September 13, 2013
Text: Psalm 116:1-9
Mark 8: 27-38
Next Sunday I’ll begin a class on what the New Testament has to say about money and possessions. But as I’ve prepared for the class, the question has arisen for me: Why do I care? Most of what the NT has to say about money to people as affluent as many of us has to do with giving that money away. What do I want to explore that for? Would I really change my behavior if I were convinced that the NT called for me to give all my money away? In other words, what kind of authority do I give to the NT and why? So this teaching is less about wealth and more about exploring what undergirds my practice around money and possessions. I’ve been trying for the last several weeks to answer this question of authority, but my attempts to explain it intellectually have seemed pretty weak, so I’m going to tell some stories and hope they help.
In 1980 I’d been practicing medicine up in a tiny Minnesota village on the north shore of Lake Superior for a couple of years. Marja and I were, for the first time in our lives, earning more money than we really needed. Both of us had always felt some responsibility toward the impoverished, so we’d begun giving money to organizations we supported. The trouble was that that meant we weren’t using our money to provide the kind of financial cushion our dominant culture claims is necessary: We weren’t taking responsibility to provide for ourselves in our old age. Did we want our children to have to support us? Did we think it responsible to become a drag on the welfare system if we could have avoided it? Now, I’m part of the dominant culture, too, so I will admit I felt a little anxious about heading into the future without a significant bank account, but mostly I felt guilty for giving our money away. I was breaking the dominant culture’s moral code. Was I being irresponsible?
I didn’t yet consider myself a Christian. I’d grown up in the church but then left it in college. Marja had been an agnostic, too, but a couple of years earlier she’d converted back to Christianity when a group of Christian friends in town had given her unconditional emotional support while I was presumed lost, perhaps dead, somewhere on Mt McKinley (Denali).
I foresaw all sorts of danger for our marriage if she had a religious faith and I didn’t, so at the same time that this question around money and responsibility came up I was in the process of trying to shoehorn myself back into the church (not a very successful project). CS Lewis had suggested “acting as if” I were a Christian and letting belief flow from that.
One night as I walking from the car into our house, it suddenly occurred to me: If I were a follower of Jesus, then the Christian Scripture would affirm our using a significant part of our income to relieve others’ suffering. And that would offer me freedom to face the opposing values of our culture. Suddenly the decision to give money away to support justice felt life giving.
This was, I think, a first step for me in giving Scripture some authority and then noticing how life-giving it was.
Since moving here to DC, I’ve been pulled ever more deeply into this community of Church of the Saviour and then of Eighth Day. I’ve worked side-by-side with some people in whom I’ve seen deep trust in the Kin-dom and a willingness to step out into unknown, sometimes scary, places on the basis of that trust. I was in a mission group, for instance, with Janelle Goetcheus, the physician who started Christ House and other health ministries. I was sometimes stunned by her level of commitment to the work but even more by her courage. Janelle is a soft-spoken person and you would hardly guess she a woman who could face down the city government, but at one point when the City stopped providing free TB testing in the shelters, she did just that. She first went through proper channels. When that failed, she went public and gave the story to the Washington Post, a very gutsy move. I watched as she struggled with the issue before she went public: Christ House depended on city funds for its very existence, and Janelle understood the real possibility that the city might cut their funding if she made too much noise. I don’t think she considered it courage to stand up for the homeless. She’d spent a lot of time in prayer, and this seemed the only choice possible given her life with Jesus. Afterwards, it was clear to me that her joy and almost unimaginable peace around such dangerous decisions were a direct result of her trust and faith.
I saw in her the fruits of giving authority to Scripture. That was a further invitation to me into this strange world of faith.
Several years later came the call to start Joseph’s House. It was scary. I was working at the Community of Hope clinic and we were living in Christ House, the medical recovery shelter for homeless men. More and more impoverished men in the community were dying of AIDS, and we weren’t yet prepared at Christ House to give hospice care, so men were dying alone in hospitals or, even, in the shelters and on the streets. I was aware, of course, of the biblical injunction to work toward justice for the poor and to care for the sick, but starting Joseph’s House was not the result of obeying an injunction. Rather, I’d come to trust enough the NT promise that life with the poor was a pathway into knowing God that I could test it. Fortunately, Marja and one of our children also wanted to move into closer relationship with the people we cared for than was possible at Christ House. So we began to talk about living in a house together with some men with AIDS.
The problem for me was that I knew that that the intensity of living and working in that chaos and the level of responsibility I’d have to take on, combined with my still-untreated depression, would ultimately be very painful for me emotionally.
But as I looked around our faith communities, I saw so many people who’d taken enormous risks to … start Jubilee Housing or Jubilee Jobs or Community of Hope or many others. I experienced the community not only as a promise of support, but also as a demonstration of the fruits of living according to one’s understanding of Scripture. The wider community and all their experiences gave me the courage to try.
And it was difficult for me at Joseph’s House. It did burn me out and after three years I had to stop living at the house and take a year’s sabbatical. I’m sure I could never do it again. Nevertheless, it was one of the most powerful and formative experiences of my life. I wouldn’t trade the fruits of that experience for anything.
A number of years ago Marja and I received a considerable inheritance from Marja’s mom. We’ve had to struggle in a new way with our privilege around money and possessions in light of the Gospel. We’ve decided to give that inheritance away to people and institutions that need it … and that’s been life affirming and invigorating for us. But many questions remain. How much do we keep for ourselves? How much financial security do we need? (In today’s world does financial security even exist?) Do we save anything for our kids? How do we decide to whom to give the money? How do we allow NT wisdom to guide us? What’s faithful? These are things I want to explore with this class.
Now, let me acknowledge that my decision to talk personally this morning about my responses to the call of the Gospel, especially in the area of money, makes me nervous; it carries risks that I don’t know how to avoid. The risk I worry most about is that these examples can easily come across as bragging or “holier-than-thou,” which, in my childhood, was one of the greatest sins. The reality, however, is that since Marja and I are wealthier than most people here, we’re not putting as much on the line as, say, a person in this community who’s given all their considerable resources away, leaving them with just enough to live a frugal life … without a safety net. And, too, I’ve chosen to give examples this morning that are, to say the least, my most faithful responses to the Gospel and not my many incomplete responses or times that I didn’t even consider the Gospel in making a decision. So I’m nervous about having put all this out there.
But if, within our community, we don’t take risks like these: to seem holier-than-thou, or to talk within the community about our wealth or financial need or, on the other hand, even to acknowledge that we can’t yet take the NT’s admonitions around money seriously, then we won’t learn or change.
Taking any of these risks is to break long-standing taboos in our culture that keep us from growing into a deeper trust in the Kin-dom. Part of coming to that deeper trust in scriptural authority is to acknowledge exactly where we are in all our confusion and unfaithfulness and let the NT speak to us in our own situation.
What’s common to all these examples is that I experienced either myself or someone else trusting the Scripture and receiving the fruits of that trust: The freedom from guilt I felt in giving money away, Janelle’s courage, the life-giving impact on our community as different ones of us discerned difficult calls, the painful but formative experience at Joseph’s House, and, I’m sure, our difficulties in discerning the proper course with our inheritance.
It’s not always happiness. Sometimes it leads to pain. Sometimes it leads, as our martyrs testify, to death, but always to new life.
Giving authority to Scripture is clearly not just blind obedience to a set of rules. (Scripture is not, for instance, going to tell me how much of my wealth I can keep for myself.) In fact the Gospel isn’t a set of rules at all but an invitation into community and a way of life.
What the New Testament expects of us is that we pay attention to Scripture, and struggle with the questions it asks of us. It expects that we give priority to scriptural understanding; which means that if we ultimately decide against following that path that seems scriptural, then the burden of proof is on us to understand why.
Scripture is a narrative, a set of stories that have deep meaning for our community and give direction to our lives. Those stories describe an understanding of the world that has emerged because the community has committed itself to the life and death of Jesus as a central event in history. We look to that history for guidance about how to live our own lives in community. It’s an invitation to a new way of life; Fred Taylor calls it a summons. Trying to extract hard rules and precepts that apply to all situations reduces the truth of the narrative to standards and principles rather than an experience of love enfleshed.
Finally, giving Scripture authority doesn’t mean giving up common sense. We pay attention and continue to pay attention, but we still have to look at the Bible critically and consider other sources of wisdom, for instance, science. How do we deal with conflicting stories or ones that just don’t seem to apply to us or that don’t even make sense … especially about money?
Perhaps it takes a community to work the questions through.
Amen