Stewardship in a Time of Collapse

As it so happened, the Sunday immediately following the election was a Sunday I was preaching on stewardship.

Meaning, I was talking dollars and cents, and what lies ahead on that front for my little congregation. Poolesville Presbyterian is a church in a company town.  Meaning, it's a town with one major employer, upon which the edifice of the entire economy rests.

That "company town" isn't Poolesville itself, which is a good-hearted little Mayberry-esque place in the heart of an exurban agricultural reserve.  The company town is the entire region, and the heart of the regional economy is the Federal government.   The ten-fold growth in the population of Poolesville since 1960?  That's an artifact of the post-WW2 growth of the Federal government.  There's still growth. As I pulled into town today for my office hours, I saw they'd finally broken ground on a new development, one that's been in the works for years.  New homes, starting in the low $800s!  Because we've been fat and happy here, for quite a while.

Folks who work for the Fed are everywhere, as are contractors and subcons and the various businesses that have sprung up to support and sustain the government.  Every plumber, grocer, electrician and general contractor in the area derives their business from that income.  As does every restaurant, every private school, and the tax base for the regional governments.  

When I asked those gathered, "on what employer does the entire regional economy rely," there was a nodding Quaker-esque consensus.  Every single soul knew the answer to that question.

This was my sermon illustration, when talking about the future financial health of our church on the Sunday after the election.

Meaning, while I wasn't bellowing, (I am Presbyterian, after all) it was a five-alarm-fire air-raid-klaxon Nostromo-self-destruct-activated sort of sermon.  I didn't need to shout.  Not being fools or idiots, we know what that means.

The fat part of the probability distribution curve points to hardship in the region.  If these next four years track the way this administration wants them to track, we're not talking 2006 downturn hardship.  We're talking Flint, Michigan levels of hardship.  

There'll be a mad scramble to make it work.  Then bankruptcies. Then worthless and unsellable homes left to rot by owners who can no longer afford their Mariana-trench-underwater mortgages.  Banks, collapsing.  Local government coffers gutted.  Strip malls and businesses and office towers looking like sets from The Last of Us, only without quite so many zombies.  

Fun times.

As a church that cares for those who are food insecure, it means more hungry and anxious people...at the same time many of us suddenly find our livelihoods torn out from under us.  This is a probable future for my flock, and for every other congregation in the region.  It is easy to talk of stewardship when you are fat and happy.  But the seven fat years, as in the dream Joseph interpreted for Pharaoh, may well be over. 

The heart of the sermon was this: our obligation to those who hunger isn't diminished, simply because the cost of discipleship will soon be proportionally far higher.  Our duty to be a beacon of hope and grace can't be furloughed, or put on leave, or let go.  We must do as we are able, and we must interpret our ability through the lenses of our actual need.  Our "daily bread," so to speak.

If we are disciples, no matter what happens, in good times or ill, our commitment to the Way remains the same.  

Fear not, little flock.

The Value of Diamonds and the Value of Dirt

I love composting, and the harvesting and distribution of the resulting soil to my raised beds is one of the pleasures of gardening.  As I pitchforked and aerated my large compost pile in the cool of an August morning, feeling the warmth rising and enjoying the sweet fine smell of newly minted soil, my mind turned to the value of my labors. 

I thought, which is worth more: a one carat diamond or forty pounds of compost?  As our human economies would have us understand it, there's no question.  It's the diamond.  

Forty pounds of compost, as of this writing, would set you back about five bucks.  

A one carat, unset diamond, well cut?  That ranges from just over a thousand dollars to around twelve hundred.  

One is valuable, the other, well, it's as cheap as dirt, being dirt and all.  

But humans are shortsighted creatures, and our imagined economies are bizarrely skewed.  Why do we think this?  Why is one thing twenty times more valuable than the other?  What are the metrics we use and assumptions we make to come to this decision?  Let's look at three: utility, rarity, and beauty.

Utility is one measure of value.  How useful and necessary is a thing?  

A diamond, cut in an ornamental manner, isn't all that useful.  If we were to take that carat and use it differently, it does have some real industrial function.  Being a phenomenally hard substance, diamonds make great drill bits and polishing surfaces.  Diamonds also have use in certain computing applications, particularly the development of quantum/qbit processors.  Cool, sure.  But generally speaking, those are pretty specialized applications.

Soil, on the other hand, grows the food we need to eat, every single day.  Without soil, we'd all die in a week.  We are utterly reliant upon it.  From the perspective of usefulness and necessity, there's no comparison.  Soil is infinitely more valuable for human life.

What of rarity?  

Generally speaking, we'd think that diamonds are far more rare.  We see soil everywhere beneath our feet, and diamonds must be mined at great cost, so we think: diamonds are rare and valuable.

But...are they?  Here on the surface of our little planet, sure.  But there are likely one quadrillion tons of diamond (that's a million gigatons) deep under the surface of the earth.  There are only around 116,000 gigatons of arable, fertile organic soil on Earth, (including grasslands, forests, and wetlands) which exists distributed in a meter-thin layer across the surface of the planet.  There's a factor of ten more diamond in and on the Earth than dirt.

In the rest of the solar system, studies suggest that the cores of many planets are comprised of massive diamond deposits.  There seems to be a layer of diamond ten miles thick under the surface of Mercury.  On all four of the gas giants, diamonds may fall from the sky like rain.  

But dirt?  There is no organic soil on any other world in this solar system.  None.  And we have no evidence of it anywhere else in the universe, at least not yet.  Soil is breathtaking rare and almost impossibly precious.

As for beauty?  

Well, beauty is entirely subjective.  Diamonds do catch the light in a lovely way, but why is that objectively more valuable than the warm richness of living earth, the promising pungency of turned biomass beneath your nostrils, the complex richness of soil rolled between your fingers?

It isn't.

So for me, at least, there is no question.  Particularly as I turn the soil in the cool of an August morning. 

Christian Business and Religious Freedom

The ongoing uproar over legislative actions in Indiana and Arkansas over the rights of businesses to serve or not serve customers based on religious preferences will echo in our ears for a while longer.

The question, of course, is: why?  Why this strange sprawling mess, in which conservatism manages to make itself look terrible?  Religious freedom is kind of a bedrock value in the United States, and the right to believe as you wish and act accordingly is one that is central to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Yet this has been botched, with "standing up for liberty" now morphed into "wanting the freedom to refuse business to people I think are sinners."

This is mostly couched in terms of wedding-stuff.  What about the infidel-weddings?  Could you refuse to provide flowers for a Muslim wedding?  Or a Jewish wedding?  Or the nuptials of a Buddhist and a Bahai?  I mean, they're all supposed to be going equally to hell, right?  None of those would be Christian weddings, right?

And...we're talking mostly about businesses that serve *weddings* here, not marriages.  Is the wedding-industrial-complex suddenly a religious thing?  Or is it a cultural accretion, one that's nice and purty and astoundingly expensive, but has no more bearing on the dynamics of a healthy, lasting marriage than the brand of limo that takes you to your reception?

Christian marriage ain't about having a Jesus cake, people.

I don't know how this would even work, honestly.  Could a Christian restaurant owner be justified in refusing service to a man and a woman who might possibly be meeting for dinner before an extramarital tryst?   Would the Christian owner of a roadside motel do the same?  How would you check, without offending every customer you have?

As I read through one in the now nearly endless series of writings on this issue, something else struck me.  The author, a fellow pastor, was genuinely baffled as to how and why anyone would make an issue of this.

"I've never understood why separation and ostracism seem to be the posture of choice," he wrote.

In response, I found myself wondering if it might go beyond theology.  Perhaps, in some way, it is also a peculiar and unintended fruit of the "Christian business" concept.

Here, I'm not talking about folks who are businesspeople and Christians, or who view core Christian virtues--welcome for the stranger, wisdom, honesty, patience, kindness--as defining their business ethics.  To be honest, I think we could use more of that and less self-serving greed and short-term profit-maximization in the C-suites of American business.  If you're that kind of Christian businessperson, you're a blessing.

I'm referring to that peculiar trend within Christianity, in which businesses actively advertise themselves as Christian, with the intent of developing and connecting to other Christians as their primary customer base.

As a pastor, I see those directories come through, on a regular basis, filled with lists of businesses who can be "trusted."

It's an output of that strain of Christianity that views itself as fundamentally at odds with the world, and that carefully seals itself off from corrupting influence by creating a mirror-economy run by and for Christians.

AmeriChrist, Inc., I call it.

You listen to Christian music, you watch Christian film, you frequent Christian bookstores.  You find your mate on Christian dating sites, you hire Christian plumbers and electricians, you vacation at Christian resorts, and make your life about Christian everything.  It's about creating an economic circle of like-thinkers.

For those Jesus folk who want no connection to the world, that way of being can reinforce the faith.  But it also creates insularity and disconnection from the broader life of our republic.  If everything you see mirrors back yourself and your way of speaking, and you will only do business and have exchange with people who think and speak as you do, then it becomes easier and easier to rationalize actions that only make sense within your own echo-chamber.

Which is why, I think, so many of the folks behind this initiative seem genuinely confused at the uproar.  Living within their own separate economy, they have lost the capacity to connect, or to understand how they are heard.

And as someone who genuinely and deeply cares about sharing the Way of Christ, I must also ask: what impact does that insularity have on our ability to articulate the Good News to those who aren't already "in?"

Lord help us.

The Cake is a Lie

The markets are soaring lately, riding high after high and crest after crest.

In point of fact, the Dow Jones Industrial Average now stands at record levels.  It's a bumper crop!  A jackpot!   A total economic turnaround from those disastrous days after the 2008 crash!  Look!  Stock values have more than doubled, with the Dow going from sixty-eight hundred and change to over fourteen thousand.

Things are awesome!

Only, they aren't.   The Dow, as even a math-challenged minister such as myself can easily observe, does not empirically measure the health of an economy.  It measures one thing: A price-weighted index of 30 stocks in United States dollars.  

What we know is that these stocks now cost nearly twice...in United States dollars...what they did in 2008.  Are there significantly more jobs?  No, not particularly.  Is there a revolutionary new force driving real economic growth?  No, there's not.  Job growth has been meh.  Incomes for all but the very top are flat, and the average household income has been falling.

What there has been a great deal more of over the last five years is money.  For five years, we've been printing money...in the form of the Fed buying bonds.   We've been doing that to the tune of $85 billion dollars every single month.

And so the exuberance on the part of Wall Street traders at the continuing surge of stock prices seems peculiar to me.  Would we be celebrating if the price of milk had doubled?  Or the price of gas?  Why should we similarly celebrate if the price of entry into the Capitalist Cornucopia has doubled?

In the absence of any significant increase in production or improvement in the real economy, what appears to have happened is a simple absorption.  We've printed money, and that money has gone directly into capital markets.  Given the absence of material growth, dollars are worth less, which means the number of dollars required to purchase stock is higher.

I cannot see any other logical way to interpret what I'm seeing.

Meaning that taste in your mouth is not cake.

Sermon Remnants: Prophet and Profit

Pretty much every Sunday, there are dozens of possible sermons that can be preached on any given passage.  Unfortunately, many pastors preach three or four of them all at once, oblivious to the principle of, you know, sticking to a theme and making a manageable number of points. 

I can't stand rambling, unstructured preaching, but I still find myself surfacing competing concepts as I try to cobble together fifteen-to-seventeen minutes of Sunday God Talk.  So something invariably gets discarded.

In my current context, I try to keep to basic bible teaching, core concepts and context, lightly seasoned with personal anecdotes and cultural references.  It's what folks want...and, frankly, need.  So this week, macroeconomics and ethics got dropped by the wayside.  Clutter, dontcha know.

This week's passage was a ferocious social commentary, a radical prophetic indictment of the concentration of wealth among the social and economic elite of Jerusalem.   The word Micah receives from God powerfully resonates in our current context, and seems particularly...difficult...as a standard against which to assess the morality of the global marketplace.

As I was reviewing the broader context of Micah, one thing that struck me again was the phrase in Micah 6:10, where the "short ephah" is declared accursed.   As the ephah is a unit of measure by which a dry good or product is measured, providing a "short ephah" means that you are giving someone less than what they pay for.  It's an indictment of those Jerusalem merchants who would use scales weighted in their favor, giving people less so they could profit more.

But the core ethic of capitalism is profit maximization.  The purpose of any corporate or profit-seeking entity is, or so we are told, to maximize returns.  Period.  Market entities serve no other purpose.

Which leads me to wonder...what constitutes the ethic of the "short ephah?"  Is it simply false measures?  Or can it be any effort to bleed out every last shekel from the guy on the other end of the exchange?   What is the ethical distinction between profit maximizing and profiteering?

Making a profit just doesn't seem inherently evil That can be simple success founded in hard work, the sort of thing that comes with a bountiful harvest.  But profit maximization as a goal, while it may have worked for Milton Friedman, just has never seemed compatible with the basic principles of ethics laid out in Torah.  Or the prophets. 

Or by Jesus, if we get down to it.

Friendly Neighborhood Blight

I've been more and more fascinated by the array of empty buildings in and around my Washington 'burb these last few weeks. It began last year, as the nearby grocery store folded. Another store chain was slated to take that place, but though the building has been gutted and prepared for a complete revamp, nothing much is happening lately. It's just sitting there, as windowless and wall-less as the DC Wasteland stores I wandered through while playing Fallout 3.

In that same strip mall, the costume shop is closed, and two stores down, the nail salon folded.

Across the street from the strip-mall, a 7-11 I've frequented for the two decades suddenly shuttered itself. This was a source of great dismay to my sons, for whom it was the great font of all Slurpee goodness. No more walks to get a cool treat on a hot summer day. It's down for the count.

Just a few dozen yards away from that, a Shell station has been abandoned, and to make it cheerier, the owners of the property painted the entire thing in a dark grey primer. I suppose the idea is that a new owner could paint it any color they liked, but the net effect is a little on the goth side. Properties don't move well if they seem moody and depressed.

This morning, as I waited outside a sporting goods store to buy the four-hundred-and-thirteenth pair of goggles we've had to get this summer, I looked out across the vast empty expanse of parking lot at the now-unused big-box electronics store that went bankrupt this spring. They deserved to go out of business, sure. But looking at the acre of asphalt in front of the store, I can't help but see the whole thing as a complete waste.

It's easy to get used to this absence, in the same way that I'm used to the vast expanses of empty pews in my oversized sanctuary. It reminds me that growth is not always good, that bigger that is not always better, and that we human beings have been overbuilding and overconsuming for thousands and thousands of years. We were certainly doing it back in the second half of the eighth century BCE, when the Prophet Isaiah laid into the endless consumptiveness of his fellow Jerusalem elites:

Woe to you who add house to house
and join field to field
till no space is left
and you live alone in the land.

The LORD Almighty has declared in my hearing:
"Surely the great houses will become desolate,
the fine mansions left without occupants..."

Not sure if an abandoned Circuit City counts as a great house or a fine mansion, but it sure is large and empty. And things are better here in the 'burbs of DC than in most places in the country.

Yeah, I know, it's supposed to be part of the "creative destruction" of capitalism. But real creativity produces beautiful things, not blighted mediocrity.