In Whom Do You Believe?

Series: Pentecost

Speaker: The Rev. Deborah Meister

          Today’s readings present us with a rather conflicted set of teachings about the role of money in the Christian life. That seems appropriate, as there are few topics about which we Christians are, in fact, more conflicted. We are caught between desire and shame, gratitude and guilt, between generosity and our own desire to control others, between Christ’s teaching that the poor are blessed and the evidence of our own senses, which suggests that if poverty is a blessing, it is, perhaps, a blessing we’d rather do without. (As I was writing this, I realized that next to my computer were a mortgage statement, a bank statement, and a bill that needs to be paid. There is a real world out there, and we are all enmeshed in it.)

            And so I thought I’d start us off today with a few words from an expert about money: Henry Ford, who had rather a lot of it. He said, “Money does not change you; it unmasks you.” I’m not so sure about the first half of that, but I think Ford is spot-on about the unmasking. Between the gilt palaces of a would-be plutocrat and the overwhelming humanitarianism of a Bill or Melinda Gates, there is a world of difference, and that difference lies in the human heart.

            The heart, of course, is Jesus’ concern, but we would miss the mark if we failed to notice that he is equally concerned about outcomes: the actual effects of money and of what we do with it on the lives of men, women, and children. He did not preach a disembodied piety, but one which connects us intimately to all our brothers and sisters in the flesh. And so we should also bear in mind that when Andrew Carnegie was opening libraries all over this country as a gift to the nation, one of his steelworkers told a reporter, “We didn’t want him to build a library for us, we would rather have had higher wages.”^[1] Those words remind us to ask about the origin of our money, why it is that a man who busts his back and burns his arms ten hours a day working with hot steel earns so much less than a man who wears a suit and sits in an air-conditioned office, or why we pay people millions to do fun things like play ball or act in motion pictures while those who collect our trash or risk their lives running into burning buildings earn, by comparison, pocket change. What we do with money reveals our values, but too often it can seem that our wealth also reveals our value — when, in the eyes of God, we are beyond price.

            So let’s begin there: “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16) That astonishing claim means that the suffering and death of human beings were intolerable to God, that even if only one person had been lost from grace, Christ would have lived and died to bring that person home. And so the question about money is the same question that should govern every aspect of our being: what consequences does that claim have in your life?

            Upon the rich man in Jesus’ parable, it is clear that the answer was, “not much.” The rich man, known to tradition as Dives (“the rich guy”), lives a sumptuous life, while the poor man at his gates longs for his table-scraps. There is, of course, another story that involves crumbs falling from tables, and this one is no parable, but a real encounter between Jesus and a Syrian woman. The woman cries out to Jesus to heal her daughter, and the disciples ask Jesus to send her away. Jesus tells her, “It is not fair to take the children’s bread and feed it to the dogs,” but the woman argues back, “even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” (Matt 15:27, Mark 7:28)

            That story is not contained in Luke, although it appears in Matthew and in Mark, so it may be fair to see this story about Dives and Lazarus as Luke’s attempt to address the same theme. In neither case is the potential giver — Jesus or Dives — being asked to do much. He’s not being asked to give up everything, just to give away his crumbs: the crumbs of his food and the crumbs of his attention. Dives is not being asked to believe in Jesus, but to believe in the reality of other human beings: to believe that our essential humanity trumps our apparent differences. (Believing a doctrine may be easier than that.) Dives chose to believe in a world in which a great chasm was fixed between rich and poor, between himself and others, and, ironically, when he dies he finds exactly what he expected. The chasm he had built during his lifetime is one he cannot cross even after his death. Jesus, by contrast, repents and heals the woman’s child; in that moment, he ushers in a world without that chasm and invites us to join him there.

            Eberhard Arnold spelled out what that might look like in our lives: “If you want to found a family, see that all others who want to found a family are able to do so, too. If you wish for education, work, and satisfying activity, make these possible for other people as well. If you say it is your duty to care for your health, then accept this duty for the health of others also. Treat people in the same way you would be treated by them. This is the law and the prophets. This is the narrow gate, for it is the way that leads to the kingdom of God.”^[2]

            We seem to have drifted, don’t we, from talking about money to talking about how we relate to one another: that’s the point. Because money is the primary medium of our exchange with those we do not know well, it takes on the nature of the assumptions that guide those interactions. If our aim is to keep those relations impersonal (think about that word for a moment: im-personal, not personed), then the money is only money, and our aim is to give away as little of it as possible. But if we seek to recognize the humanity of others, then that money is a marker of humanity, our own and that of others. Paul writes to Timothy, “love of money is a root of all kinds of evil,” but he’s not quite right: love of money as he is thinking of it is itself a symptom: a symptom of inordinate love of self, of the belief that our lives are worth more than the lives of others.

            We are struggling with that right now in this country. This week has brought us death and rioting, cries of anguish from Charlotte and Tulsa and Burlington and Aleppo[3]. The truth is that our lives and the lives of those we love do matter more to us than the lives of others, often more than the lives of thousands of others. But there have always been people for whom that was not so. When the Unitarian Church asked Martha and Waistill Clark to go to Europe and save Jews from Hitler, they went.^[4] When the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee called for volunteers to desegregate lunch-counters, people came. When people were needed to ride buses into angry crowds that injured them, they rode, and the more Freedom Riders were injured, the more stepped up to ride. When people were needed to care for those with AIDS, strangers brought food and nursing and kindness. There have always been people for whom unnecessary human suffering is intolerable; they are what I imagine when I try to see the face of God.

            Look. Jesus’ teachings are hard. There are passages in which he commands us to give everything we have to the poor, just as he gave us his very life, but this is not one of them. This parable simply asks us to give them something — enough to have the basics of a decent life. Enough that, when a child gets pneumonia, the parents will be able to get penicillin. Enough not to wear rags. Enough to eat and sleep in safety, and not have to beg.

            Here’s the key: Jesus isn’t asking us to give away what is rightfully ours, but what rightfully belongs to another.  The underlying theology of money in all of Scripture is that it’s not ours, any more than our life is really ours. Money — like life itself, the air we breathe and the water we drink and the crops that rise from the earth — money is God’s, and when we have much and others have too little, we are holding what is not rightfully ours. St. Basil the Great wrote, in words which we could paint on the doors of the Op Shop, “The bread which you hold back belongs to the hungry; the coat, which you guard in your locked storage-chests, belongs to the naked; the footwear mouldering in your closet belongs to those without shoes… Thus, however many are those whom you could have provided for, so many are those whom you wrong.”

            But if this condemnation is harsh, Paul’s words of praise for those who live from a place of generosity are to the same extent laudatory: “as for those who in the present age are rich,…they are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share,…so that they may take hold of the life that really is life.” (2 Tim 6:19) The money we have is a gift: it enables us to be generous, to be kind in ways that have impact on other people’s lives, to be able to participate in the open-handed nature of God by giving to others just as God gives.

            And God always gives in hope. No matter who we are, no matter what we have done, no matter how many Lazaruses we have passed by, or how many Syrians cry out to us for help, God believes in us. Around the year 586 BCE, when Jerusalem was ringed by the forces of Babylon and the prophet Jeremiah was living under house arrest in the palace of the puppet-king of Judah, the word of the Lord came to him and told him, “buy a field.” Buy a field??! The proposition was absurd. Jeremiah had been prophesying for years that Jerusalem was going to fall, that Babylon was going to win, and the breath of the enemy was already misting the city gates. It was like being asked to buy a plot of land at Ground Zero, sometime around September 13th, 2001. But Jeremiah bought the field. He took out his money and counted it and wrote a deed and sealed it in a jar to preserve it for a time of hope. Because Jeremiah knew that after the siege, after the conquest, after the exile — after all the consequences of our unfaithfulness, there would be life again in that city.

            Because no matter how often we are unfaithful, God is faithful to us. God believes in us. And God is waiting, not for us to believe in the God we cannot see, but to believe in one another, in the sacred flesh and blood of our brothers and sisters and neighbors and strangers. For the words God speaks to us are the same words God speaks to every one of God’s children: “For I know the plans I have for you,…plans for welfare, not for anguish, to give you a future with hope.” (Jer 29:11)

Jer 32:1-3a; 6-15; Ps 91:1-6, 14-16
1 Tim 6:6-19; Luke 16: 19-31

^[1] Cited in Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.

^[2] Salt and Light, xvi.

[3] Aleppo, of course, is not in this country.

^[4] Nicholas Kristoff, “Would you hide a Jew from the Nazis?, New York Times, 9/17/2016.