Sermons

READING ~ A Few Thoughts About Labor and Giving

Sophocles – Without labor nothing prospers.
Greek – 497 BCE

Ovid – Take rest. A field that has rested gives a bountiful crop. 
Roman – 43 BCE

John Locke – All wealth is the product of labor. 
British – 1632 AD

Martin Luther King, Jr. – All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity.
American – 1929 AD

Emily Dickenson – American – 1830 AD

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain.
If I can ease one life the aching
or cool one pain,
or help one fainting robin
unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

Nelson Mandela – Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice.
South African – 1918 AD

 

READING ~ From Generosity to Justice, A New Gospel of Wealth by Darren Walker. The Ford Foundation, 2019.

As the president of a social justice foundation with a mission
to strengthen democracy, I have one presiding preoccupation: the
staggering threat of inequality. Every day, my colleagues and I ask:
What can we do to reduce inequality in all of its forms?   (page 3)

 

SERMON

Labor and philanthropy.  One might think these two are unlikely companions for a Sunday sermon.  However, on the Eve of Labor Day, this is exactly what I want us to be thinking about.

Let us recall the words of British philosopher, John Locke, who said, “All wealth is the product of labor.”  Wealth formation was a bit different in the 17th century, but the truth of his observation endures to our own time.

The wealthiest families got that way from the fruits of the labor of the men and women who worked in their establishments for long hours and low pay.

The 3 wealthiest American families are:

The Waltons with $212 billion.   Walmart
The Mars family with $142 billion.   Mars candy
The Kochs with $124 billion.    Petroleum

Those are families.  The wealthiest individuals in America are – you already know these names –

Jefff Bezos                $201 billion
Elon Musk                 $190 billion
Mark Zuckerberg     $134 billion
Bill Gates                   $134 billion

Drop down to 11, 12 and 13 – three members of the Walton family – and to the fist woman who makes the list.

Jim Walton               $68 billion
Alice Walton and Rob Walton       $67 billion each

In our world today, wealth creates wealth faster than anything – so the already wealthy become more so while income for wage earners stagnates, or even declines.

If a person works 40 hours a week for a year at $20 per hour, the gross income from that job is $41,600.

At Amazon, most workers don’t make $41,600.  The median Amazon worker made $29,007 in 2020, a $159 increase from the year prior.

The CEO makes $12 million a year. And friends, Amazon is no special case and not even the most dramatic.

In 2021, the average S&P 500 CEO made 324 times what their company’s average worker made, according to a report published in July by the AFL-CIO. That’s up from 299-to-1 in 2020.

The numbers are so staggering that our eyes glaze over.

As we approach another Labor Day holiday, let’s remember working people.  The income of working-class people has done poorly during the Covid epidemic while the wealthiest of our citizens increased their worth.

OK, don’t take my word for it.  Here is what Forbes has to say about our current economic realities – using 2021 data.
It has been a terrible year for many, but the good times keep on rolling for the nation’s richest. The 400 wealthiest Americans saw their collective fortune increase 40% over the last year, to $4.5 trillion. Nearly all are richer than they were a year ago.
(https://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/)
OK, so why am I going over this?  I want us to recognize, and keep in mind that the world’s greatest philanthropists have plenty of money to give away in no small part because of laborers who at some point in time built the businesses that made them wealthy.    Full Stop.

These rich folk did not become rich through only their own effort.  Many inherited their wealth and continue to enjoy astounding privilege.  Even those who have risen from poor or modest beginnings to become billionaires did not do so without the sweat and toil of others.  Nor did they do it without having access to some amount of privilege and the opportunity resulting from that privilege.  These are not bad people.  They are regular people who might benefit from having their hearts break and their eyes open.

Right now, we have an extreme wealth gap this country.

Most of the problems we face today are due to crushing inequality.  Eliminating inequality, or the very least reducing inequality, must be the goal of philanthropy.

Darren Walker is the president of the Ford Foundation.  The Foundation has about 14 billion dollars.  Darren Walker is all about responsible and responsive giving.  He grew up poor and as a young teenager he made a conscious decision to take advantage of every opportunity he could to get rich.  It worked and so did he.  He now works just as hard at using the advantages and privileges of $14 billion to address and reduce inequality. He wrote a book that Ford Foundation published in 2019.  You can download the book at no charge – either as an e-book or an audio file – from the Foundation’s website.  From Generosity to Justice, A New Gospel of Wealth is his attempt to put forward the argument that giving needs to be more than charity and more than traditional philanthropy.  Giving needs to be working toward justice.

A Ford Foundation tag line is … Justice begins where inequality ends.

I really want to go on and on about what Darren Walker says and does as he and the Ford Foundation travel the journey from generosity to justice.  It is a hard journey.  It requires internalizing some very uncomfortable truths – beginning with the truth that most philanthropy and most philanthropists are blind to their own privilege.  The structures to maintain privilege are built into our capitalist economy and continue to serve the wealthy while espousing an ethic of generosity and compassion.

I’m telling you, this work is not for the faint of heart, faint of mind or faint of spirit.  Go get the book and read it.  Listen to Darren Walker speak, you can find him on YouTube.  He is, by the way, a man of deep faith and it is from that place of faith that he eventually has found philanthropy as his life’s work.

He says that charity and generosity are good.  No doubt about that.  But, dear friends, charity and generosity alone will never overcome inequality.  The antidote to inequality is, and must be, justice.

We know this, we really do.  What we don’t know is how to make our own decisions and actions a deliberate move farther along the continuum from generosity toward justice.

Let’s take another quick look at what we do here.  I know you all know the work we do with the funds we distribute each year, but it’s good to quiet our minds for a minute and celebrate together.

You’ve seen, I trust, the report of our 2021 giving. We allocate funds in a variety of ways.

Charity and Philanthropy.

Charity allows someone to survive – – and so, this is necessary.

Philanthropy allows someone to thrive – and we move toward building a world where people have the power, their own power, to shape their lives.

Some of what we do is direct giving – to individuals or to organizations who directly serve people.

Your minister’s discretionary fund is just such a vehicle.  It is designed to allow your minister to make direct contributions for individuals on a confidential basis.  I’ve been able to help people with utility bills, medical expenses, housing and food. Although I’d like to think we are helping to make it possible for people to become self-sufficient, what I do with this fund is charity.  It helps someone meet an emergency need in order to survive.

We support the Castine Area Relief Fund (CARF).  This too is charity.  It is very needed and has been able to help many of your near-by neighbors.

We also support a variety of organizations through who are engaged in direct services designed to reduce poverty and serve families.  Families First in Ellsworth.  H.O.M.E. in Orland. Community Compass in Blue Hill. The Community Childhood Learning Place here in Castine.

The UU Congregation in Aquino (Philippines) is our Partner Church – I hope you read a short piece about them in The Common this week.

We support them with direct funds for their operating budget and for their children’s school expenses.

Our Deborah Pulliam Social Justice grant program has given grants to organizations with a wide range of projects from

Hancock County Jail Volunteers and Literacy to
Next Step domestic abuse prevention and recovery to
Food and Medicine in Brewer for their work with food, healthcare, systemic racism, fair work and fair wages to
The Climate Action Network to
Blue Hill Free Medical Clinic

And the list goes on.  I’m really just mentioning a few.

We’ve given to over three dozen organizations and projects in the last three years alone.

You can find all this on our website at www.uucastine.org/social-justice/

What you will come away with when you really understand all that our small congregation is able to do is a sense of our broad-based generosity.  I hope all of you will take a little time to appreciate how vital your contributions to this congregation are and how far they reach.  Yes, we have a healthy endowment that most certainly makes all of our giving possible.  But the endowment alone cannot achieve much without the engagement and commitment of our members and friends who guide this congregation’s giving as we take seriously our mission to care for each other and our world.

I cannot say strongly enough or often enough how essential each and every one of you is to achieving our mission.  Thank you.  We are doing tremendous and wonderful work.

If you’ve been sitting back and watching as others take the lead in managing our ministry of philanthropy, I invite you to get closer.  You don’t need to be a member; you don’t need to live in Castine or our surrounding towns.  We need you, we need your energy, we need your heart, your mind and your spirit to guide and encourage our giving.  We need people to come together – on Zoom so as to include lots of us – to reason together and formulate an intentional generosity to justice giving strategy for our congregation.

So, that’s the big ask for this morning.  Two things:  learn more and get more involved.

Now here is where I am going to invite all of us to stretch ourselves even farther.  And I don’t have much time left to do this.

The whole focus of big philanthropy is changing.  Major Foundations, like Ford, are clearly leading the way.  We can follow from where we sit.

The change is a deliberate focused move from Generosity to Justice.

We are really great with the generosity part.  We understand the need for charity that addresses emergency and short-term survival needs and we understand longer-term philanthropy that invests in systems that address the root causes of inequality.

Most of the money in philanthropy comes from collected funds that are in invested through endowments and foundations. These organizations have benefitted from systems of inequality and privilege since their founding.  Our endowment is no exception.

There is nothing inherently wrong with privilege.  We all have it in one or more ways.  What we want to examine is whether the very way we give reinforces structures of privilege that perpetuate inequality.  I have to tell you, reading and listening to various managers of big funds talk about what they are doing in the way of self-examination and critical analysis of their investments as a way of addressing inequality is humbling.

Darren Walker says this: “We are on a journey to shift the very foundations of philanthropy—to inspire transformative approaches to giving that can truly disrupt the staggering inequality taking over our planet. Fortunately, we are not alone.”

Fortunately, we also are not alone.  We need to be a partner in this journey from generosity toward justice.  In order for this journey to be successful, everyone (yes, everyone) will be challenged to examine their own lives and be willing to give up some of their privilege by ending the systems that perpetuate existing privilege and reinforce inequality.

Part of justice is recognizing that just because we have the money does not mean that we have the answers.  The best solutions come from those whose lives are directly impacted by inequality.  They do not need us to “help them” by bringing our answers.  They invite us to get to know them and understand them and follow their lead in moving toward better living.

Hard.  Yes, this is hard.  It is emotionally hard and mentally hard.  It takes more time to discern what to do and how to do it.  It is harder than writing a check.  It requires our whole selves to be engaged – to give with our whole heart, our whole mind, and our whole spirit.  Without the combination of these three, we will miss a critical aspect of the very thing we are trying to achieve … justice and well-being for everyone.

Let me finish with more from Darren Walker …
That task requires humility, moral courage, and an unwavering commitment to democratic values and institutions. It demands that all members of society recognize their privilege and position, address the root causes of social ills, and seek out and listen to those who live amid and experience injustice.
Justice is calling. It’s time we answer.

My Dearest Spiritual Companions, we can do so much more with what we have.

We do not have all the answers.

We are not free from blindness to our own privilege and self-importance.

We do have each other.

We do have the heart, mind and spirit to give in ways that move us from generosity to greater justice, equity, compassion.

Let us look in the mirror and into the faces of each other to find the ones who will hear and follow the call to justice.

We have the resources.

May we have the will.

Blessed Be.   I Love You.   Amen.