Pastor John Van Sloten

This headline from the front page of this morning’s Report on Business was written in response to new, more restrictive, banking regulations that are being proposed by the Obama administration. The new laws are intended to curb banking greed and speculation, and protect main street’s money. After reading the article, I sat down to read my bible (don’t read anything into my reading priorities!), and came across these words from Jesus, “Be generous. Give to the poor. Get yourselves a bank that can’t go bankrupt, a bank in heaven, far from bank robbers, safe from embezzlers, a bank you can bank on. It’s obvious isn’t it? The place where your treasure is, is the place you will most want to be, and end up being.” Luke 12, MSG

Jesus’ big picture view made me smile. Here Obama is fighting the banking establishment so that our money will be better protected, and Jesus is saying its really not about money at all; don’t let it define you, don’t invest too heavily in it and don’t make it your god. The underlying problem in our society is that we overly define ourselves by our bottom lines. Everything is about the mad scramble to invest our time, effort and regulatory systems to better them. What Jesus is saying is, “You need to change your whole system of self definition.”

So, you have to wonder if tweaking the rules so that our money better protected will in any way help us do that.

Right now the media seems to be laying a lot of the ‘financial mess’ blame at the feet of Wall Street. I think this is a cop-out. While investment banks certainly play a big part in this debacle, they are not the only ones who are culpable. We all are…

As a consumer society who continually insists on ‘getting what we want’ – a new house we couldn’t afford in this case, we fuelled the housing bubble. As investors who continually insist on ‘getting what we want’ – ever higher rates of return (remember the ads? 18%, 21%?), we closed our eyes on the derivative deceptions that made up many recent investment products. As a government who continually insisted on ‘giving us what we want’ – eyes were closed to reasonable regulation, to the potential for greed driven excess. Why change a thing if everyone is happy?

What happening now is a bit of an indictment on the entire capitalist system (it’s extremes at least). A market driven by self interest will always risk exposure to self serving behaviour. This kind of behaviour will inevitably lead some to cross moral and ethical lines. The folks on Wall Street are poster boys in this regard, but what we see in them is a reflection of us.

We all want what we want (Woody Allen).

And sometimes wanting too much, too quickly, and too lavishly can lead to problems. The housing bubble is a symbol of an overly bloated society. The current financial hangover – when will this head splitting pain end? – is telling us something about our unhealthy consumption patterns. But will we listen?

Two days ago a Scotiabank economist said that these events are all about the “socialization of capitalism.” His comment reminded me of a sermon I preached on the Sub-prime mortgage crisis back in March. In my introduction I recalled a notion I’d had back when the Berlin Wall came down and communism collapsed,

“When communism collapsed a while ago, I remember thinking about God and how God in the bible would, over history, raise up nations and bring down and humble certain nations. And I thought, a morally bankrupt, atheistic social system with no democracy and no freedom; that couldn’t stand. Then I wondered if the same thing needed to happen, in some way, shape or form, for the other superpower’s worldview; for capitalism. Would the market economy’s downside – its shadow side – the places were we fall into greed and lust and gluttony and idolatry and all of the inequities that sometimes result from our system; would that be needing a correction as well?”

I wonder if this is that correction.

Here’s a link to that Sub-prime sermon…

The US sub-prime mortgage mess is now saddling us with hundreds of billions of dollars of global losses, global markets are trembling, banks are scrambling to find their balance, our personal retirement funds are taking a hit, and now we’re second guessing the wisdom of that recently acquired line of credit.

We feel victimized by what’s happening, but should we? Aren’t we the ones who let this happen? Why shouldn’t we pay for what we’ve done?…

Putting the blame on the recklessness or naiveté of some blue collar, hourly wage worker in Cleveland is no excuse. Sure, he was the one who didn’t read the contract, got caught by a deceptively low interest rate hook, ended up losing his job, missing his mortgage payments, and then falling into foreclosure; he and a few million others.

But we can’t put this all on him. Nor can we lay it all at the feet of manipulatively greedy lending institutions. Sure they baited and switched their high risk clients. Yes, they failed to do their due diligence. And no doubt, they covered their high risk tracks by deceptively repackaging and spreading out their bad debt, selling it to us.

But hey, who can blame them. They saw a market and met it.

And this is where our personal culpability comes in.

Ultimately we’re the ones who allowed for a manipulative lending system to even exist. We’re the ones that insisted on ever higher returns from our mutual fund managers. We’re the ones who averted our eyes, and didn’t ask the tough questions, who signed up for those returns that were too good to be true.

Face it we created the market for all of this greed and loss. And now we’re paying the price.

The same kind of math played out with the toxic Chinese toy disaster; we insisted that our big box retailers continually lower their everyday low prices, and were then horrified to discover that our kids had been poisoned.

We went to the mall expecting to pick up that “label” outfit for a song and were then appalled by the eleven o’clock news images of a ragged 11 year old Bangladeshi girl sewing glitter onto the same haute couture top we just bought.

We’re the ones who by, swiping ourselves into oblivion, and never once considering concepts like self limitation or delayed gratification, are now stressing over unprecedented personal debt levels.

We insist on cheap energy, oversized homes, big cars and expectations, and now have to listen to the planet scream back at us, “Enough!”

What’s it going to take for us to listen; total financial, ecological and sociological breakdown?

Let’s face it. We’re not innocent victims at all. These are the just desserts of a hyper-consumer driven culture operating without an appropriate conscience (or speed limit!).

Maybe we should take this time to pause and read the signs.

Instead of spending all of our energies freaking out about how to stop the bleeding and get on with life as we know it, why not pause for a second, take an honest look around. Are we headed in the right direction? Is this the best way for humanity to flourish? Is the bigger, better deal always the best for us?

Perhaps we’re not made for unlimited growth.

When is enough, enough? What’s wrong with receding once in a while? Is it really a sin to stop and be satisfied?

If you stand back and look at our world – at your own life – you have to wonder, “Given our current modus operandi, are we ever going to get to a point where we feel satiated?”

It seems to me that so much of what now ails us is the direct result of our inability to understand the concept of sufficiency.

A few months ago I attended a lecture, where Dr. Bob Goudzwaard (former Dutch parliamentarian, Apartheid dismantler, World Bank advisor, and all round global mover and shaker) introduced a very simple image of the sufficient life. In addressing the monstrous global maladies of economic injustice and environmental degradation, he spoke of a tree. A tree, he said, is a wonderful teacher of the “richness of sufficiency.”

It knows when to stop growing. It understands that any attempt to extend beyond its natural limits will result in less, not more; death, not life.

They say that mature trees clean the air, breathe in CO2, and breathe out life giving oxygen. They also take nutrients from the soil, and then replenish that same soil. They know to give back, stay in balance, and when to stop.

Perhaps we should do the same.