The Clever Servant
Luke 16:1-8
October 2, 2005
A few years ago, I became friends with a fellow named Roger who had built a very successful business from the ground up. Starting from almost nothing, he had become President and CEO of a paging service. You know, when you need your doctor in the evening or on his or her day off, you dial the office phone number and the service answers, which then passes on your emergency to the doctor. His business started with just him and his wife working out of their home, and had grown to a staff of more than fifty employees working out of two floors of a large office building in Calumet City, Illinois. When Roger and I first met, he was nearing retirement age and was grooming his daughter to take over this company which now had multi-million dollar annual sales.
One of the things I learned from him was that people who were very successful in business have a least three major characteristics. First, they work VERY hard. Secondly, they are VERY smart. And thirdly, they are not afraid to fail. They know that, if they do fail, they will learn valuable lessons which can be put to use in their next venture.
Roger worked very hard. When I say that, I don’t necessarily mean that he worked long hours. Of course, there were times earlier in his life when he worked some very long days, but over the years he had learned to be incredibly productive when he was working thereby cutting down on the need to spend most of his time in the office.
He was smart. Entrepreneurs like him are always looking for new ways of doing things. They always watch the culture very carefully in order to discover what people really need. And when they find out what people need, they go to work to meet that need.
I don’t see them around here, but if you travel in northwest Indiana, you will often see a little shed behind gas stations, convenience stores, and strip malls. They are filled with 40 pound bags of water softener salt. You see, Roger had gotten tired of having to take the time to go into grocery stores and discount department stores to buy the salt for his water softener. He thought it would be a great idea if it was sold at gas stations and other place so that he could buy it on the way to or from work. He talked one gas station operator to try is little shed idea. The idea caught on and there are dozens and dozens of those little sheds all over Lake and Porter Counties. Roger made a bundle of money off of them.
He wasn’t afraid to fail. He had been involved in a number of different business careers over his life: Real Estate, Insurance, and Manufacturing. He made mistakes and lost a bit of money a couple of times. But he never made the same mistake twice. His personal philosophy was that if one doesn’t fail on occasion, then you are really not working very hard.
As much as I hate it, the church has a lot that it could learn from the business world. Sometimes I like to pretend that we in the church are too good to get corrupted by entrepreneurship and business practices. That’s worldly stuff, I am very likely to say, and as such, has no place in the church because, after all, we do spiritual stuff around here. But business does indeed have much to teach us Christians. I think we really ought to pay attention.
Lloyd Olgilvie, who went from being the pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Hollywood, California to becoming the Chaplain of the United States Senate, tells the story of being on a plane one day. Sitting next to him on this cross-country flight was a well-known and very successful industrialist. Olgilvie asked him what the secret of his success was. The response came very quickly: shrewdness. The man said that he spent much of his waking moments thinking, scheming, planning, developing, and putting details together in order to make his company the largest profit possible. Though some of his competitors considered him to be ruthless, he told Olgilvie that he did the very best he could to be honest and fair in everything he undertook. He was single-minded and left nothing to chance. He used all of his energy, intellect, and determination to accomplish his goals. Later, Olgilvie reflected on that conversation and wondered what would happen to the church if the people of God put the same sort of shrewdness to work for the Kingdom.
The lesson from Luke this morning comes to us in the form of a parable. Depending on the biblical translation you read, this story is about a rich man and his servant, or manager, or steward…who was wasteful, incompetent, dishonest, or shrewd.
Parables are just that…short stories with a lesson attached…not actual history. Because they are parables, interpretation can sometimes be difficult, and this parable is especially hard. Struggling with this parable can make you feel like Jacob when he wrestled all night long with the heavenly messenger on the banks of the river. But like Jacob, if we are diligent and refuse to give up, there is blessing to be found.
There was a rich man…
We don’t know how he got his riches. Was it hard work? An inheritance? The product of unscrupulous business practices? We are not really told, although some commentators believe that this fellow was charging interest to his customers, a clear violation of Mosaic Law.
There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions.
Skimming off the top apparently, although again, some commentators suggest that, maybe this guy wasn’t charging customers what the boss told him to charge, because he knew that the price was too high. Later on, however, the manager is called dishonest, so I guess that we have to go along with the notion that this fellow had a character defect.
There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions. So he called him in and asked him, “What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your management, because you cannot be manager any longer.”
He got fired…canned…laid off…downsized…whatever you want to call it. He was done. Apparently, however, this manager received some sort of severance package or something. He wasn’t fired on the spot, but was given a few days to get his affairs in order.
The manager said to himself, ‘What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job. I’m not strong enough to dig, and I’m ashamed to beg – I know what I’ll do so that, when I lose my job here, people will welcome me into their houses.’ So he called in each one of his master’s debtors. He asked the first, “how much to you owe my master?’ ‘Eight hundred gallons of olive oil,’ he replied. The manager told him,’Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it four hundred.’ Then he asked the second, ‘and how much do you owe?’ ‘A thousand bushels of wheat,’ he replied. He told him, ‘Take your bill and make it eight hundred.’
So we have an out-of-work, middle management executive, who is faced with the loss of income. He doesn’t know how he is going to feed his family, keep his wife in new clothes, send the kids to college, and pay for that sporty new two-humped camel he just bought. He has too much pride to become one of those dirty beggars who line the streets. He has never done a day’s worth of manual labor in his life and doesn’t care to start now. He is in a real conundrum. But…he is not stupid.
He decided to go to his boss’ customers a strike a deal with them. He reduced the olive-oil distributor’s obligation by fifty percent. The farmer who was in debt for wheat saw that obligation reduced by twenty percent.
He did this, figuring that if he scratched their backs, they would scratch his. He helped them so that they would help him when he needed it.
There are a couple of possibilities here. Either he was subtracting his own commission as a way of reducing those bills…but that would mean that he wasn’t dishonest…or the debtors did not know that he had been fired. If that was the case, then they thought that these discounts were legitimate…and would have been VERY pleased.
The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly.
The end result of all of this is that the rich man comes out smelling like roses. If he had been charging unlawful interest, then his neighbors would praise God that he had found salvation. If he were simply a tough-edged business owner, then his debtors would have thanked him for his generosity. Either way, he looked good. Of course, there was no choice but to praise and commend his manager for his shrewdness which had paid huge dividends.
Realize that nowhere in this parable is the dishonesty of the manager lifted up for special acclamation. Nowhere is it suggested that deceitfulness and corruption are commendable courses of action. Nowhere is this fellow praised because he is too lazy or incompetent to change careers in mid-stream.
It was really interesting when I checked the thesaurus on my computer. I typed in “shrewd” and a number of different synonyms came back: astute, sharp, on the ball, smart, perceptive, insightful, wise, and clever. Those are all positive adjectives.
It is his ingenuity that is praised. It is his shrewdness which is admired. Valued is his fierce determination to complete a course of action upon which he had embarked. He set a goal and reached it. He had a plan and worked it. He pursued an end with all of the creativity and energy he could muster.
What does that say about Christians? We like to say that our Christian faith is the most important part of our lives. We like to say that we intend to live for Jesus each and every day. We like to say that the most important institution in our community is the church. We like to say that it is our Christian faith which provides us guidance and counsel to get us through our day.
But be careful. Think about it for a minute. Do we pursue our relationship with Jesus Christ with the same energy as this dishonest manager? Do we have the same sort of devotion to the cause of Christ as we have for earning a living?
For the dishonest manager, nothing was more important than achieving his goal. Is there anything in our everyday lives which becomes more important, or at least more urgent, than our faith journey?
I bought a new zoom lens for my camera a while back. I had been saving for it for over a year…five bucks here, ten dollars there, maybe a twenty now and then. Other stuff kept cropping up…phone bills, books to buy, tires for the car, and other necessities. But I kept at it…and finally was able to purchase the lens that I had wanted for a very long time. And now I wonder…do I put that much effort into achieving a relationship with Christ?
It seems to me that the parable of the dishonest manager ought to give us pause, and urge us to take an inventory of the things which occupy our greatest levels of energy. I think it probably ought to make us stop and consider just how much of our prayers, presence, gifts, and service we are willing to give for the sake of our Lord.
If we discover that we are much more willing to devote energy to things which are not of ultimate consequence than we are to the Lord of our lives, then perhaps we ought to ask ourselves what we are going to do about it.
Are we willing to, if I might borrow a phrase from Oswald Chamber, give our utmost for his highest? Are we willing to give everything we have for an encounter with the living Christ? Are we willing to concentrate our energy on a meeting with Jesus? I am firmly convinced that heaven awaits our answer.
