The Rich Are Different

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, February 28, 2010

after a reading from Stephen Gray, as well as a reading of Mark 10: 17-22:

As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, ‘Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’  Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.  You know the commandments: “You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honour your father and mother.” ’  He said to him, ‘Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.’  Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, ‘You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’  When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.

 

 

To get us started this morning, I want to share three little cultural artifacts with you:

The first is from F. Scott Fitzgerald and the well-known quote from him where he says, “The rich are different from you and me,” to which Ernest Hemingway snarkily replies, “Yes, they have more money.”

The second tidbit is an often-repeated statistic that says the average American grade school student had a vocabulary of 25,000 words in 1945 but only 10,000 words today.

The third is that old well-worn Bible verse that says, “God helps those who help themselves.”

Now let’s go back through those three items in some more depth.

Many of us know of the famous encounter between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway where Fitzgerald says, “The very rich are different from you and me,” to which Hemingway replies, “Yes, they have more money.”  We’ve seen it in print, we’ve heard it repeated, it’s become a cultural signpost and part of the common knowledge base we all share together.

Only one problem:  it never happened.

Fitzgerald and Hemingway were indeed friends for some time, but they had a nasty falling out and Hemingway, ever the competitive rascal, got back at his former friend for all time in this way:  Fitzgerald in 1926 had published a story, “The Rich Boy”, that begins with the words, “Let me tell you about the very rich.  They are different from you and me.”  Ten years later, Hemingway , while at lunch with the critic Mary Colum, mused, “I am getting to know the rich,” to which Colum replied, “The only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money.”  Hemingway, who knew he’d been very cleverly insulted, promptly borrowed Colum’s jab and aimed it squarely at Fitzgerald.  In Hemingway’s Snows of Kilimanjaro, the narrator remembers “poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of [ the rich ] and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.’  And how someone had said to Scott, yes, they have more money.”

So we remember this story, we think we all know it, but Hemingway has played a grand joke on Fitzgerald as well as on us.  We think we know the facts…

Second, there’s a statistic that’s made the rounds for many years among commentators fond of lamenting the breakdown of Western civilization.  The claim is made that the vocabulary of the average American grade school student in 1945 contained about 25,000 words;  that same demographic of American grade school students today has a vocabulary of only about 10,000 words.  Wow.  That’s horrible!  (if it’s true, which it isn’t…)

This startling statistic comes from wrongly collapsing together two very different studies with two very different aims and two very different methodologies.  The simplest way to put it is that the 25,000-word number was a count of the total distinct word forms used by the entire group of millions of school students in a 1945 study.  The 10,000-word number was an average vocabulary among a far fewer number of students in a 1984 study.  So, it’s a total versus an average, and not a valid comparison, but we hear the statistic, it conforms to what we think is happening in the culture, and so we think we know the facts…

The third little artifact is the well-known verse in the Bible that says, “God helps those who help themselves.”  Obviously in our American culture and civil religion, we think people ought to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and get out there and make it with good hard work and a little good luck, and lots of our social policies are based on this tenet:  “If you’re not helping yourself, then God won’t help you and neither will we.”  The only problem is that “God helps those who help themselves” isn’t in the Bible.  It’s an American fiction to believe that the Bible supports all our cultural conventional wisdom.  The Bible in this case teaches exactly the opposite, that God is on the side of the helpless and we ought to be, too.

So there are some facts we think we know that turn out to be fictions, things that get repeated so often that they seem like fact.

Wayne Clark, a Unitarian Universalist congregational stewardship consultant, addresses several such facts and fictions in his book Beyond Fundraising.  Here are a few of those “facts” and his answer to them:

First “fact”:  “People in low-income situations don’t have enough money to give, so they give time instead.”  Sounds right, and I’ve heard it said time and time again.

Clark says it has been disproven that people contribute either time or money.  My friend Ian, who I spoke about last week, a scholar of many things ‘church,’ did a study that shows that financial contribution to a church follows an investment of time in the congregation by those contributors.  Further, his study showed that people with limited incomes often give a higher percentage of that income to the church than do those with larger incomes.

Second “fact”:  “During times of economic downturn, people shouldn’t be expected to give as much to their church community.”  Again, it sounds only right.

Wayne Clark answers that it’s true that during more difficult times, people do choose more carefully which organizations they give to, so that if the connection to the organization is strong enough, and a compelling enough case is made that the money is needed, then donors still make substantial contributions.

A third “fact” for your consideration:  “With so many groups out there asking for money, people have decreased their giving to their church in order to disperse their giving among many causes.”  Hm-m.  I’ve said this myself, but...

Not so, says Clark, even though a large number of UU’s hold to this myth.  There simply is no research to support this claim.  Those people who have become disciplined stewards over the years do contribute to many organizations, but those organizations include their church faith communities.  My friend Ian has research that shows that faith communities are in fact receiving a larger share of charitable contributions than in the past.

One last “fact”:  “If people only understood the dire financial straits of the church, they would feel guilty and increase their financial commitment.”  Right - guilt, the gift that keeps on giving.

Baloney, says Clark.  No one wants to throw money at a sinking ship.  Besides which, guilt doesn’t work on UU’s - We want to know about the successes of the church, we want to know how much better the church will be if we give, we want to know what difference our giving will make.

Here’s what difference your giving will make:

First, your giving will make a difference for the neighbors this church reaches out to.  Because this church is involved in community outreach on several levels, you can expect your gift to have an affect at several levels.  We share meals with the homeless locally and support other churches in their justice initiatives, too.  We work with United Congregations of Metro-East to provide a voice for the voiceless at the local, state, and national levels of government.  And we’re beginning this month to mentor and tutor local at-risk students once a week.  (While they’re here, our plan is to feed them a good meal so they don’t go to sleep hungry that night, and that’s a good thing…)

Next, your giving will make a difference for the people of this church who come here expecting that we are working towards building an inclusive and welcoming community of justice.  Look around - we have an increasing diversity of folks here, even if we’re not yet where we want to be.  You may have noticed that everybody says they crave diversity, but nobody knows how to make it happen or what to do with the changes that are required when it does happen.  Your giving keeps this already-welcoming church moving in the direction of more inclusivity and greater diversity.  And that’s a good thing.

And finally, your giving will make a difference for you.  You can learn the joys of generosity.  You can put your faith into action.  You can learn what Mother Teresa meant when she said, “Love cannot remain by itself;  by itself it has no meaning.  Love has to be put into action, and that action is service.”

 

Wayne Clark offers us some ways to give and some reasons to give:

Give out of a sense of gratitude.  You have been greatly blessed, so give to say thanks for the gifts you have received, give to celebrate the abundance of life, give as an act of worship.

Give to add meaning to your life.  Giving is a great joy and provides a depth to life that is not available otherwise.  Giving takes us out of ourselves and gives us a larger, grander, deeper view.

Give because you like to help people.  We all like to be helpful, and we feel good when we’re able to do so.

Give in response to people you trust.  In a small church such as this, it should be easy to get to know your leadership - all you have to do is go up and say ‘hi.’  When you get to know them, I trust that you will find them trustworthy.  They’re the ones casting the vision.  They’re the ones you can trust to do their dead-level best for this congregation because they love it so.  And they’re the ones who are inviting you to give to the mission of this church.

Give because you believe in the mission of the church.  Our Mission Statement is on the front of your order of service.  Take your order of service home, cut out the Mission Statement, and put it on your refrigerator, read it everyday, and figure out what the mission of the church means to you and consider the ways you are committed to it and what it asks of you and what you’ll receive in turn.

Give because someone asks.  I had a friend tell me once that she was leaving her entire estate to a national non-profit agency - because they asked.  She said she would have left it all to her church if they’d only asked.  Well, I’m asking, your leadership is asking, this church is asking.

 

Now, let’s circle back around to the beginning today to that Hemingway quote about the rich being different from you and me.  I think what Fitzgerald meant when he talked about the rich, and what Hemingway meant as well, and what most everybody who uses the term “rich” means, is that the rich are people who have vast amounts of money.  In this frame of reference, you are rich if you have more than most other people - more money, more property, more things, more toys.  Both Hemingway and Fitzgerald, sadly, were in awe of people with a lot of money and property and things and toys.  But you don’t have to be.  Because you can have a different frame of reference, based not on cultural fictions but on the idea of the good stewardship.

Surely we have all known ‘rich’ people who were more owned by their possessions than their possessions were owned by them, people whose lives were taken up more by trying to keep their pile of possessions intact than by living their lives to the fullest.  Having a lot of money too often does not make you rich at all, but poor - poor in attitude, poor in outlook, poor in spirit.  I know I have been poor in that way, and perhaps you have, too.  The problem with the rich young man who comes asking Jesus how to inherit eternal life is not that he has a lot of money or possessions - having money or possessions doesn’t exclude him or make him unworthy or unwelcome.  The problem, though, is that he can’t let any of it go - he can’t share, he can’t give, he is owned by the things he has been given on loan in this life.

So when we compare this young man to what we think we know in our culture, we see him as rich.  But this young man is only called rich;  he is not truly rich.  You see, the truly rich are different:  The truly rich understand that all we have is only temporarily given us to take care of.  The truly rich have learned the joy and freedom of giving away what we once thought of as ours.  The truly rich are not held back by possessions but are set free by sharing widely of what we have.

The truly rich are different: 

their treasure is not measured by how they well hold on but by how willingly they let go;

their treasure is not measured by how much they can amass but by how much they can give away;

their treasure is not measured by how tightly they can make a fist but by how far they can reach out a helping hand.

Let go of what you think you know, reach out as far as you can, accept the invitation to become truly rich.

And you may be surprised at the blessings that flow.

So may it be.