Unrighteous Wealth - The Dishonest Steward

[Jesus] also said to the disciples, “There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was wasting his possessions. And he called him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Turn in the account of your management, for you can no longer be manager.’ And the manager said to himself, ‘What shall I do, since my master is taking the management away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. I have decided what to do, so that when I am removed from management, people may receive me into their houses.’ So, summoning his master's debtors one by one, he said to the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ He said, ‘A hundred measures of oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, and sit down quickly and write fifty.’ Then he said to another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He said, ‘A hundred measures of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, and write eighty.’ The master commended the dishonest manager for his shrewdness. For the sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the sons of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings. (Luke 16:1-13)

I mean, obviously, this parable warms my stony old heart. For who could have amassed more unrighteous wealth than someone who grew rich on the donations of the religious gullible, crashed a doily company having taken all the profits out as dividends, then taken all that unrighteous wealth and dumped it offshore to make sure the gullible can't get their money back and, when they're flat broke and old, won't even get decent state pension because I'm not paying any tax?

And the obvious answer to that is - the people who bankrolled the Leave Vote for Brexit, then shorted the country. Made a killing in currencies and now hope to do it again. When it came to setting up a belief in false vision, then cashing in - I was just an amateur.

But I wonder. Is this unrighteous wealth of which Jesus speaks just a rich person's plaything? Let's take the Church Commissioners' wealth. I mean, they do their best. Don't get me wrong. Their website goes to a lot of trouble to explain the dibblings in potentially unethical stuff that may result from investments - almost whether you like it or not. According to this page, the Church's Ethical Investment Group advises against any company that makes 3% or more of its income from pornography or conventional weapons. Which is oddly specific and gives one visions of someone having the job of having to count to ensure nobody breaches the strict limits imposed on nipples or tanks.

It's all very hard, is what I'm saying, to stay clean in this murky world. If you're a retired C of E Clergyperson, does it linger in your mind that anything up to a 3% limit of your monthly pension could be funded by porn and machine guns? But then - as you stand there in a 12th Century Church, celebrating the Mass as it has been celebrated since the year 2000, does it occur to you that the building was put up with the cash that the local landowner screwed out of the labour of his local peasantry? That the money in the plate might have come from a tobacconist, or a win on the fruities at the local, or a trust fund squirreling money away tax-free in Jersey?

If you're in Liverpool or Bristol, do you reflect that the cities themselves grew rich on human misery? Do you bear in mind that, when Wilberforce (hurrah! Good Christian!) fought and succeeded in terminating slavery in the British Empire, the church - and even and individual bishop - received compensation for the value of the slaves?

So it's a murky world. Even you, the Guardian-reading, ethical-almond-milk-drinking, Beaker Person reading this article will be using some kind of electronic device containing rare earths that may or may not have been mined, processed or engineered in an unethical way. You may have popped to Tesco Express for your guilt-free sugar for your fair-trade coffee, forgetting that Tesco bought Booker Cash and Carry - and that Booker originally made its money exploiting indentured sugar labourers in British Guiana. We are entwined in a world-wide-web of unrighteous wealth. And our employer has noticed, and having notice, has given us notice that we are entitled to what the John Lewis Partnership used to refer to as being "summarily terminated".

So, what are we going to do? We're too useless to work for our salvation and mostly too proud to beg. And Jesus says - see what you can do with that dodgy money you've got laying around.

Not the poor. God's always been very keen on giving the poor a free pass. The rest of us. With our slightly-tainted cash and our up-to-3%-corrupted pensions and our dependence for our whole lifestyles on a web of oppression  and profit.

Why not make like the dishonest steward and buy some friends in heaven? Give some of that loot away. Forgive a grudge. Get some tins for the food bank. Sponsor a medical research charity. Sponsor a child. Twin a toilet. Help pay for disaster relief, or a medic in a war zone, or surgery for the victims of war rape.

This doesn't mean just accept the world is unethical and crack on - by all means, examine where what you do does not contribute to human flourishing but instead exploits. Make your choices, campaign for justice. When you buy things, with your dishonest wealth, choose those things that you need, that are good, that you can trace. You'll still be reading this blog on a device made for dishonest wealth, with materials that earned dishonest wealth -that's kind of the world we're in - but work to make it better. You don't live in a cave, and if you did you couldn't earn more dishonest wealth to buy more friends in heaven.

And when God finds out that you've used God's wealth, earned from God's world, to cheat your way into having friends in heaven - God will say well done, faithful servant. You've grasped that most important thing - the earth is God's, and everything in it, and you're using some of God's wealth in the way God approves - by loving the people he created.

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