Please turn with me to Matthew 6:24-34
You cannot serve both God and money.
In 2008 the global economy slid into a recession and the
markets in America plummeted out of control. With many major corporations
facing financial ruin, the American government was begged to provide a bail-out
package for these Wall Street tycoons whose fiscal irresponsibility had finally
caught up with them; everyone agreed that this decision to throw away billions
of taxpayer dollars was necessary. Soon after, President Barack Obama put forth
his plan for a national healthcare program known as Obamacare. The opposition
to such a plan almost reawakened the Red Scare in some American Republicans,
the bill eventually went through but has become one of the most demonized
pieces of legislature in American history.
You cannot serve both God and money.
The Harper Conservatives achieved a majority government in
the last election, promising that they were the only ones capable of steering
Canadians through these rough economic times. Meanwhile our long enjoyed
favourable reputation abroad continues to deteriorate as the government creates
harsher and harsher foreign policies and continues to neglect its treaty
responsibilities to our First Peoples, many of whom are living in appalling
conditions that would be unimaginable even in 3rd world countries -
instead pushing through omnibus bill after omnibus bill bent on attracting
foreign investment and economic advantage.
You cannot serve both God and money.
At the inauguration of Obama’s second term in office he
swore his oath on the bible of Martin Luther King Jr., a freedom fighter for
the rights of the “least of these”, regardless of their skin color. Meanwhile,
the lives of young soldiers are sacrificed in the Middle East in an alleged
“war on terror”, and countless innocent civilians live in constant fear of being
caught in the crossfire. “Our cause is just!” some would say – though no Just
War theories ever allow for the bombing of innocent civilian populations. One
tends to wonder how much our thirst for oil is really at root in these acts of
slaughter.
You cannot serve both God and money.
Now, before we dive into this text a little bit more, I have
a couple of confessions to make. While I grew up in an Alliance church, which
tends to explain these crazy ideas of mine being a missionary, I must admit
that while at Prov I had a conversion of sorts, some would say I finally saw
the light… that’s right, I became a
Mennonite (gasp)! Part of that process involved learning a taste of
their theology and from what I gather, the Sermon on the Mount – which is where
our text is taken from today – is a really important passage for those guys. You
see, different denominational traditions tend to read the Bible differently,
placing different passages as having more or less importance in how they
interpret the rest of scripture i.e.,
Pentecostals love Acts, Evangelicals love the great commission and
Romans, and Mennonites love the Sermon on the mount. The Mennonites are
committed to reading this text as actual literal instructions for how to live,
whereas some other traditions tend to spiritualize it a bit more. I come to you
today with the Mennonite conviction that this passage has some real implications
for how we are to act.
You cannot serve both God and Money.
Have you ever felt that tension? Have you ever been offered
a chance to serve God but turned it down because you didn’t have the money? Or
the time? Or maybe you’ve just never really been open to pursuing some
opportunities too much because you know that they might leave you financially
vulnerable? After all, we need to think of the families that we have to
support…
Sometimes even while serving God, we can still get seduced
by the idol of money. I know I have. This year at Providence, as some of you
may know, I spearheaded the organization of a missions trip to the Dominican
Republic. In terms of organization – it was a complete disaster. I’ve never
been on a missions trip before so I had no idea what I was getting myself into,
or what to expect. I didn’t fully understand the organization we had been
partnering with and so it turned out that all of our communication was being
mediated by an unnecessary third party which made responses to simple questions
take weeks to get answers for. Details such as cost and itinerary were made
known to us extremely late in the game, I think I found out how much it was
going to cost about a month before we left – inconveniently for me, the price
per person for the trip was about $200 a person more than I had quoted the rest
of the team, so I had to figure out how to make up the difference, and we found
out what we were doing about a week before we left. I was a wreck. I slept
about 6 hours a night, lying in bed worrying about finding money, and feeling
like a failure that I didn’t know the answers to any of the questions my team mates
wanted to know. Worries centered around money were consuming me.
(Read vv. 31-33 again)
Jesus tells us to not worry, so do our shrinks! Everyone and
anyone can tell you that worrying gets us nowhere. So how do we cease worrying
about money? How do we live lives of service to God rather than to money?
I would like to suggest to you that what Jesus is doing in
this sermon is describing those odd people who later come to be known as
Christians, that group of people whose very lives are shaped and formed by life
in a community of practice….. “Community of Practice”, what do I mean by that?
This is an important phrase that deserves some unpacking.
The Community of Practice, or the Church is, well, us. But
it is crucial to note that our identity is not decided merely by some set of
propositions we believe. Rather the our beliefs manifest in formational
practices which we engage in regularly. I’m not advocating here some sort of
works based salvation, but merely expounding upon the principle we find in
James, “you show me your faith, and I’ll show you my works” of course meaning
that faith that is not made manifest in our daily practices is no faith at all
but merely a deception of the mind.
So what are these practices? Well I’m not talking just about
making sure our daily devotionals get done, or showing up to church or even
praying before meals. Piety is not the sole task for Christians. I’m talking
about lives of worship, centered in prayer, that are lived out in tangible ways
such as; refusing to kill one another, how about spending time with the widow
and the orphan… or in our language, the ostracized, the mentally ill, the
addicts, the homeless, the homosexuals. Guys I’m talking about all those people
out there who have been forced to the edges of society and are keenly in need
of love.
One such young man quickly comes to my mind this morning.
(You may have heard about the young aboriginal man from
Gambler who passed away a couple weeks ago, he drank himself to death, in the
middle of his drunkenness, downed a bottle of draino, which ate him from the
inside out, I grew up with this guy and while we were never close friends, I
could see that there was not a lot of love in his life – his home life left
something to be desired and he found attention from less than reputable
sources. Upon hearing of his death, I wondered how his life could have turned
out if he had had the love in his life that I have experienced)
It looks like Jesus is actually suggesting that we start
living lives of vulnerability, serving God out of our poverty and insecurity
rather than out of our security and wealth. As Stanley Hauerwas writes, ““We
are told not to lay up treasure for ourselves, so we must learn to share. We are
told not to be anxious, not to try to ensure our future, thus making it
necessary to rely on one another for our food, our clothing, and our housing.” Gene
Davenport, in his wonderful book on the Sermon on the Mount, Into the Darkness,
reminds us that “when the first hearers of Matthew's Gospel heard Jesus' call
to suffer rather than to inflict suffering, to accept death rather than to
inflict death, to reject all efforts to save themselves from their plight by
military action and to leave their deliverance to God, they knew that the one
who gave such scandalous instruction had himself lived and died in accord with
that call.”
We all know the content of the Sermon on the Mount. It has
so many of the inconvenient teachings that seem impossible to us. Asking us not
even to hate one another? Not even to look at each other with lust? Or maybe
most impossible… especially for me, not to worry?
This year in planning that missions trip I was placed in a
position of poverty. There was a point in this process when it looked like we
were going to be thousands of dollars short. In one of my many panic stricken
nights I came to the conclusion that the only option available was to pay the
difference out of my remaining student loan money and figure it out later. My
team was tapped out, I was tapped out, financially, mentally and emotionally.
And that friends, is when the words of Jesus came back to
me. As it is written, “Blessed are the poor, who understand their need for
God”, this is how the NLT translators decided to render the more commonly known
beatitude, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” found in Matthew 5. I often look at
the beatitudes and say, what’s so “blessed” about these people, but it was
brought to my attention at Providence that a better understanding of this word
for our context is “happy” so happy are those who find themselves in a place of
poverty, who understand their need for God. I’m here to testify to the truth of
that. There is a peace that passes all understanding when you find yourself in
a position of true poverty where only God can be your source of life, only his
divine working can sustain you, when all of your efforts have been in vain. The
saints understood this; those ancient mystics of the church who lived in
poverty, depending upon God for everything, saints like St. Francis for
example, a monk who chose created an order of Christians who dedicate
themselves to a life of poverty to fully appreciate the grace that can only
come from God. It is no accident that the new Pope chose the name Francis – he
sees that in a world where so often, governments, corporations, and individuals
are setting up money as their God, there is great need for the Church to offer
a different form of life, one that acknowledges God as God and refuses to allow
money to be the all-consuming force it can so easily become.
You cannot serve both God and money.
This year was almost like a constant argument between God
and myself. God would say, “Ryan, are you prepared to trust me to provide for
all of your needs?”
“Yes of course,” I would respond.
“Ok, prove it,” he would retort. And then there would be
silence, agonizing silence, and nothing would work out… Right when I would be
on the verge of finally giving up hope, God’s providence would prevail and just
the right amount of money would come in, or the email that was overdue by a
month would finally arrive, etc.
What is our response to God’s question of “Do you trust me”?
Is it, “Yes God, I trust you, but I’m
going to make sure something else is in place that will come through, just in
case you don’t”? I know that it is for me too often. Jesus is challenging us
here. He is saying that what lies at the root of this temptation is our love of
money, security, and self-sufficiency.
Especially in our individualistic North American culture, the idea of
being dependent on others is deplorable to us! “So don’t worry about these
things, saying, ‘What will we eat? What will we drink? What will we wear?’ For
the pagans chase after such things…” Jesus is calling us to lay aside our dead
identity as self-sufficient, strong, independent, Canadians, and accept the new
life that he has for us. A life of poverty, a life that recognizes our absolute
dependence on God
You cannot serve both God and money – for the Pagans chase
after such things as money, and security.
That is a challenge to us. There is a reason the rich young
ruler went away from Jesus very sad when told that he had to give all he had to
the poor. What Jesus is asking is not merely that we give up our possessions,
but that we admit his lordship in our lives. He is asking us to be vulnerable
enough to allow him to provide – to
give him our whole lives. What kind of faith can we really claim to have if we
are responsible for providing for all of our needs?
So what does this mean? Do we give away everything without a
thought in the world and trust that God will take care of it? Probably not. There
is something to be said for discernment, wise stewardship, etc. etc., all the
good ol’ Christian financial advice. BUT it does at the very least, demand that
when we are confronted with an opportunity to further God’s kingdom, we act.
This text tells us that in the community of practice into which we have been
brought, we can no longer use the excuse of “I can’t afford it” or “I don’t
have time” or “This will threaten my longterm fiscal security”. For it is
pagans who chase after such things.
You cannot serve both God and Money.
Who will you serve?
