Sermon for Sunday, September 21, 2025

September 21, 2025

By Kristin Berkey-Abbott



Luke 16: 1-13


Today’s Gospel presents one of the most perplexing of Jesus’ parables. You could spend the next month reading commentaries and come away unsure of what Jesus is saying here. Are we supposed to be like the rich man or the manager? What does this parable tell us about the Kingdom of Heaven? Indeed, this parable shows us some of the problems with interpreting parables the way we usually interpret them.

We are prone to approaching parables the way that we approach poetry, if we read much of either. It’s not our fault. We are trained to read literature of all types in this way, as problems to be solved, not mysteries to be inhabited. In our parable reading, we look for equations, and because it’s Jesus, we often try to solve the equation the same way, regardless of the parable. We’re likely to go looking for the character that represents God, the character that represents the believer, the character that represents the larger culture.

Today’s parable does not fall neatly into an equation. I would have a problem preaching a sermon that tells us that the rich man or the dishonest manager is supposed to represent God.

We are also trained to approach parables as neat moral fables, with a clear lesson that we’re supposed to learn. To be fair, some parables do just that, and they often do it so clearly that there’s no mystery. I’m thinking of the few times that Jesus explained what he was saying, just to be sure that his listeners understood both the message and the moral lesson.

So, if we’re looking to this parable to give us a clear moral message, we might interpret verse 9 as the moral lesson: “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.” Hmm. It’s hard for me to imagine that Jesus is telling us to go and cheat our employers so that we can win friends and influence people. It’s much easier for me to imagine Jesus saying this with a smirk on his face so that people would realize that he’s being ironic, meaning exactly the opposite.

In fact, if we imagine him in this way, verse 9 serves as a hinge verse to take us to the message that Jesus really wants us to understand. We might jump right to the conclusion: No one can serve two masters, God and Money—Jesus spells it out for us, in case we still don’t understand his teachings about the dangers of money.

It’s not really a new lesson, is it? We’ve had week after week of this message. And it’s not a new message. It’s not like Jesus comes along and invents this idea. Look at our first reading. Hundreds of years before Jesus, Amos preaches the same message.

Many of us have been taught that Jesus announces a split between the Old Testament and the New—but that’s not what Jesus says. Let’s look at the verses that come after our passage and before next week’s Gospel about the rich man and Lazarus.

“14 The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all this, and they ridiculed him. 15 So he said to them, “You are those who justify yourselves in the sight of others, but God knows your hearts, for what is prized by humans is an abomination in the sight of God.

16 “The Law and the Prophets were until John came; since then the good news of the kingdom of God is being proclaimed, and everyone tries to enter it by force.[f] 17 But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one stroke of a letter in the law to be dropped.”

Here and other places, Jesus proclaims that he’s not here to overturn God’s law, the laws announced by ancient prophets. No he’s here to reinforce the law—God’s law, not the law of humans. Throughout our scripture, again and again, we hear that God is on the side of the poor, not the side of those who would sell out the poor for a pair of sandals, as Amos tells us or for the crooked managers, like the one in today’s parable, who go around cutting debt in half—debt that is not owed to them. Jesus preaches that a different behavior is necessary. Again and again Jesus tells us that we need to behave and believe in ways that will demonstrate whose side we are on.

Jesus makes his point very plain, both here and elsewhere: we can’t serve God and money. But pay attention to the verb: it’s serve, not have. We can have money, but we can’t serve both God and money.

The parable shows us the dangers of giving our allegiance to money and the ones who control it in our world. We’ve got a rich owner and a dishonest business manager: both are sleazy. Both are treacherous. And we see the problem with being indebted to these kinds of people. The dishonest manager goes to all of the people enmeshed in this money system and offers them a better deal. Not one says, “No, I made a deal, and I owe what I owe.” They’re all willing to cut a deal.

We still see this dynamic today. We see it in the top branches of government, when one president says he’ll cancel student loan debt and the next president says he’s taking back allocated money going to groups that don’t align with the administration. We see it at the state level where some counties get more resources than others. We see it in smaller contexts, with people taking work resources home for personal use: I’ve seen people steal reams of paper from office spaces or food from restaurants where they worked. We may see these examples as being vastly different, but it’s a matter of degree, and Jesus reminds us that the difference in scale doesn’t matter.

Christ commands us not to lose sight of the true riches, the riches that our society doesn't comprehend fully (or at all).

God has lifted us up out of the dust and ashes of lives not worth living. Into our barren lives comes Jesus, with God’s offer to each of us: fruitful abundance and flourishing with no need for dishonest calculations to win favor. We’ve already won God’s favor. That’s the good news of this parable: God is like none of those people in the parable, not the rich man or the dishonest manager or the indebted enmeshed in a system where they can’t win. We, too, have been set free from the earthly systems that set us up to fail. We have been entrusted with great riches—let us steward those resources wisely and with joy.