Sermon for the Twenty-Third Sunday After Trinity
“Whose is this image and superscription?”
What’s this? Can it be that we are defined and governed by money? Does everything come down to money? “Money makes the world go round, of that we all are sure,” as the chorus sings in Cabaret. Is the “cabaret of life, old chum,” simply the cash nexus as Thomas Carlyle first suggested and Karl Marx famously claimed? And if so, what does that make us?
Money, it is proverbially and scripturally said, is “the root of all evil.” Why? Because money is power. The misuse of money is the abuse of power. Money is twisted around from being a medium of exchange to becoming a form of domination and control. There is, at once, the use of money to dominate and manipulate others; but there is, as well, the fact that money comes to dominate us.
It causes us to forget who we are. Nowhere, perhaps, is this more apparent than in our own world and day. Whether we are rich or poor, employed or unemployed, pensioned or unpensioned, we are constantly beseiged by images that persuade us that we are essentially economic beings, that our worth and the meaning of our lives is to be measured materially and financially. This is not only destructive of human personality and the human community but also of the forms of honest and meaningful exchange so necessary to the welfare of souls and communities. Their end, our end, “is destruction, whose god is their belly.”
Money comes to possess us because we allow it to define the way in which we live out our lives. Means become ends which they cannot be. Economic ends must always fail us for the simple reason that our lives and the worth of our lives cannot be reduced to an economic quantity. When we are defined economically, then, we are but “bellies,” as it were, mere consumers, and, no doubt, “bellyachers” too! We are seduced into thinking that everything, including God and religion, must be a consumer product, a marketable commodity. The evil of money lies precisely in making us forget who we are.
