The Rev. Keri T. Aubert   Job 23:1-9, 16-17

All Saints Episcopal Church, South Burlington, Vermont Psalm 22:1-15

October 11, 2009   Hebrews 4:12-16

Proper 23, Year B, RCL     Mark 10:17-31

One day last year at the JUMP drop-in center, our clients included a Burundian woman who had arrived in the United States only a couple of weeks before. The woman was from a group of people who had lived in refugee camps in Tanzania for over thirty years. They had been caught in the Tutsi/Hutu conflict that is best known for the genocide that took place in Rwanda. A number of these Burundian refuges have been resettled in the Burlington area, as have refugees from around the world. Most of the Burundians received no formal education in their camps. They are illiterate and have no English. Very soon after arriving in the United States, most refugees start school, where they learn spoken and written English. If they are illiterate, one of the first things they learn is how to write their names.

Because the particular Burundian woman I saw that day had been in the United States only a couple of weeks, she hadn’t yet started school. At JUMP, most assistance is provided in the form of vouchers, and these vouchers must be signed by the recipient. I gave the Burundian woman her vouchers, asked her to sign them, and waited for the translator. When the translator finished, the woman took the pen and on the signature line carefully marked an X.

I’ve known plenty of other people—both foreign-born and American-born—who were functionally illiterate. But all could write their names, even if the handwriting sometimes resembled that of a first-grader. For this woman’s X, I was unprepared. Of course I knew on an intellectual level that an X is the signature of many people the world over. But seeing it in person provided a jarring dose of reality. It’s been hard for me to even begin to understand what the lives of JUMP’s refugee clients must have been like. But I could understand that X. In the way of things concrete, it gave me a tiny clue about the magnitude of the difficulties that women must have faced, and also of the strength she must have had to survive them. It was also evidence that life in the United States would probably not be easy for her.

Education does many things for those of us who have it. Some of those things are purely self-satisfying: I can’t imagine not being able to curl up with a good book to go along with my warn blanket and hot tea on a cold day. But education does more for us than that. Education gives us access to wealth. And wealth gives us access to power. And that gives us access to more education and more wealth.

Wealth and power were also bound up in Jesus’ day. In his culture, people with wealth funded social services and public facilities. In one example of this, the Jewish leader Herod the Great built the city he called Caesarea in honor of the Roman Emperor. Construction began about 20 years before the birth of Jesus and included a deep sea port, wide roads, baths, an amphitheater, and even pagan temples. That a Jewish king was building pagan temples is perhaps a good indication that his motives weren’t necessarily altruistic. Those with wealth used it to advance their own agendas. Wealth was related to power.

Of course, power is about more than wealth. We can make some other gross generalizations about relative power in our culture. While there are always individual exceptions, as a group, educated people are relatively more powerful than uneducated people, and wealthy people are relatively more powerful than poor people. But there’s more: healthy people are relatively more powerful than sick people; white people are relatively more powerful than black or brown people; men are relatively more powerful than women; people in their thirties and forties are relatively more powerful than people in their eighties and nineties.

Oftentimes, when the rubber hits the road, having power is about having resources, about having options, about having an independent voice, about having the means to survive when times get hard. My graduate school education and my white skin are enough to get me through doors that other people can’t enter. And they—along with the money I’ve been fortunate enough to save—are insurance policies against the time when competition heats up. Depending on who I’m in competition with, they might or might not be enough.

Jesus makes it clear that rich people will have a hard time entering the kingdom of God. I suspect that no one in this room considers themself wealthy, so perhaps we’ll all be just fine. But remember, wealth is relative. Compared to Bill Gates, I’m pretty poor. But compared to the woman from Burundi, I’m wealthy beyond all measure. I have enough money not only to feed and house myself, but also to buy plenty of extra comforts. And so maybe I should be worried. But again, wherever we are on the wealth scale, I don’t think the issue is just money. The problem facing rich people might not be just their relationships with wealth, it might also be their relationships with power.

One thing that has caused me to think differently about power is learning about domestic violence. Just so you know, October is National Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Experts say that domestic violence—whether physical or emotional—is really all about power and control. The work done on domestic violence has helped bring attention to the power dynamics that play out in intimate relationships and our societal need to address them. While not all domestic violence is perpetrated by men on women, the majority is. I believe that this unfortunately reflects accepted cultural norms. This has not been true in all cultures. The Rev. Dr. Marie Fortune, who has for years worked with faith communities to help end sexual and domestic violence, tells this story.

Several years ago I was training in southeast Alaska with members of the Tlingit tribe. As we discussed domestic violence, they began to share a memory they have of a time a hundred years earlier when wife abuse was not tolerated among them and was quite rare. The custom was that if a husband abused his wife, the whole community gathered for a potlatch and his clan would have to make a material payment to her clan. Everyone knew why they were there and abuse was unusual because it was shameful and expensive.[i] 

Going back to the interplay between wealth and power, in a domestic violence situation, the woman is often at even greater risk because of the man’s greater wealth. Unfortunately, the poor economy is affecting funding for domestic violence work. A couple of weeks ago I learned through the social service grapevine that the wonderful Burlington organization Women Helping Battered Women has lost important federal funding.[ii] I also heard on NPR this week that federal budget cuts are forcing the closure of a Bennington organization that provides legal aid to domestic violence victims in Vermont. The domestic violence advocate I heard interviewed on the radio was concerned because often the man can afford to hire a private attorney while the woman can’t, and so the woman has to go to court alone.[iii] Once again, wealth and power interplay.

Fortunately, we’re getting better at talking about domestic violence, even if we have a long way to go in stopping it. Our conversation about it also challenges us to talk about other issues associated with power. Unfortunately, there’s little talk about poverty in our public discourse. For all that last year’s presidential candidates talked a lot about the middle-class, they spoke very little about the truly poor. And yet poverty is perhaps the most dis-empowering condition in the United States and around the globe. Maybe that’s why Jesus talked about it so much.

Let’s turn to the young man in today’s gospel. According to one commentator, “The demand to sell what one possesses, if taken literally, is the demand to part with what was the dearest of all possible possessions to a Mediterranean person: the family home and land.”[iv] In addition, “. . . ‘rich’ people were automatically considered thieves or heirs of thieves since all good things in life are viewed as limited. The only way one could get ahead was to take advantage of others. To be rich, is, by definition, to be greedy.”[v] It would seem that Jesus tells the young man to give up what was most important to him and most harmful to others.

In the same position, I suspect that each of us would react just like the young man did. And like the disciples, we might also ask, “Then who can be saved?” The Good News is that Jesus’ answer is also the same, “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.” God can redeem all things. In the reordered Kingdom of God, there is a place for each one of us.

On the other hand, I think Jesus reminds us not to assume that the way things are is the way things are meant to be. In our relationships near and far, he asks us to look at how we’re affected by others, and how we affect others. He encourages us to question our relative places on the scales of wealth and other types of power. He teaches us that all abuses of power have the ability to separate perpetrators, victims, and all of us from the fullness of God’s grace. And he calls us to help realize the fullness of the incoming Kingdom of God, by giving up the power that we wield unjustly, and by claiming the power that has been unjustly denied us.