Unfair Balances

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
09.23.07; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lessons: Luke 16:1-13; Amos 8:4-7

There’s nothing quite like going to a carnival.

I’m not talking about the slick and seamless entertainment experience served up by modern amusement parks, the buffed, polished and perfected product that parts you and several hundred of your hard earned dollars in a choreographed and focus group tested dance. All you need is a credit card and a willful ignorance of it's limits. Swipe! You’re in the park. Swipe! You’ve just spent 15 bucks on two hotdogs and two sodas. Swipe! You just bought Dan Snyder another tie. It’s perfect...too perfect.

I’m talking, instead, about the carny experience. We’ve all had the carny experience. Early one evening at the height of summer, you’re on your way home, inching your way in traffic past the parking lot of your local big box store. Where once there was a great expanse of hot sweltering asphalt, now there’s a great whirling spectacle of lights whirling and sparkling. From out of nowhere has appeared a berzerker frenzy of rides and games, appearing like some garish mirage in the desert of strip mall America. Can we go please daddy can we go please huh huh daddy huh rises up like a chorus...which is weird, because the kids aren’t even in the car. Did I just say that? Perhaps it was the hypnotizing spin of the Ferris Wheel, looping in slow arcs across the darkening sky. But you just know you’re going to have to go.

And go you do, into the jostle and spin. You buy your tickets for the rides from the lady with no teeth, hoping against hope that the attractions are not nearly as run down as the staff. Sure, the lights are whirling and bright, but what they show in the crowds around you isn’t reassuring...it’s rust, it’s decay, it’s the blurred tattoo on the brawny arm of the man who shouts out “c’mon up, c’mon up, winner every time, gotta winner every time.” And you pass by him the first time, as you spend five bucks of tickets on a ride that was once used to torment astronaut trainees. And you pass by him the second time, as you drop more tickets for a three minute wander through a dizzying maze of mirrors.

But...third times the charm..you stop, and the thick accent snags you, all you gotta do is pop three balloon, three balloon, dollar a dart, baby could do it, win a prize every time. What the heck, why not, you only live once. And money changes hands, and there’s a pop, then a thunk and a thunk. Only two more, don’t waste your money, can’t leave without a prize, two more, you can do it, and more greenbacks pass to the carny, and there’s a thunk and a pop and a thunk. Hey hey, nearly there, one more try c’mon can’t leave your money behind and more dollars grease the meaty hand, and thunk then pop...look! You’ve won! And a little stuffed donkey in a color that doesn’t occur in nature and made from fabric that is clearly petrochemically based is thrust into your hands. 75 cents worth of product yours for a mere 9 dollars. But in the swirl and the confusion and the bright lights, it’s so easy to walk away feeling like you’ve actually accomplished something.

That carny experience resembles the house-buying experience of so many Americans over the last few years. As relentless speculation drove the prices of homes further and further up into the stratosphere, it became harder and harder for families to afford homes. Even with the two incomes that are increasingly necessary, swinging the payments for a $500,000 mortgage was getting to be next to impossible. If you’d ever struggled with your credit, getting a lender to front you the cash was growing next to impossible. Suddenly, most people just couldn’t afford a home. We were all...too poor.

But the mortgage industry, seeing that the market was increasingly moving outside of the range of most working folks, came up with a great idea. Let’s start convincing people that they can afford more than they can. So first you had folks taking out a second smaller mortgages to afford the downpayment on their primary mortgage. Then you had people getting home loans that had balloon payments...meaning it was affordable for the first five years, and then your payments skyrocket. You just have to hope you’re making more money, eh? Then it was interest-only mortgages, where the money you’re paying to the lender isn’t buying your house. You’re just paying interest. 100% interest. You don’t own your house...at all. Then lenders began encouraging people to...um...not actually tell the truth on their mortgage applications. Just...fudge how much you make each year. It’ll be fine.

They called these loans “subprime,” which makes them sound almost legitimate. As it turns out, subprime is just another way of saying “bad.” In the whirlwind of excitement and flashing lights and complex paperwork, who could tell the difference. People...some people...made a tremendous profit from this c’mon up winner every time environment. Like the woman cited in a recent Washington Post article who made her fortune pushing mortgages to folks with bad credit. When she got married, she handed out little gifts to her wedding party. Those gifts included a Porsche 911. A Porsche. I got to thinking: I wonder what the pastor got paid? I mean, when your wedding costs $800,000...wow. As long as the money was changing hands, as long as the suckers...um..homeowners...were happy, what did it matter?

Oddly enough, things like that matter to God. From nearly 3,000 years ago, we hear the voice of Amos the prophet this morning. Amos was a nobody, less than nobody, a shepherd, from a small town to the south of Bethlehem. He came roaring out of the wilderness at a time when the wealthy were getting wealthier on the backs of pretty much everyone else. Amos had watched as more and more land was added to the acreage of the wealthy. Amos had seen how wealth begot wealth, and how those who struggled and worked for their livelihoods found it harder and harder to get by. As the injustice grew greater, and as people of Israel began to struggle more and more under the hand of the wealthy, Amos began speaking out his calling.

That calling was to condemn those who used their power to create more power for themselves. That calling was to proclaim hard truths about those who were willing to violate the very most essential teachings of Torah...seeking justice, seeking balance, respecting the covenant that held the people together...to violate that covenant for the sole purpose of profiting themselves.

The people against which Amos spoke found the restrictions placed on them by the worship of God annoying. The new moon festivals, which marked the turning of each month, would have gotten in the way of the practice of business, as would the requirement that there be no work on the sabbath. A day without profit! Unacceptable! Bites in to the profit margins.

The people against which Amos spoke made sure that they profited...making the ephah small meant that they sold you as little as possible...and making the shekel great meant that they got as much as they could. Just confuse the people, or convince them that they had to buy, or take advantage when you could. Easy as pie.

But none of this was acceptable to God. None of it. The message that Amos carried was as simple as the message borne by Christ eight hundred years later. You cannot serve God and mammon. If one is your master, you’re not going to be able to serve the other.

The message that Amos bore was a dire warning for the people of Israel...that serving wealth above the demands for loving one’s neighbor would result in destruction. Yes, it was a proclamation of justice, but it was a little more uncompromising than we like to hear, a little harsher than rings well in the ears of a society where business is king. We like the great rowdy carnival of our marketplace, with all the lights and excitement and promise of quick winnings.

But the warning to us is clear. If we seek wealth above all other things, if we make our own profit our goal and our hope, then we are violating the very essence of God’s reign among us. Our seeking to tip the balances in our own favor casts everything out of balance.

Instead of trying to serve ourselves, or to profit when we know that a profit will come at the ultimate expense of another child of God, each of us needs to remember what it is that we are called to do as servants of Jesus Christ. There’s nothing wrong with being in business, but the smoke and mirrors and tricks of carny marketing have to be set aside.

We have to stop being so eager to push aside the teachings of Sunday when we arrive at work on Monday morning. We have to be faithful with what has been given us.