Thy Word and Thy Money

Matthew 19:16-28; Psalm 24

November 1, 2015

Our third reading this morning is the 24^th Psalm:

The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it,
   the world, and those who live in it; 
for he has founded it on the seas,
   and established it on the rivers. 
Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord?
   And who shall stand in his holy place? 
Those who have clean hands and pure hearts,
   who do not lift up their souls to what is false,
   and do not swear deceitfully. 
They will receive blessing from the Lord,
   and vindication from the God of their salvation. 
Such is the company of those who seek him,
   who seek the face of the God of Jacob.^*

The earth belongs to God; the earth and all those who live upon it.

This simple, joyous, and, let’s face it, rather innocuous sounding little psalm of praise contains, if we attend to it with care, perhaps the most radical phrase in all of scripture: The earth is the Lord’s and all that is therein.

Consider what it disrupts. Consider what it turns upside down. Consider the root that it draws us back toward.

We live in a culture that invites us to order our lives along certain more or less clearly drawn distinctions. We divide and subdivide our lives into work time and family time, public property and private property, secular space and sacred space, friend and foe, black and white. We divide our finances along similar and often related lines.

Yet this simple line from the 24^th psalm obliterates all such lines and distinctions with its majestic insistence that all that is or ever will be belongs to God.

We live in an age in which our interconnectedness invites us to reconsider old divisions. As Quaker writer Sharon Parks observes, “As we try to defend the security of our private home, we are simultaneously rediscovering the economic-ecological truth of our profound interdependence within the small planet home we share.”[1]

Martin Luther King reminded us powerfully that “we are all bound together in a single garment of destiny; whatever effects one directly effects all indirectly.”

We all belong to God, and, moreover, we all belong to one another. So whatever we hold, we hold in trust, thus we hold with care but we hold loosely.

That is such a counter-cultural perspective. We are taught to hold on tight, to grasp what we can and never let it go. After all, the one who dies with the most toys wins, right?

This is the challenge facing the young man who comes to Jesus seeking the key to salvation. He’s got the traditional obligations of his religious practice down cold. Commandments? Check. Yet he knows that something is missing. His life feels less than whole. Perhaps he feels disconnected from his community and its traditions even though he is following the letter of its law. He has so much material wealth that he should be living a life of ease but, instead, he feels a vague dis-ease. So he comes to this great teacher seeking advice.

“Get rid of your stuff,” Jesus tells him. “Your money cannot buy what you seek. Indeed, the only way to get what you want is to give up what you have.”

The young man goes away grieving because he has so much. He cannot imagine life without what he has accumulated. Other versions of the story note that Jesus looks with compassion on him, and though Matthew does not include that detail, it’s important to note what else is missing: any notion of condemnation. Jesus does not condemn the rich young man, and, in fact, notes how difficult it is for the rich to enter the kindom of God – about like squeezing a camel through the eye of a needle.

Why so hard? What is it about wealth, about the accumulation of stuff, that makes kindom life so challenging?

The key is that deceptively simple phrase from Psalm 24. The earth is the Lord’s and all that is therein – including all of our money, all of our investments, all of our stuff. When we measure our own worth by the balance of our savings account we’re using a measure that is foreign to God. Moreover, such a measure is destructive of the values of the kindom of God where the commonwealth is central and individual accumulation is of little value at best and, at worst, can be destructive of community life.

In a culture that fetishizes the lifestyles of the rich and famous, that idolizes affluence, this is a profoundly difficult word. Indeed, it is not too far a stretch to take this story and substitute America for the rich young man, and to see that we have turned away grieving from the invitation to follow the way of Jesus.

Fortunately, though we may turn away from that invitation, the one who issues is never turns away from us. God is faithful still, and God calls us, even now, to follow the way of Jesus into abundant life – life marked by the joyous celebrations of a people laughing together, marked by the deep and profound grieving of a people weeping together, marked by the incredible abundance shared by a people breaking bread together.

We live in the one of the most affluent communities in the richest nation in the world. We are the ones coming to Jesus and, so often, turning away because we grasp so tightly to that wealth. Letting go is not easy, nor does it happen all at once. It is a journey, and we make the path by walking it. It is a life that we create by practicing it bit by bit.

Jesus invites us, and more than that, prepares a table for us to ensure that we are fed for the journey, that we have enough and more than enough to walk the road before us. We gather in community at this table so that we learn to trust one another, for the way is not simple but we come to know that though we may stumble and we may fall, there’s another hand to help us up when we follow Jesus’ call. Come and see; and let us break bread together. Amen.

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[1] Sharon Daloz Parks, “Household Economics,” in Dorothy C. Bass, Practicing Our Faith (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997) 44.