Amos 8.4-7; 1 Timothy 2.1-7; Luke 16.1-13
 
When I got home from my holiday about a week ago, one of the first things I did was to go through the mountain of post awaiting me.

It was the usual stuff: Christmas catalogues, offers for cheaper car insurance, numerous companies offering to lend me money for a new car, exotic holiday, home improvements and so on. Unusually there were no bills, but that could be because I’d had a load of them the week before.

I turned on my computer.  Now that I have a spam filter on my account, most of the anonymous messages are removed before they reach my in-box.

This is a great improvement then in the past - I remember noticing on my return from one holiday I had that of the 340 messages awaiting me after just 10 days away, only 13 were ones that I needed or wanted. The rest were mainly trying to sell me things that I certainly didn’t want, or pleas for money from dodgy sounding people.

Money – it plays such an important role in 21st century life. It’s easy to look to money to give us our security, but Jesus is very clear that you cannot serve God and wealth – or mammon as the older translations of the Bible put it.

Our media and the church of today tend to get very hung up about issues of sexuality, but, if we turn back to the Gospels, we see that Jesus talked far more about money and our attitude towards money than he did about sex. It’s something that our modern Church doesn’t talk about that much, I suspect because we are aware that in many ways we would be found wanting.

Our Gospel reading this morning began with a strange parable. It follows immediately after the story of the Prodigal Son, the tale of a young man who realised that money couldn’t give him all he wanted. He took his father’s inheritance – what message does that leave – that money was more important to him than his father’s life – but once it was squandered and spent, he was left with nothing. His money had provided no security, no long lasting friendships, nothing.

This strange story we’re focusing on today is in a chunk of Luke’s Gospel concentrating on the Kingdom of God: before it, there’s the parable of the great banquet, that of the lost sheep and coin, the prodigal son, afterwards more teaching on the Kingdom and what it’s like and the parable of the rich man and Lazarus with its warnings about those who trusted in the wrong things in their earthly life.

Jane Williams, wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury and a theologian in her own right, writing on this passage, pictures Luke not really sure where to put the story in his Gospel. She says: “You get a picture of Luke, sitting at his desk with a bundle of papers in front of him. He has got the overall structure of the book sorted, and he knows where all the main stories and sayings fit, but now he is left with his file labelled ‘miscellaneous’. What do I do with these? He asks himself. The old chap who told me the story said he’d been there when Jesus told it. But I can’t help thinking that he must have missed some of it or wandered off before the end. Jesus just can’t have told it like this.”

It does seem on first reading that something is wrong: how can Jesus be praising a dishonest person when that goes against all that he stands for?

I think the meaning is much deeper than that. The dishonest manager knows he’s in trouble – at last his little scam has been found out. We’re not told exactly what he’s been up to, but squandering his master’s property has led to his imminent sacking. Which is what we would expect, it’s what any normal person would expect.

But the manager is a quick-thinking man. Uh-oh, I’m for it now, he thinks, what can I do to protect my future? And then he comes up with his bright idea – he’ll cut the debts of those who owe his master and then they’ll be so pleased that they will welcome him into their homes once he’s got the sack. Forward thinking, forward planning. It’s not the man’s dishonesty that Jesus is commending but his shrewdness and willingness to act.

Forward thinking, forward planning. In the context of Luke’s Gospel, in the placing of this parable in a series of episodes connected to the Kingdom of God, we are being urged to look to our future, to ask where we put our trust.

Do we trust money more then God? It’s easy to do. But not possible to serve both at once, which I guess is a compromise we all try to make. Jesus is clear that that is not possible. The parable may be confusing, but no one can claim not to understand the phrase: You cannot serve God and wealth.

The parable appears to encourage us to start forward planning.

What future do we foresee for ourselves? Jesus was keen to persuade his followers that the important future was his kingdom.

The future we need to be thinking of is not what will happen to us here tomorrow, next week, next year, but what will happen to us beyond the grave.  

The shrewd manager had reached a point of crisis. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus is keen to get the message across to his hearers that they too are experiencing a point of crisis. They need to be ready to act at all times. God’s kingdom may come at any point.

What the shrewd manager did was to use all the resources he had to ensure survival. He recognised that he had reached a point of crisis and he acted. If only the children of light had the same appreciation of the crisis confronting them as the kingdom draws near and the same energy in meeting it is what the parable is saying.

The shrewd manager put his all into getting himself out of a sticky situation. Very few people put their all into the kingdom of heaven. But it’s something that demands our all. The shrewd manager does what he does so that he will still be welcomed into the homes of his debtors once he has been sacked. When we reach our eternal home, we will be called to account about how we have used our wealth, God’s wealth, what has been entrusted to us.