Well, there’s no doubt what today’s readings are about: poverty and riches. And there’s no doubt what we are being told to do: don’t make money your master, be content, and share. What else is there to say? It’s certainly not my business to stand up here and tell you that that’s what you’ve got to do. If we’ve been told once, we’ve all been told a million times. Now, I know a million is possibly a slight exaggeration, but here’s some figures that will give you an measure of how much this lesson is reiterated in one form or another. A group of students went through the entire Bible and made a note of how many times the poor were mentioned. They found several thousand verses. (I quote from Jim Wallis, a prominent Christian activist for social reform.) “In the Hebrew Scriptures it was the second most prominent theme, the first being idolatry, and the two were often related. In the New Testament, one out of every sixteen verses had to do with wealth and poverty. In the first three Gospels, the subject is in one out of every ten verses; in the Gospel of Luke it is in one out of seven verses. The Prophets, the Psalms, the Epistles: it’s throughout. Listen to Proverbs, “He who oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honours God.” And you will find some of the most passionate words in the entire Bible in Isaiah chapter 58 on this very subject.
Why? Why do we need to be told the same thing so many times? Other things that are mentioned in the Bible a couple of times, are inflated out of all proportion and cause huge divisions amongst us, while the most important matter of all – social justice – seems to get sidelined. The very fact that we need to be told so many times, tells us a lot about ourselves. And in such strong language, too. The story Jesus tells us is a story about a rich man and a beggar. The one lived in luxury; the other was sick and malnourished. When they died, the rich man found himself in hell, while the poor man was with Father Abraham receiving the comforts of which he was deprived during his lifetime.
Jesus’s message is clear: if the well-off let the poor suffer when they could have done something about it, they will end up in the agony of everlasting hell. It’s a clear and simple message – tough to obey, certainly, but not ambiguous.
Paul’s words to Timothy are crystal clear, too. “People who want to get rich fall into temptation… Command those who are rich to do good, to be generous and willing to share.”
As a matter of morals, I think we all understand that message already, but what both Jesus and Paul do, and what their words encourage us to do, is to place that moral duty in a spiritual context. It’s not just that we should support the less well-off; it’s that we cannot truly be the children of God unless we do so.
The story Jesus tells us, of the rich man and Lazarus, is not a story about what happened to them during their lifetimes – nothing changes there – there’s no improvement in the life of Lazarus, no change of heart of the rich man – life, you may say, was simply unfair. No, our attention is taken up with the eternal consequences of the quality of their lives, and Jesus makes it clear that what they did here has a profound effect on their life with God.
But why should that be so? Why is there such a strong connection between our relationship with God and our relationship with our neighbour?
And why is it something we need to be told so emphatically so many times?
These are really deep questions, I think, and I promise you I won’t be doing them justice this morning! I’ll just leave them to you to work on for homework. But, whatever you do, don’t bring it back to me for marking, because I shall be doing it too!
When an expert in the law asks Jesus, “Which is the greatest commandment?” Jesus replies “Love the Lord your God.” But he goes on to say that the second commandment, “Love your neighbour as yourself” is “like unto it”. The two commandments are joined at the highest level.
I am convinced that God loves us and wants us to enjoy his gifts. Enjoyment and appreciation are much in our hearts at this season of harvest. And he wants us to live without shame. For that very purpose, in his astounding love, he sent his only Son amongst us to both guide us, but also to endure the worst that humanity could chuck at him. For all our shortcomings, we are not despised, but loved. It doesn’t make sense, does it?
We get into trouble, though, when our enjoyment of God’s gifts means that others get less. If we do this knowingly and deliberately, it clearly means that we are knowingly and deliberately acting against the will of God – which is that all should be able to live abundantly. That’s clear enough. That’s what the rich man in Jesus’s story did. He knew about Lazarus. It’s at his gate that he is laid. And although he doesn’t appear to notice him, we find that, in hell, he doesn’t have any trouble recognising him. So it’s clear he simply ignored him. But by then, there is nothing to protect him from the burning fire of guilt and shame which he now has no power to shake off, and which he will feel for ever.
We enter more of a moral maze, I think, when we try to puzzle out this sort of question: is our affluent lifestyle making other people suffer more in their lives, or does it tend to raise everyone’s standard of living? Is it true that every well-off person can only be well-off at someone else’s expense, or do the rich bring employment and other opportunities that would not be there without them? In the imagery Jim Wallis uses, does the rising tide help all the boats to float, great and small, or is it only the more expensive yachts that feel the benefit? We hear about third-world workers making the shirts we buy so cheaply for a pittance, and wonder whether we should be wearing them at all; but would it do any good to take even that small opportunity away from them?
These problems are really too tough for us to solve. They raise so many complex issues that we may only be able to see them in part. We found ourselves discussing exactly these questions at our last house group meeting, and what we found was that we all had slightly different viewpoints, affected strongly by our own life experiences and the attitudes we have grown up with. As you may know, we have been following Bishop Peter’s series of presentations on the Jesus Society. In the Jesus Society, he tells us, you handle money by sharing. We heard about projects to gather food ready for needy people in Bournville, Yeovil and Bath. We heard about a pensioner whose life has been transformed by a link she has made with an orphanage in Zambia. We heard about a charity in Backwell making and sending wheelchairs to the needy abroad. And we heard about an environmental group at a landfill site near Castle Cary. All examples of different ways of showing concern for God’s people and God’s world.
On Friday, at our harvest supper here in Cranmore, we were privileged and moved to hear the Methodist minister, the reverend Sam, speaking about his own village in Sri Lanka hit by the tsunami of December 2004, how their deep needs continue even though the media spotlight is not on them, and how he is actively working with the system and the villagers to restore hope and drive out fear by practical means; for example running sewing courses for young girls who might otherwise face a bleak future. Joan has kindly agreed to show a garment we bought on Friday, and you can see the superb quality of the work being produced by members of a community ripped apart by that tragedy. Sam and his wife Hilda could not have achieved this without us and people like us being willing to share.
So, even if we can’t solve the big questions of society, we can probably play our part by living our lives conscientiously and prayerfully, and not benefiting from things that we know deprive others. And we can also act individually as God calls us to. You may find St. Paul to be particularly wise on this subject. To the Corinthians he writes, “Each man should give what he has decided in his heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.” Maybe that’s all there is to it: we can agonise so much that we end up doing nothing. We can’t stop a beggar from spending the pound we give him on drugs, but if we give nothing unless we can be sure it will transform the recipient into a respectable member of society, we’ll certainly never give anyone anything. The same is true if we want to be sure that charities will guarantee that not one penny of our pound is wasted on publicity or lining the pockets of middlemen before parting with our cash. These considerations will not make us at all cheerful, and may turn us off being a giver altogether.
Sharing is evidence of our love for God – just as God’s sharing in our life is evidence of his love for us – and God knows how we will do a bit of balancing and calculating. He may have given us everything, but he does not oblige us to do the same, and if that is our sin, when we turn to him, we find that he has already forgiven us. Although Jesus does challenge one man to sell all he has, he does not tell us all to do the same. The unbendable rule that both he and St. Paul state is not to do with the possession of material wealth, but with the question of whether it dominates our outlook. Jesus says “No servant can serve two masters. You cannot serve God and money.” And St. Paul says, “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.” Jesus doesn’t say, “You cannot have God and money.” And St. Paul is clearly tolerant of the rich in his wise and balanced words to Timothy: “Command those who are rich … not to be arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth. Command them to do good … and to be generous and willing to share.”
If the love of money is the real danger, how do I stand? Do I love money? I certainly like it, don’t you? It means I can buy things, go and visit my far-flung family, in fact live abundantly in all sorts of delightful ways. Am I eager for money, then? Well, I wouldn’t say no to a substantial raise. Would you? I don’t think I want to get rich, as an end in itself. But if I’m not to love money, what am I to do? Hate it? I certainly don’t want to get poor!
Poverty is much easier, of course. “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God.” How often we hear of the deep unhappiness of the rich! Here we are, affluent people in a prosperous country, and are we happy? Are we closer to God? Are we more able to show and to share God’s love? But if we’re not called to go down the road to poverty, somehow we’ve got to learn to manage our affluence better. Because if society really is being torn apart by the consumerism which drives our prosperity, the logic is we’ll either have to abandon prosperity, or learn how not to let it destroy society.
It’s important at the spiritual level, too. We can’t duck out of it, because it is God who gives us all these good things. As Paul says, “God richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment.” So what can we do? Well, we can acknowledge that everything comes from God, even the things we feel we work for; and we can have thanksgiving in our hearts. We can also enjoy what God provides. I say that even though it puts us at the top of a very slippery slope: the slippery slope of selfishness. If all we ever do is appreciate our own good fortune, without any regard for other people, then we are, as Paul says, “plunging into ruin and destruction”.
You may have heard recently an interview with the American economist Alan Greenspan. He speaks from a lifetime of experience at the highest level of economic policy-making and its social consequences, and his considered view is this: the money markets are unstable; they fluctuate, sometimes wildly, but it is precisely that instability that produces an overall stability, because a market economy responds to pressures rather than trying to counteract them artificially; he says that you can have either material well-being or tranquillity, but not both.” Now of course, tranquillity in the money markets isn’t the same as tranquillity of soul. The griefs that unlucky investors pierce themselves with aren’t quite the same as what St. Paul is talking about, but I still found it rather interesting that someone could be talking in the same sort of terms from an economist’s standpoint as those used for so many centuries by our spiritual leaders.
But if, as I suspect, we want both material well-being and tranquillity, and if, as Alan Greenspan says, we can’t have both, there is clearly no perfect economic system. But that doesn’t leave us without guidance. Rather than shrugging our shoulders at the whole impossible subject, let’s hold fast to the wise words of Paul: “Godliness with contentment is great gain.” And let’s not forget to look up Isaiah chapter 58.