Today I am going to focus on the first part of the Gospel reading:

The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light.  But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!  No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon. (St. Matthew 6: 22-24)

Seeing Nails
What does Christ mean when He tells us that “The lamp of the body is the eye?”  How does that relate to His words about having two masters?  In order to help explain this, I want to share a wonderful proverb; “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” (Maslow, Twain, Kaplan)

Now, if the world were comprised only of things that need pounding in, we wouldn’t have a problem.  But have you ever tried fixing a broken light bulb with a hammer?  I can guarantee you that not only won’t you end up with a light that works, you will end up with a bigger mess than you started with.  You should not use a hammer to change a light bulb.  But it isn’t just a matter of finding the right tool: the man with the hammer really thinks he HAS the right tool: “everything looks like a nail.” 

To go back to Christ’s parable, the man with the hammer has a “bad eye”.  To make matters worse (and to stretch the metaphor even further), the world only gives us hammers, and we keep swinging them at every problem that comes our way.  And just look at the mess we have made of our lives!  Just look at the mess we have made of our world!  Let me give you some real examples:

Anger. 
Some people respond to problems by taking them personally and then responding with anger.  They “see red” almost all the time.  This is one of the first tools that we try out: kids are tempted to throw fits when they do not get exactly what they want.  In adults, it has often become automatic – it is not as if they are throwing a fit in order to get their way: they actually perceive the problem as something that should be responded to with anger.

Worry & Hopelessness.
Similarly, some people respond to problems with a sense of despair.  Perhaps they have been disappointed in the past by their failure to fix things; as with anger, this can become a way of life: the “eye” can go bad, putting our “whole body” into darkness.

Money. 
This one is not emotional, but it is equally irrational.   Unfortunately, it is a hammer that is especially prevalent in our culture: we believe that money can be used to fix just about everything.  Moreover, because everything looks like a nail, every problem can look like it has roots in money.  Every problem seems to have a solution that is grounded in finance.  St. Paul warned St. Timothy that “the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.” 

This is especially true when the problem seems so obviously financial.  In this country, in our homes, and in our parish, we often struggle to make ends meet.  We are conditioned by our culture to solve this problem by treating it as a budgetary problem: we typically look for ways to either spend less (in a parish this might mean fewer services in the winter, going to a “part-time priest”, less money to programs or charity) or bring more money in (in a parish this might mean higher dues, more recognition for contributions, more fundraisers, and trying to bring in new members).  But this is no healthier than the emotional responses of anger and hopelessness.  It may seem obvious for us to treat financial problems this way, but that is only because, as Christ says; “our eye(s) [are] bad, our whole body is full of darkness.“  Obviously we need to be good stewards of our resources, but in order to become good stewards, we must first change our attitude towards money ... and only later get into the details of budgeting.  If we skip the first step, then we simply reinforce money’s influence over our worldview.  And even if we actually seem to solve the problem with our budget (or anger, or anxiety) without changing our attitude, it is only because we have misdiagnosed a spiritual problem as a financial one: we have “successfully” hammered in a light bulb.

Conclusion.
Our Lord tells us that we cannot have two masters, that we cannot serve God and mammon.  Now I hope you have a deeper understanding about what He means: mammon is every hammer that is not based in love.  If we can learn to see the world in love, then our “whole body will be full of light”; the reassurance about the “birds of the air” and the “lilies of the field” will no longer seem like naïve “wishful thinking”, but will be recognized as the Truth that Christ proclaims it to be.