Saint Luke 16:1–13
Every night, at the conclusion of his program on MSNBC Jim Cramer, {who probably would be very surprised to hear his name mentioned in a sermon}, promises his viewers: “There is a bull market out there somewhere and I am going to find it just for you.”
He had a little trouble saying this last Tuesday night when the stock market had its worse day since 2020. The sea of red across most major indexes may have caused some investors to panic. They may have looked at their portfolios and began to wonder what they should buy, sell, or hold. They may have made the mistake of looking at their 401k online summary and come to the conclusion that they were going to spend the rest of their lives living in a shoe. Or, they may have decided to just throw in the towel, sell it all, and put their money in a mattress.
Cramer and his cohorts did none of this after Tuesday’s brutal day of trading. On Wednesday morning they got up and went back to work. They may have been licking their wounds from their losses but still the next day they were back to the business of making money.
I am sure that many brokers were calling their clients and telling them that there were some stocks that were “on sale” today at prices that are far less than they were yesterday. “That stock you have been looking at for weeks and thinking was a little overpriced” they might have said. “Well, it got knocked around quite a bit yesterday and is now selling at a price that you can afford. It may never be this cheap again. How many shares can I put you down for?”
Cramer and his clan are not being crooks they are being “shrewd.” And the truth is, men and women, we want them to be!
While we may bemoan the fact that there is a statue of a bull on the corner of Wall and Broad in New York we want that bull to take our retirement funds, and our pension funds, and our stock portfolios, and run with them as far as he can as fast as he can. We want whoever is managing our money to be shrewd.
I attended two bible studies this week and have read more than a few commentaries on this passage and almost everybody, scholar and students alike, are confused. They can’t get over the fact that Jesus has made a crook the hero of this parable. They can’t get over the fact that the manager (Who had better not represent God!) heaps praise on this charlatan. They can’t get over all of this because they can’t admit that deep down in their heart of hearts there is a grudging admiration for this steward who is shrewd, really shrewd.
In the beginning of Jesus’ confusing little story, he doesn’t look so shrewd. He looks more like a crook who got caught.
At this point we are right with the master in firing the guy. We know all about him and his kind. They are the ones who overinflate the earnings of their companies. They make the profits seem bigger and the loses smaller than they really are. When tax-time comes around their returns could win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. They have no second thoughts about “ginning the books.”
At first there are only rumors for the wayward manager. Who knows where these charges are coming from but then the audit committee is called in. They are going to try to add up figures that don’t add up. These outsiders will try to reconcile books that cannot be reconciled no matter what kinds of Voodoo accounting practices are used. Instead of rolling in dough they will find out that the company is actually drowning in debt.
The guy is in big trouble, and he knows it. He also knows his limitations.
In my favorite line is all of scripture he sums up his skills perfectly when he says of himself: “I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg.”1 He frankly and honestly assesses his skills and determines that he doesn’t have any. All he has is left is his shrewdness and he puts that to work full bore.
I don’t know about you, but I am beginning to like this guy. He could have stood around staring at his shoes all day and wondering what is going to happen to him but instead he goes to work with the only skill he has left – his ability to be, let’s just call him this to be polite, a creative accountant. It is what got him into this mess perhaps it can get him out. So, the shrewd guy gets to work.
“Ah, I know what I’ll do so that when I lose my position people will welcome me into their homes!"2 he says to himself. While money may not be able to, in the words of the Beatles, “buy him love” it might be able to find him a warm place to stay on a cold night.
Up until now when he has called one of his master’s debtors into his office, he has been the bearer of bad tidings. Now he is Mr. Good News.
“Listen!” he says to the first. “We’ve been going over the accounts and there has been some mistake.” You can feel the tension rising. “It says here you owe $100,000 but I think someone has programmed in too many zeros. It can’t be that much! Let’s make it $50,000.” The tension is gone as suddenly there are handshakes all around as he asks, almost as an aside, “By-the-way, do you still have that coach house out back of your place that you are not using?”
The next guy comes in and it is the same story. “I’ve been looking over your accounts and that statement we sent you is all wrong. That $50,000 you owe us should only read $25,000. That’s it! That’s all you owe! Look for me at the pub and buy me a drink. Winks and nods this time because everybody knows what is going on.
So it goes as one by one people come in and find their debts being magically reduced. Before long the whole town owes the conniving manager a favor. His shrewdness is fast becoming the stuff of legend.
The unseemly steward is handling his misfortune by spreading good fortune all around and thus making certain that, at the end of the day, if he hasn’t made a few real friends at least he’ll have more than a few people who will owe him big time. This guy is shrewd, very shrewd.
From little on we have been told that parables are earthly stories that have a heavenly meaning but this one seems to have a lot of ungodliness thrown in. While we may expect a good shepherd carrying a sheep home, a woman searching for a lost coin, or any other figure from any other of Jesus’ parables depicted in a stained-glass window we will probably never see this guy leaning over his desk and with a sly look saying, “Let’s make a deal.”
We expect that when the rich man found out what his manager was doing the police would be called, a grand jury would be impaneled, and the manager would be indicted. There would be handcuffs for the man and maybe even a perp-walk but, much to our amazement, this isn’t what happens at all. Proving once again that Jesus always shrewdly surprises us.
When the manager is finally called on the carpet, he discovers that his boss has rolled out a red one.
Dr. William H. Willimon envisions the conversation between the man and his boss going something like this:
“You, you business genius you! I wish all these priggish sons-of-light in this company showed as much individual initiative, worldly wisdom and commercial creativity! You are one shrewd operator. I’m moving you up to the front office.”3
Why was the manager so effusive in his praise? Listen to me very carefully now otherwise you are going to miss something very important.
Those people downstream who were receiving the write-off didn’t know who it was coming from. We know it was the steward, but they didn’t. For all they knew he was acting at the behest of the boss. So, the rich guy got credit too.
All of a sudden, as he walked around town where once there were scowls now there were smiles. Now, when he strolled down the street instead of hiding from him people were coming up to him to thank him for his kindness.
No wonder he was so positive toward his crafty manager! The rich man had gone from being a miserly pariah to being the “toast of the town.” It cost him a ton of money but the goodwill he received in return might have proved to be worth it.
The people benefited, his boss benefited, and the steward benefited because he got off with a commendation rather than incarceration.
“What!” we good God fearing, law-abiding church people shriek!
"Wait Jesus! We’ve been life-long Christians trying to follow you as best we can from our youth. We’ve sat through more boring sermons and Sunday school lessons than you can count. We’ve been honest! We’ve been caring! We’ve been good! Now you are praising this shrewd charlatan! What’s going on here Jesus?
We good, God-fearing folk misunderstand this parable because we want it to be a good, god-fearing story about money. It isn’t. It is about something more and what this something-moreness is can be found in the concluding sentence. J.B. Phillips paraphrases it this way: “For the children of this world are considerably more shrewd in dealing with their contemporaries than the children of light.”4
Dr. Thomas G. Long said:
What Jesus wanted them—and us—to get out of this story [is that he wished] the people of God . . . were as shrewd for the gospel as the wheeler-dealers out there in the world are shrewd for themselves. In other words, there are people out there in the culture who get up every morning scheming for a buck, focusing every ounce of energy on feathering their nests, working in overdrive to save themselves and to scramble to the top of the heap. "I wish God's people," Jesus says, "would be just as focused and energetic."5
We are the “children of light!” We are the ones who have been redeemed by the Holy Cross of Christ that we celebrate this Sunday and every Sunday. We have received the “true riches” by that very same cross and what Jesus is telling us is that we are to be as excited about that as we are about everything else.
We are to be as excited as our broker is about selling stocks. We are to as excited as a used car salesperson is about selling us a car. We are to be as excited as a Bears fan after the first win of the season and any baseball fan is over a come from behind walk-off home run. We are to be as excited as the shrewd steward in today’s parable is about saving his skin. We are to more excited about the Gospel than anything else in the world.
The reason so many are confused by this parable is that they think it is all about money and they are justifiably turned off by Jesus turning someone we would consider to be a shrewd little crook and turning him into a hero. In the parable money is only a tool. Money here is only a literary device.
What is key to understanding is to watch how the steward reacts. He doesn’t just stand there waiting for the bottom to completely fall out. He takes action! He uses the only thing he knows how to use for not only his own benefit but for the benefit of his boss and even the entire community.
I think the basic point is that if God can use and praise someone who is a shrewd and shady as this cunning manager God can certainly use you and me. God can even teach us something from him.
The steward takes the only thing he knows how to use and uses it. All Jesus may be asking of us is that we do the same.
What are the one, two or three things we do really, really well? What are the tools in our toolbox that can be used to God’s glory? What are the gifts we have been given?
To paraphrase Jim Cramer: “There is world full of hurting people out there and it is up to us find them.”
Find those people. Use our gifts. Give it everything we have!
And in the end, we just might hear words that we never thought we would ever hear from the lips of our Lord: “Shrewd! Very Shrewd!”
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1. St. Luke 16:3c. (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version]
2. St. Like 16:3-4 (PHILLIPS) [J. B. Phillips, The New Testament in Modern English. (London: HarperCollins, 2000.)]
3. William H.Willimon, “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.” Pulpit Resource. vol. 41, no. 3 (2013): 49–52.
4. St. Luke 16:8. (PHILLIPS)
5. Thomas G. Long, “Making Friends,” Journal of Preachers (University of Rochester, May 27, 2007), http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~tim/study/MakingFriends, 53.
Sermon preached at the Evangelical Lutheran Church of St. Luke
18 September 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSQpRUHcqNM&t=1443s
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