The Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time [C]
Amos 8:4-7 + 1 Timothy 2:1-8 + Luke 16:1-13
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
September 21, 2025

“You cannot serve both God and mammon.”  This sentence is sometimes falsely thought to mean that you cannot have both God and money in your life.  In other words, this false interpretation says that there’s a sort of competition in your life between God and money which is a zero-sum game.  To use a visual metaphor:  this false interpretation says that there’s a see-saw in your life, and that God and money are sitting at opposite ends of the see-saw.  If one goes up, the other goes down.  The holier you are, the less money you will have, and the more money you have, the less holy you must be.  This interpretation of Jesus’ words is false.

In fact, our spiritual well-being and our financial well-being are not in competition with each other.  Rather, when Jesus plainly tells you that “You cannot serve both God and mammon”, the key is the word “serve”.  “You cannot serve both God and mammon.”  You can serve God, or you can serve mammon.  But you cannot serve both.  You can have both in your life.  You just cannot serve both.  The key is that simple word “serve”.

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One of the most recited prayers cited by Jewish people throughout the centuries is called the Shema.  It’s from the fifth book of the Old Testament, the Book of Deuteronomy.  This brief prayer is only three sentences long.  Here is the Shema:  “The Lord is our God, the Lord alone!  Therefore, you shall love the Lord, your God, with your whole heart, and with your whole soul, and with your whole strength.  Take to heart these words which I command you today” [Deuteronomy 6:4-6].  This prayer helps us understand that to love someone is to serve her.  This is true in our relationship with God, as well:  to love God is to serve Him.

The beautiful thing about serving God is that through this form of love, we become more like Him.  After all, “God is love” [1 John 4:8], St. John taught the first Christians.  So when we love God by serving Him, the more we serve Him faithfully, the more we love, and so the more we become like God. This is true because of a basic metaphysical principle: a person becomes like that which he loves.

By contrast, what happens when you try to serve money?  One simple way to get at an answer is to ask yourself whether your self-image goes up and down with the amount of money that you have.  Do you feel worse when you lose a significant amount of money?  Do you feel better about yourself when you gain a significant amount of money?  If so, then there is a certain likeness between your money and you.  As the money in your possession grows, so you grow.  As the money in your possession diminishes, so you diminish.  This is a false form of love, and a false serving:  a false servanthood.  It is a love of something that is beneath you, and so when you love money you debase yourself.

So we need to ask:  what is financial wealth for?  The answer is:  financial wealth is a means by which to serve others:  the Other who is God, and the others around us on earth, who are our neighbors.  That doesn’t mean that the wealthy person has to give it all away, like St. Francis of Assisi.  Despite what some socialists might say, there’s nothing inherently immoral about the action of accumulating wealth.  The sin lies in not using one’s wealth for others, especially within the setting of one’s vocation.

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So with that as a backdrop, consider the guidance of Holy Mother Church.  Consider her precept about personal finances.  As you know, there are five “Precepts of the Church”, listed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church in sections 2041-2043.  The fifth Precept of the Church is to provide for the material needs of the Church, each according to his abilities.  In a single word, this is the Church’s precept to “tithe”.  The word “tithe” literally refers to giving one-tenth of one’s income.  The Diocese of Wichita does break this ten percent down into two parts:  eight percent given to one’s parish, and two percent given to any charitable group of one’s choice (which can be one’s parish, or which can even be a secular charity that follows sound moral principles).

Some Christians are unaware that tithing is a practice not only rooted in Scripture, but also in the life of the Church and her saints.  In the Old Testament, tithing was seen among the Israelites as a giving of one’s “choicest first fruits” [Exodus 23:19].  This phrase—“choicest first fruits”—comes from the Book of Exodus.  This is an important image to consider spiritually, because it reveals to us that tithing is not merely a Precept of the Church, but also a spiritual exercise:  a practice that stretches the soul.

The image of “choicest first fruits” explains two things about tithing as a spiritual exercise.  First, what does the word “choicest” tell us?  This word, if you’ll pardon a mixing of metaphors, insists that we give God not the rump roast, but the sirloin.  Tithing is giving to God our best, not our leftovers.

But even more demanding is the call to give our “first fruits”.  If you were a farmer harvesting his crops, then your “first fruits” would be given at the beginning of the harvest, when there’s more harvesting to come.  If you were to give God your tithe from the first day of harvest, you would have no way of being sure that Mother Nature wouldn’t wipe out the rest of the crops that night, leaving you with nothing for yourself.  Nonetheless, that’s exactly the sort of faith that the Bible describes in commanding the giving of one’s “choicest first fruits”.

Here are some practical suggestions. If you don’t already know, then sit down and calculate what percentage of your monthly income you donate to the church each month. If it’s not yet 8%, increase it next month by one percent, and every so often, increase it by another one percent until you reach 8 or 10 percent. Along the way, with paper and pen look at your monthly expenditures and separate your wants from your needs, and also make sure to pay credit card balances in full every month.

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Our spiritual lives and our finances are not in competition with each other.  The chief threat that finances pose to our spiritual lives arises when we start serving money, instead of making money serve us (or more specifically, making money serve our need to give to God and neighbor).  When we make the sacrifices needed so that our finances serve our needs rather than our desires, then we’ll be more free to serve the Lord with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength.

St. Lawrence Distributing Alms by Fra Angelico [c. 1395-1455]