|
|
"Commerce without Morality"
John 2:13-22
I Kings 21:1-16
A Sermon Preached by The Rev. Douglas M. Donley
March 3, 2002
University Baptist Church
Minneapolis, MN
We have now reached our third service in a Lenten series on the seven deadly social sins as explained by Mahatma Gandhi. We started out with wealth without work. Last week we looked at science without humanity. Next week, we’ll look at education without character. Then Jim Ketcham will help us look at pleasure without conscience. Then we will be at Palm Sunday, looking at politics without principles. Finally on Easter Sunday, we will look at worship without sacrifice.
All of these seven deadly social sins have as their root narcissism. The feeling that we are alone, that we do not live in community. That we are to look out for number one and only number one. In essence to embrace any one of these social sins is to deny the holiness of your neighbor and to deny God. The essence of Christianity, according to Jesus, is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and love your neighbor as yourself. These seven social sins keep us away from that ideal. This is important work for us to do during this Lenten season because such a season is supposed to draw us closer to God. Maybe as we unpack our entanglement with this sin-sick world, we can take a step closer to God on our collective road to discipleship.
Today’s topic is commerce without morality.
I don’t know if anyone here is a Star Trek fan or not, but there is a race of people in the Star Trek series which embody this sin. The Ferenghi’s. They are the ultimate venture capitalists. Profit is their only motive: the accumulation of gold plated latinum. They have no ethics except for the ethic that they had better get the stuff before someone else gets it, and if someone else has it, it is expected that the Ferenghis will steal it from each other and anyone else. Few people like Ferenghis. Ferenghis don’t even like Ferenghis. They are a caricature of the worst of us if we don’t evolve beyond commerce without morality.
Our country’s history is replete with examples of commerce without morality. Think about the ripping off of native people’s land as the US broke treaty after treaty so they could have the gold and the minerals and the land of the Indian peoples.
Think about the devastation of southern rainforests so that grain can be planted to raise cattle for McDonalds or bananas and coffee and sugar cane for US desert tables. Think about the military dictatorships our country has supported in places like Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador in order to protect the owners of those plantations.
Commerce without morality.
Think about the sweatshops in Vietnam, in Bangladesh, in Taiwan, in Mexico, in south Carolina where a good bit of our clothing and goods are produced. Nike shoes sell for anywhere from $75.00 to $200.00. They cost only $5.60 to produce. Almost all of them are made in Asia. Female workers assembling Nike shoes for 12 hours a day in Indonesia earn $1.35 per day. That’s one third of the wages paid by the local Indonesian shoe manufacturer. If the workers demand higher wages, they get fired.
Nike’s Vice President for Asia said, "We don’t know the first thing about manufacturing. We are marketers and designers. It is not within our scope to investigate (labor disturbances)."—Center for Ethics and Economic Policy, Berkeley, CA.
Commerce without morality.
Larry Weiss said in Wednesday’s Star Tribune that in the past three years, 2,200 Minnesota manufacturing jobs were sent to sweatshops in Mexico.
Companies like 3M, Honeywell, Boston Scientific and Onan moved their manufacturing to where thanks to NAFTA the "free market" makes it possible and even desirable to engage in commerce without morality. (Sweatshop-made Coleman T-Shirts raise XXL issue—Star Tribune, February 27, 2002)
Molly Ivins wrote in Wednesday’s paper about the fact that the administration’s new energy policy institutionalizes commerce without morality by relieving corporate taxes into the superfund. The superfund, Ivins reminds us, was established to make big polluters clean up their own messes. She writes, "Does this make any sense at all? Industry creates some godawful mess that harms people, walks away and leaves it, and now we have to pay to clean it up. We didn't make the mess, we didn't make piles of money off making the mess, and the mess is killing our children. So exactly why is that our responsibility? They poison you, and you have to pay for it?"—(Star Tribune Wednesday, February 27).
But none of this happens without God’s watchful eye and God’s ultimate judgment. Today, we have two of the best biblical analyses of commerce without morality: Naboth’s Vineyard and the moneychangers on the temple mount.
Ahab coveted Naboth’s vineyard and whined when he couldn’t get it lawfully. Jezebel showed him how to govern like a venture capitalist, like a Ferenghi. She had Naboth killed, so that Ahab could have his land. She and Ahab were about to live happily ever after when Elijah got wind of the scheme. Ahab and Jezebel paid the ultimate price, proving that God notices when we do our commerce without morality.
By the time Jesus came around, money changing was big business. In order to purchase the animals to fulfill the sacrificial obligations of Judaism, people had to exchange their Roman money into Hebrew money. The moneychangers could tell the hicks from the countryside from the city-dwellers by the way they talked, the clothes they wore and even by their complexion. It was common for the moneychangers to be rather fluid in setting the exchange rate. The moneychangers and the sellers of birds made a hefty profit from the faith of the poor people who were convinced that the only way to be holy was to go up to the temple, spend your little funds on pigeons and be declared clean by a priest. Jesus said, "enough of this". Quoting Jeremiah, Jesus said in Mark’s account of this story, "My house shall be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves." Jesus was not saying you had no right to exercise commerce in the temple. He was saying your commerce must be moral.
It was no accident that Jesus quoted Jeremiah. Jeremiah had said, "If you truly amend your ways…if you truly act justly with one another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place…then I will dwell with you in this place…. But do not trust in these words "This is the Temple of the Lord, This is the temple of the Lord, This is the Temple of the Lord."(Jeremiah 7:4-7) The temple must carry out justice. Commerce, yes, but with a sense of morality.
These words fell on deaf ears for the first Temple was destroyed shortly after Jeremiah said these words. And here was Jesus quoting Jeremiah just before the destruction of the second temple.
Gandhi in his movement for a free India realized that he and others in India had bought so much of the British elitism that they often gave up their Indian ways in order to be more British. Making Indians more British was big business for Britain. It kept them buying things. It kept them putting money into the British economy and it subtly reminded the Indian people that they were not quite as good as the English. Gandhi said that one way for people to free themselves of English rule was to stop supporting the English economy and to stop trying to look English.
This meant that they had to stop buying those nice English suits and finely made silk shirts. They had to stop supporting immoral commerce.
Gandhi encouraged everyone to spin their own cloth and make their own clothing. In fact one of the soul force vows for the followers of Gandhi was that they had to wear and create homespun clothing. It gave them a sense of self-sufficiency and a sense of cleanliness. They could not participate in commerce without morality and still be people committed to nonviolence.
In January of 2000, 141 Baptist peacemakers from 26 countries met in Melbourne Australia for the fourth International Baptist Peace Conference. A portion of an open letter which they developed to be sent to the Baptist World Alliance read:
"While we have many varied opinions and economic principles, we are agreed that the practice of corporate capitalism is bringing devastation to the vast majority of the world’s population and to the earth itself. Including the devastation of forests in South America, Africa and Asia. Free trade is not necessarily fair trade. We urge church leaders at every level to examine and critique all economic structures in light of biblical values." In other words, no commerce without morality. The letter goes on to say: "The enormous disparity in the distribution of wealth in our world is a scandal, all the more so since the church itself reflects this pattern within its own ranks. This is not to say that the poor are defined by their poverty. Indeed, their lack of financial resources often means they have learned to more readily depend on God’s providence. Their spiritual health often exceeds those who live in excess. We call on the BWA to underscore these perspectives with all member bodies: (a) The transfer of financial wealth from rich to poor in mission partnerships is a matter off justice, not charity. (b) Nevertheless, such partnerships must also be characterized by mutuality, each giving generously to the other from what God has provided."
The International Baptist Peace Fellowship is calling for a redistribution of wealth. Commerce with morality. Remember that the early church held all things in common, according to the second chapter of Acts, giving people what they needed when they needed it. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians has Paul praising the Macedonian church for their generosity to the poorer Jerusalem church. These are Biblical values.
Jesus turned over the tables of the money-changers saying that the temple of all places shall not be a place where we make a profit, but where we redistribute our wealth and befriend and support and empower the less fortunate in our midst, because we are all sisters and brothers.
Jesus spoke in his first sermon quoting from the prophet Isaiah, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because God has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, to set the captives free, recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those we are oppressed, and to proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD" (Luke 4:18,19). In other words to proclaim the year of jubilee, that once in 50-year tradition dating back to the book of Leviticus where all debts would be forgiven, all land would return to its rightful owners, all slaves would be set free and for an entire year the people would live in community. SO THAT morality might become a part of commerce, and the community might be restored. As long as there is commerce without morality there cannot be community.
The prophet Amos bellowed the words of YHWH: "For three transgressions of Israel and for four, I will not revoke the punishment; because they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes—they that trample the head of the poor into dust of the earth, and turn aside the way of the afflicted…"(2:6-7) "I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies, Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings, I will not accept them, and the peace offerings of your fatted beasts I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen. BUT let justice flow down like waters and righteousness like and ever-flowing stream."(5:21-24)
The book of Revelation says that only 144,000 people see the truth. Only 12 times 12,000 have the courage to have the patient endurance to bear the faithful witness in the midst of this sin-sick world. I don’t know what the number is. But I do know that the point of the Bible and the point of Jesus’ ministry on this earth was to encourage us to be the righteous remnant; the good soil; the ones who are not conformed to this world where commerce runs amok without morality; where injustice is alive and well; where the seven deadly sins of wealth without work; science without humanity; education without character; pleasure without conscience; politics without principles; worship without sacrifice; and commerce without morality are the rules of the world.
We are called to be those oddballs who choose to live our lives in a different way, marching to a different drummer. It ain’t easy, but it leads to salvation for this world of ours and our very souls.
May we continue to live our lives transformed by our relationship with the living Christ. And may we live in such a way that we exercise our business life with ethics. And never be lured by the seduction of commerce without morality.
And most importantly, may we recognize and affirm our need for community—that place where we are nourished by God which we recognize in each other; that place where we garner the strength we need to live lives inspired by God and inspiring to our neighbors. For it is in community and only in community that we gain the strength, the wisdom, the courage and the blessing to overcome the world.
As we are in communion with God, in dialogue with scripture, holding each other accountable as we pray for and support one another, we become new creations. We are born again: begotten from above SO THAT we might reveal God’s purposes to a sin-sick world. Through all of this, and resisting the seven deadly social sins, we experience salvation. May it be so in all of us. Amen.