The Dishonest Credit Manager-September 18 2016 Sermon

Luke 16:1­-13

“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. So he summoned him and said to him, “What is this that I hear about you? Give me an account of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.” 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. I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.” So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, “How much do you owe my master?” He answered, “A hundred jugs of olive oil.” He said to him, “Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.” 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.” 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. 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.

‘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. If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? 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.’”

Let us pray together: God of all grace, pour out your Holy Spirit on us gathered here that we might experience your grace. Teach us how to be faithful and fruitful with all that you have entrusted to our care. Help us to create treasure in heaven through loving service with our neighbors. May the meditations of our hearts and minds be pleasing to you O God, our Rock and Redeemer.

We are in the third week of our preaching series called ‘Your Money­ Living Life Abundantly.’ If this is your first week joining us for this series, we’ve covered gospel texts from Luke highlighting the way in which wealth can hinder our relationship with God and our neighbors. I’ve told you about ways that greed pits family members against one another and ways in which generosity has led families into deeper love of God and neighbors. This morning we are looking at a text in which a credit manager cooks the books a little bit when he learns that he is getting fired. Professor Raj Nadella of Columbia Theological Seminary suggests that this Lukan parable is one of the most difficult passages in all the gospels to teach, preach, and interpret. In social media circles of clergy, preachers, and theological scholars this week, there is a shared inquisitive approach about what to do with this text. What good news does it contain?

We’ll get through this together!

My father graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University on a Friday afternoon and the following Monday morning he began full time work in the billing department of a local company. For close to four decades, his primary line of work was credit management corresponding with clients to make sure their invoices were paid before they received additional merchandise, supplies, or equipment. My first part time job was working at one of those companies filing the carbon copies of the invoices that had been paid. There I became familiar with Piggly Wiggly stores that were situated through the South. It wasn’t until I moved to Nashville that I saw my first brick and mortar Piggly Wiggly­. I had only known of them from filing invoices at the office. This past week my father and I revisited this morning’s text because I wanted his take on what the credit manager did in anticipation of getting fired.

My dad shared some memories of instances he came across over the years with people he knew around town who were cooking the books, cutting debt owed on invoices while skimming a bit of the top to pad their own pockets. In other words, mid-­level managers were stealing funds rightly owed to the company or the business owner. The people my father knew embezzled and defrauded first, and when they were found out, they were fired. Some of those guys went to prison for embezzlement and fraud. Jesus’ credit manager is accused of dishonest dealings, is fired, and in a last ditch effort to save his own neck, slashes debt service on behalf of his former employer to gain favor with his neighbors.

If you have been keeping up with the national news over the past 10 days, then you have surely come across the story of Wells Fargo. Over the past few years, Wells Fargo employees, in an attempt to meet sales quotas and maximize compensation policies opened banking accounts that customers never asked for. Imagine that, your bank teller opens a credit card in your name, receives a bonus for opening new accounts, boosts the bank’s bottom line from monthly fees to keep the credit line open, and you never even asked for the credit account. According to the New York Times, over 5,300 Wells Fargo employees were involved in this fraudulent behavior, opening over 1.5 million unwanted bank accounts and applying for over 500,000 unrequested credit cards. These illegal banking practices will cost Wells Fargo over $185 million dollars in fines and restitution will be paid to those victimized by economic exploitation. Instead of serving as a steward for its customers assets, a culture of profit seeking at no matter the cost at Wells Fargo enabled and encouraged predatory dealings.

But what about each individual whose earnings were siphoned off a few dollars at the time for accounts they never wanted or needed? For a single working parent, monthly maintenance fees on a credit card account or checking account could amount to a box of diapers or enough gas to get to and from work until the next paycheck arrives. Or what about for a retired adult on a fixed income whose livelihood depends on each dollar? Predatory banking and unrestrained profit seeking can literally drain the life out of the economically vulnerable. Oppressing the vulnerable through economic means has no place in the world that God envisions for us.

“In Luke, the joy of the Gospel is the joy of God’s healing of relationships, including economic relationships. Jesus repeatedly warns that we cannot be disciples while accumulating wealth at the expense of the poor.”1

We’ll come back to this because economic vitality and restoration might be some of the good news that Jesus offers in this parable.

Jesus presents this parable to his disciples: A rich man had a household manager to watch over the dealings of his property. Like many of the rich men that show up in Jesus’ parables, today’s man is likely a landowner with a wide expanse of property. He’s not living hand to mouth. Instead he has considerable assets and is in the practice of lending to his neighbors and maybe even those who work his land. His operation is large enough that he can’t or doesn’t want to manage his land and business dealings on his own so he employs someone to do it for him. This household manager, entrusted as a steward of the rich man’s assets and possessions, doesn’t have a clean reputation. Perhaps he is doing less than a stellar job in managing the rich man’s possessions or maybe his coworkers are speaking ill of him with the hopes that he will be fired.

Either way, he’s told his work on behalf of the rich man is over. Here is your two weeks. Pack up your things and go. Presented with this vocational crisis and the anxiety of being putting out without a source of livelihood, he designs a way forward. He knows that his master has loaned out oil and wheat, the bare essentials of life, and that he can leverage debt payment in order to gain favor. The first individual he calls in to settle the account owes one hundred jugs of olive oil. He is told that his bill is now reduced to 50 jugs of olive. In the bat of an eye, the debtor’s burden is reduced by half. The second individual who is called in by the steward of the house has a debt burden of 100 containers of wheat. Again in the bat of an eye, the amount of repayment is reduced by 20% so that only 80 containers of wheat are owed to the master.

Let’s put these numbers in perspective. If you were going to buy a house this week with a 30 year mortgage, you could probably get an interest rate somewhere between 3­-5%. Or if you went to buy a car, you could probably get an interest rate on a loan between 7­-10%. A high interest credit card might put you between 15­-20%. Debt reductions in our parable ranging from 20­50% are huge percentages, almost unheard of in the banking world we know.

At first glance it seems that the household steward, the credit manager, is really ripping off his master giving deep discounts to all the debtors. The master is going to lose 50 jugs of oil and 20 containers of wheat because his credit manager is scheming to save his own skin when he’s terminated. What business owner would be satisfied with an employee doing deals behind his or her back ultimately reducing bottom line profit for personal gain? It feels like we’re supposed to conclude that the manager is in the wrong stealing from his master.

But what if that’s not the case at all? What if the manager is rightly to be praised because he is giving life back to the economically disadvantaged whom his master has ripped off with high interest rates? In all likelihood, a 1st century rich landowner made his fortune lending critical supplies to peasant farmers who lived hand to mouth and charging such exorbitant interest rates that the loan could never be repaid. In lieu of full repayment, the rich landowner took the peasant farmers family land adding it to his own. The rich landowner is a 1st century loan shark, preying on the essential needs of the poor and disadvantaged. His manager is morally culpable to some degree as he is caught up in this predatory operation.

Jesus’ disciples and anyone within an earshot of the telling of this parable would know that the landowner was unfairly lending to people who had no hope of repaying the debt. Moreover, Jesus’ disciples and the crowds would remember Mosaic law given in Exodus and Deuteronomy that prohibited the laying on of interest in the giving of loans.

“25 If you lend money to my people who are poor among you, don’t be a creditor and charge them interest. 26 If you take a piece of clothing from someone as a security deposit, you should return it before the sun goes down. 27 His clothing may well be his only blanket to cover himself. What else will that person have to sleep in? And if he cries out to me, I’ll listen, because I’m compassionate.”

We don’t know whether the rich landowner is a Jew or Gentile but if he were Jewish, his unfair lending practices would be an act against the commandments given by God to Moses.

Seen in this light, perhaps the manager is rightly praised because in slashing the debts he is trimming off the exorbitant interest rate that his master expected. He is reducing the debt to the original amount that was on loan without an interest charge. Indeed his actions were self serving as he sought ways to improve his standing among neighbors. He helps restore relationships and lives in the reduction of death dealing debt. He engenders relationships through the sharp and wise decision to utilize the assets available to him to improve the condition of life for neighbors. Ultimately he is praised for this course of action as a response to the crisis of being jobless. The freedom he gives to the debtors would be cause for joy. Since the manager acted on behalf of the master’s household, the master would be perceived by the debtors as generous and worthy of honor. If the master came down hard on the steward’s actions of releasing debt, the master could be exposed for his greed and inability to control his employees. It is far better for him to praise the steward and be seen as a generous lender and in control of his affairs.

So where does this leave us? There is much more said in this parable than we’ve gone through this morning. There are a few one liners offered as commentary on the parable but leave us without a full explanation of how we should respond. “ You cannot serve both God and money” or “If you haven’t been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches?”

One of the possible intersection points in our faith life with money and this parable is payday lending. I hope it is never an option that any of you need or choose to use. For the church, payday lending is a moral and theological challenge. An average scenario is that $15 is owed for every $100 borrowed and this is on a two week loan. If you annualize this lending scenario, that’s a 400% annual percentage rate. This is the kind of predatory lending by which fortunes are amassed and the poor and economically disadvantaged can be ruined. They are locked into cycles of debt that are incredibly difficult to escape.

In what ways do we participate in the oppressive economic conditions of our neighbors? Are there ways by which we can grow relationships with the wise stewardship of the money and wealth entrusted to our care? Are there ways by which we as followers of Jesus need to seek the economic vitality and freedom of our neighbors and community?

Bless you in the name of the Everlasting God. Amen.