Spokane Friends Meeting

 Thinking of investing in an ethical fund? If seeking even higher returns is what you are after perhaps we could interest you in a ‘sin portfolio’? A sin portfolio consists, typically, of shares in gambling, tobacco and alcohol, arms and ‘adult services’. One study of ‘sin portfolios’ in 21 countries, undertaken by Frank Fabozzi, found that they outperformed the stock market indices in every year but two between 1970 and 2007. Or maybe you might want to consider a ‘Vice Fund’? This made returns of 43% between August 2002 and May 2009 as compared with a 15% average return on the Standard and Poor Index. Does it pay to be just?

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When the Israelites returned from exile in Babylon, their Persian liberators and benefactors were seen as God’s agents. Cyrus and Darius had even provided subsidies for the rebuilding of the Temple and the practice of worship. Before long, however, the subsidies stopped and the time for taxes arrived. Why? Because the Persian universal mission had not been completed. The Egyptians would not stay defeated and the Greeks would not be defeated. The response? Vast increases in military spending. Large fleets and massive armies all had to be paid for. But as one unsuccessful campaign was followed by another, the need for yet further military build-up grew. Darius was held back by the Greeks at the battle of Marathon in 490 BC. His chosen son Xerxes continued with his father’s unfinished business. But though successful in re-conquering Egypt, Xerxes was defeated by Athens at Salamis in 480 BC. And that was it. Persia’s universal mission had been thwarted. (Does all this sound familiar?)

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 Markets, governed by the impersonal laws of supply and demand, are the best rule for a sound economy – right? Well, not always. For one thing, it’s not a true reflection of reality. Economic activity also proceeds on the basis of relationships, personal as well as institutional. And, like markets, relationships have both beneficial and harmful effects on the economy. Some relationships can stifle competition or involve downright corruption. You only have to think of the widespread practice of insider trading which is as hard to prove as it is insidious. Or ‘crony capitalism’, for example, the corrupt relationships between property developers and bankers who took a stake in property development which have brought ruin to the economy in Ireland. Or the links between former Members of Parliament in Great Britain and civil servants with directorates and well-paid jobs in the private sector. Or the cozy brother-in-law non competitive contracts awarded by our own government.

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It has become commonplace to say: ‘A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.’ And in both cases the saying

applies. Yet even so, as a McKinsey study has warned, changes taken in response to crises are less likely to succeed than those taken from a position of strength. The point here is not to close the debate but to open it and to ask: why, in the face of world poverty and the threat to the environment today is there not the same urgency about innovation and what can we do to ensure that the most effective paths are chosen. And at the heart of that question is not simply a concern about technology but about justice. Is that not the meaning of the warnings of Jeremiah and Luke?

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 Harry Markopolos was a fraud investigator. When he saw the way Bernard Madoff had been using ‘Ponzi’ schemes to defraud investors, he reported his concerns with the Securities and Exchange Commission. This was in 1999. No action was taken until December 2008 when Madoff himself confessed to fraud amounting to $50 billion, later found to be $65 billion. Markopolos accused the Securities and Exchange Commission of ‘financial illiteracy’ for failing to heed his warnings. He was awarded a silver whistle by the Boston Security Analysts Society.

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Inscribed on all US currency is the motto ‘In God We Trust’. It first appeared in 1864, and then only on coins. Not all American citizens were happy with it. Some saw it as incompatible with the separation of church and state. To others it seemed an irreverent, if not sacrilegious, invocation of God’s holy name. But it served a purpose – a two fold purpose. The overt purpose was a straight-forward affirmation of faith. We place our trust in God, not gold. But at a less conscious level, the motto also served another purpose. And this had more to do with ideology than with faith. It suggests that, because we see ourselves as the sort of people who trust in God, might not the system we have set up have some sort of divine backing? Does our economic system- capitalism – have divine backing?

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 The prophets did not just speak. They also acted. Sometimes purely symbolically. Sometimes with a practical purpose. Faced with the imminent fall of Jerusalem, Jeremiah made a move that sent out a message of hope for the people of his day. His action also provides us with an example of what it means to invest, unselfishly, for the good of future generations.

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Advent 2009 – A World In Waiting

Week One – A New Jerusalem

Day One – A Vision

‘A great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity’. That was the epithet hurled at Goldman Sachs, the world’s largest investment bank, by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone magazine in July this year. Pretty strong language. But it certainly expresses the sense of anger and injustice felt by the fact that so far the biggest beneficiaries of all the public money spent to get a nation out of its financial crisis are the very firms that got us into it. Later that month Goldman Sachs declared that it had made more than $100 million on revenues on each of a record 46 days in the second quarter of 2009, beating the old record of 34 such $100 million days in the previous quarter. But Goldman Sachs was hardly alone. In the first half of 2009, the top 11 investment banks all did very nicely. Nor are retail banks doing much for their reputation as they respond to the crisis by imposing tougher terms for extending credit and by increasing fees for overdrafts. By the end of the year, US banks will have collected a record $38½ billion in fees for overdrafts, according to an estimate by Moebs Services.

No wonder the cries of anger and injustice are so loud and bitter.
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Advent 2009 Week One

Advent is the season when we contemplate the establishment of God’s Kingdom among us. It begins with judgment, much like our own spiritual pilgrimage that is initiated in a sense of inadequacy and brokenness. But we are complicit as we live well is an inadequate and broken world of obscene profligacy and abject poverty. Dare we ask ourselves whether Christ is in us and reflected in the choices we make? Dare we measure our life against our profession of faith? I was given a great bumper sticker recently that is on the wall in my office. It says “Jesus is coming, look busy!”

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Thy Kingdom Come, On Earth

For the past year when the Gospel Reading has been our focus in Worship, the Gospel to which we have turned has been that of Mark. Biblical critics regard the Gospel of Mark as a collection of memories of the life of Jesus transmitted by the disciple and then apostle Peter to his scribe while in Rome. Although the book is anonymous it has traditionally been assigned to John Mark, in whose mother’s house at Jerusalem Christians assembled. Mark was a cousin of Barnabas and accompanied he and Paul on a missionary journey. Papias, whose writings date to 135 A.D. described Mark as Peter’s “interpreter,” a view held by other patristic writers.

Though it is considered the earliest of the Gospels, what it offers in the way of teaching suggests a quite late date in its circulation. The teachings of the church which preceded it were more eschatological in character. The central affirmation of this faith was the imminent coming of the Reign of God. The message of Jesus simply summed up in the formula “Repent! for the Reign of God is at hand.”
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