Sermon: Pentecost 15, Luke 16:1-13

September 21, 2025 
Faith-La Fe Lutheran Church
Pastor Jonathan Linman

What you just heard from today’s gospel reading sounds like biblical permission to engage in corrupt business practices. The manager squandered the rich man’s property. And when the manager learned he was about to be fired, he dramatically lowered the bills people owed to the rich man so that the manager could gain favors from the debtors.

Rather than punish the manager, the rich man “commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly.” Then we hear this from Jesus’ own lips according to Luke: “And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth….” 

If we stop there without going any deeper, it’s as if Jesus has just given us the green light for waste and corruption in our business dealings. And such permission for waste and corruption is not what the doctor should order right now in our nation’s life together. Corruption seems to be the name of the game, from the highest perches of power to the ordinary scams we endure personally almost every day when people try to cheat us out of our money. Remember the couple of times when many of you got urgent text messages in my name, but not from my phone number, asking you to buy gift cards supposedly to help the needy? Scamming, cheating, deceit, deception – it’s everywhere.

Of course, such corruption has been business as usual throughout human history. We saw this in the prophetic words from today’s first reading, where Amos proclaims: “Hear this, you who trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land… [Saying] we will… practice deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals….” 

Of course, the prophet Amos is against such corruption and concludes: “The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget any of their deeds.” And of course, Jesus also condemns wealth when it becomes an idol that harms our devotion to God: “You cannot serve God and wealth,” Jesus says to conclude today’s teaching. 

So, as usual we are beckoned to take a deeper look at today’s gospel reading to understand it in a different light. Jesus’ parables generally can be viewed as stories about the kingdom of God. And in so far as God’s kingdom comes near in Jesus Christ, Gospel parables are also therefore about Jesus. So, with that angle on things, let’s look again at the parable of the dishonest manager with a more playful, Christ-focused theological imagination. 

What if the dishonest manager in the story really is Jesus? Let’s play this out. The religious leaders of Jesus’ day accused him of squandering the sacred inheritance of their shared faith tradition – just as the manager was accused of wasting the master’s wealth. Jesus was accused of blasphemy. He ate with tax collectors and sinners and other impure people. He broke the laws of the Sabbath by healing people on the day of rest when you’re not supposed to do any work. All of this adds up to squandering the riches of religious tradition in the eyes of the religious leaders.

So, the religious leaders were insistent on bringing charges against Jesus just as the rich man brought charges against the manager. And the religious leaders wanted to do far more than fire Jesus. They wanted to put him to death. 

What did Jesus do in response to all of the accusations against him? Jesus forgave people’s sins, just like the manager who reduced the huge amounts of debt held by the rich man’s customers. Remember that Jesus ended up on the cross where he proclaimed: “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.”

And remember that Jesus ends the parable by instructing us to “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.” 

And that’s exactly what Jesus was doing on the cross: Jesus used the wicked, deceitful power of the Roman empire’s most vicious tool of execution – crucifixion – as the means to make friends for himself by reconciling the whole world to himself and to God. What a friend we have in Jesus!

This was shrewd and commendable, using the dishonest power and wealth of empire as a means to rob empire of its death-dealing claims. God’s ways are not our ways, and God’s apparent foolishness is wiser than human wisdom.

It was on the cross where Christ accomplished what we heard in today’s second reading from First Timothy: “God our Savior… desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself a ransom for all…”  (1 Timothy 2:3-6) The ransom was paid on the cross for our salvation. Thanks be to God.

Moreover, on the cross, Jesus “became sin who knew no sin” (2 Corinthians 5:21) and thus made friends, welcoming them, welcoming us, into eternal homes.

Jesus still makes friends with us by means of the dishonest wealth of our human sin and brokenness. For in the fullness of his humanity, Jesus also shared in the fullness of our sullied, corrupt, squandering realities and then turned it all upside down by forgiving us.

When we are weighed down by our own versions of wasted lives and deceitful practices, Jesus still makes friends with us. And he does so each time we make our confession and receive forgiveness which we do at the beginning of our liturgy most every Sunday. What happened on the cross gets transferred to us as we make the sign of the cross in thanksgiving for our having been forgiven. 

And when we hear the words of absolution, we also hear the words of welcome invitation to the heavenly banquet in our eternal home, a foretaste of which we receive when we come to this table for holy food and drink.

And in the freedom of forgiveness, we are given the gift of faith to go out and make friends for ourselves amidst the dishonest wealth of our world, continuing Jesus’ work of reducing the debts that burden all people, especially the poorest among us. 

And when in our prophetic ministries of seeking God’s justice, we continue in the spirit of the prophet Amos who said that the Lord will never forget any of the deeds of people who “trample on the needy, and bring ruin to the poor of the land.” 

In our offering of loving kindness and mercy to the poor, and in our prophetic promotion of God’s justice, we pledge our allegiance to God alone, turning away from wealth when it becomes idolatrous, and turning away from the wastes and wraths of our world made sick by many and various forms of corruption. 

Dear people of God: here in this place, through the means of grace in Word and Sacraments, God entrusts us with the true riches of God’s love and mercy, of forgiveness and salvation. And in the power of the Holy Spirit, we faithfully steward these riches for the wellbeing and commonwealth of all even amidst the squandering and corruption of our present age.

That’s good news for our broken world desperately in need of some good news!

Thanks be to God. Amen.