Holy Currencies: Money
Mark 10:17-31
October 23, 2022
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/4zYfkO3UcHc
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a Potawatomi professor and scientist who writes lovely books about plants non-scientists. She is the author of the bestseller, Braiding Sweetgrass, and some of us have met her through her long-time friends, Kathy and Judy. During the first winter of the pandemic, she wrote a beautiful essay about a kind of fruit she calls serviceberry. You might know it by another name like juneberry or saskatoon.
Robin’s neighbor, Paulie, invited Robin to come pick these berries on Paulie’s farm. Paulie had planted her serviceberry orchard as a pick-your-own place, a way to create another revenue stream for her farm. But during the first pandemic lockdown, she invited her neighbors to come and pick for free.
As the sweet, ripe serviceberries plunked into her bucket, Robin wondered what to do with this bounty. She describes this as a gift economy. The orchard is not free – planting, tilling, irrigating, these cost real money – but the neighbor is giving away its abundance. Kimmerer writes “Gratitude and reciprocity are the currency of a gift economy, and they have the remarkable property of multiplying with every exchange, their energy concentrating as they pass from hand to hand, a truly renewable resource. I accept the gift from the bush and then spread that gift with a dish of berries to my neighbor, who makes a pie to share with his friend, who feels so wealthy in food and friendship that he volunteers at the food pantry. You know how it goes. . . . .In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away.” [1]
First century Palestine did not have a gift economy. They had an extractive economy. The capital city, Jerusalem, was organized and ordered by the urban elites who were wealthy. Their lifestyle depended on the labor of the lower classes in Jerusalem and on the peasant farmers in Galilee. [2]
Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem for the last time. Many people are following him, asking questions, seeking healing for themselves or others. And this one man comes with a religious question. This story is familiar to most of us. We don’t know the man’s name, so we often call him the rich young ruler. Mark doesn’t describe him as a ruler or as young and we only find out he is rich at the end. I think maybe we identify him that way to distance ourselves from him. We want to think that we are faithful, which we believe he is not, and we want to think that we are not rich.
Rich and poor are relative terms. To put them into some perspective, some economists suggest that an American household of two adults with an annual after-tax income of $40,000, is in the top 7% of wealth in the world.[3] That is hard to believe, I know, and this data is from a couple of years ago, so there’s a little wiggle room. But the point is that all of us here, even though we have a variety of incomes, we are among the most well-off people in the world. If we can’t consider the possibility that we are much like the man in this story, then we should probably ask why.
Barbara Brown Taylor says that Christians mangle this story in at least two ways. “First, by acting as if it were not about money, and second, by acting as if it were only about money.” [4]
It is definitely about money. When the man leaves Jesus, the open question is what he will do with his wealth – whether he will keep it or share it. It is not only about money, because to give away money will be to give away some of himself. We get money by investing ourselves in some mental or physical activity. When we look at our bank accounts or the pieces of paper in our wallets, we are looking at our invested energy made tangible. Our money represents our stored time and talent and that of our ancestors. Money gets tied up with our own sense of worth and how we are valued by others and not because of the stacks of bills or numbers on a page.
When this man comes to Jesus to ask about eternal life, he comes as someone with a lot of wealth. But that is not all he is. He comes as a religious seeker, someone who wants to live the best life he can. He comes as someone who has been morally upright. He’s a good citizen, a faithful person. He is such a rule-keeper that he has undoubtedly given all the tithes that were required of him. The Temple probably had no complaints about him. He might have been one of their top donors.
Jesus looks at him and loves him. The gospels only describe Jesus loving two particular people. One is the unnamed Beloved Disciple in John’s gospel. The other one is this man. Jesus looks at him and sees him, still looking for something he hasn’t quite found, still insecure in spite of his wealth, and Jesus loves him.
Jesus reminds him of the short list of commandments, the ones that have to do with how people relate to their neighbors. Jesus says, “You know the commandments, do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false witness.”
“Check, check, check” – the man is ticking them off.
And then Jesus changes one of them. Next in the list should be “do not covet.” “Do not covet” means “don’t be obsessed with what other people have. Don’t be jealous of it. Don’t make it your goal to get it.” But Jesus doesn’t say that. Jesus says “Do not defraud.” Or in the translation that Pat read, it says “Do not cheat”
Why would Jesus do that? Why would he replace “do not covet” with “do not defraud”
Remember the man's question - "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" This man had no doubt inherited most of what he owned; and, since that made most people rich in those days was owning property, we can assume that when Mark says "he had many possessions" he meant that he had "many properties". This was an extractive economy where landowners became wealthy by acquiring the land of their neighbors who went into debt and either sold their land to pay the debts or had the land taken from them. It is reasonable to assume that anyone who had many properties was wealthy at the expense of others. [5]
It was perfectly legal and not considered cheating or fraudulent, especially not by the religiously and politically powerful people who designed the system.
But I have to wonder if Jesus is inviting the man to step out of the system that made him rich at the expense of others. The man can not single-handedly dismantle the economic system of Rome and Jerusalem, but he can choose to invest in Jesus’ alternative gift economy.
Jesus tells him to go, sell what he has, and give the proceeds away and then come back to follow Jesus. I have always been led to believe that the man doesn’t do it, that his wealth has too big a hold on his life. But here’s the thing, we don’t know what he does. He goes away grieving. Maybe he is grieving because it will be hard to give up the surround-sound TV that his friends enjoy or the vacation home where his family made great memories. Maybe it is difficult at this stage of his life to re-evaluate his investment of time and talent. He followed the rules. He provided for his family. Maybe he grieves because he realizes that he has been clueless about his exploitation of others.
In our anti-racism conversations, we have talked about how wealth and privilege often insulates white people from knowing how our actions affect others, and when we do come to realize it, some of us grieve. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if we aren’t willing to consider the similarities between this man and ourselves, we might want to ask why not.
He goes away grieving, but whether he does what Jesus suggests or not, we just don’t know. It remains an open question for him and for us.
In that essay about the serviceberry, Kimmerer writes “In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away. In fact, status is determined not by how much one accumulates, but by how much one gives away.”
The cycle of blessings which we are exploring this month seems much like the gift economy that Robin Kimmerer describes. Here truth and wellness and relationship flow along with money to enhance the well-being of the whole community.
A quick story -- many years ago, Joan Chittister attended an international conference in Asia on the status of women. Most of the participants were women she describes as “well-funded activist types.” They were all there to professionally analyze various women’s issues around the world, especially of the needs of women in developing countries. At the gathering, these professional women called for more education for girls, more birth control training, better health-care programs, and most importantly more participation of women at all levels of the political process.
As the conference was drawing to a close, a leader of one of the small group workshops, passed a piece of paper around and asked everyone to share her e-mail address so that they could all stay in contact and support one another in their work. One of the participants; a woman named Rose, was a Kenyan pastor of a Presbyterian church in Africa. When the sheet of paper came to her, she simply filled in her name and passed it on. The woman next to Rose passed the paper back to her and pointed out that she had neglected to put her email address on the form. Rose answered quietly: “I don’t have email where I am. It is too expensive for us.”
When Sister Joan and her colleague were getting into a cab to leave, her colleague said that she couldn’t leave without first seeing Rose. She asked Sister Joan to wait and rushed back into the hotel saying that she had promised to give something to Rose. Later as they were waiting to check in for their flight, Sister Joan asked her colleague, what she had given to Rose. Her friend answered that she had given Rose her credit card.
“Your credit card? Why in heaven’s name would you give Rose your credit card?”
Her friend answered quietly, “So she can pay for her email every month.” [6]
The story is about money, but it is not only about money. Next Sunday, we have two important opportunities. Within worship we will make financial pledges to this congregation. You will receive a letter this week with a pledge card and instructions for how to pledge on-line. Either way is good. Next Sunday we will also be hosting conversations with our consultant. The conversations are framed as being about our future together, the future that God is calling us to, but it would also be accurate to say that they are about the cycle of blessings and how we circulate the holy currencies.
We invest our money, our relationships, our gratitude, in Jesus’ alternate economy which we try to imitate within this congregation. We do so in the hopes of embodying the reign of God among us, not perfectly, not all at once, but like a seed growing in a field or yeast hidden in a lump of bread dough. Because with God, all things are possible. Amen.
[1] Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance, https://www.globalonenessproject.org/library/essays/serviceberry-economy-abundance
[2] Walter Brueggemann, Money and Possessions, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2016) p 187.
[3] https://howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i
[4] Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Opposite of Rich” in The Preaching Life, (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1993) p.124.
[5] Barry Robinson, “The Only Way In” http://spirit-net.ca/sermons/b-or28-keeping.php
[6] Rowan Williams and Joan Chittister, For All That Has Been, Thanks (Norwich, UK: Canterbury Press, 2010) pp. 20-22