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The Gospel according to Luke 16:1-13

Jesus says a lot of strange things. And this morning, he tells a parable that is one of his strangest. It doesn’t start off strange. He’s been busy teaching about discipleship, about what it means to be one of his followers. And he begins a story about a man who is a cheat.

Seems there was a rich man, probably an absentee landowner, who had a manager to look after the affairs of the rich man’s business. Now the word "manager" in Greek is "oikonomos," literally the "keeper of the household." Often a manager was a slave born into the household and specially trained and tested all of his life in the supervision of the business. He had complete authority to represent his master in all matters. Today we would say that he had power of attorney. There weren’t emails or phone calls or faxes; when the master was gone, he was gone, and he had to trust his manager completely to be faithful, competent, and honest.

This master learns the worst about his manager: the guy had been squandering the master’s property. For the master, this is a nightmare from which he must awake quickly. He responds without hesitation: "I want a full accounting, and then you’re fired."

No matter how deserving the manager might be of getting fired, for him this is a nightmare from which he cannot awake. He has been trained his entire life to be the manager. The master can hire someone else and make up the profits, but the manager is ruined. There will certainly be those with whom he has done business who will gloat over his fate. Word will get out and no one will hire him. In business and society, he will be an outcast. No one will even befriend him. He is not fit for any other work, is too ashamed to beg, and there is no unemployment insurance.

"So," he thinks, "before news of this gets out and while I’m pulling together the accounting the master asked for, I’ll use my position to make some friends, because I’m going to need friends." So he goes to the master’s debtors and tells them to take off half of one bill and twenty percent of another.

Now this is pretty big money. He tells the debtor who owes a hundred jugs of oil to make it fifty. The word for "jug" is a unit of measurement that contains about nine gallons, so we’re talking about cutting nine hundred gallons of olive oil down to four hundred and fifty gallons.

Now, it’s unclear whether the manager was cheating the master by doing this. There was a practice at the time of managers getting substantial commissions for loans they made in their master’s name, and it could be that the manager was just forgiving his commission. But even if that were the case, it still does not show the manager in a very favorable light. If he were forgiving commissions, then his commission on the second loan was twenty-five percent of the loan amount and his commission on the olive oil deal was one hundred percent. So, the guy’s either continuing to cheat his master, or he’s a loan shark.

Either way, as we’re listening to Jesus tell this story, we’re all prepared for this dishonest manager to get his. I mean, we’ve all heard stories before, and this is the part where good triumphs and the bad guy gets what’s coming to him. But this is where it gets strange. Jesus surprises us, at least he surprises me, when he tells us that the master commends the manager for acting shrewdly. This unexpected reversal certainly gets my attention, and while he’s got it, Jesus drives home his point: "The children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light."

Well, Jesus is not telling us to be dishonest, and he’s not telling us to use dishonest money dishonestly. But to a world which thinks that to follow Jesus means that you are an irrelevant, passive, victimized, chump, Jesus says, "Look at the people who do not act in my name. Look at how powerful and creative and inventive and assertive they are. I did not come to turn my followers into irrelevant, passive, victimized, chumps. Yes, be ethical (and there is a list of sayings cautioning us about the corrupting power of money, culminating with, "You cannot serve God and wealth."). Be ethical, but learn this from those who do not act in my name: be shrewd. Be smart. Be creative. Be inventive. Be assertive. Be powerful for the kingdom of God.

We are all still suffering greatly from the attacks of September 11. And our grief is still so raw that it may be too soon for analysis. But, having said that, let me tell you of two things that struck me this week. First, I was struck by the discipline the terrorists showed. Not only in executing a plan which meant their own deaths, but in the year or so it took to design and implement it. We don’t know how many people the conspiracy involved, but it was certainly more than twenty. And, from an intelligence standpoint, we were apparently caught completely off guard. That means that over twenty people, probably way over twenty people, planned this horrible thing for over a year — obtained false Id’s, took flying lessons, routed money around the world — without discussing it with anyone outside their group. Now, I don’t know about your experience with groups, but mine has been that pretty much when a group gets over two people, you can forget about keeping secrets. If we, the children of light, are to resist this dark evil, can we be as disciplined as they? Can we discipline our emotions, our desire for revenge, our need to act quickly? We will have to, or the children of this age will be more shrewd than we, and we will always live in terror.

I was also struck this week by the fact that the New York Stock Exchange reopened six days after the attacks. The World Trade Center is two blocks from Wall Street. Buildings were damaged. Power was out. Traders were dead. The towers contained the world headquarters for a number of large brokerage companies. And yet, in response to these attacks on our symbols of capitalism, capitalists worked night and day, running power lines across streets, stringing computer connections like clothes lines, improvising, adapting, changing, creating — to demonstrate to the terrorists and to ourselves that we would not be on our backs for long, that the American economic structures could suffer catastrophic damage and be up and running in less than a week.

Can we Christians, we children of light, be that single minded? Can we be that dedicated? Can we be that creative in our response to this terror?

We will need to be. We will need to be as disciplined as the terrorists. We will need to be as focused, dedicated, and single minded as those who restored the Stock Exchange. Because if we are to take seriously Jesus’ commands to us that we are to love our enemies and find a way of dealing with hatred that does not return hatred, we have a difficult road ahead of us.

With all respect to the patriotic fervor that has swept our country and the Presidents’ rather masterful speech Thursday night, merely calling for war and invoking the rhetoric of military aggression won’t do it. You don’t have to think about it for long to realize that even to wage war will take a lot more creativity than that — this is an enemy like none we’ve ever seen before. If an elephant is attacked by a lion, the lion will probably die. We are well equipped to fight lions. But stinging insects can drive the elephant mad.

If, as Jesus commands, we are to wage peace, we need especially to draw on the examples of the dishonest manager, the terrorists, the New York Stock Exchange. We must be shrewd, disciplined, resourceful, crafty, powerful. My personal hope is that we can get away from the rhetoric of war and move toward the rhetoric of law. My personal hope is that we can capture Osama bin Laden and his accomplices and try them in a court of law. That, I think, would go the furthest toward breaking the cycle of violence. We would not make a martyr of him; we would show him to be a criminal who is a traitor to Islam and a mass murderer. And lest you think this is all "pie in the sky" impractical stuff, it has been done before; perhaps Mr. bin Ladin could share a cell with Slovidan Melosovic.

That will take shrewdness, discipline, and creativity as we threaten, cajole, and horse trade to organize the community of nations; track the flow of terrorist money around the world; use legal processes to intercept communications; tighten security; ensure that in the storm we create, there will be no safe harbor.

That’s a lot more difficult, it requires a lot more discipline from us, than to just call for a military strike. There may be a time for military action (it’s unlikely these people will be captured easily). But if we rain bombs on Afghanistan, while it will feel good to a lot of people, and the patriotic fervor will hit a fever pitch, we will undoubtedly kill civilians and women and children, and, regardless of how justified we feel our actions are, to a whole new generation we will appear to be the terrorists. And young men will volunteer to die in order to kill us.

Now, what I’ve discussed is only one response. You may disagree with it — I’ve often told you that we don’t always have to agree. But the important thing is that we, as a Christian community, are working on a response to this terror which is creative, tough, assertive, resourceful, and Christian. I call you to that dialog so that we may shape our government’s policy, or support it, or if necessary criticize it. That’s our duty as citizens, and it is our duty as disciples of Jesus.

The call to aggressive, tough, uncompromising peacemaking in the face of such evil is not easy. The call to war is certainly easier to make. But my prayer is that God will grant us the discipline not to hate our enemies, and the shrewdness, creativity, and power to be the children of light, who, working in the way of God’s light, take these people down.