This past Sunday's lectionary gospel reading from Luke 16:1-13 is every preacher's nightmare. This parable is often titled "The Parable of the Dishonest Manager". What does one do with such a baffling parable.
Rev. Sharon Gracen, my local Episcopal priest had rather an interesting exegesis. In her sermon, she claimed that the verses 4 thru 7 actually occur in the past tense. It's a translation error in which the English from Greek actually misses the past tense. In this reading, the manager doesn't get fired as a result of mismanagement, rather it is his past mismanagement which is the core of the issue.
The manager understands the unjust heavy debts of the folks who borrowed from his master and tries to help them out by cutting down their debts without his master's knowledge.
Jesus is this supposedly unjust manager, who subverts the unjust economic system.
This is Jesus at his best, performing a creative act of bookkeeping in an unjust and oppressive economic system.
Go ye therefore and do likewise!