God or Mammon: it's one or the other

Amos 8.4-7 Against those ‘who buy the poor for silver.’

1 Timothy 2.1-8 ‘Prayers should be made for all people to God, who desire all people to be saved.’

Luke 16.10-13 ‘You cannot serve God and money.’

 

‘You cannot serve God and money.’

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The Bible is really quite black and white on many matters.

For example, in the book of Deuteronomy we hear, ‘today…I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse.’ (Deut 30.19)

The direction is to choose life and blessing not death and curse.

It is often noted that Jesus adopts this either/or approach too.

So, in today’s gospel reading the Lord makes a hard-hitting point: you cannot serve God and money.

It’s one or the other; it really is a black and white, binary choice.

That doesn’t often sit well with Anglicans, and there are some times when creative ambiguity or lack of precision in some matters is helpful: but not here!

Of course, people have tried to fudge the ‘God or money’ choice over the ages.

We fool ourselves into thinking that we can serve God and money, or ‘mammon’ as the older translations put it.

Mammon. It’s a good word, for a bad thing!

Mammon is not just about having money – we all need money and at its best make it work for the good - but mammon is wealth that becomes a distraction and corrodes the soul.

It’s not just cash and gold that distract us from God.

We’re talking here about the sin of avarice - one of the seven ‘deadly’ ones - which is an extreme, obsessed greed for material wealth.

The sort of mantra that came from the financial markets in the 1980s, and lives on: ‘greed is good.’

When we’re in that territory, and that is the master we serve, then Jesus is clearly quite right: we cannot serve God; in fact we’ll despise God as a brake on what really drives us.

And when we do that then we despise the poor, because we start to believe that they are contemptible because they have neither money nor the power to make choices that we, the rich, have.

The poor - to which we might add the young, the old, the disabled, the ‘unproductive’ - then are a burden on the rest of us making money and living our cosseted lives, and why would be give a thought to them?

This goes further in the dangerous, frankly heretical, path known as the ‘Prosperity Gospel’, which connects material wealth with spiritual power and links more money with more blessing from God: that is plain wrong! it is contrary to Jesus’ Christ’s Gospel!

Not only does Jesus say that serving money takes us away from God, but the prophet Amos reminds us that money is not simply to serve ourselves; it is also to serve the poor.

What we receive as a gift and blessing is of true value when helping the poor and those in need.

Money is a necessary but dangerous and highly toxic part of human life and society.

Money empowers, but power can corrupt, and when it becomes an idol we worship, then God disappears off our radar.

So: life or death, blessing or curse, money or God?

The choice, as they say, is yours.

Identify the Highest God and pursue it single-mindedly.

This choice, this decision, comes before us today in Holy Baptism.

Baptism for each of us, and today for Mya-Rose and Asharn, offers blessing, life and God.

In baptism we turn away from sin the world and the devil, which we see in the deathliness, curse and allure of material wealth and acquisition.

As Jesus says, do not seek ‘treasures upon earth, which moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal’ (Matthew 6.19) but seek the eternal treasure.

May that be our quest, in the words of the psalm, ‘The law of your mouth, O Lord, is dearer to me than a hoard of gold and silver.’ (Psalm 199.72)

Mya-Rose, Asharn, everyone: may that be the treasure for which you yearn; the endless abundance of life in God’s presence.