A Little Means a Lot
Web sites and newspapers frequently tell a familiar tale. A person with power and authority exploits his position to steal or cheat and through his corruption enriches himself while failing his boss and organization, workers and stockholders and betrays the public trust. This is happening right now in a number of places as you may know. I read this week about a mid-level manager who was fired because of his incompetence and while he was on the way out the door he went to a number of the most important accounts of his employer and reduced their bills in exchange for future considerations. The interesting thing is I didn’t read this story in the Wall Street Journal, it’s found in the sixteenth chapter of The Gospel of Luke.
September 22, 2013
Luke 16:1-13, A Little Means a Lot
Doug Scalise, Brewster Baptist Church
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“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. 2 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.’ 3 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. 4 I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’ 5 So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ 6 He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’ 7 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.’ 8 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. 9 And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.”
10 “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. 11 If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? 12 And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? 13 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.”
This parable of Jesus is not as well-known nor is it as easy to interpret as The Good Samaritan in Luke 10 or those in Luke 15 about the found sheep, the found coin or the loving father with two sons. The central character in this story is a manager who squanders property that doesn’t belong to him and then shrewdly insures his own future when his mismanagement is brought to light.
Jesus doesn’t praise the man for his dishonesty; that is not what we are supposed to take from this parable. Jesus commends the man for shrewdness. All of us are a mixed bag of the commendable and the less than flattering. Some of us are more mixed bags than others. Jesus is lifting up a positive feature in a dishonest man and that feature is not one we commonly associate with saints or disciples. “Patient as a saint, kind as a saint,” roll off our tongue – they go together like peanut butter and jelly. “Shrewd as a saint,” just doesn’t seem to fit the same way, to our ears it sounds like peanut butter and pickles – it’s odd and unfamiliar and we question putting the two together.
However, shrewdness, “The possession of a keen, searching intelligence combined with sound judgment. An intuitive knack in practical matters,” is a very desirable quality in followers of Jesus. Jesus is quoted in Matthew 10:16 saying his followers are to be “as wise as serpents and innocent as doves,” meaning we’re to be smart, shrewd, and decisive and to have pure and godly motives. Jesus is commending “having keen insight; being astute, artful, cunning, sharp and penetrating.” Jesus wants us to be as shrewd as the dishonest steward about using possessions and wealth so that when our life is over we will be welcomed into eternal homes. The parable urges us to use our possessions and wealth to gain and not lose our future. Basically Jesus is saying that using our shrewdness to acquire more and more possessions and wealth for ourselves alone and for our own ever increasing consumption while neglecting God’s purposes, the spreading of the gospel, and assisting the poor is to make a serious mistake.
Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric was one of the most admired persons in American business for years. He was praised for his leadership skills and wrote his autobiography which became a best seller. Sadly his first marriage failed and subsequently his personal financial stewardship came out in the news. In a financial affidavit he filed in court he claimed total monthly expenses of $366,114. He also claimed he needed to spend monthly almost $9,000 for food and drink, close to $2,000 for clothes, $52,000 for gifts, and over $51,000 for housing. This man with a total monthly income after taxes of $1.41 million dollars made charitable and political contributions totaling guess how much? A mere $614.
Wesley Wilmer in his book God and Your Stuff: The Vital Link Between Your Possessions and Your Soul points out: “17 of Jesus’ 38 parables were about possessions. Possessions are mentioned 2,172 times in Scripture – three times more than love, seven times more than prayer, and eight times more than belief. About fifteen percent of God’s Word deals with possessions.” Why is that? Marshall Shelley says, “Not because God thinks our stuff is the most important thing about us. But because how we handle our stuff, especially our money, is a diagnostic tool that reveals how we’re doing with the things that truly are important. And where we invest our treasure on earth plays a huge role in our spiritual health.”
Jack Welch by all means deserved to share appropriately in the wealth and profits that his strong leadership helped to create. Like the shrewd manager in the parable, just because there is an area of his life that is less than flattering, that doesn’t mean there aren’t other aspects of his life that we cannot learn from, such as some aspects of his leadership. To Welch’s credit, he voluntarily reduced his compensation package as a result of the public scrutiny he received. I don’t know where Welch is in terms of being a person of faith, however to be spending so lavishly on oneself while sharing so little seems to miss the lesson Jesus teaches so frequently about how we use God’s resources.
I admire the generosity of Bill and Melinda Gates whose foundation has given billions dollars in grants to help impoverished communities with innovations in health and education. According to their web site, the foundation is based on two simple values, “All lives—no matter where they are being led—have equal value. To whom much is given, much is expected.” Those sound like the values of Jesus to me. Their leadership in the area of stewardship inspired Warren Buffet, one of the richest men in the world, to bequeath most of his estate to the Gates’ Foundation.
The privilege of wealth, whether in the billions like the Gates or Buffet, the millions like Welch, or the thousands or less like most of us, brings with it responsibility. The handling of our wealth and possession reveals the nature of our faith more clearly than virtually any other issue in life. Our church is more interested in your soul than your bank account, but because we’re interested in your soul, we need to be interested in your check book. That’s part of being a fully devoted follower of Jesus. How we develop people as stewards or managers of their time, money, spiritual gifts, and volunteer service is a measure of our effectiveness as a church.
The way we use what we have reveals who we serve, God or wealth. The obituary on the back page of the most recent edition of The Economist (9/21/13) was about Robert Capon a priest, theologian, and food writer who died on September 5 at the age of 87. It described one time when, “At a posh church in East Hampton, he started his sermon by burning a $20 bill with the words: ‘I have just defied your God’.” When we worship God instead of ourselves or our stuff, we will use our possessions to shape our future and find we truly have “friends in high places.” Whether we are shrewd as the dishonest manager depends on whether we use our material goods, great or small to help those in need.
Jesus says, “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. 11 If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches?” By now most of us have heard the story this week of Glen James, the homeless man in Boston who found a backpack with more than $42,000 in it and turned it in to the police.
Glen James alerted police after he found the backpack containing cash and traveler’s checks last weekend, and the bag’s owner was then tracked down. A complete stranger later started an online fund for Mr. James after reading media reports about his honesty. Donations of more than $110,000 have poured in from across the US. The man, Ethan Whittington, now plans to meet Mr. James to give him the money. Mr Whittington, who lives in Midlothian, Virginia, said he was so overwhelmed by Mr. James’ honesty that he decided to start the fund. He said his idea of starting donations on a crowd funding website for Mr. James “caught on like wildfire ever since.” He said, “It’s brought me a lot of hope. This isn’t only about rewarding a great guy. I think it’s a statement to everyone in America. If we come together and work toward one thing and work together, then we can make it happen.” Meanwhile, Mr James, a former Boston courthouse employee, said that he would not have kept “even a penny” of the money he had found in the backpack – even if he were desperate. “James said a medical condition made it hard for him to work, but God had always looked after him.”
If we are faithful in the small tasks and jobs in life, then the Lord will give us greater tasks and responsibilities. Until we get the smaller ones down, we shouldn’t be expecting or looking for greater ones. A wise preacher observed, “Life consists of seemingly small opportunities. Most of us will not this week christen a ship, write a book, end a war, appoint a cabinet, dine with the queen, convert a nation, or be burned at the stake. More likely the week will present no more than a chance to give a cup of water, write a note, visit a nursing home, vote for county commissioner, teach a Sunday School class, share a meal, tell a child a story, go to choir practice, and feed the neighbor’s cat.”
Jesus says if we’re faithful in the area of our finances, God will entrust us with greater riches than material wealth. How we handle our money and our stuff reveals how we’re doing with the things that are truly important. Where we invest our treasure on earth plays a significant role in our spiritual health. I really like the following description of second century disciples by Christian Philosopher Aristides in the year 125 that demonstrates how they used their lives and their resources:. “They walk in all humility and kindness, and falsehood is not found among them, and they love one another. They despise not the widow and grieve not the orphan. He that has distributes liberally to him has not. If they see a stranger, they bring him under their roof, and rejoice over him as if he were their own brother; for they call themselves brethren, not after the flesh, but after the Spirit of God; but when one of their poor passes away from the world, and any of them see him, then he provides for his burial according to his ability; and if they hear that any of their number is imprisoned or oppressed for the name of their Messiah, all of them provide for his needs, and if it is possible that he may be delivered, they deliver him. And if there is among them a man that is poor and needy, and they have not an abundance of necessaries, they fast two or three days that they may supply the need with their necessary food.”
There is a sense in which we are all like the manager in the parable. Everything we have will be taken away so we might as well use our resources to bless others. The old saying, “You can’t take it with you,” is true in one sense. But it is also true to say, “You can’t take it with you, but you can send it on ahead.”
“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.”
Prayer: “Grant, O God, That we may never lose the way through our self-will, And so end up in the far countries of the soul; That we may never abandon the struggle, But that we may endure to the end, and so be saved; That we may never drop out of the race, But that we may ever press forward To the goal of our high calling;
That we may never choose the cheap and passing things,
And so let go the precious things that last forever;
That we may never take the easy way, and so leave the right way;
That we may never forget that sweat is the price of all things, and
That without the cross, there cannot be the crown.
So keep us and strengthen us by your grace that no disobedience and no weakness and no failure may stop us from entering into the blessedness which awaits those who are faithful in all the changes and chances of life down even to the gates of death; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. By William Barclay