Prioritizing Relationship, Serving a Loving God

September 21, 2025 - The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost

My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated. 

Good morning, Epiphany. It’s good to be here in this place with you this morning. Last Sunday’s sermon was my longest at Epiphany, though it was shorter than Michael Ryan’s when he visited last December and shorter than Jim Steen’s longest from last January. My sermon about sheep, fences, and wells, well it clocked in at about 18 minutes. I think that this one will be a bit shorter. It will be shorter for a few reasons. First, as some of you have heard, my mom Joni was in the hospital this week, so my study time, my time here at church, was (I think) reasonably abbreviated. She is better now; the combination of fevers and her Multiple Sclerosis made for some scary moments for our family this week, but she’s home and doing okay. Thank you to all those who supported us this week.

The second reason this sermon will be shorter may be more obvious: this week’s gospel passage is not a fun one! There are no sheep, there are no flashlights, I have no dreams to share, no healings or calls to prayer, all of which were topics from this last summer. Instead, we have a “dishonest manager,” one who acted shrewdly, a parable whose message seems to be laid out clearly yet confusingly: “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth” so “they may welcome you into the eternal homes.” The last paragraph might make more sense to us, though we certainly don’t want to hear it: “no slave can serve two masters,” “you cannot serve both God and wealth.” We need to sit with this one a bit this morning.

Actually, can we just talk about college football instead? I know Michigan and Western Michigan both won close games yesterday... I went to bed before the Michigan State game ended. No, we need to talk about the gospel because that is in part why we’re here, why we gather together each week: to hear some good news, to hear the Good News. Plus, a mentor always said that you should try to preach from the passage in the lectionary that’s most difficult to understand, because you ideally have time to study it during the week, and if you ignore those passages, the church will struggle to hear anything else. So, little time for study, but no football for us today; let’s talk about this dishonest manager.

The first thing to share is that in my limited reading this week, I found that this parable is one of the most debated of all Jesus’s parables throughout the four gospels. Scholars and priests and preachers throughout the centuries have disagreed about what Jesus was trying to say, with what Luke was interpreting Jesus as saying here. Luke, of course, was not sitting next to Jesus, writing everything he said down word for word, we know that. We know that the gospels emerged decades after Jesus’s life and death and resurrection. And so that leaves us some room for interpretation, even for second-guessing parables... especially the ones we don’t like, the ones that make us uncomfortable, or that don’t fit our politics, or our own understanding of how the world should work.

And this one makes us, or at least it makes me, uncomfortable. Why are we urged to make friends by means of dishonest wealth? What does that mean? It’s certainly not a parable I would add to Jesus’s teachings after the fact... which, ironically, makes it more likely to me that Jesus actually preached it. Well, there are a few explanations for the parable this morning, I have five that I’ll briefly mention, from a book by John Donahue called The Gospel in Parable... and remember I said this sermon will be shorter, so stick with me; maybe pick one of these lessons as your takeaway this morning.

The first explanation here is that this is a simple parable about lending money at interest, something that was prohibited, and so the manager was dishonest, breaking Jewish law... but now he’s not. “Make friends with those who know how to repent,” this parable might say. Perhaps. The second explanation is that this is a manager from the working class, exercising what little power he has under an unfair master; Jesus could be saying, “make friends with the lowly who do what they must to survive, not with the rich.” Maybe. The last three explanations I like better. The third, perhaps particularly useful for us today, is that this manager is someone who does his best to survive a difficult situation, not collapsing when faced with his own destruction, but navigating it the best he can. I hear resonance there with our current political climate... a friend this week was adamant that we all had to cancel Disney+ lest we support fascists. We all must navigate tricky situations the best we can, not perfectly, but mindfully, which this manager does and is commended for. The fourth explanation is one I really like, summed up in this sentence from Donahue: “God, the master here, does not extract punishment from us when we go astray, but gives time and cancels debts, even in the midst of our human machinations.” God sees us trying, sees us failing to completely clean up our own messes, and God loves us anyway. I like that message. And then the last explanation, perhaps the most common, is that this manager was actually not dishonest, just shrewd, even generous; he realized that he had messed up, and so he went to each of the master’s debtors and relinquished his own cut of the deals he had offered, he gave up his own commission he might have earned to keep everyone in good relationship with each other. That explanation, I think it ties in best with the concluding sentence, “you cannot serve both God and wealth.” This manager, once accused of improper handling of the books, decides to place relationships over his money, for his own security to be sure, but the master approves of that, because God, the master in this interpretation, would always ask us to prioritize relationships.

Welcome to the biblical texts this morning, Epiphany. No matter how many times you read the gospels, something new pops up, a new interpretation, a new lesson. Many traditions, including ours, believe that the Word is living and active, that the Holy Spirit works through the text to teach us what we need to hear. Each of you may hear this parable read this morning and find something different to take away, and that’s a beautiful thing.

Can I tell you what I took away this week? It’s impossible for me to get past the last line of today’s gospel passage, the last paragraph really. This is not stewardship season quite yet, I’m not going to ask you all to hand in your pledge for 2026... that’s coming in November. (Ha.) But the line “you cannot serve both God and wealth,” that is something I cannot shake. It would make for a brutal bumper sticker; it’s a nugget that’ll stick in your craw if you let it. “You cannot serve both God and wealth.”

Let's have a little more biblical interpretation this morning, then. Wealth, here, in the Greek, is mammon, which is a transliteration of a Hebrew or Aramaic word that literally means “that in which one trusts.” That in which one trusts. Most of us - most of those in Jesus’s time, most of us today - we place our security and our trust in our finances, in money, in our wealth, so the translation and its place in this parable, it really does fit, it really does have plenty to say to each of us today. But there may be other things “in which we trust.” We may trust in our own longevity, our health... which will, inevitably, fail all of us. We may trust in our own plans... which, good luck with that. We may trust in our own understanding of what church should be, we may trust in our own understanding of the best politics or system of government, we may trust in our own unflappable and unwavering brilliance. Or... we may trust in God.

The dishonest manager this morning, the name gives him an unfair rap right out of the gate. This manager, I think, along with that fifth interpretation, he chooses relationship over money. He does not do it perfectly, but there is grace from the master for that... he is commended, I believe, for placing his trust in relationships. Jesus calls us to do the same. No slave can serve two masters; we can serve money, security, our own priorities, the earthly things we put our trust in that will always fail us... or we can serve God, we can love one another, we can follow the teachings of Christ and be led by the Holy Spirit. So, choose. Security... or love? Wealth... or Christ?

After brunch today, we have all been invited to invest in deeper relationships, in love for one another, through our practice of Knees to Knees here at Epiphany. Not all of you will attend that or are able to attend that today, and that’s okay. But this practice is another example that we do so much more than good worship and good food around here. We love each other, and we support each other, and we strive, always, to build each other up. We hope, as a church, to be an example to the world of what a good life may look like when it is grounded in love; but more than that, we hope, as a church, to actually be a school of love, where we ourselves learn to be in relationship while here so that we can be in better relationship with everyone, everywhere.

Friends, this morning, I invite you to always prioritize relationships, like this manager did, welcomed into the eternal homes. I invite you to put all your trust, not in earthly things, but in the God of love. And I invite you to serve that God of love, through worship and prayer and through loving relationship with all those around you. I assure you, there is no other master worth serving.

Amen.