A
sermon shared at the Suttons Bay Congregational Church, September 25, 2016
Scripture: 1 Timothy 6:6-19
Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra said lots
of things that make no logical sense and yet somehow hint at a deep philosophical
truth. For example, these days many of us might see some wisdom in his
observation that “The future ain’t what it used to be.” And I suppose that
every sermon ever delivered—including this one—could be summarized by Yogi’s
observation that “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re
going, because you might not get there.”
Even
in resisting the notion that he had made many of these quotable statements,
Yogi could not help sounding like Yogi. He once remarked with a wisp of merry
defiance: “I never said most of the things I said.” And maybe he didn’t.
When it comes to never saying most of the
things attributed to you, however, the Hall of Fame champion must be the Holy
Bible. Surely, no text in the history of the world has so often been misquoted,
selectively quoted, quoted out of context, or quoted to advance decidedly
unbiblical agendas. In Shakespeare’s The
Merchant of Venice, Anotonio declares that “The devil can cite Scripture
for his purpose,” and we know that Shakespeare is right (as usual) because we
see this happen with unsettling regularity.
This passage from Paul’s first letter to
Timothy is one that is often misquoted and commonly misunderstood, particularly
the verse within it that is frequently rendered as: “Money is the root of all
evil.” This morning, I want to fix the misquotation and put the phrase back
into context. I do not want to do this as a nitpicky and lawyerly exercise in
getting language right. Rather, I want to do this because I believe that a
correct understanding of this passage forces us to confront one of the most
daunting and persistent challenges of human existence.
Let’s start with two relatively minor fixes.
First, this scripture does not condemn money in and of itself. If it did, then
the passage taken as a whole would not make any sense. After all, it urges us
to be “generous and ready to share,” which presumably includes the giving of
our financial resources. At the risk of sounding like Yogi Berra, if you have
nothing to give then it’s harder to give it.
No, the scripture is worried about our relationship with money. It is not money
but the love of money that causes the
trouble. The scripture warns that loving money and the stuff it can buy leads
us into all kinds of traps and temptations that have nothing to do with the life
to which Jesus calls us. And the love of money can work against the generosity of
spirit and sharing of resources that the passage tells us we need to foster and
pursue.
Second, properly translated this passage
does not claim that the love of money is the
sole root of all evil but rather
that it is a cause of many kinds of evil. I doubt that Paul
intended to claim that money holds a monopoly on malfeasance. No, we can get
there many other ways, including through hatred, wrath, anger, bias, prejudice,
jealousy, fear—fear does a lot of work here, doesn’t it?—and a thousand other
weaknesses we are heir to.
Beyond
these minor fixes, however, I want to suggest to you that neither money nor the
love of it is actually the central concern of this text. I think the passage is
actually worried about two much bigger things. The first is that—our spiritual
aspirations notwithstanding—we experience life as physical beings. Indeed,
that’s precisely why money is problematic: it helps us scratch our physical
itches and we can fall in love with its capacity to do so.
The
second is that our attachment to this physicality accounts for much of our
unhappiness. Our selfishness, our grief, our despair, and our (sometimes
paralyzing) anxiety often have a lot to do with our clutching at our physical
life and at physical things. This is understandable: our physical being is what we know with the
greatest immediacy.
I
think it was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who wisely declared: “We are not human
beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human
experience.” At some level of abstraction we understand that this is so. But
let’s be honest: our day-to-day existence inundates us with evidence to the
contrary.
Say
we are spiritual beings if you like, but the reality is that tomorrow we will
experience life physically. We will feel the power in our muscles or the aches
in our joints; we will know the pangs of hunger or the taste of good food; we
will grapple with the discomforts of illness or enjoy the pleasures of good
health; we will look around and find no one beside us or we will delight in the
touch of a loved one.
The
poet Delmore Schwartz described these bodies of ours as “the heavy bear who
goes with [us] … in love with candy, anger, and sleep.” The good news is that we
will not go through tomorrow alone: God will be with us. The less good news is:
so will the bear.
Now,
this scriptural passage does not tell us to ignore our physicality. To the
contrary, it recognizes the reality that we need “food and clothing.” And nothing
in this passage denies that we may find comfort in physical things. Nothing
here denies that some physical experiences can even help usher us toward a more
spiritual place: witnessing one of our gorgeous Leelanau peninsula sunsets;
watching the shimmering water of the bay on a warm afternoon; listening to the
spring birdsong in the woods; laughing with beloved friends over food and a
little wine, “for our stomach’s sake,” as that first letter to Timothy says
elsewhere. Done in the right spirit there is holiness in the breaking of bread, no less than in the
praying over it.
In
a poem written toward the end of his life, Jim Harrison—who knew a fair amount
about this dear peninsula said: “My work piles up, / I falter with disease /
Time rushes toward me-- / it has no brakes. Still, / the radishes are good this
year. / Run them through butter, / add a little salt.” I can find no evidence
anywhere in the Bible that God begrudges us the pleasure of a salted radish. To
the contrary, the radish is one of God’s lovely little flirtations in the
grandeur of the divine creation.
The
problem, of course, is that the bear has much bigger appetites—that can prove
hard to control. And the scripture worries that when we chase the gratification
of those impulses we will spend our time in pursuit of the wrong things. It is
not just that this will have grave consequences for our fellow human beings,
because we will have less to share with them. It is that it will have grave
consequences for each of us, because we cannot possibly find peace,
contentment, and meaning in the temporary possession of things that we know we
are going to lose. “It ain’t over til it’s over,” Yogi Berra said; and when
it’s over “we can take nothing out of [the world],” the scripture reminds us.
In
this respect, the first letter to Timothy stands in a line of thought that we
find across cultures, philosophies, and religions. One of the central tenets of
Buddhism is that our anxiety and suffering come from our grasping at and
clinging to things that are finally impermanent. And the Roman Stoic
philosopher Seneca wrote: “For no one is worthy of a god unless he has paid no
heed to riches. I am not, mind you, against your possessing them, but I want to
ensure that you posses them without tremors; and you will only achieve this in
one way, by convincing yourself that you can live a happy life even without
them, and by always regarding them as being on the point of vanishing.” Because they are.
This
scripture therefore presents us with one of the fundamental puzzles of human
existence, a riddle with which our species has struggled for, oh, only about a
few thousand years. Yes, we know that our physical existence is fragile,
temporal, and short. But it is also our most present reality. Given that, how
can we reach for that ultimate and greater reality that a deeply spiritual
existence offers?
This scripture provides an answer to this question, although in our preoccupation
with its uncomfortable admonitions about money we may miss it. It tells us that
the way out of the dilemma—the way out of our very human fixation on our own
physicality—lies in our service to others. “Be rich in good works,” the
scripture tells us. “That you may take hold of the life that really is life.”
In
his famous book Man’s Search for Meaning,
Viktor Frankl recounts his experiences as a prisoner in a Nazi concentration
camp. He describes, in painful detail, how he and his fellow prisoners lost
everything that had defined their lives and descended into a place of
unspeakable grief and suffering. It was a trauma from which many of the
prisoners could not recover, and they withered and perished in their despair.
And,
yet, Frankl observed that some of the prisoners endured these horrific
experiences in a way that gave their existence continued meaning. Those prisoners
found something to do, some work to keep them occupied. And that work was often
not for their own benefit, but for that of other prisoners.
Frankl
writes: “For the first time in my life I saw the truth
as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so
many thinkers. That truth is that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to
which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that
human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man
is through love and in love.”
Love, this scripture tells us, is the greatest
thing, the only thing that finally matters. It has been so since before the
hidden foundations of the world. It is infinite and endless. And yet,
paradoxically, it is possible for us to waste it on the wrong things.
God wastes none of it, even while dispensing it
with wild abandon. God showers it upon us in an extravagant and unmerited—almost
seemingly reckless—show of delight and forgiveness and peace and grace. God
spends love as though it were an inexhaustible resource—because it is.
“Go and do likewise,” a voice says to us,
sometimes coming as a still soft voice, sometimes as a thunderous declaration and
shaking of us by the lapels. “Go and do likewise. And, if you do, you will dwell within the light of the world. You
will spread the light of the world.
You will be the light of the world.
And you will be so now, and forever and ever and ever.”
Amen. And amen.
