Ss Peter & Paul, Kettering
Christ and Money
A sermon preached by Canon Edmund Newell, at Choral Evensong on April 22nd, 2007
‘Who then is the rich man that shall be saved?’ This was a question that exercised the mind of the theologian Clement of Alexandria in the second century, in a famous treatise of the same title. Living and working in the heart of the City of London, famous for its large bonuses and ‘fat cat’ salaries, the same question comes into my mind from time to time.
Like modern day London, Alexandria in Egypt was one of the richest and most sophisticated cities in the ancient world. It was also a place where Christianity had firmly taken root. And as wealthy Alexandrians were drawn into the faith, they faced a shock - they were confronted by what Jesus taught about money.
There’s no more challenging example of Christ’s teaching about money than the story of the rich man who can’t let go of his possessions to become a disciple, and Jesus’ famous punch-line: ‘It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who’s rich to enter the kingdom of God.’
Is this really true? Or is Jesus using hyperbole – overstating the case to emphasise a point? This is what Clement of Alexandria wanted to clarify.
There are famous examples of people who’ve taken this story, or its parallels in the other Gospels, absolutely literally. They’ve been deeply inspired by Christ’s call to give up their possessions and to follow him, and have done so with relish.
A distant ancestor of the City-slicker who gives up a stressful job and a large salary for as quiet life in the country was Anthony of Egypt. Anthony, who lived in the fourth century, responded to Christ’s call by choosing a lifestyle of voluntary poverty. He deliberately kept a distance from Alexandria and other such places, and withdrew to live an ascetic life in the Egyptian desert.
Anthony, of course, was a key figure in the early development of Christian monasticism, and many have followed his example down the centuries. One of these was St Francis of Assisi, who renounced his family’s wealth, and dramatically and symbolically stripped himself naked in front of his bishop!
The voluntary poverty of monks and nuns remains a powerful reminder of the spiritual liberation it can bring, even if few of us feel called to that way of life – or at least to that extreme.
Clement’s interpretation of the text was rather different, however. It was less radical, more nuanced, and echoed Christ’s other teaching on wealth: that it’s not money and wealth per se that’s the issue, but rather it’s our attitude to them. Money, wealth and material possessions compete with God for our attention, and for determining the way we live our lives, and so a balance needs to be made.
Clement argued that moderate wealth is good for the soul, as it relieves anxiety. But he warned of the destructiveness of greed – that the pursuit of Mammon is a form of idolatry that supplants God from our lives. The test, then, for Christians is how we treat wealth and possessions.
The Christian call, according to Clement, is to be willing to sit lightly to them: to be generous and charitable, to use our wealth for the common good and not exclusively for ourselves; and to recognise that we’re custodians, not owners, of the earth’s resources, which ultimately belong to God.
This call for ‘spiritual poverty’ has been at the heart of mainstream Christian teaching on wealth down the centuries. It has its roots in the Hebrew Scriptures – the Old Testament – which is generally much more affirmative about wealth than the New Testament. As Psalm 112 puts it, ‘the generation of the upright shall be blessed. Wealth and riches are in their houses.’
But the stewardship of wealth comes with responsibilities and obligations. And so also in the Hebrew Scriptures there’s a strong theme of social justice, and of the need to redistribute wealth – including the concept of Jubilee, which inspired the Jubilee 2000 movement. God may bless you, but the blessing becomes a curse if you forget the source of the blessing, and if you fail to use it for the benefit of others. As our reading from Deuteronomy warns, ‘remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the power to get wealth’.
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The moral principles of sitting light to wealth and using it for the benefit of others has stood the test of time. But the context in which it has to be applied has changed dramatically.
At the time the books of the Bible were written, there was no concept of wealth creation or economic growth. The economies of the Near East were predominantly agrarian, and economic development took place at a very slow, almost imperceptible rate. Social structures were rigid, and the prospects for social mobility through economic progress were negligible. Personal generosity to the poor was essential.
We live in a very different world, which brings with it a whole host of challenges. In the eighteenth century, the British economy began to industrialise and urbanise at an unprecedented rate. So too did output and the population. And so too, in aggregate terms, did wealth. This was the Industrial Revolution, and the birth of the concept of progress in terms of wealth creation and economic growth through industrial capitalism. Suddenly, opportunities arose for a new class of people in society to generate and benefit from wealth: and to use it for good and ill. This influenced the way Church leaders of the time approached money. In a sermon on the subject, John Wesley famously urged his listeners to ‘Gain all you can. Save all you can. Give all you can.’
There’s a very strong Protestant mindset, which owes much to the Reformer John Calvin, which sees wealth creation in vocational terms – not least because it has the potential to benefit everyone - in theory at least. Many of the key entrepreneurs in the British industrial revolution were deeply religious people, who regarded what they manufactured as being good for society, and how they treated their employees as being crucial for promoting Christian values in the community.
But times have changed. We’ve moved into a corporate and highly competitive era, where higher ideals seem to play less and less a role in business activity – as Enron and WorldCom remind us. And the truth of the matter is that the benefits of wealth creation are not shared out equitably. Although economists argue over the statistics, it seems that in the long run, global income inequality has increased considerably.
The neo-liberal dream that wealth creation alone can solve the problems faced by developing countries doesn’t appear to hold true. The trickle down effect – the idea that wealth created in unfettered markets will work its way through to benefit the poor – doesn’t seem to happen. As the economist J.K. Galbraith described this process, ‘If you feed enough oats to the horse some will pass through to feed the sparrows.’ And so extreme, involuntary poverty remains an evil of modern society.
Also, the idea that wealth creation can be equated with progress has become derailed. We’re increasingly aware of the social costs of much of our economic activity, not least on the environment. The recent Stern Review on climate change spells it out – wealth creation has major costs. And we’re also acutely aware of the difficulty in curbing or reducing these costs, because of the give and take it requires between countries and businesses, and their unwillingness to do so.
And thirdly, many of us in the world’s richest nations enjoy higher disposable incomes than ever before. We have more opportunities to possess material goods than in any other generation. Indeed, one of the problems of modern living is that it’s hard to know what to spend our money on, there’s so much choice it’s confusing – just try ordering a tall, skinny, decaffeinated latte in Starbucks!
In other words, in many parts of the world today materialism is rife - and it’s so easy to be seduced by it, and it’s so easy to place our trust and confidence in material goods.
The business guru Charles Handy, in his book The Hungry Spirit, points out that if economic growth continues at about three per cent for a hundred years, then our great-grandchildren would be able to consume a staggering sixteen times as many goods as we can today! What on earth will they spend it on? Handy’s fear is that much of this will be spent on ephemera, or what he calls ‘chindogu’ - a Japanese word for useless things. Chindogu goods really do little or nothing to enhance our lives, and yet we’re all tempted to buy them – because the materialism of our age entices us to do so.
How much do we spend on what we don’t really need or use? How much do we waste? How much of the earth’s resources are used up to produce useless goods? These are serious moral issues of our day, and will become more serious in the future, as our affluence increases.
They’re also serious spiritual issues. Materialism encourages us to value ourselves and others in terms of what they and what we possess, and to place our trust and hopes in our possessions, rather than in our Creator.
These are issues that Archbishop Rowan Williams is trying to place high on the agenda. In his enthronement sermon, he touched on the spiritual erosion in western society and the extent to which prosperity is complicit in this, pointing towards our need to rediscover spiritual poverty. As he said, ‘For those who know their need, God is immediate – not an idea, not a theory, but life, food, air for the stifled spirit’.
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In our age of affluence and wealth creation, there are, then, key moral and spiritual issues to be addressed. At a very practical level, the excess and wastefulness of western society needs to be addressed because of its impact on the environment. It also begs the question, should the objective of macro-economic policy be a relentless pursuit of growth targets?
But the problem goes much deeper than that. How do we get the right balance in our lives? How can we learn to view wealth in terms of stewardship rather than ownership? How do we rediscover that sense of ‘spiritual poverty’ that puts wealth and its purpose in its proper context, and helps us to address the evil of involuntary poverty?
This hasn’t only exercised the minds of Clement of Alexandria and Rowan Williams. It also troubled perhaps the greatest economist this country has produced - John Maynard Keynes. In 1930, Keynes wrote an essay called ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.’ As we’re of that generation he was writing about – or perhaps his great-grandchildren - what does he think our outlook on wealth might be? Keynes wrote:
When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from a love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialist in mental disease.
Harsh words indeed! The question is, seventy-seven years on: has Keynes’ prophecy been fulfilled? The answer is sadly no. That’s why the story of the rich man’s encounter with Jesus is as pertinent now as it was two thousand years ago. Amen.
Edmund Newell, April 22nd, 2007
Office Address:
The Rectory
Church Walk
Kettering
NN16 0DJ