What A Waste! — 21 September 2025

What A Waste!

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Luke 16:1-13

Then Jesus said to the disciples, “There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. So he summoned him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management because you cannot be my manager any longer.’ Then the manager said to himself, ‘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. I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’

So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’ Then he asked another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘A hundred containers of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill and make it eighty.’ And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly, for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone they may welcome you into the eternal homes. Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much, and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. If, then, you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? No slave 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.”

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Let me admit, first, that I think my source is sketchy, but I saw—somewhere on the internet— that a single AI search— Google Gemini, ChatGPT— takes a gallon of water. When I searched this up, the new AI feature on the search page, claimed it was more like 5 milliliters, but I think AI might be biased? I think the gallon statistic includes not just using water to cool AI data centers, but also the water used to cool electricity generation. But, an article for Nature says that training a single model of ChatGPT is the equivalent of “the annual electricity consumption of 120 American Households.” I wondered what happened to water after it cooled the data centers, because once, in the name of ministry, I toured a nuclear power plant, and they claimed close to zero water loss, because the cooling water was returned to the river from whence it came, albeit several degrees warmer. So, I chatted up my favorite controls engineer—aka, my sister— who said that the water cools the data centers, and then is released as evaporation, so it is lost to local usage and thus, we might say, wasted. I think pumping that water through pipes is a far cry from St. Francis’s image of “sister water, useful, clear” called to “make music for your Lord to hear.” It occurred to me that all this wasted water seemed like a luxury, that maybe waste was a powerful marker of privilege. So I… well, I asked ChatGPT about it. Though, I always get receipts when we chat. ChatGPT pulled up some statistics from the EPA and WHO: in the US, the average American uses 82 gallons of water a day at home. In sub-Saharan Africa, where many people must walk to bring home water, the average household uses 2-5 gallons per day. Waste is a luxury. The average American throws away 81 pounds of clothing every year. As a country, 30-40% of all food is wasted, over 130 billion meals a year. Waste is a luxury, and we export a lot of our waste to developing countries, where the poorest of the poor subsist on what can be gleaned from our trash. In the parable of the dishonest manager, Jesus draws attention how God’s grace is extravagantly “squandered” especially on people considered a waste of space.

The parable of the dishonest manager is one in a series of parables Jesus tells because the Pharisees got grumpythat Jesus was welcoming sinners and—gasp!—eating with them. I’m never quite sure if the Pharisees get grumpy because they got there late and the best seats were taken, or because people were telling them excitedly about Jesus and they hadn’t felt invited to the table. Anyway, Jesus tells four parables right in a row:the parable of the lost sheep, the parable of the lost coin, the parable of the lost son, or, as we more often call it, the parable of the prodigal son, and the parable of the dishonest manager. It does seem like today’s story is the odd one out— who got lost, after all? But there are actually a lot of really interesting things in commonbetween our parable and those other three.

Let’s start with the word “squander.” It comes up three times in Luke’s gospel— two times to talk about characters who waste what has been entrusted to them, and one time it points to God— we’ll get to that in a minute. So, the squander characters are: the dishonest manager and the prodigal son, in many ways it is the word for prodigal, since prodigal means “extravagantly wasteful.” At the same time, in these parables it isn’t just the manager and the younger son who are extravagantly wasteful. When the shepherd finds the lost sheep and the woman finds her lost coin, they both throw parties worth more than what they had lost! And the prodigal’s father, too— the apple didn’t fall far from the tree— throws a ridiculous celebration for his son who wasted his inheritance on dissolute living. Four parables about waste, about unnecessary extravagances.

And look at who is doing the wasting: a shepherd, a woman, a younger son, a groveling steward— perhaps the employee of an absentee Roman landlord, a collaborator, just like the tax collectors also at Jesus’s table.Outsiders, marginalized people, spares, expendables—castoffs. How could the Pharisees— at least the Pharisee characters of Luke’s gospel— so righteous, so moral— how could they possibly identify with these stories? Each story seems more offensive than the last, until Jesus is commending the shrewdness of making friends by dishonest wealth. To the one who never looses anything, who never messes up, who saves and spends prudently, whose 401k is full, whose pension has vested, who has saved for a rainy day, these parables make no sense. But if you’ve been told you’re a waste of space, a drain on society, no longer productive, a burden?

Remember I said the word “squander” shows up one other place in the gospel? Well, here’s what’s interesting,the English word “squander” isn’t a word until the 1500s. The first preserved record is in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Instead, the word means something like “scattered around.” So, for the prodigal, it is more like he sowed his wild oats. The dishonest manager who scattered his master’s wealth like confetti. Wasteful is still the right connotation. But it can also be a scattering of troops fleeing in fear. The first time this word comes up in Luke’s gospel, it isn’t applied to a son or a steward, it is applied to God, who, according to Jesus’s mother, Mary, “scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.” It seems shrewd, in these parables, to wonder what happens when God is the squanderer, when God is the waster.

In this parable, the debtors are really in over their heads. One owes over 800 gallons of oil, the other, one thousand bushels of wheat— about 60,000 pounds. For perspective, an acre of wheat in the US today will yield approximately 50 bushels. Who knows why they owe, but these are surely insurmountable debts. Nothing they would have produced for the rest of their lives would have been theirs, it all would have gone to pay these debts. And then this squandering steward comes along. Who knows what form his dishonesty actually took, but what he does, which one can argue would probably not actually secure his future… but what he does do sets these debtors free. Waste for the waste of space; expenditures for the expendable, spending on the spent. All week I tried to find some cheeky alliteration for this, but it defies any cute attempt to make it makes sense.

God is a shepherd who throws a feast over one lost sheep, a woman hosting a party for one lost coin, a father celebrating one ornery kid, and, well, that tidy pattern grinds to a halt here, God is God, who forgives the unforgivable, redeems the unredeemable. God is a steward who takes on risk on those no one else is risky for. This is the good news that we know is good because it sets free our neighbor. This is the good news because, to we who have what we need, it is costly. It asks us to follow, it condemns our sin, our complicity in wasteful systems, but it is still grace, because when we are honest about our wastefulness, when we confess our sins, God is faithful, and lavishes upon us, too, God’s endless grace. Amen.