Preached on the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 20C), September 21, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Samuel Torvend.
Jeremiah 8:18-9:1
Psalm 79:1-9
1 Timothy 2:1-7
Luke 16:1-13
Olive oil painting, by Giorgio Gosti
To grasp the significance of this seemingly odd parable of Jesus, it will be helpful to see the world in which he lived. For instance, rich land owners lived in cities: they constituted what we might call the millionaires and billionaires, the wealthiest 1 percent, of ancient Palestine at the time of Jesus. In turn, the landowners hired managers to supervise their land; in this case, property devoted to olive trees and wheat fields. The manager lived on or next to the land. And those who worked the land – that would be poor laborers, poor peasants – lived in the nearby village.
Rich landowners became rich without lifting a finger through the manual labor of village peasants whose work produced the harvest of olives, olive oil, and wheat to be sold in the cities. The manager was paid for his work in the form of a percentage of what the peasants harvested. And the peasant laborers retained at best 10 to 20 % of the produce, a percentage that meant they would never escape poverty: their children and their children’s children would be consigned to harsh labor as well. To say the least, village laborers viewed absentee landowners as corrupt and greedy individuals who cared nothing for the harsh conditions of labor and poverty in which they worked.
In this story told by Jesus, the manager was accused of mishandling the owner’s land, a squandering of property or produce with no details offered. By law the owner could do one of two things: he could take the manager to court and demand full repayment for the losses incurred or he could have the deceitful manager imprisoned. In both cases, the manager’s malfeasance would become public knowledge and ensure that the manager was never hired again: a man consigned to the lower status of a laborer or a homeless beggar. But the owner does the unexpected: no court hearing and no prison. He simply dismisses the manager privately – in what was an astonishing act of mercy.
Jesus then notes that before the laborers could know of the misconduct of the newly-dismissed manager, he – the manager – seeks to have friends who will assist him now that he is no longer working for the owner. He does this by decreasing the amount of oil and wheat owed by the laborers thus allowing them to retain for their own use two staples of the Mediterranean diet: bread and olive oil. For the impoverished peasant laborers who lived hand to mouth, this, too, was an unexpected act of generosity, an act of mercy that would prompt incredible celebration in the village: an unexpected windfall, we might say.
Thus when Jesus says, “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth,” he is not suggesting that his followers engage in deceitful financial practices – though let me add that the history of Christianity is filled with people have done so – but rather encourages his followers to recognize what is at the heart of his story, his parable: two people who did the unexpected; that is, two people with terrible reputations who could have made life miserable for others but instead acted with mercy, with generosity.
This, I think, is a troubling story: a troubling story for you and me, for we live in a culture that encourages us repeatedly to protect, to hold on to whatever money, wealth, or treasure we have earned or inherited. And thus as wages stagnant, costs rise, and the American middle class begins to evaporate, there emerges the fear little different than what this manager experienced some 2,000 years ago: the fear of becoming poor, of living in a lower status than one hoped for. And so the urge to close one’s hand around what one has – little or great – becomes quite strong.
Indeed, it was the closed hand that appeared in statues found in medieval churches: the closed hand tightly grasping a bag of coins, a sign of being closed off to others, of demonstrating one’s concern only for oneself and no one else. It was the open hand that was praised as the sign of virtue for the open hand signified the person who saw money or produce as something to be shared. Rather than protected or hoarded, money or produce exists to be shared; that is, being generous is the virtue, the capacity that illuminates one’s care for others, even those who a society or family or political party might say are supposedly undeserving. For no one is undeserving of life, are they?
The open hand is also the hand that can receive from another, that signals the soul willing to admit its dependence on another. And so I wonder if you’ve noticed that we do not take or grab the communion bread or wine cup but rather open our hands – the small hands of children, the wrinkled hands of people my age – to receive the precious treasure of the Lord’s body and blood. And I wonder if you’ve noticed that each person receives the same amount regardless of gender, race, or social status. Here, again, it seems that generosity is extended to all, not just the few, not just the so-called privileged. Indeed, there is an economy at work, flowing from this table: an economy in which goods – food and drink – are shared equitably; a generosity that does not ask anyone to prove their worthiness before receiving; an economy so different than the one in which we are forced to live in which a few have more than enough, and the many have little.
In his contemplation of the significance of the Mass, the Holy Eucharist, the medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart wrote this: “Not only bread but all things necessary for sustenance in this life are given on loan to us , given because of others and for others, and to others through us.”
Dear friends, I say, let your open hand at this altar table lead you – lead you out there – into a world of profound need waiting for your generous spirit.