September 21, 2025
Pentecost 15/ Proper 20, Year C
The Rev. Dr. Elaine Ellis Thomas
St. John’s Episcopal Church, Essex CT
Jeremiah8:18-9; 1; Psalm 79:1-9; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13
Many years ago when I worked at Episcopal Community Services in Philadelphia, one of our programs was called “Teens Taking Over,” and it was designed to help vulnerable youth from underserved neighborhoods have a chance at success, designing their own after-school and career-development programs and connecting with mentors in the professional world who could guide them along the way. At the time, using a strengths-based approached to social work was fairly new, especially when working with teens, but it was a way of taking whatever positives one could find and leveraging them into pathways to success.
I will never forget the program director telling me about one young teenager who came from really difficult circumstances. In order to help support his family, he dealt drugs on the street corner. Now this did not, to me, sound like much of a strength. To my mind, this young person was on the fast-track to jail. But to the program director, this young man’s determination and perseverance in making sure he went to school while managing to provide enough money to keep his siblings fed was, in fact, a strength, overlooking for a moment how he made that money.
It does take grit and determination to do that, and when your family situation is so desperate, that he could find a way – any way – to keep his family from starving is pretty remarkable, so helping him channel that strength into preparing for adulthood was the plan for him in our program.
I was reminded of this young man from Philadelphia this week as I pondered this challenging reading from Luke, in which it appears that God, if we see him as the master in the parable, is commending the dishonest manager for bilking him out of what he is owed. There are many ways this parable has been interpreted, scholars getting twisted in knots to explain away this unsavory character. Part of the problem is that the story has come to us as the Parable of the Dishonest Manager or the Unjust Steward.
I have said before that we need to pay attention to whatever it is that comes before and after a particular bible passage, and this one is no different. The parable immediately before this one is the one we know as the Prodigal Son, but we all know that it is less about the son that it is about the forgiving father.
Jesus starts both parables with the main character. In the Prodigal Son parable, we read right there at the beginning, “There was a man who had two sons” (Luke 15:11). It is the man, the father who is the character to pay attention to, just as in the parable we heard last week that begin with a woman and her lost coin and a shepherd and his lost sheep. The main character is the one to watch, so this morning, Jesus begins with “There was a rich man,” so keep your eyes on him. Rather than naming this parable for the middleman, name it for the rich man, just like we ought to rename the preceding parable for the first named person: the father. The Parable of the Forgiving Father. The Parable of the Forgiving Rich Man.
So, while this might sound like a story that rewards dishonest gain on behalf of the manager, keep your eyes on the main character.
Like any good teacher, Jesus reiterates his point by repeating it in different ways, telling different stories or parables, and what he is trying to teach is that we have squandered God’s goodness to us. The son in the previous parable squandered all that his father had given him and, hitting rock bottom, decided that he would be better off returning home on his hands and knees and begging forgiveness. The manager in today’s story also squandered what was entrusted to him. Now this manager is only good at the job of managing property, and if word gets around that he has been fired for mismanaging – or squandering – what was entrusted to him, he’ll have no way to support himself. He will be unemployable. So, he goes to ingratiate himself to those he has cheated by inflating their debt, thereby enriching himself, and he forgives that debt. He has the authority to do that. In this economy, a steward or manager acted on behalf of the person who hired them, and in the act of forgiving debt, he won friends for himself and, most likely, good will toward the rich man.
And do you really think the rich man is going to go to these debtors and say that the steward overstepped and they really owe everything that was on the books? Of course not. He forgives their debts. So now this rich man is squandering his own property to forgive the debts of those who owe him.
Luke talks a lot about debt and forgiveness, laying on Jesus the debt of our sins. So, when this rich man forgives what is owed, that debt, that forgiveness, is at his own expense. Luke is nothing if not consistent.
Returning to our young drug-dealer who had big dreams, he was doing something less than honest to support his family who, through the oppressive systems of racism and inner-city neglect, could not make it, but like the manager in our story, he used what he had at hand to change what was going to be a bad outcome for himself and his family. Those who mentored him may not have approved of this, but they could certainly recognize that good could come from his willingness to do what he needed to do to survive, and they worked with him to channel his initiative and shrewdness onto a more life-giving path.
We have been entrusted with so much. God has given into our care a planet, and we have squandered that. God has blessed us with wealth and privilege, and we have squandered that. You see, what we think of as ours is not really ours. We are only caretakers, stewards, managers. The question for us is whether or not we are faithful even in these things because those big things, the true riches Jesus talks about, have nothing to do with money and everything to do with participating in God’s reign on earth.
We are a money-driven people, and when Jesus says, “You cannot serve God and wealth” (Luke 16:13), he is saying that everything comes at a price, often a steep price, and our quest for more than enough is always going to leave someone without. It’s the way the system works. And it is wholly contrary to God’s ways. The first commandment is to love God and to have no other gods. We have all made an idol of money and the possessions that come with it.
If we are going to love God with all our hearts and minds and strength, we must be willing to love God’s world and God’s people in the way that God does – those are the true riches Jesus refers to. Yet, I will say it again, the story is not about the boy in Philadelphia or the manager, and it is not about us. It is about God’s unfailing love, mercy, and forgiveness of us and the many ways we squander God’s good gifts. So, let’s take those gifts and squander them on all those people and things on which God squanders with such abandon. And then, oh how rich we will be in the one thing that really matters: knowing that we have poured out all that we are and all that we have on loving God and all those the God loves, because they are our neighbor.