Sermon: Being Rich towards God

“So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves and are not rich towards God.” Our society and our church speak a lot about belief as it relates to sex and relationships, but we say less about belief as it relates to money. Part of the reason may be because we all know we are implicated through money in structures and habits of sin, and we feel uncomfortable about it, and wish we weren’t, but we don’t know how to get free of it. Jesus had more to say about money than any other sphere of personal conduct, not because money is more immoral than anything else, it isn’t, but because it goes to the very heart of our relationship with God, and today’s readings ask us to face up to this. For the word ‘money’ read ‘security’ and read ‘meaning’. We use money to build into our lives both security and meaning, and that drives God out of the very place where he belongs. That is why our use of money is contested space and why Jesus has so much to say about it.

I love Ecclesiastes. Every so often, when you feel in the mood, go to a private place and read some of it aloud to yourself. It’s just right for those Eyore moments when you want to rail about the pointlessness of everything. Tax returns, folk who ask your opinion and then do what they were going to do anyway, washing and cleaning the same things you washed and cleaned last week, and the week before, Monday mornings. “Vanity of vanities, says the preacher, all is vanity.” What is the point! “I hated all my toil in which I had toiled under the sun, seeing I must leave it to those who come after me – and who knows whether they will be wise or foolish? Yet they will be masters of all for which I toiled.... So I turned and gave up my heart to despair.” Have a good grumble, get it out of your system; and then - turn away from this sin and be faithful to Christ. Because Eyore’s world is the world from which we are being rescued. ‘Here, have some new spectacles Eyore – look up, you don’t need to be trapped in this gloom any more. Christ is risen. God’s universe is bigger and brighter than that little bit of chewed grass you’re obsessing about.’ The problem with Ecclesiastes is that the existential experience of this world is all there is. “Imagine there’s no heaven. It’s easy if you try.” Much of our society has one foot at least in the world of Ecclesiastes – if this world is all there is you might as well ‘eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die’. That’s why the Christian message is so important, turning the light on about the dimension of God, that greater universe of reality, of which Eyore is a part but only a part. It is the eternal presence of God which gives security and meaning, even to Eyore if we can get him to look up. So that’s the first reading dealt with. My first epistle to Eyore.

What about the gospel reading about “those who store up treasures for themselves and are not rich towards God.”  This little episode breaks into a section of the gospel of Luke where Jesus is in dispute with the Pharisees: they want to store up lots of religious credit through the rights and privileges of the law, and that is how they get to feel secure.  In contrast Jesus is talking about a different kind of security. He is talking about trusting God. What a strange concept, strange to the people of his day, and perhaps stranger to us than it ought to be? Immediately after our reading come those wonderful passages that try to get us to dare to believe that God might actually want to look after us if only we could relax into him and let him. “Even the hairs of your head are all counted. Do not be afraid.” “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat, nor about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food...” “Consider the ravens, they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds.” “Do not keep striving for what you are to eat and what you are to drink, and do not keep worrying. For it is the nations of the world that strive after all these things, and your Father knows that you need them. Instead, strive for his Kingdom, and all these things will be given to you as well.” Wonderful words, but how do we respond to them? They carry the burden of what Jesus is about – to expose the false sources of security and to dare us to trust the real security. It is like those games of trust where you are asked to fall back into the arms of someone who will catch you. If you have ever tried that kind of a exercise you will know how very hard it is to do. We are built and conditioned to take care of ourselves, to provide for ourselves, to look after our own safety; and to trust someone else is difficult. Jesus is wooing his hearers to trust God, as he himself does. Of course, his trust led him to persecution and to the cross. That doesn’t sound very safe. But it also took him beyond death to the resurrection and to eternal life. What world are we living in? Are we really Ecclesiastes people, for all practical purposes expecting no care from God, no meaning beyond what we can get out of this passing life, no security beyond what we can gather in the bank and in bricks and mortar? Like the man in the parable. This is, of course, a very challenging line of thought, because we all need our homes, our salaries and pensions, our health care and whatever investments we can accumulate, to survive the complexities of our kind of society. We don’t expect to go down to the river and find our tax contribution in the mouth of a salmon. So how can we live in a responsible, realistic way in a 21^st century world, and also be true to what Jesus is saying about where our security and our meaning lie?

In today’s passage someone tries to treat Jesus like the small claims court, “tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me; but Jesus refuses to behave like a Pharisee or a religious lawyer, as if religion is about organising and licensing different kinds of sin. To want your share of the inheritance has the appearance of justice and the modern language of rights, but Jesus points out the covetousness which motivates this request. Perhaps this encounter is what led him to tell the story of the prodigal son which comes two chapters later in Luke. You remember there how the younger son demanded his share of the inheritance and went off with it to a foreign country where he consumed it in riotous living. But the other son, whose inheritance remained at home, was equally consumed and trapped by the money. Both sons (and to some extent their prodigal father) struggled to learn that security, meaning and worth lay not in what things can give you but in what loving people can give you. So, in today’s passage Jesus tells a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly...” Like the best capitalist he saw this abundance as a windfall profit for himself, a private possession that would provide a long life of leisure, wealth and security. But Jesus calls him a fool, because when this abundance opens to him the world of his loving and prodigal heavenly Father all he can see is the world of Ecclesiastes. “This very night your life is being demanded of you and the things you have prepared, whose will they be? So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves and are not rich towards God.”  So how could the man have got it right instead of getting it so wrong?

Could he have recognised the hand of God in the abundant harvest and asked himself what God was doing in his world by offering a bumper harvest? He might have remembered, from his religious treasure-house, the story of Joseph storing the crops from seven years of plenty so that the whole people of Egypt and the surrounding peoples could survive seven years of famine. Two things might have happened if he had been thinking of the Kingdom of God. He might have entered for himself into that trusting relationship with God which Jesus was trying to inspire when he spoke of God feeding the birds of the air, and of all your hairs being numbered. He might have experienced his heavenly Father’s prodigal generosity more as the cause for a party than either a cue for riotous living or a sulk in the ancestral fields. That is, he might have experienced love, blessing, eternal relationship, not just greed and self-sufficiency. And secondly, he may have been united to all the people around him as a channel of the generosity of God, rather than being separated from them by the walls of his barns.

How do we live with money, without living in sin? Jesus says the key is not in worry about it, nor in the nice arguments of religious law or license. The key lies in seeking God’s perspective in time and beyond time. “Seek first God’s Kingdom” he says. Strive to see his rule, his purposes, his character spread over everything you touch, and all this money business will fall into place. Concentrate on the Kingdom and you will know what to do with a bumper harvest. Don’t worry about your bank balance, worry about his Kingdom and how his purposes are coming about in and through you, and all shall be well.

As we sit in church and hear the gospel of the overflowing love of God, and we receive the sacrament of his life, we know this vision to be true, but so easily we slip back into the world of Ecclesiastes and live as if our security and the meaning of our lives is something we alone have to provide. We come back to Church to be reminded and to have our vision rekindled and our trust and love ignited once again, ready for another week where Eyore mutters Ecclesiastes and money rules.