The Life That Is Really Life – Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost (1 Timothy 6: 6-19)
Last week we heard a parable about being dishonest with money, this week a pastoral letter about the trouble with money. In the reading last week, we heard the phrase you cannot serve two masters, you cannot serve God and money. This week’s scripture reading does not come to us from the Gospels, but from a letter. The letter is the first of two letters addressed to Timothy, a disciple and then colleague of Paul’s. It is written to seem as if it is from Paul, and written to Timothy in particular. However, it is really directed at the wider church community. A group of people who have been baptized and confessed their faith. The lectionary offers us this reading today, and it serves as an appropriate follow up to what we heard last week. Especially the truth that you cannot serve God and money, because what we heard today is part of a warning about trying to use one’s religion, or godliness as the text puts it, to try and enrich oneself. The letter tells Timothy to teach that this is a fallacy, a wrong and mistaken idea. That’s just not how money, life, or God works.
So, in this reading we find the familiar saying, “love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.” Sometimes we hear that quoted as “money is the root of all evil.” Which is a different sentiment, really. Money itself is not the issue, as we talked about in last week’s sermon, money is a tool and a resource. It can be used many purposes, good or evil. It is the love of money, especially the love of money above all else, that is a problem. When quoting this line, we also tend to leave out the part that says “all kinds of evil.” Which is just to say that money is not the only motivation for evil actions. Aside from that, there is another funny little saying at the end of our reading. The phrase is about living the “life that really is life.”
Does that mean, then, that this life -the one we are experiencing- is not really life? Is “living the life that is really life” referring to the afterlife? I think yes. It would seem that this is probably referring to the coming realm of God, the new life that was promised. Timothy is being reminded that wealth and material possessions are not the point of this life. They gain you nothing in the eyes of God, and you can’t take it with you to what comes next. God gives us what we need but the love of money causes problems. It confuses us. It pulls a veil over our eyes so that we are not able to see this world clearly.
Perhaps you have been a part of a conversation where you and some friends were sitting around having a deep conversation about the nature of reality. Thinking about what life is really life. Thinking about how small we are compared to the vastness of the universe. I remember a few of my friends and I sitting around, once, contemplating whether or not we were just someone’s dream. One of those conversations that makes you feel like you’re the kid in one of those YouTube videos where a parent records their child in the car after they were put under anesthesia at the dentist’s office. Wondering aloud, “Is this real life?” The world can look a little different when you’re waking up from being under anesthetic.
Then there is one of the more famous stories about distorted reality, the story of Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll. In the story a young girl named Alice fallows a white rabbit down a large rabbit hole, and after falling through that hole she finds herself in strange place, Wonderland. As she journeys through Wonderland everything seems just a little bit off. The animals talk; the people all seem to be losing their minds; there is a mushroom that makes her grow and then shrink. As she moves through Wonderland Alice grows increasingly frustrated with the nonsensical world in which she finds herself and becomes homesick for her real life. At the end of the story, she wakes up under a tree in her family’s garden and we are left to wonder if maybe it was all just a dream.
I think this text is telling us that the love of money can be a little like that. It can distort our view of reality. The world can seem like a strange place, and people can seem to act like they are losing their minds, when we lose sight of the life that is really life in favor of the life offered to us by wealth and affluence. The love of money confuses us by making it seem as if what can be bought, sold or acquired is of the most importance. It confuses us by setting our hearts and minds on what is temporary and mistakenly thinking that it could be some sort of eternal truth.
When that happens, we begin to believe that we need money for more than we really do. For the people Timothy was tasked with ministering to, there seemed to be a belief that money would help improve their standing in their religious community, and that this in turn would lead to more financial gains. That Godliness could lead to more riches. A similar belief exists today, unfortunately. But as the scripture reminds us, that is not the reality of the world God made for us. Money offers no such advantage. Furthermore, the writer tells us to be content with what we have. If we have money for food, clothes, shelter, and other necessities then we can feel comfortable that we have what we need. We can be at peace with what we have, or as the scripture tells us, we can be self-sufficient. In this context, self-sufficiency means that we are not dependent on external things for our internal peace. We know that God has provided us with what we need for that peace, so we are content, at peace with that.
This type of self-sufficiency comes from God. This is different from the idea that being a self-sufficient person means that you should strive to be independent and that you should not expect outside help in meeting your material needs. We might think of this as the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality that is so often encouraged in our individualist culture. That’s the reality of life that the love of money creates for us. A reality where our value comes from our possessions, and so everyone has to be in it for themselves and be self-sufficient in that way. But that life may not really be life, because God didn’t give us bootstraps. God gave us this life and it is through God that we know how to live it. Not by anything we can do, or achieve, or acquire.
In 2 Corinthians 9:8 Paul also references this type of contentment. It reads, “God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that by always having enough of everything, you may share abundantly in every good work.” In this writing, we see that for Paul the purpose of having enough is to be able to share it and care for others. So, maybe that is God’s purpose in giving us enough. In a view of life that is distorted by the love of money, one might assume that the abundance that comes from God is a reward of some kind. But that simply means that we will begin viewing others as worthy or unworthy, rather than viewing them clearly and truthfully as beloved children of God. In the life that is really life we have been blessed by God because we are lovingly made creations of God, so there is not worthy or unworthy, there is only God’s beloved, and each of us is enough, and being enough means having enough to care for those around us.
In the First Nations Indigenous translation of the New Testament, they translate the “life that is really life” as the “true life of beauty and harmony that never grows old or fades away.” If we know, deep down in our hearts, that this is true, and that this is what God calls us to, it is no wonder that the world can often feel out of whack, distorted, and scary. It is because we know that this is not the life that is really life. We know that God made us and wants more for us. We know that something different and better is possible.
So, what is the life that is real life, then? We talked about it being a metaphor for the realm of God, the new life after this existence. That is all implied to come later though. Some people would call it an afterlife, but as we know, evils like the love of money are distorted and clouding our view of this reality right now. People have real needs and real struggles in the here and now. So, how do we deal with that? Can we live that life that is really life now by living as if that life is here now? Can we do this by turning away from the love of money and possessions and living into the life God calls us to? Can we wipe the blurriness away from our eyes and see this world in a new way? Like Alice waking up under the tree in the garden, can we wake up from the dream world?
We may wake up one morning without a number in our bank account, or a car in the drive way, or a phone in our pocket, and without any feeling of need for those things. They may seem like a distant memory, and we will think, maybe this is the life that is really life. Maybe the world where people are motivated by the love of money was not the real world. Maybe the world where people treat others poorly because of their lack of money was just a dream. Maybe the world where the poor are left to fend for themselves so that those who already have money can keep more for themselves was just a hallucination. Maybe the real life is a place where we take care of those in need. Where money is not a reason for people to struggle, and not an excuse to do nothing. Maybe the real world is a place where faith, love, endurance, and gentleness are the real valuable currency. Maybe the real world is a place where everyone can be rich in good works, and be generous and ready to share. Maybe that is life. Not just the life we are called to and made for, but the life we have been given if we might just wake up to it. Amen.