The power of money
Commentary
Object:
The course we are charting today takes us from our self-centered, worrisome lives to the expansive love that God has for us and wants us to have for each other. We are weaving in between all the current worries of our time and place, our fears of what the future holds, our concerns about whether our investments, pensions, and Social Security benefits will cover what we will need in our old age. It aims us toward the others in our lives, even those we do not know personally, who are sailing these same seas with us, with the same worries and fears. It aims us toward a realization that we need not face the future alone, but that we can, by working together and sharing what life has blessed us with, face the future confidently.
Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15
When we consider the Old Testament prophets, there are a few things we need to know about the culture of the times and the accepted role of the prophets. The prophets have words to deliver to the people (or the rulers) from God, of course. That we expect. But the prophets also act out the word of God to the people. In this story from Jeremiah, both of these forms of prophecy are employed. First, Jeremiah foretold the fate of Jerusalem and Judah to King Zedekiah. This was hardly a foretelling of the future, or of events that no one but God could have known: Babylon, which was one of the main powers of the ancient world, was besieging Jerusalem (v. 2). The king should have had enough sense to know that his kingdom was in a perilous position.
However, when Jeremiah delivered his prophecy that King Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon would take Jerusalem captive, and would take Zedekiah prisoner, the king’s response was to arrest Jeremiah and hold him in the inner courts of the palace, where no one could hear his prophecy.
Now, we need to remember that these prophecies of historical events are not the heart of the prophecy. The heart of the prophecy is to remind the people, the royal court, and the priests of the Temple that God is sovereign, and that our plans rely on the will of God. The forecasting of future events is the proof that this prophet in fact has been sent by God. But Zedekiah doesn’t want to listen to the obvious outcome of his current situation, and so he imprisons Jeremiah.
This leads to the second part of Jeremiah’s prophecy: “The word of the Lord came to me” and he told me that certain events would come to pass, and what I must do when those things happen.
This part of the prophecy is actually hope-filled. God told Jeremiah that his cousin Hanamel would come and ask him to redeem his field at Anathoth, “for the right of redemption by purchase is yours.” This refers to the ancient understanding that the land was given to the twelve tribes, and that land was never to be sold outside of the family to whom it was originally given by God. If a man found himself unable to pay his bills for any reason, he had the right to go to a relative who was better off than he and ask them to buy the land from him. That way the land stayed in the family and the man could pay his bills. If he later had better fortune, he could take the money he owed to his relative who had bought the land from him, and the land would revert to him, his relative would have his money back, and whatever the redeeming relative had made off the land in the meantime would be his to keep. Jeremiah was told by God that when his cousin Hanamel came and asked him to redeem this land, he would know that this was by the will of God.
From a strictly human point of view, this is a ridiculous transaction. If the land is about to be captured by the Babylonians, buying and selling it is useless. Who would want to buy a piece of land in the middle of losing a war? But from God’s point of view, there is a pledge going on here: “Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.” This deed is witnessed by a large number of Judeans who gathered in the court of the guard where Jeremiah was being held. The attempt of Zedekiah to silence Jeremiah has been sidetracked. God not only intends to turn the land over to Nebuchadrezzar, but he intends that this loss will not be permanent. This is God’s promise, acted out by the prophet, who has the official, legal documents made out and sealed in clay jars so they will survive whatever comes. There is, in other words, a witness waiting in the desert, proof that God had given Jeremiah the promise that the people will return to the land.
Is there a risk in trusting that Jeremiah knows what he’s talking about? Certainly. Everyone who listens to anyone claiming to be a prophet sent by God risks his or her own future in doing so. The only way to know if this is truly a prophet from God is to wait and see if what the prophet foretold proves to be true. The prophecy is that the people will return to this land, the land God promised their forefather Abraham. This sale, the sealed deed and the open deed, the clay jar and the saving of the documents in such a way as to see that they will be preserved over many years, is God’s pledge that this will be so.
1 Timothy 6:6-19
How many false prophets are there in the world today? Anyone who promises that we can have as many riches as we want. Anyone who promises that if we practice “right thinking” we will become rich. Anyone who says that all we have to do is visualize ourselves as having those material things that we want, and we will have them all. These days, and especially in this election year, we can barely keep track of all the promises made that we will have the jobs we want, the material goods we want, the economic security we want, for ourselves and for our country. Not a word is said about a “great gain in... contentment.”
The author of this letter is using a good deal of proverbial language from his society to get across a simple question: what gives your life meaning? In every age, there are those who think that the accumulation of a great many things will make them happy. And this has proven to be a problem not just for those of a worldly mind. Christians are not exempt from the desire to be rich and comfortable, including pastors. The desire for a bigger church which will confer higher status; the pride in having a finer parsonage than the neighboring pastor; the privilege of having a multi-office parish with several pastors sharing the ministry; having the blessing of many talented people to provide music and audio-visual support to record the service or even to have the worship broadcast. All of these elements can and often do provide an enhanced ministry. But they can also be sources of contention within the congregation and provocations to rivalries between pastors.
For that reason, it is not necessarily an “of course” situation to be striving for godliness and contentment. There are many corners in our denominations where the pastor who is content to serve God in a smaller, poorer congregation is considered to have “no drive” and therefore dismissed in the eyes of her or his colleagues and supervising pastors, bishops, etc.
It is at this point that the author says “those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.” What follows is one of the most misquoted verses in the Bible: “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil...”
Money is not the root of all evil. First, it is the love of money that is the problem. It’s the pursuit of money for itself, or for all the things it can buy, that is the problem. Where are we putting our faith, our sense of security, our hope for the future? Also, notice that the author doesn’t say the root of all evil, he says a root of all evil. It is avarice, the accumulation of things that we think will make us happy, that causes the problem.
But we live in a very wealth-oriented society. Wanting money and all the things we can provide for ourselves is the basis of our economic system. We are urged to buy, because commerce is the drive-wheel of our way of life. If we begin to take seriously the fact that things will never bring us happiness, we will cut back on our spending. If we quit buying things, people will lose their jobs. If people lose their jobs, where will they find new ones? We will invest in corporations that pay salaries, but we will not invest in programs to support families who are out of the workforce due to cutbacks. And we cannot see our way out of this situation. It requires a new perspective, one where we can observe the cosmic picture.
And this is what the author is pointing Timothy toward. “Shun all this [the pursuit of money for the sake of status, power, and luxury]; pursue righteousness, godliness... take hold of the eternal life... to which you were called.” There is this choice to be made: if we are rich, how shall we use our money to do good works? And if we want to take care of ourselves, we need to remember that there is more to life than this material world.
The author ends with a warning not to be haughty if we are rich. The attitude that our money makes us better than other people is what causes us so much pain. The worry that our money won’t hold up against inflation, the vagaries of the markets and the possibility of economic collapse causes us to grasp and claw. If we can let go of our dependence on things to define who we are, we may, as the author says, “take hold of the life that really is life.”
Luke 16:19-31
Jesus loved to tell stories. Stories have a way of sticking in our minds that precepts and ethical constructs don’t. It doesn’t take geniuses to listen to a story and walk around playing with it, or turning it over in our minds, for days, until we think we have a handle on it. As long as we’re not sure what the story is about, we will play with the elements. And once we have made sense of it, we will be sure to apply what we have learned to the various things that happen in our lives.
One of Jesus’ big concerns for his hearers was that they should understand that we all have responsibilities toward one another. We care for one another in all kinds of ways. We begin in our families, and we follow our family’s lead in reaching out to our neighbors, helping one another in small and large ways. Today’s story is about a wealthy man who has not reached out beyond his family with his concern.
In any society, the quickest way to tell the rich from the poor is by the way they dress. A fine Harris tweed skirt and a silk blouse with self-covered buttons can easily be seen as more expensive than a polyester knit skirt and cotton blouse, and just as we can tell our status apart by the obvious differences in how much our clothes cost, so it is the case everywhere. Jesus points to a man who was rich enough to be able to wear fine linen next to his skin, unlike the poor who wore rough-woven fabrics. Furthermore, the colors that people could afford to wear were much more evident than today’s fashions, where most dyes are chemically produced. In Jesus’ day, the most expensive color of all was purple, because it was made from tiny sea creatures that had to be caught and the color pressed from them.
In Jesus’ day, it was also true that the poor were everywhere. In the United States we don’t necessarily see the destitute, unless you are in those areas of our cities where the poor are tolerated, or near the shelters where they seek a dry, warm place to sleep at night. But in Jesus’ day, those who had no place to live and no way to buy food and clothes depended on the rich to share out of their bounty. “At his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus,” Jesus says, introducing us to another fact of life in Jerusalem. The poor would pick the home of someone who had enough to share, and they would beg for scraps from the table. The compassionate rich would prepare a bowl of food from the leftovers and give it to “their” poor.
But this rich man was not generous. Even the dogs that ran the streets of Jerusalem are portrayed as being kinder than this rich man, because they would lick Lazarus’ sores. The poor man died, Jesus says, and “was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham” (in other words, in the place of life). “The rich man also died and was buried.” Notice that there is nothing said about the poor man being buried. Instead, his body was probably thrown into the village dump. But the rich man finds himself in Hades, tormented by the heat, desperately thirsty.
Now here is the depth to which this rich man has fallen -- he looks up and sees Lazarus in heaven with Father Abraham, and he cries out for mercy. And how does he ask? He wants Lazarus to be sent from heaven to Hades with a drop of water to cool the rich man’s tongue! Even in death, and even seeing Lazarus in heaven, he still thinks he is above Lazarus, that this poor man can be compelled to leave his reward and come to take care of the rich man who walked around him every morning as he left his house!
There are several complications to this possibility. Evidently God foresaw that many rich people would take this attitude, so there is a chasm fixed between the two places, to keep those in heaven from actually acquiescing to such requests (and, we might suppose, to keep those in Hades from climbing up to take over heaven).
But the rich man isn’t done. Lazarus could be sent to the rich man’s brothers, to warn them that there are consequences to being stingy. But no, Abraham says: “They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.” Well, no, that’s too easy. But if someone should rise from the dead, they’ll pay attention then!
Too bad. Too late. And Luke adds, with irony, “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.” Hmm... I wonder who Luke could have been thinking of there?
Laying this story alongside the Timothy passage for today is easy. If we are rich (and most Americans, on a global scale, are rich), we have the responsibility to care for those who cross our paths. It doesn’t have to be that we give away one of the two coats we own (though that is the example Jesus gives); we can take care of others in small ways too. I had a man come to my door one day when I was still at the office and ask for money for food. My housekeeper was there, and she let him in, sat him at the kitchen table, made him a sandwich and some soup, and sat with him while he ate. I was a bit taken aback when I walked into this scene, but my housekeeper said, “I knew you wouldn’t mind. You’re generous.”
As I thought about it, that is one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever gotten.
Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15
When we consider the Old Testament prophets, there are a few things we need to know about the culture of the times and the accepted role of the prophets. The prophets have words to deliver to the people (or the rulers) from God, of course. That we expect. But the prophets also act out the word of God to the people. In this story from Jeremiah, both of these forms of prophecy are employed. First, Jeremiah foretold the fate of Jerusalem and Judah to King Zedekiah. This was hardly a foretelling of the future, or of events that no one but God could have known: Babylon, which was one of the main powers of the ancient world, was besieging Jerusalem (v. 2). The king should have had enough sense to know that his kingdom was in a perilous position.
However, when Jeremiah delivered his prophecy that King Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon would take Jerusalem captive, and would take Zedekiah prisoner, the king’s response was to arrest Jeremiah and hold him in the inner courts of the palace, where no one could hear his prophecy.
Now, we need to remember that these prophecies of historical events are not the heart of the prophecy. The heart of the prophecy is to remind the people, the royal court, and the priests of the Temple that God is sovereign, and that our plans rely on the will of God. The forecasting of future events is the proof that this prophet in fact has been sent by God. But Zedekiah doesn’t want to listen to the obvious outcome of his current situation, and so he imprisons Jeremiah.
This leads to the second part of Jeremiah’s prophecy: “The word of the Lord came to me” and he told me that certain events would come to pass, and what I must do when those things happen.
This part of the prophecy is actually hope-filled. God told Jeremiah that his cousin Hanamel would come and ask him to redeem his field at Anathoth, “for the right of redemption by purchase is yours.” This refers to the ancient understanding that the land was given to the twelve tribes, and that land was never to be sold outside of the family to whom it was originally given by God. If a man found himself unable to pay his bills for any reason, he had the right to go to a relative who was better off than he and ask them to buy the land from him. That way the land stayed in the family and the man could pay his bills. If he later had better fortune, he could take the money he owed to his relative who had bought the land from him, and the land would revert to him, his relative would have his money back, and whatever the redeeming relative had made off the land in the meantime would be his to keep. Jeremiah was told by God that when his cousin Hanamel came and asked him to redeem this land, he would know that this was by the will of God.
From a strictly human point of view, this is a ridiculous transaction. If the land is about to be captured by the Babylonians, buying and selling it is useless. Who would want to buy a piece of land in the middle of losing a war? But from God’s point of view, there is a pledge going on here: “Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.” This deed is witnessed by a large number of Judeans who gathered in the court of the guard where Jeremiah was being held. The attempt of Zedekiah to silence Jeremiah has been sidetracked. God not only intends to turn the land over to Nebuchadrezzar, but he intends that this loss will not be permanent. This is God’s promise, acted out by the prophet, who has the official, legal documents made out and sealed in clay jars so they will survive whatever comes. There is, in other words, a witness waiting in the desert, proof that God had given Jeremiah the promise that the people will return to the land.
Is there a risk in trusting that Jeremiah knows what he’s talking about? Certainly. Everyone who listens to anyone claiming to be a prophet sent by God risks his or her own future in doing so. The only way to know if this is truly a prophet from God is to wait and see if what the prophet foretold proves to be true. The prophecy is that the people will return to this land, the land God promised their forefather Abraham. This sale, the sealed deed and the open deed, the clay jar and the saving of the documents in such a way as to see that they will be preserved over many years, is God’s pledge that this will be so.
1 Timothy 6:6-19
How many false prophets are there in the world today? Anyone who promises that we can have as many riches as we want. Anyone who promises that if we practice “right thinking” we will become rich. Anyone who says that all we have to do is visualize ourselves as having those material things that we want, and we will have them all. These days, and especially in this election year, we can barely keep track of all the promises made that we will have the jobs we want, the material goods we want, the economic security we want, for ourselves and for our country. Not a word is said about a “great gain in... contentment.”
The author of this letter is using a good deal of proverbial language from his society to get across a simple question: what gives your life meaning? In every age, there are those who think that the accumulation of a great many things will make them happy. And this has proven to be a problem not just for those of a worldly mind. Christians are not exempt from the desire to be rich and comfortable, including pastors. The desire for a bigger church which will confer higher status; the pride in having a finer parsonage than the neighboring pastor; the privilege of having a multi-office parish with several pastors sharing the ministry; having the blessing of many talented people to provide music and audio-visual support to record the service or even to have the worship broadcast. All of these elements can and often do provide an enhanced ministry. But they can also be sources of contention within the congregation and provocations to rivalries between pastors.
For that reason, it is not necessarily an “of course” situation to be striving for godliness and contentment. There are many corners in our denominations where the pastor who is content to serve God in a smaller, poorer congregation is considered to have “no drive” and therefore dismissed in the eyes of her or his colleagues and supervising pastors, bishops, etc.
It is at this point that the author says “those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.” What follows is one of the most misquoted verses in the Bible: “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil...”
Money is not the root of all evil. First, it is the love of money that is the problem. It’s the pursuit of money for itself, or for all the things it can buy, that is the problem. Where are we putting our faith, our sense of security, our hope for the future? Also, notice that the author doesn’t say the root of all evil, he says a root of all evil. It is avarice, the accumulation of things that we think will make us happy, that causes the problem.
But we live in a very wealth-oriented society. Wanting money and all the things we can provide for ourselves is the basis of our economic system. We are urged to buy, because commerce is the drive-wheel of our way of life. If we begin to take seriously the fact that things will never bring us happiness, we will cut back on our spending. If we quit buying things, people will lose their jobs. If people lose their jobs, where will they find new ones? We will invest in corporations that pay salaries, but we will not invest in programs to support families who are out of the workforce due to cutbacks. And we cannot see our way out of this situation. It requires a new perspective, one where we can observe the cosmic picture.
And this is what the author is pointing Timothy toward. “Shun all this [the pursuit of money for the sake of status, power, and luxury]; pursue righteousness, godliness... take hold of the eternal life... to which you were called.” There is this choice to be made: if we are rich, how shall we use our money to do good works? And if we want to take care of ourselves, we need to remember that there is more to life than this material world.
The author ends with a warning not to be haughty if we are rich. The attitude that our money makes us better than other people is what causes us so much pain. The worry that our money won’t hold up against inflation, the vagaries of the markets and the possibility of economic collapse causes us to grasp and claw. If we can let go of our dependence on things to define who we are, we may, as the author says, “take hold of the life that really is life.”
Luke 16:19-31
Jesus loved to tell stories. Stories have a way of sticking in our minds that precepts and ethical constructs don’t. It doesn’t take geniuses to listen to a story and walk around playing with it, or turning it over in our minds, for days, until we think we have a handle on it. As long as we’re not sure what the story is about, we will play with the elements. And once we have made sense of it, we will be sure to apply what we have learned to the various things that happen in our lives.
One of Jesus’ big concerns for his hearers was that they should understand that we all have responsibilities toward one another. We care for one another in all kinds of ways. We begin in our families, and we follow our family’s lead in reaching out to our neighbors, helping one another in small and large ways. Today’s story is about a wealthy man who has not reached out beyond his family with his concern.
In any society, the quickest way to tell the rich from the poor is by the way they dress. A fine Harris tweed skirt and a silk blouse with self-covered buttons can easily be seen as more expensive than a polyester knit skirt and cotton blouse, and just as we can tell our status apart by the obvious differences in how much our clothes cost, so it is the case everywhere. Jesus points to a man who was rich enough to be able to wear fine linen next to his skin, unlike the poor who wore rough-woven fabrics. Furthermore, the colors that people could afford to wear were much more evident than today’s fashions, where most dyes are chemically produced. In Jesus’ day, the most expensive color of all was purple, because it was made from tiny sea creatures that had to be caught and the color pressed from them.
In Jesus’ day, it was also true that the poor were everywhere. In the United States we don’t necessarily see the destitute, unless you are in those areas of our cities where the poor are tolerated, or near the shelters where they seek a dry, warm place to sleep at night. But in Jesus’ day, those who had no place to live and no way to buy food and clothes depended on the rich to share out of their bounty. “At his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus,” Jesus says, introducing us to another fact of life in Jerusalem. The poor would pick the home of someone who had enough to share, and they would beg for scraps from the table. The compassionate rich would prepare a bowl of food from the leftovers and give it to “their” poor.
But this rich man was not generous. Even the dogs that ran the streets of Jerusalem are portrayed as being kinder than this rich man, because they would lick Lazarus’ sores. The poor man died, Jesus says, and “was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham” (in other words, in the place of life). “The rich man also died and was buried.” Notice that there is nothing said about the poor man being buried. Instead, his body was probably thrown into the village dump. But the rich man finds himself in Hades, tormented by the heat, desperately thirsty.
Now here is the depth to which this rich man has fallen -- he looks up and sees Lazarus in heaven with Father Abraham, and he cries out for mercy. And how does he ask? He wants Lazarus to be sent from heaven to Hades with a drop of water to cool the rich man’s tongue! Even in death, and even seeing Lazarus in heaven, he still thinks he is above Lazarus, that this poor man can be compelled to leave his reward and come to take care of the rich man who walked around him every morning as he left his house!
There are several complications to this possibility. Evidently God foresaw that many rich people would take this attitude, so there is a chasm fixed between the two places, to keep those in heaven from actually acquiescing to such requests (and, we might suppose, to keep those in Hades from climbing up to take over heaven).
But the rich man isn’t done. Lazarus could be sent to the rich man’s brothers, to warn them that there are consequences to being stingy. But no, Abraham says: “They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.” Well, no, that’s too easy. But if someone should rise from the dead, they’ll pay attention then!
Too bad. Too late. And Luke adds, with irony, “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.” Hmm... I wonder who Luke could have been thinking of there?
Laying this story alongside the Timothy passage for today is easy. If we are rich (and most Americans, on a global scale, are rich), we have the responsibility to care for those who cross our paths. It doesn’t have to be that we give away one of the two coats we own (though that is the example Jesus gives); we can take care of others in small ways too. I had a man come to my door one day when I was still at the office and ask for money for food. My housekeeper was there, and she let him in, sat him at the kitchen table, made him a sandwich and some soup, and sat with him while he ate. I was a bit taken aback when I walked into this scene, but my housekeeper said, “I knew you wouldn’t mind. You’re generous.”
As I thought about it, that is one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever gotten.
