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Davidson Loehr
Don Smith, Worship Associate
22 May 2005
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
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AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:
Don Smith
Money, according to the Oxford English Dictionary is (1) a current medium of exchange in the form of coins and banknotes, and (2) property, wealth, possessions, resources, etc. viewed as convertible into coin or banknotes or having value expressible in terms of these.
That definition describes our natural tendency to think of money in terms of what it will purchase, but I’ve come to think more and more about money in terms of what it costs. For most of us, the money we have was obtained through an exchange of our time, talent, energy, and ideas. I think it’s worthwhile to pause and take account of the exchanges we’re making; to be sure that they are fair exchanges, and that they serve us well.
When I was an architecture student living and studying in a small town in France-and being exposed, for the first time, to a totally different culture than my own-I came to an awareness of how hurried life is in our country. I was surprised to see how leisurely life can be, and how rich an experience an unhurried life can be. I remembered the carefree days of my childhood, and I made a promise to myself that I would never allow having things to take precedence over doing things; that I would not put material possessions above free time, and the enjoyment of life. How well have I done? Not so well, I’m afraid. In the end analysis, I’m very much a product of my cultutre. And my culture is one of consumption. I don’t know when, where, or how our culture became what it is, but I struggle against it daily.
I was raised by loving parents who, like most parents, wanted for my sisters and me a better life than they had had. They told us as much. By this they meant that we should have more, and work less. Having grown up on farms in depression-era America, they spent a good deal of their youth working on the farm and having little in the way of material possessions. My sisters and I were not expected to do a lot beyond the chores that we were assigned for the purpose of teaching us to be responsible. My parents didn’t talk to us about money. They didn’t want us to be burdened, as they had been in their childhood, with concerns about money. It was my grandparents who talked to us about money.
Papa Smith, my paternal grandfather, told me that as long as one spends less than one makes all is well. Like Thoreau, he chose to make do with little, allowing himself plenty of time for fishing, playing dominoes, visiting with family and friends, and reading his Bible. He spent a lot of time reading his Bible. I’d be surprised to learn that he had any money when he died.
Daddy Kennemer, my maternal grandfather, told me that if I watched my pennies my dollars would take care of themselves. He watched his pennies very carefully and had a lot of money in the bank when he died, but he didn’t enjoy life very much.
The best advice I got came from Mother Kennemer, my maternal grandmother, who always said that money is a good servant, but a poor master. You should probably write that one down. Money is a good servant, but a poor master.
For me, the daily challenge is trying to strike a balance between having the money needed to do the things I want to do, and living free from worry about money; from being enslaved by a need for money.
I enjoy my work. I have the extreme good fortune to have found a profession that suits my bifarious nature-that involves both science and art, with each informing the other. I’m thankful to be so lucky. But I would almost always be happier sitting with good friends–discussing ideas, laughing, and getting lost in the flow of time–than meeting the demands of schedules and (sometimes unreasonable) clients. On a beautiful day I’d rather be hiking along Barton Creek or working in the garden, than sitting at a desk. I’d rather practice architecture for fun than for money, and I’d wear proudly the title of dilettante if I could make my vocation and avocation one, and thereby claim every moment of my life as my own.
I don’t have children, but if I did I’d want things to be better for them than they have been for me. Just like my parents, I’d want them to work less and have more. More time to enjoy and appreciate the best things life has to offer. More time to relax with friends and family, to discuss ideas, to read great books, to express themselves through art and artful living, and fully develop their talents. More time to work on the things that build community and make life better for everyone. I’d want to teach them that life is a wonderful journey; a mystery to be experienced to the fullest. And I’d want them to understand that journeys are best when the luggage is light.
PRAYER:
Let us be grateful for all the parents in this room. They have taken on the responsibility for lives in addition to their own. They are the stewards of our collective future, and we are grateful for their work and their sacrifices.
Let us be aware of and grateful for the work and the sacrifices each of us make, as we try to steer our way through life by serving those things most worth serving. And let us have gods worth serving with our lives. Let us have meaningful work toward positive ends, so we can all feel like stewards of our collective future.
Let us work to establish relative relationships with relative ends, but absolute relationships with absolute ends, and let us learn how to tell the difference between the two. The problem with the world is seldom with its people. We are overwhelmingly good people, doing the best we know how to do. Let us remember that. The problem with the world is that far too often, we serve gods not worth serving.
Let us be more aware of the gods we are serving, and let us be sure they are worth serving with the days and years of our lives. Let us attend to the gods we are serving with our lives.
Amen.
SERMON: The Cost of Money
This is a tough topic, because you already know all the things churches are expected to say about the subject. “Love of money is the root of all evil,” “You can either serve God or money but not both,” “Don’t you be worshiping those golden calves!” – that sort of stuff.
Besides, the US economy is so bad in so many ways that many of you are working your tails off to pay the bills and get the things you want for yourselves and your families. And getting assaulted for wanting money when you come to church is too much like piling on. After all, we want to have some nice things, and most nice things cost money. So talking against money is a little like telling a fish it shouldn’t be so attached to water: it’s just too much a part of almost everything we do.
And every time I say money isn’t as important as we make it out to be, somebody tells me that if money’s not important, maybe we don’t need their pledge. And we do want your pledges. I ask and expect you to pledge 5% or more of your pre-tax income to this church or any other church you think is worth supporting. Good churches offering honest religion are about the only place in our society where we routinely question the gods we’re serving – including the god of money – and ask whether it’s worth serving. As many have said, money makes a good servant, but a bad master.
Don has already done a nice job of talking about the ways money intersects with our personal lives, so I’ll go in a different direction, bring you some thoughts about money and share a couple stories.
The stories are two of the best ever written about wanting money too much or letting work take over your life. Both stories are from the Greeks.
The first one is the most famous, and one you all know: the story of King Midas, who couldn’t get enough money. Since he was a king, he didn’t have to earn the money, but he still wished it were easier to convert the world around him into gold. So he made the famous wish that everything he touched would turn to gold. This made it tough to eat anything. But the story’s tragedy came when he touched his beloved daughter, immediately turning her into a golden statue.
Like all good myths, there are a lot of ways to go with the old Midas story. There are a lot of ways to turn people into statues, to take the life out of their lives, by acting as though their only purpose were to make money. Because then if they can’t make money, they’re useless.
I mentioned a few weeks ago that I read a report estimating that 18,000 Americans die each year because of inadequate health insurance. They haven’t got the money for the insurance, and if they can’t pay their own way, they’re not worth saving, according to our priorities. Seventy years ago, Hitler’s Nazis coined a horrible name for people like this. They were called “useless eaters.” Useless eaters. You only have a use if you can produce something, and your worth is measured by how much you can earn for others. Only 3,000 people died in the attacks on 9-11, and that has bothered us enough to spend $300 billion a year or so attacking a country that had nothing at all to do with the attacks of 9-11, but whose oil and strategic position we used 9-11 as an excuse to take. And somehow, just mentioning the 3,000 killed on 9-11 still seems to end most objections. Three thousand people is a lot. But the deaths of 18,000 Americans a year due to inadequate health care do not make the front pages. That’s coming dangerously close to treating them like useless eaters, don’t you think?
It may not feel quite like the King Midas story, but it’s closer than you think. Midas’s daughter was no longer seen as warm, loving, worth being around, because she had been converted into the lowest form of currency.
Maybe it sounds backwards to think of money as the lowest form of currency – after all, our national currency is based on the gold standard. But it’s not the currency in which human worth can really be measured. I’ve read that if you collected all the raw materials in our bodies, you’d be lucky to sell the whole pile for five bucks. We’re just not worth much money. So money can’t be the right currency for measuring human worth. Yet when we are valued and our lives are valued primarily by how much money we can make, the chief way in which we’re different from Midas’s daughter is that we’re probably worth a lot less money on the open market than a golden statue.
The Midas story doesn’t dwell too much on the other side of the equation, which is that if you want to value people primarily as people, then you probably won’t make as much money off of them. They may make more money for themselves, but you won’t be able to use them like things.
The story of Midas today isn’t often about individuals. It’s about attitudes of a whole society, like our society. The performance of our economy has been measured by how well the stock market is doing for so long it may seem that’s just how economies are always measured. But they’re not. It’s quite a drastic change from forty years ago. Then, the health of the economy was measured by how well the majority of Americans were doing. The country took pride in the fact that most people in most jobs could earn enough to buy a house and a car, on just one paycheck, and that almost anyone who wanted to go to college could afford to go without mortgaging an arm and a leg. The health of the economy was measured by how well the middle class was doing.
Now it’s measured by how much profit those who own stocks can earn every quarter. And once you do that – think about this – then people are defined in the currency of money. If workers are fired, whether you call it downsizing, rightsizing or firing, the stock prices usually go up. The money that would have gone to pay raises, health insurance and benefits for workers, workers’ pensions, that money that would have bought houses and cars and college educations for them and their children – that money is now funneled instead to other people. Not those who earned it, but those who own the stocks. We’ve lived so long in that world it might seem odd to question it. But you can value people for their humanity or for their earning potential, and when push comes to shove, one of those will shove the other.
Our challenge, and I think it’s a religious challenge, is to learn how to establish relative relationships with relative things, and absolute relationships with absolute things, and to know how to tell the difference. Which should be ranked higher: the profits of a few, or the livelihoods of many? Stock dividends, or health insurance and job security for workers? Earning more money, or having richer and more satisfying relationships?
These are religious questions because you cannot separate money from other areas of life. For example, I have read that the leading cause of divorce in our country is not having enough money, and the frustrations, guilt, blame and arguments that come from that. So one cost of valuing profits above people is that we soon diminish the humanity of most of the people around us, probably including ourselves. And that’s pretty close to a modern version of the King Midas story.
The other Greek story isn’t as well known, but it’s at least as good. It is the story about Hephaestos, whom the Romans called Vulcan. He was one of the Olympian gods – the only god who worked. But he didn’t just work. Work was his life. Work absorbed his passion, his love, his spirit. And in the ironic style of Greek wit, they had Hephaestos married to Aphrodite. Well, that’s not likely to work! She bore him no children, was never faithful to him, was never even seen with him. He had no passion left for relationships – even a relationship with the most passionate of the goddesses.
Hephaestos didn’t work to live, he lived to work. And when we live to work, it’s very hard to make room for another human being in our life. It isn’t quite like turning them to gold, but the old Greek story comes pretty close. It said that Hephaestos created golden servants to wait on him – robots.
What some interpreters have done with this is to say that this is what happens to those around people who just live to work. Without any energy or interest left for personal relationships, their mates and sometimes children are assigned roles much like the roles of golden servants: doing chores, cleaning, cooking, converting life into a series of duties. I suspect we’ve all experienced this at one time or other – or that we’ve done it.
Now this is a hard lesson to go very heavy on today when both the adults in many families must work to pay the bills, and some people have to take more than one job. This can make it feel like we’ve all been turned into robots, but it isn’t fair to throw blame around when people are doing the best they know how to do. The blame isn’t on those trying to make ends meet. The blame is on the economic priorities we as a society have adopted, that has taken so much money away from the majority of Americans that 18,000 of us die each year from inadequate health care, marriages end in divorce over the awful fights brought about by not having enough money, laws are changed and politicians and judges are bought to change the laws so those who control the money (and the politicians and media) can simply take it from those who work for it. It isn’t a healthy economy. It’s a greedy economy rewarding thieves like Kenneth Lay over fourth-grade teachers. But does anyone really want to argue that Ken Lay gave more to our society than an honest fourth-grade teacher?
Where we choose to spend money brings costs that are usually unseen. For example, there is a website you should all check out. It’s http://www.costofwar.com/. And the cost of our war in Iraq runs by as you watch, climbing hundreds and thousands of dollars each second. And you can select a city to see how much of the war’s prorated cost will come out of the incomes of that city’s residents. That’s the cost of money spent on war. In Austin, the war has cost us about half a billion dollars so far. Half a billion dollars spent there that can not be spent anywhere else. Not on education, not on health care, not on art or roads or anything else. Half a billion dollars: nearly $400 for every man, woman and child in greater metropolitan Austin (2000 census put the population at about 1.3 million). The cost of that money is measured in all the other things we can’t do with that money, and won’t be able to do for years to come.
But as a nation we aren’t valuing those things. And the things we value take value away from most of the people in our country and in the world. That isn’t just leftist rhetoric; it’s simple truth. The cost of our economic priorities is paid in devaluing the common humanity of all the common humans around us, including us. I wonder if you haven’t felt some of this in your own lives?
When we exalt profits over people, it means we don’t value people as much as we value profits. And if this doesn’t sound religious, I don’t know what is religious! It is exactly the meaning of the cry from the prophet Amos 2500 years ago that his people were “selling the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of shoes.” How different does our world sound from that? It sounds very, very different than the America I grew up in, forty and fifty years ago.
There is another dimension to the story of Hephaestos and his golden robots that is worth considering. When Hephaestos decided to devote his whole life to work, the other gods rejected his choice. Nobody followed such a silly lead, because they all saw a lot of other options. But a generation later, those in the household of Hephaestos don’t know any other way of life, any other set of choices. So they went about their work robotically, they lived to work rather than working to live, because they didn’t know there was a choice. And that too feels like it has a lot to say to us today, doesn’t it?
For me, this whole subject raises a lot of questions more profound than answers – and more frustrating, too.
Does the money we spend enrich our lives, help us have more fertile experiences, more nuanced appreciation of life, more creative engagement with others, richer relationships where we can truly know and be known? Or does our money buy distractions from human interaction? Do we spend money on distractions to avoid relationships that aren’t very rich because we don’t know how to relate to others richly?
Money can be a good servant, but it’s always a bad master. When you think of the amount of time and energy and passion you spend earning money, do you think it is more like your servant or your master?
This is dangerous territory. We have a word for people who sell themselves for money, and it isn’t a nice word. And when people are simply owned by money – I think of some of the Asian workers who are reportedly chained to their work stations, but also of people here in Austin working two jobs to make ends meet – when people’s lives are nearly defined by the need to work in order to survive, isn’t that a kind of slavery? Is that the cost of valuing profits over people? The enslavement and prostitution of our bodies, our spirits, and far too much of our lives?
I don’t have your answers. I struggle with these issues too, not always successfully. But I can offer you some questions that might be useful.
What’s the cost of the money you’re earning?
What’s the cost of the money you’re spending? What aren’t you spending it on?
Are you working to live, or living to work?
What are you serving with the days and years of your lives? Does it serve the best parts of you?
Or put it this way: If you were to die this month and in your eulogy you were defined by what you have spent the major energies of your life pursuing, would you be proud of having lived that life?
What would you like to do about it?
