Thursday, October 16, 2008
Harvest Dinner
All are invited to the annual Harvest Dinner on Sunday, November 23rd following worship
Friday, September 19, 2008
Building God’s Realm (Again and Again)
Sermon given by Pastor Kirsten Klepfer on Sunday, September 7
Building God’s Realm (Again and Again)
Romans 8:8-10; Matthew 18:15-20
Many of us have been in on the ground floor of some organization. We have been there when the idea was formed, the energy was high and it was just beginning to move from possibility to reality. And one of the things you do in this stage is make decisions about how you will function as a group. Some of these decisions are practical and mundane…we’ll meet every other Thursday. Some are of deep importance because you want to know that how your group functions reflects your shared values and beliefs. How will decisions get made? How will we resolve disagreements? Who can be a member and who can’t?
On the other hand, when you join a group already going, you step into a system where those questions were asked long ago. Things may not be exactly the same as when the group formed, but almost always it is a reflection of those who were founding members – whether in big or small ways. When you join such a group, your decisions are different then if you had been a founding member. Now, you might join because you share beliefs with people in the group, but you may not like the governing structure at all. You might feel that you have power to try and change those things you don’t like, or you might feel the crushing weight of rules so entrenched even Barack Obama and John McCain – self-appointed standard-bearers of changing entrenched systems – could do nothing about it.
As Christians, of course, we are always in the second category. Whether we are born into Christianity and continue to choose this path, or whether we have come to it later in life, we are stepping into something that is already going – and has been for quite some time. And we accept, if only tacitly, the long-standing processes and values and beliefs that govern our religion. For example, we have the scriptures which are, in part, a record of how the early church formed, how it acted and what rules and laws were most important to them. We have the scriptures and by virtue of being Christian, we are to some degree subject to them. And many of us have had to struggle with thing reality more than once.
The early Christians were the lucky ones. They had a clean slate and the fresh start. But before we get too envious and pine for the opportunity to just throw out the bible and start all over again, even the early Christians were finding out it wasn’t quite that simple. It’s true that they got to set up the rules that govern how Christians come together, treat each other and interact with the world. This is what the author of Matthew’s gospel and Paul are both doing; laying down rules – like how to resolve disagreements about behavior – and spelling out the bottom line: love your neighbor as yourself.
But, in reality they were somewhere between starting something completely new and being in the midst of a thousands year old religion with sacred scriptures that they willingly subjected themselves to their whole lives. They were Jewish. And, contrary to what we sometimes think, they did not begrudge this. They were simply trying to figure out what the Jewish faith meant in their particular time in history; namely they are answering the question: “What does our religion look like now that we have experienced this person named Jesus and this resurrection event?”
These two passages are written from the point of view of those in this new and old position. And both are dealing with the Jewish laws and commandments – or in our language, they are wrestling with how to apply their own scriptures to their lives and how to use in them in the life of the community; much like every church in every time and place. Jesus, in Matthew’s gospel, gives us a process for doing this, and Paul gives us the ultimate rule to guide us.
And in listening in on their conversations with the earliest Christians, there are three main points that I think can help us as we work to apply our own scriptures to our lives today.
· First, the law – or in our language, the bible – is not static and cannot be universally and uniformly applied.
· Second, figuring out how to apply the bible to our lives and world requires the entire community. Or, as one friend put it, Matthew’s gospel can be summed up in one warning: Don’t try this at home.
· Third, it’s hard.
So, let me flesh those out a bit. First, scripture cannot be universally or uniformly applied.
The text that Dennis read describes a situation in which there is a concern that a member of the community has broken a commandment – a law in the Torah – the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. And the first thing we notice is that there is a process for resolving this. The confrontation happens not just to punish the offending individual, but because the community must discern whether or not this individual has violated the law.
Matthew offers a process for figuring out how Christians should relate to the mandates of the Torah by using traditional terms: he used the terms binding and loosing. “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” He echoes a practice of the Jewish community where rabbis “bound” the law to a specific situation when they determined that a commandment was applicable to a particular case, and they “loosed” the law when they determined that a word of scripture was not applicable under certain specific circumstances.
Matthew and Paul believed in the Jewish law because they believed that rightly applied it was the key to bringing about God’s realm. This is why once they understood that Jesus was the fulfillment of the law, they understood that Jesus was the one that brought the kingdom of God near and planted the seed that they would then grow. The law was a good thing in and of itself. But Jesus – the fulfillment of the law – pointed out that something had gone wrong with its application.
For example, Jesus found it necessary to bind the law about adultery in a new way in his time. The law said adultery was a sin, but he said even looking at another with lust was just as serious. On the other hand, Jesus loosed the law demanding no work on the Sabbath when he healed the hand of a man on the Sabbath. The religious folks were frustrated because they believed the Sabbath to be a clear, static law. But Jesus declared that the commandment, while certainly an important Jewish law, was to be loosed in this situation, declaring that doing good work was more important in that case than the law about Sabbath.
Some believe that once a community decides what the values are and the corresponding approved and taboo behaviors, then that is what governs. They are set. If they come from scripture, the argument goes, they are immutable. Instead, these passages along with the life of Jesus suggest that it is all much more dynamic than that; much less immutable.
Second, we can only make such decisions about scripture in community.
God gave the authority to bind and loose laws to Jesus in his lifetime, and Jesus gives it to the church. He gives authority to the church, not just one individual. This is because discernment happens best in community. As he says, whenever two or more are gathered, God is there. The spirit moves between us – using each of our gifts and strengths in the discernment process. God, through Jesus, gives the church this authority not because Christians have shown themselves to be extraordinarily wise or faithful, but because when we gather, Christ dwells in our midst.
Granting authority to the church to decide how scriptures should be applied in specific circumstances also relieves the system of power imbalances. Differences are all but guaranteed to come up in any community – and of course the church is no exception. If some individuals are granted greater authority over others, then inevitably power will be the deciding factor in settling disagreements. Such a power based structure was not what Jesus envisioned – or more to the point – it has no place in God’s realm.
And this all fits my experience. Without the community, I am left to figure out on my own what the scriptures mean and how to apply them to decisions I make. And what I know is without community, I am absolutely lousy at this. It’s too small, it’s too private, and it has no relationship then to the community. For the big questions of life, community is not just a good thing, it is a necessity.
Finally, third: It’s hard. Basically, what we learn from Matthew and Paul as they try in their writings and letters to instruct the early Christians are two contradictory things: the scriptures must be properly bound and loosed if God’s will is to be discerned and obeyed, and the scriptures are often bound when they should be loosed and loosed when they should be bound, with the result that God’s will is not discerned or obeyed. It’s hard.
In other words, as people of God, we have the great responsibility to determine, in the day to day of our lives, how to love. And real love in the down and dirty world requires deliberation and sometimes tough choices. How we love or fail to love affects our relationships both to others and – because what we do here affects what happens in heaven – it affects our relationship to God.
And that’s hard enough. But add to that the fact that because the way to do that requires community, the implication is we must actually submit to the community; we must give it authority in our lives. And, well, we don’t do that. And by “we”, I mean pretty much anyone who is steeped in the western culture.
Luckily, we do have some help with this. We are given a bottom line, or a lens, in figuring it all out. Paul says that every commandment can be summed up this way: Love your neighbor as yourself. It’s a good test after decisions are made. Does it lead to me loving others in the same way I love myself – or in the same way I love my friend – or in the same way I love God? It’s hard, but we are not left without a compass.
I have been thinking lately more and more of how we should go about listening for God’s will in our lives and how the scriptures, tradition and laws should be applied in my own life; partly because I come up against walls when I try to figure it out on my own, and often I feel stuck when I think I hear God’s call to me but just can’t figure out what it means I should be doing today, tomorrow and in the future.
Many of you know I went to Ghost Ranch in New Mexico to attend a class that was discussing the possibility of starting a new kind of “religious order” where we don’t all live in the same place, but are tied together by vows that we would all take. The idea of religious orders is nothing new – think Franciscans, Jesuits, Convents and Monasteries. To be a part of these groups, you generally make commitments to one another and take “vows”.
The vows we came up with go something like this:
A vow to do radical peace and justice work in the world.
A vow to live in resistance to the dominant culture.
A vow to live in symbiosis with creation.
And, a vow to practice our faith in spiritual disciplines like worship, prayer and sharing our resources.
These vows appeal to me because they seem to capture much of what I feel God calls me to as a Christian. And what became clear to me during the week was that not only did I need a community to hold me accountable to the vows, I need a community to help me discern what these vows mean in my specific situation. And community is necessary for this, I realized. Partly because there is more wisdom in community than in one individual. But also, because when a community is involved we can all take greater risks and live more boldly knowing that group discernment factors in the ways others can support you and catch you if you fail.
It occurred to me as we were talking that week that what we were describing sounded an awful lot like church – the local congregation. At our best, we make vows to God and to each other, and then live those out in community. We allow the community to be not just our support, but to guide us and help us discern God’s will. We commit to a process that seeks to protect the weak and reflect the belief that wisdom emerges best in gatherings of the faithful. We remember what Jesus said: wherever two or more are gathered, I am there. Christ is here, in our midst, when we come together.
We can be guided by that, or we can return to our lives as individuals, solo fliers in life, apart from the power of Christ in community. But I don’t think that will ever lead us to lives filled with Christ and communities that reflect God’s realm here on earth.
This passage in Matthew may be referring to sins – to breaking of commandments. But, I think for us the question is less “are we breaking one of the 613 commandment of the Torah?”, but rather, “How can we help each other shape lives that are based on scripture and God’s Word?”
After all, it is our turn. It is time again – each new day – to do what those early Christians did, what their Hebrew ancestors did, what the church of our parents and grandparents did. And, we need each other. The world changes constantly. What it means to live out God’s will changes constantly. And it is very hard. But, fortunately, we have help. When we gather Christ is here. And when we seek to live out the scriptures and the Word of God, we have the voice of Paul ringing in our ears: “the scriptures are summed up in this word: Love your neighbor as yourself.” Amen.
Building God’s Realm (Again and Again)
Romans 8:8-10; Matthew 18:15-20
Many of us have been in on the ground floor of some organization. We have been there when the idea was formed, the energy was high and it was just beginning to move from possibility to reality. And one of the things you do in this stage is make decisions about how you will function as a group. Some of these decisions are practical and mundane…we’ll meet every other Thursday. Some are of deep importance because you want to know that how your group functions reflects your shared values and beliefs. How will decisions get made? How will we resolve disagreements? Who can be a member and who can’t?
On the other hand, when you join a group already going, you step into a system where those questions were asked long ago. Things may not be exactly the same as when the group formed, but almost always it is a reflection of those who were founding members – whether in big or small ways. When you join such a group, your decisions are different then if you had been a founding member. Now, you might join because you share beliefs with people in the group, but you may not like the governing structure at all. You might feel that you have power to try and change those things you don’t like, or you might feel the crushing weight of rules so entrenched even Barack Obama and John McCain – self-appointed standard-bearers of changing entrenched systems – could do nothing about it.
As Christians, of course, we are always in the second category. Whether we are born into Christianity and continue to choose this path, or whether we have come to it later in life, we are stepping into something that is already going – and has been for quite some time. And we accept, if only tacitly, the long-standing processes and values and beliefs that govern our religion. For example, we have the scriptures which are, in part, a record of how the early church formed, how it acted and what rules and laws were most important to them. We have the scriptures and by virtue of being Christian, we are to some degree subject to them. And many of us have had to struggle with thing reality more than once.
The early Christians were the lucky ones. They had a clean slate and the fresh start. But before we get too envious and pine for the opportunity to just throw out the bible and start all over again, even the early Christians were finding out it wasn’t quite that simple. It’s true that they got to set up the rules that govern how Christians come together, treat each other and interact with the world. This is what the author of Matthew’s gospel and Paul are both doing; laying down rules – like how to resolve disagreements about behavior – and spelling out the bottom line: love your neighbor as yourself.
But, in reality they were somewhere between starting something completely new and being in the midst of a thousands year old religion with sacred scriptures that they willingly subjected themselves to their whole lives. They were Jewish. And, contrary to what we sometimes think, they did not begrudge this. They were simply trying to figure out what the Jewish faith meant in their particular time in history; namely they are answering the question: “What does our religion look like now that we have experienced this person named Jesus and this resurrection event?”
These two passages are written from the point of view of those in this new and old position. And both are dealing with the Jewish laws and commandments – or in our language, they are wrestling with how to apply their own scriptures to their lives and how to use in them in the life of the community; much like every church in every time and place. Jesus, in Matthew’s gospel, gives us a process for doing this, and Paul gives us the ultimate rule to guide us.
And in listening in on their conversations with the earliest Christians, there are three main points that I think can help us as we work to apply our own scriptures to our lives today.
· First, the law – or in our language, the bible – is not static and cannot be universally and uniformly applied.
· Second, figuring out how to apply the bible to our lives and world requires the entire community. Or, as one friend put it, Matthew’s gospel can be summed up in one warning: Don’t try this at home.
· Third, it’s hard.
So, let me flesh those out a bit. First, scripture cannot be universally or uniformly applied.
The text that Dennis read describes a situation in which there is a concern that a member of the community has broken a commandment – a law in the Torah – the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. And the first thing we notice is that there is a process for resolving this. The confrontation happens not just to punish the offending individual, but because the community must discern whether or not this individual has violated the law.
Matthew offers a process for figuring out how Christians should relate to the mandates of the Torah by using traditional terms: he used the terms binding and loosing. “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” He echoes a practice of the Jewish community where rabbis “bound” the law to a specific situation when they determined that a commandment was applicable to a particular case, and they “loosed” the law when they determined that a word of scripture was not applicable under certain specific circumstances.
Matthew and Paul believed in the Jewish law because they believed that rightly applied it was the key to bringing about God’s realm. This is why once they understood that Jesus was the fulfillment of the law, they understood that Jesus was the one that brought the kingdom of God near and planted the seed that they would then grow. The law was a good thing in and of itself. But Jesus – the fulfillment of the law – pointed out that something had gone wrong with its application.
For example, Jesus found it necessary to bind the law about adultery in a new way in his time. The law said adultery was a sin, but he said even looking at another with lust was just as serious. On the other hand, Jesus loosed the law demanding no work on the Sabbath when he healed the hand of a man on the Sabbath. The religious folks were frustrated because they believed the Sabbath to be a clear, static law. But Jesus declared that the commandment, while certainly an important Jewish law, was to be loosed in this situation, declaring that doing good work was more important in that case than the law about Sabbath.
Some believe that once a community decides what the values are and the corresponding approved and taboo behaviors, then that is what governs. They are set. If they come from scripture, the argument goes, they are immutable. Instead, these passages along with the life of Jesus suggest that it is all much more dynamic than that; much less immutable.
Second, we can only make such decisions about scripture in community.
God gave the authority to bind and loose laws to Jesus in his lifetime, and Jesus gives it to the church. He gives authority to the church, not just one individual. This is because discernment happens best in community. As he says, whenever two or more are gathered, God is there. The spirit moves between us – using each of our gifts and strengths in the discernment process. God, through Jesus, gives the church this authority not because Christians have shown themselves to be extraordinarily wise or faithful, but because when we gather, Christ dwells in our midst.
Granting authority to the church to decide how scriptures should be applied in specific circumstances also relieves the system of power imbalances. Differences are all but guaranteed to come up in any community – and of course the church is no exception. If some individuals are granted greater authority over others, then inevitably power will be the deciding factor in settling disagreements. Such a power based structure was not what Jesus envisioned – or more to the point – it has no place in God’s realm.
And this all fits my experience. Without the community, I am left to figure out on my own what the scriptures mean and how to apply them to decisions I make. And what I know is without community, I am absolutely lousy at this. It’s too small, it’s too private, and it has no relationship then to the community. For the big questions of life, community is not just a good thing, it is a necessity.
Finally, third: It’s hard. Basically, what we learn from Matthew and Paul as they try in their writings and letters to instruct the early Christians are two contradictory things: the scriptures must be properly bound and loosed if God’s will is to be discerned and obeyed, and the scriptures are often bound when they should be loosed and loosed when they should be bound, with the result that God’s will is not discerned or obeyed. It’s hard.
In other words, as people of God, we have the great responsibility to determine, in the day to day of our lives, how to love. And real love in the down and dirty world requires deliberation and sometimes tough choices. How we love or fail to love affects our relationships both to others and – because what we do here affects what happens in heaven – it affects our relationship to God.
And that’s hard enough. But add to that the fact that because the way to do that requires community, the implication is we must actually submit to the community; we must give it authority in our lives. And, well, we don’t do that. And by “we”, I mean pretty much anyone who is steeped in the western culture.
Luckily, we do have some help with this. We are given a bottom line, or a lens, in figuring it all out. Paul says that every commandment can be summed up this way: Love your neighbor as yourself. It’s a good test after decisions are made. Does it lead to me loving others in the same way I love myself – or in the same way I love my friend – or in the same way I love God? It’s hard, but we are not left without a compass.
I have been thinking lately more and more of how we should go about listening for God’s will in our lives and how the scriptures, tradition and laws should be applied in my own life; partly because I come up against walls when I try to figure it out on my own, and often I feel stuck when I think I hear God’s call to me but just can’t figure out what it means I should be doing today, tomorrow and in the future.
Many of you know I went to Ghost Ranch in New Mexico to attend a class that was discussing the possibility of starting a new kind of “religious order” where we don’t all live in the same place, but are tied together by vows that we would all take. The idea of religious orders is nothing new – think Franciscans, Jesuits, Convents and Monasteries. To be a part of these groups, you generally make commitments to one another and take “vows”.
The vows we came up with go something like this:
A vow to do radical peace and justice work in the world.
A vow to live in resistance to the dominant culture.
A vow to live in symbiosis with creation.
And, a vow to practice our faith in spiritual disciplines like worship, prayer and sharing our resources.
These vows appeal to me because they seem to capture much of what I feel God calls me to as a Christian. And what became clear to me during the week was that not only did I need a community to hold me accountable to the vows, I need a community to help me discern what these vows mean in my specific situation. And community is necessary for this, I realized. Partly because there is more wisdom in community than in one individual. But also, because when a community is involved we can all take greater risks and live more boldly knowing that group discernment factors in the ways others can support you and catch you if you fail.
It occurred to me as we were talking that week that what we were describing sounded an awful lot like church – the local congregation. At our best, we make vows to God and to each other, and then live those out in community. We allow the community to be not just our support, but to guide us and help us discern God’s will. We commit to a process that seeks to protect the weak and reflect the belief that wisdom emerges best in gatherings of the faithful. We remember what Jesus said: wherever two or more are gathered, I am there. Christ is here, in our midst, when we come together.
We can be guided by that, or we can return to our lives as individuals, solo fliers in life, apart from the power of Christ in community. But I don’t think that will ever lead us to lives filled with Christ and communities that reflect God’s realm here on earth.
This passage in Matthew may be referring to sins – to breaking of commandments. But, I think for us the question is less “are we breaking one of the 613 commandment of the Torah?”, but rather, “How can we help each other shape lives that are based on scripture and God’s Word?”
After all, it is our turn. It is time again – each new day – to do what those early Christians did, what their Hebrew ancestors did, what the church of our parents and grandparents did. And, we need each other. The world changes constantly. What it means to live out God’s will changes constantly. And it is very hard. But, fortunately, we have help. When we gather Christ is here. And when we seek to live out the scriptures and the Word of God, we have the voice of Paul ringing in our ears: “the scriptures are summed up in this word: Love your neighbor as yourself.” Amen.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
God’s Economy: Globalization
This sermon was delivered by Pastor Kirsten Klepfer on Sunday, August 31, 2008.
Exodus 3:1-6; Romans 12:9-18; Matthew 16:21-28
This is the final week of a four-part sermon series on the economy. This is also, of course, the day before Labor Day. That was entirely accidental, but it seems fitting to be ending right before the holiday that was originally established to create more humane and just working conditions by putting humans at the heart of the economic system. Tomorrow, many people will have picnics, relax with family, sleep in, and find other ways to celebrate this holiday. But, in this time of economic difficulty, it feels more like a bitter sweet holiday. In an age of globalization and powerful forces that seem beyond our capacity to affect, what should Labor Day be about now? How can we find ways to put humanity and justice ahead of profits and bottom lines? What is our role as Christians? Good questions to ask this weekend.
But, maybe you are like me. Maybe in the face of arguments for and against “globalization”, you feel completely inadequate in sorting out what and who is right. It all seems so complicated and over my head. I find myself not knowing what to think, yet I realize that the forces of globalization affect us all – and not just a little bit. So I feel compelled to understand it and find ways to engage the issue as a Christian.
At its best, economic globalization is the effort to integrate national economies into one international economy through trade, foreign investment, capital flow and the spread of technology. Or so says one definition I found. And, in a more general sense, what follows from economic globalization is a utopic social system where all are one and free and borders are diminished. As such, it is easy to understand why some think this is a worthy, if not necessary, goal. Our world is getting smaller and smaller through technology and travel; it no longer makes sense to be isolated economically.
But, we have also seen some of the pitfalls of globalization. We see people in our own community and church lose jobs that are sent to other countries where labor is cheaper and overhead is dramatically less. We see, in many ways, a race to the bottom in terms of lowering the cost of production, regardless of the human cost. People are unable to make enough to live on, and many are left jobless and without health insurance, scrambling to pick up the pieces and find something else – which is becoming more and more difficult.
So, as Christians, should we be in favor of globalization or opposed to it? Should we be celebrating things like NAFTA, or should we be protesting the World Trade Organization meetings? It is difficult to argue against policies that are meant to unite the world and share resources. At the same time it is difficult to support this effort when it seems to be destroying local, independent cultures and markets. So which is it?
Well that’s the problem. Such choices assume that there is a dichotomy between local and global; that globalization and particularization are opposites. Any attempts at curbing or furthering globalization based on this dichotomy will be doomed one way or the other. But I think our faith has something to offer a world in desperate need of a third way. Namely, in Christ there is no dichotomy between global and local, between particular and universal.
When we live in God, with God at the center, the dichotomy that fuels a failed system disappears. Why does this change things? What difference can it make to put this God at the center of our economics? Let’s first take a closer look at the inevitable problems that arise when we don’t do this.
When either the local is sacrificed to the global or the global to the local, someone loses. And on one hand, we deprive the particular when we demand conformity to this new global economy. Last week, we talked about how, in the free market as it is understood today, people are not really free because – absent shared, communal values – each economic decision simply becomes a battle of wills and wants and at the end of the day, what matters most is sheer power. Globalization – as it exists – amplifies this exponentially.
The free market lacks concern for local cultures and practices. And globalization not only lacks this concern, but it assumes the local is less important than the universal goods of capitalism and democracy. Through our power – those of us who believe our economy is not just good for us but will be good for all – we force change in others by punishing those not willing to conform.
It’s easy to see the results of this crowding out of local cultures by just driving from one coast of our country to the other. It is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish one place from another. You see the same restaurants, the same stores, the same malls, the same housing developments. And this doesn’t stop anymore at the edges of this country. It is getting harder to travel the world without seeing the early stages of the same phenomenon. McDonalds and KFC are in communities that had virtually no similarities to ours prior to this global effort at spreading our economic virtue.
On the other hand, at the same time that we are pushing out local cultures by imposing universal sameness, almost paradoxically we are retaining a veneer of unique local culture by exploding the particular and commodifying it. In the sophisticated world of global economies and the ability to be anywhere, in any country or culture in a matter of hours, not months, and with the whole world at our finger tips, we have found ways to turn other cultures and ethnicities into commodities. We assume that consumption of these things connects us to diverse people all over the world – expanding who we are while ignoring that consuming culture by definition takes the local out of it and makes it universal – nondistinct. Then, our perceived connection to others through these purchases – including purchasing experiences as tourists – end up being thin. Worse, they become a substitute for actual solidarity and action.
A white kid in Illinois can listen to reggae music and in doing so think himself to be in solidarity with the poor of Jamaica. But, no matter how much we think we are connected to others, virtual solidarity through consumption of culture offers no concrete results. Consumption is substituted for political action. We merely bring the distinct parts of a community’s culture into our economic system, and dilute them in the sea of sameness.
Like culture, capital has lost any attachment to time and place – or person for that matter. We see this, as I mentioned before, in our labor capital when jobs are distressingly mobile. But it is true of financial capital as well. Financial systems now transcend time and place and currency can move in an instant from one place to another, affecting the wealth and poverty of any one place at the mere whims and wishes of a small number of people.
And finally, because it seems like the only other option, in response to the overwhelming conforming power of globalization and the explosion of the particular until nothing has value or meaning, we find those who believe the only way to fight this is by asserting particularity over universal and making it the only thing that has meaning. The one particular expression becomes the only true universal expression, and we fight to the death for this. Whether that particular thing is religion, or democracy, or fast food, fundamentalism is one dangerous result of a system based on a dualism of global and local.
Our God, the God that both transcends time and space and is fully attached to each particular location, time and things offers a way beyond the dichotomy that currently drives economic policy. We know there is an alternative way to build global communities that neither collapse the particular into the universal nor fiercely asserts the particular over and against any attempts at uniting diverse peoples into one global community.
And, like so much of the Christian faith and life, the way to do this is counter-intuitive. And it is definitely counter-cultural; at least it is counter to the dominant culture in which we all live. And probably we, like Moses encountering God at the burning bush in order to get his marching orders, we know that living from a relationship with the concrete universal God will require bold and great things from us ordinary people. Moses’ intuition told him that an encounter with God would change his life. What happened in this meeting was that the God that Moses understood as universal, creator and removed was present to him in extreme particularity. Here was God, face-to-face literally with Moses. It doesn’t get anymore local than that.
Interestingly, Peter had almost the opposite experience, yet the same realization of a God that is both local and universal. Peter finds, in the words of Jesus, the unexpected universal in this concrete person and friend. He sees only the possibilities for this one person, but Jesus makes it clear that it is not finally just about him – just about them. He must die so that the whole world can rise with him. His particularity must be infused with the universal. For both of these people, Moses and Peter, this encounter is jarring and gives them more than pause – it makes them retreat at first.
Jesus, through his very local life in Palestine, calls us to reinvent how we live in relationship to each other. And then, as he approaches the cross and the universalizing event of the resurrection, he tells us we must reinvent how we live in relationship to our own lives and in relationship to all those who come after. We have to lose our lives as individuals, seeking only our current goals. In that life is gained – life for all, life for Christ.
And so for the fourth time in four sermons on economics, we are drawn back to the communion table – our symbol of the concrete universal, of the gathered body of Christ in Jesus, and Jesus in this gathering. Each gathering of people who share communion is not merely a part of a whole, as if Christ could be divided into parts, like a commodity that is finite and can be offered only until the pieces are all gone. Each community is a microcosm, a mini-cosmos in which the universal Christ is wholly present. The closer one is attached to the particular community gathered around one particular table, the more united one becomes to the universal.
In this way, God’s community and economy can only be made real in concrete local practices. For it is in the encounter with the other persons that the whole Christ is encountered; in the concrete, not the abstract. As William Cavenaugh puts it, “the call to Christians is not so much either to embrace or try and replace abstractions such as capitalism and globalism with other abstractions. It is rather to sustain forms of economy, community and culture that recognize the universality of the individual person.”
Paul’s vision is the model of such a community. Paul is writing to one community in Rome, but he understands what is at stake in this community living according to the Christ-centered values he lays out beautifully. He knows that he is writing to Rome, which at the same time is the church universal – the ekklesia, as he calls it. The ekklesia is the entire gathered people. It is whole, and this church is not a part of that whole, but is the same as it.
One could argue that in these few verses of Paul’s we are given a charge to construct communities that operate quite differently from the world community we see in a global economy. It is not a call to either accept it or reject it. It is to step out altogether and not buy the assumptions.
And the implications of this are huge – and they are small, little steps each day in very particular, very local ways. We need to be in community together…closely. Not just coming here once a week, but sharing our economic lives as well. Almost like building an economy right here among us; an economy in Christ where each person is seen as universal and each transaction is a chance to meet the universal Christ.
Recently, in a very organic way – meaning necessity breeds creativity J, I entered into an economic agreement with a friend where we are exchanging laundry facilities for child care. It sounds small, almost silly. Yet, there is no reason in the world that two people who know each other and live minutes apart should both have a full washer and dryer. At the same time, building someone into the fabric of my and my daughter’s life who will be there when we need can be nothing but good. I’m able to not buy people to offer the commodity of care for my daughter. Instead, we share in life in concrete ways that builds a mini-economy where we all flourish.
And the question for us as a congregation is what can we do – literally economically – to offer each other, and so also the universe, a third way? We already do some things; sharing produce and certainly the practice of sharing our money each Sunday not just with each other but with a ministry and mission is counter-cultural. But, what else can we do. How might we be a bit more brave and bold?
They might be small, little ways, yet a huge step off the cliff of cultural norms. As pastor and theologian Sarah Dylan points out – well, really as Jesus lays it out to Peter – “there is a price to pay for defying these cultural mandates, and though it’s often miniscule in comparison to the price Jesus paid…it’s going to feel like a steep one for those of us accustomed to privilege. As we follow Jesus, things will change – us, our relationships, our world. Change means losing things as they were, but if we’ve caught Jesus’ vision for how God is redeeming the world, we know that what we gain is of far greater value that anything we might lose.” Amen.
Exodus 3:1-6; Romans 12:9-18; Matthew 16:21-28
This is the final week of a four-part sermon series on the economy. This is also, of course, the day before Labor Day. That was entirely accidental, but it seems fitting to be ending right before the holiday that was originally established to create more humane and just working conditions by putting humans at the heart of the economic system. Tomorrow, many people will have picnics, relax with family, sleep in, and find other ways to celebrate this holiday. But, in this time of economic difficulty, it feels more like a bitter sweet holiday. In an age of globalization and powerful forces that seem beyond our capacity to affect, what should Labor Day be about now? How can we find ways to put humanity and justice ahead of profits and bottom lines? What is our role as Christians? Good questions to ask this weekend.
But, maybe you are like me. Maybe in the face of arguments for and against “globalization”, you feel completely inadequate in sorting out what and who is right. It all seems so complicated and over my head. I find myself not knowing what to think, yet I realize that the forces of globalization affect us all – and not just a little bit. So I feel compelled to understand it and find ways to engage the issue as a Christian.
At its best, economic globalization is the effort to integrate national economies into one international economy through trade, foreign investment, capital flow and the spread of technology. Or so says one definition I found. And, in a more general sense, what follows from economic globalization is a utopic social system where all are one and free and borders are diminished. As such, it is easy to understand why some think this is a worthy, if not necessary, goal. Our world is getting smaller and smaller through technology and travel; it no longer makes sense to be isolated economically.
But, we have also seen some of the pitfalls of globalization. We see people in our own community and church lose jobs that are sent to other countries where labor is cheaper and overhead is dramatically less. We see, in many ways, a race to the bottom in terms of lowering the cost of production, regardless of the human cost. People are unable to make enough to live on, and many are left jobless and without health insurance, scrambling to pick up the pieces and find something else – which is becoming more and more difficult.
So, as Christians, should we be in favor of globalization or opposed to it? Should we be celebrating things like NAFTA, or should we be protesting the World Trade Organization meetings? It is difficult to argue against policies that are meant to unite the world and share resources. At the same time it is difficult to support this effort when it seems to be destroying local, independent cultures and markets. So which is it?
Well that’s the problem. Such choices assume that there is a dichotomy between local and global; that globalization and particularization are opposites. Any attempts at curbing or furthering globalization based on this dichotomy will be doomed one way or the other. But I think our faith has something to offer a world in desperate need of a third way. Namely, in Christ there is no dichotomy between global and local, between particular and universal.
When we live in God, with God at the center, the dichotomy that fuels a failed system disappears. Why does this change things? What difference can it make to put this God at the center of our economics? Let’s first take a closer look at the inevitable problems that arise when we don’t do this.
When either the local is sacrificed to the global or the global to the local, someone loses. And on one hand, we deprive the particular when we demand conformity to this new global economy. Last week, we talked about how, in the free market as it is understood today, people are not really free because – absent shared, communal values – each economic decision simply becomes a battle of wills and wants and at the end of the day, what matters most is sheer power. Globalization – as it exists – amplifies this exponentially.
The free market lacks concern for local cultures and practices. And globalization not only lacks this concern, but it assumes the local is less important than the universal goods of capitalism and democracy. Through our power – those of us who believe our economy is not just good for us but will be good for all – we force change in others by punishing those not willing to conform.
It’s easy to see the results of this crowding out of local cultures by just driving from one coast of our country to the other. It is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish one place from another. You see the same restaurants, the same stores, the same malls, the same housing developments. And this doesn’t stop anymore at the edges of this country. It is getting harder to travel the world without seeing the early stages of the same phenomenon. McDonalds and KFC are in communities that had virtually no similarities to ours prior to this global effort at spreading our economic virtue.
On the other hand, at the same time that we are pushing out local cultures by imposing universal sameness, almost paradoxically we are retaining a veneer of unique local culture by exploding the particular and commodifying it. In the sophisticated world of global economies and the ability to be anywhere, in any country or culture in a matter of hours, not months, and with the whole world at our finger tips, we have found ways to turn other cultures and ethnicities into commodities. We assume that consumption of these things connects us to diverse people all over the world – expanding who we are while ignoring that consuming culture by definition takes the local out of it and makes it universal – nondistinct. Then, our perceived connection to others through these purchases – including purchasing experiences as tourists – end up being thin. Worse, they become a substitute for actual solidarity and action.
A white kid in Illinois can listen to reggae music and in doing so think himself to be in solidarity with the poor of Jamaica. But, no matter how much we think we are connected to others, virtual solidarity through consumption of culture offers no concrete results. Consumption is substituted for political action. We merely bring the distinct parts of a community’s culture into our economic system, and dilute them in the sea of sameness.
Like culture, capital has lost any attachment to time and place – or person for that matter. We see this, as I mentioned before, in our labor capital when jobs are distressingly mobile. But it is true of financial capital as well. Financial systems now transcend time and place and currency can move in an instant from one place to another, affecting the wealth and poverty of any one place at the mere whims and wishes of a small number of people.
And finally, because it seems like the only other option, in response to the overwhelming conforming power of globalization and the explosion of the particular until nothing has value or meaning, we find those who believe the only way to fight this is by asserting particularity over universal and making it the only thing that has meaning. The one particular expression becomes the only true universal expression, and we fight to the death for this. Whether that particular thing is religion, or democracy, or fast food, fundamentalism is one dangerous result of a system based on a dualism of global and local.
Our God, the God that both transcends time and space and is fully attached to each particular location, time and things offers a way beyond the dichotomy that currently drives economic policy. We know there is an alternative way to build global communities that neither collapse the particular into the universal nor fiercely asserts the particular over and against any attempts at uniting diverse peoples into one global community.
And, like so much of the Christian faith and life, the way to do this is counter-intuitive. And it is definitely counter-cultural; at least it is counter to the dominant culture in which we all live. And probably we, like Moses encountering God at the burning bush in order to get his marching orders, we know that living from a relationship with the concrete universal God will require bold and great things from us ordinary people. Moses’ intuition told him that an encounter with God would change his life. What happened in this meeting was that the God that Moses understood as universal, creator and removed was present to him in extreme particularity. Here was God, face-to-face literally with Moses. It doesn’t get anymore local than that.
Interestingly, Peter had almost the opposite experience, yet the same realization of a God that is both local and universal. Peter finds, in the words of Jesus, the unexpected universal in this concrete person and friend. He sees only the possibilities for this one person, but Jesus makes it clear that it is not finally just about him – just about them. He must die so that the whole world can rise with him. His particularity must be infused with the universal. For both of these people, Moses and Peter, this encounter is jarring and gives them more than pause – it makes them retreat at first.
Jesus, through his very local life in Palestine, calls us to reinvent how we live in relationship to each other. And then, as he approaches the cross and the universalizing event of the resurrection, he tells us we must reinvent how we live in relationship to our own lives and in relationship to all those who come after. We have to lose our lives as individuals, seeking only our current goals. In that life is gained – life for all, life for Christ.
And so for the fourth time in four sermons on economics, we are drawn back to the communion table – our symbol of the concrete universal, of the gathered body of Christ in Jesus, and Jesus in this gathering. Each gathering of people who share communion is not merely a part of a whole, as if Christ could be divided into parts, like a commodity that is finite and can be offered only until the pieces are all gone. Each community is a microcosm, a mini-cosmos in which the universal Christ is wholly present. The closer one is attached to the particular community gathered around one particular table, the more united one becomes to the universal.
In this way, God’s community and economy can only be made real in concrete local practices. For it is in the encounter with the other persons that the whole Christ is encountered; in the concrete, not the abstract. As William Cavenaugh puts it, “the call to Christians is not so much either to embrace or try and replace abstractions such as capitalism and globalism with other abstractions. It is rather to sustain forms of economy, community and culture that recognize the universality of the individual person.”
Paul’s vision is the model of such a community. Paul is writing to one community in Rome, but he understands what is at stake in this community living according to the Christ-centered values he lays out beautifully. He knows that he is writing to Rome, which at the same time is the church universal – the ekklesia, as he calls it. The ekklesia is the entire gathered people. It is whole, and this church is not a part of that whole, but is the same as it.
One could argue that in these few verses of Paul’s we are given a charge to construct communities that operate quite differently from the world community we see in a global economy. It is not a call to either accept it or reject it. It is to step out altogether and not buy the assumptions.
And the implications of this are huge – and they are small, little steps each day in very particular, very local ways. We need to be in community together…closely. Not just coming here once a week, but sharing our economic lives as well. Almost like building an economy right here among us; an economy in Christ where each person is seen as universal and each transaction is a chance to meet the universal Christ.
Recently, in a very organic way – meaning necessity breeds creativity J, I entered into an economic agreement with a friend where we are exchanging laundry facilities for child care. It sounds small, almost silly. Yet, there is no reason in the world that two people who know each other and live minutes apart should both have a full washer and dryer. At the same time, building someone into the fabric of my and my daughter’s life who will be there when we need can be nothing but good. I’m able to not buy people to offer the commodity of care for my daughter. Instead, we share in life in concrete ways that builds a mini-economy where we all flourish.
And the question for us as a congregation is what can we do – literally economically – to offer each other, and so also the universe, a third way? We already do some things; sharing produce and certainly the practice of sharing our money each Sunday not just with each other but with a ministry and mission is counter-cultural. But, what else can we do. How might we be a bit more brave and bold?
They might be small, little ways, yet a huge step off the cliff of cultural norms. As pastor and theologian Sarah Dylan points out – well, really as Jesus lays it out to Peter – “there is a price to pay for defying these cultural mandates, and though it’s often miniscule in comparison to the price Jesus paid…it’s going to feel like a steep one for those of us accustomed to privilege. As we follow Jesus, things will change – us, our relationships, our world. Change means losing things as they were, but if we’ve caught Jesus’ vision for how God is redeeming the world, we know that what we gain is of far greater value that anything we might lose.” Amen.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
God’s Economy: Free Markets
Sermon delivered by Pastor Kirsten Klepfer on Sunday, August 25, 2008.
Pastor's note: This is the third sermon of a four part series on economics. I owe a great debt of gratitude to William Cavenaugh and the book he wrote, Being Consumed. These four sermons on economics are an attempt to share the insights he writes about in that book.
Scripture: Matthew 16:13-20, Romans 12:1-8
This is the third Sunday of a four-Sunday series on Economics. We all know that we must and do operate as players in the economic system. We must buy, sell, consume, work, choose, own, and trade. This is a reality of life. And with each day that we wake up, open the paper and see another story about the decline of the economy, we are faced with being necessary players in a system that wields great and sometimes terrifying power over our lives and the lives of others.
It is precisely when things get difficult that we are most tempted to move into “survival mentality” and abandon our principles and ideals. But, as Christians living during an economic downturn – or even recession – we can’t afford to abandon our ideals. The world can’t afford for us to do that. In fact, in my opinion, Christian churches have been far too absent from economic discussions believing theology and economics have little to say to one another. But, if our faith has little to say to the economic systems of our day, then we have little to say, period. People’s lives are affected by economics more than almost anything else.
The first week we looked at contrasting assumptions we have about our world and its resources. One can assume scarcity and then operate economically with that at the center and ground of everything. Or, one can trust in God’s generosity and assume abundance as the basis of everything which altars how we interact with one another as we engage in economic decisions.
Last week we talked about the fact that far from being too attached to material goods, it is our growing detachment from things that has led to a morally blind, or even morally suspect, economic system. We no longer know where things are produced, who produces them, how they get to us, and what happens to all the people and God’s creation along the way. This detachment keeps us from making informed decisions in our purchasing, and makes us unsuspecting accomplices in an economy that is devastating the planet and exploiting workers all over the world.
This week we will talk about what a truly free market looks like in God’s realm.
A free market, we are told, is a market in which prices of goods and services are arranged completely by mutual consent of sellers and buyers. In such a market, a decision is free if an exchange is informed and entered into voluntarily. After that, very little matters except reducing, as much as possible, interference in those decisions from the state. The less state intervention there is, according to theorists like Milton Friedman, the more free a market is. The value of goods and services is determined entirely by what people desire and the market does not judge those desires and does not encourage any community development of agreed upon desires for the social good.
When free, the market beautifully responds to what the people want; it bends and folds and changes in mutually beneficial ways because, through their free choices, the people are dictating what should be produced, how much we will pay, and how much we value certain items. And in general, this is the system we have.
The problem is, many of us do not feel particularly free in the economic arena. There are all kinds of signs that our supposedly free market is anything but.
Freedom, in the Milton Friedman sense, is pursing whatever you want without interference from others. Your only part in the system is to satisfy your desires, as long as it doesn’t harm others. But, freedom from a Christian perspective is not just a lack of external interference. We all know that just desiring something does not make that desire good. Even if we are free to act on out desires, if we can’t control them – or more precisely cultivate the “right” desires – then that freedom to act is not necessarily Christian freedom.
Our free market system makes no judgments about what we desire – our faith, on the other hand, does. In faith, all desires are subsumed and ordered under our greatest desire, which is to love and serve God. In the language of Augustine, a Christian theologian from the 4th century, there are true desires and false desires, and we cannot always figure out on our own which is which. We need a community to help us sort it out, and absent that, we are not free in the Christian sense of the word. We will be ruled by our false desires – the ones that are given to us by the world through advertising, a culture of consumption, peer pressure, and our own anxieties and fears.
The key to true freedom is not just following whatever desire we happen to have, but cultivating the right desires. We do this through worship, prayer, and conversation with other people of faith, and service.
So that’s one disconnect. We know we are not always free when we are ruled by our false desires even though the market allows us to indulge those desires endlessly and rewards them with unfettered, unregulated access to the goods and services that satisfy us.
But there are other reasons our markets are not really free in the Christian sense of the word. When there is no shared, communal objective sense of what is good to desire, then all that is left is a battle of desires arbitrated by sheer power. And the market system has fostered a massive imbalance of power making almost everyone within it anything but free.
One way this power imbalance has arisen is through marketing. There is a thinly veiled lie that marketing is important because it provides the individual with the information necessary to make a truly informed – and thus free – decision. Yet, as the marketing companies themselves would boast, more often ads are about creating and manipulating desires. Through saturation and surveillance – companies collecting information about us in order to better target our unique patterns and personalities, marketing exerts a power that takes away freedom, and certainly distracts us from cultivating “true” desires.
While we set aside a couple of hours on Sunday mornings to be immersed in worship and prayer and to fill our hearts and minds with God’s words and music, every other minute of our week we are immersed in advertising. It’s everywhere, and even those of us who make an effort to reduce the power of advertising on our lives are exposed to it when we’re not even aware.
And, marketing is not the only area in which the logic of sheer power is manifest. Another is the concentration of power in enormous transnational corporations.
Transnational corporations are able to shop around the globe for the most advantageous wage environments, that is, those places where people are so desperate that they must take jobs that pay extremely low wages, in many cases wages insufficient to feed and house themselves and their dependents. All of this is done in the name of “free” trade.
But, is the person who works for dollars a day “free”? In the definitions of free market advocates, the answer seems to be “yes”. A woman’s decision to take a job making clothes for American markets would presumably be both informed and voluntary, provided she was not deceived about the kind and amount of work she would be doing, or about the hourly rate she would be paid. Presumably no one would force her to take the job, and no one would prevent her from leaving it. Both she and her employer would enter into this exchange in the expectation of benefiting from it. The employer would expect to increase profits by paying low wages, and the worker would expect an improvement over starvation.
The problem with this view is that it is blind to the real disparity of power at work here. And, in the free market context, to ask whether the exchange serves the common good, or it if is just, is irrelevant to the question of whether or not the exchange is free. Yet, this woman is not free in the Christian sense of the word. Nor is the market that is forcing her to take a job that does not allow her to flourish.
And, while some profit massively from these un-free market systems, most people in these corporations actually feel trapped.
When managers lament the displacement and suffering caused by closing factories that pay living wages and opening others that do not, I believe they are not just being disingenuous. When they blame the move on necessity, they recognize that the “free” market does not leave them free to act in ways they might believe are more just. They feel like they have no choice in the matter, because they assume that consumers will want to maximize their own gain in any transaction by paying the lowest price possible for a product.
Yet those of us consumers who might wish to communicate otherwise to the corporations don’t always have ways to do that. First, the products don’t come with enough information for us to “vote with our money”, so to speak. Take the example of buying beef in the supermarket. These days, in efforts to be more efficient and “meet consumer demand”, the cattle industry has changed dramatically. Each head of cattle now requires about 284 gallons of oil in its lifetime. Runnoff from the petroleum-based fertilizer has traveled down the Mississippi and created a 12,000-square-mile “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. Extensive use of antibiotics has led to resistant strains of bacteria. And scientists believe that hormone use has contributed to dropping human sperm counts and sexual abnormalities in fish.
One cattleman interviewed said, “I’d love to give up hormones. If the consumer said, ‘We don’t want hormones,’ we’d stop in a second. The cattle could get along better without them. But the market signal is not there, and as long as my competitor is doing it, I’ve got to do it, too.” But it is difficult to imagine how this signal would be generated, because the system is designed to keep the origins of beef a mystery to the consumer. So the cattleman continues to feel coerced into using hormones. The exchange when we buy meat in the supermarket is less than free because the information we need is not actually available to us.
So what is the way out? How do we move from a free market system where most are prisoners to an economic system that is truly free? Paul gives it to us in one simple command: Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed so that you may discern what is the will of God; what is good. Paul, based on his own conversion, had a vision of the church – that it would be different. Not separate from the world, but different in it.
He writes to the church in Rome, “do not be conformed to the world”, but maybe the better way to hear that, given what he says next, is “do not be formed by the world.” In other words, when we take the economic system we have as a given, it will trap us. If we don’t step outside of it – get away from the advertising, the assumptions, the power imbalance – then we will be formed by a world where human freedom is not the true goal. Do not be conformed, Paul says, so that you may discern the will of God.
And Jesus offers this same vision to Peter. Once Peter called Jesus Messiah, Jesus talked about what it meant to be transformed. “Everything you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven, and everything you bind will be bound.” We have the ability to change the forces of the universe itself when we act as transformed member of the body of Christ.
If we step out, we can cultivate the right desires – so that we can figure out what is truly good and what we should allow to inform our economic decisions. We can live differently – which is no small thing, according to Jesus. It can have massive effect, on us, but also on all those who we will affect with our transformed decisions.
There is a company, Mondragon, that began in the Basque region of Spain half a century ago. It was started by a Catholic priest and it is now a transnational corporation that does more than 4.8 billion dollars of business annually. Yet, this is one of the success stories of people who take the Church's social doctrine seriously, in particular, the teachings regarding (1) the dignity of the human person and his or her labor, (2) social solidarity, (3) the primacy of labor over capital. Management is elected by the workers, not hired by the money men, and the managers are part of the cooperative process in the enterprise. Each enterprise has a social committee that considers issues of health, safety, environment, and the social responsibilities of the enterprise. Capital is borrowed, stock is not sold for financing. All new employees become worker owners. Ten percent of corporate profits are donated to charity, 40% are retained by the cooperative to be used to benefit the "common good" of the cooperative (research, development, job creation, etc.), and the balance of the profits goes into capital accounts for the worker owners. These funds may be borrowed against at the cooperative's bank at very low interest rates, and are important parts of the social security arrangements.
It all sounds idealistic I'm sure, except for the fact that it is actually working, profitable, and growing.
It is possible to be different. It is possible, in the midst of a system that traps people in lives that don’t feel free, to offer a vision of free markets “Yahweh style”. Do not be formed by this world – be transformed. Then we can discern God’s will, and act in ways that will shift even the entrenched forces of our economy. May we all live in a free market someday. Amen.
Pastor's note: This is the third sermon of a four part series on economics. I owe a great debt of gratitude to William Cavenaugh and the book he wrote, Being Consumed. These four sermons on economics are an attempt to share the insights he writes about in that book.
Scripture: Matthew 16:13-20, Romans 12:1-8
This is the third Sunday of a four-Sunday series on Economics. We all know that we must and do operate as players in the economic system. We must buy, sell, consume, work, choose, own, and trade. This is a reality of life. And with each day that we wake up, open the paper and see another story about the decline of the economy, we are faced with being necessary players in a system that wields great and sometimes terrifying power over our lives and the lives of others.
It is precisely when things get difficult that we are most tempted to move into “survival mentality” and abandon our principles and ideals. But, as Christians living during an economic downturn – or even recession – we can’t afford to abandon our ideals. The world can’t afford for us to do that. In fact, in my opinion, Christian churches have been far too absent from economic discussions believing theology and economics have little to say to one another. But, if our faith has little to say to the economic systems of our day, then we have little to say, period. People’s lives are affected by economics more than almost anything else.
The first week we looked at contrasting assumptions we have about our world and its resources. One can assume scarcity and then operate economically with that at the center and ground of everything. Or, one can trust in God’s generosity and assume abundance as the basis of everything which altars how we interact with one another as we engage in economic decisions.
Last week we talked about the fact that far from being too attached to material goods, it is our growing detachment from things that has led to a morally blind, or even morally suspect, economic system. We no longer know where things are produced, who produces them, how they get to us, and what happens to all the people and God’s creation along the way. This detachment keeps us from making informed decisions in our purchasing, and makes us unsuspecting accomplices in an economy that is devastating the planet and exploiting workers all over the world.
This week we will talk about what a truly free market looks like in God’s realm.
A free market, we are told, is a market in which prices of goods and services are arranged completely by mutual consent of sellers and buyers. In such a market, a decision is free if an exchange is informed and entered into voluntarily. After that, very little matters except reducing, as much as possible, interference in those decisions from the state. The less state intervention there is, according to theorists like Milton Friedman, the more free a market is. The value of goods and services is determined entirely by what people desire and the market does not judge those desires and does not encourage any community development of agreed upon desires for the social good.
When free, the market beautifully responds to what the people want; it bends and folds and changes in mutually beneficial ways because, through their free choices, the people are dictating what should be produced, how much we will pay, and how much we value certain items. And in general, this is the system we have.
The problem is, many of us do not feel particularly free in the economic arena. There are all kinds of signs that our supposedly free market is anything but.
- Many of us feel “stuck” in jobs that we stay in only because we need the health insurance or income.
- Many of us feel forced to make decisions that go against our conscience – do I pay the rent, pay off my visa bill, pay off my medical bills or buy food at the grocery store this month?
- We have lost control over our private information in the name of market research under the pretense that companies are only trying to understand our desires better in order to give us what we want.
- We hear rumors that our clothes are made by children and other exploited laborers, but we have no idea how we could begin to resist.
- Many people in our world exchange their labor for a “free market rate” of 60 cents an hour. When the choice is no work or work for 60 cents an hour, and someone chooses to work for 60 cents an hour, that can hardly be called a “free decision.”
Freedom, in the Milton Friedman sense, is pursing whatever you want without interference from others. Your only part in the system is to satisfy your desires, as long as it doesn’t harm others. But, freedom from a Christian perspective is not just a lack of external interference. We all know that just desiring something does not make that desire good. Even if we are free to act on out desires, if we can’t control them – or more precisely cultivate the “right” desires – then that freedom to act is not necessarily Christian freedom.
Our free market system makes no judgments about what we desire – our faith, on the other hand, does. In faith, all desires are subsumed and ordered under our greatest desire, which is to love and serve God. In the language of Augustine, a Christian theologian from the 4th century, there are true desires and false desires, and we cannot always figure out on our own which is which. We need a community to help us sort it out, and absent that, we are not free in the Christian sense of the word. We will be ruled by our false desires – the ones that are given to us by the world through advertising, a culture of consumption, peer pressure, and our own anxieties and fears.
The key to true freedom is not just following whatever desire we happen to have, but cultivating the right desires. We do this through worship, prayer, and conversation with other people of faith, and service.
So that’s one disconnect. We know we are not always free when we are ruled by our false desires even though the market allows us to indulge those desires endlessly and rewards them with unfettered, unregulated access to the goods and services that satisfy us.
But there are other reasons our markets are not really free in the Christian sense of the word. When there is no shared, communal objective sense of what is good to desire, then all that is left is a battle of desires arbitrated by sheer power. And the market system has fostered a massive imbalance of power making almost everyone within it anything but free.
One way this power imbalance has arisen is through marketing. There is a thinly veiled lie that marketing is important because it provides the individual with the information necessary to make a truly informed – and thus free – decision. Yet, as the marketing companies themselves would boast, more often ads are about creating and manipulating desires. Through saturation and surveillance – companies collecting information about us in order to better target our unique patterns and personalities, marketing exerts a power that takes away freedom, and certainly distracts us from cultivating “true” desires.
While we set aside a couple of hours on Sunday mornings to be immersed in worship and prayer and to fill our hearts and minds with God’s words and music, every other minute of our week we are immersed in advertising. It’s everywhere, and even those of us who make an effort to reduce the power of advertising on our lives are exposed to it when we’re not even aware.
And, marketing is not the only area in which the logic of sheer power is manifest. Another is the concentration of power in enormous transnational corporations.
Transnational corporations are able to shop around the globe for the most advantageous wage environments, that is, those places where people are so desperate that they must take jobs that pay extremely low wages, in many cases wages insufficient to feed and house themselves and their dependents. All of this is done in the name of “free” trade.
But, is the person who works for dollars a day “free”? In the definitions of free market advocates, the answer seems to be “yes”. A woman’s decision to take a job making clothes for American markets would presumably be both informed and voluntary, provided she was not deceived about the kind and amount of work she would be doing, or about the hourly rate she would be paid. Presumably no one would force her to take the job, and no one would prevent her from leaving it. Both she and her employer would enter into this exchange in the expectation of benefiting from it. The employer would expect to increase profits by paying low wages, and the worker would expect an improvement over starvation.
The problem with this view is that it is blind to the real disparity of power at work here. And, in the free market context, to ask whether the exchange serves the common good, or it if is just, is irrelevant to the question of whether or not the exchange is free. Yet, this woman is not free in the Christian sense of the word. Nor is the market that is forcing her to take a job that does not allow her to flourish.
And, while some profit massively from these un-free market systems, most people in these corporations actually feel trapped.
When managers lament the displacement and suffering caused by closing factories that pay living wages and opening others that do not, I believe they are not just being disingenuous. When they blame the move on necessity, they recognize that the “free” market does not leave them free to act in ways they might believe are more just. They feel like they have no choice in the matter, because they assume that consumers will want to maximize their own gain in any transaction by paying the lowest price possible for a product.
Yet those of us consumers who might wish to communicate otherwise to the corporations don’t always have ways to do that. First, the products don’t come with enough information for us to “vote with our money”, so to speak. Take the example of buying beef in the supermarket. These days, in efforts to be more efficient and “meet consumer demand”, the cattle industry has changed dramatically. Each head of cattle now requires about 284 gallons of oil in its lifetime. Runnoff from the petroleum-based fertilizer has traveled down the Mississippi and created a 12,000-square-mile “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. Extensive use of antibiotics has led to resistant strains of bacteria. And scientists believe that hormone use has contributed to dropping human sperm counts and sexual abnormalities in fish.
One cattleman interviewed said, “I’d love to give up hormones. If the consumer said, ‘We don’t want hormones,’ we’d stop in a second. The cattle could get along better without them. But the market signal is not there, and as long as my competitor is doing it, I’ve got to do it, too.” But it is difficult to imagine how this signal would be generated, because the system is designed to keep the origins of beef a mystery to the consumer. So the cattleman continues to feel coerced into using hormones. The exchange when we buy meat in the supermarket is less than free because the information we need is not actually available to us.
So what is the way out? How do we move from a free market system where most are prisoners to an economic system that is truly free? Paul gives it to us in one simple command: Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed so that you may discern what is the will of God; what is good. Paul, based on his own conversion, had a vision of the church – that it would be different. Not separate from the world, but different in it.
He writes to the church in Rome, “do not be conformed to the world”, but maybe the better way to hear that, given what he says next, is “do not be formed by the world.” In other words, when we take the economic system we have as a given, it will trap us. If we don’t step outside of it – get away from the advertising, the assumptions, the power imbalance – then we will be formed by a world where human freedom is not the true goal. Do not be conformed, Paul says, so that you may discern the will of God.
And Jesus offers this same vision to Peter. Once Peter called Jesus Messiah, Jesus talked about what it meant to be transformed. “Everything you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven, and everything you bind will be bound.” We have the ability to change the forces of the universe itself when we act as transformed member of the body of Christ.
If we step out, we can cultivate the right desires – so that we can figure out what is truly good and what we should allow to inform our economic decisions. We can live differently – which is no small thing, according to Jesus. It can have massive effect, on us, but also on all those who we will affect with our transformed decisions.
There is a company, Mondragon, that began in the Basque region of Spain half a century ago. It was started by a Catholic priest and it is now a transnational corporation that does more than 4.8 billion dollars of business annually. Yet, this is one of the success stories of people who take the Church's social doctrine seriously, in particular, the teachings regarding (1) the dignity of the human person and his or her labor, (2) social solidarity, (3) the primacy of labor over capital. Management is elected by the workers, not hired by the money men, and the managers are part of the cooperative process in the enterprise. Each enterprise has a social committee that considers issues of health, safety, environment, and the social responsibilities of the enterprise. Capital is borrowed, stock is not sold for financing. All new employees become worker owners. Ten percent of corporate profits are donated to charity, 40% are retained by the cooperative to be used to benefit the "common good" of the cooperative (research, development, job creation, etc.), and the balance of the profits goes into capital accounts for the worker owners. These funds may be borrowed against at the cooperative's bank at very low interest rates, and are important parts of the social security arrangements.
It all sounds idealistic I'm sure, except for the fact that it is actually working, profitable, and growing.
It is possible to be different. It is possible, in the midst of a system that traps people in lives that don’t feel free, to offer a vision of free markets “Yahweh style”. Do not be formed by this world – be transformed. Then we can discern God’s will, and act in ways that will shift even the entrenched forces of our economy. May we all live in a free market someday. Amen.
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