First Reading: 1 Timothy 6: 2-10

Second Reading: “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” by Wendell Berry

“… Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant…”

Sermon:

As a child, apparently disappointed in the going rate for lost teeth in the early 90s, I decided to hang on to one of my teeth for a while before putting it under my pillow. When my parents inquired as to why I wasn’t cashing in right away, I told them I thought I’d get more money for an antique.

I love that I thought this magical flying fairy, who travels the globe sneaking into children’s rooms unseen and leaving coins behind in exchange for lost teeth operated under our earthly economic system. That she would have had the same definition of what’s valuable as I did. I’ve talked to some parents recently and it does seem like the tooth fairy is keeping up with inflation, so you know, I wasn’t entirely wrong.

And I was, as it turns out, in good company. I joined in a long line of humans throughout history who have tried to financially transact with divine beings. In the ancient Greco-Roman world, the spheres of religion and economics were deeply intertwined. Temples housed banks and deities had their own bank accounts, managed by religious officials. People leased lands that belonged to gods and the gods were parties to those lease contracts. Statutes of gods and goddesses were used as weight standards in the marketplace. You would buy 10 zeus’s worth of grain. If you want a fun academic word to throw around at cocktail parties, New Testament scholar Jennifer Quigly calls this entanglement “Theo-economics.”

Quigly was my professor for “Letters of Paul,” and she was interested in this ancient entanglement because it was the context of the earliest Christian communities. Paul was writing his letters, the basis for so much modern Christian theology and doctrine, in a society that saw no separation between religious life and economic life. So, now, when you’re at home with your Bibles reading the Pauline letters for fun, as I’m sure many of you do regularly, you might start noticing how much economic language Paul uses. In his letter to the Philippians, Paul refers to the gospel “venture,” and describes the community in Philippi as being “joint-shareholders in grace.” So Paul is using the language of his context, but he does something a little transgressive. Paul, by and large, is not writing to wealthy communities. His followers make up the 99% in the Roman Empire. So he says, yes, religion and economics might be interlinked, but we’re going to use a different accounting method. Our ledger sheet looks different from the Romans. This is what he’s doing when he asserts that Christ has come to turn death into profit, writing “living is Christ, dying is gain.” We are the wealthy ones, despite what our bank accounts indicate, Paul tells the early Christian communities.

So obviously, I’m not up here to preach that Christ came to turn death into profit. So why am I telling you this? We might think it absurd today that people once set up bank accounts for Gods, but I don’t think we’re as far away from that world as we might think. If you think Paul’s letters don’t impact us, I invite you to watch house speaker Mike Johnson’s press conference where he uses Paul’s letter to the Romans to defend immigration crack-downs. So Paul’s context continues to inform our context. And I think knowing this history prompts us to starting looking for our modern theo-economic entanglements, the ones that might be a bit more hidden. Religion and economics have never been separate spheres and they still aren’t today. We can decide what we want to do with that: embrace it, transgress it, subvert it, try to sever it, but before we do any of those things, we need to see it.

So when do we invite God into our financial transactions? What are our modern equivalents of Athena’s temple bank account? It’s easy to point to all of the examples we don’t like. Televangelists embezzling money and exploiting vulnerable believers. Prosperity gospel preachers who ignore the beatitudes and promise that Jesus actually wants you to be rich and if your aren’t, you must not be praying hard enough. Or a “God Bless the USA” branded Bible that earned Donald Trump $1.3 million in royalties for his endorsement.

But religious and economic entanglements aren’t solely the domain of conservative religion and Christian nationalism. Did you know that the phrase "cleanliness is next to Godliness” is not in the Bible, it’s a phrase attributed to John Wesley that found its way into popular vernacular in the 19th century through advertisements for the brand new commercial soap industry who decided to use clergy like Henry Ward Beecher to help convince Americans it was their moral duty to buy soap.

And have any of you ever taken a yoga or meditation class at work? Or downloaded a mindfulness app as part of an employee wellness benefit? In her book, “Work, Pray, Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley,” sociologist Carolyn Chen argues that, “Work is replacing — and in some cases, even taking the form of — religion among many of America’s professionals.” She writes about how, in Silicon Valley, “tech companies have taken up pastoral and spiritual care as a way to make their employees more productive.” She shares the example of one tech start-up that implemented an employee meditation program, drawing heavily from Buddhist thought, and saw a two-dollar return on investment for every dollar spent on the program. The company concluded that “Personal conversions…translate to higher organizational returns across the board.” Talk about the-economic entanglements.

The examples I’ve given so far are pretty cynical, but this relationship isn’t always negative. It isn’t always in service of capitalism and corporate greed. As Unitarian Universalists, the way we financially structure our churches is a direct expression of our relationship to God. This is not a stewardship sermon, but I don’t think our stewardship team would mind me reminding you that your financial pledges to the church are connected to our theology. We descend from traditions that believed we needed no intermediary between us and the divine We hold as one of our values the idea that each person has a right to freely and responsibly search for truth and meaning for themselves. We are non creedal and non dogmatic. No one tells us what to believe, or tells who is allowed to preach in our churches, or what they can preach. And part of maintaining that autonomy means being financially independent. Money is power, and in our churches power rests with the congregants and no one else, so it is the congregants who fund the church. We value freely exploring and defining our own relationship with the sacred, so that means not giving up our financial control to anyone else. When the stewardship campaign rolls around this year, you can view your pledge not as a donation but as a theological commitment. That is our Unitarian theo-economics.

Once you see it, it’s hard to stop seeing it, all of the ways our economic lives are shaped by religious beliefs and values and vice-versa. And for those of us who distrust religious movements that seem too preoccupied with wealth, It’s easy to become jaded. But when I remember the sacred freedom that comes with our own tradition’s financial structure, when I look around and see all of you as joint shareholders in a common venture, I feel earnest pride and joy. And I see powerful possibilities. I wonder if, like Paul, if we can see this intersection of religion and economics, not as reason for cynicism but as a site of transgression and re-imagination. A place to redefine what we consider profit, gain, and worth in a way that aligns with our most sacred values.

Isn’t that what Wendell Berry is arguing for when he writes,

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit.

Call that profit.

I’m reminded of Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 speech at the University of Kansas where he too questions what we call profit. This is a much longer quote than I usually use in a sermon but I think it’s so powerful, so bear with me. In this famous speech, Kennedy says, “Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.” He continues, “Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”

Friends, we live in an era where the fundamental values we hold as people of faith, as people living in America, are being tested. It’s becoming riskier and riskier to protect our neighbor, defend democracy, and side with love. So what we consider of ultimate worth and what price we are willing to pay for it have become questions of fierce urgency. Like the Apostle Paul, like Robert Kennedy, like Wendell Berry, we too are invited to ask, “What do we call profit?” Paul’s faith called him to proclaim the powerful paradox that “dying is gain.”Our congregationalist ancestors decided freedom of conscience, freedom of thought, freedom of the pulpit was worth paying for. They decided that the return on investment, which couldn’t be measured in dollars, was well worth the upfront costs. What is our generation’s defiant restructuring of the divine accounting ledger?

In a society that tells us our worth is tied to our economic productivity and we need to monetize our hobbies and pick up side gigs to make ends meet, can we say “Rest is gain.” In a society that glorifies individualism and wants us to fear our neighbor and build walls and fences can we say “community is gain?” In a society that wants to monetize every natural resource, clearing our forests, polluting our oceans and stripping our mountain tops, can we say “conservation is gain?” In a society that tells us immigrants are taking our American jobs and driving down wages and making it harder for us to buy groceries, can we say, “Radical welcome is gain.” Peace is gain. Humility is gain. Mercy is gain. Love is gain.

We may never be able to entirely divorce prayer from profit, but as Paul and Wendell Berry suggest, we can decide what we call profit. May we choose carefully and courageously.

May it Be So.
Amen.