Hilton Head Island, SC – January 24, 2016
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 16:19-31; Luke 18:18-30
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – But when he heard this, he became sad, for he was very rich. – Luke 18:23
The Wisdom of Jesus: Wealth
Over the centuries during which the Old Testament was being written, there developed a genre of writing known as the Wisdom Literature. The five books in the Wisdom section of the Hebrew Bible are Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs. Many of the chapters and verses in those books are short, pithy statements which suggest general and even universal truths about a great variety of subjects.
To Christians, Jesus Christ was much more than a wisdom teacher, and indeed that is certainly true. But in addition to the other roles Jesus played during his lifetime, he also was a wisdom teacher. Many of his teachings are very similar to statements from the Psalms or Proverbs. In previous sermons over the past several months I have referred to a few of the topics upon which he focused in the dispensation of his wisdom.
Today I want for us to ponder some of the observations Jesus made about wealth. But first let us note that the word “wealth” has great flexibility of meaning in the minds of everyone who ever lived. Most of us would consider anyone whose total assets are a million dollars is wealthy. But such a person might consider someone wealthy who is worth a hundred million dollars. And those folks might assume truly wealthy people are like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett or Donald Trump. There are many people living on Hilton Head Island who would consider anyone who attends The Chapel Without Walls to be wealthy. We may not see them often, but they’re here. There are people living in small one-room apartments in many American cities who would think the people on Hilton Head Island who think we are wealthy are wealthy. And there are people living on the streets of Mumbai or Lagos or Rio de Janeiro who would think those people were wealthy. In other words, to some extent “wealth” is in the eye of the beholder.
In Jesus’ time, perhaps most of those who would be considered wealthy would not be considered wealthy by our standards. Nevertheless, for first century Judea they were wealthy. Jesus was aware of their wealth, as presumably most other people were as well.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gave several short statements which allude to wealth. The sermon begins with the Beatitudes, the first of which says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs in the kingdom of heaven” (Mt. 5:3). Many people who are poor may also be poor in spirit, because they feel so “down” so much of the time. Later in his collection of sayings Jesus said, “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, …but lay up treasures in heaven…. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Mt. 6:19-21). “Do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink…. Seek first (God’s) kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well” (Mt. 6:25,33). “Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you” (Mt. 7:7).
Jesus knew, as all of us know, that we need a minimum of money and food to sustain ourselves. However, people who are completely unable to maintain that bare minimum will cease living soon. The rest of us have varying levels of either poverty or wealth. But again, both “poverty” and “wealth” means different things to different people. And that is what Jesus was talking about in his wisdom declarations regarding wealth.
Here are some questions for all of us: Do we have our wealth, or does our wealth have us? Can we live with what we have, could we live with less, or must we have more? And if we must, why must we? How much time each day do we devote to trying to determine how much wealth we have, or how to maintain it, or how to increase it? Does money matter the most to us, or do other things matter more?
Someone with an income of $25,000 a year (to pick an arbitrary and low number for 2016) might never think or worry about money, but someone whose income is $250,000 or $2,500,000 a year might think and worry about money a sizeable portion of every day. Do we have our wealth, or does our wealth have us?
Wealth, or the lack of it, can be a spiritual issue. It is not only a financial issue. How does wealth affect our inner life or our life with God? What is most important to us? If it is anything other than God and our relationship to Him and our participation in his earthly kingdom, we have a spiritual problem. It is that problem Jesus frequently addressed when he talked about wealth.
One of Jesus’ parables is known as the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. Jesus told about a rich man who lived in luxury. Outside his door was a poor man named Lazarus who waited for table scraps to be thrown out that he might eat them. Both the rich man and Lazarus died. Lazarus ended up in heaven, and the rich man in hell. Jesus said that the rich man asked the patriarch Abraham to send Lazarus to dip his finger in cool water and put it on his tongue to try to cool the heat from the flames. Abraham noted that in life the rich man had had many good things, while Lazarus was confronted by many bad things, and now their roles were reversed. The patriarch said that in eternity nothing could be done to change that. The rich man asked Abraham to warn his five brothers, urgently telling them to change their ways. Abraham said they had the teachings of Moses and the prophets, so they could decide for themselves.
This is decidedly one of the darkest of Jesus’ parables. Cheerful it isn’t. So what is the point? Is it that wealth itself is evil? Surely not! Wealth by itself is neither good nor evil. It is how we think about our wealth and what we do with it that determines whether it is good or evil. If we are far too consumed by maintaining assets, they become the reality to which we are the most devoted. If that happens, it isn’t that wealth in itself is bad but rather that our obsession with sustaining wealth is bad.
In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, there is an implicit question: Are we sufficiently aware of the needs of others who are less fortunate than we are? Do we try to keep too much of our wealth for ourselves, or do we share it with people who are more needy than we are, and also with institutions which benefit society? In other words, are we good stewards of what God has given us, or do we keep too much of it to ourselves? It is implicit from Jesus’ story that that may have been the problem for the rich man, and perhaps it was his biggest problem.
The curious thing about wealth is that the more of it we acquire, the more likely we are to spend increasing amounts of time and energy to keep it or even to increase it. Wealth is a secondary factor in life, but if we gain enough of it, it can become primary.
The Broadway musical Annie Get Your Gun is about Annie Oakley, who became one of the stars in the Wild West Show of Wild Bill Hickok. A year or two ago Maddie Ogburn played Annie at the May River theater in Bluffton. One of her songs wisely observes, “Got no diamonds, got no pearls/ Look at me, I’m a lucky girl/ I’ve got the sun in the morning and the moon at night.”
Wealth can lead to slavery, and sparseness can lead to freedom. If that is true, probably most of us sadly would opt for a little more slavery and a little less freedom. But at what point does the independence of lower assets evolve into the bondage of higher assets? Those are the kinds of questions Jesus addressed in his wisdom observations about wealth. And how much does wealth lure us away from a proper relationship with God, the giver of all good things?
There is a story in all three Synoptic Gospels which tells about a man who came to Jesus, asking what he needed to do to inherit eternal life. In Matthew the man was young, in Luke he was a ruler or leader of a synagogue, and in all three Gospels he was rich. Therefore tradition has conflated him into someone we know as the “rich young ruler.” Jesus might have told the man there was nothing he could do to inherit eternal life, that it can only be given to us by God. But he took at face value what the man was asking, and Jesus asked him what the commandments said he should do. The rich young ruler recited some of them, and said that he assiduously followed them. Then Jesus said, “One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have, and distribute it to the poor, and come, follow me” (Mt. 18:22).
The next verse is heart-wrenching; it truly is. “But when he heard this, he became sad, for he was very rich.” Should it be harder for a very wealthy person to give away everything than for someone of average means or a poor person? It shouldn’t be, but if we were really rich, I mean really rich, I’m almost certain it would feel a lot harder. Mark’s telling of this story is the shortest of the three accounts, but he gives a lovely addition which neither of the other two Gospels includes. After the man told Jesus that he had honestly tried to observe all the commandments, Mark says this: “And Jesus looking upon him loved him, and said to him, ‘You lack one thing; go, sell what you have, and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, and come, follow me’” (Mark 10:21). Jesus sensed this was an extraordinary person, he knew he was an unusually upright and honorable man. But he also could see by how he was dressed and comported himself that he was very affluent. Thus Jesus felt obliged to address the one issue he believed might keep the rich young ruler from wholeheartedly following him.
Recently Lois and I went down to St. Augustine, Florida for a few days. While there we toured the main building of Flagler College and the Flagler Memorial Presbyterian Church. Both are uniquely beautiful buildings, and it is worth going to St. Augustine just to see them even if you see nothing else, although there are also many other interesting things.
Henry Flagler was a founding partner with John D. Rockefeller in establishing the Standard Oil Company. In the last quarter of the 19th century, he was one of the wealthiest men in the country. He had the exquisite church constructed in memory of his daughter, who died in childbirth. But he built the Ponce de Leon Hotel as an investment. It eventually became the center of Flagler College after it was chartered in 1967. The artistry in the construction is simply outstanding. The hotel operated from January 1 to April 15 each year. Guests who came there were required to be listed in the Social Register, and they had to be personally invited by Mr. Flagler himself. Furthermore, they had to pay $4000 per person in cash to stay in the Ponce de Leon. We were told that in today’s dollars that would be about $250,000. They didn’t have to stay for the entire three and a half months, but they had to pay for the entire three and a half months. And apparently the socially registered flocked there until the hotel closed.
By the standards of the 1st century, would the rich young ruler have been able to afford going to the Ponce de Leon Hotel? No one will ever know. But he was, according to all three Gospels, “very rich.” Tragically, his wealth was the factor which prevented him from becoming a disciple of the Man from Nazareth. He was sad, but no doubt Jesus was far sadder, because Jesus knew he had lost someone who potentially could have become a stellar accomplice.
To repeat, wealth by itself is neither good nor bad. It is how wealth affects our thinking and our values that determines whether it leads to good or ill.
Years ago, the richest man in the world, Bill Gates, formed a charitable foundation with his wife Melinda. By the time they both die, their entire estate will have gone into their foundation, which is the largest such foundation in the world. Many of their assets are already in the Gates Foundation. A few years ago, Warren Buffett, who then was the third wealthiest man in the world as I recall, said he was going to put all his assets into the Gates Foundation. He believed so strongly in what his friend Bill Gates was doing that he didn’t need to establish his own foundation. Steve Zuckerberg, who was the primary founder of Facebook, is doing a similar thing with his own foundation. These and other extremely wealthy people have convinced their peers to engage in similar large-scale philanthropy. It is a remarkable and powerful development.
In the end, however, we need to ask ourselves what true wealth really is. It isn’t stocks or bonds in a portfolio. Rather it is factors which are less quantifiable but much more pervasive: health, family, friends, church, community, and nation. The best and truest wealth is great music and art, good books, the nourishment of the mind, the contentment of the heart. The best things in life are not necessarily free, despite what the song says, but they come to us as factors which are ultimately given to us by God instead of those which we have earned or inherited or invested.
Wealth that ebbs and flows is not the kind that permanently keeps us going. The stock market goes up and down. Since January 1st of this year, it has gone down precipitously, and millions of people have lost billions of dollars. On the other hand, it doesn’t really affect them if they don’t need to sell off anything, and if they patiently wait for the bull to overpower the bear once again, as he always does. But health, family, friends, church, community, nation: those things continue to bless us whatever happens on Wall Street.
Seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well.