Rescuing the Rich (First Sunday in Lent; Mark 10:23-31; February 14, 2016)

Rescuing the Rich

First Sunday in Lent
Mark 10:23-31
February 14, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

We Christians have a troubled history with money.

Jesus, on the other hand, seems to have been pretty clear about it. In the earliest form of the beatitudes, the one found in Luke 6. There Jesus tells his followers, "Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God." That seems pretty straight-forward, especially if we go on to read the parallel to this verse from the woes that follow: "But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation." In Jesus' eyes, the poor are blessed and rich are cursed.

But we Christians went to work right away to soften this harsh statement. In Matthew's version of the beatitudes, the one that we maybe memorized in our confirmation classes, Jesus says, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." This raises the possibility that we could be poor "in spirit" while still being rich in what? our bodies? our bank accounts? Anyway, the door is left open a little, so that rich among us Christians don't have to go away sad.

There are other signs of this softening in the New Testament. Paul, for example, criticizes the rich in the Corinthian church, but not in a way that suggests that wealth itself is a problem. They shouldn't bring their gourmet delicacies to eat at the church's potluck suppers in front of people who hardly afford to eat at all. Paul, for his part, depends on the generosity of the wealthy, or at least the upper middle class, to support his ministry. He typically stayed at the home of one of them while he was in town, sometimes for several months. Paul needs the wealthy-ish.

Later, this trajectory continues. Clement, a teacher in ancient Alexandria in Egypt who worked in the late third and early fourth centuries, taught that, while wealth was dangerous [Clement of Alexandria, "Who Is the Rich Man That Shall Be Saved", 1], it could be possessed without harm. It is possible to be literally poor and be consumed with wanting to be wealthy [Clement, 12]. So then true spiritual poverty is this:

But if one is able in the midst of wealth to turn from its power, and to entertain moderate sentiments, and to exercise self-command, and to seek God alone, and to breathe God and walk with God, such a poor man submits to the commandments, being free, unsubdued, free of disease, unwounded by wealth. [Clement, 26]

This would be true even if the poor man that Clement describes happens to be a rich man.

So wealth itself in Clement's view--and he was certainly not alone--became morally neutral. What mattered for him was the internal attitude toward wealth.

Our own John Wesley preached on "The Use of Money." He argued that Christians should do three things: 1) Make as much as they can, 2) Save as much as they can, and 3) Give away as much as they can. Of course, he expanded and explained each of those. We should make money in ways that do not harm ourselves or others and are not forbidden or unlawful. We should live on as little as we can. Then we should give away the rest. He was pretty sure that Methodists would be able and willing to obey the first two directions. He wasn't so sure about the third. Perhaps he was right.

Then, of course, in our time we have had the rise of what is called the Prosperity Gospel. Many if not most television preachers fit belong in this camp. Prosperity Gospel argues that Wealth is a sign of God's favor that is given to those who believe and act on God's promises. Christians are supposed to have and enjoy riches in this life. So we have people like Joel Osteen who is worth tens of millions and who lives in a ten million dollar parsonage in Houston. But within the horizon of the Prosperity Gospel he serves, not as an example of clergy corruption and greed, but as a shining example of what can and should happen for all Christians who believe and act on God's promises.

It doesn't hurt that he is able to project an image that suggests that he is completely surprised by his own success and finds it barely comprehensible. There is something about him that just makes me want to root for him.

It isn't clear what we can take away from this strange history. What is clear is that we Christians aren't clear about how we should think about wealth.

Our culture isn't much help. We seem to have gotten Wesley's first rule down pretty well. We tell our kids to go to college because a college education is the ticket to having a "good job," by which we mean a job that pays well and doesn't involve getting dirty. We even look at college and universities and we evaluate them on how good an investment they are. And by that we mean, the average lifetime income of its graduates divided by the cost to attend.

At the same time, we think there is something not quite right about a pastor who lives in a ten million dollar parsonage. And we are quite willing to dispise someone like Martin Shkreli, the investment banker whose Turing Pharmaceuticals bought the rights to drug Daraprim and promptly raised its price from $13.50 a tablet to $750. Shkreli has since been arrested and charged with fraud, but the price hike was perfectly legal. All he was doing was attempting maximize his profits.

With all of this rolling around in our heads, with all of our experience of money and wealth (mostly other peoples'), with the Church's inability to sort this out, it is no wonder that we come away from hearing today's lesson, well, in the words of the reading itself, "dismayed...saddened...startled...shocked." There doesn't seem to be anyone who finds any good news here.

I'm going to skip lightly over the first part of the lesson. The man's question and Jesus' responses to it are worthy of their own sermon. I'm more concerned by the explanation that Jesus gives his followers after the man went away dismayed and saddened.

Jesus has probably not asked any of us to sell all that we possess and give the money to the poor, so we're not making up excuses in our heads for the why Jesus' demand was so outrageous. This, after all, could simply be pastoral care adapted to meet the needs of this one parishioner.

My head goes to work when Jesus begins to talk in general about wealth and entering the kingdom of heaven. Like the disciples I'm startled and shocked. Maybe it's because I know how translations sometimes make it easier to evade the text. For example, I could let myself off the hook because Jesus says, “It will be very hard for the wealthy to enter God’s kingdom!” After all, I'm not exactly wealthy! "It’s easier for a camel to squeeze through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter God’s kingdom." But I'm not really a rich person, either.

But that's not what the text actually says in Greek. There, it is "It will be very hard for those who have possessions to enter God's kingdom." What's the difference? Well, in the ancient world there were three classes of people: the destitute, the poor, and the rich. The destitute did not have resources to sustain their own lives. The poor were those who had to work to make a living. The rich were those who had enough productive land that they didn't need to involve themselves on a daily basis in the business of making a living. They had people for that. It's a little like the distinction I've heard between those who work for their money and those whose money works for them.

But I'm a little of both and so, I suspect, are most of you. I have a pension fund, money that the churches where I've served and I have contributed that is then invested in a variety of financial instruments so that when I retire, there will be an income or at least a nest egg. I am, by the standards of the ancient world, both poor and rich at the same time. So at least part of what Jesus is saying applies to me, camel and needle's eye and all.

Like the camel I can try to wiggle out of it, to wriggle through some loophole I think I see, so I can claim to be okay without having to make any uncomfortable changes. But this a vain effort. Our world tells us that we ought to make a lot of money so we can have a lot of possessions, the kind of possessions that make for a comfortable retirement. But it is clear that Jesus sees things differently. For him wealth is dangerous to us and the more we have of it the more likely it is that we will serve it and the less likely it is that we will serve God because it is impossible--not unlikely, not hard--impossible to serve both money and God.

So that leaves me in a quandry: what about my pension plan? What would I do without it, besides living in rather dire poverty, I mean? Jesus gives us a glimpse of an alternative. In Jesus' day wealth was seldom personal; it was part of a legacy, an inheritance, a patrimony. The possessions that Jesus speaks of--lands and houses--are inheritable. To abandon that sort of property was to abandon the families that went with it. This perhaps is why Jesus tells the disciples who have left their families and modest properties behind that they "will receive one hundred times as much now in this life—houses, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, and farms (with harassment)—and in the coming age, eternal life." Leaving their own families, they will enter a different sort of community, the community of Jesus followers, and the resources of the whole community will be theirs if they need it. It comes down to a choice between having my own and being in it for myself on the one hand or being part of a commonwealth and being in it together with all Christians on the other hand.

Maybe. I'm still not sure. I'm still trying to get over being startled and shocked by Jesus' words and by what they imply. I still don't get it. That's okay. It's clear that Jesus' disciples didn't get it either. He isn't done with them. He's not done with me either.