Year C
Luke 16:19-31
The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn
Investing In the Kingdom of God
It is truly amazing the amount of attention the scriptures give to material possessions. In parables and oracles it warns about the delusions that wealth brings and turns skeptical about the way we humans make idols of our money. It repeatedly directs our attention to the poor and the destitute and constantly asks questions about how we earn and spend our income. So out there are the scriptures about material possessions that we could get the impression that our focus each week should be on cautioning ourselves against the misuse of wealth. Today, Jeremiah, Paul and Jesus each have a very interesting perspective on wealth as they offer us a variety of angles on this most urgent issue.
Jeremiah, through buying a parcel of land, invests in his country when everything was falling apart. Paul urges Timothy and the congregation at Ephesus to be rich in godliness. Jesus tells a parable about material wealth not cutting it when it comes time for death and the hear after. The advice each would give us today is to take our assets and invest them for the kingdom of God rather than for our own benefit. And yet none of the biblical discussions about material possessions provide us with an economic blueprint or a Christian guide to spending money, but the beautiful story today in Jeremiah, does offer us a powerful model.
Against the best wisdom of all the financial planners of Judah, Jeremiah in the year 587 BCE purchases the field at Anathoth, investing his money in the divine promise, in the outlandish conviction that God is faithful. His prophetic mission was to speak forth God’s words both of judgment and of promise and hope. Time and time again the prophet heralded God’s intention to judge sinful Judah and, although Jeremiah himself often paid a heavy price for his prophecy of doom, he did not soften the effect of his message. This story today records a prophetic act that stakes a claim in God’s compassion and promises. By purchasing the land in the midst of Jerusalem’s destruction by Babylon and while he was imprisoned, Jeremiah defines what it means to invest in God’s future as a sign of hope for Israel’s future in the midst of adversity.
Jeremiah invests his assets in a plan to save his people. He invests in a plan to make a new people, a new community, that knows how to live together in justice and peace and righteousness, under the lordship of God. It is a plan to re-create that good and abundant and eternal life on earth that God intended for God’s world in the beginning. It is a plan that assures us of God’s faithfulness to God’s promise to preserve the faithful in adversity. In Jeremiah, we see God, patiently, working out that plan for the future that will finally lead to a cross, a resurrection and the gift of the Holy Spirit to us all.
In our second reading today Paul offers Timothy lots of “good advice” regarding money and material possessions to help guide the church at Ephesus. The whole of Paul’s letter to Timothy gives practical instructions and duties he urges Timothy to teach the Christians because there were those who had been teaching that ‘godliness is a means of gain.’ There have always been those who see success and material comfort as rewards from God. We definitely have heard this in our day with the teaching and preaching of the prosperity gospel. Paul had earlier stated that indeed godliness is beneficial and rewarding, but not in the materialistic way the false teachers are claiming but that it holds “promise both for the present life and the life to come.”
He says, “It is best to be concerned with what is truly essential. More than the basics of food and clothing, the Christian is to “pursue righteousness…and that righteousness comes from faith in Jesus Christ. It is a life that exists from, within, under and toward God. He charges them to “keep the commandment,” referring to the greatest commandment; love for God and love for neighbor as for one’s self. This puts a qualification on how we are to live our lives, not pursuing personal wealth and the pride, power and glory that can come with it, but we are “to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share, thus storing up for ourselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future.
The only kind of riches Paul says, worth having are the ones that lead to “life that really is life.” We are to be careful with our attitude toward wealth because God alone should provide the basis for our hope. Very good and very hard advice for every one of us. Every one of us has felt money suck like a leech on our soul and feed our greed much like the rich man in today’s gospel. It is a pity that the rich man didn’t have Paul’s advice or had listened to Moses and the prophets, although the story suggests that it would not have made a difference.
We are not told outright why the rich man deserves to go to hell. There’s no hint that his wealth was ill-gotten, that he was dishonest or a thief. We have to assume that it is simply because his riches keep him from seeing Lazarus starving to death at his gate. The rich man had every excuse not to notice him and his servants more than likely would have kept Lazarus from bothering their master. It is only after the death of both and their reversed positions in the afterlife that we begin to discover the real problem with the rich man.
At first glance, Luke’s parable today seems to present a harsher assessment of riches than that offered by our second reading. Yet, first Timothy sees no crime in bring rich per se, so long as those who are wealthy set their hopes on God, are generous, and in other ways show evidence of the faith that sustains them. Faith is important, but we also have to act from the foundation of that faith. Jesus is clear throughout the gospels that we are to care for the poor, the sick, and the needy. The parable today powerfully calls into question how we handle our money and raises the question of whether we “see” the poor at our gates.
The problem with riches is that it is hard to remember how dangerous they are. They are a power in our lives and in our consumer-oriented society this power has to be disarmed or it will consume us. Jaques Ellul, a religious French author in his book Money and Power, offered some hopeful suggestions. He said that there are three ways we can learn to defuse the power of money in our lives. First, in all the issues of life, we must choose to side with the human dimension rather than the economic. In other words, we have to refocus the glasses of our heart’s eyes to see persons before profits. People always matter more than the bottom line.
Second, we must each make a willful decision not to love money. Instead we are to set our hearts on the true value of our lives in God’s eyes. And the third guideline for defusing the power of money is to give it away. It is not enough, he said, to take God’s path at the fork in the road. We must also divest ourselves of the very power of the other god in our lives. The author urges that we all need to give away much more money than is our current habit. A challenge to the comfortable of every generation but thankfully we still have the opportunity to “see” the beggar at our gates and we have ‘Moses, the prophets, Jesus and Paul to warn us…if we really hear.