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.
Showing posts with label social. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Overripe
Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
07.22.07; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Amos 8:1-12
It’s a new Gilded Age!
At least, that was the headline that proudly blared out from the front page of the New York Times that showed up at the door of my hotel room this last week. As I sat recently in the back of a Manhattan deli and that third cup of coffee cleared the haze from staying up way past my bedtime the night before, I dug deep into that eager little article.
Gilded Age, you say? What does that mean? Somewhere in the hazy and distant past of an American history class, you might remember that term. It means...well...what does it mean? The Gilded Age was an era in American history that began in the late 19th century. It was called “gilded” because it was...for some...a time gilded with gold, an era of unparalleled prosperity for the richest of the rich. For those who owned or financed the businesses of the newly industrializing America, the level of wealth generated was unprecedented in modern history. This was the era of the Rockefellers and the Carnegies and the J.P. Morgans, the captains of industry who guided and profited from the explosive growth that was sweeping across America. They commanded a huge portion of the wealth of this country. In today’s dollars, for example, the Rockefeller fortune would ring in at $178 billion dollars. By that standard, Bill Gates seems lower middle class.
For the people who own and fund today’s global economy, that warm blanket of gold seems to be returning. Once again, wealth is concentrating itself in the hands of an elite few, for whom the first decade of this millenia has them soaring higher and higher above the rest of us. There are few places in this country where that surging concentration of wealth are more evident than walking around Manhattan in 2007. That part of the city is fat and happy, glistening with new construction and newly beautified parks. The concentration of wealth is stratospheric, stunning, almost impossible. It isn’t just that some hotels in that city now require you to put down one of your kidneys as a deposit. It’s not just that even apartments the size of a refrigerator box are beyond reach of most mortals. Buying a parking space on the upper West Side will put you back $250,000.
Wealth is piled upon wealth, rising as high and bright as the advertising that blares from the screens in Times Square. It seems like an age of plenty, a time of harvest, when the fruit from all of the labor of all of the world is gathered into the larders of the wealthy. With the average American corporate executive now pulling down a salary 400 times that of their workers, and with the growing concentration of wealth among the very few, it sure must seem like that way...to them, at least.
Throughout history, this pattern has repeated and repeated itself. Wealth concentrates, as riches create power that seeks to gather more riches. It’s a pattern as old as humanity itself, and that’s exactly the pattern that the prophet Amos was shouting about nearly 2,800 years ago. The passage we heard this morning comes to us from around 760 years before Christ, during the reign of King Jeroboam the Second of Israel. For all of the chaos that had wracked both the Southern Kingdom of Judah and the Northern Kingdom of Israel, this period was a had been a relatively calm time in the struggles of the Hebrew people.
For half a century, the wars between the great Empires of the Ancient Near East fell into a lull...Egyptian and Assyrian armies no longer swept back and forth across the land like a plague. In that brief time of peace, the cities of both kingdoms prospered. The educated and literate power elite that gathered around the throne of kings grew in power, as taxation and the strengthening of the monarchy gathered in the wealth. But that prosperity wasn’t something shared by all. For those who didn’t live in the cities, things were not as good as they had once been.
Amos came from just such a place. He was from the village of Tekoa, in the southern kingdom. He was a shepherd, whose flock would have wandered the hills just to the south of Bethlehem. A series of visions drove him to travel to the north, across the border into Israel and up in to the area around Bethel, where he made himself a nuisance to the priests and authorities of the north.
The vision he shared might seem a bit odd to us. Does God show him a golden throne surrounded by many-winged angels? Does he see radiant glory? No...God shows him a basket of...summer fruit. A fruit basket? That’s his vision? What sort of vision is that? That’s not a message from God...it’s the kind of gift you give to a co-worker you barely know. No self-respecting televangelist is going to get up there and say...”Brothers and sisters, the Lord came to me in a dream last night...and in his radiant glory and power he showed me...a fruit basket. He also showed me a nice Hallmark card with a picture of a kitten.”
But Amos didn’t know we’d be hearing his voice nearly 3,000 years later. He was talking directly to the people of Ancient Israel, in terms that they would have understood. This is a passage that requires a little background knowledge about both Hebrew and ancient agriculture.
When Amos says basket of summer fruit, the thing we miss is that he’s making a pun in Hebrew. When God shows him a basket of summer fruit, and then tells him that the “the end has come upon my people Israel,” those are two related words. “Summer fruit” is, in Hebrew, the word qayits. “The end,” in Hebrew, is the word qets. Summer fruit and the end don’t just sound alike, though. Like many Hebrew words that sound alike, they’re related.
When we think of “summer fruit,” we think of sweet buttered corn and watermelon juice dripping red down our chins. But for the ancient Israelites the term “summer fruit” meant the harvest that came at the very end of the season. It was the last of the gathering in, the crop that was brought in just as the growing season was over. Summer fruit didn’t last long. You had to eat it or store it quickly, because it wasn’t going to keep. It was like that banana that starting to brown and tomorrow will be nothing but blackened mush, like that watermelon that seems fine today, but when you cut into it tomorrow, the meat has turned to watery foulness. Summer fruit doesn’t last, and after it’s done, there’s nothing to follow it. The harvest is over.
From the vision of Amos came a word of God’s judgement against those denizens of the ancient cities of Israel. All of the law codes of ancient Israel served to keep their society in balance. Those ancient law helped to maintain a balance in society, a balance under which no one individual or group was to gather too much power or control to itself. The point of the Torah, which is affirmed and lived out by Christ, is that power and material wealth weren’t allowed to become the goal of God’s people. When they do, a society has lost it’s center. It is no longer focused on God’s love and love of neighbor, and is doomed to failure. The eloquent warnings that this shepherd from Bethlehem delivered to Israel proved to be true...as within a generation, Israel had fallen.
Hearing Amos...really hearing him...is as important in our age as it was in his. As amazing and impressive as the riches of the new global economy can be, we’ve got to look hard at them through that prophet’s eyes. When wealth and power become the whole focus of our lives, we lose our sense of responsibility for others. We no longer seek their good, but instead allow ourselves to believe that profit justifies itself. When profit seeks after profit, the world is thrown out of balance. When a few are sating themselves on a harvest of summer fruit, and literally billions are struggling just to have the very most basic staples in life, the world is thrown out of balance.
Such imbalances aren’t part of God’s covenant desire for us, and as the taste of that fruit rests on our lips, we have to be mindful of the warning that Amos bore.
07.22.07; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Amos 8:1-12
It’s a new Gilded Age!
At least, that was the headline that proudly blared out from the front page of the New York Times that showed up at the door of my hotel room this last week. As I sat recently in the back of a Manhattan deli and that third cup of coffee cleared the haze from staying up way past my bedtime the night before, I dug deep into that eager little article.
Gilded Age, you say? What does that mean? Somewhere in the hazy and distant past of an American history class, you might remember that term. It means...well...what does it mean? The Gilded Age was an era in American history that began in the late 19th century. It was called “gilded” because it was...for some...a time gilded with gold, an era of unparalleled prosperity for the richest of the rich. For those who owned or financed the businesses of the newly industrializing America, the level of wealth generated was unprecedented in modern history. This was the era of the Rockefellers and the Carnegies and the J.P. Morgans, the captains of industry who guided and profited from the explosive growth that was sweeping across America. They commanded a huge portion of the wealth of this country. In today’s dollars, for example, the Rockefeller fortune would ring in at $178 billion dollars. By that standard, Bill Gates seems lower middle class.
For the people who own and fund today’s global economy, that warm blanket of gold seems to be returning. Once again, wealth is concentrating itself in the hands of an elite few, for whom the first decade of this millenia has them soaring higher and higher above the rest of us. There are few places in this country where that surging concentration of wealth are more evident than walking around Manhattan in 2007. That part of the city is fat and happy, glistening with new construction and newly beautified parks. The concentration of wealth is stratospheric, stunning, almost impossible. It isn’t just that some hotels in that city now require you to put down one of your kidneys as a deposit. It’s not just that even apartments the size of a refrigerator box are beyond reach of most mortals. Buying a parking space on the upper West Side will put you back $250,000.
Wealth is piled upon wealth, rising as high and bright as the advertising that blares from the screens in Times Square. It seems like an age of plenty, a time of harvest, when the fruit from all of the labor of all of the world is gathered into the larders of the wealthy. With the average American corporate executive now pulling down a salary 400 times that of their workers, and with the growing concentration of wealth among the very few, it sure must seem like that way...to them, at least.
Throughout history, this pattern has repeated and repeated itself. Wealth concentrates, as riches create power that seeks to gather more riches. It’s a pattern as old as humanity itself, and that’s exactly the pattern that the prophet Amos was shouting about nearly 2,800 years ago. The passage we heard this morning comes to us from around 760 years before Christ, during the reign of King Jeroboam the Second of Israel. For all of the chaos that had wracked both the Southern Kingdom of Judah and the Northern Kingdom of Israel, this period was a had been a relatively calm time in the struggles of the Hebrew people.
For half a century, the wars between the great Empires of the Ancient Near East fell into a lull...Egyptian and Assyrian armies no longer swept back and forth across the land like a plague. In that brief time of peace, the cities of both kingdoms prospered. The educated and literate power elite that gathered around the throne of kings grew in power, as taxation and the strengthening of the monarchy gathered in the wealth. But that prosperity wasn’t something shared by all. For those who didn’t live in the cities, things were not as good as they had once been.
Amos came from just such a place. He was from the village of Tekoa, in the southern kingdom. He was a shepherd, whose flock would have wandered the hills just to the south of Bethlehem. A series of visions drove him to travel to the north, across the border into Israel and up in to the area around Bethel, where he made himself a nuisance to the priests and authorities of the north.
The vision he shared might seem a bit odd to us. Does God show him a golden throne surrounded by many-winged angels? Does he see radiant glory? No...God shows him a basket of...summer fruit. A fruit basket? That’s his vision? What sort of vision is that? That’s not a message from God...it’s the kind of gift you give to a co-worker you barely know. No self-respecting televangelist is going to get up there and say...”Brothers and sisters, the Lord came to me in a dream last night...and in his radiant glory and power he showed me...a fruit basket. He also showed me a nice Hallmark card with a picture of a kitten.”
But Amos didn’t know we’d be hearing his voice nearly 3,000 years later. He was talking directly to the people of Ancient Israel, in terms that they would have understood. This is a passage that requires a little background knowledge about both Hebrew and ancient agriculture.
When Amos says basket of summer fruit, the thing we miss is that he’s making a pun in Hebrew. When God shows him a basket of summer fruit, and then tells him that the “the end has come upon my people Israel,” those are two related words. “Summer fruit” is, in Hebrew, the word qayits. “The end,” in Hebrew, is the word qets. Summer fruit and the end don’t just sound alike, though. Like many Hebrew words that sound alike, they’re related.
When we think of “summer fruit,” we think of sweet buttered corn and watermelon juice dripping red down our chins. But for the ancient Israelites the term “summer fruit” meant the harvest that came at the very end of the season. It was the last of the gathering in, the crop that was brought in just as the growing season was over. Summer fruit didn’t last long. You had to eat it or store it quickly, because it wasn’t going to keep. It was like that banana that starting to brown and tomorrow will be nothing but blackened mush, like that watermelon that seems fine today, but when you cut into it tomorrow, the meat has turned to watery foulness. Summer fruit doesn’t last, and after it’s done, there’s nothing to follow it. The harvest is over.
From the vision of Amos came a word of God’s judgement against those denizens of the ancient cities of Israel. All of the law codes of ancient Israel served to keep their society in balance. Those ancient law helped to maintain a balance in society, a balance under which no one individual or group was to gather too much power or control to itself. The point of the Torah, which is affirmed and lived out by Christ, is that power and material wealth weren’t allowed to become the goal of God’s people. When they do, a society has lost it’s center. It is no longer focused on God’s love and love of neighbor, and is doomed to failure. The eloquent warnings that this shepherd from Bethlehem delivered to Israel proved to be true...as within a generation, Israel had fallen.
Hearing Amos...really hearing him...is as important in our age as it was in his. As amazing and impressive as the riches of the new global economy can be, we’ve got to look hard at them through that prophet’s eyes. When wealth and power become the whole focus of our lives, we lose our sense of responsibility for others. We no longer seek their good, but instead allow ourselves to believe that profit justifies itself. When profit seeks after profit, the world is thrown out of balance. When a few are sating themselves on a harvest of summer fruit, and literally billions are struggling just to have the very most basic staples in life, the world is thrown out of balance.
Such imbalances aren’t part of God’s covenant desire for us, and as the taste of that fruit rests on our lips, we have to be mindful of the warning that Amos bore.
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