"Hardwired for Integrity" -- by the Rev. Dr. Sabina Alkire

The past months have seen the most chaotic and severe malfunction of the banking system since the 1920s if not in history. Billions of pounds have been wiped off stock markets worldwide, and the Governments throughout the world acknowledge that the financial system is on the verge of total meltdown. The dismay of the media has been evident in the intensity of their language. The Wall Street Journal spoke of financial carnage and derivatives as weapons of mass destruction. The Financial times, of hurricanes and shifting tectonic plates. The Economist wordsmithed gloomily on: ‘there is no such thing as a free crunch’.

Economist Paul Krugman’s blog provides key tables on the crash. But more poignant was an early signoff underneath a set of interest rates that had not been seen even in the Great Depression. “Professionally, I’m fascinated,” he wrote; “As a citizen, I’m terrified.”

As people who read the papers and watch the news in the presence of the living God, we are now in a position to reflect on money, and our attitudes towards it as Christians and as a church. And the fundamental point is that we need not be terrified. This is not a terribly innovative point, because as people of faith we need never be terrified “for nothing can separate us from the love of God.” But it is worth remembering at this time for three reasons.

Objectively there are legitimate causes for concern, both individually and collectively. We genuinely not know the impact that the crash will have on ourselves, on jobs, and on the economy, and on other aspects of our lives. It may yet calm, or it may rechart our days. Fundamentally, terror comes from that uncertainty and fear blended with a feeling that we are not in control. Not only are people like you and I not in control, but we don’t even know if we will understand what has happened. So we pause to listen beyond the media, into the stillness.

The dominant view, portrayed by the media, is that the crash is totally unrelated to matters of faith and prayer, and to the habits of God. It is a malfunction of a human system because of human error. God may be omnipotent, but God, Bless God, does not deal in derivatives hedge funds or shorts. Expertise in such systems is human not divine – it sits in the treasury, not in the monastery. Hence the power to heal the system lies in techniques, not wisdom. Wisdom is lovely, but when it comes to these matters she is also a bit quaint and out of touch with reality.

Is this dominant view of a total divide between faith and economy accurate? If true, we would have part of our life in which we could live as persons of faith – perhaps related to family, gardening, justice, church, and music. And in a different part of our life, not lived under the shadow of the living God, we would address our technical conundrums and make necessary decisions: savings and investments, pensions, mortgages, and indeed negotiate other technical bits of life such as cell phone contracts and the trials of windows vista. We have fallen into this habit of interior division as a society – but do we need to?

It is interesting to note that in other cultures, when technology enters, religion is not marginalized. All of you will know of the buses and taxis in developing countries which are decorated with Jesus, or a cross, some other form of blessing, as if to remind the driver and all others around that this vehicle remains under divine review (one wishes the driving reflected that awareness as keenly). Now that may seem a bit superstitious, but underlying it is an important acknowledgment. For our faith does not recognise a total divide; it teaches, and I believe, that God’s will and purpose and wisdom extends with piercing relevance across all our lives, relational and financial, even if as now we see only darkly.

In Proverbs we are urged to seek wisdom and understanding “for her income is better than silver, and her revenue better than gold”. And the psalmist echos the priority of God’s wisdom: “The law of your mouth is better to me than thousands of gold and silver pieces”. So the first point is that if the economy is not totally cut off from the living God, then we need not be afraid, for the wisdom we have known is and will be true.

A second point is rather more mundane and practical: even if the economy did come down around our ears, we will still come to church. It’s what people do in crises – we come to church. We come to church because at church we still have one another, and we help and hope and pray together and find a way through. And as church we will remember too those who are not merely worried about their financial future, but also those perched on the margins of very survival today throughout the world. We know we are not alone, we know that people care, and together we are strengthened and encouraged to live out of our higher values, to reach out in faith and love and service – not close down in terror and dismay.

The third point is that if wisdom is true, then it may have some piercing insights into this situation that we can draw upon, both individually and a society. Some Christian groups are interpreting the financial downturn as a divine tantrum about greed and materialism by an emotionally unstable God. I do not happen to agree with them. But I do think we have some serious correcting to do, and that human excess has directly created the present situation.

At the heart of the particular problems that exploded this month, is not greed but denial. There was willful wishing away of reality, which edged into deception. An FT editor observed, accurately, that “the financial system has been operating as if it were an off-balance-sheet vehicle of the government.” Financiers wanted to quantify risk and uncertainty in numbers that seemed acceptable; they wanted to believe the numbers; they reassured us by the numbers. But the numbers were wrong. The system failed because in the end truth prevailed, and there were no bank regulators to act as a circuit breaker and shield us from poorly managed institutions.

Going forward, we need to encourage and reward truth rather than denial. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians describes the openness of his ministry, and how he hides nothing: “we refuse to practice cunning or to falsify God’s word; but by the open statement of the truth we commend ourselves to the conscience of everyone in the sight of God.” One of the reasons that people believe the economy was distanced from God is that it appeared that a different set of rules operated there – that there, lies were acceptable; ambition, required; and cunning alone deserved reward. But it was not so – there is one wisdom, stretching across the whole of life.

And as we all know, greed is not too far away. As Frank Wade preached just 12 days after Sept 11th, “Of all of the things that Jesus talked about while revealing to us the mind of God, the single most mentioned topic was the spiritual danger of wealth. We are the richest people the world has ever known. As a consequence, we live in the greatest spiritual danger that has ever been experienced. It’s not about having money or not having it. It’s what we do to get it, the lengths we go to keep it, the principles we serve with it, the meaning it has for us. [Given the events of this month, and their repercussions on others across the globe, we need to do] some serious wondering about those things.”(Wade, Wrath of God. 23 Sept 2001)

The past month has seen the most chaotic and severe malfunction of the banking system since the 1920s if not in history. But the wisdom and ways of God are of intense and piercing relevance even here. So consider this week what it means to be a worker, a consumer and a banking customer who does not react with terror come what may, but remains hardwired for integrity. There is life in such wisdom. Amen.

The Rev. Dr. Sabina Alkire is a priest, development economist, founder of the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative and author of What Can One Person Do. Sabina is an EGR board member.

Pharoah's dream and hungers physical & spiritual

The Rev. Dr. Sabina Alkire kicks off the re-launch of the EGR blog with a reflection on the story of Joseph interpreting Pharaoh's dream in Genesis 41 and God's mission of global reconciliation.

It was diplomacy from the soul and diplomacy at its best. By a single encounter Joseph comforted a troubled Pharoah, averted a national famine, and provoked his stellar professional rise. Yet it was all, somehow, so inadvertent. Almost accidental. Particular to that occasion amongst those people. What of God – or of a holy response to hunger – can we glean?

The story involves Joseph – Joseph of the coat of many colours, whose brothers sell him into slavery because he is their father’s favourite, who rises to head his slavemaster Potiphar’s household only to be imprisoned when Potiphar’s wife tries unsuccessfully to seduce him. It might be worth mentioning that Joseph alone of Old Testament males is described as having the double accolades of a “fine figure and a handsome face.”

In the story, Pharoah has a troubling dream. His butler hears of it, remembers Joseph, and fetches him from prison. Joseph has time only to shave his beard and change his outer clothes before rushing to the Pharoah, who mentions Joseph’s reputation for interpreting dreams. With considerable insensitivity, Joseph’s first words are to correct the Supreme Ruler of Egypt, protesting that God alone interprets dreams. Such effrontery is overlooked, and the discussion proceeds.

Having interpreted the dreams as predicting seven years of plenty, followed by seven years of drought, Joseph then suggests a constructive response. In the sentence that follows today’s reading, Pharoah appoints Joseph to oversee famine prevention throughout Egypt because of his wisdom and discernment. Thus Joseph’s fate changes from prisoner to prime minister. He is given a signet ring, dressed in fine linen, paraded through the streets in a chariot, and given the daughter of an Egyptian priest as his wife – all within three verses, and at the age of thirty. Just a tiny bit surreal.

But two aspects of this story are real and relevant to us – one is the issue of physical hunger. The other is the need for us to become so attuned to God that God can summon us suddenly - at a whim or whisper - to do holy work.

Biblical concern for hunger was real. In the drought-prone geography out of which our faiths came, food insecurity was part of people’s stories and lived experience. The Iraqi father of our faith, Abraham, had voluntarily moved from Iraq to Canaan, but it was famine that drove Abram and Sarah on into Egypt. Wide-ranging hunger appears in the biblical stories of Isaac, David, Ruth’s father-in-law, Elijah and Elisha. Poor Jeremiah was thrown into a cistern when there was no bread in Jerusalem, shortly before the city fell. In Jesus’ parables, it was famine that drove the prodigal son back to work when he had used up his inheritance. Given people’s experience, it was natural that addressing physical hunger was part of faithfulness, part of loving your neighbours. Indeed not only did Jesus feed the hungry, and the early Church send food aid, but from the earliest Christian writers – Barnabas, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria – to the present, the Church addresses destitution.

It may be a bit odd that at present spiritual people and the Church are not engaging this task with the even a fraction of the enthusiasm with which we swarm to other topics. A good number of our brothers and sisters across the Anglican communion are deeply affected by hunger and destitution, yet it is not this that we discuss with them. In 2004, we have 6 billion of God’s children on our planet. Around 842 million of us – one in seven – are hungry today and every day. If we temporarily suspended ourselves from the British isles and invited hungry people into our homes and hotel rooms, they would fill Britain thirteen times over. Put differently, the hungry outnumber three Europes. In fact, if you combine all the high income countries in the world our total population is 830 million. The population of those who hunger – 842 million – is greater. Although ten million of the hungry live in high income countries. And, what many people do not realize is that although some countries have dramatically improved nutrition, world hunger has been rising since 1995.

However ancient hunger’s history, it still aches. Ethiopians call the ones who are always hungry, Wuha Anfari – those who cook water. If you sit by kitchen fires in India, which alone has more hungry people than the continent of Africa, you will notice women and girls carefully spooning minute portions onto their plates so that their husbands and sons have a bit more to eat. And hunger entails tragic choices. In Zambia, a widow and mother of two entered the sex trade in order to feed her children. When interviewed, she observed a sobering truth, “I find hunger more deadly than AIDS. AIDS kills in years. But hunger kills within days."

We cannot hear these stories and watch these cold numerical trends, as food-secure Christians, without being somewhat unsettled. Perhaps that is apt. For even the soft spoken Nobel laureate in economics, Amartya Sen wrote that he wished that informed people like us would be less “coolly accustomed” to hunger, and would “rage and holler” a little bit more, because reducing hunger, though complex, is not rocket science. It requires a basic set of capabilities in agriculture, school, health care, social protection, and political stability. In fact the United Nations, the US, the UK, indeed 189 governments have pledged to achieve eight millennium development goals to reduce poverty and halve hunger by 2015. Why? Because, perhaps for the first time in history, we actually could.

As many outside the Church now recognise, if a few million persons of good will did our bit as individuals and citizens – and what we will do be different for each of us but we can each do something – then in this age where we are globally connected and democratically empowered, our momentum would make a real, unprecedented impact on poverty and hunger.

But will we? Martin Luther King Jr. preached, “Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of … individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God.”
The story of Joseph and Pharoah has a further theme, which is attentiveness to God.

Joseph’s first words to Pharoah were: “It is not I; God will give Pharaoh a favorable answer.” Joseph’s actions were not at all beyond reproach – just as ours will not be beyond reproach to future generation. Nor did he act singlehandedly – one presumes hundreds of women and men were involved. But the moment of diplomacy in this story did set in motion a chain of events, such as we need today in Darfur, or in our corporate world, or indeed in the WTO. How can we become so attuned to God that God can summon us at a whim or whisper to do holy work?

The Welch poet R.S. Thomas refers to, “the empty silence within” - where God dwells. And when we act from that place, our actions are mingled with God’s action, our fragile love with God’s love.

Oddly, or perhaps aptly, a common metaphor for this empty silence, this holy listening, is hunger. And such spiritual hunger is greatly to be cherished. As John of the Cross wrote, “if the person is seeking God, much more is her believed seeking her.” In the Psalms, God yearns for his people to be hungry and to open their mouths.“Prove your love…in actual deeds”. But we cannot neglect the interior hunger either. For eventually, gradually, we may be transformed into people God can use in ways we do not now anticipate.
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The Rev. Dr. Sabina Alkire is an Anglican priest, development economist, EGR board member, founder of the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative and co-author of What Can One Person Do: Faith to Heal a Broken World. Her writing appears on this blog on the first of each month.

Tomorrow: Abbie Coburn.