The Joker's Sermon--March 8, 2022

The Joker's Sermon--March 8, 2022

"Come now, you rich people, weep and wait for the miseries that are coming to you. Your riches have rotted, and your clothes are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you, and it will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure for the last days." [James 5:1-3]

This is a difficult passage to read, regardless of one's tax bracket.  But it's growing on me in ways that are surprising me. In fact, I think I have come to learn to see the necessary truth in this passage from an even more surprising teacher.  I learned to appreciate James' harsh criticism of decadent wealth from the Joker.

Yes, that Joker: the Batman villain, the ol' Clown Prince of Crime.  In particular, I can't shake the memory of two lines from Heath Ledger's definitive take on the Joker from the 2008 movie "The Dark Knight."  (I know some will complain, with yet another Batman movie being released this past weekend, that there seems to be an endless supply of Caped Crusader blockbusters while everything important is held up with supply-chain issues these days.  But as for me, I keep hoping I'll learn some good theology from the next Bat-movie at the cineplex.)  It's Ledger's version of the Joker, being brutally pummeled by Batman in a police interrogation room, who mocks Batman without throwing a punch back by saying, "You have nothing to threaten me with--nothing to do with all your strength."  And it's that same Joker, later in the movie, who throws a lighter onto a gas-soaked pile of money he's stolen from the mob, in order to send a message, as he says: "Everything burns."  You're not supposed to see wisdom in the villains of a superhero movie, I know.  But Joker--at least this one--has a way of forcing us to see through the lies we tell ourselves as respectable people in a civilized society.  He forces us to see that the things we think make us powerful, important, and impressive are ultimately impotent, empty--a vapor, a breath, ash.

James speaks almost with the same ruthlessly direct honesty to the well-heeled people reading his words as Joker.  He taunts "the rich" the same way Joker does to Batman, knowing that he has nothing to lose, nothing to be leveraged against, and nothing they can take from him.  But conversely, the rich in James' audience have everything to lose.  That's James' point--if you've spent your life piling up money and possessions trying to prove yourself to everyone else, at some point you discover you that all of it crumbles.  All this power, all this strength, all this wealth, but it turns out to be all for nothing.  It doesn't last--it burns.  And on this point, both James and the Joker are in complete agreement with Ecclesiastes--that other fiercely honest voice of the Scriptures--that all the things we can pile up in life, from investments to cars, to real estate to the latest rectangle of technology, all eventually end up in the garbage.  It's all like a vanishing breath on a cold day--there for a moment, and then gone.  

James' point, as we've seen throughout this book so far, is to get us to change our priorities if this is us.  If these words make us squirm, it's a sign we've been putting our hopes on our money.  If James' warning that the rich who have piled up their fortunes on the backs of unpaid labor and exploited workers (see the next couple of verses we'll get to tomorrow) makes us uncomfortable, it's a sign that we're complicit in the same kind of rottenness as James' well-to-do readers. And if we don't like hearing that money and material things won't last, it may well be the evidence that we've become possessed by our possessions ourselves.  James is free from worrying about holding onto a fortune, because he isn't interested in getting one in the first place, much less keeping it.  James is free from obsessing over every day's rise and fall of the stock market, because his life's meaning isn't tethered to the closing bell of the Dow Jones.  He offers us that same freedom as well.

Sometimes Respectable Religious people will get their feathers ruffled when the Bible says things like this.  They'll do just about anything they can to make it sound like James isn't saying what he's clearly saying (or that Jesus isn't saying what he's clearly saying, too, when he talks about the empty idol of Mammon, or tells a story about a rich fool and his quest for ever bigger barns, or announces woe on the rich, too).  But James keeps on telling the truth--to Respectable Religious folks around us, and the ones looking back at us in the mirror.  And his point is simply this: any time we value property over people, we are investing in ashes, rather than in what has eternal worth.  Our neighbors matter to God; our 401(k) reports, to be blunt, do not.  Our siblings displaced by war in Ukraine, or suffering drought in Somalia, or seeking to find shelter in our own county, are infinitely precious.  Our worries about whether our property values will go up next year, are insignificant by comparison.  If we have built our lives on acquiring more, we'll find less and less actual satisfaction when we look back at how we've spent our days.  James isn't trying to threaten us with hellfire after death if you possess a certain amount of money--he's trying to get us to change our priorities about how and why we possess things before death so we won't have wasted our lives on things that go up in smoke.  And so James says it with utter clarity, like the green-hair grinning rogue from Gotham, that it is an utter waste to have all the power, strength, and wealth in the world, but in the end to find they can't do anything for us.  "You have nothing to do with all your piles of stuff," James says, "only the eventual lesson that it all burns, or rusts, or wears out."

Every day we are faced with the choice of whether we will believe what James--and behind him Jesus himself--says about where we place our hearts and our treasures.  Every minute spent trying to build a bigger fortune will turn out to have been a minute wasted.  Every breath spent bragging about how pleasant it is to be insulated from the misfortunes and tragedies of the world because we have wealth will be words we wish we could unsay.  Every day we blocked out and ignored the needs of neighbors by distracting ourselves with "retail therapy" or fussing over the next thing we could buy will be a day we forgot what really matters, what does not in this life.

I can't help but think these days of the closing lines of Ilya Kaminsky's 2013 poem (one which has a renewed urgency in these days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine), "We Lived Happily During the War," which concludes, so powerfully:

In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

If that poem feels like it is mocking us in our affluence, you're right.  But we need voices like this one, even if they must resort to ridiculing us out of our apathy and numbness.  We need voices like James, and even the Joker's, to help us again to love people rather than things, and to place the value of fellow humans made in God's image above the never-ending quest for a bigger profit.  Whichever voice it takes to finally get through to these gold-dipped cold hearts of ours, let it get through the cracks.  May we spend our days on what will matter, after the rest has rusted and burned to ash.

Lord God, turn our hearts to love people and use things, and free us from being possessed by our possessions.