Excluded by wealth

Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4
Psalm 119:137-144
2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12
Luke 19:1-10

I got grants and loans to help my parents pay for the elite private college I went to.  But I had to earn the money for my personal expenses by working at a campus job.  In the public schools I’d attended in Indiana and Vermont, my family’s income was somewhere in the upper half of the broad tier of those of us who knew we weren’t poor, but weren’t rich, either.  Which included almost everyone I knew.   But when I got to college I grasped for the first time that there are some people who are rich.  Not rich like we are all in this country relative to peasants in the underdeveloped world, but really rich.  Like, children of middle-eastern despots or Wall Street hedge-fund managers kind of rich.   And I found being in the same world as them to be intimidating.  I was lucky, in that I was spared the humiliation of wearing a hairnet and slinging hash in the dining hall.  My job was in the library, re-shelving books.  And it’s funny to me now to think back on the embarrassment I felt wheeling my book cart past my fellow-students as if there were something shameful about being on a scholarship. 

But one Saturday evening in my sophomore year, a friend invited me to party with a friend of his in the next dorm over from mine.  This friend of a friend was someone every on our small campus recognized, because his last name was on, not one building on campus, but an entire quadrangle of science classrooms, and laboratories, and faculty offices.  And after I’d been hanging out for a while, feeling kind of awkward, I asked our host if I could play a record from his collection.  (Side note here--I’ll never forget how Bob Marley’s Babylon by Bus album sounded on his unbelievably awesome stereo).   And in his eager response to my request, I perceived something that had not occurred to me before.  Which was that he was deeply lonely and almost pitiably eager to be liked.  In that moment I saw that his privilege was an isolation cell, keeping him from ever knowing the freedom of being just an ordinary guy.  

The fellow named Zacchaeus who features in today’s Gospel lesson is not the only one in Jericho eager to see Jesus.  The crowd that lines the road through the town is so dense that a little guy like Zacchaeus can’t see over it.  The people in the crowd know who Zacchaeus is—everyone does—and if he had any friends among them, they might have moved aside a little and let him push his way through to the front.  But they all detest him, this rich tax collector, who hardly needs another privilege granted him.  So they stand, shoulder-to-shoulder, with their backs to Zacchaeus, while he jumps behind them, trying to get a glimpse of the man everyone’s talking about. 

But Zacchaeus is nothing if not resourceful.  He runs through the back alleys, to get ahead of the parade, and clambers up a sycamore tree to get an obstructed view.  And when Jesus gets there he looks up and greets Zacchaeus as if seeing an old friend.  “Hurry down from there, Zacchaeus.  I need to stay at your house tonight.”  And with touching eagerness, Zacchaeus scrambles down from his perch, and welcomes Jesus to be his guest.

Now where the point in the story where we learn that Zacchaeus is driven to try to see Jesus by something more than idle curiosity.  And maybe this is only just dawning on Zacchaeus, too.  But when Jesus recognizes him and calls him down out of the sycamore tree, and tells him he is worthy to take Jesus under his roof and be his host, Zacchaeus suddenly understands what he was really looking for— to put things right in his life.  He sees what he has to do to be restored to wholeness, and he finds the resolve to do it.  “I will give half my possessions to the poor, Lord, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay it back four times over.” 

Now Jesus confirms that Zacchaeus has got it right.  He says it there, in the street of Jericho, in front of the whole crowd, so everyone can understand, that no matter what kind of person Zacchaeus has been in the past, no matter how his wealth, and his manner of getting it, have alienated him from them, today Zacchaeus belongs again to the community.  He is once again truly what he has always been in his essence, a member of the family of Abraham.   Because today he sets out on a new path, the path that Jesus call everyone to follow, no matter their history, or station in life, the path of integrity, and generosity, and compassion.         

This is the story of the call of a disciple, the final such story in the Gospel of Luke, and Luke’s is the only Gospel that includes it.  Mark and Matthew tell of a different encounter that Jesus had in Jericho, which also turned into a call to discipleship.  And Luke tells that story, too, right before the one about Zacchaeus.  It is the story of a fellow who also wants to see Jesus but can’t, not because he is short, but because he is blind.  Like Zacchaeus, he is marginalized, kept at the back of the crowd because he cannot see.  But he cries out “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” and the more those in front of him tell him to shut up, the more he shouts it out.  And as with Zacchaeus, Jesus stops, for the one that others tried to exclude; he asks the blind man “What do you want me to do for you?” and he asks to receive his sight.  Jesus tells that his faith has saved him, and immediately he is able to see, and goes after Jesus, praising God.

In one sense the rich tax collector could not be more different from the blind beggar by the roadside.  But by adding in the Zacchaeus story, Luke sets up a parallel which seems to suggest that they are really much the same.   They share the same determination to make a connection with Jesus in spite of the disapproval of the crowd.  In both cases, Jesus takes notice of them, and initiates a conversation.  In both cases, the result is healing and transformation.  And yet the differences are also significant.  The beggar asks for and receives a gift from Jesus, the physical restoration of his sight.   While for Zacchaeus the restoration is social and moral, and it begins with giving Jesus what he asked for—the hospitality of his house.  The one man goes off to follow Jesus, on the final miles of the journey to Jerusalem, but Zacchaeus is to stay put and set things right with the folks in Jericho.  

It might help us understand what Luke was trying to say here if we consider that this is not the only place in his gospel where wealth is a wedge dividing people from each other—think of the rich man who feasts while Lazarus lies starves at his gate, or the younger brother who squanders his inheritance, and is too ashamed to go home.  The strange parable of the dishonest steward is a story, only found in Luke, in which ill-gotten wealth, like that of Zacchaeus, becomes a means of reconciliation.  All of which suggests that Luke was wrestling with a problem that wasn’t much of an issue for Matthew and Mark, namely how to bring people of unequal economic status together in the same community. 

Luke’s says nothing to soften the warnings we hear in the other Gospels against making an idol of wealth.  And, if anything, he makes an even stronger case for what modern theologians have called God’s “preferential option for the poor.”  But when Jesus calls Zacchaeus to come down from his high place, and join the rest of us, he adds nuance to this picture, a nuance sometimes missing from our contemporary debates about inequality.  We see a growing awareness nowadays of how destructive our grossly unequal distribution of wealth is to the poor, and even to the endangered middle-class, how it is corrupting our public institutions, and eroding social solidarity.   But the gospel reminds that it hurts the rich, too, who in their own way are excluded from the unity God wants us to share.  Like people marginalized by disability or poverty, or ethnic or sexual prejudice, they need a way to be reconciled and restored to communion.  They are called to a path of discipleship.  And the example of Zacchaeus provides it, a path that, like the struggle of the oppressed for liberation, requires courage and sacrifice.  It begins with redistribution and reparations.

Sharing the Wealth

Job 23:1-9, 16-17
Psalm 22:1-15
Hebrews 4:12-16
Mark 10:17-31

A few months ago my wife was balancing the checkbook and asked me if I’d remembered to deliver a payment on our pledge to the church, because it hadn’t been cashed yet.  And I had to confess to her that it had gotten lost in my wallet for a couple of weeks, but only a day or two before I’d spotted it there among the receipts and scraps of notepaper, and had turned it in to the Treasurer.  My daughter happened to overhear our conversation and she piped up at that point with a question: “Why do you give money to the church,” she asked—“Aren’t they just going to give it back to you?”  I wish I could tell you that we sat down then and there and had a long conversation about it, because it was a golden opportunity to explore with her what money is about, and what we are doing when we give it away.  But there was something going on that morning that we had to get on to, so I tossed off a quick answer, and to tell you the truth I can’t even remember what I said.

That’s the way it often is with the conversations we have in the church about money.   We know we have to do it, so we set aside a brief period, usually in the fall, to talk about our money and how we use what God has entrusted to us.  But it is not like we take the time to sit down and have a deep conversation about it.  It’s a topic that makes us uncomfortable.  So when we do bring it up, we find it safer not to talk about ourselves.  We don’t really want to talk about our own relationship with money, and how it impacts our other relationships, especially our relationship with God.

So instead, we often talk about the institutional needs of the church instead.  We can talk about the budget, and personnel expenses, about upkeep for the physical plant and the cost of administrative operations.   And what we often end up with is something like a fundraising campaign, not unlike what your favorite public radio station does.  We interrupt our regular religious programming with messages about how important this church is, and all the benefits that come along with membership, and how we can’t keep doing what we’re doing without your financial support.   And all of that is true, as far as it goes, but it can leave out the most important thing, which is to talk not about what the church needs, but about what we need.   If we did that, we’d be continuing a conversation that Jesus started. 

Jesus liked to talk to about money.  He brought it up all the time, when other people thought they were talking about religion.  In today’s reading from the Gospel of Mark we hear about a man who came to Jesus to ask him a religious question.  He was a devout man, sincere and respectful, and had been meticulous all his life in keeping the commandments of the law, and yet he saw that all this was not enough.  He perceived the limits of his human life, and imagined that beyond those limits there was fullness of life, without which all he had done was empty.  And hoping there might be just one more thing he needs can still to bring that life within his grasp, he comes and kneels before Jesus.

Jesus’ answer to the man is that he doesn’t need one more thing—he needs fewer.  The life that he seeks is not a thing we can take hold of and add to our store of possessions.  It is not the final rung, on a ladder of individual achievements.  Life in the kingdom of God is something one enters by leaving everything else behind.  Jesus doesn’t judge the man because he is unable to find the way in—he loves him.  But he is also sad for him, because he sees that he depends on his wealth in a way that prevents him from depending on God.  His many possession lead him to believe he possesses himself, and so he cannot let go and trust that he belongs to God.  And just in case we might be thinking that he is speaking only to this man, and his particular case, Jesus turns to his disciples and says, “Children, how hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!”

This is one of those sayings of Jesus that cuts deep, that seem to sever the path of following him from the normal pursuit of human happiness.   And so this section of the gospel ends with Peter, once again, speaking up and saying what is on everyone’s mind.  “We have left everything and followed you,” he says, and we can complete his sentence for him, “so aren’t we, at least, assured of salvation?”  The words of promise and encouragement that Jesus says next seem to me to be the early churches’ answer to that question.    Here is testimony that the call to give up everything for the sake of the gospel is not just a disruptive demand, to break family ties and renounce worldly gain.  It is also an invitation to join a movement.

The decision to follow Jesus is not a retreat into an otherworldly spiritual path, away from the life of everyday community, where people have to work to get by and get along.  It is a choice to enter new relationships, with Jesus and with the others who have put their trust in him.  And in the experience of the disciple of Peter who wrote the Gospel of Mark, shedding their worldly goods did not leave them as beggars wandering the streets, abandoned and alone.  It led them into a painstakingly difficult, but immeasurably rewarding new life, the life of the church. 

The New Testament ideal of the church is a community that suffers persecution with Christ, and joins in his renunciation of privilege, including the privilege of private wealth.  But that suffering and that renunciation make possible an extraordinary solidarity, an abundance of trust in the providence of God and just and intimate belonging to each other.  In the book of Acts and the letters of Paul we see again and again how fragile that solidarity is, how ready the early Christians were to turn back to the familiar security of their own separate property and their conventional gradations of privilege.  But though they acknowledge the instability of the situation, the apostles’ continually insist on the grace of Jesus Christ, and the power of the Holy Spirit, to keep the church together. 

It is that grace and that power that enables them to keep Jesus’ own radical ethic of sacrificial generosity and mutual forgiveness.  And it is the experience of unity and love that flows from this shared discipleship, more than any public ministry of good works, more than any sacred ritual or confessional statement, which puts the stamp of the Messiah on their community.  In the same way today, our faith in Christ, expressed as belonging to each other, brings us into the church, not as members of an organization, but as priests of a sacrament.  We share our lives with each other, and so we share in the priesthood of Christ, who shared his life with us.  And this makes our community a sacrament of the Kingdom of abundance and peace, and as with all sacraments this one requires a material substance, which is our money and other tangible gifts we agree to share in common.  

Our giving to the church is essential to the priesthood that we share.  As the parish priest, I have a particular role to play in this, as in other areas in which I stand in for the community.  When I anoint the sick, or give alms to the poor, or commit someone’s body to the earth, I do so in the name of the whole church.  I stand in for the church when I pronounce God’s forgiveness at the general confession, and when I stand at the altar, offering the great prayer of thanksgiving, and breaking the bread on behalf of us all. 

And I like to think that it’s the same when I cash my paycheck.  I don’t excuse myself from our shared priesthood of giving money to the church, but I do have a special relationship to it, because my family and I are the only ones here who depend on it for the food on our table and the clothes on our backs.  But perhaps in this, too, I stand in for the rest of you, for the dependence we all share on the generosity of others, for the need we all have to belong to each other, and supply one another’s needs in the name of Christ, for the desire in all of us to give away everything that holds us back from the life without limit that only comes by the grace of God.