At What Price? Thoughts On God's Strange Economy

10 For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains. (1 Timothy 6:10).

Preached at Trinity Protestant Chapel, Canadian Forces Base, Borden, 29 September, 2019.  Readings for the Sixteenth Sunday After Pentecost:  Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15; Psalm 146, 1 Timothy 6:6-19; Luke 16:19-31

I love how the church's lectionary, it's regular cycle of scripture readings, can speak into the particulars of my life.   Take the readings this Sunday, which touch on money and mortality, which illuminated for me some of the content of the "How to Retire" aka SCAN (Second Career and Networking) seminar I took last week.

SCAN is one of those things you do in the CAF checkout lane.   It’s a useful sort of activity, because we all have to leave, voluntarily or otherwise, and there’s a lot to think about as we go from a military life to a civilian life, and there’s a lot about resume writing and networking and retraining and possible second careers, which are all good to know about.

Briefings about benefits, educational opportunities, pensions, disability allowances.  In other words, there was a lot of stuff about money:  how much do you need, how much you can get?   Can I get compensated for an injury incurred during my military service?  Can I get money to go back to school?  Can I get money to go back to school and retrain for a second career?

The people in the room, mostly middle aged, got really thoughtful when they started to reflect on their own mortality.  That happened when they talked about what age you could take your pension - 55?  at 60 when, as the presenter said, you have one foot in the grave?   at 65?   

Then, when they started talking about survivor’s benefits and the importance of making a will, that’s when people were reminded that they we can’t take it with us.     Everything has an end.  There’s nothing more sobering than realizing how actuarial tables work, and how choosing when to take a pension is to place a bet on how much longer one will live.

Life,  career, money, death.  All of these things are good and necessary to think about.   Someone once said that being hanged in the morning concentrates the mind marvellously, and the same is true when you realize that the pay check and benefits that we’ve come to depend on will come to an end. 

The good news that day was that by and large, the people in that room will be ok.  They have decent pension plans, they have good benefits and good prospects of second careers.   The medical release process is fairly generous.   People will be looked after and the wolf will be kept from the door.

As I left the seminar, I couldn’t help but wonder, what about all the people facing old age without these things?  According to Statistics Canada, fewer than half of Canadian workers, and fewer women than men, have a workplace pension plan.  Many people will enter their late years without much security or rest.  That cheerful old person greeting you at WalMart may not be there by choice.

Why spare a thought for them?   Because that’s what Christians do.  The gospel is pretty clear that our responsibilities extend well beyond meeting our own particular needs and responsibilities.   For every word that scripture tells us about what to do with our bodies, there are many more that tell us what to do with our money, and this is especially true of the gospels.

Two of the readings today speak very clearly about our relationships to wealth, to God, and to one another.   They describe both God’s economics and God’s justice, and they give us some rich opportunities to reflect on what we do with the material gifts that God has given us:  “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” (v 10).  Note that it is not the root of all evil, but is definitely a source of evil.  If there “godliness” can bring us “contentment”, then the desire for wealth leads in the opposite direction, taking away from “faith” and into a state of life where we are “pierced with many pains” (v10).  

What are these pains?  Could they include anxiety?  A restlessness that comes from never having enough?   Worry about what happens when the money runs out?   A materialism that leads us away from our relationship with God and into a kind of idolatry where we think that we must be self-sufficient in all things, not needing God or anyone else?

Surely we see all these things in the world around us, in our politics, our popular culture, even in our neighbours and in ourselves.   I think of a man I knew who tracked his stock portfolio online, back when that was a new thing, and would shout red-faced at the screen when his investments had a bad day.   He had by any standards a comfortable existence, and yet he was “pierced with many pains”.

Of couse, wealth and more are one of those subjects, like war and non-violence, that Christians have long debated.  It would take far too long to sketch a summary of Chrisian attitudes about wealth and money over the years, but it would probably start with the earliest church, in Acts 2, which sold its goods and lived held all things in common, the church in Corinth which Paul accuses of ignoring the social divisions of its members, through the middle ages and the established church’s great acquisition of land and wealth.    We could spend an hour looking around Christianity today, with the debate over the prosperity gospel, and the way that churches today tend to mirror social, class, and racial divisions in western culture.

Well, when in doubt, ask a simple question:  what does Jesus say?  Last Sunday I preached on the first half of Luke 16, the parable of the dishonest manager, which is perhaps the most difficult of the parables to interpret because it’s the story of a rascal who cooks the books, tricks his master, and yet appears to do well from it.  The important thing about the parable is that Jesus twice uses the phrase “dishonest wealth”, and Jesus contrasts the dealings of the people of this age with the dealings of the children of light.

The phrase “dishonest wealth” invites us to read the gospels as showing that Jesus had, at the very least, a healthy skepticism about wealth, as we might expect from an itinerant preacher.   Certainly we know that Jesus and his disciples needed money to get by; they had a common purse, women of some means who helped them financially, and they had trades and means to make a living, like boats (Jn 8:2-3, 12,6).  Was this a lavish lifestyle?  I’ve heard that some defenders of the prosperity gospel argue that Jesus and his disciples were in fact quite wealthy, but to me that argument seems to fly against the teaching of Jesus.

If we look at some of the parables, there is nothing that a shrewd financial adviser would admire.  Consider the three parables in Luke 15 that come just before our gospel reading today.  A shepherd abandons 99 valuable sheep in the wilderness and goes off to find the lost sheep (Lk 15:1-7).  A woman searches for a lost coin, and when she finds it, invites her friends and neighbours to a celebration that costs more than the coin is worth (Lk 15:8-10).   A father throws a lavish party for a son who has squandered half of his net worth (Lk 15:11-32). 

Whenever Jesus talks about money, he doesn’t follow the rules of shrewdness and cunning that we would want our own wealth managers to give away.  People with money tend to happily give it away, or like he parable of the vineyard workers in Matthew, they get the same wage regardless of how long they’ve worked (Mt 20).   The laws of capitalism as we understand it don’t seem to apply to the kingdom of heaven.

Today’s gospel reading is a parable about a rich man who has no compassion for a poor man named Lazarus (16:19-31).   The first part of the parable paints a highly exaggerated picture of contrast, from the rich man’s purple robes to the dogs licking the sick and frail body of Lazarus.  Both die, and the rich man discovers the truth of 1 Tim 6:7 “we brought nothing into the world, so that we can take nothing out of it”.  In the afterlife, the rich man is punished and now envies the comfort of heaven given to Lazarus, but unlike he ghost of Jacob Marley in Dicken’s Christmas Carol, the rich man is not given the chance to warn others of his fate.

Some approaches to the parable however focus on the proximity of the two men, and the fact that the rich man knows Lazarus’ name.   How does he know that?  If he knew Lazarus’ name in life, was he not even more obligated to do something for him?  The rich man doesn’t even have our excuse of treating the homeless on our streets as nameless, faceless things that we can safely ignore, or even treat as nuisances.   And yet, as the commentator Mitzi Smith notes, "he asks that Abraham demonstrate mercy by sending Lazarus to cool his tongue by dipping his finger in water and placing it in his mouth to alleviate his agony (Luke 16:25). In death as in life, the man treats Lazarus as if he is a slave/subordinate whose purpose is to serve him.”

Again, I would say that when trying to understand a parable such as this one, context is everything.   We need to look at what Jesus says elsewhere and how that parable fits into his wider teaching.  In fact, he has a lot to say to the rich, including that they "consider selling all their possessions and redistribute the proceeds to the poor (18:18-25); be commended for giving half their possessions to the poor and making restitution to those they defrauded (19:1-10); and he shames the rich who contribute gifts to the Temple from their wealth, while a poor widow gives her; she sacrificed (too) much and they gifted relatively little (21:1-4)” (Mitzi Smith, commentary).

It would be tempting to end this sermon by encouraging you to try a little harder to remember the poor, to show the less fortunate some kindness, and give a little more at church.    However, that sort of exhortation might risk buying into a kind of works righteousness whereby we simply try harder to do our best to be kind and, hopefully, to please God.   It is true that 1 Timothy 6:18 encourages us to “do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share”.

Certainly its words go far beyond token efforts.   The passage is a vigorous exhortation to the fully engaged Christian life:  "Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life, to which you were called for which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses. In the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who in his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, I charge you 14 to keep the commandment without spot or blame until the manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ (12-15).

Let me finish by focusing on the word “confession”.   It is not meant, I think, in the sense of admitting to bad things that we might have done, as the sheep in the cartoon at the top seems to think.   Rather, as the Lutheranscholar Karl Jacobsen notes,

"Confession,” homologeo, has to do with two things: first, it may be a confession of faith, like the description “I believe in ... ”. Second, this confession is an exhortation to faith, like the prescriptive, “Believe this ... ” or “Do not doubt but believe” (to coin a phrase). Homologeo occurs just a few times in the New Testament. Here, of course, and tacitly in the description here in 1 Timothy in the story of Jesus before Pilate, and again in Hebrews 3:1, where Jesus is called, “the high priest of our confession.” Here in Timothy, that good confessions is, as I have said, first made by Jesus and then echoed by Timothy. In Hebrews, the good confession is both the confession of Jesus the high priest—he is the one who makes it for us—and at the same time the confession we, in turn, make about Jesus our high priest. There is both a subjective and an objective sense to our good confession. Most striking is the use of homologeo in 2 Corinthians 9:13, as it parallels 1 Timothy’s pairing of the good confession, and the warning about the love of money."

Our relationship to wealth must begin and end in our relationship with Jesus, our full identification (confession) of him, and must be grounded in a fulsome participation in the economy of the kingdom of God.   As we have noted, God’s economy as seen in the parables of Jesus doesn’t look much like earthly economies.   In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, it is easy to imagine that we might tinker with the edges of it to make it less intimidating.  What if the rich man had spent a little more time worrying about Lazarus?  What if he had given a small fraction of he wealth to the poor?  Would that have saved him?

Possibly.  Martin Luther once said that  “You can’t feed every beggar in the world, but you can feed the one at your gate”, which in the end may be all that we can do. 

However, I think we also need to be open to a radical imagining of the world, in which divisions of wealth and poverty are completely swept away in the kingdom of God.   Certainly it will be thus in the kingdom of heaven, when we arrive there with nothing that we had on earth, but only our soul, which might indeed be a very poor thing indeed, but whose value only heaven can tell. 

I once knew a person who had learned that they had a month to live, maybe less.   We talked about what that person imagined their arrival in heaven to be like, and to their credit, it was not the kind of thing you hear in many eulogies where the afterlife is a lovely place where we do what we want.   No, this person had thought through the mechanics, the economics, of their arrival.

First they will read my account in the Book of Life, this person told me, just like in St. John's Revelations, and it won't all be pretty.   Then I will be asked what I have to say for myself and I will point to Jesus and say, "ask him.   He's the only reason why I'm here".   I reckon that will be enough to get me in.

I thought that answer was simply splendid.  Christians, I think that we are called on to remember, as best we can, that our economics must align with the economics of heaven, and that the final transaction we are involved in will but be our own, but God, through our confession of his son, Jesus Christ, purchasing and redeeming our poor and impoverished soul, at a great price, through the abundance of God’s love.