Odd Couples

Psalm 146

1 Timothy 6:6-19

Preached September 29th, 2013

Emma Dobson


What I’m about to say needs to come with a preface, or, perhaps, a disclaimer.  Here’s the disclaimer: I’m all ordained and installed now, so you’re stuck with me for the foreseeable future.  And here’s why I need that disclaimer. . . I’m about to make a confession.  Back in high school, my friends and I all shared a guilty pleasure.  It was a TV show we liked to watch, and then talk and gossip about on the phone, or the next day at school.  The show was Maury, a talk show that I think is still on today.  Some of the shows were nice—they were inspirational makeovers on deserving people, surprise reunions of long lost family or friends, stuff like that. 

But the shows we really liked to talk about the most weren’t these fuzzy, feel-good stories.  Instead, and this is why it’s a confession and I’m reminding you again that you’re stuck with me, we liked the shows about the strange stuff.  These were shows about people who had strange phobias, crazy habits, or amazing abilities. 

And then, there was my personal favorite kind of Maury show.  These were the “Odd Couple” shows.  This was an hour of Maury devoted to couples who just didn’t seem to fit together at all. 

Let me paint you a little mental picture of how this worked.  Partner number one would come out on the stage, and sit in a chair next to Maury.  Maury would talk to partner number one and find out who they were.  So, for instance, partner number one would be a middle aged woman, dressed conservatively, who taught kindergarten during the week and then Sunday School for the young children at church.  Her parents had been pastors or something like that, and she liked to read and listen to classical music in her spare time.  So, once we get a good idea of who partner number one is, the best part happens.  They bring out the other partner from behind a screen.  And he’s someone like a 25 year old biker with a big grizzly beard who’s covered in tattoos.  He plays drums in a rock band, and he spends his free time with his biker friends at a bar.

The couples were always incredibly different—one person would be a 6 and a half foot tall football player, the other would be a diminutive person who hated sports.  One would be in law enforcement; the other would be an anarchist who was frequently arrested.  Always, always, they would set up expectations for who the second partner should be, and then shatter them completely. 

This is what happens with our lectionary readings this morning too.  Our expectations are shattered.  First we have partner number one—the psalm.   It’s exhorting us to praise the Lord, praise the Lord, praise the Lord—it’s an exuberant song of joy.  We would expect its scriptural partner in the lectionary to be similarly joyful and full of life. But, instead, with our happy Psalm we have what I’m going to call our Debbie Downer 1 Timothy passage, which reads “The love of money is the root of all evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.”  Ouch.  We might be rivaling Maury with this odd couple.  

Let’s take a cue from the Maury show though.  I can’t believe I just said that in a pulpit. . . but really, let’s take a cue from Maury here.  Because after all the odd couples were introduced, Maury did something that was actually pretty cool.  He had them all sit out on the stage together, and he brought out a relationship expert.  Every single time they did a variation of this odd couple show, Maury would pretend to be clueless about how these relationships could possibly work with partners that seemed so different.  And the relationship expert would inform Maury, again and again, that while the couples seemed different on a superficial level, what made relationships work wasn’t the superficial stuff that everyone could see.

 It wasn’t about the tattoos or the job title.  It was the deeper, really important stuff like morals, values, that led to a loving, working relationship.  What held these “odd couples” together was that they shared something deeper that was apparent at first glance.  And this expert would interview the couples and see just what it was that tied them to each other when their appearances would suggest otherwise.

So let’s take a little deeper look at our scriptural odd couple and find this something deeper that binds them too.  And, since you all pay me to study scriptures, I’m going to take on the role of Maury’s relationship expert, and tell you what I think this deep thing is that binds Psalm 146 and our reading from 1 Timothy together.  They both share a deep concern with the praise of God.   

We can see this pretty clearly with Psalm 146.  It repeats, over and over again, and exhortation to “Praise the Lord!”  So praise, the Hebrew word “ha-le-lu,” is clearly pretty important.  And what does “ha-le-lu” mean exactly?  What does it mean to praise God?  Is it about writing or singing songs like the psalmist, or coming to a specific building to pray and worship, like we’ve done this morning?  Well, not exactly.  Clearly, this can be part of how we express praise, but it’s not the foundation of it.  And that’s what’s really important in the scriptural relationship here—the deep foundational stuff.  So, what the Psalter as a whole and this Psalm in particular tell us is that the actual foundation of praise is trust.  Whatever our outward actions of praise, they are grounded in this trust.   

Unfortunately, both these scripture readings also remind us that we live in a world full of other things that compete for our trust and praise.  And if we’re going to truly praise God, we can’t put our trust in anything, or anyone else.  1 Timothy puts it this way: “those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.”  For us to fully trust and praise God, as the psalm exhorts us to do over and over, we cannot also trust and praise and money.  

Now, of course, it’s not likely that any of us actually build altars to money, or sing songs about how wonderful it is all day long.  But we have all been tempted to put our trust in it.  Maybe we stash a stockpile of it away, and trust that money will protect or save us from whatever problems should occur.  And when those problems do occur, maybe we seek a way to buy a solution, a magic pill or quick fix, and neglect to even lift a prayer up to God.  Or maybe we may spend all our time and energy working to make more and more money, when we already have enough to live on, and others are in need.  We may abandon our families, our friends, or maybe our spiritual lives as we do whatever it takes get more money in an attempt to feel safe and secure.

And even if neither of these sounds like you, we all live in a culture that puts its trust in money, no matter what the back of our currency might say.  We live in a culture where CEO’s make 500 times more than their workers, who struggle to get by with even the bare necessities, and we rarely raise a fuss, but instead praise the CEO for their skill or work ethic, and claim they “deserve” all that cash and that the poor “deserve” to be poor.  We live in a culture that pushes advertisements down our throat claiming that money invested in certain products will solve all our problems, making us attractive, happy, and invincible.   

Now, while it’s true that money can be associated with lots of problematic behavior, I want to be clear that there’s nothing inherently wrong with money.  There’s also nothing wrong with having money—we need money to live.  But there’s not even anything wrong with having a lot of money.  The 1 Timothy text we heard today is often misquoted to say that money is the root of all evil.  But do you remember what it actually says?  “The love of money is the root of all evil.”  When we start to love money, when we put our trust in money, we can no longer praise God in our whole lives. God’s praise and money’s praise are a couple that won’t ever be able to make their relationship work.  There’s nothing fundamental they share.  Instead, one makes the other impossible—you can’t trust put your trust in God and money at the same time. 

The work that God calls us to do— executing justice for the oppressed, giving food to the hungry, lifting up the bowed down, watching over and protecting the most vulnerable people among us, to paraphrase the psalm—we can’t do this work if we don’t put our trust fully in God.  It’s hard work, unpopular work, and work that isn’t going to make us rich.  You can’t feed someone else if you insist on keeping every penny for your stockpile.  You can’t protect someone vulnerable if you’re only concerned about protecting your cash.

So we, as followers of Christ and worshippers of God, cannot put our trust anywhere else but in God.  For us, money is, and needs to stay, a means to an end.  And our end, the place where we put our trust, our praise, and our love, needs to always be God.  Everything else will eventually fail us.  As the psalm puts it “Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help. When their breath departs, they return to the earth; on that very day their plans perish.”  We all know this is true still today.  We’ve seen the stock market crash, some of us more than once, and bring hopes and dreams down with it.  We’ve seen mighty corporations crumble.  We’ve seen powerful leaders fall.  None of them lasts.  No earthly power or ruler, no amount of money, is good enough for us to put our trust in. 

Only God is good enough.  And if a lack of better options isn’t a good enough motivator, both the Psalm and 1 Timothy share the rewards of trusting and praising God. As the psalm puts it true “happiness.”  Or 1 Timothy puts it, “the life that is really life.”  Worshipping God isn’t just something we do for God.  It’s something we do for us, our community, and our world, as well.  Only through trusting and praising God can we experience that happiness and “life that is really life.  And we can only worship God when we let go of our fear based grasping, and hoarding and instead let go and let God.  We can experience this new quality of life only when stop being concerned with being rich with money, and start caring about being rich in good works, being generous, and sharing what we have with others.  It is when fully put our trust in God that we can go about the kind of work God calls us to—to again draw from our psalm, executing justice for the oppressed, giving food to the hungry, setting prisoners free, lifting up those who are bowed down, watching over strangers and upholding the widow and the orphan.

And our relationship with money matters in this.   We can either put our trust in God, money, or some other false God with the way we pursue and spend money.  The relationship we have with money impacts the way we live our whole lives, and the relationship we have with God.

And this is so important that I’m asking us all to take some time now, and to reflect on who and what we praise, and trust in our daily lives.  So Tim is going to play some meditative music for us for a few minutes while we all reflect on the ways we live our trust in God in our daily lives, and the places where we may have misplaced our trust.  And yes, I am asking you specifically to think about your relationship with money here too.  So as you reflect, you can write, you can draw, you can just think, whatever is your style.  But take some time now and reflect, so that you can live the wisdom of the psalmist, and truly, fully praise the Lord.