Sermon to St. John the Divine Victoria BC, August 11,
2019 Luke 12: 32-40
By: Matthew Cook
Last
week we were given the warning of where not
to put our faith. In accumulation, in greed, in what we can gather and store up
for ourselves. “One’s life does not consist in the abundance of the things he
possesses.” Jesus argues against seeking worldly security, which is a natural thing
to crave. It is a restful thing to think of a well stocked fridge at the end of
a work day. To go home knowing that your plate won’t be empty. It is a natural
desire, and Jesus argues against it, he wants our desiring to be focused on
God, knowing that once God is placed at the center our lives, all other desires
shall find their proper place in the hierarchy of desire. That God shall become
your treasure, and with God your heart shall flourish.
In
today’s readings this question of what we value is put to us, along side a
warning to remain vigilant, to be watchful for when the master of the house
comes. The allegory would seem to be that we must watch our hearts, least the
judge of our hearts find us unprepared. But God’s desire for us is not to hold
us in judgement, but in freedom, the freedom from worldly desires. It’s not
something you hear much of in the world today, nowadays we are told to be a
slave to our passions, to follow our bliss, but this advice is more about
finding better glided cages than open pastures. The challenge for the Christian
of the 21st century is to answer the question of what do we value?
I want to probe this question of
value and judgement with a bit of scholarship from one of the parishioners of
St Barnabas. Brian Pollick, a doctoral candidate in Art History at UVic, wrote
a paper a few years ago on the relationship between Italian merchants and
Dante’s Divine Comedy. Bare with me.
Dante’s Inferno is a place of poetic justice, where what you valued in life is
reflected in your placement in the after life. For instance, the first circle
of hell is reserved for the lustful where those who cast aside all other cares
to pursue carnal desires are blown about by these great gale force winds, as
they submitted themselves to chaos of lust in life, so do they reap the
whirlwind in the afterlife. The punishment suits the crime with Dante.
Now
if you’re a merchant in the 14th century, you are keenly aware that
you are standing in the shadow of a crime: the crime of usury. That means
charging excessive interest. Charging interest was a dubious enterprise back
then, as, to the medieval mind, money was understood as having a fixed value.
It was understood that in accordance with nature money should
increase from natural goods and not from money itself. Interest was seen as a
kind of creation ex nihilio – something from nothing, and because only God can
create - like bring into creation – the practise of usury was viewed with a
theological scepticism as it was man playing God.
So
there was a lot more at stake with a standard business exchange. And because
there was so much riding on these dealings, there was a deeper scrutiny at
work; you have to form a relationship with someone is in good standing in the
community, and that would not be limited to a business class but would also
include your reputation in the social and spiritual spheres. More than dollar
signs are at stake. To quote Mr. Pollick directly: “The actions of an
unreliable partner or employee could not only result in loss or profits or
goods, but in the loss of one’s very soul, as the result of engaging in questionable
practices that might be deemed to be usurious.”
I find it very insightful that Dante
places those who do charge excessive interest in the seventh circle of hell,
the one reserved for the violent. Usury is seen as violence because it harms
the economy, and it does not create but it taxes creation. “It is the will of Providence,” says Dante,
“that humanity is meant to labour and to prosper, But usurers, by seeking
increase in other ways, scorn nature in herself and her followers.” Creation
and those who labour in creation are cast aside in the pen strokes of ledgers,
where faith is placed outside of God.
So
that’s the milieu that surrounds these merchants of Dante’s time and the effect, says Mr. Pollick, “was to produce a considerable state of
anxiety and fear amongst [them] about their social and spiritual position. To the
extent that there is overwhelming evidence that most merchants tried to behave
ethically and adhere to the admonition not engage in usurious activities, and
that they did not systematically set out to find loopholes.” I tell you now, if
we did not have a financial sector bent on systematically finding loopholes,
the year 2008 would have looked a hell of
a lot different.
I give this illustration to you today as it troubles the
neatness of our secular framework: Church is here, government over there, the
market over there, and together they form a pact of non-interference. Each
institution will leave the other alone and will only interject in the affairs
of the other when necessity demands no alternative. The lesson from Dante is that
this neatness is a lie, and if left to their own devices each institution
withers into a stale shadow of itself. The church becomes a private Sunday
morning club without mission, government becomes about the regulation of bodies
lacking a vision of civic life, and the economy becomes the end, rather than
the means, of human life.
Always the church is called to correct these misunderstandings,
when societal orientation is askew, when means and ends are mixed up, or when
gold and calf are mistaken for God. Always the correction is made that creation
should be returned to God, in service of Him. “The Christian tradition has
never recognized,” says Pope Francis, “the right to private property as
absolute or inviolable, and has stressed the social purpose of all forms of
private property.” We are made in the image of God, if we deprive our neighbour
of God’s creation, we rob our kin.
200 years after Dante, in the aftermath of the enclosure
movement, when the English common lands were seized by nobles and then sold to
private landlords, the greed grew so great that the English Church,
not always the most sympathetic to the lower classes, issued this prayer to
remind property owners who they were subservient to:
“The earth is thine, O Lord,
and all that is contained therein. We heartily pray thee to send thy Holy Spirit
into the hearts of those that possess the grounds, pastures and dwelling places
of the earth, that they, remembering themselves to be thy tenants, may not rack
or stretch out the rents of their houses or lands; not yet take unreasonable
fines and incomes, after the manner of covetous worldlings; but, so let them
out to others that the inhabitants thereof may be able both to pay their rents,
and also honestly to live, to nourish their family and to relieve the poor.”
Ours
is a religion based on incarnation, and that relationship with a God made flesh
is revealed in the flesh we are in relationship with; that is: our relationship
with the land and those who dwell on it. In this age, when so much of our land
has been seized by the forces of usury, and so many made homeless by those
forces, it is time that prayers like these come back into fashion. That we
rediscover the wisdom of our church and it’s warnings, least we descend in a
hell of our own making. That is not what God desires for us. He has prepared a
city for us, and when He returns to take us there, let Him find us eagerly at
work, building His kingdom on earth.
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