"The Worst Kind"--September 23, 2019

"The Worst Kind"--September 23, 2019

[Jesus said:] "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 despite the other. You cannot serve God and wealth." [Luke 16:13]

There's a brilliant line in the classic rom-com When Harry Met Sally where Billy Crystal's Harry suggests there are three kinds of people in the world: low-maintenance, high-maintenance, and then, what Harry calls the worst of all--the people who are high-maintenance but think they are low-maintenance.  (You know the sort--the folks who are tedious to be around and are fussy about having things just so, but who can't see how they come off to others.)

Well, I want to suggest that maybe there is a parallel for the categories Jesus suggests, too.  You can serve God... you can serve wealth, or worst of all, you can serve wealth while you think you are serving God.  And indeed, that is definitely the worst.

The difficulty is that we really want to find ways to turn God into our means of getting more money, more wealth, more stuff, more... of everything.  And we dress that up into sounding like we are religiously devoted to God.  It's all around us: the obvious examples are the prosperity-gospel preachers on TV and on the radio, who sell the idea that being a good Christian will result in material "blessings."  But it's in the more subtle ways we are taught to pray for our kids to be "successful"--by which, our culture usually means "has a well-paying job."  Or it's the way we Respectable Religious folks have of trying to edit out all the Bible's references to God's care for the poor, so that we can instead latch onto the myth that poor people are inherently lazy, or unintelligent, or immoral, or less important.  All of it is a scam, and all of that is our crooked attempt to convince ourselves that we are really worshipping God, while we secretly confess our faith in money when we think no one is watching.

It really is a struggle in this life, especially for us who occupy the overlapping space in the Venn diagram of being both Americans and Christians, not to devote ourselves to the pursuit of wealth and then try to baptize it as piety.  It is tempting to assume that God's job is to "bless" those who are devout with prosperity, and that if we make a big enough public display of external religiosity, we will be rewarded with a financial windfall.  You can even find folks who want to build a "National Prayer Tower" in Washington, D.C. where planners say one day people will be able to overlook the city and pray for good things to happen, apparently with the thought that having a big tower to pray in will make the praying more effective.  

The ancient Hebrew prophets had to deal with voices like that in their own day, when the conventional wisdom was that if you had big public shows of religious piety to God, complete with special shrines where the prayer-reception was somehow supposed to be better, then God was obligated to increase the nation's wealth and prosperity.  We really aren't any different than the royal-government-approved priests of Amos' day who announced that increased wealth among the elites of Israel must be a sign of God's approval and pleasure, rather than a sign that their hearts were being corrupted and hardened by the influencing power of their wealth.

And here's the thing: all of that thinking really boils down to just trying to use God as a means to getting more money.  If my unspoken goal is really to get richer, and I just offer up prayers or public shows of religiosity in order to try and persuade God to give me a windfall, well, I'm not serving God--I'm serving myself and my wealth and trying to get God to be the agent for all of that.  But that isn't really dedication to God or love for God--that's love for myself and devotion to my wealth and the attempt to use God as means to an end.  Please don't confuse that with actually serving God.

The struggle of this day is to let Jesus keep pulling us away from our love and trust in our money--whether it's my paycheck, my retirement savings, or the closing number of the whole Dow Jones Industrial Average--and to stop us from treating God just as a means toward a bigger pile of cash.  That's not serving, loving, or trusting God--that's trying to use God as a means for getting the thing we really trust: cold, hard cash.  And instead, we will let Jesus open our eyes to the way God specially cares for and provides for the folks who don't have two pennies to rub together.

And as we do that, we'll become less and less tempted to just use God as religious cover for trying to make ourselves richer... and instead, we'll be led just to serve God regardless of the bottom line.

Lord Jesus, keep pulling on us to serve you, especially when we get confused as use God as a cover for loving our money.