🐮 Proper 20

God, Wealth, and the Problem of Symbols

This morning’s lectionary texts—Amos 8, Psalm 113, 1 Timothy 2, and Luke 16—invite us to wrestle with the relationship between God and wealth. Luke puts it bluntly: “You cannot serve both God and mammon.”

At first glance, money seems like the problem. But if we pause and think more deeply, the real issue isn’t money itself—it’s the way we’ve loaded money with meaning it cannot bear.

Money as a Symbol

Money has always been a stand-in, a symbol. Coins, paper bills, digital entries on a screen—none of these have intrinsic value. They’re supposed to point to something real: gold, labor, power, access.

Ideally, money represents labor: everyone contributes some form of work, whether physical or intellectual, and money is how that contribution returns to us. But in practice, money often fails as a symbol. The wealthiest people are rarely the ones with dirt under their nails or sweat on their brows. We all know this but hesitate to say it aloud.

The emperor is naked—but we fear naming it, because what if we, too, are more exposed than we care to admit?

Veterans, Disability, and Representation

My own experience with the military reminds me how fragile these symbols can be. I gave six years of my life in uniform. At the end, I received a small check, a ticket home, and later VA benefits. Those monthly disability payments are not the thing itself—they are symbols of the toll service took on my body and mind.

Compensation is not the same as restoration. The check in the mail is meant to point toward wounds—seen and unseen—that still shape my life today.

When Symbols Lose Meaning

The danger comes when symbols lose their connection to reality. Money divorced from labor. Freedom without cost. Friendship without sacrifice.

I’ve seen this in my own life: friends who claimed loyalty but disappeared when I was in need. The word “friend” became hollow, stripped of the meaning it was supposed to carry.

We see the same emptiness in our national rhetoric. Statues and slogans proclaim that “freedom isn’t free,” yet many people inherit freedom without ever paying its cost. Others pay dearly, through service or sacrifice, only to find that the symbol no longer means what they thought it did.

Economics and Relationship

Scripture constantly pushes us back to relationship. Economics, after all, comes from the Greek oikos nomos—the rules of the household. Money is supposed to facilitate family, community, and mutual responsibility. When it stops doing that—when it isolates us, divides us, or tempts us to hoard—we’ve lost not only our economy but also our moral compass.

Luke’s warning about God and mammon is not about rejecting money outright. It’s about refusing to let false symbols rule us. When money becomes an idol, it erodes our relationships and undermines the truth of our words.

Recovering Meaning

So where does that leave us?

It means we must pay attention to what our symbols point toward. Does money reflect labor, or just speculation? Does freedom include sacrifice, or just privilege? Does friendship endure when it costs something?

If our words, practices, and rituals no longer connect us to reality, then we must do the hard work of recovering meaning. Otherwise, like Isaiah said, we will remain a people of “unclean lips”—uttering words without coherence, clinging to symbols that have lost their soul.

For me, the search is ongoing: to root faith and community in relationships that matter, to resist the hollowing out of our words, and to remember that wealth is never the thing itself. God calls us to something deeper.