A bigger vision
One of the things that struck me on my recent journeys is how easily Christianity
has been co-opted to support and give credence to economic and political
systems that benefited the very few. The Bible was used to declare slavery as God’s
way; Aboriginals in Australia and the San in Capetown as non-human and pests to
be exterminated; and whites to be superior to blacks and therefore created to
rule over them. Terrible things all justified by the use of scripture. It has
always been so with the people of God. We find the way of God hard. We look to
make it more manageable, and allow it to give credence to ways that allow us to
focus on ourselves and to be blinded to all others. Today’s readings invite us
to hold to God’s bigger vision, for ourselves, our societies, for all humanity.
The prophets, including Jeremiah constantly speak against this co-opting
of God to justify the way of self-preoccupation. We have heard Jeremiahs profound
lament over this. He is clear that this will only lead to destruction. Today hear
his call for a bigger vision.
The readings from 1 Timothy and from
Luke continue this call to a bigger vision. William Loader suggests that the
writer to Timothy “invites
us to a lifestyle which makes do with enough. There is no need to busy oneself
with more. Accumulation of wealth is the task of a lifetime and leaves little
room for others and in a paradoxical sense for oneself (and frequently those
around us usually when they need us most). So our passage is addressing the
practicalities of living and identifying the deception which we forge when we
spend our lives accumulating more and more - far more than we need. The author
appears concerned primarily with self destructive forces which bring ruin
(6:9). Greed for money also plunges others into poverty and ruin.
The godliness which the godly person is to pursue
might be a harmless kind of morality marked by good behaviour and avoidance of
what is sinful in a rather private way. Later New Testament writings, like this
one, sometimes appear heading in that direction. Such godliness was a popular
value of the time and made Christianity marketable. But concepts like
righteousness (goodness), faith, and love, can carry much more with them.
Ultimately they pose for us an alternative. We are invited to choose the
dominant values of our day (even more than theirs) of self-indulgence
(including religious self-indulgence) or to choose the way of Christ.”
A danger is to read these passages as being about
us as individuals. Jeremiah spoke to the
King who represented the whole nation of Judah. That nation had become self-obsessed,
confident in a simplistic understanding of God, who would allow nothing to
happen to them. In that confidence it had become blind to the poor within, and
the poor who lived around them. For that the nation was held to account.
Luke too wrote for his whole community. In this conversation
with the Pharisees “who love money”[1], Jesus
offers both a warning, and another vision to the whole community. Today, the
West is the rich man, accumulating more, wasting food to satisfy our need for
good looking produce, spending more and more protecting “what is ours and our
way of life” while that way of life holds millions if not billions (the Lazarus
of our story) in poverty and hunger. And the way of Jesus continues to be
colonised to keep our focus on moral individual behaviour, and to justify our Western
way as God’s way. We need that bigger vision more than ever. What is that
vision for us here in Tauranga? What is that vision for us in Aotearoa-New
Zealand?
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