by The Rev. Dr. Max Lynn
SCRIPTURE READINGS Proverbs 2:1, 6-12, Luke 7:1-10
Transcribed from the sermon preached on JUNE 19, 2022
Not long after I arrived in Salinas to serve the Presbyterian Church there, one of the members took me to the local businessmen’s bible study breakfast. There were a couple of farmers in the bunch. I’m not sure how the subject came up, but I mentioned I had read that the Salinas rivers was dangerously polluted with insecticide, herbicide, and fertilizer. So, one of the farmers asked me to come on a ride along with him to his properties. He took me past various field gullies and showed me how low the runoff flow was. I mentioned that that would change with the rain. Anyway, he didn’t convince me that fertilizer, herbicide, and pesticide was not a problem in the river. But then we stopped by his lettuce field that was being harvested. There were a bunch of workers picking the lettuce and then another crew cleaning it and putting it on the conveyer belt loading the truck.
When we pulled up it was clear everyone knew whose truck it was. We got out and there were smiles and waves and greetings. The farmer was matter of fact, straightforward, kind, and respectful, and the feeling was clearly mutual. I’ve seen enough owner’s interaction with workers in Guatemala to know the difference between earned respect and deference due to power and status. His 24 full-time, year-round workers made about $40,000 plus health care, and the seasonal pickers made minimum wage. This was at or above market rate, especially for the year-round workers. He had a couple of organic fields too which he pointed out were fertilized with cow manure.
The farmer greeted the workers as friends and colleagues, and they did the same. He looked them in the eye and asked serious questions matter of factly, and the workers were more than happy to give knowledgeable and positive answers. I kind of sat back and observed and I could tell that all the workers looked forward to greeting him. And he did make his way around to at least get eye contact and say hello to everyone.
The river may be poisoned but the boss-worker relationship was rock solid. The workers liked working for him. He was a good Christian man that knew his business and was successful because of it. And they were mostly recent immigrants happy to be starting their American Dream with a good boss.
Today is Father’s day and I thought I would riff a little on the conservative values I learned from my father and many other men in my life. Not just men but I’m going to focus mostly on men today.
I have come to the conclusion that how we have been approaching politics for about the last decade is not working. Of course, it is longer than that but especially in the last decade things have become more polarized and confusing. Social media has amplified differences, with algorithms funneling us down polarizing rabbit holes and magnifying the negative and frightening.
Certainly, there are fascist, racist, misogynistic, homophobic idiots and bigots. But the tactic of denouncing anyone who holds any conservative values has not worked and is not true. In fact, since normal decent people with some conservative values are so easily maligned by liberal propaganda, I think it has pushed middle of the road conservatives further to the right.
But there is another problem in that as progressives have funneled themselves into ideological echo chambers and focused on hating the easily hateable, we have neglected the importance of having opposition worthy of disagreeing with. It is easy to hate and be disgusted by the guy who has a T shirt that says, “Jesus was an American,” or the unintelligent fundamentalist preacher from Mississippi, or the bombastic, crooked, narcissistic real estate mogul turned politician, but it is another thing to find decent, rational minded people who are smart enough to challenge our positions. For one of the fundamental beliefs of Christianity is that we are all sinners, we are fallible and finite, and thus we are highly likely to be at least somewhat wrong almost all the time.
Now after we all got on social media and went bananas for a couple of years and found out how different the political and social views our family and friends were, and how long diatribes sometimes leaned toward nasty accusations, it became common to see the post saying something like “Nobody ever changes their mind.” But that is simply not true. Now most of us have pulled back from most polemical online arguments, and that makes sense. But everyone of us has come to the point in our thinking that we are at because we have read and studied and experienced things that expanded or changed our minds. The Presbyterian Book of Order has a basic tenant that says, there are some things to which people of good will may differ. We ought not forget that.
Today I am not talking about conservative politics or policy. I want to talk about some of the conservative values which I think are and will be around no matter what, and we are mostly better for it. And I am not going to pair the conservative value with the counter argument of the liberal side, since if you have been around long enough you know that side is shared around here all the time. I think these conservative values will stand over time, whether they are wrong or only one side of the story with regard to any given policy at any given time.
1. Everybody, every group and every nation has to have a budget. There is a conservative in every family. There has to be somebody in every family that says, no, we don’t have the money for that. We must conserve. There is an endless amount of desire and need we can come up with but a limited amount of money. We cannot have everything, and we should not spend more than we have. Stay within your budget – You can’t have everything you want or think you need. Make do with what you have sometimes, sacrifice for the future.
2. Work, almost any work is honorable and good. Gandhi made this point when he had everyone in the community do all jobs, including the latrines. He was trying to erase the caste system. King Jr too has a great sermon on the subject:
“Even if it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, go on out and sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures. Sweep streets like Beethoven composed music… sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’”
The Proverb says: 9 Better to be despised and have produce, than to be self-important and lack food.
You don’t start at the top. One job leads to another. So go get a job. A low-level job done well leads to a better job. So, give your best even in a crappy job. Start working and friends and colleagues you meet will know about other jobs. A crappy job well done will get you referrals and references. Discipline now pays off later.
Show up on time, don’t make excuses, work hard, earn your paycheck.
Work is a social contract. The Marxist point of view is that employer and employed are in conflict. But that is only part of the truth, and often not the most significant truth. You sometimes have to negotiate and advocate for higher wages, but much of the time you give your work, and they give you money. And if you are doing honorable work together, you can be friends and respect each other. In our society, much of the time that is the way it works.
• Be responsible for yourself. A Zen student goes to his master and asks, “Master, what is the key to enlightenment? The Master asks, “Have you eaten breakfast?” The student says, yes I have.” The master replies: Then go wash our bowls.” Do what you can and should do for yourself, your children and family and community.
• Wealthy people are often kind, honorable, and high in competence. Again, Marxism suggests that private property, landowners, and wealth are bad, while the proletariat is good. No question that wealth accumulates towards the top in hierarchies, especially but not only in capitalism. Accumulation of wealth at the top has been around since large societies have organized…a lot longer than capitalism and it also happened in the Soviet Union. If the distribution of wealth gets too ridiculous, a society will crumble. We all know there are exceptions. Bias and prejudice have too often prevented intelligent competent people from having a fair shot, but I have found that people who are above me in a given hierarchy have tended to be more competent than me in that area, or harder workers. If someone decides to work like a dog to get good grades, get a good job and work 70 hours a week and I decide to not work as hard and spend more time with my family or smoking weed and playing video games, I can’t complain that they are more financially successful than me. Great professors, great musicians, great basketball players, great scientists, great businesspeople, and great farmers naturally lift up to the top. Hard workers do better than lazy workers. Hard workers are liked better than loafers. A basic living wage and equal opportunity are fundamental goals of a good society. Equal outcomes, given differences in talent, discipline and effort are not realistic nor necessarily fair.
The other thing is that wicked lazy people tend to not do as well. There are exceptions but liars and dishonest people, addicts and compulsive complainers are not well liked. They are not hired twice, and their coworkers get tired of them.
Our proverb says: 11 Those who till their land will have plenty of food, but those who follow worthless pursuits have no sense. 12 The wicked covet the proceeds of wickedness,[b] but the root of the righteous bears fruit.
We see the wealthy and powerful centurion in today’s passage is a well-respected man. He is a product of his culture, so he has slaves like most of the wealthy people of his day. We don’t have to agree with slave holding or the imperial militarism of the Roman empire to acknowledge what the story tells us. He is clearly well liked and well respected by the people he has authority over. “3When he heard about Jesus, he sent some Jewish elders to him, asking him to come and heal his slave. 4When they came to Jesus, they appealed to him earnestly, saying, “He is worthy of having you do this for him, 5for he loves our people, and it is he who built our synagogue for us.” He also has humble faith, and this impresses Jesus.
• One of the first times my parents took us to see my uncles and their farms in the central valley of California, my father said to me that the two most essential jobs in the world are mother and farmer. We can criticize farmers a lot, some are better than others, corporations are a problem too, and they are as afraid of change as the rest of us. We are working toward more sustainable practices, but if we city folks think we know more about being one with nature than a farmer, we are very naïve. And we can never forget that for all our education and sophistication, or whatever great qualities or jobs we do, you and I am literally living because famers and what they provide. Be grateful and respectful to the people who produce those fundamental products we need to stay alive.
• Stronger more competent people are to protect and make way for the weaker. Younger people are to show respect to elders. We live in a sinful world where there are bad people, in particular bad men. There are bullies. Men or anyone else who has the capacity to be destructive and take what they want, but who have discipline and goodwill to know better should protect those more vulnerable from harm, whether financially or physically. Bigger doesn’t always mean better though, as the story of the shepherd David testifies. We don’t expect equality when it comes to protecting: mothers, elders and children are not expected to go fight on the front lines. That is a general rule of course. You never know. A ruddy teenager may save the day and watch out for the mother bear.
• Patriotism and love for one’s country is a good thing. Our nation has done a lot of wrong, to the people in our own land and to other nations. We have a long way to go to live up to the true meaning of our creed. And even our creed leaves room for improvement. But every other nation is selfish and also does what it can when it can. Basically, almost every person in our country is better off materially than almost anyone living before the 20th Century, thanks in no small part to us. The might we built up helped keep the Nazis from ruling the world. Somewhere around a hundred million people equally starved to death in Communist Soviet Union. So many died in China’s that nobody knows how many. Freedom of speech and freedom of religion and democracy are worth fighting for and we ought to be proud of what we have and how far we have come. God is our highest allegiance, and freedom of speech is for the purpose of speaking the truth, even about horrible history of racism and sexism and our present injustices. But we ought to be grateful for what we do have and how far we have come. And we won’t have a chance in the future without hope. We’ve got to believe we are in this together and can work together despite our differences.
Now these are just some of the conservative values I was taught by my father, uncles, and others in my life. There are conservative values that are worthy conserving, and they would pop up even if it was possible to snuff them out. They do not cancel liberal values, and those conservative values often show up in liberals and liberal policy and politics as we see with Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. As I preached each of these values you probably found yourself saying “Yeh but” several times. I know I did. But I tried hard not to elaborate. In this day when we are so tempted to demonize the other side, and act self-righteous, the middle left and the middle right are speaking less because they are afraid of being stuffed into a corner; so, the fringes are much louder. There are good reasons for that but bad ones too. The way out of our confusing situation is far from clear. But I’m pretty sure that we have more options than the current extremes of socialism or the cultural anarchy of the Proud Boys and Antifa. We need to find legitimate and difficult criticism of our own positions so that we might learn and improve. We need open dialogue. And we need sane, honorable, and courageous conservatives to get back into the game. As with the Roman centurion, a little healthy humility is in order. Jesus is not American. Perhaps our nation is not even worthy for Jesus to come all the way in. But let us pray and have faith that even from a distance, God may grant us healing, wisdom and grace.