On The Road From Greed To Giving

“Everybody would be rich, if nobody tried to be richer. And nobody would be poor, if everybody tried to be the poorest.” (Peter Maurin, Easy Essays).

This weekend, I had the joy and pleasure of (once again) visiting my daughter, Kateri, in Detroit. She has lived there for about six years and spent a few of those years living in the Catholic Worker community there. As many of you may know, the Catholic Worker movement has a strong tradition of social justice and critique of our economic systems, and so anytime Kateri and I are together, we have a lot of conversations about these topics (and I am so grateful for her perspective and witness on these issues). 

While most people know the name Dorothy Day as associated with the Catholic Worker movement, Peter Maurin is the lesser known “co-founder.” Maurin, whose vision was simple and radical, helped Dorothy Day (a convert to Catholicism) learn more about the church’s social teachings. Maurin saw the spiritual life as central to life (period) and took seriously the biblical mandate to love one’s neighbor. And part of Maurin’s vision was a radical restructuring of economic life that he (already) saw was headed out of control and antithetical to the gospel back in the 1930’s. His “Easy Essays” are often simple yet profound critiques and invitations related to the gospel and social life.

I can only imagine what Pater Maurin would write these days!

In today’s first reading from Ephesians 2, we hear Paul say that “You were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you once lived following the age of this world…[but] by grace you have been saved.”

I know that in the past, I used to breeze over passages like this, figuring that they were too focused on “sin” and only speaking about immoral behavior (which I had heard more than enough of in church).

But what if we replace a few words in Paul’s exhortation and hear it to say, “You were dead by the economic arrangements in which you once lived following the age of this world.” Changing just a few words, this passage’s meaning shifts pretty dramatically.

What does that change for you? What economic arrangements are we bound in that kill our spirit (and perhaps kill the spirit and bodies of others)?

And the gospel continues this theme.

The passage from Luke 12 today finds Jesus being consulted about a dispute over an inheritance and he says flat out, “Take care to guard against all greed, for though one may be rich, one’s life does not consist of possessions.” He goes on to tell a parable about the “Rich Fool.” A farmer who has a bumper crop asks himself, “What shall I do, for I do not have space to store my harvest? I know,” he says, “I shall tear down my barns and build larger ones.There I shall  store all my grain and other goods and I shall say to myself, “Now as for you, you have so many good things stored up for many years, rest, eat, drink, be merry!”’

If we paused right there, I’d say that this sounds a lot like the “American dream.” Get more stuff. Store it in bigger spaces. Make sure you are all set. Relax and enjoy!

And at a deeper level, the rich person’s thinking is what we’d probably hear from any modern financial consultant, right? Maximize your investments, boost your 401K and create personal wealth so that you can be free to do what you’d like to do.

Ched Myers, in a reflection on this passage, says that “This farmer sees his prosperity as an entitlement, but it was widely understood in antiquity that inordinate wealth was built on the backs of others.”

The same is true today. Wealth – and not just inordinate wealth – is often “built on the backs of others.” 

Jesus’ story goes on to say that the rich man’s life was to be taken by God that very night, and God calls him a fool for living this way. Jesus ends the story with the warning, “Thus will it be for the one who stores up treasure for themselves but is not rich in what matters to God.”

These kinds of stories bring up so many questions for me, and if we were all together right now, I’d want to know what they bring up for you. Passages like the one from Luke 12 invite us to break the silence that many of us were taught to keep related to money and assets, and  they remind us that conversations about money and wealth BELONG in church settings!

Jesus’ concluding words today offer us some deep questions. They invite us to reflect on themes like “What, actually, matters to God?” “What does greed look like in today’s world?” and “What would it mean to take a passage like this seriously?”

While Peter Maurin may have “Easy Essays”, I don’t have “easy answers” to what emerges from Luke 12, but these are struggles, conversations and responses that I think we need to take up individually and collectively – especially if we find ourselves with various forms of wealth and assets and are trying to “follow Jesus.” In fact, I have been wanting to have a conversation related to this at Spiritus for some time – reflecting collectively on how we understand Jesus’ words in light of the realities of our lives and the world we live in.

Just yesterday as I was at St. Peter’s Church in Detroit (where Kateri is an associate minister), we sang a hymn called Love Will Guide Us (Lyrics by Sally Rogers). In the song we sang, “On the road from greed to giving, Love will guide us through the hard night.”

The road presented to us in Luke 12 is meant to be a “hard night” – especially for followers of Jesus who have access to wealth and economic security. It was in the time when the gospel of Luke was written and it remains so. The invitation is to constantly move from “greed to giving” and let “love guide us” in our economic deliberations.

This is the work of discipleship to discern.

Ched Myers says, “To take [Jesus] seriously means we must confront the three primary pathologies of our modern economic culture—anxiety, addiction and alienation.” He goes on to say that passages like this one, “may be a “text of terror” for us, but it just might be a key to our liberation.”

Maybe these passages are the “grace” that is trying to save us – generation after generation.