It's Good to Be the Bishop!

The wonderful and terrifying thing about St. Basil's sermon "To the Rich" is how truthful and forceful it is. He unequivocally equates the accumulation of wealth with a lack of love. He denounces inheritances as burdens that lead beneficiaries into sin, and he employs the claws of snark to evisceration those planning to leave their estates to charity. When I read this sermon, I find myself both cheering and wincing. It's a good word! It's a challenging word! It's exactly what needs to be said, but goodness, I can't believe he said it!

Basil adopts the voice of an Old Testament prophet detailing the inequality and injustice that immediately surrounds him. He doesn't attack this issue with rhetorical questions or a story from a distant region or a related movie clip. He unabashedly condemns members of his own congregation for their greed, their vanity and their selfishness. While our modern homiletics textbooks urge preaching students to refrain from using "you" statements in favor of the less personal "one" or possibly the bold "we," Basil doesn't soften his words by putting some hypothetical other on trial. He looks directly at his congregation and accuses them of these misdeeds:

You gorgeously array your walls, but do not clothe your fellow human being; you adorn horses, but turn away from the shameful plight of your brother or sister; you allow grain to rot in your barns, but do not feed those who are starving; you hide gold in the earth, but ignore the oppressed! ... Indeed, you refuse to give anything, insisting that it is impossible to satisfy the needs of those who beg of you. You profess this to be true with your tongue, but your hand gives you the lie; silently, your hand bears witness to the falsehood, flashing as it does with the jewels from your ring. How many could you have delivered from want with but a single ring from your finger? How many households fallen into destitution might you have raised? In just one of your closets there are enough clothes to cover an entire town shivering with cold. You showed no mercy; it will not be shown to you. You opened not your house; you will be expelled from the Kingdom. You gave not your bread; you will not receive eternal life.

Who can stand the force of this word? Who can bear the assault of this word? And who can find the strength to wield it against her congregation? Basil had the privilege of being bishop. This word didn't put him at risk of offending elders who would then call for his resignation. As professional clergy we are in the nearly impossible position of being charged with proclaiming a prophetic word while finding ourselves obligated to appease the trustees who supply our livelihood. Rather than bite the hand that feeds us, we're forced to nibble, to offer a little love nip that might convey a message without offending. That preaching offers veiled suggestions of sin, allegations of guilt and insinuations of responsibility with the hope that listeners might solve the puzzle we've put before them and discern what we're really trying to say. At what point though can we no longer risk a misunderstanding of our words? With a global economic crisis, ongoing wars, xenophobia, homophobia, racism, ageism, misogyny and bigotry, is it time to replace our "some people" with "you" and our "they" with the names and faces of the people we've hurt? Is it time to risk being plain with our language because we can no longer risk being mistaken? Is it time to go full on Basil with our congregations?
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     St. Basil the Great, "To the Rich," in On Social Justice, trans. C. Paul Schroeder (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009) 47-49.

St. Basil Offers a Snarky Word on Estate Planning

In our last post we saw Basil point to the dangers of leaving one's wealth to her children because she could be leading her children into the sin of using wealth for personal gain instead of an aid to the poor.  It seems like a better solution might be to leave one's estate to charity, right? Wrong:

Yet you say, "I will enjoy all of these things during my life, but after my death I will leave my goods to the poor, making beneficiaries of my will and granting them all my possessions." When you are no longer among your fellow human beings, then you will become a philanthropist! When I see you dead, then I will call you a lover of your brothers and sisters! You deserve great thanks for your magnanimity, since you became so generous and noble-hearted after you were laid in the grave and your body had dissolved in the earth. 

You can't win the game once the play is over.

Oh, snark alert! Basil makes plain that failure to love one's neighbor during one's lifetime isn't a fault that can be corrected by promising generosity in one's death. For starters, Basil insists that whatever cosmic scorecard you have gets tallied when you die. You can't earn a million bonus points in your "good deeds" column after your death because you're plain through playing the game of life. If that doesn't make you feel absurd, Basil adds the practical note that you'll have no real control over the execution of your will because, well, you'll be dead. Even the best documented will is subject to the interpretation of others, and a few false witnesses can undo your best intentions. Unfortunately, Basil doesn't even think your intentions are very good. "Read your own will: 'I wish I could have gone on living and enjoying my own things, but...' Thus the gratitude is due to death, not to you." Ouch. Someone call the burn unit.

So what is one to do? The only option Basil offers is to be so engaged in constantly giving to the poor that one simply has nothing that could be passed on after death. What Basil demands in that instruction is that we devote ourselves tirelessly to caring for the needs of others. It's a tall order. It's a hard word, but at the end of the day, Basil understands it as nothing more than a means of honoring the commandment to love our neighbor.

And maybe we should just do that so Basil will stop bullying us.
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     St. Basil the Great, "To the Rich," in On Social Justice, trans. C. Paul Schroeder (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009) 55-56.

Who Will Inherit Our Sin?

In our first look at Basil's sermon "To the Rich" we saw him condemn wealth as evidence of a failure to love one's neighbor. Basil continues his sermon by tackling the issue of inheritances. As we journey toward the upcoming seminar on "Pastoral Care in the Context of Wealth," Basil's words offer us some advice on one of the practical issues that we expect to hear addressed there. Listen up, world!

Reading the Will by David Wilkie, 1820

The really wonderful thing about this section is that Basil again frames his argument in terms of uplifting the law of love. Now one might assume that leaving an inheritance is a sign of love to one's beneficiaries. That's how we interpret a will, isn't it? An estate is usually distributed to those persons or organizations for whom the deceased most cared so that they might flourish after his departure. If we didn't understand inheritances that way, then we wouldn't get to enjoy all of those scandalous soap opera plots in which we discover that our hero left his fortune to a secret mistress or an illegitimate son or his unknown homosexual lover. Who wants to miss out on those?

But we're forgetting what Basil said about wealth. It's no prize; it's an obligation to be used for the benefit of the neighbor. An inheritance then is something of a burden. Passing on wealth is passing on the task of distributing it to one's neighbors. The tricky thing though is that there's just no telling whether or not your beneficiaries will act so benevolently because, well, you'll be dead:

Who will vouch for the prudence of your children, that they will use what is left to them for good ends? For many, wealth becomes an aid to immortality. Or do you not hear what is said in Ecclesiastes, "There is a grievous ill that I have seen under the sun: riches were kept by their owners to their heart," and moreover, "I will leave that for which I have toiled to those who come after me, and who knows whether they will be wise or foolish?" Take care then, lest after countless efforts to acquire riches, you end up providing others with resources to commit sins. In that case, you find yourself doubly punished, both for acting unjustly in your own right, and for furnishing others with the opportunity to do the same.

Well, what is one to do then? If we leave our wealth to our children, then we risk contributing to their sinfulness. According to Basil that leaves us again being found guilty of failing the commandment to love our neighbor. Surely troubling our children with the means of sin is no way to love them. What's left to do?

(Hint: If you are thinking that we should leave all of our wealth to charity, then you're a different kind of wrong.)

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     St. Basil the Great, "To the Rich," in On Social Justice, trans. C. Paul Schroeder (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009) 54.