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“Hard Currency”
Luke 16:1-13
Pastor Ryan Landino
Calvin Presbyterian Church
Candidating Sermon
9/19/10
Luke 16:1-13
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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. 2So 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.' 3Then 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. 4I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may
welcome me into their homes.' 5So, summoning his master's debtors one by one, he asked the first, 'How much do
you owe my master?' 6He answered, 'A hundred jugs of olive oil.' He said to him, 'Take your bill, sit down quickly,
and make it fifty.' 7Then 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.' 8And 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. 9And 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.
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"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. 11If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches?
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And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? 13No 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."
Good morning. One of the best things about preaching from the lectionary is that we’ll get a
really challenging passage that I probably would never have chosen on my own. But one of the
worst things about the lectionary is that…well, we’ll get a really challenging passage that I never
would have chosen on my own.
So this week, I am blessed with the chance of losing you in the sixty seconds of my sermon.
Because what we have here is a story about money---now, I know you think you know what I’m
going to say already! Right? We already know what Jesus said about this: “Greed is bad.”
“Poverty is bad.” “Don’t let your wealth rule you.” “You can’t serve both money and God.” We
got this story figured out, right? We hear these messages so many times from the pulpit, from the
Bible, that we are already shaking our head “yes” before we are finished saying it. When I was
younger and heard these stories, I always had the picture in my head of a billionaire with a
diving board over a pool of gold coins—this kind of gospel message is for that guy. Jesus is
teaching rich people about wealth, the Pharisees, not us.
But if we are going to agree to go deeper in this story, we’ll find that this is not exactly the
message Christ has for us. In fact, if it’s this particular story, we may find ourselves getting lost
very quickly. This is one of the more confusing parables in the Gospels, with many different
interpretations for numerous verses.
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Let me first try to break this parable down with a story about my brother, Chris. I have four
brothers—Chris is eight years older than me. When Chris was in high school, he tried to
“advance” himself socially, like all of us try to do when we are in high school. Now fashions
come and go, and they each mean different things at different times. But at this time and place,
for a guy to get an earring was really cool. It made you tougher, meaner, and my brother was
interested in looking tough.
But my mother had a different opinion about his new earring. My mother basically gave him two
options to choose from: 1) “give me the earring,” or 2), “give me your car keys.” Obviously my
brother resisted this a little.
Chris had to get some perspective, really quickly. He was going to need to understand why mom
was taking such a hard stance. But all he could muster was, “This is my earring! I have a right to
wear this! How dare you do this to me?”
Mom tried to tell him patiently, “No, this doesn’t belong…to just you.” See, she had a different
understanding of belongings, of wealth, than my brother did. And Chris just didn’t get it. What
didn’t belong to him? This was his decision, his money that bought that ring, his ear he pierced.
Yet he is being accused of mismanaging what doesn’t belong to him.
Whatever this thing is that he is mismanaging, the thing that my mom could see but he could not,
I’m going to call “hard currency.” These are our true belongings that we have, our true wealth. I
call it this because, one, hard currency doesn’t have to be money; our wealth is anything we put
our trust in. Two, I’m calling it “hard” currency because it’s very hard to discern what our true
wealth actually is. This was Chris’s challenge. If he could identify what hard currency was
actually at stake with this earring, then maybe he could understand where Mom was coming
from.
The character in the parable Jesus is telling also finds himself being accused of mismanaging
what does not belong to him. This man makes a living by managing other people’s money. He is
accused of squandering a rich master’s money on things he shouldn’t have. So his master says to
1) “close your accounts, give me all your notes,” and 2) “get out, you’re fired.”
Now, when my brother Chris was accused of mishandling his “hard currency,” even if he didn’t
know what it was, he at least was given the option of giving it back to Mom, either the earring or
the car keys—he wasn’t being kicked out of the home.
But the manager accused of squandering money in this story has to decide what to do, because he
is losing income, his job, his security. We can just imagine the first century audience thinking,
“HE LOST HIS INCOME?, and he has to figure out what to do now? OH I KNOW WHAT
THAT’S LIKE!” And we can just imagine the 21st century audience thinking, “HE LOST HIS
INCOME?, and he has to figure out what to do now? OH I KNOW WHAT THAT’S LIKE!”
What is he going to do? How will he face this crisis?
He does what my brother could not do. He has to discern what his “hard currency” is, what was
truly his, and what was not. The Scripture actually shows his thought process. Paraphrasing
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here…Fact: “I don’t have a job.” Fact: “I can’t do manual labor.” Fact: “I can’t beg in the street.”
Fact: “the wealth that I have been managing is NOT mine.” Fact: “I do have some time with this
wealth before I need to leave the office.” Fact: “I can still get in touch with my clients before our
relationship ends and close my accounts with them.” Fact: “If I asked for less money than these
clients actually owe, then that would make me really popular.” Fact: “If I’m popular and people
owe me favors, then I can have some help until I find work again.”
Look how his hard currency emerges: he loses his wealth, but instead of gaining money back, he
gives it away, looking for the hard currency of friendship, security, and hospitality.
So having discerned what his hard currency actually is, what wealth he should truly value, he
goes to each of his clients and asks substantially less money than is owed. Scripture shows he
asks his clients to pay 50% less here. 20% here. Now, part of the messiness of this story is where
did that money come from? Is he still cheating the master? Is it the interest he’s forgiving? Or is
he losing his own pay, his own commission, to offer these discounts?
The reality is that it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that the rich master who was cheated
in the first place, having figured out what his manager did, was very impressed with his ability to
handle the situation. He commends him for managing his hard currency, even after he allegedly
squandered his wealth.
So Jesus presents this story to the disciples and the Pharisees as a good example of how to handle
wealth. How to discern your true wealth, your hard currency, and spend it in the right ways.
So in essence, Jesus is actually holding up someone accused of cheating with wealth as a positive
example of using wealth—did I mention this was a difficult parable?
Let’s come back to my brother’s example. My brother was not commended for handling his
“wealth” well at all. Unlike the manager, he couldn’t discern what his hard currency is—he
could identify say his ear, his money that paid for the ring, and his right to express himself as a
part of his wealth.
But what was Chris’ real “hard currency,” what should he really have held as valuable?
Let’s go through the same exercise that the manager in the story goes through as he discerns his
true hard currency. Notice that the wealth God calls us to manage cannot exclude money—we
need to be careful never to spiritualize wealth to the point where Jesus isn’t talking about money.
Now, my brother Chris’ earring was paid by allowance given to him from when we were going
through some rough times financially as a family. Six kids, one in college with two on the way,
and my dad was still out of work while my mom was doing her Ph.D. There were countless other
things we actually could have spent that money on, my school lunch money among them. So the
money itself is part of the hard currency that was mismanaged.
But more importantly, Chris has a mother who cares for him. A mother who is worried about
him. A mother who worries that by him trying to look tougher, he is getting the attention of the
bad crowd that is creeping into the neighborhood from the next city over. This is a mother who
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worries that his little brothers are going to be affected by Chris’ willingness to look tough. My
mother knew far too well how much influence older siblings have, the influence that something
like this would have on us.
What Chris was mismanaging, then, the hard currency he could not identify, was our mother’s
care for our family, his power and influence as older sibling, and perhaps even our security.
But Chris didn’t see that as his “hard currency.” All he saw was he was being deprived of his
wealth. Because he couldn’t see it, he mismanaged it.
Jesus wants us to manage our wealth well. This includes our money, but it also includes the other
“hard currency”, those things that we don’t identify immediately as our wealth!
Jesus says something really hard to hear in verse 8. He says, “the children of this age are better at
dealing with their wealth with their own generation than are the children of the light.” In other
words, we could paraphrase that people outside the walls of the church know better how to
manage their wealth, than Christians know how to handle their “hard currency.”
So how do we discern what our hard currency actually is? How do we discern our true wealth?
Scripture can really help us. We tithe to the church not only our money, but our selves, our gifts,
our passions, our lives. Everything that comes from God and was given to us specifically by God
is our wealth. There are preachers in this country who proclaim that God promises to make us
wealthy. This is true depending on your definition of wealth. If we are led to think that the more
faith we have, then the more money we’ll own, then we miss entirely what God’s wealth actually
is.
So what has God entrusted you? What has God blessed you with? I can say that I have been
blessed and entrusted with a beautiful wife and two wonderful rescue dogs. And, dare I say, in
the spirit of today’s event of my candidating sermon to be your pastor, perhaps we, my family
and your family, are being entrusted to each other.
This is the kind of perspective that God calls us as Christians to have. To be able to identify our
“hard currency” and be wise in how we manage it. Because if we recognize that our true wealth,
our hard currency, actually comes from God, then we will see that even we are God’s wealth. As
children of God, we are God’s own wealth, God’s own treasures. And God really treasures his
wealth. Because he treasures us, his wealth, God gave us who we are, and what we will be, as a
trust to spend well.
This passage tells us that God wants to give us true riches, true wealth. He gives us the ultimate
wealth, his son Jesus Christ. Each Sunday, we thank God for the true riches in Jesus Christ. The
true riches of forgiveness, a relationship with God. The gift of hope in our future. He gives us the
wealth of heaven. He gives us the Holy Spirit to guide us. He gives us the gift of each other. We
Christians are called to define wealth based on God’s perspective, not the world’s, and see how
wealthy we actually are.
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So how have you been spending God’s hard currency? Are you living into your faith? Are you
spending your time with Christ as wisely as possible? Are you enjoying every moment with your
family, using the wealth of time God gave you for the glory of God? Look at how we thank God
for our gifts of wealth: “God has blessed me with two wonderful children.” “God has graced us
with this meal.” “God has delivered his people.” This is Christian hard currency, and the
appropriate response to it.
The alternative is to make the mistake of thinking it is your money to spend on that “earring,”
your body to do with as you will, your right to irresponsibly express yourself without care for
how it might affect others.
If we go this route, then we think that God’s wealth is OUR wealth. The final verses of our
passage give us a warning. If we think it is we who own this wealth, our wealth begins to own us.
We begin to treasure what we treasure, not what God treasures. Jesus tells us in verse 11 that if
we can’t be trusted with a little wealth, how can we be trusted to have more?
I’ll close with a glimpse of how easy it is to buy into wealth that really has no value to us as
Christians. Look at these messages that assail us every day:
The Gospel of McDonalds proclaims “What you want is what you get.”
The Apostle Burger King tells us to “have it your way, right away.”
Nike makes it okay to lower our inhibitions and, “Just do it.”
Our body is such a temple to Wendy’s that we can “Do what tastes right.”
We offer comfort that God is in control of our lives when we have a British Gas
Company slogan that says, “Don’t you just love being in control?”
6. It is Pepsi, not the Church, that is “the choice of a new generation.”
7. We look to the Holy Spirit to lead us into the future, but Ford sells us cars saying
“Everything we do is driven by you.”
8. We have a New York Stock Exchange says more confidently than we can as the
Presbyterian Church can that “the World puts its stock in us.”
9. While Coco-Cola makes us believe that it is the “The Real Thing,”
10. Nokia takes responsibility for “connecting people.”
11. We are told that “The happiest place on earth” is Disneyland.
12. It is the Sylvania light bulbs company that claims it can make us “See the world in a new
light.”
13. According to society’s wealth, “The best part of waking up” … is Folgers coffee in your
cup.
14. “Nothing comes between me and my ____” God?” Nope. “Calvin Klein jeans.”
15. We proclaim that Jesus is Risen! while General Electric has the power to “bring good
things to life.”
16. “You’re in good hands with___? Christ? Nope. “All State”
17. The slogan, “The taste of paradise” belongs not to the Kingdom of Heaven, but to Bounty
Paper Towels.
18. The slogan, “has it changed your life yet?” is not about the Bible but Compaq computers.
19. Dr. Pepper promises us that that it is “good for life”
20. And Gillette is “the best a man can get”
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21. Loreal says “because your worth it” if you buy their cosmetics
22. as the slogan “Lets make things better” rallies us together to buy things from Phillips.
This is not the kind of currency that is spent in the kingdom of heaven.
So what is your true wealth?
What is your hard currency?
Jesus uses the example of a man who was stripped of his wealth so he could show us what true
wealth is, and how to manage it. Jesus tells us to “Use my wealth, my Holy Spirit, my riches, the
riches of a community gathered in my name—use them just as well.”
So let us go “count our currency.” Let’s recognize our blessings and all that Christ has given us.
Let us remember who our hard currency really belongs to. Let us not be distracted by what we
find wonderful, shiny, or valuable, but see the world through the eyes of Christ, and discern well
the hard currency we are meant to have and share with the world.