Today’s Prayer from the ELCA Lectionary for the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany:
Holy God, you confound the world’s wisdom in giving your kingdom to the lowly and the pure in heart. Give us such a hunger and thirst for justice, and perseverance in striving for peace, that in our words and deeds the world may see the life of your Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.
BUT THE QUESTION is this: what does God think of wealth? How does God reckon success? Money? Promotions? A bigger house?
Well, no. That doesn’t appear to be the way things work at all.
Look at the Prayer of the Day for Sunday, the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany (ELCA). “(God confounds) the world’s wisdom in giving your kingdom to the lowly and the pure in heart.” God will bless the poor and the weak and the sick.
This is a theme that appears over and over in both the Hebrew and the Christian scriptures: Mary finds out she’s going to give birth to the Christ Child, and what does she sing about? “Finally! The poor will be raised up, the rich will be sent away empty!”
The rich man is quite happy till he dies. Then he sees poor Lazarus, too tired to keep dogs away from licking his sores. But after death? Lazarus, Jesus says in one of his parables, is sitting next to Abraham, while the rich man is in hell. It’s all flames and fires with nothing, not even a sip of water to relieve his torment.
When we see the super-rich, we see a problem. On the one hand, the multi-billionaires who can never ever spend everything give some of their wealth away, and bless them when they do. But if you look at the percentages, they’re giving away out of their bounty.
God wants us to give til poverty. Look at the woman giving away a teensy tiny coin, the smallest amount possible, while another person pours in wealth, both, presumably, for the good of the community. But who really is the giving one? Jesus says the poor widow, because she is giving all she has.
The rich guy? Besides getting slammed about giving so much so publicly, Jesus’ disciples get told he’s just giving out a bit of all he has.
Over and over again, we hear this. The ideal is to give all, the way St. Francis did.
He came from a family of the high and mighty in medieval Italy. He gave his fortune away, all of it, even the clothes on his back, all, so that he had to walk through town naked.
Do we do that? Do I? Ummm. No.
Wealth, even being simply well off, having a house and clothes, and savings for emergencies are just plain too tempting.
The old standard, straight out of the Hebrew Scriptures, is a tithe, 10 percent, right off the top.
I remember asking myself whether that was gross earnings or after taxes when I was both younger and poorer that I am now.
But are we called to think about money in such a way that we might give it all away?
Well, here’s a place where I think young folks have a point, and maybe it’s a way that will balance the need to talk about income inequality against the need to be reasonable about the future, about being able to weather a crisis, about having enough to eat, heat, water, electricity and other utilities.
We have to be reasonable, right?
As the Institute for Policy Studies points out at https://inequality.org, “In the United States, the income gap between the rich and everyone else has been growing markedly, by every major statistical measure, for more than 30 years.”
You can see more at that website. Our young folks have no way forward.
Is there a middle place? Maybe.
After all, elsewhere we’re told to be “wise as serpents and harmless as doves.”
It’s a both/and proposition. So where is our starting point? Where do we start to fix the problem that some people (“the 1 percent”) could give up much more to those who are really not at all well off?
If you’ve been blessed by financial success, maybe you can look at what’s going on with your finances.
Are you being wise with your money? Or loving?
We need to think about being more foolish and use our money in such a way that we are harmless as doves.
But also come out and serve the poor directly.
I work with a crowd of volunteers, the Tree Park Collective. We’re there every Saturday, 1 to 3 p.m., without fail, rain or shine.
If you have abundance, show up. Bring food, cookies, clothes. Bring your excess.
Here’s a clue: if you don’t give to the poor, because you “don’t know how they’re going to use it,” I guarantee you don’t understand their lives.
It’s rich people who waste money. Poor people don’t waste it.
They watch every penny because they don’t have anything to waste.
I watch how kind the poor are to each other. And by poor, I don’t mean “folks who wasted their money.”
I mean people who have been hit harder by income equality, who have been literally impoverished by other people’s wealth.
They take care of each other.
At Holy Trinity (other churches do this as well, it’s not just us), we meet to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and give them away.
That’s, frankly, a pretty easy way to help, and we see God in each other when we do that. But I also see God when someone asks if they can take sandwiches to other people who need them.
They will take someone’s castaway clothes that clearly won’t fit, so they can give to others. “That won’t fit me, but it will fit Charlie perfectly.” And that’s God at work.
And it’s all foolish by the standards of the world.
As Jesus says in Sunday’s Gospel, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, / for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
True. But Mary in her song of thanks? She wants revolution.
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Issues of Faith is a rotating column by religious leaders on the North Olympic Peninsula. Previously a deacon in the Episcopal Diocese of Olympia, Dr. Keith Dorwick is a lay person continuing his walk with God as he moves deeper into the community at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church (ELCA) in Port Angeles. He’s also the executive director of Spiritual Directions of PA (https://spiritual-directions-pa.org), their next holy adventure!
