The Defecting Manager

Having a balance scale up here is a good visual for these Scripture readings today—what does it mean to have a world in balance?  Of course we don’t use scales like this in the marketplace; that isn’t how things are bought or sold, where the weight of the thing we’re buying equals the weight of the coin money piled up on the other side. 

But the relationship between the buyer and the seller is the same—am I getting a good value for whatever I’m paying for?  And in these days of invisible transactions—using credit cards or ordering items online without even seeing them first—am I even getting what I’m paying for? 

In our first reading, from the Hebrew Scriptures, Amos the prophet indicates that God can see what humans are up to when we’re cheating one another.  Cheating is wrong because it diminishes trust, which diminishes relationships, which makes us unable to care for each other. 

This goes for services as well as goods.  Examples abound, but consider the trust that was broken whenever those of us in the city of St. Louis faithfully separated out our recyclable materials, put it into the blue bins in the alley, and then saw garbage trucks going down the alley and emptying the recycle bins into the same trucks as the regular garbage was going into, all of it trucked to a landfill and none of it recycled.  We were trying to do the right thing, trying to recycle, and thinking we were paying for recycling, and it turned out we weren’t.  Our trust was damaged. 

There are forces that bring people together, like kinship, ethnicity, religion, local culture—these things that we broadly call “community.” And then there are forces that pull people apart, like greed and economic systems that contribute to inequality. 

Ched Myers talks about the struggle between the Great Economy symbolized by manna[1] like the people of God ate while in the wilderness, where God provides for humans everything that is needed, and the little economy symbolized by mammon, the word translated as “wealth” when Jesus says in this Gospel lesson “You cannot serve God and wealth.”  I’ve talked about the great economy and the little economy earlier this year—I have some flyers in the back that outline the values of each of these economies, along with a Bible passage from Luke’s Gospel about loving one’s enemies, which is always good to review. 

Myers writes:

“In a world on the edge of a nervous breakdown from global social disparity and ecological overshoot, Luke’s Jesus calls us to a discipleship of recovering, rebuilding, and advocating for community amidst the ever more insatiable, predatory, and destructive power of capital.”[2]

In the parable from the Gospel lesson today, Jesus is speaking to his disciples, themselves a mixed group whose employment represented a variety of fields.  Maybe kinda like us.  And Jesus tells this parable that’s often referred to as “the dishonest manager,” and we get confused by it because why would someone lie and isn’t lying wrong? 

Ched Myers calls this parable the tale of the “defect-ive manager” because the manager is defecting from his social class, disobeying the social rules that would tell him where his allegiance lies—this manager is caught between the great economy where everyone has what they need, and the little economy where the rich man is the boss and money is the only force to be served.  Myers writes:

“For modern managerial class folk, this story scenario might be analogized to that of a mid-level supervisor in a large corporation.  Just as he is about to be down-sized because of below-expected sales numbers, he ventures an act of resistance that he hopes will ingratiate him to clients who in turn will offer him hospitality.  This is an attempt to defect to the relational economy that survives just below the surface of the Master’s system that is about to disenfranchise him.  I propose this manager as the protagonist of this parable, and as an archetype for those of us who are ensnared in the toxic and oppressive imperatives of plantation capitalism.  His efforts to use the resources at his command to rebuild social relations represent an improvisational embrace of Sabbath Economics meant to animate the imaginations of all of us similarly squeezed.”[3]

Does anyone else ever feel this way, caught between economies, wondering who you’re actually serving?  Well then pay attention because this parable might just be for you.  This defecting manager is actually the hero in this story, and I’m going to tell you why. 

First of all, when Jesus says “There was a rich man…” this isn’t just any wealthy person.  We’re talking obscenely wealthy.  Go ahead and picture the richest person on earth, you can probably think of someone.  Don’t assume they got all their wealth through fair or just means.  If they lost half of all their wealth, it would not impact their quality of life at all and you wouldn’t even feel sad for them.  So that’s the master in the parable, an obscenely wealthy rich man. 

He has a manager who is accused of “squandering” the rich man’s property—the Greek word used here is the word that means “scatter.”  It’s enough to simply be accused—the rich man doesn’t even give the manager a chance to speak for himself, just hand over the books and clear out your office, you’re done here.  Anyone who has ever been fired or downsized or otherwise lost their job, a shiver just went down your spine because you know what this feels like. 

Now the manager here has choices to make: who will he serve?  Will he remain faithful to this master who just fired him?  Will he be so faithful to the economic system that he lets himself be paralyzed by shame, feeling unworthy?  Or will he consider how to be faithful to God?  What does God have to do with employment or unemployment anyway? 

Myers speaks of the culture in Jesus’s time:

“This literate bureaucratic class had a tenuous existence: they had to ensure exorbitant profits for the master through merciless resource extraction and labor exploitation while at the same time maintaining working relations with peasant producers and competitive merchants.  As [Biblical scholar William] Herzog puts it, such a manager was forever ‘caught in the crossfire between the master’s greed and excessive demands…and the tenants’ or debtors’ endless complaints.’  This is where the broad analogy with we who are middle-class, educated folks applies: like this oikonomos [the household mentioned in the story], we are privileged people who are nevertheless subservient to an economic system that both benefits and dehumanizes them.  While most of Jesus’s parables feature subjects who are either peasants (as protagonists) or elites (as antagonists), this story uniquely addresses people like us.”[4]

A middle manager accused of scattering the wealth of a rich master decides to, in Myers’ words, “defect from his patron’s world, in which all social relations are cannibalized in service of accumulating wealth for the elite.  His strategy is to intensify what he has already begun, hoping that by scattering assets he will be welcomed back into the older village-based ethos of generalized reciprocity, mutual aid, and hospitality.”[5]

So what does the manager do?  He quickly summons his master’s debtors one by one, so they cannot compare notes with each other.  He asks how much they owe, because he no longer has access to the books.  And he doesn’t erase the entire debt, just the part of the debt that would count as hidden interest, which would represent the master’s profit margin. 

Now if your ears are attuned to Jesus’s parables, you know there’s a rule of three—you’d expect there would be three debtors mentioned here, but this time it’s only two.  Because the real punchline of the story is where the master “commends his feral ex-manager”[6] for essentially making the master look good publicly—the clients are happy, now the master is a local hero.  In their world, the master would never reverse the debt write-off because he must save face and keep his honor; otherwise the whole system would be in crisis. 

As for us, we can recognize a system in crisis because, uh, we might just be living through it.  We can look around us and see there is no end to greed, though there is an end to human life—not a one of us, rich or poor, will live forever in this mortal body.  So who will we serve in the meantime?  What’s the point of all this?  What will we do with, in Mary Oliver’s words, our one wild and precious life?[7] 

Jesus is trying to teach us to use what we have for the good of building community rather than tearing it down.  Not all of us have extreme wealth, nor even access to extreme wealth like the defect-ing manager from the parable, but we all have something we can use to create community.  How will you use what you have?  And how will you use what you have to serve God? 

Whatever you have—talent, business smarts, anything our culture might call “marketable skills”—how can you use that to serve God?  How can you make life better for someone else?  How can you build a community of love, marked by generosity and welcome?  Those are the real riches in this life. 

God has given to humans everything we need, and the sun shines on everybody—people with lots of money and people with no money—and the rain falls on everybody too.  God’s goodness is proved throughout creation, yet our culture teaches us to look at creation as products to be sold, look at all this stuff I can monetize, how can I make money off this? How can I fence this off and keep wealth for myself even though it’s meant for everybody? This is how our world is thrown out of balance. 

Can we be faithful with the riches God has entrusted to us?  Perhaps we start by recognizing what riches surround us, first of all, and what power we actually do have.  May the Holy Spirit remind us of this, even when we go to our jobs. 

Amen. 

Pastor Cheryl

[1] Exodus 16

[2] Ched Myers, Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke’s Jesus and Sabbath Economics, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2025, page 152.

[3] Myers 154.

[4] Myers 156.

[5] Ibid 156-7.

[6] Myers 157.

[7] https://www.loc.gov/programs/poetry-and-literature/poet-laureate/poet-laureate-projects/poetry-180/all-poems/item/poetry-180-133/the-summer-day/