Dear Partner in Preaching, Money, politics, and religion, oh my! Yes, here is a passage that contains three of the things people aren’t supposed to talk about in polite company. (Just add sex and you’d have people running out the doors!) But while the temptation will be the flee to other texts this Sunday or, worse, preach a thematic sermon with little reference to the actual passage at hand, I think that if we can stay with the particulars of this text we’ll discover a lot that is worthy of our consideration. Let me begin, though, with a question: why is it, actually, that we’re not supposed to talk about money, politics, and...

Over the next few weeks, folks who attend churches following the Revised Common Lectionary (a pattern of readings following the church year) will be treated to a number of parables in Luke’s Gospel that have to do with money. Luke, more than any of the other Evangelists, seems quite interested in helping Christians think through the relationship between their faith and their finances. And so he shares a number of the stories Jesus tells about people and how they handle their money. Of these parables, one of the most confusing is the one about the “Dishonest Manager” which is the reading appointed for this Sunday. It revolves around the...

Name the one thing that, if you could get it tomorrow, would make you totally happy. If you’re at all like me, you probably had no trouble thinking of something. Or, actually, if you had a problem, it was limiting yourself to just one thing. And therein lies the key, actually, to our unhappiness. Somewhere along the line, we bought into the idea that if we could only get a little more we’d be happy. A little more money, a little more vacation time, a little better car or house, a little better job, a fancy new gadget… any of these things – depending on who you are – will make you happy. But it’s a lie. A lie constructed by our...

The relationship between money and happiness isn’t a new topic for this blog and its readers. We’ve discussed before the relationship between happiness, money, and memory and, in particular, our inability to predict what will make us happy because of the fragility of memory. We’ve explored the peculiar power of our cultural narrative that having more stuff makes us happy when, in fact, what we need and want so much more than “more stuff” is time enjoy what we have. And we’ve seen how money can, in fact, make you happy when you spend it on others. In this vein, I recently came across a brilliant little video that summarizes a lot...