A sermon preached at Kowloon Union Church on Sunday 22 September
2019, Fifteenth
Sunday after Pentecost, by Timothy Chan. The scripture readings that day were Amos 8:4–7, Psalm 79, Luke
16:1–13.
Good morning
everyone, the scriptures we have read this morning are concerning a sensitive
topic in church, Money. In the book of Amos, the Lord condemns economic
inequality and human trafficking! Then we read about the parable in Luke that
Jesus seems to approve and praise the shrewdness of the dishonest manager. Is
this parable a lesson on wealth management? Or is Jesus teaching us the right
way to approach life? Either way, I believe God is calling us back to the
basic. Let’s pray before we look closer into the parable.
Gracious God, we thank you
for entrusting us and the church many resources, including money. Teach us the
right way to use all these as we live and help us to understand that the
ultimate concern in our life is to serve you. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.
I will divide my
sermon into two part. In the first part, I will be reflecting how we should see
money based on the scriptures we read this morning. In the second part, I will
be suggesting some ideas on how we
should apply this parable into our Christian faith.
Let’s start with the
Old Testament reading, the book of Amos 8:4-7 illustrates how the Israelites
did business and how they trample on the needy and exploit the poor. It all
begins with an uneven wealth distribution where a handful of people controlling
most of the resource and also the market. In the scripture, they were saying to
each other, let’s do business after the Sabbath and the New Moon. These two
events are important to the Jewish people religiously and culturally. But the
businessmen were actually complaining, “When will it be over? Because I cannot
do business in these days!” These people do not care about observing the
Sabbath and New Moon. For them, these are just two days affecting their
business.
Not only they
disregard God and religious tradition, the scriptures said they trample on the
poor and needy. They made deceitful trade and false balance, and when the poor
do not have enough money to pay, they would sell them into slavery! According
to the scholars, the rich people at the time were the loan sharks, and they
rely on interests and confiscation of other’s property to accumulate their
wealth and power. That’s why they target the poor and devour their property and
sell them as slave. God is condemning these people because they put money and
their own benefit higher than God, and they mistreated and exploited other
human being for more income.
So the problem is
not money itself, but how people would disregard God and humanity to attain it.
However, is there any money which is righteous in nature? To some extends, we
are still living in a world with serious economic inequality and human
exploitation. If it is a system, then all money would be unrighteous. So when
we are reading this parable in Luke, Jesus is referring the unrighteous
wealth as earthly, temporary and perishable, comparing to the true
riches, which are heavenly, eternal and imperishable. And he is telling his
disciples to learn from this dishonest manager.
Let’s look at the
parable carefully, the rich man mentioned in the scripture might be one of loan
sharks, relying on interests and debts to accumulate his wealth. Then there is
a dishonest manager who manages the account.
He was in trouble because someone reports to the rich man that the
manager wasting his money, and he was fired by his boss. Before officially
leaving his position, he calls his master's debtors one by one to reduce their
debt. By giving a favour to them, the manager hopes that they would welcome him
when he loses his job. Very smart indeed, even his master is commending his shrewdness.
Jesus is telling
his disciples that in verse 8 and 9. “For the sons of this world are more
shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the sons of light. 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.” Jesus is somehow
encouraging his disciples to be smarter in dealing with money, and yes, not to
be afraid to utilize the unrighteous wealth. I think Jesus is aware that we
cannot live outside of this system and it is inevitable for us to deal with
earthly wealth.
In the story, the
manager is praised because he is using his master’s money, dishonestly, to make
a better future for himself. The dishonest manager does not see money as an end
goal, he cares for his life more than how much money he can keep. This is
exactly the difference between the book of Amos and this parable. In the Book
of Amos, those businessmen only care about the money, and they don’t care about
people’s life. In this parable, the main concern of this manager is his
well-being, money is never his concern. So, the manager is actually using that
unjust/earthly money to create a new purpose. Jesus is telling this parable to
his disciples, hoping that they can learn to use money for an eternal purpose.
In verse 11, Jesus
says “11 If then you have not been faithful in the unrighteous
wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches?” There are people thinking we
Christians, or the people who serves God shouldn’t be talking too much about
money, offering, church investment, and wealth management, because we believe
that God will provide what we need. We
are taught that we should focus on the riches in heaven, not the earthly one.
And Hey Jesus said, if we are not faithful in the earthly and unrighteous
wealth, we will not be entrusted the true and heavenly riches. So what to do?
Do we need to start investment class in the church now? No, I think the key
word in this passage is “faithful”. So it comes to the second part of my sermon, of how
are we going to apply this teaching in our life and in our church.
Being faithful is the key of how we should manage our
life, including money. In another
parable, Jesus talked about faithful servants who invest the money and make
profit and scold the other servant lazy for doing nothing to the money.
Therefore, we come to understand that being faithful is to utilize the
potential God has given to each one of us. If we are given a gift to sing, but
we don’t, then we might not be faithful. If we are given so much love, but we
are not sharing, we might not be faithful. If the church is given so much
talents and gifts, but we are not using it and not taking care of the people
God has given to us, then we are not being faithful! If we want to be a
faithful servant or a faithful community, we must go back to basic.
First of all, we need to know how much potential we
have. The first basic is self-understanding. If you do not know of your
talent and gift, it is difficult for you to fulfill your potential. On the
other hand, we might be content with what we have, and we are very used to the
comfort zone we are in. Then we become complacent. We might be satisfied with
the current situation, and stop ourselves from reaching our potential. To
understand our potential is a journey of uncertainty, sometime we have to
experience failures to know our limit. There are also times that we need to
work hard to have a breakthrough in our life. After all, being faithful is to
try our best. Only if we try, we would know what we are capable of. We are all
created by God in God’s own image. The best way to understand our own potential
is to ask our creator. The journey of understanding ourselves is also a journey
to understand God, and we are able to have a glimpse of his plan for us. Only
if we understand ourselves through the love of God, we would truly be faithful
to the purpose God has given to each one of us.
The second basic thing we need to learn is to pay
attention to the small detail. When
I first became a Christian, I have liked this verse. Verse 10 “One who is
faithful in a very little is also faithful in much”. It became my serving
spirit. I started to pay attention to small detail, things that people don’t
see, and do things that people in the church do not like to do. For example,
arranging the seats in the church. I remember in my church, we used to have
paper rulers of 14.5 inches help to arranging the seats. My church is much
bigger than KUC, we have around 600 seats in the church. and that 14.5 inches
ruler is the distance between the two chairs. I remember, after every prayer
meeting, I will be helping to measure if all chairs in the church are placed
exactly 14.5 inches away from each other. It sounds crazy in KUC where we are
more casual with how the pews are arranged, but it helps me a lot, I started to
see things that people used to miss and by doing the least thing in the church,
I had the opportunity to know more about the church and how things work. Only
if you are faithful to small things, people would find you trustworthy and
reliable. From little things, people can tell what kind of a person you are. I
am still learning to pay attention to small detail, like how I talk and how I
live my life when there is no one seeing me. These are the fundamentals in our
life, and I believe if we have a good foundation, we would grow higher and
firmer.
Finally, the third basic thing is our motive. The motive of us managing wealth, or time, or our
life is to serve God and His people. In verse 13 it says, “No servant can serve
two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be
devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.” As I
explain earlier, the dishonest manager was praised because he has transformed
the purpose of the unrighteous wealth. If we are serving money, then the goal
is to accumulate more of it. There can be no end. This is what it means by
worshipping money, which is to put money as the end goal. But if we are serving
God, everything, including money, would then become one of the means to serve,
for a greater and eternal purpose. It is about placing money in the right
position in our life, not too high, but not too low. When we are clear of our
motive, to recognize God as the ultimate concern in our life, we can use and
manage wealth for eternal values. Therefore, thinking about things related to
money can sometimes be very spiritual if you have a right motive. But of
course, at the end of the day, God knows our motives, for he is the one who
searches our heart and know our every thought.
Friends, sometimes we are so overwhelmed by the
things happening around us, where we have lost our focus. We may have put our
attention on the earthly/temporary/perishable things but forget about the
heavenly/imperishable things. But the parable today reminds that they are
related. The way we approach our earthly life is like a test for us. Are we
faithful to what are entrusted to us? Look at our society today, look at our
earth today, are we doing a good job being a faithful servant? We all have a
role to play, but do we know have this self-understanding to know what we can
do? and are we aware of the small things around us? There may be a lot we can
do already. Finally, we are doing all these for God, to witness his love and justice
in the world we are living in. May God help each one of us and KUC to be a
faithful servant and a faithful community. Amen.
# posted by Kowloon Union Church : Sunday, September 22, 2019
