"Greed: The Shape Shifter"

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The Fire Solstice

Long, long ago, the people noticed that the sun seemed to be leaving them. The days were getting shorter, darker, colder. The sun, which used to linger high in the sky, now seemed shy, peeking just over the horizon for a moment – and then disappearing into the cold night. Without the sun, people feared their crops would never grow again, and they themselves would never again get warm.

They went to the wise woman in the town and asked her, “What should we do?”

“The sun is sad,” the wise woman said. “Make the sun happy, and he will come back.”

“How do we do that?” they asked.

“Beats me,” said the wise woman. “What is it that makes you happy?”

“It makes us happy when we see the sun,” the people moaned.

“Sounds like a problem,” said the wise woman.

So the people went away and talked amongst themselves. And they realized that sometimes when they’re feeling blue, they feel better if they get up and dance. So they danced, they lit fires, they played music. But still the sun did not come back.

Then they noticed that there was one family in the town who did not join in the dancing, and when they went to find out why, it was because that family was too cold and too hungry. They did not have enough to eat. So even though with the sun gone and the crops fallow the people of the town all were facing scarce food supplies, they shared what little they had and brought food to the family that was hungry. Once they had eaten, the last family joined the dance. And you know what? The sun saw that everyone was included, and everyone was sharing, and no one was left out – and the sun felt happy too, and began to come back, and the days got longer and warmer, and the crops began to grow again.

This time of year when the sun goes away is called the Winter Solstice. During this time of year we light fires, and dance and sing;. And all year long, we share what we have, and march and dance and sing for justice.

Readings

From the book, “Sabbath,” by Wayne Muller. He quotes here an ad for perfume in a window at Macy’s:

You want it. You want it bad. Sometimes so much it hurts. You can taste it. You feel like you would do anything to get it. Go further than they’d suspect. Twist your soul and crush what’s in your way. Then you get it. And something happens. You become the object of your desire. And it feels incredible.

From the 1987 movie “Wall Street,” the speech given by Michael Douglas’s character Gordon Gekko to the shareholders of Teldar Paper Company

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 Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.

Thank you very much.

 

Sermon:

Greed: The Shape Shifter

By Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganz

“Dashing through the snow” – but wait – are those jingle bells I hear? Or are they the chains of Marley’s ghost?

Jacob Marley, you will remember, was the deceased business partner of one Ebenezer Scrooge. On the Christmas Eve that is the setting for Dickens’ /Christmas Carol/, Marley’s ghost appears to Scrooge. Since his death a few years previous, Marley’s fate has been to roam the earth, dragging always with him a heavy chain made up of money boxes – the same boxes he’d hoarded when he was alive. Old Marley, like his buddy Scrooge, was a miser and a meanie, railing against poor people and begrudging their poor little clerk, Bob Cratchit, his one day a year to take the day off and spend Christmas with his family.

Bah, humbug.

My friends, we are deep into the darkest of days. Is there anyone out there who hasn’t identified with Scrooge’s view of the holiday season? And let me ask you this: are you doing your Christmas duty? – not your Christian duty, though sometimes folks have a hard time separating the two. Your Christmas duty: If sales are slow this season and the economy falters, will you be able to say honestly that you’ve done your part?

This is from a recent CBS news report: The National Retail Federation is predicting that sales will be only 4% higher this year than they were last year. If that prediction holds, this will be the slowest retail growth we've seen in five years. Perhaps we should suspend church this morning and send you all out to the malls instead.

It isn’t news that our economy runs on raising the levels of everyone’s consumption, yours and mine, and this is accomplished by raising our levels of desire for things we never knew we needed till we saw them on TV or in a store window. But how did we get here?

Laurence Shames wrote his book, “The Hunger for More,” about the 1980s, the junk bond, Bonfire-of-the-Vanities decade that ended with a Black Monday crash on Wall Street. After it all came tumbling down, it looked to Shames like America might have run out of options for continuing to make the pie bigger. Shames saw this as hopeful: perhaps Americans might be ready to turn to other sources of satisfaction – happiness? Contentment? Spiritual fulfillment?

That was before the dot-com boom of the 1990s and this decade's twin homeland-security-and-privatization booms and the subprime mortgage boom and bust. Shames turned out to be more right than he wanted to be when he wrote this:

Quote -- “There was a presumption that America would keep on booming – if not forever, then longer than it made sense to worry about. There would always be another gold rush, another Homestead Act, another oil strike. The next generation would always ferret out opportunities that would be still more lavish than any that had gone before. America WAS those opportunities. This was an article not just of faith, but of strategy. You banked on the next windfall, you staked your hopes and even your self-esteem on it; and this led to a national turn of mind that might usefully be thought of as the habit of more.” – end of quote. “The habit of more” -- it began, of course, with the American frontier, this habit of mind that grew to assume there was always somewhere else to get – and then, to desire to get there.

This is what built America. How can we call it sin? If this is greed, then maybe, as Gordon Gekko said in the movie “Wall Street,” Greed really is good. How many of you remember that movie? The Michael Douglas character was so successful making money as an investment banker on Wall Street that his personal office was about the size of this Sanctuary.

But Gekko was not the first to make a saint out of what truly is the Mother of All the Seven Deadlies. Greed comes in many disguises, most of which we don’t associate with sin:

Thrift

Industriousness

Laissez-faire capitalism

The social contract

The wealth of nations

Freedom and democracy

Unconditional love

And then there’s desire, forerunner of greed. Buddhist belief is clear about desire in the doctrine of the Four Noble Truths. Truth One: Life is characterized by suffering. Truth Two: Suffering is caused by desire – by craving, by attachment.

But the religions of the world do not speak with one voice on this subject of desire – the drive to acquire things, money, prestige, sex, even spirituality. Our Protestant ancestors believed that wealth and prosperity were signs of inner grace, and blessed the drive to get them. Sufi poets like Rumi and Hafiz wrote with great beauty of desire, or yearning for God. Tricksters in many religions – Mercury in Greco-Roman mythology and Raven in Native American spirituality – are characterized by “raven-ous” appetite. We honor them for acting to serve these appetites, because this is how they create culture and make the world as we know it.

In Jewish learning, the drive for money, property, pleasure, is called the /yetzer hara. /Sometimes /yetzer hara /is translated “evil impulse,” but it’s more complicated than that. The rabbis teach that nothing much would get done in life without it, including babies getting made.

Maybe the Gordon Gekkos of the world are so attractive not only because they’re rich, but because they’re /right/. /Is/ greed good?

In a way It's true: greed and desire keep the wheels of commerce spinning and the culture changing and growing. But Gekko got one part very, very wrong. Greed does not “clarify.” Greed does not “cut through,” except when It mows down everything in its path. To the contrary, greed muddies judgment when it goes about cloaked in the garb of thrift, capitalism and democracy, unconditional love.

Take a look at thrift: it’s hard to know how to get it right. We need to save for the children’s education, we need to save for our own old age. But how much do we need? Most of us do a lot more for ourselves and our families than the prayer Jesus taught his followers: “Give us this day, our daily bread.” What would it be like to live one day to the next, trusting God or the universe to provide? How much do we really need to get by, now and in the future?

Of course it’s only wise to save for a rainy day. It’s just that we don’t know how rainy the days ahead might get. Better hang onto more than we’re likely to need. When do our impulses of self-care and self-preservation shade from thrift into greed? When does saving turn into hoarding?

Or how about greed in the guise of economic theory – supply-side or trickle-down economics, Including the current vogue for eliminating social safety nets. Did you know that on the night It was 23 degrees here, Arlington's winter shelter had to turn away 200 people? Please see Ken Perkins-Gough at the Social Action Table to find out how you can help, before the next snowfall. Eliminating social safety nets Is the project of a fundamentalist capitalism that breeds true believers, who yearn for a pure economic theory the way the Sufi poets yearned for God. Naomi Klein writes of the chaos caused by this economic system in a new book, “The Shock Doctrine” -- that this kind of capitalism has to be imposed because nobody would ever vote for it. We went to war in Iraq not to enable democracy but to create a free market field for multinational corporations. This Is capitalism masquerading as democracy, but Klein asserts this kind of capitalism is incompatible with democracy.

Most markedly at this time of year, greed shows up in love, even as unconditional love. When my children were small, I used to treasure the Santa story. After they'd gone to bed on Christmas Eve, I would drag the gifts out of their basement hiding places and spend all night putting them together. The next morning, there it was – just what they wanted, more than they wanted, appearing out of nowhere, bought by loving parents who wanted no reward but to see the sparkle in their children’s eyes. Yet it was always too much – some years, much too much. I was as vulnerable as the next person to the excesses of the season – to thinking that a magic Christmas had to be over the top. Have you seen that commercial Sears is running? “Don’t just give a gift. Grant a wish.” The gift -- the gift that Is, by Implication, Inadequate, is not one new tool for the toolbox, but a whole new shop full of new tools. It isn’t a sweater or an outfit, but a new closet full of new clothes. There is always the look of amazement – I never dreamed I’d get all this! – That was the look I wanted to see on my kids’ faces on Christmas morning. I was greedy for it, and the companies that sold the products I bought knew just how to play me.

It’s a good impulse, to love your children. Freedom is good. Democracy is good. Thrift is good.

Even though the rabbis teach that nothing much would happen in life without a /yetzer hara – /an evil impulse, a drive for money, property or pleasure – they also teach that these drives better not go unchecked. Every person has a /yetzer hara, /but they darn well better also have a /yetzer hatov, /an impulse to do good. A conscience. Both impulses exist within all of us, according to Jewish teaching. The wise person keeps them in balance.

It’s hard to do – maybe especially hard if you tend not to give too much credence to the idea of “sin” in the first place. In rejecting a hell-and-damnation, fear-based theology, Unitarian Universalists tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater and give scarce thought to the idea that we even have an “evil impulse.” Sometimes I wonder if that makes it easier for us to overlook greed when it comes cloaked in virtue like thrift, like freedom, like love. Sometimes I wonder if this is why it’s so hard for us to recognize the obvious truth that if we have more than our share of the Earth’s wealth and resources, it means that someone else has less. I wonder If we are too quick to assign the face of greed outside ourselves -- not Scrooge In the year 2007, but maybe the Investment banker I heard about on the radio the other day who earns 70 million dollars a year, or perhaps not a person at all but a multinational corporation -- for sure It's someone other that you and me, and this spares us from asking ourselves how are we complicit In the system that gives power to that greed.

Keeping balance is hard to do, in an economic system that runs amok on making us “want it bad” -- bad enough to “twist your soul and crush what’s in your way.” It’s hard to keep balance in a holiday season where the sweet sound of children’s voices is used to sell you stuff. It’s hard, in a culture where everything is screaming at us to go for the greed – and whispering in our ears what we may want to believe – “greed is good.”

Don’t let them fool you. Keep around you people who remind you where good really lies. If you are greedy, be greedy for justice. For community. Be greedy for collective action to demand that our governments restore our fraying social safety net. Put your yetzer hara to work making this a safer world, a kinder and more generous world, not just for you and your known dear ones, but for all people.

Benediction

As the days get shorter and darker, light up your nights not with neon store windows and the flickering screen, but with the glow of one another's faces. Sing and dance and march for love and for justice, and this will bring back the sun.

Sermon Sources & Inspirations:

Charles Dickens, /A Christmas Carol/

Lewis Hyde, /Trickster Makes This World/

Naomi Klein, /The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism/

Wayne Muller, /Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal and Delight in Our Busy Lives/

Laurence Shames, /The Hunger for More: Searching for Values in an Age of Greed/

Phyllis Tickle, /Greed/

/Wall Street, /1987 movie by Oliver Stone

Questions for Covenant Groups

1. What are you greedy for? Is that greed "good" In your life?

2. What mask does greed wear -- In the culture at large, and In your own life?

3. What do you think about the Buddhist Idea that 1) Life Is suffering, and 2) Suffering Is caused by desire? Is that true In your own life?

4. What do you think about the Jewish Idea that we all have a /yetzer hara/, a drive for money, property and pleasure? Do these drives seem "evil" to you? What do you think about the "yetzer hatov," the "good Impulse" that Is supposed to keep the /yetzer hara/ In check? Do you see these Impulses operating In your own life? How do you keep them In balance?