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1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13
A Sermon for the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
The treasurer of a congregation, known for his wit, looked out at the well-attended funeral, and said: “If we’d known there would be a crowd like this, we would have taken an offering.”
We don’t pass the offering plate at a funeral. Many a church treasurer no doubt regrets this.
Our gospel text today is about money: “You cannot serve God and mammon.” And as the saying goes: “The hardest part of a man to convert is his pocket.”
There are hundreds of similar Bible passages about God and money. Here are just a few more well-known texts on this theme:
- The rich young ruler (Matt 19:24; Mk 10:25; Luke 18:25). What must I do to inherit eternal life? He had followed all the commandments. Then: Go sell what you possess and give it to the poor.
- The rich fool (Lk 12:20). The rich man’s crops were so plentiful that he decided to build more and bigger barns. But alas, that night his life was required of him.
- The widow’s mite (Mk 12:41-44; Lk 21:1-4) Jesus sat down across the street from the treasury and watched the multitudes giving their money. Many rich people put in big gifts. A poor widow came and put in two copper coins. Jesus: They contributed about of their abundance; she gave her all.
- Zacchaeus (Lk 19:1-10) “Zacchaeus: Come down for I must stay at your house today.” “Behold, Lord, the half of my good I give to the poor; and if I have defrauded any one of anything, I restore it fourfold.”
What do we make of all these hard sayings about money?
They make it sound as if it’s virtuous to live a life of poverty and even live on the public dole.
Is that what we’re supposed to do? As you know, similar ideas of poverty are found in parts of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, although not Judaism.
Note, however, the many Bible verses that go in the opposite direction:
- “And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply….” (Gen 1:22).
- Parable of the talents (Matt 25:15). “Well done, good and faithful servant…”
- Parable of the fig tree (Luke 13:6-9). “I have come seeking fruit and I find none. Cut it down.”
- Parable of the vineyard (Matt 21:33-44; Mk 12:1-12; Lk 20:9-19). “[He will] let out the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the fruits in their season.”
- “Be good stewards of God’s varied grace” (1 Peter 4:10). “Who then is the faithful and wise steward?” (Lk 12:42).
- Beware those who “forbid marriage and enjoin abstinences from food which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving” (I Timothy 4:3-4).
Which way do we go? Live a life of poverty, or be fruitful and multiply?
The answer: All these parables and stories seem to be about poverty, wealth, economics, sociology, and the like, but really, they are not.
Rather, they are about idolatry – about letting things of this world—money, possessions, careers, and family—become gods in our lives.
What’s the answer? 1 Peter 5:7: “Cast all your cares on him, for he cares for you.”
This means not letting money, or family, or job, or whatever else become the thing you live for, become an idol. They are good things, but when they become the main thing—then we, like the ancient Hebrews, have fallen into idolatry.
Matthew 6:26-30 says: “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them…Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin . . . if God so clothes the grass of the field . . . will he not much more clothe you?”
We think of saints as those who are really good, who are “Godlike.” But the great saints don’t say that. Rather, they say how unlike God they are, how sinful and broken.
There was an axiom in the Middle Ages that went like this: God became man so that men could become God. Like attracts like. One had to be like God to be one with God. This was the underlying rationale of the monk, the mystic, and the pilgrim. One was to conform to God so completely that one finally became one with God.
But Luther saw the error in this thinking, and he found in his study of the Psalms and Romans a different perspective. There union with God is accompanied by awareness of one’s distance from God, of how unlike God one is.
Luther turned that medieval axiom—God became man so that men would become God—on its head. He said that God became man so that men would remain men, so that we could be free to creatures, not gods. Sinners, yet one with God through Christ who forgives. As 1 Timothy 2:5 states: “There is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all.”
The spiritual person is not the one who is inwardly and outwardly righteous. The spiritual person is the one who lives by faith alone, faith that God will be true to his promises, and despite all the evidence to the contrary, life is meaningful.
In our Gospel text today, the shrewd manager gave thought to the future and it shaped his actions in the present. He was like Jacob who was a cheat and a rascal, and nevertheless, one of the Patriarchs.
Like the shrewd manager we live with an eye to the future. Hebrews 13:14 states: “Here we have no abiding city.” Paul writes: “Our commonwealth is in heaven” (Philippians 3:20).
Luther put it this way: We live in two kingdoms. We live in this world of evil, sin, and death, God’s left-hand kingdom, with a Gospel sense of where it’s all going—God’s future kingdom where evil, sin, and death are no more.
Like the shrewd manager, we are to be smart, use our heads, and be prepared—but there’s no quid pro quo in heaven. He has done everything, and we shall receive everything.
As Luther writes in his Small Catechism: “I believe in Jesus Christ . . . who has redeemed me, a lost and condemned creature, delivered me and freed me from all sins, from death and the power of the devil, not with silver and gold but with his holy and precious blood and with his innocent sufferings and death, in order that I may be his, live under him in his kingdom, and serve him in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness, even as he is risen from the dead and lives and reigns to all eternity.”
Amen