Proper 20 (September 18-24)
Texts: Luke 16:1-13;
Amos 8:4-7
YouTube: https://youtu.be/_dNb5m0-91Q
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Note: The following script was written first, but I ended up preaching extemporaneously from the Sermon Notes.
SERVING GOD AND NEIGHBOR, NOT GOD AND WEALTH
“You cannot serve both God and wealth.” Short, simple, and to the point. And Jesus bolsters this claim with a brief metaphor about enslaved persons not being able to serve two masters at once. The implication is that God and wealth are two very different kinds of masters and we simply and absolutely cannot serve both. “You cannot serve both God and wealth.” Period. End of story. No compromises.
The question is, “Do we really believe this?” Haven’t we been raised in this country to kind of ‘hedge our bets’? We have these lists: God, country, family. Or God, family, country. Don’t most of us also presume that wealth can also be on such lists, too? It’s Ok to serve wealth, too, as long as its not first on the list? When Jesus flat-out says, “You cannot serve both God and wealth,” is he saying “No!” to wealth being on the list at all?
In fact, I think there’s warrant for Jesus not being too thrilled with the other things on that list, too. Take family, for instance. We just had the passage a couple weeks ago, where Jesus says that you must hate your family in order to follow him. Pretty drastic, right? And there’s the story where Jesus’s family is going along with the crowd in wondering if Jesus is in his right mind. Someone mentions his family to him and he says, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it” (Luke 8:21).
What about country, then? Can that go on our list of whom we serve? We’ve been talking for the past couple years about the dangers of nationalism. The problem with our serving our nation is that we so often turn it into an “ism.” No nations in history — even Yahweh’s chosen nation of Israel — have ever fully served God. They fall short, just like the citizens who populate them. So God needs us to also be critical of the nation we find ourselves in. When we serve our nation, turning a blind eye to its fundamental injustices, we turn our serving of nation into an “ism,” nationalism.
This is even more true regarding the systems of wealth that have dominated the nations of human history. It is those systems of wealth which are often at the heart of the injustices in nations, based on inequality between peoples. Jesus follows up this morning’s parable with the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus next week, where we will encounter the great chasm that arises between peoples when we serve wealth as our master.
This week we want to make sure we get the main point, that we cannot serve both God and wealth. A couple of weeks ago, I introduced you to the book we are studying with in our Racine Collective of Lutheran churches. It’s called No Cure for Being Human, by Kate Bowler.1 Kate tells the story of facing stage-four colon cancer as a mother of a toddler. I related to you a story from chapter one, where she goes down to the hospital gift store, in her hospital gown and towing her I.V. stand along with her, and she begins yanking a bunch of books off the shelves — so-called Prosperity Gospel books, as it turns out, written by popular Christian pastor-authors such as Joel Osteen. Kate did so because she had written a previous book about these books. This book: (holding up) Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel.2 I haven’t started reading this book yet, but here’s what I suspect it would say. Or at least should say: You cannot serve both God and wealth. Many American Christians have very much put both God and wealth together on their lists of whom to serve.
The Prosperity Gospel is basically the antithesis of this morning’s Gospel Reading. It believes not only that both God and wealth can be on the list of whom we serve, but it also posits a close connection. If you serve God in all the right ways, then God will bless you with wealth and health and happiness. But Jesus’ maxim this morning, that you cannot serve both God and wealth, implies a theology where the true God is not compatible with our systems of wealth. In other words, if you think you can serve both, then you are following a false God. The true God whom Jesus came to perfectly embody is incompatible with our systems of wealth. Most certainly including American capitalism?
How so? Well, again, we’ll see vividly next week, with the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, where a great chasm is shown to exist between the Rich Man and Lazarus. That chasm doesn’t become visible until after they both die. But it is essentially the same great chasm that was invisibly erected by how the Rich Man served wealth to the detriment of his neighbor.
Neighbor! Now, there’s finally something that we can have on our list of whom to serve along with God. The Parable of the Good Samaritan is the epitome of making the point of loving God by loving neighbor. There’s two great commandments under the heading of love. Love God and love neighbor. Serve God precisely by serving your neighbor. When we see a neighbor in need and move to help them, it is then that we get to see who God truly is. God is not a dispenser of wealth. God is the creator of an abundant creation who cares for all of its creatures equally and unconditionally. And God has created us, alongside the other creatures, to care for creation in ways that seek the mutual flourishing of everything and everyone.
Serving wealth proves to be the path of the Rich Fool back in Luke 12. It is the path not of helping the neighbor in need but instead the path of trying to hoard creation’s treasures for one’s self. It results in cataclysmic inequality, whereas God desires, as we saw last week (The Parables of the Lost Sheep and Lost Coin), an economy in which no one is left out. An economy in which all creatures equally and mutually flourish together. This only happens when we serve God by serving our neighbor in need. It absolutely cannot happen as long as we are pursuing a system of wealth that privileges hoarding and results in terrible chasms of inequality. We cannot serve both God and wealth, but we can serve God through serving our neighbor in need.
This morning’s Gospel Reading is known as the Parable of the Unjust, or Dishonest, Steward. But that title biases our reading of the story. At the end, the wealthy landowning master of the steward commends him for acting prudently,3 not dishonestly. Jesus also commends the prudence of the steward by saying that we children of light can learn some lessons from his prudent actions. How so? Because the steward has figured out the dead-end of the system of wealth he managed for his master and has moved prudently to transition to God’s kind of economy. He makes friends of his neighbors by sharing the master’s wealth with them. He writes off some of their debt. Just before Jesus ends his comments with the dictum to not serve both God and wealth, he features that word we’ve also encountered in recent weeks: faithfulness — here translated as “trustworthy.” The steward has seen the light, even if for selfish reasons of survival, that a better economic strategy focuses on the quality of our relationships, not on the accumulative hoarding of things. The steward is put before us by Jesus, in short, not for being dishonest, but precisely by acting wisely through defecting from his ways of acting unjustly to ways of treating his neighbors more justly. He has been defective by participating in an unjust system of wealth, but now he is defecting from that defective economics to a more just economics.4
Siblings in Christ, the moral of this story is to first come to a fuller realization that we currently participate in an unjust system of wealth that creates chasms of inequality rather than ecosystems of mutual flourishing. If we are to be as prudent and wise as the steward in the parable, then we will begin to plan our defections, too. How can we meaningfully find ways of transitioning from the unjust system of wealth at the heart of our American economy to God’s economy come into the world through Jesus? Never by trying to serve both God and wealth. But instead by serving God through serving our neighbor in need. We do this every time we host the free meal for our neighbors in need on a Sunday evening. We do this twice a month as we welcome our neighbors to help themselves to free clothing through the Thread-by-Thread ministry.
But, my friends, in a democracy is it also possible for us as citizens to advocate for ways of also transitioning our economy itself to more just ways. Instead of making laws that benefit the billionaires so much more than the rest of us, can we seek to transition our economy to ways that result in mutual flourishing? Is it time, for example, for some form of universal healthcare? Can we build a more comprehensive “social safety net,” like many other nations in the world, to make sure that the most basic needs of our neighbors are met? Can we find more ways of investing in one another for education and job-training? This is the lesson of the Defecting Steward in today’s parable, who defects from the unjust system of wealth of his master to the neighbor-oriented economics of God’s reign. We can do so not only as individual citizens, or as individual churches undertaking justice ministries. But as citizens in a democratic nation — as long as we still have one, which is seriously under threat — we can advocate for a more just economy that seeks mutual flourishing instead of greedy hoarding. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, September 21, 2025
YouTube: https://youtu.be/_dNb5m0-91Q
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Notes
1. Kate Bowler, No Cure for Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear): Random House, 2021.
2. Kate Bowler, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel: Oxford University Press, 2013.
3. The word “prudently” comes from my own translation of this Gospel, which is the one we read in the worship. Here it is:
4. My reading of this parable is largely shaped by Ched Myers, Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke’s Jesus and Sabbath Economics (Fortress Press, 2025), who calls the steward the “Defect-ive Manager,” because he defects from an economy based on capital to an economy based on community.
