A Sermon on Luke 16:1-9 for the Ninth Sunday after Trinity. Delivered by Pastor Caleb Strutz.

A parable is a teaching tool that Jesus used a lot during His earthly ministry. The Sunday school definition of a parable is “an earthly story with a heavenly meaning.” Sometimes parables are used to extol the great virtue displayed therein—in the parable of the Good Samaritan we are told to emulate that kindness and generosity. Sometimes parables are to be interpreted spiritually—in the parable of the sower and the seed every element represents something spiritual to show how God’s Word interacts with the human heart. But sometimes parables can be a lot more difficult. If you take those lenses and apply it to the parable of the unjust steward, you might get the impression that Jesus is praising the virtues of white collar crime or that we are able to cheat God out of what He’s owed. Clearly neither of those are the case, so we need to take a closer look. Jesus is telling us to be shrewd stewards, not by selfish mismanagement of what isn’t ours, but by being spiritually informed when we view and use the riches of this world.

So there’s a lot of questions that can be raised with this parable, so what’s going on here? Well, just like any other parable, Jesus is telling a story. There’s a rich man and he has a steward, a manager. This manager is accused of misusing his master’s goods. The master doesn’t fire him on the spot, but he tells him to “Give an account of your stewardship,” to close out the books and make one final report. This might seem a bit fishy, but bookkeeping in antiquity didn’t have the same rigor that we’re used to today.

The steward knows he’s going to be fired. But he uses his cunning to devise a way that he will be taken care of. Before closing the books, he calls in all of his master’s debtors and reduces their debt. Now they all owe him for helping them out so they will receive him into their homes once he is officially out of a job.

Clearly, this isn’t right. It’s fraud. It’s theft. This is a worldly story, an earthly example. The steward’s a cheat, Jesus calls him “unjust,” he’s a worldly man, and so is his master, who doesn’t even get mad, but can’t help but be impressed at his ingenuity.

So what’s the point here, why is Jesus telling us this story? Well, He draws out this conclusion, “the sons of this world are more shrewd in their generation than the sons of light.” The steward was shrewd, he used his wisdom and his cunning to make sure that his future was secure.

Now, there are clearly some elements of this shrewdness that we cannot emulate as Christians. The sons of this world are going to cheat and lie and bend the rules to get ahead. None of those things are options for us.

But Jesus is still making a point by this rather crass comparison. If the sons of this world are willing to do everything they can to get ahead, even though they’re only working for perishable things in this life, how much more should the sons of light work and be shrewd when we’re dealing with eternity?

I’m sure you know someone who’s working themselves into an early grave only to chase after the things of this life. Shouldn’t we work harder and hustle more for our eternal goals? The shrewdness of this generation puts us to shame because we should be even more deliberate than they are.

I’ve heard the criticism that Christians are too heavenly minded to be of any earthly good. Usually that’s tied to failure to participate in some kind of social or political movement, so I usually don’t make too much of it. But there is something to that. Are we so focused on heavenly things that we think what we do with our earthly things doesn’t matter? Shouldn’t we be all the more concerned with what has been given us when we know that what we do can have eternal consequences?

When it comes to our stuff, to “unrighteous mammon,” sometimes we’re too earthly minded to be of any heavenly good. We fail to see how we can and should be using our resources to work towards spiritual goals. We think the stuff of this world is just the stuff of this world and fail to see our higher calling.

The truth is, we are all stewards. God has entrusted us with everything that we have, all of it is His. Instead of being faithful stewards doing the work of God, all too often, we have “wast[ed] his goods,” used our earthly possessions only to serve ourselves and our desires. When the books are closed and we are called to “give an account of [our] stewardship,” we will be found guilty of defrauding God out of what is rightfully His.

But thanks be to God that He is not shrewd with us. He does not exact everything that we have mismanaged, He does not force us to repay what has been wasted. But He freely forgives the debt of our sin.

By His death on the cross, Jesus paid with His precious blood the debt we could not repay. “The wages of sin is death” (Rom 6:23), so Jesus suffered death for you. When He died, He cried out, “It is finished!” (Jn 19:30). Paid in full. And by His resurrection from the dead, Jesus showed that the transaction was approved. Jesus freely forgives your debt to God, because He has paid it off for you. We are right with God because of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

And He shows us every step of the way that the stuff of this world, that our physical existence, matters and is important to God. Jesus showed this by becoming a man, flesh and blood, just like you and me. By His Incarnation, Jesus redeems our fallen humanity. And by His bodily resurrection from the grave, He perfects our human nature. Jesus shows us that our physical existence matters and He elevates it, along with Himself, to fulfill a higher calling.

Jesus shows this by how He comes to us. Not just through the Word, not just through the intellect, but also through the Sacraments, through physical stuff that we can touch and feel and eat and drink. By using water and bread and wine, Jesus gives us the physical assurance that we need as physical beings that our sins are forgiven. Through the Sacraments, He unlocks for us a higher, spiritual use for all of creation.

We live in a world where God became man and where God uses the stuff of this world to convey to us spiritual benefits. And this changes how we view and how we use our stuff.

We are to use our physical goods to fulfill our higher, spiritual calling. That is why we are to be more shrewd than the sons of the world, because what we are working for does not perish.

This is the application that Jesus draws from this parable, “And I say to you, make friends for yourselves by unrighteous mammon, that when you fail, they may receive you into an everlasting home.” We are to be shrewd with our resources, to use them wisely, because we have a higher calling.

So how do we do this, what does this look like? Obviously, we want to support the work of our congregation with our offerings. And Jesus tells us elsewhere, “inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me” (Mt 25:40), so we also want to use our resources for works of charity.

But I think the most profound and most interesting way to do this is the one Jesus spells out quite plainly for us, “make friends for yourselves.” We use our stuff rightly when we use it to make friends! So invite the neighbor that you don’t know too well over for dinner! Make friends out of strangers. Get to know people better, build community, this is a God-pleasing thing.

Why? So “that when you fail, they may receive you into an everlasting home.” When we have friends, we have people we can tell about Jesus. And that is the most important thing, the ultimate goal.

Now, obviously, the outline Jesus gives (use money to make friends to make Christians) is a little barebones and a little crass. You can’t just buy friends and if someone gets the sense that you only want to be their friend to try to get them to church, they won’t want to be your friend. So we have to flesh this out more with genuine relationships and authentic care.

But the gist of what Jesus is saying is true and can be a helpful guide for us. What higher calling can we have, what better purpose can we use our stuff for, than telling other people about Jesus? That goal permeates everything we do in this life, because we know that we are working for the life to come.

Whenever someone asks me why I wanted to become a pastor, I always tell the same story, so if you’ve heard this one before, I apologize. But in high school, I was considering computer engineering, but started thinking long and hard about the lasting value of work, what difference it would make. And then one day after chapel, someone made an announcement about a mission trip or something and quoted the sayings of one of our campus pastors, “The only thing you can take with you to heaven are the souls of other people.” And I thought, that’s something that’s valuable. That’s something that lasts. So I wanted to be a pastor.

Now I’m very glad that I chose that course, I’m very happy to be a pastor, I wouldn’t change it for the world. But I realize now that that mindset was maybe a little narrow and didn’t fully appreciate the spiritual use of physical gifts. I could’ve been an engineer and made a lot of money and you know what, that’s not a bad thing as long as that “unrighteous mammon” is used for righteous goals.

No matter what you do or did for a living, Jesus sanctifies all of it and gives us a higher purpose for our physical blessings, He shows us how to be shrewd stewards of what we’ve been entrusted with. We use what we have been given to support the work of the kingdom and to make friends because we know that we will be received “into an everlasting home” because Jesus has paid our debt in full. Amen.

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