Here are the readings for this Sunday.

  No servant can serve two masters.
He will either hate one and love the other,
or be devoted to one and despise the other.
You cannot serve both God and mammon.”

This is a super-famous quote from our pal, Jesus.  What does it mean?  Well, duh, you can’t serve money and God at the same time, so choose one.

How trite is that?  And it’s totally useless too.  I mean, I suppose we could all become totally ascetic, give up everything, live in cardboard boxes, etc.,  but how else are we going to get rid of money?

So then there’s the medium position: well, we use money, but in the service of God and God’s work.  We make money our means and God our ends.  And that sounds wonderful, but what does that mean?  Again, we’ll have a lot of homilies this Sunday that extol the virtues of money-in-the-service-of-good, but how are we ever sure of that?

Augustine said that moderation is always more difficult than abstinence, and he’s right.  And he’s especially right in reference to money.  Because the basic fact is, as some conservatives like to say, we can both do well and do good.  But then we can also be greedy bastards, committed only to our own gain, pride, and vanity.  And while most of us think we’re doing good, how do we know?  Well, there are the standard answers: we follow the teachings of the Church, the examples of the saints, the accountability of our community.  Yet we all know how we can enable each other, how one’s temptation is another’s motivation.  So.  So.  So.

So this is the ultimate question of our faiths: how do we know we’re actually worshiping God?

And here’s the answer: We never do.  So drop the self-righteousness.  All of us are ten-thousand idols away from our God.  It could be money.  It could be work.  It could be social justice for you.  It could be Church for me.  Whatever it is, it’s not God.

We do see through a glass darkly.   Our lives.  Our selves.  Our loves.  We hope we strive to serve God.  But who do we actually serve?  Eh.