Finding God in our Stories

Sermon for North Hill, September 6, 2009
Text: Luke 16:1-15

On the face of it, Jesus’ story about a crooked manager is outrageous. The manager rips off the rancher he works for. The owner congratulates the crook for his cunning. In Jesus’ telling of the story the crook does not apologize or make amends, instead Jesus simply segues from the owner’s congratulation to a spiritual point the story is supposed to illustrate.

More than one church member has insisted I offer some intelligible reason for Jesus’ use of this story. So here is my take on “The Unrighteous Steward.”

First the story as Jesus told it:

Jesus told his disciples: "There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions. So he called him in and confronted him, 'What’s this I hear? Give an account of your management, because you cannot be manager any longer.'

"The manager said to himself, 'What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job. I'm not strong enough to dig, and I'm ashamed to beg. I know what I'll do so that, when I lose my job here, people will welcome me into their houses.'

He called in each of his master's debtors. He asked the first, “How much do you owe?”

“Eight hundred gallons of olive oil,” he replied.
The manager told him, “Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it four hundred.”

He asked the second, “How much do you owe?”
"A thousand bushels of wheat,” he replied.
He told him, “Take your bill and make it eight hundred.”

The master commended the dishonest manager on his cunning. For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light. I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.


Jesus is quite explicit in stating “the moral of the story:” use money to bless people because this kind of money management brings eternal benefits. We might puzzle over exactly how to implement this teaching, but the basic exhortation is clear.

I explored this idea in last week’s sermon. “Spiritual things” like the Bible, prayer and going to church are not the only tools for building a vital spiritual life. Secular things, worldly things–like money–are no less useful as tools for crafting spiritual life. You want to get ready for heaven? Don’t limit yourself to prayer, Bible study and going to church. Understand that money is a spiritual tool. What we do with our money affects others. It makes an eternal difference. The way we manage money expresses and shapes the very core of our being.

This spiritual lesson from the story does not address the question posed to me on the way out of church last week: why Jesus would tell such a story in the first place? Surely he could have come up with a story with more noble protagonists. Why use a story of scandalous money management to make his point about the wise use of money?


First, Jesus’ use of this story highlights the importance of what he was trying to get across. Jesus used a shocking story to introduce his point because he wanted to make sure no one missed it. He wanted to make sure he had EVERYONE’s attention. He wanted to make sure they would not forget it.

They didn’t.

We’re still talking about it.

Second, Jesus’ use of this story offers fantastic hope to all of us. No matter how inglorious our story, God can still use it. In fact, God needs our story to finish telling his story.


The story of Bob Pierce is full of inspiration. In 1947 he traveled to China as a missionary with Youth for Christ. He was fiery evangelist . . . and a highly effective one. Thousands of people crowded his meetings and were baptized.

One morning he was confronted by Miss Tena Hoelkedoer, a local missionary who was the principal of a mission school. It was easy for him to preach about Jesus, she said, but what was he going to do about White Jade? White Jade was a young student who had attended Pierce’s meetings. The night before she had been so inspired she went home and told her father that she was going to become a Christian. Her father beat her severely and threw her out of the house with threats of severe harm if she ever returned. White Jade dragged herself to the mission. The principal was already housing six orphans in her home she could not afford to feed another.

Pierce gave Miss Hoelkedoer, his last five dollars and promised to send her more money every month. It was the first spark of a personal vision that would eventually encompass the world.

After that preaching tour in China, Bob Pierce went to Korea. Starvation was everywhere. Children without fathers. Wives without husbands. Bob bought a movie camera and filmed the desperate need of the people, then came back to the US and toured the country showing his pictures in churches and pleading with American Christians to help those who were less fortunate.

Bob’s solidarity with the hurting of the world was irresistible. When he talked, you felt the pain of the world. That empathy, that deep connection with the hungry and orphaned and widowed, became the foundation of World Vision. From its birth in 1950, World Vision has grown into an international aid agency helping people in over 100 countries with over 30,000 staff. They assist 100 million people a year.

It’s a fantastic story. But to keep it fully inspirational, you have to edit carefully. If you tell all of Bob Pierce’s story, it sounds a lot like the story of the Unrighteous Steward.

Bob, the man with deep empathy for the world’s needy, was possessed by a fierce temper. He got into frequent angry confrontations with his board. He neglected his family, spending as much as ten months at a time away from home traveling. He justified this neglect saying, "I've made an agreement with God that I'll take care of his helpless little lambs overseas if he'll take care of mine at home." It didn’t quite work that way. He was alienated from his daughters. One of his daughters committed suicide after futilely begging him to come home from an extended trip in Asia. He and wife eventually separated.

He reconciled with his family four days before his death. A nice touch. But given his raging temper, his willfulness, and his deeply entrenched pattern of deliberately neglecting his family, I can’t help wondering how long the reconciliation would have lasted if he had stayed alive.

To put it simply, on a global stage Bob Pierce was a grand, larger-than-life humanitarian. On the smaller stages of home and office, he was a jerk.

World Vision would not exist if Bob had not been such a fanatically driven evangelist. His daughter may not have committed suicide if her father had been more appropriately attentive to his family. Bob Pierce’s story is full of glory and venality, nobility and pettiness. Contradictions.

Like your story.

Maybe that’s why Jesus told this story.

He could have used a story with more noble characters in it. He could have explicitly stated his disapproval of the crook’s business methods. Instead, Jesus took the story as it was–the record of a crooked business manager–and made it an integral part of his teaching ministry.

If Jesus could use that crooks’ story, he can use your story.

Here in our congregation, we have experienced failure. Our stories are not neat records of uninterrupted growth in grace.

Some of us have failed in our marriages. Many of us are divorced. Many of us have participated in conflict and estrangement in marriages that have not outwardly disintegrated. Still God includes our stories in his grand story.

Some of us have experienced failure in our relationships with our parents or our children. At times those failures may tempt us to consider ourselves useless for God’s service. Not so. God is still writing in your story. Invite him to use even your failures to accomplish something good.

Some of us have wasted far too many years in addictions. We are positive our stories are worthless. Unbroken records of failure after failure after failure. That’s not the way God sees it.

A friend of mine used to do meth. For years. At one time he filmed part of his life in addiction, thinking maybe the footage could be used in a documentary to help persuade young people not to follow him into the horrific nightmare his life had become.

Some of us have failed in our work. We’ve been fired or downsized.

Some of us have lost our faith.

Some of us have lost our minds.

Some of us cannot seem to escape the pit of self-pity. We know we should be overflowing with gratitude and joy for the privileges that are ours. Instead we whine and moan over the people and circumstances that annoy us as though we had a right to live in a world perfectly aligned with our desires.

Our stories are useless. At least that’s what we’re tempted to think.

The truth is your story is indispensable to Jesus. He cannot say everything he wants to say without telling your story.

Jesus redeems our stories. Even our failures, blunders, acts of rebellion are somehow rewoven into the grand design of God so that they take on a dignity utterly indiscernible when we first wrote them by our decisions and habits. We are crooks, jerks, clumsy blunders. And we are the protagonists, the exemplars, the heroes in the grand story of God.