Sermons
This Week
Special Events
Contact Us
Children's Ministries
Nursery school
Music Program
Caring for Creation
Outreach
Pastoral Care
Planned Giving
No One Can
Serve Two Masters (YrC Pr 20) September 25,
2007 The Rev. Tom Trutner
He ended his sermons superbly. They had a bite, packed a wallop, very
provocative, and made you do some heavy thinking. The only problem is, you never
knew how he got there. This was a minister I knew many years ago. Try as you
may, it was just very, very difficult to figure how, given the way his sermons
started, that he could come up with such an ending.
I won’t say that he was like that opponent of Winston Churchill’s whom the
Prime Minister described as an orator “who, before he spoke, he didn’t know what
he was going to say; when he was speaking didn’t know what he was saying; and
when he finished, didn’t know what he had said.” No, this preacher I knew wasn’t
quite this bad, but still, he was puzzling. More like Mark Twain’s description
of the speeches of Calvin Coolidge: “A herd of words galloping over the
landscape in search of an idea.” (You may even think this sermon is of the same
genre by the time I have finished!)
Some scholars feel the same way about today’s Gospel reading. St.
Augustine wrote, “I can’t believe that this story came from the lips of our
Lord,” and a commentator followed by writing, “Luke himself appears to have had
trouble with this story, because he seems to have added a few clarifying verses
at the end. Luke has Jesus say that we cannot love God and money. True, but does
it really relate to this parable?”
Someone else reflected, “The Parable of the Dishonest Steward is
notoriously the most problematic of all the stories Jesus told. In trying to
undo its knots, scholars tie themselves in fresh ones. Commentators are
bewildered by it. Those preaching on it yearn for the last hymn.” So, if Maestro
Ludtke will crank up the organ and if the rest of you will turn to Hymn 594, we
can finish this service and go home early.
Seriously, the body of this parable is enormously difficult:
dishon-esty gets rewarded, it seems to say. Rather than a sermon, the passage is
probably much better dealt with in a study group, perhaps with a biblical
scholar, in which a variety of opinions can be shared. But make no mistake, Luke
finishes this with a bang. As we read, “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.”
There are other various translations of this passage:
--You cannot serve God and the power of money at the same time."
--You cannot serve both God and worldly riches."
--You cannot be bondservants both of God and of gold.
--You can't serve both God and the Bank.
--Ye cannot serve God and mammon. (the familiar King James)
No matter how you slice it, this admonition - found also in other Gospels -
is a very arresting warning and and also a summons. Jesus alludes to this same
human dilemma in so many other instances in his teachings: namely, the enormous
power of money and wealth to distort our perspective, to tempt us away from the
values we know we should be pursing.
I’m sure we’re all familiar with the passage in Matthew, “ Truly I say to
you, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I say to
you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich
man to enter the kingdom of God.”
Christine Pohl of the Asbury Western Seminary writes, “ Our relationship to
"mammon" tests our faithfulness. Whether justly or unjustly acquired, various
forms of wealth can become our master, shaping and filling our lives in a
godlike manner. Particularly in this society, where consumption drives the
economic system and where economic values shape even family and church
decision-making, the idolatrous dimension of mammon is both ubiquitous and
subtle.”
It’s hard to escape the moral outrage in the bible against the rich.
Not because they’re rich, but because of what the rich usually do with their
wealth, how they let it become their master, how it becomes the basis for so
many decisions that deny the material blessings of God to many others, which,
ironically, in turn denies spiritual blessings to the rich.
A few years ago, I remember hearing about a new doll that was being brought
to market nationally for anywhere between $49 and $500. This pricey bit of
merchandise, which its owners described as a “work of art and a piece of
America,” was the "bag lady" doll. It was the ghastly image of starving street
men and women, complete with the gilded trivia and the rag-tag litter that a
consumer society throws out. When the National Coalition for the Homeless
protested about a business "paying more attention to a homeless doll than the
homeless themselves," the manufacturer responded that "bag ladies are part of
America," and, furthermore, said that "the doll is clean, the doll is cute."
It is, of course, hard to know where the manufacturers were coming from,
whether they were people of faith or not or what their outlook was, but clearly
they put profit ahead of any normal human sympathy. Their master was mammon.
How many times do we read in the papers of instances in which the
accumulation of personal or corporate wealth, the profit motive if you please,
determines the decision-making process, often at the expense of others for whom
some of that wealth would make a world of positive difference in their lives?
Think also of our environmental and ecological challenges. Often we hear
that any radical change in our lifestyles might upset the economy. What I hear
in this notion is that it is more important for us to keep producing and
consuming as we presently do than it is to consider what kind of world we will
present to the future, to our children and grandchildren, and their children.
Are we selfishly serving our current needs for wealth instead of serving God’s
purposes for this planet and for those that will inhabit it in the future - some
of whom will have our names?
Remember Bob Dylan. He wrote a song some years ago, and it sure seems to
fit this passage
You may be an ambassador to England or France,
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance,
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world,
You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls
But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes, indeed
You're gonna have to serve somebody,
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody.
You might be a rock 'n' roll addict prancing on the stage,
You might have drugs at your command, women in a cage,
You may be a business man or some high degree thief,
They may call you Doctor or they may call you Chief
But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes, indeed
You're gonna have to serve somebody,
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody.
The ancient wisdom of both the Old and New Testament - and the truth that
Jesus was constantly and urgently proclaiming - was that there are two
contrasting centers which continually compete for the loyalty of the heart: “No
one can serve two masters.” What is needed, we are told by Jesus, is an inner
transformation of the self at its deepest level. In a most sublime section of
the Sermon on the Mount, we hear Jesus again calling us to a new heart, a new
frame of mind, a life whose decisions are centered in God:
"No one 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.
Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you
will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you
will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more
than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow
nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father
feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any
of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?
And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies
of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell
you,
even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.
But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today
and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more
clothe you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, "What
will we
eat?' or "What will we drink?' or "What will we wear?' For it is the
Gentiles
who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows
that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of
God and
his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
(Matthew 6)
In his monumental work The Sabbath , Abraham Joshua Heschel reminds
the faithful, "There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be,
not to own but to give, not to control, but to share."
This is a supreme lesson for Christians. The love of Christ must always be
made tangible in a busy and often cruel world. If we pray ‘Thy Kingdom come, thy
will be done,’ then we must be those who are striving to put the love of
God in Christ at the center of every aspect of our lives. We are each
invited to live our lives in this sacred realm of which Heschel speaks, to
resist the clutter of things and money that so easily skew our perspective and
to live in openness and commitment to God’s spirit and leading.