Managing Our Money

            There is an ad from Publisher’s Clearing House offering $5000 a week forever.  What they mean is that they will pay you $5000 a week for all of your life and then you can designate another person to receive $5000 a week for all of their life.  That sounds like quite a deal.  It raises for me again the problem of wealth and what it does to human life.  I can hardly imagine what such wealth given to a baby upon my death would mean for them.  Wealth is, of course, neutral.  It can be used in wonderful or terrible ways.  Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have done wonderful things with their money and have made charity a cornerstone of their lives.  Others haven’t reacted this way to money.  The great temptation is to lift up the self as the owner of the wealth and to look down on those who have less.  This is the great problem that confronts our society these days. 

            Someone occasionally raises the question in a wonderful way:  “Wouldn’t it be great if the soup kitchens and the food pantries would be adequately funded and the Defense Department had to have bake sales to fund its work?”  Well, we know that will never happen, but it puts into perspective the problem that we have in this society with our wealth.  We spend it as a people on the things that protect us and leave the poor to mostly fend for themselves. 

            Rosie and I do Meals on Wheels every week.  Recently the “Sequester” has cut funding for this extremely important service and the routes have all been cut back and some of the clients assigned to the county who are only able to deliver meals three days a week.  This means that for two days, excluding weekends, there is nobody to check on the recipients of these meals.  There was one ninety some year old lady on our route who I had to sometimes look for all over her house to be sure she wasn’t lying somewhere immobile.  This, for me, was the main reason that I was coming to her house every day.  This is a terrible state of affairs.  We are only a small program, but this illustrates the great difficulty that we have with our resources as a nation.  Why can’t we take care of the impoverished among us and just let the wealthy fend for themselves?  It seems to me that this is what we are called to do as the people of God. 

            The wonderful words of Psalm 49: 9-11 seem to cry out to me: 

For we see that the wise die also;
like the dull and stupid they perish *
and leave their wealth to those who come after them.

Their graves shall be their homes for ever,
their dwelling places from generation to generation, *
though they call the lands after their own names.

Even though honored, they cannot live forever; *
they are like the beasts that perish.

            I once knew two rich women who were sisters of a member of my parish.  When they died, I did their funerals.  Each of them was buried in a heavy mahogany casket that cost a great deal of money.  Their wealth followed them into the ground.  It was a terrible shame to see this happen.  They had no sense whatsoever that their wealth could do some good for people beyond their own lives.

             In some sense, we all live like this.  Jesus told us to love one another as we are loved.  That is a very simple commandment, but it had a great deal to do with how we manage our money.  It isn’t hard to remember the poor, as long as we understand that we are just like them.  With our help, their poverty can be eased and their lives made much better.  It really doesn’t hurt us at all to do this.  It just takes a little bit more than winning the Publisher’s Clearing House lottery.