Creation Time 3

Luke 16:1-13, Jeremiah 8:18 - 9:1, Psalm 79:1-9, 1 Timothy 2:1-7
Sunday 21 September 2025. Pentecost 15. C/1Season of Creation 3.


This is one of those weeks where the lectionary – the set readings for each day – really hit hard in the current world context. The readings from the Hebrew Bible, that from Jeremiah and, particularly this morning Psalm 79 make for very difficult reading and saying in the light of what is happening in Gaza. We can, I hope, join in with Jeremiah’s lamentation and heartsickness over the hurting of people, every single one, precious in the sight of God. At the moment the question “is there no balm in Gilead?” feels like it should be a persistent howl or a wail. As for the Psalm 79, well I don’t know about you, but I find myself increasingly wanting to dodge Psalms like this because they require a whole heap of mental gymnastics around what the writer intended them to mean, how we have traditionally interpreted them and why they land uncomfortably at the moment. They are a very unwieldly reminder that the Christian faith has a whole web of relationships with the Jewish faith, and we need to take enormous care to tease some of that out.

Within all that heaviness, Paul writing to Timothy gives a piece of advice that feels like something we can buy into at the moment with all hope that this will give us a little bit of relief and help us feel a little bit lighter – pray for our leaders he says – pray that they might lead in such a way that everyone can live a quiet, peaceable and dignified life. But then our reading from Luke’s gospel reminds us that leadership is complicated and sometimes leaders are in situations where there is no easy, right answer. And sometimes they make choices which are complex and therefore it’s incredibly difficult to know whether to commend or condemn them.

In light of all of this, I want to look at two words from our gospel this morning which sum up the two dispositions of the manager: the word shrewd, but before that the word squander. This is a man who is said to have squandered his boss’ property. We are not told how we are only told that it is so serious that when he gets found out he is made redundant, and his accounts and files are taken from him. Last week we heard the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin. Between those stories and this one of the manager there is the story of another squanderer – the parable of the prodigal son. A young man who gets his inheritance early in life and squanders it – the same word is used – in fast living. To squander is to waste, to misuse, to fritter things away. We usually use it in relation to money and to time, both precious resources.

The word in Biblical Greek is sometimes translated by the English translators of the Bible as our word ‘scattered”. Which makes complete sense as you can imagine a person squandering money simply scattering it around without a care or much thought. And so, it’s the word translated as scattered way back in chapter one of Luke, in Mary’s song of praise. God, in God’s treatment of the powerful, scatters the proud in the imaginations of their hearts as well as brings down the mighty and sends the rich away empty. It’s a heartening image – the proud, self-important, arrogant powerful people having their plans, ideas and thoughts scattered, wasted, squandered and frittered away.

Our manager is kicked out of his squandering by the sudden trauma of getting found out and losing his job. In his panic he starts to face up to some truths about himself. Perhaps he was someone who had put everything into his job, including his own sense of identity. And now it is gone, he is in crisis. Unlike the prodigal son, he can’t quite bring himself to face into his responsibility for his own downfall, in his mind his master has taken his position away from him. But he does face up to some of his own vulnerabilities; his physical weakness and his sense of shame in asking for help. He does begin to recognise the web of relationships of which he is a part and start to act in ways to strengthen those. And so, he comes up with a plan to get on the good side of his master’s customers. Imagine being offered a substantial cut in the amount you owed on your loan. Of course, that would mean that you were indebted to the manager and therefore would have to reciprocate at some point with some hospitality, but that’s a small price to pay. It all leaves a bit of a nasty taste in the mouth, but on the positive side, someone who was only ever out for themselves is now caught into a web of relationships and some debts have been reduced.

For this piece of quick thinking our manager is commended by his master as acting shrewdly. It’s a piece of quick thinking, it’s sharp and canny. In Biblical Greek the root meaning of the word is all about having clear sighted perception of the current circumstances, choosing a course of action and then following through. It’s practical wisdom not just knowledge or cleverness. Crucially, it’s about understanding what is going on around you and having the resolve to set your mind on a course of action, a future goal. Understood this way, you can, I hope, see, it is the opposite of the proud having their thoughts scattered. It’s determination and resolve and singleness of thought and action.

There is, I think, something worth noticing in our managers realisation that his only positive way forward is to stop squandering and start having a singleness of purpose. There is a great wave of divisiveness in our current world context. People groups physically and metaphorically separated from other people groups on grounds of race, religion, ideology or life-circumstances. We live in smaller and smaller social circles thanks to algorithms which just keep feeding us more of the same. It’s harder and harder to verify what is true information about others. It’s easier to work in binaries; you are either pro or anti, for or against, with the group or against the group. Most of all, I think, there is a growing culture of unchallenged contempt and disrespect which provides room for people’s anxieties and dissatisfactions to grow and develop and mutate. There is a lot of scattering and squandering going on.

This is, I would suggest, the time for some real shrewdness, for some determination and resolve and singleness of purpose. This is the time for some commitment to what is true about our situation and what is true about ourselves. This is the time for some sense of humility and real engagement with the social webs on which we all depend. Most of all it’s time for a commitment to believing in and speaking about the dignity of all human persons, the necessity for listening and engagement and friendship across all divides. It’s a time to keep up that commitment, despite every temptation to dehumanise those we don’t agree especially with what we say about each other. That is one of the things that makes the demarcation between the heathen and the servants of God in today’s Psalm so particularly hard to understand and work with.

Our manager, despite his single mindedness and resolve, was still out really for himself and his rich friends. He was still operating in a world where reciprocal friendships meant everything. His owner commended him. Jesus still identifies him as dishonest, a user of dishonest wealth, a child of this age and not one of the children of light. In Luke, of course, the real future to be aiming for with singleness of purpose is a new world where the poor and the hungry and the lowly are lifted up and have all good things, where people follow God’s way of being in the world – of giving generously without expecting anything in return. Orientating ourselves around that future is what faithfulness is all about.

We are about to sing a great hymn – Praise to the Lord the almighty the King of creation. Over the centuries people from all sides, nations, creeds and ideologies have sung this hymn and its words have had meaning for them in their particularity. There is comfort in God who is health and salvation for all of us, who with love does befriend all of us, whose goodness and mercy daily attends all of us, who turns fury to peace and who welcomes the praises and adoration of all that has life and breath.