Sermon Audio Sermon Manuscript: About 250 years ago some men in Great Britain began to do some experiments with machines and the manufacturing of cloth. They had come up with some clever devices that were able to spin yarn and, later, to weave it in a way that was much more efficient than doing it by hand in people’s homes. At first these machines were powered by water wheels on a river. Eventually they would come to be powered by steam engines that used coal as their fuel. With these sources of power, which, unlike humans, never got tired, these earliest factories made a lot of cloth. The factory owners got rich. Their customers were happy with the inexpensive cloth that they didn’t have to make themselves. The tiresome chores of spinning and weaving became a thing of the past for the normal home. Soon the same kinds of ideas and techniques were applied to other things—farming, cotton picking, transportation, and many other pursuits—and productivity rose tremendously. This rather long process in human history, which is arguably still going on today, is known as the industrial revolution. The story is quite a bit longer than what we have told here. I bring it up, because when we think back to life as it was a few hundred years ago, the industrial revolution is perhaps the main thing makes us think that we are so different from them. They generally didn’t have indoor plumbing. It took a lot longer to communicate and transport things from one place to another. Much more work went into the daily chores of producing food, heating the home, doing the laundry, cooking, and so on and so forth. We have a lot more stuff and we are able to go and do many more things than they could. This is one of the ways that you can define wealth, and so you could say that we are much wealthier than they. We have a lot more food and a lot more drink. We have a lot more clothes, and they might be of a better quality than Solomon’s were in all his splendor. So it might be a little challenging to buy into what Jesus says in our Gospel reading. He says, “Do not worry about what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your clothes, what you will put on.” Well we can probably check those things off the list. Who worries about what he will eat or drink? Who worries about having clothes? The fault lines in our society, when it comes to resources, is whether you can afford to buy fresh fruits and vegetables or whether you buy the industrialized, cheaper, processed food. Nobody is going without. For clothes it’s a matter of buying name brand vs. generic. Something has to be way out of whack for any of our people to worry about food, drink, or clothing. So it’s very easy for our people to put this book back on the shelf and thank God that we are not like other men, like those poor pre-industrialized people. Or, if we want to be more pious, we can set it off in the corner of our minds as a nice thing we can fall back on if ever we should run into poverty. Either way, what Jesus says is not taken very seriously. He was speaking to a different time and different place. This doesn’t have much to do with us. However, not only is this not taking Jesus’s words very seriously, it’s also not paying very close attention. At the beginning of our reading Jesus says, “No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and mammon.” Mammon is a Semitic word for money or wealth. There was also a Syrian god called Mammon. And this is the very thing that we have been talking about today. The reason why we might look back at those poor saps, who didn’t have toilets, is because we believe that the power of our wealth blesses us. They, in contrast to us, were not blessed. They did not have countenance of Mammon shining down upon them like we do. So this is what Jesus is telling us today: No servant can have two masters. One of them is always going to be preferre