“You cannot serve God and mammon” - Matthew 6:24
(From an illustrated sermon preached by Ray Anglesea at West End United Reformed Church, Newcastle upon Tyne, 17th October 2010)
As the 7:23 pulled out of Durham railway station bound for Glasgow a couple of weeks ago I heard the guard announce “that because of cuts and staff shortages there would be no trolley service in standard class accommodation. National Express fully apologises for this inconvenience.” A few miles up the track a further announcement was made. “Because of staff shortages,” the guard said “there has been no opportunity to place seat reservation tickets in the carriages.” In a final announcement the guard went on to apologise to first class passengers that, again, “because of staff shortages they were doing the best they could to serve breakfast and requested customers to remain patient.” Was it I thought, as the train sped on through Chester le Street, a hunch, a foretaste, a premonition of the outcome of the spending review cuts that will be announced this coming Wednesday 20th October, as the nation is forced to tighten its belt to the tune of £120 billion pounds? For let us make no mistake. Next Wednesday billions of pounds will be wiped out of the public sector budget, social services, education, transport, libraries, parks, police, health service, and the military. Job losses will be profound: Whitehall veterans have already hinted that the Coalition Government cuts will be much, much deeper than anything implemented by the Iron Lady and Sir Geoffrey Howe.
But that is small comfort to the North East. The board room of the regional development agency One North East is not a fun place to be at the moment. Chancellor George Osborne’s has told One North East to take £33m out of its budget, in advance of its abolition in 2012. Paul Callaghan, the Chairman of One North East, stated that such a cut would lead to up to 3000 job losses and 700 businesses starved of investment opportunities.
Let us remind ourselves. These financial cut backs and job losses are a result of what began in 2007; American funds, exposed to subprime mortgages, snowballed into one of the worst financial crises in modern history – a near death experience of the global economy. The financial crisis here in Britain was taken to the brink. Titans of the banking industry bit the dust. Some British banks were partially nationalised with hundreds of billions of pounds of taxpayer’s money put on the line. Our own Northern Rock plc, the first bank in 150 years to suffer a bank run was taken into public ownership in 2008. As the recession bit harder the value of houses dropped by one sixth; the value of shares dropped by almost one third. High Street stores like Woolworths, MFI and Zavvi, went out of business. In the last 3 years tens of thousands of people worldwide have lost their jobs and it is said hundreds of thousands more will do so. On 17 September 2008, very shortly after the demise of Lehman Brothers, HBOS's – Halifax/Bank of Scotland shares fell 17% and to cut a long story short HBOS joined the Lloyds banking group in January 2009.
You may not know but the Bank of Scotland one of the worlds’ oldest banks and the first private bank to issue paper money. Inaugurated by the merchants of Edinburgh, they had heard from John Knox who had heard it from John Calvin in Geneva that lending money at interest was no longer a sin against God. Sadly, the irony today is that The Bank of Scotland collapsed because it was laden with debt. Weird devices for making money out of money, invented by university trained economists, enabled in this by government lawmakers, deregulated money on their advice. And as a result, in this country, and in the US, for the last 30 years money has been the master. As Jesus said – and as we have seen in the financial meltdown since Lehmann Brothers collapsed, the tragic effects has been that millions of ordinary people have lost their jobs, their homes, and millions of others going hungry because of the high price of food - you cannot serve God and money. The high price of food had difficult international consequences for nine of our young northern synod members and their leaders. After a frightening series of food street riots in the capital Maputo the young students cut short their visit to Mozambique; they were escorted out of the nation’s capital, a safe route to Johannesburg and a flight home.
You cannot serve two masters says Jesus in this morning gospel reading. You cannot serve God: you cannot serve mammon. Money is not just a poor sovereign. As a sovereign it replaces God and undermines the laws of God; it multiplies debt and bondage so that it destroys communities, families, homes, livelihoods and ultimately the earth itself. And yet today we have made it possible for ourselves to worship God and mammon.
Three year later after the financial meltdown the world has moved on. Today, without doubt, two of the most powerful forces in our interconnected globalised world are religion and money – leading Christian economists like Huw Pym and Larry Elliot, economic editor of the Guardian, have been saying for some time that theological and ethical approaches to economics are no longer marginal but are now central to the thinking and understanding of the current crises.
And yet it is quite striking that in the gospel parables Jesus more than once uses the world of economics as a framework for his stories – the parable of the talents, the dishonest steward, and the lost coin. Like farming, like family relationships, like the tensions of public political life economic relations have something to say to us about how we see our humanity in the context of God’s action. Money is after all a metaphor alongside other things as to how we see our relationship to God and God to us. But this financial crisis which has brought about this week’s spending cuts is about more than money. It is also about morality.
Morality was a word that was to resonate and reverberate on Saturday 4th March 1933 when President Frankland Roosevelt gave his inaugural presidential address. America, the world’s biggest economy had just started the slow ascent from the bottom of an economic abyss after the Wall Street Crash in 1929 that saw a quarter of the working population jobless. Roosevelt said “America was facing not just an economic but a moral crisis,” and he provided an almost biblical damnation of the excesses that had sent the stock market rise to heady heights in the boom years of the late 20’s. “Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion,” the new president said “rejected by the hearts and minds of men.” As Jesus said - You cannot serve God and mammon.
Almost 77 years later another president found an echo of the Roosevelt era when he outlined plans to reform Wall Street following another profound shock to the financial system. It took a year after his inaugural address at a White House press conference on 21 January 2010 for Barak Obama to thunder out his words of condemnation. As Jesus said - You cannot serve God and mammon.
At a European conference in 2006 another aspiring world statesmen Tory leader David Cameron said “there is more to life than making money,” arguing that improving people's happiness is a key challenge for politicians. It's time we admitted that there's more to life than money, and it's time we focused not just on GDP, but on GWB - general well-being," he said. "Well-being can't be measured by money or traded in markets. And as Baroness Warsi, chairperson of the Conservative Party, this administration, unlike the previous one “does God.” Well we shall see! Jesus said – You cannot serve God and mammon.
There’s a true story that comes from the sinking of the Titanic. A frightened woman found her place in a lifeboat that was about to be lowered into the raging North Atlantic. She suddenly thought of something she needed, so she asked permission to return to her stateroom before they cast off. She was granted three minutes or they would have to leave without her. She ran across the deck that was already slanted at a dangerous angle. She raced through the gambling room with all the money that had rolled to one side, ankle deep. She came to her stateroom and quickly pushed aside her diamond rings and expensive bracelets and necklaces as she reached to the shelf above her bed and grabbed three small oranges. She quickly found her way back to the lifeboat and got in. Now that seems incredible because thirty minutes earlier she would not have chosen a crate of oranges over even the smallest diamond. But death had boarded the Titanic. One blast of its awful breath had transformed all values. Instantaneously, priceless things had become worthless. Worthless things had become priceless. And in that moment she preferred three small oranges to a crate of diamonds.
No one can serve two masters; Jesus tells us, for he will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth, or ‘Mammon’. The verb serve means literally ‘be the slave of', showing that what really matters here is what motivates us and drives us. Jesus had eyes to see, and he saw how some people allowed themselves to become driven to the point of enslavement by their attempts to amass wealth, to extend security, so that this became the very centre of their energy and purpose. In fact, in setting their eyes on all this, they failed to see.
But what economic editors can see is that we are now in the end game of an old economic paradigm, an old economic model. Britain is at a historic turning point. Next Wednesday’s the implementation of the spending cuts review will be the biggest social change in this country. How as individuals and as a church are we going to respond to these changes – as the Evangelical Alliance have already commented “Is there life beyond debt? For after all George Osborne’s heavily loaded and highly communal phrase says it all – we are all in this together!
These turbulent times of approaching austerity will undoubtedly leave an indelible mark on our economic and social landscape. Of course we firmly believe that the Bible is outspoken on issues of poverty and injustice. We must be prepared to demonstrate that our faith is in God, not in the false gods of mammon of this age; I believe the church is uniquely positioned to help people who are in debt, have lost their jobs or are otherwise struggling with their finances. When we meet a new person, one of the first questions we ask is: "What do you do for a living?" From my own experience I know that my worth was wrapped up in planning career and is bound up in my self-supporting ministry. Our jobs becomes our identity - who we are! What we do becomes what we value! When we lose a job or are faced with a career change, we often feel we've lost our worth.
For a loss of a job is one of the greatest trials we can endure; the effects of job loss are often long lasting. This is largely due to the fact that society trains us to identify ourselves by how we provide for our family. A job loss can certainly lead to the loss of one's identity, which can result in the loss of a purpose in life. Without a purpose in life, we tend to feel as if we are no longer in control. These are natural and ordinary feelings.
With this loss of identify, the financial loss too has to be assessed. A family has to cope with less income and many families in the coming months will be facing this problem. Applying for unemployment compensation can be emotionally devastating for some people; I personally couldn’t cope with the prospect of “signing on.” Job loss can create an atmosphere of negative despair and a defeatist attitude among many individuals; so I would have to say evading this attitude is vital for Christians and non-Christians alike. When negative attitudes sink into one’s life, they are often difficult to remove.
Job loss has obvious immediate results. But the most damaging effect of a job loss is the slippery slope it generates. The situation can and often does go from bad to worse.
By combining the conviction that motivates our action with the resources and organisations already established, we as a church can develop its engagement to bring vital aid to those who will be in greatest need following the announcements to be made next Wednesday. “We must take care of those in need,” was the Archbishop of Canterbury’s New Year Message this year. “Our hearts will be in a very bad way if they are focused only on the state of our finances. They’ll be healthy if they’re capable of turning outwards - looking at the real treasure that is our fellow human beings.”
It doesn’t matter the reasons why people have lost their jobs. It doesn’t matter if it is their fault or somebody else’s fault or nobody’s fault at all. God cares for everybody and so we must care for everybody. There will be people in need because of the economic crisis – even in the community here in West End. We must be prepared to help them. Those who have lost their jobs – those who have lost their savings. Those who find that their pensions are not worth what they were or should be.
For those who are suffering job loss or will suffer a future job loss I can't offer you a resume, preparation advice or interviewing techniques, but I can assure you that God may have a better idea than anything you've ever considered before. Remember always that God cares about the situation we find ourselves in - sometimes running out of one’s own resources is a good time to turn to God for answers. When we come to God we may find that my worth is not to be found in me, in my job, and what I was capable of doing, but in God and what He saw in me and what He wants to do through me. In His eyes, our worth is not just about our accomplishments. In fact, it is often not about me/us at all! It is comforting to know that our significance, our economic worth neither began nor ended with our careers. Even though our careers may be done, a whole new world awaits us as we look for God's new direction.
Prayer
God, our companion in the wilderness, who led your people to new tasks in a new land, help us find new tasks and new purposes in a world of unemployment, early retirement and redundancy, that we too may find opportunities to labour and at the end to rest and see that it is good, through Jesus Christ our Lord, whose work was to proclaim your kingdom.
Amen
Revd Ray Anglesea is a self supporting minister working in the Northern Synod
