16th Sunday after Pentecost

"Money is the root of all evil."

 Raise your hands if you’ve ever heard that saying--  “money is the root of all evil”? Yep. Except it’s not. If you look again at the second lesson, it’s not money that’s the root of all evil—it’s the LOVE of money.  Money itself is neither good nor bad, wealth is not good or bad. As a matter of fact, Paul himself even says that there is great gain in godliness combined with contentment. God did not intend for his people to live poor, rejecting wealth, being uncomfortable, with some sort of martyr complex. No—on the contrary. God has given us this beautiful world and everything in it to enjoy and use. Money included.

Today, we have the story of a beggar named Lazarus (different from the Lazarus that Jesus raised from the dead) and a rich man. The story is pretty graphic.  And in the second lesson, we are warned against the temptations and desires felt by those who want to be rich, desires which trap people and plunge them into destruction, and cause them to wander away from the faith and suffer many pains. And if that weren’t enough, the first lesson also describes the punishment of those who lie on fancy beds and eat gourmet food and are not at all concerned with the poor and God’s will.

It would sure be tempting to think these things don’t apply to us. After all, few of us live in fancy mansions and eat filet mignon and ribeye all the time. We don’t have servants. We don’t spend every day in pursuit of leisure activities. We don’t lounge around, as Amos says, improvising music and playing idle songs and drinking wine from bowls while anointing ourselves with the finest perfumes. Or, if I could translate that into modern terms: we’re not flying off to the Caribbean on a private jet for a month-long stay at an exclusive resort, or jetting to Greece, where we will cruise the islands on our custom-made yacht.

No, we work, hard--and while we might have the occasional fancy meal, good perfume, or nice vacation-- it’s not an everyday thing. It might even be a never thing, if we have very little. I mean, come on--most of us are pretty generous and decent and wouldn’t ever ignore a poor person hungry at our door.

But you and I both know that we are tempted by those “senseless and harmful desires” that St. Paul talks about in the second lesson. We have all struggled with the love of money. Most of us don’t have enough money for money itself to be the problem, but LOVE of money is a different story. It’s hard not to want more and better things, more money, the right kind of car, the right kind of clothes. Advertisers and social media count on this, manipulating our desires and even--or especially--our kids’ desires.

Maybe we fool ourselves into thinking that we’re not after money—we just want to be comfortable and pay our bills. Just a little bit more is all we need. Just so we have “enough.” But have you ever noticed that when times get tough, it’s easy to start being less generous? Our charitable giving decreases, our concern with the poor decreases. We start thinking that we don’t have enough to help those who are so much poorer than ourselves.

 We become just concerned with ourselves, and that’s the real problem of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. It’s not that the rich man had money. It’s that he didn’t use it in generosity.

At this point, you might be feeling like this is a guilt trip, that I’m trying to shame you into giving more, or being more generous. Maybe this is everything you hate about the Church talking about money and you’re tuning me out.

But what if I said that my point is that you and I are like the five brothers the rich man had? We are still living, and there is still hope for us. There is hope that we will heed the call of Moses and the prophets and Jesus himself. That we will listen to St. Paul when he tells us to shun the love of money and worldly things and instead pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness.

There is still time for us not to get trapped on the other side of the great chasm. Fight the good fight of faith, Paul says. Take hold of the eternal life to which you are called.

The question is, though, how? How do we fight the good fight against the things of this world which lure us away from faith in the true God? How do we teach our children and grandchildren to value the things Paul lists—which aren’t things at all—instead of the best toys, the best clothes, the shiny they see on TikTok? How do we be content with what God has given us, enjoying the created world and all its blessings, without getting caught up in the worship of the false god of stuff?

The answer is right in the second lesson: St. Paul tells us that we are not to set our hope on our stuff, because that is uncertain: we brought nothing into the world and we’ll take exactly nothing out of it. Instead, we are to place our hope in God who has given us everything for our enjoyment.

It is no sin to enjoy things, to eat good food, to have nice stuff. Amos doesn’t criticize the rich people for lounging around with all their bling—instead, he has a problem that they do all this fancy stuff without being grieved over the ruin of Joseph, meaning over the vast numbers of poor people and economic injustices and cheating that happened all the time, back then as now.

God made the world for us to enjoy and love; all good stuff comes from God. But to desire those things more than God, or trust in them more than the God who gave you to them in the first place—that’s the issue. God made the world for you to enjoy and love, but also for you to take care of, making sure you look out for others besides just yourselves or your families and friends. Our lives aren’t to only be concerned with how much we have, how much we don’t have, how much more we want.

All of us are to be rich in good deeds, even more than rich in things. We are to be generous, ready to share with anyone. By doing these things, we live as our Lord has commanded us, and I guarantee that if we follow Christ in this way, our contentment and joy will increase. More important than my guarantee is St. Paul’s guarantee. Jesus’ guarantee. When we share and give, we will find that we have more, not less. Our cup will run over in all the ways that count.

St. Paul is right, though. It is a fight. It’s a fight against temptations and desires that are so subtle, we hardly recognize them. It’s a fight against thinking “Other people can afford to give; I can’t.” It’s a fight against what our culture tells us is “enough.” Only by fighting against our own selfishness can we take hold of the life that really is life.

Because it’s Christ who gives us the real life. Our fight and struggle is not ours alone, but Christ’s, who daily drowns our sinful old selves in the waters of baptism and drags a new person up out of the flood, spluttering and coughing—but full of new life. New life that cancels out all the old ways of sin and greed. You are the new creation!

After all,  it’s not about you and your things and your money—it’s about helping others, reaching out in Christ’s name, giving even when times are lean because you trust that God will always provide for you. Because Christ has given you every good thing, you hold less tightly to those things in order to share, to be generous.

We can’t afford NOT to give, because it is in giving that we receive the most.  Like the five brothers, there is still time to listen to Jesus, to hear his call to what really matters. Make the most of that time, so that you may have real life here on earth, and also in heaven.  Amen.