In Christ, our liberation is bound up in each other

Today’s Gospel contains a truth that is very hard to accept. How hard will depend on who you identify with in the story.  As long as we think of the bad guys in Jesus’ story as someone else, we can jeer and catcall and relish in the comeuppance they get. But if begin to see that the violent, greedy stewards who kill the messengers as us… well, that’s another story.

In Jesus’ parable in Matthew, a landowner gives over the operations of his vineyards to some tenants. He sends people to the vineyard to retrieve his income and to get an account about how they are caring for the vineyard. In each case, the messengers are beat up or even killed. Eventually the landowner sends his son thinking that they will respect him. But the tenants do to him what they did before: they murder him.

Now, notice what comes next: Jesus doesn’t end the story but asks the ones to whom he is telling it to fill in the blanks. “What do you think the landowner should do?” They say, “Punish these brutes and put them to a miserable end!” Jesus then turns the tables of his critics and says, “the stone which builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.”

This parable was remembered by Matthew’s church as an explanation for why the Church was becoming more and more Gentile, while becoming less and less Jewish in their populations and in their traditions. In short, Matthew is saying “you had your chance; now there is a new chosen people in town!”

I always approach this passage with great care, because it has been the vehicle and justification for two millennia of often violent anti-Semitism and Western white supremacy.

So be careful! As soon as we begin to think that the Church or the Gospel, is our personal possession, or that we have the right answer for a “perfect” church, we are setting ourselves up to take the role of the possessive stewards in this story.

If you don’t believe me, look at how the history of the Church is filled of moments when otherwise faithful people have gotten the bit in their teeth and have run rough-shod over the very church they were trying to preserve or reform.

One hundred years ago, an Episcopal bishop named Paul Jones was driven from his office for speaking words of peace during the First World War.

Not ten years later, another Episcopal bishop, William Alexander Guerry, was assassinated in his own office by a priest of his own diocese of South Carolina, because Guerry bucked the Jim Crow segregation that had taken hold of the church when he wanted to not only desegregate the churches but elect a black suffragan bishop.

I love the identity statement of the United Church of Christ and sometimes wish it were our own. It says, “God is still speaking.” But can we discern that voice when it comes to us?  Sometimes we refuse to attend to that voice, and sometimes we interrupt that voice and talk over what God is saying to us. In either case, we essentially kill the heir hoping to receive the inheritance. 

I think of this every January when Martin Luther King’s birthday rolls around. How many of us participate with civic, religious, and business leaders, replay a small portion of his 1963 Lincoln Memorial speech—the “I have a dream” speech—tip our hat to racial equality and for the rest of the year ignore how we both participate in and benefit from a system of racial division that is still present 400 years after Europeans first set foot on this continent? Yet, as soon as someone proposes something concrete about addressing the roots of racism, let alone echoes a mere slogan, how often are we are the first to say “Yeah, but… all lives matter!”

Looking back, we remember with shame the church’s response to prophetic voices concerning racial injustice, the role of women, and the full inclusion of LGBT persons. You don’t have to look far— everyone loves Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the 20^th century martyr, until we realize that his critique of “cheap grace” is really talking about our complacent use of the church and her sacraments to maintain the status quo. Everyone loves Pope Francis’ warm inclusiveness until he starts to talk about economic justice and calls on us (and his church’s hierarchy!) to live more simply. Suddenly, the cry is “what does he know?” and “Why can’t he stick to ‘moral’ issues?” as if race, peace, poverty, and economic power are somehow not moral at their core! 

And every year, we come to the Feast of St. Francis and bless our pets, which is a good thing, but we do Francis an injustice if we stop there. If we really look at Francis and his view of animals in comes much more closely to what now call "creation care." And his attitude towards the poor was both radical and deeply compassionate. Some wonder if he did not come home from the Crusades suffering PTSD, which might explain some of his stranger behaviors (like going about naked in public) but also points us to an attitude toward peaceful relationships quite extraordinary for his day--and ours! 

In a famous encounter, St. Francis of Assisi took a risk when he crossed the battlefield between European Crusaders and Arabic Muslim forces near Damietta, Egypt, and met with Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil and preach his faith in Jesus Christ. He did not convert the Sultan but he opened a dialogue that would eventually lead to peace between the warring sides.

So, if we simply domesticate Francis and restrict him serving only as a patron for our pets, we will miss the radical vision for the Church as a vehicle for peace and justice to bring about reconciliation among people and nations. 

The behavior of the landowner in today’s Gospel in confronting the wicked tenants may be hard to accept, but it is familiar! It is the behavior of God! Like the landowner, God sent prophets to teach the scriptures and proclaim the demands of justice, and that message was condemned and rejected. God tries again and again until even his Son Jesus is met with rejection and death. But the voice of their prophecy is never extinguished, for nothing can stop the word of the Lord.

So how does this story of rebellious tenants and the long-suffering landowner end? We are offered two conclusions.

The first comes from those who are gathered around listening to Jesus. In their indignation and horror, they cry out that these rebellious tenants be put to a miserable death – and then be replaced with honest substitutes. They advocate exclusion and violence, an ancient and popular notion… that leads absolutely nowhere!

Jesus has another idea. He quotes the psalms: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes.”

So instead of fighting evil with still more evil, Jesus offers a different way. He says that it is precisely the rejected stone is the foundation something new! The Gospel, of course, is talking about the death and resurrection of Jesus, who was rejected, betrayed, and abused by those around him. Who, in his rising from death, becomes the cornerstone for a new creation rebuilt from the ground up.

There are lots of more recent examples that show how rejected stones become central to what is built.

During the Nazi occupation of Denmark, the Danish king, King Christian the Tenth, rode his horse daily through Copenhagen streets, surrounded by applauding crowds. He told the Germans that he would risk death to keep the swastika from flying over his castle, and they relented from displaying their flag there. These acts of defiance turned the king into the cornerstone of the remarkably successful Danish resistance that featured schoolboys, amateur saboteurs, and underground clergymen who kept the Nazi killing machine off balance for years. The Germans wanted normalcy in Denmark, and the resistance movement worked through strikes and other actions to deny them that. A prominent indication of their success was how a majority of Danish Jews were safely transported to neutral Sweden through the help of their fellow citizens.

Back in 1986, Ferdinand Marcos was reelected as president of the Philippines in an election tainted by widespread electoral fraud. Martial law was imposed, and Marcos made personal loyalty the criterion for military promotions and economic privilege. But the People Power movement led by Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino, Jr., and, after his assassination, by his wife Corazon, stood up to the regime. When civilian protesters met military units that refused to fire on their fellow citizens, it was not long before Marcos went into exile.

Remember Nelson Mandela, who for decades was an inmate in a South African jail? He became the first elected president of the new South Africa. When he was sworn in on May 10, 1994, the former prisoner who became president vowed that “never, never, and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another.” Once rejected, he became the cornerstone.

An Australian aboriginal activist named Lilla Watson said, “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” How will you and I put this truth into practice, not simply in what we say, but in how we live?

We might start by recognizing that whomever we call an enemy comes to us bearing a gift, and that we when meet our enemy we are meeting ourselves. Because each enemy comes to us bearing some broken, rejected part of ourselves. By accepting that enemy, we accept back that part of ourselves. By continuing to reject that enemy, we remain in a fragmented state inside. Acceptance of our enemy, welcoming the other, embracing those we would cast out, means we are changed and so is our enemy as we are together propelled toward a new and unexpected creation.

We affirm in our Creed, that when Jesus was crucified, “he descended to the dead.” Before going to resurrection, he went to the place where death reigns and meets us in those places inside us, in our culture, and in our deeply ingrained history that deals death and works against life and wholeness. He meets our rejection and violence with love and transforming power. And in his resurrection, he makes it possible for us to meet our enemies with new, transformed eyes. He leads us (as our Prayer Book says) “from prejudice to truth… [delivers us] from hatred, cruelty, and revenge,” and makes all of us able and ready to stand reconciled before our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the chief cornerstone of God’s renewed creation.

Matthew 21:33-46

Tax exemptions for non-profits promotes the public good.

A recent article in Time by Mark Oppenheimer reminded me of a conversation that I have from time to time with folks about our taxes and the Church.

One interaction took place about a year or so ago, when a neighbor started parking his car overnight and for much of the day in our church lot. It probably seemed okay to him…like many centers of small cities, parking is a constant problem…and our lot was empty most nights. But we rent space to people who work downtown during the week and we kept coming up a space or two short especially in the mornings. People who paid rent for a space or who work in our church or volunteer for activities at church were growing frustrated. 

Like the Sesame Street song, we set about finding out which car was different. When we figured it out and tracked down the owner,  I explained our situation and asked him to refrain from using our spaces. (This was one of those “they didn’t teach this in seminary moments,” for sure!) 

He said that he did not know we rented spaces. I pointed to the sign that said just that. He said that he’d like to rent a space. I said, sure, but there’s a waiting list. Still, I was sure we could work something out. When he asked how much our rate was, I told him. He was aghast!

Never mind that our rate was 35% of what our city charges for a monthly on-street permit, and 50% of what other area property owners charge downtown workers to park in their spaces. He was still aghast.

“What kind of a church are you to charge this much for parking?” he sputtered.

“Well, we’re the kind of church who has to pay taxes, insurance, maintenance, and staff time to have a parking lot, that’s what.”

Less apparently aghast, but still not mollified, he said “Taxes? You pay taxes?” Clearly, he didn't believe me.

Yes, I sighed. We may be a tax-exempt, non-profit organization, but we still pay taxes. We pay property tax to the city and county for this very parking lot. We pay business privilege tax. We pay all the employee taxes and benefits that we are supposed to. And we pay fees in lieu of taxes that is tacked on to our water bill just like other local, private, non-profit, tax-exempt  groups in our town. 

Besides, we return to our community a whole host of goods and services that make our city a better place to live and work, while saving local, county, state, and federal government both the direct and indirect costs of providing those services—assuming that they would provide them at all.

Which leads me to the basic argument in Oppenheimer’s post: that charities take from the community far more than they put back in. It is an old argument...one that goes back decades. He cites a study that shows all of the potential tax revenue that is lost to all levels of government through the charitable tax-exemption. The author lives in the city of New Haven, Connecticut, and he points to the exemption that benefits Yale University, with its large endowment, as a net cost to his city. 

I suppose that chart could just as well be read another way. It is just as much an indicator of how much value tax-exempt non-profits add to their communities. Are there trade-offs? Of course! But these are trade-offs that the communities themselves have chosen to make.

Besides the fact that I will bet that between the hospital and the University, Yale is probably one of the biggest employers in the area and adds to the economy in all kinds of ways, the tax rules governing charities and charitable giving create a kind of market place that at once serves a civic purpose and is in keeping with our democratic traditions.

Tax exemption is a way for the government to promote worthy social ends without running or "owning" the project. Non-profit arts groups, charities for children and youth, senior centers, educational programs (both private and public schools/colleges, after school programs, church and non-church charitable day schools and nursery schools), housing, non-profit healthcare, and more all reflect worthy society aims. The system allows society to promote civic and social values of ethics, artistic expression, mercy, scholarship, and spirituality in a way that is at once democratic and market-based, because it is the donor who gets to choose which cause to support.

Tax exemptions for religious institutions, in addition to the charitable and NGO work they do, in and of themselves provide a worthy social aim. Many times religious and non-profit charities will go places and do things that government won’t or cannot do. And they will stick with the task longer, with closer ties to the local community, than government can. When Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, the whole array of emergency response was activated. Now, ten years later, it is the charitable community, many of them religiously based, who are still on the ground doing the long-term work of recovery and redevelopment.

In our country, we have found that the best way to promote this general good without establishing a religion… or banning religion (which would be, after all, a form of religious establishment)… is to treat every religious group (no matter what their flavor...including the non-theistic ones) as a voluntary society and to give them the same tax-exemption that is given to schools, arts groups, health care, and other charities. 

Our congregation gives back to the community as an essential and basic part of our mission. So, in addition to the religious instruction, pastoral care, and worship, which is at the core of our work, we do much that aids the community we live in. Our own parish hosts a weekly soup kitchen that feeds between 65 and 75 people a week. The Soup Kitchen is the base for other work: periodic health screenings from an area non-profit university who send nursing students and physician assistants to run the program. We practically donate our space when it serves as a public polling place because the donation that the county offers is well under what other groups collect and pay us. And that’s okay. Because we see it as part of our mission to the community.

Oppenheimer was not just picking on churches in his essay. His thesis is that there should be no tax-exemption for any non-profit institution. He cites The Church of Scientology or the tension between Yale University and New Haven as examples as to why charitable tax exemption do not work. But these examples really point to problems of management and town-gown relationships. For every corrupt or incompetent religious group or non-profit you show me, I can point to a corrupt or incompetent government agency or private sector company. This kind of argument gets us no where. Bad management and corrupt practices needs to be addressed for what they are: incompetence and dishonesty. If you can't prosecute them for their dishonesty, at least monitor them for their effectiveness. And if they won't be monitored or can't be prosecuted and you don't like how they use their money, then don't give to them.

Imagine what our society would be like if he got his wish and both the tax-deduction for charitable donations and the tax-exemption for charitable groups (including but not limited to churches) were to suddenly go away.

First, a portion of money that people give to charities would go, right off the top, to the government in the form of taxes. More than just a cost of doing business, charities would have to treat their donations the same way that businesses deal with receipts, sales, and interest income. In the non-profit world, the majority of donors are small donors. The most money comes from a few large donors, but the vast majority of the people who send money to charities are small donors. This means that people, who have already paid taxes once on their income, get to see another portion of that money go off as taxes.

Second, many small charities would simply disappear. The cost of property taxes, business taxes, etc. would simply make most small charities too expensive to operate. Only large charitable groups that have large endowments and active development programs would remain.

Most of all, what would disappear is the kind of charitable marketplace that the tax-code now encourages. Right now, people voluntarily choose to support the charitable work that appeals to them. People choose to support the charity or special cause that appeals to them. Sometimes that can go viral where everyone is jumping on board, as with last years ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, but most of all that shows up with the average donor chooses to tithe to their church or give to their alma mater or give to a local hospital or orchestra. Philanthropists have the freedom to support their favorite charity with their big ticket gifts but more often it is the small giver who chooses to support a tangible public good with a voluntary gift.

What would be the alternative if this were to go away? Well, before there was an income tax, especially in the late 19th century Andrew Carnegie went around the country building libraries, schools, and, yes, even churches. Voluntary societies abounded. But government did less and taxation worked differently in those days. Under the current tax structure, the loss of the charitable deduction and tax-exemption for charities would at worst kill off the charitable sector but most likely shrink that marketplace dramatically. 

And this isn't just any marketplace! It is a marketplace of social concern, of civic participation, and social good. It is made possible, in part, by the way we exempt charitable work and the donations that support them. This frees up the capital (yes, capital) to do the necessary charitable work (including religious, artistic, and academic work) that our society claims to value but which is not part of the job of government.

Tax-code or not, charities and charitable giving provides to the public basic social benefits where people vote with their time, their dollars, and their energy. Protecting donations to charities from excessive taxation and encouraging donors to give promotes a marketplace where social good is provided on all kinds of levels with a minimum of government interference. And in a free society, it allows people to choose their level of participation and what social good they will support through their giving. 

It only takes a girl

Why the wheels fell off

The following is a brief explanation, made as simple as one could make it, of why we are in a global recession. It was presented by Andreas Whittam Smith, who holds the title of First Church Estates Commissioner to the General Synod of the Church of England.



No, he was not driving the car, nor did he loosen the bolts to illustrate what he meant. What he did do was write the following paper. Of course, it is written from the English perspective, but I think everything in it applies to our experience as well. It well worth the read.

A brief account of the financial crisis

By Andreas Whittam Smith, First Church Estates Commissioner

The deep recession now under way differs in two respects from anything we have experienced in our lifetimes:

1. It is totally global in nature. It affects both the West and the rest of the world. I emphasise this aspect because there is a tendency in Britain to think that it is only the US and Europe that are facing difficulties. Thirty years of globalisation means that every country, from China to the tiniest African state, is caught up in it.
2. Its proximate cause is a sudden withdrawal of credit by banks that has reduced business activity. This crisis developed spontaneously and was not the result of direct action by governments to cool their economies as has often happened in the past.

The over-trading by the banks that created simultaneous bubbles in housing, in consumer credit and in the financial industry itself – driven by greed - finally collapsed under its own weight in the second half of 2007. These booms were not confined to the West. There have been unsustainable rises in residential property values all over the world – from the United States and Britain to Eastern Europe and from India to Thailand and Vietnam.

Governments unwittingly created the conditions under which unbridled speculation could race ahead. Two policy changes have proved to be highly significant. In a pattern that repeats itself in this story, they were expected at the time to bring large benefits to the world economy and have done so; their perverse consequences have arisen only recently:

1. The first was the removal of external barriers to trade. The promotion of free trade through international agreements began soon after the end of World War II. In the 1930s, protectionism had prolonged the Great Depression. In contrast free trade benefits developed and developing countries alike. Each undertakes those activities in which it has an advantage. This expansion of free trade was a continuous process and a succession of free trade pacts was still being signed in the 1990s.
2. The second was the lowering of internal barriers to trade, or deregulation by another name, comprising the removal, reduction, and simplification of restrictions on business and individuals. Promoted originally by Mrs. Thatcher and President Reagan from 1980 onward, a wide variety of businesses in many countries benefited including banking. The rationale was similar to that put forward to support free trade – that fewer and simpler regulations would lead to a raised level of competitiveness and thus bring higher productivity, more efficiency and lower prices overall.

The negative consequences arose as follows:

1. As far as free trade is concerned, industrial groups in recent years have used it to move work from their own countries to less developed countries in order to cut costs. At the same time poorer countries, having signed up to free trade in the expectation that it would bring jobs, have been forced in return to deregulate their capital markets. This was the bargain. The new arrangements have precipitated a dramatic increase in capital flows. Higher output in Asian countries, in oil exporters and in other developing countries created excess savings that flowed into the financial markets of the industrialized West. Jobs have been going one way and savings the other. And it is these excess savings deployed by the banks that have created financial bubbles.
2. Deregulation of the banks removed restrictions on what activities they could undertake. As a matter of fact, contrary to what many suppose, it didn’t weaken prudential regulation as such. Prudential regulation specifies how much capital banks should hold to support a given volume of lending. The most striking aspect of banking deregulation in Britain was that building societies, mutual organisations, could transform themselves into shareholder owned banks specialising in mortgage lending as well as in providing other financial services previously forbidden to them. They did not make a success of their new freedom. Every building society that demutualised has either been taken over by a bigger bank or rescued by the Government. None has remained independent. Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley are examples.

Meanwhile the banks had invented a business technique that improved the workings of financial markets but, like free trade and deregulation, it had a dark side. Towards the end of the 1980s banks learnt to take the individual loans they had made, each underpinned by a legal agreement between the bank and the borrower, and combine them together so that the bundle became a security that could be traded. The process is known as securitisation. It started with mortgage loans extended to homebuyers. The banks would place these packages into specially created companies or trusts, not subject to prudential regulation, which new investors would be invited to finance in return for the interest that the underlying loan agreements provided. In this way the banks could clear their books of their old loans and then make fresh commitments, earn fresh fees and finally repeat the process all over again. The advantage was that risks were widely dispersed.

As a matter of fact, the unregulated bodies were still engaged in banking even though it was never described as such. For they borrowed short-term in order to finance longer-term business. This was shadow banking, more akin to nineteenth century practice than late twentieth century. The ratio of borrowing to capital supporting the loans was often well beyond best practice. It was legal only in the sense that ways of avoiding tax are legal until the Government closes the loophole. While it lasted the banks had found a way of escaping prudential regulation. They exploited the gap.

Ten years later, in the late 1990s, the banks devised a second method of removing risk from their books and freeing up reserves. Credit default swaps were invented. A third party would assume the risk of a debt going sour and in exchange would receive regular payments, similar to insurance premiums, from the bank concerned. Again on first appearance credit default swaps seemed like an excellent idea. They were an additional way of cutting risk up into small pieces and spreading it widely. Banks became enthusiastic consumers of credit insurance, as did the investors buying the loans that banks were securitizing.

Once more problems appeared. The idea got about that, paradoxically, risk was nothing to worry about. It could be split up, passed on, sold off.
Rather than being placed at the centre of financial transactions, where it ought to be, risk was banished to the sidelines. It was a detail that could easily be handled. At the same time, banks became careless about the standing of the counterparties to whom they were handing off risk. The USA’s biggest insurance company, AIG, had to be bailed out by American taxpayers after it had defaulted on $14 billion worth of credit default swaps it had made to investment banks, insurance companies and scores of financial entities.

Consider then where we had got to by 2003. The excess savings of vigorous Asian economies, oil producers and other developing countries that had flowed into Western banks had pushed interest rates to very low levels. Globalisation had removed bargaining power from workers in the West with the result that inflation was only a percentage point or two per annum. In real terms interest rates were more or less zero. For banks, in other words, money was free. Furthermore now that loans could be securitised and removed from banks’ books so that they no longer needed the backing of their capital, lending activity had begun to appear costless. In addition, lending had acquired the extra virtue of appearing riskless because credit insurance would ensure that others would bear the cost of defaults. The upshot was clear. When money is free, and lending is costless and riskless, the rational lender will keep on lending until there is no one left to lend to.

To reach this Eldorado, the means were at hand. Automated credit scoring speeded up the processing of applications for loans. Trimming back on documentation brought more borrowers into the fold. A proliferation of products offering credit on easy terms was devised. Moreover it didn’t seem to matter if such hastily written business wasn’t always of a high quality. After all the loans were to be packaged up and sold on. In other words, the banks originating the loans would have no stake in the borrower’s continued solvency. At the same time, pay levels in the financial services industry were topped up with bonus schemes that gave very high rewards to those managers who could ‘shift product’. New borrowing was piled on old borrowing, risk on risk.

Whereas the sum of all financial assets – stocks, bonds, loans, mortgages and the like, which are claims on real things – used to be about equal to the total of the world’s output of goods and services, by 2007 financial assets were approaching four times global output. In 1990, only 33 countries had financial assets whose value exceeded that of their respective outputs. By 2006, this number had more than doubled to 72 countries. Brazil, Russia, India and China were among those with financial assets worth far more than their gross national products.

In the high summer of 2007, the first cracks appeared in the great edifice of credit that had gradually been built up over twenty years. The beginnings of a decline in US property prices were the cause. The most over-geared borrowers were asked to repay their loans. They became forced sellers. This produced a triple whammy effect. As asset prices had fallen, borrowers made losses. If they couldn’t fully repay their loans and went bankrupt, the banks that had financed them likewise suffered. At the same time, the values of similar assets had been put under pressure. This meant that the credit standing of fresh ranks of borrowers had been damaged. As a result a further cohort was forced to go through the same process with the same results. And then there followed another cohort and another cohort and so on.

Some 18 months since it began, this de-leveraging process is still under way and, if anything, gains in momentum. It is a doomsday machine. In my view, it explains almost everything: -

a. Why property prices continue to fall
b. Why any gains in stock market prices are quickly swamped by fresh selling
c. Why the banks find there is no end to the losses that they are incurring and that they thus constantly need re-financing
d. Why banks remain terrified and will engage in fresh lending only if the government forces them to do so or if it removes the risk.

The recession will continue until this process is over.

You can find the paper here or here.