Where do I start? Thank you. Thank you for letting me take a sabbatical of more than three months. It was wonderful just to be, to hike, to pray, ro read, to paddle, to be with family, to rediscover forgotten rhythms and practice new ones.
I read Scripture in worship a couple of times while I was at Mepkin Abbey in July, but I haven’t planned a worship service or prepared a sermon since the end of May. And a lot has happened since then in your lives, in mine, and in the world. We’ll be catching up for a while, I imagine, and our stories, questions and experiences will weave their way into our conversations for who knows how long.
I haven’t lived with the rhythm of weekly preaching since the end of May, and when I looked at the lectionary readings for this Sunday, a voice in my heart whispered, “How about this one?”It’s one of the most baffling of Jesus’ parables; in it, a master summons his manager and says,
“What is this I hear about you? Give me an account of your management.”
The master has heard reports, rumors perhaps, that this manager had been squandering his property.
“What is this I hear about you? Give me an account of your management.”
I found myself once again drawn to this line; it has resonated with me for many years because the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, as it says in Psalm 24, but many of us have lived on it as if it were ours, to do with as we please. At the end of today’s passage, Jesus asks, “And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own?” We are stewards destined to be heirs, but if we aren’t faithful stewards, what will we inherit? Certainly not the fullness of life God desires for God’s creation.
The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, and the owner demands an account from the squanderers. I’ll come back to this.
You’re still wondering, “What did he do with over three months of time off?” and you don’t demand an account, but you want to know what I did, what I saw and heard and tasted, whom I met and what I learned, what joys and sorrows I encountered. I had one of the best summers of my life, and today, since the gospel reading alludes to a ledger, I thought I’d share with you some numbers from the only document of this summer that looks anything like a ledger. In June I spent eleven days hiking in the Italian Alps, and I used GPS to track distance and altitude. I walked about a hundred miles, but walking may not be the best term, because what I did day after day was climb or clamber up and down — up from the valley to the pass, and down on the other side into the next valley. I climbed up a total of about 33,000’, and down a total of about 35,000’, and the highest pass I crossed was Passo del Maccagno at 8,179’. Those eleven days in the Alps were also the only days that I wore socks all summer long until this morning. Now back to the story.
There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. That’s all we’re told. A lot is left unsaid, not even hinted at. We don’t know if this manager was incompetent or corrupt; if “squandering” meant he had missed his quarterly earnings goals for the fifth time in a row or if he was embezzling. We don’t know if this manager was an employee or a slave, although some of the language suggests the latter.
The rich man summoned the manager and demanded to see the books. The manager had to think and act fast. He may not have been strong enough to work the soil, and wouldn’t consider begging, but he was quick. One by one, he summoned his master’s debtors, and together they rewrote the paperwork.
“How much do you owe my master?”
“A hundred jugs of olive oil.”
“Take your bill, sit down, make it fifty.”
Those weren’t the jugs you keep in your kitchen cabinet, the ones most of us can easily lift with one hand. Each of those jugs held about ninety gallons. They were looking at a lease agreement or a loan document involving 900 gallons of olive oil. And the manager said, Cut it in half. And to another who owed a hundred containers of wheat, he said, “Take your bill and make it eighty.” 20% off, that’s still a substantial discount. We can assume there were other debtors, although none are mentioned, because nobody needs a manager to handle only two accounts. But we don’t know if the manager was giving away what was his to give, say his commission, or if he was reducing payments owed only to his master.
The purpose of his actions, though, is obvious: he made sure that tomorrow his master’s debtors would owe him. He knew how to make the best of a critical situation, and he may have been a squandering scoundrel, but he sure was a clever one.
But now comes a curious twist: his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly. What kind of master would commend a dishonest manager? What is going on here? And then there’s another twist, because now Jesus holds him up as an example, telling us to make friends for ourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome us into the eternal homes.
Jesus’ parable of the dishonest manager has always puzzled its readers. It’s an old story that bucks like a young horse the moment you try to put a saddle on it. We’re looking at a man running out of time, making urgent decisions under the pressure of a world coming apart; and Jesus praises him—not for being dishonest, but for being shrewd: he was quick, creative, and decisive when he realized that his squandering days were over.
The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, and we have been notified that charges have been brought against us that we have been squandering the master’s property with careless, loveless, and sometimes clueless stewardship. We clearly need to be reminded constantly, that we cannot serve God and wealth. “The domain ruled by wealth is a dangerous habitat,” writes John Carroll, “for attachment to wealth entangles one in concerns that run counter to the … commitments of the realm of God.”[1] And five hundred years ago, Martin Luther wrote,
Many a one thinks that he has God and everything in abundance when he has money and possessions; he trusts in them and boasts of them with such firmness and assurance as to care for no one. Lo, such a man also has a god, Mammon by name, i.e., money and possessions, on which he sets all his heart, and which is also the most common idol on earth.[2]
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.
Some of the clothes I wore on the trail and on the water this summer were made from recycled one-way water bottles and discarded fishing nets that were pulled from the ocean. Several of them were made by Patagonia. On Wednesday, Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, revealed that he and his family had given away the company and that all future profits from the apparel maker would go toward fighting the climate crisis.
“Rather than selling the company or taking it public,” David Gelles wrote in the New York Times,
Mr. Chouinard, his wife and two adult children have transferred their ownership of Patagonia, valued at about $3 billion, to a specially designed trust and a nonprofit organization. They were created to preserve the company’s independence and ensure that all of its profits — some $100 million a year — are used to combat climate change and protect undeveloped land around the globe. …
“Hopefully this will influence a new form of capitalism that doesn’t end up with a few rich people and a bunch of poor people,” Mr. Chouinard, 83, said in an interview. “We are going to give away the maximum amount of money to people who are actively working on saving this planet.”[3]
“Earth is now our only shareholder,” Chouinard wrote in a letter posted on the company website.[4]
I tend to read corporate PR with great suspicion, especially when they tell me what I want to hear. But I hope they will be successful and that others will follow their example.
Our squandering days are over. The manager in Jesus’ story realized that his familiar world was coming to an end and he jumped into action. He invested himself and all his resources in the world to come. Shrewd like that is how Jesus wants us to be so that we may inherit fullness of life.
[1] John T. Carroll, Luke: A Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2012), 125-126.
[2] Large Catechism, Explanation of the First Commandment at http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/wittenberg/luther/catechism/web/cat-03.html
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/climate/patagonia-climate-philanthropy-chouinard.html
see also
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/16/climate/yvon-chouinard-patagonia-philanthropy.html
[4] https://www.patagonia.com/home/