9/21/25 Sermon

I’m sure I’ve talked about Dr. Ross MacKenzie to you a few times by now. When someone shapes your faith as deeply as he shaped mine, their stories tend to resurface. And this morning, his words came back to me as I wrestled with today’s scripture. He was a church history professor at Union where I went to seminary.  But I never had him as a teacher.  When I met him, he’d already left Union and was the director of the department of Religion in Chautauqua.

He’s this really fantastic, wonderful Scottish man who has the most beautiful brogue and is exactly what you’d picture a Scottish theologian to be.  He totally looks like he could have hung out with CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien down to the tweed jacket and bow tie.  In fact, Dr. MacKenzie was the reason I went to Union.  I was originally going to go to Harvard Divinity - mainly so I could say I was a Harvard man.  I’m not sure I would have really fit the mold of what that looks like.  I think they just liked my name.

But I was told by the committee on Preparation for Ministry in my Presbytery at the time that I had to go to a Presbyterian Seminary.  They didn’t like me.  It’s a long story I’ll tell you another time. So, Dr. MacKenzie in his beautiful Scottish accent told me I was going to go to Union where he taught and I think partly because of his accent, I just agreed.

The best part was hearing stories about he and his wife from the faculty who used to work with him.  Like the time one very conservative spouse of a professor ran a red light and crashed in front of Dr. MacKenzie’s house.  Flora, his wife was working in the garden and ran to see if the woman was all right.  The spouse of the other teacher said, “Oh thank God!  Jesus had his hand on the wheel!” To which Flora responded, “Well next time tell him to put his foot on the break!”

A story I heard about Dr. MacKenzie that I don’t know if it’s true but I hope it is, is that when he was a young boy going to grammar school in Scotland, his teacher was asking the kids in the class to stand up and say something that they learned over the weekend.  Young Ross MacKenzie stood up at his turn and told his teacher he’d learned that there was a man named Jonah who was swallowed by a whale and three days later was spit up alive on the shore. The teacher apparently scolded him and told him that was impossible.  No one could be swallowed up by a whale and live. It’s ridiculous.

Well, Dr. MacKenzie said, I learned it in Sunday school, it’s in the Bible, and I believe it. The teacher told him he could believe any stupid thing he wanted but it just wasn’t true.  It was impossible.  And then the teacher asked him, “How do you think that could even happen.”  To which Dr Mackenzie who was like 8 or 9 at the time said, “When I get to heaven, I’ll ask Jonah how it happen.”  And the teacher said, “What if Jonah’s in Hell?” And he said, “Then YOU can ask him…”

By the time I met Dr. MacKenzie, he was no literalist when it came to that story.  But he taught me something important about reading scripture.  He said to subvert all belief.  Forget everything you’ve learned and everything you think you know about whatever scripture you’re studying and try to read it each time as though it were your first time and start asking questions from there.  The first step he said, was to forget chapter and verse numbers and titles of sections in the Bible.  They were all added a long time after it was written and was someone’s best guess.  Make up your own mind, he told me.

That advice is especially important when we come to today’s Scripture—Luke 16:1–13. The parable of the dishonest, or perhaps shrewd, manager. It’s One of Jesus’ strangest and most unsettling stories. Let us now listen to the word of God as we find it in Luke 16:1-13

Jesus also said to the disciples, “A certain rich man heard that his household manager was wasting his estate. He called the manager in and said to him, ‘What is this I hear about you? Give me a report of your administration because you can no longer serve as my manager.’

 “The household manager said to himself, What will I do now that my master is firing me as his manager? I’m not strong enough to dig and too proud to beg.  I know what I’ll do so that, when I am removed from my management position, people will welcome me into their houses.

 “One by one, the manager sent for each person who owed his master money. He said to the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’  He said, ‘Nine hundred gallons of olive oil.’ The manager said to him, ‘Take your contract, sit down quickly, and write four hundred fifty gallons.’  Then the manager said to another, ‘How much do you owe?’ He said, ‘One thousand bushels of wheat.’ He said, ‘Take your contract and write eight hundred.’

 “The master commended the dishonest manager because he acted cleverly. People who belong to this world are more clever in dealing with their peers than are people who belong to the light.  I tell you, use worldly wealth to make friends for yourselves so that when it’s gone, you will be welcomed into the eternal homes.

 “Whoever is faithful with little is also faithful with much, and the one who is dishonest with little is also dishonest with much.  If you haven’t been faithful with worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches?  If you haven’t been faithful with someone else’s property, who will give you your own?  No household servant can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be loyal to the one and have contempt for the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”

WORD OF THE LORD

What do we do with a story like that? It’s not “consider the lilies.” It’s not “let tomorrow worry about itself.” Instead, it’s this morally confusing story where a dishonest manager is somehow praised. And if we follow Dr. MacKenzie’s advice—subvert our assumptions—what we start to see is this: Jesus isn’t holding up dishonesty, but resourcefulness. The man suddenly realizes money and privilege can do more than just serve himself. It can create relationships. It can build trust. It can secure a future—not just for him, but for those around him.

And then Jesus presses the point: if even worldly people know how to use wealth to build community, how much more should children of light know how to use what they’ve been given for God’s kingdom?

Dr. MacKenzie once gave me a book that shaped my life: Dynamics of Faith by Paul Tillich. Tillich defines faith as ultimate concern. Whatever occupies the center of your life—your decisions, your loyalty, your energy—that’s what you have faith in. And for most of us, that ends up being things that aren’t ultimate at all. We make them little gods. Money, reputation, comfort, status—these become our masters.

Jesus says the same thing: you cannot serve two masters. You cannot serve God and wealth. That doesn’t mean wealth is evil. It means wealth is a tool. It can be used to serve God’s kingdom, or it can be elevated into a god that enslaves us.

And here’s where this parable pushes us further. It makes us think not only about money, but about something else that works the same way in our lives: privilege. Because privilege is, in many ways, a form of wealth. It’s an advantage, a resource, something we didn’t choose, something we didn’t necessarily earn—but something that still shapes our lives.

Just like money, privilege can become a master that walls us off—or it can be turned into a tool that builds connection, community, and even glimpses of God’s kingdom.

Some of us were born into privilege because of the families we grew up in, the education we received, the color of our skin, our gender, our citizenship, our health. Some of us have privilege in more subtle ways: the ability to speak up without fear, the ability to walk into a room and be assumed competent, the ability to make mistakes and be forgiven.

The question is not whether we have privilege. The question is: what do we do with it? Do we cling to it as if it were ours to hoard? Or do we, like the shrewd manager, recognize that our privilege is something we can leverage for others—for relationships, for justice, for the kingdom?

Privilege, like wealth, makes a terrible master. But when it serves God, it becomes a wonderful gift.

Talking about privilege is uncomfortable, isn’t it? Because when someone names it in us, it can feel like an accusation. But naming privilege isn’t about blame — it’s about responsibility. It’s about recognizing the starting lines aren’t the same for everyone. Yes, many of us have worked hard. But hard work and privilege are not opposites; they often live side by side. The question isn’t whether we deserve what we’ve worked for — it’s what we’ll do with the advantages we didn’t work for.

If I’m honest, I didn’t earn the fact that I was adopted into a family that encouraged me to go to college, or that I grew up speaking English in a country where that opens doors. I didn’t earn being born in a body that can walk into most spaces without being questioned. Those were given to me. And there are plenty of people just as smart, just as hardworking, just as faithful - if not more - than I am who weren’t given those same advantages.

And so the question of faith is not: do I have privilege? The question is: how am I going to use it? Am I going to let it serve me, or am I going to let it serve God?

Because privilege, like money, can wall us off. It can become a master that whispers, “Keep what’s yours, protect what you have, stay comfortable.” But privilege can also be leveraged for others. It can open doors that others can’t open for themselves. It can amplify voices that otherwise wouldn’t be heard. It can step into rooms and say, “Pull up another chair—this person belongs here too.”

I think that’s the shrewdness Jesus commends in the parable. The manager suddenly realized that wealth had power to shape relationships. And maybe Jesus is nudging us to realize the same thing about privilege. If we hoard it, it isolates us. But if we use it faithfully, it can build community, it can lift burdens, it can create belonging.

And let’s be clear: using privilege this way is not about charity. It’s not about tossing crumbs from our table. It’s about recognizing that God gave us these resources, these voices, these advantages, not so that we could rest easy, but so that we could build something bigger than ourselves. It’s about the kingdom.

That’s why this passage still feels so jarring. Because Jesus doesn’t let us stay neutral. You can’t serve two masters. You can’t serve God and wealth. You can’t serve God and privilege. Sooner or later you have to choose.

And here’s the good news: when we choose to serve God with what we’ve been given, it changes us. Instead of privilege being something that divides us, it becomes something that connects us. Instead of it being a wall, it becomes a bridge. Instead of it being a burden we feel guilty about, it becomes a gift we can offer.

So maybe the question for each of us this week is simple: What privilege do I have? And how can I put it to work for the sake of someone else? Maybe it’s financial. Maybe it’s social. Maybe it’s professional connections or education or simply the freedom to take a risk. Whatever it is, Jesus is calling us to take that gift and use it to model the kingdom here and now.

Because in the end, we cannot serve two masters. But we can serve God with everything we’ve been given—and when we do, God takes what once enslaved us and turns it into grace.

Amen.