Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15, Psalm 91:1-6, 14-16, 1 Timothy 6:6-19, Luke 16:19-31
Only twelve years ago did I first start working with homeless men. I wasn’t inclined to, it’s not my specialty, but there they were, sleeping on the church’s stoop and begging out front.
At that time the Bloomberg administration had an optimistic Department of Homeless Services that aimed to solve the homeless problem, and the DHS began to treat me as their local agent. I was able to get housing for all of our guys, and then for nine more guys besides.
Then the door slammed shut. I couldn’t get housing for anyone. My referrals were useless. The DHS had changed it policies. The men had to prove that they were homeless by being sighted, sleeping out on the sidewalk, by an observer driving around the city, on any given night over a period of months. The guys wouldn’t do it, they knew it wasn’t safe, so they never got sighted.
We suspected why the policies had changed. It looked like the new priority was to get the homeless off the streets and out of sight of the tourists and visitors. Out of sight, out of mind. The city’s optimism had crashed against reality. Despite their efforts, homelessness was getting worse, because the cause of homelessness got worse.
The root cause is not mental illness or crime or any such circumstance. The root cause is simply the cost of housing. When real estate goes up, so does rent, and then so does homelessness. Face it: at least in our system, an increase in wealth brings with it an increase in poverty. So much for “a rising tide lifts all boats” and for the “trickle down effect.”
The “trickle down” is in the parable, in the crumbs from the rich guy’s table, which the servants would sweep them out the door, where the beggar could pick at them. The really nasty thing was the licking of the dogs, which was shameful and humiliating. Dehumanizing.
The beggar was dehumanized, so the rich guy owed him nothing. He could just step around him every day. It’s what we do in a crowded city: proximity with invisibility. Not out of sight, out of mind, but in sight and out of mind. Up close and impersonal. We cultivate an active unawareness. We think it’s nothing personal—there are just too many people, but in the aggregate and for the poor it’s dehumanizing.
An innocent unawareness is one thing, but the cultivated unawareness of the rich man made him guilty. It was the cultivated unawareness of his privilege. And that’s what privilege gives you: a useful and even comfortable unawareness. So that you can be in sight and out of mind.
It’s become a movement in our culture to talk about white privilege and male privilege and straight privilege, and although it’s often irritating it’s important, and valuable. I need to be aware that I do not just walk through life neutrally, but I walk through life with the benefits of white, male, straight privilege. If I refuse to be aware of this, then I’m like the rich man in the parable. If I get defensive and say it’s not my problem, then I’m really like the rich man in the parable.
Now, I’m not saying that the Lord Jesus told this parable to address the issue of privilege, but in that marvelous weekly interaction of present culture and the Bible, our present culture helps us to hear new things in the Gospel. I’ve preached on this parable at least eleven times, and for the first time I’m hearing it in terms of privilege, and the connection of privilege to cultivated unawareness.
Look how the rich man assumes his privilege even after death. Both men die, and both go to Hades—Lazarus to the Paradise part and the rich man to the Gehenna part, where he’s slowly being consumed. The rich man spies Lazarus over there, and he still assumes his privilege. He expects Lazarus to do for him now what he would not do for Lazarus back then. And he continues to dehumanize Lazarus by not addressing him directly, but by asking Abraham to order Lazarus to do it.
He further assumes his privilege by defending himself. He complains that he didn’t know, like he wasn’t told, that it’s not his fault because it was not made clear to him, and it isn’t fair. But it was made clear to him. He had not wanted to see what he was seeing, he didn’t want the awareness. He didn’t want to see what God had been showing him all along.
God had been helping him just by putting the beggar at his door. That’s why the Lord Jesus gives the beggar a name, the only time in all the parables. “Lazarus” means “God helps.” Maybe the rich man thought, “God helps those who help themselves, so if this guy is suffering it’s his own fault, and I don’t owe him anything.” I have that thought a lot. But Lazarus at his gate was how God was helping him with the chance to break free from his cultivated unawareness and the blindness of his privilege. For him to have helped this beggar would have added so much richness to his life.
We needed those homeless men out on our stoop at Old First. Last Spring, when we reopened the sanctuary and the front doors, I told that guy James he couldn’t sleep there any more. But he still does, and maybe we need him to, maybe it’s how God is helping us. We are the only church on Seventh Avenue without a front gate or a fence. Our open stoop is part of our mission. And don’t we have to accept whoever comes into our openness? When passersby ask me why I let him sleep there, I just answer, “It’s God’s house,” which either convinces them or just confirms their disdain.
There are scholarly wags who say that the radical message of Jesus was altered by the Apostles like St. Paul in order to establish the power structure of the church, and for that they needed access to privilege and wealth. It doesn’t hold up if you look closely at how Jesus financed his campaign. In any case, our second reading takes the parable and makes it practical.
Wealth is costly to us who are wealthy. I’m talking about the social cost, and the spiritual cost, and the moral cost. Your wealth offers you enjoyment and security and it demands your attention and your service and it becomes a jealous lover. So that your love of your money is the root of so much evil in your life. Evil to yourself, evil to others like yourself, and evil to the poor. This is a sobering truth. This is my second sermon in a row on wealth, and next week I hope the Lord Jesus talks about something else!
The Bible is not against the privilege of property per se. Look how God tells the prophet Jeremiah to buy some property, even though that piece of ground is in an area occupied by the Babylonian army besieging Jerusalem; and Jeremiah, himself in prison for his prophecy, will never see that property. It was God’s sign that God would bring the people back, after their necessary exile, to inherit the land and live in it again. It was their privilege, but not their right. They did not have the right to the land unless they served God on it. Their privilege was only for their responsibility.
Whenever we have privilege, we do not have the right to it, but only the responsibility for it. It’s not my fault that I was born white, and male, and straight. I am not guilty of these things, but I am responsible for them. I am guilty of it if I claim some right to my privilege, or maintain or defend it at the cost of others, or ignore how just having my privilege is costly to other people. I am responsible for it, and to serve God with it, and that means my neighbor, whoever is at my door.
We belong to each other. We are all in this together—this life, this humanity, this planet. The Christian message has its own kind of egalitarianism, its internationalism, its globalism, its vision of human solidarity. Historians tell us that the primitive Christian church grew within the Roman Empire not by evangelistic preaching so much as by taking in the sick that the pagans did not care for, and by rescuing the newborn baby girls that the Romans exposed to die outside their city walls.
That’s the kind of religion that what you want, that’s why you are here today, and you can respect the challenge of its sobering truths. This religion is the one great privilege that I did inherit from my parents, and it’s my privilege to celebrate it with you every week. So let me end where Jesus ends his parable, with his resurrection, and with his take on Moses and the prophets, and turn it positive.
He rose from the dead to vindicate the love of God, the love of God for all the world, and it is our privilege to love God back, and to love God back in terms of loving our neighbors as ourselves. We’ll be okay if we just stay with the radical and unconditional love of God.
Copyright © 2019 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
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