There was a rich man…who died last month. This is according to an article by Dana Milbank published this week in the Washington Post:

“Ted Pellegatta, the village eccentric here in rural Sperryville, Virginia, drove an ancient Honda Accord with a cracked bumper and a dinged-up vanity license plate that proclaimed: “RICH MAN.”

Jesus also tells a story about a rich man. The rich man featured in Jesus’ parable is rich in the very conventional sense: he has a lot of money and property and a manager who is “squandering” it all. At the end, Jesus concludes: “You cannot serve God and wealth” (Luke 16:13).

This is what I’ve always heard as the point of this parable: to illustrate the ways that we are called to use our wealth to serve our God (and to convict us for the ways that we so often get this backwards).

our theme this month – this emphasis on YOU MATTER – and the story I recounted earlier about Ted Pellegatta – have helped me hear another dimension to this parable.

The preacher and author Brian MacLaren suggests that God’s kingdom has an economic system. And it’s currency is not money.

This is a paradigm shift: we live in a world that is all about money. Whether you have it or you don’t, whether it’s used for good or the root of all evil, everything is measured in terms of money. Our economic system – and therefore our value system – is based on money.

God’s kingdom has an economic system that is not about money at all. God’s value system is based in relationship.

In God’s kingdom, relationships matter because people matter. YOU MATTER. God invests in a relationship with us and we are faithful stewards in God’s economic system when we use all that we are and all that we have to invest in relationships with each other.

When I hear the story of the unlikely table that Pellegatta set for all kinds of people to debate politics and forge friendship, this sounds to me like a little glimpse of the kingdom of God. You cannot serve God and wealth, Jesus said. And serving God looks a lot like investing in relationship with the people and the world God so loves. The fact that the Washington Post thought Ted Pellegatta’s way of life was newsworthy tells us all that we need to know: investing in relationships is not the way of this world. But God’s kingdom trades on the currency of relationship, not money. Thanks to Ted Pellegatta for giving us a little glimpse of what it looks like to truly be a “rich man” in the kingdom of God. May God grant us the grace and courage to invest in one another.