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In 2008, Samuel and his wife had a combined income of more than $100,000 a year. As he puts it, they “lived the middle class highlife of the twos—two salaries, two kids, a two-car garage attached to a four-bedroom house in a nice quiet neighborhood.” In looking back on that time four years ago, Samuel says, “Man, we were living the American Dream, but I’m still stunned at how quickly everything changed.” He now describes his story as a “riches to rags” story. Samuel was a website designer and writer. He and his wife were college educated and had never struggled to find desirable jobs. When Samuel lost his job in 2009, he started his own company. Samuel describes himself as a “hustler” who worked hard and managed to have a booming business for the first six months. Then, suddenly, his pool of clients shrank sharply. His clients were struggling with the Great Recession, and they could no longer afford his services.
That first year the annual income of Samuel’s family was cut in half and by 2010 it would be reduced to a third of what it had been. Soon they depleted their savings. In the meantime, job queries received no response. The children were moved from private school to a public school they deemed “substandard.” Before the end of 2010, the family’s cars were repossessed and the house went into foreclosure. Bills and unpaid taxes piled up, and the resulting tension in the household led to a divorce. At age 50, Samuel’s 15-year marriage had come to an end. The toll on his self-esteem that this economic fall has taken can be easily heard when Samuel speaks of his current life. He says, “Every day, a bill collector will call and remind me that my lack of money means I’m now a ‘loser’ or a ‘deadbeat.’ I live the life of a coward—afraid to answer my own door out of fear that a bill collector or someone who’s come to shut off one of my utilities will be standing there.” Samuel continues, “It’s hard to see myself as a contributing member of society or as a good provider now. My pride, my sense of manhood has been nearly destroyed.” In considering the whole of Samuel’s story, we might say that part of what he has undergone is akin to grief and mourning. It’s as if his pre-recession life was a whole other life that was rapidly and traumatically taken away from him. Before the economy and his own life took a downfall, he saw himself as a complete man and human being. He had a job, a happy family, and all the trappings associated with middle class life. With his former life gone, his response might have included anger and denial, but at this point, it most certainly includes depression. He has this horrible self-image of himself as a loser with nothing to offer his family or society.
What Samuel has experienced would seem to be the kind of thing no one would want to experience or wish upon one’s worst enemy. There are, of course, some who might hear Samuel’s story and say that he’s responsible for his own situation. When people are thrown into poverty, it can often be tempting to blame the victim. The bestselling author Barbara Ehrenreich has addressed this nicely. She says that “the theory for a long time…is that poverty means that there’s something wrong with your character, that you’ve got bad habits, you’ve got a bad lifestyle, you’ve made the wrong choices.” Ehrenreich, however, says, “I would like to present an alternative theory…poverty is a shortage of money. And the biggest reason for that shortage of money is that most working people are” either “not paid enough for their work” or “don’t have work.” This view of poverty seems to suggest that the number of unemployed in our country didn’t suddenly rise because there was an epidemic of laziness. Instead, it would seem to suggest that our society as a whole went into an economic tailspin that forced people to either work for less or go without a job altogether. For a lot of people in our country, the Great Recession threw the American Dream in reverse at an alarming speed. Their former lives were lost, and many are likely still grieving that loss.
When I think about this context and I think about how people like Samuel personally experienced this reversal of the American Dream, I find our scripture reading for this morning provocatively unsettling. To put it in modern terms, Jesus is telling this person of wealth to put his American Dream in reverse voluntarily. Instead of moving up the economic ladder of prosperity, he is to climb back down. He is to give away everything he has and live an itinerant life completely dependent upon the kindness of others. When I read this, it is easy for me to instantly think about what it would mean for me to suddenly get rid of my car and my home and all the things I own, but there is also another social-psychological dimension to this. Back in the time of Jesus, if you were a wealthy man, your sense of self was wrapped up in the honor that you were given and the degree of masculine power you embodied. Part of the status one was afforded reflected whether you were self-sufficient and productive. So, essentially, Jesus was asking the wealthy man to not only give up his material possessions but also that sense of standing, position, and manhood that bolstered his self-conception and self-worth. Jesus was asking him to voluntarily place himself in a place that was the ancient equivalent of where Samuel found himself placed involuntarily. Not surprisingly, in response to Jesus’ prescription for self-induced poverty our scripture says that the rich man “was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.”
In the past when I read this scripture, I had two responses: one that was critical of the rich man and one that was critical of myself. On the one hand, I saw the rich man as being kind of pathetic and morally compromised. I was pretty judgmental about him. On the other hand, I also felt as if the scripture was calling me to account. Do I have too many possessions? Am I unwilling to live my life in solidarity with the poor and marginalized just as Jesus did? I would try to see if there was some way I could bargain with the scripture to make it seem like it didn’t apply to me, but then this past week, I began to consider a different way of looking at this scripture. I focused on that line about grief—how he went away grieving—and I began to feel a lot more sympathetic toward the rich man. Whether you are putting your dream into reverse voluntarily or involuntarily, it is understandable that you are going to experience some grief. That’s not a bad thing. In fact, it can be a very good thing if one then works through that grief effectively which can be extraordinarily challenging to do.
Next month I will be heading back to Colorado for my second training on grief counseling at the Center for Loss, and the person who founded the center talks about how people who are grieving have specific needs that need to be met in order to cope with their grief as best as they are able. Let me outline three of those needs. The first is developing a new self-identity. For instance, a wife becomes a widow, a parent becomes a bereaved parent. “The way you define yourself and the way society defines you is changed.” You take on new roles whether it is taking out the garbage or buying groceries. Over time, you ideally grow into a sense of renewed confidence about who you are and what you can be. If our rich man were to follow Jesus, he would go from being a lofty, wealthy elite to being a poor, subversive disciple. That’s a radical change in identity that requires very different roles and a very different basis of self-worth. A second need is the search for meaning. A loss can throw everything into question. “How could God want this?” The resulting spiritual journey may lead you to a new place in thinking about your faith. For our rich man, this could mean discovering that there is something fulfilling and meaningful in being in solidarity with the poor, in leading a life of service to others, in proclaiming and embodying the kingdom of God. A third need is receiving ongoing support from others. I think many of us know from experience that one’s capacity to heal during the grief process has a lot to do with “the quantity and quality of the understanding support you get.” For our rich man, there was a community waiting to embrace him. He didn’t need to grieve alone. He could have been guided by others to a better place. For me, when I think about the rich man’s grief and imagine his needs, it helps me to humanize him and it helps me to realize his potential for transformation, however, challenging that might be—even if it is as challenging as a camel going through the eye of a needle.
All of this makes me feel a lot better about evaluating my own life and where I am at on the poverty-wealth continuum. What if Jesus wasn’t simply trying to make the rich man feel guilty? What if Jesus was doing what he always did which is to be the shake up artist, the one who unsettles us enough to provoke our thoughts, question our values, and spur us to transformation? It seems to me that this is exactly the kind of Jesus we need right now. We need a Jesus who will shake us up as individuals and as a society. If Jesus were alive today, I wonder if he would not only tell the rich to give away their possessions, but he might even tell those running for office to give away their war chests. A little grief might be good for our democracy. We need Jesus to shake us up, because if the status quo persists, the American Dream will keep going in reverse. It will keep running over people like Samuel and so many others in this society who don’t deserve to experience the kind of personal, involuntary loss that they have experienced. I ultimately like to think that Jesus not only came to shake things up but he came to get the rest of us to shake things up as well. In dealing with our own grief, that might be our final need: to stir up enough trouble to make the suffering cease. Let us be disciples, and let us be the shake up artists we’ve been waiting for. Amen.