Sermon

INTRODUCTION: A fascinating report came out this week about the American Cancer Society. It concerns how they intend to spend their entire $15 million advertising budget beginning this Fall.

Now normally, that would not be front page news for the New York Times. Most nonprofit health groups spend their advertising dollars, and we may or may not pay any attention to what they are doing. Except that this time, for the first time in its history – and the first time for any major nonprofit health group – they are not targeting healthy practices so as to keep us from getting cancer. There’s no push for mammograms or anti-tobacco ads…no plea to eat right, exercise, and have an annual physical.

Guess what their entire advertising budget focuses on: The fact that 47 million Americans – 16% of us, up from 10% just three years ago – do not have health insurance. And according to the most recent research, not having health insurance is directly related to delays in diagnosing malignant cancers. More specifically, “Insurance status often determines whether a person’s cancer is diagnosed early or late.” But 47 million Americans do not have health insurance, which means they either postpone going to see a physician or don’t go at all…and equally bad, the same is true for their children.

And the American Cancer Society concluded that despite every effort they might make to educate citizens about healthy choices, that none of that is going to diminish cancer related deaths in America…because the number one cause of death from cancer in America is directly related to delayed detection. Or to put it from the opposite perspective, death from virtually every major disease in American – not only cancer – is significantly reduced when early treatment and care take place.

Incredibly, the number of people without health insurance is going up, in this the richest nation in the world! And the number of businesses and corporations providing health insurance is doing what: going down!

Why is this so? Why can we rev up the troops, fly the flag, and support our military invading another country over some dictator’s alleged evil practices 10,000 miles away, and spend billions upon billions even after we know the war should never have been fought, it cannot be won, and must now be ended. We – the majority of voters in America, the Congress and the President – can agree to do all of that, but we can’t even agree to provide health care for our own children, much less their parents? Why is that?

I submit that it starts with our attitudes towards work, which means our attitudes towards benefits, and our attitudes towards unions, which is what Labor Day was initially meant to celebrate. All of our attitudes about work and benefits root in our heritage of Judeo-Christian religious beliefs. That’s why it’s appropriate to ask, “What Faith Says About Work” on this Labor Day Sunday 2007.

I’ve smuggled a bible into the service, and I want to read to you from one of the treasure troves of the Judeo-Christian myths that inform much of our culture and self-understanding.

I’ll be reading from the second of the two creation myths. The first as you will remember from Genesis 1 answers the question of “How the world and everything in it was created.” But the second creation myth, starting in Genesis 2,[2] answers a follow-up question:

“If God created the world, and it was so wonderful, then who the heck screwed it up? I mean, who is responsible for all the death, dying and sickness? Who sent the famine and drought? Who caused the floods, hurricanes and typhoons? Who caused women to have so much pain in child-birth and for babies to die? Why do we have war and hunger? Why is this such a dangerous place to live? Why do there have to be snakes and why do they scare us to death?”

That’s why we have a second creation story following the first; and in fact, it’s older than the first. Its purpose is to answer why things have gone to hell in a hand basket after God did such a heck-of-a-job…kind of like Michael “heck-of-a-job, Brownie” Brown did in New Orleans after Katrina. What happened? Why?

The answer in the Judeo-Christian tradition is the myth of Eve and Adam, an apple, and the talking snake. Eve and Adam had been told by God not to eat the fruit of the apple tree – or more technically, the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil – but after talking to the snake, Eve eats the apple, and then she gives Adam a bite. And now they are in big-time trouble with God. But who’s at fault?

When God asks Adam what happened, being a man, he answers like most men: “I confess: The woman you gave me – it’s her fault.”

God now turns to the woman he had made from Adam’s rib – not from his head, as my father would note in wedding ceremonies, just so women wouldn’t get any spurious notions that they were to be the head of the household – and God asks, “Eve, what happened? Why did you eat the apple that I said not to eat?”

She mimics Adam and passes the blame on and says, “You know what? I’m really not responsible. It was that talking snake’s fault. He tricked me into taking a bite.”

Now the snake is thinking, “It’s time to get the heck out of Dodge. I’ll just grab an apple or two and be gone.”

When God says, “Just a minute here: You screwed up all my hard work in making the world. I could have spent the time kicking back in heaven listening to the latest in angel music and harps. But instead I spent six days making the Universe. Now the three of you have really messed it up.” So he zaps the snake! Zaps Eve! Zaps Adam! And, incredibly, zaps the Earth!

2. Why do women have pain in childbearing? Because Eve ate what she was not supposed to eat.

3. Why do women always get the short end of the stick, whether it’s child-rearing, house-cleaning, or job pay? Because Eve tempted Adam into eating the fruit.

But now, here’s the key to why this scripture relates to 47 million persons in America without health insurance. God says to Adam:

Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you; and you shall eat the plants of the field.

In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dirt and to dirt you shall return.

Now, of course, no one in the myth asks the question, why did God create a woman who couldn’t even resist a snake’s spin…or why did he make a weak-willed man who couldn’t say no to a woman…or why did God make snakes in the first place…or isn’t it kind of overkill to punish apple-eating by death, pain in baby delivery, sickness, and making everyone work so hard? Again, though, this is a myth that uses imagination to address what we don’t have data for.

Of course we know that none of this ever happened. There never was an Eve, nor an Adam; neither did snakes ever talk and walk. But it does reflect the very first attitudes early human being had about work: It was the result of a divine curse…and hard work to boot!

In the Western world – that is everything West of Rome – it was not until the Protestant Reformation in the 16^th and 17^th centuries that physical labor became culturally acceptable for all persons, even the wealthy. Two people – Martin Luther and John Calvin – led the charge.

First, Luther totally challenged the notion that working was a curse. He instead theorized that people could serve God through their work: that in fact, professions were useful, that work was the universal basis of society, and that people’s work vocations were equal to their spiritual dignity. He affirmed manual labor and even gave it theological grounding.

John Calvin took it a step further. He had this weird theological notion of predestination. Namely, if God knows everything, then he knows before we are born, whether we will choose to live right. Hence, we are saved or damned before we even pop out of the womb. That being so, how is one to know whether he’s going up or down?

Here’s the key from Calvin: The only way to know if we are going to make the cut, to get in to heaven or not, isn’t only how much we go to church, pray, give and read the bible. In addition, one other really important measurement is “success.” A religious, hard-working, successful person gives evidence by his success to himself and to others that he is one of God's chosen – he is being blessed by God because God blesses those who are going to receive eternal life. So if you do the church thing, and you are successful in work, that’s a pretty good clue that you are one of the good gals and guys according to God, as interpreted by Calvin.

But here’s the interesting question, given our topic for today: What about the poor in this system? Does this mean that they are headed for hell? And that their poverty is pretty good preliminary evidence of that? Are there any prophetic hints in Calvin about the attitudes of those in America in the 21^st century who are opposed to welfare, social security, universal health insurance, Medicare and Medicaid? According to Calvin, using profits to help others rise from a lesser state violates God's law, since we can only demonstrate that we are among God’s chosen by being successful through our own labor. For government to help the poor is a violation of God’s edict that we are to work as penance for the violation by our fore parents Eve and Adam – mostly Eve – of the commandment of God against eating the apple. And that was the message of the Puritans, of Jonathan Edwards, and the White Anglo Saxon Protestants who devised our Constitution and wrote our laws. It came from the perspective of the elite, the elect, the wealthy, the landowners.

Max Weber, the German economic sociologist, coined a term for this: He called it the "Protestant ethic." In this ethic, the primacy of work is paramount. The poor are poor because they don’t work hard enough. Work is a necessary penance for original sin.

Which is to say that there is definitely history for the hostile attitude of Establishment Americans towards helping the poor…for providing health insurance…for unemployment insurance. Work is the answer, even when work is not enough.

So on this Labor Day 2007, what are the prospects for the 47 million without health insurance? Or the one in five who are impoverished by the fight against a deadly illness even when they have health insurance? When we are governed by millionaires and multi-multi millionaires…when laws are written by those who are disproportionately influenced by people with money…and who are mostly people who have never had to go without: What prospects are there for change?

Sadly, we live in a world where CEO compensation packages are in the hundreds of millions of dollars, some drawing more in one hour than many of their employees make in a year. Big-box stores come into smaller towns and wipe out small businesses, their owners and employees. Pharmaceutical firms are charging outrageous prices for prescriptions that have to be paid by the ill, the elderly and the disabled. Outsourcing and downsizing leave employees who spent their lives working for one company, suddenly without a job and trained for only one kind of work. Wall Street inflates the value of paper wealth, thereby setting the criteria by which the well-being of companies is valued.

So what do we do? Andrew Stern is the president of the Service Employees International Union, which has 1.9 million members and is the fastest growing union in the country. He has this wonderful vision of our nation as a “team.” And part of that vision is for the team to realize the “primary value” of rewarding work. He contends that American businesses are not going to be able to compete in the global market if they have to provide health insurance against other competitors in the global market who don’t. Further, he says our nation is not going to survive if our people have to choose between food and health care.

We need to all be on the same team and not competing against ourselves. Unfortunately, our team is currently dysfunctional. We don’t have leadership and we don’t have a plan. And while that’s going on there are a few getting rich beyond anything imaginable. The challenge is finding a way to work together once again.

Politically in 2008, our only hope is that we elect a president who can bring our nation together on issues of self-preservation rather than war and division, on taking care of our planet and our people.

Robert Benchley was asked once how he managed to get so much work done and still look so undiminished. The secret, he confessed, "was a simple one, based on a well-known psychological principle.’Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he or she is supposed to be doing at that moment.'"

So maybe we need to do what we’re not supposed to be doing: making mistakes in the right direction. Like the American Cancer Society: advertising for health care insurance rather than cancer care. That’s Labor Day Sunday 2007.

[1] A sermon on Labor Day Sunday, September 02, 2007, at the All Faiths Unitarian Congregation, meeting at the Crestwell School, 1904 Park Meadows, Ft. Myers, FL, by the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, minister.

[2] The division between Genesis 1 and 2 is off by three verses. What appears as Genesis 2:1-3, should be the final verses of Genesis 1, viz., Genesis 01:32-34.