“Making Ends Meet: A Theology of the Pocketbook”
by Reverend Charles Blustein Ortman
July 30, 2006
READINGS
The first reading is from the Christian Scriptures, the Book of James:
My brothers and sisters, what good is it for people to say that they have faith if their actions do not prove it? Can that faith save them? Suppose there are brothers or sisters who need clothes and don’t have enough to eat. What good is there in your saying to them – “God bless you! Keep warm and eat well!”— if you don’t give them the necessities of life? So it is with faith: if it is alone and includes no actions, then it is dead. But someone will say, “One person has faith, another has actions.” My answer is, “Show me how anyone can have faith without actions. I will show you my faith by my actions.”
The second reading this morning is from the book, "Today's Children and Yesterday's Heritage," by the venerated patron saint of Unitarian religious education, Sophia Lyon Fahs:
Just what is "religious belief?" Do we mean merely, or primarily, those beliefs that center around such ideas as God, prayer, the Bible, Jesus, salvation, eternity, the supernatural and that moral law? Are all one's beliefs religious?
From the point of view of this study, one’s religious "belief" or one's "religion" is the "gestalt" of all his [or her] smaller specific beliefs. One’s faith is the philosophy of life that gathers up into one emotional whole – and sometimes, although rarely, into a reasoned whole – all the specific beliefs one holds about many kinds of things in many areas of life.
For example, one of the most important of [people’s] beliefs is what [they think about themselves]. (She concludes quoting Henry David Thoreau :) "What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather, indicates his fate." This is one of Henry's Thoreau’s great insights...
SERMON
It’s interesting to me how, once I’ve decided on a sermon theme for a particular date, things often happen – somewhat synchronistically – in relation to the topic as the date approaches. Take for example our theme this morning, “Making Ends Meet: A Theology of the Pocketbook.” A few weeks ago, a young man stopped by the house dropping off a business card and a flyer. He did construction work, especially roofing. We needed a new roof on our house and a couple of other odds and ends taken care of, so we called. He came over to give us an estimate, which seemed quite reasonable. We asked for references and he gave us several. I talked with some of the people he’d done work for and went out to look at a couple of the jobs.
Marcello is a young Hispanic man just starting out on his own. He’s very personable and quite industrious. He worked hard at getting our business. We had several conversations about expectations. “Three days,” he assured me. “We’ll do a great job; it will look excellent and we'll be in and out in three days.” I couldn’t pass it up.
This was a great opportunity, we thought, to allow our pocketbook to express our theological values. We would be supporting a minority contractor who is just starting out. We would get what we needed, a new roof, and Marcello would get work for himself and his crew. Families that might otherwise have limited access to employment would have some income and the economy of West Orange would be supported. It had all the promise of a win-win-win proposition.
I’m not going to provide you with an entire litany of the many things that went awry with Marcello’s work – just a couple of highlights. The crew showed up only one day after the work was scheduled to begin. They arrived a week ago this past Tuesday – the day of THE storm. They took the roof off the back of the house. The tarp that the guys left over part of the roof that afternoon didn't look like it would hold out much of anything. We called Marcello on the phone and he came back over, just as the rain was beginning. This time he did a much more thorough job of getting things covered up. The additional coverage really did quite an amazing job of protecting us from the more than nearly two inches of rain that fell – except for the vent that was left uncovered. Fortunately though, all the leakage from that was limited to a single bathroom. And, I think after a couple of coats of paint, we’ll be fine there.
The day after the storm, Marcello was nowhere to be found and he returned none of the nearly dozen or so messages we left for him. He did return the next day though, at least for a few hours. Cutting to the chase… Marcello finally pronounced the job done two days ago on Friday afternoon, eleven days after the work had begun. The roof on the front of the house doesn’t really look perfect, but it isn’t all that terrible either, a few waves here and there. The roof on the back of the house didn’t turn out nearly so well. There are lots of waves really, where you wouldn’t think there should be any at all. And there’s a pronounced absence of any straight lines anywhere on the roof. I’ve been keeping an eye on the neighborhood birds to see if any of them show signs of nausea while flying over the house. Suffice it to say that I won’t be recommending Marcello in our new U2U Service Directory, which will be coming out this fall.
So, I suppose, a question we might ask is, was I foolish to hire an unbonded and probably uninsured contractor? I guess I’d have to plead guilty as charged. But I hope that’s not the only question. We might also ask, did I act in good faith with the intention of promoting the possibilities of goodness in the world and justice in the community? I think so. I hope the answer to that question is also, yes. And still, another question might be, would I do it again? And I suspect the answer to that is also, yes. I sort of have a track record of doing things like this. I’d try to be more careful next time to promote results that are more in line with my expectations, but I probably would do the same thing over again. I always want the underdog to succeed.
My colleague, Judith Walker Riggs, once wrote that if we want to know what we believe, we need only look at what we do, and from our actions we can determine where we have placed our faith.
We might take that thought a step further and say, if we want to know what we believe, we need only look at the ledger in our checkbooks to determine where we have invested our faith. In our culture, we buy or support what we believe in through an expenditure of capital. As an aside, I would invite you to compare the amount you spend on and for the church with any other regular payments that you make. And then you might answer for yourself how your support of this faith community stacks up alongside of your other activities and how that reflects your values.
By doing things like attempting to be supportive of Marcello though, I do feel that my faith is being put into action. But for me, this feels like the easier part of the message in this sermon. I suspect that it is easier – for both you and for me – to recognize the need for using our resources to obtain what we need in ways that might also promote the possibilities of goodness and the likelihood of justice. Sometimes we will be more successful in those endeavors than other times, but I have to believe that, if our intentions are to promote goodness and justice, that little by little we will surely move in that direction. If we dare to look, we can see what ought and need be done toward this end, and then we need to act on what we see. For some of us, acting on our values in this way is more easily accomplished than for others. For all of us though, I’ll bet it is the easier part of what I’m talking about this here morning.
Speaking of homiletic synchronicity, while I was at home working on this very sermon this past week, as things above me weren’t going all that well on the roof, I received a couple of emails from some friends back home in Illinois, friends that I’ll be seeing when I’m visiting out there in a couple of weeks. The first email from my friend Bill Shaw, an engineer, was a list of a couple dozen bumper stickers, intending to be humorous, though I suspect they would only be so from a political Democrat’s point of view. I, of course, enjoyed several of them thoroughly. Some of the ones I can share here include:
- BLIND FAITH IN BAD LEADERSHIP IS NOT PATRIOTISM
- IF YOU’RE NOT OUTRAGED, YOU’RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION
- POVERTY, HEALTH CARE & HOMELESSNESS ARE MORAL ISSUES
- GOD BLESS EVERYONE (no exceptions)
- WHO WOULD JESUS BOMB?
- IF YOU SUPPORT BUSH’S WAR, WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE?
- SHUT UP AND SHIP OUT!
- FEEL SAFER NOW?
- JESUS WAS A SOCIAL ACTIVIST – THAT IS A LIBERAL
- MY VALUES? FREE SPEECH, EQUALITY, LIBERTY, EDUCATION, TOLERANCE.
- IS IT 2008 YET?
There were several others that I won’t share.
The second email, which came only a couple of minutes later, was daunting in its simple and clear reply. My friend since grade school, Deb Doehler, now a design artist at a local college, wrote in reference to the sticker, “IS IT 2008 YET?”
“Will 2008 make a difference at this point? The 2nd in command for Al Qaeda has called for a Holy War against Israel today. I don’t think the Democrats are going to get us out of this mess. I think the culture of excess has spoken.”
“…the culture of excess has spoken.” Making Ends Meet: A Theology of the Pocketbook. The question becomes more complex than merely putting our money where our values are. The other, more difficult part of this sermon is about the culture of excess that we are a part of. It’s about our capacity to discern between what we want and what we need. It’s about maintaining an ability to choose and saving ourselves from addiction to the rampant consumerism to which none of us are strangers. It’s about not spending and expending. It’s about not acquiring. It’s about the value of human being in right relationship with human doing.
I'm immediately reminded of a scene in the movie, "Gandhi." A woman comes to the Mahatma to talk about her son, who eats too many sweets. She asks Mr. Gandhi to talk to her son about avoiding sugar. He asks the mother to come back a month later and to bring her son along with her. A month passes; she returns and Gandhi has the conversation with the boy about avoiding sugar.
"Why did you have to wait a month?" The mother was perplexed.
"Because I could not ask the boy to do something I had not done myself. I needed to remove sugar from my diet for a month before I could ask anyone else to do that."
I'm here to tell you and here is my confession: I have not given up sugar for the past day, or week, or month. I am as much a part of this culture of excess – give or take some narrow margin of variance – as anyone I know. Perhaps that means I have no claim, no right, to talk about it. But frankly, I don't think I know anyone who is not caught up in this culture of excess. If we have any hope of doing anything about it, we'd better start talking, and now, so that we can articulate a vision that we might work toward. If we're going to find a way to make ends meet, we'd better start making sure that we have ends that are sustainable, or perhaps our ends will promote a premature END of our own making.
If we want to know what we believe, we need to look at what we do. We drive big, inefficient, SUV’s – and other vehicles that are only moderately less wasteful – that proliferate carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, raising the temperature of our planet, melting the polar icecaps, creating catastrophic weather patterns, not to mention astronomically increasing incidence of skin cancer. I don't want to suggest that oil is the only manifestation of this culture of excess. We use and waste enormous amounts of chemicals and plastics that cycle back into our ecosystems and that also cause untold damage to ourselves and everything else on the planet. I'm focusing on oil here because, perhaps, it is the kingpin and because our addiction to it is so incredibly great.
To satisfy our dependence on oil, we have established an imperial hegemony in the Middle East. The number of innocent Lebanese and Israeli and Palestinian citizens who have died in just these past few weeks, have died not only because the United States has allowed them to die, but because their deaths have been the collateral damage of our securing our interests there. Close by, over 40,000 Iraqi citizens and more than 2,500 US troops have died in a war to protect…what? They've died to protect our right to be addicted to a lifestyle that encourages us to feel justified and comfortable with in a fantasy of isolation, in which there are merely monetary trade-offs for serious, serious abuses to the ecological balance of our planet.
A theology of the pocketbook…
Making ends meet…
Monetary tradeoffs for the immoral abuse of our fellow human beings and our planet…
If we want to know what we believe, we need to look at what we do. What do we do? We pay for things – with money. Money is the new God, yes? Many of us work endless hours to procure it... in as massive amounts as we can. Many of us use it to comfort ourselves from life's many travails. We construct the grandest cathedrals of our age to house its institutions. We allow our other values to be absorbed into terms that can be expressed in dollars, a rather perverse expression of redemption. And then very often, so many of us pretend to be quite agnostic with this new God and act as if money is really of little consequence in our lives.
If we want to know what we believe, we need to look at what we do. Sophia Lyon Fahs talks about our religious beliefs as the sum total of all our beliefs, large and small, about all things. Our lives speak volumes about our religious beliefs and values, both in what we do and in what we do not do. If we are going to seriously look at the ends that we are trying to meet, we are going to have to take a much harder look – at our culture and at our own lives – than we have been willing to take up to this point.
In so many ways it really doesn't matter if someone is a Republican or Democrat; to a large extent those parties have chosen different platforms, metaphors and approaches toward the same ends, to protect the status quo. If we are going to be successful at making ends meet, we are going to need to take a very critical look at the ends we have chosen, in order to see how they affect the entire interdependent web of which we are a part. The status quo doesn't get us there; the addiction to comfort doesn't get us there; the worship of money doesn't get us there.
What might get us there is the willingness to create a new vision of the kingdom of heaven here on earth. It would need to be a vision in which all life and all things are perceived as sacred. It would be a vision in which we saw, felt, and experienced our own connections to the sacredness of All-That-Is.
There are already too many debts that have absolutely nothing to do with dollars that need to be paid back. We need to stop incurring debt before we are totally bankrupt. I don't know how we get from here to there. I only know that we need to set out in that direction before it is too late. I don't know that any of us can speak with much authority on the subject; I only know that we need to be in conversation with one another and with our neighbors around the planet in ways that strengthen and promote those connections.
Like my incident with Marcello and our roof, there will be many experiences along the way that will make it difficult for us to keep our eye on that larger vision. We can ill afford though, to be seduced into complacency by those diversions. Just as the sum is greater than the total of its parts, the ends that we seek need to be greater than any of our parts. If we want to know what we believe, we need to look at what we do.
The more difficult part of this message is that, as always, the answers are in our hands. If we act in ways that promote sustainability in our human relationships and in our planetary ones, perhaps we can believe our way into a world that might yet survive the follies we have employed against it. And if there be any God, may God help us.
And in the meantime, the good news is that we can be of good help to one another along the way. Knowing no more than we know today, we can commit to that. Together we can continue to build a community of faith. And together we can create cause for hope. |
