Lessons for the Rich

To work with what you have while you have it and can use it... for good.



P21c 2013 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.

One sign that fall has arrived, as sure and certain as the leaves on the trees turning from green to red and gold, is the appearance of another kind of green and gold — money — in the Scripture readings appointed for worship. This is no coincidence, as fall is the time when churches take up planning their budgets for the next year and engaging in stewardship campaigns. But money and its right use are major concerns not just for the church, but for every person trying to live an ordered and just life.

Money, in spite of the misquote of Scripture, is not the root of all evil. It is the “love of money” — as Paul reminds Timothy. Money itself is neither good nor evil. It is how you relate to it, how you make use of it — or how you allow it to make use of you — that is good or evil. Money is no more evil in itself than food, or sex, or relaxation. But all of these things provide a means to sin when they are misused. Something good, good when used as God intends, can become a gateway to evil when used to excess or to the wrong ends. Gluttony is the misuse of food; sloth is the misuse of leisure; lust is the misuse of sex; and greed is the misuse of money.

All of our Scripture readings today point an accusing finger in the direction of greed, and counsel ways around it or away from it. Amos issues a strong condemnation of the rich — not just because they are rich, of course, but because while they are rich, they “are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph,” that is, about the impending day of doom that is about to fall upon Israel. Like Nero fiddling while Rome burns, these easy-chair loungers are oblivious to the coming disaster. They will be horribly surprised when their world collapses around them, and their lives end, having spent their wealth almost as a kind of anesthetic, insulating them — but not protecting them — from the realities of a troubled world.

For that “real world” breaks in, shattering the plans even of the virtuous, even of the innocent. Whether from a suicide bomber last week outside a church in Peshawar, or 50years ago outside a church in Birmingham, Alabama, or from a gang of terrorists invading an upscale shopping mall in Nairobi, or a madman in a Navy Yard, horror and disaster can overtake even good and innocent people. As poet Kofi Awoonor, one of the victims of the attack in Kenya wrote in a prophetic poem,

We are the celebrants
whose fields were
overrun by rogues
and other bad men who
interrupted our dance
with obscene songs and bad gestures

If such horror can overtake even the innocent and perceptive, how much more the prideful and ignorant? In the midst of our shock and horror, it is well to learn the sad lesson that you can take your life in your hands even going to an upscale shopping mall, even going to a humble church. Upscale, downscale, or no-scale, Anglican or Baptist, — ruin can come upon you unawares.

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And so, being aware is part of what Jesus offers us in the cautionary parable of Lazarus and the rich man. We don’t get much detail about this rich guy, other than that he feasts every day but ignores — remains unaware of — that poor, sick man who lies at his gate. His riches seem to blind him to reality. Even the dogs pay more attention to Lazarus than this rich man does, this oblivious rich man. He is not even bothered enough to chase him away, far less give him something to eat. He is unaware — ignoring the poor man as much as those who were at ease in Zion and Samaria ignored the world falling apart around them. He reminds me of another verse in Kofi Awoonor’s prophetic poem:

On the seaside, the ruins recent
from the latest storms
remind of ancestral wealth
pillaged purloined pawned
by an unthinking grandfather
who lived the life of a lord
and drove coming generations to
despair and ruin

This rich man is clueless; he lives the life of a lord, but he is ignorant, he doesn’t even know what he is looking at. He is like that rich man who couldn’t believe it the first time he saw a one-dollar bill; he couldn’t believe they made money in such small denominations. It must be a joke someone cooked up! (He should have come to church more often...)

So too should have that the rich man in the parable — at least to the synagogue, where safe from bomb-blasts or not, at least he would have heard the warnings of Moses and the Prophets — perhaps risking his life, but hearing, learning, marking and inwardly digesting those words and so gaining his immortal soul. Instead, when his proverbial sell-by date arrives he is bundled off to Hades, there to suffer torment both physical and mental.

For not only is he roasted in flames, but he realizes that his five brothers are just as bad — and just as doomed — as he. They will join him in the pit of Hell if they do not repent and amend their ways — and yet when he shows perhaps the first spark of interest in anyone other than himself in his whole life, in wanting to warn them, he receives the sad sentence that nothing special will be done for them, any more than was done for him. The warning sign was there in the Law of Moses: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”; and that warning was proclaimed by the Prophets.

But this man not only did nothing for his neighbors, he didn’t lift a finger to help a man dying on his own sidewalk. That poor, sick, starving man was a beacon shining right on his doorstep, a light that could have saved him, had he not closed his eyes and turned the other way, pulling the blinds of his heart, closing the door of mercy, and barring the gates of grace.

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We too are shown such beacons of need; they shine on every street-corner of this great and terrible city. I don’t think that any of us here is so rich as to be blinded by wealth, and are much more likely to find it enough to be content with our food and our clothing. Yet we are still called to share what we have — rich or poor — what we have, with those who have not, as Paul reminded Timothy, “to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share.” And as for those who truly are rich, Paul has a word for them as well: not to be haughty, or to set their hopes on their uncertain riches, but rather on God who desires that everyone be rich in the Spirit, and richly provides us with everything we need.

So there is no way out of the responsibility to keep an eye open for the signs of need, those beacons of need — whether one is poor, rich or middle-class, there is always someone less well off who can be helped by one who has more. The important thing, as the parable reminds us, is to do this while we are able — for once the time of parting from this life arrives, all that we have accumulated will be beyond our reach. When the time of parting comes, we lose the power to do good with whatever resources we had, and only if we’ve made a will and given direction can they do any good at all, after we have gone.

This truth is brought out very poignantly in a scene from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Jacob Marley, unlike the rich man in the parable, is given the opportunity to warn his old friend Ebenezer Scrooge, so that Scrooge can escape his fate. And what is that fate? It is not quite like that of the man in the parable — whose punishment in part is not to be able to warn his brothers. No, Marley’s punishment, what he suffers, serves in itself as an additional warning to Scrooge when Scrooge looks out the window and sees, that, as Dickens describes it,

The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley’s … One old ghost ... with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle... cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below upon a doorstep. The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.

Their fate is that terrible frustration not to be able to make use of earthly wealth — even for good — once they have departed earthly life. They end up helpless, chained to ghostly wealth that they cannot share in this world.

God calls us all to make use of what we have while we are able, as Dickens says, “to interfere, for good, in human matters.” We can still heed Moses and the prophets, heed the beacons of need on our doorsteps, on our sidewalks, and even more: heed the words of the one who did rise from the dead, who speaks to us still in the voice of Scripture and by echoing of the Holy Spirit in our own consciences — to do good, each as we are able, by the strength and in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord.+

Get What You Paid For

Wealth sticks to the wealthy like an acrylic sweater fresh out of the clothes dryer... a sermon for Proper 23b

Proper 23b • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Because you trample on the poor, you have built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not live in them; you have planted pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine.
During the economic boom of the 80s, someone came up with a T-shirt that read, “The one with the most things when he dies, wins.” This was the era of free-for-all speculation on Wall Street. Investments moved further and further away from actual commodities or industries, from real products or services, to speculation on commodity futures, and indexes, and margins, and even futures of indexes and margins. No longer were people trading just in pork bellies, or even in what pork bellies might be worth some day; They were trading in what the market might think pork bellies might be worth some day. People were trading not just in things, but in what people thought about things — and in what people thought about what people thought about things, if you can believe that — building on a very shaky foundation — if any foundation at all!

Some people managed to make huge fortunes in this rarified world: people like the fictional character Gordon Gecko from the film Wall Street, whose motto was, “Greed is good.” Governments were persuaded by this gospel of acquisition to repeal laws that had been put in place after previous economic disasters, laws designed to prevent a melt-down of the economy. Credit extended beyond the prudent , and people were sold mortgages they could not possibly afford, even in the best of times; and the value of homes came to be keyed not to intrinsic value, intrinsic worth, but as if they only could be worth more and more as time went on — no one would imagine that to be true of a car, yet people had no trouble thinking about it for a house! Meanwhile the distances between the salaries of workers and the wealth of the owners grew greater and greater. The rich grew richer and the poor poorer, and it really did begin to look like the one who died with the most things would win. The balloon kept getting bigger and bigger, and no-one expected it to burst.

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As we all know, this out-of-kilter pile of optimism came crashing down like a Jenga game just a few years ago. The chickens came home to roost to an astonishing degree, and the henhouse was full to overflowing. And sad to say, most of the chickens were dead ducks!

Some years on, it is still true a tiny portion of the population controls a disproportionate amount of the wealth of the world. And these days in the election season, who can turn on the TV without seeing a politician, or a surrogate, or a PAC, or a super-PAC, appealing to a particular worldview — either that prosperity will come by letting the wealthy trickle their wealth down to the poor who eagerly wait below like drought-stricken farmers able to receive this gentle shower of rain; or on the other hand that the government should take more from the wealthy so as to redistribute it more effectively — but still from above, as far as those below are concerned.

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Of course, as our Scriptures from Amos and Mark remind us, there is nothing new in this. There is nothing new about the magnetic attraction of wealth — how money wants to stay where other money is rather than trickling down to where it isn’t; how the rich always seem to get richer, taking advantage of the poor. And those who have the guts to challenge this, people like Amos or Jesus, get branded as malcontents or trouble-makers. As Amos says, those with power and wealth abhor the one who speaks the truth, and in times like these the prudent will keep their mouths shut; and we know what happened to Jesus when he upset the apple-cart of a society in which religious leaders worked hand-in-hand with the politicians to keep things profitable for the few at the expense of the many.

Even some with good intentions, like the rich young man in the Gospel, is disappointed when Jesus tells him what he needs to do for his own good, and the good of his soul — to say nothing of the good he could do for the poor. He could not have been the only rich person to go away sorrowful, wanting to follow Jesus but not able to do as he counseled: unable to break that magnetic attachment of wealth. The Gospel shows us how hard it is for wealth to trickle down — it wants to stay with the wealthy; and the wealthy want to stay with it!

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This is why greed, far from being good, as Mr. Gecko believed, is such a poisonous affliction. It’s an addiction that can never be satisfied — those who think having more and more is the point of life can never get enough to make that hunger stop. Because there always is more, isn’t there? It is like drinking salt-water when you’re thirsty — it will only make you thirstier, and in the end, it will kill you.

Greed is a thirst for the wrong thing, you see. No one really needs more money than it takes to live, to provide for those practical real realities of shelter and food and a modicum of comfort and leisure; and the money and the things left when they die, as indeed they must, is beyond their employment or enjoyment. While you live, your possessions and wealth can serve you and others, but the things you have but which you do not use serve no one — not even you. There is an old saying, “The second coat in your closet, the one you never wear, really belongs to someone else.” Hanging there in the closet it keeps no one warm, not even you. Yet, there it hangs.

Just as the financial markets moved further and further from reality, to focus on speculation itself as a thing to speculate about, so too the desire for wealth and possessions moves away from the good that wealth can do — to the wealth itself, and not to using it, but just to having it. Rather than a means to an end, it becomes an end in itself — a dead end.

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I mentioned politicians a moment ago and I’d like to end with not a politician, but with a First Lady. Mary Todd Lincoln suffered much in life — she lost three of her four sons to early death, at the ages of four, twelve, and eighteen; and she suffered the horror of her husband being shot as he sat next to her in the theater, her hand in his. She was far from a perfect person, and was what used to be called “high-strung.”

One of her great failings was her unrealistic relationship with money. When her husband was elected President, she went wild; she had no sense of proportion, and began to spend his new-found salary lavishly refurnishing the White House like there was no tomorrow. When tomorrow came and Lincoln was assassinated, and then with the death of her young son, Tad, just a few years later, she fell into a cycle of madness; imagining she was lost to the world, doomed to live homeless, out on the streets.

One day she was in fact found wandering in the streets of Chicago. And it was discovered by those who took her in that all the while she bemoaned the lack of money, living in panicked fear of poverty, she had over $50,000 in bonds sewn into the lining of her dress — a huge fortune in those days. But it wasn’t even enough to keep her warm. She died a few years later, never able to enjoy any of that wealth.

Julie Harris as Mary Todd Lincoln, and your preacher, in his former life as an actor, portraying Tad Lincoln, who died shortly after his 18th birthday. Photo by Martha Swope.

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It is painfully easy to say, Well, she was a bit crazy, wasn’t she? But isn’t anyone who hoards more of the world’s goods than he or she needs to live — even to live comfortably — equally out of touch with reality? How many are like the rich young man, wanting to be free but unable to let go of the very thing that holds them down.

The disciples ask, Who then can be saved? And as Jesus answers, the implication seems to be that all can be saved from possession by wealth — but not through their own efforts, only through the power of God. We all need help detaching ourselves from the goods we accumulate, the things that seem to stick to us like an acrylic sweater fresh out of the dryer, and God has shown us the way to do so — to use the power of God that is within us, God working within us, to open our hands to give to those with less, to grow accustomed to letting go and not grasping, knowing our needs will be met a hundredfold.

And just as wealth seems to attract more wealth and drag us down, so too once we start the practice, the practiceof generosity will make us more generous; the practice of charity will make it easier and easier to open our hands, and let go of the weight that keeps us from following the one who can and will free us from all such bonds, even Jesus Christ our Lord.+

Letting Go

St Paul catalogues his virtues and then throws the catalogue away! --- sermon for Proper 22a

SJF • Proper 22a • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.

There was once a very successful Turkish prize-fighter, named Ismail Yousouf. He traveled the world offering to fight anyone who would contest his strength, and he always won. In addition to his physical prowess, he also had a deep distrust of banks and bankers. Because of that, he kept his winnings in the form of gold coins that he carried with him at all times in a money belt around his waist. I suppose he might have re-written the Scriptural saying to read, “Where your treasure is, there will your stomach also be!” This decision, to keep his wealth as close to him as his skin, led to tragedy, however, when he had the misfortune to be sailing on the passenger liner La Bourgogne in the summer of 1898, when it collided with another vessel off the coast of Nova Scotia and sank. A few of the passengers escaped the disaster, but Yousouf was not among them: in spite of his physical strength, his gold money-belt weighed him down, and he sank into the depths like a stone. Perhaps after all the old saying isn’t quite true, and you can take it with you! But is it worth the trip?

Yousouf’s story is not unique — even on that ship on that day, in which fewer than a quarter of the passengers were saved, there must have been others who might have been saved had they resisted the temptation to turn back for some valued item — a necklace or a briefcase or a wallet — and waste valuable time and add to their burden in reaching the lifeboats.

In a similar vein Mark Twain wrote of his visit to the ruins of Pompeii where he saw the remains of a man who was caught in the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius just outside a door to a passage that might have protected him — now an ash-coated skeleton with a key to the door in one hand and ten gold coins in the other. Twain reflected, that had he not stopped to gather up the gold, he might have made it to the door.

The reality of someone dying because they won’t let go of some particular thing is so much a part of human culture that it has become what’s called a “trope” — which is a sort of fancy literary word for a cliché. How many movies have you seen where a character perishes for that very reason — failing to let go of some precious item. I’m sure you can think of many, and I won’t even start to list them,
but that word “precious” and the mention of volcanos can hardly pass without acknowledging poor Gollum and his obsession with the Ring of Power that ultimately leads him to his incinerated end at Mount Doom.

The moral of all of this is that some things are best let go of — and your life may depend on letting go. I reminded us last week of Jack Benny’s response to the challenge, “Your money or your life!” — “I’m thinking, I’m thinking!” — which is comical precisely because we recognize that tension in our own lives — that tension between what seems to be of value and what really is of ultimate value; and our recognition that some people really do choose money over life, dying because they won’t let go — or maybe living, but not really having much of a life.

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In our reading from Philippians last week we heard about how Jesus Christ let go — let go of everything — not to save his own life but to save the lives of all who would turn to him in faith. Though he was the Son of God, he did not consider equality with God as something to be grasped at or held on to, but rather emptied himself, taking on our human nature so as to live and die as one of us — for our sake and for our salvation.

In the continuation of Philippians we heard this morning, Saint Paul does a similar thing. He begins by cataloguing all of the things he could be proud of if he wished: his being an observant Jew, a scholar and a teacher, in zeal and devotion a leader of his people, a man rich in his own acquired righteousness under the law. But then he shows that he is willing to toss that glossy illustrated catalogue onto the rubbish heap. He will not allow all of these inheritances and accomplishments, these native qualities and acquired skills, to hold him back — as indeed they had held him back — from Christ and his resurrection. Ultimately Paul knows that he must let go of the things that were most precious to him in his life before he came to know Christ. For since knowing Christ, all of these things, however valuable and good they might be, are of no comparison to the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

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Think for a moment about your own life — what are the things that might hold you back? Is it pride in your family or your education? Is it consciousness of your skills or satisfaction with the uprightness of your life? None of these are bad things, mind — that’s the point. These are things worth valuing. They only become a problem when we hang on to them instead of letting go in order fully to grasp what is much more valuable than any such earthly good: to grasp our Lord, clinging to the hem of his garment, as if our life depended on it.

Because our life does depend on it. If anything — however good — impedes your ability to grasp Jesus and trust in his goodness in his righteousness; if your hands are full of anything else at all, however good or valuable they might be, trust in God and let go of it. Forget what lies behind and strain forward to what lies ahead, toward the goal of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. All else will be added unto you, if you put your whole trust in him who is the source of all good.

Let us pray. Lord Jesus Christ, you let go of everything for our sake, leaving the Father’s side to be with us as one of us, to save us from our sins. Help us to find the will and the way to strip off the money belt of reputation and rise from the ocean depths of materialism; to scatter the golden coins of pride, and place the key in the lock of the door that opens to salvation; to forsake the ring of power and prestige and accept the yoke of humble service; that we may at the last find our eternal home with you, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit live and reign for ever and ever.