What Money Cannot Buy

Homily on John 6:1-21

Delivered at

Grace Episcopal Church

Hastings-on-Hudson, NY

July 29, 2012

“Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, also called the Sea of Tiberias. A large crowd kept following him, because they saw the signs that he was doing for the sick. Jesus went up the mountain and sat down there with his disciples. Now the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near. When he looked up and saw a large crowd coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, "Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?" He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do. Philip answered him, "Six months' wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little." One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, said to him, "There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?" Jesus said, "Make the people sit down." Now there was a great deal of grass in the place; so they sat down, about five thousand in all. Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted. When they were satisfied, he told his disciples, "Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost." So they gathered them up, and from the fragments of the five barley loaves, left by those who had eaten, they filled twelve baskets. When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, "This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world."

When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.

When evening came, his disciples went down to the sea, got into a boat, and started across the sea to Capernaum. It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them. The sea became rough because a strong wind was blowing. When they had rowed about three or four miles, they saw Jesus walking on the sea and coming near the boat, and they were terrified. But he said to them, "It is I; do not be afraid." Then they wanted to take him into the boat, and immediately the boat reached the land toward which they were going.”

            Good morning. It is a gift and an honor to be with you this morning to lead our prayer service and to share some of my reflections on today’s lessons. And I feel a bit abashed at the task. Our Gospel reading this morning is a handful.

In this passage John brings together the feeding of the multitude with loaves and fishes and Jesus walking on the water—two images that are surely on everyone’s short list of memorable moments in the Gospel story.

Then there is the suggestive mention of Jesus fleeing from the public recognition—and a false understanding—of his kingship. In what way is the redemption of God’s love and saving grace that Jesus brings connected to our political life as human beings, and in what way is it detached from or radically transformative of politics?

As if that weren’t enough, there is also the complex rhythm of Jesus going out and coming in—his presence in the company of the people or his disciples and his absence. He is shown as being in our midst, and aloof; on the boat and off it. He sympathizes and heals and teaches, yet he is also apart from the noise, the business (and the busyness), the hustle, the hunger, the sickness, the fear, the ambition, the sheer neediness and insufficiency of our humanity. He calms the troubled waters and the busyness. He turns down the volume of fear. The moments of separation in the rhythm of this story are surely not a sign of rejection or refusal. They are an offering of another way to be and to live.

***

Each time we reread rich passages and stories like this we can get something new out of them, regardless of how familiar to us they may be. We can find in them a source of insight about our own ongoing life experiences and concerns.

In my own case, last week, while reading and thinking about the lesson from John in preparation for this morning, I was attending a conference convened in Tarrytown, NY by the Center for Genetics and Society, a nonprofit research institute headquartered in Berkeley, CA. This was a meeting of a group of scholars and activists who are concerned with the applications of genetics, reproductive medicine, and the rapidly advancing field of biotechnology. My colleagues in this movement are concerned about the social and ethical effects of the globalization of markets, and they are critical of the market thinking evident now in science and health. I attended workshops on such topics as:

• The worldwide commercialization of, and trafficking in, human organs for transplantation, gametes from desirable sources, and gestational services from poor women who have no other lucrative skill to sell.

• Web-based businesses that are the biological equivalent of Google and Facebook. They collect DNA samples from individuals and for a fee return an analysis that may indicate markers for defective genes and risk for disease. They also sell the genetic information collected to large data banks that make money in turn by selling access to this data to researchers for new genetic tests and drugs.

The advent of the new global “bio-economy” troubles me as a citizen of a democratic republic whose moral foundations are shifting, and as a person who tries to locate his life within the faith tradition of Christianity.

I believe that texts like our reading today can offer us wisdom about the shape of our world, and help us to grope for at least a blurred vision of a better one. If we can be open to that wisdom, surely it will enable us to look at the familiar and the taken for granted with new eyes. Fish don’t know that they live in water. If they read the Bible, they would realize that they do. It is the same with us. The Gospel makes the familiar surprising. What surprises does today’s lesson offer to us about where and how we live and what is becoming of us?

***

In today’s text I discern a warning about a way of living that is too much about power and control, and too little about boundaries and patience. A warning about a life that is too much about the bottom line and too little about moral lines that should not be crossed. Running like a bright thread through this text is a warning that says: There are things more important than wants and interests. There is more to life than production and consumption. There are some things that money cannot buy. That warning has a permanent pertinence, to be sure, but rarely, if ever, has it been more crucial than it is today.

The water that we live in today is becoming increasingly an environment that makes our lives economic and, as the jargon has it, “monetized.” With a rapid pace and a global sweep, human institutions and relationships are being reconstructed on the basis of a set of ideas concerning voluntary transaction and the exchange of goods and services based on competitive advantage—making more. The goal of all this is essentially power, that is, the satisfaction of expanding wants and desires—having more.

The medium of these transactions is the market, the system of buying and selling. And currency—money—is the universal, fungible instrument of those market transactions. (Do you remember the song from the musical or the film Cabaret: “… a mark, a franc, a buck, or a pound…money makes the world go round.”) In the worldview to which I refer, market exchange is the paradigm of all human activities, and money is the lubricant that oils the machinery. There is and should be no area of human life that is not essentially economic. There is nothing that money cannot buy.

The value basis of our emergent economic worldview is the idea that more is better. This life always and everywhere in quest of more, and the “ethic of more” is pervasive and multidimensional. The market economy is not limited to one sphere or set of institutions. It is not something that we leave at the office, or that stays in Las Vegas. It’s logic and ethic are spreading. The market economy is fast becoming—may already have become—the market society. It is colonizing our whole lifeworld.

More is believed to be “better” in many different senses: For one thing, expanding our opportunities for transaction and exchange is thought to enrich not only our net financial worth, but also the meaning and quality of our lives, our liberty, our pursuit of happiness.

Furthermore, in the new economics the distinction between production and consumption is erased. Once upon a time, these two kinds of activity were viewed separately. And from some points of view, such as the traditional Protestant work ethic, production was thought to be morally virtuous, while consumption, particularly when it went beyond need and into luxury, was morally suspect. But in the new economics consuming more is said to be really producing more at the same time, since the more each of us consumes, the more jobs are created. The more things are consumed, the more opportunities are opened up for individuals to use their talents and their creativity to produce.

In short, the market economy is a powerful mechanism for channeling energy, skills, and creativity efficiently toward innovation and productivity. However, there is a dark side to the ethic of more, the entrepreneurial life, and the way this mechanism works. It is not all freedom of choice, creative opportunity, and the satisfaction of desire. The benefits of growth and productivity are achieved through struggle and competition, and this involves (we hope within legal limits and the cultural limits of human decency, but not always) aggressiveness, ruthless focus on the bottom line, strategic manipulation, seduction and betrayal. It involves winners and losers.

The market mechanism arranges for the right people with the most profitable skills to be occupied in profitable tasks, economically productive right roles, at the opportune time in the convenient place. In itself this achievement is not a bad thing; what is troubling is the situation in which it becomes the only thing; the predominant thing.

Unlike the power of giving that manifests itself during the picnic that Jesus hosts by the sea, this economy does not turn initial scarcity into eventual abundance. No, it starts with initial abundance, natural and human, uses it selectively and makes some of it grow, but discards the rest. The discards, the waste products of this way of life are material, of course, but they are also human and social—a growing population of marginalized people, quite literally without market value, which is to say, without value. (For a humane and refreshingly non-condescending account of a living inequality and injustice, I recommend to you a recent book by journalist Katherine Boo called Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, a first hand account of the lives of slum dwellers in Annawadi, a desperately poor shanty town near the international airport in Mumbai.)

***

Swimming in the sea of money and understanding all human relationships as market transactions and exchanges of purchase and consumption is said by many to simply be the normal and necessary way to think and act. It is our water and we are its fish. Can we gain a sense of how profoundly one-sided and strange this worldview actually is? Or, to speak more precisely, re-gain that sense of strangeness and distance from this worldview, for we had it once, and indeed not so very long ago.

The Gospel warning has two facets. One is about creative destruction, the obliteration of boundaries. In creating some kinds of goods we destroy other equally or even more valuable goods in our lives. The single-minded pursuit of the former fatally erodes and debilitates the latter. Economic growth can actually promote social desiccation. Wealth is actually “illth,” as John Ruskin so nicely put it.

The second facet is about the universal and equal dignity of human beings and social justice. With our newly opened fish eyes, we need to look beyond the mega-millions jackpot. With ears properly attuned, we need to hear behind the blare of too much hype, the cries and whispers of too little hope. It is in light of this that I read the line: “Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.”

Around the world nearly half of humanity is comprised of individuals without training, resources, or connections, having virtually no chance to enter into the system of money and employment, reward and social position. Somebody else’s more is their less. Many others live on a precarious edge of the global economy and the ethic of more. In 2000, according to Forbes magazine, the world’s 492 richest individuals held more combined wealth than the world’s poorest 1.5 billion people. In the same year a UN study concluded that the richest 1 percent (37 million people) had more wealth than those in the bottom 95 percent (3.5 billion people).

If the injustice and inequality that accompanies the world of economic growth and the ethic of more is disturbing, even more so is the loss of boundaries that protect areas of our lives from the advantage-oriented mentality of buying and selling. A very interesting recent book, entitled What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Harvard political theorist Michael Sandel discusses with many examples the disappearance of commercial free zones in society. There are prisons in California that offer cell upgrades for a fee of $127 per night to inmates who can afford them. There are companies that hire people to stand on line so lobbyists can jump the queue to get into Congressional hearing rooms. Famous athletes sport corporate logos on their clothing and equipment; ordinary people have them applied (for much less remuneration) to their foreheads and other visible parts of their bodies. And a charity in North Carolina pays $300 to drug addicted women in return for being sterilized. About this permanent sale of fertility, Sandal indignantly remarks, “This treats …women as damaged baby-making machines that can be switched off for a fee.”

Similarly, at the conference I attended, speakers discussed in detail the ways in which the human body has become a contested terrain, where older moral norms and prohibitions are rapidly giving way under pressure from scientific and technological advance and commercial pressure. A resolutely economic reinterpretation of meaning and behavior is replacing those former norms and limits. As our biotechnology expands, the human body is being made into an object for use in new ways; it is being turned into a commodity for sale by and to others. As a result, the body is seen, not as an integral part of oneself, but rather as an instrumental object to be exploited for economic gain. If Sandel is correct, we are losing our sense that there are times and places and relationships in which this spirit of buying and selling is inappropriate.

The world depicted in the Gospel lesson is not an economized world, it is a world where boundaries and Not For Sale signs still exist. And Jesus often reaffirms and defends special relationships from the acids of competition and taking. The gathering by the sea is a space of sharing, not trading. It is a place of tables for breaking bread together, which Jesus fills, tables far from removed from those of the moneychangers trespassing on the space of the Temple. And we remember what Jesus thought of and did to those tables. (We should also recall that, at times, he does the reverse: he attacks some boundaries and breaks them down; those are the boundaries of fear, suspicion, and prejudice that dehumanize and impede our openness to the Kingdom and to love.)

This is a lesson about the limits of what money can and should buy. It is about the insufficiently, not of the food available, but of the capacity of the economic life and the ethic of more to provide for human need and flourishing. Slyly, Jesus asks Philip to solve the problem in terms of buying and selling. He cannot. Why not? It is not simply because he does not have enough money. More profoundly, it is because recourse to buying is out of place and out of bounds for this occasion. If the boy nearby who has five loaves and two fish had been properly educated by today’s standards, he would have seen a market opportunity and bargained with Andrew to secure at least what little money the disciples had. No, this is neither the time for buying nor selling. What did this boy see when facing these men, men like Andrew and Jesus? Not a business opportunity. Another kind of opportunity, perhaps. What would you and I have seen?

Our lesson this morning is about another economy and how to live in it, another water and how to swim in it. The currency of this other economy is not money but mutual responsibility. The good it provides is not the more that is someoneelse’s less, but the enough that nurtures and sustains us in those aspects of our humanity that money cannot buy.