Pentecost 17C - "Doing Faith"

"Doing Faith"

Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4 and Saint Luke 17:5–10

On Thursday, April 30, 1789, on the balcony of Federal Hall in New York City George Washington was sworn in as the first President of the United States.  As he took the oath of office, he placed his hand on a King James Version of Bible beginning what many believe is a noble tradition that is prescribed not only in custom but in law.

Custom yes. Law no. And even the custom didn’t last very long.

The website of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies lists no Bibles being used during the swearing-in ceremonies of several presidents who followed Washington, including John Adams, (1797 causing the custom to cease after only eight years) Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Quincy Adams.1

In John Quincy Adams case “the sixth president of the United States, asked not to be sworn in with a bible even though he was at the time the vice president of the American Bible Society.  He argued that the Bible was too holy to stand in as a prop for political use.”2  Would that were still the case.

In fact, Fortune Magazine reported in December 2024 While the book industry as a whole is flat so far this year, sales of Bibles are red-hot.  

A series of anxiety-inducing events, from the election to inflation to international conflict, have driven more and more people to buy the book that is at the center of Christianity. Many of those buyers are first-timers. One publisher of Bibles told the Wall Street Journal it has seen a surge of interest from Generation Z and younger Americans.3

This sudden surge in sales even inspired a song by country singer Walker Hayes, called “Bible Sales are Up.”

Bible sales are up People are searchin'

Lord I bet your ears are burnin' People are turnin' to turnin' His pages

Tired of lookin' for hope in hopeless places.

This American dream is more like a nightmare

We all agree we all feel alone While we're all looking down at our phones

But statistics have shown Bible sales are up!

As the editors of the news magazine The Week noted. “In or hyper-partisan era, each side portrays the other as not merely misguided but out to destroy our country. To some it’s just a ‘partisan game,’ but ‘disturbed listeners are less capable of separating rhetoric from reality.”4

So we have extremely mostly men, one of whom opened fire on “a Michigan church and killed four people while setting it ablaze long harbored hatred toward the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, according to longtime friends, and told a stranger who showed up at his door days before that attack that Mormons were the “antichrist.”5

Or the man behind the terror attack at a Synagogue in Manchester, England as worshippers gathered to celebrate Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar.

We may wonder as we watch armed, masked men, some with weapons marching along the Magnificent Mile looking for someone, anyone, who might have crossed the boarder illegally.  I can’t imagine they really thought they would catch one of their suspects coming out of the Louis Vuitton store on Michigan Avenue.  

Bombers, shooters, masked men with guns, all make us want to cry out with the often overlooked and seldom read prophet: “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you “Violence!” and you will not save?"6

We live in a time when, the late Dr. Walter Bruggemann was quoted as saying, “Conservatives fear when they see their familiar, tried and true world they’ve known and loved crumbling around them – and progressives fear that the world they dream of will never become reality.”7  And so some cry out how long must we wait until things go back to way they used to be while other cry out wondering if their dream for a better, more just, more loving, world will ever come true?

The prophet Habekkuk describes a “situation of exile and estrangement where there is simply no reasonable or rational expectation for ... restoration.  Yet there is still the affirmation that “God is so much greater than our human hopes or expectations.”8

“How long shall I cry,” laments the prophet in the midst of the mess of his world. And the Almighty give a vision of what shall be.  It won’t come today. It may not come tomorrow but it will come.  There will be time when the vision of the proud and boastful will fail and fail miserably.  As one modern paraphrase puts it: “Wicked men trust themselves alone .. and fail; but the righteous man trusts in me and lives!”9  Or in the translation we Lutherans might prefer, “the righteous shall live by faith.”10

And Jesus tells us that our faith doesn’t have to be huge.  It doesn’t have to be the biggest faith in the whole known world of faithfulness.  It can be as small as ... well ... a mustard seed.  (Here’s a jar full of them.  From the back of this grand church, you might barely be able to see the jar and if I held a single seed up you certainly would be able to see it.)

The mustard seed and the mulberry tree ... were well known and understood by the disciples.  Although the mustard seed is minuscule it grows into something gigantic. The mulberry tree’s extraordinary deep root system and hard wood, {makes} it nearly impossible to uproot.11

Jesus’ listeners also know, like we do, that mustard seeds do not grow into something gigantic overnight.  We know, they knew, that by sure will-power mulberry trees don’t just move from here to there.  Things take time and takes faith.

As Dr. Fred B. Craddock once said.

Most of us will not this week christen a ship, write a book, win a war, dine with the queen, or convert a nation, or be burned at the stake.  More likely this week will present a chance to give a cup of cold water, write a note, visit a nursing home ... teach a Sunday school class, tell a child a story, and feed the neighbor's cat.12

It’s the mustard seedy things that churches do that witness to the world of what a life of faith can mean. 

It means that we slavishly follow Jesus.  We slavishly follow Jesus the way we are slavishly following the Cubs after, maybe not standing on the ramparts but at least sitting in the stands or at home, waiting.  It means we slavishly follow Jesus the way Taylor Swift’s fans are staying up at all hours, waiting in line to be a part of the release of her latest album.  

It’s devoting ourselves to a purpose or project because as one friend wrote in his acknowledgements for his doctoral dissertation his advisor told him, “anything less than a Ph.D. was a waste of my time.” 13

What we have certainly discovered that following anyone, or any idea, that is less than Jesus, does not speak of Jesus, is a waste of our time.

So like Habakkuk we man the ramparts and watch.  Like the disciples we plant our mustard seeds or chop away at the obstacles in our midst and wait trusting in the age old promise: “For there is still a vision for the appointed time... If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay.”14

Until then will live in faith following Jesus inspired by his words and living out the words of Stephen Sondheim in Leonard Bernsteins Candide. “We'll do the best we know. We'll build our house and chop our wood. And make our garden grow... And make our garden grow.”

________________

1. Rob Boston, “Swear to God - or Not: Presidents Have a Habit of Swearing the Oath of Office on Bibles, but It Isn’t Required,” Americans United, April 29, 2025, https://www.au.org/the-latest/church-and-state/articles/swear-to-god-or-not-presidents-have-a/.

2. Scott Black Johnston, “Answers.” Sermon preached at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City. September 28, 2025

3. Chris Morris, “Bible Sales Soar as Anxieties Spike,” Yahoo! Finance, December 2, 2024, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bible-sales-soar-anxieties-spike-162544117.html.

4. “Charlie Kirk’s Alleged Killer Charged with Murder...”  The Week. Vol. 25, Issue 11. p.4

5. Isabella Volmert, Mark Vancleave, and Ed White, “Friends of the Michigan Church Shooting Suspect Say He Long Carried Hatred toward Mormon Faith,” AP News, October 1, 2025, https://apnews.com/article/michigan-church-shooting-fire-mormon-7eb2c20baf1e1a1e069dc0160d8cdd6d.

6. Habbakuk 1:2. (NRSVUE) [NRSVUE=The New Revised Standard Version Updated edition.

7. James C. Howell, “What Can We Say October 5? 17th after Pentecost / World Communion,” James Howell’s Weekly Preaching Notions, January 1, 2025, https://jameshowellsweeklypreachingnotions.blogspot.com/.

8. Dan R. Dick, “Habakkuk 1:1-4 & 2:-14. Commentary 2: Connecting the Reading with the World,” Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, Year C, P 35, no. 3 (Louisville: Westminister|John Knox Press, 2025): 358–60.

9. Habakkuk 2:4. (TLB) [TLB=The Living Bible. [(Carol Stream: Tyndale House Publishers, 1971)]

10. Habakkuk 2:4. (RSV) (RSV=The Revised Standard Version)

11. Nancy Lynn Westfield, “Luke 17:5-10.& Commentary 2: Connecting the Reading with the World,” Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, Year C, 3 (Louisville: Westminister|John Knox Press, 2025): 372–73.

12. Fred B Craddock, Luke: Interpretation Bible Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1990), 192.

13. Tyler Fortman, “A Longitudinal Study of the Stability of Hope in Late Adolescence ” (dissertation, 2011), v.

14. Habakkuk 2:4. (NRSVue)

 

Pentecost 16C - "Who Told it Better?"

Saint Luke 16:19-31

I

In his book Class Clown, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Dave Berry, who wrote a syndicated column every week, was often asked where he gets his inspiration and he replied, “Costco.”1

As anybody who is old enough to have stared at a blank piece of paper in a typewriter or has looked at a blank computer screen under the pressure of writing a letter, a school paper, a sermon, or even a grocery list knows that inspiration can come from almost anywhere.

Today mine came from a reply to a Facebook post.

It was a picture of where one of my dogs was staying while I was on vacation, The Pooch Hotel.  Because we shopped around for the place Lowell and I were staying in Puerto Villarta we got a great rate on a really good room.  Our rate was so good that when we got home, we discovered that it cost more for my dog’s stay than it did for ours.

I thought it was funny, so I posted it on my Facebook page, and one response took me back.  It was an acquaintance who seemed to believe that it was not only his right but his obligation to make some kind of comment that seemed to pass judgement on everything.

His reply to what I wrote in jest was. “Some people take better care of their pets than they do of other humans.”

While that comment may or may not have been true in my case or the case of anyone here this morning it is true for some people who treat other human beings because their lack of resources, or immigration status, or position in life, like “dirty dogs.”

An incredibly wealthy man who surrounds himself with incredibly wealthy people who vie for the prime spots near the man who would be king once said of the homeless.

“We have people living in our … best highways, our best streets, our best entrances to buildings . . .  where people in those buildings pay tremendous taxes, where they went to those locations because of the prestige. In many cases, they came from other countries, and they moved to Los Angeles or they moved to San Francisco because of the prestige of the city, and all of a sudden, they have tents. Hundreds and hundreds of tents and people living at the entrance to their office building. And they want to leave.” 

As Rex Huptke, columnist for USA Today, pointed out.

The modern rich man paints an incredibly sad picture of wealthy homeowners holed up in their penthouses and high-powered business types cowering in their corner offices in fear of those who are just outside the well-guarded entrances of their high-rise towers that perhaps even bear their name.

“Do you know what that does?” Huppke asked.  “That leads these people (who pay tremendous taxes) to leave, which, when you think of it, is a form of homelessness, except they still own multiple homes.”2

Huppke then goes on to point to several examples from the teachings of Jesus whom the rich man in question claims to follow.  One of those examples is today’s gospel.

While he may not be surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of tents our rich man is being held hostage by a poor man, a very poor man, who has apparently been dumped in front of his house.  There is someone on his doorstep who Jesus tells us was placed there by his friends perhaps in the hopes that the person who lived just beyond the golden gate would help him.

Jesus tells us plainly that to the rich guy he was a nuisance who had to be stepped over every morning on the way down the cobble stone drive to pick up the latest copy of The Jerusalem Post.  Because he was there special care had to be used when the Bentley was backed down the driveway lest he is run over and scratches a bumper or flatten a tire.  

It is even possible that since the beggar was dumped at the front door the rich man’s friends had to use the back entrance to avoid being bothered.  It was enough to make them all want to leave.

I have always wondered whether this parable wasn’t the inspiration for or, at least, running around in the back of Charles Dickens’ mind when he wrote A Christmas Carol.  Remember the response to the gentlemen who come to his office asking for a small gift to charity?

“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge

“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge, “Are they still in operation?”

“They are.  Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”

“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigor, then?” said Scrooge.

“Both very busy, sir.  What shall I put you down for?”

“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.  “I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry.”3

The men protest that without his help people might die.

“If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”3

If I read both offerings correctly it seems to me that Dickens is filling in the blanks of Jesus’ parable.  Like this little peace of dialogue where the words of Dickens’ very rich man could have well been spoken by Jesus’ very rich man.

Jesus never gives the rich man “a name in the parable, despite several attempts early on to give him one. In popular usage, he is called Dives.  Which, as Dr. Thomas G. Long tells us in his massive work Proclaiming the Parables, “is not a name at all but simply the Latin word for ‘rich’.”  It’s such a generic term, observes Dr. Long, that “In the original Lukan parable, though, the rich man is nameless, period.”4

So, it would be fair game to call him a Scrooge because in popular culture it has come to believe any person who is miserly is a Scrooge. But, both Jesus and Dickins tell us that their protagonist is not just cheap, he is uncaring, unfeeling.

There is, however, one huge difference between Scrooge and the antagonist in Jesus’ story.  Scrooge repents!

When one of the ghosts of Christmas shows him exactly how difficult life was for his nephew Bob Cratchit and his family and when Scrooge begins to see them as real people things begin to change.

 

Scrooge is especially touched by the plight of little Tiny Tim and, for the first time in his life, shows genuine concern for another human being.  He watches as after Christmas dinner is over and Cratchit tenderly grasps his young son’s hand.  

"‘Spirit,’ said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt before. “Tell me if Tiny Tim will live.’  ‘I see an empty seat,’ replied the ghost, ‘and a crutch without an owner carefully preserved. If these shadows don’t change in the future, the child will die.’”

Scrooge cried out.  “‘Oh no, kind Spirit! Say he will be spared!’”

The Spirit throws Scrooge’s earlier words right back at him.  “‘If he like to die, he better do it and decrease the surplus population.’ Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief.”5

Scrooge’s change of heart may be why our mailboxes are filling up about this time of year with flyers from theatre companies, large and small, inviting us to attend their annual production of the Dickens’ play while Jesus' vignette only shows up once every three years to be read by the faithful in church.

We would love it is Jesus’ rich man would have been more like Dickins’ Scrooge and seen the error of his ways, repented, took the poor man on his doorstep into his home, into his heart.  Wouldn’t it have been better if Jesus’ rich guy let Lazarus curl up in front of his hearth like an adopted puppy.  

That would have made for a great play!  An annual play!  Maybe even a musical!  However, Jesus is not a popular author trying to sell short stories, so his story does not have a happy ending. As a matter-of-fact Jesus story doesn’t have an ending at all.

The rich man Jesus is telling us about shows no such contrition.  Even when he finds himself in Hades and sees Lazarus resting near Father Abraham, he still treats this child of God with contempt. 

Up until now when Lazarus was just a heap of humanity, maybe even less than that of a flee-ridden dog ruining the very tasteful and expensive welcome mat he saw late one night watching QVC on his 1,072 inch television and ruining his prestigious neighborhood. He never acknowledged him but now he needs his help.  He needs a favor.

Still not speaking to Lazarus directly he implores Father Abraham to send him on an errand.  “‘Father Abraham, mercy! Have mercy! Send Lazarus to dip his finger in water to cool my tongue. I’m in agony in this fire.’”6

Here is something really important.  Jesus has hidden it so carefully in his story that we might have missed it.

Up until now we think that the rich man in Jesus’ story never even bothered finding out who the poor man was.  For all he knew, for all he cared, the fellow out front was just a speed bump on the highway of life.  It is only when the fires of hell are lapping at his lips do we discover that the rich guy  knew Lazarus’ name all along.  The vagrant had a name and the rich guy knew it!

At every turn of the story, he could have called to him, helped him.

That wasn’t some anonymous down-and-outer in front of the house his name was Lazarus and the rich guy knew it!  He knew it but never used it until he needed something.

When Lazarus was dependent on him, he never bothered to speak his name but now that he is dependent on Lazarus he is dropping the name frequently but only as an errand boy.

The arrogance is astounding as the rich guy continued to think that the only thing Lazarus was put on this earth to do was to serve him.  He demands that Lazarus be commanded to bring him water and when he is told that this will not be possible, he then asks that he be sent on yet another errand to go and warn his brothers.

Unlike Scrooge our rich man is so unrepentant that in trying to get Lazarus to do his dirty work for him that he goes so far as trying to order Father Abraham around.

Lazarus is still a nonperson to him.  He is still treating him like a slave who is expected to do his bidding at a moment’s notice.

The man who, in his earthly life, never took the time to pass a morsel of food through a front fence to Lazarus now expects the poor guy who has experienced so much torment on earth to pass through the fires of hell to bring him a bit of relief in the next. 

You have probably been sitting there waiting for me to drop the money card on you. You’ve been waiting for me to warn you about the dangers of the misuse of wealth and to tell you that you should be more generous but you know that.  This parable probably runs through your mind every time you pass by a beggar on the street. 

I know you and your probably bothered by this little story almost every time you stop at a stop light or reach the bottom of an expressway ramp and read the signs held by the downtrodden.  “Homeless!  Hungry!  Help Me!”

If, like me, you are bothered every time you speed past one of those poor souls that is good.  If that is the case, at least for us, Jesus’ words have achieved their goal!  Jesus has made us more aware of the plight of those who have less than we do. 

However, this parable is not just about money it is about indifference.   Jesus’ rich man was indifferent to the plight of the man at his garden gate. 

The man from our age who complained that we have “people living in our … best highways, our best streets, our best entrances to buildings” is indifferent to the plight of the poor and only sees them as a drain on the economy, a bother.

This story may be about money but it is also about our indifference to the needs of others.  Not just monetary needs but emotional needs and spiritual needs and the need that all of us have to feel loved and cared for.

Jesus is not asking the impossible of us.  Just as it would not have been impossible for the rich man to share a crust of bread not only with the guy on his front stoop but, if he was that rich, he could have used his spare pocket money to open up a soup-kitchen for all the homeless in his neighborhood.

That is, if he could endure the wrath of his wealthy friends for encouraging more of the Lazarus types to move in and take up camp.

The good news is the Scrooge didn’t stay a scrooge.  After seeing the past, the present and the future all in one night he wakes up a changed man. 

Scrooge only began to treat the Cratchit’s like living, breathing, human beings when he learned their names.  Tiny Tim, Bob, Martha.

We know how The Christmas Carol ends.

Scrooge orders the biggest turkey at the meat market for the Cratchit’s Christmas day dinner. When Bob comes in late he doesn’t fire him but gives him a raise.  And when he comes across the men he had unceremoniously thrown out his office the day before for begging on behalf of the poor he gives them a donation that is so large it causes one of them to exclaim, ““My dear Mr. Scrooge, are you serious?”

“If you please,” said Scrooge. “Not a farthing less. A great many back-payments are included in it, I assure you.”

He started to care about more than himself and his balance sheet.  And Dicken’s writes of him:

Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.7

Of the three men before us today one of them changed; the other was toast; and the jury is still out on the guy who was more worried about shabby looking tents than the people who lived in them.

Last week's Sunday Morning program with Jane Pauley on CBS featured a segment on the unveiling of a mural in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.

The mural depicts the Apparition at Knock and significant figures from the Church's history in America, including Mother Frances Cabrini, the first American citizen to be canonized. There's a stirring scene of nineteenth century immigrants disembarking in New York, and another of first responders, many of them descended from those immigrants.

But what may be most talked about are the portraits of present-day arrivals waiting to be welcomed.

The murals creator, Adam Cvijanovic, titled it “What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding” and said that he wasn’t intentionally trying to make a political statement but then added, “there's been a shift in America recently. And one of the most important things that's happened in this last tumultuous decade is that there's been a permission to be cruel.”

As cruel as Scrooge and the unnamed guy in Jesus’ parable.  Scrooge at the beginning and the repentant and Jesus’ character ever unchanged.  

Dickens’ story comes with a happy ending.  Jesus’ with a warning characterized best by Cardinal Archbishop Timothy J. Dolan’s statement at the close of the CBS piece.

"When all is said and done, when I stand before Jesus, he's not gonna say, 'Hey Dolan, good work with the mural, good work with the restoration and repair of the cathedral…. I need to ask you something: when I was an immigrant, did you welcome me?' And if I said, 'I'm afraid I didn't, Lord,'" he's gonna say, 'Well, get the hell outta here,' right?"8

All Jesus is asking us to do is to take care of each other.  To  reach across life’s chasms and help each other in ways that might not even be expensive but will be meaningful beyond measure.

Jesus finishes this parable on the pages of your life and mine for it is only when we overcome our indifference and begin seeing each other not as liabilities but those who are loved by and loved deeply by Jesus that, in the words of Tiny Tim Cratchit, “God” will “bless us everyone.” 

________________

1. Dave Barry, Class Clown (New York, , NY: Simon & Schuster Audio, 2025).

2.   Rex Huppke, “Shining Light on California's Homeless.” The Chicago Tribune, September 19, 2019, sec. 1.  p. 3.https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/rex-huppke/ct-trump-california-homeless-border-fundraiser-huppke-20190918-y3jfh5lnm5avzcqwkg7vlthv4m-story.html

3. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol. (London: William Heinemann, 906)  8-9.

4.     Thomas G. Long, Proclaiming the Parables: Preaching and Teaching the Kingdom of God (Louisville: KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2024), 340.

5.  Dickens, op.cit., p.  69-70.

6. St. Luke 16:22–24. (MESSAGE) [MESSAGE=Eugene H. Peterson, The Message (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2004).

7.     Dickens, op.cit.

8. Mo Rocca, “An Artist’s Remarkable New Vision for St. Patrick’s Cathedral,” broadcast, Sunday Morning (CBS, September 21, 2025).

 

Pentecost 15C - "Surely You Jest"

 

Saint Luke 16:1-13

One of the great comic minds of the twentieth century, and thankfully into this century, is the now 99-year-old Mel Brooks who has given us some of the most memorable moments on stage and screen.  His works include plays and movies that can make you laugh out loud while at the same time holding your hands over your face in embarrassment that you are laughing out loud.

From the lesser known, Spaceballs, to the better known, High Anxiety, to the almost classics Young Frankenstein, and Blazing Saddles and The Producers that was almost unbelievably about two charlatans, Max Bialystock and his protege Leo Bloom who are conning investors into backing a play that they are certain will be a flop so they can abscond with the money.  The plays title, as you should know is "Springtime for Hitler.” But the full title, designed to make everybody wince is “Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden” The full title alone is enough to offend almost everyone.

“Why Hitler?” Brooks was asked on the program Inside Comedy, "The only way to get even with anybody is to ridicule them," he said. "So, the only real way I could get even with Hitler and company was to bring them down with laughter."1

In his 2021 memoir, All About Me, Brooks said, “Nothing bursts the balloon of pomposity and dictatorial rhetoric better than comedy. Comedy brings religious persecutors, dictators and tyrants to their knees faster than any other weapon.”2

Dr. Scott Black Johnston, always a sermon inspirer is devoting the entire fall at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church of New York, to a series he is calling “Jesus the Jester” because he says.  

It’s impossible to know Jesus apart from the story that he lived but it is equally impossible to know Jesus apart from the stories that he told.  Apart from the beguiling stories that he told woven from the fabric of everyday life.  

Why does Jesus use these curious yarns to speak about the kingdom of God?  

Jesus uses parables because he knows how we are wired. He knows that or crafty brains want to put up walls and duck the truth. And because Jesus loves us, he is determined like some crazy fool to break through to places where we can grow.3

It will take a lot of stretching and growing to understand the parable put before us this day.  As Justo González’s observed: “It is not uncommon to see on our church windows portrayals of a father receiving a son who has strayed or of a sower spreading seed, or of a Samaritan helping the man by the roadside. But I have never seen a window depicting a man with a sly look, saying to another ‘Falsify the bill.’”4

Yet that is what we have before us today and, if we listened very carefully, we might find ourselves saying with those who heard it the first time. “Surely you jest.”  And we might have heard Jesus reply, “Surely, I do not jest.  And don’t call me Shirley.”

Almost everybody, scholar and students alike, are confused.  They can’t get over the fact that Jesus has made a crook almost palatable in this parable.  They can’t get over the fact that the manager 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.  He is one crafty character.

In the beginning of Jesus’ confusing little story, he doesn’t look so cunning.  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.”  They would sell their souls to keep the company afloat or help get the company what it wants.

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.”5

He frankly and honestly assesses his skills and determines that he doesn’t have any.   So it is time for him to go to work and uses the only skill he has.  He may not be able to make the books balance but he is crafty and he is going to put that one ability he has 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!"6   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 $10,000.”  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.  He 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. 

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. 

To make matters worse, we expect that when the rich man finds 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 has the ability to cause us to say, “Surely, you jest.”

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.”7

I wonder how surprised he was when his boss commends him for his actions. It turns out that they are cut from the same cloth and “game recognizes game.” This sort of cheating the system ... is an acceptable way of doing business to a whole group of folks; Jesus refers to them as “children of this age.”8

“Maybe the parable ... is simply a grim but truthful portrait of the world as it is ... the real world in which we are called to be “children of light.”9

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.''10

Richard Lischer called “The steward ... neither a child of the night or of the day, but of the twilight.”11

That’s where we live out our lives.   In the twilight sometimes doing what is good, and just, and right, and sometimes not so much.  

That is where we live and that is where Christ calls to be children of the light.  

Beyond the right-doing and wrong-doing in the parable there is Jesus the master storyteller who leaves us scratching our heads and wondering what we should do now, or next.

“Keep working on that, keep trying to live in the twilight and still be children of the light. Keep trying that, keep at that, Jesus seems to be saying with a laugh, and see where it takes you.”

To which we might say, “Surely you jest.” And Jesus would certainly reply. “Surely, I do not jest.  And don’t call me Shirley.”

________________

1. “Mel Brooks Talks about Getting His Comedic Revenge on Hitler,” HuffPost, March 9, 2012, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mel-brooks-inside-comedy-video_n_1334312.

2. Mel Brooks, All about Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business (S.l.: Penguin, 2022).

3. Scott Black Johnston, “Hidden.” Sermon preached at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church of New York. September 7, 2025.

4. James C. Howell, “What Can We Say September 21? 15th after Pentecost,” James Howell’s Weekly Preaching Notions, September 1, 2025, https://jameshowellsweeklypreachingnotions.blogspot.com

5. St. Luke 16:3c.  (NRSV) [NRSV= The New Revised Standard Version]

6. St. Like 16:3-4 (PHILLIPS) [J. B. Phillips, The New Testament in Modern English.  (London: HarperCollins, 2000.)]

7. William H.Willimon, “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.” Pulpit Resource. vol. 41, no. 3 (2013): 49–52.

8. Chelsey Harmon, “Luke 16:1-13,” Center for Excellence in Preaching, September 15, 2025, https://cepreaching.org/commentary/2025-09-15/luke-161-13-4/.

9. Debie Thomas, “Notes to the Children of Light,” Journey with Jesus, September 15, 2019, https://journeywithjesus.net/essays/2365-notes-to-the-children-of-light.

10. Thomas G. Long, “Making Friends,” Journal of Preachers (University of Rochester, May 27, 2007), http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~tim/study/MakingFriends, 53.

11. Richard Lischer, Reading the Parables (Louisville, , KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014). 103