Two Masters, One Heart

Well, good morning again, my fellow encouragers. You know, I’ve been thinking all week about a small thing our Lord does in the gospel this morning, and I want to name it right at the start, because it changes everything that follows. He doesn’t scold us for wanting too much. He doesn’t stand over us wagging his finger about our appetites. He tells us the plain truth, that the heart can’t cleave two ways, and then he does the one thing we could never do for ourselves. He transfers our service to a Master who keeps us. That’s the whole sermon this morning, and it’s grace all the way down. Let me walk you through it.

Start with the word the English softens on us. When Jesus says No man can serve two masters, the word underneath isn’t the language of a part-time arrangement, of a second job you pick up on the weekend. The word underneath is slavery. Bondage. And that should stop us in our tracks, beloved, because mammon never once asked for our spare hours. Mammon didn’t come knocking to borrow an evening. It asked for the deed to the whole house. It asked for us.

And look at the two verbs our Lord sets side by side, because they carry the weight of it. To one master, he says, you will hold. You cleave. You hang on for dear life the way a man hangs on to the one thing he can’t live without. And the other you count as nothing. You despise it. There’s no third posture in the sentence. He hasn’t left us a middle shelf to stand on. He isn’t describing a preference, the way you might prefer coffee to tea. He’s describing where a whole life is fixed. Either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

Now we like to imagine ourselves divided. A little for God, a little for our wants. A tithe here, an appetite there, everybody gets a portion, and we go on our way feeling balanced. Calvin names that arrangement for the flattering fiction it is, and I think he’s right to. The divided heart isn’t a full heart. Let me say that again, because it’s the hinge of the thing. The divided heart isn’t a full heart. It’s a heart already given away and pretending it isn’t.

So how does a heart like that hide in a devout parish? Because it does hide here. Augustine noticed something we’d rather not hear about ourselves. Almost no one’s conscience can bring itself to hate God outright. We don’t stand up and shake a fist at heaven. So the divided heart doesn’t hate God. It despises him quietly. It presumes on his goodness. It feels perfectly secure, sitting in a pew, singing the hymn, while it serves something else the other six days.

And you can spot the wrong master by his symptom, which is anxiety. That gnawing, distracted care our Lord forbids three times over in this gospel. Take no thought for your life. Now Calvin guards us from a lazy reading here, and I want you to hear the guard, because I know this congregation and I know your labors. Christ isn’t condemning the care your vocation requires. He isn’t scolding the man working two jobs, or the woman watching the savings against the doctor’s bill. That’s not the anxiety he means. He’s condemning the care that comes from distrust. The care that has quietly concluded God won’t come through.

The Psalm sings that whole lesson to the harp. Man in honour abideth not, and he shall carry nothing away when he dieth. That’s the fowls of the air preaching to the anxious a truth the market keeps denying all day long, that what you clutch you cannot keep, and what keeps you you never earned in the first place. Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them.

And now here’s the hope, and I’ve been waiting to get to it. You are not chained past rescue. Chrysostom presses this, and it’s the best news in the sermon. The slave of mammon isn’t condemned to his chains. It’s possible to transfer one’s service. Hear that. The old master still knows your name. He still knows your phone number, he still knows the hour of the day you’re weakest, but he no longer owns the deed. He’s been made to hand it over.

Paul shows us the other bondage this morning, the good one, the bondage in the flesh. Listen to how he ends the whole letter. I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus. He’s branded. He carries the scars of a man who belongs to somebody now, and his only boast in all the world is a cross. God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. That, beloved, is what it looks like when a man’s heart has finally cleaved to one Master and let the other one go. Nothing left to boast in but the thing that owns him.

And notice what Paul calls it. Not a repaired heart. Not a patched-up old life with the worst edges sanded down. A new creature. In Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature. Neither the fair show your neighbors are so busy keeping, nor the small income you’re a little ashamed of, counts for anything at that table. So the honest question was never how do I try harder to undivide my own heart. I’ve asked that question. I’ve stood at this altar with something unsettled in my own heart, trying to muscle it back together by will, and it doesn’t work. It can’t work. It can’t work from the inside out. The honest question is whether I’ll reckon myself owned by the One who bought me.

Which brings us home, to how he keeps us. The Collect we prayed this morning confesses out loud what the gospel simply assumes about us. The frailty of man without thee cannot but fall. Without him we can’t but fall. We can’t undivide our own hearts. So the Collect doesn’t turn around and ask us to try harder. Read it again and you’ll see it never does. It asks God to do the keeping. Keep, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy Church with thy perpetual mercy. Keep us from all things hurtful. Lead us to all things profitable to our salvation. That’s a prayer of a people who’ve stopped pretending they can hold on by themselves.

And he keeps us as laborers, not as idlers. This matters. Seek ye first the kingdom of God, Christ says, and that’s a command with a verb in it, a going and a seeking. But the Collect answers that we can’t even do the seeking unaided. So the young father’s daily work isn’t the anxiety Christ forbids. It’s the vocation God keeps him in while God keeps his heart. He works, and God holds the deed. He seeks, and God does the seeking through him. That’s the arrangement. That’s the newness of life this whole green season keeps circling back to.

So hear me, encouragers. If your heart’s been divided this week, and you know if it has, come. If your care has curdled into distrust, if you’ve lain awake serving a master who feeds on your sleep, come. If you’ve boasted in a fair show and it’s left you empty, empty as it always leaves us, come to the table where the branded and crucified Lord makes you a new creature. This is where the sermon comes to rest, right here, at the altar, where the demand is met by gift long before it’s ever a demand at all.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.