Being Rich

1 Timothy 6:6-19; Luke 16:19-31

How many of you here think of yourself as being rich?

How many of us are uncomfortable with this question?

How many are particularly uncomfortable right now because you were listening carefully to the scripture we just read?

Me, for one.

I mean, I can objectively say that I’m rich in a lot of ways – I have all kinds of choice in putting food on the table, I was able to buy the house I wanted. I worry about money, of course, and there’s plenty I want that I can never afford. But I have some savings for a rough patch, I have a laptop and a tablet and a smartphone.
On a scale of the “one percent”, I’m not even close to rich. On a global scale, I am rich.

And I’m not alone in that, here.

But I’m not especially comfortable thinking of myself as rich, particularly in church.

If you admit you’re rich, they might ask you for more money, right?

Plus, rich people don’t come off very well in scripture – especially what we hear today.

Rich people, Jesus seems to say, are fated for torment after death. You had your good things in life, now you have agony, Abraham explains to an overheated dead rich man.

(The desperately poor, meanwhile, seem to be promised comfort after death. Nobody in the gospel mentions “the middle class” – there’s no middle ground in this vision of have and have not.)

Timothy’s mentor writes to him that “those who want to be rich are tempted and trapped by harmful desires that plunge everyone into ruin and destruction”. Riches pull you away from faith and hurt people, he says, and of course, the love of money is the root of much evil.

Over and over in the witness of scripture, being rich is equated with being selfish, with being separated from God, separated from other human beings, and dangerously at risk of losing your soul. 

Very few people, seeing and hearing and reading that, would want to be identified as rich.

Except that there’s a parallel thread running through scripture – an awareness that riches and comfort and abundance in life are blessings of God, gifts to be grateful for, to celebrate and treasure for the assurance of God’s care.

Timothy’s mentor doesn’t separate those two ideas, advising Timothy to command everyone who is rich not to be haughty – not to be self-satisfied, selfish, or detached, the automatic reflex of riches, apparently – and to set their hope on God, who “richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment.”

Riches make you bad. Riches come from God.

It’s a paradox. One I’m tempted to leave well alone.

Except that Jesus – and the prophets, and the preachers, and those early Christian writers – all talk about money. A lot.

Because money – well, not money itself, but our relationship with money – is deeply, powerfully important to our hearts and our souls and our primary relationship with God.

Money itself is not the root of all evil (no matter how often you’ve heard that proverb misquoted).

The love of money, the power of the desire for more money, and for all that money can buy, is a cause of all kinds of damage and evil and pain.

There’s plenty of evidence of that in our shared economic life – the problem of the desire for cheap products and more profit that produces sweatshops; the many-sided pain of the questions of a fair minimum wage or who should pay for health care.
And there’s the damage that the flip side of the love of money does, when the fear of poverty manifests as, say, a plan to sweep homeless people out of California’s cities, and ban the desperately poor from sleeping in the doorways of the rich and exclusive.

And there’s the pain of our relationship with money in our personal lives, too. The hours we work to have “enough” - that always moving target - that unbalance our lives.
The discomfort you might feel (that in fact, I feel) when we ask you to consider increasing your giving to the church, and you wonder if giving more is going to cost you failure somewhere else;
the way we genuinely worry at every income level about “making ends meet” or simply “having enough” for security in retirement or emergencies or daily expenses.

We actually all swim in the love of money and fear of poverty or loss that’s a fundamental reality of the world we live in. We all feel – in different ways and to different extents – the pain of the desire for more and the fear of less that’s within us or around us.

And that pain is why Jesus keeps talking about money. Why he tells this harsh story about a rich man today. Why the prophets and the letter-writers and preachers of the early Christian scriptures keep telling us to give money up and give it away.

Yes, it’s about sharing the blessings of God’s abundance,

but even more, it’s because God is longing, always longing and working, to heal our pain. To choose freedom for us, to invite us into expansive, unbound, trust and faith instead of the tight limits of worry, fear, and doubt.

Loving and keeping money ties us up with the pain of trying to buy comfort and security, connection, respect, knowledge and access, and knowing we can never buy enough in the way of smartphones and cars, clothes and good school districts to actually have what we long for.

God urges us – through Jesus and the apostles, through Moses and the prophets – to practice giving money away to make our hearts and lives depend more on God than ourselves for hope and serenity, comfort and connection.

Jesus encourages us, as Timothy is encouraged, to depend on God for the assurance of our future and that of our families, instead of striving to earn it and keep it by our own effort and resources.

The tragedy of the story of the dead rich man is not simply his agony, not just his complete lack of care for Lazarus.
It’s that even in his flames he doesn’t imagine that he can fully trust in God. Instead of longing to be with Lazarus in Abraham’s closeness to God, he only imagines persuading someone to send a little drop of relief. Instead of trusting in God’s love, poured out in the words of “Moses and the prophets”, he thinks he has to arrange to save his own family.

The tragedy of the love of money is that it focuses our hope on ourselves, and blocks our trust in God. When Jesus tells this story to the Pharisees, when scripture condemns the rich as a class, God is inviting us, calling us, to let go of the smallness of the life we can earn, so that we make room for a trust infinitely greater than our selves. So that we open our hearts and souls and minds to unlimited trust in the abundant, extravagant life God longs to give.

Paul wants Timothy, Jesus wants each of us, to take hold of eternal life, here and now – that restful, active closeness with God that comes from absolute trust, a trust in God that pours into us as daily, constant, freedom from fear, and out of us as generosity and “good works”, love and gentleness.

So that if – instead of asking if you feel rich today – I ask for a show of hands of everyone who knows that you are rich in the love of God, every hand in this place and beyond will go up with confidence, faith, and joy.