15th Sunday after Pentecost, 9/21/2025

Texts: Luke 16:1-13, 1 Tim 2:1-7, Amos 8:4-7

Grace, Peace, and Mercy from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

In today’s Gospel, we are confronted with the question: Who and How do we serve? In our lives we are never without affiliation or devotion to something or someone. And that something or someone will often ask of you your whole life. Perhaps, like the Dishonest Manager in Jesus’ parable, we invest all our thoughts, efforts and hopes in our self-interest. We are devoted to ourselves and our self-preservation above everything else. Perhaps, we are devoted to certain groups or causes, by which we devote our whole life to service of a nation, or maybe a company or business. Perhaps, we dedicate our whole lives to family, or a specific person. We could say, this behavior is completely natural human behavior. We are social animals whose lives gravitate around a cause in this way. This is not undesirable in and of itself. Yet, the Gospel presents us with an existential scenario of competing interests and disordered priorities. Competing devotions that subtract the fruits from each other, competing devotions that in an unbalanced state can affect our spirit and our communities in negative ways. We know for a fact, that satisfying what is unessential before what is essential will be to our detriment. When a society, if we see society as one body, for example, worships money,

wealth, power, ostentation, over the well-being of its poorest members, it will divide and collapse on itself. We know that when our attention is divided, when someone is physically present, but maybe in though is somewhere far away, then we don’t actually listen, we are not present to the person, place, and context in which we are at. So who do we serve, how do we serve, meaning where the fire and passion of our devotion is, are indeed important questions we must ask ourselves.

I’ve been finishing Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, my first incursion into Hemingway’s writings, and the readings reminded me about this novel. The novel traces the lives of a few American expats in Paris and Spain after the 1st World War. It pictures the kind of despondency, hopelessness, and lack of purpose that some of these expats lived through in the post-war years. The scars of the war left their mark, and in the wake of its aftermath, it left a kind of emptiness that was being filled with all kinds of distractions and emotional entanglements, whether it be drink, the pursuit of fame, or any other numbing agent, their traumas led to a devotion to carelessness. They sought to reignite the passions in some way shape or form, by wandering the streets of Paris to the next bar, writing the piece that will keep them out of poverty, or perhaps the excitement of the bull-fights in Spain that can reinvigorate

the fire in their weary souls, they sought peace in the wrong places. As a reader, one can get the feeling that you just wish these people could get their act together, that they could find some kind of purpose or joy that could get them out of this never ending cycle of spiritual malaise. And in many ways, our readings today wants to show us a path forward from such a malaise as the one Hemingway wrote of.

The parable that Jesus tells the disciples in today’s reading aims to precisely this conclusion of leading the disciples out of passivity into an active devotion for the Gospel. Jesus tells this unsavory story of the dishonest manager who has embezzled money from his master’s property. At risk of being discovered, the dishonest manager springs into action, by ingratiating himself with the master’s debtors by reducing their debt. In the search of this grace by which his financial well-being might be secured, he lowers their debt by renouncing his own commission in each of those deals. He gives up his portion for the greater outcome. In the end, the dishonest manager is praised for his shrewdness in securing his own life. Of course, we can see from this worldly parable that Jesus tells, that He is not praising the dishonesty or the crime of the manager. The biblical scholar Gerhard Lohfink says it best: “What he applauds is not his crime but the consistency and initiative with which he rescues his own

existence…He used his mind. He engaged his whole imagination and, after calculating everything, he proceeded quickly and as efficiently as possible. That—Jesus wants to tell His listeners—is just how you must act in the face of the reign of God. It is offered to you, now, today”. Jesus is instructing His disciples to not do things halfway, but invest their whole self into the work of the Kingdom. The dishonest manager did not vacillate when it came to save his own skin, and now that God is present here and now, now that the world and your neighbor needs to hear the good word of the Gospel, to hear that there is new life and love for them in this world, that there is purpose and meaning, are we going to balk at that chance? Will we let the moment slip? May it not be so! May it be that we employ all our capacity, whichever that may be, to be a sign of Gospel love in this world. One could see as well that Jesus is implying the stark contrast in this parable: the swindlers and dishonest men that abound in this world are not wasting their time in doing their crime, therefore, how much more pressing it is that we, as “children of light”, not waste time in risking and giving our all for the sake of God’s reign. That is the hope of Jesus for His followers.

Then we hear: “Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much, and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much.” The

danger of ambivalence is precisely that it starts to chip away at the possibility of action. If the children of light look at the world, and cannot confidently stand on behalf of love, then who will? Even worse, others will try to fill that space with their own interests. If we capitulate on those things that represent the reign of God, if we are not faithful on the basics of gospel living, then how do we expect to be faithful when much is required? That is what is at stake in this passage. If our detachment from worldly power and wealth does not begin in the smallness of our ordinary lives, how do we expect to detach when the temptation to capitulate is stronger? When God calls us, He calls us to serve Him only. He does not want us to bend the knee to the powers of this world. Tragically, this has happened way to often in the history of the Church. A Church that has turned a blind eye to the poor, a church that has traded the gospel for wealth and political power, a church that has forgotten to be a beacon of God’s liberating mercy and universal love. Once in the little that it capitulated, like a rapidly growing snowball falling from a mountain, bigger and bigger the travail to be faithful in the larger moments. “You cannot serve God and wealth”, says our Gospel. The motivations of worldly power are in opposition to God’s reign. We cannot live as if God does not say what we heard through the prophet Amos today: “Hear this,

you who trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land…The LORD has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget any of their deeds.”

So beloved, let us answer affirmatively to the call of Jesus and say yes. Let us not be ambivalent about God, but trust in Him fully with our lives. A life lived in faithfulness to the God that is Love is never wasted. It is a life that is rich in the fruits of the spirit, the fruit that truly matters. We are gifted with: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” We are called to be truly ourselves in full authenticity, because God’s love brings up the goodness which we were made with. The wayward powers of this world distorts that divine image within us, it seeks to sow doubt as to whether love and mercy are worth it, and instead infect us with suspicion, hatred, egotism, arrogance, selfishness. The world wants to make your heart stone. But the Gospel seeks to soften hearts. The Gospel melts our hearts with the warmth of God’s love for the world He has made with good. When the Spirit calls, it sows seeds of love in our hearts, especially with those who are brought low by the worldly powers. Let us then grasp the purpose and meaning we have been gifted in Christ, we are not called to be aimless and despondent. As Pope Francis wrote in His encyclical Dilexit Nos, let’s see

ourselves as missionaries in love with the Gospel of Christ. Missionaries in our communities that preach with word and deed, who creatively use the life they have been given to let the world know that God loves them. Perhaps our initiative and efforts might not be witnessed by others, perhaps we will not see the fruit our efforts, but our calling is not to see the outcome. Our calling is to plant the seed that God will grow Himself. Our job is faithfulness and watchfulness for the Kingdom. So let us be daring and proactive for the sake of Jesus’ liberating love as He has done and continues to do so for us even more. So who and how do we serve? We serve Jesus the Lord of Life, and we serve only Him with hearts being filled to the brim with love and compassion. Let us then pray: