Cooking the books

Jeremiah 8:18-9:1
Psalm 79:1-9
1 Timothy 2:1-7
Luke 16:1-13

Last Monday, as I usually do, I dropped my daughter off at school and then went surfing.  I have a standing arrangement with Susan Stewart that I can park on the street in front of her house, from which place I can put on my wetsuit and carry my surfboard down the hill to Dillon Beach.  It’s a little extra work, especially on the way back up after a couple hours of hard paddling, but it’s well worth it, because it saves me the nine dollar parking fee every time I go.  Or almost every time.  Last week I arrived at the road junction at the entrance to the village at Dillon Beach and met with a flag stop and a road crew with some heavy equipment getting ready to work. 

They waved me by, and I turned onto Susan’s street only to find it lined with orange-and-white-striped sawhorses and placards that said “No Parking: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. September 16.”  My heart started sinking as I saw those sawhorses marching away up the hill and along all the side streets and in front of Susan’s house.  I kept going around the block and the story was the same.  I turned back out onto the main road and tried the last street before the beach—more sawhorses.  I finally resigned myself to paying for parking, and then I remembered that my wallet was empty of cash.  Now the surf wasn’t exactly epic that day, but that doesn’t really matter much to me.  I go out there mainly just to exercise my body and let the ocean wash the stress and strain of my life on land off of me—if I happen to catch a few waves that’s the frosting on the cake.  So the prospect of having to turn around and head back to Petaluma completely dry didn’t exactly fill me with joy.

So I decided to drive down to the parking lot and see what would happen.  I pulled up to the little kiosk and rolled down my window.  The attendant was a young woman, perhaps eighteen or nineteen years old.  I told her the whole story about how I usually parked up on the hill but that the road work had blocked everything off so I needed to use the lot, and didn’t have any cash.  She told me I could pay with a debit card.  I started to pull out my wallet and she said, “No, not here—up at the store.”

I paused for a second before saying—“Ok, I guess I’m off to the store.  See you in a minute.”  And I put my wallet back and was reaching for the keys, when she spoke again—“Do you live up in the village?”

So I repeated my story-- “No, my friend does.  She lets me park in front of her house, but everything’s blocked off today because of the road work.”

“Road work,” she said to herself.  There was another moment’s pause while she considered.  Then she wrote something on an orange slip of paper and handed it through the window of the kiosk--a parking pass with 9/16/13 written on it, to put on the dashboard on the driver’s side. 

Our everyday exchange of society’s goods and services is facilitated by a wonderful thing called money.  And one of the reasons that money is so useful is that it’s not personal.  If you have something that I want, I have something I can give you in exchange for it that everyone has already agreed has value.  It doesn’t matter if I don’t have anything that you want in return, and we don’t have to have a long argument about how much my plumbing services are worth compared to your sweet corn.  You name your price, I pay it, and that’s that.  And it doesn’t matter whether you know me or I trust you, as long as we’re dealing in cold, hard cash.  Thanks to money, I can be in a mutually-beneficial economic relationship with people in China that I’ve never met and never will.  

But there’s something about this impersonal quality of money that’s seductive.  The way that it works seems so simple and clear and impartial, that it can make the value of other things seem kind of vague and uncertain in comparison.  That’s particularly true for the kinds of things that are prized for their moral or spiritual value.  We can all agree that things like wisdom and wilderness and community spirit are important, but just how much value they have, relative to other things, is difficult to say.  But because the rules that govern the exchange and accumulation of money appear so rational and predictable and precisely proportioned, we can start to imagine that they are transcendent, like some kind of natural, or even divine, law.  We can start to believe that the challenging and perplexing questions about how to be a good person and a responsible member of society can really just be boiled down to charging a fair price and paying one’s debts on time.

 But then there are those moments when we find ourselves, like that young parking attendant at Dillon Beach, in a position where the clear and simple rules about money are at odds with what we feel in our hearts is the right thing to do.  There are times when the kind thing, the generous thing, the courageous and admirable thing to do, is to reinforce the shared moral values and personal bonds that keep society healthy, by breaking the rules about money.

The manager of the estate in Jesus’ parable that we hear today finds himself in such a position.  There must be some truth to the charge that he has mismanaged his master’s affairs, because he has no doubt that he is about to lose his job.  And he also knows that, left to follow the pitiless rules of the labor market, he’s not going to make it.  If he’s going to survive, it will be because people behave towards him in a way that defies their supposed rational self-interest.  So he takes a risk that might just make a bad situation worse.  He acts irrationally, and unpredictably, and violates the clear-cut rules of wealth.  Instead he banks on relationships, and on the value of kindness, generosity, and mercy. 

The manager cooks the books, to the cost of his boss and the benefit of his debtors, so it’s hard to understand why the Master would approve of him, or why Jesus would hold him up as a model to follow.  I don’t think this story literally means that we should be dishonest in our business dealings.  But the master appreciates what his manager has done because it exhibits a kind of shrewdness that is more admirable than frugality or even integrity.    It’s the shrewdness of knowing that that in the last analysis, the human economy is personal, and that love, friendship, hospitality, generosity, and compassion are its real currency.

In the coming weeks our national political representatives will be facing many grave responsibilities of national and world affairs.  They will even address some of them.  So we should pray for them—they, as much as anyone, are in need of Christ’s grace and truth.  But watch out when you see them parading across the airwaves talking the nation’s wealth as if it were governed by some self-evident and inflexible law.  When they start talking about the federal budget and the national debt as if there are no real alternatives, as if it is a foregone conclusion that the elderly, children, the hungry, the unemployed, and the working poor must sacrifice on the altar of economic necessity, and the debate is only about how much, Christians need to remember that this is what idolatry looks like.   

When Jesus tells his disciples to make friends for themselves by means of dishonest wealth he isn’t just teaching the conventional wisdom that worldly goods are fleeting and you can’t take them with you.   He’s also suggesting that the rules that govern the exchange of those goods, which seem so impartial and rational and pure, are actually unjust.  The manager might be cheating his master by changing the amounts of oil and wheat that the debtors owe.  But the game of landowner and sharecropper is one that was already rigged in the master’s favor.  And on the other hand, Jesus remind us that the laws of relationship—those indeterminate, always voluntary, ever-being improvised and negotiated rules of hospitality and generosity and forgiveness and love—those are the laws that govern the eternal economy of the Kingdom of God.

  

Rich toward God

Hosea 11:1-11
Psalm 107:1-9, 43
Colossians 3:1-11
Luke 12:13-21

In the last few months my wife Meg has been working about three days a week in her psychotherapy career.  She put it on hold when our daughter was born, and just about the time that she got it going again down in Monterey, we moved here to Petaluma.  But now it’s going again, which has been a good thing for her and our family, but has also involved some stretches and strains.  And one result that is both a blessing and a challenge is that for the first time in eleven years of marriage we have some disposable income.  In our capitalist-consumer culture this is the Holy Grail, the very thing our whole lives are supposed to be directed toward getting.  But when you’ve been accustomed for year to spend everything you earn on basic necessities, the sudden surplus can be a little overwhelming. 

First of all there is what economists call pent-up consumer demand.  A couple of weeks ago I did the unthinkable—I bought a six-pack of brand-new white athletic socks and I went home and took all of the shapeless, grayish, threadbare things that used to be white socks out of my drawer and put them in the rag bag.  We’re fantasizing about a gas grill for the back yard, or one of those thin TVs that hangs on the wall to replace the old  cathode-ray tube that squats in its coffin in the living room.  But then there’s that forty-year old furnace in the hall closet, and the crumbling brick walkway leading up to the house and the peeling exterior trim and the breathtaking possibility that instead of spending the next year’s worth of my days off scraping and washing and priming and painting we could just hire someone to do the job.  We’ve already increased our giving to charities we’ve guiltily denied or short-changed over the years.  And finally there is the voice of prudence reminding of us of all the reasons why we need to save—to pay the higher taxes we will now be privileged enjoy, to build up a cash reserve for unforeseen emergencies, to provide for our daughter’s college education, and our own not-so-terribly distant old age.

So figuring out how to prioritize all these different wants and needs is nerve-wracking, and when you start to divide the extra income all those different ways, it isn’t very much, and that little voice starts to whisper in the back of your mind that says, “if only it was a little more.”  Now, I’m not complaining—I’m well aware that there are millions of people in our country and billions more around the world who would give their eye teeth to have my money problems.  But the frustrating aspects of the situation do help me to remember the point that Jesus makes in the Gospel of Luke when he says to some brothers who are quarreling over their inheritance, "Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one's life does not consist in the abundance of possessions."

And he goes on to tell a story, a parable about a rich man, a landowner who had what every one of us who’s ever bought a lottery ticket thought we wanted, what every subsistence farmer in Palestine has always thought would be the answer to his fondest prayer.  He had a surplus, so much grain and other goods that he had to tear down his barns and build bigger ones to hold it all.  And the best thing, the man thought, about all that wealth was that now he could purchase his soul.  He could get it out of debt, out of hock to anxiety, and uncertainty about the future, and the endless toil be secure.  He could just kick back and relax and enjoy his life, because finally it was his alone. 

But here is where God comes into the story, and, as in all the parables of Jesus, God flips the script.  Because God tells the rich man that his life is the one thing that he can never own.    And the goods that he thinks will buy him his soul come at the cost of it.  They don’t give him his life, they consume it, until his goods are all that remains, an inheritance for his children to quarrel over.  “So it is,” says Jesus, “with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

It is hard for us, as it was for people in Jesus’ time, to hear this story as good news.  That is because we only hear the negative message it contains.  But there is a positive message in the story as well, as in all the teachings of Jesus about material wealth, which can sound so stern and cold and unlovely to our ears.   And the positive message is that there is an alternative to the anxious and never-ending struggle to get so much stuff that we can finally be in firm possession of our lives.  There is a way to live that understands that we are already rich, even if we have nothing in this world but the clothes on our backs.  It is possible to see the world, not as an economy of competition for limited goods and scarce commodities, but as an abundant economy of unlimited and multiplying gifts.  There is a way to pursue fulfillment and joy and peace by flipping the script, and learning to be “rich toward God.”

Last Wednesday, July 31^st, was the anniversary of a meeting that took place in 1856 in a parlor at the Washington Hotel near the corner of Main and Washington in a booming little settlement on the Petaluma River.  At that meeting a small group of pioneers met with Bishop William Kip of California and decided to establish St. John’s Church.  It’s worth remembering that at the beginning St. John’s was nothing, nothing but a name, and those people and their bishop, and the Book of Common Prayer.  And our founders may have had their dreams of building something substantial and lasting, but I don’t think they foresaw what their little project would become, any more than they foresaw the unbelievable prosperity that timber, and ranching, and the river would bring to their town.   But they did have the sense to know that whatever they did here would be worthless if they weren’t rich toward God.

One hundred and fifty years later, their children would have a quarrel over their legacy.  But I like to think that what was really at stake in that fight was not the property of the parish, or the name St. John’s, or the rightful inheritance of the Anglican tradition.  The real issue in question was the nature of the church—is it our exclusive possession?  Is it the right of any person, or one generation, to decide who belongs to it, and who does not, and to do with it as they will?  Or is the church a gift that we hold in trust for others we don’t even know, something that simply passes through our hands, on its way to a destination that we cannot imagine, that is hidden with Christ in God?

Last Thursday, August 1^st was also an anniversary, the 3^rd anniversary of my coming here to be the Priest-in-Charge.  And a lot of our time and energy in these past three years has been consumed with trying to get a handle on our inheritance—assessing the deferred maintenance needs of the property, making repairs and improvements, raising money to make the repairs, setting up financial systems, and endowment policies, and facility-use policies and the administrative and governance structures to do all these things in an efficient and transparent and accountable way.  And I admit there have been times when I’ve wished for the simplicity of nothing but people and bishop and the Book of Common Prayer.

And there also the times when I’m alone in this place and I walk around and I wonder who our neighbors are and what they might say if they knew there was this incredible asset just sitting here, holding all of its potential like a hidden treasure, and that it is here for them.  Here for them to use to create community, to celebrate life, to offer thanksgiving, and mourn the dead; here for them to use to enjoy beauty, and practice kindness, and share truth, and love wisdom, and study peace.  I think about them and I wonder what I can say or do that will let them know that this is their place to come and be rich, rich toward God.    

Good questions

Job 23:1-9, 16-17
Psalm 22:1-15

Hebrews 4:12-16
Mark 10:17-31

What is the purpose of religion, anyway?  Where is this God we are always talking about?  How do we know that God cares about us?  And how do we go to where God is?  How can we get what God has to give?  What does God want us to do?

This is a line of questioning that the world in which we live has pretty much abandoned.  It has decided that there are other, more pressing problems, problems mostly having to do with money and the things that money will buy.  Next month, the citizens of the United States of America will choose between candidates for President.  And the nominees of the two most powerful parties tell us that we face a fateful choice, between two fundamentally different approaches to the nation’s problems.  But the truth is that they agree perfectly on many of the most fundamental things.  They may differ as to who is entitled to more money, and who should be content with less.  They may disagree about how much money the government should take, or how much it should spend, but neither would think for a moment to publicly question the assumption that the whole purpose of our life in society, insofar as we can talk anymore about any shared and universal values, is to get money.

But these politicians aren’t working in a vacuum.  They are speaking on our behalf, and nobody challenges them to speak or think differently, because they are only saying what leaders in business, in the media, in academia, and the arts, and more than a few leaders in religion have also said.  There is really only one place left in society where you can consistently find a different worldview, one that proceeds on the basis of an entirely different set of assumptions, and that is here.  In a church, or a synagogue, a mosque, or an ashram.  We arrive here every Sunday, thoroughly conditioned by the values of a materialistic society, and if it were left up to us, we might just come together and sing some pretty songs, and hear some positive uplifting words that help us relax a little and feel a touch of grace.  And we would draw strength from one another to go out of here to resume our pursuit of money and the things that money can buy. 

But instead we do something kind of strange.  We invite a visitor into our midst every week and we listen to his voice.  It is sometimes comforting, but often it is disturbing.  It keeps us unsettled and unsure of ourselves.  It keeps us wondering if there isn’t something else going on in the world, something nobody is talking about, but that we really should be paying attention to.  We don’t always like what that voice says, but we take turns being its mouthpiece and when we’ve done speaking we say “the Word of the Lord,” and everyone says “Thanks be to God!” whether they feel like it or not.

This morning as we listen to this voice we hear it asking difficult questions, the kinds of questions with which I began my sermon.  They are the kind of questions that we are not supposed to ask, either because we’ve accepted the popular premise that God is irrelevant, or because we’ve identified as religious, which popularly means we’re not supposed to entertain any doubts.  But the readings raise a lot of doubts.  Job says, “Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling.”  He describes himself as like a man blundering about in a pitch-black night or a dense fog.  He turns this way and that, but God is nowhere to be found.  And at the same time Job senses that God sees him, naked and alone, and that thought brings terror, and the longing to be covered and to hide the darkness.

The Letter to the Hebrews says the word of God is sharper than a two-edged sword, cutting through all pretense and ambivalence and laying the human heart open to the eyes of the one with whom all must ultimately settle accounts.  And that must be what it was like for that nice fellow in the Gospel of Mark, the one who spoke to Jesus so politely and asked what he must do to inherit eternal life.  You can see his enthusiasm mounting as Jesus rattles off the commandments, and he says, “I have kept them all since I was young.”  But then Jesus, looking at him with that long, loving, penetrating gaze, speaks the word that sends him away crushed: "Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me."

Eternal life is not another possession to be added to our hoard.  It isn’t something Jesus can just pass on to us, like a family heirloom.  He prefers to talk about it as a space you have to enter.  You have to leave behind the place where you are.  You have to leave everything you have there, and move over into another place, the kingdom of God.  From the outside, it doesn’t look like anything.  Most people don’t even believe that it’s real.  But from the inside, it is the so-called “real world,” the world of money and the things that money can buy, that seems like a strange, surreal dream.  It’s not that that world is bad—actually it was all made by God, who loves it.  It just doesn’t mean what we think it does, and the things in it that we think matter the most really don’t matter very much at all. 

The church is that funny place in that world where the kingdom of God keeps showing up as a topic of conversation.  It doesn’t mean we’ve moved there.  Even in the church we care a little more than we ought to about money and the things that money can buy.  But we keep inviting the living word of God into our midst, to cut through our cravings and our confusion, to lay us open to deeper inspection.   We ask for eternal life for ourselves, and the incarnate word points us toward our neighbor who is poor.  But even though we can’t avoid the little problem of our disobedience, we keep holding open the questions that the world keeps wanting to close once and for all.

 And we also make a very big deal about things that the world considers worthless, things that speak to us of the goodness that is God’s alone—some water and oil on a baby’s head; prayers for peace, for the sick and the dead; a morsel of bread and a sip of wine.  Week by week, year by year, we carry on our conversation about the hard questions, we share our little worthless things, in community, and by-and-by something strange and kind of wonderful can happen.  Those hard, possibly irrelevant questions—Where is God?  Does God love us?  How do we get to where God is?  How can we receive what God has to give?  What does God want to do?—by some kind of economics that world can’t begin to understand, these questions start to find their own answers. 

They are answers that are not given so much as they are lived.  Maybe they come down from above, and maybe they come out from within, and maybe it’s a little bit of both, and the best thing about them is that they take us deeper into the questions, so that the questions themselves overflow with grace, like water from an inexhaustible spring.  

Laborers and Landowners

Exodus 16:2-15
Psalm 105:1-6, 37-45
Philippians 1:21-30
Matthew 20:1-16

We live in a time when the economy is at the top of everyone’s list of concerns.  For some people, anxiety about the economy leads to passionate debates about policy.  There is a war of words in politics and the media about who caused the current crisis, and what should be done to fix  it.  But for many others the concerns are more personal and immediate—will I keep my job?  Will I get a job to replace the one I lost?   Are my wages keeping pace with my bills?  Do I owe more on my house than it’s worth?   Will I be able to afford to educate my children?  Will I be able to retire?   

The bible says consistently that God has a stake in the game of human economies.   So we shouldn’t be surprised that Jesus, the one we look to as God incarnate, has a lot to say about the economic conditions of our lives.  But Jesus does not approach economics as social science or political theory.     Instead, he tells  stories  about people, about  a merchant who found a pearl of great  price, about  the master  of a house  who went away, leaving his  servants  with ten talents of silver, about a slave who begged and won forgiveness of  his enormous debts, only to violently demand repayment from a two-bit debtor.

What’s surprising about these stories is the way that Jesus uses them to open up a deeper conversation with us about God.  “If you really want to understand who God is,” he seems to be saying, “and what God does, you can’t limit your inquiry to your experiences in moments of solitary prayer, in the contemplation of nature, or in happy occasions with family and friends.” Jesus is in favor of these kinds of experiences, and refers them in his teaching.   But he also wants us to look at the way people do business, at their economic relations, and to find out what God is doing there.

And so he says, “the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner hiring laborers for his vineyard.”

This story describes a scene that would have been well-known to Jesus’ listeners—men standing around the marketplace hoping to get hired so they can feed their families that day.  It was an increasingly common sight in 1^st Century Galilee.   This was an era of economic upheaval, when agrarian villages were giving way to an urban society based on international trade and integration into the cash economy of the Roman Empire.  The infrastructure of this new order was paid for by increasing the burden of taxation on the peasant producers, sending more and more of them into debt.  For many that debt became an inescapable downward spiral, ending with their property being added to vast, new, aristocratic estates, where the peasants went to work as slaves and landless day-laborers.   

The ancient ideal of Israelite society was to be a nation of free and independent subsistence farmers and herders, living on their ancestral tribal lands.   One common way of describing this ideal is found in Micah 4:4:   “but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid.”   But in Jesus’ time this dream was vanishing into a mythic past.  The new symbol of basic economic security was the denarius, the silver coin with the palm leaves of the kings of Israel on one side, and the head of the Roman Emperor on the other.    It was the customary daily wage for an unskilled laborer or a common soldier, and was worth about $20—in short, about enough to keep an average-sized household going for another day.

About fifteen years ago I started my own gardening business in San Francisco.    For the most part I worked alone, but as my business got more established there were times when I needed help for a day or two.  Later, I would get to know a couple of guys I liked to work with.  I had their phone numbers and would arrange a place and a time to meet when I needed their services.   But early on there were times when I drove down Cesar Chavez St. and picked up laborers off the corner.  They’d spot my truck, the one with the tools strapped to the rack, a block away, and as I slowed to pull over six or eight men would surround me.   I’d only be looking for one, or at most two, so there was always that tense moment of decision—whom would I choose?  As often as not the choice would be made for me, and I’d end up with the first man to open the door and shove his way into the cab.   And then we’d drive away, leaving the others standing on the corner, waiting for the next truck to come by.

That moment of making the hire is the one that Jesus’ parable plays over and over again.  If the landowner is going to the vineyard to check on the progress of work, to assess the need for more laborers that day, we never hear about it.  What we do hear about is his repeated visits to the marketplace to meet the men who stand there waiting to be hired.   

We also learn nothing about where those latecomers have been.  Why weren’t they in the marketplace at 6?  Or at 9; or at noon?  And the ones who still stood there at 5 o’clock—where had they been?  Perhaps they had sick family members to care for; or maybe they still clung to a remnant of the family property and had chores to do there before they went out looking for paid work.  Maybe they’d already finished a small job that day, but were hoping to earn a little more in the hours of daylight that remained.

In short, the story leaves out everything we would want to know if we were trying to make it a conventional lesson about the virtues of hard work or sound management principles.   What matters to the landowner of the parable are not shrewd judgments about how many men to hire, and how much they should be paid.  What matters is that there is an abundance of work to be done.   The men are unemployed, so he hires them.  Their families need to eat, so he pays enough to feed them. 

You don’t need to have our ingrained Capitalist social ethic to see this as bad economic policy.  I’m sure it would have struck Jesus’ audience the same way.  You can’t do business like that.  People will game the system.  Where’s the incentive to work harder?  Where’s the penalty for being lazy?   And yet I think it must be obvious that Jesus is aiming for just that kind of reaction.  He is deliberately calling our conventional economic wisdom into question.  

Maybe we’ve become like the men of the first hour and are grumbling along with them.  Maybe, like them, we have come to truly believe that the value of a human being is how much work you can get out of him for a denarius a day.  Maybe we’ve also come to think of economic life as a competitive struggle for survival in which your gain can only come at my loss.  Maybe like them we have come to believe that the market economy is a moral law unto itself, and so we are owed special rewards for being the first into the cab of the truck, while the losers deserve to starve.

If so, Jesus is asking us to take another look, and to consider economics from the perspective of God.  The God of Jesus is a God of generous abundance, who miraculously fed his people in a deserted place with five loaves and two fishes, just as he gave them the heavenly manna in ancient times.  But he is also a God of just enough.  “Give us today our daily bread,” says the Lord’s Prayer, and the message  is not just that we  acknowledge our  dependence on God to meet our material  needs, but that we will be content to have  them  satisfied for now.   After all, we have other important things to pray for, such as being forgiven our debts, as we forgive the debts of others.    

Maybe the root causes of the crisis in the global economy are in our spiritual values.  And maybe the solutions will come not from the policy measures of central banks and regulators and corporations, but from laborers and landowners who learn to put their economic relationships back into the right perspective.    And what is that perspective?  Well, it begins; the kingdom of heaven is like this…