Dan Harper | Sermons

  • Mothering

    This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Sermon copyright (c) 2009 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading this morning is half of a very short story by Grace Paley, titled “Mother”:

    One day I was listening to the AM radio. I heard a song: “Oh, I Long To See My Mother in the Doorway.” By God! I said, I understand that song. I have often longed to see my mother in the doorway. As a matter of fact, she did stand frequently in various doorways looking at me. She stood one day, just so, at the front door, the darkness of the hallway behind her. It was New Year’s Day. She said sadly, If you come home at 4 a.m. when you’re seventeen, what time will you come home when you’re twenty? She asked this question without humor or meanness. She had begun her worried preparations for death. She would not be present, she thought, when I was twenty. So she wondered.

    Another time she stood in the doorway of my room. I had just issued a political manifesto attacking the family’s position on the Soviet Union. She said, Go to sleep for godsakes, you damn fool, you and your Communist ideas. We saw them already, Papa and me, in 1905. We guessed it all.

    At the door of the kitchen she said, You never finish your lunch. You run around senselessly. What will become of you?

    Then she died.

    Naturally for the rest of my life I longed to see her, not only in doorways, in a great number of places — in the dining room with my aunts, at the window looking up and down the block,… in the living room with my father….

    The second reading this morning is from a poem by Lucille Clifton titled “the mother’s story”:

    a line of women i don’t know,
    she said,
    came in and whispered over you
    each one fierce word
    she said, each word
    more powerful than the one before.
    and i thought what is this to bring
    to one black girl from buffalo
    until the last one came and smiled,
    she said,
    and filled your ear with light
    and that, she said, has been the one,
    the last one, that last one.

    Sermon — “Mothering”

    Mother’s Day is a perfect day for us religious liberals to reflect on mothering from our theological viewpoint. We know that motherhood and feminism are perfectly compatible. We know that same-sex couples can serve as both mothers and fathers to their children. We know that gender roles are far more fluid than the religious right admits. We know that love is a central value of our religion. Given all that, I’d like to reflect with you on what mothering means to us religious liberals.

     

    1. Now I don’t know about you, but I find that I have a pretty clear idea of the stereotypical perfect mother. The perfect mother, according to the stereotype that I know best, is warm and welcoming; she is always dressed in an understated but attractive manner; she dispenses freshly-baked cookies at the drop of the proverbial hat; and she also dispenses kind and heartfelt wisdom whenever you need it. I suspect that my stereotype of the perfect mother comes pretty much directly from the television programs I used to watch as a child.

    That is the stereotype of the perfect mother that I find lodged in my consciousness, but I know perfectly well that real mothers do not correspond to this stereotype. Take my mother, for example. My mother was a New England Yankee, and by the standards of Yankee culture she was within the norm of warm and welcoming, by any other standards she appeared cool and even a little standoffish; she was more on the prickly end of the mothering spectrum than the cuddly end of the spectrum. My mother was always sensibly dressed, but she did not dress like those mothers on the television, she dressed like the sensible New England Yankee that she was. She did bake cookies; but she was far more likely to dispense high ambitions for her children than to dispense cookies. As for dispensing kind and heartfelt wisdom, this was not something my mother did; her wisdom was thoughtful, stark, true, occasionally painful, and nearly always right.

    My mother was not the stereotypical television mother that we are all supposed to dream of. But then, whose mother is? Maybe some of us here this morning had stereotypical television mothers, and if you did I would love to hear about your perfect mom during social hour. Or maybe some of you here were in fact the perfect wise and warm cookie-baking mom, in which case I would also love to hear from you, and maybe even borrow some of your warmth and wisdom — Lord knows, I could use some. But every mother is first and foremost a unique human being. Some mothers might be able to be a stereotypical warm, welcoming, cookie-baking mom. But all mothers are first and foremost their own selves, unique individuals with unique personal and cultural characteristics that may or may not allow them to fit into the stereotype of the perfect mom.

    It seems to me that real-life mothers rarely fit the idealized stereotype. I sometimes find real people who seem to fit most of the characteristics of the idealized stereotypical mom, but not quite all those characteristics. I know someone who has five kids, all adopted from difficult settings, and all the kids are dearly loved and go off to school and come home, and he’s there to fix them a snack and help them with homework. Yes, I said “he’s there to fix them a snack,” because this is a family with two dads. He’s far closer to the ideal of the stereotypical mom than my own mother was. Or let me give you another example: I used to work with a guy named Larry, and his mother died when he was quite small (this was back in the Great Depression). Larry’s father realized that he was “a one-woman man” (those were his terms, according to Larry), and so he raised Larry and Larry’s brothers and sisters all by himself, serving as both mother and father to the children. Mothering and fathering blended together in that family; for Larry, his father was really the only mother he remembered.

    Maybe we can begin to come up with a better definition of “mothering.” Maybe we want to say something like this: “Mothering” is a human activity where a caring adult makes sure you’re going to survive until adulthood, and while most mothers are women, there are plenty of men who serve as mothers too. Of course we know that under a strict technical definition, motherhood is a biological fact related to human beings who can bear children, but remember that some biological women are not able to bear children, yet they too can be mothers. Mothering is a human activity that transcends the biological equipment that an individual may happen to have.

    So we can say this about mothering as a human activity: Mothering is when a caring adult makes sure a child survives until adulthood. Mothering is most often done by women, but it can be done by men. Mothering and fathering may blend together at times. And there are very few people who are perfect at mothering; even those moms we see on television make mistakes sometimes.

     

    2. In recent years, I have begun to realize that mothering is not limited to adults who have children in their immediate family. I began to realize that every once in a while I got mothered by people to whom I was not related. For example, I was at some political meeting, and I got mothered by someone who is no relation to me. This woman, who is both a mother and a grandmother, greeted me with a big hug, welcomed me, made sure I was comfortable, and then went on to mother someone else.

    Human beings are essentially social, tribal animals. Under the leadership of the religious conservatives, contemporary American society tries to tell us that the nuclear family, with a mom and dad and 2.5 children, is the only place where “real” mothering can take place, but of course that’s complete nonsense. There are many other family structures where good mothering takes place: extended families where several generations live together; blended families; families with two dads or two moms; and so on. And indeed, because we are social, tribal animals, mothering can go on in other human institutions, not just in families. I already told you how I got mothered at a political meeting. But what I’d particularly like to talk about is how good mothering can go on in churches.

    When I was the Director of Religious Education at the Unitarian Universalist church in Lexington, the assistant minister there, a woman named Ellen Spero, decided to hold a Sunday evening vespers service, and she got me to help out, and we held these vespers service for the next year and a half, until we both left that church to go on to other churches.

    If you attended one of Ellen’s vespers services, the first thing you would notice when you walked in was that all the chairs were in a circle. Once the vespers service started, you would find that it seemed very much like the worship services we have here on Sunday mornings: listening to readings, and singing hymns, and lighting a chalice, and sharing candles of joy and sorrow, and so on. The main difference would be that the sermon might be a sermon, or it might be a short play; or there might be an activity to go along with the sermon, such as drawing with crayons or listening to jazz.

    If you were very observant, you might notice some other important things. There was always food at these vespers services. Ellen was a great believer in what she called her “ministry of food,” so she always brought lots of delightful and comforting food. The food was right next to the circle of chairs, and if you arrived early you could have something to eat and drink during the worship service. As a mom and as a feminist, Ellen knew that you have to take care of people’s bodies at the same time you take care of their spirits.

    There was always a place for children at these worship services. As the religious educator, I would make sure there was a big rug included in the circle of chairs, with quiet toys and games and crayons and paper. That way, if you wanted to bring your children to the vespers service, they could play quietly on the carpet while you sat next to them. This, too, was an idea that came out of Ellen’s experience as a mom and as a feminist. As a feminist, she knew that many Unitarian Universalist churches have been influenced by the dominant patriarchal culture to think that children are bad, so she fought that by making sure that children were welcomed and seen as good. And as a mom, she wanted to have a worship service that her five-year-old son could attend.

    With all the mothering that went on in these vespers services, Ellen was tapping into an old line of Unitarian thought. Back in the 1870s, a group of women Unitarian ministers, mostly based in the Midwest, built vibrant congregations around the idea of the church being like a home. These women, who are often called the Prophetic Sisterhood, felt that when you come into a Unitarian church, it should feel like you’re coming into someone’s house, where you are greeted, and welcomed, where your physical needs are acknowledged, where you can have some cookies. Here in our own church, where we have absolutely no historical connection to the Prophetic Sisterhood, we still live out these ideals. Even here in this room, which is a far more formal architectural space than that used by the Prophetic Sisterhood, we live out these feminist ideals. We acknowledge that people have physical needs: you may notice that lots of people come in late to the worship service, and we don’t mind because we know the reality is that life is complex for many of us, and we get here when we can get here (although I have to say I would prefer to be here early because I would not want to miss Randy’s preludes).

    But you can really get a sense of this in our Parish House. When our congregation built the Parish House back in the 1890s, they made it feel like someone’s home. I walk into the Parish House to attend social hour after the worship service, and you see all that warm wood panelling, and the fireplaces, and the kitchen and dining room, and I feel like I’m at home. And because we have been influenced by feminist ideals, we’ve taken that feeling still further. We like to have the children with us during social hour, partly as a feminist manifesto, and partly because it feels more humane, more human, to have children around. And during social hour, we have pretty good food — homemade soup, and sometimes pizza, so if you need to eat, you often can get a pretty good meal here. And the conversations that take place during social hour are sometimes like those conversations you wish you could have had with your mother: touching on the big issues of life, like who we are, and where love comes from, and what we want to do when we grow up.

     

    3. What I think is most important about churches and mothering, though, is that churches can be places that support mothers (and support fathers for that matter). Being a parent is the hardest thing a human being can do. Parents need support. The nuclear family, so beloved of the religious right, does not provide adequate support, and I am not surprised when I hear that the divorce rate among the religious right is higher than among us: they have placed all their eggs in the nuclear family basket, and it’s a pretty fragile basket. Perhaps if you have absolutely the perfect nuclear family with superhumanly talented parents, perhaps then the nuclear family works. But speaking as a pastor, I don’t know of any nuclear families like that; all the nuclear families that I know need far more support than that. We all need lots of other people in our lives.

    To me, this is the most important function of our liberal churches today. We exist as religious communities in order to support families — both families with children, and all other families as well. As liberal churches, we do not place restrictions on who is allowed in our religious community — you are welcome no matter what your theology, gender, sexual orientation, family status, gender identity, race or ethnicity, physical or mental ability. We try to live out our highest ideal, to love our neighbors as ourselves, and we do this without shoving dogma and creeds down your throat. You can some into a liberal church, bringing your whole self, and feel at home. yes, you may be challenged at times; yes, we have internal fights; yes we make many mistakes. But our ideal is that you can be a part of this community and not have to check part of yourself at the door.

    So we welcome all mothers, all those who are engaged in the difficult human activity of mothering. We welcome mothers and their children here. We provide support beyond the over-stressed nuclear family. If you’re a relatively new mother, this is a community where you can be supported by , and learn from, more experienced mothers and grandmothers (some of whom, by the way, might be men). We welcome children, and we provide a safe place for children, hopefully while giving mothers (and fathers) time to take care of their spiritual needs. With ongoing vigilance, we make this congregation an emotionally and physically safe place for children, with many safe and appropriate adult role models.

    These represent our bedrock moral values. We value all those involved in mothering. We value all those who mother children; and yes, we also value those people who manage to mother adults too.

     

    In closing, my highest priority for a church is that it should be a place that supports mothering. Freedom of conscience and all that is all very well, but mothering is where it’s at. When I say mothering, I do not mean what the fundamentalists mean. For me, mothering is not restricted by assigned gender, not restricted by sexual orientation, not restricted by traditional gender identity: there are gay men who are good at mothering, and there are men who do not fit into standard gender identity who are good at mothering; similarly, there are women who are better at fathering than at mothering. Nor do I have a stereotyped understanding of mothering: mothering does not need to be cuddly. And given who I am, my sense of mothering is very ambitious for the people being mothered.

    But you know, mothering is one of the main reasons I stick with liberal churches.

  • Music Sunday

    This introduction to the annual music service was offered by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, what is below is a reading text. The actual introduction contained improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Copyright (c) 2009 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading is by Ned Rorem. Rorem is one of our best living American composers, and he is an accomplished writer in the genres of diary and memoir. This reading comes from his memoir Knowing When To Stop:

    “Ninety-nine percent of the globe thrives without art. Maybe, after all, art doesn’t last forever. No symphony, no ballet, not even a painting can withstand a generation without being reinterpreted, and finally growing out of fashion like an old song…. Virgil [Thompson] used to say, fifty years ago when the craving for ‘authenticity’ in pre-Bach performances was already avid, that we have reached a point where we can turn a searchlight onto the music of the past, illuminating every dusty cornerful of neumes and mordents and dynamics and metronomic tempos, and reproduce the formal sounds precisely as when they were created. Indeed, we know everything about that music except the essential: what it meant to those who first heard it. How can we in a godless time purport to listen as true believers listened?”

    The second reading comes from a biography of the mathematician Paul Erdős. You will need to know that Erdős, an agnostic, often referred to God as “SF,” which stood for “Supreme Fascist.”

    “There’s an old debate,” Erdős said, “about whether you create methematics or just discover it. In other words, are the truths already there, even if we don’t yet know them? If you believe in God, the answer is obvious. Mathematical truths are there in the SF’s mind, and you just rediscover them….

    “I’m not qualified to say whether or not God exists,” Erdős said. I kind of doubt he does. Nevertheless, I’m always saying that the SF has this transfinite Book — transfinite being a concept in mathematics that is larger than infinite — that contain the best proofs of all mathematical theorems, proofs that are elegant and perfect.” The strongest compliment Erdős gave to a colleague’s work was to say, “It’s straight from the Book.”

    [The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, by Paul Hoffman, p. 26.]

    Introduction to music

    Before the real sermon starts [i.e., Taktakishvili, Aria and Allegro scherzando from Sonata No. 1, played by music director Randay Fayan and regular guest musician Mana Washio], I offer this brief meditation.

    In our Unitarian Universalist religious tradition, we like to distinguish between the transient and the permanent. Some “truth” is transient, so for example we Unitarian Universalists are likely to say that religious creeds, dogmas, and doctrines are transient, because while they may sound true when they are first written, they will not fare so well with later generations, who will first doubt and then reject them. Yet even these transient creeds and dogmas have their use, for ultimately they all point (or try to point) to those truths which are permanent.

    We can see this same principle at work in fields other than religion. Mathematicians prove universal principles, but some mathematical proofs are valued more highly than others. A mathematical proof should be elegant, beautiful, and it gives insight into what is being proved. The Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős liked to say that somewhere there is a transfinite Book filled with beautiful, insightful mathematical proofs, the best proofs, proofs that are elegant and perfect. Whether you believe in a God who is the keeper of that Book, or whether you simply believe that somewhere there is such a book (Erdős was probably in the latter camp), he said that you have to believe that there is such a book. And all the best mathematics comes straight from that Book.

    The Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau put it another way. He said that in every age, we human beings can gain insight into the eternal truths, if we would but try. Those eternal truths are just as fresh today as when the first human being comprehended them; and to the extent that we gaze upon those eternal truths, we too become immortal. Everything else we do, any fame we acquire during our lives, founding a family or even a country, all this is impermanent and mortal; it will die away someday.

    Of the things we do together as a religious community, listening to music together is one of the things that allow us to apprehend those permanent, eternal truths. Music, like its close cousin mathematics, is one of the human activities that point us towards eternal, immortal truth. An individual performance of music does not last forever, but while the musicians are playing, through their playing we have direct access to eternal, immortal truth. We may hear a performance of the same piece of music five or fifty years from now, and by then performance styles will have changed, and society will have changed, yet still will we be able to apprehend the eternal and immortal. This is why music is central to our religious tradition: because through it, we can transcend the impermanent, the mortal, the imperfect — transcend that to reach eternity.

  • Universal Thrift

    This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Sermon copyright (c) 2009 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading was from the article “Creating Social Value” by Philip Auerswald, in the spring, 2009, issue of Standford Social Innovation Review:

    “For most of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century, economists saw themselves as ‘moral philosophers,’ as qualified to comment on the equity of societal processes as on their efficiency. That tradition came to an end rather abruptly with the publication in 1939 by John R. Hicks of the classic book Value and Capital — a work that took the creation of value as a starting point for fundamental theoretical syntheses. At a time when ideological excesses, such as communism and fascism, were becoming the norm, Hicks and his colleagues at the London School of Economics and the University of Cambridge were intent on reestablishing the field of economics on firm scientific foundations, immune to whim or rhetoric. Hicks asserted forcefully that the field of economics should be based, not on the fantasy of objectively measured happiness, but rather on subjective judgments of value as revealed through market transactions. Because utility was not measurable, interpersonal comparisons were out of bounds.” [p. 54]

    The second reading was from the Gospel of Thomas, chapter 65, Scholar’s Version translation:

    “A person owned a vineyard and rented it to some farmers, so they could work it and he could collect its crop from them. He sent his slave so the farmers would give him the vineyard’s crop. They grabbed him, beat him, and almost killed him, and the slave returned and told his master. His master said, ‘Perhaps they didn’t know him.’ He sent another slave, and the farmers beat that one as well. Then the master sent his son and said, ‘Perhaps they’ll show my son some respect.’ Because the farmers knew that he was the heir to the vineyard, they grabbed him and killed him….”

    Sermon: “Universal Thrift”

    The best churches, churches that uphold the highest ideals, tend to be critical of the society around them. I believe that in this sense our church is one of the best churches, for we do uphold the highest ideals. When we look at the world around us, we see the many things that are wrong with human society; because of our high ideals, we see ways in which human society could be so much better than it is now. We not only hold high ideals, we also act on those ideals, and when we take action on our ideals we are being critical of the society around us.

    This morning I’d like to speak with you about one church project in which we have lived out our ideals in two areas: sustainability, and helping out those of lower economic status. I am referring to Universal Thrift Store, the store we house in our church basement, which recycles used clothing and housewares by making them available at low prices to anyone who comes in the store. There’s nothing new about churches hosting thrift stores, but I find Universal Thrift more interesting than the average church thrift store, partly because of the store’s goals, and partly because of some of the innovative approaches to running a thrift store that are being taken. Let me tell you some of Universal Thrift’s story, and then I’ll relate the story of Universal Thrift to some larger religious questions.

    Universal Thrift Store was started by Lorial Laughery-Weincek in 2003; the Board of Trustees voted to approve the Thrift Store on June 3, 2003, and it opened for business soon thereafter. As I understand it, a major part of Lorial’s motivation when she founded Universal Thrift was to raise funds to go towards the operating expenses of the church. Lorial knew that she had the skills to run a profitable thrift store and the church needed additional income, so everyone would benefit.

    But Universal Thrift was always more than a way to raise money for the church. Lorial had contacts with many social service agencies in the city, and every now and again those social service agencies would send a person in need to Universal Thrift, with a letter asking if Lorial could give that person clothing or housewares at no cost. A family with small children might have had a fire in their apartment, and Universal Thrift could provide that family with basic clothing, and enough pots and pans and dishes so they could cook and eat. Or a woman with children who had escaped from an abusive relationship might need clothing and housewares, and again Universal Thrift could supply a few basic things for free, enough to get that family started in their new life.

    Under Lorial’s management, Universal Thrift became more than just a store or social service provider. It was also something of a social center for several groups of people. There was the small and changing group of volunteers who would help Lorial, some on a regular basis and some on an irregular basis. There were the regular customers who came back week after week, and maybe they bought something, but maybe they came to chat with Lorial and the volunteers. And there were a few people who never bought anything, but Universal Thrift was one of their hangouts. Anyone, of any economic or social status, could come into Universal Thrift and be treated as a human being, treated with dignity and respect. Shoplifters were warned away, but even they were treated as human beings — misguided human beings, because who’d be silly enough to shoplift in a place like Universal Thrift, but human beings none the less.

    Late last summer, we started experienced an economic crisis, which we now know is the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. At about the same time, Lorial underwent a serious illness. Now from 2003 through 2008, Lorial had run Universal Thrift herself. When I learned that Lorial was too ill to work at Universal Thrift, I thought that would be the end of it. So often, church projects like this fall apart when the founder stops working on it — even if they only stop working on it for a couple of months.

    But three people, Bill Bennett, Maryellen Kenney, and Ted Schade, stepped forward and said they did not want see Universal Thrift Store close for even one day. With unemployment rising and the economy in freefall, they felt the surrounding community needed Universal Thrift more than ever. So they pitched in and kept the store open.

    Their decision was a good one. Due to the economic downturn, sales in thrift stores rose 35% nationwide beginning last fall. Sales at Universal Thrift rose even higher than that; we don’t have seasonally-weighted records for previous years so I can’t give you an exact percentage, but I suspect fall sales at least doubled over the previous year.

    Universal Thrift Store also saw an increase in volunteer participation. People in the church and in the surrounding community knew how bad the economy had gotten, and they knew that Universal Thrift was providing an essential service to people in economic need. Donations to Universal Thrift increased, and volunteers began helping out in many ways. Many people began taking a load of donated clothing every Sunday and running it through their washing machine at home, and then bringing it back to church, laundered and folded, the next Sunday. More volunteers began helping out during store hours, both people who come to our worship services and other people whose only exposure to First Unitarian is through their volunteer work with Universal Thrift.

    By now, in April, 2009, the pundits tell us that the economy is no longer in freefall, that we have hit bottom, and that some economic signs are actually beginning to look positive. But the pundits also warn us that it is going to be a long, slow recovery, that unemployment will continue to rise for some time, that many families will not see any real improvement in their economic status for some time. Thus many people in the surrounding community will continue to rely on Universal Thrift for some time.

    I try to drop in to Universal Thrift once a week to talk with the volunteers to hear how things are going, and just to see what’s going on. The people who shop in Universal Thrift are a diverse bunch: I see people with all different shades and colors of skin; I hear different languages being spoken, English, Spanish, and Portuguese for sure, and sometimes other languages I can’t identify; I see parents with children, single people, older couples, people of all ages. While you can never be sure how much money someone has just by looking at them, I suspect some of the people who come in are comfortably middle class or upper middle class; while some of the people who shop at Universal Thrift (as Bill Bennett has pointed out) put their purchases in a wheeled shopping cart parked on the sidewalk because they don’t have a car. While you can never be certain how much education someone has, some people who come into the store seem as if they have a college education, and others who seem as if they don’t. In short, the wide diversity of the people who shop at Universal Thrift reflects the wide diversity of our church’s neighborhood.

    Let me summarize what Universal Thrift does:

    Whether someone shops at Universal Thrriftt out of choice or because they can’t afford to shop somewhere else, the store is a resource for the community. Almost as important, Universal Thrift also helps out people who are in dire need and who have no money at all, supplying free clothing and housewares when the need is great. And for all customers, Universal Thrift doesn’t threaten anyone’s personal pride: customers are treated with respect; and most goods are not given away free, thus preventing guilt, shame, and dependency.

    Universal Thrift provides a benefit to volunteers, giving an outlet for people to help others through important and meaningful work. And Universal Thrift helps the church: it is now the biggest single fundraising effort in our church, and current projections are that Universal Thrift will gross somewhere around four thousand dollars this fiscal year, twice as much money as the next biggest fundraising effort. We are doing good for others, while doing well for ourselves.

    Finally, Universal Thrift recycles perfectly useable clothing and other household goods that might otherwise have gone into the landfill. That is to say, Universal Thrift promotes a culture of sustainability and thrift, in direct opposition to the American consumer culture of unsustainability and waste. In this sense, the phrase “Universal Thrift” is not just the name of the store, it is also an economic manifesto. The goal of Universal Thrift is not to maximize profit at the expense of moral goals; instead, the goal of Universal Thrift is to increase profitability while upholding moral goals like sustainability and human dignity.

    I promised you that I would explain something of the religious significance of Universal Thrift. And given who I am, the best way I know how to do that is to retell a story that is originally attributed to Jesus of Nazareth — who was himself an outspoken critic of the economic problems of his day.

    Here’s the story Jesus told, as it comes down to us in the Gospel of Thomas, chapter 65:

    “A person owned a vineyard and rented it to some farmers, so they could work it and he could collect its crop from them. He sent his slave so the farmers would give him the vineyard’s crop. They grabbed him, beat him, and almost killed him, and the slave returned and told his master. His master said, ‘Perhaps they didn’t know him.’ He sent another slave, and the farmers beat that one as well. Then the master sent his son and said, ‘Perhaps they’ll show my son some respect.’ Because the farmers knew that he was the heir to the vineyard, they grabbed him and killed him. Anyone here with two ears had better listen!”

    In the standard Christian interpretation, this story is an allegory that has something to do with some kind of foreshadowing of Jesus getting executed by the Romans on trumped-up political charges. But forget the standard Christian interpretation: it takes a lot of work to turn this story into an allegory of Jesus’s execution.

    It makes much more sense to take this story at face value. Taken at face value, this story is an accurate description of the economic situation during Jesus’s time. There were many people who were tenant farmers — we used to call them sharecroppers here in the United States. Jesus’s original listeners would have know that the tenant farmers were badly exploited by wealthy landowners — just as we know that sharecroppers here in the United States were badly exploited by landowners. Implicit in the knowledge that the tenant farmers were being badly exploited was the knowledge that in order to make any kind of living, they in turn would have had to exploit the land, farming it unsustainably so that they could hope grow just enough extra to allow them to provide for their own families.

    If we take this story at face value, as a story about morally corrupt exploitation of tenant farmers and of the land, we can see how the different characters are driven to act by their economic circumstances. The farmers deplete the land, beat up the slaves sent to collect the crop, and kill the landowner’s son. The slaves, forced to act as the agent of the exploitative landowner, are essentially helpless and get beaten almost to death. As for the wealthy landowner, he seems to me to be morally despicable simply because he is so clueless. He obviously has no real understanding of the extent to which he exploited the tenant farmers. He doesn’t get how unjust it is that he should sit back and do nothing, and reap all the benefits of the tenant farmers’ hard work; that is to say, he doesn’t understand that exploitation is bad.

    And the rich landowner has no excuse for not understanding that exploitation is bad. Jesus of Nazareth, who told this story, was a Jew, and his listeners were Jews, and we can assume that the rich landowner in the story is a Jew. As a Jew, the rich landowner should know what is said in the Torah, in the book of Leviticus [Lev. 25.1-7], where the God of the Israelites commanded them that they shall periodically let the land lie fallow, that is, commanded them to not over-exploit the land. And when the God of the Israelites prohibits more than just exploitation, their God is also prohibiting wasteful, unsustainable practices. (Yes, the God of the Israelites was an early environmentalist.)

    Not only that, but later in the book of Leviticus [25.23], the God of the Israelites commanded them as follows: “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants.” In other words, God owns all the land, and all human beings are nothing more than tenant farmers. So that rich landowner is violating his God’s commandments in at least three ways: first, he is exploiting the land; second, he thinks he owns what really only his God owns; and third, he is living wastefully and unsustainably.

    We are not contemporaries of Jesus of Nazareth, and probably most of us here would not consider ourselves to be good observant Jews who are obliged to follow the commandments of the God of the Israelites. But although we may not observe the specifics of Jewish law, we are inheritors of the long tradition that began with the Torah, was interpreted by Rabbi Jesus, and lives on with us today as deeply-felt moral teachings. As a religious people, we know that exploitation is morally wrong: we know that we should not exploit either the natural environment, or other people. As a religious people, we know that living a wasteful and unsustainable lifestyle is morally wrong: we know that we should promote thrift, and an economy based on sustainability.

    The religious significance of our Universal Thrift Store should now become more clear. Obviously, we can’t change the whole American consumer economy all by ourselves. But what we can do is try to create moral alternatives to the wasteful, unsustainable, morally wrong American consumer lifestyle. That is precisely what we are doing with Universal Thrift Store. We are running a socially-conscious business venture that is both profitable and moral. Our business model for Universal Thrift generates income, and promotes a thrift-based, sustainable economic alternative. The very existence of Universal Thrift Store serves as a gentle but effective critique of the American consumer economy, showing we can generate income sustainably, and without exploitation.

    Let me very briefly outline the business theory behind what we’re doing with Universal Thrift. Obviously, any business tries to generate value — value for the customer, and value for the business owner. But what do we mean by value? Is value to be measured solely in terms of the monetary profit that is generated? Or when we talk about “value,” do we also include sustainability, morality, effectiveness, and equity?

    The way we run Universal Thrift, we want to generate value that includes sustainability, morality, effectiveness, and equity. And when we generate value, that value accrues, not to individuals (although many individuals do get value out of Thrift Store), but rather to a non-profit organization with a mission to further spread value through society.

    Universal Thrift is a form of social entrepreneurship. We aim to maximize income for our church, while also maximizing benefit to the customers and to the wider society. We promote sustainability by promoting thrift, provide an alternative to the throw-away society, while at the same time we make money. We aim to produce equity by helping those with excess goods donate them to help generate income for the church, while also reducing the waste that comes with manufacturing too many consumer goods. We hope to generate profit while also carrying out larger social goals. This is why I call Universal Thrift an example of social entrepreneurship, because it combines a for-profit business model with a non-profit morality.

    In closing, I should say that I believe that Universal Thrift could get significantly larger. I believe we could generate lots more income for the church — I think twelve thousand dollars in annual sales could be within reach within a couple of years. I believe we could help spread the idea of social entrepreneurship more widely in our community — as more volunteers learn the principles of social entrepreneurship through involvement with Universal Thrift, they can spread those principles more widely. Some people might even find a way to become social entrepreneurs who start new projects in such a way that they create jobs for themselves. I believe further innovation could grow out of Universal Thrift, innovations that will further the goals of sustainability while benefiting the wider community.

    I don’t claim that socially entrepreneurial projects like Universal Thrift will save civilization as we know it. But I do know that these projects have the potential to turn us away from an economics with a moral void at its center; and turn us towards an economics of universal thrift, human dignity, and sustainability. And so may the phrase “universal thrift” become an integral part of a new, morally sound, economic manifesto.