Debts

Propers: Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 23), AD 2021 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court? Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you? … If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

Boy, James isn’t pulling any punches with us this morning, is he? And on Labor Day Weekend, no less.

The Bible’s relationship to wealth, both in its pages and in its history since, has been complicated, contradictory, and confrontational at best. There are clearly times and places when prosperity was seen as proof of God’s favor. The crass version of this would be: God prefers Jacob over Laban, therefore Jacob has more sheep. A more nuanced interpretation would be that one who lives uprightly, according to the Law of the Lord, reaps the just reward of honest labor.

And it’s certainly true that living wisely, living well, earns us wealth—sometimes. For a counterpoint, one might want to read Ecclesiastes, or Job, or Jesus for that matter.

More important than the wealth, though, was how that wealth was used. Abraham is the exemplar of hospitality par excellence, who immediately runs out to greet strangers in the desert, and to fête them with sumptuous foods, curds and calves. The purpose of wealth is to share it, to steward for others the good gifts of God. Nothing is ever really, truly ours. Wealth is entrusted to us but for a season. What matters is what we do with it, and how we give it away. Shall we be good stewards?

Remember the poor, God is always repeating. Remember the orphan and the widow, the people who have no support, no security, no recourse save God and you. Reap the rewards of your labor, and care for your neighbor in his need. These two go hand-in-hand, especially in a Middle Eastern environment where charity and hospitality are matters of life or death. We must save the stranger, in the Bible, for one day we may well be strangers ourselves, in sure need of salvation.

Things get more complicated with the introduction of money. See, for much of the Bible, there’s no such thing as cash. The Egyptians, Canaanites, Assyrians, Babylonians, none of them had coins. None of them had currency. They just weighed things. The first coins, according to the Greeks, were minted in Lydia, in Anatolia, modern day Turkey. Ever heard of the wealth of King Croesus? Of course he was rich; his father invented money!

Once Persia conquered Lydia, and discovered these wonderful things called coins, they spread money everywhere: India, Egypt, Israel; eventually all the way to China. And this was something different, this was something new. No longer would wealth be measured in flocks and herds and fields, in ingots of silver and grams of gold. Now the value of the coin was guaranteed by the king—indeed, by the Emperor himself. Now you could amass a fortune, and keep it in a bag on your belt. It’s a neat trick.

Intoxicating, too. For what is wealth, if not power? What is wealth, if not choice? Pay a man enough, and he’ll walk barefoot into hell. To have that kind of power in your hand is to be like unto a god. And if it’s the coin that makes you a god—how much more must the coin itself be a god? Worthy of worship. Worthy of sacrifice. Mammon is a rival god, one of the seven medieval princes of hell. “You cannot serve both God and mammon,” Jesus admonishes. Mammon is wealth that separates us from God, which takes His place in our hearts and on our altars. Mammon is the spirit, the idea, of money as our master.

How much clearer is this today when coins aren’t even made of valuable metals? Cash is printed on paper made from rags. And most money—well, most modern money isn’t even worth that. It’s just numbers on a screen. It’s just an idea. An idea of debt and of power. An idea of who gets to choose and who gets to pay.

By the time of the New Testament, Israel is a part of Rome: de facto, and soon de iure. And the wealth of Rome is almost unimaginable. For the elites, having to work, having a job, is considered vulgar, a sort of prostitution, selling your body. The truly worthy have money enough to do anything: raise a building, raise an army, raise a rocket ship to space. And the early Christian community rejected this: not with a political party or armed insurrection but by sharing all things in common.

That’s right. You can read all about it in the Acts of the Apostles. Members of a local church would sell what they had and pool their resources. And if a church in another city fell on hard times, someone like Paul would go around to the different churches gathering up our gifts for those who are in need. It was communitarian, egalitarian, and ultimately, it seems, unsustainable. The Jerusalem church ran out of money.

But that didn’t stop the Church Fathers, during the early centuries of our faith, from preaching things that would get them run out of town today.

“When someone steals a man’s clothes, we call him a thief,” wrote Basil the Great:

Should we not give the same name to one who could clothe the naked but does not? The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry man. The coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to the man who needs it. The shoes rotting away in your closet belong to the man who has no shoes. The money which you hoard up belongs to the poor.

John Chrysostom, one of our greatest preachers, proclaimed:

This then is robbery: not to share one’s resources. Perhaps what I am saying astonishes you. Yet be not astonished. For I shall offer to you the testimony of the sacred Scriptures, which say that not to share your own with others is robbery and greediness and theft. Do you give to the poor? What you give is not yours but your Master’s, common to you and your fellow-servants.

Now that sounds downright anti-American, doesn’t it?

Wealth has always been a sensitive topic. Never ask a man what he makes, I often hear. And we, who spent 50 years fighting a Cold War between capitalism and communism, we are especially touchy about our property and our wealth. On some level, we really do think that a man’s bank account is a man’s worth. We really do think that billionaires earned every last red cent and they don’t owe a blessed thing to anyone. That’s quite a trick they pulled, convincing us of that.

Now, I know that money makes the world go ‘round. I know that for all of its excesses, and for all the environmental damage with which we must reckon, the free market has also lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty just in this century. But I also know that we are daily enslaved and oppressed by an ideology of limitless consumption, limitless debt, where the dollar is almighty and all other concerns remain immaterial. Human rights and freedom have never been the currency of the realm. Alas, it appears that only currency is the currency of the realm.

And Christ has come to free us from this. Not by welcoming us to some socialist utopia. Certainly not by endorsing a libertarian creed of self-sufficiency. But Christ has come to set us free, forgive our sins, and raise us to life everlasting as co-heirs of the Kingdom of God. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors! You aren’t your bank account. You aren’t your property. You aren’t your credit card debt. Lord, if money were the answer, the rich would be a whole lot happier than they are. You are children of God. You are the Body of Christ. You are immortal.

Everything we have is gift. I’m not saying you don’t work hard; I know that you do. But everything good we have is entrusted to us by the One from whom all good things flow. He calls us as His stewards to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Manage and use whatever you have as He intends, for the common good, for your neighbor in his need. If you are rich, learn now and well what riches are for, for we shall all be answerable for the talents entrusted to us. And if you are poor and find yourself in need, do not be afraid to stand up and claim what you deserve.

So often it seems that nobody’s trying to fix the problems in our society. We’re all just trying to make enough money so that those problems don’t apply to us. But it’s not about money, not really. It’s about letting money go; about releasing mammon’s hold on us. The excess that you don’t need, other people do, and that’s where we’ll find Christ. That’s where our faith comes alive.

In the words again of St John Chrysostom: “If you cannot find Christ in the beggar at the door, then neither will you find Him in the chalice.”

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.