Moving is never fun, even when you are moving somewhere you want to go. Things get lost… my old Scout and Army uniforms disappeared in a move years ago. Stuff gets broken. Mostly, it is just stuff, like the cheap Target lamp that didn’t survive the trip to Elmira. Our lingering sense of loss over material things should serve as a check on our privilege and sense of vulnerability, our Buddhist sisters and brothers having a thing or two to say about attachment. But sometimes, we have things that are truly precious because they are physical manifestations of our deep story, the way we locate ourselves and make meaning.
One of the most precious physical objects in my household is a small wooden side table. It is not much to look at, not even slightly fancy, more the sort of thing a freshman might make in wood shop, if wood shop still exists in an education system chasing scores on standardized corporate tests.
This little amateur table was made by my grandfather, a man I never knew, for he died when my own father was still a child. He’d been a police officer like his father before him, but back then there wasn’t any effective treatment for tuberculosis, so he was pensioned off and sent out west, to a sanatorium in Albuquerque. There, the family lived in late Depression poverty, sometimes with little more to eat than a potato and a piece of fatback, or whatever was available at the soup kitchen.
This experience had a profound impact on my father, who as an adult worked non-stop until his body would not let him work any longer, that body that was a container for all of his fear of poverty and of hunger. And just as trauma becomes embodied, is mysteriously and genetically passed down through the generations, so too is that anxiety about poverty passed on, that work ethic that says go until you can go no more. I have it. So do each of my sisters. My half-brother, adopted and only re-discovered five years ago, never knew Dad, but he grinds it out like the rest of us.
So when I think about money, I know that the weight, the gravity in my family history, distorts things, the event horizon of a black hole of hunger and fear. I probably get angrier with those who benefit from unearned wealth than is completely appropriate, and am more judgmental of those who are unwilling to work than grace requires. I have little tolerance for those who steal, whether the robbery is committed by a thug with a gun or a private equity firm. Like the Seven Social Sins developed by Canon Frederick Lewis Donaldson and popularized by Mohandas Gandhi, I consider “wealth without work” to be an evil, a cancer on the moral fabric of civilization.
This is my confession.
I work hard for my money, hustling through multiple jobs and long hours for years, and am terrified of the idea of being impoverished. And fear rarely leads us to our best judgments.
This matters, for this week’s scripture is all about money, though we trivialize it, “the Widow’s Mite” an example of proportional giving, which is true, but we miss the first half of the reading, about the men who are stealing from the widows, for this isn’t just about what you put in your offering envelope. It is also about the nature of money, the ethics around money, the art of doing justice. And the men with power Jesus confronted were corrupt, using their moral authority to take from the poor and give to the rich.
Jesus talks about money constantly, and we are in the middle of a stewardship campaign where we ask you to contribute some of your money to fund the ongoing missions of the Park Church, our mission to change lives through the good news we learn on the Way of Jesus, the call to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly.
So I’m not going to go the way of the “Prosperity Theology” heretics, promising you that the more you give to the Park Church, the more you will receive. That particular Ponzi scheme is not in scripture, though I do believe generosity has its rewards, that decoupling our finance from our fear is healthy.
Nor am I going to avoid the subject entirely, as is so often the case in churches that are polite and white, most of the Protestant Mainline if we are honest. So even though money is the third rail, powered by our original sin of fear, I am going there, though in a roundabout way.
If I learned nothing else from Mr. Miyagi, it is this. Life lessons don’t always look like life lessons. So I’m going to move you into another movie, one of my all-time favorites, to a life lesson and a scene that sets the stage for our conversation about money.
“Searching for Bobby Fisher” is the Hollywood version of the book by the same name, the true story of the chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin as written by his sportswriter father, Fred. The elder Waitzkin, determined that his son should be a champion, arranges for him to study under the person many consider America’s foremost chess teacher, Bruce Pandolfini.
So we come to a scene where Josh, tiny, sitting on phone books, stares across the board at Pandolfini, who has told him not to move a piece until he can see the move five away that wins the match. Josh repeatedly says “I can’t see it.”
This is a movie, after all, so the lighting is sharp contrasts, the room otherwise city quiet. And suddenly, Pandolfini swipes his arm across the board, sending the chess pieces flying toward the camera and onto the floor in a clatter. After his initial shock, Josh settles back in, his eyes moving across the now empty board, then announces that winning fifth move.
Sometimes, when things are too complex, when we are lost in the pieces, it helps to clear the board. So let’s forget, for a moment, the complexities and start from an empty board.
What is money, this thing that has been around since before Jesus, that plays such a prominent role in scripture?
It is a socially-constructed token that symbolizes something of value. Now, some might say that money itself has value, and maybe it did have some sort of value when it was coins made of precious metal, but who decides which metal is precious? Why is gold worth more than silver? Today’s technology makes important use of gold, but it had little practical value when it became the thing everybody chased. That gold became a monetary standard, the “gold standard” of history, is as much a fluke as anything, the result of Sir Isaac Newton, yes THAT Sir Isaac Newton, setting the exchange rate of silver to gold too low when he was serving as the Master of the Royal Mint. And we can certainly all agree that a stack of green paper with the images of dead white men on them only have value because we agree they have value, because they are the token symbols we use in the exchange of goods and services.
The value in money, then, is not the money itself, but the things money represents, traditionally the fruits of God’s great creation plus the human ingenuity and labor that turns those fruits of creation into something that we find useful. It is land and crops and iron ore and horseshoes and the years of labor and learning that the doctor uses when she treats your wounds or develops a vaccine.
Now, civilization is complex and messy, and humans are just flat out crazy, so we can always pick an individual object and object to the monetary value assigned, especially when it comes to things that are not useful in a practical way. There is an entire realm of economic activity that is completely divorced from utility and even the concept of actual value, from art auctions to cryptocurrency.
I’ve recently discussed both cryptocurrency and the Netflix series Squid Game from this pulpit, and this week started with the news that a cryptocurrency assumed to be connected with the series plummeted at the start of the week in a scam worth millions of dollars, and in the unregulated world of crypto that fuels criminal activity like Russian ransomware, no one knows who got the money. For cryptocurrency was designed exclusively for the purpose of facilitating crime.
But in the end, we have to go back to the basics, back to that cleared board. Money is a symbol of what we value. We exchange it for things we value. We store years of labor in the form of money, and we hope that very wise people will attach that money to the good ideas and hard work of others in the form of investment, which at its purest is still about combining resources, ingenuity, and effort.
Money is about values, not the socially constructed monetary value, but what matters to us. A budget is always a reflection of your values, whether it is a household budget, a church budget, a national budget. If you manage the budget to give trillions of dollars to billionaires, that says something about your values or possibly your intelligence and common sense. If you give billions to an apartheid state that is engaged in a slow-motion ethnic cleansing, that routinely commits crimes against humanity, that says something.
So when we start talking about money, when we start speaking of stewardship and your giving to the church, we have to ask what you value about The Park Church.
And that IS the question. What do you value about The Park Church? Does the community value The Park Church. Not the building, for a building is just a building and there are plenty of empty ones around here. The church is a group of people who have publicly vowed to be part of the messiness of human community to a particular purpose, and that purpose is to change lives, ours and those of a world full of lonely, scared and confused people.
And if we are not doing that, if we are not better as a result of our life together in church, if Elmira will not be a better place because of what we do in 2021, if we offer no value to the world, then we don’t deserve your mite, whether you are the widow on a fixed budget or the super-rich religious charlatans demanding that she place her tithe in the box.
What do you value? Arms across the board, pieces clattering to the floor. Clear it all away. Look. The answer is there.
What do you value?
May that holy mystery we name as God be ever present as you ask yourself this question. Amen.