Who do you serve?

This morning’s Gospel is an odd one. Here are the players: A rich man—a landowner. His manager—who doesn’t seem to be very good at his job. And a group of debtors—probably something like tenant farmers. The landowner threatens to fire the manager. And so the manager cooks the books, or so it seems, writing off debts to curry favor with the debtors. And somehow he’s the good guy.

In our modern world, when we hear a story like this, we’re likely to imagine an honest business owner betrayed by a dishonest employee. But Jesus told this story in a world with a very different economy. The whole system was dishonest, unjust. Tenant farmers, who should by right have owned the land they farmed, owned nothing and were crushed by debt. Managers and tax collectors skimmed whatever they could off the top. Landowners and the ruling class lived in luxury.

It’s not so much that the manager was dishonest. It’s that he was a manager of dishonesty, a manager of a dishonest system, a manager of dishonest wealth. He probably would have had discretion to determine how much each debtor owed, so it’s not even certain that he did anything wrong. He acted shrewdly. And in the end, he saved his job and he left the poor better off than they had been before.

I think the clue is in the last sentence of the Gospel. Jesus says, “you cannot serve God and wealth.”

“You cannot serve God and wealth.” Older translations of this passage used a different word: “You cannot serve God and Mammon.” Mammon does mean wealth or money, but it has come to mean much more than that. Mammon is almost a rival God, wealth personified, an idol, an idol we can all too easily give our allegiance to. Mammon is the whisper that says, “just a few more dollars, and you’ll be safe.”

But Jesus says, you cannot serve both God and Mammon. And so we need to ask ourselves, who do we serve?

It’s a question we need to ask again and again, in every situation. Who do you serve? It sounds simple, but it’s not always easy to untangle our own motives. It’s so easy to delude ourselves.

Today’s readings show us three very different models for a life lived in service to God rather than in service to Mammon. Each model can help us live a faithful life—but each has its own pitfalls and blind spots. Let’s call them the prophet, the shepherd, and the trickster.

Amos is the prophet, thundering his message of judgment with the confidence of righteous truth. “Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land.” The prophet’s path is dangerous, but straightforward. Clear, uncompromising honesty, with no concern about possible consequences.

But of course even a prophet can delude himself, proclaiming his own rage as if it were God’s.

And so even the prophet needs to ask, “who do you serve?”

The shepherd is a safer path. We can see the shepherd’s model in the letter to Timothy. Pray for those in positions of worldly power. Stay quiet. Keep the peace. It’s how the early Church survived under a hostile empire. And it’s how many vulnerable people survive today. For those who live their lives in fear, the shepherd’s model can provide a holy path, a path of safety and dignity in a threatening world.

For the vulnerable, the shepherd’s path offers blessing and survival. But for the privileged, it can be betrayal. Because silence can all too easily become complicity. Prudence can become cowardice. And comfort can disguise itself as faith.

And so the shepherd needs to ask, “who do you serve?”

The trickster is our third model, embodied by the manager in Jesus’s parable, clever, cunning, bending a crooked system towards survival, and maybe even towards mercy. The trickster is one who hears Jesus’s call to be “wise as serpents and gentle as doves,” and says, “yes, that’s me!”

But the danger for the trickster is clear. Dishonesty in the service of justice easily becomes self-service, self-justification. Cunning easily becomes corruption.

And so the trickster also needs to ask, “who do you serve?”

Prophet, Shepherd, Trickster. These are archetypes. But there are as many ways of living a faithful life as there are people on earth. You might recognize yourself in one of these patterns, or you might find that you’re called to different approaches in different seasons of your life. A parent protecting a child might need the shepherd's wisdom. A person confronting injustice at work might need the prophet's courage. Someone navigating a broken system might need the trickster's cunning. The Spirit moves us in different ways at different times.

Each way can be holy. Each can also be corrupted. The danger isn’t in the role we choose. The danger isn’t in the techniques we use. The danger is in self-deception. The danger is in forgetting to ask ourselves, “who do you serve?” Because, as Jesus reminds us, we cannot serve both God and Mammon.

Some of us are called to thunder. Some to endure. Some to maneuver with holy cunning. But whichever path is yours, be ruthlessly honest. Because we’re all so very good at fooling ourselves.

Ask yourself as often as you can, are you serving God? Or are you serving Mammon? And when you discover—as we all will—that your motives are mixed, that you've served yourself when you meant to serve God, remember this: the God we seek to serve isn’t waiting to condemn us for our failures. The God we seek to serve is a God who forgives, who calls us back to faithfulness, who gives us new chances to choose love over fear.

But ask yourself that question even about small things, even in ordinary moments. Because Jesus says that "whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much." It's not only in great, dramatic gestures that we serve God. It’s in how we live every day.

Ask yourself, again and again, “who do you serve?” Are you serving Mammon? Is safety or money or status the thing you seek above all else? Or are you serving the One who taught us that the last will be first? The one who told us to take up our cross and follow him? The one who said, again and again, "do not be afraid"?

Who do you serve? Because you cannot serve both God and Mammon.