I think of this as a dangerous gospel because it’s easy to analyze.
In fact, for centuries, people have piled up books and commentaries
and lectures about the dishonest steward and what he really was doing
and what he was up to. It’s easy to analyze, but it’s also easy to
avoid the meaning and the message in this gospel.

You know, on Tuesday mornings I go into Oakland or Berkeley and meet
with a group of usually eight or ten of us Church leaders, Lutherans,
Presbyterians and Catholics. And we look at the gospel for the week.
And it happened this week! We sat down. We began discussing why was
he dismissed? What was he guilty of? Was he guilty, or was it just a
rumor that people spread about him? What did he do? Was he
incompetent? Or was he corrupt? Was he dishonest? And then we even
talked about the Greek word for dishonesty, which some books
translate as “dishonest,” some as “crafty,” some as “shrewd,” and
some as “prudent.” And what were his rights? What was his job
description? Was he living up to it? Or was he, when he cut back on
their promissory notes, was it his own commission that he was cutting
back? And who’s that commending him? Is the master commending him
because he is so smart, or is Jesus recommending him to us? Ah-h-h!
After about twenty minutes of that, I slammed my Bible down and said,
“For God’s sake, it’s only a story! ... It’s just a story. We don’t
have the guy’s biography and we’re not going to find it and Jesus
didn’t give us a biography. He gave us a message. And we are avoiding
the message.”

I think there are three things to the message. It’s
1) You’ve got to be faithful.
2) You’ve got to be smart, and
3) You cannot serve God and mammon.

Let’s take that one first. “Mammon” is a fancy word. You know, it’s
the same word that we get “Amen” from. What do you rely on? Where do
you put your “Amen?” And it’s been translated (mammon) as money, as
income, as wealth. I think it’s “stuff,” the stuff we’ve got. Do we
put our stuff before God? Do we rely too much and trust and hang onto
our stuff? It’s interesting, the Bible and Jesus recommend that there
is a place for heroic poverty, people like Dorothy Day, like Mother
Teresa. But at the same time, the Bible and Jesus do not say being
poor is a good thing. They do not recommend poverty as a goal. They
do not recommend poverty as a good thing. It’s like Mae West said
once. “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and rich is better.” That’s
the teaching of the Bible, that we are to be rewarded somehow. It
always strikes me funny that we church-types argue for social
justice, for a living wage for people, for basic benefits, for a good
education. And then when it works out and you get all that stuff,
they make you feel guilty. And yet, it’s a goal, our stuff. The
problem is when our stuff gets in the way. There is stuff I think we
should all have and rejoice. We need to have enough for a college
education for our young people. We need to have enough for our
retirement for us old people. We need enough for a decent living. We
need enough for security. We need enough for future health costs and
health expenses. But, after a while, isn’t there often in our life,
in our closet, in our world, too much stuff?

And.... that’s when we have to be smart. We have to be smart. The
reason we have to be smart is it gets very complex and very
complicated. For example, even without knowing it, sometimes our
stuff is ill-gotten goods. Sometimes our stuff is ours because
someone else is suffering. And our world is so complicated and
complex, it is hard at times to figure that out. We might be involved
in promoting global disaster and, at one level, not even know it. We
might be doing well and paying less because someone is in a sweatshop
in Asia or here in California. We might be doing well and investing,
we think, wisely and it’s hurting other people. We might be
supporting all the wrong things. We’re never going to get it right.
But we’ve got to be smart and we’ve got to give it a try.

And, we’ve got to be faithful because you can’t take it with you.
Someone mentioned to me the other day, on Gregory Lane here we see
hearses go by very often up to Oakmont and up to Queen of Heaven.
We’ve yet to see a Brinks truck right behind the hearse. You can’t
take it with you. And, what’s the criteria? I think the criteria is
remembering the poor. Pope Paul VI taught that, once you have enough
stuff, anything that’s surplus (And you have to figure out what’s
surplus!) belongs to someone else. It really belongs to the poor. You
just have it in stewardship. It really belongs to the other people of
the earth. So, what do we do? Well, I think we have to worry about
those that are forgotten, the homeless, for example. We get
criticized sometimes because our St. Vincent dePaul, which does
wonderful work, meets people at our front door. I think that’s
exactly where they should be, at the front door, where people cannot
forget them. People will not forget the homeless and the poor. I
think we have to remember our troops, not just our troops that are
remembered by white crosses on a hill in Lafayette, but our troops
who have come home and are in veteran’s hospitals and are amputees
and are suffering. We have to remember our troops. We have to
remember those in service industries who wait on us and serve us. We
have to remember immigrants. I like to use that phrase. Not everyone
likes it, but I think it’s true. We have on our borders a big sign
that says, “Keep Out” and, when you cross the border, that says,
“Help Wanted.” We are trying to have it both ways. And we can’t
forget. We can’t forget the people Joe Appel talked about last week,
with severe mental illness, and reaching out to them.

And then, besides not forgetting, we have to say “I can do something.
With the stuff of my life, I can do something. I can reach out in
charity and I can try to change the system around us.” We got a
letter from Ellen Tauscher, who is kind of the highest of the
legislators that we wrote to last week, saying that the City Council
of Concord must answer our requests that we wrote to them last week,
and do it in writing and do it soon. We can do something, and we can
make a difference. Never forget those things. Never forget the poor
and needy, that I can do something, that I can make a difference.
It’s really a pretty good story, but it’s got a very, very good
message. You’ve got to be faithful. You’ve got to be smart. And you
can’t serve both God and your stuff. Amen.