Class Matters
Rev. Mark Stringer
First Unitarian Church of Des Moines
1/18/04

 

Readings 

From the Gospel book of Matthew, Chapter 25:

 

The King will say to those at his right hand, “Come… Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.  For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.”  Then the righteous will answer him and say, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink?  When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you?  When did we see you ill or in prison, and visit you?”  And the king will say to them in reply, “Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.”

 

 

An excerpt from an article by Rob Walker, from last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine:

 

Even a washing machine can be a source of consumer meaning.  Whirlpool, the appliance maker, was betting that this was the case when it introduced a washer-and-dryer line…called the Duet. …This has turned out well, as the washer is now the fastest-selling machine of its kind, capturing almost 20 percent of sales in its category in less than three years. …Whirlpool undertook a study of “washer architectures” around the world and started a lengthy consumer research campaign to try to figure out what appliance buyers might respond to.  …[Whirlpool’s global vice president for consumer design said] “We’re looking to make an emotional connection.”

         This sounds silly.  But even in focus groups, the company got a clue that it had hit on something, as participants started throwing around phrases like “the Ferrari of washing machines.”  Accordingly, the Duet washer alone was priced not in the typical $400 to $500 range but rather at a Ferrari-like level of $1300 or so.  The dryer runs you another $800. …Interviews with Duet buyers [reveal]…”multiple layers of their emotional connection with their appliances.”  [One owner said] …”They are our little mechanical buddies.  They have personality. … When they are running efficiently, our lives are running efficiently.  They are part of my family.”

 

Sermon

Once I decided that I would speak this morning, this Sunday before Martin Luther King Day, about issues related to class, I had a difficult time determining where to start.  For a while, I thought that I would begin by acknowledging that as a white, middle class male who has rarely ventured too far from my middle class reality, I am hardly an authority on the subject of class.  But, I decided against that approach, wondering what good it would do to discredit myself from the get-go. Besides, one of the reasons discussions of class are so rare in this country is that most of us think we have little to say…and so we say nothing at all.

 

Then I thought I might begin with an indictment of the consumer culture in which we live…a culture that overemphasizes over-consumption…a culture that induces us by a constant barrage of images…literally thousands each day…to see ourselves as consumers first and human beings second.  But I decided against this approach, too, believing that while there is no way to separate class issues in this country and our culture’s obsession with consuming, I would be making a mistake to begin my sermon by merely joining the tired chorus raging against the consumption machine…a machine of which most of us are painfully aware and against which most of us are already doing what we can to defend ourselves.

 

Another thought I had was to begin by sharing some facts about the state of our country—the deficit, predicted by some to soon reach 500 billion dollars, the billions of dollars we have spent and will continue to spend in Iraq, the ever-increasing numbers of Americans who have substandard health insurance…if any at all, the over 38 million of our citizens living in poverty, for example—and then to contrast these facts with our president’s announcement last week that he will put a plan in motion that makes it a priority over the next two decades to colonize the moon…and from there to “expand a human presence into the cosmos”  … to which Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” dryly pointed out, “Just what the cosmos needs.” But I decided against this approach as well.  I figure that if I go too far into statistics or into pondering our president’s desire to be a space cadet, even if I think these things might reveal a great deal about class issues in our country, my sermon could become a tragic stand-up comedy routine…not the hopeful message of good news that I like to offer from the pulpit.  Before I move on, though, I do have to tell you another quote from the Daily Show’s coverage of the President’s plan to get us lost in space.  After reading the story of the proposal, the reporter said, “Well now it’s official.  The Bush administration has officially given up on the planet earth.”  OK, one more joke that some of you have heard, but that I cannot resist sharing.  It comes from Dennis Kucinich, who suggested that Bush wants to go into outer space because he is still looking for the weapons of mass destruction.

(What was that about a tragic stand-up comedy routine?)

 

So finally, after several false starts, I decided to begin with a brief consideration of the lottery.  I’ll explain why in a few minutes.

 

A few weeks ago, the powerball lottery jackpot had grown to some obscene amount of money…over 200 million dollars I believe.  I couldn’t miss this fact, because, on my way to church, along Ingersoll Ave., there is a billboard which is changed on a regular basis to update passers-by on the growing prize awaiting those who will one day hold a powerball ticket with the winning numbers.  The billboard reads “Are you ready?”  Often, when I see that billboard, I remember an independent film from the early 90s called Equinox.  I don’t recall too much about the plot, only that it took place in a grungy, apocalyptic future, where amidst the dilapidated cityscape, virtually every billboard advertised the national lottery.  Throughout the film, the omnipresent images of lottery advertisements were a symbol of how removed the citizens were from grappling with the serious inequities all around them and how paralyzed with greed and fear they had become. 

 

As a twenty-something living in Chicago, I remember thinking that the lottery imagery was overblown…a little over-the-top.  As a thirty-something seeing similar signs in Des Moines, I’m thinking the film may have been more prescient than not.

 

But this sermon is not intended to be a condemnation of the lottery…at least not directly anyway. Besides, my disapproval of the lottery would be disingenuous, because, you see, I have played it myself.

To be honest, I have played only a couple dozen times…and in all those times, I have matched only a handful of numbers…total…
certainly never more than one on a ticket…and, for me, as I’m sure is the case for most people, matching even one number is rare.  Now before you decide to convince me after the service this morning that I shouldn’t be throwing my money away on the lottery, you need to know that I am well aware that a person is more likely to be struck by lightning…more than once…than to win the lottery.  I also know that, as I heard someone say a while back, the lottery is nothing more than a tax on people who are bad at math.  But when the jackpot gets as big as it was a few weeks ago, I, like many of my fellow citizens, and perhaps some of you, get drawn in to the possibility of riches I would never know otherwise.  I hear myself saying, “You never know, Mark,” “Think of all you could do with that money” and the most compelling message of all: “You can’t win if you don’t play.”

 

As the time of the drawing nears, I reap the only reward I am likely to receive from my investment, a few hours to exist in a never-never land of absurd possibility…to rifle through random thoughts about what I might do if I actually won.  But in the end, this is hardly a reward.  It’s mostly a distraction from the riches I already do possess. 

 

After the drawing, when I compare my ticket to the winning numbers, the absurdity of my purchase becomes abundantly clear.  I immediately think “How could I have duped myself, once again, into believing that this was worth my money and time?”

 

I got to thinking about the lottery this week after reading feminist and social thinker bell hooks’ book on class entitled Where We Stand. In this book of essays, hooks speaks mostly from her personal experience as someone who was raised in a poor family, attended well-to-do schools on scholarship, and eventually achieved her place on a more affluent rung of the social ladder.  Still connected to her less privileged roots, and therefore in a position to see the realities of class difference up close, and how rare her jump up the ladder really is, hooks contends that the majority of Americans want to believe that we live in a class-free society, “that anyone who works hard enough can make it to the top.”  However, she points out, “few people stop to think that in a class-free society there would be no top,” (5) and that, “If the citizens of this nation want to live in a society that is class-free, then we must first work to create an economic system that is just.” (9)

 

While I agree that Americans, generally speaking, may still cling to the difficult to defend belief that success and privilege are primarily the result of concentrated, individual effort, I suggest that most Americans are actually quite aware of class difference…and that, regardless of our class, we accept a notion of the top mostly without question. I believe most of us choose not to challenge the status quo because we don’t want to lose the privilege we may already have or because we keep holding out hope that we will one day strike it rich ourselves…enough to forget about class altogether. I have named my observation the lottery theory of economic justice:  very few people will actually win the big prize, but the rest of all go along with the system, playing as our resources allow, because, after all, we can’t win if we don’t play. 

 

And therein lies one of the primary roadblocks to more equitable distributions of wealth in this country. I think we’re not sure we want a society that is class free.  And even if we did, I don’t think the idea that we must “work for a just economic system” would be a motivator for most people.  Not for those who already have the bulk of their needs met…and certainly not for those who feel as though they have no voice in the first place.  One of the things I have learned from working with AMOS, the non-partisan political action group of which this church is a member, is that the way to engender real change…change beyond temporary band-aids…change that really begins to meet the needs of the people who need to be energized in order for the change to occur, is to create opportunities for people to realize how their own self-interest will be served by the change.

 

Looking at all this from a theological perspective, I believe the question becomes, even if one wins at the lottery of privilege, is the victory really all it’s cracked up to be?  In the readings this morning, we heard a portion of Matthew’s parable of the Last Judgment, where he builds upon Jesus’ advice that we should love our neighbors as ourselves by saying that there will come a day of judgment when those who have cared for the underprivileged will be welcomed into the beloved community.  In the next portion of this parable, a portion I did not ask Terry to read, Matthew goes on to explain the flip side: the people who have not cared for those less fortunate than themselves will be disinherited from the beloved community. 

 

Now UUs typically have some trouble getting our minds around these scenes of Biblical judgment, where God separates the righteous from the profligate…the sheep from the goats.  But the wisdom of the passage is not, I think, in its literal expression of one group staying with God and the other being relegated to some holding tank of eternal punishment.  The insight of the passage as I see it is that if we are not concerned with the well-being of others to the same degree that we are concerned with our own well-being, we will eventually suffer fractures in our community…which in my theology is where the divine resides…in community with others. 

 

Humans are creatures who by and large crave community; we long for opportunities to share with, care for, and learn from our companions.  That’s why I adhere to the notion of the divine as what theologian Henry Nelson Wieman called creative interchange, as a process more than a being…a process that occurs between people…a process that exists within nature but which requires our participation and allegiance.   A process that demands we cross some boundaries and take the risk to be present and accounted for in our human community…a process that gives us our best shot for increased understanding, more empathy for our companions, and a greater capacity for us to pass on the good news of creative interchange to others.  The alternative to this process is that we become so preoccupied with our own needs and desires…or maybe our own fear…that we forget our companions are pursuing their own development as individuals.  We shut ourselves off from our community, and most likely find our disregard returned. 

 

One way in which this disregard is evident today is the degree to which people are being sucked in by advertising to believe that accumulation of material possessions will stem the rising tide of emptiness in their souls.  As bell hooks points out, “Consumer culture silences working people and the middle classes.  [because] They are busy buying or planning to buy.” (6)   All the while, many people speak of a spiritual malaise they experience…a feeling of emptiness that no amount of possessions can seem to fill.  A minister I know, who serves an affluent local church, described his parishioners’ experiences with the malaise this way.  He said, “There are many people in my congregation…successful, well-to-do people, who come to me wondering why they don’t feel better about life…why they feel as though something is missing.”

 

Of course, when we hear stories about products like the Duet washer and dryer, which are designed to spark emotional connections with their owners, we begin to realize the extent to which the malaise may have settled in like a fog around us, leaving people to believe that “mechanical buddies” are equal to human ones and that appliances can be as important as family members.

 

Dr. Martin Luther King said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”  Our challenge then is to find the courage and the peace of mind to free ourselves from the grasp of our culture of self-obsession and over-consumption…to see that our interests are intricately tied to everyone else’s…and that commitment to community across boundaries of class is not only in our own best interests…it is the means by which we can access the divine, whether we can afford “the Ferrari of washing machines” or not.