HOW MUCH DO WE DESERVE?
The Rev. John Buehrens, Minister, First Parish in Needham
November 26, 2006

Readings

From the Gospel According to Matthew, Chapter 19, starting at Verse 16:
Then someone came to him and said, “Good Master, what must I do to have life eternal?” And he said to him, “Why do you call me ‘good.’ There is only One who is good. If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.” And he said to him, “Which ones?” And Jesus said, “You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; Honor your father and mother; also, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The young man said, “I have kept all these; what do I still lack?” Jesus said to him, “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, then come, follow me.” When the young man heard this, he went away sorrowful, for he had many possessions.

And from the poetry of Mary Oliver:
You are young. So you know everything. You leap
into the boat and begin rowing. But, listen to me.
Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without
any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me.
Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and
your heart, and your heart’s little intelligence, and listen to
me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent
penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a
dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile
away and still out of sight, the churn of the water
as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the
sharp rocks - when you hear that unmistakable
pounding - when you feel the mist on your mouth
and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls
plunging and steaming - then row, row for your life
toward it.
-- [from West Wind (Houghton Mifflin, 1997), p. 46]

The secret to understanding a sermon, especially from a preacher you don’t know well, says an insightful friend of mine, lies in figuring out, while you’re sitting there listening, “What made the preacher want to talk about that? So if that’s true, then let me reveal at the outset the precise moment behind what I have to share with you this morning. It happened right here in Newton, on a weekend just like this one; at the Atrium Mall in Chestnut Hill, at the beginning of the holiday shopping season. The place was packed with shoppers. Laden down with my own purchases, I was contemplating the competitive aspects of our culture’s great annual consumer potlatch. Musing about how even giving gifts to others can become tainted with sneaky forms of ego-centric self-gratification. When suddenly I caught sight of a teenager bopping along, listening to his Ipod, wearing a T-shirt inscribed with the slogan: “ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT NARCISSISM!”

It is the spiritual ailment of our time, you know. It’s message, reiterated in every ad -- “What matters is you; what you feel, what you want, and above all, what you deserve.” Driving home I popped into the CD player a disc I’d bought as a little gift from myself to myself, with love -- by “Sweet Honey in the Rock,” that amazing group of African American women, some of whom belong to the UU church my daughter joined in DC. “I been thinkin’ ‘bout how to talk about greed,” they sang. The hunger you feel for more than you need. “Greed moves like a virus seeking out everyone . . . Nothing seems to stop it once it enters your soul . . . Greed driven people created slavery . . . Greed is so sneaky, hard to detect in myself, I see it so clearly in everybody else.”

When I was serving as a denominational president, I remember squirming in my seat one year as delegates to our General Assembly voted on a so-called Statement of Conscience entitled “Economic Injustice, Poverty and Racism.” We Unitarians are a well-off bunch, and I told the Assembly frankly that I wasn’t convinced we were ready to say that we had a formed conscience on those subjects. Perhaps on racism, where we have worked hard to identify our own complicity in privilege. But when it comes to questions of economic justice, well, I could think of was the story of a Tennessee woman at a revival meetin’:

She just loved to hear her preacher denouncing all the evils of the world. Why, she’d just sit there in the front pew, rockin’ in rhythm to his fiery preachin’, dippin’ a bit of snuff, then hollerin’ “AAAmen!!” When the minister took out after runnin’ around, drinkin’, gamblin’, dancin’, druggin’, even smokin’ and gum-chewin’, she’d rock, dip, and holler “Amen! Preach it!” But when the minister got around to shaking his head over “that deplorable habit, fortunately now going out of fashion, namely, snuff-dipping,” why, she stood right up and said, “Whoa now, Reverend! Now you’ve left off preachin’ and gone to meddlin’!” As though that isn’t what religious leaders are supposed to do.

That year the great American sociologist Robert Bellah addressed our General Assembly. He talked about the effects of hyper-individualism in American society, saying, “It is no accident that . . . the United States, with its high valuation of the individual person, is nonetheless the only North Atlantic society where such a high percentage of people live in poverty. Just when we are moving into an ever-greater valuation of the sacredness of the individual person, our capacity to imagine a social fabric that would hold individuals together is unravelling. And this is in no small part due to the fact that our religious individualism is linked to an economic individualism which, though it makes no distinction between persons except monetary ones, therefore ultimately knows nothing of sacredness. Because if the only standard is money, then all other values are undermined.”

Globally, we realize that we are now over six billion people on this planet, and that at least two billion live on $2 a day or less. Two-thirds of those live on less than one dollar a day. Commitment to the common good, to distributive justice, is an issue everywhere.

Sitting in my study, where I do my writing, and where I can keep it before me, is a little bowl, in the form of a chalice, designed to hold a candle, though made of papier mache. It was given to me on a visit to Ahmedabad, India, by a group of banghi women. Now banghis in Indian villages are forced to live by cleaning out other people’s latrines. Migrating to the cities, as “paper-pickers” in the streets. Hence the papier mache. They made if for me because, with help from human rights program we run, 17,000 banghi women in Ahmedabad formed a union – which got a contract with the city to provide all its recycling services -- in return for a living wage.

I say that our support for those women illustrates the old principle, “from those to whom much has been given, much is expected.” Ethicist Peter Singer in an essay on famine goes so far as to suggest that we may need an economic formula for our responsibilities. He calculates that if we really lived out a sense of solidarity with others, then someone with $50,000 in income, he says, should devote $20,000 to helping the world’s needy.

Talk about meddlin’! As children’s writer Shel Silverstein once said in verse:
I'll share your toys, I'll share your money
I'll share your toast, I'll share your honey,
I'll share your milk and your cookies, too--
The hard part's sharing mine with you.

It’s enough to make one feel like going away sorrowing, like the rich young man in our reading for this morning. We know that we have an obligation to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly enough to empower others to develop their full human, spiritual and moral potential. But if we are honest, we should admit that we operate more from fear than from faith. Fear that we don’t know how perhaps. Which may be justified. But also fear to let go of what makes us feel secure. So we fall back on the spiritual temptation to say that whatever we have, we deserve; because we earned it. As though no one else played a role. Not our parents, teachers, colleagues, friends, or mentors. Not our values, not God. Not those who work for less than we do. Not anyone or anything. Then I can hear my mother repeating what she once said on meeting the late Sen. Joe McCarthy: “Hm! Another self-made man who worships his creator!”

Robert Frost once wrote some verses a friend sent me when I was elected UUA president:
If you should rise from Nowhere up to Somewhere
From being No one into being Someone
Be sure to keep repeating to yourself
You owe it to an arbitrary god
Whose mercy to you rather than to others
Won’t bear too critical examination.
Stay unassuming. -- “The Fear of God”

In the gospel story, when the rich young man goes sadly away, Jesus remarks that it is as hard for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle as for a person laden with riches to enter into the spiritual commonwealth of God. ‘Then how can anyone be saved?’ ask the disciples. With God’s openness all things are possible, he replies, and then tells a parable:

The owner of a vineyard goes out in the morning to hire laborers. He agrees to give them the usual daily wage. Then he goes out again a few hours later, seeing more people seeking work, and tells them he’ll pay them whatever is right. He does the same at noon, at mid-afternoon, and an hour before quitting time at sunset. When payment time comes, he orders that the last hired be the first to be paid, and receive a full day’s wage. Those who worked all day naturally grumble. But the owner of the vineyard replies, “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what is mine? Or are you envious that I am generous?”

How much do we deserve? In a book with the same title as this sermon, my colleague Richard Gilbert suggests some principles for distributive justice. Among other things, he quotes what US Catholic bishops wrote in a pastoral letter some years ago to their people:

“Distributive justice . . . calls for the establishment of a floor of material well-being on which all can stand. This is a duty of the whole of society, and it creates particular obligations for those with greater resources. This duty calls into question extreme inequalities of income and consumption when so many lack basic necessities. Catholic social teaching does not maintain that a flat, arithmetic equality of income and wealth is a demand of justice, but it does challenge economic arrangements that leave large numbers of people impoverished. Further, it sees extreme inequality as a threat to the solidarity of the human community, for great disparities lead to deep social divisions and conflicts.
[-- Economic Justice for All, Pastoral Letter, 1986]

What does our conscience say? Yours, mine?

Our political and economic views and circumstances will vary. But a spiritual view of economic justice, I believe, cannot be allowed to rest on the political or the ethical level. It has to go deeper. It has to ask deeper spiritual questions. What blocks me from my real work – which is gratitude. What makes me think I deserve what I have, and not see it all as a gift? What blocks me from empathy with the suffering and deprivation of the poor? What keeps me from feeling solidarity other people’s struggles for justice and dignity? What keeps our whole society, in all its abundance, in what the bishops so aptly called
“a state of moral underdevelopment.” And why is the word ‘entitlement’ – now made a dirty word for every public program to help the poor, the aged and disabled – still such an accurate description of our culture as a whole -- -- “a culture of entitlement”?

I know. Among the poor, though clearly we may sense objective patterns of oppression, we can be put off by the self-defeating patterns of behavior, by ‘internalized oppression.’ When that’s the case, I say, perhaps we should maintain our sense of human sister- and brotherhood the same way UU psychologist Dr. Mary Pipher suggests keeping a marriage together: Try getting up in the morning and looking in the mirror each day and saying, “You know, You’re no prize either!” Because I have never met anyone yet who did not have some form of self-defeating behavior to struggle against.

You see, only you, and you, and you, and you, and I, together can prevent narcissism -- can prevent a culture of narcissistic self-involvement from sapping our souls. Only we together can learn to talk about greed. To see it not just in others, but in ourselves here as well. And then begin to support, not an ideology, but a spirituality that moves toward economic justice. Through more responsible consumption; through support, even here in our affluent suburbs, for more affordable housing. Through the real empathy that must precede and help support all effective public policies. Which might finally include a higher minimum wage, even a living wage for families, with affordable health insurance and child-care, training and education to help the working poor and mothers moving from welfare to work. Overseas, it might include actually funding programs the President has promised to fight HIV/AIDS or to cancel the debts of the poorest countries.

You see, there is life without love for others. It’s just not worth a bent penny or a scuffed shoe. It’s not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied! So when we hear the call to deeper gratitude, to greater compassion, to economic justice, to empowerment of others, to greater love, let us also hear a Voice saying clearly: “Row, row for your life. Toward it!” Amen.

Benediction words of Mark Belletini
Go in peace. Live simply, gently at home in yourselves.
Act justly. Speak justly. Remember the depth of your own compassion.
Forget not you power in the days of your powerlessness.

Do not desire to be wealthier than your peers, and stint not your hand of charity.
Practice forebearance. Speak the truth, or speak not.
Take care of yourselves as bodies, for you are a good gift.

Crave peace for all people in the world, beginning with yourselves, and as you go, go with the dream of that peace alive in your heart. Amen.