by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given January 29, 2006
First Unitarian Church
Portland, Oregon


CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning!

We come here today

To renew our faith,

To reaffirm our ideals,

And to be strengthened in the doing of the good.

Come now, and let us worship together!

During the Cold War, there was an epic struggle between two economic systems, communism and capitalism, and it appears that capitalism has won, handily—even in China, the largest and most formidable of the Communist countries.  But all is not as it might appear.

Let me share with you the story of Jin Guilian.  His family took him to a county hospital in Fuyang, China, after a jarring two-day bus ride during which he drifted in and out of consciousness. The doctors were shocked that the family had brought this very sick man so far—but their next question was how much could the patient’s family pay—up front—to get treatment for Mr. Jin’s failing heart and an infected arm that had turned black.  The relatives, peasants and migrant workers, were able to scrape together enough money for four days in the hospital.  But when Mr. Jin did not improve, they were forced to take him to an unheated clinic on the outskirts of town where stray dogs wandered through the grimy, unlit halls. 

China’s economic reforms have turned a poverty-stricken nation into an increasingly prosperous one in just a few generations.  But the collapse of their universal health care system means that now 79% of their rural population is uninsured.  Two separate nations are emerging in China—one urban and growing more and more comfortable and the other rural, sinking into poverty and misery.  People make desperate choices, like drawing lots to see which family member will be treated for a serious disease; or a father selling a kidney to get money to treat his ill son. 

So is this the trade-off that has to be made?  A poor and economically moribund country under Communism, or an unjust country under creeping capitalism?  I would maintain that neither system is asking the right questions.  Each system sees materialism as central, each sees economics as the bottom line.  Each sees productivity as the highest value.  Each system sees the earth as a “resource” for producing goods.  But the bigger question is, producing goods for whom, to what end?  Economics is, you see, fundamentally a moral discipline.  Economics defines our material relationships with one another—that is, who gets what, of the resources of a society; and economics defines our relationship with the natural environment—what are we exacting, or extracting, from Mother Earth, and for what purposes?  When we tell our children starting in their very first year, we say, “Now, Johnny, you have to learn to share.”  That’s economics.  Or we say to our two-year-old, “No, we don’t drop that piece of paper on the ground.”  That’s economics.

The problem with economics as it is treated academically and in the business world is that ethical and moral issues are not often part of the conversation.  After all, economics is a science, they tell us.  (Was it John Kenneth Galbraith who said that if you put all the economists in the world end to end, that would be a good thing?)  We use formulas, we measure, we predict—and moral issues cannot easily be figured into the equation.  Maybe not, but we should consider that the most important things in this world are the things that are perhaps the most difficult to measure.

The movement of socialist and communist systems toward markets is correct.  They need feedback, because complex systems cannot function well without various dependable feedback loops.  But a major error of neoclassical economics is its over-reliance on only one form of feedback—it looks at prices and markets and little else.  Social and environmental costs are excluded.  But unemployment and underemployment is feedback.  Global warming is feedback.  Protestors all over the world rallying against unfair trade agreements—that’s feedback.  And in a democracy, votes are feedback—remember that mantra “It’s the economy, stupid!”  Economists have taught us to reify “the economy”—or make it seem like a system of rules and regulations that are real and tangible, a system delivered from on high, a system that just exists, that just is, like water or air, and is not amenable to change.  But the system was imagined by human beings, and it can be changed by human beings.  The present brand of economics applied to the developing world has created hunger, debt, and ecological devastation.  Surely this is not the only way to float an economic ship.

So let’s take a look at the values that run the country’s economy—and our lives—at the moment.  Let’s look at the current bottom line.  I think we’d have to use words like profit, production, efficiency, consumption, creation of capital.  Now let me make myself clear: there is nothing wrong with these words.  It’s just that they are not ends in themselves.  They should exist to serve values larger than themselves—human values.  They should exist to serve the common good, to serve human health and well-being, to ensure the care and sustainability of our precious earth. 

But now think about it—does the workplace exist to serve families—or does our family structure exist to serve the economic structure?  Why do both parents have to work, usually at full-time jobs?  Why do we have so many things and so little personal interaction with family members, not even eating together in many cases?  Do work structures exist for the efficiency of the economic machine, or for parenting, for the building of community, for citizen-activists?  Are social structures arranged to bring generations together, or to pull them apart, at the convenience of the workplace?  Just what is our bottom line—and what do we want it to be?

We have so accepted this economic model of production and consumption that our personal relationships themselves begin to be commodified.  I was talking to a man the other day, a friend of mine, who has recently gone through a divorce, and he is finding the dating scene—well, challenging.  He was finding himself drawn to a particular woman for a while, but then he began to have his doubts when she said, with some enthusiasm, “You are my list!” 

“What do you mean?” he asked. 

“Well, I made a list of all the qualities that a man must have before I would want to be in a relationship with him, and you have the qualities on my check list,” she answered.

But falling in love is not the same as making a grocery list and then checking off qualities.  Sometimes it’s loving someone you never intended to love—it’s being surprised by love, because you’re not judging and counting and weighing all the time.  In a society in which love relationships are measured by a market mentality, people are seen in instrumental terms, rather than sacred.  And there’s nothing lonelier than the narcissist who sizes up everyone else for what he can get from them.  Loving makes one feel expansive and generous; measuring and demanding diminishes the spirit.

I think children are often commodified these days—parents putting their kids on waiting lists for the best elementary schools so they can get into the best high schools so they can get into the best universities so they can meet the most powerful people with the most connections . . . so that they can what?  Start this whole cycle all over again?  Since children no longer work in the home, as they did on the family farm before the industrial revolution, they are a kind of liability, in a way.  So I wonder, are children now turned out like products, to do the parents proud? 

So how did our society get to be this way—you know, dominated by getting and spending?  Well, it comes down to power, and those who have it, wielding it.  Corporations are in business to make money—in fact, they are required to make money for their stockholders—so if consumers want a different kind of product, if we want to change corporate behavior, we can just choose not to buy the product, can’t we?  There are a couple of problems with that reasoning, though, as Rabbi Michael Lerner points out in his book Spirit Matters.  First of all, markets respond to money, and there is not an equal distribution of money, by any means; and secondly, we live in a social context that is often disproportionately shaped and formed by large corporations.

For example, do you wonder why we have a suburban culture in this country, dominated by the automobile?  This was no accident.  Gas and automobile companies spent huge amounts of money lobbying, encouraging legislatures to build more superhighways rather than provide the urban reconstruction and public transportation that would help people live closer to their work.  If the only house you can afford is far from the only work available to you, and there is no public transportation, you have no choice but to drive.  Who stands to gain?  Incidentally, this is the most telling question to ask when you’re trying to figure out who really screwed something up in politics or government: who stands to gain?

If we want a different kind of society, we need to ask different kinds of questions, questions that will help us evaluate the result of any given plan of social or economic organization.  I want to suggest what some of those questions might be.  One might be what kinds of values are the grounding for this plan—are they simply material values, or are they moral and spiritual values as well?  Another question might be what kind of human beings are likely to result from living in this environment?  Would they be adversarial and violent, or peace-loving and friendly?  A third question might be how are the weakest ones among us treated in this plan—are they considered worthless and just ground under, or are they lifted up, and given opportunity?

I’m making some assumptions here about human nature, and I believe I’ve seen enough of it as a minister to make a few generalizations.  I’ve seen that greed leads to pain, and that generosity leads to joy and well-being.  I’ve noticed that people mostly want to do the right thing, but often lack leadership and direction.  I’ve observed that people choose their life’s work not by what pays them the most, but by what gives them the most satisfaction, the best chance to create, the most ability to give of their strengths and talents.  We are not animals scrounging for our biggest share of the kill, but something higher motivates us.  I think of the words of Wendell Berry: he said, “Rats and cockroaches exist by supply and demand; human beings, by the grace of God, can consider mercy and justice.”

So we want economic structures to be different, do we?  Where do we start?  We start at home, we start at church.  When I came to this church 14 years ago, the staff did not have health insurance.  As soon as I told you that, they got it.  We did not do socially responsible investing.  Now we do—both the church and the Foundation, which controls our endowment.  We did not pay a living wage to all our employees.  Now we do.  We cannot call ourselves a justice-seeking institution until we seek justice where we live.

We can work for change locally, where we can have some influence, and watch to see how that local change spreads to other locales.  Don’t forget that recycling started in the Northwest.  Washington State just passed an anti-discrimination law which includes gays and lesbians, something the city of Portland and some other municipalities in Oregon did some time ago.  This is how change happens—begin locally, where you know the scene and can exert some influence.  Watch attitudes, behavior, policies shift and change, then, in the state and finally in the nation.

And now former Gov. Kitzhaber is back with a bold plan for universal health care for all Oregonians.  In his paper “On the Road to Revolution: Fear and Loathing in the U.S. Health Care System,” Kitzhaber points out that health insurance for the average family now costs $10,880 a year, and for the first time exceeds the gross annual income of a full time minimum wage worker.  He calls for a revolution not of violence, but of vision.  He says we have avoided answering the most fundamental of questions: who has the responsibility to pay for the health care needs of those who cannot afford to pay for it themselves?  He says that we have left the economic market to answer the question for us.  But markets are designed to turn a profit, not to foster social responsibility, so it should come as no surprise that no one competes for people who cannot pay—those who can pay are referred to as “market share”; those who cannot, as “liabilities.” 

I won’t go into his plan—you can check it out on his web site, Archimedes, if you’re interested.  He wants to realize his vision by a direct vote of the people and then through this vision, challenge the entire U.S. health care system.  His goal is a healthy citizenry.  That doesn’t seem too much to ask in a wealthy country like ours.

Here at this church we can make a difference, and are making a difference, in many ways.  The purpose of the church is spiritual growth for its members, and then the fruits of that growth flow out to bless the larger community and transform that community.  We do this first and foremost by living lives of integrity and purpose.  We educate ourselves and others.  We provide leadership for change.  We join with others in coalitions that support common goals. 

I read in the NY Times yesterday morning that there is a new tool for our country’s intelligence officers, or in common language, our spies.  Now this was on the front page of the paper.  This new tool?  A code of ethics.  Yes, morals for spies.  They are actually taking classes now entitled “Spiritual Crises among Intelligence Operatives” and “Assassination: the Dream and the Nightmare.”

I want to remind you where all of this started.  It started because one young soldier, who seemingly had no power but the power of his faith and his moral convictions, couldn’t stomach what he saw happening at Abu Ghraib, and let the whole world know of the torture occurring in that prison.  And everything unfolded from there.  

You think you cannot make a difference?  You can.  We can.  This church can.  Through our faith, through our belief in what is right.  Remember that we are not acting alone.  Those before us have shown us the way with their courage.  And always, always, we must know that when we act for the right, we have a Partner—the Holy One will be there with us, holding us up, leading us, giving us comfort in the long struggle for justice.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

Holy One, the problems seem so immense, and we feel so small at times.  Show us how to act as levers to move more than we ever thought we could.  The need is so great.  We pray that you might light the way for us, show us how to use ourselves well to bring a portion of peace and justice to this broken world.  Give us courage and hope to sustain us in these days.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

May you be instruments of healing and hope in a world that calls out for peace and for justice.  Go now, with great love and great hope in your hearts.