Rollins Chapel, April 17, 2008
Richard R. Crocker, College Chaplain
Matthew 19:13-26
As I considered the theme for this term – “Consuming Religion, Faith, Desire, and the Economy”, I thought of several titles that would look good on the sign board out front. The first: “Can Dartmouth be saved?” Then second, “If love of money is the root of all evil, is Dartmouth the compost?” But finally I settled on this one, “If you are so rich, why aren’t you smart?”
I mean it seriously. Growing up in rural Alabama, in one of the nation’s poorest counties, in the middle of the civil rights era, my family was “average”. We had land – a farm – but little money. Most of the people I knew were either poorer than we were, or like us. In many ways, my home county was deprived. But I did not know this until I went away to boarding school, in 9th grade, on a scholarship and encountered so many other students whose families had no trouble paying the then exorbitant tuition of $2000 per year.
Growing up, I was encouraged by family and friends, to have the ambition of becoming a doctor, because doctors were rich. It was always framed that I should be a doctor because I was smart and so that I could help people, but the subtext was always – so you will be rich. There was a doctor in our town – one. And there was no prospect that the town would have a doctor when he died. And indeed, it has not had one since he died in 1968.
After I discovered other interests and made other decisions in college during the tumultuous years of the late nineteen-sixties, I started down a path that was sure not to make me rich. And my relatives began to ask me, half in jest, “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” And yet, in colleges like Brown and Bates and, now, Dartmouth and in places like Montclair, New Jersey, I constantly associated with wealthy people. And I made major discovery. My upbringing had led me to believe that rich people were rich because they were smart. I discovered that often, rich people are not smart. They are just rich. It has been disillusioning. I have been taught that wealth is a sign of success, which is a sign of hard work and intelligence – maybe even of goodness. But I have learned that wealth has no relationship to intelligence or hard work or goodness. I think many of us believe that wealth is a sign of some sort of superiority that matters. But it isn’t. Yet we continue to seek it, to make it a goal, even a god. And places like Dartmouth can become its temples and altars.
That’s why this gospel story resonates so much with me. It is contained, almost verbatim, in three gospels. Jesus told it. And it is shocking. It’s the story of a person who wants to be good. So Jesus tells him to keep the law – that is, to do all the right things that make for a great resume, so that you win all the awards in high school. And the person says that he/she has done that. So Jesus then tells him/her to sell their possessions. And the person goes away – sad, but rich. And then Jesus makes the statement that it is harder for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.
There has been an awful lot of breath wasted over the millennia trying to interpret this saying in a way that lets the rich off the hook. I understand why. But the plain words can not be avoided. The disciples recognized what a hard saying it was. They knew that it meant that it was impossible for a rich person to enter the kingdom, and so they asked – “who then can be saved?” Jesus replied that, with God, all things are possible. With God, even rich people can be saved. Well, that’s good news, isn’t it! But can we be saved and keep our wealth? Can we be saved if we are not fundamentally transformed? Can we be saved if we do not see something like Bill Gates saw, and devote our lives to changing it? Can we be saved if we just keep living as we always have, relying upon our privilege and our connections? Can God save us, even without changing us?
But I don’t want to leave it there. I want to go just a bit deeper into the complexity of this text. It is so easy for me to access anger toward wealth – anger about the class divide, about the huge disparity between the wealth of the upper ten percent of Americans and the rest of us, anger about our extravagant use of natural resources, anger about the poverty and disease that we ignore while we build more weapons and fight endless and obscenely expensive wars. I can get very angry. Here’s a story in yesterday’s New York Times ((April 16, 2008, front page) that made me angry. It’s called “Wall Street Winners Get Billion Dollar Paydays” It said:
Hedge fund managers, those masters of a secretive, sometime volatile financial universe, are making money on a scale that once seemed unimaginable, even in Wall Street’s rarefied realms. … One manager, John Paulson, made $3.7 billion last year ,,,, James H. Simons and George Soros each earned almost $3 billion last year. … Their unprecedented and growing affluence underscores the gaping inequality between the millions of Americans facing stagnating wages and rising home foreclosures and agile financial elite that seems to thrive in good times and bad. ,,, To make it into the top 25 of Alpha’s list, the industry standard for hedge fund pay, a manager needed to earn at least $3609 million last year, more than 18 times the amount in 2002. The median American family, by contrast, earned $60,500 last year. Combined, the top 50 hedge fund managers last year earned $29 billion.
As I said, it is easy for me to get angry – even, perhaps, as candidate Obama said, “bitter”. But I am aware that Jesus, in this encounter, was not angry. Rather, he looked at this person with compassion and love. Is it possible for us to look at the corrupting influence of wealth, and name it that, with love? I hope and believe that it is. I am not there yet. I hope one day to be there.
