A Homily for the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity *

No man can serve two masters. . . .  Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
—Saint Matthew 6:24

   Today’s Gospel lesson is one of everbody’s favourites.  It is part of the Sermon on the Mount.  It is full of poetic imagery, especially when rendered in our seventeenth century English translation.  It evokes memories of William Barrett’s short novel, and of the movie in which Sidney Poitier sang “Amen” with the German nuns.  With its references to birds and wildflowers, this Gospel lesson has a kind of soft, pastoral feeling to it.

    And yet, what is behind today’s parables is one of our Lord’s hard sayings; perhaps the hardest of all.  It touches the most important practical question:  how shall we live?   And the word of the Lord is this: We cannot serve God if we are caught up in the pursuit of the material goods of this world.  We have to make a choice, not only in times of crisis, but every single day, whether we are going to seek God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness, or whether we are going to seek money, power, and fame.

    There are those who would have us believe that we live in a material world, and, therefore, that we have no choice but be material people. 

    In fact, Jesus tells us that the choice to be material people, to give in to the temptations of this material world, is always the wrong choice.  The material world is a trap, the material things are vanity and vanity of vanities.  Even if we could serve two masters, even if we could serve both God and mammon, we would find mammon a fickle and ungrateful master.
   
    In the companion passage to today’s Gospel lesson, found in the Gospel according to Saint Luke, Jesus introduces the parable of the lilies of the field by first telling another parable:

He spake a parable unto them, saying, The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully:  and he thought within himself, saying, “What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits?”  And he said, “This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods.  And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.’  But God said unto him, “Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?”  So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.

    There it is put as bluntly as may be that there is no security in this world’s goods.

    The lesson has been brought home to us once again, in a most vivid fashion, by the events of the last week.  Vanity of vanities: a puff of wind, a few drops of water, and the work of lifetimes is gone forever.  Did you have clothing made by famous designers?  They are now so many wet, oily rags.  Did you have flashiest models of European automobiles?  They are now rusting hulks.  Was your home furnished with exquisite antiques and expensive works of art?  They are even now dissolving in the sludge.

    But this material world is not only fickle, but also cruel.  How else could one explain the pictures of people carrying looted television sets through waist-deep water in a town without electricity?  A harsh master indeed is mammon, when its servants are driven, even in the midst of disaster and destruction, to try to acquire just a few more material possessions.

    One of the phrases we have heard over and over again in the secular media is that the people in the New Orleans area have lost everything they had, or everything that made life worthwhile, or even everything that defined their lives.  That may tell us more about journalists and intellectuals than about the people of southeast Louisiana.  But it is the perspective of the servants of mammon: if you lose your stuff, you have lost your reason for being. 

    If it happened that the material goods of this world really were the ultimate source of purpose and meaning. . . .  If it happened that human life were really about the accumulation of such goods. . . .  If it happened that human life is just a game, and whoever dies with the most toys is the winner . . .  The pursuit of material goods would still be a vain and futile thing, subject to being turned upside down in a moment by a hurricane, or a burst levee, or a tsunami, or an earthquake, or a wildfire.  This would be true, of course, even if there were no alternative. 

    The trouble with laying up one’s treasure on earth is that moth and rust corrupt, and thieves break through and steal.  And, if they don’t, then the floodwaters come and wash your treasure away, or the fires come and reduce them to ash.

    The point of the parable of the lilies of the field is to say that there is an alternative.  Life is more than food; the body is more than something to be clothed.  There is another place to lay up one’s treasure, and another kind of treasure to lay up.

    The parable does not mean that it is necessarily wrong to want material security. Jesus is saying that the best way to have material security is to trust God and obey him.  After all, we call God "Our Father." If God is a dutiful and loving father, the least he will do is be sure his children have food and drink and clothing.  Jesus says, "Your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things."

    So Jesus tells us not to let our lives be ruled by anxieties about food and drink and clothing—still less by anxieties about gourmet food or designer-label clothing. If we try to do God's will, he will see that we have whatever we really need for our life.  Jesus says, "Seek ye first his kingdom, and his righteousness; and all these things will be added unto you."

    Is he telling us to quit our jobs, to leave our houses, to abandon our cars?  No; but he is telling us that we need to examine our attitudes toward material things: to ask ourselves whether we are ruled by our anxiety about such things, or whether we are seeking first God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness. 

    There are several ways to go about doing all this.  How, for example, do we think about the money that we do earn?  Do we dedicate any part of it to God’s work?  The traditional rule, the biblical rule, is to give God back the first ten percent of all we get.  God will take care of us better with the ninety percent left over than we can take care of ourselves with the whole hundred percent, if we trust him. God takes care of the birds and the flowers, and human beings are far more valuable than birds or flowers are.

    Every day, when we recite the Lord's Prayer, we say: "Give us this day our daily bread."  But do we think he is really going to do it?  Or do we think it is really up to us, that all the responsibility lies with us? The way God gives most of us our daily bread is to provide us with the opportunity and the ability to work.  Do you we consider that that opportunity comes from our heavenly Father, or do we think of it as our own achievement?

    In the Gospel according to Saint Luke, after teaching his disciples the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus asks: “If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent?  Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion?  If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?”

    To pray is, therefore, itself an act of faith, of trust in God.  “Seek ye first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you.”  That is what Jesus means when he says, “Be not anxious.”  To be anxious about material things makes no sense unless we believe that we have control over material things and responsibility for material things.  Could any of us have held back the tsunami, or even the slow escape of water from Lake Pontchartrain?  We could not.  We ought, therefore, to put our trust in God, who will bring all things round to right.

    Saint Paul makes a similar point in Romans, when he writes, “All things work together for good to them that love God.”  If we strive truly to make God’s will the focus of our lives, we can be confident that he will take care of us, and that he will make all of the seeming madness and confusion in our lives come out right.

    And there is one more thing to be said this morning, in particular, about our relationship to material goods.  For the time being, Orange County has been spared.  The big earthquake is coming, but has not come yet; one day a tsunami may bring the Pacific Ocean all the way up to the county civic center in Santa Ana, or the fires may burn all the way from the mountains to Balboa Bay.  For all we know, the mighty Santa Ana River may one day overflow its banks and carry away all of Orange and Villa Park.  But it has not happened yet.  For the time being, the material goods of this world remain secure here in Orange County.

    And what needs to be said is what Saint John wrote in his first epistle:  “Whoso hath this world's goods, and seeth his brother hath need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?  My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth.”


* This homily was delivered on the Sunday next following the landfall of Hurricane Katrina on 29 August 2005.
Church of Saint Mary Magdalene
Orange, California
04 September 2005