THE MASTER'S TOOLS (Amos 8 • Luke 16)

"Homeless Jesus" by sculptor Timothy Schmalz

This sermon was first preached at Gethsemane Lutheran Church in Hopkins, MN, on September 21, 2025. The full livestream of the service may be viewed here.  The sermon alone is below.
Scripture texts:  Amos 8:4-7 • Luke 16:1-13

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“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” For those who’ve never heard those words before, they were written by Feminist Poet, Author, and civil rights activist Audre Lorde in her 1979 essay of the same title. In it she writes at length about the systems and structures of power under which all managers and marginalized people are held captive and turned into each other’s enemies, by the masters of wealth, class, and politics. She rightly recognizes that, “The master’s tools may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” 

And friends, her words still ring true. In view of our culture’s dominant economic, social, and political systems, social transformation can feel impossible to those who recognize that it relies upon a kind of reversal these systems are not designed to create or even tolerate. Which means that so long as we, whether by ignorance or intention, remain participants in the current order, which may appear at times to favor us while oppressing others, or vice versa, none of us will ever really be free. 

Put another way: As it has always been throughout history, including when Jesus lived and taught and died, so it remains: Our world and its institutions are built to work more like casinos than cathedrals of liberty. Some individuals will always be allowed to get lucky and win big, if only to keep everyone else hopeful enough to spend more, but the House will always win. And none of its tools or games -- even in the best and most skilled or sly hands -- will ever be able to take the house down. 

Before you ask what any of this has to do with us, let me tell you it has everything to do with Jesus’s parable in Luke 16. Because what we see happening in today’s text is precisely what Audre Lorde wrote about: 

For here we have a Rich master who wrote the rules to a game he cannot lose; and a shrewd but fired manager whose last act is to slash the debt of the master’s debtors. In doing so, we’re told, he makes friends with the indebted poor whose solidarity he’s gonna need now that he’s jobless. And he sets the Master up to lose either way: He can either draw the ire of his debtors by reinstating their balances and dragging the manager to court over the bit of wealth he redistributed to them through debt-relief; Or he can let that money, let the manager go, and stay the “gracious creditor” who eased his debtors’ burden, albeit without that money. Either way he won't get that money back. The master, for his part, recognizes a game well-played and even commends the manager for winning the round and “temporarily beating him at his own game.” 

But the game is still rigged, and the House remains standing, unassaulted because, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” 

That’s where we begin. So before we go any further, it’s crucial to note that in this parable, Jesus isn’t telling us what the Kingdom of Heaven is or will be like, nor does He suggests we are free and unbound by the norms and regulations of earthly kingdoms. We live in time and space where the game is always being played. Instead, he is reiterating what he’s been saying all along and will say again, through the parables of the Fig Tree, the Good Samaritan, the Rich Fool and the Faithful servants, of the Wedding banquet and the Great Banquet and the next parable, of the The Rich Man and Lazarus, which is that, “You cannot serve two masters, and you cannot serve both God and wealth.”  In the words of Bob Dylan: You gotta serve somebody.  But we do get to choose, so Jesus is teaching us how to choose well.

Since his time, not a lot has changed. Like the disciples to whom Jesus spoke, we are also “sheep sent out among wolves” in the kingdoms of earth. And like them, we are surrounded by all kinds of rulers, masters, slavers, and false gods, all of whose power can be traced back to one thing: Their accumulation and hoarding of ill-gotten wealth, stolen from poor underclasses and wielded against them, to purchase and preserve their own continued dominion. If you follow the money it will almost always lead you back to more money. 

That is what happens when a tool we all must use in order to survive in a currency-based economy, becomes a god we worship. That god, whose name is Mammon, will always require those it enslaves to go to war with each other in order to steal or secure more and more riches for themselves. And to be sure, its slaves -- which the Greek word describes as “affectionate and devoted servants” -- will do so with a pride and joy they reserve for no other thing. 

Wealth is and has always been power in the empires of this earth. And both are intoxicating drugs to those who worship and chase the high. Which is why the richer a person is, the richer they want to be, and the tighter the chains become, binding them to the Master of that House. All the while they miss the profound irony of the fact that the thing they believe gives them absolute power over their lives and world, in fact possesses and controls them absolutely: body, mind, and soul. It’s a tale as old as time.

Lest we think this is just about rulers and the rich, we need only glance at Amos 8 where God names and calls out the people of Israel for trampling on the needy and bringing the poor to ruin; for being so eager to accumulate more and more wealth that they shamelessly employ dishonest and unlawful practices in the marketplace, defile the Sabbath and holy law, and exploit the poor for silver and slavery. If God’s own people were vulnerable to such merciless idolatry, we would be fools to presume we’re immune to the seduction of this realm’s god. We’re not.

And so, Jesus tells us to be cautious and deliberate about how we use spend, save, and accumulate money. We can’t pretend we’re exempt from the systems into which we are born, so we must instead learn to use the tools of a losing game without losing ourselves and becoming co-conspirators to injustices that reinforce and uphold an Unholy House. 

In this one way Jesus says we are to be like parable’s shrewd manager. That guy figured out how to use dishonest and ill-gotten wealth to reverse the order of things, if only by a little, and build solidarity with the poor who are now his own people. And this is what Jesus is talking about when he calls us to “be faithful with dishonest wealth” and so prove ourselves “trustworthy with true riches.” 

The question is never what we’re faithful with but, always, who we’re faithful to with whatever we have. On this, Scripture is clear, from Genesis to the law and the prophet Amos, to the Gospels and Acts and all the epistles: Money itself is not evil -- it’s necessary -- but it becomes a god faster than almost anything else when we’re not paying attention. So we better pay attention.

Money should only ever be one among many tools we use in faithfulness to people and creation. We are called not to hoard it but to share it along with everything else we have, in common with others, pooling all our resources together in order to distribute to all according to need. 

That’s the thing about today’s text: Jesus doesn’t offer us two choices; he just reveals the choice we’ve always had and must always be making between God and Wealth. Both have the power to reorder our lives and restructure society -- in fact we are watching that happen right now as the wealth to purchase power and influence is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a very few, obscenely wealthy billionaires. And we can choose to chase that dream, try to play the game, climb the ladder, and cozy up to the ultra-wealthy in hopes that our proximity to their power will trickle down to us, despite that it never has and never will because that is not what it’s designed to do. 

Or, in a world where so many serve and worship and belong to Mammon, we can serve, worship, and belong to God which directly translates to serving and belonging to each other, caring for each other, and sharing all we have in mutuality with each other. This we do it from a deep knowing and trust that everything we have comes from God, who not only provides but transforms both massive and meager offerings into more than enough, with an abundance of leftovers to boot.

Together, we can divest from the violence of wealth, press our way ever outward to the margins, setting up camp in and with and as One Body, the Beloved Community.

That is where and how the genuine change Audre Lorde spoke of is nurtured and it is "the soil in which true and liberative transformation is rooted." 

The farther we are from the gravitational pull of Mammon worship, the easier it is to recognize the ways it forces us to compete for finite resources and jockey for position among power brokers; and the clearer it becomes that the master’s tools cannot and will not ever dismantle the master’s house. 

And so we have to create a different set of tools and build a different kind of house. One where Mammon-made patterns of separation and self-segregation into race and class and gender based hierarchies, are reversed and replaced by interdependency. A house where our diverse identities, experiences, social locations, and spiritual gifts no longer feel like a threat or liability, but instead become, as Lorde wrote, a font “of polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialect.” Through interdependence, our differences will "generate the power we need to seek new ways of being in the world, [along with] the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters,” with justice and mercy in mind.

When we’re free from the architectural rules and tools that built the master’s house, our collective imagination is liberated to create whole new worlds and kin-doms we have not yet conceived and could not conceive alone.

If such a kin-dom sounds fantastical, hear now that it is not. It's just a prophetic illustration of the kin-dom Jesus promises will come to the poor in Luke 6; the one Christ keeps revealing in parables; the one the disciples were commissioned to proclaim, in which the first is last and the least is the greatest; And the one, Jesus promised, many of them would taste and see before dying. 

Which is to remind us again and again: The Kin-dom of God is not some unattainable realm reserved for the hereafter. It is the miraculous and mundane incarnation of Christ who taught us, Lives in us, who loves through us, and establishes with us a place of belonging for everyone. The Kin-dom is the Beloved Community, where diversity is a gift and money is just another tool for deepening our roots, expanding our tables, and liberating all God’s children from the tyranny of wealth in this realm. 

Today, we get to decide whether to bind ourselves to wealth or to each other. And, Beloved of God, I choose us. I will always choose us, as I pray we all do. Amen.

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