Moral Hazard

Luke 15:1-3,11b-32

Fourth Sunday of Lent:  March 10, 2013

When the economy first went south in 2009, there was a lot of talk about bail outs.  We heard about institutions “too big to fail,” the consequences being too terrible if we let their own mistakes take them down, and all of us along with them. 

One of the phrases that I heard a lot from David Brooks, and my dad for that matter, was “moral hazard;” meaning if we bail out companies when it’s their irresponsibility that led to the problem in the first place, they will be encouraged to just continue the irresponsible behavior in the future; because, why not?  And, I have to say, that does seem to be the case with some of the companies we bailed out to save the world economy – irresponsibility continues and continues to threaten our well being.

There was also a parallel conversation that took place on the individual level.  There were many people who found themselves upside down in their mortgages.  Some people and lawmakers advocated bailing them out as well.  And the same conversation about moral hazard came up, though curiously the phrased changed to “learned dependency.”  If people don’t have to face the music, they will learn that they can always depend on someone to clean up their messes.

Of course, “learned dependency” is not a new term that we only apply to mortgage relief.  Hand outs, charity, welfare – these all cause learned dependency.  It’s all fraught with moral hazard, and no one who has learned this dependency, we’re told, can escape it until they are made to live by the consequences of their bad decisions.  They must be rewarded and punished according to their merit or they will never have the ability to care for themselves. 

Okay – fine.  I’ve seen this – you’ve seen this.  There are people who don’t know how to live off their own merit/work.  They are persistently dependent on hand outs and welfare, and in some cases it’s probably legitimate to argue it’s because they do not have to face the consequences of not being able to provide for themselves ,when really they could.  We’ve seen it.

And we are seeing it in our story today.  The prodigal son:  The perfect example of moral hazard.  The son took his father’s money, squandered it in irresponsible decisions, and when he returns, the father welcomed him back…not just as a hired hand who would have to make it on his own, but into a wealthy family and all the privileges that bestowed on a son in that culture. 

And – even more surprising – it wasn’t because he came back all contrite and everything.  It was just because he came back…he sought help from his father.  The father, the text tells us, was not at all interested in the son’s apology.  He interrupts his son, doesn’t let him get his whole, practiced, apology speech out.  “No need.  Grab the fatted calf.  You’re back.  Welcome!”  A pretty great bail out, if you ask me…fraught with moral hazard.

What in the world is the son going to learn from this?  Isn’t the “take home message” that there are no consequences for your behavior?  What would keep the son from doing it all over again?

The older brother, who would probably rather have had David Brooks for a father than the one he had, was mad because there was no justice in what happened to his brother.  The father treats both sons the same.  Well, actually, he treats the prodigal son slightly better.  The irresponsible one gets the party.  He got money once, he will get more now that he’s back.  No justice.  And certainly no tough love or hard lessons being learned.

I can imagine the older brother joining in the chorus of those today concerned with moral hazard.  “Why does he get the same thing I’ve earned by being loyal and working hard.  He’ll never learn how to take care of himself!”  But from the passage’s point of view, it seems that the brother’s assessment of the situation is the foil…the one that does not represent what Jesus believes about how things should work. 

The prodigal son is a favorite passage for many Christians.  While we can relate to the older brother, we also sympathize with the father’s response because we tend to look at the family aspect of this story.  We understand the tug and pull of family – of those we love so deeply it hurts.  The father loves his son, and he wants him to know he always has a place to come home to, no matter what happens.  Most of us think this makes for a good parent, and most of us with kids want them to know in their hearts that no matter what they do we will love them and be there for them. Not to mention many of us can relate deeply to this story because we have been the prodigal, welcomed back by our families:  bailed out.

But this parable isn’t about family in the “live-together-as-a-household” sense.  It’s not about whether wealthy families should welcome back prodigal children after they have partied away their 20s and find themselves in a huge bind.  That’s a story of privilege, and Jesus isn’t telling stories of privilege. 

At the very beginning of the passage, we see that he tells this parable because people were asking him why he is eating with, accepting, welcoming the non-privileged; the ones who weren’t a part of wealthy households.  These – the ones Jesus eats with are like the younger son in some ways – they are sinners in the eyes of others, but unlike the prodigal, they truly have nowhere to go.  So they go to Jesus.

When we remember what Jesus is addressing with his parable, the message gets harder.  It seems like he’s saying, “if a father would do this for his son, and we are all a part of God’s family, shouldn’t we do this for anyone?  Shouldn’t we embrace the bad decision makers who we might think are responsible for their current reality…give them all we have and throw a party?  You wonder why I eat with people you think aren’t worthy, and I’m telling you it’s because we should do what this father does for everyone, anyone, and all.”  And now we really feel like the older brother.

We don’t give people a warm welcome if they come desperate and looking for help, if we think helping them will just lead to learned dependency.  In fact, it makes our stomach tie up in knots a little bit – giving money to someone who we’re sure could work for a living and just doesn’t want to.  It’s hard to keep giving money to the same person over and over when they make no effort to change their lives or fix what has led them to need money in the first place.

And so, when someone comes for help, we require things.  We have standards…expected behaviors.  They can’t be immoral.  They can’t be gaming the system.  They can’t be taking advantage of us.  We’re pretty sure they should be contrite.  We will give money once, maybe twice, but if that doesn’t do the trick, then we balk because we start to realize they will never stop coming.  Ever.  Learned dependency.

But when you think about it, aren’t the non-privileged, those not in families who would always welcome them home, those who don’t have anywhere else to turn when they have messed up over and over, in more need of being helped…unconditionally.  When you live without the security of having  loving people or communities to fall back on, it affects you. 

It affects how you look at life, at others, at God.  It affects what you think is possible.  Sometimes it makes you feel like no matter what you do, you will never have security, stability, steady income:  so why even try?  When you have less opportunities available to you because, for example, you moved from school to school and never really got an education, you look at those who did differently.  You start to wonder who deserves what and why.   And who gets to decide who deserves what?

I was always curious why no one was making the case for people too small to fail.  Assuming the CEO of Goldman Sachs was going to be basically okay if Goldman failed (maybe down a house or two, but basically okay), and many of the folks who found themselves upside down on their mortgage would, well, not be okay (they’d be minus a place to live, the ability to get out of debt, good credit, stability), why wouldn’t some people be too small to let fail.  They are so small there is no cushion, no safety net, no nothing.  Why not bail out the too big and the too small.  The moral hazard is there in both cases, so why not do both?

We bailed out very, very, very few people with bad mortgages.  And, we seemed to make a distinction between people who found themselves upside down because of their own bad decisions, and those who were decent, hard working folks, who just got unfairly hit when the economy crashed – “responsible homeowners” the President called them over and over in his speeches; assuring us we would only bail out people if they deserved it.  Good people.  We wouldn’t use limited resources to bail out people who needed to learn the lesson of their bad decisions.

We cry “learned dependency,” bail out the banks, and let the bottom folks fend for themselves…because after all, it’s really what’s best for them.  It’s the only way they’ll learn something other than dependence.

But it kind of looks like Jesus doesn’t work this way.  No requirements, no proof that you’re willing to work for what you get, no apologies, contrition necessary.  Jesus seems to say that the hazard isn’t that the one in need won’t be moral if we don’t hold them accountable.  The hazard is that our privilege and judgments will undermine our own sense of moral responsibility.  And when that happens, people fail and there’s no family to help them out.  They are left out of the systems/families that always catch us when we fail.  They are left to fend for themselves, and usually do so in more and more desperate ways.  What they learn is that some people have, some people don’t, and the two are pitted against one another.

One of the things I thought a lot about during my sabbatical was the issue of learned dependency.  I read and wrote and prayed about people who are persistently unemployed, dependent, and who we all think are responsible for that.  I realized that there are people who decide which folks in need are capable of changing their lives in order to be independent of the social welfare systems, and which folks are not.  And I realized that we make those judgments without a lot of sophisticated thought, and probably without a lot of biblical basis.

When someone comes for help – to the church, to the ministerial association, to Mica – we look at the resources we have, we look at them, and we answer “Yes, we can help,” or “No we can’t.”  Yes or no…end of conversation and interaction.  Sometimes the “no” is because of lack of resources.  Sometimes it’s because we think it is not the best use of our resources.  We believe the person asking doesn’t use help wisely, doesn’t help themselves, makes bad decisions, has no desire to change their lives, so the money is wasted on them when it could be better used for someone who can be lifted out of poverty.  Often, when it’s someone who just seems lazy, or we think has a sense of entitlement, we believe giving them money just enables them to keep making the bad decisions that got them where they are in the first place, in which case our “no” is quite self righteous. 

We have to make these decisions – we are constrained…it’s the reality in which we live.  I know – from firsthand experience – we have to say “no” sometimes and we have to decide who gets what.  I don’t think we should beat ourselves up about this.

But, my brilliant conclusion after four months of reading and writing about this is this:  I don’t think this system is working.  And I’ve begun to wonder if it’s because it’s a system based on privilege.  This is ours – you have to ask for it – we require things of you to get it, and I have all the power to decide whether you are worthy of what we have.  It’s the system advocated by the older brother.

We have to get beyond the “yes/no” system. We have to figure out what comes next.  It’s terribly flawed and it’s hurting people.

All of the reading I did suggested that one of the fundamental problems with how we try to address and respond to poverty in this world is that we are starting in the wrong place.  We are assuming there is something wrong with the people who are persistently poor:  that they can’t take care of themselves and we have to figure out how to change them so they can; teach them to fish, and all that.  Instead, many authors argue, we have to look at our privilege first.  First we have to dismantle privilege – change the system…change ourselves.

Remember, the father in the story did more than just give the son money to go try again.  He welcomed him back into the family.  He threw a party!  This is where all the cries of learned dependency and moral hazard fall apart in my opinion.  It’s true, hand outs aren’t enough.  But insisting others change is not the next step.  We have to offer family – safety, security, love, forgiveness – especially to those who tie our stomach in knots.  We have to offer more, not less.

We – all of us who work hard to respond to poverty responsibly – we’re not the father yet.  We’re stuck.  We don’t know how to move beyond the yes/no system.  We don’t know what it looks like to see people as family and welcome them back with a party.  I don’t know what it looks like.  It’s certainly not simple.  My stomach is often tied in knots.  Often.  But we have to figure it out.  And my guess is that it requires a lot more change from us than from those we systematically shut out because they don’t meet our moral standards.  And probably it happens one relationship at a time.

The prodigal son calls us beyond yes and no.  It calls us beyond power and privilege.  It calls us to bring out the fatted calf, have a party and welcome people back into the family…with all the benefits that come with that.  Safety nets, security, opportunities beyond what we’ve “earned,” relationships that transcend behavior, love that is more than pity, and irrational celebrations when someone comes for help having squandered every last cent we gave them.

Thomas Ogletree wrote a book called “Hospitality to the Stranger:  Dimensions of Moral Understanding.”  He talks about hospitality being so much more than being welcoming to people when they come to you.  It means stepping into someone’s shoes and understanding the powerful dynamics of privilege…how insidious it is.  It means letting go of our place in the world to take on another’s so that we might know best how to love, welcome, and be family with them.  We need to pull some different levers to see how it might change our behavior.

He writes, “The appropriate response to oppression is not only hospitality – it is repentance, a deep turning of mind away from the familiar world toward the possibility of a new order of the world.  And in repentance, one’s former position of relative privilege is itself at risk.”

Confession during lent:

Repentance, like Ogletree talks about, means examining who we are and learning about who we are.  Today, maybe we can examine how we are like the prodigal…the ones who have left the family that welcomes all – the privileged that squanders God’s love.  If we do find ourselves there, we can repent…turn around.  And the promise is that there we will meet Jesus…we will meet God…who invites us to head home.  And here’s the absolutely crazy thing:  We will be welcomed with no requirements:  No contrition necessary, no apologies needed, nothing we have to do to prove we’re worthy.  We’ll be welcomed and then invited to dinner…to eat with Jesus….and have a big ole’ party!  Amen.