Serve a New Master
The Rev. Samuel Schaal
First Congregational Church of Wauwatosa
Sept. 23, 2007

Jeremiah 8:18-9:1
Psalm 79:1-9
Luke 16:1-13

This past summer I met some friends for lunch in Gurnee, at one of the restaurants just outside Gurnee Mills Mall. We finished our lunch and I had about an hour before I was due back in the Milwaukee area, so I thought I’d go inside the mall to check it out.

You probably know that Gurnee Mills is a huge outlet mall. It is built on a scale that far surpasses most other malls. It looked like a similar mall I had visited in Grapevine, Texas, a suburb in-between Dallas and Fort Worth. There it is called Grapevine Mills Mall. They are owned by the same company. In Texas, Grapevine Mills was built in a huge circle, so wherever you entered, you just walked (a long way around) and eventually got where you started.

I assumed Gurnee was the same, so I walked and walked, thinking I would get back to the entrance I started from. So I walked and walked (and walked and walked). But then I came to a dead end. So Gurnee Mills was not built in a circle.

I found a security guard who told me how to get back my parking lot. In the conversation, I told her I assumed the mall was built in a circle and she said, no, it was (with a sly smile) in the shape of a dollar sign. I smiled back, saying, "How ironic."

Well, driving back, I thought what a great story this will make for this sermon. But I needed to confirm that the mall was indeed shaped like a dollar sign, as this sounded unusual.

I did an internet search but couldn’t find anything and then e-mailed Tom Stacey in our church, who is an architect, and he was able to turn up a drawing of the layout of the mall from the internet. And, indeed, it does take the vague shape of a dollar sign. The main building of the mall is arranged in an “S” shape. (Though more angular; perhaps like a backwards “Z.”) And some of the bigger anchor stores stick out of this “S” shape here and there and when viewed from the top, there are vague shapes of the two slashes through the “S,” so it does look like a dollar sign.

Now, Tom says, and it makes sense, that the developers were much more concerned with visibility and access from the parking lots surrounding this mega-complex, but it’s interesting that it does take the shape of a dollar sign.

This is an apt metaphor on contemporary life. It seems that too often the dollar sign is more prominent in our lives than we would like, that perhaps as Christians we are not always following our true master.

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells the parable of the dishonest manager. This is a difficult parable to understand, as it appears that Jesus is saying that the manager’s dishonesty was a good thing. A rich man hired a manager to take care of his property and the manager had embezzled some of the property. Accused of this fact, the manager then shrewdly went to the tenants of the land and lowered their debt. The tenants, of course, loved that. The rich man, perhaps to save face with his tenants, could not reinstitute the higher debt. The rich man, oddly, praises the manager for being so shrewd, which is strange as this diminished the rich man’s profits.

Commentators have had a field day trying to figure out the point of this story. Luke himself puts forth several interpretations of the story in the sayings that follow. But finally comes the kicker, perhaps the point of the whole parable when Jesus utters those words we’d rather not hear: “You cannot serve God and wealth.”

This statement confronts us because so much of our life is devoted to wealth: the desire for it, the accumulation of it, the use of it, perhaps anxiety about the lack of it. What is, we might ask, what is the relation of wealth to our spiritual journeys as Christians?

We live in a society that richly blesses us materially. And yet we are also aware that our consumer appetites sometimes have a demoralizing effect on our lives. The availability of an ever-growing array of consumer products brings both blessing and curse. We are burdened at times by too many things. We often want more than we can afford. We struggle in helping our kids develop good attitudes about money shaped by more than television commercials.

I remember that before my children were born, I never went to McDonald’s. They didn’t have a very good hamburger, I thought. When our first child was maybe four years old, he begged to go there, having seen their commercials. He didn’t want the food, really, he wanted the Happy Meal toy. So, as Isaiah says, “a child shall lead them”—in our case to McDonalds. We went there not because the food was good, but because their advertising convinced our children to take us there.

Later, the kids wanted very expensive video games. I remember driving all over town back in the 1980s trying to find the old Super Mario Brothers video game that one child desperately wanted for Christmas. Lo and behold, I did find one (our own little Christmas miracle!), the last one on the shelves of Toys R Us. Then we were off to the races, upgrading systems, buying new games, keeping up with the latest video fads. Today, all of these things, once so desperately desired, now occupy space somewhere in a landfill.

But then there’s the blessing side of the question: The same market that brings us items we could do without, also produces many useful items which truly bless us: automobiles, microwaves, computers, cell phones, medical technologies that literally save lives…the list goes on and on.

So grappling with the materialism of our era is not an easy issue. There are issues of using and preserving earth’s natural resources, which we are using too quickly. Carbon dioxide emissions from cars, planes and industry are widely thought to aggravate global warming. All this is in direct proportion to our materialistic lifestyles.

But our materialistic lifestyles also fuel an economy that increasingly participates in a growing world economy that helps other countries pull themselves out of poverty. Further, political liberties, which we hold dear in our country and which other countries strive for, cannot exist where there is not a sufficient amount of economic liberty. A free society needs reasonably free markets. (How free is an open question among us and we continue to discern that.)

So wealth, consumer goods, material comfort, present both benefits and challenges to our society. Money is not the root of all evil, as First Timothy tells us, but it is the love of money that is the problem (1 Timothy 6:10). As I heard a speaker say many years ago, money is like a brick—You can build a temple or stone somebody to death.

Here we get down to what Jesus says: You can’t have two masters: God and wealth. We must give our allegiance to one or the other. Declaring God as our master, or more precisely, following Jesus as our master, is not to say we must relinquish wealth. It is to say our wealth must be subservient to God’s call in our lives. It is to say that wealth is only a penultimate value (that is, next to last or next to ultimate).

This question of what is ultimate in our life is best expressed by the Jewish shema: "Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One." God is our God. Anytime we substitute something for God we’re in trouble—be it wealth, or the desire for wealth, or alcohol, drugs, gambling, position, power, or any number of other compulsions that block the free flow of our relationship with the Source of all that is, that blocks our own understanding of ourselves as God’s image and likeness.

This, in fact, is the sin of the marketplace when it views human beings, the image of God, as mere consumers, when it treats us as objects and not as subjects of God’s creation. When advertising plays upon the unformed desires of children and lures them into consumption patterns that are not life-giving. When adults are likewise lured into behaviors that are not of the highest accord. When we are lured into turning things that are not God into God.

Jeremiah’s lament, “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved” was uttered in the midst of a severe draught, in a time of serious economic deprivation. In a paradoxical fashion in our age we are suffering not so much from material deprivation but from soul deprivation. We are rich in things and poor in soul, as the old hymn goes. Amid all our things, amid all our luxuries, all our comforts, we realize they cannot save us.

Jesus is not asking us to forsake wealth, just don’t make it God. We need a reasonable amount of wealth, of material sustenance, so that God’s creation is a healthy and vital creation. We see in the Gospels and in the Biblical witness generally, a real concern that we use our wealth in human and humane ways, to support each other, to build up a just society, and especially to help those who are suffering.

Because God is known in the body of the world. God cares about the bodily needs of God’s people and about the body of creation itself.

Deep within that creation, God is at work. God has planted, deep within our hearts, God’s law. And that God is calling us back to that law, that we should seek first the kingdom of God, to use all our resources in that seeking, and in that process God might be more fully known in our world.

We might try to more fully connect our wealth with our spiritual life, of connecting what we do on Sunday morning with what we do on Monday morning. God cares what we do with our wealth. God wants us to use it to build up God’s people. God is clearly, judging from the Biblical witness, concerned with the poor and marginalized.

The market is a fine economic vehicle in sustaining a community. It’s a necessary thing. But it should be used to further God’s will and God’s ways in the world. That shopping mall in Gurnee probably wasn’t designed to look like a dollar sign, as I’ve suggested. But it ended up looking that way anyway. In a similar way, our lives can take on a shape not intended by God—our lives can look too much like a dollar sign. But God did not intend for us to look like a dollar sign or for human society to look like a dollar sign. We are created in the image and likeness of God, not the image of Caesar. We should not be something (or someone) God did not intend.

As wonderful as the world is, we yearn for more than the world can give and we are weary of the world’s attempts to fill a spot in our souls that only the Eternal can fill. We yearn for the eternal sustenance that only God can provide. This is true wealth, following our true master.

Amen