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Mammon, the Demon of Greed, by Victor Moda

   

Lections: The Ninth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 19), AD 2025 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

About a thousand years ago, Paris had a Viking problem. The Danes, or the Norse—Franks had difficulty distinguishing the two—kept sailing up the Seine and sacking gay Paree. So Charles the Simple, true to his name, devised a simple solution: he would fight fire with fire; or in this case, Vikings with Vikings.

King Charles ennobled Hrolf Ganger, a man so gigantic that he could not find horses to hold him, dubbing him Duke Rollo the Wise. And he gave to Rollo’s Northmen a great chunk of the Gallic coastline—known ever after as Normandy—on the twin conditions that he (a) keep out his fellow Scandinavians, and (b) convert to Christianity. Rollo wisely accepted.

The fiefdom he founded thereby would go on to transform the courses of many nations, from the Anglo-Celtic Isles to the Byzantine Mediterranean. Yet on his deathbed, Rollo—one of the most successful Vikings in history—chose to hedge his bets. He ordered the donation of a hundred pounds of gold to the Church; and the human sacrifice of one hundred prisoners to Odin. For the pagan gods demand our blood, but he figured that Christ would settle for gold.

How bitterly ironic, indeed how perverse, that the Church of Jesus Christ, His Body and His Bride, would come to be associated with gold and greed and grift—especially when, so far as I can tell, Jesus never had a copper to His name. It’s true. Read the Gospels. The Man never has cash on-hand. When He talks about a denarius, a single day’s wage, He has to ask somebody to bring Him one so He can hold it up. When the question of the Temple tax arises, a matter of half a shekel, He has to tell Peter to go pry one out of the mouth a miraculous fish. The dude’s broke!

There’s no indication, during Jesus’ ministry, that He continues in the occupation of His earthly father, a carpenter and mason who’d have earned a decent wage. And rabbis were not paid by the synagogue for their services. Christ lived off the kindness of others. Peter was a man of means, a fisherman whose family owned a small fleet. Judas kept the communal purse, for whatever necessities might arise, yet amidst a dozen Apostles and who knows how many other disciples, that couldn’t have gone very far.

Most of Christ’s support derived from rather wealthy women: Peter’s mother in Capernaum, Mary and Martha in Bethany. He had no house of His own, and no reliable source of income. And any cash received went straight for food or to the poor. Moreover, Jesus treats the accruing of riches as something explicitly evil. Mammon, He calls it, wealth that separates us from love of God and love of neighbor. Mammon serves, in effect, as a rival god, a false idol. Jesus’ brother James, who leads the Church after Christ’s Ascension, writes that gold and silver “shall eat your flesh as fire.”

“You cannot serve,” Jesus insisted, “both God and Mammon.” But, oh, we really want to, don’t we? And Lord knows how the Church has tried.

Money as we know it did not exist in the time of Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob. It was unknown to Moses, or to David, or to Elijah. Indeed, the first coins weren’t minted until 600 BC, around the time of the Babylonian Exile, by the Lydians. You may have heard the phrase “rich as Croesus.” Well, that’s because King Croesus’ father invented money. And it really took off.

A standardized, authorized, official government coin functions as fossilized labor. It’s the ultimate means of exchange. You work a day; you get a coin; you trade it for food or for clothing. It represents a day of your life, a day of your blood and sweat and toil. And now you can parcel out pieces of your life in order to pay for things you need or want. Money is power. Money is choice. Money is options. And because it’s been commodified, life can be now exploited, more efficiently than ever before.

People accrue more than they need, more than they deserve, more than they could ever possibly have earned. And rather than using their surplus to help their fellow man—as every other species of mammal is wont to do—rich people just want more. More power, more options, more choices, more freedoms. And yes, it comes at the expense of everyone else. Money didn’t invent slavery or cruelty or opulence or excess, but it certainly made the process more efficient. It exported selfishness at scale.

And that’s insane. It’s insane to have more than you could ever possibly use, ever possibly enjoy, while Christ in your neighbor goes hungry. The most extreme example in our own time must be Elon Musk, a man who is on-track to become the modern age’s first trillionaire. Did you know that he asked the UN how much it would cost to end world hunger? And they told him that the bill would be six billion dollars a year. Thus he could spend one sixty-fourth of his wealth to cure world hunger, while still remaining by far the planet’s richest man.

He could repeat this every year until his death with the same effect. And he chooses not to. And if we think that’s morally defensible, then brother, let me tell you, we need Christ.

Someone asked me the other day, if I’m so concerned about world hunger, why then don’t I give to the poor? Well, we do, every month. But Musk earns, every single hour, more than 300 times as much money as I take home in a year. His hourly wage is three centuries of my life—just in case you feel that I’m unfairly picking on the richest and most selfish man in the world.

“Where your treasure is,” Jesus says, “there your heart will be also.” Mind you, this is not a strategy for a stewardship campaign. Christ was freed from love of money to an extent of which most of us could barely dare to dream. Rather, He is pointing out a spiritual truth. How we spend our money—those fossilized bits of our lives—reveals to ourselves and to all the world around us the secret inclinations of our hearts. We give to what, and to whom, we care about. The most obvious example would be children.

Kids are expensive. Gone are the days, by and large, when more kids meant more income, more free labor on the farm. You have to want kids nowadays. It’s going to cost you. We pour our money into our children because we love our children. We give our lives for them, hour by hour, paycheck by paycheck. And it’s worth it. They are worth it.

Another example, for our household, would be books. We have shelves, and we have piles, in every room of the house. And granted, most of them we purchased used or at a discount. But should you walk into our home, you’ll see exactly what we value. Others spend on hunting or fishing or gardening or travel or clothes or art, all of which are likewise revelatory. Those things cost you money, and money cost you life. So don’t waste your life on junk.

But there is also a sense in which money directs the heart, not just unveiling but leading it. When we pay for something, when we purchase something, we are investing ourselves in it. Whether we’re contributing to a political campaign or backing a Kickstarter project, we want our money to do good. We want it to be worth it. I think that’s also true for charity. When you offer that piece of yourself, of your life, you then care more. If our treasure follows our hearts, our hearts also follow our treasure.

Whenever Jesus talks about money, He isn’t asking for more. I’m not going to lie; this church, like every church, relies on your largess. You stop giving, and I go away. Yet Jesus’ concern is not for your cash but to free you from its fetters. “Store up treasures in Heaven,” He says. Feed the hungry. House the homeless. Clothe the naked. Cure the sick. Educate the ignorant. Give voice unto the voiceless. Do this all, knowing that you cannot take it with you.

No-one in Heaven will give a damn what sort of car you had. But all of us will remember those who were kind to us, those who were generous with us, those who reached out in our need. Those are the treasures of Heaven: love of God lived out in love of neighbor. It’s not about earning salvation. It’s about understanding that the salvation of others is our own.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

Blog: https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RDGStout/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsqiJiPAwfNS-nVhYeXkfOA

Twitter: https://x.com/RDGStout

St Peter’s Lutheran

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064841583987

Website: https://www.stpetersnymills.org/

Donation: https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home

Nidaros Lutheran

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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nidaroschurch6026