First
Presbyterian Church of
Hosea 11 and Luke 12
“A Community of Strangers”
The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry
The image of
the movie came to mind of course because of the way Jesus dismisses the fellow
who wants help. Jesus shoos him away by
saying bluntly, beware of greed. And if
you say greed I think, Wall Street,
the greed is good speech.
The main
character of the movie Wall Street is
Gordon Gekko, a buyer and seller of companies.
The greed is good speech comes when Gekko wants to make a profit on a
paper company that is doing very poorly.
He comes to a corporate meeting to address his fellow stock holders and
make clear that they are the real owners of the company and that the board
overseeing their investment and the executives being paid have lost sight of
the bottom line- the company lost $110 million the year before and in his mind
making a profit is not one alternative among others.
His speech is
fascinating. He starts:
We're
not here to indulge in fantasy but in political and economic reality.
He then moves backward to a time in his mind where
companies didn’t just roll over and die. This was, he says,
In
the days of the free market when our country was a top industrial power, there
was accountability to the stockholder. The Carnegies, the Mellons, the men that
built this great industrial empire, made sure of it because it was their money
at stake. Today, management has no stake in the company!
And then he makes a great point. Waving his had at the suits on the dais he
says,
All
together, these men sitting up here own less than three percent of the company.
And where does the CEO put his million-dollar salary? Not in our company; he
owns less than one percent. You own the company. That's right, you, the
stockholder.
And then the zinger:
Our
company has 33 different vice presidents each earning over 200 thousand dollars
a year. Now, I have spent the last two months analyzing what all these guys do,
and I still can't figure it out. One thing I do know is that our paper company
lost 110 million dollars last year, and I'll bet that half of that was spent in
all the paperwork going back and forth between all these vice presidents. The
new law of evolution in corporate
His summation though is what sticks:
The
point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good.
Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the
essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life,
for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And
greed, you mark my words, will not only save our company, but that other
malfunctioning corporation called the
"Greed
is good" is what always sticks with me, but there is another line nestled
in the end here which is much more important, it is the real point Jesus was
trying to make to the man. And the line
is “greed, in all its forms; greed for life, for money, for love,
knowledge.” Greed in all its forms.
For
the most part I believe we associate greed only with money. Yet, if we thought about for a moment, and
this is something I believe, greed for money doesn’t have much power over us
today. There is greed for money, it is
worthless to argue its non-existence, but there is enough money and it is easy
enough to find that money isn’t the most valuable of commodities.
Where
we are greedy today, by and large, is not with money, but with our freedom and
our name and our relationships, and most importantly our privacy. We want to be private, and thus, we rarely,
if ever, speak in public, act publicly, let alone live lives in the midst of
others.
This
is not something we invented; it has been a slow evolution since the
1950s. This last week I meet with
interns at the YMCA. Rebecca Reed, one
of the directors, asked me to come and speak to the four regarding community
and how a non-profit helps to grow community.
The first thirty minutes I spent trying to define what community is and
how and where it can be built. This is a
fun question because community is one of those words that everyone knows and
uses, but when called upon to define, becomes very nebulous.
So
my point with them is that the Y’s slogan: building strong kids, strong
families, and strong communities, gets harder and harder with each step. After defining this I wanted to give them a
heads up. Some of these may be future
leaders of the Y and I have a rule, if I am sending you to a fight, I will do
my best to make sure you know the lay of the land. So, on the newsprint pad I wrote: air
conditioning, the second car, and television.
These are your opponents as it were.
Like
Gekko I took them back to a time when things were different. Before these three, community wasn’t a rare
commodity, but a kind of basic building block and there was a lot to go
around. Yet with the introduction of air
conditioning people, started to stay indoors instead of sitting on porches;
with television people started to find their evening wiled away watching a box,
not talking to their neighbors; and the second car made it possible to go where
you want, when you want and, in essence, shop where you want. The corner store, the front porch, the grape
vine, all went away.
These
I said when they are added up equal a community of strangers. In our world today, where no one is known,
being unknown is the greatest commodity.
People are very ready to give money, but give their name? No.
Help a cause, yes; join a cause, no.
Attend an event, yes; become a member, no.
Privacy
is our tempter today. We bemoan the
absence of leadership, the state of our neighborhoods, and the feeling that
nothing is safe as we drive by in air conditioned cars now equipped with
televisions and stereo systems that create our own world.
A
few weeks ago there was a pediatrician who was visiting from out of state. In the fellowship hall he tried to recruit me
in his effort to get parents to reduce the amount of television kids watch. At first I wanted to say, "Good luck
with that one." But then I thought it
about for a moment. "Do you want to
know why kids watch television," I said?
This piqued his curiosity. "They watch television because we don’t
let them out of our sight. Children are
not allowed to wander, roam, play all day wherever the spirit leads them."
I
know I did, and given the fact the man was old enough to be my father I said, "And
I know for sure you did." All
summer I roamed and played and the rule was you had to be home when the street
lights came on and you weren’t allowed in people’s homes before nine in the
morning. I usually waited until 10 so I
could watch the Price is Right. But the point was you went out. Isn’t that what you did as a child? I mentioned this to someone a few days ago and
they spoke of being locked out and having to shout to get let in to use the
bathroom. Kids and dogs were meant to be
outside, such was my childhood.
Could
it be that we don’t feel safe because we don’t really know anyone? Could it be we keep our children corralled in
front of televisions because we can’t imagine them out and about? Yet, isn’t that making a community of
strangers where the greatest commodity is privacy and having everything within
your own house? There is a greed, a kind
of mania, for privacy.
A number of years ago our son, Josh, came with
a request. It was a kind of noble, young
boy making his way sort of query. He
said, "Can I use the wood in the garage to build a tree house?" I said, "You can use the wood, but not
for a tree house." He took this as
some sort of cautionary concern, a kind of parental red light regarding
safety. Immediately he began to argue
his case. Mid-argument I said, "I
tell you what, there is a tape measure in the drawer. Measure the wood and then go outside and
measure the distance between the trees where you want to build." With a hubris I must confess is my own, he
grabbed the measure and set out.
I could hear him rumbling in the
garage. I could hear the gate open and
close to the area behind our house where there plenty of lovely fir trees. And then silence. Finally, the door opened and slammed; the
drawer opened and slammed; and then he walked off in a huff. The anger was that
none of the boards he wanted to use could span the distance between the trees. None of them could be used as a basic
structure.
Sometimes
when I look around or sit in my home watching the Home and Garden Channel I wonder if all our boards are a bit too
short. We want to build, we want a
vibrant community and a place where children are safe, but we want to be anonymous
and private. We want a strong community,
not to be a part of it, but because it is good for property values and we need
good property values if we are going to remodel the kitchen, making our home
the perfect retreat from the world. The
result is a kind of greed for a world where we can come and go as we please and
live in a kind of nether world of consumerism without ever knowing the people
on our block.
Now
here is the good news, or better said, you are the good news. That you are here, right now, in this place
is the good news. To be in this place
when you could have listened on the radio (my apologies to our radio listeners),
to be in this place when you could just download the sermon and listen to it on
a jog or in a car, makes you the good news.
It is also what makes us counter cultural.
You
might not think of yourself as rebels but you are. Every time you gather here for worship, every
time we come together you are going against the grain of our greed for
privacy. A number of years ago George
Gallup found that over 90 percent of the people who said they didn’t go to
church gave as their reason for not going, "No one invited me." Now
some might say, you don’t need an invitation.
But we do.
We
live in anonymous, private worlds, a community of strangers, and this has a
powerful hold. The man who came to Jesus
was being held by a greed so he would rather enlist a stranger from a different
town who was passing through than actually speak and live and work out his
family problems with his family. You see
I don’t believe the television and air conditioning and a second car ruined our
communities because they were there; they did this but because they let a deep
temptation in us find fruit and that fruit is a kind of greed where we want to
be have everything within the confines of our castles.
Again,
the good news is that we are here, and we are gaining. Yet, we need to know the lay of the
land. You need to know that when you
invite a neighbor or friend to come to church you are not only inviting them to
give up a leisurely Sunday morning, but you are also inviting them to give up
their anonymity, to lay aside the greed of our privacy, for just a moment. If you had asked them to give you money to
help our efforts, there would be far less panic. I will tell you, it is far easier for me to
give money, than my name.
This
is what I believe: we want a vibrant community where kids roam free during long
summer days and people speak to each on the street and gather in homes and feel
like they are a vital part, but the lives we are living, the privacy we adore,
anonymity we covet, has left us with short boards for the tree house. They simply aren’t big enough.
The
lives we live today are greedy for privacy.
With them we will never bridge the gap; we will not be able to build
what we long for. The good news is that
we are here and we can reach out to others and invite them in, make them a
part, challenge them to be known and to become a real part of this church. We can do that. It isn’t easy. For we live in a community of strangers. To make it different is a fight, a challenge. But we can do it. Amen.