdly but even more dishonestly with his master’s debtors by reducing some of their debt, and then is praised for his shrewdness.

So what are we to do – be shrewd Christians?  I can’t say I like the sound of that. I think the thing that we need to do, and the part of this text that we need to focus on in our lives is to be prodigal: to be wastefully extravagant with our forgiveness. For that is the one thing that really jumps out at me this morning – the unjust and dishonest manager freely, and quickly, and purposefully is forgiving people – people who have done nothing to deserve forgiveness, have not asked to be forgiven, and are most likely shocked by the act of being forgiven. And brothers and sisters, maybe that is the reason Jesus included this difficult story into his teaching –forgiveness can be tricky and difficult.

Biblical Scholar Sarah Dylan Breuer writes about this text…

“Why forgive someone who’s sinned against us, or against our sense of what is obviously right?  We don’t have to do it out of love for the other person, if we’re not there yet.  We could forgive the other person because of that whole business of what we pray in Jesus’ name every Sunday morning, and because we know we’d like forgiveness ourselves.  We could forgive because we’ve experienced what we’re like as unforgiving people, and so we know that refusing to forgive because we don’t want the other person to benefit is, as the saying goes, like eating rat poison hoping it will hurt the rat.  We could forgive because we are, or we want to be, deeply in touch with a sense of Jesus’ power to forgive and free sinners like us.  Or we could forgive because we think it will improve our odds of winning the lottery.  It boils down to the same thing: there is no bad reason to forgive.”  Now that’s advice to live by…at least I hope you think so.

Pastor Dave