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William Allberry 2 before Lent (B) 15th February 2009 Hedge fund managers and sinners |
| And as he sat at dinner in Levi’s house, many tax-collectors and sinners were also sitting with Jesus and his disciples. |
| ‘So tell me, what do you do?’ There’s been a fascinating series of letters to The Guardian about how to answer that question that’s put to you at the drinks party – it’s the question that you always seem to find yourself being asked, and asking too. It’s a useful formula, an opening gambit that leads into conversation: how else can we get to know someone except by talking to them, and what better to talk about than something that might interest them – or that might even be a passion of theirs? It does seem that someone’s occupation tells us a lot about them. |
| It depends who’s asking, of course, and we all know that there are some people whose eyes are going to glaze over pretty quickly if the occupation we offer doesn’t fit into their conception of what is socially acceptable. We place people according to their response. One of the letters in the correspondence column went on to the next question such a person might ask: ‘Where do you send your children to school?’; and when the answer came that they had no children, the questioner immediately hit back: ‘Oh, but if you did have children, where would you send them?’ |
| It’s clear from reading the Gospels that Jesus actively sought out the less desirable members of the community: he went out of his way to avoid the socially respectable and to find instead those who probably wouldn’t have given the acceptable answers at the cocktail parties. The answer that’s most difficult to respond to has always been: ‘I’m an estate agent’; or perhaps today ‘I’m a hedge fund manager’. Or to take us rather further from our comfort zone, ‘I’m a traffic warden’, or ‘I’m an insolvency liquidator.’ |
| If Jesus had needed to ask Levi what it was that he did, he might have replied – ‘Oh, I’m a customs official – I work for the Romans, collecting tolls from people crossing the border and passing through Capernaum, and I do quite well out of it: there’s plenty of scope for constructive implementation of the tax laws, and no shortage of money passing over in brown envelopes’ – or whatever the contemporary equivalent was. And we’re told that it wasn’t just Levi Jesus was associating with, but a whole house-full of tax collectors and sinners, and Jesus not standing near the door and lecturing them about the error of their ways, but reclining at table with them, eating and drinking. An affront to the respectable people of the town, an affront to the ruling class. And the way Mark presents it in his gospel, it doesn’t read like a single incident – how would the self-righteous scribes and Pharisees be witnessing the proceedings? – it comes over as the life-style Jesus regularly followed which caused such offence to the religious establishment. |
| Jesus turned over the accepted norms of his culture. It was the despised members of society he spent time with, that he treated as being worth spending time with, eating and presumably drinking with them too – because of course he was demonstrating God’s concern for all people. ‘I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.’ Not that the righteous aren’t loved too: but he was clearly making the point that the expectations of the self-righteous needed to be overturned. |
| So what about the estate agents and the merchant bankers today? What do we say? We might say, How are the mighty fallen! and clearly with the economy in recession our perception of their contribution to society might be rather different now from what it was only a couple of years ago. It’s easy to blame, though, isn’t it? It’s easy to criticize and to generalise, but really we know, don’t we, that it’s not the individuals who are to blame, but the whole financial system which allows greed to flourish. Individuals will be greedy, and take risks with other people’s money, if the system allows them to; and it does. |
| Jesus didn’t ostracize the tax collectors, and no more should we ostracise those who work in the City. But we do need to examine how it was that the system allowed the colossal losses that we’ve seen – and the huge fortunes that have been made at others’ expense. The bank officials this week expressed their sorrow for what has happened, and well they might; but it’s the system that we all have to take responsibility for – the system we are all part of; the system we have all tried to believe in, but have seen get totally out of hand. |
| ‘No one puts new wine into old wine skins’, says Jesus. He was talking about a new philosophy, a completely new way of thinking about society and the way people relate to each other, and to God. Jesus’s new religion was based on the orthodox Jewish religion, of course, that was its strength and its heritage; but the new part of the religion was essentially counter-cultural: a revolutionary philosophy that he was calling his disciples to develop. |
| We’re accustomed to the idea of turning. Repentance. New life. We hear it so often, I think we’re almost immunised against any idea that we might actually be expected to be revolutionaries. And we are, as Christians, expected to be counter-cultural. We are expected to look at things from a different perspective from the general way of looking at things. But occasionally we’re shaken out of our comfortable complacency and forced to look at things afresh. And perhaps this is one of those times. |
| Maybe we need to look at our investments, or maybe we need to find out about the investment policies of our pension funds or investment managers. We may feel powerless, but there are many ways we can all influence the financial world. And we can follow Jesus in his overturning of conventional expectations. |
| At the drinks party we can give a different answer to the conventional one. We don’t have to lie: we can admit to being a school teacher, or a builder, or retired, or out of work. But that doesn’t need to be the end of the conversation! We all have opinions about schools, or the building industry, or how to use leisure constructively, and those opinions, and finding out what the other person’s opinions are, are what’s going to make the conversation an interesting and productive one. And if our views are informed by our beliefs, and if our faith gives us a perspective on the subject let’s not hold it back. And find out what the other person thinks – we don’t have to let them do all the questioning! |
| The man St Mark calls Levi was in fact almost certainly Matthew, which is the name he’s given in two other Gospels which tell the same story of his calling from his tax booth, and then the party at his house. Levi-Matthew left his position in the tax office and became one of the intimate followers of Jesus: Matthew the Apostle and Evangelist, collecting all those stories of Jesus seen from the point of view of the Jewish convert that were later written up as the Gospel of Matthew. A complete change of life and lifestyle. From a corrupt servant of the hated Romans, disloyal to his own people, to a faithful disciple of Jesus, devoting his life to telling the good news to those same people. |
| At Morning Prayer this week the Old Testament readings have been from the book of Ecclesiastes –‘there’s nothing new under the sun’. And there isn’t, is there? Look at the reading from Hosea (chapter2. 14-20) which we read this morning: it’s one of those many passages where God is saying to his people who have gone off worshipping foreign idols, ‘Come back, and all is forgiven.’ And God says to us today, just as tenderly as he did to his ancient people, time and time again, ‘I will remove the names of the financial Baals from your mouth, the Baals you have created for yourselves and tried to worship, and found that they offer no salvation.’ It’s time we reassessed our values – about both material things and the people we come across – and recover the humanity God gave us, the humanity he created us for. It’s never too late to begin again, when he says ‘Follow me’. Amen. |
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