This is a sermon about bread. Not about dough or baking, or wheat or gluten, but about the colloquial term. Bread. Money. This is a sermon about money, and sharing money, about generosity of money and life.
Now, money brings up a lot of anxiety for most of us. Even in preparing this sermon, I noticed my own anxiety talking about this topic. Joseph Campbell said, "Money is congealed energy and releasing it releases life's possibilities."[1] Money is, in a way, a distillation of what we value. So how we use money really points to the larger values and concerns we face, and our anxiety about money is a reflection of angst or tension about these larger issues.
There are three particular areas of tension that get reflected in money that I want to speak about today: these three areas are trust, sharing, and purpose. These connect up with money not only in our individual lives, but also in the economics of our society. After all, the word economics comes from the Greek oikonomia, 'the management of a household'. So these areas of tension -- trust, sharing, and purpose -- overlap to touch how we live our personal lives, how this country and the global society functions, and -- as one would expect in a sermon on Stewardship Sunday -- how we relate to this church community.
Let's start with trust. The act of breaking bread together -- with a friend or a companion-- is a classic image of trust. The derivation of companion, from the French, is com - pan - ion 'with bread, being'. To be with bread, to take a meal together implies a certain degree of closeness with the other person, a time where we can relax and let down our guard. Who do you choose to sit with when you take lunch at work? Who do your children sit with when they take lunch at school? Theologian John Dominic Crossan in his book "Jesus, a Revolutionary Biography" suggests that one of the most radical things Jesus did was not his teaching or miracles, but that he simply had meals with people outside his social class. That was unheard of in Hebrew times.[2]
Today, for many of us, it is less about trusting who we break bread with as it is trusting the source of bread, and the overall food supply. Our trust in the production and delivery of food has been shaken with outbreaks of food poisoning from food we once thought was safe and healthy. We've come to realize that terms like 'organic' and 'free-range' and 'fresh-squeezed' have no real meaning, that perhaps they cannot be trusted. We want to trust our sources of food, and one way to do that is to buy locally. I think that trust is the primary factor driving the local food movement, maybe more than the ecological cost of transporting food from afar. You can come to our local farmers market, and actually talk to the farmer about how the food was produced. You can visit their farm if you want. That builds trust.
In our larger society, many voices have suggested that the economic meltdown of the last year or so is due to misplaced trust. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times Magazine last month, asking "How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?"[3] He suggests that most economists put too much trust in their theories -- theories that assumed we were all rational economic beings working the free market to maximize our 'utils', our desires. This misplaced trust led to systemic changes in our markets that led to the meltdown of the last year or so.
In religious communities like this one, trust is always in tension. We have to decide which decisions need to be made by everyone, and which ones can be delegated safely to the board of trustees (there's that word again) or others. When does this tension really stretch and strain us? It is when we are talking about money. I've seen some congregations suffer through long congregational meetings, arguing over the smallest details of the budget. Not pretty. Better to find ways to build the trust in committees to make those decisions. Better to work to develop a history of good decisions around money, so we trust that the money is raised and spent wisely.
Trust, in a way, is a spiritual practice. It requires balance. If you are too trusting, you put yourself and those around you at risk. Not trusting enough, and we close off opportunities that life presents us, and we miss the chance to interact with new people or try new things.
The second tension that money places in bold relief is sharing. How do we create a system in which we contribute according to our ability and receive according to our need, and do this efficiently? I remember as a kid, trying to convince my folks to raise my allowance. When that failed, my brother and I tried to talk them into a kind of 'fee for service' arrangement where we'd get paid by the chore. Nope. My mother was pretty adamant that our allowance was paid just for being part of the family, not on the basis of what we did.
In churches, this same sort of dynamic sometimes pops up. I've visited churches, both in our denomination and outside, where it seems everything has a price. There's a jar set out -- $2 for a cup of coffee. There are fees for children's and adult religious education classes.
Some of our old historic Unitarian churches even rented pews. If you visit some of the old Boston churches, you'll find pews sectioned off by low walls -- creating pew boxes, that wealthy families would rent by the year. In a few churches of our Puritan forebears, these pew-boxes even had separate outside entrances, so you didn't have to interact with the hoi-polloi.[4]
I rather prefer the idea that we all share together in the various expenses of this church, that there are few items that require extra fees. Certainly there is the possibility that some will take more than they choose to give, but this process ebbs and flows with the changes that life brings. Part of our challenge as a community is the discernment that helps us know when people should be supported by us because they are in need.
In the larger society the tension emerges between the idea of common-wealth, and individual ownership and rights. I am convinced that a large part of what made this country great was a sense of shared responsibility in creating public schools, public libraries, freeways and open roads, national parks, among other resources of our common wealth. Many of our early Unitarian leaders were instrumental in founding some of these institutions. While it is true that private ownership and the free market also contributed to our greatness, I worry that we are out of balance now, and we've lost this sense of common-wealth. That loss makes all of our lives smaller, more separate, and less full.
The third item of money tension, and perhaps the most important, is purpose. Does how we earn our living fit into our sense of life purpose? Does it track our values? Often there are tradeoffs here, tensions, as people try to balance supporting their families with doing work that is worth doing.
Similarly, how do our values align with how we spend our money, save it, and give it away? I do not need to delineate the details of this conflict, as most of us face this daily, for we are bombarded with advertisements urging us to spend, save, or give in specific ways.
These tensions arise even in making our pledges or estimate of planned monthly giving to this church. I hope we all will think carefully about how much we can give based on how our values align with the sense of purpose of this community, our mission, what we are doing in the world. The generosity of each pledge should be deliberate, it should be well thought out. Each pledge represents a personal linkage of your life purpose to the larger purpose of this institution.
Lynne Twist worked for many years as a fundraiser for The Hunger Project. In her book, the Soul of Money, she describes learning the importance of purpose early in her career. She had two back-to-back fundraising visits. The first was to the CEO of a major agribusiness concern that had been receiving some bad press. Lynn described how this executive half-listened to her pitch, then slid a preprinted check across his desk to her for $50,000, a huge sum for her. But, as Lynn said,
... he had no genuine interest in our work, ... to end world hunger. This was a purely strategic move. He ... wanted the company to look good in the media. In purely financial terms, it was to be a simple transaction: Handing me this check for $50,000 bought his company an opportunity to mend its reputation. But as he slid the check over to me, I felt the guilt of the company coming right across the desk with the money. He gave me the money and the company's guilt.[5]As a good fundraising professional, Lynn thanked the man for the check and went on to her next meeting, which could not be more different. This was in a church basement in Harlem, in an old building where rainwater was dripping in all around in buckets placed to catch it. Lynn realized she was the only white-skinned person in this crowd of about seventy-five people. She made her pitch, and then there was silence, one of those kind of long silences we who speak publicly dread. Finally, near the back of the room, Lynn saw a middle-aged woman stand up. Lynn recalls what she said.
"Girl", she said, "My name is Gertrude, and I like what you've said and I like you. Now, I ain't got no checkbook and I ain't got no credit cards. To me, money is a lot like water. For some folk it rushes through their life like a raging river. Money comes through my life like a little trickle. But I want to pass it on in a way that does the most good for the most folks. I see that as my right and my responsibility. It's also my joy. I have fifty dollars in my purse that I earned from doing a white woman's wash, and I want to give it to you."[6]She came up and handed Lynn $50 in small bills, and the others came up too. Lynn realized that this money, barely 1% of the check she received earlier, would do more good to end hunger, than that big check. For behind these small bills there was good intention, and joy.
Lynn made a decision. When she got back to her office she returned the check with a note suggesting that the company put the money behind something it could believe in.
Now the story doesn't end there. Lynn heard from that same CEO years later. He told her he had retired, and as he reviewed his career, the returned check stuck out as a pivotal memory. He realized that he now wanted to do something with his money, he wanted to make a difference, he needed a new sense of purpose. He ended up supporting The Hunger Project and donating many times the amount of the original check out of his own funds.
Lynn concludes,
"No matter how much or how little money you have flowing through your life, when you direct the flow with soulful purpose, you feel wealthy. You feel vibrant and alive when you use your money in a way that represents you, not just in response to the market economy, but as an expression of who you are. When you let money move to things you care about, your life lights up. That's really what money is for."[7]In our reading, UU minister Lynn Ungar tells us,
This is the lifeline --It is through our touch that grain and flour become our bread, our sustenance. In the same way, money is nothing without our touch. It is only when we share it and put it to use that it has any meaning at all, any chance of satisfying us. It is wise for us to consider how we put our money, our sustenance, to use in this community. So we should ask ourselves some questions.
the etched path from hand
to grain to earth, the transmutation
of the elements through touch
marking the miracles
on which we unwillingly depend.[8]
What are the possibilities, the dreams of this church community? Can we trust others in the community to share in the efforts that carry us toward our common purpose? How will this community sustain us in the future? What miracles will emerge from our involvement, our touch, our support? What can we offer toward this higher purpose.
Following this service when we sit together and share a meal of soup and bread, we will explore some of these questions. Our visitors today are welcome to join us, and as you are our guests, we will not ask you for a financial pledge.
If as Joseph Campbell suggests, money is congealed energy, then perhaps our pledges are distilled gratitude for this community. Let us release the energy behind money, releasing our gratitude, and release life's possibilities which this church represents. When you direct the flow of your money in alignment with your life, you find deep joy.
Notes:
1. Jerrod Mundis, Making Peace with Money, 1999, p. 168.
2. John Dominic Crossan, "Jesus, a Revolutionary Biography", 1999. Chapter 3.
3. Paul Krugman, "How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?", New York Times Magazine, Sept. 6, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.html
4. Alice Morse Earle, The Sabbath in Puritan New England, 1891, p. 33.
5. Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money, 2003, p. 99.
6. ibid., p. 101.
7. ibid. p. 119.
8. Blessing the Bread: Meditations, Lynn Ungar, 1996, p. 1.
