Profitable, Political, & Faithful

PROFITABLE, POLITICAL & FAITHFUL
www.BillBruceWords.com
September 25, 2007

Text: Luke 16:1-13

I’m still between jobs, but encouraged about a ‘call’, soon to be confirmed by a congregation and presbytery. In our system, I don’t just say ‘God called me to preach to you’: it’s a dance of ‘what if’ and ‘maybe’, culminating in covenants among local and wider community, and clergy. Compare this approach to leadership succession to the secular job market, or to electoral politics, and you begin to identify your own prejudices about the distinctions amongst the private sector, the public sector, and the ‘third sector’ of charitable and religious activity.

What’s it like, chasing a job in your world? Is it all about inflating a resume, exaggerating your merits, and singing your own praises? Is it more about who you know or what you know, technical competence or interpersonal skills, IQ or EQ measures of cognitive or emotional intelligence? Are the terms regulated, with salary grids and collective agreements, with fixed hourly rates or salary ranges? Or is remuneration in your world subject to free market forces with incentives and bonuses encouraging you to ‘eat what you kill’?

In public sector jobs, do you expect different standards? Does it matter if it’s straight civil service work or a political staff job? Must all government staff toe current party lines at work? Are they free to subvert policies they oppose from within the bureaucracy? Do you expect more or less from politicians we elect and then pay, as they chase elected office? When is adversarial party politics just antagonistic mudslinging? Should politicians promise the stars, shoot for the moon, and if we end up tangled in the branches above us, say we’ve made upward progress?

What do you expect of clergy like me, looking for work? Some think clergy should be organized more like a unionized group, like nurses, or teachers, participating in chain bargaining to reach general terms. Others propose a Darwinian entrepreneurial open market, to cull the worst, and reward and encourage the best. Should we approach the succession and selection of clergy leadership more like civil service, or electoral politics? And what does each option suggest about your own role as ‘stakeholder’, boss, consumer, partner, donor, or participant in ministry?

Last week I spent about 3 hours discussing terms of a possible call with representatives of a congregation. What would you expect of them, and of me, in that room? Should they minimize their expenses? Should I maximize my gross or my take home pay, or ‘perks’ outside salary? We have minimum salaries prescribed by the denomination – should I simply accept that ‘the minimum is the maximum’, wage parity, or ask for a premium? Should the premium be based on ability to pay, local cost of living, my merit, or the demands of the specific job?

What if most of people in the congregation are poorer – or richer – than I am? What if I make more than most other United Church ministers? We make less than elementary school teachers, but more than day care workers. Today’s Globe and Post both report on Canadian income distribution, and I figure I will not be in the top 10% of incomes – but I am in the top 20%. Shouldn’t I just work for a stipend paying basic living costs, and share the rest with the poor, for whom the charitable donations were intended after all? What about AIDs sufferers in Africa?

I left my 3 hour meeting and went directly to a lecture by Leo Strine, an American judge in a key court for corporate litigation, on “Human Freedom and Two Friedmen: Musings on the Implications of Globalization for the Effective Regulation of Corporate Behavior”. Tory’s LLP and the U of T law school sponsored the event, well attended by sleek suits from downtown, the elite of the private sector. I wish leaders from the public and third sectors had heard it, too – and I’m offering these notes at least to the folks who sat in the earlier meeting with me that day.

Milton Friedman: The Nobel Prize winning economist, columnist for Newsweek, died last year, age 94. He championed free market capitalism and a smaller role for government as a voice in the wilderness from the 50’s to the 70’s, but his disciples in the neo-conservative Chicago School won influence through Reagan and Thatcher years. He said corporations owed maximization of shareholder value, and that concerns for other interests such as labour, consumers, environment, income distribution, community, politics, or charity, could only be justified as incidental to that primary duty of officers and directors to shareholders.

Thomas Friedman: The Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, is a columnist in the New York Times. He wrote The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization, and The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. How do the pure theories of market capitalism play out in outsourcing, offshoring, technology, or ascendant economies like India or China? Jobs and capital are increasingly mobile, but regional markets are not equal or the same, and the environmental impact and political and social trends are not just about progressive improvement: China’s carbon emissions passed the USA’s, and income disparities are growing.

Strine was preaching to the choir about his ‘Two Friedmen’, as he said Milton’s position rules in corporate law now, but Thomas’ observations resonate with our experience of growing trends. Financial markets, driven by funds and pensions seeking maximum short term gains, mergers and acquisitions, and compliant directors and officers’ roles and relationships, are all driven by the single criterion of ‘shareholder value’. Thomas’ globalized markets reveal the ‘externalized’ costs to environment, labour or social standards: are we bringing the world up to our own postwar lifestyle, or returning to 19th century standards with them in a big industrial do-over?

Strine adjudicates corporate litigation. He affirms ‘shareholder value’ is established and effective as the measure of roles and relationships within and among corporations. The ‘externalities’ of labour, environment, or community, in his opinion, should be regulated and adjudicated in the political arena, resulting in legal limits also external to corporations, but demanding compliance. He asserts that fund managers, directors and CEO’s, or even judges in corporate litigation, are better suited to maximizing shareholder value than to determining environmental, labour and community standards. The latter should be imposed through external constraints: the rest of us.

Domestic political arenas are vulnerable to threats of mobile capital and jobs, so Strine appealed to internationalism, of states ceding apparent sovereignty to increasingly collective responses. He appealed to analogies of the New Deal in the USA in the 1930’s, where states ceded power to the federal government so that corporations could not shop jurisdictions. He also commented on the models of the European Union, or the Global Trade Organization (GTO), and the variety of treaty mechanisms coordinating how some ‘externalities’ of corporations may be regulated.

The speaker did acknowledge the corporate responsibility initiatives of churches and social justice organizations, including socially responsible investing and use of shareholder resolutions. He did not challenge their concern for the ‘externalities’, and conceded them theatrical effect. However, he suggested that their strategies would be better directed to the political arena, pointing out that even pension and institutional investments like university trusts were now managed through the mediating agencies of funds, measured by maximum shareholder value. He commented on the level of public political discourse in his own country, confessing the temptations to bully pride or isolationist fear, and the risks of simplistic rhetoric of ‘us or them’.

Now it’s tempting, sitting in a crowd of sleek suits, listening to an American judge’s politics, to get righteous about the self-serving argument for permitting ‘maximizing shareholder value’ while relegating the great moral issues of the day to the category of ‘externalities’. Surely in the short term, the occupants of the C-suites get more, workers get less, our environment fries, and lawyers, financial managers, and corporate governance industry get fat fees to keep it that way. But every one of us with pension income expectations is complicit in the benefits, and negligent in our political inactivity and silence regarding the corporate ‘externalities’.

As I digested negotiating my next clergy remuneration in a small room of congregational leaders, and hearing a private sector perspective in an auditorium crowd of corporate law professionals, the leaders’ debate for the Ontario election had already begun. The politicians were arguing about the public sector, creating conditions for private sector success, and regulating private sector excess. What belongs in the private market, and what is better organized in the public sector? Whose job is it to ‘create jobs’, or ‘protect the environment’, ensure minimum wages and safe affordable power and roads? How much taxation, distributed how, will pay for it all?

The boundaries between the sectors, and our roles and relationships them, are not writ in stone. Health care and education slide from public sector monopolies into ‘private public partnerships’. Around the edges, what private activities are permitted and prohibited, and which are relieved of taxes, or even directly funded, at least in part? Whenever I am presented with a polarization of the public and private sector, I remember the ‘third sector’ beyond them both, which includes my charitable, religious, non-governmental and global identifications, essential to my full humanity. We are not simply members of one sector or the other, but each of us identify with all three.

We are consumers and retailers, employers and employees, service user and providers, taxpayers and voters, each in our own demographic slice of age, gender, ethnicity – and we are much more. Some of our identifications are chosen, but most are given, attributed, all building who we are, and whose we are, far more than an individual’s set of thoughts, patterns of action or association. In one afternoon, I felt some tension among my expectations and duties – and began these notes.

The gospel lesson this Sunday was about a manager who worked for a rich man. He is accused of squandering the property he managed. He apparently has not maximized shareholder value! He has paid his own living out of what was entrusted to his care – and is about to lose his job. What is he going to do? ‘I am not strong enough to dig, and I am too proud to beg. I had better make some friends for when I’m not manager any more’. So he discounts the debts owed to the rich man, and accepts partial payment – and the boss congratulates him for being shrewd!

Luke tags a set of morals to the story: make friends by means of your wealth, for the long term, in the end. If you’re faithful with a little, you get entrusted with more – so practice with money, and you’ll be prepared to handle really true riches. ‘No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.’ As I listened to a Lutheran pastor and prison chaplain preach on what that meant for young offender gang members, I confess my mind was on my own privilege.

Jack Shaver, a United Church sage, used to say, “If you’re looking for clean choices, you’re not choosing for this world.” This world is full of what ethicists call ‘tragic choices’ between good and better, or bad and worse. Too often we buy into what they call ‘naturalistic fallacies’ that what is, should be, or ‘moralistic fallacies’ that what should be, must be’. The world of black and white dichotomies is not mine, or yours, thank God. You learn that as soon as you try to come to agreement with one other person, or make a single actual decision.

The world of politics and profits is about getting to yes, or even getting to maybe, with others, for here and now. As Thomas Carlyle put it, “Do the duty which lies nearest before you, and thy next duty will become clearer to you.” Being shrewd, or political, or even profitable, a child of this age, is not a bad thing according to my reading of this week’s gospel. I asked to be paid to work with a congregation, and we agreed to terms, less than what my banker or family may wish, but far better than most of my sisters and brothers enjoy. Judge Leo Strine asked corporate leaders to maximize shareholder value within their corporate roles and responsibilities, and share in the political arena to improve corporate externalities like environmental and labour regulation. What were your provincial politicians doing last week? Thank God for each of their efforts.

What’s it like, chasing a job, or doing a job, in your world? What do you expect of yourself and of others in the private sector, the public sector – and in religious, charitable, non-governmental and global citizenship? Those who make a God of either a private sector free market, or a public sector monopoly in one state, are short-sighted and wrong. Most leaders active in corporate or government work know that. In biblical terms, to serve only the market or the state is idolatry. We are consumers and retailers, employers and employees, service user and providers, taxpayers and voters, each in our own demographic slice of age, gender, ethnicity – and we are much more.

Politics and profits alone can drive us to tragically short-term thinking and action. Economist Keynes is credited with the aphorism ‘in the long range, we’re all dead’ to justify making real world penultimate decisions. But the tension between the ‘is’ and ‘ought’, or the real and ideal, is a frame for all our choices, from the most mundane to the most sublime. I was acutely aware of that one afternoon last week. I wrote these notes, a preacher without a pulpit, to invite you to wonder with me at how to be profitable, political, and faithful in the midst of it all.

I have great confidence that the small room of lay leaders, the big auditorium of corporate suits, the politicians campaigning in the Ontario election, the Lutheran prison chaplain, and you who read these notes, share some of these ideals and hopes, offer some empathy for these dilemmas, and extend some mercy for the choices we all make in the meantime. We could all do with more ideals and hopes, empathy and mercy, in private, public, and third sector dimensions of our lives. Read more...

Leaks and Plugs

LEAKS & PLUGS
Notes from www.BillBruceWords.com
Labour Day, September 3, 2007

Text: Jeremiah 2:4-13

Labour Day, and I’m still looking for work. This is the third time I’ve been unemployed in the summer, though the other times were in recessions more than a decade ago. Have you ever been stuck between jobs? Do you remember what it feels like?

Colleagues of mine, particularly those of some seniority and credentials, are particularly ready and willing to assume the roles of ‘Job’s comforters’, justifying the ways of God and the labour market to a guy like me. I still don’t buy that it’s a fair market, but they seem sure God’s in his heaven, and our social, political, and economic order reflects God’s will.

One of these colleagues called me ‘truculent’ recently, as we debriefed why I didn’t get one job. Then asked if I knew what that meant. ‘Absolutely’, says I, choking back a churlish ‘Oh, yeah?’ I petulantly thought, but did not say, ‘I’d rather be truculent than unctuous!’ You see, folks keep telling me I’m too direct, blunt, or grumpy to meet the market demands for clergy.

Would you rather be called truculent, or unctuous? Which tone do you prefer in your clergy? See if these excerpts from the Oxford English Dictionary help you choose:

Truculent
1. Characterized by or exhibiting ferocity or cruelty: fierce, cruel, savage, barbarous.
b. Of speech or writing: Hostile; aggressive; scathing; savage; harsh
2. (In catachretic use, assoc. w. Truck, Truckle) Mean, base, mercenary.

Unctuous
1. Of the nature or quality of an unguent or ointment; oily, greasy.
5. Characterized by spiritual unction (now esp. of an assumed or superficial kind): complacently agreeable or self-satisfied.

You’ll remember that I’ve been writing for a while about our United Church profile in Toronto. We have about 110 congregations in the city – not including the GTA, just the megacity - with about 25,000 members in a population of 2.5M. We’ll admit to over $500M in congregational property, and about $40M congregational income, $10M in clergy payroll each year.

We talk like a collection of mom-and-pop corner stores on the edge of bankruptcy, claiming the moral high ground of small caring communities. Unctuous, soothing, complacently agreeable or self-satisfied, we are victims, but never villains. We live like the idiot grandchildren in a rags-to-riches-to rags-in-three-generations story. We act like unworldly aristocrats scavenging the relics of an inherited civilization. Ours are the virtues of wealthy fools living out somebody else’s happily ever after, not those of immigrants with ambitions for a better future if they hustle.


Our United Church claims the mantle of the Social Gospel, of labour unions and socialized medicine and welfare. We unctuously refer to the handful of marginal folks who enjoy occasional food or rest under our roof, or our ‘partnerships’ with arts and music or recreation or wellness or childcare tenants, as justification of our heritage claims.

Since I am not innumerate, I keep pointing out that we are parasites scavenging the inheritance of our past, and stealing from any possible inheritance for the future, as we live off passive rents and investment while deferring real costs of our buildings benefiting ourselves, controlling for ourselves, without burdening ourselves. Truculent? True! Why aren’t you?

This was the last of 4 times I spoke and led worship this summer at Emmanuel Howard Park UC. I also spoke at Hope, and at Beach United this season. I echoed the prophets, Amos, Hosea, and Jeremiah, and our city’s 200 year history, in similar eras of boom and bust, of empires and wars. We share the perspective of wee nations with delusions of grandeur, puffed up and pulled down.

Today then, I echoed Jeremiah’s rant against his nation and its leaders: what’s with you people? God says ‘what did you find wrong with me – that you should chase worthless goods and gods, and become what you love?’ As the hymn (VU292) puts it: ‘Since what we choose is what we are, and what we love we yet shall be.…’ Toronto, once a city of churches, spires over trees, has become one of bank and condo towers surrounded by sprawl, connected by gridlock. What do you choose, and what do we love? Jeremiah is, after all, truculent. Why aren’t you?

The people did not say ‘where is the Lord’. Nobody noticed anything was missing. Nobody remembered the God and goods that drew us from bondage to freedom, with immigrant virtues. We were surrounded by folks who could have evangelized us from have outside in about hope
We forgot, and did not relearn. We came into a good land, of milk and honey, to partake of the fruits, and defiled and consumed it. Do you build or spend moral, political, and material capital?

The priests did not say ‘where is the Lord’. Nobody noticed anything missing. If the leaders don’t know, they can’t tell. People who don’t worship, pray, learn, serve, are ill-equipped to celebrate, care, teach, or help. Who reads the book, let alone interprets it? We’ve got a ‘pliable biable’, a loose-leaf edition of ‘greatest hits’, and selective memory. How else could such a collection of the sinecured middle class claim solidarity with the marginalized?

Look around - north, south east, west – has anybody ever seen such a thing? We could have been anything! We tried to be everything. We are become nothing. Be appalled, shocked, desolate. Break through your denial, and acknowledge our collective grief, huddled in dozens in crumbling palaces built for thousands! Jeremiah was not a fun guy. He was depressing and depressive. In our generation, he’d be medicated. He was jailed and rejected – and right.

The prophet’s poetry of rage and despair were so distinctive, that a word was coined for them: ‘jeremiads’. Try that on your friend the next time she’s whining! His arguments in angry grief don’t get through, but occasionally an image is too powerful to screen out. So we began in worship with the old camp song ‘Deep and wide, deep and wide, there’s a fountain flowing deep and wide’, and I spent most of my speaking time on the imagery that closes the lesson today:

For my people have committed two evils:
They have forsaken me, the fountain of living water,
And dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns, that can hold no water.

Start and end with the affirmation, the confession of faith in that jeremiad: God is like a fountain of living water, showering us with blessings. It’s welling up in life, flowing to us and through us from God, spring and source and spirit, soothing and salving our wounds, and strengthening us for service. We are blessed, and ‘it is right to give God thanks and praise’.

Savour that confession of faith, that metaphor or figurative language for grace and providence, and the confession of sin follows: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water. Why would we lose that hope and expectation of a fountain of grace? Why would we fear what’s coming at us, that it would stop or be bad? Why would we resist the outflow? Why would we try to control the flow, either in or out of our hearts, our community, or our church?

When we reframe the running water image to conduit and channel to hoarding containers, we get scared, living in scarcity, not abundance. We will not be evangelized ‘from the outside in’, nor will we in turn evangelize a gospel. I’ve just moved to an apartment still under construction, and we’ve had floods from blocked drains above us – I’m a believer in ‘letting it flow’! Addressing leaks with plugs doesn’t really get at the roots of the issue.

The other sin is hewing out cisterns, cracked cisterns, that can hold no water. What an image of the terrible futility of constructing what is by its nature created! Do you know what a cistern is?
Nearly thirty years ago, I served six rural Alberta churches, where homesteaders collected rainwater in cisterns poured concrete containers as small as bathtubs and as big as swimming pools, to provide soft water and gardening water in dry spells. Sometimes they cracked, often they filled with algae – so we all knew we still had to count on rain and springs for water.

Have you seen the west Nile Virus ads? Standing water, ponds with pond scum, are breeding grounds for insects and disease. Empty them out, and rely on running water, say the ads. Rely on running water, flowing fountains. You only imagine you can’t count on the source, and leakage out might actually be a good thing, to dry out the vessel sometimes.

Our church is all about forgetting the fountain, and frantic futility of trying to contain and control the inflow and the outflow. Those who talk endlessly of being ‘inclusive’ reveal that they think it their job to control the intake, and assume that others are trying to plug and stop the intake entirely. Thank God who keeps leaking in anyhow! As for leakage out, we all recognize that patterns of mortality, morbidity, mobility: people die, get sick, or move away in any community. Those who try to plug those holes reveal that they too have lost track of the fountain.

Some will leak in, and more will leak out, of our hearts, and community, and church, however we try to put plug in the intake or the outflow. But a container is the wrong metaphor, as it was in Jeremiah’s time, construing a closed system rather than a conduit or channel of the fountain of grace. What we love we yet shall be. So what’ll it be? Unctuous, complacently agreeable, carefully controlled containers, pond scum and bugs? Truculent, turbulent, lively splashing sloppy lively water play? Which will you choose for your church, your clergy, and yourself?

We closed on Sunday with bits from T.S.Eliot’s Choruses from The Rock. I had quoted it earlier this summer, as we began with Amos. Eliot wrote this for a church repairs fundraiser, a chancel drama, in 1934 in the midst of the depression and high unemployment:

Thus your fathers were made
Fellow citizens of the saints,
of the household of God,
being built upon the foundation
Of apostles and prophets,
Christ Jesus Himself the chief cornerstone,

But you, have you built well,
that you now sit helpless in the ruined house? ….

Of all that was done in the past,
You eat the fruit, rotten or ripe.
And the Church must be forever building,
And always decaying,
And always being restored….

For every ill deed in the past we suffer the consequence….

And of all that was done that was good, you have the inheritance….

And all that is ill you may repair
if you walk together in humble repentance,
expiating the sins of your fathers;

And all that was good you must fight to keep
with hearts as devoted as those of your fathers
who fought to gain it

The church must be forever building,
For it is forever decaying within
and attacked from without;

For this is the law of life;
and you must remember that
While there is time of prosperity
The people will neglect the Temple,
And in time of adversity they will decry it.

What life have you if you have not life together?
There is no life that is not in community
And no community not lived in praise of God.

Jeremiah 2:4-13

Hear the word of the Lord, O house of Jacob,
and all the families of the house of Israel.
Thus says the Lord:
What wrong did your ancestors find in me
that they went far from me,
and went after worthless things,
and became worthless themselves?
They did not say, “Where is the Lord
who brought us up from the land of Egypt,
who led us in the wilderness,
in a land of deserts and pits,
in a land of drought and deep darkness,
in a land that no one passes through,
where no one lives?”
I brought you into a plentiful land
to eat its fruits and its good things
But when you entered you defiled my land
and made my heritage an abomination.
The priests did not say “Where is the Lord”
Those who handle the law did not know me;
the rulers transgressed against me;
the prophets prophesied by Baal,
and went after things that do not profit.
Therefore once more I accuse you, says the Lord,
and I accuse your children’s children.
Cross to the casts of Cyprus and look,
send to Kedar and examine with care;
see if there has ever been such a thing.
Has a nation changed its gods,
even though they are no gods?
But my people have changed their glory
for something that does not profit.
Be appalled, O heavens, at this,
be shocked, be utterly desolate, says the Lord,

For my people have committed two evils:
They have forsaken me,
the fountain of living water,
And dug out cisterns for themselves,
cracked cisterns,
that can hold no water.


Opening Prayers from Labour Day 2007

One: The Lord be with you
All: And also with you
One: Lift up your hearts
All: We lift them up to God
One: Let us give thanks to God
All: It is right to give God thanks and praise
One: God, fountain of living water
Welling up, flowing to us and through us
Spring and source and spirit,
Showering us with blessings
Soothing and salving our wounds
Strengthening us for service
Sure, it is right to give you thanks and praise

So we’re saying it now, praying it now
Thank God, praise God, good God…
Creating our original blessing
Saving our souls for service
Sustaining our breath and life and spirits
We ask where is the Lord –
Like a child playing hide and seek –
Like the old olly-olly oxenfree all clear –

Let it flow now, let it fly now
Who called us out of the land of Egypt
Into a plentiful land, full of fruits and good things
Remind us againwho we are, and whose we are
Better than beasts, lower than angels
Your creatures, your people
Thank God, praise God, good God…

Here and now, God with us, Emmanuel,
And so we say, and so we pray:
‘Through Jesus Christ we pray’
All: Amen.










Labour Day 2007 Prayer of Approach & Confession
Gracious, merciful God – where are you?

We have got to admit now,
That we your people have not asked that very often –
‘where is the Lord’ – if we had, this would not be so hard for us
It’s not like you’ve been hiding – just that we’re not seeking
We’re enjoying what we’ve got, using it up –
Parasites, scavengers living off what earlier generations left
Thieves, profligates, squandering the inheritance of the future
We haven’t asked where you were –
Is there a problem?

And we got to admit now,
That your priests have not asked that very often –
‘where is the Lord’ - if they had, we might have learned more
who read the book, let alone interpreted it ?
we’ve have a pliable biable, a looseleaf edition, greatest hits
we’ve leaked a lot of our folks to mortality, morbidity, mobility -
flock scattered and stressed, without shepherds’ care
blind and deaf to being evangelized from the outside in
eager to be the gatekeepers, inclusively controlling who is us
relevant and worldly, at others’ expense
they didn’t ask where you were
Is there a problem?

So we gather now to confess our faith: God’s God,
And find we have confessed our sin: we’re not God
We have forsaken you, the fountain of living water
And tried to hoard our brackish fetid bits, even as they leak
God forbid that we forget our blessings
God forbid that we forget to ask: where is our God

If we do not seek, we do not find, do not need, will not ask
So we gather in our prayers in words we sing together:
All: (sung, tune in red hymn books # 947)
Lord have mercy.
Christ have mercy.
Lord have mercy. Read more...