Sermon – August 9, 2015
From Picnic to Potluck…The Common Good…Caring Community
The choice of my sermon topic today actually came about because of a
trip to the Bay area in 2013, and a visit to Moe’s Book Store in Berkeley
where I bought a book entitled, The Common Good, by Marcus G.
Raskin. It was written in 1986 and Raskin was a staff member of
President Kennedy’s National Security Council and cofounder of the
Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. The book jacket cover
had this blurb, “this thinker and activist moved beyond the limit and
failures of socialism and capitalism to the original theory of social
reconstruction for a humane society.
My interest in this subject is also related to the fact that I worked for
corporations which administered the Medicaid program in the State of
Kansas for 20 years and my sympathies lie with our citizens who need
extra help. President Lyndon Johnson’s administration enacted the
expansion of the Social Security Act in 1965 to include Medicare and
Medicaid and he credited it as a legacy of what John Kennedy had
begun. Franklin Roosevelt had signed the Social Security Act in 1935.
The really big ideas of what the Common Good is about from my
perspective is what I would like to share this morning. It is mainly
about the major principles that I have time to talk about. I have
concluded that we all need to work harder at taking better care of our
planet and its people.
Raskin wrote, “the common good is utterly intertwined with the
question of care and taking care.” And he paraphrases William Ellery
Channing, Unitarian Theologian, “it is the obligation of caring that
human beings owe each other, owe nature and owe that which they
produce that can be used positively for each other (In a life affirming
way.)” He also used a term I had not heard before, Egalitarian
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Interdependence which he defines as the process of political and
economic equality between people in which we play out our needs and
wants through joint actions, projects and jointly defined tasks. And
Raskin also says the purpose of politics is to align institutions and
relations in such a way as enables its citizens to attain personhood
using the principles of egalitarian interdependence. One final gleaning
from Raskin is this comment about the values of the market system
from the perspective of economists, government officials, business
people who tend to see some people as marginal if they are deemed
unproductive. The worth of a political system should be valued only
to the extent that it protects and esteems those who do not appear to
have productive or economic value to those in power. For it is this
sentiment which has the greatest utility and is critical to the
maintenance of civilization.
The reason I had used the Loaves and Fishes Miracle story from the
Bible today was because of where I had remembered hearing the term
Radical Egalitarian in association with Jesus in a book by John Dominic
Crossan (Crawson), a member of the Jesus Seminar, whose members
sought to reconstruct the historical Jesus. The book was Jesus, A
Revolutionary Biography. I got to hear John Dominic Crossan speak at
St. Paul School of Theology, my alma mater, in 1997, and had lunch
with him and a group of other people after the lecture. David Grimm,
who was the Topeka UU Minister at that time, and I went together to
hear him talk. I think Lisa Schwartz was also there. She was a student
at St. Paul at the time, I believe, and another member of the Topeka
congregation. She later gave a sermon about the loaves and fishes
where I first heard this idea that the real miracle of the Loaves and
Fishes was not that laws of nature were obliterated when five loaves of
bread and 2 fishes suddenly morphed into enough to feed 5,000 men
plus women and children, but that human nature was transformed from
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its usual selfish protective mode to communal sharing mode. It is the
most elemental definition of the common good – sharing basic
resources. The eating mode changed from family picnic to community
potluck and there were left overs to boot that were undoubtedly saved
for another day.)
Crossan wrote that Jesus was a rural peasant Jewish Cynic. In Greek
philosophy cynics believed that the purpose of life was to live in virtue,
in agreement with nature, and as reasoning creatures humans could
live naturally without desires for wealth, power, sex, and fame and a
life free from all possessions. Crossan presents that Jesus’ strategy as a
Jewish cynic in rural lower Galilee, for himself and his followers was to
practice “free healing and common eating, a religious and economic
egalitarianism that negated alike and at once the hierarchical and
patronal normalcies of Jewish religion and Roman power.” Crossan
presents Jesus as a Radical Egalitarian whose absolute equality of
people and its implications for no hierarchy of religion or politics would
have been seen as a threat to local leaders and Roman overseers.
Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount about blessed are the poor for theirs is the
Kingdom of God, and his parable that concluded “whatever you have
done for the least of these my brethren, you have done unto me” fits
the egalitarian point of view of a peasant cynic. And the rich would
have a hard time joining the Kingdom of God. They had a lot more to
give up. “Go and sell all that you have and give it to the poor, and you
will have much treasure in heaven.” (So, perhaps if Jesus had been a
little less radical, he could have told the rich young ruler, we can
develop a progressive tax where you share with the poor; they could
have compromised.)
The founders of our United States were operating under the
domination of an oppressive Empire that taxed without representation.
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Consider the Declaration of Independence as a statement framed to
identify a fledgling nation fashioning an egalitarian experiment…with
words like all men are created equal, and from the Preamble to the
Constitution… to form a more perfect Union, and to promote the
general Welfare. These are principles of inclusiveness and care of
the people.
Another major contributor to the conversation about the
Common Good is Thomas Paine. If Paine’s “Common Sense”
pamphlet has not been written, this country may not have
completely severed the ties with Great Britain. Thomas Paine wrote
his pamphlet “The Rights of Man” in response to the French
Revolution with these words, “when it shall be said in any
country in the world, my poor are happy; neither ignorance nor
distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of
prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the
taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend,
because I am the friend of its happiness: when these things can
be, then may that country boast its constitution and its
government.” Thomas Paine in his “Agrarian Justice” pamphlet
proposed a ground rent system in the 1790’s for land owners to pay
to the government as a forerunner of the social security system. He
believed that all the citizens were the real owners of the earth as it
occupants and the land owners owed it to the general population to
share the profits from the development of the land. It was an estate
tax to fund universal old-age and disability pensions. Go to the
Social Security.Gov website and do a search for Thomas Paine to get
the details.
But this common good topic was also influenced by a Paul Krugman
column from 11/2/2013 that I had been saving entitled, “Republicans
Should Heed the Words of Alf Landon”. This article shows how far
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removed we now are from the ideal in Raskin’s book, our Founding
Fathers, and Jesus. Krugman wrote that John Kasich, the Republican
governor of Ohio, has done some surprising things lately. First, he did
an end run around his state’s legislature - controlled by his own party –
to proceed with the federally funded expansion of Medicaid than is an
important piece of Obamacare. Then, defending his action, he let loose
on his political allies, declaring, “I’m concerned about the fact there
seems to be a war on the poor. That, if you’re poor, somehow you’re
shiftless and lazy.” But Krugman went on in this article to say that this
hostility has not always been the case. That in 1936 Kansas Governor
Alf Landon gave his acceptance speech as the Republican nominee for
president in which he stated, “out of this Depression has come, not
only the problem of recovery but also the equally grave problem of
caring for the unemployed until recovery is attained. Their relief at all
times is a matter of plain duty. We of our party pledge that this
obligation will never be neglected.” (I actually got to meet Alf Landon.
He owned WREN Radio in Topeka and I sold office products to his
business. He and his daughter Senator Nancy Kassebaum came from an
era when across the isles civility was still in vogue.) That is not the
common sentiment now and Krugman said what this is all about is one
reason given by sociologist Daniel Little, market ideology: If the market
is always right, then people who end up poor must deserve to be poor.”
Our history in this country is a constant push and pull between
protecting the rights of the well to do and the have nots. We still have
much work to do on the lessons of sharing.
I read Wendell Berry’s book, What Matters? Economics for a Renewed
Commonwealth. Berry is a poet and agrarian…here is what he says
about the global market system. “The folly at the root of this foolish
economy began with the idea that a corporation should be regarded,
legally, as “a person.” But the limitless destructive of this economy
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comes about precisely because a corporation is not a person. A
corporation, essentially is a pile of money to which a number of
persons have sold their moral allegiance. A corporation does not age,
does not arrive, as most people finally do, at a realization of the
shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the
future as the lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in
particular. It can experience no personal hope or remorse, no change
of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were
immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money.
And, I don’t mean to say, of course, that all corporate executives and
stockholders are bad people. I am only saying that all of them are very
seriously implicated in a bad economy.”
I would also recommend Pope Francis’ Encyclical about Our Common
Home. It is 125 pages and he mentions the Common-Good around 33
times. I like what he says about taking care of our planet and the poor.
I want to finish my remarks today on a note of optimism and hope by
referencing The UnCommon Good, a book written by Jim Wallis, who is
an evangelical Christian, whose progressive Christian organization,
Sojourners, has done positive work for social justice. He says that “the
heart of the message of Jesus was a new order breaking into history,
changing everything about the world, including us.” He offers that “A
central purpose of this book is to challenge the hateful ideological
warfare between the conservative and liberal sides in our ongoing
political battles, as well as their inability to listen to or learn anything
from each other. I believe the best idea of the conservative political
philosophy is the call to personal responsibility: choices and decisions
about individual moral behavior, personal relationships like marriage
and parenting, work ethics, fiscal integrity, service, compassion, and
security. And the best idea of the liberal philosophy is the call to social
responsibility: the commitment to our neighbor, economic fairness,
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racial and gender equality, the just nature of society, needed social
safety nets, public accountability for business, and the importance of
cooperative international relationships. The common good comprises
the best of both ideas – we need to be personally responsible and
socially just. This is key to ending the hateful conflict and beginning to
understand the other side’s contributions to the quality of our life
together.
I recommend this book and that if you have Christian friends to ask
them to read it also. Cornel West, who was at UU General Assembly
this summer, says that Jim Wallis is this country’s major prophetic
evangelical Christian voice.
I would also like to recommend that you watch for Ted Glenn’s adult RE
class coming soon on Income Inequality.
That’s all I’ve got to say about that…right now…
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