Hymn - Lord Help Us Love You More

Lord Help Us Love You More
(2008) Bill Levering
to Festal Song (Rise Up O Men of God)

Lord help us love you more
with heart and mind and soul.
We offer up our patchwork life,
and long to serve you whole.

Lord help us love you more
with all that is our mind.
With logic, sense, and lofty thought
we seek to be refined.

Lord help us love you more.
Our hearts are rich and bright
with feelings, dreams, and longings pure.
Use all to spread your light.

Lord help us love you more;
Our souls are from your grace.
All souls seek oneness with your love.
Help us to know your face.

Help us to know ourselves
that we might love all true.
Help us to care for your good world
to show our love for you.

“Humility and Economics” - A Sermon by Bill Levering

September 28, 2008 - First Reformed Church of Schenectady

There are moments of crisis in the affairs of countries that transcend partisan politics and challenge the broad moral and political trends that produced the crisis. We are living in one of those moments.

It is a moment filled with passion and fear. Political philosophies and personal pensions are at risk. The frailty of an unchecked economic system run completely by the invisible hand of the market has been shown to be ultimately unhealthy for our country.

The history of deregulation in America.

The giddy deregulation of the airlines in 1978 by the Carter administration made us imagine that the market itself was a moral force for efficiency and goodness. This idea was greatly championed by the Reagan administration who relaxed the Depression-era laws that kept financial players in separate corners. You will remember this is when insurance companies became bankers became stockbrokers. Then Clinton, pressured by Alan Greenspan and others, did away with the law altogether with the result that the mortgage crisis now involves most every financial player, instead of a manageable subset of the financial sector. More recently, George Bush has overseen the gutting of all kinds of governmental oversight, from the EPA to the SEC. As a nation we all began to believe in bigger and bigger business and smaller and smaller government.

All this was based on the growing suspicion that greed had been removed from the list of deadly sins. Greed, in fact, became the norm for life in America. Even the innocuous and unquestioned greed institutionalized in home ownership became a part of our expectation of life. Possession is nine tenths of the law and the possession of a home is 100% of our understanding of success in America. This slip into destructive, self serving economics was not the first time this happened to a country. Listen to the voice of a political leader from the past.

"Faced by the failure of credit (the money changers) have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.

The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit."

- Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inaugural Address, 1933

Greed is selfish and destructive to economies.

Dictionaries define greed as "an excessive desire to acquire or possess more than what one needs or deserves." As much as we might imagine otherwise, no one in this rooms needs anything more than they have right now. No one here will ever be forced to starve to death or be without a dry place to sleep or live without clothing. The absolute worst case scenario for most anyone hearing these words is a diet of mostly carbohydrates, cramped quarters, and limited travel. Could you live on a diet of rice and beans in a small room without a car? For some the answer is, of course, that's the way I live now.

So we don't need anything more. Do we deserve anything more? Because we are smarter or taller or prettier or have access to more resources or even if we work harder, do we deserve more stuff? This is the basic question that Wall Street has answered one way and Jesus answers another. Jesus begins his understanding of moral engagement with 'love your neighbor as yourself," but he ends his life with an even more radical ethic of sacrifice for the other. Paul understands this shift and articulates it painfully clearly in the passage this morning from Philippians.

“Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.” Phil 2:3-4 (NRSV)

Greed is predicated on the idea that one individual is better than another so they can horde resources beyond their wildest needs. Greed is bad because it presumes the exact opposite of the gospel of humility. It says "Do everything with ambition and think of yourself as better than those around you. Look to your own interest first and if you have anything left over, take care of your family."

Greed is bad in its communal expression because it leads to unhealthy piles of capital and control. Piles of money corrupt and big piles of money corrupt in a big way. Even though disproved and in the face of the current crisis, people forget that the concept of trickledown economics was a failure. Large consolidation of resources leads only to banking arrogance, gouging monopolies, and an over-emphasis of the profit motive. As Francis Bacon wrote centuries ago, “Above all things, good policy is to be used that the treasure and monies in a state not be gathered into a few hands.” We believe in political democracy, but have lately practiced a kind of economic oligarchy.

Instead, we should collectively be putting our money where our altruistic mouth is. "Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others." Sometimes this is easy. When I sell my car to my daughter, I am looking out for her interests. I may not make as much as I could. I may fix the transmission before I sell it to her. I may actually lose money on the deal, but it will make me happy to know she is safe. We all understand this. Translating these familial feelings to the world at large is the task of our faith.

Translating these feelings and principles of faith to the public arena calls for great courage to stand up to the bully of greed. Being humble is not necessarily being quiet.

It is time to understand greed in our lives and in our politics. It is time to again affirm the role of government in protecting the assets of nature and of the working class by ensuring that they are not consumed for the greed of a few. Freedom is certainly a foundational value of our country, but when a small percentage of people make others less free through economic injustice, it is not only against the principles of our faith; it is an act against the common good. I am not interested in a grey world of a totalitarian government. But a world of unbridled self-interest, however enlightened, will kill us all.

What this means to individuals.

For individuals, this has political, corporate, and personal implications. It means that we can no longer afford to be cowed by the charge that we are in favor of big government because we favor equitable economics. Being humble is not necessarily being quiet. Support politicians who understand our common good and not a common greed. Ask not what the economic system can do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom and dignity of all.

As individual stockholders, we need to look at our voting rights and consider the decisions of corporations as embodying values beyond profit. Corporations legally are merely groups of people treated as one entity. They are not honor bound to profit at all costs. We are now offended by employment terms of corporation executives, but where was that indignation when the annual meeting came around? Did we assume the market simply dictated such practices? The lesson of this year is that the market is an immoral force. We need to rethink how to value people economically and say things like no salary will be more than 10 times the wage of the lowest paid worker.

For individuals, it means understanding our own private capital differently. D.H. Lawrence once wrote a poem that begins "Money is our madness, our vast collective madness. And of course, if the multitude is mad, the individual carries his own grain of insanity around with him." We carry this insanity when we risk our current relationships for future comfort. We carry this insanity of greed when we, like Imelda Marcos buy items of a passing style or, like Howard Hughes, pursue paranoid personal safety over the needs of people who are starving or sick.

The humility Jesus shows us has all kinds of subtle implications for personal relationship, decision making, and our way of life, but in its most blatant application, we give the best cut of the pie to someone else. It's not that we are slime, but that others are a part of God, and things just work better when people treat each other with such kindness.

The fruit of this humility is not grumbling resentment, but a freedom from the oppression of things, freedom from the race of more, and freedom from the hollow triumph of self. The book of Philippians is all about the joy Christ brings to all people. Each section is about how the joy Christ brings is for each of us. Joy comes in the connections of the spirit and the celebrations of what is true. Let us conspire for joy in our society. “With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking (God’s) blessing and help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own.” (JFK inaugural)

¹ If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, ² make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. ³ Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. ⁴ Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Phil 2:1-4 (NRSV)