[Monday in the First Week of Lent] The Common Good: How Do We Define It?
Read: 1 Corinthians 12:20-27
As it is, there are many members, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.
Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.
Watch
Reflect
Capitalism views the world primarily in terms of economic value, with an eye on economic efficiency. How much can an entity—human, mechanical, or natural resource—contribute toward profitability? This perspective raises numerous questions: What is the lowest cost method to get the job done? How much is a company worth if it can be split into pieces and sold as parts? What is the financial advantage of moving operations to a new city or country—and leaving behind former employees and abandoned facilities?
Competition, rather than mutual support, is one of capitalism’s driving engines. Christianity, though, has frequently seen the world differently. We ask ourselves how we are called to live in the world but not be enslaved to the world and its priorities. Scripture helps us in our questioning. One focus of Genesis’s creation story is that God calls human beings to be stewards of the created order. Adam gets the opportunity to name each individual animal that God sets before him. Similarly, Saint Paul tells us that the members of the body of Christ are many and varied, but each one is important in order to help build up the whole.
Liturgy also shapes how we live. At baptism we individually name new members of the Christian community and pledge ourselves to support the newly baptized as they grow into the full stature of Christ. Mutual support eclipses competition. The Christian message is that we are not anonymous, unknown, unconnected beings, but rather God calls us to be in relationship and support one another, in much the same way that the Persons of the Trinity are distinct but always in relationship with one another.
Conflicting views of what it is like to live in society comprise some of the hard realities of life in the twentyfirst century. Christians have lived as faithful witnesses in every economic era. How do we live as faithful witnesses in this one?
Pray
Almighty God, whose loving hand has given us all that we possess: Grant us grace that we may honor you with our substance, and, remembering the account which we must one day give, may be faithful stewards of your bounty, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
(The Book of Common Prayer, p. 827)
Author
Larry Benfield is the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Arkansas.
February 15, 2016 @ 9:44 am
This an important start. Beyond the refusal to enter into continuous competition is the
need to be aware of our mutual interdependence (all the time and everywhere). We
did place an emphasis on this many years ago (in the 1960’s) but it seems to have
faded and was not sustained as a reality. There is also, in my judgement, a great
need to restore some kind of active emphasis on the idea of Sabbath. A place to
begin is W Brueggmann’s “Sabbath as resistance” (Westminster John Knox, 2014),
an analysis of the Culture of Now and how the People of God can subvert it’s many
negatives.
February 18, 2016 @ 4:54 pm
Thanks for taking time to participate in Repairing the Breach. I appreciate your idea on a Sabbath. It would be interesting to see what shape it might take in a capitalistic world.
February 15, 2016 @ 3:46 pm
Two perhaps distinct thoughts. First, so obvious though I never thought of it this way, God most certainly did not put us on the Earth to spend our days driving some enterprise to economic efficiency. Once those financial objectives are met, jobs outsourced, and redundancies executed so the P&L will be improved, there will be no true feeling of anything representing “joy”.
Second, the U.S. culture of “American Exceptionalism” seems to have morphed into “individual exceptionalism” in the form of continuous, individual-level competition. We should reflect on the many promises we repeatedly made during all of those church baptisms to nurture the baptized “…with God’s help”, and honestly consider where we have put our time and effort.
February 18, 2016 @ 4:55 pm
Thanks for reading the post. Your thoughts on “economic efficiency” remind me more and more that so many things in life have now been monetized.
March 2, 2016 @ 7:20 am
Community, a definition: A community is a social unit of any size that shares common values, or that is situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a village or town). It is a group of people who are connected by durable relations that extend beyond immediate genealogical ties, and who mutually define that relationship as important to their social identity and practice (Yes, this came from Wikipedia…)
I believe that many Americans suffer from lack of community, and I believe that I have a responsibility to create a community when and where I can (church, work, home). In order to create a community, I have to reach out and connect with people and focus on shared interests rather than differences. When the folks next door are Sally & Bob, I treat them differently than when I think of them as “the people next door.”