More on God and Money

 

The rich man and Lazarus

My sermon today, 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year 'C':

 

The readings this Sunday follow on closely from the readings we had last Sunday and they address similar themes: our attitude to money and wealth and our attitude to the divisions between rich and poor.

The Old Testament prophet Amos denounces groups of people in his own time who are living luxuriously and self-indulgently, oblivious of the collapse of their country. They're fiddling while Rome burns, or at any rate partying while Rome burns, and that involves a blindness and a selfishness which, Amos implies, won't go unpunished in the long run. Like all the prophets Amos is using the language of threat to jolt his listeners into a new awareness and a change of values.

Christ's parable in the gospel reading also has an undercurrent of warning: when each of us comes to face God's judgement, one of the main areas of our behaviour that God will scrutinise is whether we've simply looked after our own interests, like the rich man in the story, turning a blind eye to those who are hungry and destitute and sick through the effects of poverty, like Lazarus; or will we be found to have willingly sacrificed some of our own comfort so as to show generosity and care towards those whose material needs are greater than our own?

It's worth pointing out I think that most Christians today, like most Christians in any period of history are not "rich" according to the standards of the society we live in. Most of us, even if we examine our consciences rigorously, probably don't feel that we can identify with the rich man, either in terms of our level of wealth, or, for that matter, in terms of our attitude towards the poor.

Most Christians in a country like ours probably reflect that they're not destitute by any means - but they're not smug and secure when it comes to money either: they've got bills to pay like everyone else, children to look after, perhaps anxieties about keeping their job. And to feel concerned about being able to meet all our financial obligations is hardly the same as lolling around in the kind of indulgent affluence that today's readings conjure up.

Jesus and Amos were doing what prophetic preachers often do: they were using vivid images and exaggeration to make a basic point. And the point they're both making here is that a taste for luxury in material things and a tendency to self-indulgence are things that drive us away from God. They dull our sensitivity to God and our sensitivity to other people's suffering. They damage our capacity to love.

The opposite is also true: when we set out to cultivate attitudes of simplicity and detachment towards material things, we clear a space in our lives which God can occupy. We heighten our awareness of other people's needs and our sense of responsibility towards them. We relate to others with concern and love rather than indifference.

This is an important part of the gospel message today because although most of us, as Christians, try to take Jesus' teaching seriously in this area the culture that we live in does tend to hold out luxury and self-indulgence as desirable goals in life, and as badges of success.

The assumption that many people make now is that you only live once, so you have to grasp as many of the good things of life as possible while you can: the gospel of consumerism we might call it. That's very different from our assumption, based on our faith, that this life is only a preparation for our real life with God in eternity - which gives us a very different set of goals and aspirations.

The prophet Amos, to return briefly to the first reading, paints a picture of a group of people absorbed in enjoying themselves selfishly and irresponsibly, "sprawling on their divans....drinking wine by the bowlful" and so on. What Amos seems to deplore most of all about this is their retreat from any sense of responsibility for the standards or the moral tone of society as a whole.

It's a reminder to us of the special duty we have as the Christian community - a minority in our particular society - to always try to raise the moral and spiritual tone of society, or at least to maintain small pockets of Christian faith, and the values and lifestyle that come from it, which resist the general slide into "ruin", as Amos would call it.

So I think those are the lessons we can take from this Sunday's readings: not to feel threatened by hellfire because we have material concerns, but to give good example of the Christian attitude to wealth, first, by trusting in God, second, by living simply, and third, by doing what we can to ease the burden on those who are really poor and destitute.