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March 8, 2009
First Friends Meeting
Genesis 1:26-31
‘Stimulus Package’
Doug Gwyn
This week on the radio I heard a story that raised my hopes a bit in
these gloomy times. It was about two young men who have returned
to Wilmington, Ohio to help their hometown. Most of you are aware
that Wilmington has been devastated by the departure of DHL, which was
the community’s leading employer. These two guys had left
Wilmington years ago, expecting never to return, at least not to live
and work there. After college, they had gone into the Peace Corps
to help poor people in developing nations help themselves. I
wonder if they had gone to Wilmington College, one of our Quaker
colleges, where people get hare-brained ideas like joining the Peace
Corps.
In any case, after returning to the US, both had gone into the business
world. One of them was based in New York. But they got in
touch with each other when the news spread about DHL leaving
Wilmington. They decided to go back and try to help, on the basic
premise of the Peace Corps – helping people help
themselves. Working with city and county leaders, they have
declared Wilmington a Green Zone – an idea that probably would
not have occurred to most folks there. Now they are working to
get a piece of those billions of dollars Ohio will receive as part of
that federal stimulus package. They want to turn Wilmington from
part of the problem to part of the solution. From an
unsustainable, crumbling economy to a sustainable, retooled economy,
based on renewable energy, etc.
It was an inspiring story. It’s the story of a town like
our own. It’s also a story that illustrates what this
controversial stimulus package could produce. Like many of you,
I’ve been concerned how this giant program is going to
work. I’ve heard economists comment on the challenges of
spending billions of dollars quickly – and to do it wisely and
efficiently. It needs to be done quickly, to stimulate the
economy. But how do you spend so much money so quickly and do it
prudently? Recent history in Iraq offers a sobering tale.
There has been massive waste and corruption of the money spent to
rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure in the past five years.
We’ve heard absurd and obscene stories of no-bid contracts and
utter thievery by both American and Iraqi agents. How can we
avoid that here?
Well, it has made me think this week of the original stimulus package
– the cosmic stimulus package, God’s stimulus package, in
the story Lainy just read to us. The story of the creation of
humankind is not to be understood as a biological account of who we
are. Instead, it’s the story of the charter, the covenant
by which God created and continues to create us. This is a story
of the present moment, not a mythological past. It’s the
story of the two baby girls whose births we celebrate today, as much as
it is about the origins of the human race. We are among the
billions in this stimulus package. And these two newborns are
part of it. They are part of God’s original blessing.
We are blessed by their presence with us. But as I’ve said
on occasions over the years, we’re not blessed for being
good. God blesses us in order to do good. We are challenged
to do good by these two girls. And in their turn, in years to
come, they will be challenged to make good on the blessings in their
lives.
That’s how we should understand this story from Genesis. On
the sixth day of creation, these humans are placed in the middle of
this amazing world God has created, not because they are good –
like newborns, they are innocent, neither virtuous nor vicious.
But we are placed in the middle of all this wonder in order to do good
with it, to be productive. Now this story in Genesis is at least
3000 years old in the form we have it. In those days, the human
race was still struggling to survive on this planet. In recent
years, we read this story with new eyes and new questions.
We’ve done a pretty good job of filling the earth now, with six
billion of us. We’ve done a pretty good job of subduing it
and having dominion over it – so much so that we’re
polluting and depleting its resources and upsetting the subtle balances
that sustain life on this planet. And yet, I don’t think we
can walk away from this charter. The fact is, due to our
intelligence, we’re going to dominate this planet whatever we
do. We must learn how to do it better. We must learn to
live within its carrying capacity – in our numbers, in our
patterns of consumption, our ways of living with each other. The
saga of the Bible doesn’t end with us going back to the
garden. It ends with the garden as part of a redeemed human
community – the city of God, the New Jerusalem. We urgently
need to rebuild our house accordingly.
The Greek word for house, or household, is oikos. And oikos is
the Greek root of at least three words in our English language.
They are economical, ecological, and ecumenical. Each is crucial
to renewing the charter, the covenant of God’s creation.
Certainly, the economy is front-and-center in our minds right
now. The house we’ve been building in recent decades has
been falling down for several months now, and we haven’t seen the
end of it yet. We’ve heard metaphors for this economic
disaster, like Tsunami and Katrina. They now speak of people
being ‘under water’ with their homes – the value of
the house falling below the level of the mortgage they are paying
off. It’s frightening. Tsunami and Katrina are apt
images for what’s happening today. In fact, there’s a
flood story in Genesis that might also fit with the way our global
economy is tanking right now. But I’m not going to go there.
I want to go back to Wilmington, Ohio, where these two young guys are
trying to lead their hometown back from the abyss. They are on to
something, I think – trying to make Wilmington a microcosmic
example of where the nation and the planet need to go – go
green. Any future, sustainable economy has to merge with the
ecology of the earth where we live. I think of the phrase first
coined by the radical French Christian, Jacque Ellul –
“think globally and act locally.” We have to see the
big picture of our planet’s overall health – but we also
have to focus it down to the problems right in front of us.
Rebuilding our house is partly the way we run our house – our own
households, or this meetinghouse, for example. Our Trustees have
recently conducted an energy audit with RP&L, to see how we might
become more energy efficient. A wide range of churches and other
religious groups are trying to put their houses in order too. At
the end of this month, Nathan Jones will lead us in viewing and
discussion a video called ‘Renewal’. It looks at a
variety of religious communities – ranging from Baptists to
Buddhists – and their efforts to make their houses of worship and
their way of life greener.
That is where the third term, ecumenical, comes in. We need to
see the bigger picture in our religious life too. To see
ourselves working alongside other religious peoples in this charter of
God’s creation. This morning, we’re finishing a
series on Quakerism in Room Four. It’s been a good
opportunity to learn more about our unique faith and practice.
It’s important to dig deeper into a particular faith tradition,
to go further along a specific spiritual path. Because the deeper
and further we go with any particular spiritual path, the more we will
see ourselves as brothers and sisters with people of other
faiths. Later this spring, Hal Hanes will lead us in viewing and
discussing another video, called ‘Beyond Our
Differences’. It’s a good reminder that when we come
to the limits of our own understanding – we meet not only God,
but our neighbor as well.
So we are standing at the threshold of a house that’s falling
down – but it’s also the threshold of a house ready to be
rebuilt – economically, ecologically, and ecumenically.
Yes, we’re in the midst of a crisis of confidence in finance, in
banking, industry, and consumption. It’s only right that
our confidence is shaken, given the way we’ve been
building. But remember that confidence is the most basic meaning
of faith. So let us rebuild, squarely on the foundation of our
faith in God and in our neighbor. Then we will build on the rock
of reality, and not on sand of speculation.
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