Rich and Poor

Amos 6:4-7, I Timothy 6:6-19, Luke 16:19-31

September 30, 2007

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

You know, I just love the readings from Amos and Luke today, because they give me a chance to vent. They both really put it to all those rich people out there. I told the Bible Study this week that I adore this image in Amos of the “revelry of the loungers.” That absolutely seems a good description of the rich man in the Luke story, too. There he is, in the finest of clothing, designer made, no doubt, with only the choicest foods where he has more than enough to eat every day, probably caviar and champagne cocktails before dinner daily, on gorgeous furniture in a house with more rooms than anyone could possibly keep clean without servants. Boy, this guy and folk like him are really not getting it; they have so much and share so little.

It puts me in mind of those photos a few years ago from the Enron Corporation where the big mucky-mucks were putting on a toga party around the pool at someone’s beachside home. Revelry of the loungers, indeed. The pensions of their hourly employees paid for that party! Then there’s Paris Hilton and her crew who have never done a real day’s work in their lives but seem to have more money than God and a will to spend it! Or Leona Helmsley’s dog. Did you read about that? How she left something like 12 million dollars to her dog? Boy I hope she’s getting hers right now down in Hades or wherever along with that rich man who dissed poor Lazarus.

It’s hard to imagine why God doesn’t just zap these rich people while they are alive instead of waiting. I know, some of those Enron guys went to jail, but then there are others like Paris who buy their way out of jail. It would be justice if maybe their houses would burn down or maybe they’d suffer a stock reversal and suddenly have to figure out just like the rest of us how the heck they are going to pay the mortgage this month!

Whew! That was emotionally satisfying! You know for the last several weeks in the lectionary, (the group of readings selected for use in churches each week), there has been at least one reading, and sometimes more, every week talking about the poor. I was avoiding them, feeling a bit pestered by God and not wanting to pester you. But then this week these readings were so clear and seemed to lend themselves to an Amos-like rant against all those rich people and their blindness to the depth of need and inequality in this town, this nation, this world, so I went with it.

But God has a way of kicking me in the backside when I need to pay attention to how I am interpreting scripture, just exactly as Jesus was doing to the Pharisees in telling this old folk tale in a new way. I was sitting with a couple of clergy colleagues with whom I work on some community issues, and one of them asked me when Redeemer was going to hire an associate pastor. I responded that we really didn’t have the money for that. He said he thought this church was rolling in dough; didn’t we have a six figure endowment? Well, I said, we have about 1 million, but our sister churches on the green have like 8 or 12 million each, so by comparison, we really have very little! Then he told me a story about the church he helps out at in Hartford, a small, largely African American church in the city there with a passion to serve the city, and how they had a meeting this week so folk could chip in to make sure they could pay the salary and back medical insurance bills of the pastor, a man with at least two other jobs. He looked at me and simply said, “Your church has one million dollars?”

Well, I started to explain that we were using it up slowly to pay our expenses each year, and all that, and then I stopped, because I realized how irrelevant that sounded in contrast to the situation of his church. Yeah, there are things to explain about our money here, but, yes, we have a million dollars. I have never served a church with an endowment that large, and this is the eighth church I have served as settled or interim pastor.

Now don’t get lost here and think I am preaching about our endowment or finances here or what we should do with it. That’s a different conversation for a different time. What I want to illustrate is how easy it was for me just not to see the money we have. It’s easy for us as a church or for us as individuals to see the money or stuff that other churches or other people have and think it is so much more than what we have and how whatever we have is not enough. The critique of Amos was not that the lounging revelers had too much. It was that they did not grieve over the “ruin of Joseph.” They did not see that so many of their fellow citizens and human beings were deeply in want and, if they did see, they were not upset about it enough to do something. Paul did not tell Timothy that money was evil; he said the love of money was the root of all kinds of evil. The desire for more stuff can act to blind the faithful to “the life that is really life,” and lead them away from righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance and gentleness.

It is, in the end, not what we have, but how we regard what we have and how we regard those whose circumstances are different from our own. Do we secretly wish we had Center Church’s endowment or Paris Hilton’s fortune, sure that we would know how to use it? Do we think criticizing her choices makes us righteous and relieves us of responsibility for examining our choices? Are we content with small gestures of generosity and turn away from the great problems of poverty and inadequate education that plague this very city and our nation and our world because those problems are just so big and whatever we have would only be a drop in the bucket and not make a difference anyway? Or worse, do we blame the poor for their poverty, saying that if only Lazarus had pulled himself up by the bootstraps maybe he could have gotten a decent job with the rich man and some health care to deal with those sores?

What we may really need is a revolution, but most of us are not gifted revolutionary leaders. Jesus, however, gives us some other choices. Keep in mind, for example, that Jesus did not give the world a cure for leprosy, but he healed maybe a few dozen lepers, and he was willing to sacrifice his reputation, his resources and his time to do so. He saw the lepers, he had compassion for them, and then he did what he could with what he had for them. This is a three-fold way of being that best describes how God calls Christians to live in the world. Pay attention, grieve over hurt or pain or injustice or need, then do something about it, what you can with what you have. It seems so inadequate both in the face of the temptations of the world and of the needs, but perhaps it’s the foothold we need to climb from.

I read an article this week by a woman named Klara Tammany. She volunteered in her town at homeless shelters, and then one day found herself on the verge of homelessness! Her experience on both sides of the table lead to this reflection, “There are no easy answers. Knowing where and how to follow Jesus is not always clear. At least it isn’t for me. Perhaps, the best we can do is live in the tension, humbly sit at the table of discomfort and blessing with Jesus. Just BE there and listen and WAIT and continue to wonder, ‘Who am I to be and what am I to do in this place, at this time?’” (Faith At Work Magazine, Fall 2007, p. 7).

As we sit and listen, we also are called to heed the words of Abraham in Jesus’ parable, for we also have Moses and the prophets and need to listen to them.

Oh, and then there’s that guy who DID rise from the dead. Amen.