Clackamas United Church of Christ

Jesus talked about money a lot because he knew that our relationship to money matters. In our passage, Jesus says that you cannot serve God and wealth. In the original language, the word Jesus used for wealth was mammon. Mammon was an ancient “Syrian deity” a “god of riches,” wealth, and money. People worshipped mammon because they thought the god of money would save them from financial ruin. But Jesus knew that worshipping mammon would not save anyone. In fact, worshipping money leads to greed, which only destroys our relationships, our society, and as we are seeing today, greed is even destroying the earth.

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One of the great prophets of our time is a 16-year-old girl from Sweden named Greta Thunberg. Greta is a climate change activist who, like Jeremiah, is determined to speak truth to power. This last Friday, Greta was in Washington DC to lead a protest at the White House, demanding that US politicians at the very top “Listen to science, and take responsibility.” Like Jeremiah 2,500 years ago, Greta is also an apocalyptic prophet. She warns that [quote], “Our house is on fire … We are facing a disaster of unspoken sufferings for enormous amounts of people. And now is not the time for speaking politely or focusing on what we can or cannot say. Now is the time to speak clearly.”

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“I started Team Blu because I saw a lot of people who didn’t know how to help and didn’t know how to give. They didn’t know how to flex their power to help other people. And I knew how to do it. … That’s our superpower.” – Blu from #TeamBlu

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If you look back through history, you will find that 99 percent of these “Chosen Ones” rule their people with the exact same method. They attempt to unite their people against a common enemy. They prop up a minority group as an extremely dangerous “other” that the people need to defeat. It’s the ancient politics of fear. The politics of violence. The politics of scapegoating.

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The God of Jesus doesn’t approve of cruel American political policies. The God of Jesus doesn’t approve of ICE separating children from their parents. Because the God of Jesus is serving up a party and everyone is invited. It is God’s good pleasure to generously serve everyone, including undocumented immigrants and brown people and black people and white people and poor people and gay people and transgender people. It is God’s good pleasure to dismantle the systematic ways that the United States’ government divides people into “us and them.” It is God’s good pleasure to invite us to generously love one another, because in the end there is no us and them, there is no documented and undocumented. As St. Paul said 2,000 years ago, there is no Jew or Gentile, male and female, slave or free. Because under Jesus, there is only us.

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Jesus said “Those who live by the sword die by the sword.” I began to wonder, Christians claim to follow Jesus, who warned that anyone who lives by the sword will die by the sword. So how could Christians live by the sword? We can’t. The time has come when we have to put our weapons down.

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Jesus prays that the Father’s Kingdom would come to earth. Do you see how politically subversive this prayer is? The King at the time was a man named Herod. It was Herod’s kingdom. The Kingdom of God is radically different from the Kingdom of Herod. It’s a place where despite economic status, everyone has their daily bread – or their daily needs met because we share with one another. It’s a place where we refuse to live by cycles of violence and vengeance, but instead live by a cycle of forgiveness.

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I tell you this because sometimes we can feel alone in this work. But I want you to know that there are churches throughout the world delivering the same Gospel message that we proclaim – God is love. God loves us unconditionally because God loves all people unconditionally. Our job is to simply receive God’s love so that we can do the one thing that really matters – receive God’s love and share it with others as we work for a more just world.

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In the story, God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah not because of homosexuality, but because of the way those towns treated people migrating from one place to another. The story says God destroyed the cities because they refused to show hospitality to vulnerable strangers who were staying in their town. Can you see any relevance in this story for our modern world?

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Jesus is the Son of God. This is not merely a pious religious statement. This is about a theological and political worldview. In the ancient Roman world, the Son of God was the emperor who ruled the world through violence, coercion, and death. But according to the Gospels, Jesus is the true Son of God who embodies God’s nonviolent love for all people. Jesus calls us to go beyond ourselves to care for those who act, look, and speak differently. Jesus calls us to love the immigrants in our midst. To refuse to care for the immigrant is to reject Jesus and worship the Emperor.

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