A few months ago my wife was balancing the checkbook and
asked me if I’d remembered to deliver a payment on our pledge to the church,
because it hadn’t been cashed yet. And I
had to confess to her that it had gotten lost in my wallet for a couple of
weeks, but only a day or two before I’d spotted it there among the receipts and
scraps of notepaper, and had turned it in to the Treasurer. My daughter happened to overhear our
conversation and she piped up at that point with a question: “Why do you give
money to the church,” she asked—“Aren’t they just going to give it back to
you?” I wish I could tell you that we
sat down then and there and had a long conversation about it, because it was a
golden opportunity to explore with her what money is about, and what we are
doing when we give it away. But there
was something going on that morning that we had to get on to, so I tossed off a
quick answer, and to tell you the truth I can’t even remember what I said.
That’s the way it often is with the conversations we have in
the church about money. We know we have to do it, so we set aside a
brief period, usually in the fall, to talk about our money and how we use what
God has entrusted to us. But it is not
like we take the time to sit down and have a deep conversation about it. It’s a topic that makes us uncomfortable. So when we do bring it up, we find it safer
not to talk about ourselves. We don’t really
want to talk about our own relationship with money, and how it impacts our
other relationships, especially our relationship with God.
So instead, we often talk about the institutional needs of
the church instead. We can talk about the
budget, and personnel expenses, about upkeep for the physical plant and the
cost of administrative operations. And what we often end up with is something
like a fundraising campaign, not unlike what your favorite public radio station
does. We interrupt our regular religious
programming with messages about how important this church is, and all the
benefits that come along with membership, and how we can’t keep doing what
we’re doing without your financial support. And all of that is true, as far as it goes,
but it can leave out the most important thing, which is to talk not about what
the church needs, but about what we
need. If we did that, we’d be
continuing a conversation that Jesus started.
Jesus liked to talk to about money. He brought it up all the time, when other
people thought they were talking about religion. In today’s reading from the Gospel of Mark we
hear about a man who came to Jesus to ask him a religious question. He was a devout man, sincere and respectful,
and had been meticulous all his life in keeping the commandments of the law,
and yet he saw that all this was not enough. He perceived the limits of his human life, and
imagined that beyond those limits there was fullness of life, without which all
he had done was empty. And hoping there
might be just one more thing he needs can still to bring that life within his
grasp, he comes and kneels before Jesus.
Jesus’ answer to the man is that he doesn’t need one more
thing—he needs fewer. The life that he
seeks is not a thing we can take hold of and add to our store of
possessions. It is not the final rung,
on a ladder of individual achievements. Life
in the kingdom of God is something one enters by leaving everything else behind.
Jesus doesn’t judge the man because he
is unable to find the way in—he loves him.
But he is also sad for him, because he sees that he depends on his
wealth in a way that prevents him from depending on God. His many possession lead him to believe he
possesses himself, and so he cannot let go and trust that he belongs to
God. And just in case we might be
thinking that he is speaking only to this man, and his particular case, Jesus
turns to his disciples and says, “Children, how hard it is for the rich to
enter the kingdom of God!”
This is one of those sayings of Jesus that cuts deep, that
seem to sever the path of following him from the normal pursuit of human happiness. And so this section of the gospel ends with
Peter, once again, speaking up and saying what is on everyone’s mind. “We
have left everything and followed
you,” he says, and we can complete his sentence for him, “so aren’t we, at
least, assured of salvation?” The words
of promise and encouragement that Jesus says next seem to me to be the early
churches’ answer to that question. Here is testimony that the call to give up
everything for the sake of the gospel is not just a disruptive demand, to break
family ties and renounce worldly gain.
It is also an invitation to join a movement.
The decision to follow Jesus is not a retreat into an
otherworldly spiritual path, away from the life of everyday community, where
people have to work to get by and get along.
It is a choice to enter new relationships, with Jesus and with the others
who have put their trust in him. And in
the experience of the disciple of Peter who wrote the Gospel of Mark, shedding
their worldly goods did not leave them as beggars wandering the streets, abandoned
and alone. It led them into a painstakingly
difficult, but immeasurably rewarding new life, the life of the church.
The New Testament ideal of the church is a community that
suffers persecution with Christ, and joins in his renunciation of privilege,
including the privilege of private wealth.
But that suffering and that renunciation make possible an extraordinary
solidarity, an abundance of trust in the providence of God and just and intimate
belonging to each other. In the book of
Acts and the letters of Paul we see again and again how fragile that solidarity
is, how ready the early Christians were to turn back to the familiar security
of their own separate property and their conventional gradations of
privilege. But though they acknowledge
the instability of the situation, the apostles’ continually insist on the grace
of Jesus Christ, and the power of the Holy Spirit, to keep the church
together.
It is that grace and that power that enables them to keep
Jesus’ own radical ethic of sacrificial generosity and mutual forgiveness. And it is the experience of unity and love
that flows from this shared discipleship, more than any public ministry of good
works, more than any sacred ritual or confessional statement, which puts the
stamp of the Messiah on their community.
In the same way today, our faith in Christ, expressed as belonging to
each other, brings us into the church, not as members of an organization, but
as priests of a sacrament. We share our
lives with each other, and so we share in the priesthood of Christ, who shared
his life with us. And this makes our
community a sacrament of the Kingdom of abundance and peace, and as with all
sacraments this one requires a material substance, which is our money and other
tangible gifts we agree to share in common.
Our giving to the church is essential to the priesthood that
we share. As the parish priest, I have a
particular role to play in this, as in other areas in which I stand in for the
community. When I anoint the sick, or
give alms to the poor, or commit someone’s body to the earth, I do so in the
name of the whole church. I stand in for
the church when I pronounce God’s forgiveness at the general confession, and
when I stand at the altar, offering the great prayer of thanksgiving, and
breaking the bread on behalf of us all.
And I like to think that it’s the same when I cash my
paycheck. I don’t excuse myself from our
shared priesthood of giving money to the church, but I do have a special
relationship to it, because my family and I are the only ones here who depend
on it for the food on our table and the clothes on our backs. But perhaps in this, too, I stand in for the
rest of you, for the dependence we all share on the generosity of others, for
the need we all have to belong to each other, and supply one another’s needs in
the name of Christ, for the desire in all of us to give away everything that
holds us back from the life without limit that only comes by the grace of
God.
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