Sunday, September 19, 2010
Sojourners Retreat
Worship & Bible Study
Sing
Opening Prayer
Bible Study—Luke 16:1-13—The Dishonest/Crooked Manager
This parable is one of the most difficult in all of Scripture to understand. It’s plain confusing because Jesus appears to be commending immorality. Jesus is telling a story about a boss who praises his manager for cheating him.
If nothing else, this parable is evidence that Jesus has a sense of humor. Imagine the shock on his listeners’ faces when Jesus tells about a clever trickster ends up being commended by the very people he duped.
We have a Kenneth Lay and Enron here.
Read the passage.
Small Groups
1. What is this parable about?
2. Were the manager’s actions good deeds?
3. What do you think is the point that Jesus is trying to make?
4. How does Jesus want us to live as his disciples?
Showing Up Shrewdness
The story is a wealthy landowner who apparently let out his land to tenant farmers who have agreed to pay him a fixed return in grain or oil. The landowner has hired a steward, or manager, to deal with the tenants and manage his accounts. Someone, probably another employee, tells the landowner that the steward has been mismanaging his property. The boss calls the manager into his office and fires him, demanding that he turn over the books to be audited.
The manager, faced with unemployment examines his options. He is ill suited to manual labor, and begging is out of the question, so he quickly comes up with a simple plan. He goes to each of his boss’ debtors, tells them to pull out their bills, and then orders them to reduce the amount owed on each bill. The wily manager is setting up a trust fund in “people capital”—the tenant farmers now have a debt of gratitude to the manager, ensuring they will receive him into their homes when he is out of work. Once the boss discovers what has been done, he will not be able to do anything about it without alienating his tenants. So in approving the manager’s generosity, he comes off looking generous, too.
This truly bizarre parable has confounded Christians for 20 centuries. Even Luke himself added verses in an attempt to come up with a moral lesson to the story.
The only way out of this parable is to suspend our moral judgment of the manager and not what he did that was worthy of praise, not only by his boss, but also, implicitly, by Jesus.
Showing Up
Somebody said, that “ninety percent of life is showing up.” We can’t do good deeds when we don’t show up. The crooked manager showed up for his boss’ debtors.
In a crisis moment, the manager is commended for responding shrewdly to an urgent situation. He acts with boldness and decisiveness to secure his future. Jesus said, “If only the children of light acted with as much concern for their future as this shyster did for his!” The kingdom of heaven is at hand, he kept reminding his disciples. Pay attention! Determine your priorities and make a decision, and once you’ve made it, commit to it. Your future depends on what you do now, so be bold and don’t settle for half-way, lukewarm measures. The kingdom of heaven is near—there is no time to lose.
An encounter with Jesus is a crisis that demands a decision, and that decision, once made, is an all-or-nothing commitment. If you are going to be my disciple, Jesus says, you are going to have to be a single-minded about it, and you are going to have to make some choices.
What are some single-minded choices that you made? (Share with each other.)
A professional woman who makes the choice that she “can’t have it all” and decides to stay home to raise her children.
A successful business-person who gives up a promotion and the requirement to move to another state so that the family can be settled and rooted in their supportive community.
A person decides to go into Christian ministry to live a life of simplicity and modesty.
As Sojourners, might we keep our life together as a priority to serve God through FCBC?
An encounter with Jesus forces us to ask questions of great urgency: What is important” What is worth giving up my life to? What does my future with God look like? What am I putting in trust for God?
You don’t have to become a minister or go into the monastery to make a commitment to Christian discipleship. But living a Christian life requires more than our occasional attention. I don’t think Jesus is really interested in the scraps we have left over when we’ve responded to all the other things claiming our attention.
If we are serious about our Christian growth, we have to make a decision about what has priority in our lives, and then order all the rest of our activities and commitments according to the priority of Christ. That means that my life as a spouse, parent or grandparent, employee, volunteer, and consumer of goods and services, should reflect that primary commitment.
Jesus does not give us the option of being part-time Christians. In fact, whenever new people started hanging around him, wanting to be his disciples, Jesus would challenge them with this: “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” He wasn’t trying to be disagreeable—he just wanted people to know what was involved before making a decision.
At the same time, he doesn’t tell us we have forever to make that decision. If you are going to build a trust fund for the future, he says, the time to start is now. How we live right now says something about our investment in God’s kingdom. How shrewd will we be in discerning the shape of God’s kingdom and fitting ourselves to God’s kingdom work?
“Showing up” means engaging in practices of persistent faithfulness, worshipping, reading Scripture, welcoming strangers, doing good deeds, feeding the hungry, practicing justice. It means showing up where we can most reliably expect our Lord to be found: in worship, in a small group Bible study, at a Sojourners retreat, at a sick bed or a homeless shelter, with a group of children, among the poor. Making a steady, persistent habit of showing up in these venues allows us to join our purposes to God’s.
Here’s a true story by a pastor.
“I stopped at the local library one day to pick up a book I wanted. Afterward, as I was driving out of the parking lot, a filthy, scraggly man in ragged clothes pushing a shopping cart filled with what looked to be nothing but junk shambled across the lot exit. As I waited for him to complete his passage, the front wheels of his cart caught the crack in the pavement and tipped over. I heard some glass shatter as the contents spilled out. This mishap occurred right in the middle of the exit, so there was no way I could get out of the lot until the man picked up his stuff and moved on. But clearly, that wasn’t going to happen quickly because he seemed to be in a kind of daze and was moving as if he didn’t quite know what to do. So I sat there in my car, drumming my fingers impatiently on the steering wheel, getting more annoyed by the second.
“Just then, however, the young woman who was in a car behind me got out and walked past my car to where the man was. In sharp contrast to him, she was nicely dressed, well groomed and appeared to be in full command of her faculties. I wasn’t close enough tp tell, but I was pretty certain she smelled a whole lot better than he did, too.
“As I watched, she bent down and began helping this poor man put his items back into his cart, and she continued until everything was loaded. She then helped him get his cart past the crack in the pavement, and he resumed his shuffle down the street.
“I have to tell you that never in my life have I felt more like the Levite and the priest who passed by on the other side while the good Samaritan, in the form of this young woman, helped the downtrodden guy at the roadside. And here’s the irony: The book I had come to the library to get was one I wanted to consult for a sermon I was working on. But in that parking lot, I saw a much better sermon played out in front of me.”
We don’t know if that young woman was a church person. But anyone seeing her being “faithful in a very little” could reasonably conclude she’s someone who can be trusted to be “faithful also in much.”
We can’t do good deeds unless we show up. We can’t easily do good deeds unless we see every opportunity with some degree of urgency that what we do does matter.
Like the dishonest manager, we are called to be bold and shrewd to seize the opportunity to take action, make a decision, and to plan our future with Jesus Christ as our God.
Let us pray.
Sing
Benediction
Handout
Sojourners Retreat
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Song
Luke 16:1-13
Small Groups
1. What is this parable about?
2. Were the manager’s actions good deeds?
3. What do you think is the point that Jesus is trying to make?
4. How does Jesus want us to live as his disciples?
Song Spirit Song