[This
is an edited version of a sermon delivered May 4, 2008, at St.
Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Austin, TX. http://www.staopen.com/]
The last
time I was in this pulpit to deliver a guest sermon, I spoke of
the need for each of us to take up the role of prophet, to not
be afraid of speaking in the prophetic voice, even when doing
so involves risk. (http://zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/14743)
Today I want to talk about the other kind of profit, the allure
of which can so often quiet the prophetic voice within us.
Living in
the most powerful and affluent country in the history of the world,
this is not mere word play with homophones (words that sound the
same but have different meanings). Can we resist the seductive
nature of the material rewards that come with profit to find within
us the spirit of the prophetic? If we cannot, what is the fate
of this country? What is the fate of the world that this country
seeks to dominate? And my subject today: What is the fate of our
souls?
Let's start
with one of the most well-known verses from the gospels, from
Mark, where Jesus says: "For what shall it profit a man, if he
shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" [Mark 8:36]
What do we
gain when we covet the wealth of the world that can come with
accepting the systems and structures of power? When feeling self-righteous,
we are tempted to say that we agree with Jesus, that when we place
too much value on material rewards we lose something greater.
But if we are to be honest, we have to acknowledge that those
material rewards in the world can be extremely seductive. If you
doubt this, when you leave church go visit a shopping mall. No
doubt we all know where to find one nearby. Even when the reward
is not "the whole world" but just one little piece of it in a
store in the mall, the pull of those rewards can be strong.
That's perhaps
the cruel edge of this truth - the fact that in this culture when
we talk about "selling out" or "selling our souls" we realize
the selling price is typically quite low. That's what Robert Bolt
was getting at in his play A Man for All Seasons, in which
Sir Thomas More is convicted of treason on the perjured testimony
of Richard Rich, who in exchange for his capitulation to King
Henry VIII is appointed Attorney-General for Wales.
In the play, More asks one final question of Rich after noticing
that the Attorney-General is wearing the medallion of his new
position. The stage directions call for More to look into Rich's
face, "with pain and amusement," saying, "For Wales? Why Richard,
it profits a man nothing to lose his soul for the whole world.
But for Wales?" [1]
I don't want
to take sides in British regional and class conflicts, but his
point is well taken. We can find amusement in the crumbs for which
some people will sell their souls, but there is also much pain
in recognizing ourselves in the mirror that Thomas More holds
up for Richard Rich. For what would I sell my soul? For what have
I sold my soul? Do I ever dream of Wales?
At some point
in our lives, we have all sacrificed a principle or undermined
another person to get what we want, though most of us have never
lied under oath and helped send someone to the gallows. But the
fact that there's always a Richard Rich to point to, always someone
whose soul-selling is more egregious than ours, is of little comfort.
As Rev. Jim Rigby reminds us, week after week in his sermons from
this pulpit, the job of theology is not to comfort us in our conceits
but to challenge us to go deeper.
That means
not only reflecting on our own failures in such moments, but going
beyond the idea that our souls are at risk only in a single moment
in which we might be tempted to sell out. Just as important is
the slower process by which that state of our souls can be eroded.
I want to frame that challenge in the words of the writer Wendell
Berry, using the first stanza of his poem "We Who Prayed and Wept"
[2]:
We who
prayed and wept
for
liberty from kings
and the yoke of liberty
accept the tyranny of things
we do not need.
In plenitude too free,
we have become adept
beneath the yoke of greed.
Berry trains
our attention on the day-to-day reality of the world in which
we live, in the most powerful and affluent country in the world,
in which many of us hold the freedom to enslave ourselves. So,
let's expand the question beyond the dramatic moments in which
we choose whether we will sell our souls at what price and focus
on how our souls are shaped by the everyday realities of power
and privilege.
|
The
irony is that typically we work so hard for money that buys
those cheap toys, yet we often are unwilling to do the hard
work to get something more.
|
My
focus today is not on the injustice of this system, not on the
suffering that inevitably results in a world structured by empire
and capitalism. I'm not going to talk about the cruelty of a world
in which half the population lives on less than US$2 a day. Of
course we should remind ourselves constantly that our affluence
is conditioned on that suffering around the world, and that we
have obligations to change that. But right now, I'm heading down
a different path.
Since we
live in a country that seems only to know how to speak in economic
language that assumes capitalism is the state of nature, let's
examine this question in the language of profit and loss. If we
live in "the land of the bottom line," to borrow a phrase from
the songwriter John Gorka, then let's talk in those terms. How
might we approach a die-hard capitalist who cares only about maximizing
self-interest and make an argument that it profits us not to sell
our souls for the whole world, let alone for the shopping mall.
I'm using
the mall as a stand-in for the readily available pleasures in
a consumer-capitalist society that absorbs a disproportionate
share of the world's resources, the pleasures that come with what
we might call the cheap toys of empire: big houses, fast cars,
abundant food, nonstop spectacle entertainment, and an endless
variety of numbing drugs.
When we capitulate to the system, most of us get some combination
of those things. Maybe there are some among us who have tapped
into real wealth and real power, but my guess is that most of
us here today are somewhere in the middle and upper-middle classes.
We aren't the ruling class, but we live well, at a level that
in previous eras only the elite could expect. But look closer
and what do we get?
How do we feel when we are alone with ourselves in our big houses;
when we park the fast car in the driveway; when we push back from
the table after eating too much; when we switch off the television
or drive away from the stadium; when the effects of those drugs
- whether legal or illegal, obtained from the pharmacy or on the
street - wear off.
An important
note: I don't want to ignore the fact that to those who have never
had much in this world, access to material goods is not a trivial
matter. For those who struggle for the basics, this kind of reflection
on affluence likely seems self-indulgent. But still we have to
ask: When we go so far beyond material security into the level
of consumption common in the United States, and when we are through
consuming the things that profits can buy, where are we and who
are we? Do we like where we are and who we are?
For the moment,
put aside empathy and compassion for those suffering with less.
We don't need to be told that the injustice of this system hurts
others and that the fate of those others should be our concern.
For the moment, ask yourself what have been the consequences for
you and your soul of living with the cheap toys of empire.
It's enticing
to want to wiggle out of that one by pointing a finger at those
who consume more - Richard Rich in a Hummer, perhaps - but that's
at best a temporary diversion. There are always others making
choices that are easy to critique. I'm suggesting that instead
we ask a more troubling question - not about our empathy for others
in the world who suffer with nothing or our contempt for those
wallow in everything - but about ourselves. How do we feel, deep
down in the place where we don't allow others in, where we often
won't go ourselves?
This country
is awash in abundance of most everything except the two things
we cannot really live a decent life without - the meaning we desperately
seek in a world of endless mystery, and the sense of real connection
to others that we crave so that we can share that meaning.
There are
big moral moments in our lives, times in which we must choose
between allegiance to our principles and our fear of power, between
our obligations to others and our desire for material comfort.
In those moments, we should struggle to make sure we don't sell
our souls for the temporary pleasures of the world. But every
day we also recognize that our souls - our sense of what it means
to be human beings - are being shaped day-to-day by the same systems
of power and privilege.
Let me be
clear one more time: My pitch today is not just that all this
matters for the sake of justice, but that it also matters for
more selfish reasons. In this system, we lose when we allow systems
of empire and capital to shape our souls, day after day in ways
sometimes too subtle to see. We lose no matter how many toys we
accumulate.
This is one
of the main reasons I come to church and look forward to Rev.
Rigby's reminders of how hard it is to be a decent person in this
world - not because I'm so noble but because I'm so weak. I need
to be reminded, over and over, that most of the pleasures of the
empire are mostly illusion. The irony is that typically we work
so hard for money that buys those cheap toys, yet we often are
unwilling to do the hard work to get something more. That's why
we need some kind of church, some place to come to support each
other in that struggle to be more than the culture expects of
us.
That is always
a struggle, even for the strongest among us. Wendell Berry has
done more than most of us to resist this culture of greed through
his efforts not only to theorize about sustainable agriculture
and rural community but to live those practices, yet he reminds
us that he struggles. I'll finish with the last lines of Berry's
essay "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine," in which he asks
difficult questions about how we are to make these decisions.
He ends not with a critique of others but an accounting of his
own life. He laments the ways he still is caught up in the system
and its machines, one of which is the chainsaw he uses to cut
wood because of the speed and efficiency. But he also recognizes
that it is "inconvenient, uncomfortable, undependable, ugly, stinky,
and scary." He ends that essay on a difficult, but hopeful, note:
"I am
not an optimist; I am afraid that I won't live long enough to
escape my bondage to the machines. Nevertheless, on every day
left to me I will search my mind and my circumstances for the
means of escape. And I am not without hope. I knew a man who,
in the age of chainsaws, went right on cutting his wood with a
handsaw and an axe. He was a healthier and saner man than I am.
I shall let his memory trouble my thoughts." [3]
[1] Robert
Bolt, A Man for All Seasons (New York: Vintage/Random House,
1962), p. 92.
[2]
Wendell Berry, The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (New
York: Counterpoint, 1998), p. 115.
[3]
Wendell Berry, What Are People For? (San Francisco: North
Point Press, 1990), p. 196.
Note:
Robert
Jensen is a journalism professor
at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the board
of the Third Coast Activist
Resource Center. His
latest book is Getting
Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press,
2007). He is the author of The
Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege , Citizens
of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity and Writing
Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream
(Peter Lang). He can be reached at
rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.and
his articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html.
By
Robert Jensen:
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Investigative Journalism Project Reveals Problem At Core Of Mainstream
Journalism
Raining On The Thanksgiving Day Parade
It Didn't Start With Iraq
The Siege Of The Red Mosque And The Cries Of The Suffering
