Living With Money -- And Still Being Christian
Sermon
Sermons on the Gospel Readings
Series II, Cycle B
News from the financial section of the paper is seldom as interesting as whatever's on the front page, but in terms of things that could impact each of us personally, the financial news is often a more significant story. Whether or not you personally have investments in the stock market, your economic well-being is eventually affected by what happens there.
Here's how one man explained it: "Although I don't have the interest to personally study and play the market, my pension funds are heavily invested in stocks. I find money matters boring, but I know I can't afford to be stupid about them, either. I hope to retire someday, and every so often I think about my pension and wonder if it's growing fast enough to meet my needs in retirement. Will I run out of money before I run out of life?"
But forget retirement. A financial downturn on the national level could have a much more immediate impact on our daily lives. If people stop spending, companies fail and employees get laid off. Prices fluctuate wildly, wages stop rising, and so forth.
We are not trying to paint a doom-and-gloom picture here, but we should recognize that money matters are among the important uncertainties of life as much as anything else. In terms of our own future comfort, it may be far more important to pray for the well-being of the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board than for the well-being of the president.
The fact is, Christians have long had an uneasy relationship with money and possessions. Christianity's founder, Jesus of Nazareth, has been seen as a penniless street preacher who called people to lay up treasures in heaven rather than on earth. His own possessions amounted to little more than the clothes on his back. He said, "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head" (Luke 9:58). He even said something to the effect that the person who has two coats while his neighbor has none is doing wrong.
Then we have the story in our scripture reading for today, the rich young man who asked Jesus what he had to do to inherit eternal life.
Jesus' reply, that the man should sell his possessions and give the money to the poor, was not well received. The young man went away sorrowful, for he had a lot of things. Jesus went on to comment "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God."
Ever since, Christians have had some difficulty living with affluence. Some religious orders have taken poverty as one of their vows, and in our own day, it has felt unseemly to us for our religious leaders to make large salaries.
But, if we Christians have been uncomfortable with wealth, by and large, we have also understood Jesus' words about money and even embraced some of them. Very few of us see the pursuit of wealth as a worthy goal. We tend to be realistic about money. We know it can't buy happiness, but we also know that a severe lack of it can cause problems. More than likely, our goal is to have enough to live comfortably, but not necessarily fabulously. According to periodic surveys of American attitudes, the majority of our citizens say they don't have an overwhelming desire to be wealthy. One recent poll reported that just over a third say that it's very important to get rich enough so they don't have to work if they don't want to.
The fact is, most Americans are reasonably satisfied with what they have and recognize that they are better off than their parents were at their age. And when our own needs and many of our wants are met, we don't have a lot of feelings against the very well off.
On the other hand, we have some trouble identifying with the rich young ruler because few of us consider ourselves rich. But then we realize that "rich" is a relative term. How rich is rich these days? Millionaires are now, "a dime a dozen," but most of us aren't in their number. Still, in comparison to many other places in the world, all of us here are rich. The fact is, even if our stock markets go south, it's unlikely any of us here will die as a result. We may have to eat more hot dogs than steak, but we aren't likely to miss any meals.
One of the reasons we may be uncomfortable with our relative prosperity is because of our realization that simply because we live in the United States, we are among the richest people in the world. The exact figures change a little from year to year, but Americans spend more on their pets than some countries do on their people. I point that out not to make us feel guilty but to help us see the relative nature of wealth.
Yet, most of us still don't consider ourselves rich. We've probably long ago decided that we aren't going to feel guilty because we have some nice things or because we eat regularly. We feel like "inbetweeners" -- neither rich nor poor. What does faith call inbetweeners to do? There are no simple answers.
I don't think it calls us to give away all that we have. That advice was specific to the rich young man who came to Jesus. Its specifics wouldn't work for everybody. Some years ago, writer Phillip Yancey told of his attempt to live a less expensive lifestyle, based on his Christian beliefs. He got a basic car, with no air conditioning. He lived in a mobile home with less than $500 worth of furniture. He went to extremes to get the best possible price on any item.
He became obsessed with the question, "Is there a lifestyle level above which a Christian should not live?" But he found no satisfactory answers. He lived in a mobile home, but half the world lives in mud huts and cardboard shacks. He had a stripped-down car, but nine out of ten people in the world have no car at all.1
I think about things like that, too. I sometimes remind myself that while my pension may not be able support the lifestyle I'd like in retirement, it will at least make retirement possible. Many people around the world live from hand to mouth and cannot consider retirement. They will have to scrounge for a living until the day they die.
Beyond that, think about what would happen to the world's economy if everyone radically reduced consumption. In the 1970s, after realizing how dependent we in the U.S. were on oil, there was a conscious effort to reduce our oil imports. In the process, we very nearly wrecked the economies of Nigeria and Mexico. By the same token, if we cut our coffee drinking in half, much of Latin America would suffer.
Yet, we cannot believe that the Christian approach is ever totally unfettered consumption either, where acquiring and accumulating possessions or becoming rich is our major priority. We cannot forget that Jesus warned that where our treasures were, our hearts would be, also.
So we cannot surrender to the pursuit of wealth, but neither can we give up every possession.
Is there a Christian path through the middle ground? I think there is.
First of all, faith calls those who are neither rich nor poor to neutralize the soul-killing power of money. One way we do that is to think not just about retirement, but also about "laying up treasure in heaven."
Robert Fulghum, author of the now famous All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, has, as a result of the enormous sales of the book, received a lot of money. Despite that, however, he has chosen to live modestly, a choice he made based on his commitment to serve God.
Fulghum reports that since his success, people are always saying, "Well, you must have a big house and a big car." And he responds, "No, I have the same house, same car, same friends, same wife...." While his standard of living has certainly improved, he has used some of his book tours to raise money for worthy causes. "I don't think I should be given extra credit for doing that," he says. "I think you should think ill of me if I didn't do that."2
That is laying up treasure in heaven.
Second, faith calls us inbetweeners to disarm the power of money by giving some of it away -- to the church, to other worthy causes, directly to people in need, including members of our own family and so forth. In a culture like ours where money has great power, we can disperse some of that power over us by sharing out of what we have -- giving not just what we don't want or have leftover, but out of our substance.
That's a hard lesson for some of us, for it seems to run counter to logic. Give money away to disarm it? But, of course, disarming its power is what we are doing when we talk about money after experiencing some major loss such as from a house fire or theft, but where no member of our family was injured. We may say something like, "Well, it's nothing money can't fix." We don't mean that the loss was not a setback, but we do mean that its value, when measured against the lives of our loved ones, isn't even in the same category. And there is joy in knowing that the most important things remain.
Don't wait for some loss to learn that lesson. Give money away now. Don't be like the rich young man, going away sorrowful. Find the joy that giving brings.
____________
1.Ê"Learning to live with money," Phillip Yancey, Christianity Today, December 14, 1984, p. 31.
2.ÊThe Door, May/June 1995.
Here's how one man explained it: "Although I don't have the interest to personally study and play the market, my pension funds are heavily invested in stocks. I find money matters boring, but I know I can't afford to be stupid about them, either. I hope to retire someday, and every so often I think about my pension and wonder if it's growing fast enough to meet my needs in retirement. Will I run out of money before I run out of life?"
But forget retirement. A financial downturn on the national level could have a much more immediate impact on our daily lives. If people stop spending, companies fail and employees get laid off. Prices fluctuate wildly, wages stop rising, and so forth.
We are not trying to paint a doom-and-gloom picture here, but we should recognize that money matters are among the important uncertainties of life as much as anything else. In terms of our own future comfort, it may be far more important to pray for the well-being of the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board than for the well-being of the president.
The fact is, Christians have long had an uneasy relationship with money and possessions. Christianity's founder, Jesus of Nazareth, has been seen as a penniless street preacher who called people to lay up treasures in heaven rather than on earth. His own possessions amounted to little more than the clothes on his back. He said, "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head" (Luke 9:58). He even said something to the effect that the person who has two coats while his neighbor has none is doing wrong.
Then we have the story in our scripture reading for today, the rich young man who asked Jesus what he had to do to inherit eternal life.
Jesus' reply, that the man should sell his possessions and give the money to the poor, was not well received. The young man went away sorrowful, for he had a lot of things. Jesus went on to comment "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God."
Ever since, Christians have had some difficulty living with affluence. Some religious orders have taken poverty as one of their vows, and in our own day, it has felt unseemly to us for our religious leaders to make large salaries.
But, if we Christians have been uncomfortable with wealth, by and large, we have also understood Jesus' words about money and even embraced some of them. Very few of us see the pursuit of wealth as a worthy goal. We tend to be realistic about money. We know it can't buy happiness, but we also know that a severe lack of it can cause problems. More than likely, our goal is to have enough to live comfortably, but not necessarily fabulously. According to periodic surveys of American attitudes, the majority of our citizens say they don't have an overwhelming desire to be wealthy. One recent poll reported that just over a third say that it's very important to get rich enough so they don't have to work if they don't want to.
The fact is, most Americans are reasonably satisfied with what they have and recognize that they are better off than their parents were at their age. And when our own needs and many of our wants are met, we don't have a lot of feelings against the very well off.
On the other hand, we have some trouble identifying with the rich young ruler because few of us consider ourselves rich. But then we realize that "rich" is a relative term. How rich is rich these days? Millionaires are now, "a dime a dozen," but most of us aren't in their number. Still, in comparison to many other places in the world, all of us here are rich. The fact is, even if our stock markets go south, it's unlikely any of us here will die as a result. We may have to eat more hot dogs than steak, but we aren't likely to miss any meals.
One of the reasons we may be uncomfortable with our relative prosperity is because of our realization that simply because we live in the United States, we are among the richest people in the world. The exact figures change a little from year to year, but Americans spend more on their pets than some countries do on their people. I point that out not to make us feel guilty but to help us see the relative nature of wealth.
Yet, most of us still don't consider ourselves rich. We've probably long ago decided that we aren't going to feel guilty because we have some nice things or because we eat regularly. We feel like "inbetweeners" -- neither rich nor poor. What does faith call inbetweeners to do? There are no simple answers.
I don't think it calls us to give away all that we have. That advice was specific to the rich young man who came to Jesus. Its specifics wouldn't work for everybody. Some years ago, writer Phillip Yancey told of his attempt to live a less expensive lifestyle, based on his Christian beliefs. He got a basic car, with no air conditioning. He lived in a mobile home with less than $500 worth of furniture. He went to extremes to get the best possible price on any item.
He became obsessed with the question, "Is there a lifestyle level above which a Christian should not live?" But he found no satisfactory answers. He lived in a mobile home, but half the world lives in mud huts and cardboard shacks. He had a stripped-down car, but nine out of ten people in the world have no car at all.1
I think about things like that, too. I sometimes remind myself that while my pension may not be able support the lifestyle I'd like in retirement, it will at least make retirement possible. Many people around the world live from hand to mouth and cannot consider retirement. They will have to scrounge for a living until the day they die.
Beyond that, think about what would happen to the world's economy if everyone radically reduced consumption. In the 1970s, after realizing how dependent we in the U.S. were on oil, there was a conscious effort to reduce our oil imports. In the process, we very nearly wrecked the economies of Nigeria and Mexico. By the same token, if we cut our coffee drinking in half, much of Latin America would suffer.
Yet, we cannot believe that the Christian approach is ever totally unfettered consumption either, where acquiring and accumulating possessions or becoming rich is our major priority. We cannot forget that Jesus warned that where our treasures were, our hearts would be, also.
So we cannot surrender to the pursuit of wealth, but neither can we give up every possession.
Is there a Christian path through the middle ground? I think there is.
First of all, faith calls those who are neither rich nor poor to neutralize the soul-killing power of money. One way we do that is to think not just about retirement, but also about "laying up treasure in heaven."
Robert Fulghum, author of the now famous All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, has, as a result of the enormous sales of the book, received a lot of money. Despite that, however, he has chosen to live modestly, a choice he made based on his commitment to serve God.
Fulghum reports that since his success, people are always saying, "Well, you must have a big house and a big car." And he responds, "No, I have the same house, same car, same friends, same wife...." While his standard of living has certainly improved, he has used some of his book tours to raise money for worthy causes. "I don't think I should be given extra credit for doing that," he says. "I think you should think ill of me if I didn't do that."2
That is laying up treasure in heaven.
Second, faith calls us inbetweeners to disarm the power of money by giving some of it away -- to the church, to other worthy causes, directly to people in need, including members of our own family and so forth. In a culture like ours where money has great power, we can disperse some of that power over us by sharing out of what we have -- giving not just what we don't want or have leftover, but out of our substance.
That's a hard lesson for some of us, for it seems to run counter to logic. Give money away to disarm it? But, of course, disarming its power is what we are doing when we talk about money after experiencing some major loss such as from a house fire or theft, but where no member of our family was injured. We may say something like, "Well, it's nothing money can't fix." We don't mean that the loss was not a setback, but we do mean that its value, when measured against the lives of our loved ones, isn't even in the same category. And there is joy in knowing that the most important things remain.
Don't wait for some loss to learn that lesson. Give money away now. Don't be like the rich young man, going away sorrowful. Find the joy that giving brings.
____________
1.Ê"Learning to live with money," Phillip Yancey, Christianity Today, December 14, 1984, p. 31.
2.ÊThe Door, May/June 1995.
