Serving Who Truly Matters

All Saints-SC Admin
Sep 22, 2025
5 min read

15th Sunday after Pentecost - Sept 21, 2025

Rev Sarah Colvin

You can find this week's readings here.

I don’t usually do this, but first I want to give a road map of where we are going in this sermon. This sermon is in two parts. First, I want to highlight how the passage from Jeremiah and the psalm can be helpful. Second, the Gospel is confusing, so we will spend some time there, and I think land somewhere hopeful.

When I was in seminary, the second year of three, my then college-aged daughter flew home, and was admitted to Georgetown hospital very, very ill. After a brain biopsy, finally a diagnosis, high-dose steroids, and then a short stay in a rehabilitation hospital--- a month later we were discharged home. (She did entirely recover and is now 33 years old.)

I bring this up because during my daughter’s hospitalization, I remember clearly my New Testament professor telling me, “Read the psalms.” Even if you were never taught this, you know from experience in church that psalms come in different varieties: laments and praise, from individuals and from communities. You get the idea; you can find an appropriate psalm for almost anytime. The psalm for today is a community lament which followed one of the falls of Jerusalem.

I know that many (although not all) people in the congregation feel anywhere from somewhat to very dismayed at where the country is under this current presidential administration. Harming the marginalized—the cornerstone of what our Gospel tells us not to do---seems to be part of mainstream politics these days. Because news comes out so fast, I am always left with a feeling that I should address and give some sort of consolation to my people. In many ways, this isn’t rational.

Many in the country have also buried their heads in the sand hoping all the pain on so many levels will stop. And I also know that the rest of life continues as well. I don’t want to be that pastor, that priest who seems to ignore what is going on. If you feel dismay, know that I am right there with you. And because it feels overwhelming, when I turn to address it, it also feels repetitive, because it is continually overwhelming. For today, the words of consolation I can offer are the readings of Jeremiah and the psalm. Take them home and meditate on them. For background, Jeremiah was written when Judah was in exile, and the psalm with one of the falls of Jerusalem. The line in Jeremiah “My joy is gone; grief is upon me. My heart is sick.” could be translated, “I catch my breath from sorrow, my heart within me aches.” These are meditative words for when bad things happen to good people or maybe when bad things happen to anybody. Take them home, meditate on them.

Now where I find kernels of hope this week is in the Gospel, but let us just take a minute here to say that this Gospel is confusing. A great New Testament scholar Bultmann even thought that the original meaning of this passage was “irrecoverable.” (well, that’s not helpful). However, sometimes parables that Jesus tells can be allegorical (like the parable of the “lost sheep,” as though the elements in the story represent figures and processes in the real world, including the divine world), and other times they are not allegorical and definitely don’t even seem to depict good things, let alone God’s will.

So, I repeat, today’s parable is confusing. In this parable neither the rich man nor the dishonest manager or steward depict God or any moral ideals. They also do not teach honesty in employment or accuracy in accounting, but they still do have something to teach.

First, of course, we must understand the system that was at work. The rich man was probably a landowner, made rich by acquiring other people’s land. Most likely this was something like sharecropping, where the original tenants still work the land. The manager or steward oversees billing or collecting from the laborers a portion or cut for himself and for the rich man, something like rent for use of the land. We don’t really know what part of the system the steward messed up, other than the rich man was not pleased with how he was doing his job. (The Greek word means “squandered”, as was previously used in the story of the prodigal son.)

The revision of debt records by the steward was not very remarkable in itself, or particularly dishonest. He would have been expected to make such adjustments depending on harvests and other circumstances, or just his sense of what was possible, balancing the various interests to his advantage. These interactions are not, then, a convincing explanation for the label that was translated as “dishonest manager.” Perhaps he was acting against his master’s interests, but if so, the subsequent praise is what has long confused many readers. Why praise “dishonesty”? The steward is not pilfering, like some modern “manager” fudging expenses or stealing stationery.

But Jesus calls the steward “oikonomos tēs adikias” which is literally “steward [etc.] of unrighteousness,” or “of injustice”—these two negatives are the same word and concept in NT Greek. To call someone “of x” was a way of attributing some property or quality (“x”) to a person or thing, meaning it is “of” that quality. Note that Jesus then uses a similar phrase when telling the hearers what they should do with “the mammon of injustice” (or “dishonest wealth”). “Mammon” is apparently a word borrowed from Hebrew or Aramaic, and except for the “unjust” part here is a neutral term for possessions or money. The injustice or dishonesty then cannot be merely a moral quality, given that it applies to inanimate property; instead, it is assessment of the whole system in which wealth is accrued, and in which the steward is bound up. The system is unjust.

We should then consider the “injustice” of the steward not when he has his flash of opportunism, but within the whole system in which he exists. Again, the system is unjust. So, the master is praising not so much an act of dishonesty, but an act of insightful decision-making. It was not in itself less just or honest than the rest of his conduct—in fact it may have been more just, because it was favorable to the needy farmers— but it was considerably smarter and more effective than whatever had led to the scenario.

Jesus urges the use of wealth for purposes that are good in themselves, focused on human need, not on accumulation. Here Jesus is not evaluating whether the wealth was gained dishonestly, but Jesus is focusing on the difference between a whole system of wealth/ money which is unjust and instead what is truly valuable.

Saying that faithfulness in small things reflects real priorities is not so much a statement about the ethics or as indication of true character, but about how the uses of wealth—the “small” thing—reflect the service of God—the “big” thing. The passage finishes in an uncompromising way that prevents us reducing this to scruples: “you cannot serve God and Mammon.” Money is only a means and must be used, as the steward eventually did, for the ends—or people— that really matter. Money only really has any worth when it is used in service for the people.

Let us live our lives serving who truly matters, because there is no purpose otherwise. And when the world we know feels like it is on shaky ground---meditating on God’s word will help ground us, AND (not but) living as Jesus directs us will ensure we know that we are living out God’s purposes, God’s mission.

IMAGE ATTRIBUTION: Merchant taking accounts, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=55705 [retrieved September 22, 2025]. Original source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BLW_Stained_Glass_-_Roundel_showing_a_Merchant.jpg.