Sears Is Having a Sale
Rev. Mark Stringer
First Unitarian Church of Des Moines
3/21/09 & 3/22/09

 

“To those who still uphold the traditions of religious and political thought that influenced the shaping of our society and the founding of our government, it is astonishing, and of course discouraging, to see economics now elevated to the position of ultimate justifier and explainer of all the affairs of our daily life.”
—Wendell Berry

Meditation  Bruce G. Epperley , Katherine Gould Epperley, from the Alban Institute Weekly e-mail, 3/16/09, “Navigating the Seasons of Ministry”[1]

 

The story is told of a night long ago when the stars began to fall from the sky. The villagers, surprised by the stars streaking across the sky, panicked and assumed the world was coming to an end. They ran to and fro crying, "The sky is falling, the sky is falling; the world is ending," until one of them remembered the wise ones who lived just outside the village. Frantically, they ran to this older couple in search of an answer. "Look," they shouted, "the stars are falling into the earth. What will happen to us?" The wise ones, who had been observing the changing sky for some time, paused a few moments and asked the villagers to gaze upon the sky one more time. "Look at the sky," they whispered, "look at the stars that are falling. But, now, pause a moment and look again, look this time at all the stars that are not falling, but remain shining in the heavens."

Readings

 

Our first reading is a passage by the Tibetan meditation master and former leader of the Shambhala Buddhist movement, Chogyam Trungpa.  He wrote:

 

Money is basically a very simple thing.  But our attitude toward it is overloaded, full of preconceived ideas that stem from the development of a self-aggrandizing ego and its manipulative processes.  The mere act of handling money—just pieces of paper—is viewed as a very serious game.  The energy money takes on makes a tremendous difference in the process of communication and relationship.  If a friend suddenly refuses to pay his check at a restaurant, a feeling of resentment or separation automatically arises in relation to him.  If one buys a friend a cup of tea—which is just a cup, hot water, and tea—somehow a factor of meaningfulness gets added.

 

It seems to me that it is worthwhile to work with the negative aspects of money in order to gain some understanding about ourselves.  We must try to discover how to view this embarrassing and potent commodity as part of ourselves that we cannot ignore.  When we relate to money properly, it is no longer a mere token of exchange or of our abstract energy; it is also a discipline.  Then we can deal with it in a practical, earthy way as a master deals with his tools.[2]

 

Our second reading is an excerpt from a 1988 essay by the poet, farmer and novelist Wendell Berry:

 

“Last December, when my granddaughter, Katie, had just turned five, she stayed with me one day while the rest of the family was away from home.  In the afternoon we hitched a team of horses to the wagon and hauled a load of dirt for the barn floor.  It was a cold day, but the sun was shining; we hauled our load of dirt over the tree-lined gravel lane beside the creek—a way well known to her mother and to my mother when they were children.  As we went along, Katie drove the team for the first time in her life. She did very well, and was proud of herself.  She said that her mother would be proud of her, and I said that I was proud of her.

 

We completed our trip to the barn, unloaded our load of dirt, smoothed it over the barn floor, and wetted it down.  By the time we started back up the creek road the sun had gone over the hill and the air had turned bitter.  Katie sat close to me in the wagon, and we did not say anything for a long time.  I did not say anything because I was afraid that Katie was not saying anything because she was cold and tired and miserable and perhaps homesick; it was impossible to hurry much, and I was unsure how I would comfort her. 

But then, after a while, she said, “Wendell, isn’t it fun?”[3]

 

Sermon

A month ago, the CNN home page ran a story that said nearly three out of four Americans polled are “scared” about the way things are going in the country today, eight in ten believe that things are “going badly” and three out of four say they are “angry” about the way things are going. Meanwhile, when asked how things were going for them personally, three out of four of these same Americans said that things were going well.

 

Three out of four say things are going badly. 
Three out of four say things are going well.

 

These poll results caught my attention, mostly because their dissonance confirmed some assumptions I was making about our nation’s current state of economic downturn, recession, or pre-depression (depending on who is doing the describing) and the attendant sense of malaise and fear so many of us are experiencing.  Dread is ruling the day, perhaps--dare I say it--at the expense of reality.

 

This is not to say that things aren’t tough for some, or that they aren’t going to get worse, economically speaking.  And this is not to say that more lives are not going to be adversely affected if they do.  Historically speaking, economic downturns (if not downright economic collapses) have had many victims and have significantly impacted personal and family narratives in ways that even those who have lived through them cannot fully comprehend. But as someone who is called to consider our collective spiritual well-being, I can’t help but wonder if we aren’t jumping the gun a bit, missing our chickens before they have hatched and left the coop, investing too much emotional energy in a bull market of fear and trepidation.

 

I wonder about this even as I acknowledge that few people seem willing to suggest right now that we not brace ourselves for inevitable calamity, much less to question our national focus on how bad things are.  And there is good reason for this sense of pessimism.  Things are getting tough for some of us, and, according to reports, even tougher for folks in other parts of the country.  People are losing jobs, and even those who aren’t are seeing their neighbors lose their jobs.  People privileged enough to have wealth have lost a good deal of it, especially wealth that appeared on balance sheets of their 401Ks, even if those figures were mirages anyway.  It’s true. There is a human cost to the current busting of our collective boom, and it is not easy to fully calculate these costs or to contend that their value is not high, especially when we cannot know for sure when and how the aftershocks of this economic crumble may reach us, if they haven’t already.

 

So I stand before you today feeling a need to show some caution myself.  I definitely don’t want to give you reason to discount my reflections because you think I am being an economic Pollyanna, someone so committed to sunny optimism that I can’t see dark clouds of reality.  No, I am not an economic Pollyanna. I too can get pulled into what I have seen described as our nation’s current “pervasive sense of anxiety, as though everyone feels they’re on thin ice.”[4]  I have debts and pay bills, too.  I worry about the future my daughter will face. I question the wisdom of Wall Street, Washington, West Des Moines, and everywhere else, too, as we all try to wrangle ourselves out of a mess of miscalculations and greed that took many years to create and will, if history is any guide, take many years to fully unravel.

 

At the same time, I must admit something, as if this will be news to most of you.  Even if I am not a Pollyanna about the economy, I am a Pollyanna of sorts about life.  Now I know that the most common definition for Pollyanna is someone who displays “unrealistic optimism,” a person blinded to reality by an overly sunny outlook.  To be clear, I don’t think of myself that way.  I do confess to a predisposition toward optimism, but I don’t think I am being unrealistic at all.  No, my optimism is entirely based in reality--the reality that we are alive today despite the fact that we one day will not be.  I am alive.  You are alive.  We are alive.  Hallelujah!

 

We are alive and we are resilient.  I see this resilience nearly every day as a participant in the lives of those around me and especially in my work as your minister.  I see it again and again.  People deal with things that they never would have thought they could deal with.  They roil about sometimes in grief, or pain, or disappointment (and oftentimes, rightly so), but, in the end, far more often than not, they pull themselves out of despair by whatever means they can.  And they do so not because they want to necessarily. After all, the inertia of grief and disappointment can be a powerful, enticing, and sometimes deadly force.  No, they pull themselves out, or just keep putting one foot in front of the other long enough to get out, because they determine the option of giving up or giving in to despair hurts more than the option of living through their pain toward a new understanding…that if this is the one life we have to live, our choices matter because they impact our future, and the futures of those we love.

 

Knowing that my instinct is to focus more on the positive than the negative, I did some reading this week about what life was like between the stock market crash of 1929 and WWII, known worldwide as the “Great Depression.”  I didn’t want my sermon today to downplay the possibilities of a potential economic collapse, another “Great Depression” if you will, so I figured that I better face the reality of what life was like during this difficult period of our history.  Not surprisingly to those of you familiar with this decade, what I learned was grim.  In the depths of the Depression, one out of every four Americans was out of work, and many others were underemployed, at best.  Families were forced to give up what once seemed like necessities as poverty replaced abundance for many who had once been part of the middle class, and dangerous demagogues gained power and influence, not only in our nation, but around the world.  What led to the Depression was similar in many ways to what has led to our current downturn.  Over-inflated stock values, a weak banking system, an inequitable prosperity that saw too much wealth in the hands of too few, and a seemingly unprepared, if not completely blindsided federal government.  In fact, in his final state of the union address, less than a year before the Depression began, President Calvin Coolidge said, “No Congress of the USA ever assembled, on surveying the state of the union, has met with a more pleasing prospect…The country can regard the present with satisfaction and anticipate the future with optimism.”[5] 

 

While our current-day politicians, trying to appease their disaffected and fearful constituencies, continue to proclaim, just as John McCain infamously dared to do during the presidential campaign, that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong”, the rest of us are not being lulled to complacency by the positive attitudes or hopes of our leaders.  On the contrary, it seems, we are becoming so certain that collapse is eminent that we may actually will it to be so.  Who can blame us?  Doom and gloom are two of the hottest commodities going, driving gun and alcohol sales, as well as ratings for news networks and hits on websites like FinancialArmageddon.com even as they drag us down.  Even Comedy Central’s court jester Jon Stewart has been given to overt seriousness, confronting fellow cable TV personality CNBC’s Jim Cramer for playing the game of over-inflating the truthiness of the stock market and his own perspectives, just as virtually everyone else in the financial industry has been doing for years.

 

I couldn’t help but wonder, as I watched the replay of Stewart dissecting Cramer on television last week, why it seemed so urgently important for one TV personality to make another TV personality recoil in shame.  It was like a fairgoer giving the third degree to a carnival barker for enticing him to play a rigged carnival game.  You’d have to be really naïve to think that the game wasn’t being offered for the carnival owner’s financial benefit.  Similarly, anyone who believes that the stock market was anything other than glorified gambling for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many hasn’t been paying attention.  Do we have a right to be angry as things we mistakenly took for granted crumble?  I suppose we do.  And yet, I hear the voice of my Dad warning me many years ago as I shared with him my latest childhood scheme to make money: “Mark,” he said, “you never get something for nothing.”

 

You never get something for nothing.

 

Which leads me to the title of today’s sermon, which is another often-heard quote of my father.  You see, a tradition in my family from the time I was old enough to remember such things, was to acknowledge when, every week, without fail, a flier would come in the newspaper announcing the latest sale at Sears.  Each week, upon opening the paper and finding this flyer, my Dad would proclaim with deadpanned excitement, “Hey everyone.  Sears is having a sale.”  No matter what the economy has done through the years of my life--from expansion to recession, from bull market to bear market, from boom to bust and so on--every week, Sears is having a sale, usually a “BIG” sale.  What does this have to do with the possibility of our impending “Financial Armageddon”?  Well, not a lot actually.  Except that no matter how bad things get, we can assume that money and goods will still be exchanged somehow and the economy of our shared lives will continue, for better or for worse.  No well-meaning legislation, or government take-over of banks, or impassioned citizen action group or television personality will change the fact that in a capitalistic society, the exchange of money and the pursuit of profit is the foundation of nearly everything.  We can (and probably should) argue about the role that government should play in regulating this exchange.  Assumptions need to be challenged.  Creative Interchange should rule the day.  But in the end, corrections in our global financial circumstances are inevitable and, well, simply put, a part of life.  Just as has been the case in the past, many of us may now be leery of the stock market--disillusioned, if you will--which is appropriate, considering how illusion-filled many of us had become.  To be dis-illusion-ed in this instance is a good thing.

 

So what do we do in the meantime, as our worldwide financial system goes through this necessary correction?  Let’s assume that things do get worse, even though the government has intervened far more quickly and substantially in many ways than the initial government-led interventions that helped us emerge from the Great Depression.  How might we deal with an even greater collapse impacting even more people?

 

Asking myself this question led me back to Wendell Berry, who has written extensively and persuasively on the ways we are inclined to overlook the meaning and value of community.  He asserts that since the Great Depression there has been a transition from local economies of subsistence in which everyone’s economic interests were interdependent toward more so-called “consumer economies” in which the previously self-sufficient community is actually held hostage, in a sense, by the interests of “the power industry, the defense industry, the communications industry, the transportation industry, the agriculture industry, the food industry”[6] and countless other industries.  These industrial interests make up what we have come to view as our “national” economy, an economy that actively exploits the interests of individuals and the land on which they live in service of what seems like convenience and profit, but which ultimately eliminates the inherent spiritual, cultural and economic value of their local communities.

 

He suggests we turn our focus back to nurturing community-based economies where the individual members put community interests first, knowing that, in the end, their livelihood will be better served by focusing less on national indicators of economic health and more on how our neighbors across the street, or in the next row of the auditorium, are doing. 

 

He writes, 

 

“The only preventive and the only remedy [to the exploitation of an over-emphasis on a national economy] is for the people to choose one another and their place, over the rewards offered them by outside investors.  The local community must understand itself finally as a community of interest—a common dependence on a common life and a common ground.  And because a community is, by definition, placed, its success cannot be divided from the success of its place, its natural setting and surroundings….  The two economies, the natural and the human, support each other; each is the other’s hope of a durable and livable life.”[7]

 

Next weekend we are canceling all of our regular church services in exchange for one gathering at 10am at Drake University, a time for us all to be together in one place at one time to recommit ourselves to this community of interdependence that we call our church.  During our one service we will celebrate this church and all it symbolizes and brings to our lives.  We will hear testimonials from members who find here a community where they can grow their spirit, intellect and soul, where they strive to develop in the company of others a “durable and livable life.” And we will be asked to make a financial commitment for the coming church year by singing a pledge card. 

 

In advance of this service, I have been gathering with a cross section of our members in small groups to talk about some of our hopes for our congregation and what it will take financially to realize these hopes.  I understand that some people have been made uncomfortable by this approach.  I’m not surprised. After all, conventional wisdom says that in this economic climate, when each of us may end up facing extraordinary circumstances and significant financial challenges, for me to ask you to even consider raising your pledge of support is irresponsible.  And I’d be inclined to agree, except for a couple of important points that need to be made:

 

1)    A pledge is not a contract.  It is a commitment always tied to our ability to pay it.  If our circumstances change, which may or may not happen, we can adjust accordingly.  No harm.  No foul.  I’d rather we adjust our church budget on the fly due to reality than due to assumptions.

 

2)    If things really do get as bad as some of us fear, our church will become even more important as a place to for us to find some spiritual grounding, to network with others, to seek and receive the support that we will all need.  Furthermore, our church will need to be even more visible if things get worse, because the tougher times get, the more likely demagogues will rise again to power and scapegoats will be sought. A religious community active in social justice efforts and encouraging freedom of thought and belief will only grow in importance.

 

3)    The dreams and expectations expressed by this congregation in large and small group gatherings and in our recent church-wide survey are not shrinking with the economy.  On the contrary, people are telling us they want the church to do more and be more.  We have to face the fact that to do and be more, we have to raise more money.  There is no extra benefit offered for holding back.

 

Because I am interested in the spiritual well-being of our congregation, I am not asking anyone to commit to the impossible next week.  Only you know where your resources intersect with your generosity and I assure you, your decision will be gratefully accepted and honored.  However, because I am interested in the spiritual well-being of our congregation, I do ask you to inhabit this place with your spirit and your money, which takes discipline…sticking around…being disappointed at times and staying anyway…being a long-haul participant who knows “that the work of the church is the transformation of society” one precious relationship and pledge at a time.  I ask you to consider your money not as “a mere token of exchange or of our abstract energy...” but as something each of us “can deal with…in a practical, earthy way as a master deals with his tools.”  Our individual and collective lives deserve as much, don’t they?