Matthew 6:19-24
Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness! No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.
This morning we close out our current series by asking ‘What does Christianity say about wealth?’ And to be clear from the start, I am referring to the concept in its broadest sense, including its absence. As with many of the topics we've looked at, the short answer is ‘it’s complicated’, because church and scripture don't always agree. We've seen that sometimes this is because scripture has set up a trajectory that the church has followed, so that it has rightly ended up in a more enlightened place. But we've also seen that sometimes this is because the church has shied away from the radical message of scripture, and has wrongly ended up in a more oppressive place. I believe that when it comes to wealth, we have strayed too far from the liberating truth of God's word to us. There are more than two thousand verses about wealth in scripture, yet large parts of the church have fixated on other issues that seem to have been of far less concern to the biblical writers, or God for that matter. And where the church has spoken of wealth, it has too often been to preach the prosperity gospel, falsely promising riches as a reward for faith and greedily amassing riches of its own. Of course that is not true of the church everywhere, but it is true of the church in enough places that what Christianity says about wealth has become distorted. I can't think of anything further from an itinerant rabbi who preached generosity and humility than a megachurch pastor with a dozen sports cars and a helipad on the roof of his church, and yet that is the image that so many people see projected.
Before we get deeper into what Christianity says about wealth, let's take a moment to set the context it is speaking into right now, because like all the topics we have considered so far, this is not just an academic question. What we can say most clearly is that wealth is not evenly distributed. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 3.8 million people in the UK experienced destitution in 2022, and the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2023 recorded that more than 1 billion people in the developing world were living in poverty. The World Inequality Report 2022 stated that the richest 10% of the global population took 52% of global income, whereas the poorest half earned only 8.5%. And because the rich can save while the poor need to spend, that richest 10% own 76% of global wealth, while that poorest half own a tiny 2%. In an interesting development, inequality between countries has decreased over the past two decades, but inequality within countries has doubled. And this poverty and inequality have real effects. A study by The King’s Fund found that a baby boy born in one of the least deprived areas in the UK in 2020 has a life expectancy that is ten years longer than a baby boy born in one of the most deprived areas. And a 2021 report from the mental health charity Mind noted that those with lived experience of poverty are more likely to experience mental health challenges, whilst also facing additional barriers to accessing mental health services.
It can be difficult to get our heads around statistics like those, but the bottom line is that as a global community we have a huge problem with wealth. And worst of all, it is not a problem of scarcity but of injustice. There is plenty to go around, but the rich profit at the expense of the poor, and the poor suffer to satisfy the greed of the rich. With that context in mind, it is vitally important that we look to God for a better understanding of wealth and a better vision of society, and so at this point we will turn to scripture. Beginning with the Old Testament, we see that over and over again, God is presented as the protector and defender of the vulnerable and the marginalised. This is sometimes referred to as God's preferential option for the poor, a phrase most associated with Catholic social teaching and liberation theology. As far as I understand it, it doesn't mean that God has favourites, but rather that God is trying to level the playing field, which means taking the side of those the game is rigged against.
One of the ways in which this preferential option manifests is the many protections for the poor in the Mosaic law, which appear to have been unique in ancient near eastern legislation. Perhaps most significantly, landowners were instructed that the fields were not to be stripped bare, so that the poor could take what was left to satisfy their hunger. It wasn’t quite a welfare state, but concern for the needs of the poor certainly took a significant position in defining what was expected of the rich. Complicating that picture somewhat, the Book of Proverbs contains several verses that associate poverty with laziness and commend hard work as a means to wealth, which is perhaps where the idea that God helps those who help themselves comes from. That phrase has so often been used to stereotype those who find themselves in poverty and excuse those who refuse to help them, but we have to balance it against the laws which demand action from the rich and the powerful. We also have to be honest that not everyone is able to work hard, and it is entirely possible to be both hard working and poor, so the proverbs alone are quite simply inadequate, and a pithy saying does not necessarily make for good social policy. Perhaps taking everything together, we might suggest that what is needed is for everyone to exercise all the diligence and generosity they are capable of.
Moving to the New Testament, we continue to see God’s preferential option for the poor. It perhaps comes through most strongly in the Gospel of Luke, where Mary sings of God filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich away empty, the birth of Christ is a announced first to shepherds on the night shift, and Jesus marks the beginning of his public life by reading from the prophet Isaiah to declare that he has come to bring good news to the poor. And that's only in the first four chapters! From there, Jesus speaks a lot about money, often in ways that are surprising, but always in ways that show a concern for those with the least economic power. We’ll come to some of what he said shortly, but the early church seems to have taken it seriously, because Acts says that the believers held everything in common, and the role of the deacon was established to make sure no one was overlooked in the daily distribution of food. Although that is not to say that the early church always got it right, because it seems from Paul’s letters that he was concerned about inequality in some of the communities he was writing to. The believers in Corinth were each bringing their own food to shared meals, so that the rich were feasting while the poor were going hungry, and this was being taken as a sign of who had God’s approval. Paul’s disapproval is clear, as he says their meetings are doing more harm than good and they are humiliating those who have nothing, and it is at this point that he gives instructions for the Lord’s Supper as a corrective. Churches were probably one of the few places that social classes mixed - they probably still are - and Paul was determined that wealth would not divide those communities.
I don't know how widespread the communal living described in Acts ever was, or how long it lasted even within that community of believers, but it is clear from Christian history that it did not take hold in any significant way outside of the monastic tradition. And yet considerations of wealth continued to be important, as seen in the works of early Christian theologians such as John of Chrysostom. He advocated for a return to the apostolic practice of holding all things in common, but recognised that his hearers were not ready for so radical a change, and so in a series of sermons based on the story of Lazarus and the rich man, he addressed those seeking to find a Christian way of living in a world of unequal riches. He believed that the rich must hold their property as stewards for the poor, sharing their wealth without regard to the moral qualities of those who received it, because to spend more than was necessary on themselves was to steal from those in need. It seems to me that this is somewhere between the community we saw in the early church and the charity we see in the modern church, neither putting wealth into a central pot nor doling it out in altruistic portions, but holding it with open hands and an open heart.
So we've moved through scripture and a fraction of church history, but what about us here and now? What do we say about wealth? Or perhaps better to ask what should we be saying about wealth? Here I want to come at last to look specifically at some of Jesus' teaching. Perhaps his best known words on wealth come in his encounter with the rich young man, who he tells to sell everything he has and give to the poor because it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. The instruction to sell everything is not universalised, but the caution about how hard it is to enter the kingdom with wealth should give us all pause, especially when we remember that the kingdom is not only future but also present. We may not all be called to give up every material possession, but we cannot participate fully in the life of the kingdom if our lives are controlled and consumed by wealth. I have agonised about what this means in practice. How much can I keep? How much should I give away? Am I rich because I have more than some? Am I poor because I have less than others? Is it fair that I'm asking these questions and feeling guilty about too many books and takeaways when there are a handful of billionaires who could solve world poverty if they wanted to? I don't have answers to any of these questions, and to be honest I'm slightly regretting picking this topic because I don't have my own head entirely together when it comes to money, but I am beginning to think that as an intellectual challenge it's an impossible puzzle. That's not to let myself off the hook, but to suggest that there is another way to approach this, and it is found in our reading for this morning.
“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also...No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” This is about attitude. It is about what we value, where we put our time and our energy, whose approval we seek. I believe that we need to see real structural change when it comes to how wealth is used and shared, and I think the church could lead the way by taking on God's preferential option for the poor. I would love to see if it is possible for us to hold all things in common, and I think that aiming for the kind of responsible stewardship and indiscriminate generosity John of Chrysostom spoke about would put us on a good path towards that. I know this is no easy task, but neither do I think it is an impossible one. If we can get our hearts right, if we can orient our thinking so that we choose God over money and treasure the things of the kingdom, including the people we share it with, then the rest will surely follow.
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