It all seems so interesting, but your friend tells you that he’s not happy about his job. To you, it seems rather enviable to get to go to somewhere exotic and hear Chinese lounge singers do bad impressions of American music. But the welcome for Americans may only go so far as the hamburger on the hotel menu. He’s frustrated that the time he spends away from his wife and family is spent trying to get the lowest price possible for the manufacturing of his product. As an engineer, he had grand hopes of building useful things, making things work, only to find out that his job entails securing design plans in a free bid from one Chinese factory only to take those plans to a competitor to see if it can be made any cheaper. Your friend turns to you and asks, “Is this ethical?”

Who is to blame in this situation? Your friend who simply wants to make a decent living for his wife and family? The company that sent him there? The American citizen who demands lower prices? The politics that make such a situation possible? When there’s no clear person to blame, can we justify that no wrong has been done?

A colleague who was once talking to me about the hard parts of ministry made a point that I won’t soon forget. He asked me, “Do you use your power for yourself or for others?” Those who want to engage seriously in following Christ have to take that question seriously. Our cultural values tell us that it’s OK to use your power for yourself. In fact some of our greatest American myths are built on that assumption. “You are what you make of yourself,” is something we all learn as children, and the corporate ladder is still set up routinely for us to climb. Is it any wonder then, that companies will use any means necessary to get the best returns for their CEO’s and their stockholders. Even in marriage counseling these days, too often one of the partners is encouraged to watch out for him or her-self and end a “bad marriage” rather than take ownership of their own faults and idiosyncrasies. We want to “win” our fights, “earn” our profits, and truly claim that we can make it on our own.

However, this runs contrary to biblical thinking – especially to Jesus’ thinking. Jesus, who had all the power and authority in the world handed to him, even then, rejected Satan’s offer to take it. And one of the best descriptions of Jesus’ humility in the face of power can be found in Philippians chapter 2 which says “though he was in the form of God, [he] did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.” Jesus took on our humanity, all of it, the power and the weakness, and yet he used his power to work for the good of others – to the point of his own death by execution at the hands of those who understood power in worldlier ways.

This morning’s parable is also about an abuse of power – the abuse of the poor in the hands of the rich. The rich man of the story had no thought whatsoever for the beggar Lazarus who lay at his gate every day. Lazarus would have been satisfied with the scraps from the rich man’s table, but that never happened. Eventually both men died. One goes to heaven, the other does not. From hell, the rich man didn’t really understand his own plight. He calls out to Father Abraham who stands next to the poor beggar. He says, “Send Lazarus down here with a glass of water to cool my tongue.” Abraham would have none of it, and told the rich man about the wide and un-crossable gap between the two places. There’s no going back and forth. Then, he says, “Send Lazarus to my brothers to warn them what might happen.” Again, no deal! Lazarus will not be forced to do the rich man’s bidding. It’s too late. His family, as he is told, ought to know better since for generations they’ve had the wisdom of Moses and the prophets taught to them.

It’s interesting to me that in our own Bible belt culture so much attention is paid to Jesus’ words about gaining eternal life through belief in him. Jesus says that to be sure. John 3:16 is a verse that many of us have memorized. However, we pay less attention to those passages in which Jesus warns us what will earn us eternal punishment. It isn’t “unbelief” per se. It’s not feeding the hungry sheep. It’s letting the poor beggar fester in his own sores by the gate to your house. It may be failing to pay attention to the warnings of our faith that remind us how important it is to care for the “least of these” in our communities.

Jesus at least has given some thought to mean and selfish people getting what they deserve in the end. I’m not sure we want to travel too far down that road in much of our own thinking. We theologically pessimistic Presbyterians who cut our teeth on double-predestination have gone soft on sin. We are closet Universalists who want desperately to believe that God isn’t going to judge us harshly, and yet we fail to see that it’s in recognizing just how short we fall of God’s expectations that we can begin to see the amazing depth of God’s mercy.

We’re lucky to know about God’s mercy. We’ve not only got Moses and the prophets; we’ve got Jesus’ teachings to help us. And yet, here’s this warning in parable form to let us know what might happen if we forget. We just might get what we deserve. The rich man ended up in hell because he was too engrossed in his own wants and desires to see what was happening on his front doorstep. The old teaching on the seven deadly sins was meant to help us in this regard and remind us of the many ways we use our power for our own good rather than to help someone else. Just as a refresher – those sins are: pride, coveting, lust, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth. All of them turn us inward instead of having us reach outward. All of them condemn us, and yet by pointing out our flaws Jesus is working to save us.

So to get back to our friend’s question, is it ethical to go into another country to play its manufacturers off each other to gain American profits? You decide. Is it wise to keep wanting more for ourselves when there’s an amazing amount of want in our world? I think Jesus would have us do more than just ponder these as philosophical questions. Should it surprise us when a Bill Gates foundation gives money for hunger relief and disease prevention in third world countries? Should it alert us when Wal-Mart makes large donations in the face of disaster? Moses and the prophets teach atonement and sacrifice for our sins. Perhaps there’s also a thread of spiritual wisdom in our own American fabric that reminds us to give back for what we’ve received.

We are indeed responsible for all the ways we take part in using power for ourselves and not for others. Jesus taught that the best gift of all is that we lay down our lives for our friends – not that we do everything we can to protect ourselves. So it matters not whether we are rich enough to pass by the beggar at our front gate. In the extremes or in the small ways we participate in seeing to our own needs first, we miss God’s mark for us and we sin. We are in danger of getting what we deserve.

Nevertheless, Jesus reminds us that it’s always possible to turn back to God. God will hear our prayers of regret. God will accept the sacrifices of our lives. God will gently nudge us in the right direction that honors the amazing gifts of human aptitude to be used for the greater good – the well being of all of God’s children. Do you use your power for yourself or for others? May we learn to follow Jesus in loving others just as much as we love ourselves.

Amen.