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Financial crisis
SERMON - 10.15am, Emmanuel Church, Pokfulam, Hong Kong
Sunday 28th September 2008.
Revd. Matthew Vernon
The financial crisis thunders on as the US Government decides how to respond.
These are disturbing days – and some of you are directly involved, working for banks or financial authorities.
Churches in the financial districts in London and New York have had more "suits" attending lunchtime gatherings than normal.
I'm heartened that Church leaders are speaking out.
We might not agree with what they say,
• but it's important the church makes a contribution to the debate.
It's tempting to think that these financial events are outside the scope of our faith.
• either because they are outside our control
• or because we don't understand what's going on.
But faith is relevant to all areas of life,
• whether we are used to applying it or not.
We have to work hard to apply our faith to the complexities of modern finance,
• but apply it we should.
Not in his wildest dreams did Jesus imagine the modern financial system.
But he had a lot to say about the powerful and weak;
• about the victims of the way society is run.
The victims of the credit crunch are ordinary people in ordinary homes.
The people who've lost their jobs in the last two weeks are ordinary people.
Jesus had a lot to say about the wealthy – mostly warnings –
• and the poor – mostly God's blessing.
Some of us are better placed to apply faith to the markets than others.
I'm in the latter group –
• I'm definitely a layman when it comes to economics and finance.
So I'm not about to reveal some divine investment tips.
I suspect God takes investment advice from Warren Buffet
I'll start with a positive view of money.
Then I'll say a bit about how money can be an idol and what our faith says about that.
All of this is complicated and something we struggle with,
• so forgive any lack of clarity.
To begin personally.
My Grandmother used to say "money isn't everything, but it helps".
She benefited from my Grandfather's wise investments, including stocks and shares.
Grandpa was an accountant and made sure Grandma was well provided for.
I benefited from that when they were alive,
• and from Grandma's estate when she died last year.
You may have similar experience.
I mention my grandparents to start positively about money.
The stereotype is that Christianity says money is bad.
Our first reading is easily misquoted as "money is the root of all evil".
In fact, 1 Timothy says "the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil."
And before that "those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction."
Remarkably relevant!
The Bible is full of warnings about wealth and the desire for riches for their own sake,
• but it doesn't say much at all about money itself.
This is an important distinction.
It's easy for Christians to be schizophrenic about this:
• on the one hand, to be suspicious of money,
• and the other hand to know that it's impossible to live without money.
Money today is one of life's essentials –
• like the air we breathe.
A life without money would lack much of the diversity and richness that the development of money has made possible.
Essential parts of society,
• like health care and education,
• are inconceivable without them being paid for them in money –
• that's true for both public and private health care and education.
Money enables society to work and people to live together:
• to give a very simple example, it allows me to by my colleague a coffee, in you know where…
• it allows us to give a gift this morning to Mary, our retiring churchwarden.
Money is a human good that allows the kind of human flourishing that God desires.
Our monetary system has increased the quality of life of countless people.
Of course the system is not perfect and there are victims.
Nor is money neutral –
• money shapes our sense of identity and our desires more than we are aware of,
• but money itself is a human good.
A second point to remember in trying to apply our faith to finance is the difference between money in Biblical times and money today.
Money was much less significant then and there was much less money in circulation.
There were no stock markets
• and it was inconceivable that money would be a commodity itself.
The Bible, of course, forbids usury –
• lending money with interest –
• but the church changed its tune on that in the late Middle Ages,
• when the modern system of credit was born and European societies benefited.
This week the Archbishop of Canterbury accepted that making a profit was a legitimate goal, "if not a morally supreme" one.
The Christian attitude to money has developed, just as money has since Jesus' day.
Turning then to the current crisis and money being an idol.
The Christian perspective highlights various things.
This week the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, spoke about the status of the markets in society.
He pointed out the difficulty world leaders have in funding the Millennium Development Goals
• versus the speed of the US bail out plan for banks.
The Millennium Development Goals include halving extreme poverty and fighting HIV/AIDS.
The estimate is around $5 billion to save the lives of six million children.
The bail out plan for the banks and financial institutions is estimated at $700 billion.
The Archbishop of York said "The poor are waiting".
And in saying so he represented the Biblical concern for those who lack economic security.
The Archbishop was only less firm ground in saying that the financial system had come to the brink of ruin because money was "the very item being traded" rather than the medium of exchange for trading manufactured goods.
In other words, money is a commodity itself.
It's taken me many years to get my head round the idea that money can be exchanged without any relationship to real things,
• but we are way past that argument.
The money markets allow human flourishing, as I said earlier.
But the financial crisis highlights the Emperor's New Clothes dimension of the markets.
The financial instruments that have unraveled were based on an amazingly complicated fiction.
It seems that no one understood how they were worked.
And crucially the only goal was making profit.
Greed was the reality, rather than human flourishing.
Building on that, the money markets generally are not geared primarily towards human flourishing,
• but to making more money for the sake of it.
This is where what the Bible says about the dangers of accumulating wealth comes into play.
Money has not only taken on a life of its own,
• but is the measure by which we judge everything.
Crucially, the value and worth of people is measured by their participation in the monetary system. That is rather than people being valued by their contribution to other people and society
• or being of value in their own right, as God's children.
In our financial system, money is an idol –
• and end in itself, rather than a means to God's ends.
Our faith says the rule of money shouldn't be the final arbiter in human affairs.
There's lots more that could be said and debated.
But I'll end with a couple of things our faith highlights which we can keep in mind.
Money, remember is a human good,
• but it seems to be god in the financial system and can become god in our lives.
There are some faith pointers that help us dethrone money.
The first is that you can't take it with you!
Our first reading puts it very starkly: "we brought nothing into the word and we take nothing out".
Jesus was similarly stark with his story of the man who thought he'd build bigger barns to store his wealth only to die that very night.
Secondly. we can burst money's bubble by giving it away –
• by the generous giving of alms and joining in solidarity with the poor.
That is the way of Jesus.
And whilst money today is so different to Jesus' day,
• God's solidarity with the poor is no different.
There is an argument for making lots of money so you can give it away.
Some people manage that, though the evidence suggests that money has such a power over us that we find it difficult to give away in meaningful amounts.
The financial crisis thunders on as the US Government decides how to respond.
For many of us the sums of money involved and the system itself feel beyond us.
But our faith has much to say about the situation and gives us much to reflect on.
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