Pentecost 15C (Luke 16:1-13)

​In today's parable, Jesus presents us with a dishonest manager facing lay-off. Accused of squandering his employer's property, he knows his career is over. But rather than despair, he acts with remarkable strategic clarity.

The manager makes three shrewd assessments: First, he accurately recognizes his dire situation. Second, he understands that his current employer won't rehire him. Third, he realizes his best hope lies with his employer's debtors—those who might offer him future employment. Clever!

His solution is ingenious: he reduces what the debtors owe, likely forgiving accumulated interest while preserving the principal. This creates goodwill without actually costing his employer money, ensuring continued cash flow. The employer, surprisingly, praises this shrewd action.

What drives the manager's discernment? A single, clarifying question: "What matters most?" Facing professional death, he sees clearly. Money becomes merely a tool for securing his future, not an end in itself.

This crisis reveals Jesus' deeper teaching: "If you have not been faithful with dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches?... You cannot serve God and wealth."

But what does faithfulness with "dishonest wealth" actually mean? Surely Jesus isn't advocating for better financial planning or stock market success. The answer lies in the manager's transformative moment of crisis.

The manager's impending career death awakens him to what truly matters. This is Jesus' profound insight: the reality of death—whether literal, professional, or spiritual—strips away illusions and reveals priorities with startling clarity.

Death is the great equalizer, coming to all without discrimination. Yet we often treat it as someone else's reality, not our own. As your priest, I believe we must engage more honestly with mortality—not as morbid fascination, but as a pathway to authentic living.

Meditation on death need not depress us; rather, it cultivates gratitude and humility about life itself. We too easily assume our daily existence simply continues naturally, forgetting life's unpredictable turns.
In meditation, we actually practice dying. We focus on breath—our most fundamental life source—while cutting away mental noise in silence. This mirrors our dying moment: facing the end of our plans and possibilities, stripped to essentials.

Our Christian tradition embraces this wisdom. In Compline, which means completion, the church's final daily prayer, we use the language of sleep as death's metaphor: "Guide us waking, O Lord, and guard us sleeping; that awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace."

The popular saying "You only live once" (YOLO) misses the mark twice. The first mistake is that we live every day, every moment—but we die only once. The second mistake which applies to us as Christians is that we not only live every day but also die every night. So that our every day and night is consisted of death and resurrection.

Daily contemplation of mortality makes us faithful with "dishonest wealth"—whatever we're tempted to serve instead of God. When we truly grasp our finite nature, we naturally prioritize what matters most over what merely glitters temporarily.

This practice of dying isn't meant to leave us in despair, but to prepare us for resurrection. We die daily to false securities so we might rise with Christ, discovering what it means to serve God rather than wealth, to choose eternal treasures over temporary ones.

The dishonest manager, facing his crisis, chose wisely. When we face our mortality honestly, we too can choose what matters most—not just once, but every day we're given to live.