After working for 10 years as a cowboy and two years studying herbal medicine with the Hopi Native Americans, Clark Stanley was ready to launch a new business.

Clark said he had discovered a product with incredible healing properties. It was suitable for the treatment of a wide variety of maladies from arthritis to back pain, frost bite to mosquito bites.

After setting up manufacturing plants on the East coast, Clark figured the best way to market his new discovery was to personally sell it, going from town to town in a covered wagon emblazoned with the company name: Clark Stanley's Snake Oil.

Naive purchasers lined up to hear Clark's convincing pitch. He often employed a shill, or a paid audience member, who would tout the product's miraculous powers to increase sales. And the great advantage of a covered wagon was that, come nightfall, things could be easily packed up and Clark could be out of town and  on the road, before anyone could figure out that his product did not soothe, cleanse, heal, or do anything it promised to do.

Today the term 'snake oil' is synonymous with deceptive business practices or products (after all, the original snake oil was nothing more than doctored up mineral oil), and refers to things that just can't live up to its promises.

This Sunday, we will hear Jesus describe something like that - only it's not medicine, it's money.

'Dishonest wealth' is a term we will hear not once, but twice, along with its incumbent allusions - that money can't do what it's cracked up to do. In our culture wealth promises security, popularity, contentment, comfort, and stress-free living.

In fact, we are constantly hearing subtle and not so subtle messages that if we just had a bit more money for this possession or that experience, then we would find the happiness, security, status, acceptance, and fulfillment for which we so deeply yearn.

Jesus wants to remind us that all those things are attainable, but they're only attainable through God.

'Seek first the things that are above, not the things that are below,' says St. Paul. Time and again our faith urges us to put people over stuff - to put aside the temptations that push us towards seeking our security or contentment in anything other than God.

And so we ask:

What's the Snake Oil in our lives?

What are the false promises we're buying into?

And how is God urging us to try something else?