Photo by Mathieu Stern on Unsplash

A sermon on Luke 16:1-13
by Rev. Chris Bohnhoff

You know what’s a funny word? Shrewd. Doesn’t it feel weird coming off the tongue? It sounds like it should mean getting gnawed on by small rodents. But according to Merriam Webster, it can mean “marked by clever discerning awareness and hardheaded acumen,” or “given to wily and artful ways or dealing.” So, shrewd is clever, hardheaded, wily, but in an artful way. Maybe not the first words you would use to describe Jesus and his teachings, but here he is in this passage, in effect telling his disciples – the “children of light” to whom he refers – to shrewd-en up, like the manager in this parable. Why?

Will you pray with me? God of wisdom, the line between clever and deceitful can be harder to identify than we might admit. Help us to decenter our own assumptions and remember your agendas of love and justice for all, no exceptions. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts together be ever acceptable to you, or source, our comfort, our being. Amen.

Is there a more serious charge in our capitalist culture than squandering another person’s property? Unlike the indigenous people who lived on this land before Europeans arrived, European descendants like me lay claim on land, we store up crops and wealth for personal use, our houses are. . . ours. Not all that long ago in the span of history, our ideas around ownership even extended through marriage and slavery to people themselves. Our laws reflect how we confer rights through property, things. Even laws relating to harms rooted in relationship – divorce, for example – focus more on property than they do on what happened to people.

Whether we realize it or not, relative to other cultures, we take our things very seriously. So, on hearing the charge that begins this parable that the manager squandered the rich man’s property, we are culturally conditioned to think that the manager is a bad dude. Who says squandering happened? How much was squandered? How does the manager respond to the charge? Based on the text, there’s no way to know. All we do know is that the rich man has heard all he needs to hear. The manager is out of a job.

From this starting point, through the lens of property rights, our cultural lens, the rest of the parable is hard to understand. The manager doesn’t agree to restore the squandered property; he seems to do the opposite by reducing the amounts owed to his boss for the self-serving reason that it’ll make life easier for him when he’s out of a job. The rich man and Jesus then declare that the manager is an example to be followed! What gives?

In another lifetime, almost 20 years ago, I was a wedding photographer. When I started and didn’t have a portfolio to show prospective clients the artistry they could expect, my price was low. I would tell people that I was worth quite a bit (which I truly believed), but since I couldn’t provide any proof of my worth, I’d give them a deal. That way, we both win: you get an experienced photographer who hasn’t specifically photographed weddings, and I get material to build a portfolio with. Some couples were willing to take a risk on me, and those weddings were super fun – small budget events in VFW basements and parks – and the couples were so appreciative of my work.

Eventually, I had the money and experience to build a beautiful portfolio in a fancy book, and a logo, and all the sales materials you’d expect from a real professional wedding photographer, and I charged accordingly. Those weddings were much less fun. Expectations were higher because more of their property was being exchanged for my services. I was a vendor, not a person, and while I was doing my job for them, on some level I could feel their suspicion that I wasn’t worth it, that I was squandering their property.

The funny thing is, back then, I thought my shrewd actions as a wedding photographer were putting together a slick portfolio and sales pitch. Shrewd meant climbing the earnings ladder, because I approached wedding photography like a capitalist. I assumed that my goal was to produce a thing that made as much money as possible per unit of my talent and time. But this parable makes me wonder whether my earlier actions were far more shrewd and in line with Jesus’ teachings: giving couples a deal, making some money, and having some fun providing a service that the couples were happy with.

When you approach the world through a capitalistic, property-centric lens you focus on your money, your power, your security, and what you need to do to protect and build your edifice. But as this and other parables remind us, those stacks of loot can go away pretty quickly, sometimes even for reasons we can’t explain. When our security is pulled out from under us, when the money – that thing we spend so much time agonizing over – is gone, we see the world past the grasp of our own arms. We see that we aren’t as self-sufficient as we thought we were. We see how much we need community. That’s where this parable takes me in this moment.

The manager, freed from service to his master, leans away from the narrow interests of his boss and into community. His thought process, then his actions reflect that he is thinking of his community not only as piles of debt to extract, but also as sources of support for him. It’s as if he suddenly realizes that he’s also a member of the same community who will soon be the one in need of a loan. I think that the rich man and Jesus praise the manager’s shrewd cutting of debts because even capitalists are going to fail if they wring too much from their customers. Even tyrants will fail if they wring too many liberties from a society.

We are all, rich men, managers, and debtors, interconnected. To act in alignment with God’s commonwealth is to embrace this clear reality, so obvious when we lower the capitalistic lens from our eyes, and seek solutions that benefit all.

In her conclusion to Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer puts our interconnected existence on earth beautifully. She writes, “We are all bound by a covenant of reciprocity: plant breath for animal breath, winter and summer, predator and prey, grass and fire, night and day, living and dying. Water knows this, clouds know this. Soil and rocks know they are dancing in a continuous giveaway of making, unmaking, and making again the earth.”

Jesus and the entire wisdom tradition of which he is a part call us to walk this web shrewdly – that is, with a combination of clever discernment, hardheaded acumen, and let’s not forget, a little bit of trickster wiliness. We’re called to give up our lens that recognizes individual winners and losers, and instead recognize that either we’re all going to win together, or we’re all going to lose.

Can we drop all traces of transactionality from our relationships? Can we stop settling for, What’s in it for me, and hold out for, How can we both win? Can we balance our own self-interest with the truth that all we see in the world is gift, all relationships wellsprings from which we can draw, all moments, especially the ones most fraught and dangerous, can become thresholds where God waits for us to unclench our hands and fall into a different future? Can we be that shrewd? May we open our hearts to God’s wisdom, where every answer may be found by those who seek. Amen.