Grace, Community and Lean Times

It is clear to me that we are in lean times, relatively speaking. I hear a lot about people’s finances, more than most people in most other professions, and my ministry includes a good number of people on what are often called the lower rungs of the ladder. Not necessarily through any fault of theirs, for I believe the ladder is sadly askew and is leaning against a crooked house that is built on an earthquake fault; but----be that as it may. . .

This Sunday we celebrate Thanksgiving……. in lean times. They are real. I think we need to acknowledge them………… so that we can focus on the Good News. Yes, we Unitarian Universalists have Good News too. Our Good News is about the Grace that comes to us in Good times and in Bad, and about the ties that bind us to each other in community and generosity, in Good Times and in Bad.

Today I wish to draw some comparisons between the Joseph we’ve just heard about in Genesis, and Jack Bogle, the former CEO of The Vanguard Group of Mutual Funds. I don’t know how historical the Joseph story is, and it has so many mythic-sounding elements that the sophisticated reader has to take the whole composition as a sort of novella with Joseph as its hero.

But the Hebrew writers who shaped this story wished us to see in Joseph an exemplar of someone who was able to serve Pharaoh, hold on to his integrity as a Hebrew who worshipped God, and unify spiritual, community and financial values. The Jews who tell this story as part of their Torah have given their people this man as a symbol of integrity and generosity, from generation to generation.

I think Jack Bogle, a real man who still walks among us, does the same, and so I ask your indulgence for comparing a real man with a literary hero whose historicity I cannot vouch for.

There is a great profundity in Pharaoh’s dream prophesying lean times. Seven fat cows are followed by seven lean cows, and the seven fat cows are swallowed up. Then seven fat ears of grain are followed by seven lean ears of grain, and the fat ears are swallowed up….the paradox lies in the difficulty of even imagining the fat cows and succulent ears of grain being swallowed up by something scrawny and shriveled, so that the times of plenty are almost forgotten.

I believe in dreams, they often contain startling intuitions about the nature of the world, and our relationship to it. This dream may not be your truth, may not be my truth., if we happen to be prospering, but it surely is the truth about many people in metro Denver this year. Times of plenty and times of want alternate throughout history, and if it is your family who is struggling in lean times, the times of plenty seem far away indeed.

Modern financial markets bear only a fuzzy relationship to times of plenty and of famine, but I would wager there are few of us here that have not known some oscillation of our our purchasing power or our net worth due to the wild swings of recent years.

There is a line of simplicity and virtue that leads, I think, from Joseph the Hebrew overseer to Vanguard’s former CEO Jack Bogle…..The line of the truth-teller, the line of fiduciary responsibility to one’s clients. (The term implies a moral responsibility to work in the best interests of one’s clients. . . ) Just as Pharaoh trusted Joseph, we put faith in our financial advisers. But you know as well as I do, the story is, that on a national scale, we, the clients of certain financial institutions, have been sadly betrayed.

It took courage and integrity for Joseph to tell Pharaoh that he is dreaming about a famine so destructive that huge measures must be taken to protect against its direst features, the likely starvation of a people. A less truthful Steward might not have had the stature to tell Pharaoh this unpleasant truth.

There is an ailment in our culture that reminds me of clinical dissociation. In its most dramatic form, dissociation is the splitting off of some information or experience from the psyche’s ability to process and evaluate it. A typical textbook example ……… I have seen startling examples of dissociation of trauma from car accidents.

But once you begin to watch people in action, trained by the observation of clinical dissociation, you begin to see a cousin to dissociation in the strategies of normal people living their daily lives.

I think that some kinds of professionalization lead to the kind of ethical incompetence that plagues the world of high finance. Some forms of financial expertise have regularly fostered a kind of dissociation. We need to bring together the best thinking we can about economics, and the ability to be ethical, to reap the rewards of integrity and care for others.

Joseph and Jack Bogle are my exemplars of those who have overcome the continental divide that we all need to straddle.

The two men combine business savvy and compassion and responsibility. Joseph must have known that if Pharaoh’s dream was correct, many people would watch their herds starving and not be able to feed them; then the death of herds would lead to starvation. Yet he did more that predict destruction: he let prediction lead to a plan for protection!

When you know that something dire is about to happen, you can move to protect your constituency. That is what Joseph did. Under his stewardship, the Egyptians began to store grain at a steady pace lest the famine catch them unprepared…

It’s a difficult strategy to embrace. Ben Stein was on Wall Street Week with Fortune as I began to write this sermon, and he was asked “What do the boomers really need to do in order to retire?” He answered “They need to save, save, save, because statistics show they are already behind the curve.” Saving is the only strategy that can really protect you from down times when dealing with a seven-year famine, or its equivalent.

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Joseph’s brothers, meanwhile, alienated and far away, knew nothing of Pharaoh, his frightening dream, nor of Joseph’s plan. Apparently, they hadn’t been storing grain-----I would wager because, as nomadic people, they weren’t set up for a longterm siege of drought and famine. They didn’t have caves, storehouses and traditions that supported hoarding grain.

But the day would come, when the famine tightened its lethal grip, when they would be desperate enough to take the road for Egypt on the rumor that there was food there.

When Joseph’s brothers showed up with exhausted camels and donkeys and empty sacks, I can see that moment vividly in my mind’s eye. Joseph could not have known they were coming. He must have been flabbergasted to see them, but he did not reveal himself to them immediately.

Joseph could have turned them away. He had the power to do so. And given what they had done to him, dumping him in a hole and letting him be kidnapped and lying about it to his father who loved him especially dearly, to choose to recognize the bond between them was an act of heroic compassion.

“Am I my brother’s keeper?” was the question of Cain after the slaughter of his brother Abel, seeking to deny a relationship of responsibility toward his murdered brother.

The story of Joseph plays like a complex fugue on this theme of brotherly love, betrayal, and forgiveness. Think of how difficult it must have been for the brothers to seek aid from Egypt, let alone from Joseph; imagine their humiliation and consternation when they found out who he was! But surely, humilation must have been replaced by gratitude as they recognized the grace of their brother, beyond their just deserts, literally saving them from starving.

Genesis reaches a climax with a story that more than any other outlines the continuing siblinghood of humanity. Neither violent misdeeds not abandonment nor lies had broken the bonds that tied Joseph to his brothers, and therefore he helped them out of the stores that he had.

The writers of Genesis tell us that not only did Jospeh fill the sacks of his brothers with grain, but moreover he quietly ordered their money to be placed back in the tops of the sacks. That was the crowning touch. It was tantamount to saying “We are not strangers, you and I. We are all one family. We are all one people. I will not exploit your severe need for my own enrichment.”

Fiduciary responsibility and stewardship and generosity are linked. Our culture, though founded on these virtues by persons who practiced them with religious commitment, has gone astray from its moorings in fiscal integrity. There are now often several layers of sticky fingers between you and the institutions that pay your bills.

When we manage money wisely, we may have savings and investments. We also have money and food to give to our siblings in need, both our relatives and those in our community who are in need. When we manage wisely, live below our means, and save regularly, we can know the true blessings of prosperity.

Let me now take you to Jack Bogle. A personal hero of mine, Jack came on the scene in the 1940’s and 50’s, when there were only a few index funds, and even the index funds were managed in ways that benefited the owners of the fund families. Bogle had a couple of profound intuitions.

First, he said the market is like a giant casino, and everytime a player wins, another player loses a similar amount, so you basically can’t beat the market reliably, year after year. Moreover---and this is the crux of Bogle’s thinking---the little guy with the rake who rakes up the cash, always gets a cut. You know the house always rigs the game in its favor. The guy with the rake is called the croupier. Prior to Bogle, the mutual fund families were all raking in and pocketing the croupier’s cut!

Anyway, the fund companies were acting as the croupiers, and scooping up amounts of cash that looked insignificant but really are devastating to investors. These fees and costs are usually not disclosed in any but the fine print, and since they are cumulative year over year, it’s very easy to misunderstand how significant they are in the long run.

Bogle set out to create a fund family that would not operate that way. Instead, it would accomplish economies of scale and simplicity by indexing—buying all the stocks---in the major markets and then it would essentially work like a co-op to share the profits (the croupier’s scoop) with its investors.

Elliot Spitzer writes, “In the light of the past year’s revelations about mutual fund abuses, Bogle seems remarkably prescient. He likes to say that his greatest accomplishment was ‘putting the ‘mutual’ back in mutual funds. As he wrote his senior thesis at Princeton, [he vowed] to serve investors in the most efficient, honest and economical way possible. In his 50-year-career he has never wavered from those principles.” (TIME Magazine, 4/26/04)

Paul Volcker writes about Bogle: “The strong sense of fiduciary responsibility, the objectivity of analysis, and the willingness to take a stand—are qualities that permeate Bogle’s life and writing. And William Allen says “these characteristics….were inculcated at the side of his older and twin brothers.” “Certainly the idea of fair sharing and of duty to another are concepts that brothers share.”

An interesting thing happened to Jack Bogle in his sixties. His heart gave out. He was not a sedentary man, he was playing squash and tennis and hiking, but his heart gave out. He had a cardiac arrest on the squash court in 1980, and was saved by his squash partner pounding on his chest.

He had five more cardiac arrests in the following years, and finally the doctors told him that his heart was done. He would die if he did not get a new one.

He spent 128 days months on the list, in an ethically managed queue, to receive a heart transplant, and one finally came through in February of 1996, from a 26-year-old Hispanic man killed in an accident. Bogle writes about his surpassing gratitude for that heart.

He says “it is a medical miracle, but a spiritual miracle as well, for I am renewed in body and spirit.” Bogle wrote to the family of his donor. (John Bogle on Investing—The First Fifty Years)

A new heart. “Grant us, O Lord, a clean heart, and renew a right spirit within us.” (Ps. 51) I like to think there was some cosmic justice in that gift.

Jack Bogle woke up and realized in some new depth, the meaning of grace and community. No amount of riches or even knowledge and prescience could give him the gift of a new heart; but it had come to him from a family he did not even know. That is Grace; that is community. . . .

We are not all blessed with the wisdom of a Joseph or a Jack Bogle, but we can learn from these examples the true meanings of community, the grace of planning for lean times, lean times that will surely come….

If we pay attention to these lessons of foresight and provision for lean times, chances are increased that we may end up having more than we need, or at least not suffering as much when times are bad. May we save what we need to, out of wisdom, not out of miserliness.

I pray, too, that we may overcome the dissociation that too typically separates our financial lives from our moral lives in community.

When we lead this kind of integrated life, we will give from our sense of abundance. A time may come when we are in need, years when perhaps we are the ones who in some way must receive the generosity of others; if so, may we receive gratefully and without false pride, as Jack Bogle received his new heart.