Sunday School Lessons

The faith community has only a few years left to demonstrate that its life and message is not about the rhetoric of good intentions, but contains critically important moral perspective applicable to the nightmarish facts accumulating on the ground beneath our feet; nightmares like the corruption of democracy through control of wealth by a few; or Drone attacks that slaughter the innocent; or the mass destruction of creation by our gluttonous fossil fuel appetites.  

Today's news features the argument that J. P. Morgan's $13 billion fine for mortgage irregularities (a polite way of saying fraud) is actually a good deal for them. They are said to still have on hand that much again. What a relief that must be, especially since the exploding growth of Wall Street profits (including J. P.'s) continue to strengthen the financial community’s capacity to simply buy the political system.  

Former mayor of Philadelphia and governor of Pennsylvania, Ed Rendel, is now working at the private equity firm, Element Partners, holding investments in the natural gas industry whose ambitions, The American Prospect, reports (Nov./Dec. 2013) include 100,000 fracking wells for Pennsylvania alone.  The tangled launch of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) has become a window into just such corruptions, playing into the hands of the private health care industry including big pharma, the mega insurers and the health tech equipment companies.

The evidence is that the practice of religiously expressed or nobly articulated exhortation actually erect a comfort zone behind which people can hide as ancient peoples once did, cowering behind their city’s walls as an enemy advanced upon them.  But what if the “Trojan Horse” is already inside the gate as seems the case today?

Religious language requires concrete ethical articulation. There are beginning to be important examples of this: in the Shale rebellion in Pennsylvania and the Moral Mondays Movement that started in North Carolina and is now appearing elsewhere across the country. Faith groups are often leading or facilitating and participating in these movements. This movement to resist or to occupy is the leasding edge of what must become a new non-violent revolution 

There is a seductively strong connection between good intentions and the sentiments of religious language when application proportionate to the scale of the problems around us is missing.  Consider the Congressional hearings in recent weeks that cross-examined NSA officials about the secretive role it played through gross internet invasions of privacy from Angela Merkel down to everyone else.  The same hearings made clear the existence of para-governments resident in both federal and corporate agencies that are able either to secretly serve elected officials or undermine them. 

Sunday School lessons today must acquire that scale to he heard and respected by the powerful. Consider Floyd Norris’ discussion below of pervasive bank fraud in setting interest rates.  (Norris is Chief Financial columnist of the NY Times; October 31, 1913).  Excerpts:

LIBOR— the London interbank offered rate — is supposed to represent the costs that each bank would face if it received an unsecured deposit from another bank. Each day, banks report Libor rates for maturities ranging from overnight to 12 months, in numerous currencies. The announced Libor rates are based on averages of bank submissions. In Europe, there is a similar Euribor. Banks cheated on both.  

“Don’t worry mate — there’s bigger crooks in the market than us guys!” wrote an official of Rabobank, the large Dutch lender, after he agreed to a request from one of the bank’s traders in 2007 to submit a phony rate for Libor rates in yen.

          Even without fraud, Gary Gensler, the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, said in a recent speech at Harvard, that Libor rates “are basically more akin to fiction than fact.”  “In the U.S.,” Mr. Gensler said in his speech, “Libor is the reference rate for 70 percent of the futures market and more than half of the swaps market. It is the reference rate for more than $10 trillion in loans.”

           

The danger signals require a new vocation of deeper reflection and action. A first step in the case of faith communities is to modify their saturation in the study of scriptural texts so that texts serve as a light shining on contemporary issues, no generalities or abstractions please; a new process should turn Sunday School into critical thinking seminars for young and old.  Religious language is not the same thing as ethical thinking about the search for the fairest tax policy, the wisest environmental regulations or the best health care policy. Progressively inclined folks active in churches, mosques and synagogues —and all others who link love and justice together—can easily feel overwhelmed by this predicament. 

  

By creating a “think tank” process inside weekly congregational life, the weekend Sabbath lessons can become critical thinking exercises.   Every region in the country has university-level faculty who could help resource a new wave of think tanks, a bit like the old travelling Chautauqua’s that brought learning to remote local communities a hundred years ago. Let the new lessons begin.