Texts: Psalm 86; Luke 11: 1-11

Kimi Wei is a single mother who lives in an apartment with her two children in another part of New Jersey. Her landlord was ready to evict her and her pleas that she was just getting back on her feet fell on deaf ears. Had it not been for an attorney from New Jersey Legal Services she and her children would have become guests in a faith based homeless shelter program. But she and about 11,000 others will not be able to secure legal services thanks to another lawyer who lives in the wealthy town of Mendam. You will know him as the one who guts public school funding-- his children go to parochial schools; who wants the State Supreme Court to reflect his philosophy of affordable housing in wealthy towns -- there will be none; and who is now proposing in his so-called austerity budget to fund the mega shopping mall Xanadu to the tune of $875 million. What parent among you, Jesus asked, if your child asked for a fish would give him a snake or stones instead of bread? Guess Jesus never made it to New Jersey.

In addition to gutting legal services for the poor, the new budget cuts aid to food banks, reduces energy assistance for winter fuel, decimates aid to education, and -- what more can we add? Oops, I forgot the disabled; lock ‘em up. After all, the poor can starve, freeze, and not get educated so that his myopic view of New Jersey could be realized. Charles Dickens, where are you when we need you?

Now, Middletown has a State Senator and two Assembly Members. Do any of you know how they voted on key questions of education, family planning clinics, legal services, or housing? It’s right there on the New Jersey website, but that may go, too.

Unfortunately, in this age of me for one and none for all, to paraphrase Dumas, we have lost our sense of how we are all responsible for each other. Who would give a child a snake instead of a fish or a stone instead of bread? It seems that all of us would. We have lost our sense of common purpose in this society; we have become fractured. We act no better than those photos of desperate people struggling for food when it’s thrown out from trucks. We just seem more sophisticated at it. The question for us is what has caused this breakdown in our understanding of societal responsibility and what can be done to bring it back?

The economist Klaus Schwab recently wrote about this breakdown in our societal understanding of values. He developed the “stakeholder” theory of enterprise, which sees the enterprise as a community: shareholders, creditors, employees, customers, suppliers, the state and society in general. This communitarian ideal states that unless all are committed to improving the enterprise together, it will fail. That is what has happened over the last several decades. The idea of enterprise has been replaced by a purely functional ideal, namely, that maximizing profits in the shortest period of time is the goal of business. Look at the BP fiasco.

Actually, looking at the BP fiasco, a few days ago, I heard a clip from a meeting in which a group of shareholders at an annual meeting were chanting, “Greed is good! Greed is good.” It is precisely this point of view that is destroying the idea of the common weal, the point for which governments are established among people. And I’ll wager that many of the chanters are so-called “good church people,” claiming that they support family values and the like. They don’t support real family values; they only care for themselves. Greed. As the writer of that letter known as 1 Timothy says, the love of money is the root of all evil.

Ah, but they say, we care about our own families. Really now? Last Sunday’s New York Times had what is becoming a more common story: children and their parents fighting over who controls money and property, siblings ending up in court. Not only do people abuse their children but they abuse their parents as well. One may say that this has gone on since the dawn of time, that people have always had a winner-loser mentality. Look at poor Esau after his blind old father’s been tricked by Jacob: is there no blessing for me? What deeper fears do we have? What lack of faith do we have?

Make no mistake about it: our children, not just our individual children, but the children of society, see that the elders are so concerned about themselves that when they grow up, they, too, will not care about the older elders but only about themselves. All suffer as a result of this breakdown in the communitarian commitment, in our inordinate drive for nothing more than profits. We need to do more than just rethink what a real community should be. We need a bold new imaginative approach to developing the ideal of the common weal.

What sounds like abstract theorizing affects our daily lives. The question for us as a society is who is our sibling’s keeper? In its annual report on volunteerism, the Corporation for National and Community Service noted that New Jersey ranked 49th among the 50 states and D.C. in its volunteerism. One comment was, “People are really busy here.” No busier than other places -- by the way, New York was at the bottom, and that includes the conservative upstate part that claims it’s so family oriented; Nevada was just above New York. Trying to explain why New Jersey is so low, the director of an agency noted that we had long commute times. Nonsense! Have you ever driven in states like Minnesota, Nebraska, or South Dakota? These aren’t small geographical units. Even Texas ranks way above us. And all the states with significantly higher volunteer rates are poorer than we are in New Jersey. We’re so focused on ourselves that we can’t see beyond our own noses. And all this is reflected in our state budget.

How can one small church like ours help to change the pattern in New Jersey? We can’t do it alone but by joining other like-minded religious organizations, we can help to push for a real change in attitudes. We can also look at our individual lifestyles to determine how they reflect our purported values. And we can take some action as responsible citizens to contact our elected officials to tell them what we think about issues such as the budget and its impact on the poor and marginalized in our society. This is more than a partisan political fight. It is a fight for the soul of our community and ultimately for the soul of our nation and world. Our founders pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to create a nation and society where life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness had meaning for the common weal, the entire community. We are not being asked to sacrifice even a tenth as much as they did. For our posterity, the future of our society, we need to look seriously at where we are and how to redirect ourselves. Otherwise, we will continue to have snakes for fish and stones for bread.

Let us pray: You, O God, who created us to live in community, help us imagine a new society, one based on the real values of caring for others as we follow the one you sent to show us the way, even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.