The Inward Journey

Ministerial Intern Diego Garrido – 21 Sept – 2025. Luke 16, 19-39

May the God that raises the poor from the dust, and lifts the needy from the ash heap, raise us from our trivialities, and, lift us from the ashes of our shame. May my words sit in your hearts choosing the unspoken wisdom of a God that loves us today rather than anything else.

Forgive me if my pronunciation makes Jesus’ words difficult to understand. I am just another sinner, migrant and a stranger to this world. 

Community, comunidad: “You cannot serve God and wealth.” The word of God is clear. We have to choose. For some, the decision was taken and they have to come back to God. Is either Dios or wealth. Mejor dicho, one or the other, God, o las riquezas. Let us dive together into this reading and let us ask ourselves what it means for us, today. I will introduce to you for this journey an important person, a mystic who lived in Boston for many years, dean and founder of an interfaith, intercultural and interracial church in San Francisco: Reverend Howard Thurman. 

In chapter 16, there is a story about a dishonest manager. One who squandered the wealth of a rich man. He summons the people that had a debt to his master and very strategically helps them reduce their debts before leaving. He knows he will be punished and acts to provide for himself, not his master. Finally, the rich man commends the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly, wise or thoughtful, astuto, sagaz in Spanish.  

In the previous chapter, 15, we have the three parables of the prodigal son, the lost sheep and the lost coin. Instead, in the same chapter for today, chapter 16, Jesus will say that the law and the prophets ended in John the Baptist, and then follows the story of Lazarus and the rich man. Why is this change of tone so important? In the prior parables there is no strong God, but a merciful Father that receives a prodigal son, or a shepherd that leaves the ninety nine sheep to go after the lost one. In Lazarus and the rich man, both die and the rich man has a conversation with Abraham. In this conversation he regrets his life of excess and is finding himself in a place of torment. Again, the way this reading is located seems different. What was the intention of the writer of this gospel? What is it showing in the dishonest manager that cannot be found in the prodigal son or in the story of Lazarus?

In this collection of parables, I consider it a weird story contrasted to the previous and next parables. A manager that is dishonest with the money of a rich man doesn’t seem to be the same focus as in the parable of the poor Lazarus and his rich master, or the one about a prodigal son and his wealthy father. Hmmmm. Maybe the key of the text is in its characters. Who is this rich man representing? Who is the dishonest manager and, who are the people that owed olive oil and wheat? Who are these people represented in  our lives? 

Now, imagine the anxiety of this dishonest servant. The expressions in verse 3 are also very clear: “What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg.” Weakness and shame. I understand that he is old and doesn’t have the strength to return to more physical labor, maybe this manager has also made a reputation, that people might have respected him, that begging contrasted all he had made in order to be wealthy and safe. 

If you ask me, I don’t consider wealth as only related to the rich man. I would also connect wealth to the manager, to his ambition to use the other man’s money and, later use the debt of other people to gain friends. Wealth for me is not just a lot of money waiting in a bank, it is a mindset of success, survival and competition where the poor are poor because they want, where wealth is a means, not an end, where we don’t love one unto another.

This servant, administrator, manager, is going to summon and call the debtors one by one, because he felt weak and shameful. Community, I wonder if you see with me the connection I am making. I wonder if we could connect our relationship between God and wealth, and the way the manager acted with weakness and shame. 

In the gospel of Luke, Jesus says “You cannot serve God and wealth” and, in the gospel of Matthew chapter 6, versicle 24, he will say: “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” When money is involved, usually there is trouble. With or without. God doesn’t leave us an easy answer to get to God, just a separation between God and wealth. 

Therefore, I assume that according to Luke and Matthew 1. God is not wealthy. 2. God is not a synonym of wealth. Wealth will never be God. 3. Wealth is an idol, a representation to take us apart from God. 4. God rejects wealth as a mindset of prosperity, success and scarcity that feels like God, but it is a limitation of what God is and can do.

Back to the gospel of St. Luke, the dishonest manager, acted out of shame and weakness, falling to choose God. And I ask this not to shame, nor to name weakness as negative. For we are all weak in some ways. The manager wanted wealth and safety after being fired. He was acting to survive. Just as I am being paid, and everyone works to pay rent, food and save. Survival should be transitory. 

This manager kept bad accounting of money that wasn’t his. He might have been wickedly smart, I mean, he used the Rich man’s debts to gain friends and to have people to welcome him after being fired, but it wasn’t his money, and even the rich man found out about it. 

I find in this text a much more deep division between God and wealth, a division between seeking God only and, instead, assuming God is behind your connection to wealth. And, if your blessings do come from God, what do you think God wanted you to do with those blessings from God? (pause) If you say you had chosen God, which I presume it is true, I might need legal advice on this matter (I look at the minister; laughter). If you say you had chosen God, blessed by God, or that you were born in a family that had chosen or blessed God before you, then, if we think for a moment: can you describe your relationship with God? How do you differentiate it from being wealthy? Do you see them as distinct? Should you see those as distinct? 

I could point out that, in my life, naming the relationship I have with God has helped me to answer the ways in which God hasn’t always been in my center. (Repeat) In the time of Jesus the idea of serving a master is one of the simplest ways I find to connect with that relationship. In my life, I have found God in the hours where you do something for others. Giving food or making sandwiches for people I don’t know. I name God as: service. El nombre de mi Dios es servicio.

For me, God is not in the natural landscape, because nature is already a word that we created to separate ourselves from it. As if “the hills are alive with the sound of music” could fix hunger… I feel Julie Andrews when I am in the street, face to face with the barefoot person that is waiting in line to get their food in the food pantry. Now let me ask you: How many hours do you give away as a service in a year? Have you been been strategic in your life, acting shrewdly, thoughtful, astuto, but not always for the right reasons? I want to ask if you act in your life as the manager.  

Time. Time not as the magazine. Life, not the magazine. This is the time of your life to be manager of God’s free gift. Stop. Pay attention, and continue without shame. For the choices you have made are never too late, not like this manager. It is never too late to have a cup of coffee (as rev. Mark told us last time) and start the relationship. In the center of your heart you will find the answer to this division: God or wealth. So let’s go back to yourself, where your heart is, where debts cannot reach. Go back to the coffee invitation you can offer. It is not an invitation to change people, but to let them feel loved. Time of your life, today, to choose God rather than wealth, comfort or interest. To love what is just.

And I am not saying give up your wealth like St. Francis of Assisi or like thousands of monastic communities around many faith traditions. You may think I sound idealistic as a Colombian grounded in the Theologies of Liberation of the nineteen sixties. And maybe I do. Maybe other theologians could help me understand this passage. 

For, St John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople and Father of the Church, in the commentary to this passage, he says that: “we are placed in this life not as lords in our own house, but as guests and strangers…” (pause) He continues: “Therefore whoever you are, know yourself to be a dispenser of the things of others, and that the privileges granted you are for a brief and passing use.” I am assuming that guests and strangers have a different meaning today, but I could see us included in this commentary. 

Whoever you are, the dishonest manager, the people who owed olive oil and what, and the rich man… God treats us as equals. If I understand, in this commentary, Saint John Chrysostom considers that we have received something from God, and that anyone rich or poor, black, brown, white, married and divorced, prison inmates, immigrants, neighbors and tourists, each of us… that we are all equals in the eyes of God. And all of us have received a life, and we have received it to dispense our lives as gifts, ourselves as guests and strangers, our resources as  administrators, our faith as lovers.

God is here to help us to manage our lives, instead of managing your sons, daughters or siblings. God doesn’t need saviors. God is not here for your wealth, but for your heart. Community, God is inviting us so that we invite others with a smile rather than a fancy calligraphy. To choose what is simple, because God wades in the water of simplicity. Choose God rather than wealthy promises that make us see the other as enemies. Listen. Listen to the new generations that are coming with the new times and pray with them, not for them. In their wildest questions they might find God. Trust.  

Let me now introduce to you a black man from Florida that had to choose between God and Wealth, a man that had to choose between academia and family, between San Francisco and Boston, between serving an organism and serving God: Howard Washington Thurman. 

 

 

Let’s begin with his grandmother, Nancy. In his book Jesus and the Desinherited, and many other times, Thurman remembered that his grandmother repeated the story of the slave minister she remembered, a minister who came once a year to preach to them. He would say: “You are not n——! [please do not say it] You are not slaves! You are God’s children!” and those words entered in Thurman’s memory and stayed in his heart.

This man, this black man, this holy man was born in 1899 in Daytona Beach, Florida. Besides the general information you find on the internet, he was ordained baptist and lived in between the world of church, academia, his family and the civil rights movement. 

Howard Thurman marched in Washington in 1963 when Dr. Luther King gave his famous I Have a Dream speech. Reverend Thurman gave sermons in Unitarian, Methodists, Universalists, Quaker and Baptist churches. He had read mystics like Jakob Boehme, Maister Eckhart, Plotinus, St. Francis, philosophers like Albert Schweitzer, or the representative for the Nobel Prize and a Quaker mystic: Rufus Jones. 

Those who remember Rev. Mark, he spoke in the bulletin about Spirituality and Religion, about the trend to make things Spiritual, forgetting the religious ground in which they were developed. Well, community, this is a man that chooses God rather than wealth, studying mysticism and religious experience. He grounded first in the spirituality of his own waters, the waters of his ancestors, the African American experience of christianity, the faith of the black people, their spirituals and the stories of his grandmother. He dedicated his life learning about God, so that he could differentiate this relationship from wealth.

He once said: “When I was born God must have put a live coal in my heart, for I was his man and there was no escape.” I wonder what would have been the story if the manager of the gospel had felt this… a coal in my heart… just to imagine it I feel strangely warmed.

There is one moment of Howard Thurman’s life I want to share with you. In the book What Makes You Come Alive by Lerita Coleman Brown she says: 

“In several books, Howard Thurman reports the conversation he shared with a Ceylonese lawyer on an early stop during his overseas travels. After Thurman’s lecture at a law school, the lawyer invited him to his office for some tea. Sitting across from Thurman, the lawyer interrogated him about his links to Christianity—a religion, the lawyer argued, that supported slavery, noting that one of the slave ships was named Jesus. This religion of Thurman’s, the lawyer said, justified lynching, segregation, colonialism, and imperialism. How could he possibly adhere to such a faith?”

Well, community, I love this passage in particular because lawyers remind us to think on our answers (I look at rev. Mark) and prepare our arguments. Comunidad, I also struggle with my beliefs. I find it difficult to choose when everything pushes me away from God. And I want to choose God, yes, in a world where Christianity is viewed as negative and hypocritical. I want to return to the faith of the Prodigal Son, to the poverty of Lazarus. I don’t want to be a Christian acting like the manager of the gospel. In the words of Lerita Coleman Brown, she says that: “Somewhere the true meaning of Jesus’s message had been corrupted to allow for the domination and separation of God’s creation. Thurman adamantly insisted that he was a follower of the religion of Jesus.” And I want to follow the Jesus of Thurman. 

Because this rich man, the manager and those who owed money, all of them, could have ended this parable in a good way. But we don’t know. And Jesus didn’t tell a happy ending like the prodigal son where the Father embraces the son. In this case, Jesus gave us a text in which we have to choose God to end the parable. 

In the words of Lerita Coleman Brown: “The true origin of Christianity, as practiced by Jesus, was genius because it spoke to the inherent holiness and worthiness of all that God created.” Yes, through that inherent holiness I go back to one of the principles of the Unitarian Universalist, “the inherent worth and dignity of every person” Because, the day I have a coffee with the enemy, the one I have considered the lowest, the marginal, well, the one I fear, that might be my sign that I had chosen God rather than wealth and privilege. 

I agree with Thurman and Coleman Brown, that “Jesus taught that God’s creation consists of everyone, including a wide array of marginalized individuals (such as people of color, women, and people with disabilities) as well as people of other faith traditions (Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist).” But I will add that none of us is free until we are all free. In the words of Thurman “When we love, that is what we do,” and he adds: “It says, meet people where they are and treat them as if they were where they ought to be, and by so doing, we believe them into the fulfillment of their possibilities and love becomes an act of redemption. . . . Love of this sort places a crown over the head of another who is always trying to grow tall enough to wear it.”

Howard Thurman is here today teaching us that choosing God and wealth is possible when you center in your heart your most important needs and move away from the non essential ones, that which seems to distract you from your vocation, from your calling, that what makes you come alive. Thurman chose God rather than hate and violence in a time where segregation expected anger and submission. 

He chose nonviolence to Love thy neighbor. He chose Jesus, to choose God. He chose to listen rather than to judge, like the father of the prodigal son. Thurman’s conversation with that lawyer (as any conversation we can have with any lawyer) are moments to remember the important, the argument that resides in your heart, the appeal, the denial, the sentence that beats God’s name. Therefore to go back to your heart to choose what is best for you. 

Reverend Howard Thurman founded a church back in San Francisco, he accepted to be Dean of the Chapel, professor, gave hundreds of lectures, had correspondence with the people of his time. He met Mahatma Gandhi and was one of the spiritual and academic foundations for nonviolence in the United States. He was a reference for Dr. Martin Luther King. First black dean of the chapel, representative of the black American people in India… but none of this things are God. He chose God in his heart. Nothing he could do or say was going to replace that space he gave to the silence of God’s voice. Thurman was a manager that used his wealth and power to spread Jesus message of nonviolence. 

The word of God for today is clearly saying: “You cannot serve God and wealth”. May you find a way that gives you joy, a way in which you chose God instead of wealth like Thurman did in his experience and context. May you find peace in your heart.

 Finally, I will say these last words in Spanish as I honor my mother and my father, here present in this church, after five years of not seeing my brother and two years of not seen me.

Mamá, papá, su hijo amado está predicando palabras que tal vez suenen extranjeras. Es que hasta la voz me cambia. Perdónenme si les sueno raro. Quizás, esto que les digo no se entiende, porque no es nuestra lengua, y porque ustedes, que me conocen, saben que soy un humano que continúa buscando a Dios y que no tengo nada que decir que no sea gracias. 

Dios me los bendiga por darme la vida, por darme la posibilidad de estar aquí, por traerme a la vida en este instante de tiempo que parte la eternidad en dos. Ustedes eligieron a Dios, se amaron y en esa elección que uno a otro se han hecho me dan un ejemplo de cómo amar. Gracias porque el amor de ustedes me refleja el amor de un Dios que conocí en Ciudad Jardín del Sur. 

Con la mano en el corazón gracias papá y mamá, gracias Jon, porque quiero que sepan que soy porque somos, que soy porque elegimos a Dios.

 

Gracias. Amen.