By now, many of you know that before I went to seminary to become a priest, I was a preschool teacher, and I will never stop being surprised at the ways in which the skills from that work have enriched my vocation as a priest. Everything from storytelling to getting the attention of a room full of loud four-year-olds comes in handy. One thing came to mind this week as I read and prayed through our gospel lesson this week, it’s that experience of dealing with a precocious kid, who is smart, and cannot be contained by the rules and system that the rest of the class follows. Maybe this kid has figured out a logistical way around a rule or has outsmarted your set up that works just fine for others, and while you aren’t exactly happy with the result because they didn’t follow the rules, at some point, their ongoing cunning is impressive. This is sort of how I felt reading about the “shrewd manager” parable in the gospel according to Luke this week.
Jesus opens this parable, and it does what parables often do and have done for centuries: confuse us before they enlighten us. There was a wealthy man, who had someone who worked for him, who he did not feel like was managing his properties well enough, and so he decided to fire him. The manager, knowing he was going to be fired, had to make some quick choices, and Jesus does a bit of narrative fancy work by letting the manager talk out loud, “I’m not strong enough for manual labor and too proud to become a beggar; I know what I will do,” he says, almost as if a light bulb comes to life over his head. “I’ll cut everyone who owes my boss a deal on their debts before he fires me, and that way they will let me stay with them when I have nowhere else to go.” He begins to summon them one by one. “A debt of 100 jugs of olive oil – make it 50! One hundred containers of wheat? Make it 80!” And Christ doesn’t really lay out the how the manager’s boss finds him as he is slashing these debts, but next he says that the owner commended the dishonest manager because he acted shrewdly, even if dishonestly. He bizarrely gets praised for shortchanging his boss, because the boss is impressed that he chose to break the ranks of the system to prepare for himself a soft place to land.
But Christ doesn’t stop there, though the parable narrative seems to wrap up, and goes on to say that whoever is faithful in little is faithful in much and whoever is dishonest in little is dishonest in much. That no one of us, no human, can serve two beings that demand our whole attention; that we cannot serve both God and wealth. It’s one of those parables and follow ups that I feel like I understand and then, just before I clasp my hand around it, the intention and the meaning behind this parable slip away. Honestly, this is part of why I really don’t like preaching parables.
I’ve heard lots of theologians and scholars refer to Christ’s parables as lots of things like timebombs or packages – you never know what you are going to get, but I like to think of them like a prism. On their own, it has a meaning and a beauty, but if you hold it up to a light, if you hold them up to the Light of Christ and to the work of God in the world, there can be a dazzling fractal of light, encompassing all of the color available, but that rainbow of light is never something you can grasp onto, it’s only something to be perceived, admired, and then when we come back to it next time to see how our perception of it has changed.
I have a few sermon resources I visit often, and one really hit me this week, it was from six years ago when we collectively picked up this prism written by theologian and writer, Debi Thomas, “Maybe the parable of the shrewd manager is simply a grim but truthful portrait of the world as it is—the real world in which we are called to be ‘children of light.’ Maybe the story is an acknowledgement that the calling is both radically countercultural and painfully hard. Maybe the story is Jesus leaning in towards us and saying, ‘ I know. It’s bad out there. It’s bad in here! I get it.’”[1] Maybe, and honestly, this might be the interpretation that makes the most sense, but Christ doesn’t let us or the disciples stay in the place of the shrewd manager, no matter the real meaning of the parable.
It is a dark time in our national life, and there are times in which I feel like our moral compass has gone. That those who spew hate speech are lauded, that financial crimes are praised, and that the marginalized—Black folk, women, queer people, those who are unhoused, immigrants, and the list continues to grow—must keep their head on a constant swivel to protect themselves. This week, I have felt, mostly equal parts deep despair and some sense desperate and unrelenting sort of hope, and this parable, which I did not want to preach today, has been part of helping me to realize that perhaps my goal isn’t to shift the weight all the way back toward an easy hope, but rather to lean into the radical mercy and hope found in the confounding parable of the dishonest manager.
Because when I hear Christ say to his disciples one cannot serve God and wealth, I also hear that one cannot serve God and despair. And we see in this prism of a parable that God is far more concerned with the well-being of God’s people than the just and proper ways of doing things. That the kingdom of heaven is not simply a place of justice, but one of radical and overwhelming forgiveness and mercy. The invitation of Christ’s message today is to lean toward mercy and hope. Even when the world around feels cruel and unyielding and uncompromising, we lean toward mercy and hope, not because the world deserves our mercy, but because we God’s extends boundless mercy, and that is our only hope.
A sermon delivered on September 21, 2025 to the people of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Lexington, KY for Proper 20C on Luke 16: 1-13.
Becca Kello 