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And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.
(Lk. 16:12-13) With these words from scripture suddenly we are all to dismiss our physical existence as a mere shadow of our promised lives together in that Great Economic Free Zone in the Sky. We are spirit. We are...stardust. We are to prioritize our lives to eschew the material things and embrace the spiritual. Amen.
…or not.
I have too much going on in my head this week. I’m thinking about the ongoing global economic crisis. I’m too aware of the economic realities facing many of our neighbors and us right now. And so I turn to Luke to see what he has to say about money and all I get is this message about idolatry that Jesus is giving his disciples. These are uneasy times for many people…and this is an uneasy passage of scripture. And maybe it’s for this reason alone that I am drawn to it. I too am uneasy.
A friend of mine calls this an "untamed" parable.
Even Luke himself seems to wrestle with it.
"What does it mean?
Well, here are three possible meanings,
but I’m not really sure myself."
Maybe the placement of the parable in the narrative can help…?
After the Prodigal, before…The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all this, and they ridiculed [Jesus.] So he said to them, “You are those who justify yourselves in the sight of others; but God knows your hearts; for what is prized by human beings is an abomination in the sight of God…everyone tries to enter the Kingdom of God by force, but it is easier for Heaven and Earth to pass away…(Lk. 16:14-17ish) Perhaps, Luke’s Jesus is trying to help us understand that the Kingdom of God is a gift and we have to live into it. We cannot force it into being. That would be the mistake of a theocracy or Puritanism. The Kingdom is a like a garment that is two sizes too big. You have to grow into it somehow.
That is why Luke struggles.
That is why I struggle.
This is a parable addressed to the disciples. They are being reminded that they are already recipients of the Kingdom. Thus all they have and all they are belong to God. But this is not to encourage them to step away from the material world in some nihilistic spiritualism, but to embrace our physicality for the sake of our spirituality. This is the Kingdom of God. There’s enough room in this thing for everyone…for the whole world. But first, someone has to start acting like it. Thus, Jesus turns to the disciples…and Luke explains…
And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own?
I remember one evening in college I was sitting with members of the Baptist Student Union. We were discussing this very issue. There we were at the University of Richmond (affectionately called by many students "The University of Rich Kids") trying to speak seriously about our own understandings of wealth. Some of us argued that as people of privilege, it was our responsibility to step away from that privilege and give someone else a shot. Others of us believed that it was essential that we make certain that we were secure financially before we helped those less financially stable. It was an interesting conversation...clearly, I remember it even now.
What I understood only years later is that the chaplains that day were trying to get us to understand this parable from Luke. They were trying to get us to understand that we must take our material world very, very seriously. They weren't asking for the right answer (At that age, all we knew to do was look for "the right answer" even when there clearly isn't one.). They were asking for serious consideration. The answers (and there are many) would come later.
"You have been given a gift," Jesus says. What is our own is the Kingdom. And the Kingdom that has been given to us gives context to all that we have...and how we live with and for one another. This is what it means to "share all things in common."
God frames this in terms of economics not because we’re to create a political platform that resembles God’s economics, but because the Kingdom of God is real, it is physical, it is relational, and it is practical; it is material.
Our material lives are what we have to give to one another.
Our material lives are what are at stake every moment of every day
and Jesus desires that we be shrewdly aware of this truth.
No matter what our economic realities are, we are to live into the Kingdom. This gift is for every time, every place, and all people. We don’t have to wait for the end of the crisis to live into the Kingdom. We don’t have to wait for the end of Communism or the end of a Democrat controlled congress…whatever it is we are waiting for. No.
The time is now.
It’s always now.
The Kingdom is here.
It has been given to us.
And you who are the Church are asked to live this life no matter what the economy does, or how culture and government might change.
God desires us to be more aware of our material lives and not less…
but not to force our way into the Kingdom, but to recognize that we are in it already.
It’s a glorious paradox. It’s spiritualism and materialism at the same time…Jesus is fully divine and fully human and so too is the Kingdom that has been given to us.
And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own?
This week the first run of statistics on poverty in America have been publicly released. The Heartland Alliance has extracted the Illinois specific report from the larger report and it is, as you might imagine, a difficult read.
Between 2008 and 2009 the number of families living in poverty, that is a family of four living on an annual income below $22,050 has risen 14% in Illinois. That is approximately 214,000 new people living in poverty. In the United States there are 3,739,000 more people living in poverty than there were in 2008. Economists suggest that these numbers may be our new normal for a while. No one knows the depth or scope of the effects of the present recession.
Children and single parent homes were hit the hardest.
"Global capitalism," says Juliet Schor in her book Plenitude, "shattered in 2008. The financial system came frighteningly close to a total collapse and was saved only by government guarantees and massive injections of cash. An astounding $50 trillion of wealth was erased globally. Economic pain drove people into the streets around the world from Iceland to Greece, Egypt to China. Since then, the global economy has been rescued, but it hasn't been fixed."
What then will it take to fix this? There are expert economic opinions out there. I'm not going to offer you one of those. Because, to be honest, I am not sure anything will fix this mess, but Churches do have a part to play in the economic realities of the world. So, I want to offer you a spiritual foundation.
We worship an incarnational, materialistic God. Thus, we give our bodies, our possessions, our material lives over to the task of being the Church in the world…because we have been given the Kingdom. We are called to be fully human and fully divine. It’s not a balancing act. It’s a paradox. It will take grace to make it happen.
The parable and Luke’s explication afterward suggest that our material lives are what connect us one to another. And when misappropriated, misunderstood, or mismanaged, our material lives can drive us apart. The economics of the Kingdom of God are founded on shared identity and interconnection… specifically in our material lives…but not so that we can show off like the Pharisees, but so that we can live for the sake of one another.
Jesus wants us to take our material lives even more seriously than the Pharisees do.
And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own?
There is room in the Kingdom for everyone. We simply must live like it.
Amen. |
