Sermon for 20 Proper Year C – Sunday, September 21, 2025
Jeremiah 8:18-9:1; Psalm 79:1-9; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13
Today’s scripture readings from Jeremiah and from the Gospel of Luke are a twin lightning bolt of prophetic wisdom, and looking at the political landscape in the world around us, we need some prophetic wisdom right now. Jeremiah laments our inability to adjust to the reality of God’s renewed call to us to be his people. Jesus in Luke calls us to action in the midst of a confusing story about a manager that’s commended by his master because of what we would call his dishonesty, but what this generation that we live in calls his shrewdness.
Jeremiah weeps for us, Jesus calls us to action. Jeremiah laments our mistaken loyalty to religion alone, Jesus calls on us to deeply discern what is essential in our faith and to let go of what is not. All this so that we might bring Good News to an entire generation who cannot hear us. They cannot hear us because we are not speaking their language. They cannot hear us because we don’t take an honest look at our faith tradition and separate the wheat from the chaff. They cannot hear us because we still expect them to come to us, and we do not understand the importance of us going out to them.
The children of this age are shrewder in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. This is THE prophetic assessment of the state of our churches today. This is exactly why Christian denominations are shrinking in this country. This is why church is a distant last in people’s choices of what to do on a Sunday morning. This is why church attendance continues to decline in every Christian denomination in this country. Those who are trying to sell us another pair of $200 sneakers know more about reaching the people of this generation than God’s own church does. Those who took what was basically a portable telephone and convinced our children that they could not live without a $1,200 device that gives them text messaging and mobile email and Facebook and Tik-Toc, those advertisers know more about reaching the people of this generation’s hearts and passions than God’s own church does. The children of this age are shrewder in dealing with their own generation – them – than are the children of light –us.
What is our mission as Christians to the world around us? We are to bring God’s Good News to those who have not heard it or do not understand it. How do we do that? How have we done that? Is the way our denomination does church still working? If all we’re concerned about is ministering to existing church members, if all we’re worried about is filling budget shortfalls and keeping the heat on, if all we’ve resigned ourselves to is survival, then sure, for the most part the way we do church is still working – for us. But if we consider our full ministry to be just worshiping together on Sundays, if we’re more concerned with bringing bodies into the church than we are with the bodies outside the church, if this generation believes that hope is more about what you own and what you have then how you feel in your soul, then the answer is, “no”, the way we do church, the way we bring Good News is not working for most of this generation – for them.
What is it that both Jeremiah and Jesus are telling us we do not understand about this generation? The answer is that we must wake up, not them. We must stop clinging to religious practices and dogma in order to respond to our place in this generation. As in Jesus’ message of the dishonest manager, we must wake up and realize that we are being dismissed, we have been dismissed by this generation. We have been dismissed as irrelevant Yet we do have a choice in how we respond. Do we cling to the ways we have always known, or do we dispose of those things that may at first seem inseparable from our faith but in truth are not essential? Do we have the courage to pray for proper discernment, to be prepared to let go of everything that is not the Good News preached by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in order to bring this generation to the knowledge and love of our Lord?
I’ve got bad news for us folks. It’s not this generation that is called by Jeremiah to amend its ways; Jeremiah is talking to the house of Israel, not the generation around them. And it’s not this generation that is called by Jesus into action; Jesus is talking to his disciples, not the crowd that surrounds them. We are the ones being called, not this generation around us. We are the ones that need to climb down from our ivory altars, not this generation. We are the ones that need to find new ways to minister and to make our ministry relevant, not those of this generation. Jesus said, “To those who have, even more will be given”, in our case responsibility. That’s us, Brothers and Sisters. We have the knowledge, we have the faith, and so more is required of us, much more. Much more is expected from the teacher than from the student. Those who understand sin are more deeply to be judged than those who don’t understand. God only holds us accountable for those things we knowingly do, and so, knowing better, We will be judged more harshly than this generation around us. How does that feel?
We need to act like the shrewd manager and stop pretending that nothing has changed. We need to act like the shrewd manager and acknowledge that our current model of church is dead to most of our neighbors in the world today. We need to act like that shrewd manager and trust that if we move out from the safety of our worship space and into the streets and byways and engage this generation where they live, one on one, putting our faith where our mouth is, or better yet putting our faith where our actions are, always leaving judgement to God and His healing to our actions, then this generation may begin to understand why we are followers of Jesus Christ the Wounded Healer. Then this generation may begin to understand why our Wounded Healer allowed himself to be wounded not just for us, but for them too; because he loved them before they were born, and still loves them, now and forever, no matter what they’ve done or failed to do.
So what does all this mean for God’s Church as a whole, and for we Episcopalians specifically, when the rubber hits the road? Does this mean the best use for our prayer books is to use them as firewood to heat our homes during the winter? Does this mean that we sell our church buildings and worship in a public park? Does this mean that we dispose of the moral requirements contained in the Ten Commandments and in the entirety of scripture? Does this mean that we dispose of everything in our worship that might be offensive to someone somewhere and make every accommodation with the culture we live in?
I’m not going to answer these questions because they are not questions being asked of me, they are questions being asked of us. But the real question is, especially to we leaders of the Church:
- How do we transform worship without letting go of Jesus?
- What is the core of our faith, of the Good News we are nurtured by, and what is just icing that we enjoy that is far too sweet for the uninitiated to swallow?
- How do we talk about hope and love to a generation that has been and continues to be nurtured by fear and doubt?
In order to know where and how we are called to preach the Gospel, we must understand what Jesus is saying in the parable of the guy who has simultaneously been called a “shrewd manager” or an “unjust manager”. And the problem we have with understanding the meaning of this parable is how we interpret this verse: “And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.”
This parable can be easily misunderstood to mean that, literally, we are called to obtain dishonest wealth, and to use that wealth to make sure we insulate ourselves from life’s unpleasantness by making friends with our dishonest wealth.
But Jesus is not talking about dishonest wealth in the way we do. Jesus uses the phrase “dishonest wealth” as code, and he’s used it before. Jesus is once again making the point that everything we have and are in life – everything – our talents and personal gifts, our wealth, our possessions, our relationships – all are free gifts from God – we have not earned them, we do not deserve them, we do not own them, they are simply given as free gifts. And as free gifts from God, our “master”, we are called to be the manager of our gifts. We are called to manage the master’s gifts given to each of us because we do not own them, they are not only for us personally, they are given for everyone and we are to share them appropriately.
Dishonest wealth, as Jesus speaks of it today, is everything given to us as free gifts by God. They are not earned or deserved, not a salary for services rendered or an entitlement for the privileged. They are called dishonest because they have not been earned or deserved, and because additional wealth created by this kind of wealth is also considered dishonest. In Jesus’ day only wealth that was earned or deserved was called “honest” wealth, and anything else was considered dishonest wealth. And so we the recipients of this dishonest wealth, God’s managers, are called not to bury this wealth, or to hide it under a mattress or bushel basket, but to use the master’s wealth, to make good use of our dishonest wealth, not just to benefit ourselves but to benefit all of creation.
Does this make sense? Like this manager, we too are called to be shrewd with our dishonest wealth, to spend it wisely, to earn praise not for ourselves but for our master, and to benefit others with our wealth, not ourselves. “And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth (every gift God has given you) so that when it is gone (when your life is over), you will be welcomed into the eternal home.”
The Good News today is that God has showered us with free gifts, dishonest wealth, as Jesus calls it to make his point. We are not to hold onto or to bury our gifts, but to use them for the betterment of the world and for the spread of the Gospel. When we do this, we become Jesus’ true disciples.
The Good News today is that Jesus calls on us as Christians to be in this world but not to be of this world. Jesus didn’t avoid this world, he engaged it. We are not called upon to leave Jesus behind in our attempt to adapt our message to something that this generation will understand and listen to, far from it. We have been given the open invitation by God to try something new, the freedom to try and to make mistakes along the way, to be imperfect, the freedom to venture beyond the shackles of institutional religion in order to once again hear where the Spirit is leading us. We are called upon to understand the language of this generation and to speak it, with words but especially with actions, in order that we may successfully preach the Good News to this generation.
The Good News today is that like Jeremiah and Jesus, we have been called as prophets in our time. We have been given an incredible and humbling invitation to be God’s stewards in crafting our worship and especially in crafting His message. We must translate God’s message of Good News into something that this generation cannot only hear, but can actually believe in and ultimately be saved by. God gives salvation, we are called to deliver His message of Good News to this tired and weary generation.