Amos 8:4-7; Psalm 113; I Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13
The Rev. Candice B. Frazer
Our Gospel reading this morning is challenging—and I believe it’s meant to be. It carries a certain discomfort, even a “sleaze factor,” that can make us feel uneasy. Jesus tells a story of a dishonest man using dishonest means to secure dishonest wealth that feels provocative. And it is. After all, we expect Jesus to be a man of clear and unwavering morals. It’s that very expectation that makes this parable so unsettling.
Too often, we approach the Bible as if it were a moral codebook. While Scripture certainly conveys moral teachings, that is not its primary purpose. The Bible is the story of God’s people—messy, complex, flawed, and beloved. And if we look honestly, it’s full of morally questionable contradictions. There’s the command to bash the heads of infants on rocks, the demand for Abraham to sacrifice his son, the total annihilation of enemy nations as commanded by God, and the story of the man who dismembers his wife mailing her body parts to the twelve tribes to incite a war.
And if you’re tempted to write that off as just “Old Testament stuff,” consider Jesus. If we try to cast him as the embodiment of a sanitized new morality, we need to face some facts. Jesus dines with the morally corrupt: tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners. He disregards the religious customs of his day—he doesn’t wash before meals, and he works on the Sabbath. He touches lepers, demoniacs, and bleeding women—all considered unclean in society. He questions authority and destroys property that doesn’t belong to him—remember the money changers booths? This is not a man beholden to the established moral codes of his time.
So when Jesus tells a story about a dishonest manager who uses deceitful means to secure his future—and then gets rewarded for it—why are we disturbed?
The parable is meant to shock us. It’s the first-century equivalent of clickbait. It grabs our attention and disrupts our assumptions. This might be one of the clearest examples of how parables function. They weren’t designed to make listeners feel good. They were designed to make them walk away scratching their heads, wondering whether they should be offended—or convicted. They were designed to make people think.
And this one does exactly that.
A rich man hears that his manager is squandering his property and fires him. The manager, facing the prospect of ruin, hatches a plan. He rewrites the debts of those who owe his master—reducing their payments, presumably to win their favor. Strangely, when the master finds out, instead of pressing charges or throwing him in prison, he commends the manager for his shrewdness. The manager is dishonest to the end and yet, he gets commended. Not punished. Not condemned. But congratulated.
It’s neither moral nor fair. But there it is.
It’s tempting to try to explain it away. Maybe the manager was overcharging and just corrected the accounts. Maybe the debts were inflated and would never have been repaid anyway, and he simply made repayment more realistic. Reducing unjust interest rates or cutting out his own commission—either way, we want to think that the manager is finally doing the right thing. But perhaps we don’t need to get Jesus off the hook here. Maybe what Jesus is doing is showing us what it means to be shrewd and what it means to be innocent.
In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples, “I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” (Matthew 10:16). We like to pretend that Christians are innocent and pure. (Not you, of course—you are all innocent and pure.) But the truth is, we are flawed. Pretending to be pure-hearted won’t usher in the Kingdom of God. If we are to partner with God in building that Kingdom, we must learn to be shrewd. Plenty of others already understand this, and they are using that shrewdness to attract followers, shape culture, and consolidate power—not for the Kingdom, but for control.
Let me be clear: I’m not here to disparage individuals. But as you well know (and may be sick of me saying it, but as any helicopter pilot will tell you when you are flying in turbulence you have to over-communicate), I believe Christian Nationalism is the greatest threat to Christianity in the world today and it is very shrewd. Far more shrewd than the children of light. The promoters of Christian Nationalism understand the anxieties of this age. They see a brittle, anxious, non-linear, incomprehensible world and capitalize on the fear that flows from it. They offer a worldview rooted in apocalypse and scarcity—where violence, tribalism, and uniformity are mistaken for strength, salvation, and truth.
And they are persuasive. They have masterfully co-opted biblical language, twisting it to build a theology that prizes domination over service, exclusion over welcome, and power over love. Their morality is questionable at best—and anti-biblical at worst. Instead of worshiping a vulnerable, humble God—born in filth, poverty, among animals, and who grows up to be the most famous homeless man in history—they venerate a Christ cloaked in power, splendor, and triumphalism. They conflate God with the state. They determine who belongs and who doesn’t based not on the cross, but on ideology, culture, and desire—not sacrificial love.
And here’s the astonishing thing: Jesus told us a parable 2,000 years ago that speaks directly to this moment in the Church.
As followers of Jesus—the true Jesus, not the one wrapped in flags and thrones—we must be just as shrewd. We can accept easy answers that align with our political and cultural comfort zones, or we can be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. We can recognize that the ideology of Christian Nationalism is not the Gospel. It is not the Way of Jesus.
The world is hard. Poverty is real. Inequality is systemic. It often seems like some people just get a better deal in life than others. Instead of abandoning vulnerability, Jesus calls us to walk with it—to embrace those who suffer, to see the world through their eyes, to live not for self-preservation but for self-giving.
“No one can serve two masters,” Jesus says.
The Bible is not a moral codebook. It is the messy, complicated, ongoing story of God’s people. And yes, it’s full of failure. More importantly, it is the story of God’s relentless, unceasing love in the face of all those failures. Again and again, God—shrewd and compassionate—calls us home. Even, and especially, when we don’t deserve it.
Amen.