A Sermon for Bloomsbury
Central Baptist Church
1 Timothy 6.6–19
Luke 16.19–30
I want to start with a
confession,
which is that on the way in
this morning
I passed at least two people sleeping in doorways along Shaftesbury Avenue,
and I'm fairly sure I didn't
really see either of them.
I registered them, the way you
register a lamppost or a bin.
And I kept walking, because I
had a service to get to and a sermon to preach,
and the sermon, as it happens,
was this one.
I mention that not to perform
some tidy little guilt,
but because it's the honest
place to begin with these two readings.
Because both of them are about
seeing, and about not seeing.
And both of them suspect that
the not-seeing is something we practise,
something we get good at,
something a whole way of life
can be quietly organised around.
Last week, as we began this
short series in the letters to Timothy,
we started with grace.
We heard that extraordinary
testimony –
that even a life marked by
violence
and opposition to
God could be turned around,
that no one is beyond the
reach of mercy.
And that gave us confidence.
Not in ourselves, but in God.
But grace, if it's real, has to
go somewhere.
It isn't a single event that
we can file away and admire.
It's a beginning.
And so the question shifts this
week,
from has grace reached us
to what does it look like
to live that grace out,
over the long
haul, day after ordinary day.
Because we all know that
beginning something is one thing,
and continuing it is another,
and finishing it well is
something else again.
That's true of gym memberships
and it's true of discipleship,
and the author of this letter
knows it.
And I should pause on that
word, "author," for just a moment,
because although this letter
comes down to us in Paul's name,
most scholars now think it was
written a little after his lifetime
by someone standing within his
tradition
– holding his voice, carrying
his gospel forward into a new situation.
That doesn't make it any less
Paul's in spirit.
It just means that when I keep
saying "the author" this morning
rather than simply
"Paul," that's the reason why.
And the author knows, as we all
know,
that finishing well is the
hardest part –
which is why the end of this letter reads less like theology
and more like a coach's final
word before sending the team back out.
And the world he's sending
Timothy back into is Ephesus.
Now, we tend to hear
"Ephesus" as a sort of neutral biblical backdrop,
but it was nothing of the
sort.
It was one of the great cities
of the Roman Empire –
a port, a banking centre,
a place where the imperial
economy did its work in plain sight.
Wealth flowed through Ephesus,
and it flowed the way it
always flows in an empire: upwards.
Patronage, status, the visible display of who mattered and who didn't.
And in a place like that,
certain assumptions settle into the water supply.
That those who have more are,
somehow, more blessed.
That prosperity is a sign of
divine approval.
That security is a thing you
accumulate.
And the church in Ephesus is
breathing that air along with everybody else.
Of course it is.
Which is why the warning here isn't abstract moralising –
it's a survival question.
How do you live faithfully in a system
that has already decided what
a human being is worth,
and measures it in coin?
And into that comes the line
everyone half-remembers and usually misquotes.
Not "money is the root of
all evil,"
and not even "the root of
all evil,"
but "the love of money is
a root of all kinds of evil."
The precision matters,
because the writer isn't
staging a naïve war on money itself.
Money can be used well;
the letter will end by telling
wealthy Christians exactly how.
What's being named is something further in –
a love, a trust, a devotion
that has attached itself to the wrong thing:
the moment money
stops being a tool in your hand
and becomes a master over your imagination.
And the author traces what
happens when that shift takes hold,
and it's worth slowing down
over,
because he's describing a process, not a single dramatic fall.
It begins with the illusion of
security.
Wealth makes a promise –
that if you have enough,
you'll be safe,
that you can insulate yourself
against the future,
manage the risk,
seal the cracks.
And there's a grain of truth in
it,
which is exactly what makes it
so persuasive;
resources really do open doors and steady the ground.
The danger isn't that money
does nothing.
The danger is the moment it
becomes the thing we finally trust,
quietly taking the place that
belongs to God.
Then comes the distortion of
desire,
because we're shaped by what
we chase.
If the horizon of a life
becomes more,
then slowly, almost without
our noticing,
our wanting gets retrained.
We start to measure ourselves
by what we hold.
We compare. We feel the pull.
And after a while it stops feeling like a distortion at all and just feels like
life –
while underneath, the older
desires,
the desire for God and for
justice and for our neighbour,
get crowded quietly out.
And then, thirdly, what I can
only call erosion.
The author says that some, in
their eagerness to be rich,
"have wandered away from
the faith."
Notice he doesn't say renounced
it, or rejected it, or argued their way out of it.
They wandered. It's a
drifting word, a slow word.
And that, I think, is the most
searching thing in the whole passage –
the suggestion that the real
threat to faith
isn't usually persecution or
crisis or some frontal assault.
It's the steady, ambient pull
of a rival set of values
that never once announces
itself as the enemy.
Wealth rarely destroys faith
with a bang. It just fills the room.
It occupies the space where
trust and dependence
and openness to God might have
lived,
until one day you look up and your life is pointing
in a direction you never
consciously chose.
So that's the diagnosis.
And if that's the diagnosis,
then everything hangs on the alternative –
and here the whole tone of the
passage turns,
from warning to invitation.
Pursue righteousness,
godliness, faith,
love, endurance, gentleness.
And the word to hold on to
there is pursue.
These aren't things that
happen to us while we're looking the other way.
They're things we go after, seek out, practise into being.
Faith, it turns out, is not
something you receive once
and then leave in a drawer.
It's cultivated. It takes shape over time,
through habits and choices and
the slow orientation of a life –
which is why it can be lost the same way,
by drift, and found the same
way, by pursuit.
And right at the centre of all
this sits the phrase I want us to take home.
Take hold of the eternal
life to which you were called.
Now, we hear "eternal
life" and we reach almost automatically for the future –
for something on the far side
of death,
something we wait for,
something that begins when
this life ends.
But that isn't how it's being
used here, and this matters enormously.
Eternal life here is not a
reward stored up for later.
It's the life of God, shared
with us, now –
a different quality of living
that's already available, already breaking in.
Not simply more of the same
life stretched out forever,
but a transformed life, a life
shaped here and now
by the presence and the
purposes of God.
Which changes everything about
that little verb in v.12, take hold.
You don't take hold of
something you're waiting for.
You take hold of something
that's already within reach.
And so the language here is
active and deliberate and slightly urgent,
because this kind of life
doesn't arrive by accident
and it won't settle on us
while we drift.
It has to be grasped.
And when you start to look at
what it actually looks like when it's grasped,
you find it looks like
generosity instead of accumulation,
like justice instead of
exploitation,
like love instead of the
endless project of securing yourself.
It looks like a life that's
stopped being organised around self-protection
and has been set free, at
last, to give itself away.
And it's precisely there that
Jesus tells his story,
and the story turns out to be
a mirror
held up to everything the
letter has just said.
There's a rich man, and there's
a poor man at his gate,
and here's the first thing
worth noticing,
the thing that would have made
Jesus' hearers sit up.
The rich man has no name.
He's the somebody, the man of
substance,
the one the whole world would
have known –
and Jesus doesn't give him a
name.
The beggar, though, the nobody
at the gate covered in sores,
he gets a name.
Lazarus.
He is, in fact, the only character in any of Jesus' parables who is ever named.
And that's not decoration.
In the economy of the empire,
the rich man is a name worth
knowing
and Lazarus is invisible
refuse.
In the economy of God, it's the
other way round entirely –
God knows the name of the one
the world walked past.
And notice what the rich man's
sin actually is,
because it isn't what we might
expect.
He isn't cruel.
He doesn't kick Lazarus, or
have him moved on,
or do a single dramatic wicked
thing.
His failure is quieter and far
more familiar than that.
He simply doesn't see him.
Day after day Lazarus lies at his gate,
visible, present, close enough
to touch –
and the rich man's whole life is so thoroughly organised
around his own comfort and his
own world
that a suffering human being
at his own front door
has become, to him, part of the scenery.
Not hidden. Just unseen.
And that's the danger for us,
isn't it?
Not that we'll wake one
morning and decide to renounce the faith.
But that we'll grow so accustomed to a certain way of living,
so at home in a culture that
treats deep inequality as simply the weather,
that we quietly stop noticing.
Stop noticing who's missing.
Stop noticing who's excluded.
Stop noticing who is at the
gate –
which, for us, is
not a metaphor,
but the actual doorways of the
actual streets
around this actual
building,
where actual people will be
sitting again this afternoon
when we've gone
home.
And then the story does
something almost unbearable.
From beyond death, the rich
man finally asks for something
on behalf of someone else –
send someone to warn my brothers,
send them a sign, someone from
the dead, something undeniable.
And the answer comes back: they
already have what they need.
They already know.
They have Moses and the prophets.
They don't lack information.
They lack the will to act on
what they already understand.
And that lands very close to
home for a congregation like ours,
because let's be honest – we
are not people who are short of information.
We know the call to love our neighbour.
We know the call to share what
we have.
We know the call to seek
justice.
Nobody here needs a sign from
heaven
to tell them there are hungry and
homeless people in this city.
The question was never whether we understand.
The question is whether we'll
live it.
And there's one more turn of
the screw,
and it's the one I can't
preach past,
because Luke lets the rich man
say it out loud:
if someone rises from the dead, then they'll listen.
And we sit here on the far side
of Easter and we know – someone did.
In the central story of our
faith, someone has risen from the dead.
And here we still are, still capable of walking past the gate.
Which tells us something
bracing and true:
resurrection doesn't override
us. It invites us.
The empty tomb doesn't force
our hand;
it holds the door open and
waits to see
whether we'll walk through it
into a genuinely different way of living.
So how do we live differently?
The author has already given
Timothy the word,
and it's a word we badly
misunderstand.
"Godliness with contentment," he says, "is great gain."
And we hear
"contentment"
and we think of a kind of soft
passivity,
of settling, of the absence of
ambition.
But that's not it at all.
In that world,
"contentment" was a proud word –
it named the self-made ideal
of needing no one and nothing,
of being sufficient unto
yourself.
And the letter takes that word
and turns it inside out.
Christian contentment isn't
the fantasy
of the
self-sufficient individual who needs nobody.
It's the freedom of the person
who has stopped believing
that more will
save them,
and has learned instead to
depend – on God, and on one another.
It isn't settling for less.
It's discovering, at long
last, what is actually enough.
And from that place, and only from that place,
real generosity becomes
possible.
Which is why the closing
instruction isn't a threat and isn't a shaming.
It's an invitation held out to
those who have plenty:
don't be arrogant,
don't set your hope on
something as unreliable as wealth,
be rich instead in good works,
be generous, be – and here's
the word that ties the whole thing
back to who we are
as a church – be ready to share.
Because that word is the koinonia
word, the fellowship word,
the same root as the shared
life
we're always talking about at
Bloomsbury.
Generosity, for our author,
isn't a private virtue you
practise alone with your bank statement.
It's the shape of a community that holds its life in common.
This is how we take hold, he
says, of the life that really is life.
And so we come back to where we
started,
on the pavement outside,
walking past the gate.
We become what we pursue.
Chase wealth, and we'll be
shaped, in the end, by its anxieties –
always comparing, never safe,
never seeing.
Chase Christ, and we'll be
shaped by love, and by freedom,
and slowly, mercifully, we
might even start to see again.
Last week, grace reached us.
This week, we're invited to
answer it –
to take hold of the life that is really life,
and to live it here, and now,
and together.
Amen.
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