Sunday September 21st, 2025 Worship

When I was a little kid, I was fascinated with money, especially coins. There were so many different ones, and I just wanted to collect all of them! This probably had something to do with the fact that my uncle used to bring me back currency from whatever country he had traveled to, that I kept in a giant Altoids box on my dresser and would frequently pull out to look at and sort it by country. Or that I was intent on collecting all the different state quarters, making swaps and trades to make sure we didn’t use those precious states that I hadn’t added to my collection yet. I even had this map book that I could add them into to make sure they were taken out of rotation. My sister and I would also play this “game” with my grandpa, where we would take his coin pouch from the table whenever he was taking a nap and divide the coins between ourselves. And then we would quietly sneak the pouch back to the table while he was still asleep. We thought that we were being so sneaky, when really, he was using us to help get rid of the change that he didn’t want to carry around anymore and help us with our math skills while he was at it. He knew exactly what we were doing!
There are all these lessons that we are taught about money and wealth by observing how people are treated when they have money or when they don’t. We may wish people had taught us a bit more about how we are supposed to manage it, like learning how to budget or write a check instead of just learning about what GDP means in Economics. But we exist in a world that tells us you need to have money and the amount of money you have is a direct indicator of your worth in the eyes of other people. We start to learn these things from an early age, without anyone even having to say those words to us. It doesn’t matter what we had to do or not do to get that money, as long as we have it, then we must be someone worthy of respect. Regardless of how we feel about it, this is the system that we live in; it is in the air that we breathe.
This isn’t anything new either, as our Scriptures invite us to think about our relationship to wealth and how we see it’s value in our own lives or in the valuation of the world. It’s interesting to get this entire confusing parable today because we are left wondering what we are supposed to take away from it. Are we supposed to be dishonest? Work shrewdly? Swindle others? That doesn’t seem quite right… We are tempted to skip over the whole parable because it is too confusing and Jesus gets to the heart of the message in verse 13, so why do we need that other part anyway?! As tempting as it is to simply ignore it, I think it is really important for highlighting the relationship between people and the way that wealth has an impact on those relationships. Not only between master and steward, but also between the others who owe this manager’s master a certain portion of what they have. There is a use of wealth in this story to burden other people, but also it is used to lessen someone else’s burden.
The manager who has just been fired uses the power he has to reduce the debts of others before anyone realizes that he has been dismissed from his role as a steward of this wealthy man’s accounts (Luke 16: 1-7). While he is looking out for his own well-being, as he will need another job shortly, he also acts in such a way that it helps to relieve the debts of others. He is working within the system that is surrounding him in order to make a small change. It’s especially interesting to note the way that the master commends the manager for the way he acted (Luke 16: 8a), recognizing the way that he worked within this system to affect a change that the master definitely didn’t see coming. We don’t hear that he was hired back, but there is a recognition of the way this man acted shrewdly. The system we live in may not be overturned tomorrow, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t still find ways to work within it to begin moving it closer to the vision of God’s kindom.
This is especially important as we bring in the other Scripture readings for today because they move to the forefront the idea of God’s preferential option for the poor. Again, it’s not that God doesn’t care about the others, but there is an emphasis on the people who are most downtrodden, the most abused, and the most in need of recognition of their humanity and belovedness. When we hear about Jesus eating with the outsiders, those who were rejected and deemed unworthy to be a full part of society, we are meant to hear them with this preferential option as the echo. There is a calling attention to those who were most frequently overlooked, especially because they didn’t have the social and financial capital to have their needs taken seriously. Amos declares that God will not stand for the mistreatment of others through corrupt business practices and mistreatment of the poor (Amos 8:4-7). This emphasis on right relationships between humans and God and humans and neighbor is central to the teachings of the prophet Amos, and he does not shy away from speaking those truths boldly. We are not to use humans as tools to support ourselves and break them in the process.
But then we also have the Psalm with phrases like: “The Lord takes up the weak out of the dust and lifts up the poor from the ashes” (Psalm 113: 7). God is lifting up the people that have been buried under debt, pushed down and trampled upon by others in their search for greater wealth. We don’t need to stretch our imaginations to think about what this looks like today. There is recognition that these actions that harm God’s beloved for the sake of the few are directly opposed to God’s intentions for creation. These proclamations are a major disruption to the ways of functioning in both ancient times and today, where certain people were endowed with more power and respect simply because of the amount of money they were able to make off the labor of others. And there is a promise in this Psalm that God has not stopped caring about those who feel so downtrodden that it’s like they have literally been buried. It is a resurrection story in itself, bringing hope and life from the ashes of our broken and harmful systems.
All of this is circling the closing statement of Luke’s Gospel today in which Jesus says, “You cannot serve God and wealth” (Luke 16: 13b). Full stop. Jesus doesn’t go on to give loopholes and ways to get around this. He ends the teaching regarding this parable on this note. It is a continuation of this conversation on idolatry from last week because wealth so frequently becomes an idol. And, when we love wealth to the point that it becomes an idol, the thing in which we put our trust, we do so at the expense of our neighbor. We then are no longer following either part of the greatest commandment to love God and love our neighbor. If wealth is the thing that we seek salvation from, despite the fact that wealth is not permanent, it has become our god. The value of our currency changes, inflation rates fluctuate, stock markets rise and fall. If our sense of self and worth is tied to our wealth, we are standing on a tenuous foundation.
To go back to the beginning, we all know that we live in a world in which we do have to think about money and wealth. We have bills to pay, mouths to feed, bodies to clothe. We cannot escape that reality. So, we are encouraged to think about what it means for us to live in the midst of this reality while holding onto the promises of God’s flourishing for all people, which cannot exist in our current system in which many are mistreated for the wealth of a few. So, how do we use what we have to bring life and hope into the world around us? I don’t have a great answer to this because I cannot tell you what to do or how you should spend your money. We are all in different financial situations, and one size doesn’t fit all. Despite the fact that my mom has been a financial planning assistant my entire life, I am not a financial planner! But I will encourage you to think of your money as an extension of your values. To a certain extent, we get to decide how we spend our money. And, when we do, what will those receipts say about our values and who we say that our God is?