New Testament Reading—Luke 10: 25-37
This past week I have been trying to update the parable of the Good Samaritan into a story about the current economic crisis hoping that this would help us to get a better grasp of its moral dimensions. In doing so, it has been easy to identify the people who have been mugged and left by the side of the road gasping for help. It has been the people who have been socked with foreclosures, looted of their retirement savings, pushed into the unemployment line, and stuck with the bailout tab. What gets more tricky is determining who the robbers have been. At first, I imagined the predatory lenders to be robbers who belonged to various crime syndicates, but as Jim Ferner noted in our Bible Study group, this does not really point the finger at another key culprit: the government which allowed and enabled the devious practices in the first place.
Some call it deregulation. But is this really what happened? Deregulation makes it sound as if we went from having lots of rules to having no rules. But as one commentator suggested, this is like saying that you can play baseball without rules. There are always rules. You can’t play without them. So, could it be that what really began happening in the 1970s and 80s was not the removal of rules but the changing of rules to increasingly favor the profit-making pursuits of certain corporations and investors? Could it be that over the past decades government officials at the urging of lobbyists willfully created conditions that allowed robbers to stalk their prey? Could it be that the people we expected to keep the Jericho road safe instead made it more treacherous?
Both parties have been involved in the myth-making and policy-making surrounding so called “free markets.” Now, the bailout appears to be making this long-running deception transparent. Whatever happened to letting the markets take care of everything? Why can’t corporations pull themselves up by the bootstraps? Why can’t they sleep in the bed they made? In the bailout, we see what NYU business school professor Nouriel Roubini calls the “privatization of profit and [the] socialization of losses.” In other words, the CEOs get the golden goodies while taxpayers get stuck with the tab. Is the current situation now making it apparent that the proclaimed benefits of market competition have all along only been a message for us bottom feeders while those at the top have always benefited from corporate welfare and preferential treatment?
As the web of deception becomes untangled and the nefarious reality of the Jericho Road becomes more apparent, our story of neighbors and robbers is not without its almost humorous paradoxes. Commentators and politicians from other parts of the world have been having a field day pointing to the ironies of the bailout proposals. An economist writing for a French newspaper noted, Who would have thought that Henry Paulson, the former Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, would face accusations of socialism? (Albeit socialism for the rich.) About the bailout, the president of Argentina noted how ironic it is that “the most formidable state intervention” within memory comes “precisely from the place that had told us that the state wasn’t necessary, in the context, moreover, of a fiscal and commercial deficit.” She was speaking out of the painful history of indebted Latin American countries being forced by the US and international finance institutions to privatize national industries while also cutting back on services for the general population.
All of these ideological and public policy dimensions of the current crisis make it difficult to translate into a story about a simple street crime committed by a couple of thugs. Moreover, some of the financial details of the present crisis do not exactly translate well. For example, tied up in the housing bubble was the practice of the super rich channeling money into hedge funds. I remember a divinity school professor I once had giving me the seemingly odd advice that I should make friends with business school students, so I could learn about things like hedge funds. Now, I wish I had taken his advice.
Despite having actually read The Wall Street Journal for years, I am guessing that I am not alone when I say that my eyes sometimes glaze over when reading some of the intricate details of the current crisis. I have come across single sentences that could use about 12 footnotes for me to understand them, but it has occurred to me that this is part of the problem. So much of our current economy depends upon specialized professional knowledge. Think of the education of those involved in the corporations that have tanked. These are corporations run by those who are thought of as the “best and brightest.” The corporations hire the highest ranked students from the highest ranked schools. In a society that places a high value on education, this might sound great, but what happens when only a thin segment of the population learns the language and inner workings of huge parts of our economy? The rest of us become left to their mercy without our own interests or needs or even our own existence being factored into the equation. In the end, many of us are left vulnerable on the Jericho Road and inevitably get knocked about without hardly knowing what hit us.
Well, I am firm believer that most moral problems are not really as complex as some would have us believe, so I don’t think one needs to get frightened if one doesn’t completely understand what credit derivatives and collateralized debt obligations are. This past week I read an article by a food and trade policy analyst named Devinder Sharma who helped me put a moral dimension of the present bailout into perspective. Sharma looked at the billions of dollars the US has spent and will spend on bailouts. She then estimated that $600 billion would wipe out hunger, while $900 billion could pull the world’s desperately poor out of poverty “on a long-term sustainable basis.” I am not sure how these calculations were made, but I think Sharma is right in pondering what would happen if global leadership acted with as much urgency to fight poverty and hunger as they have acted to bailout corporations. It’s almost like passing by the wounded man on the side of the road in order to help the king pin money lenders get back into business at the temple. (Granted that our present economy depends upon money lending). Still, in the end, Jesus’ parable effectively reminds those of us who are not severely bruised and battered to not lose sight of those who are and to think of them as our neighbors. This might sound simple, but would we be in the mess we are in today, if it were not for economic practices and policies that showed no concern for the welfare of one’s neighbors?
So, thus far we have talked about who our neighbors are and who the robbers are, but we have not gotten to the question of who the Good Samaritan is. One way to think about this is to think about the qualities the Good Samaritan possessed within the context of a crisis. Imagine, for instance, that you are the Good Samaritan on the Jericho Road. When you first see the wounded man, your initial instinct might be to hit the panic button. “Oh, no, what do I do?!” You might at first lack confidence in yourself for handling the situation. “What can I possibly do to help?” But, then, you get a hold of your senses, and you realize that it is within your power and capacity to be a person of action, or more precisely a person of action and compassion.
With the financial crisis, our country has indeed hit the collective panic button, and the results have already been disastrous. There have been the factual inaccuracies running rampant amid media hysteria in reporting stock declines, and then there has been the manner in which our government has acted. The Pulitzer Prize winning economic journalist David Cay Johnston pointed out how Congress only heard from the two principal advocates of the bailout plan that was adopted. They did not take testimony from anyone else, including “a whole slew of economists who have proposed different solutions.” Congress rushed to judgment without tapping the intellectual resources of this country.
So where does that leave us now? Being that it is the election season, I cannot but help to offer a few thoughts in that context. In fact, this morning I want to give an endorsement. I want to endorse compassion. I want to endorse looking at issues through a moral lens without getting caught up in election personality cults, beauty pageants, and surface level symbolism. And, I want to endorse action. Because regardless of who wins, history has shown that the actions of ordinary people are what truly matter most when it comes to making compassion real and vital. It is ordinary people who hold office holders accountable. It is ordinary people who motivate and compel them to take act justly. Ultimately, there is no politician, however virtuous he or she may be, who is capable of being our savior. The second coming of Christ has not yet arrived. In the meantime, we can take a cue from our scripture for today. Jesus does not tell us to wait and do nothing. He points to the Good Samaritan and tells us to go and do likewise. Go and act with compassion.
“Now, that’s well and good, Brooks, but some of us are thinking about this great big economic crisis in relation to our church and its future.” That’s an important point. When I first began hearing reports about our skylight problem, I saw the future of the church lying on the side of the road, and it didn’t look good. I wanted to hit the panic button. “Oh, no, what do we do?” I had a momentary crisis of confidence. “How can we possibly solve this problem without going under?” But, thankfully, I realized that our church has some intellectual resources better than my own. I met with the Capital Campaign Committee, and I met with the Property and Finance Committee. We carefully investigated the options. We weighed the pros and cons. And, then the members of these committees showed me how addressing the problems we face is feasible and within our power. I realized with renewed faith that we are indeed ready to be a church of action.
But just as the Samaritan was not only a person of action but also a person of compassion, some might wonder if a capital campaign will inhibit us from continuing to be a church of compassion. I think there are at least a couple of ways to think about this: One is to return to the image of our church as a Noah’s ark. In order to be an active and committed church of compassion in the future, we need to make sure we have a ship that sails. For the good of the ship and for one’s own survival, sometimes one has to patch up the leaks and do what needs to be done, so we don’t have to later abandon ship. If we want to be a sturdy ship of compassion, we also need to be a ship that stays afloat.
Another matter for future consideration is to include within our capital campaign an element of charitable giving and service. Some churches tithe a percentage of what they raise for good causes. There might also be other creative options such as special fundraising dinners or service projects that will provide us with ways of enacting compassion as part of our mission during the capital campaign. It will be up to the church to decide what accurately reflects its commitments. In the meantime, I don’t think we have to wait for the second coming. We have this blessed body of Christ, and I believe that is all we need. Amen.