Sermons
September 26, 2010 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.
John W. Vest
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church
Psalm 146
Amos 6:1–8
Luke 16:19–31
Where you live should not decide
Whether you live or whether you die
Three to a bed, Sister Ann, she said
Dignity passes by
And you speak of signs and wonders
But I need something other
I would believe if I was able
I’m waiting on the crumbs from your table
U2
“Crumbs from Your Table”
Preachers love synchronicities between our faith, our culture, and our world. We might call them instead “providential correspondences” between what we receive from our faith tradition and what we experience in the world around us. With the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in mind, listen to what caught my attention this week.
• • •
This very weekend, a modern-day version of this parable opened up in theaters across the nation. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is the sequel to Oliver Stone’s classic film from 1987. In the original Wall Street, we meet the iconic corporate raider Gordon Gekko, who takes a young stockbroker under his tutelage and teaches him the ways of unscrupulous financial gain. Insider trading and other dishonest practices pave the way to lucrative profits. In one of the most memorable scenes of the film, indeed one of the most memorable lines in all of American cinema, Gekko delivers a powerful speech to the stockholders of a paper company he is targeting for a hostile takeover. His speech is punctuated by the infamous dictum, “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.”
In the two decades that followed what was meant to be a cautionary tale, Gordon Gekko’s suggestion that “greed is good” became a mantra for many in the financial world. The extravagant lifestyle and brutal ferocity of Gekko’s approach to business became both the inspiration and model for those seeking the accumulation of wealth and power. For the past quarter century, Gordon Gekko has been the symbol of aggressive and profitable growth in the financial world.
Money Never Sleeps opens with an older Gordon Gekko emerging from prison, where he has served time for his financial improprieties. While in jail, Gekko reevaluates his approach and pens a book that transforms his famous declaration into a provocative question: Is Greed Good? Set in the years right before the financial meltdown that resulted in our current economic situation, the film recasts Gekko as an antihero who sees the writing on the wall and tries to warn the financial world of its impending doom. The irony, of course, is that no one is willing to listen to a man who has been imprisoned for financial crimes. Like the rich man of Jesus’ parable, Gordon Gekko is exiled to a version of hell and in unable to warn others away from a similar fate. And when Gekko himself slips back into his old ways and once again succumbs to the temptations of revenge and excessive wealth, we are left to wonder if we are in fact incapable of overcoming the power of greed.
• • •
This past week at the United Nations, leaders from around the world gathered to discuss progress on the Millennium Development Goals. Developed ten years ago, all 192 UN member states agreed to achieve these eight goals by 2015. They include the eradication of extreme hunger and poverty; the achievement of universal primary education; gender equality and the empowerment of women; the reduction of child mortality rates; improvement in maternal health; the combat of HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases; environmental stability; and a global partnership for development (http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/). These goals are tangible ways the international community has envisioned to bridge the expansive gap between the developed world and the developing world.
After ten years of living into these goals and just five years before the target date of completion, world leaders are taking stock of progress and the need for continued or renewed commitments to these goals. Various dignitaries, including President Obama, have laid out wide-ranging plans and strategies. As is typical, our leaders do a fair job of identifying the problems and our potential to solve them, but there still seems no clear path to sustainable solutions. Our year progress, or lack thereof, underscores the daunting task of addressing these critical goals.
• • •
Just this morning on her public radio show Being, Krista Tippett interviewed New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof about the challenges of using his medium of journalism to raise awareness of suffering and need around the world. An eyewitness to terrible tragedies and unthinkable misery, Kristof struggles to find the best ways to open the eyes of the world and inspire the kind of compassion and sympathy that will ultimately result in change (http://being.publicradio.org/programs/2010/journalism-and-compassion/). This, too, is a daunting task.
• • •
Back to Wall Street. In the original film, the character of Gordon Gekko is sharply contrasted with his protégé’s father, a working-class airplane mechanic, the kind of person whose fate is determined by the machinations of corporate tycoons like Gekko. To Gekko, such people are insignificant, merely numbers that only matter insofar as they impact the bottom line. But Gekko’s apprentice, Bud Fox, is naturally disposed to sympathize with the plight of those at the bottom, people like his father, who suffer because of decisions made by those at the top. This is why he never truly fits in Gekko’s world. Gordon Gekko is blind to the needs of those from whom he has separated himself with wealth and power.
Ultimately this is the greatest sin of the rich man in Jesus’ parable. At least in this parable, Jesus does not seem to demonize wealth on its own. Instead, the rich man is guilty above all else of ignoring Lazarus, whom he passes by every day. Every day, he walks past this desperately poor man and cannot be bothered to recognize his suffering. Every day, he has the opportunity to give Lazarus even the smallest bit of aid. Every day, he fails to share even a fraction of his immense wealth, not even the crumbs that fall from his table.
And so the parable casts these two characters, the unnamed rich man and poor Lazarus, into diametrically opposed fates in the afterlife. Jesus’ end times vision of role reversals, in which the “last shall be first and the first shall be last,” comes to fruition in this cautionary tale of wealth and poverty. The particulars of the afterlife presented in this parable are not of central importance. We need not worry about the realities of heaven and hell and what they might be like. What does matter here is the finality that death provides. The rich man’s failure to care for his poor neighbor in this life will not be redeemed in what comes after death. He missed his only chance to do the right thing. The “great chasm” that exists between the rich man and Lazarus in the afterlife mirrors the great chasm that existed between them in the material world.
It is in this great chasm, this expansive gap between the extremely rich and extremely poor, that most of us find ourselves. The remarkable reality of an urban congregation like ours is that we do in fact have among us the very wealthy and the very poor. Right now in this very sanctuary we likely have representatives of both extremes. And our church as a whole, given this providential location that I doubt could have been anticipated a century ago, finds itself continually straddling this gap. One of my predecessors here in youth ministry, Jim Wellman, wrote a book on the subject, the title of which perfectly captures this remarkable location and our corresponding sense of call: The Gold Coast Church and the Ghetto. At this intersection of one of the world’s most concentrated avenues of affluence and consumption and what is left of the Cabrini-Green housing project less than a mile away, we are critically aware of this chasm and our position within it. Through the work of the Elam Davies Social Service Center, our incredible Tutoring program, and many other ministries, we try to answer our call as residents of this great chasm.
The gap between the extremely wealthy and extremely poor is well known and well documented in our recession-era media. With regularity now, the evening news reminds us of the exorbitant salaries of CEOs compared to the plight of the working class. As an example, in 1969, the country’s largest corporation was General Motors and its CEO made eighty-eight times the average salary of a GM worker, the difference between $4.3 million and $40,000 in today’s dollars. Now, America’s largest corporation is Walmart: a few years ago, with a salary of $17.5 million, Walmart’s CEO made nine hundred times the salary of its average worker (Jim Wallis, Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Mains Street, and Your Street). In 2010, the CEO of Walmart will make $19.2 million (http://www.aflcio.org/corporatewatch/paywatch/ceou/database.cfm?tkr=WMT&pg=1). Despite bailouts and the effects of a recession, bank presidents and CEOs are still receiving massive compensation packages. Likewise and perhaps even more incredibly, even as crude oil was hemorrhaging into the Gulf of Mexico, BP managed to make a substantial profit in the second quarter of this year. Nothing, it seems, will change the economic inequalities we live with.
Yet for most of us, the extremes that characterize this chasm seem outside of our personal experience. Most of us are neither extremely rich nor extremely poor. We are part of what is called the middle class. And in point of fact, the middle class is the economic group that receives the most press in the United States. It is the middle class that politicians spend most of their time wrestling over. Tax cuts and stimulus plans are thrown at us in attempts to earn our votes, if not actually better our lives.
But the focus on the middle class obscures the reality of those just below middle class. As theologian and social activist Jim Wallis has recently said, “It might just be time for people in poverty to get a better PR firm” (Jim Wallis, http://blog.sojo.net/2010/09/17/poverty-is-not-a-dirty-word/).
This week, the Census Bureau released figures from 2009 indicating that 43.6 million Americans are living in poverty, the highest number our country has ever seen. Our poverty rate of 14.3 percent is even more staggering when you consider the fact that the official poverty level thatis used to calculate such statistics has not been adjusted in four decades. That means there are a lot more people who are living in effective poverty that are not even included in these numbers. Yet using the numbers we have, consider the following statistics:
While an increasingly small portion of our population amasses huge amounts of wealth, these are the realities faced by an increasingly high portion of our population. The stories of these individuals and communities need to be told. They need to be heard.
This past summer, our senior high youth group traveled to the Mississippi Delta on a unique mission trip that brought together youth from our church and youth from two predominantly African American churches here in Chicago. The purpose of our trip was racial reconciliation, and we divided our time between a pilgrimage to historic sites in the civil rights movement and hands-on service projects in Mississippi. The communities we served in rural Mississippi were some of the poorest I have ever seen. What I found most frustrating and downright chilling is the lack of potential for improvement in those communities. Long gone are the days of sharecropping that once sustained this part of the country, such as that way of living was. Now all the farms are mechanized and there is significantly smaller demand for farming labor. And there are practically no other industries or means of economic subsistence, much less growth. The Mississippi Delta is an economic desert. The story of these communities needs to be told.
In many ways, the barren landscapes and dearth of potential in rural Mississippi reminded me of the economic deserts in our own city. There are so many neighborhoods right here in Chicago that lack businesses or industries to provide meaningful employment for the people that live there. And as University of Chicago theologian and ethicist Franklin Gamwell reminds us, income patterns are related to other issues like political influence, educational inequality, and corruption in the criminal justice system (Franklin I. Gamwell, By the People, For the People: A Political Voice for Progressive Christians). The story of these communities needs to be told.
A year ago, a teenager named Derrion Albert was beaten to death on his way to school in a South side neighborhood. His tragic murder called national attention to the skyrocketing rates of violence and death among Chicago youth. It isn’t hard to connect the dots to see that such violence occurs disproportionately in less-affluent neighborhoods of our city.
The Sunday after Derrion was killed, we discussed his death with our own high school students here at Fourth Church. For the most part, they all come from neighborhoods where such things simply do not happen. Our greatest challenge is to help our youth conceive of community in such a way that bridges the chasm between his neighborhood and ours. Somehow we must come to realize that what happens to kids like Derrion isn’t just a problem for the South Side. It is a problem for our entire community.
This is why the “Silence the Violence, Support Our Youth” rally happening next week is so very important. Churches and civic organizations on the south Side have rallies like this all the time. But what our city sees much less of is a church like ours, in a neighborhood like ours, standing in solidarity with those who are suffering throughout Chicago. We must stand in the gap for communities like the one in which Derrion died, to call to the attention of people of power here what is happening down there.
The most haunting aspect of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus is not the desperate condition of Lazarus or the depiction of hell that the rich man suffers. It is the notion that the rich man’s brothers are unwilling to hear, unwilling to see the suffering of others and to do anything about it.
I fear that this is where many of us, and certainly many in our city and throughout our nation, find ourselves in this parable. We are not the extremely rich or the extremely poor. We are the ones who are called to stand in the gap, to stand in that great chasm, and listen to the cries of the needy. Like the rich man’s brothers, we have it all laid out before us in Moses and the prophets. Unlike them, we do in fact have someone who has risen from the dead to show us the way. We have cable television and the Internet. We have rock stars and celebrities.
But will we have eyes to see and ears to hear? And if so, will we have the faith and courage to show others?
Amen.
Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church
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