Sermon - 2013-09-22

When a child is growing up, we often give a child a piggy bank.  A place to put all their quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies.  Here through the collecting of coins, the smallest amounts of money, the children begin to learn the importance and value of each of them.  Over the course of time, they learn that without the penny, the smallest measure of money, the rest would not have any value.  We teach our children that the smallest part of something is also the most important and should be regarded as such.  

By teaching this lesson to our children with money, they will be able to apply it when they get older and have even more money.  Whoever can be trusted with a little, can be trusted with much.  Whoever can not be trusted with a little, can not be trusted with much. For within every aspect of life, we use money.  We use money for the house in which we live, the clothes we wear, the shoes we have, and even the food that we eat.  Every single day of your life, you use money, but it will be used in many different forms: credit cards, checks, electronically, or cash.  In one form or another, you use money within your life.  So it is important for us to understand how to use it and use it wisely.  We must learn how best to use this tool that we use in our society.  

With money being used within our life so regularly, we can often begin to think of it as something that we need.  The tool that we created to ensure that we treat one another fairly in times of trade, can be viewed as something that we need.  It can be seen as the very source of everything for which we long.  We want it and we desire.  It becomes something that controls us rather than something we use.  We even begin to worship it.  We track the health of it within our society on the Wall Street markets.  It affects our future and how we shall live out our days.  Now I am not saying that money, or Wall Street are bad; but they should be placed in their proper place within the world.  

Yet there are some things that money can not buy.  Money can not buy health.  Money can not buy love.  Money can buy happiness or peace.  Yet that is what Christ is trying to get people to understand.  When you seek the tool as an ends, you will not find the happiness for which you long because it is not the source of all things.  God is the one who created heaven and earth, brought them into order and even has placed you into this world.  

So a person can not serve two masters, God and wealth.  For when you are focused on wealth, you are only worshiping a tool, an earthly thing that was created to be used to help us serve others fairly.  However, God calls us back time and time again.  He calls us back into the right relationship that we were created to be in and live in within our lives.  In our Baptism, we are humbled but reminded that we are beloved children of God, brought into this world to serve God out of love, for God and one another.  Through our Baptism, we are united as the people of God and made to be ambassadors of God’s love. This is purely and truely a gift.  For we are humbled  when we bear witness and are reminded of the work that God does for us on the cross in giving us God’s only son.