The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom 6:23)
If you look, you will find that there are people out there in America who are hoping for a return to the gold standard. The gold standard was the government policy by which the value of currency was defined and guaranteed by a reserve of actual gold bullion held somewhere in vaults. In theory, and perhaps in practice, if you wanted to turn your paper money in for gold, you could do so, I guess? The idea behind the gold standard is that gold is a real precious metal with a real value in the marketplace. And paper (or coin?) currency, this thinking goes, ought to be little more than a stand-in for the real value of gold. FDR suspended the gold standard in 1933 to counter the effects of the Great Depression. And Richard Nixon abandoned it altogether in 1971. So today, American currency, like most paper money in the world, is what’s called a fiat currency, which means (to grossly oversimplify) that it has a floating value that is determined by market forces.
In a way, you can see the appeal of the gold standard, especially in a world that is enthralled to virtual-this and artificial-that. It’s nice to know that something in the world is real - especially money. And what could be a better definition of ‘real’ than a pile of gold sitting somewhere like Fort Knox?
I myself have been making the argument for some time now, that most Americans (and others, too) are delusional in their acceptance of the idea that a market economy is as natural a phenomenon as water seeking its own level. I’m no economist, but it’s not hard to find economists who will tell you that the idea of a real free-market system is delusional. Markets do not spring up from the earth like water; you have to build and organize artificial systems (like the gold standard) to create a market economy. And to do so, you have to decide that a market is better than, say, a monopoly, or a sharing economy… which very much depends on who you are.
The field of economics is really about trying to understand the forces that make societies work (or not), which is of great interest to the church. No one I know turns to the clergy for economic advice, but here’s mine.
When the silver plates that hold your Sunday contributions are carried to the altar and held up for me to bless, none of you hear the words that I say, but those words come from I Chronicles, in a passage in which the old King David is giving thanks for offerings that have been given for the building of the temple that Solomon will build - gold, silver, wood, bronze, iron, onyx, marble, and precious stones. And this is what David says, “Yours, O Lord, are the greatness, the power, the glory, the victory, and the majesty…. Riches and honor come from you… it is in your hand to make great and give strength to all….
“But who am I, and what is my people that we should be able to bring this free will offering? For all things come from you and of your own have we given you… all this abundance… comes from your hand and is your own.” (I Chron 29:14)
All things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee - that’s what I say, every Sunday. These words, that come to us from the tradition of King David, are among the foundations of what I call the Economy of Giftedness. You’ve heard me speak of it before. And I contend that the Economy of Giftedness is the real and true economy of humanity, since everything we have (by which I mean everything) comes from God: everything on this planet, every atom and molecule of our bodies, every gift and talent and human skill, every construct and idea, every tower and every bridge, road and home, and everything it took to build them - all things come of thee, O Lord. All things come of thee, and of thine own have we given thee!
The Economy of Giftedness is the true economy that makes the world go round, because it is the only economy built on something real, because it is built on the truth that all things come from, God - which is the first tenet of the Economy of Giftedness. The second tenet of the Economy of Giftedness is that the best things you will ever do with your life will be gifts that you give away (which is, of course, possible because of gifts that have been given to you).
And all of this discussion of the Economy of Giftedness is preamble to try to make sense of one sentence that Saint Paul wrote to the church in Rome. He wrote this: “The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
At first, it sounds like St. Paul is talking about sin, death, and the afterlife, as though these are the features of God’s economy. But no one these days really wants to hear about any of that. Take my word for it. Almost no one I know is seriously concerned about sin. I’m not saying it should be this way; I’m just saying this is the way it is. Almost no one I know wants to talk about death, except to go on refining the ways we can deny and avoid it. And almost no one I know is harboring an abiding hope for an eternal life-after-death, at least not if it looks much like life on this side of death, but just lasts for ever. So why should it matter to us, when St. Paul - after hammering the notion of ‘slavery to righteousness,’ like he thinks that any kind of slavery could be perceived as a good idea - out of this painful context, he says, “the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” What!?!?!
I think that what St. Paul is actually talking about here is the Economy of Giftedness. And the give-away is that he uses such baldly economic terms. He is not just talking about the difference between sin and righteousness. He is not just talking about the difference between death and life. He is also talking about the difference between wages and gift.
And wages (wages!) are a mechanism of economies like the marketplace, or monopolies, or even socialism. Wages are what you get paid for what you do. The Greek word St. Paul uses, is literally the word that described the pay of a Roman soldier - wages!
And wages - the reward for participating in the worldly economy, however it’s organized - wages lead to no where and nothing. At the end of wages there is nothing, for all that can be bought and sold with wages amounts to nothing, more or less, which is what I’ll call death.
So wages, which are a tool of the market economy, lead to nowhere and nothing.
Now, before I go any further, let me stipulate, as I have done before, that we mostly misunderstand what Jesus means when he uses the term “eternal life.” What we hear is most likely a term that signifies a never-ending linear lifespan in a nice hotel in the sky called Heaven. I think this is a gross under-estimation of what Jesus might mean by ‘eternal life.’ I think eternity is not a long and endless string of linear time, but a reality in which everything is always happening everywhere. And maybe eternal life is being able to perceive the created order as it truly is, as God perceives it, which might be in four dimensions or more. Maybe eternal life isn’t a measure of time; maybe eternal life is a measure of God’s love. Whatever eternal life is, for sure, for sure, eternal life is “the free gift of God.” That’s what St. Paul says. It’s a gift, a gift, a gift!
And if eternal life is a gift, then it corresponds with the true economy, which is the Economy of Giftedness. And maybe eternal life is a life lived, not only in four dimensions, not only as God perceives reality, not only where everything is always happening everywhere, not only as the measure of God’s love… maybe eternal life is a life that is actually lived by the rules of the Economy if Giftedness (of which there are only two rules so far). And those two rules are that everything we have comes from God; and that the best things we will ever do with our lives are gifts that we give to others.
If Jesus has anything to say to the world today, if the church has anything to say for Jesus to the world today, then it has to matter, it has to make a difference, and it has to be real. And one of the things that I think Jesus may be asking the church to say is this: that we live in a world of virtual-this and artificial-that, in which a vague nostalgia for something like the gold standard could even seem important to some, because, well, it would be nice to know that something in the world is real. And St. Paul, who was Christ’s great apostle, is teaching us that there is something real to believe in, there is a real economy, based not on a stockpile of gold somewhere, or on the forces of the marketplace, but on the true economy, which is the Economy of Giftedness, in which “the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus.” And the Economy of Giftedness is based on nothing more or less than the vast stockpile of God’s love, that is not kept stored in deep vaults somewhere, but which is being poured out, day by day, as the gracious gifts of God’s love.
Why any of this might matter is because something there is that makes the world go round. Something gives us a reason to get up out of bed every morning. Something guides us in making the choices we make every day, and this something is tied very, very closely to what we believe about the economy, like whether we believe it is based on something real, like a pile of gold, or like the wisdom, promise, and love of God that are at the hear of the Economy of Giftedness.
The longer I live on this earth, the more convinced I am that those words of King David are right and true, and that they tell the real story of what makes the world go ‘round, and what gives us all a good reason to get out of bed in the morning: “Yours, O Lord, are the greatness, the power, the glory, the victory, and the majesty…. Riches and honor come from you… it is in your hand to make great and give strength to all….
“But who am I, and what is my people that we should be able to bring this free will offering? For all things come from you and of your own have we given you… all this abundance… comes from your hand and is your own.”
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
2 July 2023
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia
