Dishonest, Shrewd, or Defect-ive?

Message for worship at West Richmond Friends Meeting, 25th of Fifth Month, 2025

Speaker: Brian Young

Scripture: Luke 16:1-13

Luke 16:1–13, NRSVUE: 1 Then Jesus said to the disciples, “There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. 2 So he summoned him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management because you cannot be my manager any longer.’ 3 Then the manager said to himself, ‘What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. 4 I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’ 5 So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ 6 He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’ 7 Then he asked another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘A hundred containers of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill and make it eighty.’ 8 And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly, for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. 9 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.

10 “Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much, and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. 11 If, then, you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? 12 And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? 13 No slave can serve two masters, for a slave will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”

This past week was the end of the school year for Richmond Friends School; five eighth graders graduated on Friday afternoon, and their parents and relatives and friends gathered here in this room to mark their passage from this Friendly place on to high school and the world beyond. The school celebrates this rite of passage with gifts and kind words for the graduates, and ice cream for everybody—and there’s a more prosaic ritual that they encourage each student and family to observe before the end of the last school day: check the lost & found.

Any organization that has eighty or ninety children regularly coming in and out of its doors is going to accumulate plenty of lost items. I frequently find things here and there that someone, an RFS student or a West Richmond kid—or a West Richmond adult—has left behind. There’s a small box in the fellowship room here in the meetinghouse that I think probably has both RFS and WRF stuff in it, and a much larger box in the hallway in the school building. I haven’t checked to see how many items are left unclaimed at this point, but I’m sure there are still some things that someone is going to have to truck to Goodwill at some point this summer. Some of the lost things never get found—at least not by the ones who left them in the first place.

“Lost and found” is a major theme of the section of Luke’s Gospel that we are currently working our way through. Last week, Mimi Holland narrated the three parables of chapter 15 for us—the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost boy, or what is traditionally known as the “the prodigal son.” Mimi put these three parables into new words and told them from unusual perspectives: in the first two, taking the viewpoint of the thing that was lost, the sheep and the coin themselves, and in the third, telling the first part of the parable from the perspective of the pigs that the lost son finds himself among when he begins to turn around and look towards home. Each of these parables assures us of God’s care for what is lost—for those who, whether by choice or by circumstance, find themselves separated from the flock, from safety, from home. These stories assure us that while some of our lost things never get found, God continues to seek and save the ones who are lost.

And some commentators suggest that today’s passage lines up with this theme. This parable, sometimes called “The Dishonest Manager,” follows chapter 15 immediately. In the narrative, the audience has not changed—the people who are there listening are the disciples, and the scribes & Pharisees, and some tax collectors and sinners, all mentioned at the beginning of chap. 15—they are all apparently still there. So it may very well be that Jesus completed the story of the lost son and his forgiving father, and went straight into this one, which seems to be about something very different. Let’s hold on to that question, though, of whether this is a lost-and-found story for a little bit, and we’ll come back to it.

To the story itself—first, I have to acknowledge that a lot of the rest of what I’m going to say here comes from the radical scholar and activist Ched Myers. He's written a recent commentary on the Gospel of Luke, and I’m leaning very heavily on it.

As I’ve said, the parable is often called “The Dishonest Manager,” or sometimes “The Shrewd Manager,” but either way, it's a jarring story. It's hard to imagine why Jesus would be praising someone who is dishonest. One thing that I notice is that we aren't actually told that the manager is doing anything dishonest. That word shows up, but his actions themselves are arguable. Verse 1 says that he’s accused of “squandering” his boss’s possessions... but is “squandering” necessarily dishonest? Or is he just ineffective? Is he just bad at his job?

And what exactly is this guy's job, anyway? He's a steward. We use the term stewardship often around here when we're talking about how we care for things or for people, or for time. But a steward is anyone who cares for something that belongs to someone else. And in this case, this man is a steward of the property of a rich man, a very rich man; an absentee landowner. The manager is responsible for collecting rents on the land from those who farm it, the tenants. And these rents are often paid in kind rather than in coin. So that’s why we read about olive oil and wheat, when the manager begins to settle accounts with the tenants in vv5–7. The manager would make his salary from a commission on what came in from the tenants, so the more rents came in, the more of a commission the manager would earn.

By the way, those amounts mentioned in vv5–7, a hundred jugs of oil, a hundred containers of wheat—in another translation, these are nine hundred gallons of oil and a thousand bushels of wheat. They’re truly staggering amounts. If this was what the rich man was due, he was indeed very very rich. One scholar suggests that these were the amounts that would be owed by an entire village, rather than just one farmer. So again, this rich man’s holdings were vast, and the number of people under his control quite numerous. And the manager is responsible for all of this; as such, he is a conduit for mammon, for wealth, for transferring huge amounts of it from villagers and farmers and other common folk to his employer.

In the economic situation of first century Palestine, this kind of thing was becoming more and more common. The Roman Empire in the first century was a place where some few people were able to acquire more and more land. The extraction of resources—oil, wheat, and other agricultural products—replaced an earlier system that was based in the local community, in the local village; it was a smaller-scale, more traditional society, based on reciprocity and mutual aid. A market economy, as we would think of it more or less today, was supplanting a community-based economy. Debt became more commonplace. When farmers couldn’t make the rent, they sometimes had to become indentured servants, essentially hiring themselves out, leaving the land that they farmed in order to pay off what they owed the rich man. And on top of this, there was taxation from the empire, and for faithful Jews, from the Temple; additional burdens.

So In this light, what is the manager doing wrong? Let's go back to verse 1 and think about “squandering” for a minute. The Gk verb here is diaskorpizo, which usually means “to scatter,” as in seed, or grain when it is being winnowed, or people when they go abroad. Think of the parable of the sower; the sower there is scattering, diaskorpizo. Only here in chap. 16, and in the parable of the lost son, just previously, in 15:13, is it translated “to squander.” In the previous chapter, it reads, “...the younger son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant region, and there he squandered his wealth in dissolute living…” You probably remember that part of the parable. What if we read these verses with “scatter” instead? How does it sound in these two places? Was the lost son simply excessively generous, scattering his wealth among those he met, whether or not they needed it? And is the manager scattering the rich man’s property, instead of concentrating it the way his boss has told him to? A fully effective steward is going to extract every drop of oil, every grain of wheat that he can. Maybe this manager’s defect is simply that he refuses to do this?

A little more Greek here: in verses 8 and 9, the adjective that is usually translated “dishonest” is the Greek word adikia. Jesus says, “His master commended the dishonest (adikia) manager, because he had acted shrewdly.” And then Jesus tells his disciples, “Make friends for yourself by means of dishonest wealth.” Dishonest manager and dishonest wealth. Because of this rendering, we usually apply dishonesty to the manager as a personal quality. But as I've been saying, I don't think we can really lay that at his feet.

Now, it can also be translated “unrighteous”, or “unrighteousness”. And so, In the King James Version, in verse 9, where our pew Bible says, “dishonest wealth,” the King James has “mammon of unrighteousness.” Scholars suggest that adikia can also be translated “unjust” or “injustice”; so in verse 9, Jesus could have been speaking of the “wealth of injustice.” By the same token, the manager is not an “unjust manager,” but rather, a “manager of injustice.” He’s a manager in an unjust system, a cog in a massive machinery that exploits the many for the profit of the few. In that light, dishonesty, or even unrighteousness, is not a personal quality, it's the quality of a system.

So what the manager has been doing, in “scattering,” is perhaps already turning against the injustice of this system, already refusing to extract every last drop and grain, softening the blow, refusing to be a “manager of injustice.” Ched Myers suggests that he is not dishonest, he’s not even so much shrewd, as he is “defect-ive.” And not really defective in the sense of not working right, but in the sense of defecting from the system that he serves.

So perhaps what he does in vv5–7, when he realizes this system is going to crush him and he summons the tenants—perhaps he has actually been doing this all along. He's been scattering, not squandering. And here he turns to that older economy, an economy based in community; the household of God, the village system of reciprocity and mutual aid. In that he demonstrates shrewdness, so much that even his rich boss praises him as he shows him the door. Apparently the boss man has to honor the deals that the manager has cut; otherwise, there would be chaos.

Back to this question of lost and found: is this a lost-and-found parable? We might consider the manager lost in as far as he is at the mercy of this unjust system, just as much as the tenants on the farms are. He's certainly lost if he should be dismissed. He says in verse 3, “I'm not strong enough to dig, and I'm ashamed to beg”; what  am I gonna do, if I can't work this job? Clearly, he was vulnerable, in a place and time where there was no social safety net as we know it today (or as we have known it…) So we could say he's lost, in the sense of being vulnerable, beholden to a system that is merciless, just as the folks that he extracts money from are. We could perhaps say that he's lost in the sense of not having a true purpose, a purpose that really aligns with the community of the household of God.

Now, closer to home, and perhaps further from Luke's meaning (but stick with me for a while, if you would), we might consider how we are lost, in the light of this parable. We are all—each one of us here, citizens of the United States, residents of the state of Indiana—we are all like the manager, caught up in a vast system that is unjust in all sorts of ways. We are, each of us, tiny parts of the gigantic machine of market capitalism. Each of us participates in some way, as consumers, as producers, as people who profit from interest. It's very difficult not to participate in this system; you don't really get a choice. So for us, what does it take to be found, if we're lost in that way?

Ched Myers states that there is something in the call of Moses and the prophets, in the testimony of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, that points to an alternative way of doing things. An alternative community, again, what I'll call the economy of God, based in things like community, reciprocity, and mutual aid. And there are lots and lots of ways to pursue this, and not enough time to talk about it in enough detail, but I'll just ask a few questions: Is it possible to defect in the manner of the defect-ive manager, in some small way—and in small ways that might lead to larger ones? To try and focus it a bit more, here’s another: How do we use mammon, unrighteous wealth, to build community?

I have lent a fairly large sum of money to a friend. He’s a good man who has had a hard time making ends meet recently—and I should say, he gave me permission to share this story. He and his wife are both servants of the church, in ways both formal and informal, and in probably more ways than I even know. They have opened their home to people who needed help, and that and some unexpected expenses increased their financial burdens considerably. They had to take out a loan to keep afloat—and yes, that loan came with interest. Last year I lent him enough that he could pay off that debt, and we agreed that he would begin paying me back when he was ready. For months now, he’s been telling me he’s ready—all he needs is my account information so he can set up a regular transfer from his bank. I have been putting this off, for reasons that I haven’t really been able to articulate until today. I feel like I just need to cancel this debt. The money has done more good for his family than it was doing in my bank account, and I will survive if I don’t get it back. It does more good building and supporting community than it does stored up for me. So I'm canceling that debt.

How do we use mammon to build community, as a body, as West Richmond Friends?For some years, our meeting had a commitment to building community across economic lines in the Renaissance House ministry on North Eleventh Street. John Fitch, the founder and linchpin of that ministry, invited us and folks from that neighborhood to a weekly meal, breaking bread and worshiping together. At various times, attenders of West Richmond lived under John’s roof or in a building he owned nearby, sharing in the ministry as they were able. The work took various forms over the years, but it always featured the regular opportunity to rub elbows with folks from different life circumstances. Until John had to lay the ministry down, that weekly meal was, in a small way, an enactment of the great banquet that God invites all people to; the table where those who have the least are given the places of special honor. Since 2017 or so, when John laid that ministry down, we haven't had that kind of regular opportunity as a meeting, as a community.

However, the work that John Wessel-McCoy and others are doing in the area of

housing rights has some of that kind of promise. If you haven’t heard about the Richmond Housing and Human Rights Coalition, there’s a little write-up in the bulletin this week. It’s one of the projects that our Witness & Service Committee has chosen to sponsor for this year’s outreach fundraising campaign. You’ll see from the write-up that they’re asking for a very modest amount of money, to be able to expand the support that they offer to people living in substandard housing in a few specific ways, and also to increase their capacity as an organization.

Now, for us as a meeting, a sum of less than two thousand dollars is not a lot. I’m sure the Housing and Human Rights Coalition could do more with a larger contribution. But it’s not so much about a one-time gift (“here’s your chunk of mammon, good luck, see you around...”) The call to community—God's call to an alternative way of being together—means regular engagement.

What if we were to join this coalition, not just giving the occasional donation, but in a more thoroughgoing way, as we did for years with Renaissance House?

As usual, Friends, I've just scratched the surface of this, and I've gone on for longer than I usually do. So, just a few questions as we prepare ourselves for open worship:

• How do we use mammon, unjust wealth, to build community?

• How do we use an unjust tool to build justice?

• How do we defect, from within the vast machinery of market capitalism, towards the alternative community that Jesus began, and that God calls us to even now?

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