You Cannot Serve God and Mammon
Sermon preached by Dina Zingaro on Sunday, June 21, 2026
Patricia Williams, a professor at Northeastern here in Boston, told a story once from her childhood. When she was six, her family was on a road trip in the summer. As they drove down the highway in the sweltering heat, the highway, “hot and shimmering darkly in the sun,” looked different colors to Williams and to her sister.
Williams said it was black—her sister said it looked purple. The two went back and forth in disagreement. Eventually, after Williams kept insisting, her sister said “Fine! The road is black.”
Later, Williams’ father said to her, “You know, your sister still sees the road as purple.”
Many years later, and after driving down many, many highways, Williams says she now sees the highways on those hot summer days as slightly more purple than black.
I begin with this story of black and purple highways—and the idea that two people can see the most concrete thing in different ways—because today’s Gospel speaks about perception.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus says, “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light…”
Lamps in the first century, in Jesus’s time, were small clay vessels with olive oil inside. The oil acted as fuel. A small wick was placed in the vessel so that the bottom of the wick rested in the oil. The oil would move up the wick and feed a small flame at the top, producing light at night.
“The eye is the lamp of the body.”
A lamp, providing us with light so that we may see, shapes the way we perceive, and thereby experience, the world. If your eye—your perception—is sound, your whole body is full of light!
Jesus then says, “but if your eye is not sound, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the [light that is in you] is darkness, how great is the darkness!”
This language—“if then the light that is in you is darkness”—seems to suggest there is a light that already constitutes the human person, a glimmer that darkness can overshadow.
Perhaps this light that is in you and in me is God’s breath, the divine image—for when God created human beings from dust, God also gave something of God’s own: divine breath. St. Clement of Alexandria describes God’s breath, this divine image, as a “love-charm”—a sharing of breath that connects God with the human being.
Early Church theologians like Gregory of Nyssa believed humans could know God and recognize God’s presence in the world because of this connection with the divine.
The image of God, this divine spark, within each of us, invites us to recognize God’s presence in the world. Gregory of Nyssa said, “[T]o see God is…the life of the soul.”
Do we recognize God’s presence in the world—God’s handiwork in the melodies of the birds on an early morning or in the sound leaves make as they dance in the wind? Theologian Nonna Verna Harrison wrote that “when we see God in the things [that God] has made,” the natural world becomes a “window, or a door into God’s presence.”
Each person we encounter is a fellow image and icon of God, a divine spark, “a window, a door into God’s presence.” Do we see God in our neighbor?
St. Maria of Paris wrote that “our relations with people should be an authentic and profound veneration.” Can we venerate each person we encounter by loving them as God loves—without exception? with patience, kindness, acceptance, compassion, forgiveness?
Seeing God in each person is not easy. What if I see the highway as black and you see it as purple? Can we communicate those different perceptions and still be in communion with one another?
God did not reveal Godself in “one way only” but, as St. Athanasius said, the knowledge of God “unfold[s] in many forms and by many ways.”
The trouble for us is that differences can too easily be used to justify our division.
Our task, the journey of Theosis, is to learn to give our neighbor the freedom to be different from us and still be in communion with them. To love the other not in spite of but because they are different—Other. The Trinity shows us divine Love as a unity that does not erase but maintains difference. Three unique persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—share in one essence, encircling one another in unity.
Do we perceive God in the person before us?
In today’s Gospel, when Jesus says, “if your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light,” the word for sound can also have the meaning, “undivided,” “single,” “whole.”
What does it mean then for our eye to be unsound, to be divided?
One answer comes later in today’s Gospel. Jesus says we cannot serve two masters—we cannot serve both God and money. He discourages excessive worrying or anxiety about what we will eat or drink or what clothing we will wear. Food, drink, clothing—these are pretty basic necessities, so is concerning ourselves with them really unreasonable?
But Jesus is saying something else. When he says we cannot serve both God and money, he uses the word “mammon” (μαμωνᾷ) for money. This is a very particular word. Mammon is not just wealth or material possessions, but a wealth that we trust in so deeply that it becomes personified— it takes on a life of its own. It demands our attention, our devotion, our trust; it shapes our priorities.
Each of us has a mammon, something that swallows up our attention, demands our attention, and pulls us away from God’s presence in the world. It prevents us from seeing God’s presence in ourselves or in our neighbor. It becomes what we see, what we see taste, touch, hear. It sucks up all the oxygen in the room.
Perhaps the mammon in our lives is wealth or power; maybe emotions like jealousy, fear, and anger; beliefs and judgments about others; or perhaps beliefs we hold about ourselves.
Our eye becomes divided, split between “two masters”: God and mammon. Like the worrying and anxiety Jesus warns against in today’s Gospel, the mammon pulls us away from an awareness of God’s presence—an awareness that would otherwise shape how we relate to and love others.
The weeks, months, years pass by as we seek comfort and place comfort in the mammon. But Jesus asks us, “can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?”
The mammon cannot add a single hour to our lives.
What do we trust in, bind ourselves to so tightly, that it so constricts our vision that our eye is no longer sound, our eye becomes divided?
Our perspective itself—what we believe is right and what we believe is wrong—can be a mammon. We may give all our attention, devotion, and trust to this one way of seeing something.
It seems so natural to want certainty, a sense of security, of standing on solid ground, to know our perception of things is right. It is not to say that we should not have convictions. Rather, it is to be wary of perspectives, beliefs, judgments that we cling to so hard that they cloud our ability to see God’s presence in our neighbor.
Maybe the road is a bit purple.
The practice of repentance teaches us to reorient ourselves in humility and love towards God, including the image of God within and in our neighbor. We recommit to a humility and love that loosens our grip on our perceptions, judgements, and beliefs so that we may see anew. Repentance, metanoia in the Greek, means a change of heart and mind—a change of direction that transforms us.
“[T]o see God is…the life of the soul.”
God saturates the world around us, in many forms and in many ways. Each of us—a unique signature of God—has a perspective shaped by our particular identities and experiences. Some see the highway on a hot summer day as more purple that black. As we learn to love as God loves, we allow for those perspectives, those differences to coexist in our communion with one another.
I want to close by offering an Orthodox practice we may take with us after we leave church today. Perhaps we might carry it with us, like we do the Jesus Prayer, returning to it throughout our day. The practice comes from an image offered by a sixth century desert monk: Dorotheus of Gaza (Harrison, God’s Many-Splendored Image, 49).
Take a deep breath and close your eyes…with eyes sound and undivided…imagine a circle with God at the center of it. Imagine all of us and our neighbors standing on the rim of that circle. When we and our neighbors really see each other and we “move closer to each other, the circle gets smaller so that we also move closer to the center and to God. And when we move closer to God, we also move closer to our neighbors.” (Harrison, 49)
We cannot separate or divide Love of God from love of neighbor. As St. Maria of Paris said, Jesus put an “equal sign” between Himself and anyone in need.
Each day, with our eyes sound and undivided, may we trust in God’s presence and see God in our neighbor.