The Life That Really Is Life

1 Timothy 6:6-19; Luke 16:19-31

September 29, 2013

 “They are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share, thus storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of the life that really is life.”

That line doesn’t get quoted nearly as often as the pithy one from the beginning of the passage: the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. It’s no accident that the lines come together here, nor that the editors of the revised common lectionary pair this passage with Luke’s challenging little story about Lazarus and the rich man.

It would seem like a great big ol’ softball perched on a waist-high tee that these passages should come up in the lectionary the week after the House voted to cut funding for food stamps by $39 billion even as the real income of the bottom 40 percent of Americans has declined by six percent since the so-called end of the Great Recession.

I have no doubt that I could take a good, strong whack at that softball, and knock it a ways out toward the rhetorical warning track, but I’m going to resist that. Not merely because, well, frankly it’s just too easy, but also, and more importantly, because of the other news I heard just the other day. It seems that we now gather to worship pretty much smack in the middle of the richest county in the United States.

Yup, according to the most recent data, Arlington County has the highest income per capita of any county in the country.

You don’t have to look too far in scripture to find two striking themes: God’s deep concern for the poor and God’s deep suspicions about the idolatry of money.

Jim Wallis, long-time editor of Sojourners, frequently recounts the story of a project he undertook with friends early in his seminary days. They took an old Bible, searched (and this was way before search engines, by the way) for every verse that had to do with wealth, poverty and economic justice, and cut them out. Wallis always says, “we were left with a Bible full of holes, and this has become the American Bible.”

As my mom’s college classmate, William Stringfellow, observed, “where money is an idol, to be poor is a sin.”

As Pope Francis said recently, the great and growing disparity between the world’s rich and its poor “is the consequence of a world choice, of an economic system that brings about this tragedy, an economic system that has at its center an idol which is called money.”

That’s the problem with the American Bible: money is its most powerful god. According to its teachings, the poor deserve their fate and, therefore, the rest of us are off the hook. If poverty is not, itself, a sin, it is, according to the American gospel, a result of sin or, at the very least, of mistakes, bad choices, or individual ineptitude.

There are, of course, connections between decisions and outcomes in any individual’s life, but the great American myth of social mobility is not actually a myth; it’s a lie, and all of the economic statistics tell us that. The plain and simple truth is that poverty in American has a great deal more to do with where and to whom you were born than with anything that happens after that moment.

Not only does the American gospel of prosperity let the rest of us off the hook for any responsibility for and to those who are poor, but it also encourages us – the obviously not-sinful-because-we-are-not-poor – to separate ourselves from the poor. After all, you wouldn’t want to live next to a red-light district because you don’t want to be associated with that sinfulness – it might just rub off.

There’s nothing wrong with the American gospel of prosperity until it claims to be Christian. Or, as another Roman Catholic theologian – Stephen Colbert – put it:

“If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it.”

Now it’s pretty obvious that poverty, food policy, food stamps, unemployment and all the rest are both political and economic issues. It’s just as obvious that there are a wide variety of approaches to these problems, and that people of good faith can reach quite different conclusions about the best and most effective policies to address them.

I do, of course, care about that stuff, and I certainly have opinions about it. But none of that is what most concerns me. Jim Wallis was on to something crucial when he cut up that Bible, because this is, first and foremost, a theological problem for me, and it is one that challenges me deeply.

After all, I live in the richest county in American and I follow the one who said, “you will have the poor with you always.”

That is among the most regularly misunderstood words of Jesus. It has been used often as either an excuse to ignore poverty out of resignation or to charge Jesus with not caring about the poor.

But Jesus was not making economic predictions – as accurate as they may have been as such. No. Instead, he was offering a description of the community of followers of Jesus. The people of the way would always include the poor. The poor would be, always, part of the community of faith. Rather than being reduced to consumers of charitable services, Jesus understood that the poor would be full and significant members of the community of faith.

I fear that we are constructing a “great chasm” between ourselves such that we cannot get from here to there, as the Lazarus story puts it. We cannot get from here to abundant life much less to eternal life – however we think of that – if we cannot get across the great chasm that we construct between ourselves and others.

Passion and compassion are fundamental to the way of Jesus. To follow the suffering servant means following him into places of despair, and it means being willing to experience that despair ourselves, fully. It’s hard to do that when we live fenced lives, gating ourselves off from the risks of poverty as if we might catch it like a virus.

Richard Rohr, one of my favorite contemporary spiritual writers, put it this way:

Until we walk with despair, and still have hope, we will not know that our hope was not just hope in ourselves, in our own successes, in our own power to make a difference, in our image of what perfection should be. We need hope from a much deeper Source. We need hope larger than ourselves.

If we live the life of the rich man – a life well and clearly designed and constructed to avoid suffering and despair – we do not know that we need hope from a much deeper source. Until we let go of our own designs, Rohr goes on to say, “we will never discover the Real Life beyond what only seems like death. Remember,” he says, “death is an imaginary loss of an imaginary self that is going to pass away. This very journey is probably the heart of what Jesus came to reveal.” (Rohr, Near Occasions of Grace, 100.)

Most of the time we are asleep to that journey.

A wise friend once said to me “discernment essentially means ‘wake up.’” Discerning God’s call and claim on our lives entails waking up to the reality of our lives. For us, here in the middle of the richest county in the richest country in the history of the world, waking up means being honest about what we have received, what we have been given. Waking up means hearing, again, with honest clarity, Jesus’ charge that from those to whom much has been given, much is expected. Waking up means seeing with honest eyes the great chasm that we are digging between ourselves and so much of the rest of creation. Waking up demands a journey to the other side of the chasm. Waking up means confronting the truth that the life that is really life lies mostly on the other side of the chasm.

Waking up means, for individual life, for congregational life, for political life, that the first question we must ask about decisions we make in each of those realms of life is this: will the choice I make help bridge that chasm or will it dig it deeper? As we try to follow the way of Jesus toward the life that really is life, may our lives and choices and, yes, our politics, be filled with building bridges. Amen.