You Cannot Serve God and Mammon

'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."'

--Luke 16: 1-13

In 1987 Gordon Gekko quipped, “Greed is good,” a quote so iconic that a lot of people think Gordon Gekko is one of those people talking finances on a cable news network, not, in reality, Michael Douglas’ character in the film Wall Street. Some have said that that line came to personify the Affluent Eighties, a decade marked by more, well, everything, especially money.  We’ve seen where such a focus on excess has gotten us—a greater disparity between rich and poor, haves and have nots, than any of us have ever seen. 

Gordon Gekko from Wall Street.

There are plenty of characters from Scripture who might echo Gordon's sentiment, and we meet one of them this week, a character in one of Jesus' most complex and confusing stories: the Parable of the Dishonest Manager.  It's a rather strange tale of a manager, or steward, as he is called in some translations, who is after wealth in any way that he can get it.  Not content to simply be a trusted manager of his employer’s household finances, he sets out to skim off an extra share of the money for himself.  In a not-so-surprising twist, his employer puts an end to this as soon as the wrongdoing comes to light, and the manager, now deprived of his source of income and prestige, runs one last scam in order to buy some goodwill with a few households that are in debt to his now former employer.  In an actually shocking move, the employer commends the shrewdness of this dishonest manager, perhaps understanding the rules of cutthroat business dealings—a man after Gordon Gekko’s own heart, it would seem.  He doesn’t like being stolen from, but he can still admire the artistry of the crime.

When the parable is finished, Jesus offers an application of its lessons for those who have just listened to him.  It's certainly confusing when Jesus says things like, "Make for yourself friends by means of dishonest wealth." Could Jesus be encouraging people to steal or cheat their neighbors?  If we understand the climate of Jesus' day we can understand that this is not what he is doing, but instead he is giving good news for how the poor can survive.  It was a social, economic, political, and religious system that saw the rich and powerful get even more rich and powerful at the expense of the poor and downtrodden, and for that reason Jesus does make it clear that some shrewdness, cunning, and quick thinking are important if those living on the margins—those who predominantly made up his audience—were going to survive.  In a system that was built on exploitation of the poor (especially in the collaboration between Roman occupiers and religious authorities), this parable offered some much-appreciated advice for how the poor might get one over on their oppressors.

The Parable of the Unfaithful Steward by Marinus van Reymerswaele

Still, the poor were not the only ones in that audience.  Verse 14, the very next verse after this passage ends, points out that among those in the crowd were—and this is how the text itself puts it—“The Pharisees, who were lovers of money.”  And they, according to that same verse, ridiculed Jesus.  Perhaps it was not so much because he just told a parable that actually gave the poor and vulnerable some ideas on how they might get hustle the rich and powerful, but more because of the last sentence of his application of the parable for the crowd:  You cannot serve God and wealth. 

The Greek word that gets translated to wealth is mammon, which is sometimes also translated as money or riches, but there really is no direct English version of the word; hence, the King James Version of the text doesn't even bother translating it ("You cannot serve God and mammon.").  So what is mammon?  The literal definition is "that which in which one trusts."  That is to say, the thing that we value most of all, that for which we will do anything.  If the thing most important to us is not God, then that thing is mammon, and it is impossible to give all of our heart, all of our soul, and all of our mind to both God and mammon. 

What exactly constitutes mammon is debatable, but there is a reason why the word gets translated to wealth in our text today and to money and riches in other translations.  Think about this:  Can you name a human invention in which we have put a greater degree of our trust, devotion, and love than money?  It isn't like it is something new.  The prophet Amos, preaching at the most affluent time in the history of the kingdom of Israel, scolded the rich and powerful, who had made their mammon into their god:

'Hear this, you that trample on the needy,

and bring to ruin the poor of the land,

saying, "When will the new moon be over

so that we may sell grain;

and the sabbath,

so that we may offer wheat for sale?

We will make the ephah small and the shekel great,

and practice deceit with false balances,

buying the poor for silver

and the needy for a pair of sandals, 

and selling the sweepings of the wheat."'

--Amos 8: 4-6

This elevation of wealth into a kind of idol was true in Amos' day, in Jesus' day, and in our own day.  There are always those folks who hear Jesus' words (or Amos' words) and say, "That's not true!  You can totally serve God and wealth!" The rich and powerful place all of their trust in wealth, thinking that it will save them.  What's more, they end up preaching a message to poor folks, telling them that what God really wants is for them to be rich because such riches are a sign of God's favor.  Today we call this message the Prosperity Gospel, a modern-day heresy in which religious elites like Creflo Dollar and Joel Osteen pack arenas full of poor folks and try to convince them that obtaining more wealth will lead to greater security and to higher favor with God.  

False Prophets.

What is it about the poor that seems so frightening to the rich?  Why this need to convince folks that wealth is part of God's plan for all people?  One of my favorite contemporary Christian writers is a preacher named Shane Claiborne, who says that the problem with modern Christianity is not that rich folks don't help poor folks, they do through efforts like soup kitchens or homeless shelters, but the deeper problem is that rich folks don't know any poor folks.  They're not in relationship with them because, as Shane puts it, those of us with wealth have been taught to quarantine off suffering.   And that is what poor folks represent:  suffering, pain, loss.  This is why they are so frightening to rich folks, and why Jesus' message of "good news to the poor" made the rich folks so nervous.  Jesus is talking about emptying oneself, but the rich don't even know how to begin doing that, they're so filled up with mammon.  Yet the poor are emptying themselves every day.  They can't hide behind their mammon because they have none, and they can't pretend that they don't know pain and suffering because these are constant companions.  In so many ways, the poor have a deeper understanding of God and fuller spirituality than the rich will ever know, which has historically meant that they are pushed to (and even out of) the margins.  

Jesus’ message sought to bring everyone into the fold of the community, even Christian churches picked up this practice of quarantining off suffering by pushing folks out of communities based on their skin color, the language they spoke, the expression of their gender, where they lived, and a number of other qualifiers, all of which had one thing in common:  they were all poor.  The beat goes on, with the rich, out of fear for suffering that the poor represent, hide behind their mammon, keep them out of their buildings, and pretend like such things will save them. 

But brothers and sisters, we cannot run from suffering, nor can we hide from it, and certainly no amount of money is going to make it go away.  Ironically, the more we try to hide behind our wealth, the more ferocious the suffering becomes.  To make things even more poetic, our church currently knows better than most that our building won't save us because we cannot even use the majority of it right now! And so we are worshipping outside, exposed to the world.  We have broken free of our walls, and with that freedom comes the chance to connect with those who perhaps have walked or driven past our nice, wealthy church and been too afraid to step inside because they're not a lawyer, a doctor, or anyone else with money and status.  Now, perhaps, when they walk by and see us worshipping outside, they will know that we are a community that does not hide behind anything!  Not our mammon, not our building.  Perhaps now, in this season of vulnerability that we find ourselves in, we can be emptied and go out into the world to connect with the folks who have been afraid to step inside our doors, those with whom Jesus most identified, whom he called the least of these, but whom we call brothers and sisters . 

The Church of the Good Shepherd worshipping outside while our sanctuary is repaired. 

Does all of this mean that money is bad or that Jesus is picking on us for having it?  No, and to think so is a very simplistic way of reading this text.  But Jesus IS reminding us that we cannot serve God and our money.  We cannot hang on to our stuff the way we should be hanging on to God.  We must refocus how we are using our wealth, but we mustn't embody the dishonest manager's desire for more of it--because, no, Gordon, greed is not good! Still, we can learn from the dishonest manager's shrewdness, his cunning, and apply those qualities to our pursuit of love, peace, and justice for God's creation and all of God's people. Let us empty ourselves of our mammon, embrace those who are suffering, and allow ourselves to be transformed by them. It is then, brothers and sisters, that we can with our whole heart, soul, and mind serve only our God.  

Pick one.