Management Material

And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings.  -- Luke 16:9

The parable of the Unrighteous Steward is one that has always given me trouble.  The understanding I have of it, I owe, mostly, to Arnot’s The Parables of Our Lord.  The story is simple enough:  a steward or manager has not dealt honestly with his master’s property and is about to be fired.  Desperate to find a means of supplying himself with life’s necessities, the manager, before balancing his ledgers, calls his master’s debtors and offers them a discount.  Those that owe a hundred are told to write down eighty or fifty.  By this ploy, the manager makes friends of those same debtors and may call upon them for assistance once his tenure as manager is over.  The master, upon learning he has been so cleverly cheated, nevertheless commends the ex-manager’s cunning. 

Our tendency is to think that the dishonest manager should have seen the error of his ways, rather like the Prodigal, repented, begged and received his master’s gracious forgiveness.  The Lord, however, had a different lesson He wished to impart. This parable was given to His disciples and was not for the benefit of those outside His circle or as a message for those who opposed Him. 

As Christians, what are we to do with the things of the world?  From our health and strength, our natural gifts, and our families to our property and money, jobs and careers, we have much that pertains as much or more to this world than to eternity.  Jesus wanted to answer that question for us.  The things of this world, including our own bodies and physical lives, are going to pass away.  We should not be afraid or even hesitant to use those things up in order to help us on our journey toward our “eternal dwellings”. 

Unrighteous wealth or, to use the more evocative KJV word, Mammon can be a great hindrance to our spiritual progress.  The Lord’s point is that it need not be.  The Master has given these things to us that we might make the best use of them – not to enrich ourselves and tie our souls to the temporal things of this life, but to make our “calling and election sure”. 

Does wealth get misused?  Are art, literature, cinema, television, the internet channels of evil and wickedness?  Absolutely, but they can be beneficial as well as corrosive.  Arnot asked if the Rich Young Ruler failed because of wealth or sin.  Was the beggar Lazarus saved because he was poor and the rich man in hell because he was rich?  No.  Poverty does not make one holy.  Many will live impoverished in this world only to step from a life of envy into the fires of envy’s just reward.  Some who were rich in this world’s goods already enjoy the bliss of eternal life in heaven.  

Things can be a snare to us.  Things can set us free.  The difference is in us and in our attitude.  The first step is recognizing that nothing we "possess" actually belongs to us.  We are only stewards.  We are responsible for wise management.  This is the key to the parable:  the master commended the unrighteous steward because he wanted him to come out all right.  He couldn’t allow him to go on managing his goods, but he did not want him to starve.  

Our life in this world is coming to an end -- the end of our tenure as steward.  It may be yet many decades for some.  It may be tomorrow.  Regardless of the time frame, we know we cannot go on in this life indefinitely.  Our Good Master wants us to enthusiastically make use of all we have been given, however little or much that may be, whatever form it may take, to improve, augment and further the spiritual components of our lives.  If that is not happening, we are not doing it right, and we are not pleasing God. 

Portait of a Saint in a Cloud of Smoke

But the LORD said to Samuel, "Do not look at his appearance or his stature, because I have rejected him. Man does not see what the LORD sees, for man sees what is visible, but the LORD sees the heart." — 1 Samuel 16:7

I want to thank you all for your prayers with regard to the death of my brother-in-law. My wife's mother has now lost two of her five children in the last eighteen months. I can't imagine the pain of losing a child — even when the child is well-past middle age. Because my brother-in-law lived about seven hundred miles from where he was buried, there was a memorial service in his church with his pastor before the body was brought down here. The family asked me to speak at the funeral — I can't say I was happy to do it, but I knew him well. We didn't have to resort to a generic message brighten with a few personal sprinkles.

The truth is that my wife's brother was a troubled person. Dealing with him could range from frightening to frustrating to absolutely hilarious. I once knocked him flat on his back and bloodied his nose in the corridor of a VA hospital. As he started to sit up, he said, "That's all right. No, that's all right. I had that coming." And he did. On the other hand, he was the life of any party. He loved people and crowds and food and women. I started to say "pretty women", but, rather like Robert Heinlein, I don't think G. ever saw an ugly woman. If a person didn't know him, it was easy to think he was some kind of monster. He asked the wife of one of his nephews for a date, which would have been merely amusing, except it was at his own wife's funeral.

Still, the words that came to mind when I was told of his death were not words of criticism. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of the unrighteous money so that when it fails, they may welcome you into eternal dwellings. He loved to give. Even after he stopped drinking, he would buy a round for the house. He wanted to pay for every meal — including home-cooked ones. You couldn't give him a birthday present without fighting off payment. He handed money to strangers on the street. In one restaurant he frequented, the manager asked him to stop tipping so extravagantly because it made the waitresses uncomfortable.

Given his often questionable behavior, not to mention his outrageous words, it would be easy to question G.'s Christianity. He certainly professed his faith in Christ publicly and profusely. But the life of Christ in us, "the Master's indwelling", should have a transforming impact on our words, our worldview, and our actions. We should not amen the man who said, "It's true that I got drunk and slashed with my razor a fellow who caught me shooting craps with loaded dice, but, thank God, I've never lost my religion." It's not that we don't need to take thought for our deeds; we, and those around us, benefit from our attempts at self-discipline. God has given us a spirit of power, love, and good judgment. We as the Body of Christ should hold one another accountable for bad judgment and indifference to the sensibilities of others. Paul told Timothy that Scripture is useful for rebuking, correcting, and instructing.

Nevertheless, Christianity is not primarily a moral teaching or a program of social reform. Genuine Christian conversion takes place in the innermost part of the human soul and gradually — with the help of sacraments, ordinances, and disciplines, works its way out. Aside from a few months in the Marine Corps, G. never had fifteen minutes of discipline in his life. He had a dozen Bibles that he never read because he didn't like to read and "couldn't understand it". He no doubt prayed at times. He had been baptized. He occasionally took Communion. A Catholic by nature, he was poorly served by our evangelical protestantism. Had he been left alone by his sisters to follow the tradition of his grandparents and his father, he would have had the confessional and the Eucharist for his comfort and Mary and the saints for his devotion. Catholicism would have been as hospitable to him as it is inimical to me.

(That, too, is in God's hands. I am wrong. He was where he needed to be. Perhaps the benefit the rest of us received from his life and his struggles would not have been effective had G. remained a Catholic. God's connections always flow both directions.)

I think a funeral ought to comfort the living, but it ought also to make an initial assessment of someone's life — to give a brief first draft of their history and help those who remain gain a little perspective. I'd like to think G. appreciated my attempt to do that for him. I hope when I'm gone someone will do the same for me. My brother-in-law had many issues, but they were all at the surface. If he had only understood how to shut up and stop the mental traffic, he would have realized his sainthood. He was like the bush that got Moses' attention. He seemed to be on fire with passions and craziness, but the core of his life was serene and sanctified. When death finally extinguished the smokey, sputtering life of flesh, the holy inner man was left -- to be welcomed into eternal dwellings.