by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given to First Unitarian Church

November 5, 2000

In early 1998, in the wake of the cloning of a sheep named Dolly, eccentric physicist Richard Seed shocked the public when he vowed to clone a human being. Thankfully, we haven’t heard from him since. Now comes Ron Harris—fashion photographer and soft-core-porn videographer—whose entrepreneurial mind has turned up the idea of a come-hither website called Ron’s Angels, the purpose of which is to auction off the eggs of beautiful models.

Harris’s idea outraged fertility experts, not to mention ethicists. Senator Ron Wyden, who wrote the 1992 federal law regulating fertility clinics, called the operation "crass commercialism." In an interview with Time magazine, Harris stated that the site is for real and is based on his own "personal theories of beauty and biology." Harris says, without a trace of irony: "This is the first society to truly recognize how important beautiful genes are to our evolution." The first society maybe since Nazi Germany.

But then why not? Why not pay for beautiful and intelligent children? Medical students have for years sold their sperm to buy their textbooks. Why can’t Cheryl—a self-described 24-year-old blonde blue-eyed California waitress--sell her eggs? The problem is that what was once a service—providing treatment to infertile couples—has become big business. The marketing strategies are bold. There are dozens of agencies featuring hundreds of egg donors who reportedly profit anywhere from $2,000 to $35,000 per transaction. An attorney recently placed this ad in Ivy League newspapers: "$50,000 to an egg donor who is intelligent, athletic, 5’10" or taller, with SAT scores of 1400 or higher." This practice evokes charges of exploitation of poor women and the creation of a breeding class. Said one infertile woman who was advertising for eggs in a student newspaper, "You’re going to get a better grade of person. I didn’t want to get some addict off the street."

Biotechnology is taking us places we may not have wanted to go, has made possible decisions that we may not have wanted to face. How do we insure that we do not undermine our concept of what it means to be human? Are people themselves being turned into saleable commodities?

Commerce in human organs has almost universally been prohibited, but that may be changing, too. Even now, human skin is not covered by the law that prevents profiting in human parts. Skin is distributed by tissue banks and goes to the highest bidder. There is always plenty for plastic surgery, while burn victims lie waiting in hospitals as nurses and technicians scour the country for skin to cover their patients’ wounds.

The latest issue of Lancet, Britain’s pre-eminent medical journal, contains an article entitled "The Case for Allowing Kidney Sales," which argues that, since people can live relatively happily with only one kidney, and since kidneys for transplant are in short supply, selling one to a stranger should be permitted. The article dismisses arguments that such sales might be exploitative of the poor. There is a legal human kidney market in Bombay, India. That city has slums known as Kidney Colonies, where residents line up to sell a kidney to get money to get out of the slum or perhaps for their daughter’s wedding. Amnesty International has called on China to ban organ harvests from executed prisoners. In a 1995 Senate hearing Amnesty said that 90% of transplanted organs in China were from this source.

As revolting as these practices may seem, we need to see the context out of which they have grown—the market economy. The question is, can anything be sold in such an economy? Are there human values that should take precedence over market values? We would like to think so. So where do we draw the line?

Advertising so permeates our lives that it is part of the air we breathe in. We simply accept it as part of what is. Only when we go to the forest or to the desert, where the sounds and sights of selling are absent, do we realize how our lives have been inundated by marketing. We pick up an apple at the grocery story and find a sticker on it promoting a Jim Carrey movie. We stop for a drink and see the cigarette company logos on the ashtrays. We go to a movie and see for the 88^th time a Western style spoof performed by the cute little Pepsi girl. BUY-ME, SMOKE-ME, DRINK-ME, WATCH-ME, DRIVE-ME, I’M-ON-SALE-BUY-ME-NOW! The more invasive it becomes, the more invasive it must become, to get our attention.

Advertising has entered our school systems in a big way, as soft drink companies give big money so that their products can have an exclusive market in a given school. Is that a Pepsi school or a Coke school? Because schools are strapped for money, they are making the trade-off, thus offering their children as brand-loyal consumers so the school can have more computers or a new ball field.

You know, I’ve wondered if we’re passing up an opportunity right here at church. Surely we could get a sponsor for our order of service. Or maybe we could, for a fee, allow a big S, for Starbucks, right there in front of our pulpit. And then of course give Starbucks the franchise for our coffee hour. As a remarkable example of commodification in religion, an article in a suburban paper in the San Francisco Bay Area reported the following: "The members of St. John’s Lutheran Church have a money-back guarantee. They can donate to the church for 90 days, then if they think they made a mistake, or did not receive a blessing, they can have their money back. The program is called ‘God’s Guarantee’ and the pastor is confident it will work. ‘We trust God to keep his promises so much that we are offering this money-back policy,’ the pastor said . . . ." Well, I can tell you right now that if you send your money in to this church, we’re not going to send it back, so just be forewarned.

Consumerism has become so much a part of what we are that we are in danger of commodifying almost everything. The examples I have mentioned so far have been blatant, obvious. But commodification is more often subtle—so ingrained is this way of thinking that we often don’t even notice the shifts in our consciousness. Let’s take the term "child care." I’m not sure when that expression entered our vocabulary, but it surely has a cultural and economic history. Perhaps it began being used when dual-career families became the norm. Families could no longer care for their own children (both parents worked, chiefly because of economic pressures), and so there was a need to pay for—that is, commodify--the care of our children. This is a concept unknown in most parts of the world, where children are cared for by their parents, their relatives, and the village in which they live.

There are other major areas of our lives that have commodified—and we benefit in ways that are seductive to us. Let’s talk about agri-business. Giant agricultural corporations have taken over farming and the feeding of our people. To be sure, we have a huge variety of foods at all seasons of the year, at reasonable prices. But the topsoil is disappearing fast, and we consume pesticides in our vegetables and hormones in our meat. Food has become a commodity that we purchase from afar. I myself try to buy local products at farmer’s markets when I can, and love to pick my own strawberries and blueberries. And I am fortunate enough to be able to buy organic. But still—other than a few "iffy" tomato plants, I’m not much involved in food production. I have little relationship to the land or to the ones who plant and harvest. I eat meat, but I can’t imagine killing an animal myself. I pay the large feed lots and butchering operations to do that. The animal becomes a commodity neatly wrapped in cellophane.

I’m concerned about commodification in other arenas. Professionals are increasingly treated like commodities. Teachers are told that they are to be accountable—accountable not only for lessons, but apparently accountable to make up for all of the disparities of this society. The students have to achieve, as measured by some outsider’s test, and if they do not, it’s the teacher’s fault. Baby boomers shop for churches the same way they shop for other consumer items—what’s in it for me?

In the publishing world, fine literature is losing out to potboilers. There was a time when major publishing houses would put into print a beautifully written book, even though they knew it would have limited sales and they would make a modest profit. As these houses have been absorbed into conglomerates, the bottom line is the only consideration. With film, since sex and violence sell, we get sleazy sex and gratuitous violence. The film industry is actively marketing R rated films to children under 17—actually to children as young as 9 or 10—as eight industry executives recently reluctantly admitted in hearings before the Senate. And what about violent video games? We have a group here at the church working to rid the market of these games. Why feed our children this fodder? One simple answer: money.

That same answer is the reason that Firestone and Ford got into trouble recently over defective tires that blew out and caused many deaths. The companies blamed each other, said they didn’t know, rationalized that the tires were really OK—and why all this obfuscation of the facts? Again, the simple answer: money. Profit. Too much was at stake to tell the truth.

Needless to say, our political system has been commodified. We roll our eyes at the President selling nights in the Lincoln bedroom—how could he be so crass? But the system is so far gone, I’m sure that little gesture did not seem crass at all. Let me give you a few facts about how money operates in politics. Most of the money that is donated is given to politicians serving on congressional committees that oversee various industries—for example, banking industry money goes to members of the finance committees, regardless of the party. In the 1997-98 election cycle business interests outgave labor by a factor of 11 to l. Dirty industries far outspent greens--$48,000,000 from companies compared to $815,000 from environmental groups. Consider that only 170,000 people contribute $1,000 or more to political campaigns—and these people belong to a narrow elite that is highly unrepresentative of the general public.

What does this kind of money buy? Well, to cite a few recent examples, a coalition of industry groups has succeeded in delaying the implementation of new safety rules sought by OSHA. The pesticide industry still has yet to take steps to reduce pesticide use and protect children, who are the most vulnerable. We pay exorbitant prices for medication compared to other countries, and yet the drug industry is the most profitable in the country. Campaign finance reform is the single most important reform citizens can make. I am proud to say that this church was the single institution responsible for the largest number of signatures to get the campaign finance reform initiative on the ballot in this election. Democracy should not be for sale.

I have to say I have been dismayed at the level of discourse in this Presidential election. So many of our electorate seem to be mired in narcissism. I’m thinking of the televised debate in which the undecided voters asked questions. One woman got up and said, "I’m a 34-year-old single woman. What can you do for me?" What can you do for me? This is what she is asking of these candidates, one of whom will become the new leader of the free world? From the major parties, I heard very little about issues that are really crucial to our country—issues like global warming, foreign policy, the growing power of multinational corporations, the still amazing levels of poverty in a rich land. And when did the candidates ask the electorate to give anything? Would it sound hopelessly naïve to bring back John F. Kennedy’s ringing challenge: "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country"?

I have often wondered how our society has become so enamored of the individual--and the protection of private property. Certainly much of our understanding of social reality was put in place at the end of the eighteenth century and much of that was dependent on the thought of John Locke. His philosophy promised unprecedented freedom and an unlimited opportunity to compete for material well-being, with great limitation on the powers of government to interfere with individual initiative. As it was originally expressed, Locke’s thought was inseparable from his theology, with its clear sense of obligation, but by the mid-18^th century, his American followers emphasized the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of happiness being equated with the appropriation of property. Government was instituted for the protection of that property.

We wrongly interpret Locke, though, if we mean that individuals develop outside the common life of the community—in other words, that we are the makers of our own lives and fortunes, independent of others. We are in an era in which vast wealth is moving from the public to the private sector, and we are in danger of creating a Blade Runner kind of society in which the wealthy are ensconced in their private opulence, while the poor among us struggle with crumbling streets and overcrowded schools, and where the very least privileged must be put away in jails and prisons, or left to walk the streets, for there is no other place for them.

The commodification of our lives has reached even into our families. Once the evening meal was a kind of sacramental time when the children learned what civil discourse was about—learned that they were part of the whole and responsible to an entity larger than themselves and their needs. But now the microwave has become indispensable, as each person drifts in, warms something up, and then goes off for some individual pursuit.

Michelle Slatalla tells the story of picking up one daughter from a friend’s house and depositing another at a piano lesson before the last leg of the car-pool route. She was thinking that she had approximately 10 minutes for either dinner preparation/homework assistance/or personal time. As she considered these possibilities, a little voice piped up from the backseat. "Do you know what I want for my birthday?" She fell back, she said, on a generic response: "Chocolate cake, pink-frosting flowers, and a personalized birthday serenade from a famous teenybopper-heartthrob band?" The voice from the back seat responded, "No, I want to stay home and play with friends in the backyard."

"Why not ask for a pony?" the mom thought. Rerouting her overscheduled family toward an afternoon of free time was nigh onto impossible. A recent University of Michigan study determined that kids’ free time has decreased 16% in a single generation—it has shrunk dramatically from 1981 to 1997, from 63 hours a week to a mere 51. This year some Minneapolis suburbanites founded an organization called Family Life 1^st, to call for limits on extracurricular activities (they even have a website at Family Life1st.org). Says the group’s organizer Bill Doherty: "The problem is consumerism—overscheduling our kids because we think of them as products to develop." That phrase struck me: we think of kids as products to develop. Play music for them while they are inutero. Get them into the best pre-school. Make sure they read before kindergarten. Plan early the route to one of the Ivy League universities. Are our children a product to reflect our own worth, our own egos? Do they exist to "do us proud"? If so, no wonder that they feel devalued, even as they are given everything.

I came across a sampling of definitions of love, by children 4 to 8 years old, and I want to share some of those with you this morning. Notice that not a single one of them has anything to do with achieving or producing. Maybe we could learn something from them. Maybe their clear vision, unclouded with hierarchy and class, could tell us what is closer to the heart and truer to the soul:

"When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You know that your name is safe in their mouth."

"Love is when you go out to eat and give somebody most of your french fries without making them give you any of theirs."

"Love is what makes you smile when you’re tired."

"Love is when my mommy makes coffee for my daddy and she takes a sip before giving it to him, to make sure the taste is OK."

"Love is when you kiss all the time. Then when you get tired of kissing, you still want to be together and you talk more. My mommy and daddy are like that. They look gross when they kiss."

"Love is when you tell someone something bad about yourself and you’re scared they won’t love you anymore. But then you get surprised because not only do they still love you, they love you even more."

"I let my big sister pick on me because my Mom says she only picks on me because she loves me. So I pick on my baby sister because I love her."

"When you love somebody, your eyelashes go up and down and little stars come out of you."

You know, we constantly have to redefine ourselves and our society. It’s not enough to just drift through and go with the status quo, because if we do, we are likely to look in the mirror one day and find ourselves in company we don’t want to keep. We are likely to look at our children and say to ourselves, "Where did they get that idea?" We are likely to find that the pitcher from which we drink, the common cup, is polluted and unhealthful, and we won’t know how it got to be that way.

We need to stop and reflect upon what it is we truly value, as individuals and as a society, and head straight for that. Keep on the path. We need more of a balance, I think. The right of the individual to achieve and be rewarded is a value we hold up--and we hold up the needs of the community in which that individual develops, through the grace of God and with the help of good people who care. We want to earn and to own, to care for that which is ours by ownership—and at the same time, we need to share our plenty with those who through no fault of their own, are in need. We value efficiency, for it lends us time—but when efficiency destroys relationship, prevents presence, we need to ask if the trade-off is worth it. We like getting a bargain—and at the same time we want to pay a just and living wage to all workers, whether in our country or abroad, for we do not want to gain because someone else loses.

Let us understand that when our children ask us the question—so who made this country the way it is?--that there can be only one answer: "We did." Will it be a place where human beings are cherished and respected for no other reason than their inherent worth and dignity? Or will it be a place where everything is for sale, including our hearts and souls? Do we think we can buy peace or package up love at the market? Do we think that we can choose to avert our eyes from others in pain and claim we are not kin--and yet keep our own spirits intact? You know the answer, my friends, as well as I do.

Each generation has to ask itself the age-old questions: what is beauty? What is goodness? What does love look like, in all its disguises? There is no one else to tell us what should be the fruits of our existence. There is no one else who can shape promise for our children. May we consider well how we spend the stuff of our living.

So be it. Amen.

PRAYER

Creator God, we come today thankful for all the blessings of life—for health, for family and friends, for material blessings. Help us to live mindfully, to be fully present to the larger life of which we are a part. Let us know each day of our connection to the Holy in all its manifestations; let us be a conduit of Divine love; and let us live in right relationship with others and with the earth. Amen.

BENEDICTION

Go now, and look into your hearts and know what you value, and then live what you know. Go in love and go in peace. Amen.

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning! Welcome to each one of you. As the days grow cold, may you find here in this community warmth. As the days grow short, may you learn to cherish the light. As you walk through this time of winter, may you be open to the love that surrounds you and holds you fast. Come, let us worship together.

Copyright 2000, by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.