Wealthy Worries '06

Texts: Amos 5:6-7, 10-15; Hebrews 4:12-16; Mark 10:17-31

I must confess that there was a time early in my preaching career when I would heave a sigh of relief when I found these readings set for a Sunday on which I was to preach. I felt pretty safe on the subject of wealth. On many other topics that come up in the course of the preaching year, I was just as vulnerable as anybody in the congregation, but at least I couldn’t be accused of being too partial to material wealth. After all, I had given up the fat salary that goes with being a lawyer, and had become instead a relatively penniless priest. On this count, at least, I was in the clear.

That was until Tear Fund came into my life, and pricked that particular balloon. It wasn’t their harrowing pictures of deprived children with their stick legs, distended bellies and big doleful eyes that got me. It was one of their items in a Did You Know? column.

Did you know that if you own a house in a developed country such as New Zealand , that alone (without any other assets) puts you in the richest 5 percent of the world’s population? That’s what it said. I didn’t want to believe that, so I checked it out. It turned out to be true. Ninety-five percent of the people living on this earth today have less than we do if we own a house in New Zealand .

Now technically, of course, Trish and I don’t own a house at the moment, but we do have the means to do so. So what that means for me is that, instead of pointing the finger at those rich people – and feeling holier than them – I have to look at these readings in a rather different way. I have to let them address me as a rich person, not because I’m poorer than some people, but because I am richer than ninety-five percent of them.

That’s the first thing I want to say this morning, and the second is this. Sometimes the Anglican preference for taking the middle position on any issue can be a bit wishy-washy, or even a cop-out. But on this issue we may be about right. In a recent issue of Time Magazine, there was an article about Christians and wealth, with both sides taking up the extreme. The proponents of the so-called Gospel of Prosperity insisted that “righteous people” (like themselves) could be expected to be wealthy because God would bless them for their faithfulness. Why would a loving God want one of his own faithful children to live in abject poverty?

On the other side, it was argued that many of the Scriptures, particularly in the New Testament, condemned the rich, and that poverty was next to godliness. Neither side of the argument seemed to recognise that there might be a middle position, somewhere between the sort of poverty that cripples and the abundance of wealth that testifies to personal greed rather than divine blessing.

So what do the Scriptures tell us about this perilous topic of wealth? First of all, they instruct us to consider the source of our wealth – how have we made our fortune? Have we prospered at the expense of others? Has there been any false dealings, misappropriations, exploitation, or corruption? And in case you think those words are a bit politically charged at the moment, let me assure you I am thinking more of some of the proceedings brought by the Commerce Commission recently. False advertising, and using timber knowing that it is not of the standard shown on it, would clearly fail the test.

Amos is clear about that. All our economic relations must be just as fair and loving (in the biblical sense) as any other relations. As a tenant or landlord, as an employer or employee, as a mortgagor or mortgagee, as creditor or debtor, as a trader or customer, the biblical call is to act justly – to have the same regard to the interests of the other party as to our own. (To take one simple example: do we pay our bills as soon as we can in the interests of our creditor, or as late as we can in our own interests?) And, I must add, all this surely applies even where the other party is the State, which is, after all, all our neighbours acting collectively. As beneficiary or as taxpayer, we are called to act fairly and generously.

And on that subject, let me remind you that the Old Testament in particular emphasises the need for social, and not just individual, justice. The call is understood as a call to the whole community. At the very least this must mean that as Christians we have an advocacy role for any policy that promotes social justice nationally and internationally. We have an obligation to the ninety-five percent of the world’s population who are poorer than us.

So much for Amos – and, for that matter, most of the other prophets who also lent their voices to the call for fair trading and economic justice. We might wonder how much notice was ever taken of their teaching when we turn to Jesus’ time. As I have mentioned in the pewsheet notes, one of the things that stands out in our gospel reading today is the response of the disciples to Jesus’ teaching.

St Mark seems to be rather enjoying himself at the disciples’ expense. According to him, when Jesus first observes how difficult it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God , the disciples were amazed at his words. Then when Jesus continues to drive home the point with his famous reference to the camel and the eye of the needle, St Mark says, The disciples were even more amazed, and said to each other, “Who then can be saved?”

They were, as we might say today, gob-smacked. For them, if the rich were not to be saved, there was no hope for anyone else. Clearly, they believed in the idea that prosperity was a sign of God’s blessing.

So what are we to make of Jesus’ instruction to this man in the story, known to us as the Rich Young Man, bearing in mind that we may not be young like him, but we are rich? What is Jesus getting act?

Not surprisingly with such a discomforting text, there have been many attempts to water it down over the centuries. To me the silliest is to claim that this teaching was personal to this particular individual, and has no application to the rest of us. That he alone had a spiritual blockage arising from his wealth, and Jesus as his spiritual physician was dealing with his problem. Quite why this teaching has been preserved in the Scriptures if it was intended purely for this one individual has never been explained.

It seems to me that the centre of this teaching is verse 21: Jesus looked at him and loved him. “One thing you lack,” he said. “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” It was his wealth that was preventing this man from following Jesus; and that is confirmed for us by the young man’s response. He went away sad, because he had great wealth.

The danger of wealth is that it may keep us from following Jesus. It can make us think we are self-sufficient, we can meet our own needs, we do not need to rely on God. Or it can become our all-consuming passion; we apply all our talents, and energy and time to making and accumulating wealth and neglect our neighbours and our God. It can make us defensive and antagonistic to our neighbours whom we might see as a threat to our wealth.

So this teaching is about priorities. God must come first in our lives. And it is about what we do with our wealth – do we use it to help others or for our own self-glorification? What it isn’t about is salvation. This teaching does not say that the rich or the poor will be saved – that the way to salvation is to give away all our possessions. When his amazed disciples ask, “who then can be saved?” Jesus makes it clear that salvation is God’s doing, not ours.

This is tough stuff, and perhaps we need to finish with some reassuring words from our second lesson. The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us that one day we must give account of ourselves to God, from whom no secrets are hidden. That could be a frightening thought, but for the good news, the gospel, of Jesus Christ. He writes: For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathise with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are – yet was without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.

And that applies to the five percent of us who are wealthy, and the ninety-five percent who are not.