Audio from worship at the 10 AM Worship Service January 15, 2023 at St Peter’s Episcopal Church in Carson City, Nevada edited from a flawless transcription made by edigitaltranscriptions all errors are mine.
Well, it’s 4:00 o’clock somewhere. Why is that in the gospel reading? Why is it important for John to tell us that it was about 4:00 o’clock, it was at 4:00 o’clock in the afternoon? What? What? Why do we care, John?
Now, John is – it’s a strange thing for John because John is, can we say it, he’s chronologically challenged. He’s not a time guy. I mean, we’ve got Matthew, we’ve got Mark, and we’ve got Luke. And they say things happened this way. And then we got John said, oh, it went all over here, craziness. All over here. Crazy. I mean, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, one year, they’re done. Jesus done. Over here John, three years. This guy’s not about the timekeeping. You know, Fitbit, all that kind of – nothing. Why does he say 4:00 o’clock?
Now, you might say, well, you know, he’s about light and dark and coming into the light, you know, and going out of the dark, and there’s light, and the times of day are emblematic of the lightness and darkness of the day. Well, what’s 4:00 o’clock? What crazy time zone is there kind of light and dark change at 4:00 o’clock? Not even the craziest daylight savings get us there. And so I look at this, and I’m reading, okay, they’ve got the spirit, and they go and get Caiaphas and all. And he goes, it was about 4:00 o’clock. What? Why does he say that?
Another thing that is going to be John is that he uses a word called ”μένω” (men-o). It is used about 40 times, and over half the times of in the New Testament that it’s used, half the time is in the gospels of John and the letters of John. He loves that word. And the word is in here three times in this scripture. And it’s translated different ways. It is “remained” when the holy spirit descends like a dove.
And then it comes also in kind of a throwaway line in that when Jesus asks a question, you know, “What do you seek?” you know, why don’t they say answer that question? You know, like oh, we seek the four spiritual laws. Or we think the theological ramifications of the Eucharist, you know. Why don’t they say that? They’ll say no, they say, “Rabbi, where you stay?” Men-o. That word is a big word for John. It’s one at the feeding of the 5,000. Feeding of the 5,000, there’s no food, suddenly there’s a bunch of food, everybody eats, everybody’s happy, it’s, you know, like Thanksgiving. They’re all full. And Jesus brings the crowd down, you know, really sucks the energy out of the room when he says, “Yeah, that’s good food, but get the food that men-o, that endures, that stays, that remains, that abides.”
John also likes that word when he talks about how to come to faith, how to be in faith. It’s faith about abiding. And remember it goes, “He who abides with me, I abide in them.” Same word. I abide in them. And John also says wherever the spirit abides, that’s where you can come to faith. It’s a big word. A big word in John. Abiding. Staying. Now, that one word, that one concept has several different meanings in our culture.
So several different meanings in our culture. And one of them was demonstrated in the classic film which please don’t watch on my recommendation, there’s a lot of cursing in it, is The Big Lebowski. So let’s take a look. “The Dude abides.”
Now, Sam Elliot character there, only named “The Stranger,” tells him “Take care. I know you will.” And Jeff Bridges’ character, Lebowski, The Dude, says “The Dude abides.” Now, what does he mean by that? Abides had several different readings, not only in our scriptures, but also in today. It could be you abide by the law. It could be obey. I obey. I abide by that law. I abide by that.
And it could also mean usually in the negative sense that the things you put up with or not, you know. Oh, I just can’t abide by someone who is constantly sniffling instead of using a tissue. I just cannot abide by that. There’s that kind of abide.
There’s also – doesn’t that bother everyone? Am I the only one? No? That bothers everyone; doesn’t it? Okay. So, yeah, abide is also, in a more positive sense, an abiding memory; you know? We talk about the memories of childhood, vacations at the lake, continued to abide with him throughout his life. So there’s that kind of abiding. And there’s also the kind of abiding where it’s a staying, it’s an enduring. He abided by her throughout her illness. Where do you abide? Where do you stay? Where do you live? Where do you keep your soul? The abiding. Several different kinds of abiding.
Remember that 4:00 o’clock thing I was talking about earlier, you thought I forgot about? What about that? That’s really the place they talk about abiding with Jesus, and right before they start bringing in other people to him. Peter, yay, Peter. We like Peter here. So abiding, it was 4:00 o’clock in the afternoon. What’s 4:00 o’clock in the afternoon in your life that abides? What time abides with you? I’ll tell you a time for me: 2:30 p.m. 2:30 in the afternoon. July 12th, 1980, I got married. I remember Dr. Paul F. Bauer. I was okay until he turned to me and said, “We just have to wait for the chimes, then we’re going in.” The chimes were at 2:30. That’s when I started abiding as a husband. And when I took the vows, Bette Lynn said “obey,” ha ha ha ha. So, but we took vows for each other and cherished one another, and that was the beginning of abiding together as husband and wife. And that was about 2:30 in the afternoon.
10:10 in the morning. Not just the way people set clocks that look pretty, but 10:10. That’s when my daughter Rachel was born. I remember looking at the clock. That’s when I became a parent. And that was – she’s less than 40. But that was a moment that abides. That abides with me. So I’m thinking that when John includes the 4:00 o’clock thing, it was when the disciple says, yeah, I remember the day that Jesus says “Come and abide with me. Come and see where I am abiding. What are you seeking? You’re seeking to abide with me.” It was 4:00 o’clock in the afternoon. I remember it was yesterday.
What does it mean to abide altogether? There’s definitely staying, and definitely enduring, and definitely some kind of toleration and putting up with, a little bit of obeying, not in terms of I have a command, but to get along with you I’m going to abide. And boy, has that been a challenge in the last few years, to abide with our relatives. Oh, my gosh, and friends. It’s been – and Facebook, oh, my gosh. Who can abide by Facebook anymore? It’s so difficult.
When I left, tried to leave the ministry for a few years to go work on computers, I was sucked back into a church, and my boss, the pastor there, John, was – not his real name – John went through a very traumatic divorce. There was actually violence against him, and he was staying in my basement for a while. It was a mess. And one of the times I got a call from the Christian educator at the church on Friday night. In case you’re wondering, that’s not accepted practice in the Presbyterian circles. We don’t usually call at Friday night about something in the church. And she called up and said, “John’s been arrested.” Oh? And that’s also something that doesn’t happen in Presbyterian circles much, the pastor’s been arrested. And she says, “I can’t go there. I don’t want,” you know, because of the divorce, she didn’t want to go down there and the soon-to-be-ex-wife go crazy about the other woman, whatever she was thinking. And I said all right.
So I go on down. And I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t hang out with people that got arrested. I don’t know. Went to the little police office in our little town. And they wouldn’t let me in the door. But I said, “Hey, I’m looking for John. He just got arrested. I don’t know where he is.” He goes, oh, yeah, yeah. And he went in, and he brought out the court order that he violated. He was supposed to stay, I don’t know, 50 feet away from her and all those things that he’s supposed to do. He was definitely less than 50 feet away her. He was definitely on the porch saying, “Why can’t I see my kids? Why are you keeping my kids from me?” And that was definitely within 50 feet. He definitely did that wrong. And they called him, they hauled him off
And the police officer was arguing with me about the 50 feet and that he did something wrong, and he should have been arrested. And I wasn’t there for that, you know. I said, “John’s my friend, and John does stupid things. Here’s one of them. This was stupid. He definitely violated that, and definitely you should have arrested him. He was in the wrong. But even though he does stupid things and violates court orders, he’s still my friend. And I’m here trying to figure out how to help my friend. How can I help my friend?”
So the cop put the arrest report away, and he said, “He’ll be down at the detention center, and his arraignment is about in an hour. He’ll probably get out, and he’s going to need a ride.” I go, “Thanks.” So went down there, and they decided they could maybe trust the local Presbyterian pastor to behave. So they did let him go, and I picked him up. That’s abiding. I mean, he was wrong. The cop was right. You know. He shouldn’t have done that. But he’s my friend. And we put up with each other. We abide.
Some people think Christianity is, you know, when I made a decision for Christ, when I said the four spiritual laws, or when I confessed my sins, or when I came up to the altar, the Presbyterians were having a little fight about whether or not we can come up to the communion table. We don’t have altars, a big stink in the [indiscernible]. So people say this, you know, that made me a Christian. Okay. If you think that, that’s fine. But it’s like a wedding, a marriage, the difference there. A wedding takes part in a specific time and place and location, and it starts and stops. And the wedding is over, but the marriage endures. The marriage abides. And there’s a lot of, you know, I will abide by that, or I will endure that. I will go with you through that. I will cherish you in sickness and in health. That’s all about abiding.
And the gospel writers and the epistles writers often talk about the relationship with Christ and the Church, which is us, the Church, is like a marriage in that we abide with one another, that we put up with one another, that we stick through with one another no matter what. “The Dude abides” I think means I get through it the best I can with the help of my friends. And isn’t that the faith? Isn’t that what God calls us to do? What are you seeking? I’m seeking to abide with you. Amen.
I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. Fight, finish, and I’m going to go with fidelity because I can’t remember unless they all start with the same letter. So fight, faith, and fidelity. Those three things is what Paul lifted up. Or whoever wrote 2 Timothy. If you want to start an argument with anybody, just go up and say, “As Paul says in 2 Timothy.” Oh, my gosh, they all yell at you. Paul didn’t write 2 Timothy. That was somebody else, and the letter uses a totally different vocabulary
I had one guy in seminary that said, “Well, you see, Paul had that shipwreck. And when he had a shipwreck, he hit his head. And when he hit his head, his whole vocabulary changed. And so that’s why 2 Timothy doesn’t match up with the rest of the letters.” I thought it was a stretch, but whatever.
Whatever this was, this was somebody trying to say, or Paul saying, what Paul was like on the very last days, month of life. He had lost the first appeal. He had already been there. And it looks like where he’s sitting now he’s going to go off to be killed by empire for going against the king, going against – meddling with politics. Oh, my gosh. And so at this time he sort of looks back over his life, according to this author of 2 Timothy, and he says these three things. Instead of being upset or angry or depressed or giving up or regrets, instead he says three things: Fight, fidelity, finish.
Now, you can say the good fight is that he did it according to the rules, that he had the umpire with him all the way, the officials said he was okay, he counted the mats, he didn’t cheat and all that. I don’t think so. I think the good fight is something worth fighting for. Something that is worth fighting for is a good fight. John Lewis, a politician and a great leader of our country, talked about getting in, not fighting, he talked about getting in good trouble. He talked about good trouble, to get in good trouble. You could always tell John Lewis because when everybody else was out marching ready to get beaten up, bloodied, and tear-gassed, and they were in their work clothes for getting beaten up, bloodied, and tear-gassed, John Lewis was the guy in the suit. He came, he was serious.
And John Lewis was saying that if you see unfairness, if you see injustice, if you see someone being oppressed, you have a moral obligation to speak up, to walk, to shout, to call attention, to shout, to sit down, to demonstrate, all the things you can do to make that right, in fact, to get in good trouble. Good trouble. Trouble that is worthwhile for getting into. John Lewis, at the end, he had a book come out. And it kind of reminds me of 2 Timothy, you know, because it was a collection of his thoughts and essays. He’s supposed to have been involved, I don’t know much involved it was, at the very end of his life.
And the last book came out, it said: “Carry On.” Carry on. And his idea was that he would have a book, the last book of his life, to pass the torch to the next people, maybe some sitting here, to work for the good of the people, good of the country. Carry on. Fight the good fight. Stand up, speak out, get in the way. Get in trouble. Good trouble. I think that’s what Paul got in. He got in some good trouble.
I also want to talk about keeping the faith. Now, keeping the faith could be also, could be that you preserved, that you persevered through all your life, that you didn’t renounce Jesus, that you kept the faith. And, you know, kind of a personal inside yourself, all to yourself. But I like to think it’s more like fidelity, you know, kept the faith as – kept it the way it should be, preserved it. Kept it unadulterated. Kept it from being watered down. Kept it from being distracted. Boy, do we have a trouble with that now.
I mean, we’ve gotten rid of radios. Does anyone still listen to radio? One person. I have a weekly radio show, so I’m looking bad at all of you because I have the weekly radio. But remember you used to tune the radio? And you would tune it, and it’d go . And then you get, you just, you almost get it, and you tune it just in, and you can hear the message, you can hear the voice, you can hear the music and hear the program. But on either side was a lot of static. And they called that, when you just get it just right, and you just had the music, you just had the tones, you just had the sound, you just had the program, you just had the broadcast, and none of that other stuff, they called that “high fidelity,” that you could hear things with fidelity, only the message and nothing else. No other distractions. No other things that obliterated or changed the music.
Boy, do we have trouble with fidelity today with our faith. Horrible, awful trouble, so much static. I call it “white noise.” Have you heard the white noise? All lives matter . Just drowns out the suffering of the people of color, drowns out the suffering of indigenous people, drowns that all out with white noise. All lives matter . You will not replace us. Welcome the stranger. Love the stranger. Welcome the stranger. Help the captives. Welcome people to come in and goes, oh, we’ve got to have borders. Close the borders. Secure the borders. You don’t have a country. White noise. Covering it up and all.
It’s so hard to keep the faith, to have fidelity to the faith, to tune into faith and tune out everything else. I like to say the word “blasphemy.” You know what I hear? I come down through Minden from Carson City, and what’s up in Minden? They have a Save America rally. Now, you all may not be old enough, some of you, but I remember when they had a Save America rally, they were talking about the Savior Jesus Christ. Anybody remember Savior Jesus Christ, supposed to save America, save the world? He was the Savior. That’s fidelity. That’s keeping the faith. Saying something else, someone else going to save America? White noise. White noise.
Paul here says I didn’t let that white noise drown out the message. I kept it high-fidelity. I kept the faith. That’s one of the things that we are called to do, to keep the faith, no matter what happens, no matter what we go to.
Good trouble. Good trouble. What does that mean, taking those two together, high-fidelity to faith and getting into good trouble? Maybe it’s throwing out the whole idea that we don’t elect a President, we elect people who elect the President. What’s that about? I’m against that. What is it about where the leaders choose their voters? What in the world’s that about? And we’ve got to change the districts all around so I get the voters that I want to stay in power. The people in power get to choose who’s going to vote for them to keep them in power. It’s supposed to be the other way. The people are supposed to choose who’s the people in power. The people in power aren’t supposed to choose who’s voting for them. That’s just wrong.
Now, you can tell me, Christy, and you probably will, “Christy, you’re getting into politics. Oh, my gosh. Awful, terrible, awful.” Well, I follow the God that is the God and the Ruler of the Universe. And it’s not the entire Universe except the, you know, little parts of United States where we’re arguing about this issue, so God, you stay out of that part. The rest of the universe, cool. But this part right here, no. You’re not supposed to be there. Unh-unh. That’s white noise. That’s not getting into good trouble. People say, “Oh, Christy, that’s just being politically correct. You’re just being politically correct.”
You know, we had a good word for politically correct. It’s called compassion. It’s called empathy. It’s called looking at other people as ourselves, that feel what they feel, to understand what they’re going through, to be with them in their struggles and their oppression. That’s not politically correct. We had a good word, that’s compassion. And what are they advocating when they say no politically correct? What do they want? They want political corruption? I would much rather be correct than corrupt. So when someone says, oh, that’s just politically correct, oh, you’re for the corruption. You like politically corrupt. I would rather be correct.
If that doesn’t work, you talk to them about empathy. Don’t have to go inventing new words. I thought that was a horrible awful thing to do, to vet new words and change things. We had a perfectly good word called “compassion.” What does this look like? What does it look like when we don’t go with empire? What does this look like if we were kind of like Paul was in that he went up against empire probably preaching like this, in Valley and Lee Vining, got in trouble.
But what does Paul – what does it look like when we go up against empire and say all that stuff that you value, that you structure society, that you’re saying how people should live, that there should be slavery, that there should be oppression, that there should be winners and losers, that there should be huge wealth inequality, that we should worship the emperor to save the empire, instead of God to save the world. What does that look like? We’ve got a video. And we’ll probably see what it looks like. And this is the last part about finishing the race. What does it mean to finish the race? It’s not winning the race. It’s finishing the race.
Now, that is some good trouble. He went against the officials and the crowd and finished the race. He said that his dad came up and said to him, you don’t have to do this. You can quit. And he said, “Get me to Lane 5.” That was his lane. And he finished the race. 65,000 people, the entire crowd, got up and gave him a standing ovation. That was finishing the race. Wasn’t winning the race. And he says in later interviews, “I’d rather have the gold medal.” You’ve got to really admire his honesty.
But that’s what it looks like when we don’t go for the gold when our only motivation, our only thing is to win like the empire tells us to win, like the capitalism system tells us to win, that the one who dies with the most money, and we’ve got to keep trying to make sure that the rich gets even richer, and more and more goes up to the even tippy-top 1%. And everybody else gets crumbs. Winning at all costs. Going for the gold instead of going for community and support and helping one another so that we can all finish the race, instead of one or two winning the race.
John Lewis, Paul, Derek Redmon, all show us what it is like to not get into empire, to live the life of faith, to be faithful. Which is to fight good fights for good things. Get into good trouble when there’s something that needs to be called out, to be fixed, to be changed, for other people so that they can get into the race and finish the race. What it means to be fidelity to the faith when all the other noise attempts to drown it out, to still hit those clear tones and broadcast the gospel message of love your enemies. Do not kick them out. Help those that need help.
Later on I think if we remember we’re going to talk about in Presbyterian churches we say forgiveness of debts. But some people would tell us that forgiving debts of student loans was some kind of horrible awful thing. No one complained about forgiving the PPP loans, but that was different, I’m told. But every Sunday we are radicals. Every Sunday we get into good trouble. Every Sunday we say forgive us our debts as we forgive our debts. Because, well, that’s spiritual debts. Well, no, no. Forgive us our debts. That’s a very subversive thing.
Our people come from a place where honor and debts and money and thrift were very important, the Scottish people. And they chose to say forgive us the absolute worst thing, being in debt, as we forgive the absolute worst thing with others. That was some strong words that we prayed. Don’t let them be drowned out. Don’t let it be confused about who – we’re looking to save America – who we think the savior of the world is. Don’t let that be drowned out. Get in some trouble over it. That’s a good thing to get in trouble over. Stand up for those that are suffering. Call out for people that are suffering injustice or being put down.
Stay tuned in to the message and the faith of Jesus Christ. And you will finish the race. You may not win it, may not want it. But you will finish it. And God will keep you. And it’s not something that’s just one day. John Lewis says it’s not just – freedom isn’t just a place where we stop. It’s just not one day or one hour, or it’s not an election or presidential term. Freedom is a lifelong pursuit. It’s a race that we’re all looking to finish together. Amen.
Take a look at that cover of the bulletin. And I can see you on Zoom, whether you do it or not. There’s a beautiful temple with some beautiful stones. The key thing is, that does not exist. That was not even in the mind of a human. That was made by a computer. I told a computer to paint me a beautiful temple. And that’s what it did.
So this is an imaginary temple that’s beautiful that’s on the front of our cover, that never existed. What is our beautiful temple? What one would we point out to Jesus, or Jesus would see us honoring and say, look at the beautiful things, by the special gifts dedicated to God. What is your beautiful temple? We have the computers one. What would yours be? Would it be your home? Could it be your home? Do you have a wonderful home, perhaps passed down through the family? Would it be family and grandchildren? Would it be your marriage? Would it be those that you love, some that are here and some that have gone on? What would be your beautiful temple, your place of honor and respect and safety and admiration? Would it be your country? It could be your country. For some it’s the alma mater, at least the football team of the college they went to.
Or maybe it’s a church. Could it be a church? Some people live for the church. Does it help you to realize that when Luke is writing this, finishing up writing it, and when the people are reading it for the very first time, fresh off the parchment, does it help you to realize that at that time the temple was already destroyed? When people first read Luke, the temple was already destroyed. Stones were already disaster, and it’s already a ruin. So for them, for the first readers, and actually for Luke as he writes it, this is not – they would not experience this as a prediction of things to come, but rather as an explanation of things that just happened of the recent past.
What beautiful things have you lost? What do we idealize in the past that we wish were there, that we thought was there, that we thought was eternal and withstand the test of time, and we could put our hopes and our faith and our safety in, but is now gone? Like it would be for the people first hearing this scripture? If we can figure out what that is, we can figure out how the original hearers, the first readers, the intended audience would take this. That’s one part of it.
The next part of it talks about all the attacks on Christians. Or it doesn’t talk about attacks on Christians. It talks about how terrible things would come, and folks that have just experienced the destruction of the temple would certainly recognize this and certainly identify with it. But I want you to think about the phrasing that’s used. And maybe it’s not true to the test. But it certainly spoke to me very profoundly because it talks about attacks on people because of Christ’s name.
Now, what if it wasn’t the attacks on people bearing Christ’s name, and they got attacked because of it? What if we read it another way? What if we thought that people were using Christ’s name to attack others? What if because of Christ’s name, there was attacks taking place? That is easily read in the way, if you look through the scriptures, it says there’s attacks because of Christ’s name.
Well, who’s attacking whom? Is it the Christ name people attacking those without Christ’s name? Or is it others attacking those that had Christ’s name? We always assume the latter, that we’re the persecuted and the martyrs, the ones under attack. And people love to flock to this when a store says “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas,” and their beautiful temple is threatened with destruction. But what if it wasn’t that? What if the attacks were because of Christ’s name? Here’s a little clip. If technology likes us, we will be showing a little clip from the 2003 film called “Saved.” I hope it works well. Let’s see what we can do here.
The gospel is not a weapon. Or this is not a weapon. I wish they would have said the Bible’s not a weapon, or the gospel. That’s from “Saved” in 2003. It seems kind of prophetic to me for today. I mean, who is suffering from the Christians? Who’s being attacked by the Christians? I think I can find more examples of that than I can find examples of the horrible awful trauma imposed upon us by seeing “Happy Holidays” at some places.
Is it the immigrants? Do immigrants because of the CHINOs – I call them CHINOs, you know, Christians In Name Only. The immigrants got bussed up to Martha’s Vineyard, political pawns, with lies, and were registered in homeless shelters throughout the nation. And they had appointments in Texas and Washington D.C. and Georgia for Monday morning and were shipped up to Martha’s Vineyard for Saturday. By Christians. You know, immigrants, like Jesus. Is it white people or brown people? Brown people like Jesus. Is it people that have nice homes or the homeless that are swept off the streets like, you know, homeless, like Jesus, didn’t have a place to be born? Is it Christians that get attacked, or non-Americans? You know, like Jesus. Pretty scary. But scary for different ways.
I mean, I’m a martyr. That’s my spiritual gift. You know martyrdom is a spiritual gift? I think it’s a one-time use thing. I don’t know. But I, you know, I’ll suffer. And I kind of know about that and kind of being a pastor and a church leader and, you know, I kind of understand a little bit about suffering for your faith and heard about stories and inspirations and all that, and I understand that. But suffering because of your faith and then having other people use the faith so other people suffer. I don’t want to face that. I don’t like that. That’s worse to me than the other option, that folks are being attacked because of Christians.
I’m going to try to share the screen now. Put your – how’s that? Do you see a quote up there? Yeah.
This is Jamie Raskin. He’s Jewish and identifies as a Humanist, as well. This is from 2006. “Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You did not place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.” That should give us pause as Christians.
You know, Jamie’s a Jew, and according to Jews or according to their tradition, they’re religious in the following of their faith. They are required, they are required by their religion to prioritize the life of the mother over the life of the fetus, of the unborn child, of the developing embryo, whatever names you choose. They are required that when the choice comes down to it, that they must prioritize the health and life of the mother. That’s against the law. They can go to jail now for practicing their religion. From Christians.
I mean, for 50 years it was fine. I mean, we had a – I read Roe v. Wade back when it was passed in the ‘80s, studied it, came to terms with it as a way the nation can go forward, accommodating all religions and not just imposing one understanding, a very narrow understanding, a biblical understanding of life on everybody else because freedom of religion is not the freedom of other people to practice my religion. That’s not freedom of religion.
When folks got so upset about this issue or that, and the Christians came after me and talked to me about, oh, my gosh, it’s against God’s will, that gay marriage, for example. And I’d tell them, you know, it’s okay if you do not participate in gay marriage. You can still keep your own marriage. You know you’re allowed to do that. But somehow freedom of religion has changed to freedom for other people to practice my religion. And that’s not good. And people are attacked because of Jesus’s name. But it’s not the Jesus’s name people. It’s the people with Jesus’s name that are attacking.
Did you know that insurance companies now are allowed, according to a recent court case, not to cover preventative medicine for HIV because the company does not approve of homosexuality? And said, well, that helps the homosexuals not die from doing things I don’t believe in, so I don’t want to pay for the not dying medicine. I want to let them die because they don’t believe the way I do. That is very troubling to me as a minister, and I’m going to trouble you with it because I’m troubled. I see that as an attack in Jesus’s name, on folks that are vulnerable. And I don’t like it, and I’m going to preach against it.
But I don’t want to leave you with that. I try not to be all terrible awful, even though I’m three hours away, if you got in the bar, really mad, got in the car, start down, it’d be three hours before you got here. But there are other good things in this scripture that you might have missed, as well. But let me point them out. There’s hope in this scripture, and endurance in this scripture, and even advice in this scripture. It’s so good that the disturbing parts kind of uncover it.
One of the advices there that is really good to me – remember I say my spiritual gift is martyrdom, and I always go looking for opportunities to practice my spiritual gift, which means I’m always on the defensive, always looking for someone attacking me, so I can be a martyr, so I can be defensive. And I’m not going to get into it. I pay someone to listen to me twice a month so you don’t have to listen. But what it talks about there is it talks about defense. Do not prepare a defense in advance.
Oh, my gosh, is that a hard one for me. I’m always preparing a defense in advance. I’m ready for all your objections to the sermon. Sometime last week I was ready in my head because I prepare a defense in advance. And God said don’t do that. Don’t prepare a defense in advance. Wow. Instead, it says I will give you words and wisdom. And it’s important those are both because wisdom, we think of wisdom as pithy sayings. We think of wisdom as little bon mots, little tiny little things to say that, oh, my gosh, I need to put that up on a poster and put it as my desktop background or something.
But that’s not wisdom in the Bible. Wisdom in the Bible is so much more than words. Wisdom is a way of being in the world. Wisdom is a way of being open to others, to God, and of course to the possibility that I might actually be wrong. Wisdom is listening to others. Wisdom is taking advice. Wisdom is listening to God, to the situation, and finding a way through it all, that mess. Wisdom is openness. Defense, on the other hand, if you’re being defensive, you’re going to shut down, shut out, build the gates around, build up the walls, reinforce your own beliefs, take away all the other advice, put down anybody else because you’re defending. And God said don’t do that.
Consider that defense is the opposite of wisdom. If you’re preparing your defense, you’re going away from wisdom. If you don’t allow other people in, if you do not see other folks living their lives, if you do not allow other people their pronouns, even though you don’t understand it, what’s the big deal? If you go in defensive about that, go, well, I’m not doing that, you’re going away from wisdom. Wisdom is openness. Wisdom is learning. Wisdom is listening to God. And wisdom is paying attention to others. Wisdom is paying attention to what God is doing in the world. Wisdom is listening to other people’s stories and their faith and their understanding. That’s wisdom, wisdom, wisdom. It’s a way of being in the world. And it’s not being defensive. If you know it all, you’re not going to learn anything.
I think the difference could be in the phrase of “that’s different.” Have you ever been told when you were talking to someone or arguing with someone, let’s be honest, and you said, well, what about this, you know, the what-abouters? And you say, “Well, that’s different.” Well, now, the thing between defense and wisdom is how that is used in the conversation. Is it that’s different, period, end of sentence, go away, you bother me, gates are shut, the walls are up, I’m defensive, you’re not going to get in here because, you know what, that’s different. So that stops everything. Okay, that’s defense.
But you know it could also be the beginning of wisdom. That same phrase with different ways of saying it could be the beginning of wisdom because you can say it with curiosity instead of condemnation. You can say it as, not as a curse, but as an invitation. You could say, well, that’s different. I never thought of that before. Let’s talk about that. I didn’t consider that point of view. There, there’s wisdom. So when someone says to you, “Well, that’s different,” you can say, “Thanks for noticing,” and continue the conversation about the differences we have in our faith, our life, our experience and where we go and how we live together. “That’s different.” “Well, thanks for noticing.” Let’s talk about that. Because as we talk and we learn, that is the beginning of wisdom.
And Jesus, in the scripture it says here that – and Jesus prompts us, is that how you will endure? And if we’re thinking the way I’m thinking, that you endure the attacks of Christians, or as I call them, CHINOs, which are not a comfy, cotton-based pant, but rather Christians In Name Only, what are you going to do? You can be defensive, and I want to be defensive. I mean, I’ve got a scripture and a commentary for every scripture they got, buddy boy. They come at me with some abortion scripture, I’m going to show them Numbers 5 because right there looks like a prescription for abortion according to God, right there in Numbers 5. Oh, you never read Numbers 5? I read the whole Bible. Go ahead. Try me. I can do that all day long.
But that’s not wise. What’s wise is to be open to other things and to live our lives according to respect, admiration, and to get along with other people, to realize that our freedom of religion does not mean everybody else has to follow our religion. That’s not what this America is for, not what the country’s for, not what Jesus desires for us. Jesus does not desire us to attack others in the name of Jesus. In the name of Jesus I’m passing this law, so you all have to be Christian. No, no. I reject that. I hope you do, too. Because the more that we are defensive about our faith, the more we’re going to retreat from wisdom.
Wisdom is what’s going on? What is God doing in the world? Where is God working in my life and in the lives of others? What could be the best for all the people, not just my people? That’s very difficult to do, especially for me when my spiritual gift is martyrdom, and I want to stop everybody from attacking me, and anyone who doesn’t live like me must be attacking me. But no. Jesus says no.
So I hope you consider flipping this scripture around and not look so much at checking off, oh, my gosh, here comes another attack against Christians, checkmark, checkmark. Because you can do that. You can be defensive. Don’t do that. You’re going to reduce your wisdom. Instead, flip it around and watch how we, Christians, in Christ’s name, attack others. How we turn families against one another in Jesus’s name. And how we prepare defenses when we should be preparing to listen and to be open to the wisdom of others.
Friends, you will endure. There is good news in this scripture today. It’s not just all about calamities and disasters. And remember that even then, if you remember that the temple was already destroyed when they were reading this, it wasn’t so much about let’s know the future and have a peek at what God’s doing in the future, and we can tell, and we have extra special knowledge that no one else does; but rather it was let’s try to understand where we are here and now and what we’re suffering here and now, and what our challenges are here and now, that we could be open to what God is doing in the world here and now with one another. Not gather our battlements around our beautiful temple and wonderful gifts and stones, but realizing that God is not there, and that it’s already gone, but what is left is not to be defensive, to be wise and listen to others and see God’s work in the world and know that we will endure if we follow God instead of our own defenses.
I want to talk to you about truth. And why we can’t believe it. Why we have so much trouble with it. Now, again, I must warn you in these times that if you think truth and lie is political, you get another political sermon today. Hopefully it’s not as long. But if you think that truth is a good thing for Christians to consider when we follow the guy, the savior, the son of God that calls himself, what?, the way, the truth, and the life, well, then this is a faithful sermon. I mean, after all, truth is Jesus’s middle name. We should be able to talk about that as Christians.
What is going on in this scripture? Is this the weirdest scripture ever? Is it true? Ooh. That’s a tough one. If you’re saying, Christy, is it true, is this a transcript of a conversation between heaven and hell and between Abraham and the rich man who has no name, and Lazarus, who doesn’t say a word in the whole darn story, is that true? Is it a transcript? Did Fox News have a reporter there transcribing everything? Was it on a podcast? Was it captured by a secret recording device? Is there video? If there’s video, didn’t happen. If you say all that about being true, well, I don’t know. If you’re saying, Christy, is this a roadmap to heaven and hell? Is this a way to figure out how we could go with heaven and hell? Can we measure the actual chasm? How deep is it? How wide? Can we sing about it deep and wide or what? Is it true that way? I’m not so sure.
And maybe even step back further, and you say, Christy, Christy, is this all about heaven is a place where those who have a lot get tormented, the rich get tormented, and those that have suffered get comfortable, so it’s okey-doke, the great wealth inequality and divide today, because after all it’ll get all sorted out in the afterlife? Is that what this scripture’s about? Now, most preachers will tell you that the whole thing is on the last one, that even if someone would rise from the dead, they would not believe them. Jesus is kind of predicting what would happen when he comes back from the dead and people don’t believe him. But I don’t know if Jesus was really thinking about that when he told the story.
What is true in this story? Strangely, I think what is true is the last line, that people don’t believe based on evidence, based on what they see and what they know. They do it the other way around. We don’t take a whole bunch of little evidence and then come up with the truth. We don’t do that as a people, as a species, as human beings. We don’t do that. We’re not like a whole bunch of scientific instruments and measurements and rulers and spectrographs and that we figure out what is true. We’re not like the James Webb Telescope where we look out, we take those photons and assemble them into galaxy and the truth of the universe. We don’t do that.
There is a book called Noise that just came out, and it’s by a really big thinker named Daniel Kahneman. Here’s what he said on Science Friday in July.
We have the wrong idea about where beliefs come from, our own or those of others. We think we believe in whatever we believe because we have evidence for it. Because we have reasons for believing.
Reasons. When you ask people, why do you believe that, they are not going to stay silent. They’re going to speak. They’re going to give you reasons that they are convinced explain their beliefs.
But actually the correct way to think about this is to reverse it. People believe in reasons because they believe in the conclusion. The conclusion comes first for us humans. And the belief in the conclusion in many cases is largely determined by social factors. You believe that people you love and trust believe, and you find reasons to believe it. And they tell you your reasons for believing that, and you accept the reasons. For this larger social phenomenon it is not an error of reasoning because reasoning isn’t involved until after you’ve made your decision and conclusion.
And that, by the way, is true to your beliefs and my beliefs. Your beliefs and my beliefs reflect what we’ve been socialized. It reflects the company we keep. It reflects our belief in certain ways of reaching conclusion, like a belief in the scientific method. Other people just have different beliefs because they’ve been socialized differently. And because they have different beliefs, they accept different kinds of evidence. And the evidence that we think is overwhelming just doesn’t convince them of anything. And it’s only gotten worse. With social media and streaming services, you know, when I grew up there were three networks. Four if you counted UHF, but who watches news on that? There were three networks and the paper, the newspaper. That was it. That’s all you got.
But now you can fine-tune your reality down to the very last demographic got point. If you want to see only Trump news all the time, just switch on this channel. Or you get this Facebook feed. And Facebook tracks how long you watch things, and they’ll show you more like that. YouTube’s even worse, that the more you watch stuff, the more of that kind of stuff you get. So suddenly you’re in a very tight little bubble of social news and information that you are not exposed to anything else. And of course when you’re clicking on it, you’re clicking on stuff that interests you that already support your conclusions and what you think. And we’re just never going to get to the truth.
So in Twitter, I don’t know if anybody has Twitter. But on TweetDeck, if you click on an article that said, an article, whatever you wanted to call it. It’s terrible awful. You click on it and say I want to retweet this. I want to pass it on. Twitter will stop you now and say, uh, do you want to read that first, before you send it out to everybody? How do I know that? Oops. We come to a conclusion, and then we find reasons.
So you say to yourself, you see, so how can people believe the Big Lie? It’s obvious to me that the election was fair. I mean, they’ve had 60 court cases, and we’ll go after our reasons one after another. But it doesn’t matter because we went from conclusions to reasons, not reasons to conclusions. And the other people do the same way. Of course it was stolen because there was boat parades and Trump is the greatest ever and he told us that it was stolen. They have all these reasons, too. But it doesn’t really matter because they started, just like us, with the conclusions, and then went for the reasons afterwards.
What can you do if our whole life, our whole belief system, the way we live, the way we look at the world, the way we vote, the way we talk to another, is conclusion first, reasoning to support it after? What is there to do?
There’s a great movie, the video’s coming out. There’s a great movie called “Secondhand Lions” from 2003. I highly recommend it. It got a little punchy in places, but not so bad compared to today. And one of those things is there’s a mystery of the two men and where the heck they come from. They were gone for 40 years. They supposedly have a lot of money, like buried treasure money. And where they’ve been 40 years, supposedly they were in Africa and had these wild adventures. And they were telling them to their great-nephew Walter. And Walter confronts Hub about those stories in our clip today.
WALTER: Those stories about Africa, about you. They’re true, aren’t they.
HUB: Doesn’t matter.
WALTER: It does, too. Around my mom, all I hear is lies. I don’t know what to believe.
HUB: If you want to believe in something, then believe in it. Just because something isn’t true, that’s no reason you can’t believe in it. There’s a long speech I can give, and it sounds like you need to hear a piece of it. Sometimes things that may or may not be true are the things that man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good. They find courage and virtue in everything. The power and money, money and power mean nothing. The good always triumphs over evil. I want you to remember this. Love, true love never dies. Remember that, boy. Remember that. Doesn’t matter if it is true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things because those are the things worth believing in. Got that?
WALTER: That was a good speech.
HUB: Think so? Thanks.
Doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not. You can still believe in it. Do we agree on that? If we choose what we believe, and then find reasons to come to that? Why do we believe? We can say, well, we’ve been socialized to believe the Bible and the scriptures and the Savior and the stories and Sunday school and all that stuff. But you know, that’s what our friend the author says. But you know he doesn’t go far enough because it’s not just what we believe and what we experience and what we figured out, what we socialized. I don’t think so. I don’t think it gives enough thought to it, too.
Because, you know, what we believe is partly what we talk about is what the received canon is, what the received faith is that goes, not just what we know, certainly hopefully not just the faith is based only on what we’ve experienced, but it’s through the history of the church and thousands of years, and experiences that go all the way back to those that actually knew Jesus and those that were with him and around him and around the witnesses that wrote the gospels. And it comes back through us through thousands of years. So it’s not just what we experience, but what the church has experienced, the people have experienced. You know, it’s like having blue checkmarks on Twitter, you know, these are verified sources that we believe in.
But I think he’s right in that we don’t believe things because we actually found Noah’s Ark and its preserved wood, and we did carbon dating, and we found all sorts of animal food, and all sorts of different debris from animals, and so we know that was Noah’s Ark, and so we know it – no, we don’t do that. That part’s true. We believe what we believe because of what we see in the lives of other people, not just social things, but how we see other people live out their lives.
There was a woman named Terry. Terry came to the church I served. Terry did not believe in God. She was right out front saying she did not believe in God. But oh my gosh, she was there every Sunday. So she was there every Sunday with her partner, who was a big God believer. And she came, and she listened. For years she listened to me yell at her. I mean preach, like I do. And she finally came in to be baptized – she was in her fifties – and accepted Jesus Christ, not because it was proven to her, but because she saw the difference in the life of her partner and the friends and the church. And she saw what it meant to others, people, what it prompted other – her partner was a great deacon, leader of the deacons, just always helping people everywhere, all the time.
And she was baptized, became a member, elected to Session, served on Session. And then when I left that church she was my reference. And it wasn’t because I proved Christianity to her by the four spiritual laws or anything else that led from reasoning to conclusion. It was because she had the conclusion, you know, this Christian thing seems to be working out pretty good for these people. They’re pretty good people that are around here. And she went that way.
You know Jesus doesn’t really give an entire theological course. The systematic theology of Jesus is not a thing in the Bible. He doesn’t say one after another, how does the trinity work. He doesn’t say how does salvation work. He doesn’t even say what effectual calling is, and we get tested on that in seminary, and there’s nothing from Jesus on it. He doesn’t say anything. What does he do? He tells stories about people and their lives and how they live and how they treated other people. And he says this is the way that people treat one another. This is the way the kingdom is. This is the way people work out.
He healed people. He healed the sick. He didn’t say “Give me your testimony, and also you’re going to have to be baptized. You’re going to have to do” – no, he healed the sick, whoever was brought to him. He healed the Roman servant, the Roman, the occupier, the military, the colonizer, the one that beat down and will eventually kill him. He healed the servants. Are we going to say “friend”? That’s another sermon. There’s no faith there. But he was showing them how we live in the kingdom.
So you’ve got some friends, one way or the other. I don’t know which way they are. We are not going to take a survey. I will be checking your cars for bumper stickers later and taking notes. But you’re not going to change one way or the other by arguing them with proof and conclusions. I mean, just look at the things going on. They go down to Mar-a-Lago and do an FBI raid. And there’s all, “Oh, a raid, it’s terrible, it’s awful, what the heck are you doing there? There’s nothing there.” And they go, “Well, okay, there were boxes of classified secrets.” Oh, yeah. “Oh, it was obviously planted. It’s not really that important.”
Evidence doesn’t matter because we’ve already come to a conclusion, and we’re just looking for reasons to support it. So what Hub tells us, and what Jesus tells us, and what I’m telling you, is that choose straight up what you’re going to believe. And then go around the world making that happen, making reasons for other people to believe that what you write is true.
If you believe all people are basically good, what are you going to be looking for? You’ve going to be looking at evidence that all people are basically good. That’s a pretty good way to spend your life. If you believe that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything, that is what you’re going to work on. You’re going to work on being honorable, being courageous, being virtuous. And you’re going to be looking for that in other people, and pointing that out, and lifting that up, and celebrating that.
If you believe that money and power, power and money mean nothing, you go live your life that way. And you go look for reasons why money and power, power and money mean nothing. If you believe good always triumphs over evil. I always like the saying
“In the end, everything will be okay. If it’s not okay, it’s not yet the end.
~Fernando Sabino, translated from Portuguese, popularized by John Lenon.
You’ve got to be looking to do that, looking for reasons to believe that, to celebrate that, to promote that, to pass it along. The same thing with true love. True love never dies.
And there are problems in the scripture. We could go on and on. I know you like long sermons, but what’s going on in that scripture. But, you know, even if you hear the sermon about oh, my gosh, he’s ordering Lazarus around even though Lazarus is dead and kind of not his servant anymore because, you know, dead. You know, and he doesn’t even treat him, he won’t even go himself, he doesn’t even ask himself, oh, Abraham, forgive me for being such a big jerk. That would be a whole different sermon there, if he did that. But it’s a story, and Jesus was telling us that people don’t come to faith by people telling them and arguing with them about how they’re wrong and how they should live different. It comes from us living different, from us choosing what we believe and living that way, of getting our conclusion and then making the reasons in world and in their lives to support that conclusion.
Wouldn’t that be wonderful, if we were the proof that faith and courage and virtue were the most important, that power and money mean nothing, and that true love is forever, never ends. Wouldn’t that be great if that was our conclusion, and we spent our life coming up with reasons why that’s true? Much better than arguing with other people about how that should be because, even if someone comes back from the dead, they’re not going to believe it. But they will not believe it. But we can live it, and we can pass it on by our lives.
If greed is your politics, this is a political sermon. I hope it’s not a political sermon, and that greed is not your politics. Because you may think from the beginning that the sermon is about or the scripture’s about Jesus said I’m not going to be a divider or an arbitrator. I’m not going to be your financial counselor or your family intervention specialist. I’m not, just like with Martha and Mary the last time I preached about telling the other sibling to do what I want, well, I’m not going to tell you and your brother how to get along with money. But later on Jesus says to everybody, he really knew what that was about. It wasn’t about fairness or judicial process or financial planning or any of that stuff. It was about greed. And he tells the story about a man with the land that produces very well, and what does he do about it.
Now, some people will hide their greed, not so much in dividing their inheritance among their brothers, but they will say this. Have you ever heard this? Have you said it? Don’t raise your hand if you did because it’s a bad thing. If you said “The church needs to run like a business.” You ever hear that? “We have to run the church like a business.” Or “We have to run the country like a business.” That is usually a cover-up for greed. Because what is the business, then, if you say the church, or the country, or the nonprofit, or the family has to run like a business? Who’s the customer? What’s the product? Who do you serve? Well, yeah, if you’re running a government like a business, well, then you have the product of governmental services and graft and corruption and all that. And you give it to the highest bidder, the one who will pay you the most, and the rest of you forget about it. You know, hey, if you want some government services, how about giving some money? You know, this is a business. I’m not in it for my health.
The same thing with the church. Running a church like a business, that usually means I’ve given a lot of money to this church, and I’m not getting a lot back. You’ve got to run like a business, you know, take care of your paying customers. That’s not with the church is about. The church is one of the only institutions that exist primarily for those outside the institution. And that’s not very business-y.
12 Step has this tradition, as well. 12 Step’s tradition, you probably wonder in a 12 Step group, any of the recovery groups, you may say to yourself, hey, what’s a recovery group for? Well, it’s for those folks that go, those poor folks that go to the recovery group to recover. That’s their purpose, their meaning, and their mission. I mean, they’re the paying customers; right? No. It says right in every recovery group the tradition is that their number one purpose is for those that are still suffering. That’s not very business-y. It’s for the other people, not the customers.
It’s not so much the problem with money or with riches. You say, oh, well, he’s just all against the riches. He’s all about terrible awful things. But no, it’s not about that. It’s about who does that serve? Who is it for? The little zing right at the end, you know, man, those things you have prepared, who will they be for? You know, that is a good question to ask before you die. All these things that I have prepared, who are they for? Who is my life for? Who are my riches for? What am I here for?
Warren Buffett, who we talk about, has a philosophy. He’s one of the world’s, I don’t know what number he is, he’s like eighth or something. He’s getting up to $100 billion. He says his money is not his. And he tells other billionaires and millionaires, the money is not theirs, it’s just entrusted to us while we’re here. He knows, and he thinks about the next generations, about what’s going on with the money.
And running things like a business doesn’t work for the government. The government does things that no one wants to do, that no one can find a profit in, that no one can find enough people to do it. And there’s all sorts of things that only the government could do. The interstate highway system is an absolute loser in terms of building projects and things. To have an interstate highway system that goes from coast to coast, up and down, north and south, maintained, is a government job no nonprofit business would ever take on because there’s no money in it. You can’t have enough tolls to keep backing the money. They keep trying to do that, and they keep failing. But, you know, once we got the interstate highway system, boy, trucking really took off. Shipping really turned out. Amazon would not be possible without the interstate highway system. And the government does that.
Ever heard of the Internet? Nobody wanted to do the Internet. It was ridiculous. Nobody wanted to do that. There was no money in there. I remember in 1990 they were saying, what’s the good of the Internet? Who’s going to look at this stuff? But the government saw something in it and put it in there. AT&T wouldn’t do it. There wasn’t any money in it. They had plenty of money in the telephone and in their leased lines. They’ve got plenty of money. And they had no interest in getting the Internet to everybody. Who wants that? There’s no money there.
The government did it, called Arpanet, and set it up and made the protocols and promoted it and did that. When I started using the Internet, imagine if you will how old I am. When I started using the Internet, you were not allowed to talk about money. You were not allowed to talk about products. You were not allowed to talk about prices or anything. It was like community radio. You couldn’t make money on the Internet because it belonged to the government.
ATTENDEE: So un-American.
REV. RAMSEY: I know. But then the government says, okay, we got it going. You see how great it is? We got it done. Go for it. And gave it over to private industry. But the private industry, the government as a business would not have done that because it was a big money loser to make it. Ever heard of Hoover Dam? Nobody wanted to do that project. Way too much money. The government did it and electrified the nation along with other projects. Rural electrification, no one wants to run electric line to little towns and little farms and everywhere. The government, in rural electrification and co-ops, they made electricity go out through the entire country.
The same thing we’re trying to do with telecommunications today, to go out through the entire country. There’s no money in it. There’s no profit in it. Who’s the customer? They can’t pay. If all the government had to do – Obama said this and got into so much trouble because he didn’t know what he was doing. Obama says, if I just had to make widgets or an app, that would be easy because I would just have to worry about satisfying my customer about whether they would buy the app or not. But when I make a widget or an app, I’m in the government, I have to worry about everybody. I have to worry about the poor people who can’t afford the widget and the app. What are they going to do? I have to worry about unintended consequences about the environment, about our society, about economics, about the next generations. I have to worry about a lot more than selling the widget at the store.
And I just can’t go bankrupt and walk away. It’s a lot harder to be good government than it is to be business because it’s not all about greed. It’s about asking the question, who is this for? Is it for the paying customers? The one that has the money? Or is it for everyone, for the next generation, for the greater good, for the culture, for all that. Look at what he said in that scripture. Back to scripture. I knew you never thought I’d get there. But look at all the scriptures he said, “What am I going to do?” How many times does he say “I” and “my”? What am I going to do? What am I going to do with all this? What am I going to do? Say to myself – he even talks to himself. He talks.
The only other person he talks to is himself. He says to Saul – now, I don’t know about economics and farming business back in Jesus’ time. But I’m thinking there’s a couple people working that land. I’m thinking maybe one or two. I’m thinking there were some people selling the stuff. I’m thinking there were some people keeping track of the ledgers and all that. I’m thinking there were some people driving the wagons to market. I’m thinking there’s a lot of people. How about those people? How about the people that built the barns, or tore them down and built bigger ones? What about them? What did they do? He didn’t say anything about them. You know, you fool. The things you have prepared, who would they come from us?
Now, if your politics are about greed, you’re going to say this is a politician story. But I want to tell you that the idea of what do we do with our wealth is very biblical. About person-wise and with society. What do we do with our wealth? Do we build bigger and bigger barns so that less and less people can have more and more? There’s all sorts of statistics. But the one I like is pretty close. It would be nice if it was exact. But it’s really close to 50% of the world’s wealth, 50% of the world’s wealth. You got a barn. 50% of the barn go to 1% of the people. All right? 50% of the world’s wealth goes to 1% of the people. Well, they earned it. Or I don’t know, whatever you want to say. But I don’t know. Is that the way we want it? Is that the way we want to do that?
Wonder how the other side, there’s another 51%. Did you know that? 1% of the world’s wealth. 1% of the world’s wealth. Remember that 1% of the people had 50% of the wealth. If you look at the other end, the 1% of the wealth pretty much goes to 50% of the world. So 50% of the world’s population is dividing up 1% of the wealth. while 1% of the people is putting in a big barn of 50%. Is that the way we want it? Is that the way Jesus wants it? Is that showing that we’re not into greed, that we’re thinking about that?
There’s a wonderful quote. And remember why did that guy build bigger barns? It was for security. Wasn’t it? He says, “What am I to do?” And he says at the end, goes “Whoa, I’m set now. I can eat, drink, and be merry. I’ve got all I want. That’s my security.” And what he feared was the loss of security.
There’s a chart I saw recently that I can’t get out of my head. A Harvard business professor and economist asked more than 5,000 Americans how they thought wealth was distributed within the United States. This is what they said they thought it was. Dividing the country into five rough groups at the top, bottom, and middle three 20% groups, they asked people how they thought the wealth in this country was divided.
Then he asked them what they thought was the ideal distribution. And 92%, that’s at least nine out of 10 of them, said it should be more like this. In other words, more equitable than they think it is. Now, that fact is telling, admittedly, the notion that most Americans know that the system is already skewed unfairly. But what’s most interesting to me is the reality compared to our perception. The ideal is as far removed from our perception of reality as the actual distribution is from what we think exists in this country. So ignore the ideal for a moment. Here’s what we think it is again.
And here is the actual distribution. Shockingly skewed. Not only do the bottom 20% and the next 20%, the bottom 40% of Americans barely have any of the wealth. I mean, it’s hard to even see them on the chart. But the top 1% has more of the country’s wealth than nine out of 10 Americans believe the entire top 20% should have. Mind-blowing.
But let’s look at it another way because I found this chart kind of difficult to wrap my head around. Instead, let’s reduce the 311 million Americans to just a representative 100 people. Make it simple. Here they are. Teachers, coaches, firefighters, construction workers, engineers, doctors, lawyers, some investment bankers, a CEO, maybe a celebrity. Now let’s line them up according to their wealth, poorest people on the left, wealthiest on the right, just a steady row of folks, based on their net worth. We’ll color code them like we did before, based on which 20% quintile they fall into. Now, let’s reduce the total wealth of the United States, which was roughly $54 trillion in 2009, to this symbolic pile of cash. And let’s distribute it among our 100 Americans. Well, here’s socialism, all the wealth of the country distributed equally.
We all know that won’t work. We need to encourage people to work, and work hard to achieve that good old American dream, keep our country moving forward. So here’s that ideal we asked everyone about. Something like this curve. This isn’t too bad. We’ve got some incentive, as the wealthiest folks are now about 10 to 20 times better off than the poorest Americans. But hey, even the poor folks aren’t actually poor since the poverty line stayed almost entirely off the chart. We have a super healthy middle-class with a smooth transition into wealth. And yes, Republicans and Democrats alike chose this curve. Nine out of 10 people, 90%, said this was a nice ideal distribution of America’s wealth.
But let’s move on. This is what people think America’s wealth distribution actually looks like. Not as equitable, clearly. But for me, even this still looks pretty great. Yes, the poorest 20 to 30% are starting to suffer quite a lot compared to the ideal. And the middle-class is certainly struggling more than they were, while the rich and wealthy are making roughly 100 times that of the poorest Americans and about 10 times that of the still-healthy middle-class.
Sadly, this isn’t even close to the reality. Here is the actual distribution of wealth in America. The poorest Americans don’t even register. They’re down to pocket change. And the middle-class is barely distinguishable from the poor. In fact, even the rich, between the top 10 and 20 percentile are worse off. Only the top 10% are better off. And how much better off? So much better off that the top 2 to 5% are actually off the chart at this scale. And the top 1%, this guy, well, his stack of money stretches 10 times higher than we can show. Here’s his stack of cash restacked, all by itself. This is the top 1% we’ve been hearing so much about. So much green in his pockets that I have to give him a whole new column of his own because he won’t fit on my chart.
1% of America has 40% of all the nation’s wealth. The bottom 80%, eight out of every 10 people, or 80 out of these hundred, only has 7% between them. This has only gotten worse in the last 20 to 30 years. While the richest 1% take home almost a quarter of the national income today, in 1976, they took home only 9%. Meaning their share of income has nearly tripled in the last 30 years. The top 1% own half the country’s stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. The bottom 50% of Americans own only 0.5% of these investments. Which means they aren’t investing. They’re just scraping by.
I’m sure many of these wealthy people have worked very hard for their money. But do you really believe that the CEO is working 380 times harder than his average employee? Not his lowest paid employee. Not the janitor. But the average earner in his company. The average worker needs to work more than a month to earn what the CEO makes in one hour.
We certainly don’t have to go all the way to socialism to find something that is fair for hard-working Americans. We don’t even have to achieve what most of us consider might be ideal. All we need to do is wake up and realize that the reality in this country is not at all what we think it is.
All right. That was, like, 10 years ago. And it’s worse now, if you can imagine. Now, is that political? Well, if your politics is greed, yeah. Yeah, it’s political. So what are we going to do? Remember that our guy in the scripture was about security, and worried about security, and he built bigger barns for security and said, “Eat, drink, and be merry.” I used to, when I was more annoying than I am now, I know it’s hard to imagine, but I used to go around and say, you know, “Eat, drink, and be merry” is in the Bible. It’s right there in the Bible. I’d tell everybody that, and they go, oh, yeah, really? I go, yeah. The next verse it says, “And then God said ‘You fool.’” Right after. So you’ve got to kind of read more than one verse in the Bible. That’d be good.
All right. But Ernst Bloch says this. In fact, he’s back early in the 1900s. “The most tragic form of loss isn’t the loss of security. It’s the loss of the capability, capacity to imagine that things could be different.” The most tragic form of loss is not what that guy felt in the story of Jesus, that loss of security. It’s a loss of the capability, the capacity to imagine that things could be different. Do we have that? Are we tragic, more tragic than the person in our story that had everything and then died the next day. We could even be more – it’s not Bible, but I think that’s true. We can imagine things.
How could things be different? Well, on an individual level, certainly, we can spread the wealth around. We can do things that are not concentrated. Maybe, just maybe, oh, my gosh, it’s so easy to order from Amazon, but maybe we don’t want Jeff Bezos to have traveling to Mars money when other people don’t have traveling to the grocery store money. Maybe we don’t want to buy everything on Amazon. Maybe. Maybe could do other things, too, about choosing where we spend our money, choosing who.
Maybe we tip more. You know? Tip used to be To Insure Promptitude. Did you know that’s what it stood for? To Insure Promptitude. I think that was a reverse engineer. I don’t think it started that. And it came out, well, it came out with Prohibition, and the bars quit selling drinks, and they figured out they weren’t making money, so they cut the wages of the workers, and the workers didn’t have any money, so they had to say everybody throw some money to the worker because we’re not paying them anymore.
But now I think tips are To Insure Poverty. Because if you’re working for tips, you’re going to be in poverty. So we were at a conference. All the big, big thinkers of the Presbyterian Church had a conference for training. And, you know, we were at a conference center, and they said, “Shall we leave something for the housekeeping staff when we check out?” And the person says, “Well, you know, the tip is included in your registration fee. And we do put on a gratuity. But I want to tell you, none of these people are making too much money. So if you want to leave something, go ahead.” Maybe you want to do that.
But how about some more specific examples, Christy? Well, there’s Warren Buffett. Have you heard of Warren Buffett? I talked about him earlier. That man is, even though he’s having so much trouble giving away his money, you know how much money Warren Buffett has given away in his lifetime? What do you think? What would be a lot of money to give away, if you were really rich? What do you think? How much?
ATTENDEE: One million.
REV. RAMSEY: One million. Do we have any – it’s higher. Anybody?
ATTENDEE: 10 million.
REV. RAMSEY: 10 million. Higher still.
ATTENDEE: 50 million.
REV. RAMSEY: 50 million. That’d be a lot.
ATTENDEE: Billion.
REV. RAMSEY: Million, yeah. He’s given 42 billion with a “b” dollars away in his lifetime. The man still has almost 100 million, can’t stop making money, poor guy. In fact, Warren Buffett has so much money that he’s hired Bill Gates, who’s a billionaire on his own, to spend his money. He actually gives money to Bill Gates, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to go ahead and spend it for him on things like Third World health and all that.
In fact, Warren Buffett is behind something called the Giving Pledge. And what that is, he invites millionaires and billionaires to pledge, it’s not a legal contract or anything like that, but they have a letter, and it’s all public and all that, you can look it up, GivingPledge.org. And these people pledge to give away half of their fortune during their lifetime or when they die. At least half. He’s getting a handful of billionaires and millionaires to sign up, you can look it up on the website, and they have a little letter about what they’re doing and how they’re giving away their money. So maybe…
But Christy, you say. We’re not billionaires. We’re not millionaires. We’re barely scraping by. Come on. What else can we do? Well, there’s a guy and his wife in Akron, Ohio – Akron, Ohio, where they shoot black people with 60 bullets if they run away from the police, my hometown – Duane and Lisa. Duane and Lisa just had a heart for ministry and decided they needed to do something for race relations and poor relations. And so they took their family of four – hello – and bought a house in the poorest, awful-est, most neglected neighborhood in Akron, Summit Lake. Summit Lake, during the 2008 when everything fell apart, money and all that, you could buy a house in Summit Lake for one dollar. They had one dollar houses at Summit Lake because no one wanted to live at Summit Lake. One dollar.
Well, I don’t know what he paid, but he got a pretty good deal. But that was later on. It was early, around 1998. He moved his family there and started working in the community. He started out with the bike shop and brought the neighborhood kids in, got some donated bikes, and says, hey, you work enough hours on fixing these bikes and learn how to use the bikes and being a good person, you can take the bike home with you. And he’s still doing this now, 25 years later.
But also it’s moved into, it’s higher, what they call reentry ministry, in that they take the people, and in fact they’ve got a little building, it’s called The Front Porch. It’s a café. It’s a coffee shop. It’s a rehabilitation center. It’s within walking distance of the jail. And a lot of folks come right out of the jail, they don’t have a job, they don’t have prospects, they don’t have anything, and go to The Front Porch. And The Front Porch finds them a job, gives them a job, puts them to work, does something. They have a recovery meeting on Sunday.
And that is his retirement. I mean, that’s what Duane and Lisa did with their money. They made The Front Porch. And they got the foundation, they got employees, and they’ve got things, they got the 501(c)(3) in about 10 years. But they started out the ministry, and they moved to the worst neighborhood in Akron. And, oh, they’re a couple good white people. And lived there, and gained the trust of the community, and worked with community, and bought a ministry. That’s a barn heat bill.
What about something a little closer to home? We’re not all from Akron, Ohio, Christy. Although everybody could be, should be, and it’s a sad thing you are not. But we have Carson City. 10 years. I’m in my 10th year at Computer Corps. Computer Corps is run by Ron Norton. Ron Norton is an amazing guy with great talents, former Army drill instructor, among other things. So he’s got a little of that sprinkled in there. And what he did when it was time for him to retire, he took his retirement, and he, if you will, founded Computer Corps. He got donations, and he got a house, and he started making computers available to senior citizens. Because back then seniors didn’t know about the mouse and graphics and back there 25 years ago. He started out with that.
He started refurbishing computers. He started saying, hey, give me your old computers. He got old computers, taught people how to refurbish them, and then sell them at a cheap rate to people that don’t have computers. Twenty-five years later, he’s got four different locations. He’s got over 1,000 computers a month coming in. They’re refurbished, and they’re sent out, and they’re sold, and people are rehabilitated. People, again, are coming out, even before, instead of jail, they get to go to community service at Computer Corps. He feeds them six hot meals a week, daily lunches. Has a food pantry runs there, rehabilitation things.
And I said, “Ron,” you know, the man’s getting old. I mean, I’m old. He, yeah, really there. And I said, “Ron, you know, what are you going to do? And how long are you going to do this?” You know, he’s there, six, seven days a week because on Sundays he’s up there rolling supplies in. I said, “Ron, Ron, what are you going to do?” And he goes, “Well, this is my retirement. I took all my retirement money, and that’s what you see around here. I got nowhere to go. This is what I’m retired from. This is what I’ve got to do.” He lives at the original house, along with other people in various modes of employee, volunteer, rehabilitation. And that’s how he built his barn, and how he invests, and how he answered the question: When you’re gone, whose would this be?
Maybe that’s all you need to do, you know, to overcome our propensity to greed and security and material things is to ask yourself, all these things I have prepared, if my life was gone today, whose would they be? What have I done for others? How am I rich toward God, as the commentators that wrote the Bible put in at the end. Those are good questions. Then you get yourself in the place where God calls you a fool. Never, never a good thing.
So what can you do? You can refinance. You can say I’m not like the billionaires and the millionaires. Anybody can do this. I mean, right now I’m in Valley Bishop, and I don’t want to say I’m a saint or nothing. I’m not. In fact, this is what I do because I’m not a saint. I’m here in Valley Bishop, and my church home is an Episcopal Church in Carson City, and I’m rarely there. In fact, it’s getting so they have to pay me to be there. They have to hire me for a Sunday. And I go, well, I got that Sunday, great. But every Sunday my tithe is there, my contribution is there.
And you can think about that. One of the cures, if you will, treatments for greed is to start percentage giving. It doesn’t have to be 10%. Doesn’t have to be a tithe. I haven’t done the math yet. I really need to do that. But if you can commit yourself to a certain percentage of your income going to other people, the church is fine, nonprofits, whatever, any of that would help your greed and your barn building. Just by thinking about percentage giving to something that will go on beyond you. You can reinvest. And like Warren Buffett says, and he should know, he’s got more money than most of us, than about everybody but seven people in the world, you could say, “This isn’t my money. I’m just holding on to it while I’m here.” And move it to other people. So you can set up automatic giving. You’ve got to watch out. There’s some dangers in that and some things.
And also, if you notice, that was in Episcopal Church, and I’m a little embarrassed because I am giving money to the Episcopal Church when I’m Presbyterian. So I also give money to the Presbyterian Church PC(USA) Mission. I have a missionary I support. And that’s not because I’m wonderful. It’s because I’m horrible. If I didn’t set that up automatically, I wouldn’t do it. And I didn’t do it. And I would go to the Episcopal Church, and I would look at Betty Lynn, I’d go, we haven’t been there in two months, and we owe this. Oh, my gosh, I’m not writing that check. Ow. So we do that.
So you can reinvest your money. And pledge to yourself, like even – you don’t have to be a billionaire. You can pledge to yourself. Pledge. It is not a legally binding contract. Oh, there it is again. You can say to yourself, you can even write yourself a little letter, don’t have a website, but you can say I’m going to give this much away. Doesn’t have to be 50% like the billionaires. But can it be 2%? Can it be 1%? The important thing is that it’s going to be regular, it’s going to be a percentage, and you’re going to commit. You know, if last year you gave to something $1000, maybe you’re going to go by percentage, and that turns out to be $800. I think that’s a better gift. Not just if you’re in the mood, just saying I’m committed, and I’m going to do that. Reinvest.
You can also rebuild. I didn’t say rebuild, but at Computer Corps they rebuild. And what they do, they take chances on all sorts of people. When I showed up there, imagine, if you will, I showed up there, minister without a church, coming to Nevada without a job. That is very suspect. Why were you kicked out of the church? Who hates you? What have you done? I mean, that is an obvious question. And they gave me a chance. And after a year I got the key to the place. I tried to not take it; but no, I still have it.
But rebuild. And they just don’t rebuild computers. They take people there who have never had a job, that have never been outside their home, and they take them in, and they show them how to work a time clock, and they show them how to show up and how to leave, they give them a lunch, and they show them how to clock out for lunch and clock in for lunch. And there’s a lot of people don’t know how to do these things. And then when they leave, they’ve got one line on their résumé. And they’ve got a reference from Ron. And so many people have gone through there. And our best volunteers we lose because they go out and get somebody to pay them for what we train them to do.
So you can refurbish. You can invest in other people. Invest in other people that don’t really – maybe not worth the investment. And we’ve had some bad things. That happens. You can also, oh, it’s kind of like reentry, as well, in that you let people back in to life, figure out how they to get back into life. That’s what they do at, I didn’t say it, Southside Ministries in Akron. They figure out how to get people back into things. Maybe you’re in recovery. Maybe you support someone in recovery. Maybe you host a recovery group at the church or somewhere. But maybe we can figure out how to get people back on their feet again, and what could be done to help people instead of blame them.
There’s a little program up in Carson City called Circles. And what the Circles does is not so much giving money to the poor people, but they have the poor people and the people that are struggling, the people that almost have the first and last month’s rent, almost, to come and to – they have dinner, and they have training, and they asked them, what do you need to do to get a job? One time they said, “Everybody wants us to know PowerPoint. We don’t know how to do that.” Or “We don’t have a computer.” So we had a class in PowerPoint. Everybody learned how to use PowerPoint, and they can have another thing on their resume. Reentry.
Where are you putting the stuff of your life? What barns are you building? When you leave, the things you have prepared, who will they be? Think about that, and God and Jesus will not call you a fool. You will not be a fool. You will be blessed. Amen.
Christy Ramsey
