Greetings!

The cost of living in our area is something that I hear people talking about all the time. Money is on our minds a lot! How much things cost, what we choose to include in our budgets, how we often don’t have enough to feel like we’re making it. We have a lot of concerns about money. How we choose to use our money says a lot – about us, and about the things we choose to spend it on.

This Sunday we’re going to look at a reading where Jesus is again talking about money. But this story is a complicated one! There’s a dishonest manager who angers a rich man. There are shady dealings with dishonest wealth. It ends with a commendation of behavior that we’re not sure we would call good!

I hope you’ll join us as we dig into this text, and think about the role of money and other resources in our lives.

Peace,

Hardy

Theme for Sunday

“We can use our resources and our access to resources to build relationships or to destroy them, to help people or to hurt them. Jesus observes that the children of this world often understand the significance of wealth better than those in the religious community do. Worldly people know that they can use resources to gain friends or to lose them, to make a place for people or to shut the door on them.”

      ―Christine D. Pohl, “Profit and Loss,”

The Christian Century

Luke 16:1-13

Then Jesus said to the disciples, “There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. So he summoned him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.’ Then the manager said to himself, ‘What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’ So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’ Then he asked another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘A hundred containers of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill and make it eighty.’ And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes. “Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”