Come Now, You Rich People

I’ve been going to church for longer than the Simpsons have been on the air, longer than the widespread use of the World Wide Web, longer than people have been playing an Atari 2600. I’m old. And I can’t remember a pastor preaching on the beginning of James 5.

James 5:1-6

Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you. Your riches have rotted, and your clothes are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you, and it will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure during the last days. Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have nourished your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the righteous one, who does not resist you.

I mean, that’s a good one right now, amirite?

I could be wrong about how often this is preached. Again, I’m older than the Atari 2600 so my memory may not serve us well here. I couldn’t find it listed as a Sunday reading in any Lectionary year. It feels like it ought to be talked about more so here we are. It offers a powerful critique of wealth and exploitation, two unruly neighbors who keep crashing our parties. It seems like a strike zone text to preach on for your average mainline church in the Trump era.

Alas, discussing economic equality can be a sensitive topic in mainline churches whose congregants are largely white and certainly wealthy by any global standard. Yet those same congregants are facing crashing stock markets, rising inflation and the destruction of the American dollar as the global currency, so they probably don’t feel wealthy right now. Creating a welcoming environment makes addressing wealth a little bit uncomfortable for everyone involved. I’m not sure telling visitors that their riches, “will eat your flesh like fire,” is something people want to hear while new tariffs and attacks on Social Security are postponing their retirement ages by 97 years.

And let’s face it, maybe there are other social justice issues that are bigger than worrying about any defensiveness over our own relative wealth and comfort. Everything we should care about as Christians is under attack right now — racial equality, the environment, LGBTQ+ rights, overall economic justice, protection of immigrants and refugees, feeding the homeless — the list goes on. Maybe this text is just white noise in this battle. Maybe we’re all just tired of feeling poor, trampled, and neglected compared to our oligarchs.

Maybe we’re so battered these days by negative news like the latest DOGE firings, constitutional crises, world market collapses, and deaths in Ukraine and Gaza, that we want to spend more time cheering each other on in the pews. I’m all for messages of hope, love and community right now. Maybe preaching about wealth feels too accusatory when so much is going so wrong. Maybe we need more uplifting messages.

I can see it would be difficult to find nuance in any part of James. How do we use this text to address the greater work we must do in service and advocacy? Economic issues are complex. So are political issues. Maybe it’s best to avoid these topics all together. You wouldn’t want to make the Svenson family mad because there’s 15 of them and together, they are the third largest contributor to the church budget. I mean, Jesus doesn’t want us to rattle the status quo, right? Jesus was always very careful about receiving backlash or creating division, right? Right?

In recent decades in America, there is a pronounced intersection of faith and politics. That’s just me being polite. What’s really going on is that a group of greedy conservative politicians and preachers have found ways to corrupt the gospel message and sanitize it so that we don’t need to feel uncomfortable about all the Jesus stuff like feeding the poor, welcoming the stranger and shunning wealth. Jerry Falwell, Pat Buchanan and the like turned false faith into a political cudgel. Joel Osteen and the like turned false faith into big business. And there is a notable development – perhaps you’ve heard of it – called the “Make America Great Again (MAGA)” movement that has suckered many evangelical Christians into ignoring large parts of what it means to be Christian.

This creates – how shall I put it? – profound tensions between the values of authentic Jesus followers as found in scripture and the values of MAGA.

Come now, you rich people, awake to the dangers of the drugs of wealth accumulation, of exploitation of workers. Awake to the judgement that awaits those who seek their own self-aggrandization over justice and compassion.

I realize MAGA is not stereotypically uniform. Some Trump voters just wanted cheap eggs and a better job and would’ve voted for Pat Sajak, Brad Pitt or Corey Feldman if they thought they had a chance to escape their situation. But according to their own self-promotion — and people who drive enormous trucks with enormous flags attached are great at self-promotion — they do seem to share certain values. There is a kind of civil religion that says you should emulate those with money even when you don’t have money, you can solve all your problems with money, and so you’d better not get in the way of making lots of it.

In my kindest moments which are quite rare these days, I would categorize those values as an emphasis on nationalism, wealth and prosperity and carefully outlined social mores (i.e., unstudied joy-killing conformity). I take them at their word that they believe these things are the key to a better future. I simply disagree that these values have anything whatsoever to do with following our Lord.

I’m not sure how you can read this text in James and think it’s OK to celebrate wealth as a sign of success or even divine favor. The verse is a clear warning against greed, hoarding and living in luxury while others suffer. There is nothing inherently virtuous about financial success. Instead, we should be urging each other to reconsider the ethical implications of massive wealth. Why would we think that wealth indicates anything at all? We often subscribe to the American myth that the wealthy have pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. The data does not support this idea. What if you can’t even afford boots? You only need to look at how many times Trump golfs or how many times Musk tweets to know that wealth has nothing to do with focus and hard work. And it should be obvious to anyone with eyes that for a 34-count convicted felon and president who was found liable for sexual assault, wealth does not correlate to virtue.

Our scripture is calling us to a deeper examination of what success means. I’m not trying to soften the blow of this text, but I doubt many of my readers are aspiring to be billionaires. As Christians we can find ways to be comfortable financially while still allowing our financial decisions to lead to greater outcomes for others. We can choose to build lives around Christ not wealth, compassion not fear, justice not greed.

But please consider the incredible commitment to evil it takes for one person to remain a billionaire and not help others. No one, and I mean absolutely no one, needs $1B. If you lived another 80 years from today, and you made no interest on your money, you could spend $34,000 a day before you burned through $1B. The average annual Social Security benefit this year is about $24,000. Some estimates say that around $10B could end sheltered homelessness in the USA. Maybe that’s incorrect, but could you imagine having $10B and not at least trying? Consider that by some estimates Elon Musk has lost over $100B dollars of wealth this year through tariff reactions and also reactions to him being a public nuisance and still seems to be unaffected. The American Cancer Society has in total over its 80-year history raised and invested $5B into cancer research. Instead of throwing his billions away on being an edgelord, Musk could have made a 20X difference in cancer research. Billionaires are committing great evil simply by remaining billionaires.

The Christian faith comes with ethical responsibilities, or it is meaningless. No careful interpretation of our scripture would lead you to conclude that you should focus on wealth and nationalism. Instead, you are called to care for the poor, advocate for economic justice and challenge oppression.