A Health Risk (Sept 29 2013)

Homily:  Yr C P26, Sept 29 2013, St. Albans

Readings:  Jer 32:1-3a,6-15; Ps 91:1-6,14-16; 1 Tim 6:6-19; Lk 16:19-31

And so it continues.  Jesus in the Gospel of Luke just won’t let us off the hook when it comes to money.  Last week’s parable, about a rich man and his manager, was disturbing because it was ambiguous and confusing.  This week’s parable about the rich man and Lazarus is even more disturbing because it is so darn clear.  Jesus tells us a story which is a stinging indictment of the dramatic inequality between rich and poor that we perpetuate in our economy and our society, and he makes a promise that in the end, God will not allow this to stand.

Two years ago today, parks and public spaces around the world were flooded with supporters of the Occupy Movement which started on Wall Street in New York.  The Occupy movement drew world-wide attention to the inequality between the rich and the poor.  The numbers are quite staggering.  In Canada, the top 1% receive 11% of total income.  But it’s not just doctors and executives and pro hockey players who are wealthy. By global standards, many of us are wealthy.  We live in a wealthy country.  If your income is $21,000 or more, you are in the top 10% of income earners in the world.

What’s more, as we started to talk about last week, all of us are participants in economic and social systems that are oppressive and unjust towards the poor.  In fact, most of us actually benefit from these unjust systems.  I happen to like chocolate.  And I can buy chocolate for a lower price because in the Ivory Coast, the workers on cocoa plantations are held in slave-like conditions.  My taxes in Ontario are lower than they would be otherwise because the Ontario government promotes gambling, and has a plan to increase gambling in this city and throughout the province in order to extract more money from people, many of them lower-income people, who have a weakness for gambling.  My pension plan is funded in part from the profits of the Canadian financial system which promotes the use of credit cards, which boost the price of everything in the stores by several per cent and then the banks charge interest rates of 24% a year on people who can’t afford to pay their debts on time.  I expect that you can think of other examples.

So we need to be concerned about wealth.  Not because simply having wealth is wrong, but rather because having wealth puts us at risk.  There is a health risk, a tremendous risk to our spiritual health in having wealth.  If you like, think of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus as akin to the health warnings written on a pack of cigarettes.

So what is the risk?  One of the risks is the danger that Paul identifies in our second reading as being haughty:  the risk of thinking that we are better than other people, the risk of thinking that we are deserving of our wealth, the risk of forgetting that all that we have belongs to God and that we are mere managers who will one day be asked to account for what we have done with that which was entrusted to us.

In the story of the rich man and Lazarus, the rich man has fallen into this trap.  I mean think about.  Even after he’s died in the story, even after he notices that Lazarus is by Abraham’s side while he, the rich man, is in agony, even then, he still has the gall to think he can ignore Lazarus and instead call out to Abraham who will send Lazarus to him as his personal servant, to cool his tongue and to warn his brothers.  I mean who does he think he is?  I tell you who he thinks he is.  He thinks he’s the rich man, and that he’s better than the poor beggar and that as a result he has the right to speak right past Lazarus as if he’s not even there and to demand to be served by him.  The rich man’s sense of identity has been so warped by his wealth that he is blind to seeing Lazarus as a brother, as one who is a fellow child of God.

But that’s not the only thing that has gone wrong for the rich man.  Think about it.  Day after day, Lazarus lies at the gate of the rich man.  And day after day, as the rich man leaves his home and as he returns, he has to step over or around Lazarus.  I imagine that at first, the rich man feels some compassion for Lazarus, after all, it’s only human to feel compassion.  He doesn’t chase him away.  He has his servants give him scraps from the table.  But day after day, as the rich man steps over Lazarus, his sense of compassion must dwindle.  He becomes more and more immune to Lazarus’ suffering.  He sees Lazarus less and less.  Perhaps his own sense of entitlement grows.  And his ability to be compassionate shrinks and shrinks until it is completely stunted and he can’t feel it anymore.  And when the rich man, or any of us, lose the ability to be compassionate, we have lost something which is deeply and genuinely human, and we are lost.

Oh and one more thing – why does the rich man have a gate?  Is it because he feels the need to keep Lazarus and any other beggars at a distance?  Is it because he’s afraid that he might be a target for thieves because of his wealth?  Is he tired of having people knocking on his door and asking him to donate money to their charitable causes?  Whatever the reasons, and I’m not saying that they’re necessarily bad reasons, whatever they are, notice that the rich man’s wealth has caused him to separate himself from other people.  The chasm in the afterlife which separates the rich man from Abraham and Lazarus is not the only chasm in this story.

There is another risk to our spiritual health illustrated in the parable, and that is the trust that we put in our financial security.  The rich man in this story thought that he was going to be okay.  He built a gate to protect himself from thieves and beggars.  Even when he arrives in Hades, he thinks he can use his status as a rich man to coax some special favours from Abraham.  When we are wealthy, it’s very tempting to trust in our wealth.  After all, it’s our wealth that buys us food and clothing and houses and security systems for our houses.  It’s our wealth that marks us out as successful, as intelligent, as well-educated, as hard-working, as deserving of respect, as powerful. 

But as children of God we are called to place our trust in God, not in wealth.  We are to be the crazy ones who like Jeremiah actually hand over our wealth, all seventeen shekels of silver, to buy a piece of land in enemy-occupied territory simply because Jeremiah trusts God, and God wants him to do this in order to provide his people with a symbolic gesture of hope.

When I was studying economics at university, I learned about a concept called “crowding out”.  The idea goes something like this.  If the government starts to invest a large amount of money in a particular sector of the economy, the automotive sector for example, eventually private businesses and individuals will stop investing in that sector, because of the competition from the government investments for resources and good investment opportunities.  Economists like to say that the government investment “crowds out” the private investments.

Well, I don’t care much what you think about this particular economic theory, but I do think this concept of “crowding out” applies to the things that we invest ourselves in.  Where do you place your trust?  In what do you have faith?  What is the source of your hope?

If we place our trust in our riches and possessions, then sooner or later, these will start to crowd out our trust in God.  There just won’t be room for it in our lives.  Like a muscle that doesn’t get used, it will waste away until it just isn’t there anymore.  When we set our hope in our wealth, we stop living by faith. 

And that would be tragic.  Because living by faith is what makes us fully alive, able to live in a way that is bold and beautiful and bigger than it otherwise would be.  Living by faith both enriches us and enables us to be open to the lives of others and to live justly and generously in response to their needs.

So let this story of the rich man and Lazarus be a warning to you about the spiritual risks associated with wealth.  And not just a warning, but also a spur to action.  Because it seems to me that there are two things we can do to stay healthy.

The first is to follow Paul’s advice that he gives to young Timothy in our second reading:

“As for those who in the present age are rich, command them not to be haughty, or to set their hopes in the uncertainty of riches, but rather on God who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment.  They are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous and ready to share.”

And the second thing that I think all of us need to do, whether we’re rich or poor, is what I’ll call “chasm work”.  There are chasms which separate people in our society, deep divides.  And we are called to do our part to bridge them, and to bridge them before it’s too late.  How can we do that?  I think that’s where I’ll stop for this morning and let you continue as we move now into our Open Space.

Amen.