WHAT HAVE WE LOST? WHAT DO WE OWN? WHOSE OWN ARE WE?

A Sermon for Sunday, October 5, 2008

Loving God, we live in disturbing days: across the world, prices rise, debts increase, banks collapse, jobs are taken away, and fragile security is under threat. Loving God, meet us in our fear and hear our prayer: be a tower of strength amidst the shifting sands, and a light in the darkness; help us receive your gift of peace, and fix our hearts where true joys are to be found, in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

( www.cofe.anglican.org/prayers/#debt)

Just where did our financial crisis start? Was it on April 28, 2004? The Securities and Exchange Commission met that day. Few people attended, and none of the major media outlets covered it. After the 55 minute meeting, which can now be heard on the S.E.C. Web site, the chairman, a veteran Wall Street executive, called for a vote. The unanimous decision changed what was known as the net capital rule. With that vote, the five big independent investment firms (those with more than $5 billion in assets) were turned loose. In loosening up capital rules, which are supposed to provide a buffer in tough times, the S.E.C. also decided to rely on the firms’ own projections to determine the riskiness of investments. This means that the job of monitoring bank risk was outsourced…to the banks themselves.

“Over the following months and years,” a national newspaper reported on Friday, “each…investment firm would take advantage of the looser rules. At (one firm), the leverage ratio — a measurement of how much the firm was borrowing compared to its total assets — rose sharply, to 33 to 1. In other words, for every dollar in equity, it had $33 of debt. The ratios at the other firms also rose significantly. The 2004 decision…gave the S.E.C. a window on the banks’ increasingly risky investments….But the agency never took true advantage of that part of the bargain. The supervisory program under (the next chairman of the S.E.C.), who arrived at the agency a year later, was a low priority” (Stephen Laboton, The New York Times, 10/3/08).

Where did the financial crisis start? For me, it began in the 1950’s, when I got $1 each week from my godparents to put in my church offering envelope. By Sunday, I had often “re-allocated” that dollar, from my offering envelope into my pocket, so I could buy that Superman or Batman comic book I “really needed.” Nobody, including my parents, who thought I put that dollar in the collection plate each week, knew about my use – or more accurately, my misuse of money. At home, love was perfectly abundant. Financial supervision, however, was a lower priority.

One columnist describes our financial crisis this way: “I hope the titans of finance who expect us little people to save them are ashamed of themselves. But at the same time, in painting Main Street solely as a victim of a rapacious Wall Street, we are being hypocritical. We are all to blame.…Who made the decision to take on that mortgage she couldn’t really afford? Who lied about (his) income or assets in order to qualify for a mortgage? Who used the proceeds of a home equity line to pay for an elaborate vacation? Who used credit cards to live a lifestyle that was well beyond their means? Well, you and I did. (Or…at least, our neighbors did.)” (Bethany McLean, The New York Times, 10/03/08)

I wonder: with proper supervision and healthy financial habits, would our nation be as scared as we are right now? Last week, in one of those rare moments when I was watching TV, a headline read: “How scared are you?” A network reporter, interviewing folks on the street, asked, “When it comes to our current financial crisis, where would you rank yourself, from 1 to 10, on the panic scale?” I must admit that when the federal government bailout bill first failed, I felt some fear, if not panic. Amidst those fears, some still live in denial. Have you seen the hand-made signs popping up at street corners around town, proclaiming: “$ 0 down. $ 0 closing costs. Yes, you can own a home! Call 888….”?

What do these words do to us? Do these media messages encourage financial freedom or fear? We all claim we want freedom. But some of us need help living into financial freedom. Some of us need some help, some kind of supervision, in order to be free from our debts. By the way, human help IS available. So is divine help. I’m going to put information about human financial help on my blog at our church website (www.allsaintsmd.org). For now, let’s talk about divine help. And in a moment I’ll introduce you to someone who knows about divine help.

It is fear that drives people’s actions in a financial crisis. Fear drove the people of Japan in their crisis in the 1990s and the people of our own country in the 1930s. The crisis of 2008 is no different. A bailout bill may have passed, but we still face a scary time ahead, a critical time in our country’s, our community’s, our church’s history. We need all the help we can get.

Divine help comes when we remember that God’s perfect love casts out fear. More divine help comes when we open our minds and learn how fear – and its sibling, anger – are about loss. As I said last Sunday evening at care team training, when it comes to our need for care, it’s all about our losses. Loss of parents and jobs and dreams. Loss of health and income and retirement. And when fear takes over, controlling our lives, it’s about our loss of hope and belief in ourselves as God’s beloved. We need to hear of God’s perfect love casting out fear. We need to hear God’s Word remind us, over and over again, to “fear not.”

St. Paul knew about fear and about loss. In our passage from Philippians, he uses the language of profit and loss to compare his benefits, before and after following Jesus. Things he had once regarded as assets he now writes off as loss, for the sake of Christ (3:7). Paul describes his gains in terms of ownership – not his ownership, but God’s ownership and, therefore, Paul’s stewardship. “For his sake,” Paul says in verse 8, “I have suffered the loss of all things…not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes from faith in Christ.” And he sums up his theology of stewardship in verse 12: “Not that I have already attained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.”

In the midst of free-floating anxiety and anger, in a society fraught with fear, how shall we live our lives? Shall we live in fear of losing what we own? Or shall we live in faith, knowing WHO owns us, knowing whose own we are, knowing Jesus Christ? As human beings, we do live our days somewhere between fear and faith. But how do we – how do you and I want to live? What have we lost? What do we own? Who owns us? And Jesus, who talks about money more than almost anything else – where is Jesus in all this? (Sharon O’Rear, the chair of our Stewardship Team, had some things to share with us at this point about fear, help, faith and stewardship.)

A woman wise in the ways of life told me this week that, in order to be happy, we human beings seem to think we need all the money we can get. Why is that? Just how much money do we think will make us happy? She also says we believe we don’t have enough money, when we actually do. We think and are taught and programmed to believe we will never have enough. For those who may have lost their jobs, this wisdom means something different than it does for those of us who are fairly well-off financially. Still, questions remain, questions that take on new meaning for us at All Saints’ these days: How might we have ALL that we truly need? How is God calling us to share the time, talent and treasure we have been given? What have we lost? What do we own? Whose own are we?

The Rev. Thomas A. Momberg
All Saints' Episcopal Church, Frederick, MD
October 5, 2008