Our True Value
(Originally delivered in the spring of 1999.)
Like many of you, I
live in a nice house. It is so nice, in fact, that a recent visitor from Kenya
guessed that I must have many, many children to live in such a house. No, I told
him, it was just me and my husband. We had always dreamed of living in an old
farmhouse, I said. When we could not find one, we built one, I said. It turned
out a little bigger than we had planned, I said. As I ground to a halt, my guest
raised his eyebrows and said, “Ah, I see.” I did not have the nerve to ask him
what he saw, but after he left I saw my nine rooms, my two and half baths, my
stocked pantry and my walk-in closets with new eyes.
So of course I don’t
like Luke’s parable about Lazarus and the rich man, any more than I like his
story about the rich man who spent all his time building bigger barns for
storing his stuff (did I mention my two barns?) or the bit about the camel and
the eye of the needle, or those in-your-face woes Luke tacks on to the end of
the Beatitudes: “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your
consolation.”
As I am sure other people have pointed out to you
by now, Jesus said more about wealth than he said about any other moral issue of
his day. If we could buy a green letter edition of the Bible, with all
of those passages highlighted in U. S. Department of the Treasury green ink, it
would be hard for any of us to deny that the gap between rich and poor concerned
him more than lying, more than stealing, more than sex—especially in Luke’s
gospel, where he confronts the rich four times as often as he does in the other
gospels.
Biblical scholars call this evidence of God’s “preferential option for the poor,” which means, roughly, that given a choice between siding with a rich person and siding with a poor person, God is going to choose the poor people every time—not because they are more virtuous, necessarily, but because if God weren’t on their side, no one would be. Goliath would
win every time, and the ground would be littered with home-made slingshots. So
God stands with the little people, and when the big people come at them, God
lets them know that—sooner or later, in this world or the next—big and little,
rich and poor, happy and sad, are going to change places.
If you have
gotten this message loud and clear, as I have, then perhaps you too wonder
sometimes if rich people are not wasting their time hanging out at church. If
God has already decided whom to side with, and if wealth is as much an
impediment to heaven as Jesus seemed to think it was, then perhaps it is time
for those of us with assets to try scientology, or Hinduism, or good old
humanism. Why stay here, where we can count on getting beat up fairly
regularly for what we have?
In late January of this year, Pope
John Paul II met with the Catholic bishops of North and South America in Mexico
City, where he surprised none of them by urging them to care for the poor. But
he surprised quite a few of them by also calling them to minister to the rich.
“Love for the poor must be preferential, but not exclusive,” the Pope said in
his apostolic exhortation. “The leading sectors of society have been neglected
and many people have thus been estranged from the church.”
While he did
not put it this bluntly, he was warning church leaders that if they continue to
villainize the rich in their teaching and preaching, they are going to drive
those people out of the church of Christ and into the church of unbridled
capitalism, where their wealth and success will receive a much warmer welcome.
In the capitalist church, it is good to be rich. It means you have done
something right, not wrong, and there are no regular scoldings about how you
should give your money away to people who have not worked anywhere near as hard
as you. Success is earned in this value system. It is the reward you get for
your brains, your guts, your long hours—or at least that is the myth.
If you have spent any time out of work—either because you don’t work, or
because you got sick, or old, or had a baby, or because your company was bought
by a larger company and you got “downsized”—then you know something else about
the church of capitalism, and that is that it really does not care about you
unless you can produce. Some people take that into account and buy extra
disability insurance, but others are plainly shocked when they are called into
the boss’s office one day and handed their pink slips. I know one man who was a
manufacturer’s representative for the same company for twenty-seven years. In
1991, they gave him a gold pin for being sales agent of the year. In 1992, they
fired him for failing to meet their new quota.
If you don’t have some
other value system in place when something like that happens to you, then it can
knock you overboard. If you have not learned that you are worth more
than your bottom line, more than your billable hours, more than your individual
contribution to the gross national product, then you can find yourself treading
some pretty dark waters while you wonder where all your brains and guts and long
hours have gotten you.
That is what the Pope is worried about,
I think—that if the church does not minister to rich and poor alike, then
economic distinctions will divide people in church as much as they divide them
everywhere else on earth. The sides will just change places, is all. The poor
will be the good guys and the rich will be the bad guys, but money will still be
what determines who is who—not God but mammon. Money will still divide the body
of Christ.
What does all of
this have to do with the parable of Lazarus and the rich man? I hope I can say.
I have always heard it as one more story about how the poor will be rewarded
while the rich will be punished, with Father Abraham standing between them to
prevent any blurring of the boundaries at the end. I suppose that is all right
as far as it goes, although the parable itself admits that the warning will
never work.
When the rich man wants Abraham to send Lazarus with a
message to his equally rich brothers—tell them to get shed of that cash now
before it is too late—Abraham lets him know that it won’t do any good. They have
already been told, Abraham says. Moses and the prophets told them and told them,
the same way they told you, but people never seem to get the message. They just
keep letting money divide them—the poor outside the gate, the rich inside the
gate—and when the division turns out to be permanent, with—whoops, all the heat
on the inside—then they wail and moan like no one ever told them so.
We
know better. We know money cannot save us, at least not in any ultimate sense,
and yet look around. Money remains our favorite way of distinguishing between
who is saved in this world and who is lost. Do you live in a nice house with
nine rooms and two barns? Safe! Or do you live in a trailer park south of town
with duct tape over the broken windows? Lost! Do you have a good pension plan, a
good health plan, plus an extra IRA to which you make regular contributions?
Safe! Or are you fifty years old and still working without benefits, hoping
against hope that you never get sick? Lost!
These kinds of judgments come
so naturally that few of us ever question them. I don’t know anyone who wants to
be sick or poor or out of work, but wouldn’t it be interesting if we had
different criteria? Do you have plenty of time for the people and things that
matter most to you? Are you truly free to choose how you spend most of the days
of your life? Safe! Or do you work all the time, and even when you are not
working, do you worry about not working? Lost! Are you rich in love? Can you
look at almost any human face and see the family resemblance there? Safe! Or do
you see mostly strangers, who fall into two basic categories: of use or of no
use to you? Lost!
I don’t think money was the rich man’s problem
so much as it was that gate he bought with it. If the gate had just
kept Lazarus off his property, that would have been one thing, but it did more
than that. It kept Lazarus off his hands as well. It kept Lazarus off his heart
and mind, because the rich man made the same mistake most of us do. He believed
money really could fix a chasm between the saved and the lost—that once he had
enough money to buy a gate, he was safe from all the ugliness on the other side
of it—or at least safe as long as he could afford to live there. God forbid that
he should ever be like Lazarus. God forbid that he should ever be in such great
need that he had to live on someone else’s leftovers.
I don’t know what
Lazarus’ part in the great divide was, but I do know people who are on his side
of the gate. One of them is a single mother with seven children whose name I got
from the Department of Family and Children Services. When I told her the church
wanted to sponsor her family for Christmas, she looked at me with a face full of
fury. “I need that,” she said. “My children need that, so I can’t say no. But
don’t expect me to march down the aisle of your church crying thank you so
that all you big Christians can feel good about yourselves. I have done that and
done that, but I’m not doing it anymore.” Then she did start to cry. “I’d like
to sit where you sit just one time in my life,” she said. “Just one time I’d
like to be the one giving instead of the one taking.”
Wherever you sit,
the story of Lazarus and the rich man suggests that most of us are afraid of the
wrong things. We are afraid of what lies on the other side of the gate when the
gate itself is really much scarier. It separates us from our kin. It deceives us
about who is safe and who is lost. It shuts out those who might bring us cool
water. And as Jesus pointed out ahead of time, this warning will do most of us
no good whatsoever.
We will continue to view those on the other side of
the gate as members of some other species, whom we face across a great chasm of
fear, or envy, or just plain incomprehension. We will continue to resent each
other for being there, for reminding us of things we would rather not think
about, and while we are doing that we will miss a very great truth: namely, that
we are all God’s beloved. We are all members of the same body. Money
cannot change that, at least not unless we insist on it. If we insist, then God
won’t argue. The gate between us will stay closed, even when our lives depend on
getting through it.
There is no way to change the ending of this
story. The rich man is hot and Lazarus is not, but I still hear good news in it
for everyone involved. God knows the rich can be as imprisoned by their wealth as the poor are by their poverty. There is so much more to any
of us than our money. There are so many better ways to measure our worth. If we
can open the gates between us while we are still alive, then the message is hard
to miss. Our true value lies in Who loves us, and Who keeps hoping against hope
that we will learn to love each other too. Amen.
Copyright©1999 The Rev. Dr.
Barbara Brown Taylor.
