Beastly Self-Destruction
Isaiah 5:1-10
Luke 6:20-26
Epiphany 5 (series)
February 9, 2014
Luke 6:20-26
Epiphany 5 (series)
February 9, 2014
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
One of the myths
that this culture tells itself is that growth is good. “If you’re not growing, you’re dying,” it
says. “Bigger is better.” “If we’re ever going to get everybody back to
work, we have to grow the economy.” “The
church’s mandate from God is to grow.” “Let’s
face it, size matters.”
That’s what our
culture says. Does it come as a surprise
to you that I disagree?
I’m not opposed to
all growth. One of the joys of being a
grandparent is watching our grandchildren grow.
When we were parents we were busy and our children’s growth was
inconvenient. It meant having to buy new
clothes.
Some growth is okay,
even good. But some growth is not. Exponential growth, the kind that is caused
by some compounding rate of increase, can be exciting for a while, but sooner
or later it becomes a nightmare.
Several years ago I
remember there was a rather short-lived fad called “Friendship Bread.” You would be minding your own business when
someone would give you a loaf of homemade sourdough bread. That part was harmless, but with it came a
sourdough sponge. A sourdough sponge, also
called a starter, is a thick batter of flour, water and wild yeast. It came with instructions. You were to add ingredients, essentially
tripling the sponge. After a week or so,
you were to split the sponge into three equal parts. One part would be an ingredient for a loaf of
bread; the second part would be a sponge.
These parts were to be given to some other unsuspecting person. The third part you would retain to begin the
process all over again. The instructions
contained admonitions not to break the chain of “friendship.”
But I calculated
that breaking the chain of friendship was absolutely necessary for the good of
the planet. A single cup of starter
yields two cups of starter every week, plus a loaf of bread. It wasn’t the bread I was worried about. It was good.
It would get eaten. I was worried
about the sponge that was doubling every week.
One week: two cups. Two weeks:
four cups. Three weeks: eight cups. Some of you will recognize this problem as
“the king’s chessboard” and it spells trouble.
After a year there would be 4.5 quadrillion cups of sponge. That’s 2558 cubic miles of sourdough
starter. Just five weeks later and our
sponge would be larger than the earth itself.
I decided that it
was up to me to save the planet, so I broke the chain of friendship. The UMW in our church was upset, but really
they should have thanked me.
It is a peculiarity
of our economic system that it must grow if it’s going to work at all. This has been true ever since the beginnings
of capitalism some five hundred years ago.
It must expand at about three to five percent per year. That’s a lot slower than our sourdough
starter, but it yields the same result eventually. In the past it’s been possible to expand our
system by extending it geographically, growing the territory that is part of
the system. But now, in the age of
globalism, there is no more room to grow.
It’s also possible
to expand the system by bringing in activities that had been outside the system. Many things that used to belong to all of us now
belong to someone in particular. Common
grazing lands and hunting rights were among the first to be privatized in the
United Kingdom. Today there is pressure
on the prison system, public schools, and public utilities to become part of
the for-profit private economy.
In the 1970s and
1980s the economy expanded by bringing large numbers of women into the
capitalist economy. The economy has its
sights on our children, and not just as the next generation of consumers,
either. It wants them now and employs
them as unpaid lobbyists to convince their parents of the importance of buying
this or that brand of thing they do not need.
The economy claims more and more of our time for the roles of producer
and consumer and we are taking that time from the time we used to give to the
community and to our own hours of sleep.
Even these have not
provided enough room to satisfy the needs for growth for the economy. The economy has colonized the future by
extending easy credit. We are inclined
to put the blame for this on the borrowers.
The fact is that this system is built on consumer debt. If the economy cannot claim future as well as
present income it will not grow. If it
does not grow it will crash.
Now, of course, it
is not enough that the system requires that people use future income to buy
what they need now. Now young people
must surrender their future income in order to get an education that qualifies
them to earn that income. At the end of
last year, the average student loan debt for graduating seniors was over
$29,000.[1]
But there is no guarantee that they will find jobs that will let them
pay off their debt. Unemployment for
recent graduates is high and underemployment was as high as 44 percent in 2012.
In the meantime some
people are doing pretty well. Eighty-five
of them in fact own as much as the poorest half of the world’s population. One percent own half of the world’s
wealth. And in our own country the
wealthiest one percent has sucked up 95 percent of the growth since 2009, the
supposed end of the Great Recession.[2]
Our system is very good to some people.
To others it is
beastly. We have cut off long-term
unemployment benefits and reduced food assistance to the poor.
So, we have a system
in which the rich get richer—making sure that the system’s rules do nothing to
interfere with that; a system in which the poor are used as economic shock
absorbers; a system that requires unending, exponential growth.
Isaiah, who was
active in Jerusalem over twenty-eight hundred years ago in the late eighth
century, was a prophet not an economist, but he had something to say about
systems like this.
He noticed that the
land of Judah had been emptied of its residents. It no longer supported small villages of
peasant farmers and herdsmen and their families. More and more the farms were large, the
possession of fewer richer people. Where
had the peasants gone? How they been
separated from their land? We aren’t
told. Some, doubtless, continued to work
on the same land, but now as tenant farmers or worse as casual labor for the
great landlords. Some, doubtless, sold
themselves and their families into slavery to pay off their debts.
This wasn’t the way
it was supposed to be. This was not what
God had intended for this people. The
prophet Isaiah, although a member of wealthy family in Jerusalem, saw the
injustice of this and spoke out against it.
He told a parable, a
song. He sang of God’s work in all that
God did to develop and protect a vineyard.
God looked for the vineyard—the nation of Israel—to be productive. And it was.
I’m sure the economists were pleased with how the grape-growing sector
was doing. Larger operations meant
economies of scale. Fewer workers meant
more profits for the owners.
But God is not an
economist. In God’s eyes the profits of
a few meant little. As far as God was
concerned the only thing that Israel produced was injustice.
Jesus wasn’t fond of
systems like this, either. We like
Matthew’s version of the Beatitudes because they are softer, kinder. But in Luke, that scholars judge to be closer
to Jesus’ words, it is plain:
Happy
are you who are poor, because God’s kingdom is yours. Happy are you who hunger
now, because you will be satisfied. […] But how terrible for you who are rich, because
you have already received your comfort. How
terrible for you who have plenty now, because you will be hungry.
It is clear to me that the whole of the prophetic tradition, from
Samuel to Elijah to Amos to Isaiah to Jeremiah to Jesus to Paul to Benedict to Martin
Luther King, Jr., stands opposed to any system in which the rich get richer and
the poor are abused. The whole prophetic
tradition cries out that God holds these systems under judgment. In the long-term they are doomed, no matter
how good the current quarterly projections look.
This is not pleasant talk. We
are not comfortable with the idea of a judging God, but I don’t think we are
any more comfortable with an indifferent God, either. The judgment of God, I believe, is built into
the universe itself. Martin Luther King,
Jr., famously paraphrased a Congregationalist pastor Theodore Parker who wrote
in 1851:
I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the
/ arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the
figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends
towards justice.[3]
When God’s judgment comes it is not something that falls from the sky; God’s
judgment comes when the nature of a thing, a person or a system, works itself
out in ordinary human history.
Like Parker “my eye reaches but a little ways.” But I think I see enough of the character of
our beastly system to glimpse its future.
Its future is contained in the need for the system to grow by three to
five percent each year. That growth is
slower and less dramatic than our sourdough sponge, but the result is the
same. Sooner or later any compounding
growth runs up against hard limits.
In the case of the beastly system there is a single hard limit that we
are rapidly approaching, quickly enough that the youngest of us here will live
to see it reached if the system continues.
There is a limit to how much heat the earth can absorb without it
becoming unlivable for humans without drastic changes in both the number of us and
in how we live. We are releasing heat at
unprecedented levels while at the same time changing the atmosphere enough to
keep more of that heat in our atmosphere.
The results so far are astounding.
For the first time in recorded history, the old dream, the dream that
sent dozens of expeditions to North America, the dream of a Northwest Passage
to Asia from Europe is a summertime reality.
The Arctic Ocean is warming and the weather systems over it have
destabilized, sending southward the buckets of cold air that we have been
enjoying this winter.
The world’s leading climate scientist, James Hansen, tells us that
“most of the fossil fuels must be left in the ground.”[4] But eight of the ten largest corporations in
the world are in business to extract fossil fuels from the ground. This beastly system is self-destructive.
In itself that wouldn’t be so bad.
There have been self-destructive systems in the past. They have hurt a lot of people. But many people responded by running away to
someplace the beast wasn’t or hunkering down and waiting for the rampage to
stop. And then life went on. But this incarnation of the beast has left us
nowhere to go. It’s everywhere.
We are called as Christians to hasten the beast’s demise if we
can. If we can’t we are called to resist
it as our way of being faithful to God. This
is a huge task. It renders of secondary
importance nearly all of what we usually worry about in our churches and our
homes. It requires real life changes and—even
harder—a revolution in our thinking, our ways of looking at the world, our
attitudes, our hearts. It requires the
sort of repentance that you and I been glad to avoid.
I have hesitated to speak about this not only because I’ve been
ruminating on these things for some time, but because I’ve been afraid,
frankly: afraid that you’ll dismiss me as a crazy jeremiad, afraid that saying
these things will cost me my job, afraid most of all that we’ll all shrug our
shoulders and go on with business as usual.
But I’m more afraid of being faithless to my calling than I am of any of
those things. So I speak, even if my
knees shake.
I do it without optimism. But, I
can say with Wendell Berry, “I am not optimistic, but I’m hopeful.”[5] I’m hopeful because God has not left us without
the means for being faithful. We have
the common table where God fashions a new reality among us. We have the Scriptures the stories of which help
us to see that world more clearly and to take comfort in the fact that our time
is not the only time when God’s people have been tested. We have, most important of all, the gift of
the Spirit of Christ who lives in our hearts, who upholds us in our journey, and
who gives us the strength to do what we are called to do and to do it—even if we
are afraid—with peace, joy and love.
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[1]
“Project on Student Debt: State
by State Data,” Cited 7 February 2014. Online:
http://projectonstudentdebt.org/state_by_state-data.php.
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