Sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time 2025

Luke 16:1-13

“Yes indeed, you’re gonna have to serve somebody Well it may be the Devil Or it may be the Lord But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.” So goes Bob Dylan’s single “Gotta Serve Somebody” after his conversion in 1979. Less well known than Dylan’s conversion, however, is that John Lennon was annoyed by it, and in his self-important way wrote a response, “You Gotta Serve Yourself.” Both artists are tapping into a theme that is central to the Gospel passage today, that we have to choose who we will serve. In Luke 16, Jesus is saying something much more profound than either, when he says, “you cannot serve both God and wealth.” This passage exhorts us to be discerning of the coming of the Lord and direct our lives to furthering his Kingdom.

It begins with Jesus turning away from his discourses with the Pharisees and scribes and turning to his disciples. Now, the next passage tells us that the S&P begin to grumble, so while this is directed at his disciples, Jesus clearly intends for them to hear. The parable begins by presenting us with a crisis: a manager has misused his master’s finances, and will be removed from his position. Knowing he is too weak to dig and too proud to beg, the manager devises a scheme. Before his firing is public knowledge, he brings in all the people that owe his master and gives them a deep discount, and so gets them to pay immediately. The profit goes to the master to whom it belongs, but the manager gains something as well. By giving all of these people such a good deal, the manager ensures that they will do him a favor when he needs it, as he says, “people may welcome me into their homes.” The master hears of this and is impressed at the shrewd, if dishonest, solution of the manager, and commends him. All three parties win: the clients get a great deal, the manager has a list of favors to call on, and the master gets an influx of wealth and a reputation as a generous lender.

Now, you may, like me, wonder why Jesus uses this parable. It is important to see that it is meant to be an analogy to make a point about Christians, but to do so, we have to recognize that the manager is not praised for his honesty or integrity, but for his shrewdness, his ability to discern. When Jesus says, “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,” what he is doing is subtly transitioning from talking about the parable to speaking of discernment regarding himself. As he shifts from the story into the point, what Jesus is saying is that “dishonest wealth” is a stand-in for temporal wealth. “The children of this age,” Jesus tells us, are very shrewd about that kind of wealth, discerning how to gain and use it in this life.

If the children of the age are so discerning, Jesus goes on to say, then how much more should be the children of light? As one commentator put it, “If such a negative character can outwit his master to extricate himself from a crisis, how much more should the disciples of Jesus be street-smart and use earthly resources to further God’s kingdom.” Their wealth ought to be used as people who have encountered Jesus the Messiah, as people who know Christ has come. Their “dishonest wealth,” ie that earned in this world, ought to be directed towards “eternal homes.” Their resources and wealth gained in this life are to be directed toward the furthering of God’s Kingdom. In their context, the exhortation is to almsgiving, the use of money to provide for those less fortunate than themselves. You cannot serve God and Mammon. You cannot serve God and preserve your idols. You cannot serve God and hold on to anything that is not then used to further his Kingdom, to bring it here, now.

Kids, one of my favorite books growing up was “No Coin’s, Please,” by Gordon Korman. In it, an 11 year old boy named Artie Geller is taken on a cross-country trip of the US with some other boys. Artie, we learn early on, is a con artist (explain). Starting in New York, he begins selling “attack Jelly,” which is just normal jam, but his fast talking gets people to buy it. He uses his profits to buy a toy racetrack in WA DC and takes bets on which car will win. In Denver he is able to run a nightclub for a couple days. By the time the book ends, we find out Artie has been tracked by the FBI, and they shut him down, and in exchange for not prosecuting him for his crimes, he has to pay all the fees for the laws he broke and taxes for the money he made, and ends up with what he started with. The point is that he was focused on making money, but not on anything that really matters, not on doing what’s right or helping people, just on cheating to make more money. This is called idolatry, when something is more important to us than God, and what Jesus is teaching us here is that everything, like our money, is not just for us to gain however we can, or use however we want, but all of it is a gift from God to use wisely to make the world more like his Kingdom: full of peace, kindness, and love.

In a society that does not care about the poor and in which we are encouraged to make an idol of money, we must be ever vigilant to recognize that at the coming of the Lord into our lives, everything must shift and change. Dylan was right that we have a choice, but as it turns out, there are many ways to serve the Devil. What we have are all gifts to be given to the service of God and the furtherance of his Kingdom, not the focus and goal we all strive for. The degree to which wealth is accumulated in our society is a grotesquery, and we do well to see it, and so many other self-serving ideologies like power and prestige, as idols aimed at keeping us from truly following Christ. Smash your idols, and use all the gifts God has given you for the furtherance of his Kingdom, that we may all make our present darkness a bit lighter, a little more humane, a small but ever-expanding outpost of the Kingdom, until Christ comes again. Amen.