Mammon

A sermon for Sunday, August 16, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God of all good gifts, thank you for bringing us to this time and this place. By your Spirit, make your presence known among us. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

I’m sure y’all all remember the Family Circus cartoons that used to run in the paper. Maybe they still do—I haven’t looked at the comics section in a long time. But I remember one Family Circus comic where the mother is standing at the check-out counter of a department store, fixing to pay, while one of the kids holds up a toy that they want her to buy for them. And the caption says, “It’s okay! You don’t have to pay for it, you can just write a check for it!”

I suppose kids today say, “It’s okay! Just use a credit card!”

But I bring up this cartoon because I think that this was the first time I realized that money was a real, important thing, and that money matters. I can’t tell you exactly how old I was when I saw this cartoon, but I can’t have been older than eight or nine. And somehow, seeing money, or the lack thereof, as the punchline to a comic made me realize that if you wanted things in this world, you needed to have money to get them.

See, I didn’t grow up particularly wealthy, but I also didn’t grow up dirt poor. Sure, we were on food stamps for several years there, and my parents have told me, now that I’m grown, that a couple of Christmases were rough, but we owned a house and we had support from family members and the church we went to. We got by, and so our money, or lack thereof, didn’t really stick out to me. But I knew, before the age of 10, that money mattered to others.

And, as much as we might be uncomfortable admitting it, money mattered to Jesus too. The only thing that Jesus talks about more than money is the kingdom of God, making money the second most common topic for Jesus to teach about.

So what does Jesus think about money? Well, this passage is a good place to start answering that question. The first thing he tells us is not to store up treasures for ourselves here on earth, because the treasures of this earth don’t last. They can be taken from us. They’re subject to rot and ruin.

And Jesus doesn’t want us storing up treasures here because he knows that where our treasure is, there our heart will be also. There’s no two ways about it. If your treasure is stored here on earth, that’s where your heart is. Our hearts follow our treasure.

Now, that is a hard word from Jesus for us in the United States today, because it is so different from what we hear from the world around us. We get the message that the pursuit of treasure here on earth is good, blessed, or holy, even, as long as we stay humble. We can have all the money in the world, but if we’re humble, we’re good.

That’s simply not what Jesus tells us here. Jesus says that where our treasure is, our heart is. The message we get from the world around us tricks us and traps us, leading us to think that we can pursue money and wealth and possessions here on this earth without any consequence to our souls, to our connection to others, or to our connection to God. But Jesus is firm in saying that’s not true. You can’t serve two masters. You cannot serve both God and wealth.

Now, the word that Jesus uses there for wealth has a long and storied history. It’s Mammon. It’s a Greek translation of an Aramaic word that comes from a root that word originally meant, “that which you rely on, other than God.” Jesus here is telling us that serving wealth is the same thing as worshiping idols, the same thing as abandoning God for the things of this world, and so you’d think that we as Christians would learn that we should stay away from striving for wealth. But Christians have, over the years, wrestled with Mammon over and over again because, well, we can see Mammon, but we can’t always see God.

Because where is God when, in the middle of a pandemic when people are losing their jobs and potentially their homes, the billionaires of the world have gotten richer? Where is God when the stock market is doing fine but people have to let their loved ones be buried in unmarked graves because they can’t afford funeral costs? Where is God when we have enough money to grow enough food to feed the world, but there are still hungry and starving adults and children around the world? Where is God when we as a nation have the ability to send people to the Moon but not to a quality hospital? Where is God when the rich get richer and the poor get poorer?

So, we turn to Mammon, because we can see Mammon doing work in the world. After all, Mammon made the billionaires. Mammon drives the stock market. Mammon guides hospital and pharmaceutical executives. Mammon chooses the food we grow and how we process and package it. Mammon has given plenty of people in this world more money that they could spend in a million lifetimes. Mammon gets things done. Mammon will keep us safe.

And once you know to look for Mammon, you can see it everywhere. Mammon is right and left and up and down our politics. Mammon is in our schools, in the jobs we tell our children to strive for, in the way we think about others. Mammon is in the property we own, in the decisions we make, in the pride we have in ourselves. Mammon is even in our churches, in our denominations, in the making of the Bibles we read. There is no way around it and no escape from it.

That leaves us believing that Jesus is calling us to an impossible task. How can we serve only God when we live in a world that is dominated by Mammon? You can’t exist in this world without money. Money matters! Well, let me invite you to jump to the end of our passage for this morning, before Mammon envelops our hearts once again and makes us believe that we can never have enough without it. Jesus tells us, “Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

Jesus isn’t saying that money doesn’t matter. Jesus knows the reality we live in. We have to have enough to get by and God knows what we need. Jesus isn’t telling us to ignore the realities of this world. He’s telling us to put our trust in God, not in money. Our first question in life shouldn’t be, “Is there money enough to do this?”, it should be, “Does this please God?”

Imagine how different our lives, our world, would be if we asked ourselves this question first and foremost. Does what we do please God? Is what we’re doing kingdom-seeking?

And I mean that in a really real, really direct way. I know that I’ve heard sermons in the past on this passage that are about reducing our stress and doing random acts of kindness and things like that, which is all well and good, and I know that I’ve heard sermons about the kingdom of heaven as the world after this one, which has some merit too, but I don’t think Jesus is talking about just these things. I think Jesus is calling us to think about everything we do, everything we participate in, on this earth and to ask ourselves, “Does this please God? Does this seek the kingdom of God?” Because, as we know, Mammon is a part of everything in our lives, from our homes to our schools to our politics to our churches. Wealth, money, guides so much of what we do. What would it look like if instead of being guided by money, we actively chose to be guided by God? What if we chose to act like people who knew that they would be provided for, as long as we were seeking the kingdom of God? What if that guided the careers we encouraged people to pursue or the way we voted? What if we chose to move forward loving people extravagantly, in every circumstance, saying, “It’s okay! God’s got this!”?

Because that’s what it means to ask if something pleases God. That’s what it means to ask if something seeks the kingdom of God. We know that our God is love and we know that our God is at work in this world. What Jesus is calling to do here is to seek out love where it can be found and elevate it. Jesus is calling us to think about everything we do, everything we’re involved in, and to seek to make it more loving, and to set it aside if we can’t.

Because that’s what it means to seek out the kingdom of God first. That’s what it means to serve God instead of Mammon. It means in everything we do, to the best of our ability, seeking to love people extravagantly, without worrying about how to pay for it. There are so, so many people in this world today who need our love, in any way we can give it. That’s the work that Jesus calls us to, today. And we have to start doing that, today.

After all, today’s trouble is enough for today.

Amen.