Parable of the Shrewd Manager--Soviet Style (Luke 16:1-13)

The Parable of the Shrewd Manager (Luke 16:1-13) for Sunday, Sept 22, 2019

I received an email a few days ago from a former Princeton Seminary student who had been the coordinator for the Princeton Globalization Project at the seminary for which I was a consultant and speaker. Now a pastor in North Carolina, she was preparing her sermon for Sunday on the lectionary gospel reading—Luke 16:1-13--which is the Parable of the Shrewd Manager. Her email read in part:

“I want to tell the story you told at the Princeton Youth Forum about your work in the Soviet Union [in 1995]... You shared that your organization had to work with the young Russian mob to get the medicine to the people who needed it.  I'm preaching on the parable of the Dishonest [Shrewd] Manager and how Jesus is telling us to be wise...but to use it for good...which I thought you did.”

She was trying to remember a story I told over 20 years ago about my own shrewdness in asking members of a local mafia to help us deliver a container of emergency food and relief supplies in the mid 1990’s after the fall of the Soviet Union. 

The relief and development organization I was working with at the time had a single mission project to distribute nutritional food aid to displaced and marginalized Armenians living in Soviet Azerbaijan. My partner and I traveled to Baku for a complex assessment, partnership and planning.  Within the week we had to make a judgment call about whom to trust with the food distribution.  

We first met with the Soviet-style government officials and military officers who are typically tasked with such foreign aid.  We also met some young businessmen who operated outside the System, buying and selling goods on the black market as part of a local Mafia. As ‘gate-keepers’ and ‘movers and shakers’, they became our hosts, demonstrating their connections and interests to help us with our mission (and presumably to take some credit for the getting foreign aid to the recipients). 

So we lined up the various characters we met that week in our imagination and asked ourselves: Not “who do we trust?” But “who do we trust the most, here and now, to get this food to those poor families?” The answer was—the mafia guys over the more corrupt government officials. So, as shrewd managers, we decided to work outside the system and trust the equally shrewd young mafia dudes to get the job done.   And they did. 

 I hope this old story helped her preach her sermon on Sunday. It’s a difficult parable Jesus told and hard to preach on.  Such is the value of lectionary preaching.  Makes us think about texts we tend to avoid.

Coincidentally, I was in Oxford last week researching CS Lewis archives for original unpublished material and found 3 pages of omitted material from his published manuscript “Letters to Malcolm”. Those 3 pages were on his interpretation of the Parable of “The Unjust Steward.” But that’s a topic for another post…