“Turn, Then, and Live”

Rev. Alice Hildebrand
First Congregational Church of Deer Isle, UCC
Sunset Congregational Church, UCC
Ezekiel 18:1-4, 25-32; Philippians 2:1-13
“Turn, then, and live”

Well, this has been quite a week for sermon writing. Pairing Ezekiel and Paul with the threatened collapse of our financial system has been interesting. Ezekiel’s words are so stern, Paul’s so demanding. “I will judge you, O house of Israel, all of you according to your ways,” says God through Ezekiel the prophet, 600 years before the time of Jesus and Paul, as the whole world of Israel falls apart under the rule of Babylon. “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others,” says Paul to the Philippians, 30 years or so after Jesus’ crucifixion at the hands of the Romans, writing from a Roman prison and uncertain as to his own fate.

This week we have heard plenty of talk about the contrast between Main Street and Wall Street, between the “real” economy, in which actual money changes hands, as we buy groceries, pay bills, put gas in our car, clothe our bodies, and the “market” economy, in which the transactions are so complicated that the folks making them can’t explain what they are actually doing, even to themselves. Remember the 1993 movie “Dave,” starring Kevin Kline as an everyman who runs a temporary employment agency in Washington, D.C., and who happens to look exactly like the President of the United States? He is pressed into service to portray the President during a crisis – but rather than just being the quiet puppet of the politicians who want to make use of him, he begins to ask questions and get involved in some of the problems facing the nation. There is a truly wonderful scene in which he asks an accountant friend to come to the White House and help him figure out what is wrong with the budget — why is the national debt so out of control? After carefully looking over the numbers, his friend says deferentially, somewhat in awe of his buddy’s new stature, “Well, you see here, Mr. President, here’s your problem – look at this column – see, you’re spending more money than you’re taking in.” The real economy meets the economy of the nation’s superstructure, and the logic of the real economy wins! Except that it’s not quite so simple.

I dimly understand that my little life in the “real” economy, my little capillary of cash flow is part of the huge circulatory system of a magnificent, complicated organism – that all of us, no matter whether we are kids running a lemonade stand at the end of our driveway, or grownups in offices who sell lemon futures on the global market, depend on each other to stay afloat. I am grateful to the “captains of industry” who make it possible for me to save my money in a bank, get a loan and go to seminary, make payments on a car, participate in the world markets and actually buy lemons and sugar here in Maine, where neither grows. So, while it is tempting at present to do that good old human thing and find someone to blame for the present financial mess – “those BAD, BAD Wall Street boys and girls, thinking only of their penthouses and their multi-million dollar salaries;” “those corrupt politicians who only care about feathering their own nests and getting re-elected” – and while it is surely true that there has been plenty of greed and plenty of corrupt ambition in the making of the mess, it is also true and very important to remember that most, if not all, of us have benefited in some way from the boom times that seem now to be coming to a crashing halt. Let’s not waste any time blaming and fault-finding, let’s get on with whatever comes next. My son pointed out that this is probably the only time that the boxer Mike Tyson will be quoted by a financial analyst — “Everyone has a plan ‘till they get punched in the mouth.” Well, many of us are feeling sucker-punched right now. Many of us feel frightened, anxious, uneasy. How can we help each other?

In our country there are many, many people who are perpetually pretty much shut out of both the “real” economy and the market economy. They have no jobs, and there are no employers, no banks, no hospitals, no grocery stores, no clothing stores, in their neighborhoods. There are convenience stores where you can buy liquor, junk food, cigarettes, and lottery tickets. There are “check-cashing” establishments where you can pay exorbitant rates to cash your Social Security check. These are the neighborhoods of our inner cities, of our Indian reservations, of the rural hinterlands. We are very, very lucky that we live in a community where we have grocery stores, a dental clinic, a medical clinic, a vet, a nursing home, an ambulance company, a school, many churches, a movie house, an auditorium, art galleries, a crafts school, a country club, a lumber yard, real estate offices, an insurance office, a newspaper, restaurants, a commercial pier, working harbors – the list could go on a long time. Imagine living in a place where there was none of that! Too many of our fellow citizens do. How can we help each other?

Along with their words of warning and reproof, we find that Ezekiel and Paul have words that are comforting. The rules for life never change, they say. No matter what is going on around you, God’s rules are the same – “All lives are mine,” says God through the mouth of Ezekiel. “I have no pleasure in the death of anyone. Turn, then, and live.” “It is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for God’s good pleasure,” says Paul. The Ezekiel text specifically contradicts a popular proverb which says that each generation will be held accountable and punished for deeds done by the generations before; children will always be punished by God for the misdeeds of their parents. No, says God through Ezekiel – each person is an individual and each person will have their own accounting with me. In verses we didn’t read, God says, “The righteousness of the righteous shall be his own, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be his own.” No one gets punished for someone else’s behavior; you can’t ride on someone else’s coattails to glory, either. And the punishment or the glory aren’t ours to give. That’s God’s department. Our department is more along the lines of what Paul says, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus;”—the mind of humility, of love and compassion and sharing and service.

From the attention given to matters financial in the ancient texts of both testaments of the bible – the elaborate code of how to hold debtors accountable AND how to forgive them their debts, the need to share food and shelter with the poor without any thought of repayment, the focus on God rather than wealth — we can guess that knowing how to sort out the economic life of peoples has never been easy. We can guess that the human-made world of money, of commerce, of exchange has been unjust since time immemorial. Let’s face it, a while back, when we weren’t worried about the price of heating oil, our pensions, our savings accounts, were we losing sleep over the millions of people all over the world who are starving, homeless, dying from easily preventable illnesses? I know I wasn’t. Oh sure, I remembered them in my prayers, I sent what money I felt I could afford. But did I truly think of them as my brothers and sisters, did I truly think of their well-being as though it were my own?

Every indication that we have from the teachings of the Hebrew prophets right up through the teachings of Jesus and Paul is that God’s desire for humanity is an end to this perpetual situation of economic injustice. Financial insecurity for some, financial excess for others IS NOT what God wants. Every indication is that God wants there to be enough of the worlds’ goods shared by everyone, that no one has too little, and that God wants there NOT to be so much of the worlds’ goods for anyone, that anyone has too much. But it’s easier to say those words on Sunday morning than it is too live them out. It’s easier to write a check for charity than it is to consider whether we need to radically change the way we live. Well, this week the pundits say the economy has to be re-structured – maybe this is also a chance to re-structure our own lives. We know that too little money is a soul-killer, as folks exhaust their bodies and their minds in an endless and futile struggle to survive. We may also know that too much money is a soul-killer, pre-occupying our time and energy with its acquisition and its management, exhausting us with the illusion that we are in control of the world.

A few years ago, Stephen King spoke at my son’s college graduation. As many such speakers do, he spoke about success, most commonly understood as financial success, and what the graduates could do to achieve it. He said, “What will you do, graduates? Well, I’ll tell you one thing you’re not going to do, and that’s take it with you . . . A couple of years ago I found out what ‘you can’t take it with you’ means. I found out while I was lying in the ditch at the side of a country road [having been hit by a hit and run driver]. . . I had a MasterCard in my wallet, but when you’re lying in the ditch with broken glass in your hair, no one accepts MasterCard. . . My life, as it happened, was saved. The man who saved it was a volunteer EMT …. He did the things that needed to be done at the scene, and then he drove me to the nearest hospital at a hundred and ten miles an hour. And while [he] may have an American Express Card, I doubt very much if it’s a gold one . . . We all know that life is ephemeral, but on that particular day and in the months that followed, I got a painful but extremely valuable look at life’s simple backstage truths. We come in naked and broke. We may be dressed when we go out, but we’re just as broke. No matter how many credit cards [we] have, sooner or later things will begin to go wrong with the only three things [we] have which [we] can really call [our] own: [our bodies, our spirits, and our minds].”

King identified the power to give, the power of compassion, as the greatest power on earth. And, he said, “Giving isn’t about the receiver or the gift but the giver. It’s for the giver. One doesn’t open one’s wallet to improve the world, although it’s nice when that happens; one does it to improve one’s self. . . I give because it’s the only concrete way I have of saying that I’m glad to be alive . . . Giving is a way of taking the focus off the money we make and putting it back where it belongs — on the lives we lead, the families we raise, the communities which nurture us.”

How can we help each other? I think that where we each must start is in doing what Paul calls working out our own salvation – by looking to our relationship with God first and foremost – setting our anchors firmly in that good holding ground of faith in God. In God’s unfailing presence and care. Laying aside blame, anger, desires for revenge and retribution. Then we need to move out of ourselves and share with one another the encouragement, love, sympathy and joy of which Paul speaks, and which we find when we renew ourselves in God. And then we need to move out a little further, to make sure that, as Paul says, we are not looking just to our own interests but to the interests of others – make sure we share what we have and that we let no one fall through the cracks. That we remind ourselves of how glad we are to be alive, that our focus be not on the money we make, but on the gifts which God gives to us each day. Let our joy be complete. Turn, then and live. Amen.

Stephen King’s remarks are from his speech to the graduating class of 2001 of Vassar College.