Here’s some music for your day; it’s totally topical! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpbbuaIA3Ds Also the sermon.
Luke 12:13-21; Colossians 3:1-11; Psalm 49:1-12; Ecclesiastes 1:2,12-14,2:18-23
Out of all the four gospels, it’s Luke’s that makes me the most nervous. Texts like this are the reason why, and there’s a frighteningly large number of them. Early in the gospel, the stage is set, because Mary sings in the Magnificat, “[God] has brought down rulers from their throne but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty.” Jesus’ “mission statement” from Luke 4 is “to preach good news to the poor.” The beatitudes, the lists of blessings not unlike those found in Matthew, also include a list of woes. It’s not enough to say “blessed are the poor, hungry, weeping, and hated,” Jesus also says, “Woe to the rich, well fed, laughing, and those who are spoken well of.”
It’s something called “The Great Reversal”, and it’s all over Luke: the haves will be made to be have-nots, and the have-nots will be haves. It’s a consistent, and nerve-inducing, theme. No matter how rich or poor you feel, it’s hard to remember that, simply by virtue of living in America, we are among the richest people in the world. While we have around 5% of the world’s population, we hold 25% of the world’s wealth. (To be fair, when measured in “wealth per person”, we’re beaten out by Luxembourg and Hong Kong.)
If you haven’t figured it out, this week’s texts are all about money. Ecclesiastes shares for us that, “everything is meaningless!” without a proper relationship to God. In particular, wealth is meaningless because anything you acquire just goes to someone else when you die. Jesus statements in the gospel echo this, as he tells the story of a man who built storehouses to hold all his wealth only to die that night. Psalm 49 says the same thing, that no matter what anyone has, when they die it’s worth nothing to them.
So if all this wealth is so fleeting, why do we seek after it so much? We’ve been conditioned in our culture to think we need bigger and better stuff. Just watch TV, and you’ll see it first hand. “You car isn’t good enough, you need this one instead.” “You may think you have the best shampoo on the market, but this one gets your hair cleaner and smells better.” “You don’t really like the food you’re eating, you need to eat this instead; it’s better.”
All of it appeals to our greed, something that Paul’s letter to the Colossians warns against. “For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God… Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, and greed, which is idolatry.” Aha! There’s the root of the problem, isn’t it? Greed gets us in trouble over and over again. Our gospel starts out with a man who was essentially greedy; he wanted more of his inheritance, and Jesus calls him out for it. Just like Solomon writing in Ecclesiastes, Jesus recognizes the meaninglessness of wealth for its own sake. Just like Paul in Colossians, Jesus tells his hearers to focus away from material things and on to God.
There’s always been an interesting relationship between the Church and wealth. In Acts 4, Luke writes that the believers “were one in heart and mind. No one clamed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had… There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostle’s feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.”
Now I’m going to enlighten you a bit into a really old argument: how rich should Christians be? This came to a head in the 13th and 14th centuries, as there were a few groups of friars, namely Franciscans but also others, who asserted that the Church in that time was too rich and powerful, and was ignoring the poor and needy. (Where have we heard that before?) The members of these groups would go around and own no land, property, or money. Now a number of different religious orders took vows of poverty, but there were ways around them, mostly that they gave up possessions but had no problem with taking things on semi-permanent loan from the church.
This debate ended up in an interesting place, namely if or not Jesus and the apostles had possessions. The Franciscans claimed they did not, while their opponents claimed they did. Finally in 1323, the pope declared the teaching that Jesus didn’t have possessions heretical, which usually settled that argument, but in this case did not – in fact, it’s never gone away.
Have any of you ever heard of what is disparagingly called the “health and wealth gospel”? Even if you haven’t heard the term, I’m sure you’ve seen the people who preach it. They’re usually men, immaculately groomed wearing expensive suits, preaching that God wants to bless his followers with material wealth, and then asking them to send in “seed money” that the preacher prays over that their contribution will return to them many times over.
If you can’t tell, I’m not a huge fan of that kind of preaching, in large part because of texts like we have today. We should be seeking after God for His sake alone, and trust that He’ll care for us no matter how much we have or don’t have. I think that’s really the message that we’re given today. Love of money shouldn’t be our motivator, but instead love of God. As Paul writes, we should “put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.”
It should be as we prayed earlier in the pray of the day, “that our possessions may not be a curse in our lives, but an instrument for blessing.” Yet we’ve let our possessions, and our love thereof, become a curse. We’ve, by and large, forgotten the poor and needy among us, using them for our own gain. Instead, let’s use our possessions to help those in need, and show them God’s love in the process.