Fifteenth Sunday after the Pentecost 2025
St. John’s Cathedral
Luke 16:1-13
The Right Rev. Brian L. Cole
Tennessee Ernie Ford. Do you remember Tennessee Ernie Ford?
He was a native of Bristol, Tennessee. For decades, from the 1930s until his death in the early 1990s, with that deep baritone voice, he sang Country and Western, and Gospel songs. I knew him because of my family’s deep commitment to watching Hee-Haw every Saturday night.
He had several hit songs, like Mule Train and The Ballad of Davy Crockett. But I think if you remember him, you remember him because of the song, Sixteen Tons.
“You load sixteen tons, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. St. Peter, don’t call me, ‘cause I can’t go. I owe my soul to the company store.”
Isn’t that a great song? Isn’t that a great song about an unjust situation?
The worker works and produces great wealth. For that, he is paid in script that can only be redeemed at the company store. The company store prices are a bit high. And no matter how hard the worker works, the fix is in, and the cycle continues. More work, more script, more company store, which owns your soul, world without end.
At first glance, this morning’s parable appears quite confounding. Except, if we look at it while whistling Sixteen Tons and snapping our fingers, then we can see the parable looks like much of what many of us know about life. The fix is in.
The main character in the parable is the manager, also spoken of as the steward in the King James. And he has been squandering the owner’s property.
He has been taking too big of a cut when collecting the rents from the farm workers who work the land on behalf of the owner. Now the owner understood that the steward, for his troubles of collecting rents, was entitled to a handling fee.
But the steward has grown greedy, and his fees are too high, and the owner has had enough. So, turn in your accounts and your records, because you can no longer be my steward.
So, the steward must start thinking and fast. He has lost the confidence of his boss. So, he needs help and lots of it. Since he knows the fix is in, work with what you got. The good brother knows how to shave here and cut there.
So, he goes to the workers who owe the debts to the owner and the steward starts wheeling and dealing. He doubles down on taking from the owner, but this time, on behalf of the workers who will owe the steward once he is unemployed.
And once the owner finds out about this? He commends the steward. We are left with the impression that the steward may keep his job, perhaps even end up promoted. For the steward understands how the world works and that the fix is in.
Jesus tells a story about corruption to remind us that the Good News is always situated in the real world where you and I live and work. The Good News was not intended simply to stay put in the Sunday School room, while workers owe their souls to the company store.
As stewards of the Good News, we are to be as crafty and cunning as the unjust steward, but on behalf of the cause of the Kingdom breaking in here and now, where we work and live and wheel and deal.
The unjust steward paid attention to every angle and knew how to count things and take the measure of the day and the people who filled it. Jesus wants the hearers of this teaching, both the first listeners and you and me to pay attention to every angle and learn how to count things and take the measure of the day and the people who fill it.
But pay attention, not to use people, but to learn how to love them, as people made in the image of God, made to be treated as holy things. Their souls are to belong to themselves, not held as collateral at the company store.
“Whoever is faithful in a very little thing is faithful also in much.” I hear Jesus saying that most of what you and I encounter is a series of small things. If we are always waiting for the large and grand moment to do the right thing, then we end up missing most of the opportunities to do the right thing in the countless small moments that make up most of living in the world.
This week, a friend of mine, while reflecting on the need to tend to small things, told me that if we are always waiting for the large and grand moment to do the right thing, it’s not just that we will miss the many smaller opportunities but that we also won’t have the habit and muscle to do the grand thing when something grand is required.
Jesus calls us children of light. Claim that vocation now, for this world, like the world of St. Luke’s Gospel, is one where the fix is still in.
This summer, while on sabbatical, I took a trip to the Mississippi Delta. While there, a friend and I spent the day with an older black man named Sylvester Hoover. Mr. Hoover gives tours, highlighting the history of blues music in the region. Mr. Hoover is about 10 years older than me.
Mr. Hoover grew up on a plantation near Greenwood. We drove past the property, and he told us about growing up there and his father’s life as a sharecropper and how the entire family helped work the land on behalf of the owner.
Later that day, Mr. Hoover took us to a now empty house where a sharecropping family would have lived. He told a story about his father and one year where they had picked more cotton than ever before. At the end of the year, while settling accounts, his father came home with the news that the family’s debt had grown, despite the record amount of cotton.
In that empty house, hearing an unjust story, I came to believe that it is not enough for us to hear the blues and be moved by the cry and the lament.
Why is the singer crying and lamenting? Do we hear the cry and lament? Can we, through the grace of God, give ourselves to the crafty and cunning work of the Gospel, to show up in small things? Can we do the next right and good thing in the world as it is, not waiting for someone else to set aright what we see and know to be wrong?
With God’s help, I pray we can.