The House Built on Rock

Three years ago, at the start of his pastoral visit to the United States, Pope Benedict XVI asked: “Is it consistent to profess our beliefs in church on Sunday, and then during the week to promote business practices or medical procedures contrary to those beliefs? Is it consistent for practicing Catholics to ignore or exploit the poor and the marginalized, to promote sexual behavior contrary to Catholic moral teaching, or to adopt positions that contradict the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death? Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted. Only when their faith permeates every aspect of their lives do Christians become truly open to the transforming power of the Gospel.”

Jesus solemn warning at the conclusion of his Sermon on the Mount - “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my father in heaven” [Matthew 7:21] - was not addressed to people generically, but rather very specifically to those who believe in him – that is, to us. Surely, we have all heard that old cliché: If I were put on trial for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict? Well, guess what? On Judgment Day, Jesus warns, it will not be enough to have believed, to have said ‘Lord, Lord’, to have professed faith in Christ and considered oneself a disciple, without having also therefore lived in a way which warrants one’s being recognized as such – by him first of all! Even those entertaining superstars who drive out demons and do mighty deeds don’t get guaranteed a place in the kingdom without corresponding, recognizable action. Once again, we are being reminded that we really are what we do. That is: what we do, how we live, reveals who we are – and who we hope to be, the kind of person we will in fact be for all eternity, thanks to our actions in the here and now.

In this regard, I really like the image Jesus uses of the house – the house built on rock vs. the house built on sand. So often Jesus’ parables reflect their rural roots in the agrarian society in which they originated. Fair enough, but not all of us live on farms or in rural villages. But everybody everywhere needs and depends on adequate shelter – and so can relate to the universal image of a well-built house.

Jesus’ image, however, should also us that we do not build our house entirely on our own, all by ourselves. The faithful disciple may indeed be like the one who builds a great mansion on a foundation of solid rock. The rock, however, is not built by the builder. It is there for us to build upon, but it is not of our own making. It is, so to speak, a gift, to which we respond by building well upon it. We give thanks for that gift by what we build, by the life we live, all made possible in the first place by the firm foundation we have been given.

Often in recent years, riding the bus between New York City and Newark Airport, coming out of the Lincoln Tunnel, I have often found myself staring at a particular building built on top of an especially impressive outcrop of solid stone at the end of a Jersey City street. I think it’s a public library now, but it was obviously originally built as a private house. Looking at it is almost enough to make one want to sing a verse or two of John Rippon’s stirring 18th-century hymn that begins: How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord, is laid for your faith in his excellent word!

So, even before we worry about building, first and foremost we have to make sure we are building on a firm foundation – and not on any of the faulty structures that seem so tempting today. Jesus famously promised to build his Church on the solid rock of the revelation of who he is and what he is all about, rather than the shifting sands of popular alternatives.

This coming Wednesday, we will all come to church to be signed with blessed ashes – reminding us of our mortality, calling us to conversion and repentance, and identifying us publicly, for all the world to recognize, as his professed disciples. Jesus challenges those who would want to be recognized by him as his disciples to build ambitiously upon the firm foundation of his freely given grace. Rather than sink into the superficially seductive sand that so deceptively lures us every which way, let us build - with God’s gift of himself as our firm foundation – a beautiful building for all eternity, out of what we make of our lives in the here and now.

March 4, 1861

On this day in 1789, the US Constitution went into effect. It was apparently an inauspicious beginning. Not enough members of Congress had even made it to New York in time to constitute a quorum, and it would be almost two months before George Washington would finally be inaugurated as the first President. But the government did get going, and every four years after that - from 1793 through 1933 - the United States inauagurated a President on this date.

150 years ago today, it was Abraham Lincoln's turn to be inaugurated at what was perhaps the most precarious moment in American history, when the very existence of the United States was threatened as never quite before or since. (Tennessee was what was then called a "border state." It had not yet seceeded - something that would not happen finally until June).

Lincoln's 1st Inaugural Address is justly famous for his appeal - simultaneously reasoned and passionate - for the country to stay together. His emotionally powerful conclusion still resonates in a society still sadly all too deeply divided: We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Lincoln's speech contained more than memorable and inspiring rhetoric, however. It was a well articulated expression of a philosphy of democratic constitutional government. Lincoln had strong convictions about what a democratic polity entailed and did not hesitate to express them, even to the likely discomfort of the man who a few minutes later would administer the Presidential oath of office to him - Chief Justice of the United States and author of the infamous Dred Scot decision, Roger Taney. Confronted with the calamitous consequences of that particularly malevolent exercise of judicial imperialsm, Lincoln laid out his position - the position of democratic constitutionalism - with a lawyer's clarity.

I do not forget the position assumed by some that constitutional questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court, nor do I deny that such decisions must be binding in any case upon the parties to a suit as to the object of that suit, while they are also entitled to very high respect and consideration in all parallel cases by all other departments of the Government. ... At the same time, the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.

One could hardly have said it better.

Trains

Of all the many modes of transportation, I have always liked trains most of all. (Prior to my knee and back problems a couple of years ago, I invariably even preferred the New York City Subway to riding the bus!).

Forty years ago, an assignment in my undergraduate American Political Thought class was to write an American "Utopia." There are any number of things about the America I envisioned in that paper that I might not subscribe to today, but the privileged status of inter-city train travel that I included in my "Utopia" expressed an anti-automibile bias I still feel (even if I now have to drive a car every single day!).

Living in New York until last year, I almost always took Amtrak if I was going to Washingotn, Dc, or to Boston. Although I can hear the railraod from my bedroom at night, it's entirely freight traffic. Although there is now a welcome MegaBus connection between Knoxville and DC, there is no longer any passenger train service from Knoxville to anywhere. (There is a beautiful train station, walking distance from my church, which -oddly - is now slated to become a high school!)

All this is on my mind because of reading George Will's political column in the March 7 Newsweek. As for Will's take on trains, his title says it all: "High Speed to Insolvency: Why Liberals Love Trains." Now Will is undoubtedly one of the brighter bulbs in the conservative chandelier, and there have been many occasions over the decades when I have found much wisdom and insight in his analyses. Nor do I necessarily doubt Will's facts, however much I disagree with his pro-car ideology. He is probably correct on the costliness of rail transportation. Indeed, I am almost willing to stipulate that probably any other way of getting from place to place - bus, plane, or even auto - is probably more efficient and less expensive to society in the long run. But I still prefer trains!

Some of that may be purely personal and esthetic. Airline travel was once seen as luxurious, but not anymore. Trains are the one mode of travel (apart perhaps from ships, which are also largely irrelevant as alternatives) where one can really sit in comfort and also walk around, etc. Admittedly, however, that is a highly personal preference.

At its heart, however, Will's argument is about freedom - individual freedom. "To progressives," contends Will, "the best thing about railroads is that people riding them are not in automobiles, which are subversice of the deference on whihc progressivism depends. Automobiles go hither and yon, whever and wherever the friver desires, without timetables," Will continues. "Automobiles encourage people to think they - unsupervised, untutored, and unscripted - are masters of their fates. The automoibile encourages people in delusions of adequacy, which make them resistant to government by experts who know what chopices people should make."

That quasi-libertarian argument resonates deeply at the roots of Americna experience. As I have often said, in explaining American values to European friends, most of our ancestors came here to get away from overly controlling social structures, which is why Americans will often choose the excesses of liberty over the security and comfort of government intervention in their lives. I understand that - and can even agree with it up to a point.

But there is another dimension to human existence, which an uncritical preoccupation with liberty misses. What is so powerfully appealing about trains to me is how irreducibly (as I believe Tony Judt once remarked) public traveling by train is. It is a communal experience, which for me taps into the fundamentally social dimension of human nature - the very dimension which is so thoroughly under attack today.

Trains may not be efficient. They probably are more costly than we can as a country afford at present. But they represent something we cannot afford to forget about why we need a country and what it takes to flourish as full human beings - something we forget to our great peril.

"Do Not Worry"

Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount” was all about the “Kingdom of God” and what it takes to be a committed citizen of that kingdom – in other words a disciple. Nowadays we have the peculiar modern anomaly of dual citizenship. For most of history, however, people instinctively understood citizenship as one’s highest earthly loyalty, something which by definition precludes dual allegiance. Likewise, when it comes to citizenship in the kingdom of God, Jesus is equally exclusivist: “No one can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other” [Matthew 6:24]. No surprise there! Nor should we be surprised when Jesus singles out material wealth as the great alternative that can most effectively undermine our commitment to God. “You cannot serve God and mammon,” Jesus asserted, without qualification or nuance.

Now obviously Jesus understood that we all need material things – just to live, let alone to live well. Jesus lived in a world of scarce resources. In pre-capitalist societies, most people are poor and have to focus most of their energies on just making a living. Jesus himself depended on the generosity of others. Luke’s Gospel specifically mentions a number of wealthy women who provided for him and his disciples out of their resources [Luke 8:3]. And any number of Jesus’ parables praise hard-working people, whose industriousness Jesus proposes as a model for his disciples to adopt in their religious life as well.

At the same time, we all know well how corrupting wealth – particularly the preoccupation with wealth - can be, both personally and socially. The class tensions that increasingly seem to be tearing at the fragile fabric of our own American society certainly serve to remind us of that. Nor is there anything new or novel about that. As Adam Smith observed back in the 18th century: “This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition … is … the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”

Jesus’ words of warning were not addressed abstractly or theoretically. They were addressed to individuals directly and personally.

But notice: Jesus didn’t tell his disciples not to work, not to be personally productive, economically and otherwise. What he said was “do not worry.”

We all know what worrying can do to a person, how it can completely capture and immobilize a person. In extreme form, worry becomes obsessive, a compulsive disorder that practically paralyzes a person, totally distorting one’s perspective, the proper perspective that comes from being able to set proper priorities in one’s life and keep one’s priorities in order. (A peculiarly religious variation of this is what we call scrupulosity, an obsessive worry that everything one does is a sin, a total distortion of what our relationship with God is supposed to be about, leaving one feeling as forsaken as Zion in today’s first reading [Isaiah 49:14]).

Jesus challenges us to focus on what is important – to keep our concerns about material things in some sort of perspective. We do this all the time – or at least try to, if we are reasonably sane and focused – in our ordinary, day-to-day decisions – distinguishing what we can and cannot control, what’s of real importance from what is a sideshow, what’s of long-term value from what is short-term. Jesus wants us to do the same with what is most important – to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.

“The miser,” Isaac Hecker wrote in 1843, “is an outward example of what the Christian should cheerfully do from the spirit of God living within. What does not the miser do for his God Mammon? … Do for the establishment of Christ’s kingdom upon Earth what he does for money.”

Homily for the 8th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN,

February 27, 2011.

Unions

Comparisons between the anti-government protests in Wisconsin (now seemingly spreading to other states as well) and the anti-government protests spreading around the Arab world are undoubtedly overblown – whether one sees them both as popular expressions of authentic democratic values or whether one judges Midwestern attempts to frustrate the program of the democratically elected government as ultimately somewhat anti-democratic. Either way, the situations are sufficiently different to argue against trying to draw too many parallels or any too easy comparisons. That said, however, what is happening in Wisconsin and elsewhere may be almost as important for the future direction of American society as some of what has been happening in the Arab world is there.

The Wisconsin situation seems to invite ideological extremism. Either one is for public-employees’ unions - or not. Either one is for getting the deficit under control - or not. And, of course, the ideological divide is mirrored in the positions of the two political parties – the Democrats in general siding with the unions, the Republicans in general against them. In actual fact, of course, as in most real-world situations, both ideologies – and both parties - have valid points to make.

I grew up in the post-war “Baby Boom” years when the propserous American economy exceeded anything most people had ever previously experienced. Labor unions had contributed notably to this incredible elevation in the living standards of the “working class.” In fairness to organized labor, it is only right to recall that what we now look back on almost as a “golden age” for ordinary American workers was also the period when unions were most powerful. (That prosperity, incidentally, also coincided with significantly higher tax rates than today, but that is another discussion). Of course, the labor market has changed radically since then, radically altering the situaiton of organized labor.

All the attention being focused on public employees’ unions highlights the fact that labor union membership in the United States has been declining in recent decades and that the one area in which unions seem to have (until now) maintained a powerful position has been among government employees. No doubt there are multiple factors contributing to this, but one seems especially obvious. The decline of unions has corresponded to the movement of jobs away from the traditional bases of union power, in the first place, to other jurisdictions in the United States (e.g., “right to work” states) and more recently to other countries. “Globalization,” “free trade,” etc., have all been characterized by the movement of jobs away from the high-cost labor market in the US (and from the union-friendly states within the U.S.) Government employees are in contrast one group of workers whose jobs, for the most part, cannot move to cheaper foreign labor markets at home or abroad.

So the rise of government employees’ unions is in reality a commentary on the changed character of the global labor market – and the consequent decline of organized labor’s power. At the same time, it highlights how different is the position of government employees’ unions vis-à-vis private sector unions. In private industry, unions have an incentive to see companies make a profit. High Wages, benefits, and “job security” don’t count for much in the end if they help put a company out of business. But governments generally don’t go out of business. Unions have less incentive to moderate their demands, while the politicians on the other side of the bargaining table likewise have less incentive to alienate workers (who vote, after all, and whose unions endorse candidates and contribute to campaigns).

The latter point highlights yet another – specifically political – factor. Unions in general (and the teachers’ unions in particular) are notoriously pro-Democrat. Given the obscene amount of money that nowadays goes into political campaigns, unions represent one solidly Democratic constituency that can be relied upon for help at election time. Just as many Democrats (at least in theory) would like to eliminate or reduce the influence of corporate money in politics, many Republicans would just as logically like to do the same with organized labor. This particularly political dimension of the controversy seems especially evident in Wisconsin where it seems to be primarily the more reliably pro-Democratic unions that appear to have been targeted.

Some elements on the right have long disparaged public employees as somehow less deserving than private sector workers. While this may be largely unfair, it has worked. And then there is the special case of teachers’ unions, which are even more particularly unpopular because of the widespread perception (probably justified to a considerable extent) that teachers’ unions represent a major obstacle in the way of meaningful educational reform.

So there is plenty of right and wrong on both sides of the current shouting match.

As for the deficit, again there is plenty of blame to go around – in both political parties.