Luke 12:32-34
I wondered as we approached this theme whether the news as we hear it or read it and the Good news of scripture might be mutually exclusive. If you are an avid “news junky” you will realize that this is not always the case. A couple of weeks ago I preached a sermon entitled, “who is my Neighbour?” The Toronto star had a series in it recently exploring interesting neighbour relationships in the GTA some of them not just interesting but inspiring.
This week I was pleasantly surprised again to find something in the news that seemed to directly illustrate the Good news of the gospel Lectionary text for this week which was read for us by ……………………………………..
In our text this week we hear “Sell whatever you own and give the money to poorer people, Make purses for yourselves that don’t wear out- treasures that won’t fail you.
Well, on Wednesday of this week 40 Billionaires pledged to give away half their money.
Spearheaded by Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates, The Giving Pledge project aims to recruit the richest of the rich. It’s not a charity itself. Participants simply promise to give at least 50 per cent of their cash to projects of their choosing, during their lifetime or after their deaths.
I was intrigued and so I went to their website, thegivingpledge.org to see what all of this was about. On that site you will find the pledge letters of those who have chosen to participate. These letters vary significantly in the reasons these wealthy individuals cite for giving away half of their wealth. Apparently Warren Buffet is planning to give away 99 percent of his wealth without compromising the needs or wants of himself or his family. He talks openly about his material wealth and what he thinks of possessions.
Quote from Warren Buffet, he says,
Some material things make my life more enjoyable; many, however, would not. I like having an expensive private plane, but owning a half-dozen homes would be a burden. Too often, a vast collection of possessions ends up possessing its owner. The asset I most value, aside from health, is interesting, diverse, and long-standing friends.
He also admits that his wealth is the result of as he and his family call it “winning the ovarian lottery” – the time and place of his birth simply being what they were and he says,
My luck was accentuated by my living in a market system that sometimes produces distorted results, though overall it serves our country well. I’ve worked in an economy that rewards someone who saves the lives of others on a battlefield with a medal, rewards a great teacher with thank-you notes from parents, but rewards those who can detect the mispricing of securities with sums reaching into the billions. In short, fate’s distribution of long straws is wildly capricious.
Tom Steyer and Kat Taylor (who became rich through investing well) – also on this giving pledge page – name Saint Francis as their inspiration – In their letter they remind us that [Saint Francis] stripped himself of his worldly goods (including clothes), identified with animals, and kissed the sores of lepers. Tom and Kat go on to say,
Because what he did came to define him, St. Francis is our epitome of a “to do” kind of guy. While we might struggle to emulate his example in many ways (while keeping our clothes on), we can see that an active life like his – he spent it famously consoling, understanding, loving, giving, and pardoning — promises the greatest satisfaction.
Though they are not about to take a similar vow of poverty, they understand there is little point to having more money or possessions than they could ever want or need and wish to leave their kids a different kind of inheritance – the desire to lead a worthwhile life – a life of doing good things with their resources in fun and constructive ways.
As I read through several of the pledge letters I was struck by one commonality – even though many of them acknowledge that their wealth came to them in surprising and unexpected or lucky ways – right time, right place, right kind of market economy that benefits a few in billions of dollars,
all of them view the resources they have gathered as their own resources to do with as they wish
This is part of their power. They are not only wealthy they are very powerful with a lot of say over vast resources and their use. Power and wealth seem to go hand in hand. I will get back to this issue of wealth and power later in my sermon.
I read this article online and so I was also able to enjoy reading the comments beneath the article. A few comments lauded the article as good news, but many expressed unconcealed anger at the wealth and power of these individuals, whose companies and investments generated inconceivable amounts of personal wealth through exploitation. One particular comment reads:
wait a second
In the process of doing business you moved work overseas and exploited the workers. You bought businesses up and bankrupted others to gain dominance, you forced people into unemployment countless times……
and it goes on.
There are also critics who wonder, thoughtfully, who actually will be benefited by this move? Only time will tell.
And so this morning, my question is, what do we make of this “news” in light of the gospel injunction in today’s passage “to sell our possessions and give our money to the poor. Make purses for ourselves that don’t wear out… where thieves cannot steal and moths cannot destroy. For wherever our treasure is that is where our heart will be also.”
First, I’ll say more about wealth and power. Billionaires are not the only ones with wealth and power. I know that I have wealth and power. Most of us in this room, by virtue of the fact that we live in North America and have a roof over our heads, a job or prospects for a job, enough to eat, friends and family and a social safety n
et that works at least some of the time and live in a country where war and the ravages of war seem far away, are probably in the top 2 percent of the most wealthy in the world. And like these billionaires, in our society and economy, we have a say in what we plan to do with the resources that we have been given.
Given. The resources we have been given. Herein lies the key to everything.
If we read today’s Luke text carefully, we hear, “Fear not, little flock, for it has pleased your Abba or father to give you the kingdom. And then it goes on to say sell what you own and give the money to the poor …. But first we have been given the Kingdom.
A bit of background to this text: It’s hard to tell in this part of the book of Luke whether we are hearing Jesus’ words to the disciples and crowds or Luke’s words to the community reading his text initially, but either way, if we go back a little bit farther in this chapter, the hearers of this text are being exhorted to beware of greed and anxiety about worldly possessions. Luke records the story of the wealthy farmer who built bigger barns to manage his surplus of produce and then died without being able to take advantage of his wealth. This is how it works with people who accumulate riches for themselves, but are not rich in God,” the text says. Then we hear “don’t worry about your life – what you will eat or what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?…. God knows that you need these things …set your heart and eyes on the Kingdom of God and all these other things will be given to you as well. Fear not little flock, for it has pleased your father to give you the kingdom. (as I wrote this sermon I worried a little about what I should eat for lunch and what I should wear to go out in the evening and I checked my bank account to make sure my bills were paid and and and – have you ever paid attention to how often we think about the things that in this text we are exhorted not to worry about?)
But back to the text: First, it has pleased God, I imagine it delighted God, to give us the kingdom. And the Kingdom – God’s politic and God’s economy – is full of abundance. – It is, in fact, everything we need. Do we know how counter-cultural these words are? We have been given everything we need. As children of God formed in the mists of time as part of God’s good creation –
our life is gift,
the resources of the earth are gift,
our resources of time and love and mercy and grace are all gift.
And our very human failing is to view these gifts as possessions – to do with as we will/wish/want.
[Indigenous people] understood a cardinal property of gift: whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again, not kept. The essential is this: the gift must always move.. “One man’s gift,” they say, “must not be another man’s capital.[i]
In our market economy where one of the foundational principals is to create scarcity or fear of scarcity so that prices will rise, our tendency is to hoard what we have been given. We may call it saving for a rainy day. I have a symbolic example of this tendency in my basement. I have several examples of this in my basement, but I’ll tell you about one of them. There was a time in my life when my children were small, that I had time to piece quilts. I haven’t had time for that since I began studying for my first Masters Degree about 13 years ago. Way back then, I folded up my fabrics, my unfinished pieces, my extra cotton batting and I put them in two dressers that I purchased second hand. Those dressers and fabrics have followed me through three moves and still sit in my basement untouched. I told my mother this summer that soon I would be giving the fabric away. She said, “oh no” you’ll get back to it someday. Well, she may be right. My mother is wise, but there is something stronger building in me, a deep need within to stop the holding/hoarding of things in my basement. Even my eldest son said to me recently, “when you look around this basement, it’s as if we have a house in order to store stuff.” My son is also wise. I ask myself, what happens if the fabric and the time I spent making quilts can be viewed as a gift instead of a possession. If it is a gift it has become a gift that has stopped moving? What would it take to get it moving again? I could either use it or give it away. If I give it away, maybe it will come back as a gift another day and maybe it won’t. If it doesn’t, maybe I won’t need it.
Even though everything is gift, another very human tendency is to claim the power and the right and the autonomy to be the one who decides, me alone, what I’m going to do with “my” resources. My brother lives in Texas and when he first moved to Texas about 7 years ago,
he converted quickly to support for Republicans and the Bush administration. We couldn’t talk about politics in my family of origin any longer. And then my brother chose for ethical reasons to leave the well-paying job that he had and found himself for the first time living without work in the United States with a wife and two young sons and no health insurance. A shift began in his thinking. Shortly after this shift in his thinking, he raised the question of support for Obama’s health care plan in his, Grapevine, Texas, Sunday school class. He was almost “ridden out of town,” he told me. “If you tell the people in my Sunday school class that someone has a need, you can pass the hat and raise more than two thousand dollars in a matter of five minutes, but raise the idea that a 1 percent raise in taxes for everyone could provide millions of people with health care and they think you have two heads.”
What this story raises is the role and responsibility of community in how and where we use our resources. I don’t think that in some ways we are much different than the good folks in Grapevine, Texas. We sometimes chaff under our burden of taxes, partly because of our own desire for autonomous generosity and partly because we don’t always approve of where our tax dollars are spent. Even so, it requires a significant shift in thinking if we acknowledge that all of our resources are gifts from God – our life, and the circumstances that have allowed us to be wealthy. If this is truly so, then maybe the community of God’s people may have some legitimate say in how these gifts move.
We, the members of a North American, Mennonite church are wealthy and powerful people. The Billionaires who are pledging to give away half or more of their wealth are not the only ones. Whatever their motives and fundamental assumptions about their vast wealth, I think their generosity is important to notice. I don’t know where their treasure is, but their hearts are being moved in some way. God has already given us the Kingdom and has delighted to do so – We have everything we need.
What I have hoped to do with my sermon this morning is to open up the question of our resources, how we view them and what implications this has for how they move within and among us. I hope this conversation can and will continue among us. I know that the Adult Education planners are considering something for this theme in the fall. A couple of resources I would like to rec
ommend for your summer reading if you are interested are Mary Jo Leddy’s Radical Gratitude – where she discusses our economy’s propensity for creating a culture of perpetual dissatisfaction – and then moves on in her book to concrete ideas about how we move beyond this enculturation. I have also found helpful Ched Myers writings: in particular The Biblical Vision of Sabbath Economics and Sabbath Economics: Household Practices.
Let us thank God for knowing what we need and for the delight God takes in Giving us the Kingdom. May this Treasure consume our hearts.
[i] A quote by Lewis Hyde in: “the Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property” quoted in The Biblical Vision of Sabbath Economics, p.4 by Ched Myers, December 2008.