Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

MSF Picnic 2010

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."

In today’s first reading, the Prophet Amos berates his contemporaries for their exploitation of the poor, the foolish and the defenseless:

We will buy the lowly for silver,
and the poor for a pair of sandals;
even the refuse of the wheat we will sell!"
The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob:
Never will I forget a thing they have done!

In his classic study of The Prophets, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel writes,

There are more scandals, more acts of corruption, than are dreamed of in philosophy. It would be blasphemous to believe that what we witness is the end of God’s creation. It is an act of evil to accept the state of evil as either inevitable or final. Others may be satisfied with improvement, the prophets insist upon redemption. The way man acts is a disgrace, and it must not go on forever. Together with condemnation, the prophet offers a promise. The heart of stone will be taken away, a heart of flesh will be given instead. (Ezek. 11:19) even the nature of the beasts will change to match the glory of the age. The end of days will be the end of fear, the end of war; idolatry will disappear, knowledge of God will prevail.

If Amos was horrified by what he saw in his day, he would be no less appalled by what happens routinely in our banking and business sectors. He would see our “democratic” government corrupted by powerful lobbies who care neither for justice nor compassion, who play only to win and game the system for everything they can take. He would discover the cheating, the short-changing and the corner-cutting that happens in every industry from medicine to education to government to infrastructure. He would see an entertainment industry consistently exploiting the basest instincts of the populace with no concern for consequences.

The prophet could pull up a thousand studies to show how our entire civilization teeters on the edge of collapse with our refusal to conserve energy, maintain infrastructures, protect the unborn, assist the poor, care for prisoners, discipline our consumption, or provide for the elderly. He would not be amused by our passion for sports or our obsession with powerful weapons, powerful cars, and powerful computers. In fact he would condemn our obscene worship of power, even as we gaze with pious eyes upon the powerless God who died on a cross.

Speaking with the terrible wrath of God he says again, “Never will I forget a thing they have done!”

Jesus speaks to us today through the Gospel of Saint Luke, somewhat more gently but with no less urgency: You cannot serve both God and mammon. Etching a pious phrase on your coinage – In God we trust – may mollify the foolish but it does not cancel Jesus’ warning.  Like Lot in the doomed city of Sodom, we find ourselves surrounded, enmeshed and deeply compromised by the culture in which we live.

Saint Paul, in the tradition of Jeremiah, has taught us to pray for our civil authorities and to support just laws. But we should never confuse the Kingdom of God with any nation or constitution. Nations rise, nations fall; we have seen them come and go. We belong to God and have been sent to be a “sign that will be contradicted” by our contemporaries. We are sojourners in a strange land, and can never be satisfied with improvement. Our passion is for salvation.