Sermon for the Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost
“Fingers in the Cookie Jar”
Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord
and Savior Jesus Christ! Today’s Gospel is not an easy Gospel, but it certainly
is easy to get hung up on the details. For example, I cannot explain why Jesus
would chose a dishonest manager as the star of the show rather than a good and
honest one, but those decisions are not up to me. Perhaps today’s Gospel is not
a parable, but an actual event that had recently taken place, and now everyone
at work was talking about it by the watercooler:
There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that
this man was wasting his possessions. And he called him and said to him, “What
is this that I hear about you? Turn in the account of your management, for you
can no longer be manager.” And the manager said to himself, “What shall I do? …”
Summoning his master's debtors one by one, [the manager] said to the first,
“How much do you owe my master?” He said, “A hundred measures of oil.” [The
manager] said to him, “Take your bill, and sit down quickly and write fifty.”
Then he said to another [debtor], “And how much do you owe?” He said, “A
hundred measures of wheat.” [The manager] said to him, “Take your bill, and
write eighty.”
The point of today’s Gospel is this: God your heavenly Father has placed a
certain amount of His wealth and possessions into your care and keeping, just
as this manager was given care of his master’s belongings. God your heavenly
Father wants you to win friends for yourselves, so to speak, by using His
wealth and possessions.
Dear Christian friends:
If your childhood was anything like mine, unauthorized dipping into the
cookie jar was a “high crime and misdemeanor.” It brought severe punishments:
No one is allowed to touch the cookie jar! Those little nuggets of baked peanut
butter and chocolate are more valuable than gold, not to be given away easily
and certainly not just before supper.
In today’s Gospel, your Lord Jesus declares to you that dipping into the cookie
jar is a very good and praiseworthy thing. In fact, that is exactly what your
God dearly wants you to do—God wants you to dig deeply into the cookie jar of
His divine gifts, so to speak. Your heavenly Father has put countless cookies
into the jar for the very purposes of having you enjoy them and of giving them
to others. He wants you to grab as many of His “cookies” as your little fingers
can hold, and He wants you to turn and pass those prized possessions to as many
people as you can find.
“There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to
him that this man was wasting his possessions.” The manager had better get
busy, because his future suddenly looked very dismal. The rich man called the
manager and said to him, “Turn in the account… you can no longer be manager.
In order to hedge against his own future, this manager forgave many debts that
people owed his master. Jesus includes two examples of the lucky winners: one
fellow’s debt of a hundred measures of oil was reduced to fifty; one’s debt of
a hundred measures of wheat was reduced to 80. This manager had reached into
his master’s cookie jar, so to speak, and he passed out to others as many
cookies as he could gather up. Then Jesus speaks a surprising conclusion to the
whole affair: “The master commended the dishonest manager for his shrewdness.
For the sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation
than the sons of light.”
Do not mistakenly think that your Lord is praising villainy or unfaithfulness
or theft. We are not to learn from this Gospel that one wrong deserves another
wrong, or that a Christian may return an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth.
Jesus merely uses this cheating, stealing, embezzling manager as a good example
for you. “I tell you,” says Jesus, “make friends for yourselves by means of
unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal
dwellings.” This wicked manager is a good example to you because he used his
master’s possessions while he was able. So also ought you—so must you—use your
master’s possessions to gain friends for yourselves. “I tell you,” says Jesus,
“make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it
fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings.” In other words, God
your heavenly Father wants you to dig into His cookie jar. He wants you to take
from those countless things that belong to Him and only to Him, and He wants
you to gain friends for yourselves—that is to say, heavenly friends, brothers,
sisters, fellow Christians—through your use of His possessions.
“UNRIGHTEOUS WEALTH”
What are those things that belong to God, which He desires that you use
in gaining friends and fellow Christians? Jesus gives you the answer right here
when He says to you, “Use unrighteous wealth.” Do not allow that word,
“unrighteous” to throw you off the horse. When Jesus speaks about “unrighteous
wealth” in this Gospel, He is simply speaking about those little green bills
from the US Treasury Department that we all foolishly feel tempted to think we
need.
You confess under the First Article of the Creed that you don’t actually own
anything, that you have never earned anything of your own, and that there is
nothing in this entire creation that originated with you. It is a good
confession that you make, because you end up admitting that your heavenly
Father has given you “clothing and shoes, food and drink, house and home, wife
and children, land, animals, and all we have.” All that you have is from God.
Every dollar bill and every scrap of material in your possession actually
belongs to Him. God the Father wants you to use these things—His things—as
though they are cookies from the cookie jar. God does not want you to think of
your stuff as something you must hoard or pile up. God the Father wants you to
use His wealth—that is, the stuff He gave to you—in your proclamation of the
Gospel, in order that you may gain friends and fellow Christians for yourselves.
“MAKE FRIENDS FOR YOURSELVES”
When Jesus calls you to “make friends for yourselves by means of
unrighteous wealth,” He is calling upon you to live in the confidence and
surety that can only come to you by the life and power of His Gospel.
· When Jesus commands that you use your money in this way, He is not
really focused on the money. Jesus is focused, rather, on the new heart and new
mind that He has created for you in His Word. You have been given the
forgiveness of sins by His death and His resurrection. You have been given the
gift of the Holy Spirit, just as He promised. You have been made “a new
creation,” as St. Paul says (2 Corinthians 5:17), and this new creation now
lives without fear.
· In His powerful Word, Christ removes from you all fears, including the
very same fear experienced by the manager in today’s Gospel—that is, the fear
that you will be left without any means to live in this life. When God’s
powerful Word awakens you, so that you realize and believe that your heavenly
Father shall not fail to provide for you; when you apprehend the fact that all
of your needs have already been met for you in Christ; when you believe by the
miracle of God that the indwelling Holy Spirit shall not depart from you, then
all fear melts away. Then you are no longer a slave. Then you are free to do
that which Jesus calls you to do: “make friends for yourselves by means of
unrighteous wealth.”
“THEY WILL RECEIVE YOU”
What happens when you make such friends for yourselves? These friends will
“receive you into the eternal dwellings,” says Jesus. Of course, this does not
mean that you earn your way into heaven. When Jesus says your friends and
fellow Christians will “receive you into the eternal dwellings,” He is simply
stating that people will rejoice in heaven over the way you used your
possessions here on earth. Some of those people—having heard God’s Words of
Life as a result of what you said or what you did—some of those people will be
happy to see you when you arrive. They will “receive you into the eternal
dwellings” with rejoicing because you did not love your possessions too much.
They will receive you with rejoicing because you loved your neighbor, and you
used your possessions to show love to your neighbor. That is really what
today’s Gospel is all about.
Do not let the little details in this Gospel derail you. Focus on the main
point, that God wants you to use your possessions—His possessions—with your
future in mind. If this manager could be generous with his master’s wealth as a
way of securing his own future, how much more generous can you be—you whose
future is already set and secure in the blood of Jesus? You have nothing to
lose by losing your money and you have nothing to gain by keeping it. You have
learned from other places in God’s Bible how things will be for you when you
depart this life and you stand before the judgment seat of your God. Your deeds
shall not give you entry there, and that is a good thing. Your Lord has earned
your place in heaven for you by dying on the cross and shedding His blood for
your forgiveness. When you go to heaven, your deeds will simply bear witness
to your faith by which you lived here on earth. On the Last Day we shall say to
Him, as our fellow
Christians will say with us, “We are unworthy servants. We were only doing
what we ought” (Luke 17:10). Jesus shall say to each of you in return, “Well
done, thou good and faithful servant… Come and share in your master’s
happiness!” (Matthew 25:21).
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