Dealing with Money

Ordinary Time XXVIII; October 15, 2006

Mark 10:17-31

This is our memory verse today: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” (v. 25)

I have a rather ambivalent relationship with money. On the one hand, I really enjoy money: it has the power to purchase nice things, to foster comfort and ease, and it has the power to do enormous good. It’s great that members of this congregation participate in Nicaraguan Credit Alternatives in order to provide credit to improve the lives of Nicaraguans, and that some of our Endowment Fund is invested in Nicaraguan Credit Alternatives. It’s great that the Nobel Peace Prize this year honors Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank for the great use of money in providing micro-credit in Bangladesh. And, as a former math geek, I enjoy working with figures; handling money gives me that opportunity. This may sound like the symptom of a mental illness to you, but I actually enjoy doing our income taxes.

On the other hand, money and property are a trap. There never seems to be enough money; research has shown that, no matter how much money we have, we think we will be happier if we have just a little bit more. Since no matter how much money I have, that trap will be out there, I have decided to change my way of thinking about it. And consider the things we own, the things money allows us to have. For example, most of us own a car, and the rest probably either used to own one or will own one some day. My convertible was the result, of course, of a mid-life crisis, and I enjoy it very much, thank you. But do I own it or does it own me? Since I own a car, I have to buy gasoline, insurance, registration, and pay for maintenance and repairs. The universal ownership of private cars and trucks is the reason we no longer have train service to Clarinda, that transportation options in the United States are more limited than they used to be. We like to think of our cars as symbols of freedom – and never do I feel that more keenly than on a spring day on Highway 2 with the top down, the wind blowing through what’s left of my hair – but, at the same time, cars have become symbols of our entrapment.

You can think about virtually everything else you own, and recognize the same ambivalence: a house, a DVD collection, a vacation home, a computer, video games, and – oh my, now I’m really getting personal – books. Imagine Jesus looked at you, and said, “You’ve done a real good job at your life so far. You’re a pillar of the community, you keep the commandments, you use your money and influence well. I really like you and want you to go with me. Sell everything, give the money to the poor, and come with me.” Can you identify with the man’s reaction? He was shocked that Jesus would say such a thing, and was deeply sad that he could not do it. Could you? Could I?

Now, don’t try wriggling out of it by saying, “Oh, but this man was rich, and I’m only middle class.” If you own a house or a car or truck or as many books as I do, then you fit the profile.

There are two things I want to accomplish before this sermon is over: sketch the Bible’s instructions about money, and suggest why it’s so hard for the comfortably off to enter the kingdom of God – so maybe we can do something about it. The Bible has a lot to say about money; these three principles summarize it: get it honestly, use it wisely, be generous with it. Big duh, right? Yet if it were so obvious, God would not need to repeat himself so often.

It does matter how one gets one’s money. Leaving it to a charitable foundation really is not atonement for having acquired it through defrauding the public, or monopolistic practices, or vicious destruction of the competition. Get it honestly. The reason the disciples were aghast that Jesus would say what he did about the rich is that their culture encouraged the rich to use their wealth for philanthropy and the benefit of the community. Well, the Bible encourages that: start businesses, employ people and pay them promptly; support your family but don’t spoil them; buy things you need but do not indulge in unnecessary luxury. Use your money to do good. I like to say that you can tell what you really believe in by looking at your checkbook – or your credit card statements. If you spend more on eating out in a month than you give to your church, then I suspect your stomach is more important to you than your soul. Get it honestly; use it wisely.

And the third principle is to be generous. Think of yourself as comfortably off and do not worry that if you give a dollar to this beggar then you will not be able to eat. And it’s not your job to decide if the beggar is going to use it wisely or not; it is your job to train yourself in generosity. Here’s a clue about the next-to-last thing Jesus says in our text: the reason his followers have an abundance of houses, relatives, fields – oh, and persecutions too; Jesus is consistently honest – is that those who follow Jesus share everything with each other. As Jesus envisions his church, if you own a house you do not own it for yourself and your family alone, but for your whole church, and so you also have a share in the home of everyone else in your church. No one in the church goes hungry, no one is homeless, no one is without family to call upon, because all are generous with each other. We’ll have to give some thought as to how to get Jesus’ church to actually look like that. Get it honestly; use it wisely; be generous with it.

The rich man in the story had done all that; don’t pretend he hadn’t. So why does Jesus say it is so hard for him and others like him to enter the kingdom of God? The clue is in the context: two things. Here is the first: Jesus just got finished saying that you cannot enter the kingdom of God unless you receive it as a child; I suggested last week that the statement implies that we get our identity as children of God. It is hard for those with money to think of themselves first as children of God; we tend to think about our money and our property and to identify ourselves by what we own. Here is a definition of a cynic, from Oscar Wilde: “A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.” (Lady Windermere’s Fan, act III) Do you know the value of a piece of land, in terms of what it contributes to the ecology, the animals and plants that live on it, its aesthetic beauty, its meaning to a particular family? Or do you know only its price?

Please indulge me another Ohio Renaissance Festival story. I wear some very nice things as part of my costume, and children generally do not ask me what they mean, or why I like them; they ask how much they cost. We grow cynical far too young. For example, I wear a very pretty ring that I say was a gift from my wife. In fact, of course, I bought it from a jeweler at the Festival, but as far as the story of my character goes, it was a gift from my character’s wife. A group of children admired the ring and asked where I got it. I said it was a gift from my wife. They did not say, “Oh, she must love you!” Or, “What is her name?” Or anything else about “my” (Alexander’s) relationship with “my wife” (Cordelia). They asked, “How much did it cost?” Even children have a hard time receiving the kingdom of God as a child, because they are taught in our culture to measure things by their price and not by their value, and to measure themselves not by the love of God, but by the things they can buy. That is why it is so hard for those with money and property to enter the kingdom of God: the tendency to measure their worth by what they own and can buy, rather than by the love of God.

And the second clue is that Jesus told the man to follow him, and the man could not. If you keep reading, you see where Jesus is going, where the man cannot go: to Jerusalem, to suffering, death and resurrection. Owning things makes it difficult to die; this world has such a hold on us that it is difficult to let it go. If we cannot die with Jesus, then we cannot live with him.

That is really all that needs to be said. If you want, take away from this sermon the three biblical principles for money, and hope that Jesus never looks you in the eye and asks for anything harder. Personally, what I am going to do is pray about my willingness to enter the kingdom of God, by caring less about the price of things I have than about the love of God, and by asking myself if I’m ready to give it all up, if necessary, and die with Jesus, so that I can be raised with him.

Lord Jesus, you do say the hardest things. Give us your Holy Spirit to make us able to do whatever you ask, even to follow you to Jerusalem. Amen.

Robert A. Keefer

Westminster Presbyterian Church

Clarinda, Iowa