Priorities, folks. Because the fanatics can take this passage and insist that we are all poor and we all give to everyone. Forgetting two or three things.
The first is that if we do not provide for our wives and children we are to be counted as idolators: if we do not work we are not to eat, and our giving is voluntary.
The second is that Christ used rhetoric and analogy. He compares the person who holds onto wealth and worships that — the Pharisees in his time worshiped money, and there are heretics in this time who preach a gospel of prosperity — and tells them to be rich in the kingdom. He tells us all to be ready. To continue to work for the kingdom. To not retire, but to work: to be awake and not sleep.
Finally, he says that we should not fear, for the kingdom to come is greater than this world. And that kingdom will come when it is least expected. When there are articles proclaiming the death of Christianity, and that the anti-christian forces in this world will overcome, then the Kingdom will come.
This, is a counsel to avoid despair. The kingdom is more certain that the land we live in.
“Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give to the needy. Provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
“Stay dressed for action and keep your lamps burning, and be like men who are waiting for their master to come home from the wedding feast, so that they may open the door to him at once when he comes and knocks. Blessed are those servants whom the master finds awake when he comes. Truly, I say to you, he will dress himself for service and have them recline at table, and he will come and serve them. If he comes in the second watch, or in the third, and finds them awake, blessed are those servants! But know this, that if the master of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have left his house to be broken into. You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.”
(Luke 12:32-40 ESV)
I took that picture yesterday. It is at a place called Moeraki, where buried in sandstone are volcanic rocks. The coast is eroding, and these boulders fall onto the beach and are gradually destroyed. I live in and island where there are earthquakes: they are so common that anything below Richter scale 4 is ignored. The land changes continually: in this decade we have had the second city of NZ flattened by an earthquake, and the special legislation that allowed for houses to be torn down, owners compensated, and the city rebuilt of firmer land has just lapsed.
Within society there are phases and changes. Anyone who observes the Western world is seeing a revolt against the trans-nationalist elite: there is resistance to free movement of Peoples, and there is reluctance to sign up to more free trade deals. The accepted and promoted authors in SF — such as Scalzi, who leads the Pink SF faction, are not selling as well as the nationalist right, such as Day.
People are moving and alliances change. We should not be shocked. The world has always been like this.
And there will not be surcease and justice until the kingdom comes, but in the church. For we are the harbinger of the kingdom. And what we need to do is proclaim Christ.
Not signal virtue. Not be merely a social welfare organization. Not be a branch of the state — if the state funds your charities, the state will demand that you follow their policies — but be working for the kingdom.
But do not fear. That is what those who have converged should do: their fear is that they know, unless they change, they are doomed for destruction. We should not be like them. We should be instead part of the kingdom of God, knowing it is not of this world, and aiming to honour Christ if we live or die.
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