Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost September 21, 2025

Prayer of the Day
God among us, we gather in the name of your Son to learn love for one another. Keep our feet from evil paths. Turn our minds to your wisdom and our hearts to the grace revealed in your Son, Jesus Christ, our Saviour and Lord. Amen.

Luke 16:1-13
1 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. 2 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.’ 3 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. 4 I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’ 5 So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ 6 He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’ 7 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.’ 8 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. 9 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.

10 “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. 11 If, then, you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? 12 And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? 13 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.”

Reflections— Once upon a time there was a loan shark whose enforcer started skimming from his boss. He gets caught. Gets sacked. Vinnie’s a quick thinker, see so he goes to the debtors and doesn’t let on he’s been sacked, see. Vinnie decides he needs these people, so he makes like his boss sent him with an attractive lower interest offer on their debts. Badda-bing, badda boom, it works! It works so good that the even loan shark is impressed. Not that Vinnie gets his job back…..

That little story is in essence the one Jesus tells….In Moses’ day and in Jesus’ day there were cultural and religious objections to charging interest; especially to poorer people. These folk knew the stories about rigged games like the one the prophet Amos railed on about some 800 years before Jesus tells the loan shark story. They likely had personal history in which so-called rent capitalism a scheme that reduced indebted small time farmers to sharecroppers and eventually to slaves working their own land to pay off unpayable debts.

Remember who’s telling the story here and bear in mind we’re hearing it in Luke’s Gospel; you know the one where Jesus’ mother sings about tyrants being toppled and the poor receiving good things while the rich are sent away empty? You know Mary’s boy telling people to stop building bigger barns and to sell their baubles and toys and give the proceeds to the poor? Sometimes people of faith take the hint.

Once upon a time, a church in the U.S. (it turns out that multiple churches did this) got fed up with payday loan companies charging their neighbours 400 percent interest. Know what the church did? They raised money and paid off the pay day lenders to stop the interest racking up and to give folk a fresh start. Guess what? The payday loan companies didn’t like it because even though repayment money came in, money that ultra compounded interest money didn’t anymore.

It should bother us that the nice cashier at Walmart makes about 29,000 US while their CEP took home 27.4 million. Journalist Julia Conley does the math for us that’s a 930 to one gap! The barista at Starbucks needs to work for 6,000 years to earn the same pay their CEO took home in 2024.

Again the church weighs in….Pope Leo writes in the Catholic outlet Crux that “CEOs that 60 years ago might have been making four to six times more than what the workers are receiving… it’s [now] 600 times more than the average workers are receiving,”

“Yesterday, the news that Elon Musk is going to be the first trillionaire in the world: What does that mean and what’s that about?” he added. “If that is the only thing that has value anymore, then we’re in big trouble.” Pope Leo must have heard Jesus say we can’t serve God and the money scheme at the same time. Thank God some are listening!