A Vicar preached a sermon on God and money, resting his case, of course on the gospel saying of Jesus – You cannot serve God and mammon.  On the way out a lady tried to offer him sympathy for his dilemma – “Never mind,” she said, patting his arm comfortingly, “we can only try to do our best.”

In our current Global crisis it is very tempting to use the encounter between Jesus and his opponents about which we heard in today’s Gospel, as an illustration of what happens when we get sidetracked by mammon.  Why that is tempting is because those who have put their trust in money – in an economy that must be forever growing and providing wealth for some – has been found wanting.  It would be easy to be smug about this and, as a Christian, saying,  there, I told you so.

The trouble is that because our society is based on certain premises relating to wealth creation it isn’t just the fat cats of banking and the city who suffer – we all suffer.  The people worried about rising prices and those worried about the security of their pension fund are in the same boat as those who are concerned that their bonuses are under threat.  Shareholders in the major banks must be very worried by the Government's action to part-nationalise financial institutions because the taxpayer rather than the share-holder gets the first cut of the profits.  Even so, the poor will get poorer and there will be some in society for whom the economic downturn will be a boon.  These are the stock-market speculators who alongside the irresponsible financiers have helped create the crisis.

I am beginning to sense that I am getting sidetracked into and avenue which might turn out to be a cul-de-sac so I just want to say one thing about the economic crisis and another about it’s consequence before I look again at today’s Gospel.  The first thing I want to say is that the way we have been ordering our Society in which rich get richer and poor get poorer and  in which the creation of wealth and plenty is, if not the  only goal, a major pre-occupation, is a society based on the worship of false gods.  Monsignior Roderick Strange, writing in yesterday’s Times newspaper, put his finer on a great truth when he wrote:

In times of plenty we may be happy to worship at Mammon’s altar but when confidence collapses, what do we find? False gods, idols, silver and gold as the work of human hands, lifeless things that we have made for ourselves. They cannot speak to us or advise us or hear what we have to say.

In short – they turn out to be as worthless as the god of Baal against whom Elijah contended on Mount Carmel.  When the sacrifice the priest’s of Baal had prepared was ignored by their so-called god, Elijah taunted them –

Cry louder! Surely he is a god: either he is meditating or he has wandered away, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be wakened!”

Elijah’s call to God was, of course answered and that may be a reminder to us that unless our values are God’s values then our society will always be found wanting.

The rich nations of the world have long been living by false values and there is in all this mess a call to repentance – a call to return to God’s values about how we should both live our lives and also build a just and fair society.  Which brings me to my second observation which is that money whilst often seen, as Chaucer saw it in the Canterbury Tales as, the root of all evil, might also be used to build precisely that just and fair society.  What is evil about money is that it can turn peoples’ minds and led them to greed, selfishness and acquisitiveness.  What is not evil about it is that, used wisely, it can bring a lot of good into the world.  I remember being struck by a saying about the Third World which was:

You don’t make the poor richer by making the rich poorer.

Riches can be used to bring about social justice; a fairer world; and to create opportunities for people to improve their quality of life.  Every day I get appeals from some charitable group or other for money and almost all their causes are just and attractive.

Take the current appeal from The Box, for example.  To keep open a vital social space , a safe haven and a place of trust for young people- many of them disadvantaged – there is a need to pay the rent on the unique and important location on the High street.  £5 a month from 500 people will do just that and that requires not only a belief in what is going on there but a willingness to give some of our wealth for the advantage of others. That is about building up a more just and fair society and it is that value which can be helped by mammon.

Our Christian giving – including the Parish share – is about using money wisely and generously.  I heard, with some horror, this week of a Parochial Church council which had eight financial concerns in descending order.  Having a large reserve fund in the bank was number one and paying their share in the provision of Christian ministry was number 8.  That’s an example of letting mammon dictate mission.

When we get out of the current economic crisis, as we doubtless will at some time, I hope we might have learned a few lessons and re-assessed the values by which we have been living.

Have I now gone too far down this side-track to have lost sight of my journey?  Well, no, because what Jesus said in today’s Gospel has immense significance for re-discovering what those values should be.  Let’s return to the context.  Jesus was becoming a menace. The so-called religious leaders had very different values to his.  They loved power, control, riches.  They trampled the poor with their dogmas and they controlled the rich with their rules.  Jesus was preaching a much more radical gospel which was indeed Good News for all but the fat-cats of Jewish society.  If we recall the Gospel passages of the last few weeks, we will remember that in stories and through action Jesus was painting pictures of what the Kingdom of Heaven was like and what we must be like in order to inherit it.  Every one of those stories challenged the prevailing status quo of those in religious power as well as the Roman occupiers who allowed those puppets to do their dirty work for them.  So it was time to face the challenge by a little entrapment.

They came to him with their false praise –

we know you are a sincere teacher blah, blah blah.

So please tell us whether we should pay taxes to the emperor.

Very clever, very devious.  They knew they had him.  If he said NO, he became an enemy of the state.  If he said YES then his teaching would be discredited.  They asked their question with mock innocence and a pretence at genuine enquiry.  But they were dealing with God and God sees the secrets of all hearts and knows the warped ways in which we sometimes act.  His response was characteristically masterly.  He called for a coin – which, interestingly these haters of Rome had upon them – another sign of their duplicity.  OK, says Jesus, whose head is this?  They fell for the trap –then Give to the Emperor what belongs to the emperor and to God, the things that are God’s.  You can’t mess with God!  That’s the lesson they should have learned that day though, as events were to prove, they didn’t learn it.

In the end, this isn’t a story about money but about values and central to those values is, as St. Paul told the Thessalonians in today’s Epistle,  serving a living and true God.  To do that we need other values – and Paul mentions some of them:

Works of faith.

Labours of love.

steadfastness of hope.

and later – receiving the Word (The Gospel) with joy.

The Thessalonians had given up on idols as Paul acknowledges. They are now living by Christ-like values.  They were rendering unto God what belongs to God and what belongs to God is our very lives, transformed by grace.  This grace comes to us through a repentance which is true to its meaning – a re-turning of our lives back to God.  And that is precisely what is needed today.

We, who hopefully, have a greater insight into the things of God than some others also have a vital part to play in the re-turning of society back to God.  Visible Repentance is what will do this and by that I mean that we are to demonstrate what joys and fulfilment comes from lives turned towards God.  So often we see repentance as something we must do to avoid the consequences of God’s wrath.  I suspect that comes from childhood when we were controlled by such sentiments as if you do that, God will punish you – a bit on the same level as wait ‘til your Father gets home!  Repentance isn’t something we do to avoid punishment but rather because we have glimpsed and experienced something of the powerful love of God acting in Christian lives and transforming them with such joy that, actually, we would like a piece of the action.

We will not necessarily be successful if we follow the doom-mongers and tell society it is doing things all wrong.  We will be more successful if, to borrow a slogan from mammon, we show that there is a better way!  That better way is seen through the strength of our faith; our demonstrations of God’s love – what it means to us and how we share it with others; and the hope we have in God  which is based on our learning about and living out the Good News of Jesus Christ.  That is about giving back to God what belongs to God – the world, society, even the economy – and, of course, our own lives.  As the lady at the church door unwittingly put it  – we must do our best.