Who Do We Serve?

Who Do We Serve?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

September 18, 2016

Scripture: Amos 8:4-7; Luke 16:1-13; 1Timothy 6:10.

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 want to start this morning by asking you a question. What does the Bible say more about than it says about anything else? Sex? Power? Sin? Well, actually it says almost nothing about the first of those things. It talks about the second, power, but often only indirectly. It talks about sin but often doesn’t bother to define it. No, what the Bible says more about than it says about anything else is actually money. One site I found online says that the Bible has about 500 verses about prayer, fewer than 500 verses about faith, and over 2,000 verses about money. Jesus actually says more about money or wealth than he says about anything else. Money is a really big deal in the Bible.

The Bible says a lot about money, and it often says it in a context that makes money out to be something really bad, or at least really problematic. We heard one passage where money is associated with evil in our passage from Amos this morning. That passage doesn’t use the word money, but it pretty clearly is addressing, and condemning, people who have a lot of it. In that passage the prophet Amos blasts people who resent religious practices that keep them from making money, who cheat others, especially the poor, so that they get more money out of them, who “do away with the poor of the land,” meaning I suppose so abuse poor people that they actually die, which did happen quite a lot in biblical times. Amos judges the wealthy in some of the strongest language in the Bible. In one of my favorite verses in the whole Bible he says “let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream.” That’s at Amos 5:24. You can look it up. By both justice and righteousness he means social and economic justice, justice that protects and serves the poor rather than the rich. Amos doesn’t condemn money per se, but he sure condemns the people who have it. He condemns them for valuing money over people, all of the people of their time and place, and especially the poor. That is pretty much the whole Bible’s attitude toward money.

And I suspect that some of you may be thinking yes, that’s right, for money is the root of all evil. A lot of people think that the Bible says that money is the root of all evil. Well, here’s the thing. The Bible doesn’t actually say that. What it says is “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.” That’s at 1 Timothy 6:10. You can look that up too. See, in the Bible’s way of looking at the matter, money isn’t the problem. It’s our relationship to money that’s the problem. 1 Timothy says it’s the love of money that is a root of evil, not money itself. That verse often gets misquoted, but is about our relationship to money not about money itself.

We heard it again in our passage from Luke. There’s that parable of the shrewd manager. It is perhaps a bit startling when it tells us to be shrewd, to use worldly wealth to gain friends. I suppose there are lots of sermons in that part of the passage, but what struck me this week about the text is how it ends: “No servant can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money’ Jesus, like the author of 1 Timothy, is talking here about our relationship to money, not about money itself. 1 Timothy speaks of the love of money. Jesus speaks of serving money. Both of these texts are pointing us toward something more than money itself.

Maybe it’s because by American standards I don’t have much of it, but I find it really easy to think that money in and of itself leads to various kinds of evil. I used to work in a world where a lot of people had a lot of money, a lot more than I ever had working there as an employee not a partner. I see how money corrupts American politics. I see the great gap in prosperity between the wealthy in our country and the poor. Last Monday I was up in Skagit County representing the Faith Action Network in connection with a vote to form a union by farmworkers, most if not all of them Hispanic. I was powerfully struck by the presence there of these poor laborers and the several quite opulent houses you see dotting the landscape. It’s really easy for me to think that money in and of itself creates social inequality and political corruption.

Yet that’s not what the Bible says about money. Now, clearly money created problems in the worlds of the Bible, as we see in our passage from Amos. But the Bible is in most respects quite wise, and it is often a lot more nuanced than are the people who use it as a weapon in support of various causes in our day. It doesn’t say money is the problem. It says that an unhealthy relationship to money is the problem. Serving money is the problem. Loving money is the problem. So what are we to make of these biblical warnings about the dangers of a bad relationship to money?

Well, maybe we can start to answer that question by looking at what our biblical texts imply about the nature of a healthy relationship to money. If loving money is the problem that creates an unhealthy relationship to money, then I suppose not loving money is part of a healthy relationship to it. If serving money is the problem that creates an unhealthy relationship to money, then I suppose not serving money is part of a healthy relationship to it. But what does it mean to love money? What does it mean to serve money? I think some of my life experience have a bit to say about that, so I’ll share a little of that experience with you here. Like I said, I used to work in a world where a lot of people had a lot of money, both the partner lawyers I worked for and many of their clients. I sensed quite strongly that, with a few exceptions, the people who had the most money were the people who cared the most about money. In biblical terms they were people who loved money and served money. Again with exceptions, it seemed to be general rule in that world of wealthy lawyers that the ones who cared the most about money cared the least about lawyer ethics. Many of them saw the ethical rules by which lawyers are bound as unnecessary interference with their ability to make more money. They didn’t care what people or what causes they represented as long as they could make money doing it.

I think we see the same dynamic in the larger world of our American society. Greedy wheeler-dealers on Wall Street caused the worst collapse of the American economy since 1929 a few years ago as they thought up ever shadier schemes to get more money out of people with little concern for what those schemes actually meant for the people whose money they were taking. A British petroleum company cut corners to save money and nearly destroyed the environment of Gulf of Mexico a while back. Many other examples could easily be noted. In all of those cases it wasn’t really money that was the problem. It was the love of money that was the problem. It was serving money not the common good that was the problem. In all of those cases loving and serving money hurt people and/or hurt God’s good earth. Love of money is indeed the root of all kinds of evil.

So if that’s what an unhealthy relationship to money looks like, what does a healthy one look like? I think Jesus implies a good answer to that question when he says that you cannot serve God and money. Clearly Jesus calls us to serve God in all aspects of our lives including in our relationship to money. We learn from Jesus that serving God means first of all serving God’s people, all of God’s people but especially those whom the world puts down, rejects, or oppresses. Serving God means caring for people. It means caring about their health and their wellbeing. It means caring about their opportunities to lead a whole life. It means not kowtowing to those in power but lifting up the lowly. It means, as we read in the Gospel of Matthew, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and the prisoners. If serving God means doing those things, and it does, then money can play a significant role in our service of God. It can pay for housing for the homeless. It can pay for clothes for the naked. It can pay for food for the hungry. It can pay for medical care for the sick and injured. Some people with a lot of money get that about money, Bill and Melinda Gates for example. They have a really healthy relationship to money. Yes, they keep a lot of it for themselves, but they also give enormous amounts of it away to support programs the aid the poor all over the world.

None of us has that kind of money, as far as I know. If you do, let me talk to you about tithing. But we all have some money. And that means that we are all faced with decisions about what to do with our money. I often think that the old cliché WWJD, what would Jesus do, is flip and even silly, but in this context maybe it isn’t. Jesus had no money as far as we know, but it’s easy to see what he would have done with it if he’d had it. Feed the hungry. House the homeless. Help the sick. Oppose injustice and oppression. Those things are the marks of a healthy relationship to money.

So who do we serve, God or money? That, I think, is a challenging question for all of us, or at least I know that it is for me. So let us wrestle with that question. Let us seek to serve God rather than money. Only by doing that can we be faithful disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.