Sermon on Sunday, September 26, 2010

Bridge Over Troubled Waters, A Sermon preached by The Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, September 26, 2010 at Church of the Ascension, Rochester, New York

Between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so. (Luke 16:26 )

For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered far away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains. (1 Timothy 6: 10 )

You know how sometimes the passages we have to reflect upon from Holy Scripture seem obtuse and confusing and we look at them and say, “What on earth are we to make of this?” Well, this week we certainly don’t have that problem! The theme of this week’s lections is so consistent that I wondered why I needed to preach at all. The words speak for themselves. In the pastoral letter to Timothy we have classical Greco-Roman ethical maxims about money and its potentially destructive spiritual force, and in Luke, Jesus gives us yet another parable about the same topic. You will notice that Jesus has been preaching and teaching about wealth, possessions, money and their destructive force with numbing consistency for many weeks now. Luke’s gospel, in particular, is deeply concerned with economic issues and the theme that in God’s kingdom the privileges and comforts of this world will be overturned. It began as early as when Mary sang her Magnificat at the beginning of the gospel, where she envisioned a time when the lowly would be lifted up and the mighty brought low. The message hasn’t changed at all as we’ve proceeded on through 16 chapters of the gospel. The call to care for the poor, the warnings to the rich to be careful not to be corrupted by their wealth, exhortations to hold wealth lightly and put God and God’s kingdom first in one’s life priorities are all themes that Jesus hammers home again and again.

It is probably no accident that all major world religious traditions sound this same theme. The call to care for the poor, for the rich to be generous with their wealth and to give it away to further the work of God and God’s people is a hallmark of every world religious tradition. One of the five pillars of Islam is “zakat”, the requirement that all Muslims must give away 2.5% of all their assets and wealth to charity every year as part of their obedience to God and their relationship with God. Jews are expected to give alms to the poor and Buddhists are called to detach from material possessions and give freely as part of living a compassionate life. From time immemorial, in places as diverse as the mountains of Tibet, the streets of Chicago or the deserts of Saudi Arabia, religious and spiritual gurus have identified money as something with potentially lethal destructive force in the human psyche and in the conduct of human community. Of course, despite the persistence with which religious leaders and spiritual giants have preached about the dangers of wealth, our human societies have marched on pursuing wealth and material comforts as the key to “the good life” and the gap between rich and poor has always been and continues today to be enormous. That chasm about which Father Abraham spoke in today’s parable is as large today as at any time in history.

One problem in reading today’s parable for most of us middle class Americans, is that we probably don’t completely identify with either the rich man or with Lazarus. Fortunately for most of us in this room, we have never experienced the kind of grinding and degrading poverty that Lazarus experienced, although many of us have seen it in our cities. I couldn’t help but remember all those years that I emerged from the Path trains in midtown Manhattan to walk to my law job on Madison Avenue, clad in my business suit and sporting my briefcase, stepping over and around the homeless men sleeping in the station. The stark contrast between the wealth and power concentrated in those midtown office buildings and the abject poverty of the homeless people huddled over the subway vents right in front of them was horrendous.

Most of us don’t identify with the rich man either, because we who are comfortably middle class don’t feel “rich” in the way that this man is described. The parable gives us an image of a man dressed opulently in fine purple garments who feasts sumptuously every day. We don’t think of ourselves in that category, as we carefully budget our money and go without some things while we save for other things, or worry about having enough money to pay for a child’s education, or to fund our retirement or pay for prescriptions and uncovered medical costs. What is truly shocking is that despite our concept of ourselves as only moderately comfortable financially, virtually every one of us in this room is in the top 4-5% of wealthy people in the world. There is a website in which you can enter your annual income and the site will compare you to all the people in the world in terms of wealth. (www.globalrichlist.com) Believe it or not, on my clergy salary, I came out in the top .001% of rich people in the world. According to their statistics I am the 107,565th richest person in the world! Suddenly, the rich man in the parable became a whole lot more like me!

Between you and us a great chasm has been fixed …The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil…

There is a great chasm between the haves and have-nots in our world, one that does seem almost unbridgeable. And the love of money, and the pursuit of money and material gain is a root of all kinds of evil and corruption. In recent years we’ve watched as giants of industry and banking have toppled as a result of their unbridled greed, saddling taxpayers with the burden of their bailouts as the government attempted to forestall economic devastation by pumping millions of dollars into those institutions when their executives had driven them to the brink of collapse. The song from the musical Cabaret really nails it – “Money makes the world go around…that clinking, clanging sound…Money makes the world go around. Money, money, money, money…” And money corrupts not only at the corporate, societal and international relations level, but even in the context of individual and family lives.

As a lawyer I had occasion to be involved in innumerable disputes in divorce cases and trusts and estates matters where families were fighting bitterly over money and wealth and distribution of assets. So often those emotionally charged family squabbles are inflamed and magnified as money becomes the driving force in what then devolves into bitter and protracted battles in which almost no one is ever happy with the outcome. In family conflicts, whether they be between parents and children, or spouses, or siblings money is so often used as a weapon by one upon the other, obscuring the emotional, psychological and spiritual importance of the human relationship and destroying it in many cases. The corrosive force of love of money on the human soul was no more graphically illustrated than when the stock market fell in 1929 and people who had lost all their money jumped out of windows on Wall Street to their death.

The old adage, “you can’t take it with you” is another way of saying what the author of the letter to Timothy reminds us today. “We brought nothing into the world, so that we can take nothing out of it.” “If we have food and clothing, we will be content with these.” Spiritual advice that is not unique to our Christian tradition, but universal in all religious writings. Contentment is not found in vast wealth but rather in enjoying the necessities of life and sharing what we have with those who have less. In all religious traditions you will notice that the monastic persons within those traditions renounce worldly wealth and live in communities where all receive the basic necessities of life but none are rich. Timothy has sound advice for those of us who are rich. “As for those who in the present age are rich, command them not to be haughty, or to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but rather on God who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. They are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous and ready to share, thus storing up for themselves a good foundation for the future.”

As we enter the time of the year when our church, like all others, begins to prepare for our annual pledge campaign the lessons of Timothy and the parable of the rich man and Lazarus are important to keep in mind. While it is absolutely true that the church encourages tithing because it is only through the generosity of the members of the faith community that we can do the ministry to which we are called here, it is also true that the spiritual discipline of tithing, of giving back to God from the abundance God has first given us is the best way to guard against the corrosive and spiritually damaging potential of the great wealth that we all do enjoy. If we are incapable of being generous in our charitable giving then we run the risk of widening the chasm between God and us created by our reliance upon wealth for our sense of security and comfort. The chasm that is created by that misplaced trust is between us and God as much as between us and our fellow human beings. If we want to draw closer to God, we will give generously of the abundance we have been given so that the chasm so easily widened by increasing wealth will not separate us entirely from God.

I am reminded of the song “Bridge Over Troubled Water” when I think about that chasm to which Father Abraham refers in today’s parable. God is the one who will “lay me down like a bridge over troubled water” when life gets us down, when we need a friend, when we need sustenance. That chasm so easily created and widened when we rely upon our own resources and wealth for comfort and security can be bridged so easily by God and is bridged every time we are ready to let go of our wealth, to give some of it away for the furtherance of God’s kingdom. We are very accustomed to thinking about our own needs as we go about our earthly life and we are careful to use our money to meet those needs. The one need we can too easily forget is our need to give- our soul’s need to be generous and to give our resources away for the good of humanity so that our souls will draw closer to God rather than inch slowly but surely over the chasm to the place where God is not.