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.

Disposable Sheep

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
09.16.07; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Luke 15:1-10

No-one likes losing stuff. But are we really able to hear the words that Jesus spoke in the same way that his audience did in first century Judea?

We don’t live in the same era, and in our society, we’re pretty far away from caring about the stuff that clutters and piles up in our lives. We’re just so very used to tossing things away. Sure, you could use that plastic container a hundred times or more, or reuse that plastic spork for a dozen meals without it breaking. But we don’t. We drink, we eat, and we discard.

The boys and I often hike over to a neighborhood fast food establishment...I won’t tell you where, ‘cause my agent wasn’t able to negotiate enough compensation for this product placement... when my dear wife is off traveling or at a meeting. There, we consume plenty of empty calories, but also an amazing quantity of paper. After we’ve eaten, a mound of cups and fry containers and balled up hunks of wrappers piles high on that tray, seemingly taking up more room empty than they did full. They get dumped, of course, into the wide open maw of the trash bin.

It used to be worse. We used to get the boys kid’s meals, which not only had mounds of paper and cardboard, but also came with...a toy! These toys weren’t anything like the doofy little cardboard crowns that I used to get as a kid. No, these toys were real toys. Little handheld video games, batteries and all. Wind up cars. Action figures. Spongebob Bobbleheads. Little stuffed animals. Every last one was a marketing tie-in for a film or a T.V. show, but they were the kinds of things that you’d have paid good money for back when I was but a lad. Progress!

Only... the kids played with them for about 30 minutes, then forgot them. If you go once a week and you get two toys each time, they...well, they start to pile up. Bins full of them, buckets full of them, until it started to feel a bit like that scene from Fantasia with the replicating brooms, like we’d accidentally put a boy happy meal toy in the same cage as a girl happy meal toy. You can’t give them away...they’re just...disposable. So we finally threw them away, and just stopped getting kids meals. The boys didn’t mind. The meals were still the meals...but the toys were worthless. They weren’t even worth having.

Ours is a society where things are either disposable or soon worthless. In the relentless march of progress, the relentless consumption of stuff is necessary to keep the great wheels spinning along. It’s something called planned obsolescence. If we don’t get rid of our stuff, or feel that our stuff is no longer good enough stuff, then there’s not going to be a reason for us to buy new stuff. So products are planned that will only last...or only be desirable for a few years...and then they’ll be undesirable, not worth searching out, not worth having. The legendarily fast product cycle of the iPod is a perfect example. If you drive a car that was made in 2002, it’s still basically a decent car. But who’s going to buy a second generation iPod...shoot, they didn’t even really have the click wheel going the way it should. Of course, there are 90 million iPods out there that have just been rendered obsolete...but if you lost one, are you really going to go look for it? Of course not. We wouldn’t bother. You may as well just take all of those obsolete iPods and see what you could build with them...like, say, paving two lanes of the Beltway with iPods...not just the new HOT lanes, but the entire way around. You could...really. I’ve done the calculations. You’d just need lots of epoxy and a whole bunch of free time. And why not? We’re too rich in possessions to care about such things.

Jesus, of course, knew that there were people like that. As he taught a crowd that had gathered around him, he could hear people in groups around the edge of the crowd muttering and complaining about him under their breath. Look at this rabble! Look at this mess...they’re the dregs of humanity! These people aren’t worth anyone’s time...I can’t believe he even bothers with them.

The ones who grumbled against him were the educated and the elite. The Pharisees were the literate suburbanites of first century Judea, the ones who read and studied the law. The scribes worked for the court of the king and in the houses of the wealthy, managing their affairs and keeping track of their business. They did well. They had possessions, all that they needed.

So when Jesus told his parable of the lost sheep to describe how earnestly God seeks out those who are broken and lost in this life, he knew those mutterers would be unable to hear. Shepherds would understand exactly what Jesus was talking about, but shepherds were poor Galilean trash, and the mutterers weren’t...ugh...shepherds. Pharisees didn’t gather their flocks by night. They paid people to do that for them. Lost sheep? Who cares about one lost sheep? I’ve still got the 99...and I was planning on ordering a new sheep from isheep.com anyway. Why bother with that worthless thing? It’s not worth the time.

Then Jesus tells another little story, a story that only appears in Luke’s Gospel. Matthew tells the parable of the lost sheep in Matthew 18:12-14, but doesn’t give us this next one. Why? Why the difference? Remember, Luke was put together to be heard by an educated and elite audience of early Christians, and so it’s author wanted to make absolutely sure that they heard the next thing that Jesus said...because Luke’s readers were dangerously similar to the whisperers who sat around the outskirts of the gathered crowd.

I can hear him raising his voice a little, pitching it out a little further, out over the heads of the outcasts and tax collectors around him and towards the well-dressed little group beyond..making sure that they heard, making sure that they saw his eyes on them. Then he tells a story of a coin. Say...you had a stack of ten fifty dollar bills. Fifty bucks is close to what a drachma would be worth today, seven hours of work from a day laborer. Enough to be real money, something you can relate to. And you knew you had $500, it was right there the last time you counted it, but when you counted it up again, you came up fifty bucks short. You’re going to tear the house apart looking for that bill, now, aren’t you?

But Jesus wasn’t talking about sheep, and he wasn’t talking about the value of cash. He’s trying to get it through the thick skulls of human beings just how deeply God values each and every one of us, and how deeply God wants us to understand the goodness that God intends for us.

Jesus saw that we struggle to see the value that God sees, and that the richer and more powerful we become, the harder that struggle becomes. As you gather wealth and position in society, it isn’t just that you stop caring quite so much about things. You also make the mistake of viewing people further down in the pecking order as somehow less worthy than yourself. The Pharisees and the scribes were sure that they were righteous, sure that they were chosen, sure that they were important. They were equally sure that those who had less, who didn’t measure up, who deserved less...the shepherds and the sinners and the tax collectors...they were just less important to God. We are the chosen! We are the saved! God just loves us more.

That was the trap of self-righteousness they’d fallen into, and it’s a trap that clamps shut on any number of Christians today. Our wealth makes the wealth of those scribes look like the allowance you might give to a five year old. A one bedroom apartment pretty much anywhere in Montgomery County has more luxuries than the palace of Herod...who, in new findings from recent archeological digs, may not even have had cable.

The temptation is there..strongly there for all of us...to succumb to the same selfishness that consumed the Pharisees. You look out into the world and you see it everywhere, the willingness to cast people aside, to discard them, to see them as somehow of less worth than ourselves.

Does the feeling of helpless anger that fills the hearts of those day laborers who’ve been cast back out onto the streets in Herndon matter less to God because their documentation isn’t up to snuff? There are some who think so. Does the struggle with addiction that has crushed the joy from that rank-smelling man we push our way past, eyes averted, matter less to God? Too often, we act as if he is worth discarding, worth less than a piece of crumpled burger wrapper that blows by in the wind. Does the gnawing in the belly of a seven year old Bangladeshi boy matter less to God because he is poor amidst a crowd of the poor? As we move through our lives, full of wealth and the pursuit of wealth, such people barely merit a second thought.

But each of those people deserve our love, deserve our concern, deserve to be told...and more importantly, shown...that God and those who follow his Son care for them. Because our good shepherd does not have a single disposable sheep.

The SkyBox

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda 09.02.07; Rev. David Williams Scripture Lessons: Proverbs 25:6-7; Luke 14:1, 7-14 In pretty much every new sports stadium...and most older stadiums around the country...there are seats and then there are SEATS. If you’ve gone to any big venue event, be it baseball or football or full contact extreme team macrame, you know the drill. First you get yourself a parking space, preferably one where you can actually see the stadium with the naked eye. After making your way with the rest of the throngs, you work through the entrance and begin searching for your seats. You’re herded along with thousands of others into seating that makes airline seats seem like an overstuffed Barcalounger. Unless you’re willing to forego meals or electricity or both next month, getting to those seats seems like you’re trying to climb the north face of Everest. Up and up and up you go, one step after another. Finally, you take your seat, and try to catch your breath. A vendor walks down the aisle, shouting “Beer! Hotdogs! Oxygen!” From your perch in row 197 FF, you look down, way way down, to the tiny little dots running around on a patch of green far below. Wait...what color is your team wearing today? But at least you can watch the game on the Jumbotron, right? It makes perfect sense to fight your way through traffic for an hour and pay good money to watch a game on a TV. Sure it does. Just have a beer and a big hit from the oxygen tank, and try not to think about how the other half lives. You know the folks. They’re down in the boxes. But, of course, those boxes aren’t really just boxes with seats. They’re suites with seats. You get your own special parking places. You have your own V.I.P. entrance. When you get to your seat...it isn’t like everyone elses. The chairs are huge. The food is copious. They’ve got waitstaff who’ll attend to your every need. They’ve got anything your heart could desire. At Chase Field in Phoenix, some of the premium boxes come with their own swimming pools, so that you can lounge in the water with a margarita while you watch the Diamondbacks. They don’t have swimming pools at FedEx Field, but they’ve got a facility that Forbes Magazine described is “nicer than the nicest country club in the country.” And anyone who wants can have one, so long as they’re able to hand Dan Snyder $100,000 a season for a small box, and upward of $200,000 for a bigger one. And that’s not a problem for most folks who run in the Skybox set, because when you get right down to it, Skyboxes have very little to do with sports. They’re about wealth and they’re about power. If you want to make a positive impression on a Congressman who’s considering legislation that could impact your widget making business...well, you’re not sending him up to the nosebleed seats. If you’re trying to cement a business deal, nothing sways that new potential client better than the roar of an enthusiastic crowd filtered through the lens of luxurious seating, attentive servers, and several glasses of single malt scotch. Where you sit has everything to do with power, and everything to do with wealth. In that regard, very little has changed over the last several thousand years. In fact, the short reading that we heard from the Book of Proverbs today reflects a similar interest in seating arrangements. There’s a little bit of difference, though, in that this saying isn’t describing a sporting event, but political maneuvering. I know, I know, in this town political maneuvering is practically a sport, but we Washingtonians are just strange that way. In the court of the Kings of Judah, who sat where and why was even more intensely important than it is to us today. This saying is part of a collection of teachings found in the Book of Proverbs known as the Solomonic Sayings. This part of the collection runs from the beginning of chapter 25 all the way to the end of chapter 29. They can be loosely described as an instruction manual for newbie scribes and young nobles, sort of a “How Not To Have the King Disembowel You...For Dummies.” One surefire way to lose influence in the court was to be impatient or assume that you had the right to speak with boldness before the King. Yeah, you might think you were hot stuff, all full of new ideas from your Court Management classes at the University of Judea. You might think it was a good idea to shout out your idea in front of the throne, as a way of impressing the court with your wisdom. But that’s not how the court worked. To speak out of turn, or to speak without the bidding of the king...well...it just wasn’t smart. Only the great and the most powerful were permitted that honor. At best, you’d lose standing in the court. At worst...well...let’s just say that the royal human resource department did it’s exit interviews a bit more intensely than we do today. So the wisdom of the scribes over the ages was simply this: be humble in the presence of the king. Don’t presume. Speak when spoken to. Step up where you’re asked to step up. Good, basic information. It was this bit of royal wisdom that Jesus was referring when he spoke up at a dinner to which he had been invited by a local bigwig. Luke’s Gospel makes it completely clear that this was not a dinner like others, as Jesus was being observed carefully to see how he acted and what he said. Jesus, however, was not just being monitored. He was also paying careful attention to how his host and the other guests were acting. When he spoke, it was to tell them a parable of a wedding banquet. At this banquet, to take a seat that was not yours by right was to risk public humiliation. You’d be better off taking a humble position, and then having your host invite you up to a position of honor. For the other guests at the dinner, this would have seemed both wise and familiar advice. Of course, they thought. You have to appear humble, so that you’ll then be honored by the host. Looks like our strange guest from Nazareth has read the Solomonic Sayings. He really does know how to play the game. But then Jesus turned to the host, and gave words of advice that took the proverb in an entirely different direction. With a room full of this man’s friends and brothers and rich neighbors, all invited to a meal, Jesus tells him that he’s invited the wrong crowd. All of these people who are jockeying for position, all of these important and significant people...well...they’re just not important. The people who should be around the table aren’t those whom the host hopes to impress. They should be people from whom the host expects nothing, seeks nothing, no tit-for-tat, no quid pro quo, no I’ll scratch your back and you scratch mine. Nothing. And to avoid the temptation of expecting anything from those people, Jesus suggests that he should have invited the poor, the lame, those in Judean society who would have been regarded as so low in the pecking order as to be barely human at all. If you wanted this to count at all, Jesus says, you should have filled these seats without considering who they were at all. Those words would have hit hard back then...and they’re not much softer now. Ours is a society that thrives on hierarchy, where the rich and the powerful mingle and network with one another. It’s easy to emulate that, to play at that, to try to gather power by showing favor to those who we think might be able to give us something in return. But you can’t buy Christ’s favor. You can’t show off your riches to the Creator of the Universe. The only thing that God seeks in us...the first and most important thing God requires...is that we show care for others out of no desire for repayment. He’s got no need for skybox seats, because he knows our game all too well already.