This is the second week running in which the readings have to do with this issue that, as I said last week, seemed to have been central in the consciousness of Jesus: poverty. This story, although it only appears in Luke, is certainly consistent with what we read in the other Gospels. We can ask, "Why was Jesus fixed on the poor?". I think the problem, which seems to go back as far as the human race does, is pretty clear in this little passage from Luke. It is the notion that we are what we own, so that if we possess more there is more of us, and if we possess less then we are lesser human beings. How do you account, for example, for something that would have been considered extraordinarily gouache when I was growing up, namely, the flashing of designer names on the front of shirts. People used to be very embarrassed so you had to hide the tags. Now, they are proudly displayed: "I am a Tommy Girl. This is a Calvin Klein T-shirt. This is a Pierre Cardin belt buckle, etc.". What is going on there? Is the word "Tommy Hilfiger" so beautiful an object that I can offer it to people? Or rather, is it simply the claim that because I can afford to buy Tommy Hilfiger clothes I can somehow superior as a human being? I believe that is called conspicuous consumption. What is the problem with that? I mean, nice clothes are precisely that: nice clothes. They fit better, they are more comfortable, and they may even be more durable. So what is the difficulty of owning lots and lots of stuff? It is this terrible illusion that we so easily fall prey to: the more I own the more I am, so that I really have serious misconstructions of myself as a human being. That is the first point. But the second point is even more telling.

If there is more to me because I can wear these clothes or own this property, then this distances me from those who do not own and possess as I do. I mean, there is an extraordinary sense of independence among the wealthy. And the more wealth we have the more independent we can be. We can tell everybody else to go buzz off. This is embedded in our consciousness so deeply. All you have to do is to look at advertisements: "Win the lotto and then you will be free". Free of what? Free from having to be bothered or having to depend on anybody else. The difficulty, therefore, is that the human community is made almost impossible to achieve with those kinds of inequities. All you have to do is look at the way the world is structured right now where we in North America consume seventy-five to eighty percent of the world's resources. Then too, look at the death rates of Third World countries and look at the death rates of our country. Obesity is a major problem in North America. It is not a major problem in most of the world. There is something that simply keeps us away from each other that makes, just as Lazarus was invisible to this rich person, the poor invisible to us. We cannot see them.

Furthermore, the greatest thing attendant on having lots of money is power. The United States Congress’ senators must raise ten-thousand dollars a day in order to run their campaigns. So who is going to be running the country? And power, of course, as Jesus says over and over, is most often the power to intimidate. And intimidation, to make the other afraid of one, is, again, a distancing maneuver. We are afraid of the rich. They are intimidating. And on the other hand, who is afraid of the poor. The poor are not able to intimidate. Well, I have to qualify that because I just read that security guards for gated communities is one of the biggest growth sectors of the service industry in the United States. So, you can build all of your nice houses and then you can erect big brick walls and iron gates and hire security guards in order to keep all of those nasty rubbies out. So we are afraid of them but only in so far as they can take our stuff and thereby diminish us. Again, the problem is determining how we can get together with those kinds of disparities. How can we, as Paul will say, "be members of each other" with those kinds of disparities?.

So, what can be done practically? Well, I have two small suggestions. One is simply to carefully monitor one's purchasing: Why do I buy what I buy? Where do I buy what I buy? "What do I buy?" is the obvious question. How much do I buy? And the other thing is a little experiment I have carried on for a number of years and it works, if you pay attention to it. (I keep having these lapses, so it does not work all that well for me.) It is this: when you sit down at a table for a meal, think of an empty chair which is occupied by the two-thirds of the people on this planet who are undernourished. It makes a difference. It truly does make a difference. To walk around imagining the reality, because it is the reality, of the mass of people who are pauperized, on the planet. Jerry and the historians can correct me on this, but from what I know of the culture of the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, or the Middle Ages, being market-driven was not the central means whereby the culture was put together. And today it clearly is. The United States government, to take it as an instance, is the most powerful nation in the world in terms of its money and guns. Yet who runs their foreign policy? How much of their domestic policy is market-driven? So, I think this is a novelty. Therefore, I think that all of this talk about poverty takes on a force and an urgency today that it has never previously had, especially for us in the First World.

But the danger, of course, is, as they say, that this is just going to take me on a guilt trip: "Make me feel bad." Oh, religious people have been doing that for years! "Badger people! Hector them into submission!". That is not at all my intention because I have to listen to what I am saying. How do you begin to encompass this world where the economic disparities are so gross and becoming graver? It only happens authentically to the extent that we really do believe that we are loved by God. Therefore we do not have to rely on all of this other stuff for our sense of ourself. And clearly, as the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible says over and over, to the extent that we are absolutely persuaded that we are loved by God we become more and more available to everybody else. That is the key, of course.

So, what do we do until we grow deeper into that conviction? Because I tell you, quite frankly, that is not my normal sense of myself. So, I have to simply look at statistics and be driven by the statistics of the mal-distribution of this world's plenty among us. And if you say that is being guilt-driven, I would rather say it is being truth-driven. And that is not a bad thing until I grow up and become more and more persuaded that God really does love me as much as God loves everybody else on this planet, and my response to everybody else ought to take place within that context.