Thursday, September 29, 2016
Pentecost 19, Proper 21 - September 25, 2016
Sermon for The Nineteenth
Sunday After Pentecost
Year C, Proper 21 ~ September
25, 2016
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Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
The love of money is the root of every
kind of evil.
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided
Trinity
“You cannot serve God and mammon.” That is where we left
off last week. Our Lord tells us that serving
mammon (which means money) is inimical to spiritual life.
We heard about the crafty steward, who was put in charge of his master’s
ill-gotten gains and turned them to his own advantage by forgiving the debts of
the poor, so that they would take care of him when mammon failed. The theme
continues this week in our Lord’s parable of Dives and Lazarus.
Again we hear of the
necessity of solidarity with the poor, which is the essence of the Gospel. The
poor are favored by God. The Kingdom of God is for the poor. Our own well-being
depends on a right relationship to the poor and to money.
I’m afraid NRSV errs
theologically in translating mammon
as wealth. Wealth means well-being. Money is useful as a medium of exchange,
but spiritually deadly as a measure of well-being. What the NRSV calls
“dishonest wealth” is better rendered in the King James version as unrighteous mammon. That means the use
of money to maintain unjust relationships among human beings.
Dives and Lazarus have only
one thing in common: they are both human. That means they are both mortal. And
they both die. “Dives” is the traditional name for the rich man of the parable. It simply means “rich man”. Dives is defined as rich. In this story he is
nothing but the archetype of a rich man: one who serves not God, but Mammon — that is, money as the measure
of distinction, or separation between people. That archetype — being defined as having — cannot enter the Kingdom of God. The problem is that the
archetypical Dives cannot imagine his own death. He is deeply unaware of the
homely truism that “you can’t take it with you." He wastes his life
denying death, while Lazarus has been experiencing it outside his door. The
parable illuminates the contrast between the way of mortification and the way
of illusion.
Mortification means the
remembrance of death. It is essential to a healthy spiritual life.
Dives-consciousness misinterprets the term to mean a morbid preoccupation
accompanied by bizarre practices of a more or less masochistic kind: hair
shirts, chains, excessive fasting, and the like. But these exaggerations
undertaken by certain very advanced ascetics, are not the essence of
mortification. The essence is the recognition of our mortality, which is to say the recognition of our common humanity. Dives and Lazarus are alike in
death. We are all equal in death. Distinctions of material wealth in this life are
a trap, the very definition of sin — even of
original sin, understood (following St. Ambrose) as the confusion of being
and having. The antidote is alms-giving, among the most important of the
practices of mortification.
Mortals, human beings, have nothing; imagining that we do is
Dives’ dreadful mistake. In so far as we do not share it, insofar as we fail to
establish solidarity with Lazarus in this life, thus far are we separated from
Lazarus in the bosom of Abraham. There is no bridge across the chasm for Dives
as archetype. I do not take this story to prove any doctrine of everlasting
damnation, the idea that there is anything that actual persons can do to place
themselves beyond the reach of God’s mercy. As the Collect reminds us, God declares almighty power chiefly in showing
mercy and pity. We can hope that the grace of God may purge us of our own
participation in the archetype, even after death. The more we share the
illusions of Dives, the more will need to be purged. Might as well start now.
Our personal consciousness
survives our physical death. The state of that survival is continuous with its
state in this life. I think that supposition clearly underlies the story of
Dives and Lazarus. It is also a cautionary tale about those who are content to
sink themselves in delusion by shaping their consciousness to conform to the
Dives archetype, regarding distinctions of possession as the only reality. As Paul writes to Timothy,
The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil,
and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and
pierced themselves with many pains.
Dives’ lack of concern for the poor man at his doorstep
expresses his deformed consciousness. His delusion creates a barrier between
him and Lazarus, the separation theology calls “sin”, a barrier that becomes an
unbridgeable chasm, when they both die. It seems that even though Lazarus may
wish to do so, he cannot not help Dives in his suffering. I think the point is
that Dives’ predicament is of his own making, bad karma that he will have to work through, not that it is
necessarily permanent. He has made his own bed, now he has to lie in it. Maybe
for quite a long time, because his consciousness is not fit for eternity and
the Vision of God. But that does not mean that he is personally beyond the
mercy of God. That would be impossible.
The parable certainly
cautions us not to neglect the poor. But it applies to everyone in a deeper sense
too, warning us against our own favorite illusions — chief among them that we
are immortal. Dives forgets about his death and encounter with God, for which
this life is a preparation. Possession has nothing to do with this encounter.
Or rather, our so-called “possessions” measure our ultimate well-being only to
the extent that we place them at the service of the poor.
Dives may have been rich —
by definition — but he was not wealthy. He
did not really enjoy well-being, but only a counterfeit, an illusion. Worldly
possession is genuine wealth only
when it is the instrument of solidarity with the poor. Had Dives established
such solidarity in this mortal life, his worldly possessions would not have
separated him from Lazarus in the next. It is the same theme as last week’s
crafty steward, who used money to make friends with the poor, so that when the
inevitable happened, they would welcome him into their dwellings.
The
love of money is the root of all kinds of evil,
because it causes us to forget God and the fact that we shall shortly encounter
Him. The delusion of possession is so seductive that the ancient Christian
desert ascetics regarded it as the most subtle and dangerous of temptations.
Men and women who had passed every other spiritual test might succumb in the
end to avarice.
The modern Church restates
the same truth in up-to-date language as the “preferential option for the
poor.” The Church as a whole supports policies that favor the poor, and asks
its members to do the same in their lives. The story of Dives and Lazarus is
about the unquestionable necessity of this choice for nations as well as for
persons. As the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth, observed:
Between the rich man and the poor man, heaven does
not adopt a position of neutrality: the rich man can take care of his own
future, God is on the side of the poor.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS!
