Sermon copyright (c) 2024 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. As usual, the sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.
Opening words
from “To His Newborn Great-Grandson,” by W. E. B. DuBois
The return from your work must be the satisfaction which that work brings you, and the world’s need of that work. With this satisfaction, and this need, life is heaven or as near heaven as you can get. Without this — with work which you despise, which bores you, — with work which the world does not need — this life is hell.
Readings
The first reading comes from the New Revised Standard Version of the Christian scriptures, the Book of Mark, chapter 10, verses 17-26:
“As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, ‘Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: “You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and ”’ He said to him, ‘Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.’ Jesus, looking at him … and said, ‘You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’ When he heard this, the man was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.
“Then Jesus looked around and said to his followers, ‘How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!’ And his followers were perplexed at these words. But Jesus said to them again, ‘How hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.’ They were greatly astounded and said to one another, ‘Then who can be saved?’”
The second reading comes from Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, from the first chapter, titled “Economy”:
“For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the labor of my hands, and I found, that by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living. The whole of my winters, as well as most of my summers, I had free and clear for study. I have thoroughly tried school-keeping, and found that my expenses were in proportion, or rather out of proportion, to my income, for I was obliged to dress and train, not to say think and believe, accordingly, and I lost my time into the bargain. As I did not teach for the good of my fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure. I have tried trade; but I found that it would take ten years to get under way in that, and that then I should probably be on my way to the devil. I was actually afraid that I might by that time be doing what is called a good business. When formerly I was looking about to see what I could do for a living, some sad experience in conforming to the wishes of friends being fresh in my mind to tax my ingenuity, I thought often and seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely I could do, and its small profits might suffice, — for my greatest skill has been to want but little, — so little capital it required, so little distraction from my wonted moods, I foolishly thought. While my acquaintances went unhesitatingly into trade or the professions, I contemplated this occupation as most like theirs; ranging the hills all summer to pick the berries which came in my way, and thereafter carelessly dispose of them; so, to keep the flocks of Admetus [add MAY tose]. I also dreamed that I might gather the wild herbs, or carry evergreens to such villagers as loved to be reminded of the woods, even to the city, by hay-cart loads. But I have since learned that trade curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business.”
Sermon — “A Religious Liberal Looks at the Economy”
Back in 1992, Jim Carville was a strategist working in the presidential campaign for the Democratic candidate, Bill Clinton. To help his campaign workers promote a uniform message, Jim Carville posted a sign in the Clinton campaign headquarters with the three main points he wanted to convey to voters. Using Carville’s exact wording, those three points were as follows: Don’t forget healthcare; Change versus more of the same; The economy, stupid.
Well, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Thirty-two years later, these points could still be used by either of the major presidential campaigns. The last two points — Change versus more of the same; The economy, stupid — remain especially relevant. Indeed, I’d argue that the last point — “The economy, stupid” — probably motivates more voters than anything else.
Because the economy continues to be so important in our democracy, I thought it made sense for me to devote a sermon to the economy. However, I’m not an economist. Nor am I adept at talking about American politics. So this won’t be a political sermon. Instead I’m going to try to talk, from my point of view as a religious liberal, about some of the moral implications of economics.
To begin with, let’s consider the New England approach to doing business, as I experienced it growing up in a New England town during the late twentieth century. In those days, before the big box stores and multinational conglomerates took over, and before people bought everything online, many businesses were still local or regional. The most reputable of those businesses had a guiding philosophy of doing well by doing good. So, for example, during the 1980s I spent seven years working for a family-owned lumber yard. The family which owned the lumber yard went into the lumber business to make money. At the same time, they knew they had to provide goods and services that were needed in the community. They also felt it was their duty to provide stable middle class jobs that allowed their employees to buy a house and raise a family.
I don’t mean to romanticize those New England businesses from another day. The lumberyard where I worked, for example, was pretty sexist, and worker safety wasn’t always at the top of their list of priorities. But the best of those businesses did their best to follow the ideal of doing well by doing good; and there are still some businesses today that still follow that ideal.
Keeping that ideal in mind, let’s consider the story told about Jesus of Nazareth that we heard in the first reading.
The story opens by telling us that Jesus was about to set out on one of his travels through the countryside around Jerusalem. A young man approaches him, and asks this famous spiritual teacher what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus lists some of Moses’s teachings from the Torah: don’t murder anyone; don’t have sex with someone who is someone else’s spouse; don’t steal, lie, or cheat; take care of your parents. Upon hearing this, the young man feels complacent, for he has in fact done all these things. To puncture his complacency, Jesus tells this wealthy young man that there’s one more thing he must do: he must sell everything he owns, give it to the poor, and join Jesus on those travels through the countryside to bring teaching of spirituality and justice to all people. Upon hearing this one last requirement, the rich young man walks away grieving. As he walks away, Jesus turns to his followers, and tells them how difficult it will be for wealthy people to enter the kingdom of God.
Let me pause for just a moment to consider what Jesus meant when he spoke of the “kingdom of God.” Today’s mainstream Christians are sure they know exactly what the kingdom of God is. They assure us that the kingdom of God is some kind of afterlife where human beings get to go if they are good Christians. By “good Christian,” they mean people who belong to their Christian denomination, and profess belief in the orthodox dogma of their denomination. However, theirs is an anachronistic understanding of Jesus’s words. Jesus was a Jew, not a Christian. Nor did Jesus profess belief in any kind of Christian orthodoxy; there was no Christian orthodoxy until a couple of centuries after Jesus had died.
If you read the Book of Mark with an open mind — that is, if you do not cloak Jesus in anachronistic religiosity, but consider him as a spiritual thinker of depth and insight — you can see that when Jesus says “the kingdom of God,” he was not referring to an afterlife. Jesus felt that the kingdom of God is happening here and now, all around us. Nor is the kingdom of God limited to human beings, for Jesus tells us that not a sparrow falls but that God is aware of it. The Kingdom of God is, to use the words of theologian Bernard Loomer, nothing less than the “world conceived of as an indefinitely extended complex of interrelated, interdependent units of reality” — those of us who are not theologians call this the Web of Life, and it includes both the human and the non-human worlds. When even a tiny bird like a sparrow dies, that death affects the whole kingdom, because each being is connected to every other being.
To return to the story: When the rich young man approached Jesus, he faced a dilemma. Jesus and his followers hung out with people from a wide range of social classes, ranging from well-to-do merchants, to destitute beggars. Jesus saw that all persons were equally a part of the kingdom of God, and so Jesus maintained equality of relationships with all persons. The rich young man, on the other hand, liked his wealth, and he liked the high status his wealth gave to him. He followed all the teachings of the Torah to the letter, but his wealth prevented him from completely following the spirit of the Torah; or to put in contemporary terms, his love of his wealth prevented him from participating fully in the interdependent web of life. Seeing this, Jesus challenged him: Would the rich young man sell all his possessions and come follow Jesus? How attached was he to his wealth and possessions? Was he more attached to his wealth than he was to the interdependent web of life?
The followers of Jesus somehow manage to miss all these undercurrents. They are baffled by what Jesus says. If a rich person who has followed all the teachings of the Torah can’t enter the kingdom of God, then who can? Jesus tries to explain to them using a vivid metaphor to describe an almost impossible task. He says it will be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to become part of the kingdom of God.
Henry David Thoreau took up exactly this question in his book Walden. In this book, Thoreau describes how built himself a cabin a mile from the nearest house, and lived off the land. Walden is full of passages like the one we heard in the second reading, which ends: “I have since learned that trade curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business.”
Because of passages like this, many people believe that Thoreau was telling us that we should all go off into the woods, plant a field of beans like he did, and stay out of the money economy. These same people then take great delight in pointing out that Thoreau did not in fact live completely on his own. They love to tell us that his mother did his laundry, and that he would often eat dinner with his family. Because of this, these people dismiss Thoreau. But these critics of Thoreau gloss over some key facts showing us that Thoreau’s actual message was more complex. Thoreau’s cabin was a station on the Underground Railroad, and one reason he went home to dinner was to attend gathering of anti-slavery activists. And Thoreau was also an important part of the family business of manufacturing pencils; he had to go home regularly because his work made an essential contribution to the family income.
Nor did Thoreau say that everyone should go build a cabin in the woods. He used his two year sojourn in the cabin at Walden Pond as an experiment. He wanted to that we could detach ourselves from our possessions; for when we allow ourselves to be governed by our money and our possessions, we lose sight of what Thoreau called “higher laws.” He was especially sensitive to the way that slavery in the United States warped the morality of the national economy. New Englanders liked to pretend they had nothing to do with slavery, but the Mexican American War showed him how northerners were happily complicit with southern slaveholders. Thoreau put it this way: “It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.” Jesus used the image of a camel trying to get through the eye of a needle to illustrate how attachment to wealth could disconnect people from the interdependent web of existence. Thoreau used a different metaphor, a metaphor of enslavement, and he talked of “higher laws” rather than the “kingdom of God.” But he was making the same point: too much wealth can disconnect us from the web of life.
This brings us to the present day, and to the present election cycle. When we listen to politicians talking about the economy — when we ourselves talk about the economy as it relates to the election — what exactly do we talk about? Are we talking about what Thoreau called “higher laws,” what Jesus called the “kingdom of God,” what we might call the interdependent web of existence? Or do our political conversations somehow fall short?
One area where the political conversations of our own day usually fall short is that we reduce the economy to jobs. If everyone has a job — so goes this rhetorical turn — then the voters will be happy with the politicians. But it is not just jobs that we human beings want and need. This has been true since ancient times. The Torah tells us, “one does not live by bread alone” [Duet. 8:3, NRSV]. Yes, we want work that allows us to put bread on the table. But we humans need more than that; we need to know how we are connected to the rest of humanity, and to the entire interdependent web of existence.
Furthermore, not every job brings us that sense of connection to something larger than our selves. In my seven years working in the lumberyard, and five years working for a carpenter, I was lucky enough to have decent jobs that allowed me to bread on the table. But those jobs didn’t provide much opportunity for attending to “higher laws.” So I was grateful for the hour each week when I could attend a Unitarian Universalist worship service. Maybe I didn’t always pay much attention to the sermon, but the service as a whole gave me a time and place to reconnect with something greater than myself. The social hour following the service was equally valuable as a time when I could talk with others about something besides my job. This may sound trivial, but spending a couple of hours once a week thinking about something other than carpentry helped me to stay connected to what Thoreau called the “higher laws.” We all have a spiritual need to feel connected to a greater whole.
The political conversations of our own day also fall short if they fail to make a strong connection between the economy and justice. This was true in Thoreau’s day, too, as some politicians chose to ignore the fact that at that time the economy of the entire United States depended upon race-based chattel slavery. While many free White northerners may have found slavery to be reprehensible, they too were held in thrall by an economic system which was rooted in slavery. Their comfort and their relative wealth kept them from ending slavery — kept them from paying attention to the demands of the higher laws, kept them from a full awareness of the interdependence of all human beings.
This helps us better understand what Jesus was trying to tell the rich young man who wanted access to the kingdom of God. That rich young man was not in control of his wealth and possessions; he was controlled by them. His highest duty was to his wealth, not to his higher self. Because of this, even though he lived a seemingly moral and blameless life, divinity was not easily able to stir within him.
Or perhaps Thoreau and Jesus both set higher standards than most of us can live up to. Selling all our possessions and following an itinerant preacher is not possible for most of us. Building a cabin a mile from the nearest neighbor and growing all our own food is not possible for most of us. This is especially true if we are responsible for other people — children, elders, spouses. But we should not get caught up in the specifics of these stories. Both Jesus and Thoreau stated their case in extreme terms to grab our attention. Each of them, in their own way, wanted us to fully understand the truth of that old saying from the Torah: human beings need more than food to live; we need a higher life as well. They wanted us to reflect on how we are disconnected from the higher laws. What is keeping us from realizing our essential connection with the interdependent web of existence?
Somehow we all need to find ways to remember that we are connected to all other people; that we are connected to something greater than ourselves; and that we have it in ourselves to make this world a better place. Thus when we say that it’s only about “the economy, stupid” — when we make it sound like the economy is a matter of selfish gain for each individual — we are doing a disservice to ourselves and to our whole society. The economy is more than just a job for you and a job for me. The economy should also be a means for helping all persons to lead better lives. We do not live by jobs alone. The economy should be a means for making this a better world. We should realize that our economic policies need to be governed by “higher laws,” that is, by high moral standards and by the ideals of justice.
Not that we’ll always agree among ourselves. Nor will we agree with every politician’s moral standards, or their notions of justice. But we can demand that whenever we as a people consider economic policy, we must always consider morality and justice. We must always consider higher laws. We must always understand that economics means we are connected to the vast web of all existence.
