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Foundry United Rev. |
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Sermon Series: The Economics of Jesus “Faith and Financial Insecurity” Sunday, February 7,
2010 |
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Rev. |
Here’s the answer. Worse than Judas (anybody say
Judas?); worse than Jezebel (anybody say Jezebel?); worse than Cain (anybody
say Cain?). The character who is the one that we should most want not to be
is the guy who actually gets to ask Jesus a question… think of it, he
actually gets to have a one-on-one exchange with Jesus… he can ask him
anything he wants to know… he can ask him for any blessing he wants to ask
for… he has his unique moment in history to connect with Jesus…
And what he says to Jesus is: “Tell my brother to
divide the family inheritance with me.”
He is the person in the Bible I would most want not
to be.
Here’s one of the things on my top ten list of
things seminary doesn’t prepare you for. It was during my first year of
ministry after seminary. I was scheduled to meet with a family to plan their
mother’s funeral—her two children, a son and a daughter, and their children. We
met in a conference room at the church. Five minutes into the conversation
the family members were standing on opposite sides of the table screaming at
each other about who would inherit how much and what.
The son and daughter kept turning to me and saying:
“Which of us is right, pastor?”
A family has one chance to plan a service that would
honor their mother’s life and they can’t do it because they are fanatically
obsessed with who will inherit how much.
Money can be about more
than money. In a workplace,
money—salaries, say—can feel as though they are about respect and
appreciation. In a family—in a will, say—money can feel as if it is about
love. Money can make us feel like successes or failures. Our sense of justice
and injustice in the world is often centered around money. We are trying in this
sermon series to understand the way that Jesus thought about money… the
economics of Jesus. I have said in almost every
sermon in this series that Jesus did not live off of the grid. He
participated in the money economy of the society of which he was part. He and
his disciples had a treasury (John 12:6). They had a treasurer. They had
donors who supported their ministry; the ones mentioned in the Bible are
mostly women (Luke 8:2). Jesus was not an ascetic. He
seemed to like to attend parties. They called him a glutton and a drinker
(Matthew 11:19). He did not own a home but at least two of his disciples were
homeowners (Mark 1:29). He did own what seems to have been an expensive
cloak, the most important article of clothing people owned at the time
because you might have to sleep in it as well as wear it during the day (John
19:23). Jesus’ statement of the
purpose of his ministry in the Gospel of Luke was to announce the year of
Jubilee, the year of the end of economic injustice, good news to the poor[i]
(Luke 4: 18-9). Luke’s Jesus believes his ministry will have an impact on the
world so as to make the world more equitable. According to the Book of Acts
(also written by Luke), Jesus’ first followers lived owning everything in
common after his death and resurrection (Acts 4: 32). They believed that
following Jesus meant giving up private property and living as (small c)
communists. That is what those who were closest to him in time thought
following Jesus meant. Jesus told some rich people
to give their money to the poor and follow him if they wanted to live an
eternally meaningful life. Luke says Jesus told everybody who wanted to be
his disciple to give away their possessions. “So therefore, none of you can become
my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions” (Luke 14:33). None of you can become my
disciple if you do not give up all your possessions. Luke’s Jesus makes a
total economic claim on the lives of his disciples. Matthew and Mark’s Jesus
does not seem to make the same extreme claim, but Luke’s Jesus does. All this is hard to
translate into our time and place. What does it mean for we who seek to be
disciples of Jesus here and now? A couple weeks ago Garrison
Keillor was talking about Lutherans on The Prairie Home Companion. [ii] “This is what Lutherans
believe,” he said. “We don’t believe in miracles. We don’t approve of them.
We don’t believe in big transformations. No matter what Scripture says, we
don’t believe in it. “We believe everyone has a
dark side, and if you will turn away from that and look at what is good
within you and focus on that and do your best, it will turn out okay. “This is what we believe
in. It’s not what Jesus said. This is our own religion. Jesus advocated big
dramatic things – Give all that you have to the poor and come follow me. We
don’t go for that. “But Jesus wasn’t married
with children. He didn’t do that. He wasn’t a homeowner; he was the Son of
God… Whole different thing.” That’s what Garrison
Keillor says Lutherans believe. So what does Jesus really
expect of us? I don’t know if Jesus expects us to sell our homes and cars and give the money to the poor. I suspect he may call some of us to do that, and some of us do. There are more people doing this than we know. I recommended three books you might want to read if you are interested in thinking more about this topic. One of them is a discussion about Jesus’ teachings on money that comes out of the new monastic movement—Jonathon Wilson-Hartgrove’s book God’s Economy: Redefining the Health and Wealth Gospel. There are 12 marks of the new monastic movement and the first three are: 1) Relocation to the abandoned places of Empire. 2) Sharing economic resources with fellow community members and the needy among us. 3) Hospitality to the stranger.[iii] There are still more people
than we are aware of who choose to give up private property, to live in
community, to own everything in common for the sake of the ministry that they
are called to. But I am not convinced that
this is the kind of life Jesus calls us all to. You remember there were
people Jesus healed whom he did not permit to follow him but he sent them
home to be witnesses to the people they lived with in their ordinary lives in
the cities where they lived (Luke 8:39). I am convinced that one of
Jesus’ core teachings was a warning not to let money get in the way of a rich
and full life. I think this is the point
Jesus is making in response to the person in the Bible I’d least like to be. He asks Jesus, “Tell my brother
to divide the family inheritance with me.” Jesus says, “Take care! Be on your
guard against all kinds of greed; for one's life does not consist in the
abundance of possessions.” Then he tells the story of
a person who got so caught up in his own success that he put off living a
rich and full life until it was too late. In the story the person did
not even appear to be greedy. It wasn’t that he set out to accumulate
possessions. It was that his farm produced so well that he got caught up in
expanding to accommodate his success. It wasn’t that he set out to be rich;
it was that he got caught up in trying to keep up with his own success. In
the process he put off enjoying life; he put off parties, he put off
relationships, he put off literature and music, he put off working for
justice—things that make us rich toward God, spiritually whole—and when he
finally reached the point where he thought he had built enough barns that he
could pay attention to those kinds of things, he had no more life left. Notice that what Jesus said
was: “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed.” All kinds. Because greed
is not just about money and possessions. We can be greedy for other things.
We can be greedy for attention. We can be greedy for admiration and
adulation. There are people who can not get enough adulation. The more they
have the more they want. We can be greedy for competence and proficiency and
for knowledge. We can be greedy for love.
Have you ever known someone who just could not settle down with a partner because
they were always looking for a more perfect love? We can even be greedy for
God. We may need a sense of God’s presence in our lives too much. God will
not always be present to us the way we want God to be present to us. We may even be greedy for poverty.
We need to be very careful in our thinking about this, because we don’t want
to ever blame the victim. But I listen to the podcast of a
Pentecostal/charismatic church in But I have never heard the
Pentecostals in Greed is any desire that
causes us to hold off living a rich and full life today because we don’t
think life can be rich and full until we have something we don’t have yet or
we don’t have enough of something to start really living yet. This is why, in Luke, Jesus
goes directly from telling the parable of the rich fool to the teaching that
begins: "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you
will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food,
and the body more than clothing.” Whatever it is that is
causing us to put off leading the best and fullest life we can live today,
let it go. Assume you may never have it and ask what it means to leave 100
percent today even if it never happens for you. One of the greatest
paradoxical truths Jesus ever taught is: “For those who want to save their
life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it”
(Matthew 16:25). Or Luke 17:33: “Those who
try to make their life secure will lose it, but those who lose their life
will keep it.” The only way to save our
lives is to invest them into today… to let go of everything that seduces us
to suppose it will give us life and live today in the Spirit of Christ. www.foundryumc.org |
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