Whose Wealth?

The scriptures referred to are Deuteronomy 15:7-11. Psalm 112, and 2 Corinthians 8:1-9, 13-15.

In 2006 the Episcopal Church switched to the Revised Common Lectionary. None of the passages this sermon was based on are now read on the Third Sunday after Pentecost and the passage from Deuteronomy is not read at all during the 3 year cycle, which is a grave mistake.

One of the scariest movies I've ever seen had no ghosts, no vampires, nothing supernatural and no villain either. It was a TV movie called No Place Like Home. It's about a working class family of 4. The local factory has closed so the mother supports the family while the father takes classes to get a better job. Then a fire in their apartment building leaves them homeless. They stay with relatives for a while but tensions and the lack of room and privacy drives them out. They find an apartment whose monthly rent they can afford but they cannot come up with the initial amount of first and last month's rent plus security deposit. The father goes to another state to look for work while the wife and children stay in a shelter. Violence in the shelter and the near molestation of one of the kids forces the mother to pull them out of the shelter. The father returns, jobless, and they end up living in an abandoned building, fighting off addicts to protect their new home. The family in the film had a string of bad breaks but what was scary was that each step in their becoming homeless was plausible. And the film wasn't made just last week or last year but in 1989!

The film was brought to my mind when I saw a front page article in the Key West Citizen about the homeless. There was a picture of a homeless couple who were planning to wed. A friend said, “What business have they got getting married if they can't afford a place to live?” Then I reminded my friend that the price of a notary public wedding is a lot less than the cost of housing here.

The average American lives paycheck to paycheck. 51% of working adults are one missed paycheck from not being able to cover their necessities, unless they have savings to dip into. An additional 15% would be in that position if they missed 2 paychecks. That's 66% or 2/3 of working Americans. Throw in a major illness and they could end up like the family in that film. Families with children are the fastest growing segment of the homeless population, accounting for between 40 and 50% of the country's homeless. There are a lot of causes of homelessness, like unemployment, poverty, mental illness, substance abuse, teen pregnancy and domestic abuse. But the main cause, according to the Conference of Mayors, is the lack of affordable housing. In many homeless families both parents have jobs but their combined wages are not enough to afford an apartment. And full-time minimum wage workers can't afford to rent anywhere in the US. A full-time worker would have to make at least $20 an hour to afford a one-bedroom rental.

And it's very hard to leave a minimum wage job as the late Keys author Barbara Ehrenreich discovered when she went undercover for her book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. If you have no other resources, you won't make enough to save anything and you won't have enough time to go on multiple job interviews or take classes.

3 of our 4 lectionary readings are about wealth and poverty. The emphasis, of course, is on helping the poor. The rich always have help because they have the power to shape laws and influence government. A Princeton study showed that the probability of any legislation passing Congress is just 30%, regardless of how popular it is with the average American. The only thing that increases the likelihood of a law passing is if the rich favor it. The richest 1% of the population control more than 30% of the wealth, and the top 10% own 66.9% or 2/3 of the wealth in the US. And they are getting richer by $1.7 million a day. They also pay an average tax rate of 8.2%, compared to 13% for the average American taxpayer.

The Bible has nothing against the rich, provided they are God-fearing, honest and generous to the poor, as we read in Psalm 112. After all, the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob became wealthy, mostly in sheep and livestock. But they are not comparable to today's millionaires and billionaires. And unlike today's wealthy, they never complained that they weren't rich enough or that something was inhibiting the growth of their wealth. They were simply grateful to God for their prosperity.

Our passage from Deuteronomy is about the distribution of the wealth in the then-future nation of Israel. Just before our reading begins, God says, “However, there should be no poor among you, for in the land the Lord your God is giving you to possess as your inheritance, he will richly bless you, if only you fully obey the Lord your God and are careful to follow all these commands I am giving you today.” (Deuteronomy 15:4-5) In other words, God is saying, “I am giving you a good land and if you follow my instructions for living a just life, you should all do well.” But God is not naive. As he says in our passage, “There will always be poor people in the land.” So he makes a law to prevent his citizens from being perpetually buried in evergrowing debt. Every 7^th year all debts were cancelled. And God warns those who are better off not to get stingy as the 7^th year approaches and the time in which the debt is to be repaid shrinks. And because God commands us to help the poor and needy, not to do so is a sin! Again, as Psalm 112 reminds us, generosity towards the poor is not optional but is an integral part of righteousness.

But why? If I work hard and make a surplus of money, isn't it mine to do with as I wish? I know that God will be happy if I give to the poor but why is it a sin if I don't? Because the money isn't really mine. Nothing is ours. Everything is God's.

God created everything. We are essentially stewards of his lands and possessions. All that we have we received as gifts and grace. To say that we “own” anything is no more literally true than to say we “make” money on our jobs. If we really did, the Treasury department would arrest us as counterfeiters. What we actually do is perform certain tasks in exchange for promises on pieces of paper called checks or cash, that we can exchange for goods or services that in turn are the fruits of someone else's labor. But the talents, the muscles and the brains we use to perform these tasks are gifts from God.

The idea that God owns everything undergirds all Biblical thought. For instance, that is why we use the term “redemption” for what Christ has done for us. In both Greek and Hebrew the words for redeeming have the sense of someone, usually a kinsman, paying a ransom to buy back someone else from slavery. So to help us understand our redemption the Bible uses the metaphor that Jesus finds us in slavery to sin and buys us back at the cost of his blood. (John 8:34-36; Mark 10:45) We are then returned to our rightful owner, God.

So we are beholden to him for liberating us from our slavery to our worst habits, urges and fears. But since God the Son has bought us with his life, we are now God's servants. We are given the run of his lands and the use of his goods but we must never act presumptuously. We are not to destroy, abuse or neglect our Lord's things. And that includes our fellow servants. The lives of others are not mine to take or misuse according to my pleasure. All is God's and what I think are mine are actually on loan to me for a short while. I must one day give an account of the responsibilities given to me.

So the command to be generous to the poor is not really telling me how to use my money and possessions but God's. I am to be generous with his stuff, which he has entrusted to me for the time being. And it is interesting that the poor often understand this better than the rich, For instance small, less wealthy churches give proportionately more per member than larger churches with richer parishioners. Why is that? I think that the less well-off you are, the more aware you are of God's hand in giving you the good things in your life.

Rich people tend to forget how much of their wealth is based on things outside their control. Like being born into wealth. Or born with talents that are marketable. Or having a teacher or mentor who helps you learn and develop skills that will help you succeed in the world. Or knowing someone who can recommend you for a well-paying career. And it helps if you are attractive and able bodied. Those are all things that are outside your control. The world calls this luck. The Bible calls them gifts.

Some people realize that they have been given their good fortune by God and pay it back. If Scholastic Books hadn't taken a chance on a much rejected manuscript by an unpublished single mother on welfare, we wouldn't have the Harry Potter books, movies and upcoming TV series. And J.K. Rowling wouldn't have gone from being a poor single mother to someone who was at one time richer than the Queen of England. But Rowling remembered her days of poverty and has been so generous with starting charities and giving to people with medical problems and helping at-risk women and children that her net worth has actually dropped way below that of the royal family. She is a Christian and a member of the Church of Scotland.

In his Corinthian letters, Paul refers to a pet charitable project of his. He is raising money for the church at Jerusalem. Helping out the mother church is not just the Christian thing to do but Paul would also like to cement the relationship of the largely Gentile churches he has planted throughout the Roman empire to the Jewish church back in Judea. Though previously enthusiastic about the idea, the church at Corinth has become apathetic. Paul tells them of the amazing generosity of the poorer church in Macedonia. He reminds them of Jesus, who, though rich in his heavenly position, became a poor mortal that we might share in God's riches. And Paul appeals to the idea of balance. Quoting from the account of how God gave manna to his children wandering in the wilderness on their way to the promised land, he says that if everybody gave out of their abundance then no one would have either too much or too little. (Exodus 16:18) And in the early days church we are told that “All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions were his own, but they shared everything they had....There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.” (Acts 4:32, 34-35)

The US is the richest nation on earth. On average we live better than 2/3 of the people in the world. Though we only make up 5% of the world's population, we use a greater proportion of the world's resources than our numbers would indicate was fair. And yet we whine about our lot—a lot! And there is nothing less attractive than the rich whining about how bad they have it. Especially when they have it better than people in some parts of Africa, Central and South America and Asia. Many of us do not know what it is like to go without food for lack of money. A lot of us do not know what it is like to wear rags or sleep in our car or not be able to get our children health care. Many of the things we take for granted would be considered huge blessings to other people, including some living in this country.

Here's another fact: 68% of Americans say they are Christian. But some of those Christians seem to have forgotten that in Jesus' parable of the Last Judgment that those who fed the hungry, gave the thirsty something to drink, clothed those who needed it, welcomed the alien, looked after the sick and visited those in prison, were actually doing it to Jesus. (Matthew 25:46) They somehow missed the more than 800 passages in their Bible that tell us to help the disadvantaged, the disabled, the diseased and the despised. (Such as Leviticus 19:10, 14, 33-34; Proverbs 19:17; 31:8-9; Isaiah 58:6-7; Jeremiah 22:3; Ezekiel 16:49; Luke 14:12-14; 1 John 3:17-18, etc) They apparently ignore Jesus' saying that you cannot serve both God and money. (Matthew 6:24) They are way more concerned about making sure that help is not given to people they don't think deserve it than that help is given to those who need it. Yet Jesus said, “Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.” (Matthew 5:42)

The world into which Jesus came was one in which the rich and powerful felt no duty to the poor and unfortunate. His followers changed that. They helped the poor, rescued abandoned infants, and took care of the sick, even victims of plague at the risk of their own lives. After Constantine made Christianity legal, the churches built hospitals in every bishop's city. The last pagan Roman emperor Julian, a nephew of Constantine, complained to the pagan priests that Christians “not only feed their own poor, but ours also...” He felt that pagans ought to imitate Christians in this regard in order to regain the popularity of the old gods. But the pagan gods did not love humans. Their relationships were purely transactional. The Christian God is the God who is love and his love extends to all. That changed how society acted towards the disadvantaged. That's what made western civilization Christian. Going from a nation that helps the underdogs to a dog-eat-dog one as some so-called Christians seem to want would be a regression to the way things were before Jesus came.

When we remember that all we are and all we have comes from God, it lifts the burden of ownership from our shoulders. It frees us from the desperate race to buy more and more things, which is what we are urged to do by today's omnipresent advertising. We should see ourselves instead as the servants of an immensely wealthy king, with instructions to spend the gifts he gives us of time, talent and treasure on making sure the others in his kingdom have enough of what they need. And when we die, it will not be the one who has the most toys who wins but the one who has made the most friends for God. And we know how much he values them by the high price God paid.

First preached on June 29, 2003. There has been some updating and revising.