(Play the O’Jay’s
song, “For the Love of Money” on your phone) You may have heard that song
and like me, only remember the chorus. I
remember grooving out to it during my funk days. Does a pastor get to have musical funk days? Yes, I think so. Anyway, I had never remember hearing the
verses, two of which go,
Money is the root of all evil
Do funny things to some people
Give me a nickel, brother, can you spare a dime?
Money can drive some people out of their minds
Don't do it
Save your soul, save your soul, don't sell it
For that mean, mean, mean, mean green.
Indeed. The O’Jays seem to know our Scripture verses
in the Gospel of Luke and Jesus’s critique of the rich men in story and
encounter.
Lawren Simmons,
writing for The New York Times, recently shared,
The longest government shutdown in American history appears to be coming to an end, but there are two sets of images from these last few weeks that could endure well beyond it. The first shows the lines snaking out of food pantries after the Trump Administration chose not to use available funds to keep full food stamp benefits flowing to millions of poor Americans this month, and fought the federal rulings requiring it to make full benefits available. The second, released on social media by President Trump himself, shows his gleaming new bathroom in the Lincoln Bedroom, renovated in gold fixtures and marble.[1]
Sisters and brothers, siblings and
cousins, this is where we find ourselves.
Throughout our lectionary readings in the Gospel of Luke, I have shared
Jesus’s teachings which have included stories about six rich men. Each of these stories tells the reality of
how the wealthy violently disrupt and destroy life, creating a huge chasm, the
great gulf, between themselves and the rest of creation. As Biblical scholar Ched Myers is want to
say, “Repetition is the key to pedagogy.”
And Luke is repeating.
In our Scripture verse today, Jesus
makes it clear that his critique is about a need to dismantle the current
economic system. He juxtaposes two
scenes on display at the Temple. Last
week, Zacchaeus showed the way with the way he paid reparations and
repatriation. But the system still
stands. And Jesus sees the system
crushing one of the very vulnerable groups Jewish story, mythology, and Law were
to protect.
Jesus goes to Jerusalem in chapter 19,
he critiques the Scribal exploitation of widows’ estates in chapter 20, he
laments over the war to come, that can be anticipated in chapter 19. Today he once again critiques the rich in our
Scripture verse. He “cleanses” the
Temple in chapter 19 and repudiates the marketplace economy in our Scripture
verse before us.
Their policies, their presumptions,
their plutocratic blindness. It is
plunderama. The wealthy use the present
system to gain more and more profit. In
Chuck Collins new book, Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining
Our Lives and the Planet, he talks about how we
are caught in the “plutocracy doom loop.”
Wealth flows upward, it concentrates in fewer hands, the wealthy use
their amassed fortunes and power to rig the rules to extract more wealth from
the economy. Collins believes that in
the last 40 years we have been pulling apart, a great gulf, if you will,
starting with wealth inequality. And this
gulf is created to grow wider. Today the
pace of wealth flowing upward has been like a money pump that is moving wealth
upwards, faster and faster, to the top one-tenth of one percent. There are 920 billionaires in the U.S. with a
combined wealth of 8 trillion dollars today when just five years ago we had 850
billionaires with 3 trillion dollars. Hear
that? That sound is unpaid wages being
sucked upward. It is a system that is
now on autocratic auto pilot.[2]
“The greatest social disruption,”
Collins believes, “is driven by households in the top one-tenth of the one
percent—that is, those with more than 40 million dollars in assets.”[3]
And the wealthy know what this leads
to. They are scared. Why would they need a vote in Congress
condemning socialism if they didn’t see the reaction building to their plunder? When over half of our members of Congress are
millionaires? When they have to build a
war chest of economic resources to get elected?
What Luke turns to is
what happens when this system takes hold, when the systemic inequality
continues. In Luke, chapter 19, Luke
puts into the mouth of Jesus his lament over the city of Jerusalem and what
happened to the people when Rome began its attack on the holy city of
Jerusalem, “[W]hen your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround
you, and hem you in on every side. They
will crush you to the ground, you and your children with you, and will not
leave within you one stone upon another.”
Jesus believes this wealth accumulation leads to total destruction.
The Roman Jewish
historian, a contemporary of Luke, shares what Rome did to Jerusalem, “[He]
wrote in agonizing detail about these events, including famine, whole families
disappearing, and ‘the lanes of the city full of the dead bodies of the aged .
. .’ A million people who had taken
refuge in Jerusalem were killed and another 97,000 taken captive, and the city
razed.”[4]
Luke then has Jesus
foretell what he saw in Jerusalem in chapter 21. Jerusalem is surrounded by armies. Desolation
has come near. Do not go near
Jerusalem. Woe to those who are pregnant
or nursing. This will come as a great
distress to the earth and wrath against the people.
This is not God’s
wrath. This is what happens when a
systemic exploitation, extraction, and wealth inequality become too much. Jesus says that the rich bring hell to earth
and wrath to its peoples, a desolation in chapter 21, verse 23. The sea roars. The people faint from fear.
Ched Myers said that
in the research for his book he found that, “Some sociologists 20 years ago did
a study of wealth disparity in Luke’s world and compared it to wealth disparity
in the United States and found that the wealth disparity today is worse than it
was in 1st Century Rome.”[5]
Culturally, we have
to get past as a people the idea that wealth is somehow deserved, that the
wealth accumulators deserve what they have, that they made it on their
own.
All wealth is created in community—with nature and people and workers. No one can say, “I did it alone.” . . . No, you didn’t create your wealth alone. We, as a society, helped create this wealth together through God’s gifts of creation, nature, and the fertile ground we build with our labor and taxpayer-funded investments.[6]
And the flip side is that we think,
“Well, if I’m not rich, then there must be something wrong with me.”
Jesus says
that the rich bring hell to earth. Chuck
Collins details how that is happening through health care, climate change, and
taxation, the pool for public services for all of us ending up in the hands of
the very wealthy. He goes on to relate
how that is now happening in housing and even to pet care, many of us willing
to go into debt to take care of our pets.
That hell
even captures the very wealthy.
Beijing-based historian, Professor Jiang details how excessive amounts
of wealth changes the chemistry of the brain, that the brain of a psychopath
and the brain of a wealthy person are very similar. You can’t appreciate the feelings of others. You can’t relate to the feelings of other
people[7].
Tracy told
me the other day how, in loneliness, people are reaching out to what are these
AI, or artificial intelligence partners.
The problem? The AI partners are
a creation of the person themselves so that they don’t rub up against them in
the right or wrong ways, don’t push on them, make growth a necessary part of
their socialization. So the relationship
actually needed to stem their loneliness never occurs. AI partners are a form of narcissism that
never help us experience true partnership and the beginning of true community.
Several years ago an article ran in The
Atlantic that detailed how power causes brain damage. In studies spanning 20 years, it was found
that those under the influence of power acted as if they had suffered a
traumatic brain injury—more impulsive, less risk-aware, and less adept at
seeing things from other people’s point of view. Other studies that looked at brains more
than behavior, found that the powerful were missing a specific neural activity called “mirroring”
which is critical to empathy[8]
Wealth is a
disconnection drug. There is a
loneliness and alienation that accompanies it .
And the antidote is a connection, the vulnerability of reciprocity and
neighborliness and community and interdependence. Instead Professor Jiang sees
the very wealthy trying to build these huge survival bunkers, desperately
trying to keep the world as it is, to survive all alone. All alone.
Remember
what happens, Jesus says, when Zacchaeus makes reparation and
repatriation? He becomes part of the
wider community, the huge family that is past, present, and future. Jesus does not declare that in the
synagogue. So I would be lying to you if
I thought the place to look for that community happening would be in the
church. Instead, I believe Jesus wants
us to throw our doors open to the wider community.
Two primary
ways that Jesus addressed the systemic injustice of his day, the disparity in
power and wealth. First, he
re-instituted neighborliness and found new and novel ways to build community. He did that so often through table community
and the sharing of food and drink that his enemies called him a glutton and a
drunkard. Jesus did not see this
extended neighborliness as a burden but experienced it as a joy.
Second,
Jesus counseled non-cooperation with the unjust system that drained the life
from people. Don’t let the system shame
you into believing that you are less than.
Don’t rob each other of your livelihoods. Don’t unfairly tax one another. Remember your humanity, your value to God,
how you are loved with the beauty of wildflowers in the field, how ever God
cares for the birds in the air. Don’t
plug into their system. Don’t buy their
bread. Don’t cooperate. Don’t participate. Sometimes have a sense of humor about it and
practice it to build your spiritual muscle.
One of my
parishioners at St. Paul’s UCC , Suzanne, recently gave me a book by Native
biologist, Robin Wall Kimmerer, which asks us to live into what is called “the
gift economy,” an economy that does not sound unlike what Jesus counseled for
the people of his day. Kimmerer writes
that abundance happens naturally in the good earth. But abundance is not something to be hoarded
by the person who may have gathered it, hunted for it, collected it, but shared
with the whole community. An
anthropologist might ask, “What are you going to do with this excess meat you
have from your hunt—are you going to store it, dry it, or smoke it?” And the hunter would look at the
anthropologist in disbelief to say, “I store my meat in the belly of my
brother.” In gift economies, abundance
and excess are based in gratitude and reciprocity. And we can just remember Jesus standing with
the small boy who offered his five loaves and two fish to feed the 5,000 to
know this how Jesus helped fracturing communities in his day to not only
survive but to thrive.
There is a movement afoot to not
participate in the sensalization of wealth that begins this next week with
Black Friday. And it is also about being
conscious of how we might return wealth to our own communities. We love our neighbor with how we participate
as economic beings. So we do both things
that Jesus taught us to do so that we might find joy in our own humanity and
glory in the gifts of this good earth.
Because, in reality, alternative community and mutual aid networks, and
neighbors joining hands to defend neighbors are breaking out everywhere in our
country. We should be joining them.
To get you started, I copied off a list
from one of these “Blackout” movements and put them on the table (where we keep
the worship bulletins/in the narthex). I
invite you to take one and start building your spiritual muscle to do both
things Jesus taught: weave together
community and stop cooperating with the wealth-hoarders. If you can just do one, do one of the
recommended actions, you can start watching your freedom and your spiritual
muscle grow. I included a flyer from the
largest UCC church, Trinity UCC in Chicago, so you can see how they are trying
to protect and serve their community. I
did it so you would know you are not alone.
The uber wealthy are bringing hell on earth. I watched the COP30 event from Brazil this
past week as their lobbyists overran the event that was intended to help the
world meet the challenge of climate change.
These representatives of the uber wealthy refused to let any real
progress be made at the event. But then
. . . but then, indigenous people making the trek from the Amazonian rain
forest moved on the event and got concessions from the Brazilian government
nobody every would have expected. Alessandra Korap Munduruku, an indigenous
environmental leader said,
So, what keeps me going are my people. My people keep me going, and my people keep me alive. The children, the territory, my family, it’s a collective struggle, and this is what keeps me alive.
Asked to speak directly to the camera,
to tell people in the United States what she wanted them to know, she said:
You need to know, because we, here, we do not eat soy. We do not eat gold. We do not eat iron ore. We eat the fish, and we eat the fruits from the forest. And we need our forest standing. So, I ask you, please, monitor your corporation. Monitor your company. Monitor your governments. Watch your representatives. Be aware of what they’re doing. We need you to do this for us here in the forest. This is my message to you, from Alessandra Korap Munduruku.[9]
As people of faith, what keeps us
going? We are the Beloved Children of
God, given to the task of walking in the way that Jesus walked, not believing
the lies of a culture that would have us believe our value is tied up in our
wealth and power over others.
Good
people, join the movement. Show your
freedom. Build your spiritual
muscle. Amen.
[1]
Lawren Simmons, “On Politics,” The New York Times, November 12, 2025.
[2]
Chuck Collins, “Scholar Activist Encounter 28: - Ched Myers & Chuck Collins
- November 13, 2025,” CBSJ, November 13, 2025, https://vimeo.com/1137040314.
[3]
Interview with Chuck Collins, “The Wealth Extractors: Billionaires are upending our lives and our
economy. Author Church Collins on how we
fight back and rebuild, “ Sojourners, December, p. 24.
[4]
Ched Myers, “Jesus’ Final Warning: The Rich Bring Hell upon the World,” Bartimaeus
Cooperative Ministries, https://bcmonline.org/2025/11/14/jesus-final-warning-the-rich-bring-hell-upon-the-world/.
[5]
Ched Myers, “Scholar-Activist Encounter.”
[6]
Collins, “The Wealth Extractors.,” p. 27.
[7] "Money
Causes Brain Damage" (Why Elites Are Psychopaths) | Prof. Jiang Insights https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MBLppxIFlI.
[8]
Jerry Useem, “Power causes brain damage,” The Atlantic, July/August 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/power-causes-brain-damage/528711/
[9] “We
Need to Be Heard”: Indigenous Amazon Defender Alessandra Korap Munduruku on
COP30 Protest
!,” Democracy Now!, November 21, 2025, https://www.democracynow.org/2025/11/21/indigenous_leader_alessandra_korap_munduruku.
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