by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given April 6, 2003

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning! Welcome!

Our call to worship comes to us from the Song of Solomon:

For now the winter is past,

The rain is over and gone.

The flowers appear on the earth;

the time of singing has come.

The fig tree puts forth its figs,

and the vines are in blossom;

they give forth fragrance.

May we be thankful for the beauty of the earth,

and the newness of the season.

Come now, and let us worship together.

"Three dozen middle-aged rebels in business suits are gathered for lunch in a conference room on the top floor of the LaSalle Bank building in Chicago. They have come for sandwiches, and for spiritual sustenance, and before long they are floating radical ideas: Work less. Slow down. Stop multitasking. Listen to your heart." This is the opening paragraph of a cover article in Fortune magazine, a cover article entitled "God and Business."

"God and Business"? This very juxtaposition of words is somewhat startling because we do not normally think of religion and spirituality as having a place in the business world. But there is a growing movement to bring spirituality into the workplace. The American Stock Exchange has a Torah study group; Microsoft has an on-line prayer service. Spiritual study groups at noon are sometimes called "Higher Power Lunches" instead of "power lunches." Fast food companies such as Taco Bell and Pizza Hut hire chaplains from many faiths to minister to employees with problems. Problems like, I would guess, not being paid enough to live on.

One might ask, is this just another fad? Like the "one-minute manager," or "the pursuit of excellence" or some of the other "quick fixes" that emerge from time to time in the beleaguered workplace? I think we have to look deeper. What are workers really wanting, and what are the cultural, historical, and economic pressures that prevent so many from having satisfying work lives? And what can we do to change things?

Here’s a true story, by a man named Jack who grew up in a small farming town in the Midwest. Trains passed through every day, going to a city some 40 miles to the north. Sometimes some of the more daring boys in the town would hitch a ride on the train and spend the day in the city. One day Jack, craving some cookies from a certain bakery in the city, jumped a train. Pulling up some discarded burlap over his shivering body, he fell asleep. Unfortunately for him, he slept right through his stop. Hours later he woke up and found himself in a cold, darkened car that was locked, from the outside. His silent companions were several dozen sides of beef, and they were all rattling together toward an unknown destination. Jack spent several days in the chilly company of these bovines, and finally was rescued by a yard man who heard his muffled cries. Jack emerged from his ordeal into the bright light of one of those rare, sunshine-filled Oregon afternoons. He found himself asking "Were the cookies worth it?"

A lot of people begin their working lives like Jack. They just want to go for a short ride into town. They just want a little of the sweet things of life—you know, just a salary sufficient to feed their families. Many workers, though, wake up years later, only to discover that they are riding in the dark, rattling toward some uncertain destination.

People are craving spirituality in the workplace, and not so much gimmicks, but spirituality—an emphasis on values. A turning away, for even a moment, from the trudging in the trenches, and asking: How do I want to live, to relate to others? What is the purpose of my work? Ultimately, what do I want my life to be about? We need to develop a theology of the workplace. Something that informs us of our worth, aside and apart from the paycheck. Something to which we can be accountable, besides the boss or the bottom line.

There was a time long ago, during the settling of our country in which church and state were really not separate. The religious values of the settlers, who were seeking free expression of faith, was often the motivating force that took them to a new country in the first place. The Pilgrims knelt upon the face of the earth and gave thanks that they had been delivered to this New Canaan. Their work was the work of the God that had brought them safe thus far. And they worked hard, they were an industrious people. What we call the "Protestant work ethic" goes back that far into our history, and it is still a potent power in the minds of most Americans. Work is Godly, yes and more than that, one who prospers in this world must surely have found favor with God. That’s the tricky part.

This theology of work has persisted in the United States up until this day and is now in full flower. At Seattle’s Christian Faith Center, author Paul Pilzer spoke on the topic "God Wants You to Be Rich." He drew 500 people at $50 a head. Several stories in the book God is My CEO recount tales of bereft people who turn to God and subsequently become successful and rich. God has a new co-pilot, and his name is Midas.

The Horatio Alger myth is alive and well—you know, the poor boy makes good by virtue of his own prudence, sacrifice, and hard work. The mantra is "Anyone can get rich in America. There is freedom of opportunity." This myth of the equality of opportunity is so deeply entrenched that most people think that very wealthy people got that way by being smart and working hard. And in some cases that is true. But that’s not the whole story, nor the usual story. We should give privilege its due. This reminds me of a cartoon I saw once in The New Yorker. One well-dressed man says to another, "Well, you were at the right place at the right time." And the other answers, "Yes, at the right place at the right time, and I had the right parents, and went to the right school, and had the right friends."

The corollary to believing that the prosperous are favored by God is believing that those who are poor have fallen into poverty because of some flaw of character: they are lazy, or immoral, or both—they have no "work ethic." It’s their own fault they are in their difficult situation. But poverty is not a moral problem—it is an economic problem. The fact is that many poor people are working at one, two, or even three jobs, and still find it difficult to earn enough to live on.

So this cultural imperative that God favors the rich coupled with this questionable belief that there is equality of opportunity lays the groundwork for our worship of the "free market." In fact, theologian Harvey Cox has written an intriguing article called "The Market as God," showing the market as our highest measure of value, and of course Greenspan as the high priest.

In the past couple of years, we have seen corporate scandals like unto those we have not seen since the "Gilded Age." After the Enron collapse, Arthur Andersen followed, and following that, WorldCom came crashing down. A wave of corporate accounting scandals cast a shadow over America’s corporations. Public confidence plummeted. In a recent address by Thomas Capps, Chairman, President, and CEO of Dominion, Capps speaks of these scandals, but goes on to state, "I’m an unapologetic capitalist. In my opinion, the system is not broken—it needs more transparency and accountability by corporate management. Corporations played accounting games to hide their mistakes, and many investors were defrauded. The damage is widespread." But he then concludes that "greed and ego" have caused the problems—and it’s only "a few bad characters" that have ruined it for all of corporate America.

So he places the blame for the scandals on a few people who are "bad apples." I just don’t believe this. I believe that the cultural norms in which these violations occurred create an atmosphere that invites corruption. I think it works like this. When the free market is stripped of serious regulation and oversight, which it has been true ever since the Reagan administration, then freedom becomes license, license to move untrammeled towards power and wealth, without consideration for ethics. I don’t believe that the leaders of these failed corporations are all "bad apples," but I do believe that they did not have the strength to resist the temptations that are there when the government fails to regulate and then oversee corporate bodies.

There are of course companies that have thoughtful, moral leadership. They are the ones who do not do "business as usual." Not that I want to divide all the companies in the world into "good" and "bad," because like people they are all over the map. But I want to hold up an example of a company who took the road less traveled, Tom’s of Maine. They produce soap and toothpaste. It’s a fascinating story. Tom Chappell says that he come to a point in his life when he seemed to have achieved everything he could want in life—a successful business, a large salary, a strong marriage and family, a big house, etc. But he woke up one day with a profound sense of depression and disillusionment—and he had no idea why. He decided that he needed to study theology—after all, the question at hand was the loss of his soul. There at Harvard Divinity School he was exposed to another tradition, another language. He then went back to those external voices—the accountants, the board of directors, the professional managers of his company—and he argued to convince them of values based on rights, duties, ethics. He was met with fear, anger, and various expressions of resistance from all ranks of his company. His new vision was constantly and severely tested. He had to spend countless hours patiently and willingly listening. But people were won over, and his company began its new—and profitable—life, but a life with a spiritual dimension. The company gives away 10% of its pretax profits to charities. Chappell says, "I am ministering—and I am doing it in the marketplace, not in the church, because I understand the marketplace better than the church."

I want to say a word about the role of business in relation to the war in Iraq. Those of you who have been in the marches have seen over and over the sign "No Blood for Oil." It is true that Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world—it’s high quality oil, and easily accessed, compared to oil in some other countries, and the U.S. needs a stable supply of oil. So that’s part of the picture, in my opinion, but it is not the whole picture.

Oil is not the simple explanation for this war. We often hear the administration saying that the war is being fought for freedom. We once fought for freedom from oppression—that is how our country came to be formed. That is our heritage. But the freedom that we are fighting for now is the steady and profitable flow of goods and raw materials. We value stability over democracy. When the two values have collided, American power has come down heavily on the side of stability—for example, toppling democratically elected leaders from Mossadegh in Iran to Allende in Chile. I think what we are going for now is empire—hegemony over the Middle East. The problem with empires, though, is that the resources we pour out abroad, we cannot spend on the glaring needs at home—on health care or housing or roads or schools. As one policy expert put it, we have to ask "whether in becoming an empire the country risks losing its soul as a republic."

What does business have to do with God? Everything. Yesterday morning at a church Board meeting, we were beginning a scrutiny of our next year’s budget. I started the meeting by lighting a chalice and saying to the group, "We are about to look at our budget. This is holy work." This statement was met with not a few guffaws. But you know, I deeply believe that what I said is true. Our financial life supports all of our programs at this church—all the good works that we would do rests in our economic health and well-being. And you, our people, bring the financial resources to the church, and you come by these resources with your work—you pay with your very life, for life is made of time. Your life, your time, are sacred. The business manager’s work is no less holy than our social justice work.

How can we move to a different place in our culture? Now the spiritual and the material are kept artificially apart. I think the change has to come from the ground up. I think we have to have witnesses. I think we have to have prophets. And I think those witnesses and prophets are right here in this sanctuary. All of us work, or have worked. All of us buy products. Most of us invest money in some way or other. We are all a part of the consciousness of this commercial society. So we must imagine, as did Tom Chappell, what we want our business lives, our commercial lives, to look like. We must not push that part of our world aside, and say, "I cannot take my God there."

Again, a true story. A CEO is pacing up and down on the slate-gray carpet. He has just put forth a plan, and he looks at his circle of executives around the table, and demands, "I want to know what you all think about this plan, on a scale of one to ten." The CEO is testy. It is plain to see that he wants everyone to say "ten." He wants compliance. He is just plain tired of people resisting his ideas. One man, though, is sitting there thinking that the plan is terrible—everyone in the company will lose by it. He knows that at least half of the other executives think so, too. But they go around the table. Most say "ten," some with great confidence. One brave soul says "nine and a half." The man doesn’t know what to do. He is the last to go. He is going to say what he thinks, he leans forward, he . . . falters, he hears a mouselike, faraway voice, his own voice, saying, "Ten."

Imagine what it would have been like if the man had said, "Zero. On a scale of one to ten, this is a zero." The word "zero" would have passed through the group like a shock wave, bringing forth both more cringing cowardice from some, and courageous statements from others. This "zero" would have had to come from the depths, though, from the entire body, from a grounded sense of "this is who I am." It wouldn’t be a belligerent "zero"—it would be a simply stated truth. A courageous word requires the speaker to embody the word, it is one form of incarnation, the sacred made flesh.

Of course, we have to choose our battles. We have to know the cost of our speaking our truth. The point here is that this man felt that this was a battle worth fighting. This was the time to see if he had a voice. But his courage failed him. And as he reflected on the incident, he realized that the part of him that wanted to say "zero" wanted a different life, a different destiny, and he was not yet ready to take on that new life. You see, the people who hear themselves say "zero" do not have the same life ahead of them as those who said "ten." Out of that word "zero" would arise another man, wilder, less predictable to others, but more trustworthy to himself.

We have to find a new bottom line, don’t we? Yes, businesses have to show a profit, or they would fail to exist. But profit is not the bottom line. The longer I live in this world, one thing becomes clearer and clearer to me: in this life, in this common life that we live together, the means are everything. The end is only as valuable as the intent and character of the means. Profit? "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his soul?"

We’re not talking about a prayer breakfast here. Not that I have anything against prayer, or breakfast. But we’re talking here about moving from a center that is given over, a being that is surrendered. And then speaking and acting from that deep place where the sacred has taken up residence. Where is the appropriate place for the sacred to reside? In the garden, with the colors of spring declaring a new day is at hand. In the warm, soothing waters of the shower. In the bedroom where we rest, and love. And in the Boardroom and at the bank and at the bakery, where we engage in our common life of commerce, that we might live. So be it. Amen. 

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, let us seek fullness of life in all the forms offered us. We confess that we so often feel powerless in the face of the powers that be, and we ask not that you would take fear from us, but that you would give us the courage to speak and to act in spite of our fear. Take us to your heart and give us the words that we need to be your prophets, your witnesses, in this hurting world. Amen.

BENEDICTION

As you go from this place today, know that you are the only hands that the Holy One has in this world, and the only voice. Go in love and go in peace. Amen.

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Copyrights 2003, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.