Fred
Pearson is a banker, a good and generous man.
He sits on the boards of six major charities, helps build Habitat houses
in his spare time, and teaches Sunday School at First BigSteeple Presbyterian
Church, whose motto is “Where All
God’s Children Have a Home.” Emphasis on
the “all.” He is past-Treasurer and
finance-committee chair at First BigSteeple because, well, he's a banker, after
all, and who better than a banker to
faithfully steward the precious resources of God? But that’s not all . . . Fred is particularly
well-suited to teach Sunday School because he has a seminary degree from Old
Liberal Presbyterian Seminary, whose motto is “Training Progressive
Presbyterians for Over One Hundred Years.” Emphasis on the “Progressive.” But although Fred loved seminary, and knows scripture well enough to joust with
Pastor Ferguson on the fine points of interpretation, after much prayer—and
contemplation of his sizable post-seminary student debt—he decided he could
serve the church in much more meaningful ways by remaining a banker and dedicating
his art to the service of God.
Rita
Garrett is another member of First BigSteeple Presbyterian Church who, up until
three years ago, was married to her high-school sweetheart Tony. Theirs had been a lovely romance: the
handsome high-school quarterback and the pretty cheerleader, and everybody said
it was picture-perfect, like in a story-book, or Hollywood’s idea of small-town
bliss (Chris Hemsworth and Scarlett Johansson would be perfect for the roles). Tony
went to work straight out of high-school as vice-president at his father’s
company, which made the best pfluger-widgets in the world—even better than the
ones from Germany, where—as everybody knows—pfluger-widgets originated. Rita stayed home to raise their children,
because everyone agreed that children need their mother, and they could certainly
afford it, because Tony made a very good
salary at Allied pfluger-widgets, his father firm.
The
story-book came to an end in the crash of 2008, when the market for pfluger-widgets
dried up almost overnight. Fred Pearson
was an officer at the bank that held the note on Tony’s father’s plant—recently
re-financed to buy more efficient pfluger-widget makers—and he tried his
hardest, he really did, extending their credit as far as he could, but the law
was the law: he had a fiduciary responsibility to the stockholders of his bank,
and his hands were tied. Tony’s father lost the company he'd given his life for;
the day after it closed, he hung himself in his and wife Lorraine’s walk-in closet.
Well. Stronger marriages than Rita and Tony’s had
crumbled at this kind of catastrophe, so it was no particular surprise when
theirs did too. At first, Rita didn't notice
Tony’s slide into depression and addiction, but she did notice his emotional withdrawal: increasingly, he'd just . . .
disappear, right in front of her. And
that was the last thing Rita needed .
. . she needed support, she needed comfort, she needed assurances that it was
going to be ok., that she and the children wouldn't be out on the streets. Tony was in no shape to provide that for her,
and his arrest for trafficking was the last straw. Mandatory sentencing got him 10 years, and
when the divorce became final, Rita got the children, the car—which was paid
off—and a mortgage, which wasn't.
She
lasted fifteen months in the house. Her formidable
home-making skills were little in demand, and the best she could do was at the
local McDonalds, where the wage wouldn't even pay for childcare, much less food
and housing, and Lorraine couldn't help much: her husband had used their life
insurance as surety for a loan.
So
Rita went to Fred Pearson, elder at her church, whose bank held the note on her
house, and asked him for a loan to start a business she could operate from home. And although Fred had serious reservations
about her business plan—he felt she’d severely
over-estimated the market for pfluger-widget-themed gifts—he was a
Christian man, and believed that Christians should help other Christians, and
so he got her a small-business loan at a really good rate, secured by the
equity in her home.
Well,
you can guess what happened next, can't you?
Fred was right: there was very
little market in pfluger-widget-themed gifts, and he helped all he could (he
even paid the mortgage a couple of months as an anonymous donor) but in the
end, there was nothing he could do: after all, the law was the law, and the
bank had a fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders.
Now,
this sounds like a set-up, a made-to-order story to provide sermonic hay, and
of course it is, but it's also is a
fairly accurate representation of modern-day counterparts of the characters in
Jesus’ teaching. Scribes weren’t just experts
in the Hebrew scriptures (like Fred is of the entire Bible), they were also the
ones proficient in cyphering, in keeping the books. They not only kept the Hebrew law,
adjudicating its finer points from the best seats in the synagogues—literally
the “first couches”—but they were the temple bankers as well. And although Rita isn't a widow, she is in the same dire straits as those
whose houses the scribes devoured. And
there are a lot of Rita's in this
country: statistically, women fare much worse than men in a divorce or in case
of a spouses’ death.
In
fact, women worldwide are many times more likely to be in poverty than men,
saddled as they usually are with multiple mouths to feed and under-valued
skills; what the market will bear is almost universally
women’s salaries that are a small fraction of those of men. Even in this enlightened country, women only
make 79% of their male counterparts. So,
just as in Jesus’ day, single women—widowed in those days, divorced and widowed these days---are emblematic
of the poor these days.
But
a funny thing happened on the way to the stereotype: though widows (and
orphans) were code words for the poor in Jesus’ day, and there was no
particular negativity placed on them, these
days things aren't so cut and dried.
In classic blame-the-victim rhetoric, the phrase “single mothers” has
become politicized so it has less-than-spotless credentials. In fact, it has been so overused that a
certain mother I know, though she's
not single, sighed heavily when she read a sermon wherein I used the term,
asking Isn't there some other group
you could've as representative of the downtrodden?
What’s
worse, the term has been slyly associated with a much more pejorative one: ”welfare
mothers,” which refers to largely imaginary women who lay around all day, popping
out babies like raisins so they can live luxurious lives on the public
dole. This image helped drive so-called
“welfare reform” in the mid-nineties, which produced many more latch-key, at-risk
children than before because while it limited single mothers to two years of
assistance before they had to find a job, it didn't specify that the job had to
pay a living wage . . .
Anyway.
Jesus sets his morality tale up with
stark, cardboard-cutout characters: the scribe who is more interested in his
image, in his standing in marketplaces, synagogues and banquet-halls, than he
is in helping the poor, of whom the widow is a stock representative. This of course, screams hypocrisy, and I'm sure that it's in part what Jesus has in
mind. After all, over in Matthew he
castigates church officials for their hypocrisy in no uncertain words, calling
them whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside are
full of the bones of the dead.
Here
in Mark, he doesn't go that far. . . not long before this story, he commends a
scribe, telling him he's not far from the Kingdom of God. Indeed, he knows as well as anybody else that
there are good scribes and bad scribes, just like there are good widows and
bad, good Pharisees and bad. Why then
does he seem to condemn scribes in general here? Could it be that just as widows are symbolic
of a certain group, so the scribes represent, are code for such a group as well? Widows (and orphans) stood for the poor and
disenfranchised in Jesus’ teaching; what did the scribes represent?
Look at Fred: he was a decent guy,
a guy who—like the scribes—knew his scripture.
Also, like the scribes, he knew his finances, and was trustworthy enough
that his church depended upon him to manage its treasury. When Allied Pfluger-widgets went under, he
didn't want to foreclose on the
factory. In the same way, he didn't want
Rita to lose her house, but he was caught in a system of financial laws and
obligations, and he couldn't see his way out of them. In our little morality
tale, you might say he represented “the system,” a financial system that isn't
particularly easy on the vulnerable in society.
Is that what the scribes represent
in today’s scripture passage? Do they
represent a system that devours widows’ houses?
And if so, what system do they represent? Well, they were employed by the religious apparatus
of that day, and because there was no separation of church and state, they were
apparently involved in relieving people in need of their possessions. The scribes were symbolic of the religious
and financial apparatus of the time; like Fred, they represented “the system.”
Last week, in our remembrance of
the saints of the church, I read a quote from modern martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
who said: we must work “not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the
wheels of injustice, drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” Although “injustice” maybe too strong for
Rita’s case, what happened to her, and what happen to women and men all over
the country, is certainly unfair and unfortunate . . . Is it our calling as
Christians to ameliorate that, to help “fix” a system—through our votes, if
nothing else—that can be harmful to its most vulnerable members?
There is one thing Rita has going
for her, though, that others might not have: she has the love and support of
her church community. Although it is
caught up in the system itself, it provides a caring, comforting presence in
her life, and in the life of her children.
As another saint said, Christians are the hands and feet of Christ. It is through them that we fell God’s
presence. It is through them that we
know that no what matter comes, we are not alone. Amen.
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