Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 19, 2004

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I think I’ve quoted this here before, but bear with me while I quote it again. I once heard someone--I don’t remember who--say: "Show me your checkbook and I’ll tell you what you believe in." Now, I think that is an overstatement; or at least I hope it is since I don’t think I’d like the conclusions this person would draw from my checkbook. Still, I think this claim says something important about the life of faith. How we relate to money is in fact a matter of faith. It is a spiritual matter.

Scripture has a lot to say about money. Both of our Scripture lessons this morning, for example are about money and how people relate to it. First we have the passage from Amos. Coincidentally, we are studying Amos right now in our Sunday morning education series. Amos, the oldest of the writing prophets whose words come to us from the mid 8^th century BCE, over 2,700 years ago, is one of the Bible’s great voices for social justice. His central message was : God has given up on Israel and will bring ruin upon her because her wealthy power elites have refused to treat the poor with justice and compassion. Because of the economic exploitation of the poor by the rich, it’s all over for Israel. Thus says the Lord. Amen.

That’s Amos’ message, and we hear it loud and clear in this morning’s passage from Chapter 8, one of my personal favorites in all of Scripture. Amos here thunders as only Amos can against "you who trample on the needy and bring to ruin the poor of the land." He paints a brutal picture of people--people then and people now--whose only concern in life is making money, who consider petty little things like religion simply as an impediment in their quest to make more money, and who will cheat and exploit the poor to make themselves even richer. That’s what he’s talking about when he assails those who can’t want for the Sabbath--Judaism’s central religious observance--to be over so they can go back to selling things (dishonestly) and making money. On the Sabbath these people don’t turn their hearts and minds to God, which after all is the purpose of the Sabbath. Rather, they concoct new ways to cheat and exploit the poor: "We will make the ephah small and the shekel great." In other words we’ll short people on the amount we sell and shortchange them in their money. We’ll doctor the scales so we can charge them for more than we actually sell them. These guys would have been right at home working for Enron in our day.

And Amos has no doubt that God is most unhappy with them. God rejects and condemns their, and our, exploitation of the poor of the land, and the poor of the world. That’s what Amos means when he says: "The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob; Surely I will never forget any of their deeds." So far from forgetting Israel’s transgressions, Amos says, God will utterly destroy the entire nation. In fact, something like forty years later, Israel was destroyed by Assyria, the dominant empire of the day. We may not agree with Amos that God caused the conquest and destruction of the northern kingdom, that is, Israel. After all, the poor God cares for suffered in that disaster as well as the rich; and the political and military realities of the day were such that Israel was probably doomed to perish at the hands of her much larger and more aggressive neighbors in any event. Still, we can and should understand Amos’ prophesy of God’s destruction of Israel because of the injustice of her power elites as a metaphorical statement of God’s extreme displeasure with us when we use our own positions of privilege and wealth to exploit the poor for our own enrichment. Economic injustice displeases God. When we benefit from it--and we do every day--our relationship with God is harmed. That makes justice a spiritual matter, and that at the very least is the message Amos roars at us across nearly three millennia.

Then there’s that lesson from Luke. I have to admit that when I saw that the Gospel lesson for this Sunday was the Parable of the Dishonest Manager, my first reaction was that I’d have to find something else to preach on. I mean, that parable just makes no sense to me, and I doubt that it makes much sense to you either. On the surface at least, it sounds like an owner who has fired his manager for squandering his property turns around and praises the same man for cheating him even more. Even worse, the various moral axioms that follow the parable don’t make any sense either. They praise worldly shrewdness. They say use ill-gotten gain to make friends for yourselves. They say you aren’t worthy of spiritual things if you can’t manage money. It all sounds like nonsense to me. When I turned to a respected commentator named Luke Timothy Johnson for help, I found him struggling to make sense out these passages just as I was. Johnson struggles mightily, and his discussion isn’t entirely satisfactory. Still, it helped. I won’t bore you with all of the details of his analysis, but here’s at least some of what I think I learned from him.

We need to understand the use of money that these passages talk about as symbolic of our relationship with God. The symbolic nature of our use of money is suggested by several lines in this passage. In the line about using money to make friends so that later we can enter the sacred home, which Johnson thinks is about giving alms, seems to suggest that Jesus is drawing a parallel between how we use money and our eternal fate, or better, our relationship with God. He’s doing the same in the line about not being trusted with true wealth if we aren’t trustworthy with money.

Moreover, all of this must be seen, I think, in light of the last verse of the passage, the famous "you cannot serve God and Mammon." At first glance that line seems to be at least somewhat inconsistent with the preceding verses. They tell us to be faithful and responsible in our use of money, then we’re told we can’t serve God and Mammon. I don’t think, however, there really is an inconsistency here. This last line draws the passage together by making two points. First, our use of money is symbolic of our relationship with God. Second, our ultimate priority, that which in the end we serve, much always be God first.

So, if that reading of this difficult passage from Luke is anywhere near correct, then when we put the Amos and the Luke together, this is what we get. How we use money is a spiritual matter. It is a spiritual matter because God cares about how we use money and how in general we relate to money. The sin of the elites of Israel was not that they had money. In the Luke passage Jesus tells us not to have no money but to use our money responsibly as a reflection of our spiritual values. Money itself isn’t the problem. I’ll probably have more to say about that next week, since the lectionary readings for next Sunday are once again about money. Israel’s problem wasn’t that the rich and powerful had money but that money was all they cared about. They cared nothing for God’s people but only for their own wealth. They served Mammon and not God, and God, to say the least, was not pleased. Jesus certainly agreed that we displease God when we make money rather than people our ultimate concern.

This lesson is, I believe powerfully appropriate in America today. Our culture worships Mammon. Money is what we’re all about. An entire generation has now grown up having internalized the message that their only purpose in life is to be consumers. How else do you explain the way they unthinkingly pay money for the privilege of becoming walking billboards for Nike or some other clothing manufacturer? We value people not as people but according to how much money they have and how they can help our economic elite make more of it. To illustrate this point I want to tell a story out of the present Presidential campaign. Early last July John Kerry, then the presumptive but not yet the official Presidential candidate of the Democratic party, selected Senator John Edwards as his running mate. Edwards had run for President himself, and his central theme was that there are two Americas, essentially the America of those with money and therefore power and the America of those without money and therefore without power. When Kerry announced Edwards as his choice for Vice President, he wanted to appropriate that theme, which had resonated powerfully with many Democratic voters. How he did that, however, was very telling about this country’s priorities. He praised Edwards for speaking out for "the middle class and those struggling to become part of the middle class." Not the middle class and the poor, the middle class and those struggling to become part of the middle class. That formulation betrays this nation’s misplaced priorities. We value people not for who they are but only for their potential to be consumers--consumer being the primary roll the middle class plays among us. We can’t say we care about the poor. The poor, after all, are people with very little money; so they matter to us only to the extent that they are trying to become people with more money. Our culture’s priority is money not people. It, and we, serve Mammon and not God.

Both Amos and Jesus make it very clear to us that that’s wrong. It is wrong as a matter of justice. It is also wrong as a spiritual matter. It is a spiritual matter because it affects our relationship with God. We cannot be in truly right relationship with God as long as we value people not as people but as consumers. We cannot be in right relationship with God as long as we value people with money more than people without money. And, in terms of our relationship with God, it doesn’t matter why they don’t have money, and, John Kerry to the contrary notwithstanding, it doesn’t matter whSether or not they are struggling to become people with money. It only matters that they are people, because people matter to God.

So, what are our priorities? Whom do we serve, God or Mammon? For so long as our country continues, by our political and economic policies at home and around the world, to trample on the needy and bring to ruin the poor of the land, we will continue to give the wrong answer to that question; and we do that at peril to the health of our souls. Amen.