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By Peter W. Marty


Challenging conversations


Talking dollars and sense Jesus suggested mammon relationship filled with moral consequence


M


oney can buy almost anything these days. We no longer live merely in a market economy; we now inhabit a market culture. Once upon a time, buying and selling were connected primarily with material goods.


Today everything is up for sale. You can even sell your own forehead space for an advertising tattoo if you need cash badly enough and are open to a new look. We pay kids to read books. We permit solo drivers without passengers to drive in carpool lanes provided they pony up a little extra money. Human eggs and sperm are available for a price. Naming rights get slapped on stadiums and concert halls when big donors step up. Our campaign finance system in America is built on candidates practically buying public office. The reason people don’t value sunsets very much, author Oscar Wilde once noted, is because they cannot pay for them. His idea may be truer than we want to believe. Money talks, we say. But we certainly have trouble talking about money. In a day when self-worth often gets determined by net worth, it is hard to be honest about all the hidden properties of money.


Jesus said money is more than a neutral medium of exchange. It is a force


possessing personality and power. He gives wealth the name mammon, and suggests our relationship to it is filled with moral consequence. Given this challenging relationship, how should we think and talk about money in the Christian life? First, we could afford some honesty about our tendency to deny personal


wealth. Something within most of us wants to be exempt from any classifica- tion of people that might bear the label “rich.” We figure that word must be for other people. Not so. When you hear the parable of the rich fool read (Mark 10:17-22), see if you don’t start inventorying your possessions before the story even concludes. Second, it would help if we would spend more energy focusing on things


that money cannot buy. The richest things in life have nothing to do with money. So, what would your worth be if you lost most of your assets and all your savings? Would your life have any attractive features left? If so, what would they be? Your true wealth may be wrapped up inside those answers. Third, be on the lookout for a conversation partner who has wrestled with the dogged pursuit of money. “There are people,” wrote theologian Frederick Buechner, “who use up their entire lives making money so they can enjoy the lives they have entirely used up.” Perhaps you have met, or can get in touch with, such a soul. Surely there is someone you know, besides the person you see in the mirror, who has struggled to create a life while making a living. Become friends with such a person.


Fourth, instead of just praising or condemning money, what if we were to


regularly confess our addiction to the powers of money. “Forgive me, Lord. I have sinned. Money has seized my heart and taken it captive.” Arthur Simon, founder of Bread for the World, once described the fix we’re in: “The problem is not that we’ve tried faith and found it wanting, but that


we’ve tried m a m m on and found it addictive, and as a result we find follow- ing Christ inconvenient.” Fifth, make sure that the money you give away is given gener- ously and with a glad heart. It is typically much harder to give money away than it is to acquire it. Yet according to the Bible, when we give money away we give something of ourselves away. And, according to Jesus, our spiritual character deepens every time we give a piece of life away. Sixth, get in touch with some peo-


ple who have little interest in money. Attach your life to theirs in whatever way is workable. As writer Rudyard Kipling once told a graduating class of medical students, “You’ll go out from here and very likely make a lot of money. One day you’ll meet someone for whom that means very little. Then you will know how poor you are.” Those words resemble the thinking of the apostle Paul, who wrote one day that in “hav- ing nothing … [we] can still possess every- thing.” 


Marty is a pastor of St. Paul Lutheran Church, Davenport, Iowa, and a regular columnist for The Lutheran.


Eighth in a series


The reason people don’t value sunsets very much, author Oscar Wilde once noted, is because they cannot pay for them. His idea may be truer than we want to believe.


December 2013 3


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