· Psalm 8
Last Tuesday, as I usually do,
I drove my daughter to her piano lesson after school. There’s a comfy leather couch in the front
room of the teacher’s house, where parents are welcome to wait while the lesson
is going on. I had brought some things
to read over before the vestry meeting that evening, but as I was sitting down
I saw a magazine on the coffee table.
What caught my eye was a single word splashed across the cover page, a
word so ideologically-loaded that it is hard to say it without a certain
discomfort. Maybe that’s why we so often
prefer not to mention it, even though it is the dominant cultural force of our
existence. The word, as you might have guessed, was
“Capitalism.”
So I opened the magazine to
the cover article, and was startled to read, and I quote, “The U.S. system of
market capitalism is broken.” Intrigued,
I read on about the growing concentration of wealth and its investment, not in the
expansion of productive business activity, but in debt-fueled speculation on existing
assets such as housing, stocks, and bonds.
Across every industry from banking to auto-makers to computers and
telecom, the focus has shifted from developing new enterprises that create new
jobs to making more money from money. The
result: an unstable and anemic economy that provides astronomical fortunes for
hedge fund managers, Fortune 500 CEOs, and large shareholders, and diminishing returns
for everyone else. It is a system, the
article concludes, that needs a “lifesaving intervention.”
What was really surprising
about this article was where I found it.
It’s not as if the story it tells is news. They proclaimed it at Occupy encampments all
over the country in 2011 and 2012, and the political establishment and its media
outlets jeered in disdain. Armored
police drove the Occupy protesters out of the public squares, but they must
have scattered like sparks on the wind, because now, five years later, their
message is on the cover of Time
magazine.
Naturally, the Time article was quite narrow in what it
was willing to admit about the crisis of Capitalism. It touched only lightly on the political crisis
that is engulfing the system because of its corruption and inability to reform
itself. It said even less about the
moral crisis of a system in which 31% of children in the District of Columbia
do not have access to a reliable supply of food. And it said nothing at all about the
ecological crisis of Capitalism, epitomized by the fact that it would take 3.9
earths to sustain the world’s 7 billion people at the level of consumption of
the average American.
But, be that as it may, the idea
that the Capitalist system is fundamentally broken must have penetrated far
into our society, if Time magazine can
put it on the cover as the simple truth.
And when an idea that once was unthinkable is suddenly accepted as obviously
true, it liberates enormous energy for change.
In 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev was finally ready to admit what everyone
already knew, that the economic system he oversaw was no longer functioning to
meet the needs of his people, and he called for “perestroika” or restructuring,
it was already too late. Now I’m not
saying that the United States of America is going to collapse in six years,
like Gorbachev’s empire did, only that at the critical turning points of
history, the great creative breakthroughs begin with changes in what people agree
to believe.
It seems the editors at Time understand this, because why else,
in the closing paragraphs of the article, would they start reaching for
religious language? They speak of
American capitalism’s “crisis of faith,” and talk of reforming business education,
“still permeated with academics who resist challenges to the gospel of
efficient markets in the same way that medieval clergy dismissed scientific
evidence that might challenge the existence of God.” They remind us that our market system “wasn’t
handed down, in perfect form, on stone tablets,” and call for a “reaffirmation
of first principles.”
The only “first principle” they
can come up with is that the financial system should “provide a clear,
measurable benefit to the real economy.”
Fair enough, but we Christians have been through religious reformations
before, and we have our own first principles, largely forgotten, that might
prove useful at this time: “Man does not live by bread alone, but from every
word that comes from the mouth of God.” Or
“do not worry about what you are to eat, or what you are to drink, or what you
are to wear. Your heavenly father knows
you need all these things. But set your
hearts on his kingdom first, and its saving justice, and all these other things
will be given to you as well.” Or how
about this one: “No one can be the slave of two masters: you will either love
the first and hate the second, or be attached to the second and hate the
first. You cannot be the slave of God
and money.”
You see, from the point of
view of those who follow Jesus, the great error of Capitalism is its distorted
view of human beings. Because our true
value as persons is not measured by how much we produce, or how much we consume
or accumulate. In truth it is immeasurable,
for we were made in the image of God, and this is as true of the profoundly
disabled person who will never have a “job” in his life, as it is for the CEO. And we do not achieve our highest good by
each pursuing his own self-interest in competition with others, but by taking
Christ as our pattern, walking in love as he loved us and gave himself up for
us as an offering and sacrifice to God.
We don't think nowadays, of the
idea of Holy Trinity as a revolutionary breakthrough. But it was, historically, and might still be, because
it originated, not as a new doctrine about God, but as the experience of a new
way of being human. You and I experience
the world through a narrow window each of us calls “myself.” Our habit of identifying with that self, of
fearing for its safety, defending its reputation, and promoting its interests,
is near impossible to break. And yet
this “self,” which seems to be the single indispensable fact of our being, is
treacherously unstable. Because it
learns who it is and what it wants by imitation. It desires what the other people have.
But in Jesus of Nazareth, the pioneers
of the Trinitarian faith encountered a different kind of self. It was not that he didn’t have the individual
personal characteristics. It was that he
didn’t seem to want what other people had.
To meet him was to come into the presence of person who wasn’t trying to
get anything from you, but only to give you something that you couldn’t see was
already yours, an indescribable fullness of being, flowing from an unseen
source. Not that this made him
indifferent to the people around him. On
the contrary, he was exquisitely attuned to them, embracing their aliveness,
encouraging their faithfulness and generosity, perceiving with compassion their
fear, their delusion and suffering. With
flawless precision he would find the places they were bound, trapped by their
traumas and disappointments, attachments and resentments, and he would say the
word or make the gesture that opened the cage and gave them the chance, if they
chose, to go free.
And when Jesus rose from the
dead, the apostles finally began to understand that this is also the kind of
person God is. Not a jealous rival for
our affections, for there is no God but God, but an inexhaustible fountain of life
pouring out for the well-being of others.
They saw that God’s desire to give life and blessing to all creatures—with
infinite tenderness, and absolute respect for their integrity and freedom, to
speak to them in terms that they could work with, and come in time to
understand—this parental love was the mysterious force at work in Jesus. And when they looked into each other’s eyes
and saw the recognition, the agreement, that this is how it really is, that
same love poured into their hearts.
They received the gift of the new
person each of us is called to be, not a person restlessly hunting to shore
himself with what others have, but a person whose self springs with
effervescent freshness from the depths of life in God. This gift is still here for us, still working
in our remembrance of Jesus, in the grace and peace of his Word and Sacraments. And when can look at our neighbor, and our
eyes meet with a knowing look that says in both of our hearts, “yes, this is
really how it is,” this is the promised Spirit of truth. It is declaring to you the things that are to
come, the fullness of being we were created to share from before the foundation
of the world.
