A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
20 June 2021
Mark 10:17-27
Amos 5:6-7; 10-15
Listen to this sermon here: https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/good-with-money
One of the recurring themes in British political discourse
are discussions on the gap between the rich and the poor,
and on ways in which the rich might, or might not,
be taxed in order to preserve the social care budget
that protects those at the bottom end of the social spectrum.
And I have long had an interest
in how we might, as Christians,
help our society to do ethical things with money.
I mentioned this briefly in last week’s sermon,
when we were looking at how Christianity might bring healing
to the sickness that so often affects the global financial markets.
And our passage this morning from Mark’s gospel
takes us right to the heart of Jesus’ thinking
on issues of wealth, economics and justice.
In these verses from Mark chapter 10,
we meet a very rich man
who is wrestling with some profound questions about eternal life.
And in this I suspect he is not alone:
There are numerous examples
of good people who also have a lot of money.
Not everyone who has money is bad, or evil, or compromised.
And there are many people who have money,
who also try to live good lives.
This rich man who comes to Jesus in Mark’s gospel, would, I think,
have liked to think of himself as ‘good, with money’.
A bit like the old Co-Op bank slogan
where they used to claim that they were
‘good, with money’
with the clever double meaning emphasizing that not only do they intend to be
‘good with money’
in terms of being able to invest wisely
and get a good return on their investments
but also that they will use their money to do ‘good’:
they are ‘good’, and they have money, they claim.
Well, we all know how that worked out for the Co-Op,
with their infamous ‘crystal Methodist scandal’
but I wonder whether our rich man from Mark’s gospel will fare any better?
Yes, he has money,
but he clearly also wants to be ‘good’.
And so he comes to Jesus,
who has been travelling around
preaching a message of good news and newness of life,
encouraging people to live lives of eternal value
and to consider their lives from heaven’s perspective
And the rich man says to Jesus,
"Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?"
In response, Jesus gives him a stock Jewish answer
and lists six of the ten commandments.
Interestingly, Jesus misses out the first four ‘theological’ commandments
citing only the final six ‘ethical’ ones.
This man’s issue is not, it seems, to do with his belief in God,
it is to do with his behavior.
How his belief works itself out in practice.
And in fact, Jesus actually changes one of these:
In the list of the ten commandments in Exodus 20
the final one is :
‘You shall not covet … anything that belongs to your neighbor.’
But Jesus changes this in the list he gives to the rich man
to ‘You shall not defraud’,
which is actually not a command from the ten commandments at all,
but from Leviticus 19.13 – which says
‘You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning.’
With this deft bit of editing,
Jesus reveals that he is more interested
in how this man became so affluent,
than he is in any pious theological inquiry about eternal life.
The temptation facing this rich man,
is not about coveting the wealth of others:
after all, he already has great wealth.
Other people covet his possessions,
not the other way around.
Rather, his particular problem is the acquisition of wealth,
at the expense of those less fortunate then himself.
So let’s return to the man’s original question:
It seems that this rich man assumes he can inherit eternal life.
It seems that he is of the opinion that eternal life, like property,
can be inherited! – passed on from one’s ancestors.
Like many who find themselves the beneficiaries of a socioeconomic system,
he sees the benefits of religion - eternal life, in this case -
as a mere reproduction
of his own class entitlement.
He has inherited wealth,
and now he wants to inherit the eternal life,
to which he also believes he is entitled by virtue of his privileged birth.
In first century Palestine, the basis of wealth was land,
and the primary mechanism for the growth of such wealth
was the acquisition of land through the debt-default
of small agricultural land holders.
The socioeconomic system of Jesus’ time
was one of haves, and have-nots.
With rich growing richer, and the poor growing poorer,
and the gap between the two getting wider with each generation.
The landed class took great care, of course,
to protect its entitlement from generation to generation,
and to ensure that their inheritance was protected.
And so the rich man asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life,
and Jesus tells him:
that he should not participate in the defrauding
of others out of what is theirs,
in his ongoing possession and acquisition of wealth.
Jesus doesn’t directly dispute the man’s improbable contention
that he has ‘kept the whole law’ since his youth,
even though it flies in the face of Jesus’ own assertion
that ‘there is no-one good but God alone’.
Instead, Jesus ‘looked at the man and loved him’,
whilst then delivering the hardest truth of all:
‘You lack one thing’ – he says to the man who has everything.
What the man lacks is forgiveness…
This rich man has a debt to pay:
he remains indebted to the poor,
who have been defrauded down the generations,
in order that he may inherit his great wealth.
‘Go’ pleads Jesus,
‘sell what you own and give the money to the poor’
This is radical stuff:
Jesus is asking the man to do nothing less
than dismantle the very system from which he derives his privilege.
If he gives his money away,
there will be nothing for his children,
and the system of inherited wealth and privilege,
will be challenged as money is redistributed to the benefit of the poor,
rather than hoarded for future generations of the wealthy elite.
According to the logic of Jubilee,
by redistributing his ill-gotten surplus,
the man stands to receive true ‘treasure in heaven’.
But it doesn’t end there, ‘Come, follow me’, says Jesus.
This isn’t just about asking the man to change
his personal attitude towards his wealth,
or to treat his servants better,
or to reform his personal life.
Rather, it is asking him to participate
in the overturning of the system that generated
his elite status in the first place.
The man gives up and leaves dejected,
because, says Mark, ‘he had many possessions’.
We can imagine his distress:
if he does as Jesus asks,
where does that leave his children and the rest of his family?
In the context of class inequality,
Jesus’ message of repentance means redistributive justice.
The economic model Jesus is proposing here
is one where wealth does not simply perpetuate and accumulate
in the hands of the few,
as they pass it from generation to generation
whilst the poor get poorer.
Rather, it is one where the structures are in place,
to ensure that the flow of money goes down through the social strata
as well as up.
I think there are echoes of Jesus’ challenge to the rich man
in the Philanthropic Pledge,
initiated by multi-billionaire Warren Buffet.
This directly challenges the rich elite of our time
to give at least 50% of their wealth to charity,
and Buffet himself has pledged to give
99% of his wealth to philanthropy.
However, he states that even this level of giving
will leave his personal lifestyle and that of his children untouched.
And with insight, he says that a vast collection of possessions
ends up possessing its owner.
So, back to gospel…
Mark wants his readers to know
that this story means exactly what it says,
and so he has Jesus drive the point home
with some absurdist humour:
"Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! 25 It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God."
The joke here about the camel and the needle
has been twisted by commentators anxious to avoid its sting.
In an interview for the Independent newspaper,
the born-again Christian rock star Alice Cooper
trotted out the old chestnut about the eye being a gate in the city wall,
as he sought to justify his own great wealth.
But the reality is that Jesus named the largest known animal,
and the smallest known aperture,
precisely to denote the impossibility of the rich
entering the kingdom of God with their wealth intact.
You cannot, as they say, take it with you!
But you can, of course, leave it all to your kids…
Anyway, the disciples protest ‘Who then can be saved?’
and we might well join them in this question.
Because we, like them, all to often interpret wealth
as a sign of God’s favour
Those of us who have inherited western wealth and privilege,
have done so in a context
where church and state have colluded down the centuries ,
to create a version of Christianity
that is predominantly educated, privileged, and elitist.
And those who have shaped our thinking,
have been so anxious that Jesus here might be saying
something exclusive or critical about the rich,
that they have often missed the fact that this terrifying passage
is not primarily about the rich at all.
It is about the nature of the kingdom of God.
The kingdom of God, says Jesus, is that place and time
when there are no rich and poor.
It is the place and time when Jubilee is enacted
when the equality of all humans in the eyes of God
becomes reality in the lives of all.
And this vision of the kingdom of God
- the place where eternal life is to be encountered,
is a place which the rich, by definition,
cannot enter with their wealth intact.
This is a vision of a genuinely new social order
based on economic equality,
and Jesus acknowledges that it seems truly impossible.
Certainly in the culture and religion of capitalism,
any economic model that has been predicated
upon re-distributive justice
has been considered high heresy.
And the nightmares associated with totalitarian communism
still haunt any such discussions.
And yet churches
have been quick to embrace movements
such as the Jubilee debt campaign
which has called for the cancellation
of the debts owed to the west
by heavily indebted poor countries around the globe.
The biblical vision of Jubilee
was neither a utopian prescription,
with no earthly hope of ever working,
nor an eschatological hope,
to be realized only in the hereafter.
Rather, it was intended as a practical hedge,
against the inevitable concentration of wealth and privilege in the hands of the few
to the detriment of the whole society of ancient Israel.
The vision of Jubilee restitution and redistribution,
originates not from social idealism,
but from the revealed character of God.
The dependent poor were to be released from their debt,
because the God of Israel
was the God who brought Israel out from slavery in Egypt (Lev 25.35-38).
Land was to be shared amongst the people rather than retained by the few
because the land ultimately belonged to God
with those living there doing so as his tenants (Lev 25.23-28).
This Old Testament Jubilee vision represents the antithesis
of those systems that promote wealth concentration,
and Jesus not only insists that redistributive justice is possible
but he implies that without it we cannot speak of the kingdom of God.
Mark’s portrait of the rich man seems to suggest
that he is ‘possessed by his possessions’,
and today we might call this the addiction of affluence.
Perhaps it is because economic greed
is the most difficult and pervasive of human addictions
that Mark emphasizes Jesus’ love for the rich man.
But love speaks the truth:
‘Recovery’ from this addiction will, for the rich man,
take the form of ‘reparation’
Few subjects in the gospel are as difficult for us to address as this one,
and the trouble with wealth is that it is so insidious:
We hardly even know how to define it!
And yet its pursuit can so easily become one of the primary goals of our lives,
unless we take Jesus’ counsel seriously.
The truth is that if we mean it when we pray the Lord’s prayer,
if we mean it when we say
‘your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven’
then we are committing ourselves to the task
of seeing a new social and economic order
come to birth in our midst.
And one of the ways we can do this
is to ask ourselves about the ways
in which wealth exhibits itself in our society.
One distinguishing characteristic of wealth,
is the opportunity to make decisions and choices
about the direction of our own lives and the lives of our loved ones.
Where and when and into what circumstances we were born,
often determines whether we can make choices in life,
and if so, which ones.
Often it is difficult to differentiate
between necessities and luxuries.
In fact, the very definition of ‘necessity’
varies widely according to the context of our lives.
Food, clothing, shelter, recreation, and security,
for example, are basic human needs.
But how we interpret the satisfaction of these needs in our own lives,
may provide our contemporary context
for the application of this gospel story to our own lives.
Food, for example, is just one example:
In a world where the diets of pets in wealthy households
are significantly better than the diets
of many children in poor households
something is terribly wrong.
Or what about clothing and shelter?
We live in a world where designer goods fill the shops,
whilst the streets remain home to those who freeze at night.
Affordable housing is a growing political issue,
as the need to build more dwellings
becomes ever more apparent.
We are often encouraged to believe that wealth and privilege ‘just happen’
- by good luck, or hard work, or the will of God.
And I’m reminded of the verse we don’t sing any more
from ‘all things bright and beautiful’
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly,
And fashioned their estate.
The reason this is an unacceptable theology,
is that great wealth and great injustice
all too often go hand in hand.
Now, I don’t want to reduce this to a personal issue,
and I don’t want to target those of us who are personally wealthy
into feeling guilty and inadequate.
That is not the point of Jesus challenge to the rich man
and we shouldn’t make it such either.
But we do need to recognize
that we live in a world where the vast majority of people barely survive,
and the small minority live extremely well.
Mark’s story about the rich man
needs to be interpreted in our own times,
as an invitation to transform the systems and structures
that create wealth inequality,
that perpetuate poverty,
and that maintain privilege within our own society,
and within our world.
It is an invitation to enter the world of politics,
to make our voices heard on issues such as international debt relief,
on the housing crisis,
on the policies relating to the fair and just taxation of the rich,
on the provision of benefits for the poorest of the poor,
on the welcoming of refugees…
If we ignore these, and confine ourselves to a privileged vision of faith,
where we look after me and mine, or us and ours,
then we too, like the rich man,
may find that we have turned away from Jesus
and his dawning kingdom.
And forgive me, but I remain doubtful
that a political rhetoric of ‘spreading privilege’, and ‘trickle down economics’,
which does not also address those systems
that further benefit the already super-privileged,
has anything more than very limited practical application.
But, if we can learn to hold lightly to our possessions,
and if we can learn to be generous
with our wealth and privilege and power,
and if we can learn to follow Jesus wherever he calls us…
Then maybe we can learn what it is to be good with money,
and maybe we can, by the grace of God,
find our place in the dawning kingdom of God.
Where the poor find value
and where first are last and the last are first.
are discussions on the gap between the rich and the poor,
and on ways in which the rich might, or might not,
be taxed in order to preserve the social care budget
that protects those at the bottom end of the social spectrum.
And I have long had an interest
in how we might, as Christians,
help our society to do ethical things with money.
I mentioned this briefly in last week’s sermon,
when we were looking at how Christianity might bring healing
to the sickness that so often affects the global financial markets.
And our passage this morning from Mark’s gospel
takes us right to the heart of Jesus’ thinking
on issues of wealth, economics and justice.
In these verses from Mark chapter 10,
we meet a very rich man
who is wrestling with some profound questions about eternal life.
And in this I suspect he is not alone:
There are numerous examples
of good people who also have a lot of money.
Not everyone who has money is bad, or evil, or compromised.
And there are many people who have money,
who also try to live good lives.
This rich man who comes to Jesus in Mark’s gospel, would, I think,
have liked to think of himself as ‘good, with money’.
A bit like the old Co-Op bank slogan
where they used to claim that they were
‘good, with money’
with the clever double meaning emphasizing that not only do they intend to be
‘good with money’
in terms of being able to invest wisely
and get a good return on their investments
but also that they will use their money to do ‘good’:
they are ‘good’, and they have money, they claim.
Well, we all know how that worked out for the Co-Op,
with their infamous ‘crystal Methodist scandal’
but I wonder whether our rich man from Mark’s gospel will fare any better?
Yes, he has money,
but he clearly also wants to be ‘good’.
And so he comes to Jesus,
who has been travelling around
preaching a message of good news and newness of life,
encouraging people to live lives of eternal value
and to consider their lives from heaven’s perspective
And the rich man says to Jesus,
"Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?"
In response, Jesus gives him a stock Jewish answer
and lists six of the ten commandments.
Interestingly, Jesus misses out the first four ‘theological’ commandments
citing only the final six ‘ethical’ ones.
This man’s issue is not, it seems, to do with his belief in God,
it is to do with his behavior.
How his belief works itself out in practice.
And in fact, Jesus actually changes one of these:
In the list of the ten commandments in Exodus 20
the final one is :
‘You shall not covet … anything that belongs to your neighbor.’
But Jesus changes this in the list he gives to the rich man
to ‘You shall not defraud’,
which is actually not a command from the ten commandments at all,
but from Leviticus 19.13 – which says
‘You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning.’
With this deft bit of editing,
Jesus reveals that he is more interested
in how this man became so affluent,
than he is in any pious theological inquiry about eternal life.
The temptation facing this rich man,
is not about coveting the wealth of others:
after all, he already has great wealth.
Other people covet his possessions,
not the other way around.
Rather, his particular problem is the acquisition of wealth,
at the expense of those less fortunate then himself.
So let’s return to the man’s original question:
It seems that this rich man assumes he can inherit eternal life.
It seems that he is of the opinion that eternal life, like property,
can be inherited! – passed on from one’s ancestors.
Like many who find themselves the beneficiaries of a socioeconomic system,
he sees the benefits of religion - eternal life, in this case -
as a mere reproduction
of his own class entitlement.
He has inherited wealth,
and now he wants to inherit the eternal life,
to which he also believes he is entitled by virtue of his privileged birth.
In first century Palestine, the basis of wealth was land,
and the primary mechanism for the growth of such wealth
was the acquisition of land through the debt-default
of small agricultural land holders.
The socioeconomic system of Jesus’ time
was one of haves, and have-nots.
With rich growing richer, and the poor growing poorer,
and the gap between the two getting wider with each generation.
The landed class took great care, of course,
to protect its entitlement from generation to generation,
and to ensure that their inheritance was protected.
And so the rich man asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life,
and Jesus tells him:
that he should not participate in the defrauding
of others out of what is theirs,
in his ongoing possession and acquisition of wealth.
Jesus doesn’t directly dispute the man’s improbable contention
that he has ‘kept the whole law’ since his youth,
even though it flies in the face of Jesus’ own assertion
that ‘there is no-one good but God alone’.
Instead, Jesus ‘looked at the man and loved him’,
whilst then delivering the hardest truth of all:
‘You lack one thing’ – he says to the man who has everything.
What the man lacks is forgiveness…
This rich man has a debt to pay:
he remains indebted to the poor,
who have been defrauded down the generations,
in order that he may inherit his great wealth.
‘Go’ pleads Jesus,
‘sell what you own and give the money to the poor’
This is radical stuff:
Jesus is asking the man to do nothing less
than dismantle the very system from which he derives his privilege.
If he gives his money away,
there will be nothing for his children,
and the system of inherited wealth and privilege,
will be challenged as money is redistributed to the benefit of the poor,
rather than hoarded for future generations of the wealthy elite.
According to the logic of Jubilee,
by redistributing his ill-gotten surplus,
the man stands to receive true ‘treasure in heaven’.
But it doesn’t end there, ‘Come, follow me’, says Jesus.
This isn’t just about asking the man to change
his personal attitude towards his wealth,
or to treat his servants better,
or to reform his personal life.
Rather, it is asking him to participate
in the overturning of the system that generated
his elite status in the first place.
The man gives up and leaves dejected,
because, says Mark, ‘he had many possessions’.
We can imagine his distress:
if he does as Jesus asks,
where does that leave his children and the rest of his family?
In the context of class inequality,
Jesus’ message of repentance means redistributive justice.
The economic model Jesus is proposing here
is one where wealth does not simply perpetuate and accumulate
in the hands of the few,
as they pass it from generation to generation
whilst the poor get poorer.
Rather, it is one where the structures are in place,
to ensure that the flow of money goes down through the social strata
as well as up.
I think there are echoes of Jesus’ challenge to the rich man
in the Philanthropic Pledge,
initiated by multi-billionaire Warren Buffet.
This directly challenges the rich elite of our time
to give at least 50% of their wealth to charity,
and Buffet himself has pledged to give
99% of his wealth to philanthropy.
However, he states that even this level of giving
will leave his personal lifestyle and that of his children untouched.
And with insight, he says that a vast collection of possessions
ends up possessing its owner.
So, back to gospel…
Mark wants his readers to know
that this story means exactly what it says,
and so he has Jesus drive the point home
with some absurdist humour:
"Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! 25 It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God."
The joke here about the camel and the needle
has been twisted by commentators anxious to avoid its sting.
In an interview for the Independent newspaper,
the born-again Christian rock star Alice Cooper
trotted out the old chestnut about the eye being a gate in the city wall,
as he sought to justify his own great wealth.
But the reality is that Jesus named the largest known animal,
and the smallest known aperture,
precisely to denote the impossibility of the rich
entering the kingdom of God with their wealth intact.
You cannot, as they say, take it with you!
But you can, of course, leave it all to your kids…
Anyway, the disciples protest ‘Who then can be saved?’
and we might well join them in this question.
Because we, like them, all to often interpret wealth
as a sign of God’s favour
Those of us who have inherited western wealth and privilege,
have done so in a context
where church and state have colluded down the centuries ,
to create a version of Christianity
that is predominantly educated, privileged, and elitist.
And those who have shaped our thinking,
have been so anxious that Jesus here might be saying
something exclusive or critical about the rich,
that they have often missed the fact that this terrifying passage
is not primarily about the rich at all.
It is about the nature of the kingdom of God.
The kingdom of God, says Jesus, is that place and time
when there are no rich and poor.
It is the place and time when Jubilee is enacted
when the equality of all humans in the eyes of God
becomes reality in the lives of all.
And this vision of the kingdom of God
- the place where eternal life is to be encountered,
is a place which the rich, by definition,
cannot enter with their wealth intact.
This is a vision of a genuinely new social order
based on economic equality,
and Jesus acknowledges that it seems truly impossible.
Certainly in the culture and religion of capitalism,
any economic model that has been predicated
upon re-distributive justice
has been considered high heresy.
And the nightmares associated with totalitarian communism
still haunt any such discussions.
And yet churches
have been quick to embrace movements
such as the Jubilee debt campaign
which has called for the cancellation
of the debts owed to the west
by heavily indebted poor countries around the globe.
The biblical vision of Jubilee
was neither a utopian prescription,
with no earthly hope of ever working,
nor an eschatological hope,
to be realized only in the hereafter.
Rather, it was intended as a practical hedge,
against the inevitable concentration of wealth and privilege in the hands of the few
to the detriment of the whole society of ancient Israel.
The vision of Jubilee restitution and redistribution,
originates not from social idealism,
but from the revealed character of God.
The dependent poor were to be released from their debt,
because the God of Israel
was the God who brought Israel out from slavery in Egypt (Lev 25.35-38).
Land was to be shared amongst the people rather than retained by the few
because the land ultimately belonged to God
with those living there doing so as his tenants (Lev 25.23-28).
This Old Testament Jubilee vision represents the antithesis
of those systems that promote wealth concentration,
and Jesus not only insists that redistributive justice is possible
but he implies that without it we cannot speak of the kingdom of God.
Mark’s portrait of the rich man seems to suggest
that he is ‘possessed by his possessions’,
and today we might call this the addiction of affluence.
Perhaps it is because economic greed
is the most difficult and pervasive of human addictions
that Mark emphasizes Jesus’ love for the rich man.
But love speaks the truth:
‘Recovery’ from this addiction will, for the rich man,
take the form of ‘reparation’
Few subjects in the gospel are as difficult for us to address as this one,
and the trouble with wealth is that it is so insidious:
We hardly even know how to define it!
And yet its pursuit can so easily become one of the primary goals of our lives,
unless we take Jesus’ counsel seriously.
The truth is that if we mean it when we pray the Lord’s prayer,
if we mean it when we say
‘your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven’
then we are committing ourselves to the task
of seeing a new social and economic order
come to birth in our midst.
And one of the ways we can do this
is to ask ourselves about the ways
in which wealth exhibits itself in our society.
One distinguishing characteristic of wealth,
is the opportunity to make decisions and choices
about the direction of our own lives and the lives of our loved ones.
Where and when and into what circumstances we were born,
often determines whether we can make choices in life,
and if so, which ones.
Often it is difficult to differentiate
between necessities and luxuries.
In fact, the very definition of ‘necessity’
varies widely according to the context of our lives.
Food, clothing, shelter, recreation, and security,
for example, are basic human needs.
But how we interpret the satisfaction of these needs in our own lives,
may provide our contemporary context
for the application of this gospel story to our own lives.
Food, for example, is just one example:
In a world where the diets of pets in wealthy households
are significantly better than the diets
of many children in poor households
something is terribly wrong.
Or what about clothing and shelter?
We live in a world where designer goods fill the shops,
whilst the streets remain home to those who freeze at night.
Affordable housing is a growing political issue,
as the need to build more dwellings
becomes ever more apparent.
We are often encouraged to believe that wealth and privilege ‘just happen’
- by good luck, or hard work, or the will of God.
And I’m reminded of the verse we don’t sing any more
from ‘all things bright and beautiful’
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly,
And fashioned their estate.
The reason this is an unacceptable theology,
is that great wealth and great injustice
all too often go hand in hand.
Now, I don’t want to reduce this to a personal issue,
and I don’t want to target those of us who are personally wealthy
into feeling guilty and inadequate.
That is not the point of Jesus challenge to the rich man
and we shouldn’t make it such either.
But we do need to recognize
that we live in a world where the vast majority of people barely survive,
and the small minority live extremely well.
Mark’s story about the rich man
needs to be interpreted in our own times,
as an invitation to transform the systems and structures
that create wealth inequality,
that perpetuate poverty,
and that maintain privilege within our own society,
and within our world.
It is an invitation to enter the world of politics,
to make our voices heard on issues such as international debt relief,
on the housing crisis,
on the policies relating to the fair and just taxation of the rich,
on the provision of benefits for the poorest of the poor,
on the welcoming of refugees…
If we ignore these, and confine ourselves to a privileged vision of faith,
where we look after me and mine, or us and ours,
then we too, like the rich man,
may find that we have turned away from Jesus
and his dawning kingdom.
And forgive me, but I remain doubtful
that a political rhetoric of ‘spreading privilege’, and ‘trickle down economics’,
which does not also address those systems
that further benefit the already super-privileged,
has anything more than very limited practical application.
But, if we can learn to hold lightly to our possessions,
and if we can learn to be generous
with our wealth and privilege and power,
and if we can learn to follow Jesus wherever he calls us…
Then maybe we can learn what it is to be good with money,
and maybe we can, by the grace of God,
find our place in the dawning kingdom of God.
Where the poor find value
and where first are last and the last are first.
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