The world is becoming wealthier and wealthier.
Since the turn of the century, the net worth of many countries in the West and in Asia has tripled.
Poverty rates have fallen.
Life expectancy has increased by more than six years.
At the same time, the divide between rich and poor has increased,
with the richest 1% owning almost 50% of all the world's wealth.
5 to 10% of people still live in extreme poverty, even in the most affluent nations.
Furthermore, while money can buy happiness, it can only do so up to a certain point.
Wealthier people are more likely to be less generous and less kind to others.
So how, as Christians, should we think about affluence?
Is material prosperity a blessing or a curse or both?
Given the state of the world and income equality, what do we do with the riches God has given us?
At our 2024 August event, Michael Jensen, rector of St Mark's Anglican Darling Point,
helped us to see our earthly treasure the way our Heavenly Father does.
In this episode, we bring you the audio from that event, minus the Q&A segment,
which you can find on our website, ccl.moore.edu.au.
We hope you find Michael's talk helpful as you think about the blessings that God has bestowed on you.
Well, good evening, everyone, and welcome.
Good evening and a very warm welcome to Moore College and this Centre for Christian Living event.
My name is Peter Orr and I'm on the faculty here at Moore College.
Warm welcome to you if you're in the room, but also a very warm welcome to you
if you are watching online.
Our topic this evening is affluent and Christian material goods, the King and the Kingdom.
And we're very privileged that we have Michael Jensen, good friend to many of us,
coming to speak on this topic and we'll introduce Michael in a moment.
This is the third of our live events for 2024.
And the Centre for Christian Living exists to bring biblical teaching, particularly biblical,
ethical teaching to everyday issues.
And this year, our four live events have explored the idea of culture creep.
It's the idea that's expressed in the Apostle Paul's letter to the Romans
when he warns them against being conformed to the world.
So thinking about different areas where as Christians we might be tempted to conform to the world.
And this year, we've already looked at technology, we've looked at sex,
and tonight we're thinking about wealth.
And Michael has joined us.
We were meant to have another speaker, Emma Penzo, but unfortunately family emergency has kept her away.
I'll introduce Michael in a moment, but I thought I'd begin by just reading those two verses from Romans
and praying and committing our time to the Lord.
So this is what the Apostle Paul says.
Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice,
holy and pleasing to God.
This is your true and proper worship.
Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is,
his good, pleasing and perfect will.
Let me pray.
Our Father, we thank you so much for this time when we can meet together or be online
and think about this important topic.
We do pray for Michael as he leads us through this teaching.
Please help him as he speaks, strengthen him.
Please help us to listen carefully.
And we pray that by your spirit, you would change our hearts for your glory.
We ask it in Jesus' name.
Amen.
But I might ask us to welcome Michael as he comes up and I'll just ask him a few questions.
Michael, you are the rector of Sir Mark's Darling Point.
Correct.
Great.
You also are a host of a podcast with Megan Powell,
Megan Powell Du Toit, called With All Due Respect.
That's correct.
Can you just tell us a little bit about your podcast?
The podcast is aiming to model what we find so hard in society in general,
and also within the evangelical movement, I think, and the evangelical church too.
And then it's conversations about serious topics with respect,
curiosity, and to advance our understanding in that way without completely dismissing
or showing contempt for the other.
That takes you to some risky places,
but we find we perhaps agree sometimes more than we expect to.
So we're 116 episodes in and haven't punched each other yet.
Before your time at Mark's, you were here at Moore College.
Before that, you did a PhD at Oxford.
And then before that, you also had some time at Moore College.
Yes.
And you actually lectured me.
I did.
And you actually marked one of my essays.
I just thought since I had you, I could just ask you a little bit more information about
some of the comments.
This is so unfair.
So one comment here is you've said about me,
sometimes your criticism was more rhetorical than substantial.
Yeah.
And then another place you put, I think you're perhaps a little too sanguine about
the strength of your conclusions.
Now, I do have a real reason for mentioning this.
I won't read it out, but somewhere in this essay, I think you're perhaps a little too
sanguine about the strength of your conclusions.
I won't read it out, but somewhere in this essay, I made a slightly sarcastic comment
about someone that I was engaging with.
And Michael, you wrote, this is an inappropriate tone.
Yeah, right.
And in all seriousness, I have remembered that.
And it sort of flows into your podcast, this idea of engaging with people that you might
not agree with everything, but to do it with respect.
So jokes aside, I still have this and that little comment has stuck with me.
You want me to upgrade it?
Yeah.
So there are many things for Michael, but that's one that has particularly stuck with me.
Sorry to embarrass you, put you on the spot.
I didn't tell him I was going to do that.
You are speaking on the topic of wealth.
All of Sydney in global terms is wealthy, but you minister in perhaps a particularly wealthy
area of a very wealthy city.
What are some of the complexities?
Yeah, I think we should be honest about it.
It's the wealthiest area in a wealthy city in a wealthy country.
So in world terms, it is one of the wealthiest spots.
My parish includes Darling Point and Double Bay and Point Piper.
And so you don't want to see what the record breaking house prices are there.
And that comes with its own joys and privileges and also difficulties because spiritually,
it's hard not to believe you're in heaven already.
You really are on a day like today.
You go down to the harbour.
Things look marvelous.
It's sparkling.
And you have a nice lunch at Margaret and then you walk around.
It's fantastic.
It's hard not to believe that you're in heaven already.
But that wealth, that affluence can actually conceal deeper questions.
And so it's interesting talking to the undertakers.
Being a minister, I do a lot of funerals and I get to talk to funeral directors.
And they would say that suicide remains a very big issue even in our area, especially
amongst men in their 50s, which is my age.
And I find the existential pain is there even though it's concealed behind high and beautiful
walls.
And that's another reason why it's very important for us to consider this topic.
So thank you for coming.
I'll hand over to you.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Well, thank you very much, Peter.
And from the Centre for Christian Living for the invitation, it's great to like to be here
and a joy to be back at both the college I studied at and taught at for so long and lived
at as a child because as some of you will know, my father was a principal here.
So I actually grew up in this area.
I want to start by talking about coffee and about Germans and their coffee.
So Germans do love their coffee and historically have the citizens, though, of East Germany
was separated politically from West Germany from 1945 to 1989.
They still shared a love of coffee in common.
Now, Katja Hoyer, who's a historian, she's the author of recent history of East Germany.
I really enjoyed listening to this on Audible, so I couldn't reach for a copy of it, unfortunately.
But it's worth getting and reading.
I think it's called Beyond the Wall.
And it tells that surprising tale of East Germany.
She explained in an interview that coffee is for Germans like tea is for Britons, a regular
and comforting ritual, part of a civilized and stable life.
It was a sign of a certain level of affluence as it is today, a simple luxury good that
depends on a global economy.
You might be facing nuclear war, but at least you had coffee.
Now, that's why the 1970s worldwide coffee crisis.
And I know the idea of a coffee crisis probably has some more college students gulping.
But could that happen again?
Apparently, there was a black blight in Brazil, which spoiled the coffee harvest in the mid 70s.
And it really hit the communist nation extremely hard.
Coffee had to be bought from other suppliers at competitive rates.
And East Germany didn't have the cash to do that, to supply its population.
We can only imagine what it would be like for there to be a coffee shortage in Sydney.
The government became afraid that this shortage would lead to civil unrest.
There had been a few human rights protests over the years, but nothing too alarming.
You could take away someone's freedom of speech or their right to free movement,
but don't take away their coffee.
The East German government then had to think of other alternatives.
So it came up with a kind of horrible chicory barley mix as a coffee substitute.
Can you imagine it came in packets and it sort of clung to the filter paper and tasted horrible.
But at least it was sort of black like coffee, I suppose.
It became known as Eric's brew after the East German leader, Eric Honecker.
It wasn't easy to protest in East Germany because that was suppressed,
but more than 14,000 letters were written to the government complaining about this dreadful coffee.
But why did it matter?
People were used to bad services and queues, latenesses and shortages of goods.
They were okay with waiting a decade for a trebant car, which is an awful car.
Okay. Just to give you the picture, but they had been promised their coffee as a sign that
their living standards were as good as those of their West German cousins.
If you had West German relatives, you could be sent some precious coffee as a present.
But then what did you have to send them in return?
The traditional return gift was stolen cake, you know, stolen cake, fruit cake.
There wasn't enough fruit.
So you couldn't even bribe your cousins in West Germany to send you proper coffee.
Their anger rather than the urzats coffee was what was brewing.
So what was to be done?
You can't grow coffee in Germany, but you could somewhere warmer,
but it had to be a place that was sympathetic to the communist German Democratic Republic.
So they went to Vietnam, newly liberated, newly free of the Vietnam War in 1976.
The American soldiers had left.
Now it was a communist government and they started to plant coffee plantations there.
But the first yield of Vietnamese coffee wasn't due until the early 1990s.
In 1989, as good students of history will know, the East German state collapsed
and East Germans were able to drink a good cup of coffee at last,
but not the Vietnamese brew that they'd been expecting.
Now this of course is too simplistic an explanation of a major historical event,
but like saying that World War I was caused by train timetables,
as a famous historian once did, crediting a lack of coffee for the fall of East Germany
points to a deeper explanation, which in turn reveals something about the world in which we live today.
For example, a historian, Gary Cross writes that in reality, the fall of communism had more to do
with the appeals of capitalist consumerism than political democracy.
Now I don't want to demean the bravery of human rights activists or the impact that they had,
or to underestimate the profound impact of the famous peace prayers conducted in Leipzig's
Nikolai Kirchherr through the 70s and 80s.
In fact, you should read the story of that amazing Christian witness
in the midst of East Germany in those times.
But it was Levi's as much as Liberty that most moved the East German masses in 1989,
or perhaps the Liberty to buy Levi's instead of the government issued alternative.
Whatever its high ideals, liberal democracy turns out to be powerful because it's the best way for
people to access the consumer economy and with it, a share of affluence, which for us today,
as much as back then means a good cup of coffee.
Now I tell this story not to judge or sneer at East Germans, but as an illustration of the meaning
and the power of affluence in our world.
The desire for affluence can tear down walls and silence the guns of war.
It can reunite a once divided nation.
It can transcend boundaries of race and color and creed.
So what is this magical thing called affluence?
Well, the first task of Christian ethics and sometimes the hardest task is to describe well
what we see, not for us to be quick to judge, but actually to describe well,
to be alert to what is going on around us, lest our judgment be askewed so we can see
what's actually before us.
I have to admit when I was first asked to give this lecture, I was unsure what my particular
qualification for giving it was until I remembered that I'm the rector of a church in the most
affluent area in Australia, which is, as I said before, one of the most affluent nations in the
world.
So I am surrounded in affluence, if anyone is.
I'm swimming in it, which means that it's taken some conscious effort for me to think about what
affluence actually is.
I'm acutely conscious of my enmeshment in affluence, even as I give this talk and the
possibility that I may sound like I'm speaking from some superior moral height, I most certainly
am not.
Now, what is affluence?
Affluence is not just wealth.
It's not simply dollars.
Affluence properly describes more than what we have in the bank.
It says something about the freedom and opportunities that wealth affords.
It names access to a lifestyle way beyond the basics of survival.
Indeed, we may say that an affluent person doesn't have to think about the basics of
survival.
They are not naked.
They are not starving.
And they are not thirsty.
Shelter and safety are for them givens.
Beyond this, an affluent person can assume access to a good level of affordable health
care and a decent level of education.
Although individuals are certainly affluent, affluence is better suited, I think, as a
description of communities, societies, even nations.
We could speak of very affluent people in extremely poor countries, but we can also
speak of affluent societies in which even people with very different levels of income
may be fairly described as affluent because they have a share in the wealth and wellbeing
of the society in which they live.
Just in the last week, I visited someone in social housing.
And the market value of their brand new apartment in an inner city suburb would be many times
what they could literally afford.
And they're quite well aware of this.
He says he's the luckiest man alive.
Since our wealthy society can put its poor in relatively good accommodation.
Now, of course, up in Redfern and Waterloo, there's less salubrious accommodation.
But that's an example where I think we've done very well by those who don't have much.
Now, I'm certainly not one of the wealthiest people in my suburb.
I take down the average income, that's for sure.
But I would describe myself as benefiting from the wealth of the rich.
But I would describe myself as benefiting hugely from the collective affluence of the
local community.
My access to specialist health care, reliable public transport, quality educational choices
for my children, cultural institutions, the media and in other parts of our society too,
media, law, politics, recreational facilities and social clubs is extraordinary.
I also have access to people with their hands on the levers of power, CEOs of major banks,
politicians, judges and more.
The local culture is also affluent in terms of what you might call social capital.
It's easy to get a habit of healthy living in the eastern suburbs of Sydney.
Levels of obesity are not large, sorry for the pun.
People eat well.
That's their habit to eat well.
They exercise frequently.
They are obsessed with exercise.
They hardly ever smoke.
It's really noticeable if you smell a cigarette in the eastern suburbs because people know
it's bad for you.
They even have great teeth.
They are at least outwardly optimistic.
Longevity seems normal.
People can expect 20 or even 30 years of active life in retirement.
I can easily think of eight or nine people well into their 90s that I know and some in
their hundreds.
To sum up what I've said thus far, affluence names not just wealth but a lifestyle.
It's not just individual but social.
Affluence means access, access to desirable things, good things like health and health
care, leisure and education and more access to the public.
And education and more access to the benefits of the consumer economy.
The story of East German coffee, however, shows some other things about affluence.
The first is that affluence is usually a relative term.
To live in East Germany in the 50s and 60s wasn't all bad.
In fact, Katja Royer, she shows that in East Germany they were doing better in some respects
than they were in the UK.
There were still people living in houses without their own toilet in the north of the UK.
Well, that wasn't the case so much in East Germany in the 1950s, even after the devastation
of the Second World War.
They recovered very speedily.
It was something of a miracle.
It was very well governed in that way.
They were in advance of their West German cousins in the 50s and 60s in terms of access
to education, the rights of women and in several other economic markers.
It was certainly better to live in East Germany at almost any time than it was in, say, Ethiopia.
However, the planned economy of the GDR could not keep up with the West and the nation became
relatively less affluent.
It was more affluent than pre-war Germany, but less affluent than its contemporaries.
So in relative terms, historically it was doing quite well.
But in relative terms, when you looked over the Berlin Wall, you could see that
you could see what the other half was doing, what everyone else had, and that had a marked effect.
And this leads to the second observation that I think this story tells us, that affluence
is an enviable state.
It's enviable for modern human beings.
To be affluent is greatly to be desired.
If you aren't affluent, then you certainly want to be.
And this is where we start to move from description to judgment.
When I said to my Bible study group, my Kinect group, hello to those watching
online, that I was giving a talk on affluence, one of their first reactions was,
oh, you're just going to make us feel guilty, aren't you?
We're just going to feel guilty.
It was as if in even addressing this topic, we were walking into a prison from which we
couldn't escape.
I think this was an instructive reaction because it raises the thought that my affluence
may be a matter for moral reflection and even better, particular moral action.
I may be affluent precisely because others are not.
My affluence may have a particular moral quality to it or make a particular moral demand on me.
And so what if I am affluent?
What then?
We'll return to that reaction.
So I think again, one of the things Christian ethicists saw to do is to interrogate their
instincts, their instinctive reactions.
Those intuitions are not a nothing in the moral field.
They give us some moral evidence.
And we ought to interrogate those instinctive reactions.
We will come back to it.
But we haven't described affluence properly unless we make some historical observations
first.
I want to point to, I think the points get shorter from here, so don't worry.
We'll make some historical observations then.
The Bible talks a great deal about wealth and the wealthy, about prosperity as a blessed
state, but also about the spiritual dangers of riches.
But before we apply what scripture says or consider it, we need to know what the particular
features of modern affluence are, for they are very unusual.
In his book, Remaking the World, how 1776 created the post-Christian West, I've got to
hear, magnificent book and highly recommend it, theologian Andrew Wilson describes how
massive social, cultural, technological and political changes at the end of the 18th century
have made the world weirder.
That's all in capitals.
It's an acronym he's using.
And this is what it stands for.
Weirder stands for Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic, ex-Christian and romantic.
So Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic, ex-Christian and romantic.
Now in his chapter entitled Prophets, he says this, the most significant impact of the late
18th century on world history will surely be the transformation in health, wealth and
prosperity that it launched.
Economic historians called it the great escape, the great divergence, the great enrichment
or the European miracle.
The rest of us know it as normal life.
We take economic growth for granted.
We're kind of shocked and surprised and disappointed and angry at governments when we don't experience
economic growth, when growth slows down or when we have a recession.
But the truth is economic growth as we've experienced it is anything but normal.
I have to say actually we experienced unparalleled period of prosperity between the 1980s and
between the great financial crisis of the 2008, 2007 sort of era.
That was an extraordinary period of upswings, upticks in global affluence.
But that goes back to the beginning of this period that Andrew Wilson names.
And what he says is the reality is for most of human history, humankind was caught in a loop.
For every advance in productivity and in wealth, a rise of population would follow which would
soon swallow up the benefit.
You'd come up with some advance in agriculture, produce more food, have more babies, more
babies would eat more food and then growth would stall.
As a result, gross domestic product has barely changed between the age of King David, maybe
a thousand BC and William Shakespeare.
We today consume more than 70 times the goods and services than human beings did two centuries
ago.
Even though the population of the earth has multiplied, it is dwarfed by the rise in
consumption in that period.
Now I'm not an economic historian or an economist.
I did economics for the HSC but I can't remember any of it.
Neither is Wilson but it is scarcely debatable that no matter what standard we use, humankind
is massively more prosperous than we were before the 1770s.
One particular measure is fascinating.
Until the 19th century, life expectancy globally, and of course this is estimates because records
are sketchy, right, of course, but global life expectancy before the 19th century was
estimated to be 25 to 30 years.
Today, globally, it is more than 70.
Of course in our nation, it's something like 84.
So it will certainly be the early 80s depending if you're a man or a woman.
Women still outlive men.
Isaiah prophesied, you might remember in Isaiah 66, he said, never again will there be in
the world an infant who lives but a few days or an old man who does not live out his years.
The one who dies at 100 will be thought a mere child.
The one who fails to reach 100 will be considered accursed.
And we're not there yet but we're considerably closer to it than we were in 1776.
We're not a lot far off.
Why has this come about?
Wilson suggests that there have been four broad answers given to this question, namely
institutions, greed, culture, and geography.
Institutions, greed, culture, and geography.
Now, with the father of modern economics, Adam Smith, Wilson shows that solid legal
and governmental frameworks promoted innovation and investment, provided guarantees and protections
for those who are willing to risk their money.
That's institutions.
So good institutions, really important if you're going to have economic growth.
But it's also true that the great enrichment has occurred on account of the looting of
Africa, Asia, South America, and Australia by Europeans.
As Wilson writes, much as we might want to, we cannot disentangle the story of modern
economic growth from the guns, resource extraction, enslavement, and death.
That spells out greed, guns, resource extraction, enslavement, and death that made much of it
possible.
You can tell the story without that aspect of it but it's not sufficient on its own.
For European culture had also experienced a number of changes which had made it more
open to the new rather than mired in tradition.
It was already possessed of a middle class that was literate, ambitious, and curious.
So that's culture.
We have institutions.
We have greed.
We have culture.
And then lastly, we have geography.
And Wilson, along with others, reflects that Europe has benefited from being both divided
and united all at once.
So since the 17th century, it's been kind of divided into smaller competitive states
rather than one clumsy, slow moving empire.
And though there were violent flare ups between the end of the Napoleonic Wars, 1815 and 1914,
the Western European powers enjoyed an unprecedented period of peace between them.
At the same time, Christianity provided something of a common currency between them that enabled,
facilitated both competition but also elements of trust.
Now okay, so we've got institutions, greed, culture, and geography explaining this great
expansion in prosperity and affluence in the last couple of centuries.
But I want to just say I'm not going to pretend that this cursory overview that I've given
in just a few minutes is sufficient to explain the causes of contemporary affluence.
And we could perhaps do some more reflecting on that a bit later.
But I think we should know with Wilson, the moral ambiguity of the great enrichment.
The great enrichment has been the cause of hugely increased living standards across the
globe.
This heralded huge improvements in the lives of billions of people.
People are alive today that would not have been alive in the past because of the great
enrichment.
I had appendicitis when I was 17.
Likely in a previous era, I would be dead before the rise of antibiotics.
Yet now you'd never think of anyone dying.
You'd be utterly shocked if someone died of appendicitis.
I heard of a man in the 1930s, he was a relative of Dr. Knox, a former principal here, who
died from an infected pimple.
Infection spread, again no antibiotics.
Again, that is an astonishing thing to think of in our world.
We should not be naive about this or forget just what benefits the great enrichment has
brought to our world.
Even if there is inequality, because the base standard of living is so much higher, the
worst impacts of unequal wealth distribution are somewhat mitigated.
However, the affluence we enjoy was built on the seizure of land and resources, the
enslavement of peoples, and we should add very often at the expense of the earth itself.
It's vital to note that moral ambiguity because so many contemporary culture war accounts
tend to be so lopsided.
They're either defenders of colonialism and capitalism or they're its greatest critics.
They've got nothing good to say about it.
Either capitalism and colonialism are demonic or they're instruments of divine blessing.
Both of these takes are, I think, the result of ideology more than anything else.
That brings us back to our feelings of unease because I think we ought both recognize the
benefits we have from the great enrichment but can't possibly reckon with the moral cost
of the past either.
Furthermore, through the spread of information technology, we are perhaps more aware of the
inequality of people's experience of the great enrichment but feel helpless to do anything
about it.
Think about our unease.
Why do we feel uneasy?
Well, what are affluent Christians to do?
To help, I'd like to enlist the work of a great theologian and pastor of the church,
Basil of Caesarea, known as Basil the Great.
He wasn't christened Basil the Great, of course, title bestowed on him by history.
Now, Basil was born around 330 AD in the region of Cappadocia in what we now know as Turquia,
central Turquia.
He came from a wealthy and prominent noble family that was also well known as Christians.
It's quite an extraordinary tale.
Think of this family, right?
The grandmother, father, and mother were all made saints and there were nine brothers and
sisters and Basil and three of his brothers and sisters were made saints as well.
It's quite a family.
His spiritual teacher was perhaps the most saintly of all, St. Macrina the Younger, who
founded monasteries and lived an exemplary life and was his tutor for much of his life
too.
He records that, as did his brother Gregory of Nyssa.
As a young man from a wealthy family, he had the privilege of an education in which he
excelled.
He had also all the pleasures of that, the recreation available to wealthy people in
that era.
However, Basil was deeply impacted by the parable of the rich young ruler who was told
by Jesus to go sell all your possessions and give your money to the poor.
This is what he read when he opened the gospels.
And so this is what Basil himself did, especially during the time of a great famine that visited
Caesarea in the 360s, by which time he had become a parish priest.
It was there he'd also become known as a preacher and a kind of founder of Christian communities.
Now it's from several of his sermons that we can hear the pastor theologian Basil speaking
to the rich about their affluence.
I think if I preach these sermons at St Mark's, I'd be turned out.
They're pretty strong stuff.
With the help of his modern translator, Paul Schroeder, we can highlight three major theological
themes that he outlines in his preaching on wealth.
Firstly, what Schroeder calls the limited resource paradigm.
So firstly, for Basil, the problem with the rich young ruler was not that he was too attached
to worldly things, but that he was failing to love his neighbour as himself.
It was a failure of love.
It was not the worldly things in and of themselves.
It was the possession of those things limited or not displaying his neighbour love.
In a sermon called To the Rich, he says, if what you say is true, that you have kept from
your youth the commandment of love and have given to everyone the same as to yourself,
then how did you come by this abundance of wealth?
So what should those with wealth do?
Basil believed that God had provided enough in the creation to meet the needs of everyone.
If there is a lack of necessary things, he says, it's because there has not been an equitable
distribution of the things that God has given.
The problem is not with God's provision of things, but without clinging to them.
In preaching on the parable of the rich fool who intends to build bigger barns for his
hoard, he says, if we all took only what was necessary to satisfy our own needs, giving
the rest to those who lack, no one would be rich, no one would be poor, and no one would
be in need.
Love of neighbour, he says, requires that we adopt a way of life that ensures that everyone
has enough.
And so he urges us to a simplicity of lifestyle rather than to lavishness, not because good
things aren't good, but to ensure there is enough available for all.
He tears strips from conspicuous consumers.
I mean, it's remarkable how contemporary he sounds here.
He says, you gorgeously array your walls, but do not clothe your fellow human beings.
You know, I met a guy whose job it is in the Eastern South, it's to go around and hang
people's paintings.
And his whole life he goes and hangs your paintings on your wall for you.
So you know where you put your Brett Whiteley and your etc.
That's a whole job.
You adore horses, but you turn away from the shameful plight of your brother and sister.
You allow grain to rot in your barns, but you do not feed those who are starving.
You hide gold in the earth, but ignore the oppressed.
That does not limit to the resources, but we do.
So the second theme is what Schrader calls the distributive mandate.
That is, Basil calls upon those of us who have a surplus to our actual needs to redistribute
it to those who have less.
But we might say at this point, yes, but what is my actual need?
How do I know?
Now it's easy for this to become a sliding definition.
This is where Basil's sermon on the foolish rich man calls us out.
For he notes how often we redefine our needs to account for our surpluses.
That is, we commit our extras to our needs and then find ourselves with nothing to share.
Like the rich fool, we tear our barns down to build bigger ones.
For in Eastern suburbs terms, we renovate the renovations we've just renovated.
Basil anticipates the way in which we convince ourselves that wealth is necessary for rearing
children by calling this a spacious excuse for greed.
He really skewers this and you hear this all the time, that I excuse my accumulation of
affluence because I'm looking after my children or the number of children I'm having is limited
by the lifestyle I want to have for myself and give to my children.
But we excuse everything in our society because of the children, it turns out.
Our problem is that often because of our own spending decisions, we don't feel affluent
even though we are, because we've redefined need.
Because we're committed to private schooling for our children, quality holidays and to
owning our own home.
I'm going to put my hand up to all of those.
The average Australian family is under enormous financial pressure.
That both parents work in a family with children is no longer a sign of freedom, but a necessity
for economic survival in our city.
We actually have limited the freedom of choice for members of a family to work or not, rather
than expanded it.
So what does Basil suggest?
Well, this brings us to the third of his themes, the conversion to sociality.
What does that mean?
For Basil, God made the world and its benefits in order to be shared.
Human selfishness is a mark of the fallenness of the world.
Not that he says everyone should have exactly the same or that there is something wrong
with private property per se.
Rather human beings are given private property to use in God's service and in the service
of others.
Basil asks us, tell me, what is your own?
What did you bring into this life?
And where did you receive it?
This changes our approach marvelously to what we have since we cannot see it as a right,
but as a blessing.
We receive it then not begrudgingly, but with thanksgiving, which means we may use what
we have to be a blessing to others.
Having received it joyfully, we may give it away joyfully.
We may deploy it joyfully.
God distributes things unequally.
Basil is not embarrassed about that, by the way, but not so that we would keep those things,
but so that we might receive the reward and enjoy the benefit of sharing them around.
It is more blessed to give than to receive.
This is treasure in heaven, as Jesus puts it.
Earthly treasure has its use, but chiefly in order to gain stocks of the heavenly treasure,
so that as we die, we are decked out, not like the pharaohs with their positions, but
garlanded with our generous deeds.
In Christ, God is calling everyone to become truly social human beings, formed not to accumulate
possessions and experiences, but to use them to care for others, to build relationships
rather than to destroy them, to break down divisions rather than to build them up.
And this is where we might bring out the gospel of God's grace to us in Jesus Christ, which
is rather more implicit in Basil's sermons than explicitly stated.
The gospel is premised on God's prior ownership of all things, including us.
His total affluence, we might say, God is a God of abundance, but exceedingly rich in
mercy, as Ephesians chapter 2 says.
In the famous passage from 2 Corinthians 8-9, beloved of rectors, preached every year, at
least once, 2 Corinthians 8-9, when we're trying to raise money for the following year.
But we hear there how the gospel of Christ's sacrificial love is an example for us in loving
use of affluence.
For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake
he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.
Like Paul, I mean it takes a prosperity doctrine preacher to twist that thought, by the way,
to understand the last use of the word rich, that we might become rich in a non-spiritual
way, in a quite literal way.
Of course it doesn't mean that, it means rich in the spiritual sense through Christ's poverty.
Like Paul, Basil saw the generosity of God as the constitutional basis for a new community,
but not by competition and acquisitiveness, not by the building of high walls to keep
envious neighbours from looking and perhaps stealing, but by the sharing of burdens and
the caring of one another's needs.
Well so what then?
In Romans chapter 12 verse 2, as we began tonight, we heard that Paul calls us there
to not be conformed to the pattern of this world, but to be transformed by the renewing
of your mind.
In terms of our affluence, what might transformed non-conformity look like?
Well firstly, it will mean being shaped by the sovereign mercy of God.
We do need to return to that guilty feeling, we experience it being prosperous, and the
perception that follows it, that we cannot possibly untangle the web of wealth and the
inequality of its distribution that we see on the face of the earth.
What can one say when confronted by the vast scale of child poverty, just to name one form
of it, on the planet?
When we see the disparity of wealth, when we reckon that yes, in general, we might say
affluence on the globe has been lifted for most people, and yet some people still live
as if it is before 1776 and they are at the bottom of the pile.
Or even when you hear the statistics regarding the gap in our society between the experience
of indigenous peoples and everyone else, everything I've said about longevity is not true for
indigenous people even living in our cities.
I think one of the problems is the contemporary way of speaking about global problems.
It resorts to ascribing guilt without giving us a way out of that feeling.
It's a politically motivated blame game, easily weaponized for ideological purposes, but ultimately
futile to change anything.
This is because it is not guilt that ultimately motivates, but grace.
The blame game leads either to denial or to despair.
How else can we existentially cope with it?
How can we bear with the problems of the world if we examine them too closely?
And so better, we might say, to hide in our affluent cul-de-sacs and not encounter a
lack of affluence or the disparity of affluence because that's just too hard.
But the gospel of the grace of Jesus Christ liberates us from this.
We need not deny that we've benefited from and even contributed to the dark side of affluence.
Indeed, we must not do that.
But neither are we the saviours of the world.
Only one human being is qualified for that role.
Our task is obedience to his call, but only within the scope of our creaturely limitations.
When we recall again and again the grace of God, we will find the freedom and joy in sharing
of our abundance with those who don't have.
Now, I don't want to be misheard here as arguing for a kind of quietism or giving up or just
giving up on the world's problems and not acting, not doing what actually is demanded
of us here.
We are counseling a shrug of our shoulders, we must develop God's heart for the poor.
We cannot read the scriptures, hear the teaching of Jesus Christ and be deaf to that.
Basil would harangue us about that, rightly.
But precisely because we're not God, we're free to anticipate the final coming of the
kingdom without having to die for the sins of the world.
Indeed, history tells us that alternative would-be saviours leave the world awash with
blood, not their own.
We should be shaped by the sovereign mercy of God, liberated indeed by it.
But secondly, we should consider the danger of our affluence and consider it very seriously.
We need to be alert to the spiritual dangers of what we own.
To be affluent is undoubtedly a blessing.
We are showered in good things and we shouldn't ever say it's not good, right?
This is good.
Good is good.
I think it's one of the difficulties I have is that in an affluent congregation, affluent
area is people thinking I'm going to say that good things are bad or that having good experiences
are not good.
I need to name them for the good that they are.
But they're only reflections of the ultimate good.
Our affluence in it of goodness can offer us a seductive illusion and I know that it
does this.
In exceeding our needs in some areas, affluence obscures our true need, which is for reconciliation
with our Creator.
It offers us a kingdom of heaven no more real than East German coffee mix.
Our desire for affluence and its trappings enslaves us to patterns of life that ultimately
mean that others have less than they need and it makes us miserable.
And it especially makes young people glued to Instagram utterly miserable, all the mental
health professionals are saying.
At one level, being affluent means access to a whole raft of mental health problems
that are unknown where we don't have so much, which is curious, isn't it?
I think this is increasingly becoming the situation.
We desire to consume to find out that we are consumed.
Basil would have us take a careful inventory of our actual needs.
What have I redefined as a need that is actually surplus?
He would have us live more simply so that we can afford the luxury and find the joy
in being generous.
See being generous as our luxury, as our joy, our hobby, our recreation.
We need to get out of our bubbles of affluence.
This again came up in my connect group as we considered affluence last week.
Affluent communities can seduce us into thinking that a level of affluence is normal.
It's only what everyone else has.
A friend of mine's daughter came back from school utterly gutted that she wasn't going
on a destination holiday.
They weren't going skiing in Aspen, Colorado.
They were only going to New Zealand.
I don't feel extravagant if everyone in my world has the same things as me.
But when I genuinely encounter those who have less, I'm given the chance to see that life
exists without all the things that I have perfectly well, perhaps even more happily.
This is more than simply popping your head through the curtain to see what it's like
to sit in economy class for a few minutes.
And being part of the Church of Jesus Christ should give us unique opportunities for this
experience.
Finding real relationships across levels of affluence is a deep spiritual challenge,
but a real expression of the transformative power of the gospel and a counter to the pattern
of the world, which likes to segment us off, divide us, keep us all in gated, whether literally
or metaphorically gated communities.
And so my encouragement to us as Christian communities is to ask, do we actually encounter
through our church experience people of different levels of affluence?
And of course, it's more difficult, perhaps you might say, where we live in the eastern
suburbs.
However, just a minute walking distance away is Darlinghurst, St John's Darlinghurst, and
some of the people doing it the absolute toughest in Sydney.
So it's really important ministry to us that our partner parish, St John's Darlinghurst,
has in keeping us spiritually real, keeping us aware of the quality and volume of what
we actually have in seeing those who have much less than us.
I wonder what partnerships your church community could foster that might help you as a community
foster as I say, real relationships, real connections with people who have less.
Thirdly, we need to consider the purpose.
So that's the danger of our affluence, affluence, not effluence.
Sorry about that.
We do have a better quality of effluence over where we were affluent, might say, has more
cocaine in it, apparently.
Why did I say that?
The purpose of it is true.
The purpose of our affluence, what is it?
Well, lastly, Basil has helped to remind us that we've been made affluent for a purpose.
Our affluence should cause us to praise and give thanks to God since it's a blessing that
comes from him.
The pattern of the world is to say that we are affluent because we deserve to be or are
entitled to be.
I have to say that's easy to say.
I mean, a lot of what I'm saying you could have said yourself, but actually doing this
is the challenge, isn't it?
Right?
I mean, I find this the case.
Of course, I don't deserve to have what I have.
And yet I deep down do believe that it's the case.
I educate my children to believe that hard work is rewarded.
Those who work hardest are richest.
Feels really hard not to pass that on.
And you know, with it comes the almost karmic belief that those who have less are what they
are because they are morally of less worth than me.
That's an instinctive, deeply rooted thought that we have.
And that's the pattern of the world.
That is not a Christian take on affluence by any stretch.
Rather, our affluence is given to us as a gift which affords us particular opportunities
for serving God in the fallen world.
This is not just with our dollars.
And I really hope this has come across as that affluence isn't just our dollars, but
our access, our whole quality of life, our privilege, our access to things.
We are given these so they might be a blessing to all, not so that we might bury them.
This is not simply about the distribution of funds, but about the extension of the love
of Christ that comes to us in the gospel and that we are to radiate.
We're given the church as a new community within which we are to practice koinonia,
the fellowship of sharing our blessings with one another as the early church did.
As Jesus said to his disciples, freely you have received, freely then give.
That is a sign that the kingdom of heaven is near.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Michael.
I'm going to pray and then we'll conclude.
Our Father, we thank you for challenging us tonight.
We thank you for the teaching of your word, which does confront our world and its priorities
and which searches our own hearts.
And Father, as we consider our own lives, we do pray that we would yield to the prompting
of your Holy Spirit as he has opened your word tonight.
And we do pray that each of us, as we are able, would be marked by generosity that loves
our neighbour more than ourselves and loves you and honors you.
And we ask you in Jesus' name.
Amen.
Our culture is obsessed with identity.
We're often told, you do you and encouraged to live according to our true and authentic
self, expressing publicly how we feel about ourselves internally.
However, the very idea of personal identity is inherently slippery.
It encompasses things like ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, religion, belief, educational
background, profession and personality, but it's not fixed.
Our identity can change through time and circumstance and even self-invention.
So how as Christians should we regard identity?
God created us as unique individuals.
How does our creatureliness affect who we are?
Furthermore, as sinners who have been redeemed and sanctified by the Lord Jesus and adopted
into the family of God, how does Christ's work change the way that we view ourselves?
How does the encouragement to find your identity in Christ actually play out in the complexities
of competing sources of identity?
Join us for our next and final event in our series on Culture Creep on Wednesday, 23rd
of October, when Rory Shiner, senior pastor of Providence City Church in Perth, will show
us how losing ourselves for the sake of the kingdom will help us find ourselves once and
for all.
Register and find out more on our website, ccl.moore.edu.au.
Podcast producer Karen Beilharz here.
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The music for our podcast was generously provided by James West.