Readings (click here for full text of the readings):
  Jeremiah 17:5-10; Psalm 1; 1 Corinthians 15:12-20; Luke 5:17-26

When I training to be a pediatrician, I spent a month working at a hospital in Tanzania. I lived with a fascinating doctor there – an older man who rose out of poverty to become an anesthesiologist at London’s best hospital.  He’d given up a lucrative and respected practice because He felt that God had called him to East Africa.  He and I would eat breakfast together most mornings, on a terrace overlooking Lake Victoria, and one day he asked me about my childhood. I told him how I’d grown up in a wealthy suburb of New York City where the major topics of conversation were what kind of car you drove and how many nannies your kids had. I told him that I’d never really been deprived of anything, and I was free to pursue whatever career or adventure I wanted.

He paused for a second, and said something I’ll never forget.  He said, “Ah, I see that you weren’t as fortunate as I was.”  I didn’t have to ask him what he meant. He was saying that I’d had more obstacles to God than he’d had, mostly in the form of money.

I thought of that conversation this week because just a few weeks ago I stood up here in front of all of you at the Annual Meeting and said, “This is exactly how much money I earn,” and you have a right to know, because you all pay my salary. One person, when they saw that I make about $16,000 a year from this job, said rather drily, “Don’t go spend it all in one place.” What they meant was: it’s not very much, especially for someone who spent seven years in grad school. 

Today’s readings have a lot to do with wealth: the first thing Jesus says this morning is “blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.”  And since He tends to pair a woe with a blessed, He goes on to say, “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.”  In more modern terms, Jesus was saying to the poor, “How fortunate you are,” and to the rich, “how shameless you are.”

So I found myself thinking: Which am I?  Am I rich or poor?  Fortunate or shameless? So I went to this nifty website called “Global Rich List dot com,” where you can enter your income and they’ll tell you how you compare to the rest of the world.

So where do you think $16,000 put me?  Conventional wisdom would say pretty near the bottom, as it falls below the poverty line in this country.  But in comparison to everyone in the world? It put me in the top 12%.  Which means that there are a lot of people who make less money than that. 5,281,914,618 to be precise, at last count.  So pulling in a humble sixteen-grand put me ahead of 7 out of every 8 people on earth.  That sounds pretty rich to me.

But then add in the other stuff: the lovely house I get to live in, my two other jobs, and where does that put me?  In the top one-half of one percent. Which means that 199 out of every 200 people on earth earn less than I do. I’m way up there. 

We tend not to think of ourselves that way, though.  We might be very well-off, but we’re not rich.  We’re not Bill Gates or anything. A while back I heard a congressman take idea that to extremes.  He reported his income at about $750,000 a year, which he said put him in the “upper middle class.”  When I heard that, I found myself thinking, “Where does rich begin? Is there such a thing as the ‘upper class’? Or is there just Bill Gates, and then all the rest of us?”

I think there’re a lot of reasons why we’re reluctant to call ourselves rich.  First up, there’s always someone out there who makes more than us. Second, it seems a little haughty, to claim that we’re rich. It’s best just to keep quiet and not lord it over everybody. And, finally, maybe those numbers just don’t seem right to us, because when you struggle to pay your bills, you don’t feel rich. But the statistics are clear: half of the people on earth make less than $1000 per year.  If you make $25,000 per year – which seems rather meager in this country – you’re in the top 10% worldwide.

But even if we don’t call ourselves rich, we all want to be that way.  We play the lottery, hoping to hit the jackpot.  Everywhere you look people are touting get-rich-quick schemes.  And within the Church, things aren’t much different.  There seems to be a sense among many Christians that wealth is a sign of God’s blessing – that if you do what God tells you to do, you’ll be rich. 

I did a little research about this and came across a whole lot of websites that were preaching that message.  One, in particular, caught my eye, and I’m going to quote it exactly so no one thinks I’m making this up. It was plugging a book called “How to Amass Abrahamic Wealth,” and this is what it said:  “You must do what Abraham did to obtain the wealth that God promised you in the Abrahamic covenant. The Greek New Testament … proves that God wants to make you wealthy … These pages dispel the devil’s myth that God wants you in poverty.”

So what are we to do?  Jesus said “woe to you who are rich,” and on a worldwide scale pretty much all of us here are “rich.” Yet somehow we’ve come to see money as God’s blessing on the faithful, even as we strive to acquire more of it. In the end, this is a very dangerous topic, and there are several perils we must avoid.

First, we must not look at money as inherently bad.  People fling around the phrase that “money is the root of all evil,” which is taken out of context. The Bible says in First Timothy that “the love of money is the root of all evil.”  So the bottom line is there’s nothing wrong with having gobs and gobs of money – as much money as you can imagine having – as long as everybody else just has enough.  If everyone else has food to eat and a roof over the head and medicine when they need it – then play the lottery, invest in the market, amass Abrahamic wealth to your heart’s content. But if you happen to live in a world like ours, where 850 million people go to bed hungry every night, a billion people lack adequate shelter, and 1.5 billion don’t have access to medical care – in a world like that, if you have Abrahamic wealth, you obviously love money more than you love your hungry, exposed, and sick brothers and sisters.

Second, we mustn’t try to wriggle our way out of what Jesus said.  People have been doing that ever since He said it: trying to make it seem like He wasn’t talking about the poorest of the poor, but rather the folks who led a simple life.  Who could put food on the table, but weren’t into extravagant luxuries. But that’s not who Jesus was talking about: there are two words in Greek for “poor,” and one of them describes humble folk who live from paycheck-to-paycheck and have to live simply to get by. That’s not the word Jesus used.  He used the strongest possible word to describe social poverty: not just destitute, but oppressed, miserable, dependent, humiliated.

Third, we must not glorify poverty.  We mustn’t go up to the homeless person on the street corner and tell him how lucky he is, how we envy and admire him, even as we head home in time for dinner. Rich folks have been doing that, too, even since Jesus was around. They would say to the poor folks: “Look on the bright side, Jesus said you were blessed.  The kingdom of heaven is yours, so there’s a lot to look forward to in the next life.” Those promises about the afterlife don’t mean much, though, when you’re hungry and cold and sick, but they do make the rich feel a lot better.

Fourth, we can’t just sit back and let God take care of it, because He expects us to do something about it.  If we look at what Jesus said while He was with us, He said more about social justice than anything else. Yet it seems like we’ve fallen into the trap of thinking that Christianity has more to do with how much you pray and who gets into heaven, than with whether your neighbor has enough to eat. In the New Testament, there about 500 verses that talk about prayer, less than 500 that talk about faith, and over 2000 that talk about money. 2/3 of Jesus’s parables were about money.  One might even say that Jesus was obsessed with hit.

So what are we to do?  We could go off the deep end and give everything away. And we’d be killing two birds with one stone: we wouldn’t have any money left to distract us from God, and we’d qualify for the blessings Jesus promised to the poor. Noble as that might be, it’s also impractical, because we all have responsibilities. We have children and parents and friends to take care of, both near and far away.  And we won’t be much good to the rest of the world if we don’t have anything left to give – that’s a bit like feeling sorry for the guy drowning in quicksand and jumping in to keep him company.

So we might decide to chip in and lend a hand. Volunteer at a soup kitchen. Build a house with Habitat for Humanity.  All good stuff, and very helpful. But part of that bargain is that we get the warm fuzzies for helping some poor soul, and it doesn’t touch our treasure, our money. Sometimes we don’t end up doing that much good, despite our best intentions. Doctors up at UVM often ask me how they can volunteer overseas.  And I tell them that if they really want to help, instead of going to Africa for 3 weeks, they should keep working at their job and send 3 weeks’ salary over there.  That would do a lot more good in the long run, but it isn’t as glamorous.

And what of us here, today?  What should we do?  How should we respond?  Well, first of all, we have responded as a community. St. Paul’s gives 4% of our pledges away to people in need – what the Bible calls “tithing on the tithe.”  We’re literally putting our money where our mouth is.

And individually we all do a great many things to help others: from volunteering to help people get home from the hospital to bringing food to folks who can’t get out to selling mulch and donating the profits, and on and on. But God is asking us to do more – He’s always asking us to do more. 

So let me give you a specific challenge. As you all know, each week we take up an offering basket of food to give to people who are hungry. The gifts there don’t go to St. Paul’s – they go to people who need food.  I invite all of you to contribute to the food basket this morning.  More than that, I challenge you to give all the money you’re carrying with you.

I used to do that. Back before I pledged a certain amount to church, I’d just give whatever I had in my pockets and wallet that Sunday morning.  And that turned out to be a lot, as Pam can attest – whenever she doesn’t have any money in the morning she sifts through my pants pockets and always seems to come up with enough for a cup of coffee, if not a whole breakfast. Sometimes I’d end up giving more than I really wanted to give, which was a good experience for me.  And, to be brutally honest, I have to admit that I stopped taking as much out of the ATM on Saturday afternoon, because I knew, at least subconsciously, where it was going.  That would be called greed.

So I challenge you to do that this morning.  I have no stake in it, because none of it’s coming to St. Paul’s.  And I don’t care how much you end up giving – if you empty your pockets, fine.  If not, I still love you. But just see how it feels, to think of giving it all up – not everything you own, but just everything you have today – and imagine how much more Jesus is calling us to do. 

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