September
2007
And We Are Not Saved…
Sermon for the Mt. Hollywood Congregational Church, September 23, 2007 – Peter Laarman
Jeremiah 8.18-9.1; Luke 16.1-13
Preachers from time immemorial have wanted to get the attention of their listeners by painting a grim picture of a world that is perishing. What I want to observe here this morning is that, while once such characterizations of chaos and catastrophe could be dismissed a cheap rhetorical flourishes, today we are looking at a world that is quite literally perishing—what with the arctic ice cap now looking like miscellaneous small cubes in the bottom of a cocktail glass, with the imminent threat of massive species loss, and with strange new plagues and viruses related to global warming beginning to pop up alarmingly all over the place.
And that’s just one dimension of human-generated chaos and danger. The other, of course, is the catastrophe we have made for ourselves by failing to seize the peace dividend that could have been such a great blessing at the close of the Cold War. Instead of using that rare opportunity to really beat our swords into plowshares and repudiate war and imperial aggression for all time, what actually happened in the early 1990s? What happened is that while most of us weren’t paying attention, a small group of well-connected neoconservative thinkers drew exactly the wrong conclusion from the Cold War’s end. Their conclusion was that this was a great opportunity for the U.S. to completely dominate everyone else. And they produced their now-infamous Plan for a New American Century that said we should brutally crush any foreign entity that would threaten us even slightly, whether militarily or economically.
September 11 was the moment these people were waiting for. By September 2001 these same neoconservatives, including Wolfowitz, Perle, Douglas Feith (and others) found themselves in positions of power within the new Bush Administration. They had no interest in mounting an effective international police action to track down and disable al-Qaeda. They let Osama bin Laden go. And in a way it was good for them to keep al-Qaeda alive. Because that would help them launch an open-ended and apparently endless “war on terror” that would allow this country to pre-emptively invade other countries whose leaders we don’t like and that would justify any amount of military expenditure for as long as the eye can see.
If this sounds paranoid, I am sorry to say that it is all well documented in many books and articles that have been produced in the six years since al-Qaeda’s attack and the four years—yes, it’s four-and-a-half years now—that we have been in Iraq. And what did Alan Greenspan just tell us in his book, in an aside that was not picked up in the mass media? Greenspan—whom no one would accuse of having a left-wing bias—writes in his book that he can’t imagine anyone thinking that the Iraq war is not about the oil!
If you really want to know what the 11th hour world is beginning to look like, I strongly recommend a new book by the brilliant Canadian writer Naomi Klein. The title is Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, and in this lucid and compelling book Klein shows how terrorism and environmental catastrophe are now seen by shrewd corporations to represent great new business opportunities.
Klein writes that with public services and public infrastructures in tatters, what happened in New Orleans after Katrina and what is happening in Iraq now actually provide the templates for an emerging new pattern in which privileged enclaves—whether it’s the Garden District in New Orleans or the Green Zone in Baghdad—get maximum protection from private contractors and private security specialists, while all around these enclaves things fall into chaos and abandonment. Again, if you think this is an exaggerated view, read Klein’s book, or at least read the long excerpt published in Harper’s magazine. Klein’s thesis is meticulously researched and documented. And if the U.S. mass media tend not to show us what the 11th hour world really looks like (and after all, why would they? they’ve got products to sell us), believe me when I say that a very significant part of the world’s people outside of the United States do see this pattern of disaster capitalism. How could they not? They are living through its dire effects every day.
Yes, friends, in the very apt words given to us by Jeremiah in this morning’s scripture reading: “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved…” This is presented in Jeremiah as the cry of a fearful and oppressed people in ancient Israel. Today it is the cry of the great majority of the six and a half billion people inhabiting our small planet.
I want to stick with Jeremiah for a little bit, because what is most interesting about this passage is that in it Jeremiah channels what the divine one, our mother/father God, feels in times when poor people can see only chaos and catastrophe overtaking them. Remember that the people are saying, almost by way of challenge, “Is the LORD not in Zion? Is her King not in her?” And in the way Jeremiah renders it, it is almost as though God is feeling the same thing and is suffering right along with the people rather than rebuking them for their complaining.
“For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt,” says the Almighty: “I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored?”
“O that my head were a spring of water and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep for the slain of my poor people.” Hard to tell here whether it is Jeremiah or God speaking—but Jeremiah is a prophet, meaning God’s words flow freely through him.
Then there is a bit of a change in tone, if we read just beyond today’s passage into chapter 9: “O that I had in the desert a traveler’s lodging place, that I might leave my people and go away from them! For they are all adulterers, a band of traitors. They bend their tongues like bows; they have grown strong in the land for falsehood, and not for truth; for they proceed from evil to evil, and they do not know me, says the LORD.”
What’s going on here? The only way to read this is that God, according to Jeremiah, mourns for the poor people of the land, but God is actually repelled by those who, again quoting the text, “have grown strong in the land for falsehood, and not for truth”—who “proceed from evil to evil.”
Compare this—and it’s a great comparison—to the strange passage we have today in the reading from Luke’s gospel. I mean, this is really one of those passages you have to shake your head over. What on earth can Jesus mean with this parable about the estate manager who is about to lose his job and then says, “Hey, I know what to do so I won’t have to starve! I’ll just suck up to everybody who owes debts to my lousy boss! I’ll give them all receipts that say their bill is paid off in full, even though they won’t actually pay what they owe. This is brilliant! Why didn’t I think of it before??”
Of course the manager can’t carry out this ploy without cheating the owner, his boss. So what happens to this dishonest estate manager? Is he punished? No, when the owner finds out what he’s done, the owner actually commends the manager for his cunning. And then, in verse 9, Jesus appears to add his own comment on the parable in which he also commends the steward’s dishonesty: “I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth…”
Holy cow! What in God’s name—and I mean quite literally what in God’s name—can this be about? I confess that I have never understood this parable myself, so I actually consulted a bunch of commentators, and what I gleaned about it is that the parable is about what one commentator—James Scott—calls “the weapons of the weak in a limit situation.”
Remember that the steward or manager has been maligned behind his back, probably by these same debtors, who went to his boss and accused him of mismanaging the estate. They were using the weapons of the weak here. So the steward is vulnerable. But at the same time the owner is also vulnerable, because underneath or in the backstage of this parable lies the issue of extortion or usury by powerful patrons in the ancient world. Many commentators insist that the debtor who supposedly owed a hundred jugs of olive oil should really only owe fifty if it weren’t for the high interest. So by also resorting to the weapons of the weak and by using the only means of survival available to him—namely, by marking down the hugely inflated debts—the manager not only does the debtors a favor but he also does the owner a favor in a way, by cementing future good relations between the owner and these clients.
In a sermon, the great theologian Karl Barth once observed that because the debts are marked down this way and because suffering and oppression caused by usury is relieved, we can almost see in this parable—and here I am quoting Barth—“a piece of the kingdom of heaven.”
How else can we read the spin that Jesus puts on the parable when he talks about remaining faithful around dishonest wealth? It turns out the estate steward is much less dishonest than the estate owner, and also that the steward was being faithful to the owner—or, as Jesus puts it, “faithful with what belongs to another”—when he eliminated the excessive and unjust part of the debt. By making those cut-rate deals with the clients the steward restored the damaged social ethics of the owner, which in turn explains why the owner thanks the manager and commends him for his shrewdness. Yes, it was a survival strategy for the steward, but it was also the right thing to do because, as Jesus says in the last line—and this is a line meant solely for the owner and for no one else: “You cannot serve God and wealth.”
OK, so I said that this strange portion of Luke 16 compares well and even echoes the lesson in Jeremiah. Why would I say that? Very simply because in what we might call God’s economy, or the kingdom of heaven, exploitation doesn’t pay. Sure, it pays big time for a handful of exploiters in the short run, but it extracts a much larger cost in the long run, which is social misery and then ultimately conflict and chaos. Whereas a lessening in exploitation—even a forgiveness of debts—creates greater joy in the long run and clearly reduces the potential for nightmarish conflict and chaos.
Chaos or community? Which will it be? That was one of Dr. Martin Luther King’s most haunting questions, and it still haunts us today, living as we do during the era of record-shattering inequality and what Naomi Klein accurately describes as “disaster capitalism.”
We have before us in Congress today some perfect examples of the choice between chaos and community. The president and his party don’t like the way Democrats in Congress reauthorized and expanded the state health insurance program for children, or S-CHIP as it’s called. They say it will take us down a path toward government-run health care, whereas we should be going down the path toward completely privatized health care. Make people more self-reliant that way, toughen them up. Never mind that the S-CHIP program will allow millions of kids who would otherwise have no health coverage to get needed care. But this same president and his party, who want to toughen up people with limited incomes, are going to fight to the very end to prevent the richest people of all—some fabulously wealthy hedge fund managers—from being taxed on their earnings at the same quite-low rate that ordinary people are taxed, even though if the fund managers’ taxes were normalized in this way it would actually generate enough revenue to pay for the kids’ health insurance program.
And no, I’m not making any of this up. Right now it is looking like the effort to tax the hedge fund kings equitably is going to fail. And so will the health insurance bill fail if the president vetoes it, because the Republicans can probably block a veto override.
We claim to be a godly nation. The strongest supporters of the Republican Party claim to be born-again Christians. Do we think God’s heart rejoices to witness what is going on in Congress today? Do we think that the God who says in Jeremiah, “for the hurt of my poor people I am hurt,” can be very pleased to look down upon the thousands and thousands of families, mostly poor and mostly Black, who have not returned to New Orleans and who are still living in formaldehyde-poisoned FEMA trailers? Especially when God can also see that wealthy of New Orleans, joined by many new wealthy, are living it up again in the rich enclaves of that city??
Disaster capitalism may be the way the world is going at this 11th hour, but somehow I can’t convince myself that the God we know from the scriptures is very fond of the savage inequalities that disaster capitalism thrives on and takes for granted.
Now I know that you here at Mt. Hollywood, with this congregation’s great tradition of prophetic ministry, are very well aware that something is badly amiss, that something is badly out of joint, in our nation and our world today.
And what I really want to say to you is that you don’t need to listen to MoveOn.org or to some left-wing political group to figure out what’s wrong. Listen to them if you want, but listen most of all to the testimony of God and the Holy Spirit as these are given to you through your sacred scriptures and your Christian faith. It’s not the word of MoveOn but the word of God that you really need to pay attention to; it’s what you really need to process and lift up, especially in the context of a culture that is inevitably so strongly stamped by biblical consciousness, although most of the time it’s a misinformed and misguided biblical consciousness.
In saying this I don’t mean to suggest that you should become more biblically literate as some kind of expedient short-term political strategy. Yes, progressive Christians would be much more effective in public life if they had more confidence about what’s in the Bible and what God is really saying there. No doubt about that. No, I’m saying immerse yourselves in the sacred testimony because it will nourish you and strengthen you and remind you that even in times of greatest chaos and confusion—times like these—God has not abandoned you, and God has certainly not abandoned her dear creation, to the despoilers and exploiters and deceivers.
On bad days God may wish to retire to a desert hideaway, a traveler’s lodging, to get away from our madness and our proneness to screw up. But God never does. That’s the good news. Is there no balm in Gilead—is there no physician there? It’s a good question, and some days it may feel like we are without hope. But it’s only a question.
The answer: God is ever-faithful.
A more important question, always, is will we be faithful—faithful to God and to our own calling? That, too, is why we continue to read the scriptures. We read so that the scriptures can in turn read us, giving us some ugly truths about ourselves but also giving us the hope we need to struggle on.
To the ever-faithful God be the glory and praise, both now and forever.
Amen.