The God of Wealth and Death

Propers: The Fourth Sunday of Easter, AD 2023 A

Homily:

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

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed! Alleluia!

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

“All who believed were together, and held all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods, and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.” Now that right there is a line guaranteed to raise just about everyone’s hackles.

The Acts of the Apostles provides us with a window unto the earliest Christian community in Jerusalem. Much of what we read should be familiar: teaching and fellowship, the breaking of bread and the prayers, Word and Sacrament. This is a community of mutual support, education, religious ritual, and charity—precisely the sort of thing, in other words, that served as a slap to the face of the Empire.

Rome was a highly hierarchical society, with the Emperor as a veritable god on earth, followed by the senatorial and equestrian elites, then those who possessed much-coveted Roman citizenship, and finally everybody else, all supported atop a massive base of subhuman slaves. It was a wonderful world in which to be rich. And it was hell on earth to anyone else who got in the way of their wealth.

So to have in the heart of rebellious Jerusalem this Christian community in which rich and poor, slave and free, man and woman, young and old, Jew and Greek, Roman and barbarian, all gathered together at the same table, all ate the same food, all praised the same God, was absolutely scandalous, subversive, revolutionary. It doesn’t seem like much to us: a supper-club, really. But they knew what they were doing, worshipping a crucified convicted criminal as King of Kings, Lord of Lords, and divine Savior of the world—all titles given to Augustus, to Caesar.

They were setting up an anti-Empire, an oasis of fellowship, forgiveness, love and generosity, in the midst of a population displaced and impoverished by the ravages of Rome. People with no country found the Kingdom of God in Christ. Little wonder, then, Acts speaks to us of miracles and signs, of the presence of God alive amongst the baptized, in the society of Jesus where He makes all things new.

And this Jesus movement, this Good News, spread like wildfire. Even taking into account hagiographic tendencies, later exaggerations and assumptions by Christians in power looking back upon the early Church as an inevitability, it still seems clear that this struck a chord with people, met a need in people. In many ways we were most effective, most powerful, when we had no power at all, when Christianity was for misfits and outcasts and ne’er-do-wells, back when the Church was more than a little bit crazy and we all spat at violence and death.

It wasn’t until we defeated Rome that Rome defeated us.

Socrates, Augustine, Aquinas, and Luther all agree that everyone has a religion because everyone holds something to be sacred. That’s your summum bonum, your greatest good, the thing that gets you out of bed in the morning. Whatever it is to which you bend the knee, that is your god. And however you strive to serve it, to commune with your god, that is your religion. The question then becomes not whether we believe in God but what gods we are already serving. For indeed, there is no irreligious species of humanity.

Should you ever be curious as to what it is that any given society holds to be sacred, simply look to that which you cannot criticize. Whatever you’re not allowed seriously to question or critique, that thing is sacred; it is sacrosanct. And those who claim to hold nothing as sacred, and to have no gods, are in some sense the worst fanatics of all, for they hold their truths to be self-evident. They can’t even question their faith, because they don’t see it as faith.

So now, my question to you: What is it that we as Americans cannot question? What is it we truly hold as sacred? It surely isn’t God, or the Bible, or Church; they’re anodyne. What raises our hackles, raises our ire, is when we question money. Money is the American god, just as she was for Rome. Good old Mammon, the root of all evil, how we love it so! And we are so far down the rabbit hole, we can’t even see it for what it is. We worship wealth even when we don’t have it, especially when we don’t have it. Now that right there is a god.

For centuries the powerful have choked on those verses: “All who believed were together, and held all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods, and distribute the proceeds to all.” It’s one of those parts of the Bible where priests fall over themselves to insist that it doesn’t actually mean what it says. When I was a kid, the big worry was that the whole thing sounded communist, when Jesus was a good capitalist, right?

Satan is mentioned 52 times in Scripture, while money and possessions are mentioned over 2000, twice as often as faith and prayer combined. It’s even more impressive when you realize that parts of the Bible predate the invention of money. Yet we don’t talk about it, do we? Churches never mention money save for when we need it, and we always need it. That’s power, right there, to have priests of the living God so consistently turn a blind eye out of deference to wealth.

Mammon, mind you, isn’t simply money. Currency is meant to be a means of exchange, a means to an end. Mammon is when money becomes an end in itself, when we hoard so much more than we need while others go hungry. And the worst offenders are billionaires—billionaires whom we laud as captains of industry, as superheroes, the real-life Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark. They earned that money, we say, and so maybe we can too, all us budding billionaires.

But this is simply because we aren’t very good at math. We don’t realize how big a billion is. A million seconds is about 11 and a half days. A billion seconds is 32 years. Right now, eight men on the planet, out of a population of eight billion, possess more than half of humanity’s wealth. Eight men out of eight billion! That’s obscene. That’s satanic. And the only reason we don’t think so, the only reason we don’t say so, is because we worship wealth. We go to war for wealth. Even the Romans knew that the god of wealth was the god of death.

You think I’m getting political. You think I’ve overstepped the bounds of my office. Talk about faith, preacher. Talk about religion. Oh, but I am, true faith and false. See, we are all part of a cult, so pervasive, so insidious, that we don’t know it’s a cult. We don’t even know that it’s there. It’s the cult of the atomistic individual, the cult of the postmodern self. Its prophets were Rousseau and Freud and Marx.

And its history of salvation unfolded like this: Rousseau came along and psychologized everything, made reality all about me and how I feel; then Freud sexualized psychology, at every stage of life; finally Marx politicized sexuality, so that everything is about power, everything is about class oppression. So now we think that what makes up an individual, the constituent parts of the human soul, are the ego, the libido, and political opinion: i.e. how I feel, what sex I’m having, and whom it is I hate. This we mistake for a soul. This we take on faith.

And the medium of exchange for all of this, the unquestioned sacrament of the cult of the individual, is cold hard cash. I can be anything I want! —so long as I can afford it. Thus, we aren’t trying to fix problems anymore. We’re just trying to make enough money so that the problems don’t apply to us.

Then we wonder—we wonder!—why it is we’re all lonely and depressed and stressed-out and despairing; why we’re all poorer now than we were in the 1970s because billionaires deserve rocket ships while children can’t get healthcare. And I for one am sick of it! “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

See, we still live under empire. We still live in a society that is riven by race, class, culture, gender, and the worship of false gods. We still suffer from displacement, alienation, pervasive violence, and war, just like those first Christians. And we are still the Church, the anti-empire, where all are welcome, where everyone can gather, around teaching and fellowship, the breaking of bread and the prayers. Here is Christ alive; in our neighbors, in strangers; in Word and Sacrament and the forgiveness of our sins.

People think we don’t need the Church anymore because it’s irrelevant, as though there were nothing from which Jesus needs to save us. For God’s sake, look around! We have a great need for a Savior. And we have a great Savior for our need.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

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

 

 

 

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