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 One Percent Commute

For sale!  Price? $4.8 million.  That's $18,000 a month, kids.

It's my commute every day now, this journey up River Road, northward to my little church in the little town of Poolesville.  I depart my modest brick rambler, located in an inside the Beltway Virginia suburb, in a neighborhood inhabited by federal workers and military officers.   These are not inexpensive homes, because nothing around DC is inexpensive.

But they are also utterly average, in fact, smaller than average.  It's a nice neighborhood, but it is not rich, at least not yet, not by the standards we so desperately cling to as we feel them slipping through our fingers.

I motor onto the Beltway, slog through traffic, cross the Potomac on the American Legion Bridge, and then take Exit 39 onto River, headed west north west, through an area called Potomac, Maryland.

I have often commented in blog-passing about the homes on this road, about their size and ostentation.  Today, I thought I'd share a representative sample of them with you, a picture being worth a thousand words and all.  So I stopped the bike, here and there, and took some snapshots.

A nice little driveway.

Understand this:  there is no significant industrial base in and around DC.  It is not a major financial center.  It is a government town, and I am not overreaching when I state that these homes are built on the foundation of our tax dollars and/or the good faith and credit of the United States.

They are not, of course, the homes of federal workers, those "wasteful bureaucrats" who exist primarily in the minds of those who buy what the right-wing corporate-funded media sells them.  You can live comfortably on a federal government income, but even people who've climbed the ladder all the way into senior executive service do not live in homes like this.

These are the homes of high powered lawyers, and lobbyists, and contractors.  These are the homes of those who live and work in the private sector, and who make their money off of government.  These are the homes of those with the power that comes with wealth.

A quaint little residence.

Now, some of the residents of these homes are perfectly pleasant people, I have no doubt.  I also don't doubt that many..if not all..of them are educated, hardworking, and driven.  Some may be quite charming.  Some of them may well have created interesting new products or services.  Some may be foreign dignitaries, here to schmooze and wine and dine.  I cannot speak to the particular merits of the souls in residence at these places, nor would I presume to.

But I can note, because it is hard to miss, that the row upon row of vast homes and estates out on the periphery of the nation's capital seem strangely incongruous in a time of concern about governmental efficiency and stifling debt. 

A personal favorite, for it's tackiness and eagle-based decor.

Driving a road upon which one passes one vast mansion after another after another, it's hard to see just quite how the ethic that builds these homes meshes with the economic worries that consume the nation whose wealth went into building them.  It's hard to see how these homes, which present like the estates of Venetian gentry or the dachas of Soviet commissars, mesh with the values of our republic as it struggles to find its feet again.

Though I've been riding this road for months, it still feels vaguely unseemly and unsettling as I pass through them.

Fortunately, River Road continues on, and the homes grow more modest.  By the time I've reached my destination, the surroundings are small town humble, surrounded by farmland and cattle and horses, large working plots of land with well-kempt but relatively modest homes.

It feels like America again.