Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“No one can serve two masters; for a 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.”
NL Daily Devotion for Tuesday, January 31, 2023
by R. M. Fergus, Clergy Stuff
Seldom is Jesus so direct. He answers questions with other questions. He speaks in parables and allegories. Even his own disciples don’t understand him half the time. But this time there’s no spinning it, no getting around it, no avoiding it. You cannot serve God and wealth. Period.
Well, someone might say, what exactly does it mean to serve wealth? I mean, doesn’t wealth serve you? Doesn’t it allow you to better serve God? Yeah…no. In order to acquire and maintain wealth—and I’m talking riches, not the funds necessary to cover basic needs and a life of meaning and flourishing—you have to put it first, above all other interests. You have to make decisions which, if you were putting God first, you could not in good conscience make. You have to find ways to justify those decisions. You have to deliberately close yourself off to any thought or outside influence that suggests the way you acquire money might be morally questionable. This is the work of serving wealth.
Serving God requires trust. Trust that there is enough. That you are enough. That your needs can and will be met and you can have a full and joyful life without wealth. Serving God means seeing your neighbors as beloved children of God just as you are, and living in a way that allows them to also have enough. Serving God means sacrificing what you think you need out of love for others, and then coming to find that what you get in return is far more than what you were afraid to lose. Serving God is a daily practice, and it happens on every level of our lives. To be certain, it is not an easy practice. We must, in the immortal words of Yoda, “unlearn what we have learned” from the money-and-appearance-obsessed societies in which many of us were raised. Luckily, we don’t do it alone. God meets us more than halfway, supporting and encouraging us, reminding us just how much we are loved, and how valuable we are to God.
Do I serve God above anything else? What does that look like in my life?