Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Please pray with me.
Lord, open our hearts and minds by the power of your Holy Spirit, that as the Scriptures are read and your word is proclaimed, we may hear with joy what you say to us today.
Amen.
Today's reading is From Matthew, chapter 6, verses 19 through 34.
Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume, and where thieves break in and steal.
But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes, and where thieves do not break in and steal.
For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
The eye is the lamp of the body.
So if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness.
If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness.
No one can serve two masters. For 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 which of you, by worrying, can 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, 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 seek all these things.
And indeed your Heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.
But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. And all these things will be given to you as well.
So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today's trouble is enough for today.
This is the word of the Lord.
[00:02:41] Speaker B: And thank you, Nora, for reading that section of the Sermon on the Mount. Perhaps Jesus most famous discourse in Scripture. And I have a confession to make, having just sat over there and listened to this passage, and that confession is this. I have stored up treasures on earth.
More than that, I've done It right under your noses, or rather, to be precise, right over your heads. You see, right back there in our narthex, there is a storage room above that back section. And in that storage room I have kept now Almost a year, 29 boxes of riches.
I received these boxes of books from Bill, my former colleague and supervisor at the church I served out in Connecticut. He recently retired from ministry. And when Bill learned that Jill's in my house had burned down in the Eaton fire and that all the books that we had kept in that house were destroyed, he sent me the better part of his library. 29 boxes full, including the entire set of Bart's Church Dogmatics, which we had lost all of last week. After nearly a year, I finally finished sorting through all these books.
A number of them I added to my library you're welcome to see anytime over in my office. A number of them I passed on to Josiah, and a large number of them I brought over to Monte Vista Grove. And by the way, thank you, Laura and Corey and others who work in their book storage and distribution department or whatever. It's a wonderful way of passing on books like that.
Sorting through all these books, those that were in my office, those newly added to my library, I realized something.
I treasure books.
I do. I especially love a heavy hardcover book. You know, I love its physicality. I even love its smell.
I love how it looks on my shelf.
And I know thieves, moths, floods, fires, or simply decay will take them away. I know that. But still, I confess, I hold these earthly treasures dear.
Some of you know what I'm talking about.
A second confession I'll make when Jesus says in today's passage, do not worry about your body, what you will wear. I confess I have worried often this past year over precisely that question. What will I wear after losing my entire wardrobe to the fires, as many of you have, I've woken up many a morning and thought about an upcoming event. Maybe it was a worship service or a party or a wedding or a funeral or a trip to go fishing or a trip out to the beach and realized, wow, I don't have the clothes. Clothing I need for that.
When Jill and I were getting set to make a winter trip out to New Jersey, I realized, oh, I wanted to reach for this black, really warm long coat that brought back so many great memories of walks in the snow during our time in the northeast with friends out by the water, the New England sound. And then I also wanted to reach for a blue jacket that brought back great memories of time in Scotland. Jill had bought it for me right before our trip in 2016. During my sabbatical, I wanted to reach for that too, and realized it was no more.
And without them, I was anxious, what will I wear?
And so there's a part of me that wants to gently challenge Jesus.
Hearing today's passage from his Sermon on the Mount, I want to ask Lord, aren't these treasures on earth precisely the kind of things we want to have and hold and even maybe worry about?
Aren't they deserving of some level of concern? Sure, they're ephemeral, doomed to decay. I get that. But without them, how do I make it through a week?
Without books, how do I prepare for messages like this one, or for talks I might give or devotionals?
And without clothes, how do I walk through the door?
Without those things, how do I understand the world and God's work in it? Lilies and grass. They don't need to get dressed in the morning. I do.
I do.
And then the verse right at the center of today's passage seems to jump out at me. And it's like the verse shakes me up, maybe even smacks me around a bit.
But then it picks me up, brushes the dust off of me, and gives me a solid place to stand.
No one can serve two masters, Jesus says, for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise, despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.
Well, thankfully, the fire did not destroy my Greek dictionaries and commentaries, so I took the time to look up the meaning of that word translated as wealth to try to see if I might be serving this power placed by Jesus in such stark contrast to God with this concern of mine around things like books and clothing.
Well, the Greek word translated as wealth in the New Revised Standard Version here is mammon. And that is not, in fact, a Greek word at all. Jesus is pulling in a word from another language, like you or I might, when we use a term like pax romana or je ne sais quoi or que sera 3.
Mammon is an Aramaic word transliterated into Greek. And so in some English translations, the word is also transliterated and shows up simply as mammon. Not wealth, but mammon. That's an English translation of a Greek transliteration of an Aramaic word.
Aramaic. That was the language that Jesus and the disciples actually spoke. It was like an everyday person's form of Hebrew. And when we look at how that Aramaic word mammon, was used around Jesus time, we see in some of the legal Texts that mammon was distinguished from matters or cases that dealt with the life or the body. In other words, there was mammon, which meant possessions or things that a person might own, and then there was that which was about the body or the life or breath. And the two were distinct. And I think that's helpful. Sometimes we can confuse possessions with the life, the body, the person in their essence.
But then in the Targum, another ancient text, mammon was used to describe not simply possessions, but specifically dishonest gain. It could be a kind of shorthand to refer to possessions acquired by vice, violence or theft or dishonesty.
In other words, mammon was what one possessed at the expense of one's neighbor, one's community, one's web of relationships with God and neighbor and the earth that by God's law were meant to be marked by justice, the common good, compassion, defense of the widow, the immigrant and the orphan. Mammon was thus what one possessed at the expense of one's soul.
In Luke's gospel, when we hear Jesus make reference to mammon, he calls it not just mammon, but the mammon of unrighteousness or the mammon of injustice. In today's passage, when Jesus speaks of mammon, he's contrasting it with God, with service to God, with service to God's kingdom.
And many scholars wonder if Jesus left that Aramaic word mammon untranslated because it communicates so much more than a word like wealth or possessions or gain. Mammon. You know, it almost sounds like a person or an entity or a pseudo God, a false God, one we might grant power over us, but does not have the power to actually give our lives meaning.
Mammon. It's like the wood carved objects we read about in the Prophet Isaiah, chapter 44, where the Prophet speaks of how a carpenter will carve an object out of wood and use part of that wood, that cedar tree, for example, to heat their home or to make bread. And then part of that wood they'll use to carve an object in human form. And then people will bow down to that. That makes no sense.
That's like mammon.
Mammon. It's like Jesus is saying possessions, even beautifully crafted objects or printed money or what we hold in our bank accounts or what we have on our shelves or in our wardrobes. If we look to that stuff to save us, if we look to that to give our lives meaning, it will fail us and our neighbor. It will be like the metaphor Jesus uses to close his Sermon on the Mount. It will be like the foolish man who built his house upon sand. It will not hold our life, our identity, our sense of worth when the storm comes.
Well, if you want a picture of the power of Mammon, check out a film from 2015 called the Big Short.
The movie is about the 2008 financial crisis, and it's based on actual events. The film details how in large part that financial crisis was the result of mortgage brokers, Wall street banks, and credit rating agencies all profiting by the creation, marketing, and sale of incredibly risky financial products that were presented to the public and investors and as if they were as safe as government bonds, but they were not.
And when the risky underlying assets of these products, the sum prime mortgages on which these complex financial instruments were based, when they began to fall, the whole economic structure built on them, well, collapsed like a house built on a foundation of sand.
My favorite scene from that movie takes place shortly before the 2008 collapse in the housing market. It's at a time when a financial instrument called a CDO, that's a collateralized debt obligation, was selling like crazy. And a hedge fund manager Mark is trying to understand how the CDO business operates. He meets up in a fancy upscale sushi restaurant with a CDO manager from an investment firm called Harding Advisors.
And Mark stops the CDO manager mid sentence and says, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Tell me this again. So Merrill lynch gives you clients, they pay you fees, they expect you to put their financial products in your portfolios, but you as a CDO manager, claim to represent the investor.
And the CDO manager smile and says, well, yeah, but we're not in the Merrill lynch building. And Mark, this hedge fund manager asks him in turn, well, yeah, you're just 20 minutes away in New Jersey. And then the CDO manager says, well, five minutes if you use a helicopter.
And suddenly so much is revealed. The rarefied air, the CDO manager.
And then the manager goes on to describe these instruments he has worked to create. He talks about these CDO products. He tells of how he takes part of one CDO and puts it in another CDO and part of this CDO and puts it in another CDO and parts of both of those CDOs and put them in another one called a CDO squared.
And as Mark is listening to that and he's thinking about the riskiness, the. The low value of the underlying mortgage assets, he asked this manager, wait, how much money is betting on these underlying subprime mortgages? How many times the value of that mortgage is? And the CDO manager says, oh, about 20 times.
20 times the value of that original mortgage is being bet through these complex financial products that people are investing in that pension plans have investments in. And then Mark looks down and just can't believe it. And then the CDO manager asks him, are you okay? And Mark says, no, no, actually, I feel a little sick.
I think I need to leave.
And then the CDO manager says to Mark, you know, you think I'm a parasite, don't you? But let me do this. Let's do this, Mark.
I'll tell you how much I'm worth.
And then you tell me how much you're worth.
And in that scene, we see it, that's Mammon.
That's seeing your worth based on your quote, unquote, net worth. And it's failing to see the neighbors, the investors, the ordinary folks who have money in these accounts that are going to see those funds evaporate when that house falls. It's failing to see the impact of one's actions on other people and the worth of that network of relationships and how it can be marked by justice or simply by profit for oneself.
So much is revealed.
That statement, you know, mammon can reflect not just unethical business practices.
Mammon.
It can lead whole nations and their leaders into war, hungry for resources like oil or raw materials or geopolitical control over others.
Mammon, Jesus warns, is a powerful force.
But it is a pseudo God, a false God. Its foundation is sand. And if you build your house, your sense of self worth, your identity, your economy on it, that house will come crashing down.
Well, hear the good news in today's passage. There is an alternative to mammon, and it comes to us as a gracious gift from the heavens. Jesus points to it with these simple words. Look to the birds of the air. They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns. And yet your heavenly father cares enough about them to feed them.
Are you not of even more value, more worth than they?
And consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They neither toil nor spin. Yet even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed as beautifully as they are.
And aren't you of yet greater value than they? Are not you individuals created in God's image? Aren't you a people called and claimed as God's own? Are not you children of God, beloved by your Creator, Redeemer and sustainer? Don't you see the value God has given you that you don't need to earn?
Why chase after false gods like Mammon when you have worth, value already?
As Matthew's gospel will come to a close. We'll see the love of God poured out for us in our Savior's death on the cross.
And we'll see in our Lord's resurrection the first fruits of a world to come. A world where God is reconciling and renewing all things in our Savior's life and teaching, his ministry and healing, his truth telling and evil dispersing and ultimately in his death and resurrection. We have a foundation of rock. Jesus calls it rock and not sand. We have a foundation of right and just and rich relationships with God, with neighbor, with community, with all creation. A rich web in which the very redemption of God in Christ is at work. Praise God. Those connections Christ gave us, that's where we find our true worth of so much more value than our quote net worth.
Chasing mammon, on the other hand, can break those relationships, leaving us and our neighbors isolated and alone, seeing where our true value lies. That's what I think Jesus is describing when he calls the eye the lamp of the whole body. If you can see your value in God's eyes, see God's kingdom at work among you. It will bring light to your path.
Without it, there's darkness.
Our worth is not in what we own. It's in the one who owns us and our neighbor and all creation and has bound us together in Christ.
My books, my clothes, my bank account, they do have value.
But the value, according to Jesus teaching, is not in my possession of them. Their value is in the part they play in that rich web of relationships that gives me my worth.
Those 29 boxes of books, you know, they have value in the relationships they represent between Bill and the church. He and I both served in Greenwich and the church Bill served in Chicago and this church here in Pasadena and Monte Vista Grove. And all those rich connections, that's the value of those books.
Those books are part of those connections. And I get to be stewards of them, using some, passing them on, having them shared with me and sharing with others. So many of you have given me books, frankly, a number of books on my shelves you all have written.
It's a great gift, the relationships those represent. During Lent, many of us are reading Soul Feast, an Invitation to the Christian Spiritual Life by Marjorie Thompson. That's a book I've now read in context of two different church communities. And one book can bind people together, can invite us on a journey together of knowing God more deeply and following Christ more deep, faithfully.
The treasure I realize so many of my books communicate to me is the relationships they represent many going back to classes I took in seminary. And so many point me to a God whose love for me was shown in Christ, including that whole shelf containing Bart's church dogmatics and clothing.
Well, I'm getting to build new memories and connections now, as so much of my new wardrobe has been built by gift cards or actual tangible gifts of clothes from people here and around the country.
And I wanted to show you just one. So, you know, there's a secret compartment in this movable pulpit.
So one of the things that I lost in the fire that was precious to me were T shirts that reminded me of trips that I'd taken with many from this congregation. With Tommy and Amaya Givens and with Jeff and Parker Howard, and with Rob and James and Anna Grace Curtis, and with a host of other people, too. Trips we'd taken out to Glamis in the desert, or to Big Bear up in the mountains in the forest, or over to Catalina island. And getting to enjoy the natural world, getting to pray up on a mountain or by a river when we're white water rafting, and getting to experience the beauty of creation and life together.
Those were the memories that I remembered with so many shirts. And I had them in colors like yellow and green each year from this YMCA Dads and Daughters program, each of which was commemorated in a shirt. And then I was given this, which is one that contains the particular pack that we had, the wolf pack, the group within it. I didn't have a maroon shirt like it before, but now I do from the South Pasadena and Pasadena ymca and something that can help build and remind me of those memories.
And this shirt's gonna go one day. Friends like the shirts before Moth will take it.
But those relationships that bound us together, the relationships of mutual giving, of generosity, of sharing life and walking together on the road with Christ in our midst. That.
That's the treasure.
In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, amen.
