2 Samuel 22:26-34; 1 Corinthians 10:6-13; St Luke 16:1-9(10-13)
Farewell to the Grandstaff Family
In the Name + of Jesus. Amen.
Dear people loved by God, today you have set before you the difficult parable of the Unjust Steward; of the commendation of an unrighteous servant who uses another man’s wealth to secure his own position. The easiest way to handle this text would be to just skip it; to focus on the last three verses where Jesus says you cannot serve God and money and preach a harsh sermon against possessions and stuff; against owning nice things or living in big houses; and really hitting you with the Law to try to get you to open up your wallets. Or, in modern terms, text a larger gift.
Such an approach would not only be an insult to your piety, turning the Gospel into Law and using it as a club to extort charity; but such an approach would also be unfaithful to the text and disingenuous to the reality that Scripture can be difficult to understand. Remember what St Philip asked the Ethiopian eunuch? Do you understand what you are reading? And the eunuch said, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” (Acts 8:30-31). How shall they hear, St Paul asks rhetorically, unless they have a preacher (Rom 10:14).
This is not meant to justify my return, for you have been in the very faithful pastoral care and preaching of Pastor Irmer in my absence. Rather, the inclusion of this difficult parable in the lectionary is evidence enough that our Lord Jesus, Scripture as a whole, and the Church do not hide the thorny, vexing parts of God’s Word, but deal directly with them in the selfsame thorny difficulties in which you live. Hardly a parable is spoken by Jesus in which He does not also offer its interpretation. So too here. He is the Preacher, always and foremost.
Your Lord and Master, the Faithful Steward of the mysteries of the Kingdom, proclaims to you, once debtors of the Rich Man, For the sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation that the sons of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings.
Take a lesson from the world’s playbook, says Jesus. The world is all wrong in its assumptions, but look at how dedicated the sons of this world are to their own goals - to their gods! - of having an easy life and heaping up stuff and money. Now, says Jesus, you be as dedicated toward the ends of the Kingdom. Consider this:
God blesses you with wealth, with all the stuff included in the First Article and the Fourth Petition, but not so that you can pretend it is your own. That’s what the children of this world do. You are children of light. You have been catechized better. You know that there is not a single thing we possess that is really our own. Every last one of us is managing the possessions that belong to Another, to the true Rich Man, to Jesus Christ. Everything we have is really His. The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein (Ps 24:1).
And so we’re all managers. Receiving our daily bread with thanksgiving and using it to thank, praise, serve and obey Him. For like every manager, we’ll have to give an account one day of what we’ve done with what was entrusted to us.
And our Lord is very clear on how He wants us to use His possessions. He wants us to use them to support the preaching of His Gospel, of His good news of the full and free forgiveness of sins, proclaimed to the ends of the world. That other part of St Paul’s question: How are they to preach unless they are sent? (Rom 10:15). Or St Philip’s mission to the Ethiopian, his preaching and catechesis which resulted in baptism.
And our Lord wants us to use what we’ve received from Him to alleviate the sufferings and hardships of those who are poorer and more disadvantaged than ourselves. As Jesus says earlier in Luke’s Gospel: Do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return (6:35) and Become merciful, just as your Father is merciful (6:36). He wants us to invest the stuff He gives us in bringing blessing, both temporal and eternal, to others.
To do so takes trust. Trust that all the stuff is His to begin with. Trust that He will continue to supply our daily needs and so we have no need to hoard against tomorrow. Tomorrow is entirely in His hands. And on one of those tomorrows we will be called from this life to stand before His throne. And every one of us will leave this world carrying out exactly as much as we brought in: nothing! Not one blessed thing! But when we stand before His throne, and He calls us to account for how we’ve handled what He entrusted to us in our time in this world, trust that we stand in His mercy and grace.
For how blessed we’ll be on that day, if as we stand before the throne, person after person stands up and says: “Lord Jesus, he helped me when no one else would. He gave me food and drink. Please welcome him now to Your feast!” And another, “Lord Jesus, I am here today sharing Your glory because she supported the preaching of the Gospel and so I came to hear of Your great sacrifice on the Cross and to know and believe that You had taken away the sins of the world, and mine too. She supported that preaching, welcome her home!” And another, “Lord Jesus, I remember feeling so down and alone, and that person noticed. He came and spent time with me. He listened and prayed with me. He shared Your Word with me and gave me new hope. Welcome him home!” And so on and so on.
On that day of accounting we won’t be surrounded by our stuff, but we will be surrounded by the people whom we have blessed or abandoned in their need. Which will it be? Let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall.
Don’t misunderstand me, though. Our Lord is not in any way implying that by our use of His good we can earn our way into the heavenly home. God forbid we teach or even think such a thing! He and He alone has won the right for us to share in His heavenly home and He bestows it upon us in His grace. For He who never mismanaged anything entrusted to Him by His Father, but offered His entire life as one great sacrifice to God, wiped out the debt of your sin and restored to all who believe and are baptized into Him the joy of being beloved children of the heavenly Father. He is faithful, merciful and blameless. He saves a humble people and His way is perfect. He is the One who by His suffering and death has opened the Kingdom of heaven to all believers.
But believing has its fruit. Believing is not just a matter of the heart, but breaks forth out of the heart and shows itself in the deeds of our lives.
And so these people who surround us on the Day of Judgment, when they point to the good we did them and urge Christ to welcome us into the heavenly home, they are not saying our deeds earned us what Christ freely gives. No, instead they are witnessing to the fact that we truly believed, we truly trusted that Christ would provide for our every need of body and soul. They are confessing that our lives were lighted up by the trust that freed our hands to be open in blessing instead o staying clasped in fear.
Our giving of self to others just witnessed to the fact that we had found in Christ a life that was more than we’ll ever need for ourselves. When you come to realize that you are not only a manager, but that the One for whom you are managing in your Brother, who shared His eternal wealth with you, that you are a co-heir with Him of all His Father’s riches, then you can be very generous in the handling of what’s been entrusted to you.
Today, dear people, at His Table, your Jesus goes on giving you more than you’ll ever need. He imparts His Body and Blood for forgiveness. Forgiveness for all the times you've doubted and distrusted and so kept to yourself what He wanted you to give to others. Forgiveness for turning mammon into an idol. Forgiveness for greed and selfishness and avarice. Not slashing debts in-half, but forgiving entirely, fully, and completely.
But He also imparts His Body and Blood to you to strengthen in you the faith that flows forth into love. So that you begin to share with others more and more, confident that in Him you have and you will always have more than you will need for time and eternity. This God - His way is perfect; the Word of the Lord proves true; He is a shield for all those who take refuge in Him.
In the Name of the Father and + of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Farewell to the Grandstaff Family
In the Name + of Jesus. Amen.
Dear people loved by God, today you have set before you the difficult parable of the Unjust Steward; of the commendation of an unrighteous servant who uses another man’s wealth to secure his own position. The easiest way to handle this text would be to just skip it; to focus on the last three verses where Jesus says you cannot serve God and money and preach a harsh sermon against possessions and stuff; against owning nice things or living in big houses; and really hitting you with the Law to try to get you to open up your wallets. Or, in modern terms, text a larger gift.
Such an approach would not only be an insult to your piety, turning the Gospel into Law and using it as a club to extort charity; but such an approach would also be unfaithful to the text and disingenuous to the reality that Scripture can be difficult to understand. Remember what St Philip asked the Ethiopian eunuch? Do you understand what you are reading? And the eunuch said, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” (Acts 8:30-31). How shall they hear, St Paul asks rhetorically, unless they have a preacher (Rom 10:14).
This is not meant to justify my return, for you have been in the very faithful pastoral care and preaching of Pastor Irmer in my absence. Rather, the inclusion of this difficult parable in the lectionary is evidence enough that our Lord Jesus, Scripture as a whole, and the Church do not hide the thorny, vexing parts of God’s Word, but deal directly with them in the selfsame thorny difficulties in which you live. Hardly a parable is spoken by Jesus in which He does not also offer its interpretation. So too here. He is the Preacher, always and foremost.
Your Lord and Master, the Faithful Steward of the mysteries of the Kingdom, proclaims to you, once debtors of the Rich Man, For the sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation that the sons of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings.
Take a lesson from the world’s playbook, says Jesus. The world is all wrong in its assumptions, but look at how dedicated the sons of this world are to their own goals - to their gods! - of having an easy life and heaping up stuff and money. Now, says Jesus, you be as dedicated toward the ends of the Kingdom. Consider this:
God blesses you with wealth, with all the stuff included in the First Article and the Fourth Petition, but not so that you can pretend it is your own. That’s what the children of this world do. You are children of light. You have been catechized better. You know that there is not a single thing we possess that is really our own. Every last one of us is managing the possessions that belong to Another, to the true Rich Man, to Jesus Christ. Everything we have is really His. The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein (Ps 24:1).
And so we’re all managers. Receiving our daily bread with thanksgiving and using it to thank, praise, serve and obey Him. For like every manager, we’ll have to give an account one day of what we’ve done with what was entrusted to us.
And our Lord is very clear on how He wants us to use His possessions. He wants us to use them to support the preaching of His Gospel, of His good news of the full and free forgiveness of sins, proclaimed to the ends of the world. That other part of St Paul’s question: How are they to preach unless they are sent? (Rom 10:15). Or St Philip’s mission to the Ethiopian, his preaching and catechesis which resulted in baptism.
And our Lord wants us to use what we’ve received from Him to alleviate the sufferings and hardships of those who are poorer and more disadvantaged than ourselves. As Jesus says earlier in Luke’s Gospel: Do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return (6:35) and Become merciful, just as your Father is merciful (6:36). He wants us to invest the stuff He gives us in bringing blessing, both temporal and eternal, to others.
To do so takes trust. Trust that all the stuff is His to begin with. Trust that He will continue to supply our daily needs and so we have no need to hoard against tomorrow. Tomorrow is entirely in His hands. And on one of those tomorrows we will be called from this life to stand before His throne. And every one of us will leave this world carrying out exactly as much as we brought in: nothing! Not one blessed thing! But when we stand before His throne, and He calls us to account for how we’ve handled what He entrusted to us in our time in this world, trust that we stand in His mercy and grace.
For how blessed we’ll be on that day, if as we stand before the throne, person after person stands up and says: “Lord Jesus, he helped me when no one else would. He gave me food and drink. Please welcome him now to Your feast!” And another, “Lord Jesus, I am here today sharing Your glory because she supported the preaching of the Gospel and so I came to hear of Your great sacrifice on the Cross and to know and believe that You had taken away the sins of the world, and mine too. She supported that preaching, welcome her home!” And another, “Lord Jesus, I remember feeling so down and alone, and that person noticed. He came and spent time with me. He listened and prayed with me. He shared Your Word with me and gave me new hope. Welcome him home!” And so on and so on.
On that day of accounting we won’t be surrounded by our stuff, but we will be surrounded by the people whom we have blessed or abandoned in their need. Which will it be? Let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall.
Don’t misunderstand me, though. Our Lord is not in any way implying that by our use of His good we can earn our way into the heavenly home. God forbid we teach or even think such a thing! He and He alone has won the right for us to share in His heavenly home and He bestows it upon us in His grace. For He who never mismanaged anything entrusted to Him by His Father, but offered His entire life as one great sacrifice to God, wiped out the debt of your sin and restored to all who believe and are baptized into Him the joy of being beloved children of the heavenly Father. He is faithful, merciful and blameless. He saves a humble people and His way is perfect. He is the One who by His suffering and death has opened the Kingdom of heaven to all believers.
But believing has its fruit. Believing is not just a matter of the heart, but breaks forth out of the heart and shows itself in the deeds of our lives.
And so these people who surround us on the Day of Judgment, when they point to the good we did them and urge Christ to welcome us into the heavenly home, they are not saying our deeds earned us what Christ freely gives. No, instead they are witnessing to the fact that we truly believed, we truly trusted that Christ would provide for our every need of body and soul. They are confessing that our lives were lighted up by the trust that freed our hands to be open in blessing instead o staying clasped in fear.
Our giving of self to others just witnessed to the fact that we had found in Christ a life that was more than we’ll ever need for ourselves. When you come to realize that you are not only a manager, but that the One for whom you are managing in your Brother, who shared His eternal wealth with you, that you are a co-heir with Him of all His Father’s riches, then you can be very generous in the handling of what’s been entrusted to you.
Today, dear people, at His Table, your Jesus goes on giving you more than you’ll ever need. He imparts His Body and Blood for forgiveness. Forgiveness for all the times you've doubted and distrusted and so kept to yourself what He wanted you to give to others. Forgiveness for turning mammon into an idol. Forgiveness for greed and selfishness and avarice. Not slashing debts in-half, but forgiving entirely, fully, and completely.
But He also imparts His Body and Blood to you to strengthen in you the faith that flows forth into love. So that you begin to share with others more and more, confident that in Him you have and you will always have more than you will need for time and eternity. This God - His way is perfect; the Word of the Lord proves true; He is a shield for all those who take refuge in Him.
In the Name of the Father and + of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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