“Property: Fetish or Vehicle of Justice?”
The Reverend Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick
The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 20, Year C
Jeremiah
8:18-9:1
1
Timothy 2:1-7
Luke
16:1-13
Last
week Barbara spoke about the difference between Kingdom values and the values of
the market place. This morning I’d like
to expand her trenchant observations, in the light of this morning’s Scripture
readings, by reflecting on how kingdom values and prevailing economic/political
values sometimes conflict around the issue of property and how it can be used responsibly
by Christians.
One of
the basic assumptions of our time is that the private possession or ownership
of property is almost as essential to our well-being as life itself. In fact, for many, the fullness of life
depends on owning property. The basic governing
principles of
Politically
there may be nothing wrong where this understanding of government is concerned.
But this morning’s readings from
Scripture suggest a somewhat different and initially puzzling way of looking at
the ownership of property when it is seen from God’s point of view. And that different way is potentially very
destabilizing of many of the assumptions we make about our responsibilities to
other people if we are trying to live by kingdom values in a world that is not
yet the Kingdom.
The
first sign we have that something may be amiss in how we should regard our
ownership of property is in the strange, disturbing parable Jesus tells in the
Gospel of Luke. The manager is charged
by his master with squandering his property and is asked to give an account of
his actions. The manager reports that he
has reduced what is owed his master by each of the master’s debtors. The manager’s action is, however, clearly
dishonest. But the master, much to our
surprise, commends the dishonest
manager because he has acted shrewdly.
Our natural temptation, of course, is to
identify the master with God, but that leaves us with the puzzling conclusion
that God is commending dishonest use of someone else’s property. This bafflement, I think, is a clue that we
need to rethink what ownership and property are all about in Jesus’ parable of
the kingdom. Clearly the manager’s
actions make sense if we want to live successfully in the world as what Jesus
calls the children of this age. If
shrewdness in the ways of the world is the ultimate moral criterion then the
manager has done well. But the children
of light are not nearly as shrewd or calculating, and what Jesus may be saying
is that the politically shrewd way of viewing property is fundamentally askew. If that’s true then what values are we to live
by?
Enter at
this point the counter-intuitive values about property that appear consistently
throughout the Bible. While never
condemning the goodness of material things (since God created the material
world and called it good and later incarnated himself into as a fully material being
like the rest of us), the Bible never elevates material property to an
unqualified good in itself, to a fetish. Instead, the goods of the material world are consistently
seen as instrumental means to the
fullness of life, and, until all can share in them to the degree necessary for
fulfillment, they are never to be held without qualification for the sake of
private possession in and for itself. If
Jesus shared his property, his material body, with the world by giving it up on
a cross so that all might be redeemed, then it made sense for the early Church
to insist on having its members give up all their material wealth as long as
there were material needs that had to be met in the community. As the book of Acts reminds us, in the
earliest Church, because the whole group was of one heart and soul, “no one
claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was
held in common.” And there was not a
needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and
brought the proceeds of what was sold, and it was distributed to each as any
had need.
Now this
practice of the earliest faith community was not, as we know, (except in
monastic communities) continued in the life of the Church or society once
Christianity had been made a state religion and had entered upon its ambiguous history
of alliances with the secular powers that be. But the notion of the common good, the subordination of one’s own private interest to the
needs of the larger community, never entirely died out among Christians, though
it was more often articulated in theory than carried out in practice. Ambrose, one of the great early bishops, put
it succinctly: the words “mine” and “thine”
are chilly words which introduce wars into the world and they should be
eliminated from the Church, because wars are almost always about retaining or
getting back property.
This
vision was hard to sustain and many would argue that we would have no market-based
economy if we had continued to practice what the early Christians thought of as
the kingdom values of common, not private, property. This is not the place to explore all the
dimensions of this contrast, but at the very least we have to remind ourselves
that kingdom values do not always sit comfortably with private property values
especially when the latter are not overridden from time to time when needed by
common good values, that is, when people are hurting and in need.
But
there is one way we might let those kingdom values influence our current
practice without necessarily overturning the whole market-based system on which
so much of our economic life clearly relies. In the words of Jeremiah this morning we hear
the questions: “Is there no balm in
© Copyright 2007 by
the Reverend Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick